Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi

p. 213The old sorceresses, when they spent the night at the meeting-place of three cross-roads, yelled three times in honour of the triple Hecate. All these figures, all these dispositions of numbers and of characters, are, as we have already said, so many instruments for the education of the will, by fixing and determining its habits.

They serve, furthermore, to conjoin all the powers of the human soul in action, and to increase the creative force of the imagination ; it is the gymnastics of thought in training for realisation ; so the effect of these practices is infallible, like nature, when they are fulfilled with absolute confidence and indomitable perseverance. The Grand Master tells us that faith could transplant trees into the sea and remove mountains.

Even a superstitious and insensate practice is efficacious because it is a realisation of the will. Hence a prayer is more powerful if we go to church to say it than when it is said at home, and it will work miracles if we fare to a famous sanctuary for the purpose, in other words, to one which is strongly magnetised by the enormous number of its frequenters, traversing two or three hundred leagues with bare feet, and asking alms by the way.

Men laugh at the simple woman who denies herself a pennyworth of milk in the morning that she may carry a penny taper to burn on the magic triangle in a chapel ; but they who laugh are ignorant, and the simple woman does not pay too dearly for what she thus purchases of resignation and of courage.

Great minds with great pride pass by, shrugging their shoulders ; they rise up against superstition with a din which shakes the world; and what happens ? The towers of the great minds topple over, and their ruins revert to the providers and purchasers of penny tapers, who are content to hear it everywhere proclaimed that their reign is for ever ended, provided that they rule always.

The great religions have never had more than one serious rival, and this rival is magic. Magic produced the occult associations which brought about the revolution termed the Renaissance ; but it has been the doom of the human mind, 2p. 214blinded by insensate passions, to realise literally the allegorical history of the Hebrew Hercules ; by overthrowing the pillars of the temple, it has itself been buried under the ruins. The masonic associations of the present time are no less ignorant of the high meaning of their symbols than are the rabbins of the Sepher Jetzirah and the Zohar upon the ascending scale of the three degrees, with the transverse progression from right to left and from left to right of the kabbalistic septenary. The compass of the G.'. A.*, and the square of Solomon have become the gross and material level of unintelligent Jacobinism, realised by a steel triangle ; this obtains both for heaven and earth. The initiated divulgers to whom the illuminated Cazotte predicted a violent death have, in our own days, exceeded the sin of Adam; having rashly gathered the fruits of the tree of knowledge, which they did not know how to use for their nourishment, they have cast it to the beasts and reptiles of the earth. So was the reign of superstition inaugurated, and it must persist until the period when true religion shall be again constituted on the eternal foundations of the hierarchy of three degrees, and of the triple power which the hierarchy exercises blindly or providentially in the three worlds.

CHAPTEE IV THE CONJURATION OF THE FOUR THE four elementary forms roughly separate and distinguish the created spirits which the universal movement disengages from the central fire. The spirit everywhere toils and fructifies matter by life ; all matter is animated ; thought and soul are everywhere. By possessing ourselves of the thought which produces diverse forms, we become the master of forms, and make them serve our purposes.