The history of magic

by Éliphas Lévi

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 must 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; and 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 know now 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 provisional hypothesis respecting thaumaturgic 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 (1) 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 on the alleged modes of its perpetuation: my standpoint is known otherwise and has 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 respected 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 disciples, 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 some 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 their 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 root-matter 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 side-lights 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—from his standpoint—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 the true idea of religion is not constituted by “universal suffrage” (see text, p. 517), 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.

PORTRAIT OF ÉLIPHAS LÉVI, TAKEN AFTER DEATH