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operation it would be unjust to Magic to denominate it a Science.
The third, and in some ways the most important branch for my particular purpose at the moment, is
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Vision, or the Body of Light technique. It is with this latter that I shall deal exclusively in this essay,
as it contains elements which I feel answer more definitely to the requirements of a Science than any
other.
In discussing Magic, the reader's pardon must be sought if reference is continually made to a
technical philosophical system named the Qabalah. They are so interlaced that it is well-nigh
impossible to separate them. Qabalah is theory and philosophy. On the other hand, Magic is the
practical application of that theory. In the Qabalah is a geometrical glyph named the Tree of Life,
which is really a symbolic map both of the universe in its major aspects, and of its microcosm, man.
Upon this map are depicted ten principal continents, so to say, or ten fields of activity where the
forces constituting or underlying the Universe function in their respective ways. In man these are
analysable into ten facets of consciousness, ten modes of spiritual activity. These are called the
Sephiros. I cannot enter more fully into an outline of this map here though I have repeatedly referred
to it here and in other essays; but the reader will find it adequately described in various books or
articles on the subject.
Now consider with me that especial Sephirah or subtle aspect of the universe called by the Qabalists
Yesod. Translated as the sphere of the Foundation, it is part of the Astral Light--an omniform plane
of magnetic, electric, and ubiquitous substance, interpenetrating and underlying the whole of the
visible perceptible world. It acts as a more or less permanent mould whereupon the physical world is
constructed, its own activity and constant change ensuring the stability of this world as a
compensating factor. In this world function the dynamics of feeling, desire and emotion, and just as
the activities of this physical world are engineered through the modalities of heat and cold,
compression and diffusion, etc., so in the astral are operative attraction and repulsion, love and hate.
Another of its functions is to exist as the memory of nature, wherein are automatically and
instantaneously recorded every act of man and every phenomenon of the universe from time
immemorial to the present day. The nineteenth century Magus, Eliphas Levi, has written of this
astral Light that: "There exists an agent which is natural and divine, material and spiritual, a
universal plastic mediator, a common receptacle of the vibrations of motion and the images of forms,
a fluid and a force, which may be called in some way the Imagination of Nature...." And again he
registers the conviction that it is "the mysterious force whose equilibrium is social life, progress,
civilization, and whose disturbance is anarchy, revolution, barbarism, from whose chaos a new
equilibrium at length evolves, the cosmos of a new order, when another dove has brooded over the
blackened and disturbed waters."
It is interesting to glance from this theurgic concept to a psychological one which is not very unlike
it. The following paragraph is more or less of a paraphrase of Jung's ideas concerning it, culled from
an essay of his entitled Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung. It is an extension of the ideas
previously quoted. He defines it first of all as the all-controlling deposit of ancestral experience from
untold millions of years, the echo of prehistoric world-events to which each century adds an
infinitesimally small amount of variation and differentiation. Because it is in the last analysis a
deposit of world-events finding expression in brain and sympathetic nerve structure, it means in its
totality a sort of timeless world-image, with a certain aspect of eternity opposed to our momentary,
conscious image of the world. It has an energy peculiar to itself, independent of consciousness, by
means of which effects are produced in the psyche that influence us all the more powerfully from the
dark regions within. These influences remain invisible to everyone who has failed to subject the
transient world-image to adequate criticism, and who is therefore still hidden from himself. That the
world has not only an outer, but an inner aspect. That it is not only outwardly visible, but also acts
powerfully upon us in a timeless present, from the deepest and most subjective hinterland of the
psyche---this Jung holds to be a form of knowledge which, regardless of the fact that it is ancient
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wisdom, deserves to be evaluated as a new factor in forming a philosophic world-view. I suggest,
then, that what the Magicians imply by the Astral Light is identical in the last resort with the
Collective Unconscious of modern psychology.
By means of the traditional Theurgic technique it is possible to contact consciously this plane, to
experience its life and influence, converse with its elemental and angelic inhabitants so-called, and
return here to normal consciousness with complete awareness and memory of that experience. This,
naturally requires training. But so does every department of science. Intensive preparation is
demanded to fit one for criticial observation, to provide one with the particular scientific alphabet
required for its study, and to acquaint one with the researches of one's predecessors in that realm. No
less should be expected of Magic--though all too often miracles are expected without due
preparation. Anyone with even the slightest visual imagination may be so trained as to handle in but
a short while the elementary magical technique, by which one is enabled to explore the subtler
aspects of life and the universe. To transcend this "many-coloured world." To gain admittance to
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