Transcendental Magic II: The Ritual (Éliphas Lévi) · 63 of 123 · tr. A.E. Waite
13. Necromancy-f
Thus, a fatal law drives demons downward when they wish and believe themselves to be ascending.
So also those who term themselves chiefs are the most impotent and despised of all.
As to the horde of perverse spirits, they tremble before an unknown, invisible, incomprehensible, capricious, implacable chief, who never explains his laws, whose arm is ever stretched out to strike those who fail to understand him.
They give this phantom the names of Baal, Jupiter and even others more venerable, which cannot, without profanation, be pronounced in hell.
But this phantom is only the shadow and remnant of God, disfigured by wilful perversity, and persisting in imagination like a visitation of justice and a remorse of truth.
When the evoked spirit of light manifests with sad or irritated countenance, we must offer him a moral sacrifice, that is, be inwardly disposed to renounce whatever offends him; and before leaving the oratory, we must dismiss him, saying: “May peace be with thee!
I have not wished to trouble thee; do thou torment me not.
I shall labour to improve myself as to anything that vexes thee.
I pray and will still pray, with thee and for thee.
Pray thou also both with and for me, and return to thy great slumber, expecting that day when we shall awake together.
Silence and adieu!” We must not close this chapter without giving some details on Black Magic for the benefit of the curious.
The practices of Thessalian sorcerers and Roman Canidias are described by several ancient authors.
In the first place, a pit was dug, at the mouth of which they cut the throat of a black sheep; the psyllae and larvae presumed to be present, and swarming round to drink the blood, were driven off with the magic sword; the triple Hecate and the infernal gods were evoked, and the phantom whose apparition was desired was called upon three times.
In the Middle Ages, necromancers violated tombs, composing philtres and unguents with the fat and blood of corpses combined with aconite, belladonna and poisonous fungi.
They boiled and skimmed these frightful compounds over fires fed with human bones and crucifixes stolen from churches; they added dust of dried toads and ash of consecrated hosts; they anointed their temples, hands, and breasts with the infernal unguent, traced diabolical Pantacles, evoked the dead beneath gibbets or in deserted graveyards.
Their howlings were heard from afar, and belated travellers imagined that legions of phantoms rose out of the earth.
The very trees, in their eyes, assumed appalling shapes; fiery orbs gleamed in the thickets; frogs in the marshes seemed to echo mysterious words of the Sabbath with croaking voices.
It was the magnetism of hallucination and the contagion of madness.
The end of procedure in Black Magic was to disturb reason and produce the feverish excitement which emboldens to great crimes.
The Grimoires, once seized and burnt by authority everywhere, are certainly not harmless books.
Sacrilege, murder, theft, are indicated or hinted as means to realization in almost all these works.
Thus, in the Grand Grimoire and its modern version the Red Dragon, there is a recipe entitled “Composition of Death, or Philosophical Stone”, a broth of aqua fortis, copper, arsenic and verdigris.
Ritual maintenance of relationship with the dead as ongoing presences whose favour is cultivated and whose offence is propitiated. Shinto uji-gami and obon, Norse disir and the alfablot, Celtic samhain and the feast for the deceased, Roman lares and parentalia, Chinese ancestor rites, Vedic śrāddha. Practice-coded rather than belief-coded: distinct from soul_migration (cosmological doctrine of soul-transmigration) and theosis_deification (deification trajectory); ancestor_veneration centres the living's ongoing ritual obligation to the dead.
Necromancy practices involve evoking the dead and using corpse parts, treating them as ongoing presences.
Augustinian and Plotinian doctrine that evil has no positive being of its own but is a lack, distortion, or absence of the good — denying ontological dualism while preserving moral seriousness.
The phantom is defined as a 'shadow and remnant of God, disfigured by wilful perversity,' aligning with evil as distortion of the good.
Transgressive knowing acquired against divine prohibition — the Watchers' teaching of metallurgy, sorcery, and cosmetics in 1 Enoch, the Gnostic Eve narratives, the Promethean mytheme; explicitly contrasted with gnosis_direct_knowledge, which is salvific.
The passage explicitly details Black Magic practices, necromancy, and Grimoires containing recipes for death and poison as transgressive means.
Iamblichean ritual practice that engages the gods directly through consecrated material symbols and actions, on the premise that divine power descends into properly prepared matter — distinct from philosophical contemplation alone.
The passage details ritual practices using consecrated material symbols and actions to engage spirits.
The doctrine and practice that spoken or sung word carries causal-magical force — that uttering names, formulas, songs, or incantations alters reality directly rather than merely communicating about it. Vainamoinen's runo-songs that move mountains and command iron, Norse galdr, Vedic mantra, Shinto kotodama, the magician's barbarous names in the Greek Magical Papyri, Iamblichean arcane signatures and inexplicable symbols, biblical creation-by-word. Distinct from sacred_names (the ontological power of names themselves) and prayer (address to the divine); word_power_incantation is the magical-causal efficacy of the spoken word as such.
The text describes calling upon spirits three times and the power of names to be pronounced or avoided.