True Magic Is the Gnosis of Pythagoras, Occult Knowledge of Divine Law

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 15 pages

If you want one definition to take away from this section, it is here. Magic as a science is the knowledge of the metaphysical principles, and of the way by which the omniscience and omnipotence of the spirit and its control over nature's forces may be acquired by the individual while still in the body. Magic as an art is the application of that knowledge in practice. And the condition attached to both, which the rest of the series exists to explain, is that it may be exercised only by the pure in heart.

The article was published in The Theosophist in October 1886 as Ancient Magic in Modern Science, and its wider claim is about continuity: that occultism is the synthesis of all the discoveries in nature, and chiefly of the psychic potency within and beyond every physical atom of matter, which cemented into one cornerstone the foundations of all the religions of antiquity. Pythagoras stands in the title as the type of that synthesis, his Gnosis being knowledge of divine law rather than of secret techniques. A short section gathers the synonymous terms used for the pristine purity of the Pythagorean Gnosis, and Boris de Zirkoff's annotation closes the piece. At fifteen pages it is the best place in the section for a reader to begin.

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