Persistence of occultism—It accompanies mystical activity—is often confused with it—It is a serious philosophy—Its claim stated and criticized—Its limits—It does not attain the Absolute—It influences all religion and some science—It is based on psychological laws—Its aim is to enlarge man’s universe—Its method is enhancement of the will—Modern magic—“New” Thought—The doctrines of Magic—Eliphas Lévi—Hermes Trismegistus—Three occult dogmas—(1) The Astral Light—antiquity of this idea—The Cosmic memory—The “universal agent”—(2) The Power of the Will—Occult education—a re-making of character—Magic ceremonies agents of will-enhancement—addressed to the subconscious mind—Value of liturgies—Symbols—they are (a) instruments of self-suggestion (b) autoscopes—(3) The Doctrine of Analogy—Its breadth of application—in mysticism—in art—Abnormal power of the trained will over the body—in religion—in producing transcendental consciousness—Mental healing purely magical—Attitude of occultism to suffering—The pure theory of magic—its defects—its influence on character—Magic and religion—Occult elements in Christianity—Ceremonial religion largely magical—This is necessarily so—The inner and the outer church—The Church of Mysticism and Church of Magic
It seems hardly necessary to examine in detail the mistakes—or, in ecclesiastical language, the heresies—into which men have been led by a feeble, a deformed, or an arrogant mystical sense. The number of such mistakes is countless; their wildness almost inconceivable to those who have not been forced to study them. Too often it has happened that the loud voices and strange declarations of their apostles have drowned the quieter accents of the orthodox.
It would seem as though the moment of puberty were far more critical in the spiritual than it is in the physical life: the ordinary dangers of adolescence being intensified when they appear upon the higher levels of consciousness. Man, becoming aware of a new power and new desires within him, abruptly subjected to the influx of new life, is dazzled and pleased by every brilliant and fantastic guess, every invitation, which is p. 179 offered to him. In the condition of psychic disorder which is characteristic of his movement to new states, he is unusually at the mercy of the suggestions and impressions which he receives. Hence in every period of mystical activity we find an outbreak of occultism, illuminism, or other perverted spirituality. In the youth of the Christian Church, side by side with the great Neoplatonists, we have the arrogant and disorderly transcendentalism of the Gnostics: their attempted fusion of the ideals of mysticism and magic. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance there is the spurious mysticism of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the occult propaganda of Paracelsus, the Rosicrucians, the Christian Kabalists; and the innumerable pantheistic, Manichean, mystery-making, and Quietist heresies which made war upon Catholic tradition. Usually owing their existence to the undisciplined will and imagination of some individual adventurer, these died with the death of his influence, and only the specialist in strange faiths now cares to trouble their graves.
But it is otherwise with the root idea whence these perverse activities most usually develop. This cannot be so easily dismissed, nor is it in our interest so to treat it; for, as Reality is best defined by means of negatives, so the right doctrine is often more easily understood after a consideration of the wrong. In the case of mysticism, which deals largely with the unutterable, and where language at once exact and affirmative is particularly hard to find, such a course is almost certain to help us. Leaving therefore the specifically mystical error of Quietism until we come to the detailed discussion of the states of orison, we will consider some of those other super-normal activities of the self which we have already agreed to classify as magic:1 and learn through them more of the hidden forces which she has at her command, the dangerous liberty which she enjoys in their regard.
- 1 Supra, p. 84. p. 179
The word “magic” is now out of fashion, though its spirit was never more widely diffused than at the present time. Thanks to the gradual debasement of the verbal currency, it suggests to the ordinary reader the art practised by Mr. Maskelyne. The shelf which is devoted to its literature at the London Library contains many useful works on sleight-of p. 180 hand and parlour tricks. It has dragged with it in its fall the terrific verb “to conjure,” which, forgetting that it once compelled the spirits of men and angels, is now content to produce rabbits from top-hats. This circumstance would have little more than philological importance, were it not that the true adepts of modern occultism—annoyed, one supposes, by this abuse of their ancient title—tend more and more to arrogate to their tenets and practices the name of “Mystical Science.” Vaughan, in his rather supercilious survey of the mystics, long ago classed all forms of white magic, alchemy, and occult philosophy as “theurgic mysticism,”2 and, on the other side of the shield, the occultists display an increasing eagerness to claim the mystics as masters in their school.3 Even the “three-fold way” of mysticism has been adopted by them, and relabelled “Probation, Enlightenment, Initiation.”4
- 2 R. A. Vaughan, “Hours with the Mystics,” vol. i. bk. i. ch. v. p. 180
- 3 In a list published by Papus from the archives of the Martinists, we find such diverse names as Averroes, St. Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, and Swedenborg, given as followers of the occult tradition! p. 180
- 4 See R. Steiner, “The Way of Initiation,” p. 111. p. 180
In our search for the characteristics of mysticism we have already marked the boundary which separates it from magic: and tried to define the true nature and intention of occult philosophy.5 Now, I think, we may usefully ask of magic in its turn what it can tell us of the transcendental powers and consciousness of man. We saw that it represented the instinctive human “desire to know more” applied to suprasensible things. For good or ill this desire and the occult sciences and magic arts which express it, have haunted humanity from the earliest times. No student of man dare neglect their investigation, however distasteful to his intelligence their superficial absurdities may be.
