[4] "Followers" of Marsilio Ficino advocated the existence of spiritual beings and spirits in general, though many such theories ran counter to the ideas of the later Age of Enlightenment.
In doing so, he came into conflict with Johannes Trithemius who refused to believe in Ficino's theory but created spells and incantations of his own related to beneficial communication with spirits.
[4] His work included the De occulta philosophia libri tres which contained an outline of, among other things, classical elements, numerology, astrology and kabbalah and detailed ways of utilizing these relationships and laws in medicine, scrying, alchemy and rituals and ceremonies.
[5] It is the coming-together of these ideas - early "natural" religions and later philosophical thinking - that Knight suggests is "at the root of the Western tradition of white magic".
[6] His modern definition maintains that the purpose of white magic is to "do good" or to "bring the practitioner to a higher spiritual state" of enlightenment or consciousness.
The link between white magic and a Mother Earth is a regular theme of the practitioner Marian Green's written work.