Against all the opposition in the world, I make this statement — that once I knew a magician. I was a witness of a performance that may some day be considered understandable, but that, in these primitive times, so transcends what is said to be the known that it is what I mean by magic.
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Speaking of a dog's homing skills, in Ch. 27Charles Fort
Everybody remembers his or her first magic show. Mine was in a garage in the dark. I passed out bowls of peeled grapes and described them as the devil's eyeballs. After that, by the light of a lantern on a wall of cinderblocks, there were card tricks and some pigeons we pretended to decapitate. The attraction of magic, to the amateur magician, derived from the fact that it wasn't magic at all; it was science in the service of illusion. Having sent in the magazine coupon and received our kit, we knew how everything worked toward achieving the ecstatic grasp.
John Leonard
Black magic is not a myth. It is a totally unscientific and emotional form of magic, but it does get results — of an extremely temporary nature. The recoil upon those who practice it is terrific.
It is like looking for an escape of gas with a lighted candle. As far as the search goes, there is little fear of failure!
To practice black magic you have to violate every principle of science, decency, and intelligence. You must be obsessed with an insane idea of the importance of the petty object of your wretched and selfish desires.
I have been accused of being a "black magician." No more foolish statement was ever made about me. I despise the thing to such an extent that I can hardly believe in the existence of people so debased and idiotic as to practice it.Aleister Crowley
White magic is supposedly utilized only for good or unselfish purposes, and black magic, we are told, is used only for selfish or "evil" reasons. Satanism draws no such dividing line. Magic is magic, be it used to help or hinder. The Satanist, being the magician, should have the ability to decide what is just, and then apply the powers of magic to attain his goals. Nature, in her ineffable wisdom, wastes nothing. Seemingly useless but parasitic or destructive persons should be used like clay pigeons: for target practice.
Anton LaVey
The schizophrenic has had their window kicked in, the magician has got a body of law – probably most of it bollocks, it doesn’t matter. The magician’s got a system into which the alien information that will be pouring into him or her will be fitted. They’ve got a filing cabinet, like the Qabalah, which is a filing cabinet for ideas. It divides the whole universe up into ten drawers. Any experience can be passed into one of the drawers. The schizophrenic is probably having exactly the same experience as the magician but has no context in which to understand it. … The schizophrenics I have known, the most evident thing about it is the interconnectedness of everything. That’s standard lunacy, it’s also standard magic. But with one of them, it is uncontrollable, you are lost in a world in which everything is obviously connected by symbolic threads. That is what the magician is seeking, to see these threads that connect things up. If you’ve got a system – even if it’s a completely made-up bogus system – then you’ve at least got a filing cabinet to sort this stuff into, you don’t have to get crushed under it.
Alan Moore
I think I said "All men are Jews except they don't know it." I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it's an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men.
Bernard Malamud
Fort, Charles
Forteguerri, Niccolo
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