ABSTRACT
The magical attitude is clearly more active and also more arrogant. The magician is at the centre of his own particular universe. The arrogance and even 'primitivism' of this approach has to some extent been made more legitimate by the ascendancy of existential philosophy. It has been common for recent interpreters of the magical tradition to regard the gods of High Magic as emanations and symbols of the creative imagination, forces of the transcendent psyche. The significance of this wide range of interests was that the magical rituals of the Golden Dawn, in whose shaping and formation Mathers played a major role came to draw on every major mythology in Western culture. Such a bisexual symbol represents the embodiment in a single form all the pairs of opposites, a transcendence of the contraries of phenomenality; and this incarnate form of forms is then conceived of as the one whose dance is the created world.