- 5 Supra, loc. cit. p. 180
The starting-point of all magic and of all magical religion—the best and purest of occult activities—is, as in mysticism, man’s inextinguishable conviction that there are other planes of being than those which his senses report to him; and its proceedings represent the intellectual and individualistic results of this conviction—his craving for the hidden knowledge. It is, in the eyes of those who practise it, a moyen de parvenir: not the performance of illicit tricks, but a serious and philo p. 181 sophic attempt to solve the riddle of the world. Its result, according to one of the best modern writers upon occult philosophy, “comprises an actual, positive, and realizable knowledge concerning the worlds which we denominate invisible, because they transcend the imperfect and rudimentary faculties of a partially developed humanity, and concerning the latent potentialities which constitute, by the fact of their latency—the interior man. In more strictly philosophical language, the Hermetic science is a method of transcending the phenomenal world and attaining to the reality which is behind phenomena.”6
- 6 A. E. Waite, “The Occult Sciences,” p. 1. p. 181
Though certain parts of this enormous claim seem able to justify themselves in experience, the whole of it cannot be admitted. The last phrase in particular is identical with the promise which we have seen to be characteristic of mysticism. It presents magic as a pathway to reality. We may as well say at once that this promise is not fulfilled; for the apparent transcending of phenomena does not necessarily entail the attainment of the Absolute. Such an attainment must, as its first condition, meet and satisfy upon the plane of reality each activity of the self: Love, Will, and Thought. Magic at its best only satisfies two of these claimants; and this by extending rather than escaping the boundaries of the phenomenal world. At its worst, it satisfies none. It stands for that form of transcendentalism which does abnormal things, but does not lead anywhere: and we are likely to fall victims to some kind of magic the moment that the declaration “I want to know” ousts the declaration “I want to be” from the chief place in our consciousness. The true “science of ultimates” must be a science of pure Being, for reasons which the reader is now in a position to discover for himself: but magic is merely a system whereby the self tries to assuage its transcendental curiosity by an extension of the activities of the will beyond their usual limits, obtaining by this means experimental knowledge of planes of existence usually—but inaccurately—regarded as “supernatural.”
It will, no doubt, be felt by those who are not occultists that even this modified claim needs justification. Few recognize that the whole business of the true magician is not with vulgar marvels, but with transcendental matters: fewer still that this p. 182 business may be prosecuted with honesty and success. The search after hidden things has become synonymous with foolish and disreputable deceits: and the small but faithful company of Thrice-great Hermes is confused with the army of camp-followers which preys upon its ranks.
Most persons who do not specialize in the eccentric sciences are of opinion that in these days the occultist can only be said to exist in either the commercial or the academic sense. The Bond Street palmist may represent one class; the annotator of improper grimoires the other. In neither department is the thing supposed to be taken seriously: it is merely the means of obtaining money or of assuaging a rather morbid curiosity.
Such a view is far from being accurate. In magic, whether we choose to regard it as a superstition or a science, we have at any rate the survival of a great and ancient tradition, the true splendour and meaning of whose title should hardly have been lost in a Christian country; for it claims to be the science of those Magi whose quest of the symbolic Blazing Star brought them once, at least, to the cradle of the Incarnate God. Its laws, and the ceremonial rites which express those laws, have come down to us from immemorial antiquity. They enshrine a certain definite knowledge, and a large number of less definite theories, concerning the sensual and supersensual worlds, and concerning powers which man, according to occult thinkers, may develop if he will. Orthodox persons should be careful how they condemn the laws of magic: for they unwittingly conform to many of them whenever they go to church. All formal religion is saturated with magic. The art of medicine will never wholly cast it off: many centuries ago it gave birth to that which we now call modern science. It seems to possess inextinguishable life. This is not surprising when we perceive how firmly occultism is rooted in psychology: how perfectly it is adapted to certain perennial characteristics of the human mind—its curiosity, its arrogance, its love of mystery.
Magic, in its perfect and uncorrupted form, claims to be a practical, intellectual, highly individualistic science, working towards a declared end: that, namely, of enlarging the sphere on which the will of man can work and obtaining experimental knowledge of planes of being usually regarded as transcen p. 183 dental. It is the last descendant of a long line of teaching—the whole teaching, in fact, of the mysteries of Egypt and Greece—which aims at initiating man into the secrets of knowledge, and aspires, egoistically, to an understanding of things. “In every man,” says a living occultist, “there are latent faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself knowledge of the higher worlds... as long as the human race has existed there have always been schools in which those who possessed these higher faculties gave instruction to those who were in search of them. Such are called the occult schools, and the instruction which is imparted therein is called esoteric science or the occult teaching.”7
- 7 Steiner, “The Way of Initiation,” p. 66. p. 183
These schools, at least as they exist in the present day, formulate the laws which govern occult phenomena in a manner which seems distressingly prosaic to the romantic inquirer; borrowing from physics and psychology theories of vibration, attraction, mental suggestion and subconscious activity which can be reapplied for their own purposes.
