Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 148of rage and hunger; sprinkle their bodies with powdered spurge and ground glass ; then place them in a well-sealed retort, and extract all their moisture by fire. Let the glass cool ; separate the ash of the dead bodies from the incombustible dust, which will remain at the bottom of the retort. You will then have two poisons — one liquid, the other a powder.
The first will be fully as efficacious as the terrible Aqua Poffana ; the second, in a few days' time, will cause any person, who may have a pinch of it mixed with his drink, to become, in the first place, wilted and old, and subsequently to die amidst horrible sufferings, or in a state of complete collapse.
It must be admitted that this recipe has a magical physiognomy of the blackest and most revolting kind, and sickens one by its recollections of the abominable confections of Canidia and Medea. The sorcerers of the middle ages pretended to receive such powders at the Sabbath, and sold them at a high price to the malicious and ignorant. The tradition of similar mysteries spread terror in country places, and came to act as a spell.
The imagination once impressed, the nervous system once assailed, and then the victim rapidly wasted away, the very dread of his relatives and friends insuring his loss. The sorcerer or sorceress was almost invariably a species of human toad, swollen with long-enduring rancours. They were poor, repulsed by all, and consequently full of hatred.
The fear which they inspired was their consolation and their revenge ; poisoned themselves by a society of which they had experienced nothing but the refuse and the vices, they poisoned in their turn all those who were weak enough to fear them, and avenged upon beauty and youth their accursed old age and their atrocious ugliness.
The mere operation of these evil works, and the fulfilment of these loathsome mysteries, constituted and confirmed what was then called a compact with the devil. It is certain that the worker must have been given over body and soul to evil, and justly deserved the universal and irrevocable reprobation expressed by the allegory of hell. That human
CHARMS AND PHILTRES 149 souls could descend to such an abyss of crime and madness must assuredly astonish and grieve us ; but is not such an abyss needed as a basis for the exaltation of the most sublime virtues ? and does not the depth of infernus demonstrate by antithesis the infinite height and grandeur of heaven ?
In the North, where the instincts are more repressed and vivacious ; in Italy, where the passions are more diffusive and fiery, charms and the evil eye are still dreaded; the jettatura is not to be braved with impunity in Naples, and persons who are unfortunately endowed with this power are even distinguished by certain exterior signs.
In order to guard against it, experts affirm that horns must be carried on the person, and the common people, who take everything literally, hasten to adorn themselves with small horns, not dreaming of the sense of the allegory.
These attributes of Jupiter Ammon, Bacchus, and Moses are the symbol of moral power or enthusiasm, so that the magicians mean to say that, in order to withstand the jettatura, the fatal current of instincts must be governed by a great intrepidity, a great enthusiasm, or a great thought. In like manner, almost all popular superstitions are profane interpretations of some grand maxim or marvellous secret of occult wisdom.
Did not Pythagoras, in his admirable symbols, bequeath a perfect philosophy to sages, and a new series of vain observances and ridiculous practices to the vulgar ? Thus, when he said : " Do not pick up what falls from the table ; do not cut down trees on the great highway ; kill not the serpent when it falls into your garden," — was he not inculcating the precepts of charity, either social or personal, under transparent allegories ?
When he said : " Do not look at yourself by torchlight in a mirror," was he not ingeniously teaching true self-knowledge which is incompatible with factitious lights and the prejudgments of systems ? It is the same with the other precepts of Pythagoras, who, it is well known, was followed literally by a swarm of unintelligent disciples, and, indeed, amongst p. 150our provincial superstitious observances, there are many which indubitably belong to the primitive misconception of Pythagorean symbols. Superstition is derived from a Latin word which signifies survival. It is the sign surviving the thought ; it is the dead body of a religious rite. Superstition is to initiation what the notion of the devil is to that of God.
This is the sense in which the worship of images is forbidden, and in this sense also a doctrine most holy in its original conception may become superstitious and impious when it has lost its spirit and its inspiration. Then does religion, ever one, like the supreme reason, change its vestures and abandon old rites to the cupidity and roguery of priests dispossessed and metamorphosed by their wickedness and ignorance into jugglers and charlatans.
We may include among superstitions those magical emblems and characters, of which the meaning is no longer understood, which are engraved by chance on amulets and talismans. The magical images of the ancients were pantacles, i.e., kabbalistic syntheses.
Thus the wheel of Pythagoras is a pantacle analogous to the wheels of Ezekiel ; the two figures contain the same secrets, and belong to the same philosophy ; they constitute the key of all pantacles, and we have already discoursed concerning them. The four beasts, or, rather, the four-headed sphinx of the same prophet are identical with an admirable Indian symbol which we have reproduced in this work, as having reference to the great arcanum.
In his Apocalypse, St John followed and elaborated Ezekiel ; indeed, the monstrous figures of his wonderful book are so many magical pantacles, the key of which is easily discoverable by kabbalists. On the other hand, Christians, rejecting science in their anxiety to extend faith, sought later on to conceal the origin of their dogmas, and condemned all kabbalistic and magical books to the flames.
To destroy originals gives a kind of originality to copies, as was doubtless in the mind of St Paul when, prompted beyond question by the most laudable
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