Top 15 Eliphas Levi Quotes

There was much talk in the last century about an adept accused of charlatanism, who was termed in his lifetime the divine Cagliostro. It is known that he practised evocations and that in this art he was surpassed only by the illuminated Schroepffer.

He whom we behold perishing poor and abandoned is Cornelius Agrippa, less of a magician than any, though the vulgar persist in regarding him as a more potent sorcerer than all.

Judge not; speak hardly at all; love and act.

They are without fears and without desires, dominated by no falsehood, sharing no error, loving without illusion, suffering without impatience, reposing in the quietude of eternal thought... a Magus cannot be ignorant, for magic implies superiority, mastership, majority, and majority signifies emancipation by knowledge. The Magus welcomes pleasure, accepts wealth, deserves honour, but is never the slave of one of them; he knows how to be poor, to abstain, and to suffer; he endures oblivion willingly because he is lord of his own happiness, and expects or fears nothing from the caprice of fortune. He can love without being beloved; he can create imperishable treasures, and exalt himself above the level of honours or the prizes of the lottery. He possesses that which he seeks, namely, profound peace. He regrets nothing which must end, but remembers with satisfaction that he has met with good in all. His hope is a certitude, for he knows that good is eternal and evil transitory. He enjoys solitude, but does not fly the society of man; he is a child with children, joyous with the young, staid with the old, patient with the foolish, happy with the wise. He smiles with all who smile, and mourns with all who weep; applauding strength, he is yet indulgent to weakness; offending no one, he has himself no need to pardon, for he never thinks himself offended; he pities those who misconceive him, and seeks an opportunity to serve them; by the force of kindness only does he avenge himself on the ungrateful...

He looks on the wicked as invalids whom one must pity and cure; the world, with its errors and vices, is to him God's hospital, and he wishes to serve in it.

To live like an anchorite, without the superstitious ignorance which leads him to such a course of life, this is wisdom indeed, and power is the reward.

The Magus must have also another avocation than that of magician. Magic is not a trade.

The most important magical instruments are the wand, the sword, the lamp, the chalice, the altar and the tripod. In the operations of Transcendental and Divine Magic, the lamp, wand and chalice are used; in the works of Black Magic, the wand is replaced by the sword and the lamp by the candle of Cardan."

The sorcerer and sorceress were almost invariably a species of human toad, swollen with long-enduring rancours. They were poor, repulsed by all and consequently full of hatred. The fear which they inspired was their consolation and their revenge; poisoned themselves by a society of which they had experienced nothing but the rebuffs and the vices, they poisoned in their turn all those who were weak enough to fear them, and avenged upon beauty and youth their accursed old age and their atrocious ugliness.

In the “Ritual” it will be our task to estimate the sequence of truly magical ceremonies and evocations which constitute the great work of vocation under the name of the Exercises Of St. Ignatius.

I will go further and affirm that magical circles and magnetic currents establish themselves, and have an influence, according to fatal laws, upon those on whom they can act. [...] The man who is eccentric in his genius is one who attempts to form a circle by combating the central attractive force of established chains and currents.

He knows the significance of all symbolisms [sic] and of all religions; he dares to practise or abstain from them without hypocrisy and without impiety; and he is silent upon the one dogma of supreme initiation. He knows the existence and nature of the Great Magical Agent; he dares perform the acts and give utterance to the words which make it subject to human will, and he is silent upon the mysteries of the Great Arcanum.

ALL religions have preserved the remembrance of a primitive book, written in hieroglyphs by the sages of the earliest epoch of the world. [...] The tradition in question rests altogether on the one dogma of Magic: the visible is for us the proportional measure of the invisible.

Magic is the divinity of man conquered by science in union with faith; the true Magi are Men-Gods, in virtue of their intimate union with the divine principle.

The science of spirits is therefore summed up entirely in the science of Jesus Christ. Angels and demons are purely hypothetical or legendary beings; let them remain in poetry, they cannot belong to science."*"Magic, the mere name became a crime and the common hatred was formulated in this sentence: "Magicians to the flames!" – as it was shouted some centuries earlier: "To the lions with the Christians!