ABSTRACT
With the Fall, people had lost their dominion over nature, but not irretrievably. Like
Shakespeare’s Prospero boasted about his control over nature:
I have bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
Whether we consider Prospero’s itemisation of his former achievements or
Faustus’s ambition to ‘raise the wind, or rend the clouds’,3 the magician’s claim to
power is represented as performing the works of fallen nature. This, however, is to
view magic from outside the occult tradition. It is true that some occultists seemed
to share this negative attitude to magic. According to Pierre Poiret, human
Most occultists, however, would have agreed with Robert Turner that ‘Magicke and
Witchcraft are far differing Sciences.’5 For an occultist, ‘the science of Magic is not
evil, for by the knowledge of it, evil may be eschewed and good followed’.6 The
word ‘magician’, according to Agrippa, ‘doth not among learned men signify a
sorceror, or one that is superstitious, or devilish; but a wise man, a priest, a
Mircea Eliade has observed that modern Western thought is dominated by the
discovery ‘that man is essentially a temporal and historical being’. Hence the
preoccupation of Western thinkers with the factors conditioning existence. Eliade
problem of Indian thought’, but he adds that ‘its corollory’, the process of
deconditioning, is ‘rather neglected in the West’.8 There is, however, a long
tradition of meditation on the deconditioning process embodied in the Western
gnostic tradition and its various occult descendants. The origins of this tradition are
themselves to be found partly in Eastern thought,9 and throughout its development
it retained enough of a morphological similarity with its Eastern progenitor to be
instantly recognisable as belonging to the same family of ideas. On the other hand,
this family likeness has been attenuated by a process of miscegenation, and the
Western preoccupation with this world surfaces even in its approach to non-
conditioned being. The goal of the yogi’s spiritual endeavour is a simple liberation
from this world of illusion; the Western gnostic, at least in his later incarnations,
seeks dominion over rather than release from the phenomenal world. Hence the
different responses of East and West to magic. The yogi acquires various
miraculous powers (siddhis) through his ascetic practices, but he must renounce these if he is to progress towards non-conditioned being: ‘For as soon as the ascetic
consents to make use of the magical forces gained by his disciplines, the possibility
of acquiring new forces vanishes.’ In Indian thought, ‘all possession implies
bondage to the thing possessed’, and this is true of the siddhis as much as anything else.10 For the Western occult mystic the magical powers conferred by his spiritual
growth are welcomed for their utility rather than avoided as stumbling blocks.
