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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The History of Magic," Éliphas Lévi presents a comprehensive exploration of magic's evolution, intertwining philosophy, mysticism, and the occult. The book delves into historical practices, figures, and doctrines that shaped magical thought, ranging from ancient civilizations to modern esotericism. Lévi's literary style is marked by an eloquent synthesis of scholarly rigor and poetic prose, making complex ideas accessible to a wider audience. His contextualization of magic within cultural and spiritual frameworks reflects the 19th-century fascination with the metaphysical, highlighting the interplay between science, religion, and human consciousness. Éliphas Lévi, a significant figure in the revival of esoteric traditions, was deeply influenced by the socio-political milieu of his time, particularly the tension between rationalism and mysticism. His own experiences with magic and his interactions with prominent occultists inform the depth of insight in this work, illustrating his conviction that magic represents the hidden forces of nature and the human spirit. Lévi's philosophical background and profound curiosity propel his narrative, revealing his genuine quest to elucidate the mysteries of existence. For readers passionate about the intersections of history, mysticism, and philosophy, "The History of Magic" offers a captivating journey into the arcane. This book is essential not only for scholars of esotericism but also for anyone intrigued by the profound questions surrounding the human experience, inviting them to contemplate the magical dimensions of reality. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The History of Magic
Table of Contents
Introduction
Poised between the glare of rational daylight and the shimmer of forbidden mysteries, The History of Magic follows the perilous border where human curiosity seeks lawful order within forces long dismissed as superstition, proposing that the same energies that inspire religion, science, and art are refracted through symbolic rites and doctrines, and inviting readers to consider whether the marvels banished by skepticism might, under stricter reason and conscience, disclose a hidden continuity of nature and spirit without surrendering the dignity of critical thought, and cautioning that true power demands ethical balance.
Written by the French occultist Éliphas Lévi (born Alphonse Louis Constant), this work belongs to the nineteenth-century genre of esoteric history and speculative philosophy. First published in French as Histoire de la magie in the mid-nineteenth century, it surveys magical doctrines and practices from antiquity to Lévi’s own era, moving across temples, monasteries, laboratories, and libraries rather than a single geographic setting. Lévi assembles materials from classical lore, medieval scholasticism, Renaissance natural philosophy, and later illuminist currents to argue for a coherent tradition, addressing both legendary narratives and documented systems with the ambition of a panoramic, morally informed synthesis.
Readers encounter not a neutral chronicle but a commanding, personal voice that blends reportage with metaphysical persuasion. Lévi writes in ornate, aphoristic sentences, interlacing anecdote, symbol, and etymology in ways that can feel simultaneously encyclopedic and incantatory. The book’s movement is cyclical rather than strictly linear, returning to emblematic figures and ideas to develop contrasts between legitimate and aberrant practice. Its tone is earnest, didactic, and often hortatory, yet animated by a romantic curiosity about the imaginal dimension. The result is a hybrid of survey and meditation, inviting reflective reading and occasional pause to decode dense symbolic cross-references.
At the heart of Lévi’s argument is the notion of correspondences: that visible phenomena and invisible principles mirror one another through numbers, images, rituals, and moral laws. He insists that magic becomes science when disciplined by reason and becomes religion when elevated by charity, making ethical intention the hinge of every operation. He differentiates between constructive traditions that seek harmony and destructive currents that court domination, tracing recurrent cycles of revelation, misuse, and reform. Along the way, he emphasizes the power of symbols to educate imagination and will, treating emblem, rite, and parable as practical instruments for self-governed transformation.
Although wide-ranging, the book does not follow contemporary academic standards, and its confident unifications sometimes rest on conjectural bridges. Lévi cites authorities from antiquity and the Middle Ages through early modern compendia, yet he often reads them allegorically and through a Christian-inflected philosophical lens. The result is a learned synthesis that prizes coherence over archival dispute, illuminating patterns while occasionally compressing differences. Readers new to the subject may wish to consult modern reference works alongside his chapters, not to undermine the text, but to appreciate how its interpretive daring converses with stricter historiography and how its moral framing shapes the selection and emphasis of examples.
In an era negotiating artificial intelligence, resurgent spiritualities, and contested narratives of expertise, Lévi’s inquiry retains a provocative relevance. He asks what counts as knowledge, who may steward it, and how symbol and imagination organize communal life, questions that echo in contemporary debates about science communication, ritualized politics, and wellness cultures. His idea that power requires ethical proportion challenges both credulous fascination and cynical dismissal, offering a middle path attentive to responsibility. Even where one disputes his genealogies, the book models a synthetic, interdisciplinary appetite, encouraging readers to seek connections across disciplines and to test grand patterns against conscientious practice.
As an introduction to the work, this preface invites a paced, dialogic reading: attend to the architecture of each chapter, note recurring emblems and terms, and observe how moral claims guide historical arrangement. Allow the text’s theatrical cadences to provoke questions rather than demand assent, and supplement its panoramas with careful side study to ground your impressions. Approach it as both a map and a provocation, a record of one influential mind grappling with continuity amid change. If you read with patience and measure, The History of Magic rewards you with an enlarged vocabulary for thinking about wonder and responsibility.
Synopsis
Éliphas Lévi’s The History of Magic presents a sweeping, argumentative survey of magical doctrine as it has appeared across civilizations, written from the vantage of a nineteenth‑century French occultist seeking rehabilitation of the term. Lévi frames magic not as superstition but as a perennial wisdom that mediates between religion, philosophy, and early science. He proposes that mythic narratives and ritual symbolism encode laws of nature and mind, and that disciplined knowledge of such laws underlies reputed marvels. Setting his method as comparative and synthetic, he foregrounds Kabbalah, Hermetic traditions, and symbolic alphabets as interpretive keys, while distinguishing spiritual science from credulity and fraud.
