Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi

WITCHCRAFT AND SPELLS 309 During our civil wars, a shopkeeper had the misfortune to denounce one of his neighbours, who, after a period of detention, was set at liberty, but with his position lost. His sole vengeance was to pass twice daily the shop of his denouncer, whom he regarded fixedly, saluted, and went on.

Some little time after, the shopkeeper, unable to bear the torment of this glance any longer, sold his goods at a loss, and changed his neighbourhood, leaving no address. In a word, he was ruined. A threat is a real bewitchment, because it acts powerfully on the imagination, above all, when the latter receives with facility the belief in an occult and unlimited power.

The terrible menace of hell, that bewitchment of humanity during so many centuries, has created more nightmares, more nameless diseases, more furious madness, than all vices and all excesses combined. This is what the Hermetic artists of the middle ages represented by the incredible and unheard-of monsters which they carved at the doors of basilicas.

But bewitchment by threat produces an effect altogether contrary to the intentions of the operator when it is evidently a vain threat, when it does outrage to the legitimate pride of the menaced person, and consequently provokes his resistance, or, finally, when it is ridiculous by its atrocity. The sectaries of hell have discredited heaven.

Say to a reasonable man that equilibrium is the law of motion and life, and that liberty, which is moral equilibrium, rests upon an eternal and immutable distinction between true and false, between good and bad ; tell him that, endowed as he is with free will, he must place himself by his works in the empire of truth and goodness, or relapse eternally, like the rock of Sisyphus, into the chaos of falsehood and evil ; then he will understand the doctrine, and if you term truth and goodness heaven, falsehood and evil hell, he will believe in your heaven and hell, over which the divine ideal rests calm, perfect, and inaccessible to either wrath or offence, because he will understand that if in principle hell be eternal as liberty, it cannot in fact be more

310 THE RITUAL OF TKANSCENDENT MAGIC than a temporary agony for souls, because it is an expiation, and the idea of expiation necessarily supposes that of reparation and destruction of evil.

This much said, not with dogmatic intention, which is outside our province, but to indicate the moral and reasonable remedy for the bewitchment of consciences by the terrors of the life beyond, let us speak of the means of escaping the baleful influences of human wrath. The first among all is to be reasonable and just, giving no opportunity or excuse to anger.

A lawful indignation is greatly to be feared ; make haste therefore to acknowledge and expiate your faults. Should anger persist after that, then it certainly proceeds from vice ; seek to know what vice, and unite yourself strongly to the magnetic currents of the opposite virtue. The bewitchment will then have no further power upon you.

Wash carefully the clothes which you have finished with before giving them away ; otherwise, burn them ; never use a garment which has belonged to an unknown person without purifying it by water, sulphur, and such aromatics as camphor, incense, amber, &c. A great means of resisting bewitchment is not to fear it ; it acts after the manner of contagious maladies. In times of epidemic, the terror-struck are the first to be attacked.

The secret of not fearing an evil is not to think about it, and my advice is completely disinterested since I give it in a book on magic of which I am the author, when I strongly urge upon persons who are nervous, feeble, credulous, hysterical, superstitious devotees, foolish, without energy and without will, never to open a book on magic, and to close this one if they have opened it, to turn a deaf ear to those who talk of the occult sciences, to deride them, never to believe in them, and to drink water, as said the great pantagruelist magician, the excellent cure* of Meudon.

As for the wise — and it is time that we turned to them after espousing the cause of the foolish — they have scarcely any sorceries to fear save those of fortune, but seeing that they are priests and physicians, they may be called upon to

WITCHCRAFT AND SPELLS 311 cure the bewitched, and this should be their method of procedure. They must persuade a bewitched person to do some act of goodness to his bewitcher, render him some service which he cannot refuse, and lead him directly or otherwise to the communion of salt. A person who believes himself bewitched by the execration and interment of the toad must carry about him a living toad in a horn box.

For the bewitchment of the pierced heart, the afflicted individual must be made to eat a lamb's heart seasoned with sage and onion, and to carry a talisman of Venus or of the moon in a satchel filled with camphor and salt.

For bewitchment by the waxen figure, a more perfect figure must be made, as much as possible in the likeness of the person; seven talismans must be hung round the neck ; it must be set in the middle of a great pantacle representing the pentagram, and must each day be rubbed slightly with a mixture of oil and balm, after reciting the Conjuration of the Four to turn aside the influence of elementary spirits.

At the end of seven days the image must be burnt in consecrated fire, and one may rest assured that the figure fabricated by the bewitcher will at the same moment lose all its virtue. We have already mentioned the sympathetic medicine of Paracelsus, who medicated waxen limbs and operated upon the discharges of blood from wounds for the cure of the wounds themselves.

This system permitted the employment of more than usually violent remedies, and his chief specifics were sublimate and vitriol. We believe that homoeopathy is a reminiscence of the theories of Paracelsus and a return to his wise practices. But we shall follow up this subject in a special treatise exclusively consecrated to occult medicine.

Contracts by parents forestalling the future of their children are bewitchments which cannot be too strongly condemned ; children dedicated in white, for example, scarcely ever prosper ; those who were formerly dedicated to celibacy fell commonly into debauch, or ended in despair and madness. Man is not permitted to do violence to