According to its modern teachers, magic is in essence simply an extension of the theory and practice of volition beyond the usual limits. The will, says the occultist, is king, not only of the House of Life, but of the universe outside the gates of sense. It is the key to “man limitless”; the true “ring of Gyges,” which can control the forces of nature, known and unknown. This aspect of occult philosophy informs much of the cheap American transcendentalism which is so lightly miscalled mystical by its teachers and converts; Menticulture, “New” or “Higher Thought,” and the scriptures of the so-called “New Consciousness.” The ingenious authors of “Volo,” “The Will to be Well,” and “Just How to Wake the Solar Plexus,” the seers who assure their eager disciples that by “Concentration” they may acquire not only health but also that wealth which is “health of circumstance,” are no mystics. They are magicians; and teach, though they know it not, little else but the cardinal doctrines of Hermetic science, omitting only their picturesque ceremonial accompaniments.8
- 8 See E. Towne, “Joy Philosophy” (1903) and “Just How to Wake the Solar Plexus” (1904); R. D. Stocker, “New Thought Manual” (1906) and “Soul Culture” (1905); Floyd Wilson, “Man Limitless” (1905). But the literature of these sects is enormous. p. 183
These cardinal doctrines, in fact, have varied little since their first appearance early in the world’s history: though, like the doctrines of theology, they have needed re-statement from time to time. In setting them out for the enlightenment of the modern reader, I shall quote largely from the works of Eliphas Lévi; the pseudonym under which Alphonse Louis Constant, probably the sanest and certainly the most readable occult philosopher of the nineteenth century, offered his conclusions to the world.
Eliphas Lévi found in the old magical tradition, rehandled in the terms of contemporary thought, an adequate theory of the universe and rule of practical life. In his writings, therefore, we see the Hermetic science under its most favourable aspect—Opus hierarchicum et Catholicum, as he proudly calls it upon the title-page of his great “Histoire de la Magie.” It is the one object of his later works to exhibit—indeed to exaggerate—its connection with true mysticism; to show that it is “Le Clef des Grands Mystères” which will open the gate of that Secret Garden on which the desire of the soul is ever set. The spectacle which he presents is that of a man of eager desires and natural intuitions, set, is is true, upon the quest of reality; but pursuing that quest by strange and twisted paths. It remains for us to examine with his help the nature of these paths and the prospects which they offer to other wayfarers.
The tradition of magic, like most other ways of escape which man has offered to his own soul, originated in the East. It was formulated, developed, and preserved by the religion of Egypt. It made an early appearance in that of Greece. It has its legendary grand master in Hermes Trismegistus, who gave to it its official name of Hermetic Science, and stands towards the magicians in much the same position as Moses occupied in the tradition of the Jews. Fragmentary writings attributed to this personage and contained in the so-called Hermetic books are the primitive scriptures of occultism: and the probably spurious Table of Emerald which is said to have been discovered in his tomb, ranks as the magician’s Table of Stone. In Gnosticism, in the superb allegories of the Kabalah, in much of the ceremonial of the Christian Church—finally, in secret associations which still exist in England, France, and Germany p. 185 —all that is best and truest in the “secret wisdom” of magical tradition has wandered down the centuries. Its baser offshoots, by which it is unfortunately represented to the crowd, are but too well known and need not be particularized.
Like the world which it professes to interpret, magic has a body and a soul: an outward vesture of words and ceremonies and an inner doctrine. The outward vesture, which is all that the uninitiated are permitted to perceive, is hardly attractive to the judicious eye of common sense. It consists of a series of confusing and often ridiculous symbolic veils: of strange words and numbers, grotesque laws and ritual acts, personifications and mystifications, wrapped one about the other as if the bewilderment of impatient investigators were its one design. The outward vestures of our religious, political, and social systems—which would probably appear equally irrational to a wholly ignorant yet critical observer—offer an instructive parallel to this aspect of occult philosophy.
Stripped of these archaic formulæ, symbols, mystery-mongerings, and other adventitious trappings, magic is found to rest upon three fundamental axioms; none of which can be dismissed as ridiculous by those who listen respectfully to the amazing and ever-shifting hypotheses of fashionable psychology and physics.
(1) The first of these axioms affirms the existence of an imponderable “medium” or “universal agent,” which is described as beyond the plane of our normal sensual perceptions yet interpenetrating and binding up the material world. This agent, which is not luminous and has nothing to do with the stars, is known to the occultists by the unfortunate name of “Astral Light”: a term, originally borrowed from the Martinists by Eliphas Lévi, to which the religious rummage-sales of current theosophy have since given a familiarity which treads upon the margin of contempt. To live in conscious communication with the “Astral Light” is to live upon the “Astral Plane,” or in the Astral World: to have risen, that is to say, to a new level of consciousness. The education of the occultist is wholly directed towards this end.
