# Magic: History, Theory, Practice

> Book Report Number Six Five

**Published by:** [The Book Report](https://paragraph.com/@thereporter/)
**Published on:** 2026-03-29
**Categories:** magic, history, theory and practice, ernst schertel
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@thereporter/magic-history-theory-practice

## Content

"Magic, History, Theory and Practice" by Ernst Schertel is a fascinating book on the esoteric and occult. Written from a Western perspective on the Balance of good and evil, Heaven and Hell, and other dualities. In the East this concept is simply known as the yin and yang, or the symbol of 卍 (Manji) - The opposing forces and their union. This book was in Adolf Hitler's library, and it speaks of ecstasy; giving insight into his performances on the world stage as he channeled his inner gods and demons. This ecstatic state is also commonly observed in African American sermons where the preachers and the congregation go into a fit of hysteria. My takeaway from all this personally is that it is very okay to channel anger and express verbally one's passion. As anger, rage, wrath are simply another color in all of man's diverse color palette. Here are quotes from the books"He who does not have demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world.""It is still necessary to count the signs which suggest that our culture is getting ready to attack its own roots. Thankfully, it is essentially easy to grasp this fact of the field of exact science. Every step that has gone forward is like the blow of an ax against the supporting pillar, a complete and new concept of the truth is produced, and with that, a complete and new concept of understanding. The more exact we are in our thinking, the more we are open our eyes to the vagueness of the basis of our thoughts."For early man, there could not have been a difference between living and dead things or even between imaginary and real. Instead for him, there was only a hierarchy of forms. An order of images and signs in accordance with their forces. For him, they were visible, audible, tangible, tastable essentialities, which have been partially there and had to be created by him, and which he learned to pit against each other, according to his will.We already indicated that the type of magical man does definitely not signify something ill in the common sense, despite displaying a slot of symptoms which we call pathological in our world sphere. In the sphere, the magician operates indeed as healthy and shows the essential attributes of the healthy, that is to say, courage, self-confidence, ability to cope with life, etc. Likewise, there appears what we call imagination completely as reality in their associated world and our realities appear there simply as obtuse imbecilities quite frequently."Since all magic is in one way or another based on animism and demonism, contrary, for example, to our empirical domination of nature. It is explainable that the cult of the demons is also at the fore, outside of the closer area of magic. This is called pictorial magic. The word picture has to be understood in the widest sense. These are not necessarily exact replications of the object, but every piece of wood, every kind of a good drawing in the sand, and under certain circumstances, the pure concrete imagination are enough. It is only crucial that something is used as a substitute for the real thing. Therefore, pictorial magic comes into consideration only where the real object is difficult to access for direct magical manipulations. Amulet magic can be steered like pictorial magic into totally opposite directions. It is able to heal and destroy, can inspire love or crush it, can give a strength for battle or weakness, and much more, the difference with pictorial magic is only that the amulet must be worn by the one. It is designed to have effects on while pictorial magic is designed for the farthest distance.But a history of magic cannot be written in the same manner as, for example, a history of physical science. Our knowledge is of old peoples and the exotic is insufficient to establish a biogenesis of its darkest, most cryptic and most or more or less secret beliefs and activities. Whenever we encounter people we find that they possess magic systems and practices, but we are often unable to ascertain how these symptoms emerge, where we could speak of influence or even what justifiably should be set as earlier or later.We can only speak of the old or of the exotic and have to treat a millennium as if it were a day on the other side, magic by its nature, resist the use of our concepts of development, since it rests too much on intuitive knowledge and autogenetic power. Arguably, great magicians are replaced by mediocre ones and time where magic dominates and penetrates all life or replaced by times where magic recedes, but true progress, in our rationalist sense can be demonstrated nowhere.The Europeans, and with them, the late type of man is the general characterized by his lack of feeling for the concrete corporeal. He does not experience the physical world as something intrinsic and substantial, and he therefore lacks every sense for a deeper meaning of the gazalt like the actual. It is always said that the European has a pronounced sense of reality and a sense of fact, but closer inspection reveals that he always looks past reality and the facts, and what he holds in his hands are empty schemes, the whole materialism and rationalism of, or time virtually strikes in the face, every deeper sense of reality and facts. The European type of man is solely attuned to his running dry of the brain, and therefore he is not able to grasp the fullness of reality anymore. What I don't clearly and distinctly recognize is not says the clatis and this shape, the fundamental principles of European rationalism. European poll, and therefore the degeneration of magic of demonism and of religion begins around the world, roughly at the same time, namely, about 500 years before Christ, the year 500 BC identifies the climax of a magical consciousness. At that time, allowed, say, was working in China, a representative of a certain enlightened mystic in India. Buddha was completing Brahmanism, and Persia, Zoroaster was reforming the older magic and was founding his quite a rationalistically substantiated sect. The concrete human, the concrete people, the concrete gods are thereby eliminated, and in their stead, the abstract notion of humanity is placed above which a likewise purely conceptual monotheism is enthroned. The slogan of humanism of the general humanity, the universal manhood derives from this tendency of universalism, of a late time, likewise do dreams of a solely true world of religion. The immediate consequence of abstract monotheism was the establishment, the absolute morality, which was seen as equally applicable for all people. The early time knows no morality in