Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 121Further, the simultaneous presence of the missionary Francis Xavier in several places at one time has been no less strictly demonstrated. It will be said that these are miracles, but we reply that miracles when they are genuine are simply facts for science. Apparitions of persons dear to us coincident with the moment of their death are phenomena of the same order and attributable to the same cause.
We have spoken of the sidereal body which is intermediary between the soul and the~physical body. Now, this body frequently remains awake while the latter sleeps, and passes through all space which universal magnetization opens to it. It lengthens without breaking the sympathetic chain which attaches it to our heart and brain, and it is for this reason that it is so dangerous to awaken dreamers suddenly.
As a fact, too great a start may break the chain in an instant and cause death immediately. The form of our sidereal body is conformed to the habitual condition of our thoughts, and it modifies, in the long run, the characteristics of the material body. This is why Swedenborg, in his somnambulistic intuitions, frequently beheld spirits in the shape of various animals.
Let us now make bold to say that a were-wolf is nothing else but the sidereal body of a man whose savage and uinary instincts are typified by the wolf ; who, further, hilst his phantom wanders over the country, is sleeping painfully in his bed, and dreams that he is actually a wolf.
What makes the were-wolf visible is the almost somnamic excitement caused by the fright of those who behold it, or else the tendency, more particularly in simple country persons, to enter into direct communication with the astral light, which is the common medium of visions and dreams.
The hurts inflicted on the were-wolf really wound the sleeping person by the odic and sympathetic congestion of the astral light, and by the correspondence of the immaterial with the material body. Many persons will believe that they are dreaming when they read such things as these, and will ask whether we are really ourselves awake ; but we will p. 122only request men of science to reflect upon the phenomena of gestation, and upon the influence of the imagination of women on the form of their offspring. A woman who had been present at the execution of a man who was broken upon a wheel gave birth to a child with all its limbs shattered.
Let anyone explain to us how the impression produced upon the soul of the mother by a horrible spectacle could so have reacted on the child, and we in turn will explain why blows received in dreams can really bruise and even grievously wound the body of him who receives them in imagination, above all when his body is suffering and subjected to nervous and magnetic influences.
To these phenomena and to the occult laws which govern them must be referred the effects of bewitchment, of which we shall speak hereafter. Diabolical obsessions, and the majority of nervous diseases which affect the brain, are wounds inflicted on the nervous mechanism by the astral light when perverted, that is, absorbed or projected in abnormal proportions.
All extraordinary and extra-natural tensions of the will predispose to obsessions and nervous diseases ; enforced celibacy, asceticism, hatred, ambition, rejected love, are so many generative principles of infernal forms and influences.
Paracelsus says that the menstruations of women beget phantoms in the air, and from this standpoint convents would be seminaries for nightmares, while the devils might be compared to those heads of the hydra of Lerne which were reproduced eternally and propagated in the very blood from their wounds. The phenomena of possession amongst the Ursulines of Loudun, so fatal to Urban Grandier, have been misconstrued.
The nuns were really possessed by hysteria and fanatical imitation of the secret thoughts of their exorcists, which were transmitted to their nervous system by the astral light. They received the impression of all the hatreds which this unfortunate priest had conjured up against him, and this wholly interior communication seemed diabolical and miraculous to themselves. Hence in this tragical affair everyone acted sincerely, even p. 123to Laubardemont, who, in his blind execution of the prejudged verdicts of Cardinal Richelieu, believed that he was fulfilling at the same time the duties of a true judge, and as little suspected himself of being a follower of Pontius Pilate as he would have recognised in the sceptical and libertine curd of Saint-Pierre-du Marchd, a disciple and martyr of Christ.
The possession of the nuns of Louvier is scarcely more than a copy of those of Loudun ; the devils invent little and plagiarise one another. The process of Gaufridi and Magdalen de la Palud possesses stranger features, for in this case the victims are their own accusers. Gaufridi confessed that he was guilty of depriving a number of women of the power to defend themselves against his seductions by simply breathing in their nostrils.
A young and beautiful girl, of noble family, who had been thus insufflated, described, in the greatest detail, scenes wherein the unchaste seemed to vie with the monstrous and grotesque. Such are the ordinary hallucinations of false mysticism and ill-kept celibacy. Gaufridi and his mistress were obsessed by their mutual chimeras, and the brain of the one reflected the nightmares of the other.
Was not the Marquis of Sade himself infectious for certain depleted and diseased natures ? The scandalous trial of Father Girard is a new proof of the deliriums of mysticism and the singular nervous affections which it may entail. The trances of la Cadiere, her ecstacies, her stigmatas, were all as real as the insensate and perhaps involuntary debauchery of her director.
She accused him, when he wished to withdraw from her, and the conversion of this young woman was a revenge, for there is nothing more cruel than depraved passions. An influential body, which intervened in the trial of Grandier for the destruction of the possible heretic, in this case rescued Father Girard for the honour of the order.
Moreover, Grandier and Girard attained the same results by very different means, with which we shall be specially concerned in the sixteenth chapter.
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