The opening historical sweep turns to antiquity, where priestly castes guard temple sciences and teach through rites and images. Lévi treats Chaldean astronomy, Egyptian theology, and Hebrew sacred lore as reservoirs of encoded principles, with number and letter mysteries conveying cosmology and ethics. He argues that ancient magi practiced a moralized art that sought harmony with a living order, contrasting it with malefic sorcery. Initiation and secrecy are presented as pedagogical necessities, protecting potent knowledge from misapplication. Reports of prodigies are reframed as controlled operations upon subtle forces, whose existence he infers from the consistency of symbolic correspondences across cultures.
Classical philosophy becomes, in Lévi’s narrative, the scene where speculative reason and sacred rite intersect. Pythagorean number doctrine, Platonic and later Neoplatonic metaphysics, and theurgy appear as attempts to recover the unity of the intelligible and the sensible. He reads oracular practice, mystery initiations, and civic religion as parallel channels for transmitting a hieratic physics and morality. At the same time, he maintains a critical boundary between legitimate theurgical work and the degradations of goetia, attributing declines to moral failure rather than to the bankruptcy of the doctrine itself. The chaptered treatment emphasizes how symbolism organizes perception, will, and communal order.
With the rise of Christianity, Lévi recasts biblical and patristic motifs as a transformation rather than abolition of magic, arguing that Christian symbolism transposes earlier hieroglyphs into a new moral synthesis. Medieval Europe becomes a battleground of knowledge and suspicion: alchemists, astrologers, and natural philosophers refine symbolic languages while ecclesiastical authorities police orthodoxy. Trials and legends—of sorcery, heresy, and secret orders—are interpreted as misread or politicized encounters with esoteric practice. Lévi defends alchemy as a covert philosophy of nature and virtue, insisting that its imagery conceals ethical and methodological teachings, while he condemns practices aiming at coercion, wealth without labor, or domination.
The Renaissance revival of antiquity, in Lévi’s account, brings a renewed articulation of magical philosophy through philology, medicine, and experiment. Humanists and physicians reframe ancient doctrines, while emblem-books, grimoires, and speculative treatises spread mixed materials. Figures such as Agrippa and Paracelsus exemplify, for him, the scholar-magician engaged with nature and scripture alike, attempting to heal bodies and polities by correspondential insight. He credits esoteric fraternities and manifestoes with sustaining a coded discourse that preserves method under allegory. The Enlightenment introduces sharper skepticism, yet Lévi locates a subterranean continuity of practice beneath rational critique, arguing that symbol and will remain operative powers.
Having surveyed exempla, Lévi consolidates a doctrine: a universe permeated by analogies, a plastic medium often termed astral light, and a disciplined art of imagination, will, and rite. Kabbalah, in his synthesis, supplies a grammar of emanation and equilibrium, while the Tarot functions as a portable hieroglyphic book that orders doctrines and exercises memory. Ceremonial operations are treated as ethical and cognitive technologies rather than mere wonder-working, designed to harmonize the operator with cosmic law. He delineates a polarity of constructive and destructive magic, locating responsibility in intention and purity, and warns that ignorance, vanity, and fear generate the specter of superstition.
The work concludes by advancing magic as a reconciliatory science of symbols, aspiring to mediate faith and reason without collapsing either. Lévi’s historical argument seeks to vindicate the dignity of the magus as a moral agent, situating mastery not in secret power but in balanced understanding and service. The book’s legacy lies in its comprehensive synthesis and its insistence that myths, rites, and alphabets express a consistent philosophy of nature and ethics. Read as scholarship, manifesto, and method, it helped shape the modern occult revival and continues to invite reflection on the uses of knowledge, the ethics of power, and the language of the sacred.
Historical Context
Eliphas Levi—born Alphonse-Louis Constant in Paris in 1810—published The History of Magic (Histoire de la magie) in Paris in 1860, during the Second French Empire of Napoleon III. Trained at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, Levi left before ordination, carrying into his writings a rigorous theological vocabulary joined to radical early experiences in the 1840s. Paris’s expanding presses, salons, and bookstalls under an increasingly centralized regime furnished an avid reading public for syntheses of religion, myth, and science. Levi’s book emerged as a learned, polemical survey that placed "magic" within a longue durée of civilization, addressing readers formed by revolution, restoration, and accelerating modernization.
The intellectual climate of mid-nineteenth-century France joined Romantic medievalism to combative scientific positivism. Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842) popularized a program of empirical knowledge, while Victor Hugo, Jules Michelet, and other Romantics revived fascination with the Middle Ages and folklore. Public controversies over mesmerism and hypnosis—stemming from Franz Mesmer’s late-eighteenth-century "animal magnetism" and James Braid’s 1840s terminology—kept invisible forces in the news. Table-turning swept Europe in 1853–1854, and Allan Kardec launched Spiritism with The Spirits’ Book (1857) and the Revue Spirite (1858) in Paris. Levi’s narrative addresses these currents, arguing for an ordered, symbolic science behind visionary phenomena.
New tools for historical and philological inquiry reframed antiquity just before Levi wrote. Jean-François Champollion’s decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs (1822) and the Louvre’s Department of Egyptian Antiquities (established 1827) widened access to ancient corpora. Orientalist scholarship translated Sanskrit epics and Near Eastern inscriptions, while medieval studies matured through national archives and the École des Chartes (founded 1821). Humanists had long questioned the antiquity of the Hermetic corpus—Isaac Casaubon dated it to late antiquity in 1614—yet Egyptomania remained potent. Levi mined this contested landscape, presenting magical traditions of Egypt, Greece, and the medieval West with citations that blend erudition and apologetic intent.
Nineteenth-century France saw renewed study of Jewish mysticism. Adolphe Franck’s La Kabbale (1843) offered a systematic modern account, building on earlier Christian Hebraists and the Latin Kabbala Denudata (1677–1684) of Knorr von Rosenroth. Levi adopted Kabbalistic terminology, combining it with Catholic symbolism and Renaissance hermetism. He advanced a theory of a pervasive "astral light," resonating with contemporary discussions of invisible fluids, from electricity to Baron Carl von Reichenbach’s "odic force" (1840s). This synthesis positioned magic as a philosophy of correspondences, ethics, and natural law, not mere superstition. His approach reflects both scholarly availability of sources and popular hunger for integrative world-pictures.
