The history of magic

by Éliphas Lévi

Philosophy in that day will be exact like mathematics, for true ideas—being those which are identical with the living order and so constituting the science of reality—shall combine with reason and justice to furnish exact proportions and equations as rigorous as numbers. Error thenceforth will be possible to ignorance alone, and true knowledge will be free from self-deception. Aestheticism will be subordinated no longer to caprices of taste which change as fashions change. If the beautiful is the splendour of the true, we shall be able to calculate without error the radiation of a light of which the source shall be certainly known and determined with exact precision. Poetry will abound no longer with foolish and subversive tendencies, nor will poets be those dangerous enchanters whom Plato crowned with flowers and banished from his republic; they will be rather magicians of reason and gracious mathematicians of harmony. Does this mean that the earth will become an Eldorado? No, for so long as humanity exists, there will be children, meaning those who are weak, small, ignorant and poor. But society will be governed by its true masters, and there will be no irremediable evil in human life. It will be understood that the divine miracles are those of eternal order, and the phantoms of imagination will be worshipped no longer on the faith of unexplained wonders. The abnormal character of certain phenomena is only a proof of our ignorance in the presence of the laws of Nature. When God designs to communicate the knowledge of Himself He enlightens our reason and does not seek to confound or surprise it. In that day we shall know the utmost limit of the power of man who is created in the image of God; we shall realise that he also is a creator in his own sphere and that his goodness, directed by Eternal Reason, is a lower providence for beings which are placed by Nature under his influence and domination. Religion will then and for evermore have nothing to fear from progress, and will follow in the course thereof. The Blessed Vincent de Lerins, a doctor justly venerated in the golden chain of catholicism, expresses admirably this accord between progress and conservative authority. According to him, true faith is worthy of our confidence only on account of that invariable authority which safeguards its dogmas from the caprices of human ignorance. “This notwithstanding,” adds Vincent de Lerins, “such immobility is not death; on the contrary, it preserves a germ of life for the future. That which we believe to-day without understanding will be understood by the future, which will rejoice in the knowledge thereof. Posteritas intellectum gratuletur, quod ante vetustas non intellectum venerabatur. If therefore we are asked whether all progress is excluded from the religion of Christ Jesus, the answer is no, assuredly, for great is the progress expected. Who indeed would be so jealous of humanity and at such enmity with God as to wish to hinder progress? But the condition is that it should be progress in reality, and not change of belief. Progress is the growth and development of each thing according to its class and its nature. Disorder is confusion and the medley of things and their nature. There must be undoubtedly a difference in the degrees of intelligence, science and wisdom, as much for men in general as for each man in particular, according to the natural succession of epochs in the Church, but so only that all be conserved and that dogma shall ever cherish the same spirit and maintain the same definition. Religion should develop souls successively, as life develops bodies which remain the same through all the stages of their growth. How great is the difference between the infantile flower of early years and the maturity of age. The old notwithstanding are the same in respect of personality as they were in boyhood; it is the exterior and the appearances which have changed. The limbs of an infant in the cradle are exceedingly frail, yet are they the same organs, having the same root principles, as those of the man; and this must be so, for otherwise there is deformity or death.

“The analogy obtains in the religion of Jesus Christ, for progress therein is fulfilled according to the same conditions and following similar laws. It grows with the years, with the years it increases in strength, but nothing is added to the sum total of its being. It was born complete and perfect in respect of proportions, and it grows and extends without changing. Our fathers sowed the wheat, and our nephews ought not to reap tares. The intermediate crops change nothing in the nature of the grain; we leave it perforce as we take it. Catholicism planted roses, and is it for us to substitute brambles? No, unquestionably; otherwise, woe to us. The balm and cinnamon of this spiritual paradise must not change in our hands to aconite and poison. All whatsoever which in the Church, that lovely land of God, has been sown by the fathers must be cultivated and nourished by the sons. This only must grow, and this alone blossom; but it may increase, and it should develop. As a fact, God permits that the dogmas of his heavenly philosophy shall be studied, developed, polished in a certain sense; but that which is forbidden is to change them, and that which is a crime is to prune them or to mutilate. May new light come down on them and the wise distinctions multiply, but let them ever preserve their fulness, their integrity and their native quality.”

