HISTORY OF MAGIC.

A monster accepted as an executioner by the sovereign power and who, according to the energetic expression of an ancient Catholic writer, can call God the God of the devil while giving himself as a devil of God!

There lies the irreligious phantom that slanders religion; take away from us this idol that hides our savior. Down with the tyrant of lies! Down with the black God of the Manichaeans! Down with the Arimane Ahriman, the spirit of evil in Zoroastrianism of the ancient idolaters! Long live God alone and his incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, the savior of the world, who saw Satan fall from heaven! And long live Mary, the divine mother who crushed the head of the infernal serpent!

This is what the tradition of the saints and the hearts of all the true faithful say with unanimity: To attribute any greatness to the fallen spirit is to slander the divinity; to lend any royalty to the rebellious spirit is to encourage revolt, it is to commit, in thought at least, the crime of those who in the Middle Ages were called with horror sorcerers.

For all the crimes formerly punished by death in the ancient sorcerers are real and are the greatest of all crimes.

They stole fire from heaven, like Prométhée Prometheus.

They rode, like Médée Medea, winged dragons and the flying serpent.

They poisoned the breathable air, like the shadow of the mancenillier manchineel tree, famously poisonous.

They profaned holy things and made the very body of the Lord serve works of destruction and misfortune.

How is all this possible? It is because there exists a mixed agent, a natural and divine agent, corporeal and

INTRODUCTION.

spiritual, a universal plastic mediator, a common receptacle for the vibrations of movement and the images of form, a fluid and a force that one could call in some way the imagination of nature. By this force all nervous systems communicate secretly together; from this are born sympathy and antipathy; from this come dreams; by this are produced the phenomena of second sight and extra-natural vision. This universal agent of the works of nature is the od the hypothetical "odic force" of Baron von Reichenbach of the Hebrews and of the Chevalier de Richembach, it is the astral light of the Martinists, and we prefer, as more explicit, this last name.

The existence and possible use of this force are the great arcane of practical magic. It is the wand of the thaumaturges and the clavicule little key of black magic.

It is the Edenic serpent that transmitted to Eve the seductions of a fallen angel.

The astral light magnetizes, heats, enlightens, magnetizes, attracts, repels, vivifies, destroys, coagulates, separates, breaks, and gathers all things under the impulse of powerful wills.

God created it on the first day when he said the FIAT LUX Let there be light!

It is a force blind in itself, but which is directed by the égrégores Egregors, or the collective watchers/spirits, that is to say, by the leaders of souls. The leaders of souls are the spirits of energy and action.

This already explains the whole theory of prodiges and miracles. How, indeed, could the good and the wicked force nature to show exceptional forces? How would there be divine miracles and