Ideas of

Good and
Evil.

my longer poems for the stage, and all my shorter ones for the Psaltery, if only some strong angel keep me to my good

resolutions.

1902.

MAGIC

I

I BELIEVE in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are—

(1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can. flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.

Ideas of Good and Evil.

I often think I would put this belief à magic from me if I could, for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the world.

II

Some ten or twelve years ago, a man with whom I have since quarrelled for sound reasons, a very singular man who had given his life to studies other men despised, asked me and an acquaintance, who is now dead, to witness a magical work. He lived a little way from London and on the way my acquaintance told me: that he did not believe in magic, but that a novel of Bulwer Lytton's had taken such a hold upon his imagination that he was going to give much of his time and all his

belief

ve cor

thought to magic. He longed to believe
in it, and had studied, though not learnedly,
geomancy, astrology, chiromancy, and much
cabalistic symbolism, and yet doubted if
the soul outlived the body. He awaited
the magical work full of scepticism. He
expected nothing more than an air of
romance, an illusion as of the stage, that
might capture the consenting imagination
for an hour. The evoker of spirits and
his beautiful wife received us in a little
house, on the edge of some kind of garden
or park belonging to an eccentric rich
man, whose curiosities he arranged and
dusted, and he made his evocation in a
long room that had a raised place on the
floor at one end, a kind of dais, but was
furnished meagrely and cheaply. I sat
with my acquaintance in the middle of the
room, and the evoker of spirits on the
dais, and his wife between us and him.
He held a wooden mace in his hand, and
turning to a tablet of many-coloured
squares, with a number on each of the

Magic.

Ideas of Good and Evil.

squares, that stood near him on a chair, he repeated a form of words. Almost at once my imagination began to move of itself and to bring before me vivid images that, though never too vivid to be imagination, as I had always understood it, had yet a motion of their own, a life I could not change or shape. I remember seeing a number of white figures, and wondering whether their mitred heads had been suggested by the mitred head of the mace, and then, of a sudden, the image of my acquaintance in the midst of them. I told what I had seen, and the evoker of spirits cried in a deep voice, 'Let him be blotted out,' and as he said it the image of my acquaintance vanished, and the evoker of spirits or his wife saw a man dressed in black with a curious square cap standing among the white figures. It was my acquaintance, the seeress said, as he had been in a past life, the life that had moulded his present, and that life would now unfold before us. I too seemed to