Imagination's Real (God In My Brain) -- For D.D. at 69

Magic, being the science of universal equilibrium, and having the truth, reality and reason of being for its absolute principle, accounts for all the antimonies and reconciles all actualities which are in conflict with one another by the one generating principle of every synthesis – that harmony results from the analogy of opposites.  

For the initiate of this science religion is not in doubt because it exists, and we do not deny what is.  Being is being.  The apparent opposition of religion and reason is the strength of both, establishing each in its distinct domain and fructifying the negative side of each by the positive side of the other : as we have just said, it is the attainment of agreement by the correspondence of things that are contrary.  The cause of all religious errors and confusions is that in ignorance of this great law, it has been sought to make religion a philosophy 
and philosophy in its turn a religion.

Dave Davies: Imagination's Real (link) 

Sculptures:  Dan Flavin

Text:  Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant), The History of Magic

Imagination's Real (God In My Brain) -- For D.D. at 65

Magic, being the science of universal equilibrium, and having the truth, reality and reason of being for its absolute principle, accounts for all the antimonies and reconciles all actualities which are in conflict with one another by the one generating principle of every synthesis – that harmony results from the analogy of opposites.  

For the initiate of this science religion is not in doubt because it exists, and we do not deny what is.  Being is being.  The apparent opposition of religion and reason is the strength of both, establishing each in its distinct domain and fructifying the negative side of each by the positive side of the other : as we have just said, it is the attainment of agreement by the correspondence of things that are contrary.  The cause of all religious errors and confusions is that in ignorance of this great law, it has been sought to make religion a philosophy and philosophy in its turn a religion.

Dave Davies: Imagination's Real (link) 

Sculptures:  Dan Flavin

Text:  Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant), The History of Magic

Magic: My Fear Is For Those Who Fear Him (Eliphas Levi)

      For a great number of readers Magic is the science of the devil – even as the science of light is identified with that of darkness.  We confess boldly at the outset that we are not in terror of the devil.   “My fear is for those who fear him,” said St. Teresa.  But we testify also that he does not prompt our laughter and that the ridicule of which he is often the object seems to us exceedingly misplaced.  However this may be, it is our intention to bring him before the light of science.  But the devil and science – the apposition of two names so strangely incongruous – must seem to have disclosed the whole intent in view.  If the mystic personification of darkness be thus dragged into the light, is it not to annihilate the phantom of falsehood in the presence of truth? Is it not to dispel in the day all formless monsters of the night? Superficial persons will think so and will condemn without hearing.  Ill-instructed Christians will conclude that we are sapping the fundamental dogma of their ethics by decrying hell; and others will question the utility of combating error in which, as they imagine, no one believes longer.  It is, therefore, important to enunciate our object clearly and establish our principles solidly.

      We say, therefore, to Christians that the author of this book is a Christian like yourselves.  His faith is that of a catholic strongly and deeply convinced; for this reason he does not come forward to deny dogmas, but to combat impiety under its most pernicious forms, which are those of false belief and superstition.  He comes to drag from the darkness the black successor of Ahriman, in order to expose in broad day his colossal impotence and redoubtable misery.  He comes to make subject the  age-long problem of evil to the solutions of science, to uncrown the king of hell and bow down his head at the foot of the cross.  Is it not virginal and maternal science -- that science of which Mary is the sweet and luminous image – destined like her to crush the head of the old serpent?

 

NOTE:  I greatly enjoy reading Eliphas Levi's History of Magic in the kinetic A.E. Waite translation, but I would like to say that I object to the image of crushing "the head of the old serpent."  There are many serpents I like and admire.  Leave serpents alone.  There are enough human malefactors about.

Rothko Sunday (Paracelsus 3)

           Of such were the secrets known by Paracelsus, and it was in the application of these hidden natural forces to purposes of medicine that he made at once so many admirers and enemies.  For the rest, he was by no means a simple personality like Postel;  he was naturally aggressive and of the mountebank type; so did he affirm that his familiar spirit was hidden in the pommel of his great sword, and never left his side.  His life was an unceasing struggle; he travelled, debated, wrote, taught.  He was more eager about physical results than moral conquests, and while first among practical magicians he was last among adepts of wisdom.  

           His philosophy was one of sagacity and, on his own part, he termed it philosophia sagax. [1]   He divined more than anyone without knowing anything completely.  There is nothing to equal his intuitions, unless it  be the rashness of his commentaries.   He was a man of intrepid experiences, intoxicated with his own opinions, his own talk, intoxicated otherwise on occasion, if we may believe some of his biographers.  The works which he has left are precious for science, but they must be read with caution.  He may be called the divine Paracelsus, understood in the sense of diviner; he is an oracle, but not a true master.  He is great above all as a physician, for he had found the Universal Medicine.   

