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

Philtres and Magnetism

Let us now adventure in Thessaly, the country of enchantments. Here was Apuleius beguiled, like the companions of Ulysses, and underwent a humiliating metamorphosis. Here all is magical - the birds that fly, the insects humming in the grass, even the trees and flowers. Here in the moon-light are brewed those potions which compel love; here spells are devised by stryges to render them young and lovely like Charites. O all ye youths, beware!

The art of poisoning reason, otherwise the art of philtres, seems indeed, if traditions may be trusted, to have developed its venomous efflorescence more abundantly in Thessaly than elsewhere. There also magnetism played its most important part, for stimulating or narcotic plants, bewitched and harmful animal substances, derived all their power from enchantments - that is to say, from sacrifices accomplished and words pronounced by sorcerers when preparing philtres and beverages. Inflaming substances, and those in which phosphorus predominates, are naturally aphrodisiacal. Anything which acts strongly on the nervous system may induce impassioned exaltation, and when a skilful and persevering will knows how to direct and influence these natural tendencies, it can use the desires of others to the profit of its own, and will soon reduce the most independent personalities into instruments of its pleasures. From such influence it behoves us to seek protection, and to give arms to the weak is our purpose in writing this chapter. Here, in the first place, are the devices of the enemy. The man who seeks to compel love - we attribute such unlawful manoeuvres to men only, assuming that women can never have need of them - must in the first place make himself observed by the person whom he desires and must contrive to impress her imagination. He must inspire her with admiration, astonishment, terror, and even with horror, failing all other resources; but at any cost he must set himself apart in her eyes from the rank of ordinary men and, with or against her will, must make himself a place in her memory, her apprehensions, her dreams. The type of Lovelace is certainly not the admitted ideal of the type of Clarissa, but she thinks of him incessantly to condemn him, to execrate him, to compassionate his victims, to desire his conversion and repentance. Next she seeks his regeneration by devotion and forgiveness. Later on secret vanity whispers to her how grand it would be to fix the affections of a Lovelace, to love him and yet to withstand him. Behold, then, Clarissa surprised into loving Lovelace! She chides herself, blushes, renounces a thousand times and loves him a thousand more. Then, at the supreme moment, she forgets to resist him. Had angels been women, represented by modern mysticism, Jehovah indeed would have acted as a wise and prudent Father by placing Satan at the gate of heaven. It is a serious imposition on the self-love of some amiable women to find that man fundamentally good and honourable who enamoured them when they thought him a scapegrace. The angel leaves him disdainfully, saying: “You are not the devil!” Play the devil as well as you can, if you wish to allure an angel. No licence is possible to a virtuous man. “For what does he take us?” say women. “Does he think us less strict than he is?” But everything is forgiven in a rascal. “What else could you expect?” The part of a man with high principles and of rigid character can never be a power save with women whom one wishes to fascinate: the rest, without exception, adore reprobates. It is quite the opposite with men, and this contrast has made modesty woman's dower, the first and most natural of her coquetries. One of the distinguished physicians and most amiable men of learning in London - Dr. Ashburner - told me last year that a certain client, after leaving the house of a distinguished lady, observed to him: “I have just had a strange compliment from the Marchioness of_. Looking me straight in the face, she said: ’Sir, you will not make me flinch before your terrible glance: you have the eyes of Satan.’” “Well,” answered the doctor, smiling, “you, of course, put your arms round her neck and embraced her?” “Not at all; I was overwhelmed by her sudden onslaught.” “Beware how you call on her again, then, my friend; you will have fallen deeply in her estimation!”

The office of executioner is commonly said to go down from father to son. Do executioners really have children? Undoubtedly, as they never fail to get wives. Marat had a mistress who loved him tenderly - he, the loathsome leper; but still it was that terrible Marat who caused the world to tremble. Love, above all in a woman, may be termed a veritable hallucination; for want of a prudent motive, it will frequently select an absurd one. Deceive Joconde for a clown, how awful! -Ah! but supposing it is awful, why not perpetrate it? It must be pleasant to be occasionally guilty of a small abomination.

Given this transcendental knowledge of woman, another device can be adopted to attract her notice - not to concern oneself with her, or to do so in a way which is humiliating to her self-love, treating her as a child and deriding all notion of paying court to her. The parts are then reversed; she will move heaven and earth to tempt you; she will initiate you into secrets which women keep back; she will vest and unvest before you, making such observations as: “Between women-among old friends-I have no fear about you-you are not a man for me.” etc. Then she will watch your expression; if she find it calm and indifferent, she will be indignant; she will approach you under some pretext, brush you with her tresses, permit her bodice to slip open. Women, in such cases, occasionally will risk a violence, not out of desire, but from curiosity, from impatience and irritation. a magician of any spirit will need no other philtres than these; he will also use flattering words, magnetic breathings, slight but voluptuous contacts, by a kind of hypocrisy and as if unconscious. Those who resort to potions are old, idiotic, ugly, impotent. Where, indeed, is the use of the philtre? Anyone who is truly a man has always at his disposal the means of making himself loved, providing that he does not seek to usurp a place which is occupied. It would be a sovereign blunder to attempt the conquest of a young and affectionate bride during the first felicities of the honeymoon, or of a fortified Clarissa made miserable already by a Lovelace, or bitterly lamenting her love.

