The reason I am putting this up here is so that we can analyze what he is saying in relation to more modern interpretations of magic and the psychology of consciousness.
This is from the chapter entitled "Evocation" from Eliphas Levi's "The Great Secret or Occultism Unveiled"....
Now... much of what Levi says here makes a great deal of sense to me. Liberty and Reason are what Jung would refer to as the "Self" or what Roberto Assagioli would refer to as the "Conscious Self". Certainly, this fits somewhere on Leary's 8-Circuit model of the mind.Reason alone gives the right to liberty. Liberty and reason, these two great and essential privileges of mankind, are so closely united that one cannot be renounced unless the use of the other is also given up. Liberty wills the triumph of reason and reason imperiously demands the reign of liberty. Liberty and reason are more important than life itself to man. It is beautiful to die for liberty, and it is sublime to be a martyr for reason, because reason and liberty are the very essense of the soul's immortality.
God Himself is the free reason of all that exists.
The devil, on the other hand, is fatal irrationalism.
To forswear one's reason or one's liberty is disown God. To make any appeal to what is irrational or fatalistic is to evoke the devil. We have already said that the devil does exist, and that he is a thousand times more horrible and pitiless than the legends describe him, even at their most gruesome. For us and for reason, he could not possibly be the fine fallen angel of Milton, nor flashing Lucifer, trailing his starry glory through the night with here and there the glitter of lightning. Such titanic fables are impious. The true devil is the one sculptured in our cathedrals and depicted by the naive illuminators of our Gothic books. His essentially hybrid form is the synthesis of all nightmares; it is hideous, deformed and grotesque. He is fettered and binds others in fetters. He has eyes everywhere, except in his head; he has faces in his stomach, in his knees, and on his unspeakably filthy rump. He is everywhere where folly can find a footing, and everywhere he drags behind him the torments of hell.
He himself does not utter a syllable, but he makes all our vices speak; he is athe ventriloquist who operates the gluttons, the Python of abandoned women. At times his voice is as impetuous as the whirlwind, at times it is as insinuating as a low hiss. To converse with our troubled brains he inserts his forked tongue into our ears and to undo our hearts he shakes his tail like an arrow. In our head he slays reason, in our hearts, he poisons liberty, and he does this always and of necessity unremittingly, be cause he is not a person but a blind force; he is accursed, but accursed with us; he is a sinner, but he sins in us. We alone are responsible for the evil which he makes us do, because as for him, he has neither liberty nor reason.
The devil is the beast; Saint John hammers this home in his marvellous Apocalypse; but how can one comprehend the Apocalypse without the keys of the holy Qabalah?
An evocation, therefore, is an appeal to the beast, and only the beast can respond. We might add that to make the beast appear one must first form it within oneself and then project it outside. This secret is that of al the grimoires, but it was only expressed by the ancient masters in a very veiled manner.
To see the devil it is necessary to make oneself up like the devil and then look in a mirror. This is the secret in its simplicity, so that even a child could understand it. Let us add for the benefit of men that, in the mysteries of sorcerers, the devilish countenance is imprinted on the soul by the astral intermediary, and the mirror is darkness animated as the head reals.
Every evocation would be in vain if the magician did not commence by damning his soul in sacrificing for ever his liberty and his reason. It is easy to understand this. To create the beast in us it is essential to kill the man; which is what was represented previously by the sacrifice of a child, and even more distinctly by the profanation of a host. The man who elects to perform an evocation is a wretch who is embarrassed by reason and wishes to magnify in himself the beastial appetites, so that he can turn this into a magnetic centre endowed with a fatal influence. He wishes to personify unreason and fatalism; he wishes to become a disordered magnet, and an evil one too, to attract to himself the vices and the gold which feed them. It is the most terrible crime which the imagination could dream of. It is the rape of nature. It is the direct and absolute outrage thrown in the face of divinity; but also, and happily so, it is a frightfully difficult task, and most of those who have attempted it have come unstuck in the accomplishment. If a man who was strong enough and perverse enough were to evoke the devil in the required conditions, the devil would materialize. God would be held back and terror-stricken nature would be subjected to the despotism of evil.
But, just as "liberty" and "reason" are the makeup of the Self, or as Levi calls it, "man's immortal soul," everyone is aware of various compartments of mind which, whatever you call them, are not the realm of reason or liberty. In fact, these realms of the unconscious, superconscious, id or whatever are all quite beyond reason and quite beyond one's control. Societal imprints and early habits, repression and neurosis make up a large portion of an unrecognized whole personality.
It is these unrecognized aspects of the whole personality that are identified on the Qabalistic Tree of Life and it is by bringing these unconscious realms to the forefront of consciousness that the process of self-realization or "individuation" can occur.
There is a lot more that can be added here about "demons as aspects of the human mind," but I'm not sure what exactly. This is somewhat of a popular opinion these days that "demons are all in your mind, you just have no idea how big your mind is" ... or, as Levi says:
What do you think?An evocation, therefore, is an appeal to the beast, and only the beast can respond. We might add that to make the beast appear one must first form it within oneself and then project it outside. This secret is that of al the grimoires, but it was only expressed by the ancient masters in a very veiled manner.
To see the devil it is necessary to make oneself up like the devil and then look in a mirror.