to communicate ideas from one person to another; it does not purport to contain a consecutive, consistent meaning. It is an instrument serving special purposes, intended for the exercise of man’s specific power over things, and its meaning, giving this word a wider sense, can be understood only in correlation to this aim. It will not be therefore a meaning of logically or topically concatenated ideas, but of expressions fitting into one another and into the whole, according to what could be called a magical order of thinking, or perhaps more correctly, a magical order of expressing, of launching words towards their aim. It is clear that this magical order of verbal concatenations—I am purposely avoiding the expression ‘magical logic’ for there is no logic in the case—must be known and familiar to anyone who wishes really to understand the spells. There is therefore a great initial difficulty in ‘reading’ such documents, and only an acquaintance with a great number makes one more confident and more competent.
III.
In the ordinary routine of working out such texts, I tried to obtain from the magician the equivalents, word for word, of the more cryptic expressions. As a rule the magician himself knows a good deal more than anyone else about the mythical references, and about certain esoteric expressions contained in the spell. There are some unintelligent old men, unfortunately, who rattle