Root Of Magick

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Root Of Magick
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I have looked at the Ancient Art of Magic and traced down some of the original scrolls for ancient magick workers.

The below came from here:-
http://www.lib.umich.edu/pap/exhibits/magic/in tro.html

Quote:

'Magic,' as modern scholars have grudgingly learned to admit, is a very elusive category. No definition of ''magic'' has ever found universal acceptance, and countless attempts to separate it from ''religion'' on the one hand and ''science'' on the other have borne few, if any, fruits. The problem lies, to a large extent, in that what one society may label ''magic,'' another would label ''religion,'' and another ''science,'' so that by choosing one label we are implicitly choosing sides whenever conflicting definitions of magic compete with each other, or run the risk of imposing our own categories upon societies in which these categories would have made no sense.

The practice of ancient magic was quite like that of modern cooking. Just as today, while anyone can cook but only some can cook well, anyone in the ancient world could make a simple amulet or castigate a wayward demon, but only a few specialized in such activities and achieved superior results. And, just like modern cooks, such ancient practitioners had their own private note-books, where their painstakingly accumulated secrets were preserved -- collections of recipes, hints, notes, and ideas, whether borrowed or adapted from others or independently developed. Each recipe was tested, improved upon, and in some cases passed on to clients, colleagues, disciples, or successors. Being the main vehicle for the transmission of magical lore, such books often were the target of suppression, especially, but not exclusively, by Christians (cf. Acts 19:19). Fortunately, some of these collections have survived. Since these were normally written on papyrus, a perishable organic material, the specimens which did survive all come from the dry sands of Egypt, and are written either in Greek or in Egyptian. However, similar recipe-books -- in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic -- were found in the Cairo Genizah (the used-paper store-room of a medieval synagogue in Cairo, Egypt), and numerous medieval manuscripts -- in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and many other languages -- attest to the vitality of such recipe-books in various forms throughout the Middle Ages.


To a great extent this is my view as well, and holds for modern occultists too: anyone can do magic, but few are master chefs of it. Even fewer chefs have degrees in nutrition and make foods as healthy as they are tasty. There are also degrees of understanding. This is like physics. There is basic physics that can help you shoot a cannon, or calculate how far away a bolt of lightning is from the difference in time between the flash and the thunder reaching your ears. And there is the physics that can build and fly a starship. They are both physics, but the principles are very different because they describe different levels of reality.

One level is right in our face, and the other is so deep we are not sure it exists at all, unless we apply it. One level requires a bit of education and common sense, while the other cannot be understood without light-year leaps in creative intuition and a point of view so complex, it defies reason and maybe even sanity. There are mysteries of magic that have not been lost because they were hidden, but because too few really understood them for them to be communicated in a realistic manner. When we don't understand something, we speculate, and the speculation can pass as truth on its way to becoming rigid dogma.

What the above author may consider average magic may be the magic of the pre-school level, while the author's conception of superior magic may be that of the 3rd grade. He/she may not be able to concieve high school or university, let alone PhD or Nobel Prize level magics. Indeed magic, religion and science have blurred boundaries, and Aurthur C Clark has said that science sufficiently above our level of conception is magic. Let us also not forget art, the fourth category whose lines are blurred with the other three, although in our society not as much.

To an enlightened individual these four categories are actually the same thing.

The first book I came across (Not an Ancient book) doesn't really cover any spells but gives an overview of them, and an understanding on what you need to know to make them work.

http://www.hermetic.com/crowley/libers/liber77 7.pdf

This book will help in understanding symbols and other Ancient arts and hidden information.

It is a great first book for reference.

If others have links and ideas please post them.
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