Before The History of Magic, Levi’s Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854–1856) had outlined ceremonial and doctrinal themes that made him a central voice in France’s occult revival. Paris offered ample infrastructure for such work: subscription libraries, the Bibliothèque nationale’s catalogs, and a dense network of booksellers and journals facilitated wide circulation. Public lectures and polemical pamphlets were common vehicles of debate. In this environment, Levi framed magic historically to legitimize it as a perennial sapience surviving through sages, orders, and grimoires. His survey speaks to readers who encountered esoteric lore alongside serialized novels, scientific reviews, and religious apologetics.
Political experience also shaped Levi’s perspective. The upheavals of 1848 and the 1851 coup that led to Napoleon III’s authoritarian empire set the context for arguments about authority, tradition, and progress. Earlier, Constant had been prosecuted and imprisoned in 1841 for La Bible de la liberté, reflecting his involvement with radical journalism. Under the Second Empire, rapid urban transformation under Baron Haussmann (from 1853) and spectacles like the Exposition Universelle (1855) celebrated material power. Levi’s historical account of magic—emphasizing moral law, symbolism, and hierarchy—implicitly critiques purely material explanations, proposing an older spiritual order as a counterweight to technocratic modernity.
The book’s afterlife illustrates emerging transnational occult networks. In France, later occultists such as Gérard Encausse (Papus), Stanislas de Guaita, and Joséphin Péladan drew on Levi’s syntheses when forming fin-de-siècle orders like the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix (founded 1888). In Britain, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (established 1887) adopted correspondences Levi popularized, notably Tarot–Kabbalah linkages. Arthur Edward Waite translated The History of Magic into English in 1913, canonizing Levi for Anglophone readers. This reception confirms that Levi’s historicizing method, even when contested by academics, furnished a vocabulary for ritual, symbolism, and comparative esotericism.
The History of Magic mirrors its era’s conflicts between faith, scholarship, and science. It draws on archives, antiquarian references, and theological learning to argue that magic is a structured, ethical philosophy embedded in civilization’s development. By tracing traditions through antiquity, the medieval church, and the Renaissance, it counters narratives of linear secular progress and resists reductive materialism. At the same time, its confident syntheses reflect nineteenth-century ambitions to construct grand, unified histories. Levi’s work thus functions both as a critique of positivist modernity and as a product of Romantic historicism, mediating between ecclesiastical heritage and the modern occult revival.
The History of Magic
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION
In several casual references scattered through periodical literature, in the biographical sketch which preceded my rendering of Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie and elsewhere, as occasion prompted, I have put on record an opinion that the History of Magic, by Alphonse Louis Constant, written—like the majority of his works—under the pseudonym of Éliphas Lévi, is the most arresting, entertaining and brilliant of all studies on the subject with which I am acquainted. So far back as 1896 I said that it was admirable as a philosophical survey, its historical inaccuracies notwithstanding, and that there is nothing in occult literature which can suffer comparison therewith. Moreover, there is nothing so comprehensive in the French language, while as regards ourselves it must be said that we have depended so far on a history by Joseph Ennemoser, translated from the German and explaining everything, within the domain included under the denomination of Magic, by the phenomena of Animal Magnetism. Other texts than this are available in that language, but they have not been put into English; while none of them has so great an appeal as that which is here rendered into our tongue. Having certified so far regarding its titles, it is perhaps desirable to add, from my own standpoint, that I have not translated the book because it is entertaining and brilliant, or because it will afford those who are concerned with Magic in history a serviceable general account. The task has been undertaken still less in the interests of any who may have other—that is to say, occult—reasons for acquaintance with “its procedure, its rites and its mysteries”. I have no object in providing unwary and foolish seekers with material of this kind, and it so happens that the present History does not fulfil the promise of its subtitle in these respects, or at least to any extent that they would term practical in their folly. Through all my later literary life I have sought to make it plain, as the result of antecedent years spent in occult research, that the occult sciences—in all their general understanding—are paths of danger when they are not paths of simple make-believe and imposture. The importance of Éliphas Lévi's account at large of the claims, and of their story throughout the centuries, arises from the fact (a) that he is the authoritative exponent-in-chief of all the alleged sciences; (b) that it is he who, in a sense, restored and placed them under a new and more attractive vesture, before public notice at the middle period of the nineteenth century; (c) that he claimed, as we shall see, the very fullest knowledge concerning them, being that of an adept and master; but (d) that—subject to one qualification, the worth of which will be mentioned—it follows from his long examination that Magic, as understood not in the streets only but in the houses of research concerning it, has no ground in the truth of things, and is of the region of delusion only. It is for this reason that I have translated his History of Magic, as one who reckons a not too gracious task for something which leans toward righteousness, at least in the sense of charity. The world is full at this day of the false claims which arise out of that region, and I have better reasons than most even of my readers can imagine to undeceive those who, having been drawn in such directions, may be still saved from deception. It is well therefore that out of the mouth of the masters we can draw the fullest evidence required for this purpose.
In the present prefatory words I propose to shew, firstly, the nature of Éliphas Lévi's personal claims, so that there may be no misconception as to what they were actually, and as to the kind of voice which is speaking; secondly, his original statement of the claims, nature and value of Transcendental Magic; and, thirdly, his later evidences on its phenomenal or so-called practical side, as established by its own history. In this manner we shall obtain his canon of criticism, and I regard it as serviceable, because—with all his imperfections—he had better titles of knowledge at his own day than anyone, while it cannot be said that his place has been filled since, though many workers have risen up in the same field of inquiry and have specialised in the numerous departments which he covered generally and superficially.