          This notwithstanding, he could not prolong his own life, and he died, while still young, worn out by work and by excesses. [2]   He left behind him a name shining with fantastic and ambiguous glory, due to discoveries by which his contemporaries failed to profit.  He had not uttered his last word, and is one of those mysterious beings of whom it may be said, as of Enoch and St. John:  He is not dead, and he will come again upon earth before his last day.

[1]  This is really the title of a particular treatise, but it is exceedingly long and may be said to be de omnibus rebus, it may be not taken unjustly to represent his philosophy at large.

[2]  The latest and most successful apologist of Paracelsus says that the charge of intemperance was invented by his enemies.  See the Life of Paracelsus, by Miss Anna M. Stoddart, 1911.

Eliphas Levi, The History of Magic (Including A Clear And Precise Exposition Of Its Procedure, Its Rites And Its Mysteries), 1860 (translated by A.E. Waite, 1913). Float.  Serene.  Occupy.

Paracelsus 2: Palingenesis (The Jugglers)

John Gautz, Man Levitating, 1820

        "At Baroche,” says the estimable traveller Tavernier, [1] “there is a first-class English house, which I reached on a certain day with the English president, on my way from Agra to Surat.  There came also certain jugglers, asking leave to exhibit some of their professional skill, and the president was curious to see it.  In the first place they lighted a great fire, at which they heated iron chains, then wound them around their bodies and pretended that they were suffering in consequence, but no harm followed.   They next took a morsel of wood, set it in the ground and asked one of the spectators to choose what fruit he liked.  His choice fell upon mangoes, and thereupon one of the performers put a shroud about him and squatted on the ground five or six times.  I had the curiosity to ascend to an upper room, where I could see through a fold in the sheet what was being done by the man.  He was actually cutting the flesh under the armpits with a razor, and rubbing the wood with his blood.  Each time he rose up the wood grew visibly;  on the third occasion there were branches and buds thereon, on the fourth the tree was covered with leaves, and on the fifth it was bearing flowers.

Howard Thurston theatrical poster, early 20th century

        The English president had brought his chaplain Amadabat to baptise the child of the Dutch commander, the president acting as godfather.  The Dutch, it should be mentioned, do not have chaplains except where soldiers and merchants are gathered together.  The English clergyman began by protesting that he could not consent to Christians assisting at such spectacles, and when he saw how the performers brought from a bit of dry wood, in less than half an hour, a tree of four or five feet in height, having leaves and flowers as in springtime, he felt it his duty to put an end to the business.  He announced therefore that he would not administer communion to those who persisted in witnessing such occurrences.  The president was thus compelled to dismiss the jugglers."

Hindu Jugglers, 1822

      Dr.  Clever de Maldigny [2], to whom we owe this extract, regrets that the growth of the mangoes was thus stopped abruptly, but he does not explain the occurrence.  To our mind it was a case of fascination by the magnetism of the radiant light of blood, a phenomenon of magnetised electricity, identical with that termed palingenesis (παλιγγενεσια), by which a living plant is made to appear in a vessel containing ashes of the same plant long since perished.

Ramo Samee, the most famous Indian juggler, performing at the Royal Coburg Theater (later the Old Vic), London, 1822. ("Is it then a trifling power we see at work, or is it not something next to miraculous! It is the utmost stretch of human ingenuity." William Hazlitt on Ramo Samee: from The Indian Jugglers in Table Talk, 1828 (link))

[1]   From:  Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, en Turque, en Perse et aux Indes, Paris, 1676.

[2]  Source not cited by E. Levi. However, the Baron de Maldigny, a surgeon in the Royal Guards of France, is known for  successfully performing a lithotomy on himself before a mirror, thus relieving himself of excruciating pain. This achievement is cited in Dr. Leonard J.T. Murphy's article Self-Performed Operations for Stone in the Bladder, British Journal of Urology, Vol. 41, October 1969,  pp. 515-29.

 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in Oriental Costume, 1679

 Sparrows in a mango tree, Jaipur

Eliphas Levi, The History of Magic (Including A Clear And Precise Exposition Of Its Procedure, Its Rites And Its Mysteries), 1860 (translated by A.E. Waite, 1913)

Paracelsus (From Eliphas Levi -- The History Of Magic)

Quentin Massys, Portrait of Paracelsus, 1528, Oil on panel, Louvre, Paris 

        Let us pass to another maniac who was called Theophrastus Aureolus Bombast and was known in the World of Magic under the famous name of Paracelsus. [1]  

Let both the said pieces of Money be engraven only on one side, in the hour of the said conjunction of Mercury and Mars; and let them be so kept, that they touch not one another. The right-hand Lamen (or coin, medallion) seems to represent Mars piercing Venus.

