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 Twenty: Thaumaturgy” (Greer & Mikituk, pp. 369-376).
Commentary:
There are many things that one can do with magic, and our text has touched on a few of those. It’s an interesting detail of Lévi’s understanding of magic that the one that comes first in his mind, and the one that fills the current chapter, is healing. The word “thaumaturgy” (from the Greek words thaumata, “wonders,” and ourgia, “work”) literally means the working of wonders, the art and science of causing amazing things to happen; there are many branches of thaumaturgy in magical tradition, but “the immediate action of the human will on the body,” to use Lévi’s own turn of phrase, is the one that fascinated him most.
He’s by no means unique in that focus. It bears remembering, for example, that the term “medicine” in most Native American dialects of English means both medicine and magic; the term “medicine man,” for example, is a common and widespread term for Native American shamans. In much the same sense, practitioners of conjure (the traditional magic of the American South) and exponents of old-fashioned witchcraft in rural Europe are at least as frequently consulted for medical treatments as for magical workings. In a thoughtful book entitled Wondrous Healings, sociologist James McClenon has argued that the ability of charismatic healers to cure illnesses without using physical medicines is among the wellsprings of human religion and magic around the world.
In Lévi’s time as in ours, of course, to discuss such healings as a form of magic is to risk treading on certain very sore theological toes. Jesus of Nazareth, whose example is a constant theme in our text if not always an explicitly stated one, owed much of his reputation during and after his short public career to his ability to bring about sudden healings in apparently incurable patients. For most of the last two thousand years it has been common for the promoters of Christianity to stress the miraculous nature of those healings while downplaying or denying equivalent healings performed by the holy people of other faiths; Lévi’s exploration of the psychological basis of sudden healings challenges that rhetorical strategy to its core.
In doing this Lévi stepped straight into the middle of one of the major philosophical feuds between materialists and Christians. Then as now, the most common Christian theory concerning miracles has it that God, having created the laws of nature, can set them aside any time he wants to. Then as now, the most common response by materialists is to insist that this kind of arbitrary interference with natural law would plunge the universe into chaos. In his usual way, Lévi offends both sides by cutting straight through the middle of the quarrel and defining miracles as “the natural effects of exceptional causes.”
Take a moment to think through this definition; it explains an enormous amount about what magic can and cannot do, and not just in the sphere of healing. Consider the spells typically cast by folk magicians around the world. None of their effects involve any violations of natural law. Healing spells? It’s entirely natural for people to recover from illnesses. Love spells? People do fall in love now and then, you know. Prosperity spells? We all know of people who have risen from poverty to wealth. Spells to bring good or bad luck? Extended streaks of fortune or misfortune happen all the time.
What makes magic distinctive, in other words, is not the nature of its effects but the nature of its causes. The effects are natural; the causes are exceptional—or simply poorly understood. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose volume On the Will in Nature was as far as I know the only major work of 19th-century philosophy to take magic seriously, argued that what made magical spells effective, as well as philosophically interesting, is tha tthey worked through a mode of action rooted in consciousness and distinct from ordinary material cause and effect. (Readers who are familiar with Carl Jung’s writings on synchronicity will recognize the same concept under a different label.)
Lévi’s approach in this chapter, however, is considerably subtler. As several earlier chapters have shown clearly enough, he seems to have been one of the very few people in his time to make a close study of what is now called the placebo effect and its nasty twin sister, the nocebo effect. The confidence of the patient in the healer, he pointed out, is the most important factor in healing even in official medicine; when reinforced by a good working knowledge of human psychology, it allows remarkable healings to take place.
The stories that Lévi cites of miraculous healings brought about by inadequate or ludicrous means, so long as the patient believed in the healer’s power to heal, show clearly enough how he conceived of miracles. For that matter, some of the Gospel stories of the miracles of Jesus bear the same interpretation readily enough: what does “Thy faith hath made thee whole” (Matthew 9:22 etc.) amount to, after all, but a restatement of Lévi’s theme in this chapter?
