Dogma and Ritual of High Magic Part II - Eliphas Levi 1896

The Triple Chain

The Great Work in Practical Magic, after the education of the will and the personal creation of the Magus, is the formation of the magnetic chain, and this secret is truly that of priesthood and of royalty. To form the magnetic chain is to originate a current of ideas which produces faith and draws a large number of wills in a given circle of active manifestation. a well-formed chain is like a whirlpool which sucks down and absorbs all. The chain may be established in three ways - by signs, by speech and by contact. The first is by inducing opinion to adopt some sign as the representation of a force. Thus, all Christians communicate by the Sign of the Cross, Masons by that of the square beneath the sun, the Magi by that of the Microcosm, made by extending the five fingers, etc. Once accepted and propagated, signs acquire force of themselves. In the early centuries of our era, the sight and making of the Sign of the Cross was enough to bring proselytes to Christianity. What is called the miraculous medal continues in our own days to effect a great number of conversions by the same magnetic law. The vision and illumination of the young Israelite, Alphonse de Ratisbonne, is the most remarkable fact of this kind. Imagination is creative not only within us but without us by means of our fluidic projections, and undoubtedly the phenomena of the Labarum of Constantine and the Cross of Migne should be attributed to no other cause.

The magic chain of speech was typified among the ancients by chains of gold, which issued from the mouth of Hermes. Nothing equals the electricity of eloquence. Speech creates the highest intelligence in the most grossly constituted masses. Even those who are too remote for actual hearing understand by sympathy and are carried away with the crowd. Peter the Hermit convulsed Europe by his cry of “God wills it!” A single word of the Emperor electrified his army and made France invincible. Proudhon destroyed socialism by his celebrated paradox: “Property is robbery.” A current saying is sufficient on occasion to demolish a reigning power. Voltaire knew this well - he who shook the world by sarcasms. So, also, he who feared neither pope nor king, neither parliament nor Bastille, was afraid of a pun. We are on the verge of fulfilling the intentions of that man whose sayings we repeat.

The third method of establishing the magic chain is by contact. Between persons who meet frequently, the head of the current soon manifests, and the strongest will is not slow to absorb the others. The direct and positive grasp of hand by hand completes the harmony of dispositions, and it is for this reason a mark of sympathy and intimacy. Children, who are guided instinctively by Nature, form the magic chain by playing at base or rounds: then gaiety spreads, then laughter rings. Circular tables are more favourable to convivial meetings than those of any other shape. The great circular dance of the Sabbath, which concluded the mysterious assemblies of adepts in the Middle Ages, was a magic chain: it joined all in the same intentions and the same acts. It was formed by standing back to back and linking hands, the face outside the circle, in imitation of those antique sacred dances, representations of which are still found on the sculptures of old temples. The electric furs of the lynx, panther and even domestic cat, were stitched to garments, in imitation of the ancient bacchanalia. Hence comes the tradition that the Sabbath miscreants each wore a cat hung from the girdle, and that they danced in this guise.

The phenomena of tilting and talking tables have been fortuitous exhibitions of fluidic communication by means of the circular chain. Mystification combined with it after wards, and even educated and intelligent persons were so infatuated with the novelty that they hoaxed themselves, and became the dupes of their own absurdity. The oracles of the tables were answers more or less voluntarily suggested extracted by chance: they resembled the conversations which we hold or hear in dreams. Other and stranger phenomena may have been exteriorized products of imaginations at work in common. We, however, by no means deny the possible intervention of elementary spirits in these occurrences, as in those of divination by cards or by dreams; but we do not believe that it has been in any sense proven, and we are therefore in no way obliged to admit it.

One of the most extraordinary powers of human imagination is the fulfilment of the desires of the will, or even of its apprehensions and fears. We believe easily anything that we fear or desire, says a proverb; and it is true, because desire and fear impart to imagination a realizing power, the effects of which are incalculable. How is one attacked, for example, by a disease about which one feels nervous? We have cited already the opinions of Paracelsus on this point, and have established in our doctrinal part certain occult laws confirmed by experience; but in magnetic currents, and by mediation of the chain, the realizations are all the more strange because almost invariably unexpected, at least when the chain has not been formed by an intelligent, sympathetic and powerful leader. In fact, they are the result of purely blind and fortuitous combinations. The vulgar fear of superstitious guests when they find themselves thirteen at table, and their conviction that some misfortune threatens the youngest and weakest among them, like most superstitions, a remnant of magical science. The duodenary, being a complete and cyclic number in the universal analogies of Nature, invariably attracts and absorbs the thirteenth, which is regarded as a sinister and superfluous number. If the grindstone of a mill be represented by the number twelve, then thirteen is that of the grain which is to be ground. On kindred considerations, the ancients established the distinctions between lucky and unlucky numbers, whence came the observance of days of good or evil augury. It is over such matters above all that imagination is creative, so that both days and numbers seldom fail to be propitious or otherwise to those who believe in their influence. Consequently, Christianity was right in proscribing the divinatory sciences, for in thus diminishing the number of blind chances it gave further scope and empire to liberty.

Printing is an admirable instrument for the formation of the magic chain by the extension of speech. No book is lost; as a fact, writings go invariably precisely where they should go, and the aspirations of thought attract speech. We have proved this a hundred times in the course of our magical initiation; the rarest books have offered themselves without seeking as soon as they became indispensable. Thus have we recovered intact that universal science which so many learned persons have regarded as engulfed by a number of successive cataclysms; thus have we entered the great magical chain which began with Hermes or Enoch and will end only with the world. Thus have we been able to evoke and come face to face with the spirits of Apollonius, Plotinus, Synesius, Paracelsus, Cardanus, Cornelius Agrippa and others less or more known, but too religiously celebrated to make it possible for them to be named lightly. We continue their great work, which others will take up after us. But unto whom shall it be given to complete it?