The Mysteries of Magic - A Digest of the Writings of Eliphas Levi

Arthur Edward Waite

• Publisher: White Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781528768856
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Fundamentalism & Cults

"The Mysteries Of Magic" is a 1927 work by A. E. Waite that explores the life and work of Éliphas Lévi Zahed (1810 – 1875), a French occult author and ceremonial magician. Arthur Edward Waite (1857 – 1942), more commonly referred to as A. E. Waite, was an American-born British mystic and poet. He wrote profusely on the subject of the occult and esoteric matters, and is famous for being the co-creator of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. His work arguably constitutes the first attempt to systematically studying the history of western occultism, which he viewed more of a spiritual tradition than proto-science or pseudo-religion, as was the more common conception. Contents include: "Life of Alphonse Louis Constant", "Notes on the Mysteries of Magic as expounded in the Occult Philosophy of Eliphas Levi", "Threshold of Magical Science", "Doctrines of Occult Force", "Written Tradition of Magic", "Doctrine of Spiritual Essences, or Kabbalistic Pneumatics", "Ceremonial Magic", "Science of the Prophets", etc. Other works by this author include: "The Alchemical Writings of Edward Kelly" (1893), "Turba Philsophorum" (1894), and "Devil-Worship in France" (1896). Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

THE DOCTRINE OF SPIRITUAL ESSENCES;
OR, KABBALISTIC PNEUMATICS,

WITH THE MYSTERIES OF EVOCATION, NECROMANCY, AND BLACK MAGIC.

INTRODUCTION.

THE great and indispensable hypothesis of the destinies of futurity has been elaborated and directed from deduction to deduction by the seers of the ancient world. Kabbalistic pneumatics are a veritable science, which proceeds methodically and exactly, ascending from the known to the unknown by the way of the least questionable analogies, because facts make known laws to it, and on these laws it substantially lays the foundation of its ever-prudent hypotheses. It is, therefore, Kabbalistic Pneumatics which we are about to unveil to our readers, and we shall add an analysis of Isaac de Loria’s profound treatise on the circular progression of the soul—De Revolutionibus Animarum—and that of the Sepher Druschim by the same doctor. We shall bring forth from the shadows of occultism these amazing books, whose key the modern world no longer possesses, and by so doing we believe ourselves to deserve well at the hands of science and reason.

By the help of these powerful lights we shall explain the strange phenomena which scientific smatterers find it so convenient to deny, but which overwhelm them, nevertheless, by their evidence. Yes, images tremble, statues weep, the consecrated bread is injected with blood, a hand may issue from the wall to alarm the impious festivities of Balthazar by a menacing inscription. The author of this book does not fear to acknowledge that he has himself had the most astounding and formidable visions; he has seen and touched angels and demons, as Maximus of Ephesus, and Schrœpfer of Leipsic, caused them to be seen and touched by their adepts. He has been enabled to compare the hallucinations of the waking state with the illusions of dreams, and from all this he has concluded that reason directing faith and faith supporting reason are the only true lights of our souls, and that all else is but a vain exertion of the mind, aberration of the senses, and delirium of thought. He is not, therefore, writing what is of mere conjecture, he boldly affirms what he knows.

It was after he had descended from gulf to gulf and from horror to horror to the bottom of the seventh circle of the abyss, it was after he had traversed in all its length the darkness of the dolorous city, that Dante returning, and taking the devil, so to speak, against the grain, rose consoled and victorious towards the light. We have performed the same voyage, and we present ourselves before the world with tranquillity on our countenance and peace in our heart. We come calmly to assure mankind that hell and the devil, the hopeless gulf, the chimæras, satyrs, ghouls, personified vices, three-headed dragons, and all the rest of the dismal phantasmagoria are a nightmare of madness, but that God only living, alone real, alone everywhere present, fills and leaves no void, fills, I repeat, the unlimited immensity with the splendours and eternal consolations of the sovereign reason.

The things which are above this life can be conjectured in two ways, either by the calculations of analogy, or by the intuitions of extasis, in other words, by reason or by folly. The sages of Judea chose reason, and have left us, in books which are generally ignored, their magnificent hypotheses. On reading them, it becomes evident at once that our creeds have come out of them like inexplicable fragments, and that the apparent absurdity of our dogmas disappears when they are completed by the splendid reasoning of these masters. One is astonished, moreover, to find all the most beautiful and grandiose aspirations of our modern poetry philosophically realised and completed therein. Goëthe studied the Kabbalah, and the epic of “Faust” has issued from the doctrines of the Sohar. Swedenborg, Saint. Simon, and Fourier seem to have glimpsed the divine Kabbalistic synthesis through the darkness and hallucinations of a more or less extraordinary nightmare, according to the different characters of these dreamers. In reality, this synthesis is the most perfect and beautiful thing which can be attained to by human understanding.