This doctrine of the Astral Plane, like most of our other diagrams of the transcendent, possesses not only a respectable ancestry, but also many prosperous relations in the world of p. 186 philosophic thought. Traces of it may even be detected under veils in the more recent speculations of orthodox physics. It is really identical with the “Archetypal World” or Yesod of the Kabalah—the “Perfect Land” of old Egyptian religion—in which exist the true or spirit forms of all created things. Perhaps it is connected with the “real world” described by such visionaries as Boehme and Blake. A persistent tradition as to the existence of such a plane of being or of consciousness is found all over the world: in Indian, Greek, Egyptian, Celtic, and Jewish thought. “Above this visible nature there exists another, unseen and eternal, which, when all things created perish, does not perish,” says the Bhagavad Gita. According to the Kabalists it is “the seat of life and vitality, and the nourishment of all the world.”9 Vitalism might accept it as one of those aspects of the universe which can be perceived by a more extended rhythm than that of normal consciousness. Various aspects of it have been identified with the “Burning Body of the Holy Ghost” of Christian Gnosticism and with the Odic force of the old-fashioned spiritualists.
- 9 A. E. Waite, “Doctrine and Literature of the Kabalah,” p. 48. p. 186
According to the doctrine of magic the Astral Plane constitutes the “Cosmic Memory,” where the images of all beings and events are preserved, as they are preserved in the memory of man.
“The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky”—
all are living in the Astral World. There too the concepts of future creation are present in their completeness in the Eternal Now, before being brought to birth in the material sphere. On this theory prophecy, and also clairvoyance—one of the great objects of occult education—consists in opening the eyes of the mind upon this timeless Astral World: and spiritualists, evoking the phantoms of the dead, merely call them up from the recesses of universal instead of individual remembrance. The reader who feels his brain to be whirling amidst this medley of solemn statement and unproven fairy tale must remember that at best the dogmatic part of the occult tradition can only p. 187 represent the attempt of an extended consciousness to find an explanation of its own experiences.
Further, in its strictly undenominational form, the Astral Light is first cousin to the intangible ether beloved of Sir Oliver Lodge and other transcendental physicists. In it our whole selves—not merely our sentient selves—are bathed; and here again we are reminded of Vitalism, with its unresting River of Life. Hence in occult language the all-penetrating Astral is a “universal agent”: the possible vehicle of hypnotism, telepathy, clairvoyance, and all those supernormal phenomena which science has taken out of the hands of the occultists and renamed metapsychic. This hypothesis also accounts for the confusing fact of an initial similarity of experience in many of the proceedings of mystic and occultist. Both must pass through the plane of consciousness which the concept of the “Astral” represents, because this plane of perception is the one which lies “next beyond” our normal life. The transcendental faculties, once they are freed, become aware of this world: only, in the case of the mystic, to pass through it as quickly as they can. The occultist, on the contrary, is willing to rest in the “Astral” and develop his perceptions of this aspect of the world. It is the medium in which he works.
From the earliest times, occult philosophy has proclaimed its knowledge of this medium: always describing its existence as a scientific fact, outside the range of our normal senses, but susceptible of verification by the trained powers of the initiate. The possessor of such trained powers, not the wizard or the fortune-teller, is to be regarded as the true magician: and it is the first object of occult education, or initiation, to actualize this supersensual plane of experience, to give the student the power of entering into conscious communion with it, and teach him to impose upon its forces the directive force of his own will, as easily as he imposes that will upon the “material” things of sense.10
- 10 For a more detailed discussion of this subject the reader is referred to Steiner’s exceedingly curious and interesting little book, “The Way of Initiation.” p. 187
(2) This brings us to the second axiom of magic, which also has a curiously modern air: for it postulates simply the limitless power of the disciplined human will. This dogma has been “taken over” without acknowledgment from occult philosophy p. 188 to become the trump card of menticulture, “Christian Science,” and “New Thought.” The preachers of “Joy Philosophy,” and other dilute forms of mental discipline, are the true priests of transcendental magic in the modern world.11
- 11 Compare the following: “Imagine that all the world and the starry hosts are waiting, alert and with shining eyes, to do your bidding. Imagine that you are to touch the button now, and instantly they will spring to do the rest. The instant you say, “I can and I will,” the entire powers of the universe are to be set in motion” (E. Towne, “Joy Philosophy,” p. 52). p. 188
The first lesson of the would-be magus is self-mastery. “By means of persevering and gradual athletics,” says Eliphas Lévi, “the powers of the body can be developed to an amazing extent. It is the same with the powers of the soul. Would you govern yourself and others? Learn how to will. How may one learn how to will? This is the first secret of magical initiation; and it was to make the foundations of this secret thoroughly understood that the antique keepers of the mysteries surrounded the approach to the sanctuary with so many terrors and illusions. They did not believe in a will until it had given its proofs; and they were right. Strength cannot prove itself except by conquest. Idleness and negligence are the enemies of the will; and this is the reason why all religions have multiplied their practices and made their cults difficult and minute. The more trouble one gives oneself for an idea, the more power one acquires in regard to that idea.... Hence the power of religions resides entirely in the inflexible will of those who practise them.”12
- 12 “Rituel de la Haute Magie,” pp. 35, 36. p. 188
In its essence, then, magical initiation is a traditional form of mental discipline, strengthening and focussing the will. By it, some of those powers of apprehension which lie below the threshold of ordinary consciousness are liberated, and enabled to report their discoveries to the active and sentient mind. This discipline, like that of the religious life, consists partly in physical austerities and in a deliberate divorce from the world, partly in the cultivation of will-power: but largely in a yielding of the mind to the influence of suggestions which have been selected and accumulated in the course of ages because of their power over that imagination which Eliphas Lévi calls “The eye of the soul.” There is nothing supernatural about it. Like the more arduous, more disinterested self-training of the mystic, it is character-building with an object, conducted upon an heroic p. 189 scale. In magic the “will to know” is the centre round which the personality is rearranged. As in mysticism, subconscious factors are dragged from the hiddenness to form part of that personality. The uprushes of thought, the abrupt intuitions which reach us from the subliminal region, are developed, ordered, and controlled by rhythms and symbols which have become traditional because the experience of centuries has proved, though it cannot explain, their efficacy.
