Sorcery and witchcraft are the degenerate offspring of occult traditions with the popular conception of witchcraft, shaped by the anti-Christian manifestations that occurred in the Middle Ages, which is so distorted and so inadequate that to try and interpret the symbols of its mysteries, perverted and debased as they are, without reference to the vastly ancient systems from which they derive is like mistaking the tip of an iceberg for its total mass.
It has been suggested by some authorities that the original witches sprang from a race of Mongol origin of which the Lapps are the sole surviving remnants. This may or may not be so, but these 'mongols' were not human. They were degenerate survivals of a pre-human phase of our planet's history generally- though mistakenly- classified as Atlantean. The characteristic that distinguished them from the others of their kind was the ability to project consciousness into animal forms, and the power they possessed of reifying thought-forms. The bestiaries of all the races of the earth are littered with the results of their sorceries.They were non-human entities; that is to say they pre-dated the human life- wave on this planet, and their powers- which would today appear unearthly- derived from extra-spatial dimensions. They impregnated the aura of the earth with the magical seed from which the human foetus was ultimately generated.
Arthur Machen was, perhaps, near the truth of the matter when he suggested that the fairies and little people of folklore were decorous devices concealing processes of non-human sorcery repellent to mankind.
Machen, Blackwood, Crowley, Lovecraft, Fortune, and others, frequently used as a theme for their writings the influx of extra-terrestrial powers which have been moulding the history of our planet since time began; that is, since time began for us, for we are only too prone to suppose that we were here first and that we alone are here now, whereas the most ancient occult traditions affirm that we were neither the first nor are we the only ones to people the earth; the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods find echoes in the myths and legends of all peoples.
