The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 21

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, as we have over the four years now past, 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-one:  The Science of the Prophets” (Greer & Mikituk, pp. 377-386).

Commentary:

Divination, the theme of the next to last chapter of our text, is also the most popular branch of the occult sciences. This is as true now as it was fifty centuries ago.  For every person you can find today who practices ceremonial magic, you can easily find twenty who know how to read tarot cards and a hundred who now and again check their horoscopes via a smartphone app or get a friend to do readings for them. It’s one of the constants of human culture.

When Lévi refers to divination as “the priesthood of the mage,” he has two things in mind, for a priest (or for that matter a priestess) always faces, like the Roman god Janus, in two directions at once. One face always turns toward the divine, however envisaged, and the other toward the community of worshippers the priest or priestess serves. (This is what differentiates the priest or priestess from the monk or nun, whose whole face is turned toward the divine.) On the one hand, the mage as diviner exercises divine power and attains divine knowledge—in a small and very human way, to be sure, but nonetheless in a way that is real. On the other hand, the mage as diviner listens to the questions of clients and offers them good advice.

Look at the great mages of legend and you’ll find that same pattern repeated over and over again. Merlin, to cite only the most famous example, is much less famous in the old legends for magical powers than he is for his ability to know the past and future, to see the unknown, and to penetrate even the most deeply held secrets of human beings. His chief role in the Arthurian legends is as Arthur’s counselor and adviser, offering him crucial guidance all through the vulnerable early days of his kingship—and it is when Merlin departs to his crystal cave, never again to be seen by mortal eyes, that Arthur’s great attempt to bring peace to a war-ravaged land begins to fail.

To see the hidden is a much simpler thing than it might seem—though here as so often, “simple” is not the same thing as “easy.”  As our text points out a little further on, there are broadly speaking two ways to do it, the instinctive and the initiated. The uneducated child or peasant, who has never been taught to ignore intuitive insights, very often has this ability naturally; the mage has regained the ability through systematic training and initiation. It is those who fall in between—the “midwits,” to use a bit of current slang—who lack either source of insight and so blunder through life without intuitive guidance, not least because they try to use reasoning to perceive what reason cannot grasp.

The mage, by contrast, can know others because he knows himself. Having penetrated his own disguises and defenses, having learned his own weaknesses and faults, he can perceive those of others. As Lévi points out, most people betray their secrets at every moment by their words, their motions, their glances, and the very shape and stance of their bodies. When Freud wrote about slips of the tongue and the other odd habits of neurotics, he was discussing something that diviners have known and used since the most ancient times.

Yet even the person who has mastered his body, voice, and movements leaves traces of his secrets in the astral light. This is what sets the mage apart from most psychologists. (Those like Carl Jung, who used classic occult methods to access the astral light while veiling it all in terms such as “active imagination” and “collective unconscious,” are the exceptions.)  The ability to read images in the astral light, using one or more of the technical methods of occultism, gives an even more detailed glimpse into the fears, habits, and intentions of others than the sort of close observation just discussed.

As our text points out, this deeper insight can be a very dangerous thing. Lévi spends two paragraphs sketching out the type of person that makes it dangerous, and in the process gives a good clear portrayal of a character type as common in our time as in his. When he writes that this “is a whole class of men, with whom the mage most often deals, especially in our century,” he speaks to this century as well. All those who have been public practitioners of occultism know the type, and most of us have at least some elements of that same type in our characters; again, we can know them because we know ourselves.

Lévi then suggests that a career as a diviner is a bad choice for the serious mage. His reasons are sensible enough—that the industry is full of clever frauds who use trickery to achieve astounding results, and the mage will have to do the same in order to compete with them. This is true, and goes considerably further than Lévi realized. The art of cold reading, as it’s called in the carnival business, uses careful observation and equally skillful canned readings to convince chumps that the old lady with the crystal ball really can see their inmost thoughts and foretell their future. There are many other tricks that fraudulent diviners use, with good results, to extract money from their customers and establish a reputation for omniscience

Even so, Lévi is not quite correct to say that professional divination isn’t an option for the serious occultist.  An impressive number of occultists got through the Great Depression in good shape by casting horoscopes for pay; a significant number still do this, or find some other way to use honest divination as an income source. That’s easier nowadays than it used to be, because so many diviners have fallen into the habit of asking their clients, in effect, “what do you want the reading to mean?” Honest answers to serious questions are uncommon enough nowadays, and not just from diviners, that the astrologer, card reader, or other diviner who offers it may find a much larger clientele than he or she expects.