“The fundamental principle,” says A. E. Waite, speaking of occult evocations, “was in the exercise of a certain occult force resident in the magus and strenuously exerted for the establishment of such a correspondence between two planes of nature as would effect his desired end. This exertion was termed the evocation, conjuration, or calling of the spirit, but that which in reality was raised was the energy of the inner man; tremendously developed and exalted by combined will and aspiration, this energy germinated by sheer force a new intellectual faculty of sensible psychological perception. To assist and stimulate this energy into the most powerful possible operation, artificial means were almost invariably used. ... The synthesis of these methods and processes was called Ceremonial Magic, which in effect was a tremendous forcing-house of the latent faculties of man’s spiritual nature.”13
- 13 “The Occult Sciences,” p. 14. p. 189
This is the psychological explanation of those apparently absurd rituals of preparation, doctrines of signs and numbers, pentacles, charms, angelical names, the “power of the word” and all the rest, which go to make up ceremonial magic. The power of such artifices is known amongst the Indian mystics, who, recognizing in the Mantra, or occult and rhythmic formula, consciously held and repeated, an invaluable help to the attainment of the true ecstatic states, are not ashamed to borrow them from the magicians. So, too, the modern American schools of mental healing and New Thought recommend concentration upon a carefully selected word as the starting-point of efficacious meditation. This fact of the enormous psychical effect of certain verbal combinations, when allowed to dominate the field of consciousness, is the practical reason of that need of a formal liturgy which is felt by nearly every great religion: for religion, on its ceremonial side, is always largely magical. It, too, seeks p. 190 by artificial means to stimulate latent energies. The true magic “word” or spell is untranslatable; because its power resides only partially in that outward sense which is apprehended by the reason, but chiefly in the rhythm, which is addressed to the subliminal mind. Did the Catholic Church choose to acknowledge a law long known to the adepts of magic, she has here an explanation of that instinct which has caused her to cling so strenuously to a Latin liturgy, much of whose amazing and truly magic power would evaporate were it translated into the vulgar tongue. Symbols, religious and other, and symbolic acts which appear meaningless when judged by the intellect alone, perform a similar office. They express the deep-seated instinct of the human mind that it must have a focus on which to concentrate its volitional powers, if those powers are to be brought to their highest state of efficiency. The nature of the focus matters little: its office matters much. I give a short extract from the “Rituel de la Haute Magie,” which sufficiently exhibits Lévi’s opinion on this subject. Many of its phrases might be fresh from the pen of the newest American psychologist.
“... All these figures, and acts analogous to them, all these dispositions of numbers and of characters [i.e. sacred words, charms, pentacles, &c.] are, as we have said, but instruments for the education of the will, of which they fix and determine the habits. They serve also to concentrate in action all the powers of the human soul, and to strengthen the creative power of the imagination. ... A practice, even though it be superstitious and foolish, may be efficacious because it is a realization of the will. ... We laugh at the poor woman who denies herself a ha’porth of milk in the morning, that she may take a little candle to burn upon the magic triangle in some chapel. But those who laugh are ignorant, and the poor woman does not pay too dearly for the courage and resignation which she thus obtains. The wise pass proudly by shrugging their shoulders. They attack superstition with a clamour which shakes the world: and what happens? The houses which they build fall down, and their debris are re-sold to the providers and purchasers of little candles; who willingly allow it to be said that their power is at an end, since they know that their reign is eternal.”14
- 14 “Rituel de la Haute Magie,” p. 71. p. 190
Magic symbols, therefore, from penny candles to Solomon’s seal, fall, in modern technical language, into two classes. The first contains instruments of self-suggestion, exaltation, and will direction. To this belong all spells, charms, rituals, perfumes: from the magician’s vervain wreath to the “Youth! Health! Strength!” which the student of New Thought repeats when she is brushing her hair in the morning. The second class contains autoscopes: i.e., material objects which focus and express the subconscious perceptions of the operator. The dowser’s divining rod, fortune-teller’s cards, and crystal-gazer’s ball, are characteristic examples. Both kinds are rendered necessary rather by the disabilities of the human than by the peculiarities of the superhuman plane: and the great adept, like the great saint, may attain heights at which he can entirely dispense with these “outward and visible signs.” “Ceremonies being, as we have said, artificial methods of creating certain habits of the will, they cease to be necessary when these habits have become fixed.”15 This is a point at which the history of magic lights up for us certain peculiarities in the history of mysticism.
