The history of magic

by Éliphas Lévi

GENERAL PLAN OF KABALISTIC DOCTRINE

That which has revolted public conscience is not the dogma of hell but its rash interpretation. Those barbarous dreams of the middle ages, those atrocious and obscene tortures, sculptured on the porticos of churches, that infamous cauldron for the cooking of human flesh which lives for ever, so that it may for ever suffer, while the elect are rejoiced by the smoke—all this is absurd and impious; but none of it belongs to the sacred doctrine of the Church. The cruelty attributed to God constitutes the most frightful of blasphemies, and it is precisely for this reason that evil is for ever irremediable while the will of man rejects the divine goodness. God inflicts the tortures of reprobation on those who are damned only as He causes the death of the suicide. “Work in order to possess, and you will be happy”—so speaks the Supreme Justice to man.—“I would possess and enjoy without labour.”—“You will then be a robber and will suffer.”—“I will rebel.”—“You will be broken and will suffer further.”—“I will rebel for ever.”—“Then shall you suffer eternally.” Such is the decree of the Absolute Reason and the Sovereign Justice: what can be answered hereto by human pride and folly?

Religion has no greater enemy than unbridled mysticism, which mistakes its feverish visions for divine revelations. It is not the theologians who have created the devil’s empire, but the false devotees and sorcerers. To believe a vision of the brain rather than the authority of public reason or piety has been ever the beginning of heresy in religion and of folly in the order of human philosophy; a fool would not be a fool if he believed in the reason of others. Visions have never been wanting to piety in revolt, nor chimeras to reason which excommunicates and banishes itself. From this point of view, magnetism has its dangers assuredly, for the state which it induces leads to hallucination as easily as to lucid intuition. We are dealing in this chapter, on the one hand, with mystic magnetisers, with materialistic magnetisers on the other hand, and we would warn them in the name of science concerning the risks which they run. Divinations, magnetic experiences and evocations belong to one and the same order of phenomena, being those which cannot be misemployed without danger to reason and life.

Some thirty or forty years ago a choirmaster of Notre Dame, who, for the rest, was an exceedingly pious and estimable man, became infatuated with mesmerism and gave himself up to its experiences; he also devoted more time than was reasonable to the study of the mystics, and above all the vertiginous Swedenborg. Mental exhaustion followed, and as it was accompanied by sleeplessness, he used to rise and continue his studies; if this failed to quiet the restlessness of his brain, he took the key of the church, entered it by the Porte Rouge, repaired to the choir which was lighted only by the feeble lamp of the High Altar, took refuge in his stall and there remained till morning, immersed in prayers and profound meditation.

There came a night when eternal damnation formed the subject of his reflections, in connection with the menacing doctrine of the small number of the elect. He was unable to reconcile such rigorous exclusion of the majority with the infinite goodness of that God Who, according to Holy Scripture, wills the salvation of all and their attainment of truth. He thought also of those fiery torments which the most cruel of earthly tyrants would not, were it possible, inflict for one day only on his worst enemy. Doubt entered his heart by all its avenues, and he had recourse to the conciliating explanations of theology. The church does not define the fire of hell; according to the gospel it is eternal, but it is nowhere written that the greater number of men are destined to suffer eternally. Many of the condemned may undergo only the privation of God; above all the church forbids absolutely the assumption of individual damnation. Pagans can be saved by the baptism of desire, scandalous sinners by sudden and perfect contrition, and in fine we must hope for all, as we must pray also for all, save one only, being he of whom the Saviour said that it would have been better for him had that man never been born.

