The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 17

With this post we continue a monthly chapter-by-chapter discussion of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Lévi, the book that launched the modern magical revival.  Here and in the months ahead we’re plunging into the white-hot fires of creation where modern magic was born. If you’re just joining us now, I recommend reading the earlier posts in this sequence first; you can find them here.  Either way, grab your tarot cards and hang on tight.

If you can read French, I strongly encourage you to get a copy of Lévi’s book in the original and follow along with that; it’s readily available for sale in Francophone countries, and can also be downloaded for free from Archive.org. If not, the English translation by me and Mark Mikituk is recommended; A.E. Waite’s translation, unhelpfully retitled Transcendental Magic, is second-rate at best—riddled with errors and burdened with Waite’s seething intellectual jealousy of Lévi—though you can use it after a fashion if it’s what you can get. Also recommended is a tarot deck using the French pattern:  the Knapp-Hall deck, the Wirth deck (available in several versions), or any of the Marseilles decks are suitable.

Reading:

“Chapter Seventeen:  The Writing of the Stars” (Greer & Mikituk, pp. 341-354).

Commentary:

Few aspects of Lévi’s writing show the immense gap between his time and the present than the idiosyncratic treatment he gives astrology in this chapter. In 1855 astrology was very nearly a dead science.  In Britain and the United States it was still a living tradition, but it occupied a space far out on the fringes of society, pursued by a handful of oddball intellectuals interested in occultism and by thriving but isolated pockets in folk culture.  In most other European countries it had been driven even further onto the margins of society, landing in the same purgatory of the imagination as geomancy, sacred geometry, and the Lullian art of combinations.

The difference in the reception of astrology between the English-speaking countries and the rest of the industrial world was caused almost entirely by one person, a man who lived some three centuries before Eliphas Lévi took up his pen.  His name was William Lilly and he was an English astrologer and writer who lived in the seventeenth century. His most important work was a textbook of the science of the stars first published in 1647, and titled Christian Astrology—the adjective was there to reassure potential readers that the book wasn’t about devil-worship, which may tell you what kind of prejudices he faced. (It may also tell you just how little things have changed since his time.)

Unlike every serious work of astrological instruction before Lilly’s time, Christian Astrology wasn’t written in Latin. It was written in good readable English. Since ordinary men and women who didn’t know Latin could read and use it, it promptly became a bestseller, and inspired other astrologers in England to bring out books of their own in English.  As a result, when the scientific revolution arrived on the scene and astrology stopped being popular among the privileged classes, there were plenty of people in less fashion-conscious corners of society who still knew how to cast horoscopes for paying customers, and kept at it. Their efforts alone kept the tradition going until it was picked up by the occult revival Lévi set in motion. That didn’t happen in other parts of Europe

In this chapter we see what would have been left of astrology if Lilly had done the usual thing and written his textbook in Latin. Lévi knew about the planets and the signs of the zodiac as symbols, but he apparently had no idea how horoscopes were cast and interpreted, nor even the slightest clue about the rest of traditional astrology. In our text, he sets out a typical nineteenth-century assortment of substitutes for astrology. In the corresponding chapter of the Doctrine, he described a set of simple predictive tools using planetary cycles:  what happened four, eight, twelve, nineteen, and thirty years ago gives you some insight into what will happen now.  I encourage my readers to try this out and see how well it works for them; my experience has been, well, underwhelming.

In the present chapter, he adds to this two more practices.  The first is the ancient and highly traditional practice of using the phases and the days of the moon as a guide to timing. Most people these days know about planting by the moon, and half of this is a matter of knowing its phases and how they appear to affect plant growth and other matters. This half Lévi has encountered, and summarizes briefly but accurately. The second half of planting by the moon, which uses the elemental characters of the twelve zodiacal signs as a guide to action, our text does not mention and Lévi had apparently never encountered.

What he discusses instead is a far more ancient system, one that survived in European almanacs well into the moderm era but can be traced much further back.  This is the tradition that assigns a specific fortune to each day of the lunar month. There’s a version of this in Hesiod’s Works and Days, one of the oldest surviving works of ancient Greek poetry; there are versions of it in very old Hindu writings; there are substantial traces of it in the only surviving ancient Celtic calendar, the bronze Coligny calendar, and in other archaic calendars from around the world. It may be one of the few surviving traces of the oldest of all systems of astrology, the purely solar and lunar system practiced before the five visible planets were identified as being something other than stars sometime before 5000 BC.

