Madness.
Each and every practicing magus that I've ever known has some cautionary tale to tell of some poor uninformed soul who did something and went mad a result. God knows that my own experience with The Fragments has pushed me to the edge of my sanity. And I know its insidious sigils have left more than one mind broken on the shoals of intellectual curiosity.
But what most people leave out of their equations in these sorts of workings is that madness is not a linear progression. Some go mad slowly, quietly. Indeed many of their closest friends may not see or feel their madness until it is far too late. Drummond was such a case; his bibliomania was one of those quiet forms of insanity. Indeed, his family and his peers fed it for years. No one could have foreseen that he would die from a double cross at the hands of the thief who broke into the Smithsonian at his bequest. If only he'd stayed away from the Biblia Ad Tenebrae, he might be alive today.
Others go mad all at once, and usually with extreme consequences. I remember when Luther Cabrell went over the high side. To be fair, he'd been doing experiments with summonings, and that's always playing with fire, in my opinion. But Luther was a strong-minded individual with the willpower of a true magus. He had power, talent, imagination, and most importantly, patience.
So what went wrong? No one knows for sure, but I suspect that each of us is prey to fears in our subconscious. Fears we don't even know of, and one of the spirits reached in and pulled one screaming out into the light of day.
Pain is what causes madness, and we all react to pain differently. Thus endeth the lesson.
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