The Power of the Magician Is Inversely Related to His Worldly Interests

Eliphas Levi and Arthur Edward Waite · Black versus White Magic Series · 63 pages

Sixty-three pages of Eliphas Levi in A.E. Waite's translation, gathered under a title that states the principle the compiler wanted foregrounded: that a magician's power stands in inverse proportion to his worldly interests. The opening section calls occult philosophy the key to all divine obscurities and the absolute queen of society in the ages when it was reserved for the education of priests and kings — and observes, in Levi's characteristic register, that the multitude never conspires except against real powers, possessing no knowledge of what is true but a sure instinct for what is strong.

The historical argument is that magic was not destroyed but driven into disguise. Christianity, on this account, owed magic no hatred; it was human ignorance that feared the unknown, and the divine science responded by clothing itself in new hieroglyphics and inventing the jargon of alchemy — an enduring deception for the vulgar and a living language for the disciple of Hermes. What men ceased to understand ceased to exist for them, and passed into the domain of enigma. Julian is called the Don Quixote of Roman chivalry and set beside Socrates as executed for the same crime. Later sections take the seven powers and privileges of man, the two Oedipuses, Cupid and Psyche, and the Sphinx as the granite pedestal of divine wisdom. Illustrated throughout by Ilene Meyer.

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