Lévi on the Power of Mind, Unruffled by Desire

Éliphas Lévi, Arthur Edward Waite (T) · Living the Life Series · 6 pages

From Éliphas Lévi's Transcendental Magic, the section headed “Preparations,” pages 192–93, in Arthur Edward Waite's translation. The frontispiece is by Mahmoud Farshchian. Two further Lévi pieces in Waite's translation are held in the Down to Earth series.

The passage begins by defining magical operations as the exercise of a natural power, though one superior to the ordinary forces of nature — the result of a science and a practice that exalt the human will beyond its normal limits. From this comes the redefinition the piece is built on: the supernatural is only the natural in an extraordinary grade, or the exalted natural; a miracle is a phenomenon that strikes the multitude because it is unexpected, the astonishing being simply that which astonishes. Miracles are called effects that surprise those ignorant of their causes, or who assign them causes out of proportion to the effects — so that miracles exist only for the ignorant, though since there is scarcely any absolute science among men, the supernatural still obtains for the whole world. Lévi then makes the concession that gives the argument its balance: that he believes in all miracles, being certain from his own experience of their entire possibility, and that some he cannot explain he nonetheless regards as no less explicable. The condition on the operator follows, and it is the passage the title points to — that to work miracles one must be outside the ordinary conditions of humanity, either abstracted by wisdom or exalted by madness, superior to all passions or beyond them through ecstasy or frenzy.

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