The methods of divination, to Lévi, are simply an assortment of ways to silence the chattering of the mind and direct attention to compelling symbols through which intuition can work. Here he sets out some of the methods that were especially widespread in his time. Scrying in a magical mirror, a bowl of water, or a blackened thumbnail are all variants of the same practice, along with the crystal ball made famous by a long string of carnival sideshows and media clichés. All these are instruments by which the mind may be cast into a shallow trance during which dream images surface before the conscious awareness.

Geomancy, cartomancy, and the tarot (a subset of cartomancy) all belong to another category of divination, which is technically known as sortilege:  the use of random combinations of symbols as an instrument for divination.  The geomancer uses various random or semirandom methods to generate four geomantic figures, each one a four-digit binary number denoted by single or double dots, and these are then used to generate twelve more figures, from which the answer is read. The cartomancer, using tarot or any other card deck, gets the same results by shuffling the cards, laying some of them out in a particular pattern, and interpreting the results. Another form of sortilege Lévi mentions uses the Bible; the diviner formulates a question, chooses a single-digit number at random, then opens the Bible at random and reads the first verse on the page that has the number he chose; this provides the answer to the question.

Metoposcopy, which is divination by face reading, and chiromancy, divination by palm reading, belong to another category, technically called physiognomy.  In either case the conformations of face or hand are used to reveal character and destiny. These are not the only body parts that have been interpreted this way—one of the odder books I’ve ever read was a manual of breast divination, which claimed to be able to interpret a woman’s personality by the shape of her breasts—but for obvious reasons the more intimate body parts only get this kind of attention in very specialized circumstances.  None of the forms of physiognomy, oddly enough, have gotten much attention in the modern occult scene; readers interested in pursuing something other than the usual forms of divination might consider them.

Another mode of divination that Lévi discusses is divination using a person’s preferences in animals, flowers, and colors, and their characteristic imaginations and dreams. Here again we have drawn close to modern psychology, and for good reason. What occultists call the astral light, psychologists of certain schools term the unconscious mind; for this reason, the methods that occultists use to reveal the former are very closely related, when not identical, to those that psychologists use to disclose the latter. If you know someone’s likes and dislikes, the stray notions that move through their mind and the images that haunt their dreams, you know a vast amount about them and can very often predict what they will do and what sorts of things will happen to them—this latter, of course, because so much of what happens to us is a product of our own thoughts, words, and deeds.

All these are effective methods of gauging the nature of personality and the flow of events. Less effective is the method to which Lévi devotes the last few pages of this chapter:  the use of grand narratives by which the coming and going of historical ages can be measured.  This is always a very popular approach, mostly because the age about to dawn is almost always painted in the gaudy colors of utopia, but it’s also guaranteed to flop in practice, because too few people recall that the word “utopia” literally means “nowhere.”

The specific system Lévi uses here is the scheme of planetary ages introduced in the sixteenth century by Johannes Trithemius, the teacher of Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa. In this scheme history is divided into a repeating sequence of seven ages, each lasting 354 years and 4 months. These ages are assigned to the planetary archangels, in an order that goes through the days of the week in reverse: Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Moon, and Sun. Do the math and you’ll find that these seven periods add up (within rounding error) to two of the ages marked off by the precession of the equinoxes—for example, the Arian and Piscean ages. It’s an intriguing system that deserves more attention than it’s gotten, and it played a very large role in the belief—widespread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century occult scenes—that the Age of Aquarius arrived promptly in November 1879, with the coming of the current period, ruled by Michael, angel of the Sun.

The difficulty, of course, is that Lévi’s idea of what the epoch of the Sun would bring has far too much in common with the more recent notions of the Age of Aquarius, and far too little to do with the realities of human history. He expected France to found a worldwide political and religious empire after conquering East Asia, bringing peace and happiness to the entire planet. Obviously that’s not what happened, nor was there any reason to think that it would happen, but hope—or rather wishful thinking—springs infernal, no matter how many times it is contradicted by the calm logic of events.

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 the final chapter of Lévi’s magnum opus, “The Book of Hermes,” on March 12, 2025. See you then!