Magick in Theory and Practice (Section 1)

occupy the samc space at the same time without interferîng wkh each other or losing their outlines. In that Light, objects can change their appearance completely without suffering change of Nature. The same thing can reveal itself in an infinité number of different aspects5 in fart, it iden¬ tifies itself by so doing, much as a writer or a painter reveals himself in a succession of novels or pictures, each of which is wholly himself and nothing else, but himself under varied conditions, though each appears utterly différent from its fellows. In that Light one is “swift without feet and flying without wings”; one can travel without moving, and communicate without conventional means of expression. One is insensible to heat, cold, pain, and other forms of appréhension, at least in the shapes which are familiar to us in our bodily vehicles. They exist, but they are appreciated by us, and they affect us, in a different manner. In the Astral Light we are bound by what is, super- ficially, an entirely different sériés of laws. We meet with obstacles of a strange and subtle character ; and we overcome them by an energy and cunning of an order entirely alien to that which serves us in earthly life. In that Light, symbols are not conventions but realities, yet (on the contrary) the beings whom we encounter are only symbols of the realities of our own nature. Our operations in that Light are really the adventures of our own personified thoughts. The universe is a projection of ourse!ves; an image as unreal as that of our faces in a mirror, yet, like that face, the necessary form of expression thereof, not to be altered save as we alter ourselves. 1 The mirror may I. This passage must not be understood as asserting that the Universe is pureîy subjective. On the contrary, the Magical Theory accepts the absolute reality of ail things in the most objective sense. But ail perceptions are neither the observer nor the observed; they are repré¬ sentations of the relation between them. We cannot affirm any quality in an object as being independent of our sensorium, or as being in itself that which it seems to us. Nor can we assume that what we coenize is more than a partial phantom of its cause. We cannot even déterminé the meaning of such ideas as motion, or distinguish between time and space, except in relation to some particular observer. For example, if I fire a IÏO