We shall not discuss here the impurities of Black Magic; the subject of philtres: we have done with the coctions of Canidia. The epodes of Horace tell us after what manner this abominable Roman sorceress compounded her poisons, while for the sacrifices and enchantments of love, we may refer to the Eclogues of Virgil and Theocritus, where the ceremonials for this species of magical work are described minutely. Nor shall we need to reproduce the recipes of the Grimoires or of the LITTLE Albert, which anyone can consult for themselves. All these various practices connect with magnetism or poisonous magic and are either foolish or criminal. Potions which enfeeble mind and disturb reason establish the empire already acquired by an evil will, and it was thus that the empress Caesonia is said to have fixed the savage love of Caligula. Prussic acid is the most terrible agent in these envenomings of thought; hence we should beware of all extractions with an almond flavour, and never tolerate in bedchambers the presence of bay-cherry, Datura stramonium, almond-soaps or washes, and generally all perfumes in which this odour predominates, above when its action on the brain is seconded by that of amber.

To weaken the activity of intelligence is to strengthen proportionally the forces of unreasoning passion. Love of that kind which the malefactors we are concerned with would inspire is a veritable stupefaction and the most shameful of moral bondages. The more we enervate a slave, the more incapable we make him of freedom, and here lies the true secret of the sorceress in Apuleius and the potions of Circe. The use of tobacco, by smoking or otherwise, is a dangerous auxiliary of stupefying philtres and brain poisons. Nicotine, as we know, is not less deadly than prussic acid and is present in tobacco in larger quantities than is this acid in almonds. The absorption of one will by another frequently changes a whole series of destinies, and not for ourselves only should we watch our relations, learning to distinguish pure from impure atmospheres, for the true philtres, and those most dangerous, are invisible. Such are the currents of vital radiating light, which, mingling and inter-changing, produce attractions and sympathies, as magnetic experiments leave no room to doubt. The history of the Church tells us that an archheretic named Marcos infatuated all women by breathing on them; but his power was destroyed when a valiant Christian female forestalled him in breathing, and said to him: “May God judge thee!” The Cure Gaufridy, who was burnt as a sorcerer, pretended to enamour all women who came in contact with his breath. The notorious Father Girard, a Jesuit, was accused by his penitent, Mlle. Cardier, of destroying her self-control by breathing on her. Such a pretext was necessary to minimize the horrible and ridiculous nature of her accusations against this priest, whose guilt, moreover, has never been well established, though, consciously or unconsciously, he had certainly inspired an exceedingly shameful passion in the miserable girl.

“Mlle. Ranfaing, having become a widow in 16—,” says Dom Calmet in his Treatise on Apparitions, “was sought in marriage by a physician named Poirot. Failing to obtain a hearing, he thereupon gave her potions to induce love, and these caused extraordinary derangements in the health of the lady, increasing to such a degree that she was believed to be possessed, so that other physicians, baffled by her case, recommended her for the exorcisms of the Church. Thereupon, by command of M. de Porcelets, Bishop of Toul, the following were named as her exorcists: M. Viardin, doctor in theology, the state councillor of the Duke of Lorraine, a Jesuit and a capuchin. But in the long course of these ceremonies, almost all the clergy of Nancy, the aforesaid Lord Bishop, the Bishop of Tripoli, suffragan of Strasbourg, M. de Nancy, formerly ambassador of the most Christian King at Constantinople and then priest of the Oratory, Charles of Lorraine, Bishop of Verdun, two Sorbonne doctors specially deputed to assist, exorcised her frequently in Hebrew, in Greek and in Latin, and she invariably replied to them pertinently, though she herself could scarcely read even the last language. Mention is made of the certificate given by M. Nicholas de Harlay, learned in the Hebrew tongue, who recognized that Mlle. Ranfaing was really possessed, that she had answered the mere motion of his lips without any uttered words, and given numerous other proofs. The sieur Gamier, doctor of the Sorbonne, having also adjured her several times in Hebrew, she replied lucidly, but in French, saying that the pact bound her to speak an ordinary tongue. The demon added: ’Is it not sufficient for me to show that a understand what you say?’ The same doctor, addressing him in Greek, inadvertently used one case for another, whereupon the possessed woman, or rather the devil, said: ’You have blundered.’ The doctor replied in Greek, ’Point out my error.’ The devil answered, ’Be satisfied that I mention the mistake: I shall tell you no more.’ The doctor bade him be silent in Greek, and he retorted, “You bid me hold my tongue, but for myself I decline to be silent.’”

