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The Conflict Between Black and White Magic
Magic can be good (white) or evil (black). Those who practice
this ancient art do it for two reasons. The magician who
seeks wisdom and attempts to unravel the truth about the
workings of the universe is a white magician. A practitioner
who strives for power, and attempts to dominate others to
compensate for his or her personal deficiencies, is a sorcerer
or black magician.
White magicians call upon God, elemental
spirits, or angels as a source of power for their rituals. Black
arts
specialists conjure up demons and monsters of the night
for their power base.
Amulets hung around the neck, perhaps
inscribed with the Lord's Prayer or the gospel of St. John, protect
an
individual from black magic attacks. A state of drowsiness
was supposed to be the time when one is vulnerable to
such an attack. The charm bracelet, a popular luck-bringer
since its introduction about 100 years ago, is probably the
last of the traditional protective devices.
The history of the conflict between
black magic and white suggests that in the main it is not the highly
specialized
magician who is held responsible for psychic attacks, but
ordinary individuals, usually neighbors" In the past, whenever
personal systems of protection failed to put the mind at
ease, a white magician was called in, in much the same
way that a psychiatrist is consulted today.
The country white magician functioned
as a type of general practitioner. His or her counterpart in the
cities was
more likely to specialize in one aspect of these arts, such
as astrology. The role of the white magician will always
remain important in a community that fears magic, or in
one that has been convinced by its clergy of the presence
of devils. |
Evil
Forces on the Astral Plane
Occult
therapy avers that every human thought coalesces
with one of the creatures of the astral plane, which
temporarily embodies it. A mere passing impulse of
annoyance with somebody will not last long in the astral
world, any more than in this one, but a steady flow of
malevolence will have more potentially dangerous
consequences. C. W. Leadbeter, a Theosophist, stated in
his book, The Astral Plane:
A feeling of envious or jealous
hatred towards another person sends an evil elemental to
hover over him and
seek for a weak point through which it can operate; and if the
feeling be persistent, such a creature may
be continually nourished by it and thereby be enabled
to protract its undesirable activity for a long period. It
can, however, produce no effect upon the person
towards whom it is directed unless he has himself
some tendency which it can foster-some fulcrum for
its lever, as it were. From the aura of a man of pure
thought and good life all such influences at once
rebound, finding nothing upon which they can fasten,
and in that case, by a curious law, they react in all
their force upon their original creator. In him by the
hypothesis they find a congenial sphere of action..¹3;.
Evil astral plane creatures may be created by, or attracted
to, a victim when a magician conducts a ceremony filled
with hatred and destruction. Sinister creatures in the manner
of thought-forms or ectoplasm attackers on the astral plane
are brought in on this attack. The essential ingredient of
the ritual is the vivid concentration of violent rage which the
magician conjures up in his own mind and conforms to the
bodily and mental manifestations exhibited in recognized
derangements, such as insanity, seizures, sterility, paralysis,
wasting diseases, or sensorial disorders.
Evil forces can attack anyone traveling on the
astral plane. Since we all dream and astrally travel for three
hours
every night, the dreamer may fail to bring his astral self
back into his physical body. The astral body may wander
helplessly about and may be attacked by these unseen
energies. Such symptoms as nightmares, fits, hysteria,
headaches, and fainting may be experienced by the victim.
These psychic attacks have resulted in insanity. It is accepted
in occult circles that all cases of insanity are caused by
such astral plane attacks to the soul.
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