THREE SCHOOLS OF MAGICK (I) 
65 
Nature, or to escape them by appeal to a postulated power 
which is assumed to have laid them down. The religious man 
is, as such, incapable of understanding what the laws of 
Nature really are. (They are generalizations from the order of 
observed fact.) 
The History of Magick has never been seriously attempted. 
For one reason, only initiates pledged to secrecy know much 
about it; for another, every historian has been talking about 
some more or less conventional idea of Magick, not of the 
thing itself. But Magick has led the world from before the 
beginning of history, if only for the reason that Magick has 
always been the mother of Science. It is, therefore, of 
extreme importance that some effort should be made to 
understand something of the subject; and there is, therefore, 
no apology necessary for essaying this brief outline of its 
historical aspects. 
There have always been, at least in nucleus, three main 
Schools 
of Philosophical practice. (We use the word 
'philosophical' in the old good broad sense, as in the phrase 
"Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for the 
Advancement of Knowledge.") 
It is customary to describe these three Schools as Yellow, 
Black and White. The first thing necessary is to warn the 
reader that they must by no means be confounded with racial 
distinctions of colour; and they correspond still less with 
conventional symbols such as yellow caps, yellow robes, 
black magic, white witchcraft, and the like. The danger is 
only the greater that these analogies are often as alluring as 
they prove on examination to be misleading. 
These Schools represent three perfectly distinct and 
contrary theories of the Universe, and, therefore, practices of 
spiritual science. The magical formula of each is as precise as 
a theorem of trigonometry. Each assumes as fundamental a 
certain law of Nature, and the subject is complicated by the 
fact that each School, in a certain sense, admits the formulae 
of the other two. It merely regards them as in some way 
incomplete, secondary, or illusory. Now, as will be seen later,