Happy in the time of Jesus were those who wept! Happy, now, are those who can laugh, because laughter is the attribute of man, as the great prophet o… - Eliphas Levi

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!

Magic has been confounded too long with the jugglery of mountebanks, the hallucinations of disordered minds and the crimes of certain unusual malefactors. There are otherwise many who would promptly explain Magic as the art of producing effects in the absence of causes; and on the strength of such a definition it will be said by ordinary people — with the good sense which characterises the ordinary, in the midst of much injustice — that Magic is an absurdity.

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.