- 15 “Rituel de la Haute Magie,” p. 139. p. 191
These facts, now commonplaces of psychology, have been known and used by students of magic for countless generations. Those who decry the philosophy because of the apparent absurdity of its symbols and ceremonies should remember that the embraces, gestures, grimaces, and other ritual acts by which we all concentrate, liberate, or express love, wrath, or enthusiasm, will ill endure the cold revealing light of a strictly rational inquiry.
(3) To the two dogmas of the “Astral Light” or universal agent and the “power of the will” there is to be added a third: the doctrine of Analogy, or implicit correspondence between appearance and reality, the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the universe, the seen and the unseen worlds. In this, occultism finds the basis of all its transcendental speculations. Quod superius sicut quod inferius—the first words of that Emerald Table which was once attributed to Hermes Trismegistus himself—is an axiom which must be agreeable to all Platonists. It plays an enormous part in the theory of mysticism, which has always assumed that the path of the individual soul towards loving union with the Absolute is p. 192 strictly analogous with the path on which the universe moves to its consummation in God.
The notion of analogy ultimately determines the religious concepts of every race, and resembles the verities of faith in the breadth of its application: for it embraces alike the appearances of the visible world—which thus become the mirrors of the invisible—the symbols of religion, the tiresome arguments of Butler’s “Analogy,” the sublime allegories of the Kabalah and the spiritual alchemists, and that childish “doctrine of signatures” on which much of mediaeval science was built.
“Analogy,” says Lévi,16 “is the last word of science and the first word of faith ... the sole possible mediator between the visible and the invisible, between the finite and the infinite.” Here Magic clearly defines her own limitations; stepping incautiously from the useful to the universal, and laying down a doctrine which no mystic could accept—which, carried to its logical conclusion, would turn the adventure of the infinite into a guessing game.
- 16 “Dogme de la Haute Magie,” p. 361 et seq. p. 192
“Analogy,” he says again—and this time, perhaps, with more propriety—“is the key of all the secrets of nature: ... this is why religions seem to be written in the heavens and in all nature: this must be so, for the work of God is the book of God, and in that which he writes one should see the expression of his thought and consequently of his Being, since we conceive of him only as Supreme Thought.”17 Here we have a hint of that idealistic element which is implicit in occultism: as even the wildest heresies retain traces of the truths which they pervert.
- 17 Ibid., p. 363. p. 192
The argument by analogy is carried by the occultists to lengths which can hardly be set down in this place. Armed with this torch, they explore the darkest, most terrible mysteries of life: and do not hesitate to cast the grotesque shadows of these mysteries upon the unseen world. The principle of correspondence is no doubt a sound one, so long as it works within reasonable limits. It was admitted into the system of the Kabalah, though that astute philosophy was far from giving to it the importance which it assumes in Hermetic science. It has been accepted eagerly by many of the mystics. Boehme and Swedenborg gladly availed themselves of its method in presenting their intuitions to the world. It is implicitly ac p. 193 knowledged by thinkers of innumerable other schools: its influence permeates the best periods of literature. Sir Thomas Browne spoke for more than himself when he said, in a well-known passage of the “Religio Medici”: “The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes [i.e. Trismegistus] that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that invisible framework.” Such a sense of analogy, whatever the “severe schools” may say, is the foundation of every perfect work of art. “Intuitive perception of the hidden analogies of things,” says Hazlitt in “English Novelists,” “or, as it may be called, his instinct of the imagination, is perhaps what stamps the character of genius on the productions of art more than any other circumstance.”
The central doctrine of magic may now be summed up thus:—
(1) That a supersensible and real “cosmic medium” exists, which interpenetrates, influences, and supports the tangible and apparent world, and is amenable to the categories both of philosophy and of physics.
(2) That there is an established analogy and equilibrium between the real and unseen world, and the illusory manifestations which we call the world of sense.
(3) That this analogy may be discerned, and this equilibrium controlled, by the disciplined will of man, which thus becomes master of itself and of fate.
