Eight hours later
Finished Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling (1891). I highly recommend the entirety of Chapter XI as it relates to the Knowledge & Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel and sets the stage for the practices in Book Four.
When we think of what we might be if we could master ourselves, and call on the vast sea of knowledge which is in the brain of every one who reads these lines, to give strict reckoning of its every wave and every drop of water, and every shell, pebble, wreck, weed, or grain of sand over which it rolls, and withal master the forces which make its tides and storms, then we may comprehend that all the wonder-working power attributed to all the sorcerers of olden time was nothing compared to what we really have within us.
It is awful, it is mysterious, it is terrible to learn this tremendous truth that we are indeed within ourselves magicians gifted with infinite intellectual power-which means the ability to know and do all things. In the past men surmised the existence of this infinite memory, this power of subtle research and combination, but between them and the truth in every land and time interposed the idea of objective spiritual or supernatural existences whose aid or medium was necessary to attain to wisdom. Outside of us was always Somebody Else to be invoked, conciliated, met in vision or trance, united to in spiritual unity or syncope. Sometimes they hit upon some form of hypnotism or mesmerism, opiates or forced swoons and convulsions, and so extorted from the nerves and dream-power some of their secrets which were all duly attributed to the "spirits." But in the whole range of occult literature from HERMES TRISMEGISTUS down to Madame BLAVATSKY there is not a shade of a suspicion that all the absolutely authentic marvels of magic began and ended with man himself.
When we think of what we might be if we could master ourselves, and call on the vast sea of knowledge which is in the brain of every one who reads these lines, to give strict reckoning of its every wave and every drop of water, and every shell, pebble, wreck, weed, or grain of sand over which it rolls, and withal master the forces which make its tides and storms, then we may comprehend that all the wonder-working power attributed to all the sorcerers of olden time was nothing compared to what we really have within us.
It is awful, it is mysterious, it is terrible to learn this tremendous truth that we are indeed within ourselves magicians gifted with infinite intellectual power-which means the ability to know and do all things. In the past men surmised the existence of this infinite memory, this power of subtle research and combination, but between them and the truth in every land and time interposed the idea of objective spiritual or supernatural existences whose aid or medium was necessary to attain to wisdom. Outside of us was always Somebody Else to be invoked, conciliated, met in vision or trance, united to in spiritual unity or syncope. Sometimes they hit upon some form of hypnotism or mesmerism, opiates or forced swoons and convulsions, and so extorted from the nerves and dream-power some of their secrets which were all duly attributed to the "spirits." But in the whole range of occult literature from HERMES TRISMEGISTUS down to Madame BLAVATSKY there is not a shade of a suspicion that all the absolutely authentic marvels of magic began and ended with man himself.