GOETIA

To me, then, it remains to raise the One Thousand and One Nights original: "Alf Laylah wa Laylah," the classic collection of Middle Eastern folk tales often called the Arabian Nights into its proper place once more.

I am not concerned to deny the objective reality of all "magical" phenomena; if they are illusions, they are at least as real as many unquestioned facts of daily life; and, if we follow Herbert Spencer (a 19th-century philosopher who argued that every effect must have a cause), they are at least evidence of some cause.^1

Now, this fact is our base. What is the cause of my illusion of seeing a spirit in the triangle of Art? The "triangle of Art" is the consecrated space outside the magician's circle where spirits are commanded to manifest.

Every amateur original: "smatterer", every expert in psychology, will answer: "That cause lies in your brain."

English children (with all due respect to original: "pace" the Education Act) are taught that the Universe lies in infinite Space; Hindu children, in the Akasa (a Sanskrit term for the "ether" or the fundamental substrate of the universe), which is the same thing.

Those Europeans who go a little deeper learn from Johann Gottlieb Fichte (a philosopher who taught that the external world is a product of the mind), that the phenomenal Universe is the creation of the Ego; Hindus, or Europeans studying under Hindu spiritual teachers original: "Gurus", are told, that by Akasa is meant the Chitakasa (the "space of consciousness" or the mind-sky). The Chitakasa is situated in the "Third Eye," that is original: "i.e.", in the brain. By assuming higher dimensions of space, we can reconcile this fact with a realistic view of the world; but we have no need to take so much trouble.

This being true for the ordinary Universe—that all sense-impressions are dependent on changes in the brain^2—we must include illusions, which are after all sense-impressions as much as "realities" are, in the class of "phenomena dependent on brain-changes."

Magical phenomena, however, come under a special sub-class, since they are willed, and their cause is the series of "real" phenomena called the operations of ceremonial Magic.

1 This, incidentally, is perhaps the greatest argument we possess, pushed to its extreme, against the Advaitist (a school of Hindu philosophy that believes only the ultimate soul is real and the world is an illusion) theories.
2 Thought is a secretion of the brain (August Weismann, a German evolutionary biologist). Consciousness is a function of the brain (Thomas Henry Huxley, a famous English biologist and advocate of Darwinism).