Once it was quite an ordinary thing for human beings to see and hear the spirits of the place where they lived and to look to such spirits to provide food and shelter and all the materials for life as well as advice about how to live it. The world would have seemed unimaginably sterile and meaningless without them. Since then as the world has become noisier the earth has fallen mute, but in Melbourne in 2007 one junk mail deliverer can not only hear the voices in the street, he can talk back to them too.

...By midnight the sky had completely cleared and I found myself in Jupiter Street in Caulfield South. I saw his planet overhead and I heard the King of the Gods speak with the urgent voice of a police siren speeding up Kooyong Road. 'Magus, why do you still hold aloof? Write out the Great Work and read from it aloud! Raze the city to its fundament and build a cathedral in its place. The fruit is ripe, the branch is straining under its weight; so thrice-great Magus, by my thunderbolts I ask, why do you hold deaf?'