IN T R O D U C T I O N
his friend 'to indicate the certainty and reality of the life beyona
the grave'. Three days later, just half an hour past midnight, Mackenzie, who was lying in bed, not thinking of Buckley, of whose death he was not yet aware, suddenly felt 'a cold clammy hand very gently placed upon his forehead'. Not surprisingly, Mackenzie turned round in order to see what had caused this odd and frightening sensation. He saw 'the spirit of Buckley, in his usual dress, standing at his bedside with a portfolio under his arm, exactly as he had so often seen him in life'. Mackenzie claimed that after he had recognised the figure it 'retreated towards the window, but after remaining there most distinctly visible both in form and feature for more than two minutes, it slowly faded away'. This apparition, which Mackenzie saw twice more, seems to have had a profound effect upon his intellectual development. He began to attend seances and to make a study of spiritualism, already becoming fashionable since the commencement of D. D. Home's spectacular mediumistic career in the previous year. More significantly, he became almost the first English student of the works of Eliphas Levi-Dogme de la Haute Magie had been published in 1854 and its companion volume, the Rituel, in 1856-and I suspect that he fell completely under the spell of that writer's limpid French style and ingenious romanticisa tion of the magical tradition, for by 1861, when he had two long interviews with Levi, his attitude towards the French mage was one of veneration. I am certain that Levi found his English visitor's solemnity difficult to cope with-Mackenzie actually mistook his host's tobacco-jar for a valuable statuette of the goddess Isis-and reading between the lines of Mackenzie's lengthy account7 of these visits it is clear that Levi indulged in a good deal of leg-pulling. There is no doubt that Mackenzie developed into what is sometimes called 'an advanced occultist'; he claimed a con tinental Rosicrucian initiation from a mysterious Count Apponyi, he became an important figure in a masonic Rosi7 This account is reprinted in full in my Ritual Magic in England (Neville Spearman Ltd. 1970). 32
