Transcendental Magic II: The Ritual (Éliphas Lévi) · 104 of 123 · tr. A.E. Waite
21. The Science Of The Prophetsc
The Tarot was the sole book of the ancient Magi; it is the primitive Bible, as we shall prove in the following chapter, and the ancients consulted it as the first Christians at a later date consulted the Sacred Lots, that is, Bible verses selected by chance and determined by thinking of a number.
Mlle.
Lenormand, the most celebrated of our modern fortune-tellers, was unacquainted with the science of the Tarot, or knew it only by derivation from Etteilla, whose explanations are shadows cast upon a back-ground of light.
She knew neither high Magic nor the Kabalah, but her head was filled with ill-digested erudition, and she was intuitive by instinct, which deceived her rarely.
The works she left behind her are Legitimist tomfoolery, ornamented with classical quotations; but her oracles, inspired by the presence and magnetism of those who consulted her, were often astounding.
She was a woman in whom extravagance of imagination and mental rambling were substituted for the natural affections of her sex; she lived and died a virgin, like the ancient druidesses of the isle of Sayne.
Had Nature endowed her with beauty, she might have played easily at a remoter epoch the part of a Melusine or a Velleda.
The more ceremonies are employed in the practice of divination, the more we stimulate imagination both in ourselves and in those who consult us.
The CONJURATION Of THe Four, the Prayer Of Solomon, the magic sword to disperse phantoms, may then be resorted to with success; we should also evoke the genius of the day and hour of operation, and offer him a special perfume; next we should enter into magnetic and intuitive correspondence with the consultant, inquiring with what animal he is in sympathy and with what in antipathy, as also concerning his favourite flower or colour.
Flowers, colours and animals connect in analogical classification with the seven genii of the Kabalah.
Those who like blue are idealists and dreamers; lovers of red are material and passionate; those who prefer yellow are fantastic and capricious; admirers of green are often commercial and crafty; the friends of black are influenced by Saturn; the rose is the colour of Venus, etc.
Lovers of the horse are hard-working, noble in character, and at the same time yielding and gentle; friends of the dog are affectionate and faithful; those of the cat are independent and libertine.
Frank persons hold spiders in special horror; those of a proud nature are antipathetic to the serpent; upright and fastidious people cannot tolerate rats and mice, the voluptuous loathe the toad, because it is cold, solitary, hideous and miserable.
Flowers have analogous sympathies to those of animals and colours, and as Magic is the science of universal analogies, a single taste, one tendency, in a given person, enables all the rest to be divined: it is an application of the analogical anatomy of Cuvier to phenomena in the moral order.
The physiognomy of face and body, wrinkles on the brow, lines on hands, furnish the Magus also with precious indications.
Metoposcopy and chiromancy have become separate sciences; their findings, purely empirical and conjectural, have been compared, examined and combined as a body of doctrine by Goclenius, Belot, Romphilus, Indagine and Taisnier.
The work of the last-mentioned writer is the most important and complete; he combines and criticizes the observations and conjectures of all the others.
Themes
◆Active Contemplationpraxis
A form of meditation that uses imagery, imagination, or symbolic thought rather than purely empty stillness.
The passage emphasizes stimulating 'imagination' and using symbolic thought (colors, animals) in the practice of divination.
The doctrine and worldview that natural phenomena, places, and objects possess inherent spirit, soul, or personality — and that the cosmos is populated by countless local, plural, embodied divine agents: kami in mountain and tree, sidhe in cairn and well, landwights in field and stone, nymphs in spring and grove, haltija in forest and lake, lares and penates in household and threshold, Iamblichean daemons in element and place. Distinct from monotheism (single transcendent God), pantheism (one underlying substance), and emanation_hierarchy (cascading single source); animism's signature is the plurality, locality, and embodied-in-landscape character of the divine.
The invocation of the 'genius of the day and hour' suggests belief in local spiritual agents inhabiting time and space.
The Hermetic axiom that the structure of the cosmos is reflected at every scale — 'as above, so below; as within, so without' — making each level a legible map of the others.
The passage explicitly defines Magic as 'the science of universal analogies' and details how colors, animals, and flowers connect to cosmic genii.
The Stoic and Plotinian doctrine that all parts of the cosmos are bound by hidden affinities, so that a movement in one part resonates through the whole; the metaphysical basis for astrology, magic, and divination.
The text describes hidden affinities between human tastes (colors, animals) and cosmic forces as the basis for divination.
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 such as conjuration, evoking genii, and offering perfumes to engage spiritual powers directly.
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 mentions 'CONJURATION' and the 'Prayer Of Solomon' as tools to disperse phantoms and succeed in operations.