Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi

CHARMS AND PHILTRES ]. associations have frequently struck down or destroyed slowly the revealers or profaners of mysteries, and when the magic .sword has refrained from striking, when the spilling of blood was dangerous, then Aqua Toffana, poisoned nosegays, the shirt of Nessus, and other deadly instruments, still stranger and still less known, were used to carry out sooner or later the terrible sentence of the free judges.

We have said that there is in magic a great and indicible arcanum, which is never mentioned among adepts, which the profane above all must be prevented from divining ; in former times, whosoever revealed, or caused the key of this supreme secret to be discovered by others through imprudent revelations, was condemned immediately to death, and was often driven to execute the sentence himself.

The celebrated prophetic supper of Cazotte, described by Laharpe, has not been hitherto understood. Laharpe very naturally yielded to the temptation of surprising his readers by amplifying the details of his narrative. Everyone present at this supper, Laharpe excepted, was an initiate and a divulger, or at least profaner, of the mysteries.

Cazotte, the most exalted of all in the scale of initiation, pronounced their sentence of death in the name of illuminism, and this sentence was variously but rigorously executed, even as several years and several centuries previously had occurred in the case of similar judgments against the Abbe* de Villars, Urban Grandier, and many others.

The revolutionary philosophers perished as did Cagliostro deserted in the prisons of the Inquisition, as did the mystic band of Catherine Theos, as did the imprudent Scroepfer, constrained to suicide in the midst of his magical triumphs and the universal infatuation, as did the deserter Kotzebue, who was stabbed by Carl Sand, as did also so many others whose corpses have been discovered without any one being able to learn the cause of their sudden and sanguinary death.

The strange allocation addressed to Cazotte when he himself was condemned by the president of the revolutionary tribunal will be readily called to mind. The Gordian Knot of the 2p. 146terrible drama of '93 is still concealed in the darkest sanctuary of the secret societies ; to adepts of good faith, who sought to emancipate the common people, were opposed adepts of another sect, attached to more ancient traditions, who fought by means analogous to those of their adversaries : the practice of the great arcanum was made impossible by unmasking its theory.

The crowd understood nothing, but it mistrusted everything, and fell lower still in its discouragement ; the great arcanum became more secret than ever ; the adepts, checkmated by each other, could exercise their power neither to govern others nor to deliver themselves ; they condemned one another to the death of traitors ; they abandoned one another to exile, to suicide, to the knife and the scaffold.

I shall be asked possibly whether equally terrible dangers threaten at this day the intruders into the occult sanctuary and the betrayers of its secret. Why should I answer anything to the incredulity of the inquisitive ? If I risk a violent death for their instruction, certainly they will not save me ; if they are afraid on their own account, let them abstain from imprudent research — this is all I can say to them.

Let us return to venomous magic. In his romance of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas has revealed some practices of this ominous science.

There is no need to traverse the same ground by repeating its melancholy theories of crime; describing how plants are poisoned ; how animals nourished on these plants have their flesh infected, and becoming in turn the food of men, cause death without leaving any trace of poison ; how the walls of houses are inoculated ; how the air is permeated by fumes which require the glass mask of St Croix for the operator ; let us leave the ancient Canidia her abominable mysteries, and refrain from investigating the extent to which the infernal rites of Sagana have carried the art of Locusta.

It is enough to state that this most infamous class of malefactors distilled in conjunction the virus of contagious diseases, the venom of reptiles, and the sap of poisonous plants, that they