Here’s how it works. You begin the cycle when you see the first faint sliver of the Moon setting just after the setting sun—remember, this dates from before anybody thought of writing out a calendar, so the notional date of the new moon doesn’t matter.  The night and day following that first sighting of the Moon is the first day of the moon, and each of the days that follows has its corresponding number. There are 28 or 29 days before the moon is no longer visible; then you wait until the first glimpse of the new moon begins the cycle again.

Lévi’s version of the days of the Moon is different from others purely because it assigns the days to the Tarot trumps and the seven traditional planets. The references he gives to Biblical events is straight out of medieval lunaries—that’s what you call a book of the moon’s days, signs, and phases. The “Book of Moons” mentioned in the lively old Elizabethan folk song “Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song” is a lunary:

“From the hag and the hungry goblin

That into rags would rend ye

The spirits that stands by the naked man

In the Book of Moons defend ye…”

I have no idea what kind of market there might be for an old-fashioned lunary these days, but Lévi apparently decided that it was a tradition worth trying to revive.  For whatever reason, though, it doesn’t seem to have caught on.

This is not Lévi’s only contribution to ersatz astrology in our text. His other suggestion, though, is an example of his sense of humor, as what he describes as “a very simple way” of using names to work out some simulacrum of a celestial horoscope is anything but.  Take a piece of black card stock, he says, and cut out of it the letters of the name of the person whose fate you want to know, so that each letter makes a gap in the card. Make a paper cone with the card over the wide end, look through the cone in the four directions at night, and count how many stars you can see. Write this down.  Then convert the letters of the name to numbers, add them up, make another card with the number written on it and then cut out, repeat the operation, and count the stars you see this time.

Add this number to the number you got the first time, convert the total into Hebrew letters, repeat the whole process, but this time figure out which stars you are seeing in the four directions and look them all up in the book Lévi references, which gives the spirits corresponding to each star. Use this as a basis for predicting the fate of your client. All things considered, casting a natal horoscope—even if you do it by hand—involves considerably less hassle. (Yes, in case you’re wondering, I’ve calculated horoscopes that way; I wouldn’t describe it as “a very simple way” of doing the thing, but it’s not as forbidding as many people these days seem to think.)

These two methods of divination aren’t Lévi’s only contribution to the subject, but they’re the only practical methods he gives in this chapter. He also picks up the classic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notion that the letters of ancient alphabets were derived from constellations, though he doesn’t really seem to do much practical with that belief.  Even in his time, for that matter, philologists already knew that this wasn’t true. Instead, as they showed, the world’s alphabets and syllabaries (syllable-based writing systems) are derived, through the same kind of wear and tear that rocks undergo in a streambed, from older hieroglyphic writing systems.

Behind our current letter A, for example, lies a crude little sketch of the head of an ox—you can still see that if you turn it upside down—which was borrowed from Egyptian hieroglyphics by the Phoenicians to represent a glottal stop, and then borrowed from them by the Greeks and used for the “a” sound, since Greek doesn’t use glottal stops to communicate meaning. The Romans got it from the Greeks, and all the western and central European languages got it from the Romans, or more precisely from the Roman Catholic church, since literacy did the usual thing and dropped out of general use when the last round of European dark ages hit.

All in all, in terms of the specific practices and symbolism included in it, this chapter offers less to the modern student of magic than just about any other chapter of Lévi’s book. That doesn’t make it irrelevant; it simply points to the fact that in this area of occultism, modern students of high magic have far more useful options available to them than Lévi ever dreamed of having.

Astrology is perhaps the most dramatic example.  The surviving tradition in Britain and America was picked up out of the gutter and put back on its feet by capable practitioners as the twentieth century dawned—the most important names here are Alan Leo in Britain and Evangeline Adams in America. The twentieth century as a whole was quite literally a golden age for astrological study.  While there was no shortage of cheap popularizations and shoddy astrological work all through that century, with occultism as with brewing beer, it’s the froth of the surface that tells you that things are fermenting deeper down.

