Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi

p. 345termed them his precious, most illustrious patients, and dedicated his books to them. So are we convinced that Gargantua and Pantagruel cured more black humours, more tendencies to madness, more atrabilious whims, at that epoch of religious animosities and civil wars, than the whole Faculty of medicine could boast. Occult medicine is essentially sympathetic.

Reciprocal affection, or at least real good will, must exist between doctor and patient. Syrups and juleps have very little inherent virtue ; they are what they become through the mutual opinion of operator and •subject ; hence homeopathic medicine dispenses with them and no serious inconvenience follows.

Oil and wine, combined with salt or camphor, are sufficient for the healing of all afflictions, and for all external frictions or soothing applications, oil and wine are the chief medicaments of the Gospel tradition. They formed the balm of the Good Samaritan, and in the Apocalypse, when describing the last plagues, the prophet prays the avenging powers to spare these substances, that is, to leave a hope and a remedy for so many wounds.

What we term extreme unction was the pure and simple practice of the Master's traditional medicine, both for the early Christians and in the mind of the apostle Saint James, who has included the precept in his epistle to the faithful of the whole world. " Is any man sick among you," he writes, " let him call in the priests of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.

This divine therapeutic science was lost gradually, and Extreme Unction came to be regarded as a religious formality necessary as a preparation for death. At the same time, the thaumaturgic virtue of consecrated oil <could not be altogether effaced from remembrance by the traditional doctrine, and it is perpetuated in the passage of the catechism which refers to Extreme Unction.

Faith and charity were the most signal healing powers among the early Christians. The source of most diseases is in moral disorders ; we must begin by healing the soul, and then the cure of the body will follow quickly.

346 THE RITUAL OF TRANSCENDENT MAGIC CHAPTER XXI THE SCIENCE OF THE PROPHETS THIS chapter is consecrated to divination, which, in its; broadest sense, and following the grammatical significance of the word, is the exercise of divine power, and the realisation of divine knowledge. It is the priesthood of the magus. But divination, in general opinion, is concerned more closely with the knowledge of hidden things.

To< know the most secret thoughts of men; to penetrate themysteries of past and future ; to evoke age by age the exact revelation of effects by the precise knowledge of causes ; this is what is universally called divination. Now, of all mysteries of nature, the most profound is the heart of man, and at the same time nature forbids its depth to b& inaccessible.

In spite of the deepest dissimulation, despite the most skilful policy, she herself traces, and makes plain in the bodily form, in the light of glances, in movements, in carriage, in voice, a thousand tell-tale indices.

The perfect initiate has no need of these indices ; he perceives the truth in the light ; he senses an impression which makes known the whole man, his glance penetrates hearts, he may even feign ignorance to disarm the fear or hatred of the wicked whom he knows too well.

A man of bad conscience thinksalways that he is being accused or suspected ; he recognises himself in a touch of collective satire, he applies that whole satire to himself, and cries loudly that he is calumniated.. Ever suspicious, but as curious as he is apprehensive, in thepresence of the magus he is like the Satan of the parable, or like those scribes who questioned tempting.

Everstubborn and ever feeble, what he fears above all is the recognition that he is in the wrong. The past disquiets him, the future alarms him ; he seeks to compound with himself and to believe himself a well-placed and virtuous, man. His life is a perpetual struggle between good aspira-

THE SCIENCE OP THE PROPHETS 347 tions and evil habits ; he thinks himself a philosopher after the manner of Aristippe or Horace in accepting all the corruption of his time as a necessity which he must undergo ; he distracts himself with some philosophical pastime, and appropriates the protecting smile of Mecaenas to persuade himself that he is not simply a battener on famine like Verres or a parasite of Trimalcion.

Such men are always mercenaries, even in their good works. They decide to make a gift to a public charity, and they postpone it to get the interest. The type which I am describing is not an individual but a class of men with which the magus is liable to come frequently in contact, especially in our own century.

Let him follow their own example by mistrusting them, for they will be invariably his most compromising friends and most dangerous enemies. The public exercise of divination is unbecoming at the present period in a veritable adept, for he would be frequently driven to jugglery and feats of skill in order to preserve his clients and astonish his public.

Accredited diviners, both male and female, have always secret spies, who instruct them as to the private life or habits of those who consult them.

A code of signals is established between cabinet and antechamber; an unknown client at his first visit receives a number; a day is arranged, and he is followed ; doorkeepers, neighbours, servants are engaged in gossip, and details are thus arrived at which overwhelm simple minds, and cause them to invest an impostor with the reverence which should be reserved for true science and genuine divination.

The divination of events to come is possible only in the case of those the realisation of which is in some sense contained in their cause.

The soul, scrutinising by means of the whole nervous system the circle of the astral light which influences a man and from him receives an influence, the soul of the diviner, we repeat, can compass by a single intuition all the loves and hatreds which that man has evoked about him ; it can read his intentions in his thought,