Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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PHILTRES AND MAGNETISM 333 violence does nature cry out for that which is denied her, but is brooded over continually to increase detestation thereof ! The pretended bewitchments of Magdalen Bavan, of Miles, de la Palud, and de la Cadiere, began with mysticism. The excessive fear of a given thing makes it almost invariably inevitable. To follow the two curves of a circle is to reach and to meet at the same point.
Nicholas Remigius, criminal judge of Lorraine, who burnt alive eight hundred women as sorcerers, beheld magic everywhere ; it was his fixed idea, his mania.
He was eager to preach a crusade against sorcerers, with whom Europe, in his opinion, was swarming; in despair that his word was not taken when he affirmed that nearly everyone in the world had been guilty of magic, he ended by declaring that he was himself a sorcerer, and was burned on his own confession. To preserve ourselves against evil influences, the first condition is therefore to forbid excitement to the imagination.
All those who are prone to excitement are more or less mad, and a maniac is ever governed by his mania. Place yourself, then, above puerile fears and vague desires ; believe in supreme wisdom, and be assured that this wisdom, having given you understanding as the means of knowledge, cannot seek to lay snares for your intelligence or reason.
Everywhere about you, you behold effects proportioned to their causes ; you find causes directed and modified in the domain of humanity by understanding ; in a word, you find goodness stronger and more respected than evil ; why should ou assume an immense unreason in the infinite, seeing t there is reason in the finite ? Truth is hidden from no e.
God is visible in His works, and He requires nothing ntrary to its nature from any being, for He is himself the thor of that nature. Faith is confidence ; have confidence, not in men who malign reason, for they are fools or impostors, but in the eternal reason which is the Divine Word, that true light which is offered like the sun to the intuition of every human creature coming into this world. If you believe in absolute reason, and if you desire truth and p. 334justice before all things, you will have no occasion to fear anyone, and you will love those only who are deserving of love. Your natural light will repel instinctively that of the wicked, because it will be ruled by your will. Thus, even poisonous substances, which it is possible may be administered to you, will not affect your intelligence ; ill, indeed, they may make you, but never criminal.
What most contributes to render women hysterical is their soft and hypocritical education; if they took more exercise, if they were instructed more frankly and fully in matters of the world, they would be less capricious, and consequently less accessible to evil tendencies. Weakness ever sympathises with vice, because vice is a weakness which assumes the mask of strength.
Madness holds reason in horror, and on all subjects it delights in the exaggerations of falsehood. In the first place, therefore, cure your diseased intelligence. The cause of all bewitchments, the poison of all philtres, the power of all sorcerers, are there.
As to narcotics or other drugs which may be administered to you, it is a subject for the physician and the law, but we do not think that such enormities will be largely reproduced at this day. Lovelaces no longer stupefy Clarissas otherwise than by their gallantries, and potions, like abductions by masked men and imprisonments in subterranean dungeons, have even passed out of our romances. All these must be relegated to the Confessional of the Black Penitents or the ruins of the Castle of Udolpho.
THE MASTERY OF THE SUN 335 CHAPTER XIX THE MASTERY OF THE SUN WE come now to that number which is attributed in the Tarot to the sign of the sun. The denary of Pythagoras and the triad multiplied by itself represent wisdom in its application to the absolute. It is with the absolute, therefore, that we are concerned here.
To discover the absolute in the infinite, the indefinite, and the finite, such is the great work of the sages, that which is termed by Hermes the work of the sun. To find the immovable foundations of true religious faith, of philosophical truth, and of metallic transmutation, this is the whole secret of Hermes, this is the philosophical stone. Now, this stone is both one and manifold ; it is decomposed by analysis and recomposed by synthesis.
In the analysis it is a powder, the alchemical powder of projection ; before the analysis and in the synthesis it is a stone. The philosophical stone, say the masters, must not be exposed to the air, nor to the eyes of the profane ; it must be kept in concealment and preserved carefully in the most secret receptacle of the laboratory, the key of the place being always carried upon the person.
He who possesses the great arcanum is truly king and is above any king, for he is inaccessible to all fears and to all vain hopes. In any malady of soul or body, a single frag- Iment broken from the precious stone, a single grain of the divine powder, are more than sufficient for their cure. " He that hath ears to hear, let him hear," as the Master said.
Salt, sulphur, and the mercuries are only accessory elements and passive instruments of the great enterprise. Everything depends, as we have said, upon the interior magnes of Paracelsus. The work consists entirely in projection, and projection is accomplished perfectly by the effective and realisable intelligence of a single word. There is but one important operation, and that is sublimation,
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