Transcendental Magic

by Eliphas Levi

  I am stating facts as they occurred, but I would impose faith on no one. The consequence of this experience on myself must be called inexplicable. I was no longer the same man; something of another world had passed into me; I was no longer either sad or cheerful, but I felt a singular attraction towards death, unaccompanied, however, by any suicidal tendency. I analysed my experience carefully, and, notwithstanding a lively nervous repugnance, I repeated the same experiment on two further occasions, allowing some days to elapse between each. There was not, however, sufficient difference between the phenomena to warrant me in protracting a narrative which is perhaps already too long. But the net result of these two additional evocations was for me the revelation of two kabalistic secrets which might change, in a short space of time, the foundations and laws of society at large, if they came to be known generally.

  Am I to conclude from all this that I really evoked, saw and touched the great Apollonius of Tyana? I am not so hallucinated as to affirm or so unserious as to believe it. The effect of the preparations, the perfumes, the mirrors, the pantacles, is an actual drunkenness of the imagination, which must act powerfully upon a person otherwise nervous and impressionable. I do not explain the physical laws by which I saw and touched; I affirm solely that I did see and that I did touch, that I saw clearly and distinctly, apart from dreaming, and this is sufficient to establish the real efficacy of magical ceremonies. For the rest, I regard the practice as destructive and dangerous; if it became habitual, neither moral nor physical health would be able to with stand it. The elderly lady whom I have mentioned, and of whom I had reason to complain subsequently, was a case in point. Despite her asseverations to the contrary, I have no doubt that she was addicted to Necromancy and Goëtia. At times she talked complete nonsense, at others yielded to senseless fits of passion, for which it was difficult to discover a cause. I left London without bidding her adieu, and I adhere faithfully to my engagement by giving no clue to her identity, which might connect her name with practices, pursued in all probability without the knowledge of her family, which I believe to be numerous and of very honourable position.

  There are evocations of intelligence, evocations of love and evocations of hate; but, once more, there is no proof whatsoever that spirits leave the higher spheres to communicate with us: the opposite, as a fact is more probable. We evoke the memories which they have left in the Astral Light, or common reservoir of universal magnetism. It was in this light that the Emperor Julian once saw the gods manifest, looking old, ill and decrepit—a fresh proof of the influence exercised by current and accredited opinions on the reflections of this same Magical Agent, which makes our tables talk and answers by taps on the walls. After the evocation I have described, I re-read carefully the life of Apollonius, who is represented by historians as an ideal of antique beauty and elegance, and I remarked that towards the end of his life he was starved and tortured in prison. This circumstance, which remained perhaps in my memory without my being aware of it, may have determined the unattractive form of my vision, the latter regarded solely as the voluntary dream of a waking man. I have seen two other persons, whom there is no occasion to name, both differing, as regards costume and appearance, from what I had expected. For the rest, I commend the greatest caution to all who propose undertaking similar experiences: their result is intense exhaustion and frequently a shock sufficient to occasion illness.

  I must not conclude this chapter without mentioning the curious opinions of certain Kabalists, who distinguish between apparent and real death, holding that the two are seldom simultaneous. In their view, the majority of persons who are buried are still alive, while a number of others who are regarded as living are in reality dead. Incurable madness, for example, would be with them an incomplete but real death, leaving the earthly form under the purely instinctive control of the sidereal body. When the human soul suffers a greater strain than it can bear, it would thus become separated from the body, leaving the animal soul, or sidereal body, in its place, and these human remains would be less alive in a sense than a mere animal. Dead persons of this kind are said to be identified by the complete extinction of the moral and affectionate sense: they are neither bad nor good; they are dead. Such beings, who are poisonous fungi of the human race, absorb the life of living beings to their fullest possible extent, and this is why their proximity depletes the soul and chills the heart. If such corpse-like creatures really existed, they would stand for all that was recounted in former times about brucalaques and vampires. Now, are there not certain persons in whose presence one feels less intelligent, less good, sometimes even less honest? Are there not some whose vicinity extinguishes all faith and all enthusiasm, who draw you by your weaknesses, who govern you by your evil propensities, and make you die slowly to morality in a torment like that of Mezentius? These are dead people whom we mistake for living beings; these are vampires whom we regard as friends!