Before entering upon these matters it may be thought that I should speak at some length of the author's life; but the outlines have been given already in an extended introduction prefixed to a digest of his writings which I published many years ago under the title of Mysteries of Magic, and again, but from another point of view, in the preface to the Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic, already mentioned. These things are still available in one edition or another, and very little has transpired subsequently, because—as a matter of fact—the salient biographical facts are not numerous.
In the present place it will be therefore sufficient to say that Alphonse Louis Constant was born at Paris in 1810, and was the son of a shoemaker, apparently in very poor circumstances. His precocity in childhood seemed to give some promise of future ability; he was brought to the notice of a priest belonging to his parish, and this in its turn led to his gratuitous education at Saint-Sulpice, obviously with a view to the priesthood. There his superiors must have recognised sufficient traces of vocation, according to the measures of the particular place and period, for he proceeded to minor orders and subsequently became a deacon. He seems, however, to have conceived strange views on doctrinal subjects, though no particulars are forthcoming, and, being deficient in gifts of silence, the displeasure of authority was marked by various checks, ending finally in his expulsion from the Seminary. Such is one story at least, but an alternative says more simply that he relinquished the sacerdotal career in consequence of doubts and scruples. Thereafter he must, I suppose, have supported himself by some kind of teaching, and by obscure efforts in literature. Of these the remains are numerous, though their value has been much exaggerated for bookselling purposes in France. His adventures with Alphonse Esquiros over the gospel of the prophet Ganneau are told in the pages that follow, and are an interesting biographical fragment which may be left to speak for itself. He was then approaching the age of thirty years. I have failed to ascertain at what period he married Mlle Noémy, a girl of sixteen, who became afterwards of some repute as a sculptor, but it was a runaway match and in the end she left him. It is even said that she succeeded in a nullity suit—not on the usual grounds, for she had borne him two children, who died in their early years if not during infancy, but on the plea that she was a minor, while he had taken irrevocable vows. Saint-Sulpice is, however, a seminary for secular priests who are not pledged to celibacy, though the rule of the Latin Church forbids them to enter the married state.
In the year 1851 Alphonse Louis Constant contributed a large volume to the encyclopædic series of Abbé Migne, under the title of Dictionnaire de Littérature Chrétienne. He is described therein as ancien professeur au petit Séminaire de Paris, and it is to be supposed that his past was unknown at the publishing bureau. The volume is more memorable on account of his later writings than important by its own merits. As a critical work, and indeed as a work of learning, it is naturally quite negligible, like most productions of the series, while as a dictionary it is disproportioned and piecemeal; yet it is exceedingly readable and not unsuggestive in its views. There is no need to add that, as the circumstances of the case required, it is written along rigid lines of orthodoxy and is consequently no less narrow, no less illiberal, than the endless volumes of its predecessors and successors in the same field of industry. The doubting heart of Saint-Sulpice had become again a convinced Catholic, or had assumed that mask for the purpose of a particular literary production. Four years later, however, the voice of the churchman, speaking the characteristic language of the Migne Encyclopædias, was succeeded by the voice of the magus. The Doctrine of Transcendental Magic appeared in 1855, the Ritual in 1856, and henceforth Alphonse Louis Constant, under the pseudonym of Éliphas Lévi, which has become almost of European celebrity, was known only as an exponent of occult science. It is these works which more especially embody his claims in respect of the alleged science and in respect of his own absolute authority thereon and therein. Certain later volumes, which followed from his pen in somewhat rapid succession, are very curious when compared with the Doctrine and Ritual for their apparent submission to church authority and their parade of sincere orthodoxy. I have dealt with this question at length in my introduction to the Mysteries of Magic, and I shall be dispensed therefore from covering the same ground in the present place. Such discrepancy notwithstanding, Éliphas Lévi became, in a private as well as in a public sense, a teacher of occult science and of Kabalism as its primary source : it was apparently his means of livelihood. He was in Paris during the siege which brought the Franco-German war to its disastrous close, and he died in 1875, fortified by the last rites of the Catholic Church. He left behind him a large sheaf of manuscripts, several of which have been published since, and some await an editor. The issue of his life and letters has been long promised in Paris, under the auspices of M. Lucien Mauchel, but the fact that over sixteen years have elapsed since the announcement was first made may signify that they are withheld permanently. Possibly the executors of Mme Constant, who is said to have married a second time in 1872, may have laid an interdict on the design.
Passing now to the subject-in-chief of this preface, it is affirmed as follows in the Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic : (1) There is a potent and real Magic, popular exaggerations of which are really below the truth. (2) There is a formidable secret which constitutes the fatal science of good and evil. (3) It confers on man powers apparently superhuman. (4) It is the traditional science of the secrets of Nature which has been transmitted to us from the Magi. (5) Initiation therein gives empire over souls to the sage and the adroitness for ruling wills. (6) Arising apparently from this science, there is one infallible, indefectible and truly catholic religion which has always existed in the world, but it is unadapted for the multitude. (7) For this reason there has come into being the exoteric religion of apologue, fable and nurse's stories, which is all that is possible for the profane: it has undergone various transformations, and it is represented at this day by Latin Christianity under the obedience of Rome. (8) Its veils are true in their symbolism, and it may be called true for the crowd, but the doctrine of initiates is not less than a negation of the absolute therein. (9) It is Magic alone which imparts true science[1q].
Hereof is what may be termed the theoretical, philosophical or doctrinal part, the dogma of “absolute science”. That which is practical follows, and it deals with the exercise of a natural power but one superior to the ordinary forces of Nature. It is to all intents and purposes comprised in a Grimoire of Magic, and is a work of ceremonial evocations—whether of elementary spirits, with the aid of pantacles, talismans and the other magical instruments and properties; whether of spirits belonging ex hypothesi to the planetary sphere; whether of the shades or souls of the dead in necromancy. These works are lawful, and their results apparently veridic, but beyond them is the domain of Black Magic, which is a realm of delusion and nightmare, though phenomenal enough in its results. By his dedications Éliphas Lévi happened to be a magus of light.
