Éliphas Lévi

The teaching

Taught from his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854 to 1856) and the books on magic that followed it.

To know, to dare, to will, to keep silent

Four conditions open the way, and Lévi calls them the four words of the magus: an intelligence lit by study, a boldness nothing can check, a will nothing can break, and a discretion nothing can corrupt or intoxicate. To know, to dare, to will and to keep silent are written, he says, on the four symbolic forms of the sphinx, the man, the lion, the bull and the eagle.

The magus is first master of himself. Until his passions obey him he commands nothing, and the long preparations of the old books are, in Lévi's reading, a schooling of the operator rather than a charm.

The great magical agent

All of Lévi's magic rests on one agent. There is, he teaches, a fluid and a force spread through all nature, at once bodily and spiritual, which he calls the astral light: a universal plastic mediator, the common receptacle of the vibrations of movement and of the images of forms, which may be called the imagination of nature. The ancients knew it under many names. It is the Telesma of Hermes, the Azoth of the alchemists, the serpent of the old symbols and the magnetic fluid of Mesmer. It keeps the images of all that has been, and from it come visions, dreams and the pictures that seers see.

The astral light is the instrument of the will. It moves by two forces, attraction and repulsion, and a trained will can gather it, project it and fix it. Everything magic does, it does through this light: the magus is one who has learned to direct it, and the visionary and the sorcerer are carried by it. Left blind and serving error, it is the serpent of temptation; ruled, it is the light of the work.

Balance, the law of all things

The law that rules the astral light, and everything else, is equilibrium. Every force rests on its opposite, and nothing stands that is not held between two: light and darkness, mercy and severity, the active and the passive, the man and the woman. The two pillars of Solomon's temple, Jachin and Boaz, one white and one black, are its sign, and the life of the world moves between them. Harmony, Lévi teaches, is born from the analogy of contraries, and the third term that reconciles two is the secret of the triangle. His Baphomet, which gathers every pair of opposites into one body, is taught part by part in Baphomet.

Analogy is the key to the whole science. The visible is the manifestation of the invisible, so that what is above is like what is below, and the small world of a human being answers to the great world in every part. Knowing the law of one level of being, the magus reasons to the others.

The will and the rite

The will grows by acts. An intention that never passes into an act is a vain intention, Lévi teaches, and the magus trains his will as an athlete trains the body, by steady action and by doing what is hard. Ceremonies, signs, perfumes and instruments have no power of their own. They gather the imagination and fix the will, and their worth is exactly the help they give to a will already formed. Superstition, he says, is what the word means: a sign that survives after its meaning is lost.

The pentagram and the elements

The sign of the will's rule is the pentagram, the star of the microcosm, and his rule of its points is taught in The pentagram. By it the magus commands the spirits of the four elements, the sylphs of air, the undines of water, the salamanders of fire and the gnomes of earth. He consecrates it by the elements, breathing on it, sprinkling it with water and drying it in the smoke of perfumes. But the elements obey only one who has first mastered them in himself.

The magic chain

No great work is done alone. To form the magic chain, Lévi teaches, is to create a current of ideas that produces faith and draws many wills into one circle of action. The chain is made by a shared rite, a shared sign and a discipline kept at fixed hours, and once formed it carries more force than any of its members could alone. It is how a master is followed, how a church endures and how a movement takes hold of a crowd, for good or for ill.

The tarot, the book of keys

Lévi holds the tarot to be a very old book of the Kabbalah, the book of Hermes, a key to every science. Its twenty-two trumps answer to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet: the Juggler to Aleph, the High Priestess to Beth, and so on down the series, with the unnumbered Fool placed at Shin, the twenty-first letter, and the World at Tau, the last. The four suits answer to the four letters of the divine name, wands to Yod, cups to He, swords to Vau and coins to the final He. His Dogme and his Rituel keep the same plan: each has twenty-two chapters, one for each letter and trump.

A prisoner with no books but a tarot, he writes, could in a few years gain a universal science by learning to use it, for its figures and numbers can be combined into every idea.

Evocation and its dangers

Lévi tells of one evocation of his own, in London in 1854, when after long preparation by abstinence and meditation he called on Apollonius of Tyana and a figure appeared before him. He does not claim that the dead returned. He holds that such rites work through the astral light on the imagination of the operator, that what appears is an image kept in that light and shaped by the operator's own mind rather than the soul of the dead, and that the work is dangerous: it exhausts the body, unsettles the reason and is never to be undertaken from curiosity. The house repeats his warning, performs nothing from his rite, and adds that no one whom a fast could harm should fast.

Black magic, in his teaching, is the will set to serve the passions and to harm, and it destroys the one who works it before anyone else. The devil, for Lévi, is no rival god but force put for a time at the service of error, and the magus whose will is joined to the order of the world has no pact to make with anything.