natural? It is an insult to human nature to brand magic and the occult science with the name of imposture. To believe that for so many thousands of years, one-half of mankind practiced deception and fraud on the other half, is equivalent to saying that the human race was composed only of knaves and incurable idiots. Where is the country in which magic was not practised? At what age was it wholly forgotten?
In the oldest documents now in our possession—the Vedas and the older laws of Manu—we find many magical rites practiced and permitted by the Brahmans.* Thibet, Japan and China teach in the present age that which was taught by the oldest Chaldeans. The clergy of these respective countries, prove moreover what they teach, namely: that the practice of moral and physical purity, and of certain austerities, developes the vital soulpower of self-illumination. Affording to man the control over his own immortal spirit, it gives him truly magical powers over the elementary spirits inferior to himself. In the West we find magic of as high an antiquity as in the East. The Druids of Great Britain practised it in the silent crypts of their deep caves; and Pliny devotes many a chapter to the "wisdom"† of the leaders of the Celts. The Semothees[1], — the Druids of the Gauls, expounded the physical as well as the spiritual sciences. They taught the secrets of the universe, the harmonious progress of the heavenly bodies, the formation of the earth, and above all — the immortality of the soul.‡ Into their sacred groves — natural academies built by the hand of the Invisible Architect — the initiates assembled at the still hour of midnight to learn about what man once was and what he will be.§ They needed no artificial illumination, nor life-drawing gas, to light up their temples, for the chaste goddess of night beamed her most silvery rays on their oak-crowned heads; and their white-robed sacred bards knew how to converse with the solitary queen of the starry vault.∫∫
On the dead soil of the long by-gone past stand their sacred oaks, now dried up and stripped of their spiritual meaning by the venomous breath of materialism. But for the student of occult learning, their vegetation is still as verdant and luxuriant, and as full of deep and sacred truths, as at that hour when the arch-druid performed his magical cures, and waving the branch of mistletoe, severed with his golden sickle the green bough from its mother oak-tree. Magic is as old as man. It is
* See the Code published by Sir William Jones, chap. ix., p. 11.
† Pliny: "Hist. Nat.," xxx. I: Ib., xvi., 14; xxv., 9, etc.
‡ Pomponius ascribes to them the knowledge of the highest sciences.
§ Cæsar, iii., 14.
∫∫ Pliny, xxx.
- ↑ Diogenes Laërtius, Βίοι, Βιβλίον Α', 1, says Aristotle, "ἐν τῷ Μαγικῷ", called them Σεμνοθέοι, "Semnothees" (Wikisource contributor note)