It will be observed that all this offers a clear issue, and—for the rest—the Grimoire of Transcendental Magic, according to Éliphas Lévi, does not differ generically from the Key of Solomon[3] and its counterparts, except in so far as the author has excised here and enlarged there in obedience to his own lights. He had full authority for doing so on the basis of his personal claims, which may be summarised at this point. (1) He has discovered “the secret of human omnipotence and indefinite progress, the key of all symbolism, the first and final doctrine”. (2) He is alchemist as well as magician, and he makes public the same secret as Raymund Lully, Nicholas Flamel and probably Heinrich Khunrath. They produced true gold, “nor did they take away their secret with them”. (3) And finally: “at an epoch when the sanctuary has been devastated and has fallen into ruins, because its key has been thrown over the hedge to the profit of no one, I have deemed it my duty to pick up that key, and I offer it to him who can take it: in his turn he will be doctor of the nations and liberator of the world”.
It must be said that these claims do not rest on a mere theory or practice of ceremonial evocations. There is no question that for Éliphas Lévi his secret doctrine of occult science is contained in a hypothesis concerning an universal medium denominated the Astral Light[1], which is neither more nor less than the odylic force of Baron Reichenbach[2], as the French writer himself admits substantially, but it is dilated in his speculation and issues therein greatly transformed as follows. (1) It is an universal plastic mediator, a common receptacle for vibrations of movement and images of form; it may be called the Imagination of Nature. (2) It is that which God created when He uttered the Fiat Lux. (3) It is the great medium of occult force, but as such it is a blind force, which can be used for good or evil, being especially obedient to the light of grace. (4) It is the element of electricity and lightning. (5) The “four imponderable fluids” are diverse manifestations of this one force, which is “inseparable from the First Matter” and sets the latter in motion. (6) It is now resplendent, now igneous, now electric, now magnetic. (7) It has apparently two modes, which tend to equilibrium, and the middle point of this equilibrium seems to be the attainment of the Great Work. (8) It is “ethereal in the infinite, astral in stars and planets, metallic, specific or mercurial in metals, vegetable in plants, vital in animals, magnetic or personal in men”. (9) It is extracted from animals by absorption and from men by generation. (10) In Magic it is the glass of visions, the receptacle of all reflections. The seer has his visions therein, the diviner divines by its means and the magus evokes spirits. (11) When the Astral Light is fixed about a centre by condensation it becomes the Philosophical Stone of Alchemy, in which form it is an artificial phosphorus, containing the concentrated virtues of all generative heat. (12) When condensed by a triple fire it resolves into oil, and this oil is the Universal Medicine. It can then only be contained in glass, this being a non-conductor.
Again, here is a clear issue at its value, and I make this qualification because the Astral Light is, as I have said, a speculation, and personally I neither know nor care whether such a fluid exists, or, in such case, whether it is applicable to the uses indicated. It is enough that Éliphas Lévi has made his affirmations concerning it in unmistakable language.
Let us pass therefore to the Histoire de la Magie, though I have been borrowing from it already in respect of the putative universal fluid. Magic therein is still the science of the ancient Magi; it is still the exact and absolute science of Nature and her laws, because it is the science of equilibrium. Its secret, the secret of occult science, is that of God's omnipotence. It comprises all that is most certain in philosophy, all that is eternal and infallible in religion. It is the Sacerdotal Art and the Royal Art. Its doctrine is contained in Kabalism, and it derives apparently from primeval Zoroastrian doctrine, of which Abraham seems to have been a depositary. This doctrine attained its perfection in Egypt. Thereafter, on its religious side, the succession appears to have been : (a) from Egypt to Moses; (b) from Moses to Solomon, through certain custodians of the secret law in Jewry; (c) from the Temple at Jerusalem to St. Peter's at Rome, though the method of transition is obscure—as that which was previously affirmed is still maintained, namely that Rome has lost the Kabalistic Keys. It is naturally left to our conjecture as to when the church possessed them—from Éliphas Lévi's point of view, perhaps in the days of Dionysius, perhaps in those of Synesius, but not from my standpoint, and so the question remains.
Now, if these things do not differ specifically from the heads of the previous testimony, on the surface and in the letter thereof, it is no less certain that there is a marked distinction alike in general atmosphere and inward spirit. About this all can satisfy themselves who will compare the two texts, and I need not insist on it here. What, however, in the Histoire de la Magie, has befallen that practical side which, after all the dreamings, the high and decorative philosophy, the adornments—now golden, now meretricious—was the evidence, term and crown of the previous work? Those who are reading can again check me; but my answer is this: whether the subject of the moment is the art of evoking spirits, whether it is old cases of possession, whether it is witchcraft or necromancy, whether it is modern phenomena like direct-writing, table-rapping and the other properties of spiritism, as they were known to the writer and his period, they have one and all fallen under the ban of unreserved condemnation. It is not that they are imposture, for Éliphas Lévi does not dispute the facts and derides those who do, but they belong to the abyss of delusion and all who practise them are workers of madness and apostles of evil only. The advent of Christianity has put a decisive period to every working of Magic and anathema has been pronounced thereon. It is from this point of view that Lévi takes the disciple through each century of the subject, sometimes indeed explaining things from the standpoint of a complete sceptic, sometimes as Joseph Ennemoser might himself have explained them, but never—no, not once—like the authorised exponent of practical Magic who has tried the admirable and terrifying experiments, who returns to say that they are true and real, which is the testimony of the Doctrine and Ritual, if these volumes can be held to signify anything. Necromancy as a science of the abyss; spiritism as the abyss giving up every form of delusion; sorcery, witchcraft, as rich indeed in testimony but to human perversity alone, apart from intervention of diabolism belonging to the other world—I testify with my whole heart to the truth of these accusations, though I do not believe that the unseen world is so utterly cut off from the world of things manifest as Éliphas Lévi considered in his own paradoxical moods. But once more—what has become of Magic? What has happened to the one science which is coeval with creation itself, to the key of all miracles and to almost omnipotent adeptship? They are reduced as follows: (a) to that which in its palmary respects is the “sympathetic and miraculous physics” of Mesmer, who is “grand as Prometheus” because of them; (b) to a general theory of hallucination, when hallucination has been carried by self-induced delusion or otherwise, to its ne plus ultra degree; and (c) but I mention this under very grave reserves, because—for the life of me—I do not understand how or why it should remain—to the physical operations of alchemy, which are still possible and actual under the conditions set forth in the speculation concerning the Astral Light. It is not as such, one would say, a thaumaturgic process, unless indeed the dream should rule—as it tends to do—that fulfilment depends on an electrifying power in the projected will of the adept. In any case, the ethical transliteration of alchemical symbolism is seemingly a more important aspect of this subject.
