by Eliphas Levi
We have referred, in the previous chapter, to what the masters in Kabalah call the embryonic condition of souls. This state, completed after the death of the person who thereby possesses another, is commenced often in life, whether by obsession or by love. I knew a young woman whose parents inspired her with a great terror, and who began suddenly to inflict upon an inoffensive person the very acts she dreaded in them. I knew another who, after participating in an evocation concerned with a guilty woman suffering in the next world for certain eccentric acts, began to imitate, without any reason, the peculiarities of the dead person. To this occult influence must be attributed the terrible power of a parent's curse, which is feared by all nations on earth, as also the imminent danger of magical operations when anyone has not reached the isolation of true adepts. This virtue of sidereal transmutation, which really exists in love, explains the allegorical marvels of the wand of Circe. Apuleius speaks of a Thessalian woman who changed herself into a bird; he won the affections of her servant to discover the secrets of the mistress, but succeeded only in transforming himself into an ass. This allegory contains the most hidden secrets of love. Again, the Kabalists say that when a man falls in love with a female elementary —undine, sylphide or gnomide, as the case may be—she becomes immortal with him, or otherwise he dies with her. We have seen already that elementaries are imperfect and as yet mortal men. The revelation we have mentioned, which has been regarded merely as a fable, is therefore the dogma of moral solidarity in love, which is itself the foundation of love, explaining all its sanctity and all its power. Who then is this Circe, that changes her worshippers into swine, while, so soon as she is subjected to the bond of love, her enchantments are destroyed? She is the ancient courtesan, the marble-hearted woman of all the ages. She who is without love absorbs and degrades all who approach her; she who loves, on the other hand, diffuses enthusiasm, nobility and life.
There was much talk in the last century about an adept accused of charlatanism, who was termed in his lifetime the divine Cagliostro. It is known that he practised evocations and that in this art he was surpassed only by the illuminated Schroepffer.1 It is said also that he boasted of his power in binding sympathies, and that he claimed to be in possession of the secret of the Great Work; but that which rendered him still more famous was a certain elixir of life, which immediately restored to the aged the strength and vitality of youth. The basis of this composition was malvoisie wine, and it was obtained by distilling the sperm of certain animals with the sap of certain plants. We are in possession of the recipe, but our reasons for withholding it will be understood readily.
1 “Fourteen is the number of fusion, association and universal unity.”—La Clef des Grands Mystères, p. 55.
1 See my translation of Lévi's History of Magic, second edition, pp. 364 et seq.
1 Loc. cit., p. 372.
2 See P. Gustave Brunet: Le Marquis de Sade, 1865.
3 Lévi's History of Magic, second edition, p. 373.
1 See, in the “Ritual”, Schroepffer's secrets and formulas for evocation.— NOTE OF ÉLIPHAS LÉVI. They do not appear, however, or at least cannot be identified, for want of reference. On Schroepffer himself, see my Secret Tradition in Freemasonry, ii, 127 et seq.
XV P1
BLACK MAGIC
SAMAËL AUXILIATOR
WE approach the mystery of Black Magic. We are about to confront, even in his own sanctuary, the black god of the Sabbath, the formidable goat of Mendes. At this point those who are liable to fear should close the book; even persons who are a prey to nervous impressions will do well to divert their attention or to abstain. We have undertaken a task, and we must complete it. Let us first of all address ourselves frankly and boldly to the questions: Is there a devil? What is the devil? As to the first point, science is silent, philosophy denies it at hazard, religion only answers in the affirmative. As to the second point, religion states that the devil is the fallen angel; occult philosophy accepts and explains this definition.2 It will be unnecessary to repeat what we have said previously on the subject, but we may add a further revelation:
IN BLACK MAGIC, THE DEVIL IS THE GREAT MAGICAL AGENT EMPLOYED FOR EVIL PURPOSES BY A PERVERSE WILL.