  1 “Thirteen is the number of death and birth, of property and inheritance, of association and the family, of war and treaties.”—La Clef des Grands Mystères, p. 49.

  2 According to La Science des Esprits, p. 245, Necromancy is horrible and constitutes “a crime against Nature”.

  3 These Hebrew names translated into French are Alphonse Louis Constant.—NOTE OF ÉLIPHAS LÉVI.

  1 “Black Magic is the occult continuation of proscribed rites belonging to the ancient world. Immolation is the basis of the Mysteries of Nigromancy, and bewitchments are magical sacrifices where the magnetism of evil is substituted for stake and knife. In religion it is faith which saves; in Black Magic it is faith which kills. . . . Black Magic is the religion of death.”—Le Grand Arcane, P. 53.

  XIV O1

  TRANSMUTATIONS

  SPHERA LUNAE SEMPITERNUM AUXILIUM

  ST AUGUSTINE questioned seriously whether Apuleius could have been changed into an ass by a Thessalian sorceress, and theologians have long debated about the transformation of Nebuchadnezzar into a wild beast, which things merely prove that the eloquent doctor of Hippo was unacquainted with magical secrets and that the theologians in question were not advanced far in exegesis. We are concerned in this chapter with different and more incredible marvels, which are at the same time incontestable. I refer to lycanthropy, or the nocturnal transformation of men into wolves, long celebrated in country tales of the twilight by the histories of werewolves. These accounts are so well attested that, with a view to their explanation, sceptical science has recourse to furious mania and masquerading as animals. But such hypotheses are puerile and account for nothing. Let us turn elsewhere for the secret of the phenomena which have been observed on this subject and begin with establishing (I) That no person has ever been killed by a werewolf, except by suffocation, without effusion of blood and without wounds; (2) That werewolves, though tracked, pursued and even maimed, have never been killed on the spot; (3) That persons suspected of these transformations have always been found at home, after a were wolf chase, more or less broken up, sometimes dying, but invariably in their natural form.

  Let us next establish phenomena of a different order. Nothing in the world is better borne out by evidence than the visible and real presence of P. Alphonsus Ligouri beside the dying pope, whilst the same personage was simultaneously seen at home, far from Rome, in prayer and ecstasy. Further, the simultaneous presence of the missionary Francis Xavier in several places at once has been no less strictly demonstrated. It will be said that these are miracles, but we reply that miracles when they are genuine are simply facts for science. Apparitions of persons dear to us coincidently with the moment of their death are phenomena of the same order and attributable to the same cause. We have spoken of the sidereal body, which is intermediary between the soul and the physical envelope. Now, this body frequently remains awake while the latter sleeps, and passes in thought through all space which universal magnetism opens before it. It lengthens without breaking the sympathetic chain which attaches it to our heart and brain, and it is for this reason that it i
s so dangerous to awaken dreamers suddenly. As a fact, too great a start may break the bond in an instant and cause immediate death. The form of our sidereal body is in correspondence with the habitual condition of our thoughts, and it modifies, in the long run, the characteristics of the material body. That is why Swedenborg, in his somnambulistic intuitions, frequently beheld spirits in the shape of various animals.

  Let us now make bold to say that a werewolf is nothing else but the sidereal body of a man whose savage and sanguinary instincts are typified by the wolf; who, further, whilst his phantom wanders over the country, is sleeping painfully in his bed and dreams that he is a wolf indeed. What makes the werewolf visible is the almost somnambulistic excitement caused by the fright of those who behold it, or else the tendency, more particularly in simple country persons, to enter into direct communication with the Astral Light, which is the common medium of visions and dreams. The hurts inflicted on the werewolf do actually wound the sleeping person by an odic and sympathetic congestion of the Astral Light, and by correspondence between the immaterial and material body. Many persons will believe that they are dreaming when they read such things as these, and may ask whether we are really awake ourselves; but we need only request men of science to reflect upon the phenomena of gestation and upon the influence of the imagination of women on the form of their offspring. A woman who had been present at the execution of a man who was broken on the wheel gave birth to a child with all its limbs shattered. Let anyone tell us how the impression produced upon the soul of the mother by a horrible spectacle could so have reacted on the child, and we will explain in turn why blows received in dreams can bruise and even wound grievously the body of him who receives them in imagination, above all when that body is suffering and subjected to nervous and magnetic influences.

