Elementary Treatise on Practical Magic

you are in a position to know, very quickly, mechanics, philosophy, physiology, and, above all, magic. There you have it.

If my question and, above all, my answer seem absurd to you, it is because you do not know how to observe. You see, but you do not look; you passively experience sensations, but you are not accustomed to reasoning about them, to seeking the relationships between things, even those most gross in appearance. Socrates, one day seeing a man laden with wood passing through the streets of Athens, observed the artistic manner in which the wood was arranged. He went to the man, spoke to him, and made a Xenophon out of him. The fact is that Socrates saw with his brain more than with his eyes.

Now, if you wish to study magic, begin by understanding clearly that everything which strikes you around you, all those things that act upon your physical senses—the visible world, in short—all of this is only interesting as translations into a crude language of laws and ideas that will emerge from sensation once that sensation has been not only filtered by the sense organs, but also digested by your brain.

What interests you in a man, if you are serious, is not his clothes, but the character, the way of acting of that man. His clothes, and especially the way he wears them, may well indicate, approximately, the education of that man; but these are only reflections, images more or less exact of his inner nature.

Now, all the physical phenomena that strike our senses are only reflections, the clothes of much higher principles: ideas. This bronze before me is only the garment in which the artist has clothed his idea; this chair over there is also the physical translation of the artisan's idea; and, in all of nature, a tree, an insect, a flower are material translations of a language that is entirely ideal, in the true sense of the word.

This language is misunderstood by the scientist, who only occupies himself with the clothes of things, with phenomena, and who already has much to do; but poets and women understand this mysterious language better than any other, for poets and women know intuitively what universal love is. We shall see shortly why magic is the science of love. For the moment, let us return to our hansom cab.

A carriage, a horse, a driver: that is the whole of philosophy, that is the whole of magic, provided, of course, that you take this crude phenomenon as an analogical type and know how to look.

Have you noticed that if the intelligent being, the driver, wanted to make his cab move without a horse, the cab would not move?

Do not laugh and do not call me a clown the original text uses "Calino," a popular 19th-century French stage character representing a fool or simpleton, for if I ask you this question, it is because many imagine that magic is the art of making cabs move without horses, or, to translate it into a slightly more elevated language, of acting upon matter through the will and without any intermediary.

Therefore, let us retain this first point: that in a cab, the driver cannot put both the carriage and himself in motion without a motor, which, in this current case, is a horse.

But have you noticed that the horse is stronger than the driver, and that yet, by means of the reins, the driver uses and dominates the brute force of the animal he is leading?

If you have noticed all this, you are already half a magician, and we can continue our study without fear, but by translating your observations into "cerebral" language.

The driver represents intelligence, and above all the will, that which governs the entire system: in other words, the DIRECTING PRINCIPLE.

The carriage represents matter, that which is inert and that which supports: in other words, the MUTE PRINCIPLE.

The horse represents force. Obedient to the driver and acting upon the carriage, the horse moves the entire system. It is the MOTOR PRINCIPLE, which is at the same time the INTERMEDIARY between the carriage and the driver, and the LINK that unites