We must now examine in more detail the third of these propositions—that which ascribes abnormal powers to the educated and disciplined will: for this assumption lies at the root of all magical practices, alike of the oldest and the newest schools. “Magical operations,” says Eliphas Lévi, “are the exercise of a power which is natural, but superior to the ordinary powers of nature. They are the result of a science, and of habits, which exalt the human will above its usual limits.”18 This power of the will is daily gaining recognition in the camps of science, as the chief factor in religion and in therapeutics—the healing of the body and the healing of the soul—for our most advanced theories on these subjects are little more p. 194 than the old wine of magic in new bottles. The accredited psychological theory of religious “experience,” for instance, rests upon the hypothesis that by self-suggestion, by a deliberate cultivation of the “will-to-believe,” and similar means, it is possible to shift the threshold of consciousness, and to exhibit those supernormal perceptions which are variously attributed to inspiration and to disease. This is exactly what ceremonial magic professes, in milder and more picturesque language, to do for her initiates: and all such deliberate processes of conversion are, on their psychological side, the results of an involuntary obedience to the laws of Hermetic science. The ancient occultists owed much of their power, and also of their evil reputation, to the fact that they were psychologists before their time.
- 18 “Rituel de la Haute Magie,” p. 32. p. 193
Recipes for the alteration and exaltation of personality and for the enhancement of will-power, the artificial production of photisms, automatisms, and ecstasy, with the opening up of the subliminal field which accompanies these phenomena—concealed from the profane by a mass of confusing allegories and verbiage—form the backbone of all genuine occult rituals. Their authors were perfectly aware that ceremonial magic has no objective importance, but depends solely on its effect upon the operator’s mind. In order that this effect might be enhanced, it was given an atmosphere of sanctity and mystery; its rules were strict, its higher rites difficult of attainment. It constituted at once a test of the student’s earnestness and a veil which guarded the sanctuary from the profane. The long and difficult preparations, majestic phrases, and strange ceremonies of an evocation had power, not over the spirit of the dead, but over the consciousness of the living, who was thus caught up from the world of sense to a new plane of perception. For him, not for unknown Powers, were these splendours and these arts displayed. The rationale of the evocation of an angel consists, not in summoning spirits from afar, but in opening the operator’s eyes upon angels who are always there.
“When the spiritual exaltation of the Magus has been accomplished by ... various ceremonial practices, the spirit is, in magical language, compelled to appear. That is to say, the operator has passed into a condition when it would be as p. 195 impossible for a spirit to remain invisible to him as for an ordinary mortal to conceal itself from our common sight, without any intervening shelter, in the blaze of a noonday sun.”19 Thus the whole education of the genuine occult student tends to awaken in him a new view and a new attitude. It adjusts the machinery of his cinematograph to the registering of new intervals in the stream of things, which passed it by before; and thus introduces new elements into that picture by which ordinary men are content to know and judge the—or rather their—universe.
- 19 A. E. Waite, “The Occult Sciences,” p. 32. p. 195
“In the end,” says Steiner, with the usual exaggeration of the professional occultist, “it all resolves itself into the fact that man, ordinarily, carries body, soul, and spirit about with him, yet is conscious only of the body, not of the soul and spirit; and that the student attains to a similar consciousness of soul and spirit also.”20
- 20 “The Way of Initiation,” p. 142. p. 195
So much for the principles which govern occult education. Magic therapeutics, or as it is now called, “mental healing,” is but the application of these principles upon another plane. It results, first, from a view of humanity which sees a difference only of degree between diseases of body and of soul, and can state seriously and in good faith that “moral maladies are more contagious than physical, and there are some triumphs of infatuation and fashion which are comparable to leprosy or cholera.”21 Secondly, it is worked by that enhancement of will power, that ability to alter and control weaker forms of life, which we have seen to be the reward of the occult discipline. “All the power of the occult healer lies in his conscious will and all his art consists in producing faith in the patient.”22
This simple truth was in the possession of the magi at a time when Church and State saw no third course between the burning or beatification of its practitioners. Now, under the polite names of mental hygiene, suggestion, and therapeutics, it is steadily advancing to the front rank of medical shibboleths. Yet it is still the same “magic art” which has been employed for centuries, with varying ritual accompaniments, by the adepts p. 196 of occult science. The methods of Brother Hilarian Tissot, who is described as curing lunacy and crime by “the unconscious use of the magnetism of Paracelsus,” who attributed his cases “either to disorder of the will or to the perverse influence of external wills,” and would “regard all crimes as acts of madness and treat the wicked as diseased,”23 anticipated the discoveries of Charcot and Janet.
- 23 “Dogme,” p. 134. p. 196
But in spite of the consistent employment by all the great adepts of their “occult” or supernormal power in the healing and the prevention of disease, on its philosophic side magic, like Christianity, combines a practical policy of pity for the maimed, halt, and blind, with a creed of suffering and renunciation. Here it joins hands with mysticism and proclaims its belief in pain as the schoolmaster of every spirit which desires to transcend the life of sense. Eliphas Lévi, whilst advising the initiate whose conscious will has reached its full strength to employ his powers in the alleviation of pain and prolongation of life, laughs at the student who seeks in magic a method of escaping suffering or of satisfying his own selfish desires. None, he says, knows better than the true magician that suffering is of the essence of the world plan. Only those who face it truly live. “Alas for the man who will not suffer! He will be crushed by griefs.”24 Again—perhaps his finest utterance—“To learn to suffer and to learn to die; this is the gymnastic of Eternity, the noviciate of immortal life.”25
Here, then, is the pure theory of magic. It is seen at its best in Eliphas Lévi’s works; because he was, in some respects, greater than the system which he preached. Towards the close of his life the defective and limited nature of that system became clear to him, and in his latest writings he makes no secret of this fact. The chief of these defects is the peculiar temper of mind, the cold intellectual arrogance, the intensely individual point of view which occult studies seem to induce by their conscious quest of exclusive power and knowledge, their implicit neglect of love. At bottom, every student of occultism is striving towards a point at which he may be able to “touch the button” and rely on the transcendental world “springing to do the rest.” In this hard-earned acquirement of power over the p. 197 Many, he tends to forget the One. In Lévi’s words, “Too deep a study of the mysteries of nature may estrange from God the careless investigator, in whom mental fatigue paralyses the ardours of the heart.”26 When he wrote this sentence Lévi stood, as the greater occultists have often done, at the very frontiers of mysticism. The best of the Hermetic philosophers, indeed, are hardly ever without such mystical hankerings, such flashes of illumination; as if the transcendental powers of man, once roused from sleep, cannot wholly ignore the true end for which they were made.