I need not register here that I disbelieve utterly in Lévi's construction of the art of metallic transmutation, or that I regard his allegorising thereon as a negligible product when it is compared with the real doctrine of Hermetic mysticism; but this is not the point at issue. The possessor of the Key of Magic, of the Kabalistic Keys, thrown aside or lost by the Church, comes forward to tell us that after the advent of Christ “magical orthodoxy was transfigured into the orthodoxy of religion”; that “those who dissented could be only illuminati and sorcerers”; that “the very name of Magic could be interpreted only according to its evil sense”; that we are forbidden by the Church to consult oracles, and that this is “in its great wisdom”; that the “fundamental dogma of transcendental science…attained its plenary realisation in the constitution of the Christian world”, being the equilibrium between Church and State. All that is done outside the lawful hierarchy stands under an act of condemnation; as to visions, all fools are visionaries; to communicate with the hierarchy of unseen intelligence we must seek the natural and mathematical revelations set forth in Tarot cards, but it cannot be done without danger and crime; while mediums, enchanters, fortune-tellers, and casters of spells “are generally diseased creatures in whom the void opens.” Finally, as regards the philosophical side of Magic, its great doctrine is equilibrium; its great hypothesis is analogy; while in the moral sense equilibrium is the concurrence of science and faith.
What has happened to a writer who has thus gone back on his own most strenuous claims? One explanation is—and long ago I was inclined to it on my own part—that Éliphas Lévi had passed through certain grades of knowledge in a secret school of the Instituted Mysteries; that he was brought to a pause because of disclosures contained in his earlier books; and that he had been set to unsay what he had affirmed therein. I now know by what quality of school—working under what titles—this report was fabricated, and that it is the last with which I am acquainted to be accepted on its own statements, either respecting itself or any points of fact. An alternative is that Éliphas Lévi had spoken originally as a Magus might be supposed to speak when trafficking in his particular wares, which is something like a quack doctor describing his nostrums to a populace in the market-place, and that his later writings represent a process of retrenchment as to the most florid side of his claims. This notion is apart from all likelihood, because it offers no reason for the specific change in policy, while—if it be worth while to say so—I do not regard Lévi as comparable to a quack doctor. I think that he had been a student of occult literature and history for a considerable period, in a very particular sense; that he believed himself to have discovered a key to all the alleged phenomena; that he wrote the Doctrine and Ritual in a mood of enthusiasm consequent thereupon; that between the appearance of these volumes and that of the Histoire de la Magie he had reconsidered the question of the phenomena, and had come to the conclusion that so far from being veridic in their nature they were projected hallucinations variously differentiated and in successively aggravated grades; but that he still regarded his supposed universal fluid as a great explanatory hypothesis respecting thaumaturgie facts, and that he still held to his general philosophy of the subject, being the persistence of a secret tradition from remote times and surviving at the present day (i) in the tenets of Kabalism and (2) in the pictorial symbols of the Tarot.
It is no part of my province in the present connection to debate his views either on the fact of a secret tradition or in the alleged modes of its perpetuation: they are well known otherwise and have been expressed fully elsewhere. But in the explanation just given I feel that I have saved the sincerity of one who has many titles to consideration, who is still loved by many, and for whom my own discriminating sympathy has been expressed frequently in no uncertain way : I have saved it so far at least as can be expected; one does not anticipate that a Frenchman, an occultist and a magus is going to retract distinctly under the eye of his admirers, more especially when he has testified so much. I feel further that I have justified the fact of the present translation of a work which is memorable in several respects, but chiefly as the history of a magic which is not Magic, as a testimony which destroys indeed the whole imputed basis of its subject. It does not follow that Lévi's explanation of physical phenomena, especially of the modern kind, is always or generally correct; but much of it is workable in its way, and my purpose is more than served if those who are drawn toward the science of the mystics may be led hereby to take warning as to some of the dangers and false-seemings which fringe that science.
A few things remain to be said. Readers of his History must be prepared for manifold inaccuracies, which are to be expected in a writer like Éliphas Lévi. Those who know anything of Egypt—the antiquities of its religion and literature—will have a bad experience with the chapter on Hermetic Magic; those who know Eastern religion on its deeper side will regard the discourse on Magic in India as title-deeds of all incompetence; while in respect of later Jewish theosophy I have had occasion in certain annotations to indicate that Lévi had no extensive knowledge of those Kabalistic texts on the importance of which he dwells so much and about which he claims to speak with full understanding. He presents, however, some of its lesser aspects.
