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The plan to pursue was to comply with physiological propriety, but to keep each appetite in its 
place, to prevent it from invading the sphere of the whole consciousness. In practice, I proposed to 
live an absolutely normal life, but without attaching undue importance to any element of it. I 
intended to enjoy my dinner, whether it was salmon and Chateau Yquem '78, or cold mutton and a 
glass of milk. I had found by experience that the minimum 
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of disturbance was secured in this way. The agony of sugar starvation on the Baltoro glacier had 
showed met that to try to repress a natural appetite is merely to invite it to obsess one. 
I expected then to settle down slowly into a routine of scientific research on the lines 
philosophically indicated by Spencer, Huxley and the Buddha, while morally I followed the 
Rosicrucian principle of complying with the customs of the country through which I was travelling. 
The condition of my soul is clearly indicated by my output. The fount of lyric poetry had run 
completely dry. I had not touched the unfinished Orpheus; wrote nothing new. I no longer aspired 
to become the redeemer of humanity. I doubt whether I should have been able to attach any 
meaning to any such words. After returning from Edinburgh, I do not seem even to have kept a 
record and I remember nothing about my doings. July is however the date of an essay "The initiated 
interpretation of ceremonial magick" which I prefaced to my edition of The Goetia. I had employed 
Mathers to translate the text of The Lesser Key of Solomon the King of which The Goetia is the first 
section. He got no further; after the events of 1900, he had simply collapsed morally. I added a 
translation of the conjurations into the Enochian or Angelic language; edited and annotated the 
text, prefixed a "Preliminary Invocation", added a prefatory note, a Magical Square (intended to 
prevent improper use of the book) and ultimately an Invocation of Typhon when the First Magical 
War of the Aeon of Horus was declared. 
This essay throws a very clear light upon my position. I could not deny the facts of Ceremonial 
Magick. It is impossible to explain why a dog squeals when you hit him with a stick; but we do not 
therefore deny that this happens, or at least that there is some impression of some such kind 
somewhere. I was in precisely the position of those philosophers who were driven to the theory of 
causality and said that there was no cause why an apple should fall; it was simply a matter of 
coincidence that God should happen to will that it should touch the ground after willing it should be 
detached from the bough. The facts of Magick appear quite natural if one accepts the explanation 
officially put forward without inquiring too closely. 
This theory, roughly speaking, is that of Milton or Dante. There is even some excuse for saying it is 
the Catholic tradition ŕ rebours; that tradition is of course the development and degradation of 
various animistic cults. Magical facts were explained by the intervention of spiritual beings. One 
spiritual being, myself, throws a stone. That is how it happens that the stone has changed its 
position. Another spiritual being, Zeus, is annoyed; that explains how such and such a house is 
struck by lightning. All facts are of the same order and their interpretation must be uniform. 
Now, I had dismissed the whole theory of spiritual hierarchies as repugnant to reason; thus I was 
left with a set of phenomena on my hands which 
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cried aloud for explanation, exactly like the man who noticed that rubbed amber attracted certain 
light objects. In this essay, I endeavoured to show how it was the Magical Operations were 
effective. My collection of facts was at that time comparatively small and I had not yet analysed 
and classified them properly. But the essay shows that I was on the right track. My interpretation 
conformed with the mechanical theory of Victorian physics. 
The sequel shows my development on the same lines as the rest of modern science. The materialists 
had to include the connotation of "spirit" in their definition of "matter". One of my difficulties was 
that my senses told me that the archangel Gabriel exactly as they told me that Ernst Haeckel