Natural magic and necromancy

Meaning

The conclusion distinguishes a lawful natural or magical art from necromancy involving spirits and prohibited means. The supplied edition deliberately retains “magical” instead of modernizing it to “scientific.” That choice preserves a boundary the speaker himself draws, rather than substituting a present-day classification for his vocabulary.

Neither direction of simplification is adequate: the phrase is not automatically modern experimental science, but it is also not identical with every practice the same passage condemns. Its claim to lawful efficacy remains the author’s claim. The lexicon explains the distinction without supplying instructions for either category. The passage’s denial of power to the Devil and the godless is expressly qualified by “without God’s permission”; it is not an unqualified denial of every possible possession.