The old serpent of the legend is nothing else than the Universal Agent, the eternal fire of terrestrial life, the soul of the earth, and the living centre of hell. We have said that the Astral Light is the receptacle of forms, and these when evoked by reason are produced harmoniously, but when evoked by madness they appear disordered and monstrous: so originated the nightmares of St Anthony and the phantoms of the Sabbath. Do therefore the evocations of goetia and demonomania produce a practical result? Yes, certainly—one which cannot be contested, one more terrible than could ever be recounted in legends! When anyone invokes the devil with intentional ceremonies, the devil comes and is seen. To escape dying from horror at that sight, to escape catalepsy or idiocy, one must be already mad. Grandier was a libertine through indevotion and perhaps also through scepticism; excessive zeal, following on the aberrations of asceticism and blindness of faith, depraved Girard and made him deprave in his turn. In the fifteenth chapter of our “Ritual” we shall give all the diabolical evocations and practices of Black Magic,1 not that they may be used, but that they may be known and judged, and that such insanities may be put aside forever.
M. Eudes de Mirville, whose book upon table-turning made a certain sensation recently, will be contented possibly and discontented at the same time with the solution here given of Black Magic and its problems. As a fact, we maintain like himself the reality and prodigious nature of the facts; with him also we assign them to the old serpent, the occult prince of this world; but we are not agreed as to the nature of this blind agent, which, under different leadership, is the instrument of all good or of all evil, the minister of prophets or the inspirer of pythonesses. In a word, the devil, for us, is force placed temporarily at the disposal of evil, even as mortal sin is, to our thinking, the persistence of the will in what is absurd. M. de Mirville is therefore a thousand times right, but he is once and one great time wrong.
Whatsoever is arbitrary must be excluded from the realm of things positive. Nothing happens by chance, nor yet by the autocracy of a good or evil will. There are two houses in heaven, and the tribunal of Satan is restrained in its extremes by the Senate of Divine Wisdom.
1 “Fifteen is the number of antagonism and of catholicity.”—La Clef des Grands Mystères, p. 61.
2 “We have said that the devil exists and is a thousand times more horrible and pitiless than the blackest legends represent. . . . His essentially hybrid form is the synthesis of all nightmares. ... In our brain he destroys reason, in our heart he poisons liberty and so does always, . . . for he is not a person but a blind force. He is accursed, but it is with ourselves; he sins, but it is in us. We alone are responsible for the evil which he causes us to do, for in him there is neither freedom nor reason. The devil is the beast. . . . An evocation is therefore an appeal to the beast, and the beast alone can answer. To manifest the beast it must first be formed within us and then projected without. . . . To create the beast within us, we must destroy the man.”—Le Grand Arcane, pp. 59, 60.
1 It should be understood that the processes are innumerable, especially considering the extent of unprinted Rituals. What Lévi gives actually is a few typical examples, and they bear some marks of invention.
XVI Q1
BEWITCHMENTS
FONS OCULUS FULGUR
WHEN a man gazes unchastely upon any woman he profanes that woman, said the Great Master. What is willed with persistence is done. Every real will is confirmed by acts; every will confirmed by an act is an action. Every action is subject to a judgement, and such judgement is eternal. These are dogmas and principles from which it follows that the good or evil which we will, to others as to ourselves, according to the capacity of our will and within the sphere of our operation, must take place infallibly, if the will be confirmed and the determination fixed
by acts. Such acts should be analogous to the will. The intent to do harm or to excite love, in order to be efficacious, must be confirmed by deeds of hatred or affection. Whatsoever bears the impression of a human soul belongs to that soul; whatsoever a man has appropriated after any manner becomes his body in the broader acceptation of the term, and anything which is done to the body of a man is felt, mediately or immediately, by his soul. It is for this reason that every hostile deed committed against one's neighbour is regarded in moral theology as the beginning of homicide. Bewitchment is a homicide, and the more infamous because it eludes self defence by the victim and punishment by law. This principle being established to exonerate our conscience, and for the warning of weak vessels, let us affirm boldly that bewitchment is possible. Let us even go further and lay down that it is not only possible but in some sense necessary and fatal. It is going on continually in the social world, unconsciously both to agents and patients. Involuntary bewitchment is one of the most terrible dangers of human life. Passional sympathy inevitably subjects the most ardent desire to the strongest will. Moral maladies are more contagious than physical, and there are some triumphs of infatuation and fashion which are comparable to leprosy or cholera. We may die of an evil acquaintance as well as of a contagious touch, and the frightful plague which, during recent centuries only, has avenged in Europe the profanation of the mysteries of love, is a revelation of the analogical laws of Nature and at the same time offers only a feeble image of the moral corruptions which follow daily on an equivocal sympathy. There is a story of a jealous and infamous man who, to avenge himself on a rival contracted an incurable disorder and made it the common scourge and anathema of a divided bed. This atrocious history is that of every magician, or rather of every sorcerer who practises bewitchments. He poisons himself in order that he may poison others; he damns himself that he may torture others; he draws in hell with his breath in order that he may expel it by his lungs; he wounds himself mortally that he may inflict death on others; but possessed of this unhappy courage, it is positive and certain that he will poison and slay by the mere projection of his perverse will. There are some forms of love which are as deadly as hatred, and the bewitchments of goodwill are the torment of the wicked. The prayers offered to God for the conversion of a man bring misfortune to that man if he will not repent. As we have said, it is weariness and danger to strive against the fluidic currents stirred up by chains of wills in union.
