Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 279darkness in the Gospel. Number constitutes the law, and progress takes place inversely in hell — that is to say, the most advanced in Satanic development, and consequently the most degraded, are the least intelligent and feeblest. Thus, a fatal law drives the demons downward when they wish and believe themselves to be ascending. So also those who term themselves chiefs are the most impotent and despised of all.
As to the horde of perverse spirits, they tremble before an unknown, invisible, incomprehensible, capricious, implacable chief, who never explains his laws, whose arm is ever stretched out to strike those who fail to understand him. They give this phantom the names of Baal, Jupiter, and even others more venerable, which cannot, without profanation, be pronounced in hell.
But this phantom is only the shadow and remnant of God, disfigured by their wilful perversity, and persisting in their imagination like a vengeance of justice and a remorse of truth.
When the evoked spirit of light manifests with dejected or irritated countenance, we must offer him a moral sacrifice, that is, be inwardly disposed to renounce whatever offends him ; and before leaving the oratory, we must dismiss him, saying : " May peace be with thee ! I have not wished to trouble thee ; do thou torment me not. I shall labour to improve myself as to anything that vexes thee. I pray, and will still pray, with thee and for thee.
Pray thou also both with and for me, and return to thy great slumber, expecting that day when we shall awake together. Silence and adieu ! " «We must not close this chapter without giving some deils on black magic for the benefit of the curious. The practices of Thessalian sorcerers and Roman Canidias are described by several ancient authors.
In the first place, a pit was dug, at the mouth of which they cut the throat of a black sheep; the psyllse and larvae presumed to be present, and swarming round to drink the blood, were driven off with the magic sword ; the triple Hecate and the infernal gods were evoked, and the phantom whose apparition was desired was called upon three times. In the middle p. 280ages, necromancers violated tombs, composed philtres and unguents with the fat and blood of corpses combined with aconite, belladonna, and poisonous fungi; they boiled and skimmed these frightful compounds over fires nourished with human bones and crucifixes stolen from churches; they added dust of dried toads and ash of consecrated hosts ; they anointed their temples, hands, and breasts with the infernal unguent, traced the diabolical pantacles, evoked the dead beneath gibbets or in deserted graveyards.
Their bowlings were heard from afar, and belated travellers imagined that legions of phantoms rose out of the earth ; the very trees, in their eyes, assumed appalling shapes ; fiery orbs gleamed in the thickets ; frogs in the marshes seemed to echo mysterious words of the Sabbath with croaking voices. It was the magnetism of hallucination, the contagion of madness.
The end of procedure in black magic was to disturb reason and produce the feverish excitement which emboldens to great crimes. The grimoires, formerly seized and burnt by authority everywhere, are certainly not harmless books. Sacrilege, murder, theft, are indicated or hinted as means to realisation in almost all these works.
Thus, in the Great Grimoire, and its modern version, the Eed Dragon, there is a recipe entitled " Composition of Death, or Philosophical Stone," a broth of aqua fortis, copper, arsenic, and verdigris.
There are also necromantic processes, comprising the tearing up of earth from graves with the nails, dragging out bones, placing them crosswise on the breast, then assisting at midnight mass on Christmas eve, and flying out of the church at the moment of consecration, crying : " Let the dead rise from their tombs !
" — then returning to the graveyard, taking a handful of earth nearest to the coffin, running back to the door of the church, which has been alarmed by the clamour, depositing the two bones crosswise, again shouting: " Let the dead rise from their tombs," and then, if we escape being seized and shut up in a mad-house, retiring at a slow pace, and counting four thousand five hundred steps in a
TRANSMUTATIONS
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straight line, which means following a broad road or scaling walls. Having traversed this space, you must lie down upon the earth, place yourself as if in a coffin, and repeat in lugubrious tones : " Let the dead rise from their tombs ! " Finally, call thrice on the person whose apparition you desire. No doubt any one who is mad enough and wicked enough to abandon himself to such operations is predisposed to all chimeras and all phantoms. Hence the recipe of the Grand Grimoire is most efficacious, but we advise none of our readers to have recourse to it.
CHAPTER XIV TRANSMUTATIONS
ST AUGUSTINE speculates, as we have said, whether Apuleius could have been changed into an ass and then have resumed his human shape. The same doctor might have equally concerned himself with the adventure of the
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