This was not entirely a new concept in occult teachings when Lévi wrote. Back in the sixteenth century, in the pages of his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Cornelius Agrippa discussed the importance of religion and superstition as helps to the magical practitioner, and the Picatrix—the classic handbook of early medieval magic—stresses the importance of the magician having faith in the power of his workings. These earlier texts, however, held that magical power comes to the practitioner from the cosmos, and faith is simply a necessary part of the process by which that power is accessed.
It was left to Lévi to propose faith as the prime mover in its own right. That followed naturally from the central theme of his work. As we have seen, his intention all through The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic has been to ground the powers of magic in human will and imagination, rather than tracing magical powers to realities outside the self. If it is individual will and imagination that heals, some explanation has to be found for the varied material means of healing used in different traditions around the world and across time. The power of faith is one hypothesis, and a strong one.
At the same time, Lévi does not quite reduce magical healing than clever psychology. Our texts talks about warm and cold exsufflations—this is a fancy way of talking about breathing on an afflicted body part as a means of healing. Most people can learn how to do both of these in a moment. Hold the back of one of your hands close to your mouth, and breathe out slowly and steadily through a mouth held as though you meant to say the sound “aaah;” the breath will feel warm on your skin. Then breathe out more forcefully, through pursed lips, as though you meant to blow out a candle; the breath will feel cold.
With a little practice, it’s easy for most people to learn to use both these breaths for healing purposes, and experience will show that they have noticeable benefits. As our text points out, the warm breath brings energy and increased vitality, while the cold breath clears away inflammation and congestion. Combined with a healing intention held strongly in the mind of the practitioner, especially if this is reinforced by imagination, they can have remarkably good results. (I encourage interested readers to try this for themselves and see.)
How much of this is the placebo effect, and how much is the transmission of the astral light, the mysterious force to which Lévi attributes so many of the results of magic? It’s all but impossible to say, not least because the astral light in Lévi’s theory forms the bridge between mind and matter and thus provides a mechanism for the placebo effect to take place!
Homeopathy, which Lévi also discusses, is another healing modality in which psychology and subtle energy intertwine inextricably, though here some degree of chemical effect is also involved. For those who are unfamiliar with homeopathy, it takes compounds that cause illnesses in large doses, and give them in extremely low-dose dilutions—for example, one part per million in a little pill, or in a few drops of alcohol in a glass of water—to cure those same illnesses.
It’s a tolerably effective system of healing, though you probably don’t want to mention that around true believers in standard modern medicine; like everything else that doesn’t make money for multinational pharmaceutical corporations, homeopathy is denounced as quackery by the medical mainstream. Understanding how it works is a little complex because it draws on all three of the factors just discussed. There is the biological effect of microdoses of active ingredients; there is the effect of the astral light, which old-fashioned homeopaths understood very well—Dr. James Tyler Kent, one of the leading American homeopaths at the turn of the last century, wrote about the astral ligt at length as “simple substance”—and then there is the placebo effect, which comes into play whenever a patient is confident of the healer’s abilities.
All three of these have to be taken into account to explain the effects of homeopathy, or any other healing modality for that matter, including those of the medical mainstream. I’ve thought more than once that one of the reasons that the medical industry here in the US does such a very poor job of treating people’s illnesses is that its practitioners have lost track of one of the basic principles of placebo medicine: unlike the slightly mad nun Lévi discusses, they stopped listening attentively to their patients. Their evident boredom with their work and lack of concern with their patients’ well-being inevitably communicated itself to those same patients, and lessened the effectiveness of the otherwise powerful medicines they prescribed.
Certainly, however, the skill at attentive listening exercised by occult healers and rural witches in earlier times has been preserved more or less intact by alternative health care providers, which goes a long way to explain why they continue to thrive despite savage legal persecution by the mainstream medical industry and its government enablers. Quite a few of the alternative modalities that emerged in the Western world originated in circles strongly influenced by the same magical traditions Lévi discusses, though most of those have gone out of their way to avoid talking about that aspect of their heritage.