Hence there are two kinds of bewitchment, voluntary and involuntary; physical and moral bewitchment may be distinguished in like manner. Power attracts power, life attracts life, health attracts health: this is a law of Nature. If two children live, above all if they sleep together, and if one be weak while the other is strong, the strong will absorb the weak, and the latter will waste away. For this reason, it is important that children should sleep always alone. In conventual seminaries certain pupils absorb the intelligence of the others, and in every given circle of men one individual emerges who avails himself of the wills of the rest. Bewitchment by means of currents is exceedingly common, as we have observed already; morally as well as physically, most of us are carried away by the crowd. What, however, we have proposed to exhibit more especially in this chapter is the almost absolute power of the human will upon the determination of its acts and the influence of every outward demonstration of will upon outward things.
Voluntary bewitchments are still frequent in our rural places because natural forces, among ignorant and isolated persons, operate unreduced by any doubt or any diversion. A frank, absolute hatred, unleavened by rejected passion or personal cupidity, is, under certain given conditions, a death-sentence for its object. I say unmixed with amorous passion or cupidity, because a desire, being an attraction, counterbalances and annuls the power of projection. For example, a jealous person will never efficaciously bewitch his rival, and a greedy heir will never by the mere fact of his will succeed in shortening the days of a miserly and long-lived uncle. Bewitchments attempted under such conditions reflect upon the operator and help rather than hurt their object, setting him free from a hostile action which destroys itself by unmeasured exaggeration. The term envoÛtement (bewitchment) so strong in its Gaelic simplicity, expresses admirably what it means, the act of enveloping someone, so to speak, in a formulated will. The instrument of bewitchments is the Great Magical Agent which, under the influence of an evil will, becomes really and positively the demon. Withcraft, properly so called, that is, ceremonial operation with intent to bewitch, acts only on the operator, and serves to fix and confirm his will, by formulating it with persistence and travail, the two conditions which make volition efficacious. The more difficult or horrible the operation, the greater is its power, because it acts more strongly on the imagination and confirms effort in direct ratio of resistance. This explains the bizarre nature and even atrocious character of the operations in Black Magic, as practised by the ancients and in the Middle Ages, the diabolical masses, administration of sacraments to reptiles, effusions of blood, human sacrifices and other monstrosities, which are the very essence and reality of Goëtia or Nigromancy. Such are the practices which from all time have brought down upon sorcerers the just repression of the laws. Black Magic is really only a graduated combination of sacrileges and murders designed for the permanent perversion of a human will and for the realization in a living man of the hideous phantom of the demon. It is therefore, properly speaking, the religion of the devil, the cultus of darkness, hatred of good carried to the height of paroxysm: it is the incarnation of death and the persistent creation of hell.
