This book is not a project in "bashing"; I have no interest in denouncing the admittedly (now) clear failings of Yates and Eliade in their efforts to resuscitate a beautiful lie. To be sure, Yates's analyses of Bruno arc now questionable, and Eliade's vast oeuvre often rests on tendentious misreadings of dubious secondary sources
Nostalgia for a golden era, when the elite knew secrets of the universe, is a central principle of magic in many of its manifestations.
For us, though, mere historical and temporal distance will not suffice. In the history of magic, the Hennetica do not come from Egypt-if by Egypt we mean the historical time and place known to Egyptologists-but from Ægypt. In Ægypt, man and gods had constant communication, divinity and truth were always present, and magic worked. It was a land of wonders, and nearly every magician since entry to that land was barred has looked back on it with reverence, awe, and nostalgia. And it is Ægypt, not Egypt, that we fallen moderns must learn to explore and map.
We may briefly compare it to the Egyptian myth of the god Theuth's invention of writing as recounted in Plato's Phaedrus. There, Theuth (Thoth) invents writing as a remedy for memory, but King Thamus (Amun Ra) realizes that the invention will poison both memory and speech. When Theuth claims that "this discipline ... will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories," the king replies, "The fact is that this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it.''
Goethe's morphology provided him a mode in which to speak of multi ple plants as having relationships that resemble historical ones but arc not temporally ordered. That is, Goethe examined a given botanical phenomenon not as a development from some other phenomenon without that develoment's implying temporal causality; instead, he could interpret all botanical forms as interrelated by endless dynamic – literally vital – processes.
Eliade sought instead a way to talk about the history of religion rather than religions; that is, he wanted to study an object with no historical existence, an object outside history.