Long ago in the mountains of Serbia there dwelt an evil magician, a man whose studies in the deeper sciences were undertaken solely for the intellectual and selfish pleasure which he found in them. He had progressed so far beyond the normal human consciousness that he had no worldly ambitions. To him the world was but a despicable place to escape from, and the people of the world were insects beneath his notice, save only as he could use them for his purposes. He considered himself a kind of god, and so diligent were his selfish labors that had he devoted his knowledge to the good of the human race from which he sprang, he might really have become a kind of god. But selfish and evil beings need never aspire to godship. At most they can take but a step beyond the human. The grub may become a butterfly, but if it hates the sunlight and the air of the higher regions, its wings had better not have grown. This man, this selfish magician, had learned that by certain magical formulæ he could call to himself beings of the elements, and that by the aid of these invisibles he could create astral beings which, while themselves soulless, he could energize with his own force. Now the turn for real and active evil which marked a certain stage in his life, came about in this way: He had found what seemed to him a secure retreat among the mountains, he had prepared and magnetized the neighborhood of his hut so that it was a centre of astral force, and his right to the undivided possession of that spot was one of the ideas which he energized for his own protection. Now the owner of the mountain where the magician lived discovered that the neighborhood of his hut was a good place for hunting the wild animals of that region, and soon the quiet of the magician’s studies was broken by the reports of the guns of the hunters, who even crossed with their despised bodies the very circle which the magician had prepared for his own use. This proved that he was not a very high magician, for had he made that centre for a work having as object the benefit of humanity, members of that humanity could not have profaned it. The retreats of the Masters of Compassion are secure against intrusion. In his rage and disappointment he called down curses upon the hunters and upon all the region roundabout, and by his evil magic he created beings who should execute his curses. He created them upon the earth and in the air above and in the region below the surface of the earth, and to each he allotted a task with fearful penalties for disobedience. His use of the power he had gained was a use _positively forbidden_ by the Law under which the real Masters work. It really caused the hunters to go away from that neighborhood, but the beings he had called and the beings he had created remained there; for he had not sufficient knowledge, or maybe not a sufficient sense of responsibility for his nefarious work, to make him destroy or banish them himself.