Ramsey Dukes

First published in 1974, this book established itself as a seminal text of the magical revival--a thinking person's guide to the unthinkable.

An Essay on Magic

SSOTBME Revised

lilgramps

Times change and different ways of thinking come and go. When Religion is dominant, it tends to overlay Magical practice and you get all the prayers, psalms and conjurations of the traditional grimoires. When rationalism takes over there is an urge to systematize and try to ‘pin down’ this feeling of ‘what goes with what’, and we inherit the highly complex tables of cabalistic correspondence, and the rules of Feng Shui.

we begin our lives as ‘Magical’ thinkers. By early childhood we have built up an inner world of memories which begins to overwhelm observation and shift the emphasis toward intuition, but we still have not mastered real logic. So we evolve into ‘Artistic’ thinking: a golden age when we live outmyths of fairies and dragons and can believe in them when we want to: The armchair is a space ship when we play with it.

Around the pre-teen age this growing intuitive sense has overwhelmed feeling and the reasoning power is now in the ascendent. Still living off our rich inner worlds, we begin to wonder why things are as they are. This rather serious-minded phase of ‘Religious’ thinking lasts until the teenage years when logic grows to dominate intuition, and a growing awareness of the outside world moves us into ‘Scientific’ skepticism: ‘just give me one good reason why I can’t stay out all night,’ demands the teenager.

SSOTBME Revised quotes

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