I remember well the excitement when in 1954 Roger Bannister, a 25-year-old British medical student, not a professional athlete, became the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. His time was 3mins 59.4 seconds, achieved at the Iffley Road track in Oxford and watched by about 3,000 spectators. In spite of strong cross winds with 30 m.p.h. gusts he broke the psychological barrier and made a four minute mile possible for every good miler. Inside two years the first three in top class mile races always broke the four minute mile. Today the record is around 3 minutes 43 seconds.

It was my original intention to write about Black Magick for this final article of the ‘Magick is the ability to change the state of consciousness at will’ series. I was going to detail the appalling skill of the pharmaceutical companies at persuading Americans to take their obscenely expensive drugs for invented diseases like ‘depression’ using neuro linguistic programming of the public mind, and subtly changing the definition of the disease every year, until just about anyone could come under the diagnosis, and become a life long cash cow battling side effects for ever.