[24] The notes and papers concerning the physiological side of sex in the next world that have been collected are not suitable for general reading. Experienced Spiritualists will have no difficulty in surmising the general character of these records. CHAPTER VI THE REALITY OF SORCERY I have often been asked by folk who were perfectly serious in their inquiry if there “was anything in” latter-day sorcery, and whether the practice actually existed outside the realm of fiction. It is a difficult question to answer, for the average man mixes up witchcraft, sorcery and necromancy, and one cannot be certain whether he is alluding to the dark ceremony of the Black Sabbath, to the use of occult knowledge for malevolent purposes, or whether he is thinking of wax images and pine, incantations and night rides astride a broomstick. Put in a simpler form, the question comes to this: Can experienced occultists utilize spirit or unknown natural forces for malevolent uses? The answer is an unhesitating affirmative. Under certain conditions, it can be done. Magic has always been divided into white or good magic, and black or bad magic. Both have been liberally endowed with ritual observance, but shorn of non-essentials the determining factor that decides whether magic is black or white is the secret intent of the operating magician. In the past the great popular attribute of the magician was his knowledge of healing. He was not only a seer of the future and a finder of lost things, but also a healer. On the reverse side may be set against his capacity for healing his power for casting spells or doing harm; against his draughts of beneficent medicine, his vials of poison. The doctor who uses hypnotic treatment, practises suggestion or acts as a psychotherapeutist, is to-day the direct twentieth-century descendant of the magicians of the past. Apollonius of Tyana is his patron; Merlin worked his wonders by the same rules. It is to the modern studies in psychic science that we must turn to find the underlying mechanisms of magic practices, for a full three-quarters of art magic is due to the little-known effects of hypnotism or suggestion, and but a shadowy balance to the powers of discarnate intelligences of evil. The discoveries of the existence of “animal magnetism” by Mesmer was the first step which brought the psychic phenomena of will domination out of the realm of the occult into the domain of medical knowledge. For a century Mesmer’s theory has been discredited, but to-day modern students of psychic science are beginning to pay attention to it again. It fell into discredit owing to the discoveries of Braid, the Manchester physician, who discovered that Mesmer’s phenomena could be produced independently of the theory of “animal magnetism” by plain hypnosis.