Art Magic

Tertullian, one of the most zealous of the second century converts to Christianity, sternly advised that, "any persons calling themselves Christians, who could not even expel demons, or heal the sick, should be put to death as impostors."

The celebrated Bishops Montanus and Gregory, Origen, St. Martin, Theophilus, and numerous other eminent Christian Fathers, urged that the same tests suggested by Tertullian should be required of professing Christians. They alleged their own willingness to submit to such an ordeal, and report affirms that they gave continual evidence of their ability to sustain their claims.

So long as Greece and Rome maintained an independent nationality, spiritual influences ruled their councils, and interpreted every phase of their history. In China, Thibet, India and amongst the Northern Asiatic nations, Spiritism has never died out, and continues in force, subject only to modifications in the decadence of religious zeal and fervor to this day.

In every land where gregarious man yet resolves himself into national communities, the exceptional gifts of Seers and Prophets have furnished means by which spirit visitants glance athwart the darkened paths of mortality. Spirit voices have resounded in the air. The semblances of the buried dead have glided through the open door, mounted the stair, and flashed upon our sight like glimpses of moonlight breaking through thick banks of clouds. Luminous forms radiant with the glory of the better land; shapes of woe, shipwrecked waifs from the shores of a retributive hereafter, have come and gone, forming a perpetual chain of spiritual revelation, which time and change have never had power to break. The realms of spiritual existence have never been without some witness in human consciousness. Bland materialism or bigoted ecclesiasticism have never had the excuse to say, in any decade of time, "The vision is closed;" "the gates of the eternal city are shut;" "the canon of revelation is ended."

Magic as an art may have been pursued in the middle ages, only at spasmodic intervals, and that under the ban of the church, and the prohibitory frown of the State.

We are not writing the history of Spiritism and Magic, otherwise we could assign reasons in abundance for this decadence in the faith of old; a few suggestions, however, we feel compelled to make in this direction, and commence by claiming that the brand of reprobation first launched against the name and fame of Spiritism was cast by the hands of Christian Ecclesiastics.

By internal luxury and external pride, the aristocratic rulers of the Christian churches in the sixth and seventh centuries succeeded in driving spirit influence from their midst, and finding themselves deprived of spiritual gifts, and rebuked by the sight of laymen performing those apostolic works required of them in proof of their faith, they resolved in solemn council that henceforth it should be unlawful for any layman to attempt the rites of exorcism, or the cure of disease, by the laying on of hands. PUblic opinion once impelled in this direction soon gained force by momentum.

In Great Britain the ignorant and prejudiced missionaries who were sent to convert the poor natives to Christianity, commenced their work by leveling their bitterest diatribes against the prevailing worship of Druidisim.

The ancient rites of the Druids consisted of solar and sex worship interblended. The heaps of stones sometimes piled in single cairns, sometimes arranged in circles, but above all, these gigantic rings formed of upright unhewn stones, with others horizontally laid across them, were all symbolical of the ancient faith of the Sun worshipper, blending with those emblems significant of the Eastern Phallus and Yoni. The upright unhewn pillars of Lithoi were Phallic emblems, the horizontal slabs formed the mystic Gate or Tau, both important symbols of Phallic worship. Other Druidical altars formed of stones there were, which, either under the subtle influences communicated to them by powerful Priests and Priestesses, or from another peculiar virtue in the stone itself, when balanced one mass on another, could be caused to rock and thus give responses to inquiring worshipers, just as the modern Spiritists obtain communications through the movements of inanimate bodies.

The curious investigator of Druidical remains and ancient faiths will find abundant evidence to show that these "Cromlechs" or rocking stones were nothing less than oracular tables used by the Priestly orders to obtain responses from the invisible world.

The nature of these weird rites was known to the ancient Britons, and when they became converts to Christianity, the Prophetic powers of the Priests and Priestesses, connected, as they were, with dreadful sacrificial offerings, in which the sacred human form was not always exempt, left such impressions of mystery and awe upon their untaught minds, that it was not difficult for their Christian Teachers to convince them that this powerful Priesthood wrought their marvels and obtain responses through the devils whom they propitiated with human sacrifices.

Thus the early Christians in Great Britain grew up with an instinctive horror of Spiritualistic rites, and never failed to connect them with the influence of evil spirits and Satanic worship.

In Continental Europe whenever spiritual gifts were manifested in the Convents or Monasteries, they were deemed evidences of the special favor of God, and signs of extraordinary sanctity. The individuals thus highly favored were canonized after death as saints, and vast revenues accrued to the shrines, which enclosed their ashes, from the miracles they were assumed to work.

