Page 81 (part 1)

CONCLUSION THE ceremonial literature of White and Black Magic has now spoken for itself in the catholic sense of the words. We see exactly what the Rituals had to offer, by the hypothesis of their own claim, to those who followed in their putative practical courses. I presume once more that it is unnecessary to debate whether the Olympic Spirits will make gold in a moment by Magic, transport precious stones, prolong life to several hundred years, teach all arts and provide the operator with ministering spirits in visible and corporal form. These claims merely externalise the cupidity and other desires of the artist. Hereof at least is the domain of the occult working where it happens to suffer the title of transcendental; its entire term and horizon are within the limits of low material gain and pleasure; and the ambition of the Magus was to secure these advantages--firstly--by the trickery and artifice of the occult world, instead of by his proper activity, and--secondly--on a very much larger scale than was normally likely or possible. When we turn, however, to the Rituals which I have classed as composite, we shall find that we are dealing with a much more valued and popular series of handbooks, and the head or crown of all is held in the polite opinion of occult circles to be white by its essential nature and only Goëtic in its accretions. As a matter of fact, it is Goëtic by intention and essence, and white only in the sense that some of its distracted processes might, apart from their sanguinary nature, be termed harmless. It is obvious, however, from the text that the Intelligences who are the subjects of conjuration are fallen spirits, and that one of the anxieties in respect of their apparition is the hideousness of their native form. The main purposes of experiment are (1) the recovery of stolen goods; (2) the power to go invisible, for reasons which are not less certain because they pass unsaid; (3) the possession of a buried treasure; (4) the seeking of love and favour. Those that remain are more expressly and literally of the order of Fairyland. This is so far concerning what is accepted as the prototype and fountain of the Art. The Infernal Hierarchy of the Lemegeton seems from time to time a promise of things more important, but the diabolism of practical Magic was essentially of a popular kind in the bulk of its documents, and those which aimed too high--as, for example, at logic and philosophy, the liberal sciences, eloquence and good understanding--had comparatively few votaries. To give riches, to kindle love and lust, to discover treasures--as these were the sum of ambition, so they were the qualifications in chief demand from the spirits. The class of people to whom such considerations would appeal were those obviously--and as I have otherwise indicated--who could not obtain their satisfaction through the normal channels--the outcasts, the incompetent, the ignorant, the lonely, the deformed, the hideous, the impotent and those whom Nature and Grace alike denied. This is the category into which the modern psychic mind would enter unwittingly, could I suppose for a moment that, outside such purlieus as Paris, there has been any revival of Ceremonial Magic in the nineteenth or twentieth century. The typical occult student is preposterous enough in his preoccupations, but when he takes the Grimoires seriously he has usually some assumption as to a meaning behind them--not that they are allegorical writings, but rather that they are the final issue in abuse and travesty of something that looms to his intelligence like real knowledge.