{"collection":"ETC Sacred Texts","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_etc_bb_bb08_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_etc_bb_bb08_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_etc_bb_bb08_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/etc/bb/bb08.htm","summary":"This is a scholarly essay or lecture \u2014 likely early 20th century, given its citations \u2014 surveying the history and philosophy of magic from within the tradition of comparative religion and intellectual history. Its central argument is that magic represents a genuine developmental phase of human thought rather than mere superstition: the author famously calls magic \"the womb from which sprang the science of the present.\" The essay traces magical philosophy through Neo-Platonic and Kabbalistic sources, focusing especially on the Doctrine of Emanations \u2014 the idea that divine virtue flows downward through angels and stars into all earthly things \u2014 which the author treats as philosophically serious, comparing it favorably to orthodox creationism and suggesting it anticipates Swedenborg. A key claim is that sympathetic magic (the belief that acting on a symbol or part of something affects the whole) is not primitive nonsense but reflects a coherent theory of universal correspondence, and the author revises the definition of magic as \"an attempt to employ the powers of the spiritual world by the aid of symbols.\" Most distinctively, the author argues the doctrine of emanations is better suited to explaining ordinary experience than extraordinary miracles, inverting the usual frame: the truly magical, he contends, is the mundane fact of experience itself. Readers interested in the intellectual genealogy of occultism, the relationship between magic and science, or Neo-Platonic philosophy as it filtered into medieval and Renaissance practice will find substantial, if densely argued, material here.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"Bygone Beliefs","tradition":"ETC Sacred Texts","translated_text":null,"word_count":6126}