That the lives of the saints, and holy ascetics of the Christian Monasteries should be full of spiritual works, was naturally to be expected. The conditions for the unfoldment of latent spiritual powers were as rigidly enforced in monastic rule as they were voluntarily endured by Hindoo Fakeers. The severe discipline, numerous fasts, vigils, and penances of these gloomy recluses, produced the same physiological and psychological changes which have been indicated as resulting from Hindoo and Egyptian methods of Initiation. By the same law, the fires of persecution and continual prospects of martyrdom only served to quicken the zeal and stimulate the devotion of the early Christians, until they actually attained to those degrees of exalted insensibility to pain, that mark even now the self-inflicted mutilations of Eastern Ecstatics.

The rack and the thumb-screw, the convent and the monastery, each produced their legitimate fruits in legions of wonder-working saints and inspired martyrs, and these sufficed to supply the Christian church with all the spiritism it was either safe or politic to encourage.

As it became the interest of the Christianity Hierarchy to attribute all marvels wrought in Monastic Institutions to the special favor of God, and the incomparable sanctity of Catholic devotees, so it was also necessary to reserve such vast auxiliaries to Clerical power within clerical boundaries, and hence, all who presumed to manifest miraculous powers outside the privileged pale of the church and its dependencies, were at once branded with the odious charge of witchcraft, necromancy and black magic.

The more vague these charges were, and the more difficult of definition, the more they struck terror into the mind of an ignorant populace, until it was deemed the highest act of piety on the part of laymen to accuse, and churchmen to destroy, every hapless creature whom the superstition of the time, or the possession of actual spiritual endowments, furnished excuses to brand with the fearful charge of witchcraft.

It must be remembered that whilst the power of life and death was vested in the hands of civil governments, the power of conferring eternal life or eternal torments, was claimed by the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of the middle ages.

The Church, usurping the name and authority of Christ, claimed not only to be god's vicegerent on earth, and to hold the keys to the kingdom, but to be the very porter and door-keeper of heaven, peddling out passports and selling seats for the divine amphitheatres of eternity, to those who could pay best, or confer the richest benefits on its luxurious orders.

If Spiritual gifts had passed away from such a Church, if its well-fed, pampered and ambitious disciples could no longer perform the works enjoined on them by the houseless and wandering Nazarene, was not that sufficient reason why no one else should presume to do more than themselves? - that is no one outside of ecclesiastical dependencies - for it was as much the policy of such a Church to encourage the prestige of miraculous gifts within the limits of its own holy "ring" as it was to burn, crush, torture, hang, drown, and slay generally, all who made profession of the same stupendous powers, outside their special jurisdiction.

Every layman who could perform the works which Christian ecclesiastics ought to have done, was a living rebuke to them for their lack of faith, and so there was but one remedy, and that the all potential one of death. Thus perished to the number of nine thousand, the brave and devoted Stedinger, a section of the Frieslanders, who fired with the love of freedom, protested against the insolent autocracy of the church, and so under letter of authority from the Pope and their Catholic Majesties of Germany, they were exterminated root and branch. Thus died the noble Waldenses, a sect of early Protestants, whose death warrant was sealed for the same cause and by the same murderous hands.

Thus, in the fourteenth century perished miserably, fifty-nine of the celebrated military knights of the Holy Temple with their brave and noble Commanders Jaques de Molay and Guy of Normandy, all roasted alive before slow fires by Christian Priests, and that under the accusation of excelling in those very arts for which the model man of the Christian Bible, the great law-giver of the Jews - Moses - has proved himself to be so accomplished an adept, namely, magic. According to the most authentic records of the times, and from transcripts of the very trials themselves, we learn that between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, thus perished amidst tortures too shocking for recital, and under circumstances that curdle the blood to remember, over 200,000 persons of both sexes and all ages, and that in Continental Europe alone! These murders were perpetrated by roasting alive, hanging, burning, slaying and crushing. They included the destruction of the pure, pious, self-devoted and Angel-led Joan of Arc, the Savior of her country, and the ungrateful monsters who publicly burned her, and all thus perished, either being totally guiltless of any crime, or charged only with the possession of those spiritual gifts which the founder of Christianity demanded as the evidence of Christian faith.

