In Modern Magick I described why I thought the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was important. Imagine a simple hourglass: The sand in the top half represents the  forms of occultism known in the West during the middle to late 19th century, ranging from ceremonial magick to Paganism. They were filled with differences and yet some occultists conceived that there was a hidden, underlying, unitary basis. At the central point, all of those systems merged into a complex but coherent system. That system spread out, as represented by the sand in the bottom half of the hourglass, influencing directly and indirectly virtually all forms of occultism and spirituality in the West as they exist

Many years ago, when I was living in Minnesota, I appeared on a local radio talk show. The host was Ms. Barbara Carlson, former wife of then Governor Arne Carlson. Why was I on the show? Well, in the major media, there are generally only two times they want to talk with someone involved with magick, occultism, Witchcraft, etc: when there is a crime that is supposedly related to the occult, and the week or so before Halloween. This was just before Halloween. She asked me what magick was. I explained that it was something natural, a way of having a desired effect on your future. I also told her that the image of waving a wand and making the door open on its own was a fantasy, not the

Aleister Crowley thought that developing the "magickal memory" was an important part of magickal training. The magickal memory is the ability to recall past lives. In Magick Without Tears, chapter 37, he points out that one of the values of remembering past lives is that it helps you overcome a fear of physical death. In Liber ThIShARB he goes into methods for remembering past lives, but for a different reason. Here, there is far more than merely overcoming the fear of the inevitable. Rather, remembering past lives has the goal of seeing a thread that unites all of the past lives and how those lives apply to your current life: "let him apply them [memories] to his own career, forging the

For many years, calling the illusions presented by stage performers "magic" could get you in trouble for pretending to be supernatural, even if what you were doing was comedic tricks for kids. As a result, many performers, rather than calling themselves magicians, used other terms such as "conjuror," "juggler," or "prestidigitator." Aleister Crowley came up with a different solution for making a written differentiation. He used an archaic spelling, magick with a final "k," to indicate the real practice and used "magic" to represent the entertainment. [The "k" also had another meaning for Crowley, indicating a reference to sex magick, but that's a different issue.] In my Modern Magick and