All the same, it strikes me as unfortunate that the simple forms of thaumaturgical medicine Lévi discussed have apparently dropped out of use. I have yet to meet an occult healer who knows how to charge the simple medicines Lévi mentions—water, oil, wine, camphor, salt—and use them for healing purposes, nor has insufflation remained anything like as common as it was in Lévi’s time. It might well be worthwhile for today’s more traditionally minded occultists to experiment with a revival of these methods.
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 21, “The Science of the Prophets,” on February 12, 2025. See you then!
As I re-read the chapters I notice now that Levi likes to use a certain number of examples to make his point. He often uses four examples. Sometimes two and three, but he uses four a lot.
For example, on page 42 he writes: What is man? He is the initiator, he who fractures, who ploughs and who sows. What is woman? She is the teacher, she who consolidates, who waters and who harvests.
I thought there might be a reference to the four elements but it doesn’t seem that way. On the other hand, it could be another reference to the tetragrammaton, which is a four-letter word. But in this case, you must find the ternary between the masculine and feminine for each of the four.
In any case, when he uses a specific number of examples, it’s time to pay attention.
It rather appears that ‘placebo’ and ‘nocebo’ are simply modern medicalese for thaumaturgy.
I have often thought that at least 80% of most healings (or failures to heal) are due to the combination of the patient and the healer’s attitude and beliefs about the malady, cure, nature of the patient, and competency of the healer. This helps explain some of the more dramatic/theatrical aspects of many shamanic and folk healing traditions. Or even the dramatic aspect of modern medical devices in hospitals. That great big, wildly expensive, weirdly noisy MRI machine is difficult to dismiss when you are put into the magic hole so the “shaman” can “see” inside you! It’s so impressive it MUST be magically efficacious!
Thank you for the reminder of how often religious care and medical care have been offered by the same person or institution throughout humanity’s tenure on this globe. Undoubtedly that will also be the case in the nascent cultures arising from the rubble of the American era.
“The natural effects of exceptional causes” sounds like another definition of magic to this reader.
What do you think of the idea of taking Aurum Metallicum as a way to make, as it were, a fluid codenser of oneself? It seems to me this particular homeopathic remedy is a true gold for the modern astral-alchemical practitioner.
It seems that timing the making of a fluid condenser to the strongest period of the waxing moon would also be beneficial for making it more etherically and astrally charged.
One more for now… I’d be interested in that camphor thing. Ointments like White Flower and Tiger Balm use it as an ingredient. A well known modern day exorcist in the occult community swears by camphor for help in dealing with ridding people of parasites and other unwanted beings. Well, its gets rid of my headaches as reliably as ibuprofen and without the side effects.
This total abandonment of any shadow of placebo medicine seems to be another way the new “managers” of mainstream western medicine seem intent on destroying it.
Even with all of its flaws, western medicine back in the 1970’s or so did a good job of creating an aura of authority and competence around doctors. One entered the office to be processed by a prim nurse in her white uniform complete with hat. Then you were often ushered in to the MD’s office resplendent with diplomas and certificates. Then the doctor in his suit-with-tie and white coat would examine you in a confident manner. The cures he would dish out would often have the kind of authority that was in itself a placebo.
Now a visit to the doctor brings you to a kind of beaten down functionary dressed in the same garb as the rest of the office staff. The timid behavior of the woke era ( may I touch your back sir) gives the patient little confidence. Then in. most cases you can tell the doctor is deferring to some kind of money saving protocol, or new drug regime handed down by HMO managers and big Pharma.
Now in many cases, the smart patient ( if they have not already abandoned mainstream medicine) realizes that the clinic, urgent care or ER they are at is owned by the likes of United Health and Bain Capital. At least 40 years ago the hospital or clinic was probably owned by a catholic charity so you could imagine that the doctors authority was being managed by god and not some private equity vulture.
