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3
- Divination as Magic
At its crudest divination can degenerate into vulgar fortune-telling - the fatalistic belief that the future
is immutable, that man has no control over his destiny, that what is to come may be foretold by the
mechanical application of a particular set of rules. Such superstition has nothing in common with
genuine occultism (although it might be compatible with the theology of Augustine or Calvin) and
was denounced in the Chaldaean Oracles of the pseudo-Zoroaster.
'Direct not thy mind', wrote the mystic, 'to the vast surfaces of the earth; for the Plant of Truth grows
not upon the ground. Nor measure the motions of the Sun, collecting rules, for he is carried by the
Eternal Will of the Father, and not for your sake alone. Dismiss from your mind the impetuous course
of the Moon, for she moveth always by the power of Necessity. The progression of the Stars was not
generated for your sake. The wild aerial flights of birds give no true knowledge, nor the dissection of
the entrails of victims; they are all mere toys, the basis of mercenary fraud; flee from these if you
would enter the sacred paradise of piety where Virtue, Wisdom and Equity are assembled.'
Most magicians would be in agreement with 'Zoroaster's' strictures but do, nevertheless, accept
divination as a method of (a) examining the full potentiality of a given situation (ie ascertaining some
of its many possible outcomes) (b) deciding which of the infinite series of choices open to them they
shall take, and (c) developing their own intuitive faculty. Exactly how divination works is uncertain
and, before we go on to give detailed instructions regarding the techniques which we consider
unequalled in their ability to develop the magical intuition, we shall briefly outline the nature of the
currently fashionable theory and contrast it with more traditional hypotheses.
One traditional Chinese explanation of how the I Ching and all other methods of divination work is
simple enough; it is that the physical manipulations involved in obtaining an answer to a question are
not in any sense random or accidental but bear a direct relationship to the full cycle of happenings,
cause and effect, to which both question and answer belong. By its very nature such an explanation is
unprovable - but it is quite as good an explanation as any other - and bears a considerable resemblance
to certain aspects of C.G. Jung's theory of synchronicity, one of the two fashionable western theories
which seek to provide a rationale for divinatory systems.
Before making some examination of the concept of synchronicity, it is worth taking a brief look at the
other western theory regarding divination. It is a theory that until a few years ago was confined to, at
the most, a few hundred occultists but is now, thanks to the increasing popularity of the formerly
neglected writings of Aleister Crowley, becoming more widely known. The theory is concerned with
what Crowley and his teachers in the Golden Dawn called 'Intelligences'. Crowley described these
Intelligences and his theory of divination as follows:
'We postulate the existence of intelligences, either within or without the diviner of which he is not
immediately conscious. (It does not matter whether the communicating spirit so-called is an objective
entity or a concealed portion of the diviner's mind.) We assume that such intelligences are able to
reply correctly - within limits - to the questions asked.
'We postulate that it is possible to construct a compendium of hieroglyphs sufficiently elastic in
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