  To such phenomena and to the occult laws which govern them must be referred the effects of bewitchment, of which we shall speak hereafter. Diabolical obsessions, and the majority of nervous diseases which affect the brain, are wounds inflicted on the nervous mechanism by perverted Astral Light, meaning that which is absorbed or projected in abnormal proportions. All extraordinary and extra-natural tensions of will predispose to obsessions and nervous diseases; enforced celibacy, asceticism, hatred, ambition, rejected love, are so many generative principles of infernal forms and influences. Paracelsus says that the menstruations of women beget phantoms in the air, and from this stand point convents would be seminaries for nightmares, while the devils might be compared to those heads of the hydra of Lerna which were reproduced eternally and propagated in the very blood from their wounds. The phenomena of possession amongst the Ursulines of Loudun, so fatal to Urban Grandier, have been misconstrued.1 The nuns in reality were possessed by hysteria and fanatical imitation of the secret thoughts of their exorcists, these being transmitted to their nervous system by the Astral Light. They experienced an impression of all the hatreds which this unfortunate priest had conjured up against him, and such wholly interior communication seemed diabolical and miraculous to them selves. Hence in this tragical affair everyone acted sincerely, even to Laubardemont, who, in his blind execution of the prejudged verdicts of Cardinal Richelieu, believed that he was fulfilling the duties of a true judge, and as little suspected himself of being a follower of Pontius Pilate as he would have recognized in the sceptical and libertine cure of Saint-Pierre-du-Marché a disciple and martyr of Christ. The possession of the nuns of Louvier is scarcely more than a copy of those of Loudun: devils invent little and plagiarize one another1. The process of Gaufridi and Magdalen de la Palud possesses stranger features, for in this case the victims were their own accusers. Gaufridi confessed that he was guilty of depriving a number of women of the power to defend themselves against his seductions by simply breathing in their nostrils. A young and beautiful girl, of noble family, who had been thus insufflated, described in the greatest detail scenes wherein lubricity seemed to vie with the monstrous and grotesque. Such are the ordinary hallucinations of false mysticism and infringed celibacy. Gaufridi and his mistress were obsessed by their mutual chimeras, and the brain of the one reflected the nightmares of the other. Was not the Marquis de Sade himself infectious for certain depleted and diseased natures?2

  The scandalous trial of Father Girard is a fresh proof of the deliriums of mysticism and the singular nervous affections which it may entail.3 The trances of la Cadiére, her ecstasies, her stigmata, were all as real as the insensate and perhaps involuntary debauchery of her director. She accused him when he wished to withdraw from her, and the conversion of this young woman was a revenge, for there is nothing more cruel than depraved passions. An influential society, which intervened in the trial of Grandier for the destruction of the possible heretic, in this case rescued Father Girard for the honour of the order. Moreover, Grandier and Girard attained the same results by very different means, with which we shall be concerned specially in the sixteenth chapter.

  We act by our imagination on the imagination of others, by our sidereal body on theirs, by our organs on their organs, in such a way that, through sympathy, whether of inclination or obsession, we possess one another reciprocally and identify ourselves with those whom we wish to aftect. Reactions against such dominations may cause the most pronounced antipathy to succeed the liveliest sympathy. Love has a tendency to unify beings; in thus identifying, it renders them rivals frequently, and hence enemies, if in the depth of the two natures there is some unsociable disposition like pride. To fill two united souls with pride in an equal degree is to disjoin them by making them rivals. Antagonism is the necessary consequence of a plurality ofgods.

  When we dream of any living person, either his sidereal body presents itself to ours in the Astral Light or at least a reflection thereof, and our impressions at the meeting may often make known his secret dispositions in our regard. For example, love fashions the sidereal body of the one in the image and likeness of the other, so that the psychic medium of the woman is like a man and that of the man like a woman. It was this transfer which the Kabalists sought to express in an occult manner when they said, in explanation of an obscure passage in Genesis: “God created love by placing a rib of Adam in the breast of the woman and a portion of the flesh of Eve in the breast of the man, so that at the bottom of woman's heart there is the bone of man, while at the bottom of man's heart there is the flesh of woman”—an allegory which is certainly not devoid of depth and beauty.