The Ritual of High Magic: Chapter 22

With this post we conclude 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-two: The Book of Hermes” (Greer & Mikituk, pp. 387-418).

Commentary:

We have reached the end of Lévi’s magnum opus, the book that redefined magic for the modern world and set the occult revival of our time on its way. It was standard in Lévi’s day, at least, for authors to refrain from introducing anything really new in the last chapter of a book, and our text follows that old and by no means outworn tradition. This chapter, lengthy as it is, is simply a summary of some of the essential points of the book, and serves as a virtual podium for one more tub-thumping oration of the kind that Lévi’s nineteenth-century readers expected and he himself was more than willing to provide.

Thus it is possible to sum up Lévi’s points, and his achievement, with a good deal less prolixity than he himself used. The essential themes of this chapter, and of the doctrine and ritual of high magic as Lévi understood them, are three in number.

The first is the existence of a secret language of number, letter, and symbol, embodied in the 22 trumps of the tarot deck, with which the great narratives of classical and Biblical mythology can be reinterpreted in terms more meaningful to modern minds than the literal interpretation imposed on them by the scholars and priests of Lévi’s time. The second is the existence of the astral light, the subtle substrate of life and consciousness, which can be directed by the human will and is responsible for the apparent miracles performed by the prophets, sages, and wizards of legend. The third is the Great Arcanum: the secret knowledge that brings mastery over the astral light and transforms the seeker into the adept, at once prophet, priest, and king, equipped with powers that represent the closest human approach to omnipotence.

This is what Lévi has been talking about all through the last forty-three chapters. This is the vision of individual and collective human possibility that fired his imagination, and transformed the minor literary figure and political rabblerouser Alphonse Louis Constant into the prophet of a new age of magic. The book we’ve read is the magical talisman he used in his attempt to make that vision a reality, with at least some measure of success. As we review this chapter, then, it’s appropriate to survey his three themes, and assess the successes and failures of the vision itself and its consequences in the 170 years since Lévi wrote.

The tarot deck in Lévi’s time was just beginning the ascent to its modern role as the most widely used divinatory oracle in the Western world. In his day, to most people who had heard of it at all, it was an obscure card game played in various corners of Europe. Antoine Court de Gébelin started the tarot on its way to the big time by proclaiming it a relic of ancient Egyptian wisdom, and Jean-Baptiste Aliette, under his pen name Etteila, had introduced it to the French public as a divination deck. Lévi took these ideas, added a connection to the Cabalistic Tree of Life, and redefined the tarot not only as a universal key to the world’s mystery traditions, but also as one of the most important survivals of ancient magic, the secret oracle handed down from the priests and wizards of the legendary past.

It’s probably worth being frank here: in historical terms, he was wrong. The tarot was invented sometime between 1415 and 1425 by Marziano da Tortona, secretary to the Duke of Milan, as a clever game. (This has been documented for more than a century in European publications; it says little for the level of scholarship in occult circles in the English-speaking world that so few are aware of it here.) Taken up by the noble classes in a dozen northern Italian towns, it passed through various forms and variations before the specific deck used in Milan became the basis of the version nearly everyone uses today. Passed from Italy to the French town of Marseille, the tarot became the most popular card game among the sailors and dockworkers of that bustling port city. From there it spread to various corners of Europe, including Paris, where it came to the notice of Court de Gébelin and Aliette.

Does that mean that the tarot can’t be used for the purposes Lévi had in mind? Not at all. To begin with, as a product of the collective imagination of the late Renaissance, the tarot embodies the worldview of that era, which is for all practical purposes identical with the worldview of the modern occultist. Furthermore, once occultists took up the tarot, they went to work on it, changing the imagery and in some cases reordering the cards to fit the role that Lévi gave them. Whether the old tarot decks had any particular esoteric content, in other words, classic occult tarots such as the Oswald Wirth deck, the Knapp-Hall deck, or Pamela Colman Smith’s Rider-Waite deck are dripping with it. They are well suited to the kind of work that Lévi assigned to the deck, as generations of occultists have learned.

Very few of the writers and practitioners who followed Lévi’s lead, however, used the tarot for the core purpose he had in mind: the reinterpretation of the symbolic narratives of classical and Christian mythology as a new gospel of human freedom. I’m not at all sure why that project so rarely caught fire among students of Lévi’s work. Attempts were made, some of them highly elaborate, but few people were interested. Nor did many follow the hints Lévi dropped so liberally and connect the tarot with the ars combinatoria, the art of conceptual algebra launched by Catalan mystic Ramon Lull in the Middle Ages, which was practiced so enthusiastically by the mages and occult scholars of the Renaissance.

Instead Aliette, with his exclusive focus on divination, had the last laugh. Divination, for most people, became the be-all and end-all of the tarot, and retains that status today. It interests me to see that even among students of the old occult schools that preserve Lévi’s vision of the tarot, such as Paul Foster Case’s Builders of the Adytum, the magnetic pull of divination is a force to reckon with. It may be that the temptation to know the future in advance is just too strong; it may be that our culture tried so hard to slam shut the doors of perception that a backlash in the direction of prophecy couldn’t be avoided. Still, at least for me, reading what Lévi had to say about the tarot is a poignant glimpse of a road that could have been taken, and wasn’t.

