May 18,1963

 

Dear Gail,

   Magicians are strange creatures. They have two paths to follow – the right hand path which is the white magic or good magic and the left hand path which is the black magic or bad magic. There is no center path as one might call it.

   A magician is not especially interested in reaching the goal of being one with deity which is the final path of the mystics. He is concentrated on  learning the techniques of manipulating the forces  of nature. He works with nature and over nature to gain his ends; the white magician is working for the good of  universal mankind and the black magician is working  for  himself. These are the end goals of each type. A magician might be called a necromancer, a sorcerer, a conjurer. However, he deals with the secret forces of nature and works primarily on the astral plane where the spiritual force is dualistic in nature, although this can also be said of the various level of the mental plane as well.  Hence  the  reason why he can use the negative or positive forces.

   Magicians also work on the mental level, using the mind powers  for their illusions, phenomena and healings. They can be witchdoctors,  kahunas, priests, mediums, or shamans, medical doctors, or that which we know of today as advertising men, propagandists, etc. They work with a principle called the vital force, which is known to us as Soul force, and which is existent in man, animal and plant. Sometimes this is called Mana which means mind, and can be manipulated so that phenomena occurs, such as the raising of tables; moving furniture without apparent human effort; levitation; making a change in the weather; and  the holding of life and death in the hands of a single person.

   Many groups use magic today but it is, under another name, still as primitive as the earlier days in our history of mankind.  Magic went under cover when the orthodox religious groups came into power, when medicine gained a political hold over people, when science became a popular fad trying to explain away the mysteries of mind and nature. Voodoo still practices its magic in many parts of the world, including civilized Great Britian and America. The witch doctor is prominent among the South American Indians, negro tribes in Africa, and the Shaman is popular with the peoples of the north. All these were very necessary before the invention of psychology and psychoanalysis. You must understand that with the advent of the industrial revolution, the social revolution and the leisure which man is gaining today, the church lost its hold over the masses and Luther’s schism brought a new power into office, the industrialist has needed all the resources possible to keep the people in check. So it is done through several agencies, not as an organized plan but one which has fitted in, hand and glove together.

   Man was once a God who walked the earth, but now he is reduced to being a puppet who is enslaved to work  for the benefit of others. The Freudian doctrine which has been accepted by our western  civilization has set forth a theory that man is inherently weak, that he must be mothered from childhood to death by his mother and, when he is old enough, married to a woman who will take over where mother  departed.  The old theory under which we lived until the advent of Freudism was that too much mothering made a boy a weakling. This new doctrine (comparatively new – 50 years old) has brought about the conflicts seen in our society today, where youth won’t take discipline; hence juvenile problems. It is practiced in the Catholic church –  although this would be denied if questioned – but if you stop to think how much emphasis is put upon the Mother of God by the church, then you can start thinking what is behind all this. This thought has taken over our whole  life in society  today.

   Where does this fit in with magic? The Freudian doctrine is the antithesis of magic, as well as the church. In the east where magic is  practiced daily by all peoples from high government officials to peasantry, the Brahmans (priest caste)  tried the same controls over people  as the church did from its beginning in Rome by putting together a doctrine which says man is weak, an animal, and lives at the mercy of a Creator who deals only through Its priests. Magic, on the other hand, created Gods of men, when it was white magic; when black magic it tried to reduce men to zero points. Get the point? This being true, then the orthodox religions, psychoanalysis, medicine, etc., are practicing black magic today – that is to some extent. At least this is my thought because they are trying to make controls  on man through moral and materialistic laws.

   Some of the greatest magicians known in history have been: Count Alessandro Cagliostro, Hermes Trismegistus, Apollonius of Tyana, Albert Magnus, Arippa of Nettesheim, Mesmer, Paracelsus, Plotinus, Simon Magus, William Butler Yeats, etc.  These men are  ancestors of many today who walk the streets unknown to others as magicians. Great are the numbers of those who attempt to utilize the dark side of these arts, in a lust after Power, it is always a condition of Power versus Love. A magician has power over  the fire elementals, water elementals, the air sylphs and the earth elementals. Western magic stems from earlier civilizations – the Chaldean, Babylonian, Assyrian,  Greek and Roman. The Jewish people took it up and developed it in the Kabbalah to a much higher form than it had been, but that was still only achieving the mental plane. Palestine was at the crossroads of it when the Romans learned of it and took it back to Italy, thus spreading it to the rest of the western world.

   The Essenes were a Jewish cult, to which Jesus belonged, that trained its members in magic. It was one of the early mystery schools. It was put on paper  for the first time in 12th century Spain where it was later picked up in Poland by a mystery school (as Chassidism) where a famous rabbi taught it. Later a German monk put down the secret science in a manuscript after being initiated into a secret order of magicians, and started a secret school in his homeland, the first except for the Knights Templar who practiced magic until destroyed by the king of France in the 16^th century. Elphas Levi belonged to the German school, but he revealed his findings in an amazing set of books which can be found in certain libraries over the country. His works revived a group who in the last century opened the famous Order of the Golden Dawn, that sought  power through the manipulation of natural forces, and to which belonged a number of writers: Wm. Butler Yeats, Aleister Crowley, Arnold Bennett, A.E. Waite, etc.

   Much of Jung’s, the psychologist, works belong to the secret teachings of magic. Anyways, these fail in their import in comparison to Eckankar, as they seek to manipulate through the will of man, that which must be surrendered to the Divine. They misunderstand the nature of the divine Soul,  Godlike in nature, for being in and of Itself an individual God among men, but such a desire for Power always corrupts, and never provides the desired payoff.  This secret wisdom among their teachings teaches the truth that man’s destiny is in his own hands, that he can control  the  Siddhi powers of the mind. Many of the secrets are too powerful to teach any but the purest and most disciplined and balanced of initiates. In the course of time the student  of magic learns telepathy; healing of: insanity, drunkenness, disease; how to project his desires into the formative  world  where all things must originate before materialization; learns to control the mind forces by use of symbols, by rituals, and limited attempts at divination which when used by these criteria can never compare to that provided by the pure Spiritual flow from the Godhead to It’s pure channels. These magicians often learn clairvoyance and clairaudience, although few are able to grasp the means of claircognizance, the pure knowing. He learns astral travel   and the other planes using the lower bodies, but most don’t learn the use of  using the Soul form for expansion of consciousness rather than traveling in a lower state through time and space.  He learns the Tattwa vision and the Tattwa tides. His powers of concentration, memory, intuition, creative imagination and judgment  are enormously increased. The path of Eckankar contains a majority of these concepts within it, however we are concerned with being directed by the Eck as opposed to serving the personal human will, i.e. the ego.

More Later  

               Paul