The Equinox (Volume I, Number II)

THE EQUINOX Agrippa and other books) you would draw in the four colours with such other devices as your experience may suggest. 4. And soon. We cannot here enter at length into all the necessary preparations; and the student will find them fully set forth in the proper books, of which the “ Goetia” is perhaps the best example. These rituals need not be slavishly imitated; on the con- trary the student should do nothing the object of which he does not understand; also, if he have any capacity whatever, he will find his own crude rituals more effective than the highly polished ones of other people. The general purpose of all this preparation is as follows : 5. Since the student is a man surrounded by material objects, if it be his wish to master one particular idea, he must make every material object about him directly suggest that idea. Thus in the ritual quoted, if his glance fall upon the lights, their number suggests Mercury; he smells the per- fumes, and again Mercury is brought to his mind. In other words, the whole magical apparatus and ritual is a complex system of mnemonics. [The importance of these lies principally in the fact that particular sets of images that the student may meet in his wanderings correspond to particular lineal figures, divine names, &c., and are controlled by them. As to the possibility of producing results external to the mind of the seer (objective, in the ordinary common-sense acceptation of the term) we are here silent.] 6. There are three important practices connected with all forms of ceremonial (and the two Methods which later we shall describe). These are: 16