[215] His fate was shared by the servants already mentioned, who are said to have been his accomplices.
[216] The Marquis Eudes de Mirville wrote Des Esprits et de leurs Manifestations Fluidiques devant la Science Moderne, 1858, and other large books, which were highly recommended by ecclesiastical authority of the day. He saw the intervention of Satanism everywhere in psychic and occult phenomena. Remove the personality of Satan and Éliphas Lévi says exactly the same thing.
[217] The reference is to La Réalité des Esprits et le Phénomène Merveilleux de leur Écriture Directe. It appeared in 1857 and is a very curious collection of materials. Long after, or in 1875, the same writer published La Morale Universelle, which seems to be a plea for secular education.
[218] The reader should understand that Éliphas Lévi is only giving expression to a point of view; it must not be supposed that there were adepts—either true or false—who said or thought the things which are here set down at the period in question, or indeed at any other period.
[219] See Gabriel Naudé: Apologie pour les Grands Hommes faussement accusés de la Magie.
[220] Bartholemæus Platina was assistant-librarian of the Vatican, and his Opus in Vitas Summorum Pontificum appeared at Venice in 1479, two years before his death.
[221] “Let the popes see to it,” he remarks, according to a Note of Lévi; “it is they who are concerned in the question.”
[222] Éliphas Lévi, in his defence of the Catholic Religion, by which he means that of Rome, reminds one of Talleyrand proceeding to consecrate and entreating his familiars about him not to make him laugh: in the symbolic language of the man in the street, his tongue is so evidently in his cheek. An open enemy of Rome would think twice before saying that the pope who authorised the instruments which were used in the execrable massacres of Albigensians and Vaudois was “so eminently catholic.”
[223] I refer the readers of this section to my Book of Ceremonial Magic, where the content and history of this Grimoire are considered with special reference to the criticism of Éliphas Lévi.
[224] I have mentioned in the Book of Ceremonial Magic that the first edition of the Grimoire of Honorius is referred to 1629, being about 900 years after the death of its alleged author. I have also referred it to its proper source in the Sworn Book of Honorius, which belongs to the fourteenth century. The Honorius here in question was the spokesman of magicians assembled at a mythical place. He is described as the son of Euclid and Master of the Thebans.