Alternately: “And he did not work many mighty deeds there because of their lack of faith.” Matthew 13:58
We live in an age that would seem (superficially, at least) to have some degree of confidence in the will and the self, so I can see how such a message might resonate. I would demur, to a degree; in my view, if a person is not rooted in something greater than the self, I suspect it is like a branch without a vine. But, perhaps it’s that very connection that has something to do with why those simpler medicines don’t readily take (several of them are still used in the church as sacramentals, and seem to have quite potent effects). My family had a habit of sharing a simple moment together over olive oil and salt that I always remember with fondess, a focal point that had a sort of grounding effect…
Axé
Acquisition of three dimensional reality. Here in India at an Aryuvedic treatment center the grounds, the workers, the animals and plants are pervaded by that astral light driven by the healing by advanced practitioners and the ancient Vedic prayers recited on a daily basis and given by excellent recording to recipients of treatment in the treatment rooms. There is an instantaneous confluence of spirit among the animal and plant denizens- for example an admiration of the beauty of the resident peacocks can result in finding a perfect feather along a path, an appreciation of the resilience of the numerous wild boar in the surrounding woods can lead to an unexpected visit at night by a mother boar and her child, seen through a window despite darkness. The admiration does not cause the effect, admiration and response each reinforce the growth of the other.
I got placebo-ed by a crafty older dentist decades ago. He was drilling away on a tooth and the novocaine wasn’t working. He stopped because of my pain and told me to come back in late afternoon “ when teeth are less sensitive”.
I returned and after a small shot of pain killer my tooth was a numb pain free stone. I said when he was done, “Yeah, doctor, teeth are less sensitive in the afternoon” His reply “Yes, the power of the mind is a wonderful thing”.
I was puzzled by his words and wasn’t until months later I understood that I had been placebo-ed.
Hi John Michael,
I’m old enough to know folks who’ve told me that back in their day, doctors used to advise their patients to go and have a smoke whilst relaxing in the waiting room. Hmm. There’s an inherent problem in a group pretending that they’re all seeing, and all knowing, when in fact they may only have a grasp of the subject under their control. After all, the facts suggest that if they were all knowing, people wouldn’t die – which seems to be the common fate of all mankind. At best, the end point is somewhat delayed, and I have a hunch that with the rush to specialisation, the basics get ignored – probably because they’re considered boring. The nifty bits of information I’ve picked up over the years about the subject of health, is quite surprising, and I do wonder why the basics aren’t drilled into the population.
You know, the whole argument reminds me a lot of the ongoing debates about the subject of soil. (Oh! And I’ll be interested to hear how your growing experiments work out.) Anyway, the soil debate, is really an argument where people get in their ideological corners. I suspect as a civilisation, we know far less about that subject of soil than we pretend to do so. Hmm. After a quarter century of mucking around with this stuff, the core issue for me is: Does this here thing you’re talking about work in my circumstances?
It’s a bigger question than most people would acknowledge, and it is the one that most people avoid due to it challenging their belief systems.
Cheers
Chris
There is a huge, and utterly fascinating, body of medical and scientific literature on placebos (and their lethal twin, nocebos), which I have only dipped into slightly. (I can access medical and scientific journals through my University library.) Slight as my dipping has been, a few general results seem to me to have been solidly established:
(1) Placebos alone can alleviate or cure various illnesses in many people, without any other medicine.
(2) Placebos can be also often be effective even when the patient knows it is a placebo.
(3) Some patients can even administer a placebo to themselves, knowing full well that it is a placebo, and thereby alleviate or cure an illness of theirs.
(4) Use of ritual in connection with a placebo enhances the effectiveness of the placebo.
(5) Administration of placebo can produce measurable changes in the patient’s physiology and neurology.
(6) Nocebos seem to have the same powers as placebos, only (by definition) the results are injurious or even lethal, not beneficial.
All these points — and especially nos. 4 and 6 — obviously bear on the effective practice of magic.
No doubt there is a lot more to be learned — also by theorists of the effectiveness of magic! — from a deeper dive into the medical and scientific literature on placebos and nocebos. And there are obviously unwelcome implications, too, for the pharmaceutical industry.
When my daughter was an infant, I learned that if I held her after her 4am (or thereabouts) feeding, she would sleep for another three hours and I could get a little more sleep, even if it was sitting in a chair. In retrospect, I think perhaps she wanted or needed some of my etheric energy.
