Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
BLACK MAGIC 127 universal agent, the eternal fire of terrestrial life, the soul of the earth, and the living fount of hell. We have said that the astral light is the receptacle of forms, and these when evoked by reason are produced harmoniously, but when evoked by madness they appear disorderly and monstrous ; so originated the nightmares of St Anthony and the phantoms of the Sabbath.
Do, therefore, the evocations of goetia and demonomania possess a practical result ? Yes, certainly — one which cannot be contested, one more terrible than could be recounted by legends ! When any one invokes the devil with intentional ceremonies, the devil comes, and is seen. To escape dying from horror at the sight, to escape catalepsy or idiocy, one must be already mad.
Grandier was a libertine through indevotion, and perhaps also through scepticism ; excessive zeal, following on the aberrations of asceticism and blindness of faith, depraved Girard, and made him deprave in his turn. In the fifteenth chapter of our Eitual we shall give all the diabolical evocations and practices of black magic, not that they may be used, but that they may be known and judged, and that such insanities may be put aside for ever. M.
Eudes de Mirville, whose book upon table-turning made a certain sensation recently, will possibly be contented and discontented at the same time with the solution here given of black magic and its problems.
As a fact, we maintain, like himself, the reality and prodigious nature of the facts ; with him also we assign them to the old serpent, the secret prince of this world ; but we are not agreed as to the nature of this blind agent, which, under different directions, is at once the instrument of all good and of all evil, the minister of prophets and the inspirer of pythonesses.
In a word, the devil, for us, is force placed temporarily at the disposal of error, even as mortal sin is, to our thinking, the persistence of the will in what is absurd. M. de Mirville is therefore a thousand times right, but he is once and one great time wrong. What we must exclude above all from the realm of p. 128existences is the arbitrary. Nothing happens by chance, nor yet by the autocracy of a good or evil will. There are two houses in heaven, and the lower house of Satan is restrained in its extremes by the senate of divine wisdom.
16. yQ BEWITCHMENTS FONS OCULUS FULGUR WHEN a man gazes unchastely upon any woman he profanes that woman, said the Great Master. What is willed with persistence is done. Every real will is confirmed by acts; every will confirmed by an act is action. Every action is subject to a judgment, and such judgment is eternal. These are dogmas and principles from which it follows that the good or evil which we will, to others as to ourselves, according to the capacity of our will and within the sphere of our action, will infallibly take place, if the will be confirmed and the determination fixed by acts. The acts should be analogous to the will. The intent to do harm or to excite love, in order to be efficacious, must be confirmed by deeds of hatred or affection. Whatsoever bears the impression of a human soul belongs to that soul ; whatsoever a man has appropriated after any manner becomes his body in the broader acceptation of the term, and anything which is done to the body of a man is felt, mediately or immediately, by his soul. It is for this reason that every species of hostility towards one's neighbour is regarded by moral theology as the beginning of homicide. Bewitchment is a homicide, and the more infamous because it eludes self-defence by the victim and punishment by law. This principle being established to exonerate our conscience, and p. 129for the warning of the weak vessels, let us affirm boldly that bewitchment is possible. Let us even go further and lay down that it is not only possible, but in some sense necessary and fatal. It is continually going on in the social world, unconsciously both to agents and patients. Involun- . tary bewitchment is one of the most terrible dangers of i human life.
Passional sympathy inevitably subjects the hottest desire to the strongest will. Moral maladies are more contagious than physical, and there are some triumphs of infatuation and fashion which are comparable to leprosy or cholera.
We may die of an evil acquaintance as well as of a contagious touch, and the frightful plague which, during recent centuries only, has avenged in Europe the profanation of the mysteries of love, is a revelation of the analogical laws of nature, and at the same time offers only a feeble image of the moral corruptions which follow daily on an equivocal sympathy.
There is a story of a jealous and infamous man who, to avenge himself on a rival, contracted an incurable disorder, and made it the common scourge and anathema of a divided bed. This atrocious history is that of every magician, or rather of every sorcerer who practises bewitchments.
He poisons himself in order that he may poison others ; he damns himself that he may torture others ; he draws in hell with his breath in order that he may expel it by his breath ; he wounds himself to death that he may inflict death on others ; but possessed of this unhappy courage, it is positive and certain that he will poison and slay by the mere projection of his perverse will.
There are some forms of love which are as deadly as hatred, and the bewitchments of goodwill are the torment of the wicked. The prayers offered to God for the conversion of a man bring misfortune to that man if he will not be converted. As we have already said, it is weariness and danger to strive against the fluidic currents occasioned by the chains of wills in union. Hence there are two kinds of bewitchment, voluntary and involuntary ; physical and moral bewitchment may be I
No commentary for this page under the selected tracks.
There is commentary on page 1.