The Kabalist Bodin who has been considered erroneously of a feeble and superstitious mind, had no other motive in writing his Demonomania than that of warning people against dangerous incredulity.1 Initiated by the study of the Kabalah into the true secrets of Magic, he trembled at the danger to which society was exposed by the abandon ment of this power to the wickedness of men. Hence he attempted what at the present time M. Eudes de Mirville is attempting amongst ourselves; he gathered facts without interpreting them and affirmed in the face of inattentive or pre-occupied science the existence of the occult influences and criminal operations of Evil Magic. In his own day Bodin attracted no more attention than will be given to M. Eudes de Mirville, because it is not enough to enumerate phenomena and to prejudge their cause if we would influence serious people; we must study, explain and demonstrate such cause, and this is precisely what we are ourselves attempting. Will better success crown our own efforts?
It is possible to die through the love of certain people, even as by their hate. There are absorbing passions, under the breath of which we feel ourselves depleted like the spouses of vampires. Not only do the wicked torment the good, but unconsciously the good torture the wicked. The gentleness of Abel was a long and painful bewitchment for the ferocity of Cain. Among evil men, the hatred of good originates in the very instinct of self-preservation; moreover, they deny that what torments them is good and are driven to deify and justify evil for their own peace. In the sight of Cain, Abel was a hypocrite and coward, who abused the pride of humanity by his scandalous submissions, to Divinity. How much must this first murderer have endured before making such a frightful attack upon his brother? Had Abel understood, he would have been afraid. Antipathy is the presentiment of a possible bewitchment, either of love or hatred, for we find love frequently succeeding repulsion. The Astral Light warns us of coming influences by its action on the more or less sensible, more or less active, nervous system. Instantaneous sympathies, electric loves, are explosions of the Astral Light, which are as exactly and mathematically demonstrable as the discharge of strong magnetic batteries. Thereby we may see what unexpected dangers threaten an uninitiated person who is perpetually fooling with fire in the neighbourhood of unseen powder magazines. We are saturated with the Astral Light, and we project it unceasingly to make room for and to attract fresh supplies. The nervous instruments which are specially designed either for attraction or projection are
the eyes and hands. The polarity of the hand is resident in the thumb, and hence, according to the magical tradition which still lingers in rural places, whenever anyone is in suspicious company, he should keep the thumb doubled up and hidden in the hand, and while in the main avoiding a fixed glance at anyone, still being the first to look at those whom we have reason to fear, so as to escape unexpected fluidic projections and fascinating regards.
There are certain animals which have the power of breaking the currents of Astral Light by an absorption peculiar to themselves. They are violently antipathetic to us and possess a certain sorcery of the eye: the toad, the basilisk and the tard are instances. These animals, when tamed and carried alive on the person, or kept in one's rooms, are a guarantee against the hallucinations and trickeries of A STRAL INTOXICATION, a term made use of here for the first time and one which explains all phenomena of unbridled passions, mental exaltations and folly. Tame toads and tards, my dear sir, the disciple of Voltaire will say to me: carry them about with you, but write no more. To which I may answer, that I shall think seriously of so doing if ever I feel tempted to laugh at anything of which I am ignorant, or to treat those whose knowledge and wisdom I fail to understand as fools or as madmen. Paracelsus, the greatest of the Christian Magi, opposed bewitchment by the practices of a contrary bewitchment. He devised sympathetic remedies and applied them, not to the suffering members, but to representations of these, formed and consecrated according to magical ceremonial. His successes were incredible, for never has any physician approached Paracelsus in his marvels of healing. But Paracelsus arrived at magnetism long before Mesmer and had carried to its final consequences this luminous discovery, or rather this initiation into the Magic of the ancients, who better than us understood the Great Magical Agent and did not regard the Astral Light, Azoth, the Universal Magnesia of the pages, as a special animal fluid emanating only from a few seculiar creatures. In his occult philosophy, Paracelsus opposes Ceremonial Magic, the terrible power of which he did not certainly ignore, but he sought to decry its practices so as to discredit Black Magic. He locates the omnipotence of the Magus in the interior and occult magnes, and the most skilful magnetizers of our own day could not express themselves better. At the same time he counselled the employment of magical symbols, talismans above all, in the cure of diseases. In our eighteenth chapter we shall have occasion to return to the talismans of Paracelsus, while following Gaffarel upon the great question of occult iconography and numismatics.1
