Transcendental Magic II: The Ritual (Éliphas Lévi) · 98 of 123 · tr. A.E. Waite
20. The Thaumaturge-a
We have defined miracles as the natural effects of exceptional causes.
The immediate action of the human will upon bodies, or at least that action exercised without visible means, constitutes a miracle in the physical order.
The influence exercised upon wills or intelligences, either suddenly or within a given time, and capable of subjugating thoughts, changing the most determined resolutions, paralysing the most violent passions - this influence constitutes a miracle in the moral order.
The common error concerning miracles is to regard them as effects without causes, contradictions of Nature, sudden vagaries of the Divine Mind, not seeing that a single miracle of this class would destroy the universal harmony and reduce the universe to chaos.
There are miracles which are impossible even for God, namely, those that involve absurdity.
Could God be absurd for one instant, neither Himself nor the world would be in existence the moment following.
To expect from the Divine Arbiter an effect having a disproportionate cause, or even no cause at all, is what is called tempting God: it is casting one's self into the void.
God operates by His works - in heaven by angels and on earth by men.
Hence, in the circle of angelic action, the angels can perform all that is possible for God, and in the human circle of action men can dispose equally of Divine Omnipotence.
In the heaven of human conceptions it is humanity which creates God, and men think that God has made them in His image because they have made Him in theirs.
The domain of man is all corporeal and visible Nature on earth, and if he cannot rule suns and stars, he can at least calculate their motion, compute their distances and identify his will with their influence.
He can modify the atmosphere, act up to a certain point upon the seasons, heal or harm his neighbours, preserve life and inflict death.
By the conservation of life we understand resurrection in certain cases, as already established.
The absolute in reason and volition is the greatest power which can be given any man to attain, and it is by means of this power that he performs what astonishes the multitude under the name of miracles.
The most perfect purity of intention is indispensable to the thaumaturge, and in the next place a favourable current and unlimited confidence.
The man who has come to fear nothing and desire nothing is master of all.
This is the meaning of that beautiful allegory of the Gospel, wherein the Son of God, thrice victor over the unclean spirit, receives ministration from angels in the wilderness.
Nothing on earth withstands a free and rational will.
When the wise man says, “I will,” it is God Himself Who wills, and all that he commands takes place.
It is the knowledge and self-reliance of the physician which constitute the virtue of his prescriptions, whence thaumaturgy is the only real and efficacious remedy.
It follows that occult therapeutics are apart from all vulgar medication.
It makes use for the most part of words and insufflations, and communicates by will a diverse virtue to the simplest substances - water, oil, wine camphor, salt.
The water of homoeopathists is truly a magnetized and enchanted water, which works by means of faith.
The dynamic substances added in, so to speak, infinitesimal quantities are consecrations and signs of the physician's will.
What is vulgarly called charlatanism is a great means of real success in medicine, assuming that it is sufficiently skilful to inspire great confidence and to form a circle of faith.
In medicine, above all, it is faith which saves.
There is scarcely a village which does not possess its male or female compounder of occult medicine, and these people are - almost everywhere and always - incomparably more successful than physicians approved by the faculty.
Eckhart's Abgeschiedenheit/Gelassenheit — radical letting-go of will, image, and grasping that opens the soul to God; distinct from inner_silence (quietness) and from material renunciation, and adjacent to Sufi tark and Buddhist non-grasping as a practice rather than a metaphysical claim.
The master of all is defined as one who has come to 'fear nothing and desire nothing,' aligning with radical letting-go.
Pronoia — the doctrine that the divine actively orders the unfolding of the cosmos and human affairs toward intelligible ends, against pure chance or blind necessity.
The ordering of action through angels and men implies divine governance of the cosmos.
A chain of divine beings or principles flowing downward from a single transcendent source (the One or the Father), each level less perfect than the one above.
A chain of action is described from God to angels to men, suggesting a hierarchical flow of power.
The doctrine — central to Eastern Orthodox and Maximian theology — that the human person is progressively transformed into a partaker of the divine nature by grace, not merely justified or united in passing ecstasy.
Men are described as able to dispose equally of Divine Omnipotence within their circle of action.
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.
Thaumaturgy is presented as a ritual practice engaging divine power through will and consecrated substances like water and oil.
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 passage explicitly describes occult therapeutics using 'words and insufflations' to communicate virtue to substances, aligning with the magical efficacy of spoken word.