The History of Magic
Éliphas Lévi (trans. A. E. Waite) · 1913
4.8 · 5 ratings
About the book
Lévi tells the whole story — Zoroaster to the nineteenth century — as only he can, with magic as the secret thread running through every religion and revolution. Waite translates faithfully and disagrees loudly in the footnotes, so you get two magicians for one.
Try the short course
Part 1 · What Lévi means by magic. The first six slides, free.
1 / 6
Magic, Lévi complains on his first page, has long been confused with the tricks of street conjurors, the hallucinations of disordered minds and the crimes of a few unusual criminals. Worse is the educated version: magic as the art of producing effects without causes. Ordinary people call that absurd, and Lévi agrees with them.
His own definition runs the other way. Magic is “the exact and absolute science of Nature and her laws.” Nobody gets to decide what it is, because it draws only on itself, the way mathematics does.
So set aside the picture of a wand bending reality to a wish. In Lévi’s hands magic admits no effect without a cause. Its whole claim is that it knows the causes better than anyone else does.
Inside the course
20 parts- Magic defined by its most romantic historianFree above
- The fabulous sources: before the record begins
- The magic of the Magi
- Magic in India, and the Gnostic inheritance
Questions
Is The History of Magic free to read in Astra Trainer?
Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Russian.
What is the short course?
20 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.
Where do I get the app?
Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. The History of Magic is waiting in the app’s library.
