Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 136wicked and crafty mind avail itself of this snare and we are lost ; we may not go mad or turn idiots, but we become positively alienated, in all the force of the expression — that is, we are subjected to a foreign impulsion. In such a state one dreads instinctively everything that might bring us back to reason, and will not even listen to representations that are opposed to our infatuation.
Here is one of the most dangerous disorders which can affect the moral nature. The sole remedy for such a bewitchment is to make use of madness itself in order to cure madness, to provide the sufferer with imaginary satisfactions in the opposite order to that wherein he is now immersed.
Endeavour, for example, to cure an ambitious person by making him desire the glories of heaven — mystic remedy; cure one who is dissolute by true love — natural remedy; obtain honourable successes for a vain person ; exhibit unselfishness to the avaricious, and procure for them legitimate profit by honourable participation in generous enterprises, &c.
Acting in this way upon the moral nature, we may succeed in curing a number of physical maladies, for the moral affects the physical in virtue of the magical axiom : — " That which is above is like that which is below. This is why the Master said, when speaking of the paralysed woman: Satan has bound her. A disease invariably originates in a deficiency or an excess, and ever at the root of a physical evil we shall find a moral disorder. This is an unchanging law of nature.
p. 13717 D R ASTROLOGY STELLA OS INFLEXUS OF all the arts which have originated in ancient magian wisdom astrology is now the most misunderstood. No one believes any longer in the universal harmonies of nature and in the necessary interlacing of all effects with all causes.
Moreover, true astrology, that which connects with the unique and universal dogma of the Kabbalah, became profaned among the Greeks and among the Romans of the decline.
The doctrine of the seven spheres and the three mobilies, primitively issuing from the sephirotic decade, the character of the planets governed by angels, whose names have been changed into those of Pagan divinities, the influence of the spheres on one another, the destiny attached to numbers, the scale of proportion between the celestial hierarchies corresponding to the human hierarchies — all this has been materialised and degraded into superstition by genethliacal soothsayers and erecters of horoscopes during the decline and the middle ages.
The restoration of astrology to its primitive purity would be, in a sense, the creation of an entirely new science ; here let us attempt merely to indicate its first principles, with their more immediate and approximate consequences.
We have said that the astral light receives and preserves the impressions of all visible things ; it follows from this that the daily position of the heaven is reflected in this light, which, being the chief agent of life, operates the conception, gestation, and birth of children by a sequence of apparatuses naturally designed to this end.
Now, if this light be sufficiently prodigal of images to impart to the fruit of the womb the visible imprints of a maternal fantasy or appetite, still more will it transmit to the plastic and indeterminate p. 138temperament of a newly-born child the atmospheric impressions and diverse influences which, in the entire planetary system, are consequent at a given moment upon such or such particular aspect of the stars.
Nothing is indifferent in nature ; a stone more or a stone less upon a road may break or completely modify the destinies of the greatest men or even the largest empires ; still more must the position of this or that star in the sky have an influence on the child who is born, who enters by the very fact of his birth into the universal harmony of the sidereal world.
The stars are bound to one another by the attractions which hold them in equilibrium and cause them to move with uniformity through space. From all spheres unto all spheres there stretch these indestructible threads of light, and there is no point upon any planet to which one of them is not attached.
The true adept in astrology must, therefore, give heed to the precise time and place of the birth which is in question ; then, after an exact calculation of the astral influences, it remains for him to compute the chances of estate, that is to say, the advantages or hindrances which the child must one day meet with by reason of position, relatives, inherited tendencies, and hence natural proclivities, in the fulfilment of his destinies.
Finally, he will still have to take into consideration human liberty and its initiative, should the child eventually come to be a true man, and to isolate himself by an intrepid will from fatal influences and from the chain of destiny. It will be seen that we do not allow too much to astrology, but so much as we leave it is indubitable ; it is the scientific and magical calculus of probabilities.
Astrology is as ancient as astronomy, and indeed it is more ancient ; all seers of lucid antiquity have accorded it their fullest confidence ; now, we must not condemn and reject in a shallow manner anything which comes before us protected and supported by such imposing authorities. Long and patient observations, conclusive comparisons, frequently repeated experiences, must have led the old sages to their
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