Of course that ferment ran to extremes in various directions; such things always do. The excesses of the psychological school of astrology in midcentury, which too often abandoned prediction in favor of navel-gazing, were balanced by the equal and opposite excesses of the traditionalist school of astrology at the century’s end, which too often went out of its way to pretend that nothing had been learned about the subject since the fall of Rome. In the wake of all this work, however, today’s astrologers have an astonishingly rich smorgasbord of analytical and interpretive techniques to choose from, and whole branches of astrology that had been completely forgotten in Lévi’s day are being revived and put to use as I write this.

The same thing is true in a smaller way of the divinatory method that Lévi called onomancy—literally “name divination.” These days, that’s been absorbed into the broader practice usually called numerology (the proper technical name is arithmancy, but nobody uses that term any more). Calculations based on personal names and birth dates got taken up by pioneering numerologists around the same time that astrology was hitting its stride, and the tentative fumblings Lévi displays in this chapter have long since given way to a body of precise and generally accepted technique. As with astrology, there’s no shortage of cheap inaccurate popularizations, but then the same thing is true of modern physics.

One of the great challenges in reading any really pioneering work well after the fact is precisely that its earlier readers will have gone beyond that first effort.  It’s all rather reminiscent of the famous twelve-year-old who read Shakespeare for the first time and said, “Well, it’s pretty good, but it’s full of clichés!”  It takes a certain sense of history to realize that it was Shakespeare who coined the phrases in question and made them clichés; that same sense of history is useful for similar reasons when reading our text.

Notes for Study and Practice:

It’s quite possible to get a great deal out of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by the simple expedient of reading each chapter several times and thinking at length about the ideas and imagery that Lévi presents. For those who want to push things a little further, however, meditation is a classic tool for doing so.

Along with the first half of our text, I introduced the standard method of meditation used in Western occultism:  discursive meditation, to give it its proper name, which involves training and directing the thinking mind rather than silencing it (as is the practice in so many other forms of meditation).  Readers who are just joining us can find detailed instructions in the earlier posts in this series. For those who have been following along, however, I suggest working with a somewhat more complex method, which Lévi himself mention in passing:  the combinatorial method introduced by Catalan mystic Ramon Lull in the Middle Ages, and adapted by Lévi and his successors for use with the tarot.

Take the first card of the deck, Trump 1, Le Bateleur (The Juggler or The Magician). While looking at it, review the three titles assigned to it:  Disciplina, Ain Soph, Kether, and look over your earlier meditations on this card to be sure you remember what each of these means. Now you are going to add each title of this card to Trump II, La Papesse (The High Priestess): Chokmah, Domus, Gnosis. Place Trump II next to Trump I and consider them. How does Disciplina, discipline, relate to Chokmah, wisdom?  How does Disciplina relate to Domus, house?  How does it relate to Gnosis?  These three relationships are fodder for one day’s meditation. For a second day, relate Ain Soph to the three titles of La Papesse. For a third day, relate Kether to each of these titles. Note down what you find in your journal.

Next, combine Le Bateleur with Trump III, L’Imperatrice (The Empress), in exactly the same way, setting the cards side by side. Meditate on the relationship of each of the Juggler’s titles to the three titles of the Empress,  three meditations in all.  Then combine the Juggler and the Emperor in exactly the same way. Then go on to the Juggler and the Pope, giving three days to each, and proceed from there. You’ll still be working through combinations of Le Bateleur when the next Lévi post goes up, but that’s fine; when you finish with Le Bateleur, you’ll be taking La Papesse and combining her with L’Imperatrice, L’Empereur, and so on, and thus moving through all 231 combinations the trumps make with one another.

Don’t worry about where this is going. Unless you’ve already done this kind of practice, the goal won’t make any kind of sense to you. Just do the practice.  You’ll find, if you stick with it, that over time the relationships between the cards take on a curious quality I can only call conceptual three-dimensionality:  a depth is present that was not there before, a depth of meaning and ideation.  It can be very subtle or very loud, or anything in between. Don’t sense it?  Don’t worry.  Meditate on a combination every day anyway. Do the practice and see where it takes you.

We’ll be going on to Chapter 18, “Potions and Magnetism,” on November 13, 2024. See you then!