THE HISTORY OF MAGIC AND THE OCCULT
Kurt Seligmann
The author of this book, who is a brilliant surrealist painter, has compiled and crystallized here some significant and interesting aspects of the religious and animistic beliefs of ancient, medieval, and modern times.
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"God is the matter and form of the universe. Everything exists in Him; He is at the bottom of all things and all beings, which carry the symbols of His intelligence. The whole, God and the universe, is a perfect unity."
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"Imagination is like the Sun, the light of which is not tangible, but which can set a house on fire. Imagination leads man's life. If he thinks of fire, he is on fire; if he thinks of war, he will cause war. All depends only upon man's imagination to be Sun, i.e., that he imagines wholly that which he wills." Paracelsus
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"One God is the cause of all creation."
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"In the higher magical religions, the priests conceived a supreme deity, a wise controller of the world's harmony."
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"The 'prima materia', the alchemists declared, can be found everywhere. It was considered the essence of all substances, 'the underlying something that always remains identical and one.' (Aristotle, 'On Generation and Corruption', Bk 1)"
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"There exists no accidental happening; everything obeys the one law."
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"Gnosticism arose from the widely held belief that revelation and wisdom of the divine were to be found among all civilized nations, and that every faith contained a germ of the great truth."
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"An important feature of Neo-Platonic ethics was the belief that god had manifested himself not only to one, but to many nations. His spirit had breathed wherever one discovers traces of divine revelation."
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"In relating the things of the earth to the celestial, and those of heaven to the inferior, the Chaldeans have shown in the mutual affections between these parts of the universe (which are separated in space but not in essence) the harmony that unites them in a sort of musical accord." Philo Judaeus
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"It is very likely that in nature a marvellous mysticity of numbers is at work, and in history also. Is not everything of significance, symmetry and strange connection? Can God not reveal Himself as well in mathematics as in other sciences?" Novalis
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"Amidst variety and multiplicity there exists harmony and unity which can only derive from the One Coordinator." Juda Halevi
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"All is contained in All. And All is One."
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"The human soul is made of the same elements as the world soul."
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"In the great corporeal world, which appears in different forms, of air, earth, sea and fire, a divine soul does rule, a deity does govern wisely." Marcus Manilius, 'Astronomy to Augustus', modernized
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"God has imbued man's soul with a longing for perfection. Like nature, man should strive for the divine within him."
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"God is the Word that became World."
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"The original virtue and vigour of all things depend upon the soul of the world. All Platonists, Pythagoreans, Orpheus, Trismegistus, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Avicenna, Algazel, and all Peripatetics confess and confirm this."
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"The world soul-spirit animates all bodies."
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"In Plato's world heaven and earth, the elements, the soul and the spirit, the divine and the terrestrial are interrelated and partake of one another."
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"One is All, by him is all, and for him is all, and in him is all." Early Alchemical saying
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"Matter is One, or as the alchemists used to say: 'One is All'."
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"The power of God permeates every being of the universe."
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