The books which treat of spirits according to the Kabbalists are the Pneumatica Kabbalistica, found in the Kabbala Denudata of Baron de Rosenroth; the Liber de Revolutionibus Animarum, by Isaac de Loria; the Sepher Druschim, the book of Moscheh of Cordova, and some others less celebrated. We shall give here not merely their abridgement, but, in a certain way, their quintessence.

I.—IMMORTALITY.

ON matters which our science cannot in this life ascertain we can only reason by hypotheses. Humanity can know nothing of the superhuman, since the superhuman is that which exceeds the scope of humanity; the phenomena of decomposition which accompany death seem to protest in the name of science against this innate necessity of faith in another life which has brought forth so many dreams. Science, nevertheless, must take account of the want, for Nature, which does nothing without object, does not endow beings with desires that are not to be satisfied. Science, therefore, though necessarily ignorant of, must, at least, suppose the existence of things which are beyond her, and cannot put in question the continuity of life after the phenomenon called death, since no abrupt interruption is found in the magnum opus of Nature, which, according to the philosophy of Hermes, never proceeds by jumps.

The immortality of the soul is kabbalistically proved by analogy, which is the one doctrine of the universal religion, as it is the key of science and the inviolable law of Nature. Death, in fact, can no more be an absolute end than birth is a real beginning. What we call death is birth into a new life. Nature does not unmake what she has made in the order of the necessary progressions of existence, and she cannot belie her own fundamental laws. Birth proves the pre-existence of the human individual, since nothing is produced from nothing, and death proves immortality, as being can no more cease to be than nothing can cease to be nothing. Being and nonentity are two absolutely irreconcilable ideas, with this difference, that the wholly negative notion of nothingness is derived from the very conception of existence, whose antithesis cannot even be understood as an absolute negation, whilst the idea of being cannot even be compared with that of nonentity, to say nothing of being derived from it.

Pythagoras believed above all things in the immortality of the soul and the eternity of life. The perpetual succession of the seasons, of days and nights, of sleeping and waking, sufficiently explained to him the phenomenon of death. The individual immortality of the human soul consisted according to him in the persistence of memory. The Bible seems to give this idea a divine sanction when it says in the Book of Psalms—In memoria œsterna erit justus.

According to Synesius, the dream state proves the individuality and immateriality of the soul, which, in this condition, creates itself a heaven, a landscape, palaces blazing with light, or darksome caverns, according to its affections or desires.

But the immortality of the soul, being one of the most consoling doctrines of religion, must be reserved for the aspirations of faith, and, consequently, never will be proved by facts accessible to the examination of science. Who indeed can be assured beforehand of his eternal destiny? Life here below appears to be a school in which we learn how to live. It is to be concluded from this that we shall live elsewhere. This is a dramatic farce which precedes the grand mystery.*

II.—THE ASTRAL BODY.

WE have spoken at length of a substance diffused through infinity, the single substance which is heaven and earth, that is, volatilised or fixed, according to its different degrees of polarisation. This substance is what Hermes Trismegistus calls the Great Telesma. When it produces refulgence, it is called light. This is the substance which God created before all things, when He said, Let there be light! It is at once matter and motion, a fluid and a perpetual vibration. The inherent force which puts it in motion is called magnetism. In the infinite this unique substance is ether or etherised light. In the stars, which it renders magnetic, it becomes astral light. In organised creatures, it is magnetic light or fluid. In man, it forms the astral body, or plastic mediator, which is a magnet that draws or repels the Astral Light under the pressure of the will.

The Astral Light transformed at the moment of conception into human light, is the first envelope of the soul, and it is by combining with the most subtil fluids that it forms this etherised body or sidereal phantom which Paracelsus speaks of in his philosophy of intuition—Philosophia Sagax—and which reproduces with the greatest facility the forms corresponding to ideas. It is the mirror of imagination, and is nourished by the Astral Light precisely as the physical body is nourished by the produce of the earth. During sleep it absorbs this light by immersion, and in the waking state by a kind of more or less slow respiration. When the phenomena of natural somnambulism occur, the plastic mediator is overcharged with ill-digested nourishment. The will then, though weighted by the torpor of sleep, instinctively drives the mediator towards the organs to disengage it, and a reaction occurs which is in some way mechanical, and which equilibriates the light of the mediator by the motion of the body. For this reason it is dangerous to awake somnambulists with a start, for the congested mediator may then suddenly retire towards the common reservoir and wholly abandon the organism, which thereby will be separated from the soul, and death will result. The somnambulistic state is, therefore, extremely dangerous, because, by blending the phenomena of the waking state with those of sleep, it constitutes a sort of great digression between the two worlds. The soul agitating the springs of individual life, while plunged in the universal life, experiences an inexpressible happiness, and would willingly loosen the nervous cords which keep it suspended above the current. The situation is identical in every species of extasis; if the will should plunge therein by an impassioned effort, or even abandon itself entirely therein, the subject may remain idiotic or paralysed, and may even die.