this universal sense, its rule of life is given by the folkish custom and by the will of the tribal god whose governing was utterly autocratic and was giving orders at his discretion. These, as well as the customs of the people, can potentially be very violent and immoral. They can demand blood and destruction have nothing to do with humanness, brotherly love, or an abstract good of some sort. The so-called good for which the late universal moral strives consists of an apotheosis of the abstract and rational, and therefore of an alienation, from the concrete, from the body, from the picture, from their rational compulsiveness."It is a moral of the castration and abatement, just as abstract monotheism is appearing as an emasculated and weighing demon, the fleshly strong aristocratic idea of life of earlier times is forsaken and forgotten in favor of sentimental, leveling down which seeks the imprisonment and domestication of all mankind. But magic is something primeval, heroic, unsentimental, something violent, violent, aristocratic, bodily concrete, which resists every abstraction, universalism and moralization.Magic is the plunder of demonically imbued men.The nerve center of witchcraft was the artificial creation of sama nambulant dream states by using narcotics salves and inhalence, and modeled on antiquity, and the consequential experience of mamgamation, with the otherworldly demonic potencies, analogous, the antique sexual mysteries. This devil love actually represented only a very primeval form of communal with the deity, which was also sanctioned by the Catholic Church, which gives witchcraft.While we present the following of theory of magic, nothing will be further from our mind than to simply explain the phenomenal way and portray everything as completely natural. On the contrary, we want to show that the whole addiction to naturalness is a serious misunderstanding of nature, that at the bottom of nature, something tremendously unnatural is sleeping, and that the every intellectual understanding only leads. This pseudoscientific oriented European believes himself to be surrounded by things which he regards as objects, self-contained static qualities. His sensory organs transmits to him the perception of these things, and for him, it is only a question of looking accurately enough to form a correct view about them, and to not fall for an appearance, a deception, he thereby believes that an accurate view is indeed equivalent to the actual things of the environment. This perception was soon weakened by the realization that things are only accessible to us in accordance with our sensory organs, that we should would observe the things differently poor or richer. If we had other, more numerous or more limited sensory organs, we could there still be an equivalent between our mental image and the thing itself.Now the objection is suggested that in this way, every differentiation, between fantastical perceptions, imagination, and objective observations might be blurred. But there is indeed no fundamental difference between them. Imagination and observations are the same extent, products of the cosmic dynamic and of inner bodily forces, and as such, are real, provided that the notion of reality still has any means at all. That, in practice, we nevertheless differentiate between imagination and observation is because of the fact that the imagination is to stronger degree caused by inner bodily compression of cosmic energy. Observation, on the other hand, is caused more by the influence of layers of cosmic force net, which are further away. These distinguishing features can be very important for daily life, but they do not play any role in relation to true or false, real, or illusion. The notions of true and false are completely relative and depend on the overall meaning of our world of perception, just as the meaning of an individual world always depends on the overall meaning of the whole sentence or even the whole book. Now the objection is. That is somewhat gives rise to the emergences of this perception. The difference between true and false has disappeared. We have only gained one thing, an insight into the structure, that is to say, into the drawing floor of that jugulary of fantasy, which we call the objective world, but quite a lot of it is gained with it, namely, the possibility to intervene in this structure that is to say, change the world according to our will. But this is magic, and on this basis, we are able to create reality, where no reality is. The man with the greatest force of imagination is commanding of the world and creates realities according to his will, instead of being the slave and unstantial bodily less empiricism. Empiricism fulfills the laws of probability, but imagination makes the impossible happen. The pure empirical man is the entropic type which leads to the complete devaluation of cosmic energy. The imaginative man instead, the magician is the actual focus of the ectropic, the renewal of the world, remodeling of the world, the new birth of being. Magic is autogenetic exertions of power on the basis of imagination, and we have gained a new definition or for the notion of reality. Reality is the becoming an image of our deepest essential powers. Truth is nothing receptive about something creative. The process of observation, not a process of depiction, but of a construction.There has been worldviews which have rejected being for this reason, renounce it, and neglected it, for example, the doctrine of Buddha or Schopenhauer, but this is a religion negativism, which is negating the will of the gods and is pushing them back into nothingness. From this attitude, springs of resigned pessimism, nihilism, and atheism, which can never act as culture creating. Remember that thoughts create the idol, and these idols can destroy the faith. Know that these idols are really powerless, but you can endow them with power and not know it. Ah, but still, you do not understand what you have power and you've invented idols and mind gifted them with power through your faith, your imagination, you still do not know that your faith is more than just what you think, faith is you, faith in you is the high strength. Remember this only through faith. Can we free ourselves from fetters. Through faith, we can have all knowledge and realize all dreams, but the key to our deepest faith is ritual and belief and without these, we cannot obtain it. Once again, the birth of the demon arrives all.The other magic and making the closest possible relationship with the demon should be practiced because everything centers on the magical forces and our demon. It gives us the gift in a sense to help persuade the hidden gods, to make themselves known, only by doing magic through practice and gaining experience, will we recognize divinity, and learn to be one with her. This is the goal."

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