Lévi’s advocacy for the concept of the astral light, on the other hand, was destined to have a much greater success. Partly he had the momentum of the age behind him. From the late eighteenth century onward to the present, the life force was constantly being discovered by European and American scientists. No matter how savage the suppression of the idea and its discoverers became—and it was often pretty brutal—the life force just kept revealing itself to unprejudiced researchers.

One consequence of this history is the plethora of names assigned to the life force. Franz Anton Mesmer called it animal magnetism, Carl von Reichenbach called it Od, Wilhelm Reich called it orgone, T. Galen Hieronymus called it eloptic energy, and the list goes on. Occult practitioners generally called it the astral light when they didn’t borrow the concept of ether from nineteenth-century science, or make use of Asian names for it such as prana and qi. Despite the fulminations of dogmatic materialists, this force of many names is recognized and understood throughout alternative culture today, as often as not veiled under the vague but useful metaphor of “energy.” To the spread of the concept of the life force, and its enthusiastic and productive application all through the alternative scene nowadays, Lévi made a significant contribution.

And the vision of adeptship through the mastery of the Great Arcanum? That had a longer and stranger road ahead of it. For a century after Lévi’s time, that vision remained firmly in place, not least because most occult schools all through that period claimed a connection with actual, living adepts of the kind Lévi wrote about. The Theosophical Society had its Mahatmas, the Golden Dawn had its Secret Chiefs, and so on; it was very rare for anybody to try to start an occult school without staking some kind of claim to sanction from such beings, no matter how thin or obviously fraudulent that claim might be.

Two things happened, however, as the years unfolded. The first was that the concept of adeptship got inflated to an absurd degree by devout but overenthusiastic believers, and turned into a way of avoiding the challenges Lévi hoped to encourage his readers to embrace. H.P. Blavatsky, the effective head of the Theosophical Society for most of its first twenty years, tried her best to insist that her Mahatmas were incarnate human beings living in southern Asia, whose unusual powers were simply the product of many lifetimes of spiritual practice; ordinary Theosophists blithely ignored her and reimagined them as world-ruling demigods unimaginably far above the mere human level. The same thing happened over and over again, as people tacitly rejected adeptship as something they could hope to attain and pushed it off on imaginary supermen of planes far higher than ours.

That led to the second thing I had in mind, which is that these supposed supermen failed to live up to the reputations foisted upon them. The classic example is the Krishnamurti affair of 1929, in which Jiddu Krishnamurti formally refused the role of World Teacher his Theosophical mentors expected him to act out, and dissolved the organization founded to glorify him; the result was a widespread crisis of faith from which the Theosophical Society has never really recovered. On the other end of the spectrum connecting high drama with low farce were the would-be Masters who turned out to have feet, or other bodily appendages, of clay. Quite a respectable number of self-proclaimed superhuman adepts turned out to have the same cravings and weaknesses as the rest of us—and then there were the ones who claimed to be immortal, and proceeded to refute their own propaganda by dropping dead.

By the end of the twentieth century, as a result of such antics, the only responses most esoteric teachers could expect for such claims were raucous laughter and a shortage of students. Less absurd forms of self-promotion accordingly became more popular. This is by and large a good thing. Somewhere in the rise and fall of fantasies of Secret Chiefs, however, Lévi’s far less extreme vision of adeptship got lost—and it may yet be worth recovering.

The crucial point here is that the Great Arcanum does in fact exist. In its simplest form, a form that can be practiced by the beginner, it can be pieced together without too much difficulty from Lévi’s own repeated allusions and hints. In terms of the Tetragrammaton, the fourfold name of the Divine that structures so much of his teaching, the י or Yod of the Great Arcanum is the will, trained, purified, and focused to a single point. The ה or Heh is the imagination, equipped for the task by the systematic study of a symbolic alphabet such as the tarot. The ו or Vau is the breath, used in a variety of ways, including those relatively simple methods of which Lévi gives quite adequate descriptions. The ה or Heh final, lastly, is the use of any of a number of specific material substances as a focal point for the astral light.

None of this is especially obscure. All of it is covered in the book we’ve just finished reviewing, and in fact our author gives a number of specific examples of the entire working of the Great Arcanum in action, though of course he is careful not to flag them as such. A few careful readings of this book, therefore, and a little delving into the literature of medieval and Renaissance magic that influenced Lévi, will be more than enough to reveal the method as well as the forms of training needed to master it.

Any reader of this book, in other words, can become an adept of the kind Lévi imagined, given a willingness to invest the necessary time, intelligence, and hard work in that process. The possibilities of his or her adeptship, in turn, will be measured precisely by how much of those inescapable ingredients each aspirant is willing to put into the work. Thus the doors of the sanctuary stand open to all those willing to enter. Will you be one of them? That, dear reader, you alone can decide.

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.

This concludes our study of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic. I want to thank all my readers for their attention and enthusiasm during the period of almost four years we’ve put into this project! Next month we’ll begin a new sequence of book club posts; stay tuned.