Page:Weird Tales volume 42 number 04.djvu/61

 wall, a coat-hanger, or even the side of a pepper-pot! But it's always there.

"When I was making researches into the history of the Pythagoreans, I found the secret was known to them centuries before the time of Christ, only they mistook the pentagram for the cause and not just the triangle contained therein. They used to practice the rites of raising these unpleasant apparitions, and then conquering them by destroying the sign. They felt purified by the struggle with evil and uplifted by the symbolic victory over it. I'm not sure, though, that they always had the victory

"Naturally, they kept these dark secrets from common men, but the people gradually got wind of it, feared and hated them as sorcerers and tried to expunge them. The persecution reached its height in the middle of the 5th century B.C.; everywhere the meeting houses of the Pythagoreans were burned down and any Pythagoreans found there slain.

"You're probably wondering why a particular kind of triangle should cause such phenomena, anyway. So am I. I'm still investigating.

"My own theory at the moment goes like this: Firstly, these devils and demons which appear have no material existence, and, in fact, no existence at all—outside your own mind! They exist in our unconscious mind, memories we are born with, handed down from our most primitive ancestors.

"Do you remember when you were a child, alone in your own bedroom, trying to sleep, those uneasy times when you imagined you saw faces—nasty, glare-eyed, frightening faces—in the darkness of your room? And when you shut your eyes to escape them, there they were behind your eyelids, clearer than ever? They are the things our terror dreams are built upon.

"Children see them more than we do, for the imagination is so much more active in childhood. In adults it gradually grows moribund and we become creatures of habit. But very sensitive and imaginative people, who live more in their unconscious mind than their conscious one, the introverts, still see them.

"Very sensitive and imaginative people, I repeat—like artists, poets, composers... like Blake, Shelley, Schumann. You begin to get the idea? The music-makers—and the dreamers of dreams.

"Far more strongly than extroverted, materialistic people—I can't imagine those business men having much trouble with their pentagrams, even if by a remote chance they hit upon a Pythagorean one—they react to this touchstone of a triangle. It acts as a sort of gateway through which seep ever more strongly the images and; waves of the unconscious, until they flood over and submerge the conscious mind altogether. And when that happens to a man we say he is mad. The conscious mind weighs and judges, it is our critical faculty, it keeps us in balanced relation to the material world. But when it is gone, we are helpless. We will believe in anything that our unconscious mind believes in, for that wholly possesses us now.

"Why haven't all great men, like Beethoven, Shakespeare, da Vinci, gone mad? Why only a small proportion? I anticipate your questions. Well, simply because they never happened to come into juxtaposition with one of these triangles. But the ones I have listed, and many others that I have not, must have had that triangle somewhere about their houses. Or, quite conceivably, within their own physical body—a bone structure or vein formation or some such freak effect.

"It seems that physical vision of the triangle is not necessary. Extra-sensory perception is pretty firmly established, and I am inclined to believe that the design is perceived extra-sensorily if it is close at hand. It seems to exert an hypnotic effect on the subject's mind, but in just what manner is yet to be discovered. What are thought-waves, anyway, and may not they react only against certain designs, as a certain design of antennæ is needed to catch television waves? Come to that, what is imagination?

"It is because you are a writer and therefore have some amount of imagination that I sent you my little puzzle—and pentagram. It should have had some amusing results, However, I don't think they will have been