Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi

p. 100occult power and their unpopularity, is established upon the plan and follows the conditions of the most potent magical chains, and herein is the secret of their force, which they attribute solely to the grace or will of God, a vulgar and cheap solution for every mystery of power in influence or attraction.

In the Eitual it will be our task to estimate the sequence of truly magical ceremonies and evocations which make up the great work of vocation under the name of the Exercises of St Ignatius. All enthusiasm propagated in a society by a series of communications and practices in common produces a magnetic -current, and continues or increases by the current.

The action of the current is to carry away and often to exalt beyond measure persons who are impressionable and weak, nervous organisations, temperaments inclined to hysteria or hallucination. Such people soon become powerful vehicles of magical force and efficiently project the astral light in the direction of the current itself ; opposition at such a time to the manifestations of the force is, to some extent, a struggle with fatality.

When the youthful Pharisee Saul, or Schol, threw himself, with all the fanaticism and all the determination of a sectarian, across the aggressive line of Christianity, he unconsciously placed himself at the mercy of a power against which he thought to prevail, and hence he was struck down by a formidable magnetic flash, doubtless the more instantaneous by reason of the combined effect of cere- .bral congestion and sunstroke.

The conversion of the young Israelite, Alphonsus of Ratisbonne, is a contemporary fact which is absolutely of the same nature. We are acquainted with a sect of enthusiasts whom it is common to deride at a distance, and to join, despite one's self, as soon as they are approached, even with a hostile intention.

I will go further, and affirm that magical circles and magnetic currents establish themselves, and have an influence, according to fatal laws, upon those on whom they can act. Each one of us is drawn within a circle of relations which constitutes his 2p. 101world, and to the influence of which he is made subject. The lawgiver of the French Eevolution, that man whom the most spiritual nation in the whole world acknowledged as the incarnation of human reason, Jean Jacques Kousseau, was drawn into the most lamentable action of his life, the desertion of his children, by the magnetic influence of a libertine circle and a magical current of table-d'hdte.

He describes it simply and ingenuously in his Confessions, but it is a fact which has remained unobserved. Great circles very often make great men, and vice-versd. There are no unrecognised geniuses, there are eccentric men, and the term would seem to have been invented by an adept. The man who is eccentric in his genius is one who attempts to form a circle by combating the central attractive force of established chains and currents.

It is his destiny to be broken or to succeed. Now, what is the twofold condition of success in such a case ? A central point of stability and a persevering circular action of initiative. The man of genius is one who has discovered a real law, and is thereby possessed of an invincible, active, and grinding power.

He may die in the midst of his work, but that which he has willed comes to pass, in spite of his death, and is indeed often ensured thereby, because death is a veritable assumption for genius. " When I shall be lifted up from the earth," said the greatest of the initiators, " I will draw all things after me. The law of magnetic currents is that of the movement of the astral light itself, which is always double, and augments in an opposite sense.

A great action invariably paves the way for a reaction of equal magnitude, and the secret of phenomenal successes consists entirely in the foreknowledge of reactions. Thus did Chateaubriand, penetrated with disgust at the saturnalia of the revolution, foresee and prepare the immense success of his " Genius of Christianity.

To oppose one's self to a current at the beginning of its revolution is to court being destroyed by that current, like the great and unfortunate Emperor Julian ; to oppose one's self 3p. 102to a current which has run its round is to take the lead of a contrary current. The great man is he who comes seasonably and knows how to innovate opportunely. In the days of the apostles, Voltaire would have found no echo for his utterances, and might have been merely an ingenious parasite at the banquets of Trimalcyon.

Now, at the epoch wherein we live, everything is ripe for a fresh outburst of evangelical zeal and Christian self-devotion, precisely by reason of the prevailing general disillusion, egoistic positivism, and public cynicism of the coarsest interests. The success of certain books and the mystical tendencies of minds are unequivocal symptoms of this widespread disposition.

We restore and we build churches only to realise more keenly that we are void of belief, only to long the more for it ; once more does the whole world await its Messiah, and he cannot tarry in his coming.

Let a man, for example, come forward, who by rank or by fortune is placed in an exalted position — a pope, a king, even a Jewish millionaire — and let this man publicly and solemnly sacrifice all his material interests for the weal of humanity ; let him make himself the saviour of the poor, the disseminator, and even the victim, of doctrines of renunciation and charity, and he will draw round him an immense following; he will accomplish a complete moral revolution in the world.

But the high place is before all things necessary for such a personage, because, in these days of meanness and trickery, any Word issuing from the lower ranks is suspected of interested ambition and imposture. Ye, then, who are nothing, ye who possess nothing, aspire not to be apostles or messiahs.

If you have faith, and would act in accordance therewith, get possession, in the first place, of the means of action, which are the influence of rank and the prestige of fortune. In olden times gold was manufactured by science ; nowadays science must be remade by gold. We have fixed the volatile, and we must now volatilise the fixed — in other words, we have materialised spirit, and we must now spiritualise