Forget Summers, Father Satan has already dealt with him and all those hypocritical fools who thought they could play around with the demons, hold them in chains, and embarrass them. The demons are free now and anyone who wants to follow Montague Summers can join him in Satan's personal chamber of torment. That is his price to pay for agreeing with all those witchburnings, hahaha. I'm glad he's dead. May he suffer in Hell.
I stumbled over this book purely by accident. I had no idea that Summers is still in print. It is like finding a long-lost childhood friend!
Back in the 1950s I used to hang with ceremonial sorcerers and the occasional black magician in my old home town of San Francisco. I was an avid collector of old coinage, you see, and my main source for Indian head pennies and Liberty dimes was a strange little shop in the Mission District run by an old geezer who was also a taxidermist. He claimed to be over 200 years old, his life preserved and extended by ingesting certain Lovecraftian "essences" from his stock in trade. Frankly, I didn't believe him; I'm sure he wasn't a day over 150.
Anyway, the shop was the local gathering place for the questing brotherhood. After all, if you lived in San Francisco and your grimoire called for, say, a tablespoon of bat's blood, where on earth were you going to get it but from your friendly and slightly weird local taxidermist? Let me make it clear that I never met a sorcerer who was anything but respectable. The black magicians in particular were the most law-abiding of people. One would-be necromancer spent his days visiting and cheering up elderly residents in hospitals. The story that he was sizing up future clients was a vile canard. These were not the social misfits who took up Satanism as peddled by Anton LaVey and all his charlatan successors; they came much later. Really, the only questionable thing about the sorcerers I knew was a deplorable tendency of some to walk about the streets in cloaks.
From time to time, one sorcerer or another would take the plunge and attempt to conjure up a demon. (The more namby-pamby among them would say "daimon," but it was a distinction without a difference.) Real ceremonial magic is not for the unindustrious or slothful. There are robes to be embroidered, wands to be cut, blades to be forged, sigils to be drawn, flames to be lit, smokes to be inhaled and, believe it or not, prayers to be uttered. It is a long, intense, fatiguing process and, what the heck, it sometimes worked. It worked, that is, to the extent that an exhausted and half wigged-out sorcerer would convince himself that he had indeed called up a spirit from the vasty deep. And it would scare him silly. (In one of his books, Aleister Crowley gives a lengthy description of his shot at demon-raising and the absolutely predictable result.)
After a bout of demonism, sorcerers would check in for short stays at convenient psychiatric facilities or, perhaps more likely, go on long benders. Then it was back to the taxidermy shop for sorcerous bull sessions about the esoteric literature then in print. (Grimoires, of course, were only valid in manuscript form and copies were held secret and unique to each individual sorcerer.) Eliphas Levi, the consensus held, was instructive but unsound in detail. Aleister Crowley was suggestive but ultimately incomprehensible--a delusion and a snare. Montague Summers was regarded as sound as to historical facts and crazy as a bedbug with regard to conclusions. The sorcerers of San Francisco, by and large, subscribed to the often quoted opinion that Summers' learning was as vast as his stupidity.