Hallucinations and visions result from injuries inflicted on the plastic mediator, and from its local paralysis. Sometimes it ceases to radiate, and substitutes, as it were, condensed images for the realities revealed by light; sometimes its radiation is excessive, and it condenses without about some fortuitous and irregular centre, as the blood does in fleshly excrescences; then the chimeras of the brain take shape, and seemingly assume a soul, we appear to ourselves either radiant or deformed, according to the ideal of our desires or fears. Hallucinations, being dreams of waking persons, always suppose a state analogous to somnambulism, but, on the contrary, somnambulism is sleep borrowing phenomena from the waking state; hallucination is the waking state still subject in part to the astral intoxication of sleep.

Our fluidic bodies attract and repel one another, according to laws conformed to those of electricity. It is this which produces instinctive sympathies and antipathies. They are thus equilibriated by each other, and this is why hallucinations are frequently contagious; abnormal projections change the direction of luminous currents; the nervous excitement of a diseased person takes possession of the most sensitive natures about it, a circle of illusions is established, and a whole crowd is easily drawn away after it.

The fluidic body can be dissolved or coagulated by the volition of the soul acting on the Astral Light of which it is formed. It reacts on the nervous system, and thus produces the motions of the physical body. This light can indefinitely dilate and communicate its images to considerable distances; it magnetizes objects which are subject to the act ion of man, and by contracting can draw them towards him. It can assume all forms evoked by thought, and, in those fleeting coagulations of its radiating part which have been already referred to, can appear before the eyes and even offer a species of resistance to the touch. But these manifestations and exercises of the plastic mediator being abnormal, that luminous instrument of precision cannot produce them without being distorted, and they necessarily cause either permanent hallucination or madness.

The fluidic body, subject, like the mass of the Astral Light, to two opposite movements, attractive on the left and repulsive on the right, or reciprocally, in the two sexes, produces within us the struggle of opposite tendencies, and contributes to anxieties of conscience; frequently, it is influenced by the reflections of other spirits, and thus are produced either temptations or subtle and unexpected graces. This is the explanation of the traditional doctrine of two angels who aid and try us. The two forces of the Astral Light may be represented by a balance, wherein our good intentions for the triumph of justice and the emancipation of our liberty are poised.

The astral body is not invariably of the same sex as the physical, that is to say, that the proportions of the two forces often seem to contradict the visible organisation; it is this which produces the apparent errors of human passions, and which explains, without in any way justifying them from a moral point of view, the amorous eccentricities of Anacreon or Sappho.

The sidereal body, when disengaging itself at death, attracts and long preserves, by the sympathy of homogeneous things, the reflections of the past life. If a powerful sympathetic will can draw it into a particular current, it is manifested naturally, for nothing is more natural than prodigies. Thus apparitions are produced. But we shall develop this point more completely in the chapter devoted to necromancy.

III.—UNITY AND SOLIDARITY OF SPIRITS.

ACCORDING to the Kabbalists, God creates eternally the great Adam, the universal and perfect man, who contains in a single spirit all spirits and all souls. Intelligences therefore live two lives at once, one general, which is common to them all, and the other special and individual. Solidarity and reversibility among spirits depend therefore on their living really in one another, all being illuminated by the radiance of the one, all afflicted by the darkness of the one.

The great Adam was represented by the tree of life, which extends above and below the earth by roots and branches; the trunk is humanity at large, the various races are the branches, and the innumerable individuals are the leaves. Each leaf has its own form, its special life, and its share of the sap, but it lives by means of the branch alone, as the life of the branch itself depends on the trunk. The wicked are the dry leaves and dead bark of the tree. They fall, decay, and are transformed into manure, which returns to the tree through the roots.

The Kabbalists also compare the wicked, or reprobate, to the excrement of the great body of humanity. These excretions serve as manure to the earth, which brings forth fruits to nourish the body; thus death returns always to life, and evil itself serves for the renewal and nourishment of good. Death thus has no existence, and man never departs from the universal life. Those whom we call dead still survive in us, and we subsist in them; they are on the earth because we are here, and we are in heaven because they are located there.

The more we live in others, the less need we fear to die. Our life, after death, is prolonged on earth in those we love, and we draw on heaven to give them tranquillity and peace. The communion of spirits in heaven with earth, and on earth with heaven, is accomplished naturally, without disturbance and without prodigies; universal intelligence is like the sun’s light, which falls at once on all the planets, and which the planets reflect to illuminate one another in the night.

The saints and angels have no need of words, nor of any sound, to make themselves understood; they think in our thoughts and they love in our hearts. The good which they have not had the opportunity to accomplish they suggest to us, and we perform it for them; they enjoy it in us, and we share its recompense with them, for spiritual rewards increase in proportion as they are shared, and what we give to another we double for ourselves.

The saints suffer and toil in us, and their perfect happiness will not be attained till the whole of humanity shall be happy, for they are a part of that indivisible humanity which in heaven, has a radiant and smiling face, on earth a toiling and suffering body, while in hell, which for sages is but a purgatory, it has fettered and b...