The history of magic

by Éliphas Lévi

I shall impose my will for a law upon them.[232]

After many other ceremonies there comes the night of evocation. In a sinister place, in the light of a fire kindled with broken crosses, a circle is traced with the embers of a cross, reciting while so doing a magical hymn containing versicles of several psalms. It may be rendered as follows:[233]

“O Lord, the king rejoices in Thy power; let me finish the work of my birth. May shadows of evil and spectres of night be as dust blown before the wind.... O Lord, hell is enlightened and shines in Thy presence; by Thee do all things end and all begin by Thee: Jehovah, Tsabaoth, Elohim, Eloi, Helion, Helios, Jodhevah, Shaddai. The Lion of Judah rises in His glory; He comes to complete the victory of King David. I open the seven seals of the dread book. Satan falls from heaven, like summer lightning. Thou hast said to me: Be far from thee hell and its tortures; they shall not draw to thy pure abodes. Thine eyes shall withstand the gaze of the basilisk; thy feet shall walk fearlessly on the asp; thou shalt take up serpents, and they shall be conquered by thy smile; thou shalt drink poisons, and they shall in nowise hurt thee. Elohim, Elohab, Tsabaoth, Helios, Ehyeh, Eieazereie, O Theos, Tsehyros. The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof; He hath established it over the gaping abyss. Who shall go up unto the mountain of the Lord? The innocent of hands and clean of heart; he who hath not held truth in captivity, nor hath received it to let it remain idle; he who hath conceived the height in his soul and hath not sworn by a lying word. The same shall receive strength for his domain, and hereof is the infinite of human birth, generation by earth and fire, the divine bringing forth of those who seek God. Princes of Nature, enlarge your doors; yoke of heaven, I lift thee. Come to me, ye holy cohorts: behold the King of glory. He hath earned his name; he holds in his hand the seal of Solomon. The master hath broken the black bondage of Satan and hath led captivity captive. The Lord alone is God, and He only is King. To Thee only be glory, O Lord; glory and glory to Thee.”[234]

One seems to hear the sombre puritans of Walter Scott or Victor Hugo accompanying, with fanatic psalmody, the nameless work of sorcerers in Faust or Macbeth.

In a conjuration addressed to the shade of the giant Nimrod, the wild huntsman who began the Tower of Babel, the adept of Honorius menaces that ancient reprobate with the riveting of his chains and with torture increased daily, should he fail in immediate obedience to the will of the operator. It is the sublimity of pride in delirium, and this anti-pope, who could only understand a high-priest as a ruler of hell, seems to yearn after the usurped and mournful right of tormenting the dead eternally, as if in revenge for the contempt and rejection of the living.

CHAPTER II
APPEARANCE OF THE BOHEMIAN NOMADS

At the beginning of the fifteenth century hordes of unknown swarthy wanderers began to spread through Europe.[235] Sometimes denominated Bohemians, because they claimed to come from Bohemia, sometimes Egyptians, because their leader assumed the title of Duke of Egypt, they exercised the arts of divination, larceny and marauding. They were nomadic tribes, bivouacking in huts of their own construction; their religion was unknown; they gave themselves out to be Christians; but their orthodoxy was more than doubtful. Among themselves, they practised communism and promiscuity, and in their divinations they made use of a strange sequence of signs, allegorical in form, and depending from the virtues of numbers. Whence came they? Of what accursed and vanished world were they the surviving waifs? Were they, as superstitious people believed, the offspring of sorceresses and demons? What expiring and betrayed Saviour had condemned them to roam for ever? Was this the family at large of the Wandering Jew, or the remnants of the ten tribes of Israel, lost sight of in captivity and long enchained by Gog and Magog in unknown regions? Such were the doubting questions at the passage of these mysterious strangers, who seemed to retain only the superstitions and vices of a vanished civilisation. Enemies of toil, they respected neither property nor family; they dragged their women and children after them; they pestered the peace of honest house-dwellers with their pretended divinations. However all this may be, their first encampment in the vicinity of Paris is told by one writer as follows:—

“In the next year, 1427, on the Sunday after the middle of August, being the 17th of the month, there came to the environs of Paris twelve so-called penitentiaries—a duke, earl and ten men, all on horses, saying that they were good Christians, originally of Lower Egypt. They stated further that in former times they were conquered and turned to Christianity, those refusing being put to death, while those who consented to baptism were left as rulers of the country. Some time subsequently the Saracens invaded them, and many who were not firm in the faith made no attempt to withstand or defend their country, as in duty bound, but submitted, became Saracens and abjured our Saviour. The Emperor of Germany, the King of Poland and other rulers having learned that the people renounced their faith so easily, becoming Saracens and idolaters, fell upon them and conquered them again easily. It appeared at first as if they had the intention to leave them in their country, so that they might be led back to Christianity, but, after deliberation in council, the emperor and the rest of the kings ordained that they should never own land in their native country without the consent of the Pope, to obtain which, they must journey to Rome. Thither they proceeded in a great body, the young and the old, involving great suffering for the little ones. They made confession of their sins at Rome, and the Pope, after considering with his advisers, imposed on them, by way of penance, a seven years’ wandering through the world, sleeping in no bed. He ordained further that every bishop and croziered abbot should give them, once and for all, ten livres of the Tours currency as a contribution towards their expenses. He presented them with letters to this effect, gave them his benediction, and for five years they had been wandering through the world.

“Some days afterwards, being the day of the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist, or August 29, the general horde followed and were not permitted to enter within Paris, but were lodged at the Chapelle St. Denis. They numbered about 120 persons, including women and children. They stated that when they left their own country they consisted of one thousand or twelve hundred souls; the others had died on the road, their king and queen among them; the survivors were still expecting to become possessors of worldly goods, for the holy father had promised them good and fertile lands when their penance was finished.

“While they were at the chapel there was never so great a crowd at benediction, for the people flocked to see them from St. Denis, Paris, and the suburbs. Their children, both boys and girls, were the cleverest tricksters. Nearly all had their ears pierced and in each ear were one or two silver rings, which they said were a sign of good birth in their own country; they were exceedingly dark and with woolly hair. The women were the ugliest and blackest ever seen; their faces were covered with sores, their hair was black as the tail of a horse, their clothes consisted of an old flaussoie or schiavina tied over the shoulder by a cord or morsel of cloth, and beneath it a poor shirt. In a word, they were the most wretched creatures who had ever been seen in France, within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. Their poverty notwithstanding, they had sorceresses among them who inspected the hand, telling what had happened to the person consulting them in their past life and what awaited them in the future. They disturbed the peace of households, for they denounced husband to wife and wife to husband. And what was still worse, while talking to people about their magic art, they managed to fill their purses by emptying those of their hearers. One citizen of Paris who gives account of these facts adds that he himself talked to them three or four times without losing a halfpenny; but this is the report of the people everywhere, and the news reached the bishop of Paris, who went thither taking a Minorite friar called the little Jacobin, and he, by the bishop’s command, preached a great sermon and excommunicated all, male and female who had told fortunes and all who had shewn their hands. The horde was ordered away and departed accordingly on September 8, proceeding towards Pontoise.”