Necromancy

from Eliphas Lévi, The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, John Michael Greer and Anthony Mikituk, new translation 2017. Penguin Publishing Group.

Death is the phantom of ignorance; it does not exist.

All is alive in nature and it is because all is alive that everything incessantly mutates and changes form.

Death is neither the end of life nor the beginning of immortality; it is the continuation of the transformation of life.

The resurrection of a dead person is the masterpiece of magnetism, because one must, to accomplish it, exert a type of sympathetic omnipotence. It is possible in cases of death due to congestion, suffocation, lethargy, and hysteria, in short in cases where the bodily vehicle is undamaged and the spirit, enchanted by its new environment, is not unwilling to re-enter it.

Eutychus, who was resuscitated by Saint Paul after falling from the third floor, undoubtedly had broken nothing inside himself, having succumbed either to asphyxia, with the air driven from his lungs, or to seizure due to fear. One must, in such a case, and when he feels the power and enthusiasm necessary to accomplish such a work, practice, like the apostle, mouth to mouth insufflation, by making contact with the extremities in order to bring back the heat of the body.…

In such a case it may sometimes suffice to take the person by the hand and energetically raise it while loudly calling out her name.

Such procedures, which ordinarily work for fainting episodes, can have the same effect on death when the acting magnetizer is gifted by a sympathetically powerful speech and possesses what we can call eloquence of the voice.

She must also either be tenderly loved or respected by the resurrectionist, and he must perform his work with a great surge of enthusiasm and will, which cannot always be found during the initial shock.

What we vulgarly call necromancy has nothing to do with resurrection, and it is also highly doubtful that, in necromancy one actually makes contact with the souls of the dead whom one evokes.

There are two types of necromancy, light and dark: evocation through prayer, the pentacle, and the perfumes; and evocation through blood, imprecations, and blasphemies.

Within the astral light are conserved images of people and of things. It is also in this light that we can evoke the forms of those who are no longer of this world. The Cabalists who spoke of the world of the spirits were simply recounting what they had seen in their evocations.

Eliphas Lévi Zahed, who writes this book, has evoked and has seen.

Let us first say what the masters wrote of their visions and of their intuitions in what they called the light of glory.

We read in the Hebrew book of the Revolution of Souls that there are three types of soul: the daughters of Adam, the daughters of angels, and the daughters of sin.

There are also, according to the same book, three types of spirits: captive spirits, errant spirits, and free spirits.

Souls are sent off in couples. There are, however, male souls born widowed, and whose wives are being held captive by Lilith and Na’amah, the queens of the stryges: these are souls who must expiate their rashness through a vow of celibacy.

Thus when a man renounces from early childhood his love for women, he renders the wife who was destined for him a slave to the demons of debauchery. Souls meet and multiply in heaven as well as in bodies on earth. Immaculate souls are the daughters of the kisses of angels.

Nothing can enter heaven which does not come from heaven. After death, the divine spirit which animated a man returns alone to heaven and leaves on earth and in the atmosphere two cadavers: one terrestrial and elementary, and another aerial and astral; one is already inert, the other is still animated by the universal movement of the world soul but is destined to slowly die, absorbed by the astral powers which produced it. The terrestrial corpse remains visible; the other is invisible to the eyes of terrestrial and living bodies and can only be seen through applications of the astral light upon the imagination, which communicates its impressions to the nervous system and thus affects the organ of sight to the point of being able to see the forms which are conserved and the words which are written in the book of the vital light.

After a time, a man’s astral corpse evaporates like pure incense by rising towards the upper regions, but if that man lived in crime, his astral corpse, which holds him prisoner, continues to search for the objects of his passion and wishes to live again. He torments the dreams of young girls, bathes in the vapors of spilt blood, and loiters around places where the pleasures of life have flowed; he still watches over the treasures he had possessed and hoarded; he exhausts himself with painful efforts, in order to make himself material organs so as to live again. But the celestial bodies suck him up and drink him; they feel his intellect weaken, his memory slowly fading, his entire being dissolving…. His old vices appear to him as monstrous figures and chase him; they attack and devour him…. The poor devil thus gradually loses all the members of his body which had served him in his iniquity; and then he dies for a second time and forever, because he then loses his personality and his memory. Souls which must live but are not yet entirely purified stay captive in their astral corpse for more or less time, where they are burnt by the odic (force-filled) light which wishes to assimilate and dissolve him.

It is in order to escape their astral corpse that souls sometimes enter into the living, and live within them in a state Cabalists call embryonate. It is these aerial corpses which we evoke through necromancy.

It is the larvae, of dead or dying substances, that we contact; ordinarily they cannot communicate except through the ringing in our ears, and they are normally understood only by reflecting upon our thoughts or our dreams.

To see these strange forms one must enter into an exceptional state, between sleep and death. One must magnetize oneself and reach a lucid and alert hypnotic state.

Necromancy obtains real results and magical evocations can produce actual visions. We have said that within the great magical agent, the astral light, are conserved the imprint of all things, all images which have been formed either by rays or by reflections.

It is within this light that our dreams appear. It is this light which intoxicates madmen and pulls their sleepy judgment into chasing the most bizarre ghosts.

To see without illusions in this light, one must push aside the reflections with a powerful will and attract only the rays to oneself.

To dream awake is to see within the astral light.

The orgies of the Sabbath, as recounted by so many witches during their criminal trials, had appeared to them in the same manner.

Often the preparations and the substances used to arrive at their results were horrific, as we shall see in Ritual; but the results were never in doubt.

They saw, they heard, they touched the most abominable things, the most fantastic, the most impossible.

In the spring of the year 1854, I went to London to escape my personal sorrows and dedicate myself, without distraction, to science. I had letters of introduction to eminent people who were curious about revelations from the supernatural world. I saw several of them, and I found in them, along with their very courteous behavior, a foundation based on indifference or frivolity….

Hokusai: The Ghost of Oiwa