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intelligences or elementals of Earth. It is, so far as my own experience goes, a highly efficient
technique, and I can clairn at least an 80% degrce of accuracy over several years. Tarot is the
name of a set of cards, seventy-eight in number, which were introduced into Europe in either
the fourteenth or fifteenth century from . . . ? No-one knows where they came from. Their
origin is a complete mystery. At one period in Europe there were no such cards available, so far
as we can see. At another time, the cards were circulating freely. Little mention need be made
of astrology, since that has long been one of the most popular methods with which the public
has been made familiar. Anyone who practises these methods with this objective in mind will
assuredly become aware of the results I have described. And while, it is true, his querents for
divination may receive perfectly good answers to the questions they have asked, departing from
his threshold in the spirit of gratitude and wonder, the intuitive development accruing to him
will constitute the more important side of that transaction.
It is when we leave the relatively simple realm of divination to approach the obscure subject of
Evocation that we enter deep waters. Here it is that most difficulty has arisen. And it is in
connection with this phase of Magic that the greatest misunderstanding and fear even has
developed.
In order to elucidate the matter, let me again turn to the terminology of modern psychology.
The term "complex" has achieved a fairly wide notoriety during the last quarter of a century
since the circulation of the theories of Freud and Jung. It means an aggregation or group of
ideas in the mind with a strong emotional charge, capable of influencing conscious thought and
behaviour. If my interest is Magic, then naturally every item of information acquired, no matter
what its nature, is likely to be built by association into that constellation of ideas clustering
around my interest--becoming in the course of years a thorough-going complex. Mrs. Jones my
dairywoman, because of her professional predilection, will have her complex centering about
milk and cows and butter and the price of eggs.
Over and above this definition, however, is the more subtle one of a group of ideas or feelings
congregating about a significant or dominant psychic theme, such as sex or the need to
overcome inferior feelings, or some psychic wound of childhood, tying or locking up nervous
energy. Thus, as a result of repression, we may find a complex of which the possessor is totally
unconscious--a complex expressing itself in a sense of insecurity, obsession by morbid
unreasonable fears, and persistent anxiety. Moreover, a constellation of feelings and moods and
emotional reactions may exist which have become so powerful and yet so obnoxious to reason
as to have become completely split off from the main stream of the personality. What modern
psychology calls a complex in this sense, the ancient psychology of Magic, which had its own
system of classification and nomenclature, named a Spirit. The system of classification was the
Qabalistic Sephiros or the ten fundamental categories of thought.
Thus, should we essay translation of terms, the sense of inferiority we might call the spirit of
Tipharas, whose name is said to be Soras, inasmuch as the Sun, one of its attributions or
associations, is considered the planetary symbol of the individuality. Hence an affliction to the
personality, which may be considered a general or rough definition of the inferiority sense,
could well be referred to Soras--since the spirit in the case of each Sephirah is considered evil.
That complex expressing itself in insecurity is the spirit of Yesod and the Moon, whose name is
Chashmodai. This sphere of Yesod represents the astral design or foundation imparting stability
and permanence to physical shapes and forms, in a word it is a symbol of security and strength.
Should we be confronted with a case where the emotions were split off from consciousness--
this is the influence of the spirit of Hod and Mercury, Taphthartharath. One wallowing in
emotional chaos, having refused to develop equally consciousness and the rational faculties, is
subject to the spirit of Netsach and Venus, Haniel. A purely destructive or suicidal neurosis
which causes one to exhibit the symptomatic tendency deliberately to break things, or to use
them in attack against oneself, is of a martial quality, belonging to Gevurah and Mars, the spirit
Samael.
This, naturally, is the subjective point of view. That there is a purely objective occult theory I
do not deny, but that cannot be dealt with here.
How, nowadays, do we deal with the psycho-neuroses in the attempt to cure them--to eliminate
them from the sphere of the patient's thinking and feeling? Principally by the analytical method.
We encourage the patient to narrate freely his life-history, to delineate in detail his early
experiences in connection with his father and mother, his reactions to brothers and sisters, to
school and playmates and the entire environment. He is asked to dwell particularly on his
emotional reaction to these earlier experiences, to re-live them in his imagination, to recount
and analyse his feelings towards them. Moreover, his dreams at the time of analysis are
subjected to a careful scrutiny. This is necessary because the dream is a spontaneous psychic
activity uninterfered with by the waking consciousness. Such activity reveals present-day
unconscious reactions to the stimuli of life--reactions which modify, even form his conscious
outlook. In this way the patient is enabled to realise objectively the nature of this complex. He
must detach himself from it for a short space of time. And this critical objective examination of
it, this understanding of its nature and the means whereby it came into being, enables him, not
once and for all, but gradually and with the passage of time, to oust it from his ways of
thinking.
Magic, however, at one time proceeded according to a slightly different technique. It too [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]