       There is no need to recapitulate what has been said concerning this master in our Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic, but something may be added on the occult medicine restored by Paracelsus.  This truly universal medicine is based on a spacious theory of light, called by adepts fluid or potable gold.

Potable Gold

  

       Light, that creative agent, the vibrations of which are the movement and light of all things; light, latent in the universal ether, radiating about absorbing centres, which, being saturated thereby, project movement and light in their turn, so forming creative currents; light, astralised in the stars, animalized in animals, humanized in human beings; light, which vegetates in plants, glistens in metals, produces all forms of nature and equilibrates all by the laws of universal sympathy – this is that light which exhibits the phenomena of magnetism, divined by Paracelsus, which tinctures the blood, being released from the air as it is inhaled and discharged by the hermetic bellows of the lungs.

"The stubble on my chin knows more than you and all your scribes, my shoe buckles are more learned than your Galen and Avicenna, and my beard has more experience than all your high colleges!"  

-- Paracelsus, Der grossen Wundartzney (The Great Surgery), Augsburg, 1536. (Roderick Bowen Library and Archives, University of Wales).

       The blood then becomes a true elixir of life, wherein ruby and magnetic globules of vital light float in a slightly gilded fluid. These globules are actual seeds, ready to assume all forms of that world whereof the human body is an abridgement.  They can become rarefied and coagulated, so renewing the humours which circulate in the nerves and in the flesh encompassing the bones.  They radiate outside, or rather, in rarefying, they are drawn by the currents of light and circulate in the astral body – that interior and luminous body which is dilated by the imagination of ecstatic, so that their blood sometimes colours objects at a distance when these have been penetrated and identified with the astral body.  

       In a special work on occult medicine that which is stated here will be proved, however strange and paradoxical it may seem at first sight to men of science. Such were the bases of medicine as put forward by Paracelsus.

-- Eliphas Levi, The History of Magic (Including A Clear And Precise Exposition Of Its Procedure, Its Rites And Its Mysteries), 1860 (translated by A.E. Waite, 1913)

[1]  Paracelsus (born Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 11 November or 17 December 1493 – 24 September 1541) was a Swiss Renaissance physician, botanist, alchemist, astrologer, and general occultist.  "Paracelsus," meaning "equal to or greater than Celsus," refers to the Roman encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus from the 1st century, known for his tract on medicine. He is also credited for giving zinc its name, calling it zincum, and is regarded as the first systematic botanist.

   

Magic 2 -- The Rose

 

      Whilst religious wars incarnadined the world, secret illuministic associations, which were nothing but theurgic and magical schools, were incorporated in Germany. The most ancient of these seems to have been that of the  Rosicrucians, whose symbols go back to the times of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, as we see by the allegories in the poem of Dante and by the emblem in the Romance of the Rose.

      The rose, which from all times has been the type of beauty, life, love and pleasure, expressed mystically the secret thought of all protests manifested at the Renaissance.  It was the flesh in rebellion against the oppression of spirit; it was Nature testifying that, like grace, she was a daughter of God;  it was love refusing to be stifled by the celibate; it was life in revolt against sterility;  it was humanity aspiring towards natural religion, full of reason and love, founded on the revelations of the harmony of being, of which the rose, for initiates was the living floral symbol.  It is in truth a pantacle; the form is circular, the leaves of the corolla are heart-shaped and rest harmoniously on one another;  its tint offers the most harmonious shades of primitive colours; its calyx is of purple and gold.

From Eliphas Levi, The History of Magic, Chapter V, Some Famous Sorcerers and Magicians

Top:  Odilon Redon, Pegasus Captive, 1889, lithograph, Chicago Institute of Art

Center:  Blue Rose

Bottom: Paul Ranson, Nabis Landscape, 1890, oil on canvas, Private Collection

Magic (Eliphas Levi)

     "Magic has been confounded too long with the jugglery of mountebanks, the hallucinations of disordered minds and the crimes of certain unusual malefactors.  There are otherwise many who would promptly explain Magic as the art of producing effects in the absence of causes; and on the strength of such a definition it will be said by ordinary people  -- with the good sense which characterises the ordinary, in the midst of much injustice -- that Magic is an absurdity.  But it can have no analogy in fact with the descriptions of those who know nothing of the subject; furthermore, it is not to be represented as this or that by any person whomsoever; it is that which it is, drawing from itself only, even as mathematics do, for it is the exact and absolute science of Nature and her laws."


     -- Eliphas Levi, The History of Magic (Including A Clear And Precise Exposition Of Its Procedure, Its Rites And Its Mysteries), 1860 (translated by A.E. Waite, 1913)