13. Necromancy-a

EX IPSIS MORS We HAVE said that the images of persons and things are preserved in the Astral Light. Therein also can be evoked the forms of those who are in our world no longer, and by this means are accomplished those mysteries of Necromancy which are so contested and at the same time so real. The Kabalists who have discoursed concerning the world of spirits have described simply what they have seen in their evocations. Eliphas Levi Zahed, who writes this book, has evoked, and he has seen. Let us state, in the first place, what the masters have written on their visions or intuitions in that which they term the light of glory. We read in the Hebrew book concerning the Revolution of Souls that there are three classes of souls - the daughters of Adam, the daughters of angels and the daughters of sin. According to the same work, there are also three kinds of spirits captive, wandering and free. Souls are sent forth in couples; at the same time certain souls of men are born widowed, for their spouses are held captive by Lilith and Naemah, queens of the stryges: they are souls condemned to expiate the temerity of a celibate's vow. Hence, when a man renounces the love of women from his infancy, he makes the bride who was destined for him a slave to the demons of debauch. Souls grow and multiply in heaven, as bodies do upon earth. Immaculate souls are the daughters of the kisses of angels. Nothing can enter heaven save that which comes from heaven. Hence, after death, the divine spirit which animated man ascends by itself above and leaves two corpses below, one upon earth, the other in the atmosphere; one terrestrial and elementary, the other aerial and sidereal, one already inert, the other still animated by the universal movement of the soul of the world, yet destined to die slowly, absorbed by the astral forces which produced it. The terrestrial body is visible; the other is unseen by the eyes of earthly and living bodies, nor can it be beheld except by the application of the Astral Light to the TRANSLUCID, which conveys its impressions to the nervous system and thus influences the organ of sight, so that it perceives the forms which are preserved and the words which are written in the book of vital light. When a man has lived well the astral body evaporates like a pure incense ascending towards the superior regions; but should he have lived in sin, his astral body, which holds him prisoner, still seeks the object of its passions and wishes to return to life. It torments the dreams of young girls, bathes in the stream of spilt blood and floats about the places where the pleasures of its life elapsed. It watches over treasures which it possessed and buried; it expends itself in painful efforts to make fresh material organs and so live again. But the stars draw it up and absorb it; it feels its intelligence weaken, its memory gradually vanishes, all its being dissolves . . . . Its former vices rise up before it, assume monstrous shapes and pursue it; they attack and devour it . . . . The unfortunate creature thus loses successively all the members which have ministered to his iniquities; then he dies a second time and for ever, because he loses his personality and his memory. Souls which are destined to live, but are not yet purified completely, remain captive for a longer or shorter period in the astral body, wherein they are burned by the odic light, which seeks to absorb and dissolve them. It is in order to escape from this body that suffering souls sometimes enter the organisms of the living and dwell therein in that state which Kabalists term embryonic. Now, it is these aerial bodies which are evoked by Necromancy.