As regards the religion of his childhood, I feel certainly that it appealed to him strongly through all his life, and in the revulsion which seems to have followed the Doctrine and Ritual he was drawn back towards it, but rather as to a great hierarchic system and a great sequence of holy pageants of living symbolism. Respecting the literal truth of its teachings, probably he deceived himself better than he fooled his readers. In a multitude of statements and in the spirit of the text throughout, it is certain that the Histoire de la Magie offers “negation of dogma” on its absolute side. We obtain a continual insight into free sub-surface opinions, ill concealed under external conformity to the Church, and we get also useful sidelights on the vanity of the author's sham submissions. In this manner we know exactly what quality of sentiment led him to lay all his writings at the foot of the seat of Peter, for Peter to decide thereon. It is needless to add that his constructions of doctrine throughout are of the last kind that would be commended to the custodians of doctrine. At the same time there is very little doubt that he believed genuinely in the necessity of a hierarchic teaching, that, in his view, it reposed from a very early period in certain sanctuaries of initiation, that the existence of these is intimated in the records of the Mosaic dispensation, that they were depositaries of science rather than revelation, that Kabalistic literature is one of their witnesses, but that the sanctuaries were everywhere in the world, Egypt and Greece included. Of all these the Church of Christ is the heir, and though it may have lost the keys of knowledge, though it mistakes everywhere the sign for the thing signified, it is entitled to our respect as a witness and at least to qualified obedience.
I think that Éliphas Lévi has said true things and even great things on the distinctions and analogies between science and faith, but the latter he understood as aspiration, not as experience. A long essay on the mystics, which is perhaps his most important contribution to the Dictionnaire de Littérature Chrétienne, indicates that he was thinly acquainted with the mind of Suso, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa and St. Francis of Sales. Accordingly he has a word here and there on the interior life and its secrets, but of that which remains for the elect in the heights of sanctity he had no consciousness whatever. For him the records of such experience are literature and mystic poetry; and as he is far from the term herein, so is he remote also when he discourses of false mystics, meaning Gnostic sects, Albigensian sects, illuminati so-called and members of secret heretical societies representing reformed doctrine. As the religion of the mystics is my whole concern in literature, let me add that true religion is not constituted by “universal suffrage”, but by the agreement of those who have attained in the Divine experience that which is understood by attainment.
In conclusion, after we have set aside, on the warrants of this History, the phenomenal side of Magic, that which may be held to remain in the mind of the author is Transcendental Magic—referred to when I spoke of a qualification earlier in these remarks; but by this is to be understood so much of the old philosophical systems as had passed within his consciousness and had been interpreted therein. It will be unacceptable to most readers at this day, but it has curious aspects of interest and may be left to stand at its value.
A. E. WAITE.
INTRODUCTION
Magi[4]c has been confounded too long with the jugglery of mountebanks, the hallucinations of disordered minds and the crimes of certain unusual malefactors. There are otherwise many who would promptly explain Magic as the art of producing effects in the absence of causes; and on the strength of such a definition it will be said by ordinary people—with the good sense which characterises the ordinary, in the midst of much injustice—that Magic is an absurdity. But it can have no analogy in fact with the descriptions of those who know nothing of the subject; furthermore, it is not to be represented as this or that by any person whomsoever: it is that which it is, drawing from itself only, even as mathematics do, for it is the exact and absolute science of Nature and her laws.
Magic is the science of the ancient magi[2q]; and the Christian religion, which silenced the counterfeit oracles and put a stop to the illusions of false gods, does, this notwithstanding, revere those mystic kings who came from the East, led by a star, to adore the Saviour of the world in His cradle. They are elevated by tradition to the rank of kings, because magical initiation constitutes a true royalty; because also the great art of the magi is characterised by all adepts as the Royal Art, as the Holy Kingdom—Sanctum Regnum[5]. The star which conducted the pilgrims is the same Burning Star[6] which is met with in all initiations. For alchemists it is the sign of the quintessence, for magicians it is the Great Arcanum, for Kabalists the sacred pentagram[7]. Our design is to prove that the study of this pentagram did itself lead the magi to a knowledge of' that New Name which was to be exalted above all names and to bend the knees of all beings who were capable of adoration. Magic, therefore, combines in a single science that which is most certain in philosophy, which is eternal and infallible in religion. It reconciles perfectly and incontestably those two terms, so opposed on the first view—faith and reason, science and belief, authority and liberty. It furnishes the human mind with an instrument of philosophical and religious certitude as exact as mathematics, and even accounting for the infallibility of mathematics themselves.
An Absolute exists therefore in the realms of understanding and faith[3q]. The lights of human intelligence have not been left by the Supreme Reason to waver at hazard. There is an incontestable truth; there is an infallible method of knowing that truth; while those who attain this knowledge, and adopt it as a rule of life, can endow their will with a sovereign power which can make them masters of all inferior things, all wandering spirits, or, in other words, arbiters and kings of the world.
If such be the case, how comes it that so exalted a science is still unrecognised? How is it possible to assume that so bright a sun is hidden in a sky so dark? The transcendental science has been known always, but only to the flowers of intelligence, who have understood the necessity of silence and patience. Should a skilful surgeon open at midnight the eyes of a man born blind, it would still be impossible to make him realise the nature or existence of daylight till morning came. Science has its nights and its mornings, because the life which it communicates to the world of mind is characterised by regular modes of motion and progressive phases. It is the same with truths as it is with radiations of light. Nothing which is hidden is lost, but at the same time nothing that is found is absolutely new. The seal of eternity is affixed by God to that science which is the reflection of His glory.
The transcendental science, the absolute science, is assuredly Magic, though the affirmation may seem utterly paradoxical to those who have never questioned the infallibility of Voltaire—that marvellous smatterer who thought that he knew so much because he never missed an opportunity for laughter instead of learning. Magic was the science of Abraham and Orpheus, of Confucius and Zoroaster, and it was magical doctrines which were graven on tables of stone by Enoch and by Trismegistus. Moses purified and re-veiled them—this being the sense of the word reveal. The new disguise which he-gave them was that of the Holy Kabalah[8]—that exclusive heritage of Israel and inviolable secret of its priests.1 The mysteries of Eleusis and of Thebes preserved among the Gentile some of its symbols, but in a debased form, and the mystic key was lost amidst the apparatus of an ever-increasing superstition. Jerusalem, murderer of its prophets and prostituted over and over again to false Assyrian and Babylonian gods, ended by losing in its turn the Sacred Word, when a Saviour, declared to the magi by the holy star of initiation, came to rend the threadbare veil of the old temple, to endow the Church with a new network of legends and symbols—ever concealing from the profane and always preserving for the elect that truth which is the same for ever.