But something that didn’t make sense in terms of etheric energy (until now) is how I got her to go sleep by herself in the crib. She resisted being alone in her crib, but I learned that if breathed on her head for a few minutes, she would fall asleep and stay asleep for hours. Seems like I was doing warm exsufflations without knowing it…
“…it strikes me as unfortunate that the simple forms of thaumaturgical medicine Lévi discussed have apparently dropped out of use. I have yet to meet an occult healer who knows how to charge the simple medicines Lévi mentions—water, oil, wine, camphor, salt—and use them for healing purposes…”
I found this paragraph interesting, given my Mormon upbringing. Mormon men who have the higher level of the Mormon priesthood (the Melchezidek priesthood) have the ability to consecrate oil for the healing of the sick. It is actually really common. Also, healing baptisms used to be practiced in the church in the old days before it turned corporate and ironed out everything interesting.
“The confidence of the patient in the healer, he pointed out, is the most important factor in healing even in official medicine; when reinforced by a good working knowledge of human psychology, it allows remarkable healings to take place.”
Besides just healing magic, this reminds me of psi and other matters that are held in suspicion by the scientific community. What if tests to verify the reality of such phenomena fail because belief in the phenomena is necessary for it to work in the first place? The placebo effect is so interesting, because it seems to be a direct example of mental causation!
Thanks for the great post, John!
Greetings, Archdruid, and fellow readers.
I have personally discovered that cold insufflations are very helpful with painful period cramps. Its effectiveness does indeed depend on the amount of love and care it is administered with. It can be highly effective if administered by a lover or spousal partner who feels agonised by the cramps of their loved one, and therefore acts out of strong sympathy and devotion.
To make cold insufflations more effective, I recommend making the skin surface moist and cool first. I do this by filling a bowl of water, and placing it inside the deep freezer well in advance to ensure that it freezes solid (periods are, of course, somewhat periodic; we know when they are coming). When the cramps come, I pull out the bowl, take some tissue paper, and rub the paper on the ice. It becomes moist and cold. Then I rub it over her belly, and also above, below, and to the sides of her belly, so that the region becomes cool and moist. When it is cool and moist, I blow softly, steadily, and through puckered lips (to ensure that the insufflations are cool) on that region of skin. This has a very positive effect, and can help her to overcome her pain, even if for a bit.
Administering this cure once a month has taught me personally how important it is to listen to the “patient”. After all, she knows where the pain from the cramps is most severe, and where the most detailed action is needed. I have discovered that listening for instructions is the most significant part of the process – insufflations applied at the wrong locations are often unwelcome, since it does have the effect of a shocking cold, and can make matters worse on top of the existing pain.
I might want to point out that I do not personally know what period cramps feel like. I am a man and have been exempted from that agony by birth and providence.
Jon, excellent. I see you’re paying attention.
Ken, of course they are. I use them because incantations in medicalese seem to communicate well to most modern people.
MOLF, it should. As for Aurum Metallicum, it works quite well — I like to dissolve four tablets in a small amount of warm water, paint that on watercolor paper, and use that to make talismans. As for camphor, good; I use Tiger Balm fairly often.
Clay, exactly. I don’t imagine they’ll figure that out in time to save the industry, either.
Fra’ Lupo, I’d tend to agree with you, but these posts are meant to discuss Lévi’s ideas, not mine.
Sarah, certainly, though, we’d both agree that the psychological effect on the patient has an effect.
BeardTree, ha! A very good example.
Chris, it’s been a few years, but when I last looked into soil science I learned that humus is too chemically complex to be analyzed by any known method…
Robert, yes, exactly. I use placebo methods on myself quite routinely, with good results; it doesn’t matter what the conscious mind thinks, since it’s the subconscious where the placebo effect works.
Random, you were indeed. Thank you for the data point!
Enjoyer, you’re welcome and thank you. I’m glad that the practice has continued somewhere!
Rajarshi, thank you for this! My late wife would have benefited from it back in the day. The trick we learned was to have me rub the lowest part of the back, just above the hips — again, listening to her and finding the right place via her guidance was crucial.