Let us therefore take it for granted that all conquests of science in the past have been achieved for the profit of the universal Church, and, with Vincent de Lerins, let us allocate thereto the undivided heritage of all progress to come. Unto her be the great aspirations of Zoroaster and all discoveries of Hermes; hers be the Key of the Holy Arch and the Ring of Solomon, for she represents the holy and immutable hierarchy. She is stronger by reason of her struggles and is grounded by her apparent falls in still greater stability. She suffers in order that she may reign; she is cast down that she may be exalted in her rising; and she dies that she may rise again. “We must be prepared,” says Comte Joseph de Maistre, “for a great event in the divine order; we are moving towards it at an accelerated pace, which must be manifest to all observers, while striking oracles announce that the hour is at hand. Many prophecies in the Apocalypse have reference to these modern times. One writer has gone so far as to say that the event is already inaugurated and that the French nation is destined to become the great instrument of the most mighty of all revolutions. There is perhaps no truly religious man in all Europe—I speak of the educated classes—who is not in expectation of something extraordinary at this present moment. Does a general presentiment of the kind count for nothing? Go back through past ages, even to the birth of our Saviour. At that period a high and mysterious voice, beginning in the eastern realms, proclaimed that the East was about to triumph, that a conqueror would come out of Judea, that a divine infant was given us, that he would descend from highest heaven and restore the golden age upon the earth. Such ideas were spread abroad everywhere, and as they lent themselves to poetry above all things, they were taken over by the greatest of Latin poets and emblazoned with brilliant hues in his Pollio. To-day, as in the time of Virgil, the universe is in expectation, and how on our part shall we despise such strong persuasion, or by what right condemn those who are devoted to sacred researches on the indications of divine signs? If you seek proof of what is in store, look at the sciences themselves; consider the progress of chemistry, of astronomy also, and you will see where they are leading. Would you think, for example, that Newton takes us back to Pythagoras and that it will be proved presently that the heavenly bodies are set in motion, like human bodies, by intelligences joined thereto? We know not how, but this is what is on the point of being verified beyond all dispute. Such doctrine may seem paradoxical and even ridiculous, because current opinion imposes this view; but let us wait till the natural affinity of religion and science marry both in the mind of a single man of genius. His advent cannot be far off, and then the opinions which now seem bizarre or irrational will become axioms which no one will question, while people will talk of our present stupidity as they now speak of mediæval superstition.”[370]

According to St. Thomas, and it is a beautiful utterance: “All that God wills is just, but that which is just should not be so designated only because God wills it”—Non ex hoc dicitur justum quod Deus illud vult. The moral doctrine of the future is contained herein, and from its fruitful principle one deduction follows immediately: not only is it good from the standpoint of faith to do what is ordained by God, but even from the standpoint of reason it is excellent and rational to obey Him. Man can therefore say: I do good not only because God wills it but because I also will. The will of humanity may be thus at once free and in conformity, for reason—demonstrating in an irrecusable fashion the wisdom of the prescriptions of faith—will act on its proper impulse by following the divine law, of which reason thus becomes, as it were, the human sanction. From that time forward superstition and impiety will be no longer possible, while from these considerations it follows that in religion and in practical—that is to say, in moral—philosophy, there will be an absolute authority, and moral dogmas will alone be revealed and established. Till then we shall have the pain and consternation of seeing daily the most simple and universal questions of right and duty challenged, while if blasphemies are reduced to silence, it is one thing to impose such silence but another to persuade and convert.

So long as Transcendent Magic was profaned by the wickedness of men, the Church of necessity proscribed it. False Gnostics have discredited that name of Gnosticism which was once so pure; sorcerers have outraged the children of the Magi; but religion, that friend of tradition and guardian of the treasures of antiquity, can no longer reject a doctrine anterior to the Bible and in perfect accord with traditional respect for the past, as well as with our most vital hopes for progress in the future. The common people are initiated by toil and by faith into the right of property and knowledge. There will be always such a people, as there will be children always; but when the aristocracy, endowed with wisdom, shall become a mother to the people, the path of personal, successive, gradual emancipation will be open to all, and he that is called will thereby be enabled through his own efforts to attain the rank of the elect. This is that mystery of the future which antique initiation concealed in its dark recesses. The miracles of Nature made subject to the will of man are reserved for the elect to come. The crook of the priesthood shall become the rod of miracles; it was so in the time of Moses and of Hermes; it will be so again. The sceptre of the Magus will be that of the world’s king or emperor; and that person will by right be first among men who shall have shewn himself greatest of all in knowledge and in virtue. Magic, at that time, will be no longer an occult science except for the ignorant; it will be one that is incontestable for all. Then shall universal revelation resolder one to another all links of its golden chain; the human epic will close and even the efforts of Titans will have served only to restore the altar of the true God. All forms which have clothed the divine thought successively will be reborn immortal and perfect. All those features sketched by the successive art of nations will be united to form the perfect image of God. Having been purified and brought out of chaos, dogma will give birth naturally to an infallible ethic, and the social order will be constituted on this basis. Systems which are now in warfare are dreams of the twilight; let them pass. The sun shines and the earth follows its course; distracted is he who doubts that the day is coming. Distracted also are those who say that catholicism is only a dead trunk and that we must put the axe thereto. They do not see that beneath its dry bark the living tree is renewed unceasingly. Truth has no past and no future; it is eternal; it is not that which ends; it is our dream only. Hammer and hatchet, which destroy in the sight of man, are in God’s hand as the knife of a pruner, and the dead branches—being superstitions and heresies in religion, science and politics—can alone be lopped from the tree of everlasting convictions and beliefs.

It has been the purpose of this History of Magic to demonstrate, that, at the beginning, the symbols of religion were those also of science, which was then in concealment. May religion and science, reunited in the future, give help and shew love to one another, like two sisters, for theirs has been one cradle.

Here ends the History of Magic

APPENDIX

AUTHOR’S PREFACE PREFIXED TO THE FIRST EDITION[371]

The works of Éliphas Lévi on the science of the ancient magi are intended to form a complete course, divided into three parts. The first part contains the Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic; the second is The History of Magic; and the third will be published later under the title of The Key to the Great Mysteries. Taken separately, each of these parts gives a complete instruction and seems to contain the whole science; but in order to a full understanding of one it is indispensable to study the two others carefully.