In all lands but those dominated by Christianity, Spiritism has not only prevailed, but it still exists; has been, and is openly taught as an art, engrafted on the services of religion and cultured as a science. Under Christian rule alone have its hapless votaries' powers been crushed out by torture, or silenced by death; and thus it is that so strange and sudden a decadence appears on the page of history to have fallen upon the once popular and universal methods of intercourse which prevailed between spirits and mortals in the early ages. The attitude of the Christian Ministry towards the spiritual side of man's nature has been that of unceasing hostility and presumptuous denunciation; can we wonder then, that a final eclipse of faith has fallen upon the people thus materialized by the very power to whom they have entrusted the charge of their spiritual relations, or that the soul of Christian humanity has become secularized, and its spiritual functions dwarfed almost to annihilation by such a process of training?

To gather up the scattered fragments of spiritual life and phenomena which have burst forth like pent-up fires from every hamlet, city, or nation, of civilization, during the bitter clerical proscriptions of the middle ages, would be impossible in a book of this character. Nothing less than a consecutive and all-embracing history could do justice to so vast a theme; our part, therefore, must now be limited to a few brief notices, and for this purpose we select five classes of representative Spiritists, who figured most prominently during the middle ages, and connected the first or ancient era of spiritual history with the present time.

The three first of these are the Alchemists, Rosicrucians, and Mesmerizers; a noble triad of scholarly men, who, inspired with the belief that spiritual powers and forces must be based upon scientific laws, endeavored to discover and practicalize these, by occult researches into nature, and the revival of magical rites and ceremonials.

The two remaining classes included all those unfortunates branded with the crime of witchcraft, and unquestionably in many instances endowed with true prophetic powers, and finally the Modern Spiritualists.

Of the Alchemists, as a class, we have but little now to say. Although they professed to be engaged in seeking that mysterious stone, which would enable them to transmute base metals into gold, and by expressing the virtues of certain drugs and herbs compound an elixir which should prolong life indefinitely, it is well known to modern scholars that the prestige of these pursuits was designed in many instances to conceal a more occult and spiritual idea. Alchemy owed its introduction into Europe to the to the Arabians, amongst whom Alfarabi and Avicenna were the most celebrated.

These men were no idle pretenders to the Hermetic philosophy. They were both instructed Physicians, wise Magnetists, and profound Psychologists. Some of their cures effected by the laying on of hands and inimitable performances on the lute and other instruments of music, proved them to be adepts, if not in magical art, at least in the powers of magnetism and psychology. The first Alchemist of any repute, whose writings are preserved, was Geber, supposed to have been an Arabian, but historically proved to have been a German. This philosopher claimed that Alchemy was first practices by Noah, and transmitted to his son Shem, from whom the derivation of the word Alchemy was traces. He proved that which the Jesuit Father Martini and Lenglet du Fresnoi, in their several histories of the Hermetic philosophy, have clearly shown, namely; that Alchemy was believed in, and its principles attempted, if not successfully practiced, in most early periods of time. The Chinese taught of its possibility more than two thousand years before the birth of Christ, and many learned Alchemists claimed both Abraham and Moses as brothers of their craft.

The facts were, that the bitter persecutions heaped upon all dissenters from the stereotyped doctrines of Christianity, as enunciated by the Roman Catholic Hierarchy, compelled the concealment of heretical opinions beneath some external form of science, whose semblance could give no offense to the ruling powers.

The Arabian Alchemists and their philosophic successors - the German Rosicrucians - were all waifs drifted off from the great ocean of natural Theosophy, whose source was to be found in the East, and whose origin dates back to the foundations of Sabaism and Ancient Masonry, in Chaldea, India and Egypt.

These men were essentially the "Fire Philosophers" of the middle ages, and their doctrines and practices were derived from a profound study of the truths discoverable only in the powers of nature.

They assumed that matter was resolvable back into two, three, or at most, four primordial conditions. That by various combinations of these original elements all the varieties of material form and substance were produced, hence gold (in these philosophers' opinion) was but a result of the highest combination of elements, and the most perfect experiments of nature.

If them, they argued, they could reduce matter back to its primordial states and then recombine, leaving out the subsidence or flux, and preserving only the finer particles, they could make gold at will, and that form the very same substances that produced iron, lead, and all the baser metals, which were really gold in embryonic condition.

