Part One: The Middle Pillar - iPage

The Two Pillars of the Temple 21
spiritual training. Were it possible, and were there magical schools
in existence, it would gratify me enormously to see magical train-
ing preceded by six or twelve months of application to reductive
analysis, pursued by sympathetic physicians or lay-analysts who
had long and intimate experience with clinical work. The magical
schools must open a department of analytical psychology, if their
own systems are to attain public prominence worthy of attention
and patronage. Such schools, though offering courses of training
considerably prolonged, would eventually develop such a type of
individual that the public would eliminate "dangerous" from its
association with magic, and be obliged to take cognizance of the
soundness of its technique. This union of two systems would, for
magic at any rate, build up psychological credit, and a sense of
great reliability and prestige would accrue to it.
One of the greatest obstacles to success in magic, to any kind of
worth-while result in the mystical sciences, is that the psycho-emo-
tional system of its average student is hopelessly clogged with
infantile and adolescent predilections which have not been recog-
nized as such. The ego is compelled to extreme courses of action, as
though by compulsion. And underneath his every activity lurks
the unconscious spectre--fear. It is precisely with these monsters of
fantasy that analyfxal psychology can deal effectively, and it is
from such absurd obstacles that the magical students is a con-
firmed but unconscious sufferer.27
By associating magic with analysis, we should be able to avoid
the pitfalls into which our predecessors fell so headlong. The pro-
duction of genius--more specifically a religious and mystical type
of genius4ver the goal of magc, should be more within our grasp
than ever before, and considerably more open to achievement.
These ideas are mentioned not because a systematic union of
magic and psychology will be here presented, but in the hope that
this effort will spur some psychologist acquainted with magical
and mystical techmques to attempt such a task. Whoever does suc-
ceed in welding the two indissolubly together, to him mankind will
ever be grateful. For such a union comprises the marriage of the
archaic with the modem, the unconscious with the conscious-the