Magick in Theory and Practice (Section 1)

of himself with his sigil. It is apparently assumed that the spirit already possesses the means of working on matter. The conception seems to be that of a schoolboy who asks his father to tell the butler to do something for him. In other words, the theory is grossly animistic. The savage tribes described by Frazer had a far more scientific theory. The same may be said of witches, who appear to hâve been wiser than the thaumaturgists who despised them. - They at least made waxen images — iden- tified by baptism — of the people they wished to control. They at least used appropriate bases for Magical manifestations, such as blood and other vehicles of animal force, with those of vegetable virtue such as herbs. They were also careful to put their bewitched products into actual contact — material or astral — with their victims. The classical exorcists, on the contrary, for ail their learning, were careless about this essential condition. They acted as stupidly as people who should Write business letters and omit to post them. It is not too much to say that this failure to understand the conditions of success accounts for the discrédit into which Magick fell until Eliphas Levi undertook the task of re-habilitating it two générations ago. But even he (profoundly as he studied, and luminously as he expounded, the nature of Magick considered as a universal formula) paid no attention whatever to that question of the Magical Link, though he everywhere implies that it is essential to the Work. He evaded the question by making the petitio principii of assigning to the Astral Light the power of transmitting vibrations of ail kinds. He nowhere enters into detail as to how its effects are produced. He does not inform us as to the qualitative or quantitative laws of this light. (The scientifically trained student will observe the analogy between Levi’s postulate and that of ordinary science in re the luminiferous ether.) It is déplorable that nobody should hâve recorded in a syste- matic form the results of our investigations of the Astral Light. We hâve no account of its properties or of the laws which obtain in its sphere. Yet these are sufficiently remarkable. We may briefly notice that, in the Astral Light, two or more objects can — 109 —