Chiefly illuminating, in this episode of John’s continuing exegesis of Lévi, is his initial description of how to define (real) magic, and how it works. That’s of special interest.
Take the descriptions as metaphor if you prefer; or as literal. Either way, he’s saying something, known for thousands of years to practitioners of appropriate disciplines, which has been briefly air-brushed away from our official Western-post-modern belief-system; but which is entirely unkillable, because it speaks accurately about certain basic realities in which we exist.
If you want an inkling of how the current slow paradigm-shift going on in The Science is going to have to go, in order to include in its worldview the magical aspects of reality whose very existence our present *goco-vigilantes, the massed dawkinsoids, strive always to deny, then John’s basic beginners’ account of what real magic is, and how it works, is a sound pathway towards that correction:
*goco - guardian of current orthodoxy