Magick in Theory and Practice (Section 1)

be distorted, dull, cloudcd, or cracked j and to tins extrait, due reflection of ourselves may be false even in respect of its symbolk présentation. In that Light, therefore, ail that we do is to discover ourselves by means of a sequence of hieroglyphics, and the changes which we apparently operate are in an objective sense illusions. But the Light serves us in this way. It enables us to see ourselves, and therefore to aid us to initiate ourselves by showing us what we are doing. In the same way a watchmaker uses a lens, though it exaggerates and thus falsifies the image of the System of wheels which he is trying to adjust. In the same way, a writer emplovs arbitrary characters according to a meaningless convention in order to enable his reader by retranslating them to obtain an approximation to his idea. Such are a few of the principal characteristics of the Astral Light. Its quantitative laws are much less dissimilar from those of material physics. Magicians hâve too often been foolish enough to suppose that ail classes of Magical Operations were equally easy. They seem to hâve assumed that the “almighty power of God” was an infinité quantity in presence of which ail finites were equally insignifiant. “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years” is their first law of Motion. “Faith can move mountains” they sav, and disdain to measure either the faith or the mountains. If you can kill a chicken by Magic, why not destroy an army with equal exertion? “With God ail things are possible.” This absurdity is an error of the same class as that mentioned above. The facts are wholly opposed. Two and two make four in the Astral as rigorously as anywhere else. The distance of one’s Magical target and the accuracy of one’s Magical rifle are factors in the success of one’s Magical shooting in just the same way as at Bisley. The law of Magical gravitation is as rigid as that of Newton. The law of Inverse Squares may not apply; but some cannon twice at an interval of 3 hours, an observer on the Sun would note a différence of some 200,000 miles in space between the shots, while to me they seem “in the same place.” Moreover, I am incapable of perceiving any phenomenon except by means of the arbitrary instruments of my senses; it is thus correct to say that the Uni verse as I know it is subjective, without denying its objectivity. lïî