"Those who apply themselves too closely to little things often become incapable of great things." Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Thursday, November 27, 2008

On The Passions

From Synchronicity - Carl Jung:

Albertus Magnus:

"I discovered an instructive account [of magic] in Avicenna's Liber sextus naturalium, which says that a certain power to alter things indwells in the human soul and subordinates the other things to her, particularly when she is swept into a great excess of love or hate or the like.

When therefore the soul of a man falls into a great excess of any passion, it can be proved by experiment that it [the excess] binds things [magically] and alters them in the way it wants, and for a long time I did not believe it, but after I had read the nigromantic books and others of the kind on signs and magic, I found that the emotionality of the human soul is the chief cause of all these things, whether because, on account of her great emotion, she alters her bodily substance and the other things towards which she strives, or because, on account of their dignity, the other, lower things are subject to her, or because the appropriate hour or astrological situation or another power coincides with so inordinate an emotion, and we [in consequence] believe that what this power does is then done by the soul....

Whoever would learn the secret of doing and undoing these things must know that everyone can influence everything magically if he falls into a great excess...and he must do it at that hour when the excess befalls him, and operate with the things which the soul prescribes. For the soul is then so desirous of the matter she would accomplish that of her own accord she seizes on the more significant and better astrological hour which also rules over the things suited to that matter....

Thus it is the soul who desires a thing more intensely, who makes things more effective and more like what comes forth....Such is the manner of production with everything the soul intensely desires. Everything she does with that aim in view possesses motive power and efficacy for what the soul desires."

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