explain
it. Eliphas Levi, whilst denying the existence of Satan "as a superior
personality and power," admits this fundamental truth: "Evil exists; it
is impossible to doubt it. We can do good or evil. There are beings who
knowingly and voluntarily do evil."[239] There are also beings who love
evil. Levi has admirably described the spirit that animates such beings
in his definition of black magic:

Black magic is really but a combination of sacrileges and murders
graduated with a view to the permanent perversion of the human will
and the realization in a living man of the monstrous phantom of the
fiend. It is, therefore, properly speaking, the religion of the
devil, the worship of darkness, the hatred of goodness exaggerated
to the point of paroxysm; it is the incarnation of death and the
permanent creation of hell.[240]

The Middle Ages, which depicted the devil fleeing from holy water, were
not perhaps quite so benighted as our superior modern culture has led us
to suppose. For that "hatred of goodness exaggerated to the point of
paroxysm," that impulse to desecrate and defile which forms the basis of
black magic and has manifested itself in successive phases of the
world-revolution, springs from fear. So by their very hatred the powers
of darkness proclaim the existence of the powers of light and their own
impotence. In the cry of the demoniac: "What have we to do with Thee,
Jesus of Nazareth? art Thou come to destroy us? I know Thee who Thou
art, the Holy One of God," do we not hear the unwilling tribute of the
vanquished to the victor in the mighty conflict between good; and evil?

The Rosicrucians

In dealing with the question of Magic it is necessary to realize that
although to the world in general the word is synonymous with necromancy,
it does not bear this significance in the language of occultism,
particularly the occultism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Magic at this date was a term employed to cover many branches of
investigation which Robert Fludd, the English Rosicrucian, classified
under various headings, of which the first three are as follows: (1)
"_Natural Magic_, ... that most occult and secret department of physics
by which the mystical properties of natural substances are extracted";
(2) _Mathematical Magic_, which enables adepts in the art to "construct
marvellous machines by means of their geometrical knowledge "; whilst
(3) _Venefic Magic