This remarkable example of hysterical affection carried into the region of ecstasy and demonomania, as the consequence of a potion administered by a man who believed that he was a sorcerer, proves better than any argument the omnipotence of will and imagination reacting one upon another, and the strange lucidity of ecstatics or somnambulists, who comprehend speech by reading it in thought, though they do not understand the words. I make no question as to the sincerity of the witnesses cited by Dom Calmet; I am merely astonished that men so serious failed to notice the pretended demon's difficulty over answering in a tongue foreign to the sufferer. Had their interlocutor been what they meant by a demon, he would have spoken as well as understood Greek: the one would have been as easy as the other to a spirit so acute and learned. Dom Calmet does not stop here with his history; he enumerates a long series of insidious questions and trivial injunctions on the part of the exorcisers, and a sequence of more or less congruous replies by the poor sufferer, still ecstatic and somnambulistic. It is needless to add that the excellent father draws precisely the luminous conclusions of the not less excellent M. de Mirville. The phenomena being above the comprehension of the witnesses, they were all ascribed to perdition. Brilliant and instructed conclusion! The most serious part of the business is that the physician Poirot was arraigned as a magician, confessed like all others under torture, and was burnt. Had he, by any potion, really attempted the reason of the woman in question, he would have deserved punishment as a poisoner: this is the most that we can say.

But the most terrific of all philtres are the mystical exaltations of misdirected devotion. Will ever any impurities equal the nightmares of St. Anthony or the tortures of St. Theresa and St. Angela de Foligny? The last applied a red-hot iron to her rebellious flesh, and found that the material fire was cooling to her hidden ardours. With what violence does Nature cry out for that which is denied her, but is brooded over continually to increase detestation thereof! The pretended bewitchments of Magdalen Bavan, of Mlles. de la Palud and de la Cadiere, began with mysticism. The excessive fear of a given thing makes it almost invariably inevitable. To describe the two curves of a circle is to meet at the same point. Nicholas Remigious, criminal judge of Lorraine, who burnt alive eight hundred women as sorcerers, beheld Magic everywhere: it was his fixed idea, his mania. He was eager to preach a crusade against sorcerers, with whom Europe, in his opinion, was swarming; in despair that his word was not taken when he affirmed that nearly everyone in the world had been guilty of Magic, he ended by declaring that he was himself a sorcerer and was burned on his own confession.

To preserve ourselves against influences, the first condition is to forbid excitement to the imagination. All who are prone to exaltation are more or less mad, and a maniac is ever governed by his mania. Place yourself therefore above puerile fears and vague desires; believe in supreme wisdom and be assured that this wisdom, having given you understanding as the means of knowledge, cannot seek to lay snares for your intelligence or reason. Everywhere about you are effects proportioned to their causes; causes are directed and modified by understanding in the realm of humanity; in a word, you will find goodness stronger and more respected than evil: why then should you assume an immense unreason in the infinite, seeing that there is reason in the finite? Truth is hidden from no one. God is visible in His works, and He requires nothing contrary to its nature from any being, for He is Himself the author of that nature. Faith is confidence; have confidence, not in men who malign reason, for they are fools or impostors, but in that eternal reason which is the Divine Word, that true light which is offered like the sun to the intuition of every human creature coming into this world. If you believe in absolute reason; if you desire truth and justice before all things, you will have no occasion to fear anyone, and you will love those only who are deserving of love. Your natural light will repel instinctively that of the wicked, because it will be ruled by your will. Thus, even poisonous substances, if such are administered to you, will not affect your intelligence; ill indeed they may make you, but never criminal.

What most contributes to render women hysterical is their enervating and hypocritical education; if they took more exercise, if they were instructed more frankly and fully in matters of the world, they would be less capricious and consequently less accessible to evil tendencies. Weakness ever sympathizes with vice, because vice is a weakness which assumes the mask of strength. Madness holds reason in honor, and on all subjects it delights in the exaggerations of falsehood. In the first place therefore cure your diseased intelligence. The cause of all bewitchments, the poison of all philtres, the power of all sorcerers are there. As to the possible administration of narcotics or other drugs, it is a question for the doctor and the law; but we do not think such enormities very likely to be repeated at this day.

Lovelaces no longer entrance Clarissas otherwise than by their gallantries, and potions, like abductions by masked men and imprisonments in subterranean dungeons, have passed even out of our romances. They must be relegated to the Confessional of the Black Penitents or the ruins of the Castle of Udolpho.