"When we survey the existing races of mankind from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, or from Scotland to Singapore, we observe that they are distinguished one from the other by a great variety of religions, and that these distinctions are not, so to speak, merely coterminous with the broad distinctions of race, but descend into the minuter sub-divisions of states and commonwealths, nay, that they honeycomb the town, the village, and even the family, so that the surface all over the world is cracked and seamed, sapped and mined with rents and fissures and yawning crevasses opened up by the disintegrating influence of religious dissensions.

Yet when we have penetrated through these differences, which affect mainly the intelligent and thoughtful part of the community, we shall find underlying them all a solid stratum of intellectual agreement among the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and the superstitious, who constitute, unfortunately, the vast majority of mankind.

One of the great achievements of the nineteenth century was to run shafts down into this low mental stratum in many parts of the world, and thus to discover its substantial identity everywhere. It is beneath our feet - and not very far beneath them - here in Europe at the present day, and it crops up on the surface in the heart of the Australian wilderness and wherever the advent of a higher civilisation has not crushed it underground. This universal faith, this truly Catholic creed, is a belief in the efficacy of magic.

While religious systems differ not only in different countries, but in the same country in different ages, the system of sympathetic magic remains everywhere and at all times substantially alike in its principles and practice."

The Egyptian pharaoh inside the dark temple of 'The Opener of the Way', in the middle of a maitaki sign, is no strange coincidence, of that I am certain. The ancient view of cosmos was an integrated - indeed fundamental - part of magic (the precursor of science).

"... a great step in advance has been taken when a speical class of magicians has been instituted; when, in other words, a number of men have been set apart for the express purpose of benefiting the whole community by their skill, whether that skill be directed to the healing of diseases, the forcasting of the future, the regulation of the weather, or any other subject of general utility.

The impotence of the means adopted by most of these practitioners to accomplish their ends ought not to bind us to the immense importance of the institution itself. Here is a body of men relieved, at least in the higher stages of savagery, from the need of earning their livelyhood by hard manual toil, and allowed, nay expected and encouraged, to prosecute researches into the secret ways of nature. It was at once their duty and their interest to know more than their fellows, to acquaint themselves with everything that could aid man in his arduous struggle with his life.

The properties of drugs and minerals, the causes of rain and drought, of thunder and lightning, the changes of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the daily and yearly journeys of the sun, the motions of the stars, the mystery of life, and the mystery of death, all these things must have excited the wonder of these early philosophers, and stimulated them to find solutions of problems that were doubtless often thrust on their attention in the most practical form by the importunate demands of their clients, who expected them not merely to understand but to regulate the great processes of nature for the good of man."

They must have used every possible means to obtain from their colleagues in neighbouring communities such pieces of knowledge which could be useful. They did not compete but cooperate and ideas must have spread quickly and efficiently, eventually across the whole globe.