To find the great factor by whose universal agency these natural transmutations proceeded in the bowels of the earth, they had only to resort to the Rosicrucian theory of latent, divine, invisible fire, permeating every portion of matter, theories of which we have written in former sections. Time, experience, and deep study discovered to many ancient philosophers a resemblance between the virtues which proceeded from certain stones, crystals, minerals, drugs, herbs, and plants; astral, solar and lunar influences and the touch of the human hand, or even the contact of any object which had been worn by human beings.

These, together with the mysterious powers of the loadstone, and the universal correspondence which the realms of nature and the sidereal heavens disclosed, convinced these fire philosophers that the great hidden virtue, the universal motor of being, was this all-pervading latent fire, or that which we call magnetism in the earth and minerals; attraction and repulsion in the loadstone; electricity in the clouds and plants, and sparks evolved from batteries; life in animated bodies; and force throughout the Universe of moving forms. In recondite treatises elaborating the ideas which we have thus briefly summed up, the ancient Fire Worshipers, Mediavel Alchemists and Rosicrucians, dilated on the Universal Force of being, as the "Philosopher's Stone," which applied to chemical lore could make and unmake worlds - dissolve all bodies, and recombine them in whatever proportions the accomplished chemist desired, or if expressed into juices and mixed in such degrees as would preserve the largest amount of this force in a liquid form, it would be the "Elixir Vitae" of which those who partook, drinking in the true element of life, might prolong it at will, or if supplied with a sufficient quantity from time to time, live forever!

Had Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Geber, Artephius, Friar Roger Bacon, and other great and truly learned students of these occult ideas, once beheld a Voltaic pile reducing huge bars of metal into a few particles of ash in a single lash, could they have seen similar lightning sparks passing through invisible airs, crystallizing them into drops of water, or acting upon water, solidifying it into hard crystals - could they have witnessed processes now so simple then so stupendously magical, and beheld as the only visible agent of these wonderful transmutations, nothing but a flash of lightning, who can question that their faith in the philosopher's stone would have been sealed into certainty, and that they would have joined in the choral cry "Eureka! The grand Hermetic secret is revealed!"

Again, had these Adepts beheld, as the author has, a frail, wasted, dying creature, extending its emaciated frame on the couch over which the shadows of impending death were falling fast, and watched, as the author has, a simple, untaught countryman waving his rough warm hands over the helpless sufferer, until, without an atom of visible matter used, a single particle of sensuous cause discoverable, the color returned to the wan cheek, light to the glazing eye, the crimson glow of life to the pallid lip, and strength to the wasted form, until upspringing from the couch of death and agony, the sufferer becomes a man again quite restored to life, strength, and health, would not the watching Sages have pertinently asked, "Do you now question the potency of the Elixir Vitae, or doubt that under its influence the mortal might become immortal and live forever?"

With every day's experience in marvels of transformation, transmutation and chemical change wrought by the all-potential magician Electricity, with an equal opportunity for experience to those who dare avail themselves of it, of the no less marvelous potency of vital magnetism, as a restorative of health, a healer of disease, nay a very Messiah who can restore the entranced and semi-dead to life again, who can question that the Alchemists of old were Prophets of the new? and that their labors, veiled mysticism, and occult symbolism, only hovered on the threshold of those sublime truths, which Mesmer and Franklin have since demonstrated, and that even now, modern science is applying the philosopher's stone to every act of simple electrotyping, and modern magnetizers are administering draughts of the Elixir Vitae with eery wave of their life-bringing hands.

It boots not now to rehearse the names and exploits of the many wise and patient scholars, whose heretical beliefs were necessarily hidden under the jargon of alchemical discourses, and pretended researches into physical science. The Alchemists started upon metaphysical propositions, and arguing from the original sacredness of fire, the Deific principle hidden away under every atom of matter, they proceeded to physical experiments, in order to utilize this divine fire, and obtain a perfect command over all the elements of nature.

They discovered in the course of their varied wanderings, from the visible to the invisible, many useful chemical combinations. Roger Bacon, for example, eliminated many profound truths in Astronomy, and improved upon, if he did not actually invent the telescope, burning-glasses and gunpowder. Arnold de Villeneuve, Raymond Lulli, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and many others more or less renowned, preserving faith in the wonders of chemistry, added constantly to the sum of human knowledge in this direction, besides advancing step after step into those realms of power and achievement which enabled Swedenborg, Mesmer, Franklin, Galvani, Volta, and even the scoffing Faraday, to found upon the experiments of unknown and despised builders, those triumphant galleries and corridors of mesmeric, magnetic and electrical science, of which the Ancient Alchemists and Rosicrucians laid the foundation stones.