It is this that the erudite and ill-starred Dupuis should have found on Indian planispheres and in tables of Denderah; he would not have ended by rejecting the truly catholic or universal and eternal religion in the presence of the unanimous affirmation of all Nature, as well as all monuments of science throughout the ages.2 It was the memory of this scientific and religious absolute, of this doctrine summarised in a word, of this word alternately lost and recovered, which was transmitted to the elect of all antique initiations. Whether preserved or profaned in the celebrated Order of the Temple, it was this same memory handed on to secret associations of Rosicrucians, Illuminati and Freemasons which gave a meaning to their strange rites, to their less or more conventional signs, and a justification above all to their devotion in common, as well as a clue to their power.
That profanation has befallen the doctrines and mysteries of Magic we have no intention to deny; repeated from age to age, the misuse itself has been a great and terrible lesson for those who made secret things unwisely known. The Gnostics caused the Gnosis to be prohibited by Christians, and the official sanctuary was closed to high initiation. The hierarchy of knowledge was thus compromised by the intervention of usurping ignorance, while the disorders within the sanctuary were reproduced in the state, for, willingly or otherwise, the king always depends from the priest, and it is towards the eternal adytum of divine instruction that earthly powers will ever look for consecration and for energy to insure their permanence.
The key of science has been thrown to children; as might have been expected, it is now, therefore, mislaid and practically lost. This notwithstanding, a man of high intuitions and great moral courage, Count Joseph de Maistre, who was also a resolute catholic, acknowledging that the world was void of religion and could not so remain, turned his eyes instinctively towards the last sanctuaries of occultism and called, with heartfelt prayers, for that day when the natural affinity which subsists between science and faith should combine them in the mind of a single man of genius. “This will be grand,” said he; “it will finish that eighteenth century which is still with us…. We shall talk then of our present stupidity as we now dilate on the barbarism of the Middle Ages.”
The prediction of Count Joseph de Maistre is in course of realisation; the alliance of science and faith, accomplished long since, is here in fine made manifest, though not by a man of genius. Genius is not needed to see the sun, and, moreover, it has never demonstrated anything but its rare greatness and its lights inaccessible to the crowd. The grand truth demands only to be found, when the simplest will be able to comprehend it and to prove it also at need. At the same time that truth will never become vulgar, because it is hierarchic and because anarchy alone humours the bias of the crowd. The masses are not in need of absolute truths; were it otherwise, progress would be arrested and life would cease in humanity; the ebb and flow of contrary ideas, the clash of opinions, the passions of the time, ever impelled by its dreams, are necessary to the intellectual growth of peoples. The masses know it full well, and hence they desert so readily the chair of doctors to collect about the rostrum of mountebanks. Some even who are assumed to be concerned in philosophy, and that perhaps especially, too often resemble the children plaving at charades, who hasten to turn out those who know the answer already, lest the game should be spoiled by depriving the puzzle of the questions of all its interest.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” has been said by Eternal Wisdom. Purity of heart therefore purifies intelligence, and rectitude of will makes for precision in understanding. Whosoever prefers truth and justice before all things shall have justice and truth for his reward, because supreme Providence has endowed us with freedom in order that we may attain life; and very truth, all its exactitude notwithstanding, intervenes only with mildness, never does outrage to tardiness or violence to the errors of our will when it is beguiled by the allurements of falsehood.
It remains, however, according to Bossuet, that, antecedent to anything which may please or repel our senses, there is a truth, and it is by this that our conduct should be governed, not by our appetites. The Kingdom of Heaven is not the empire of caprice, either in respect of man or God. “A thing is not just because it is willed by God,” said St. Thomas, “but God wills it because it is just.” The Divine Balance rules and necessitates eternal mathematics. “God has made all things with number, weight and measure”—here it is the Bible speaking.3 Measure an angle of creation, make a proportionally progressive multiplication, and all infinity shall multiply its circles, peopled by universes, passing in proportional segments between the extending symbolical arms of your compass. Suppose now that, from whatever point of the infinite above you, a hand holds another compass or square, then the lines of the celestial triangle will meet of necessity those of the compass of science and will form therewith the mysterious star of Solomon.4
“With what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again,” says the Gospel. God does not strive with man that He may crush man by His grandeur, and He never places unequal weights in His balance. When He would test the strength of Jacob, He assumes the form of man; the patriarch withstands the onset through an entire night; at the end there is a blessing for the conquered and, in addition to the glory of having sustained such a struggle, he is given the national title of Israel, being a name which signifies—Strong against God.5
We have heard Christians more zealous than instructed hazarding a strange explanation of the dogma concerning eternal punishment by suggesting that God may avenge infinitely an offence which itself is finite, because if the offender is limited the grandeur of the offended being is not. An emperor of the world might, on the strength of a similar pretext, sentence to death some unreasoning child who had soiled accidentally the hem of his purple. Far otherwise are the prerogatives of greatness, and St. Augustine understood them better when he said that “God is patient because He is eternal.” In God all is justice, seeing that all is goodness; He never forgives after the manner of men, for He is never angered like them; but evil being, by its nature, incompatible with good, as night is with day, as discord is with harmony, and the liberty of man being furthermore inviolable, all error is expiated and all evil punished by suffering proportioned thereto. It is vain to invoke the help of Jupiter when our cart is stuck in the mud; unless we take pick and shovel, like the waggoner in the fable, Heaven will not draw us out of the rut. Help yourself and God will help you. In such a reasonable and wholly philosophical way is explained the possible and necessary eternity of punishment, with still a narrow way open for man to escape therefrom—being that of toil and repentance.6
