Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 142chances analogous to those which I owe already to the influence of the same planets, and I conclude that in 1851 I had employment which was moderately but sufficiently remunerative, with some embarrassment of position ; in 1847 I was violently separated from my family, with great attendant sufferings for mine and me ; in 1843 I travelled as an apostle, addressing the people, and suffering the persecution of ill -meaning persons; briefly, I was at once honoured and proscribed.
Finally, in 1825 family life came to an end for me, and I engaged definitely in a fatal path which led me to science and misfortune. I may therefore suppose that I shall this year experience toil, poverty, vexation, heart-exile, change of place, publicity, and contradictions, with some eventuality which will be decisive for the rest of my life ; every indication in the present leads me to endorse this forecast.
Hence I conclude that, for myself and for this year, experience completely confirms the precision of Cardan's astrological calculus, which, furthermore, connects with the climacteric years of ancient astrologers. This term signifies arranged in scales or calculated on the degrees of a scale. Johannes Trithemius in his book on Secondary Causes has very curiously computed the return of fortunate or calamitous years for all the empires of the world.
In the twenty-first chapter of our Eitual we shall give an exact analysis of this work, one even more clear than the original, together with a continuation of the labour of Trithemius to our own days and the application of his magical scale to contemporary events, so as to deduce the most striking probabilities relative to the immediate future of France, Europe, and the world.
According to all the grand masters in astrology, comets are the stars of exceptional heroes, and they only visit earth to signalise great changes ; the planets preside over collective existences and modify the destinies of mankind in the aggregate ; the fixed stars, more remote and more feeble in their action, attract individuals and determine their tenp. 143dencies ; sometimes a group of stars combine to influence the destinies of a single man, while often a great number of souls are drawn by the distant rays of the same sun.
When we die, our interior light in departing follows the attraction of its star, and thus it is that we live again in other universes, where the soul makes for itself a new garment, analogous to the development or diminution of its beauty ; for our souls, when separated from our bodies, resemble revolving stars ; they are globules of animated light which always seek their centre for the recovery of their equilibrium and their true movement.
Before all things, however, they must liberate themselves from the folds of the serpent, that is, the unpurified astral light which envelopes and imprisons them, unless the strength of their will can lift them beyond its reach. The immersion of the living star in the dead light is a frightful torment, comparable to that of Mezentius.
Therein the soul freezes and burns at the same time, and has no means of getting free except by re-entering the current of exterior forms and assuming a fleshly envelope, then energetically battling against instincts to strengthen that moral liberty which will permit it at the moment of death to break the chains of earth and wing its flight in triumph towards the star of consolation which has smiled in light upon it.
Following this clue, we can understand the nature of the fire of hell, which is identical with the demon or the old serpent ; we can gather also wherein consist the salvation and reprobation of men, all called and all successively elected, but in small number, after having risked falling into the eternal fire through their own fault.
Such is the great and sublime revelation of the magi, a revelation which is the mother of all symbols, of all dogmas, of all religions. We can realise already how far Dupuis was mistaken in regarding astronomy as the source of every cultus. It is astronomy, on the contrary, which has sprung from astrology, and primitive astrology is one of the branches of the holy Kabbalah, the science of sciences, and the religion of religions. Hence upon the seventeenth page of p. 144the Tarot we find an admirable allegory — a naked woman, typifying Truth, Nature, and Wisdom at one and the same time, turns two ewers towards the earth, and pours out fire and water upon it ; above her head glitters the septenary, starred about an eight-pointed star, that of Venus, symbol of peace and love ; the plants of earth are flourishing around the woman, and on one of them the butterfly of Psyche has alighted ; this emblem of the soul is replaced in some copies of the sacred book by a bird, which is a more Egyptian and probably a more ancient symbol. In the modern Tarot the plate is entitled the Glittering Star ; it is analogous to a number of Hermetic symbols, and is also in correspondence with the Blazing Star of Masonic initiates, which expresses most of the mysteries of Eosicrucian secret doctrine.
18 v S CHAKMS AND PHILTEES JUSTITIA MYSTERIUM CANES WE have now to grapple with the most criminal abuse to which magical sciences can be put, namely, venomous magic, or, rather, sorcery. Let it be here understood that we write not to instruct but to warn. If human justice, instead of punishing the adepts, had only proscribed the nigromancers and poisoning sorcerers, it is certain, as we have previously remarked, that its severity would have been well placed, and that the most severe penalties could never be excessive in the case of such criminals. At the same time it must not be supposed that the right of life and death which secretly belongs to the magus has always been exercised to satisfy some infamous vengeance, or some cupidity more infamous still ; in the middle ages, as in the ancient world, magical
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