The last thought brought the choirmaster to a pause, and it came upon him suddenly that a single man was thus carrying officially the burden of condemnation for centuries, that Judas Iscariot, who is the subject of reference in the passage of Scripture quoted, after so far repenting his crime that he died because of it, had become the scapegoat of humanity, the Atlas of hell, the Prometheus of damnation. Yet he it was whom the Saviour on the threshold of death had termed his friend. The choirmaster’s eyes filled with tears, redemption seemed ineffectual if it failed to save Judas. “For him and for him only,” he exclaimed in his exaltation, “would I have died a second time, had I been the Saviour. Yet is not Jesus Christ a thousand times better than I am, and what must He then be doing in heaven, if I am weeping on earth for His hapless apostle?... What He is doing,” added the priest, his exaltation increasing, “is to pity me and console me; I feel it. He is telling my heart that the pariah of the gospel is saved and that he will become, by the long malediction which still weighs upon his memory, the redeemer of all pariahs.... Now, if it be so, a new gospel must be proclaimed to the world, and it will be one of infinite, universal mercy—in the name of the regenerated Judas.... But I am astray, I am a heretic, a reprobate ... and yet, no—for I am sincere.” Then clasping his hands fervently, the choirmaster added: “My God, vouchsafe me that which Thou didst not refuse unto faith of old and which Thou dost not refuse now—a miracle to convince and reassure me, a miracle as the testimony of a new mission.”

The enthusiast then rose and in that silence of the night which is so formidable at the foot of altars, in the vastness of the mute and darksome church, he pronounced the following evocation in loud tones, but slowly and solemnly: “Thou who hast been cursed for eighteen centuries, thou for whom I weep, for thou dost seem to have taken hell solely unto thyself, so that heaven may be left for us; thou, unfortunate Judas, if it be true that the blood of thy Master has purified thee, so that thou art saved indeed, come and lay thy hands upon me, for the priesthood of mercy and love.”

While the echo of these words was still murmuring through the affrighted arches, the choirmaster rose up, crossed the choir and knelt under the lamp before the High Altar. He tells us, for the account is related by himself, that he felt positively and really two warm and living hands placed upon his head, as bishops impose them on the day of ordination. He was not sleeping or swooning and he felt them; it was a real contact which lasted for several minutes. He became certain that God had heard him, that a miracle had been performed, new duties had been imposed, and that a new life was for him begun; from to-morrow he must be a new man. But on the morrow the unhappy choirmaster was mad.

The dream of a heaven without hell, the dream of Faust has made other victims innumerable in this hapless century of doubt and egoism, which has only succeeded on its own part in the realisation of a hell without a heaven. God Himself has become of no effect in a system where all is permissible, where all things count for good. Men who have reached the point where they fear no longer a Supreme Judge, find it easy to dispense with that God of simple folk, who is less of a God in reality than the simple folk themselves. The fools, who vaunt themselves as conquerors of the devil, end by making themselves gods. Our age is above all that of these pseudo-divine mummers, and we have known all grades of them. The god Ganneau, a good and too poetic nature, who would have given his shirt to the poor, who reinstated thieves, who admired Lacenaire, and who would not have hurt a fly; the god Cheneau, a dealer in buttons in the rue Croix des Petits-Champs, a visionary like Swedenborg, and recording his inspirations in the style of Jeannot;[350] the god Tourreil, an excellent personage who deified woman and decided that Adam had been extracted from Eve; the god Auguste Comte, who preserved the Catholic religion intact with two only exceptions, being the existence of God and the immortality of the soul; the god Wronski, he being a true scholar, who had the glory and the happiness to rediscover the first theorems of the Kabalah, and who, having sold their communication for 150,000 francs to a wealthy imbecile named Arson, has borne witness in one of his most serious works that the said Arson, having refused to pay him in full, has become actually and literally the beast of the Apocalypse. With a view of enforcing payment, Wronski published a pamphlet entitled Yes or No—that is to say, have you or have you not, yes or no, purchased from me for 150,000 francs my discovery of the absolute?

Lest we should be accused of injustice towards one whose works have proved useful to ourselves, and whose eulogium has been pronounced in our former publications, we will give verbatim the passage in Wronski’s Reform of Philosophy, p. 512, which calls the attention of an indifferent universe to the pamphlet above mentioned. It will also offer a curious specimen of the style adopted by this merchant in the Absolute.