 Addressing myself this time to a, perhaps somewhat unusual topic, at least unusual in some circles, because more than most topics that we tend to consider here, it is, I think, frequently misunderstood, misrepresented, and both on the positive and the negative side treated in an unreasonable manner. So what is magic? First of all, it's derived, the term magic is derived from an old Indo-Aryan root, M-A-G, mug, which, in all the languages where it occurs, has something to do with greatness. Even in English we have such terms as magnitude, magnification, and so forth. So it has to do with an expansion, with an enlargement. Even the word magnet has something to do with it, because it was named after the Greek island of Magnes, where there was a lot of magnetic ore, and people would see the magnetic ore, how it draws onto itself smaller pieces of iron, and thereby enlarges. So it all has to do with that enlargement. Now, enlargement of what? Enlargement of consciousness, enlargement of the soul, attaining to a magnification of our essential self-hood. This is the essence of magic. And so from a certain time on in history, disciplines, and at least a basic worldview surrounding these disciplines, came about in many different cultures, by no means confined to the Mediterranean culture or to various cultures of Asia, but it can be found everywhere. These disciplines developed that are oriented toward that kind of an expansion. Why? Because the need to expand our consciousness, the need to widen our soul, as Rudolf Steiner called it, the white-verdened zeale, a rather nice metaphor, is an essential longing, an essential instinctual underlying desire in the human being. In fact, most other preoccupations and desires that we have are in a certain sense materialized metaphors for that. We think that we want a lot of money. And what is that? But an enlargement, well, of our bank account, of our stock portfolio, or whatever the case may be. But this very well may be, and in fact I think it is, a certain distortion of an other desire which we are not conscious of, because it's character is of a much more subtle nature, and that is the expansion of our soul. We are in need of expanding our consciousness much more than we are in need of expanding our bank account. Yet with the extraversion of consciousness, as Jung would have called it, we project this much more subtle interior need onto the external world, and we think that we need things. We think that we need external objects. And yet how many of these objects can we really use? There is an obvious limitation to the accumulation of externals, but there is no limitation. Not even the sky is the limit to the expansion of the soul. So people have not only felt and believed but known for a very, very long time, and in many, many places. And it was to respond to this great internal need, this longing that magic came to be designed and came to be devised. So the very first thing, the very first important concept that we need to keep in mind in connection with magic is that its true aim is the expansion of our interior nature, and that everything else that people ordinarily associate with magic is really but a byproduct and often the distortion of that. Now we also need to keep in mind a few other concepts without which we will never understand this peculiar field. One of the most important of these is that the religious spiritual effort and kind of the map of the greater realm of being into which our consciousness is designed and destined to expand varies from time to time, going to various factors which we don't need to consider here because they sort of have to do with the cultural history of the West. We have come to a gross oversimplification of the religious and spiritual worldview. We have come to think that to the extent that we are religious at all, that here we are and there is God. These are the two things that matter and in that order ourselves, first and God, second of course, but that religion and the religious effort is a mere simple interaction between the individual's consciousness, the individual's soul, and the ineffable ultimate reality of God and that there is nothing in between. A very peculiar notion. It's a notion that comes from intellectual inflation that has come upon us in the course of our history since about the Renaissance, but gradually. But somehow all the ancient peoples including the people who are our ancestors within western culture knew better than that. They envisioned a vast and really in many ways very exciting, very fascinating region between ourselves here in the manifest external reality and the ultimate reality. A great in between world that is filled with its own flora and fauna, is filled with angels and less highly developed spiritual beings, planetary spirits, all kinds of entities within their own regions, within worlds upon worlds upon worlds. And the usual assumption was that when we came here originally, whether when we were born or whether in a reincarnation according to a reincarnation or pattern perhaps eons ago prior to our series of embodiments here, we came through this vast landscape. And if we are to go back, we need to go back through that landscape again. Now it is this intermediate landscape between ourselves and ultimate reality that is addressed by magic. It cannot be addressed in a physical way. We have no physical means of traveling in a non-physical region. So it has to be addressed by means of consciousness, by means of the spirit, by means of the mind. And this view was virtually universal at least in the higher and deeper aspects of religiosity right up to the modern era when our obsession with the external, the extroverted world has sort of replaced it and pushed it out of the way. Now then, so it is by way of thus extending ourselves into these deeper regions that our consciousness, that our selfhood grows. And if you want to pinpoint the particular philosophical schools and disciplines from which this tradition has descended to our culture, then we can look primarily to the Alexandrian period of the Mediterranean culture, namely from about 300, 400 or so BC until 300 or 400 AD along the shores of the Mediterranean and particularly centered in the Egyptian, the Greco-Egyptian great city of Alexandria. And we will find there such people as the Neoplatonists, the Gnostics, the Hermeticists, who were all magicians. Particularly in the 19th century, namely late 18th and 19th century and through a good deal of the early part of the 20th century, the magical orientation of these people was not emphasized very greatly in our literature by our historians and by various scholars. They were all called philosophers, but we need to keep in mind that philosophy, the love of wisdom certainly included magic as far as these people were concerned. The Neoplatonists, let's say, of the kind of Yamblichus or Proclus would have considered it laughable to study the philosophy of Plato or of Plotinus or of Ammonius without doing something about it. The notion that just thinking about things will produce titanic changes in reality or in our own internal reality was not considered a viable proposition to these people. I knew a rather wise gentleman, the late Professor Ernest Wood, the first man ever to write about the Seven Rays, for instance, about the full eleven years before Alice Bailey. Professor Wood was one to say, you know, one thing you have to remember is that thinking leads only to more thinking. Thinking is self-perpetuating. The mind keeps churning out more ideas, more concepts, more images, but thinking by itself hardly ever leads beyond itself. But this is something that we have managed to forget. So with these kinds of basic ideas in the back of our minds, first of all realizing that magic is, well, that goes almost without saying, at least in this place, that magic is not pulling rabbits out of hats. That is the stage magic that came about as a clever imitation of certain magical phenomenon, that neither is magic just causing phenomena to occur in the external world, whether it is healing an illness, as I mentioned before, or whether it is beating up our enemy. Some people would call one of these white magic and the other one black magic. But that these are all peripheral, external, at the heart of it all, is an endeavor to expand, to widen our consciousness and to widen it in the direction of ultimate reality, recognizing, however, the intervening realms of being through which consciousness must travel in order to reach ultimate reality. Fine. Now, we'll get away from this theory to something a little more concrete. How are we going to study this field? The best way to do so.