- 26 “Histoire de la Magie,” p. 514. p. 197
In Lévi’s case, as is well known, the discord between the occult and mystical ideals was resolved by that return to the Catholic Church which has always amazed and sometimes annoyed his commentators. Characteristically, he “read into” Catholicism much that the orthodox would hardly allow; so that it became for him, as it were, a romantic gloss on the occult tradition. He held that the Christian Church, nursing mother of the mystics, was also the heir of the magi; and that popular piety and popular magic veiled the same ineffable truths.
He had more justification than at first appears probable for this apparently wild and certainly heretical statement. Religion, as we have seen, can never entirely divorce herself from magic: for her rituals and sacraments, whatever explanations of their efficacy may be offered by their official apologists, have, and must have if they are to be successful in their appeal to the mind, a magical character. All persons who are naturally drawn towards the ceremonial aspect of religion, are really devotees of the higher magic: are acknowledging the strange power of subtle rhythms, symbolic words and movements, over the human will. An “impressive service” conforms exactly to the description which I have already quoted of a magical rite: it is “a tremendous forcing-house of the latent faculties of man’s spiritual nature.” Sacraments, too, however simple their beginnings, always tend, as they evolve, to assume upon the phenomenal plane a magical aspect. Those who have observed with understanding, for instance, the Roman rite of baptism, with its spells and exorcisms, its truly Hermetic employment of salt, anointing chrism and ceremonial lights, must have seen in p. 198 it a ceremony far nearer to the operations of white magic than to the simple lustrations practised by St. John the Baptist.
There are obvious objections to the full working out of this subject in a book which is addressed to readers of all shades of belief; but any student who is interested in this branch of religious psychology may easily discover for himself the numerous and well-marked occult elements in the liturgies of the Christian—or indeed of any other—Church. There are invocative arrangements of the Names of God which appear alike in grimoire and in Missal; sacred numbers, ritual actions, perfumes, purifications, words of power, hold as important a place in religion as in magic. In certain minor observances, and charm-like prayers, we seem to stand on the very borderland between magician and priest.
It is inevitable that this should be so. The business of the Church is to appeal to the whole man, as she finds him living in the world of sense. She would hardly be adequate to this task did she neglect the powerful weapons which the occult tradition has put into her hand. She knows, implicitly, that only under those ecstatic conditions which it is the very object of magic to induce, can normal man open his door upon the Infinite, and let those subconscious powers which are the media of all our spiritual experiences emerge and peep for a moment upon the transcendental world. She, who takes the simplest and most common gifts of nature and transmutes them into heavenly food, takes also every discovery which the self has made concerning its own potentialities, and turns them to her own high ends. Founding her external system on sacraments and symbols, on rhythmic invocations and ceremonial acts of praise, insisting on the power of the pure and self-denying will and the “magic chain” of congregational worship, she does but join hands with those Magi whose gold, frankincense, and myrrh were the first gifts that she received.
But she pays for this. She shares the limitations of the system which her Catholic nature has compelled her to absorb. It is true, of course, that she purges it of all its baser elements—its arrogance, its curiosity—true also that she is bound to adopt it because it is the highest common measure which she can apply to the spirituality of that world to which she is sent. But she cannot—and her great teachers have always known p. 199 that she cannot—extract finality from a method which does not really seek after ultimate things. This method may and does teach men goodness, gives them happiness and health. It can even induce in them a certain exaltation in which they become aware, at any rate for a moment, of the existence of a transcendental world—a stupendous accomplishment. But it will never of itself make them citizens of that world: give to them the freedom of Reality.
“The work of the Church in the world,” says Patmore, “is not to teach the mysteries of life, so much as to persuade the soul to that arduous degree of purity at which God Himself becomes her teacher. The work of the Church ends when the knowledge of God begins.”27 Thus in spite of persistent efforts to the contrary, there will always be an inner and an outer Church: the inner Church of the mystics who know, the outer Church which, operating beneficently it is true, but—roughly speaking—upon the magical plane, only knows about. The New Testament is not without its reminders that this was bound to be the case.28