Olympic Magic

There is an ancient tradition, kept in the Arbatel de Magia Veterum, according to which the world is not governed by chance: under the command of ELOHIM, seven intelligences share among themselves time, blessing, force, light, beauty, the word, and the dream. They are not gods. They are not demons. They are servants — and the first thing they do, when someone kneels before them, is to bid him rise.

This series is the record of seven conversations with them.

Frater Eisenheim does not evoke them, does not constrain them, makes no pact, and asks nothing. Whoever walked with him through the Goetia knows that he knows the art of calling by name — and knows too that here he did not use it: he asked of God, waited, and whoever came, came by the order of the One who governs him, and might not have come. There is all the distance in the world between evoking and being answered. He merely asks.

And what the seven answer is not what the world expected to hear: none of them offers power. Each teaches the force entrusted to him — and, in the same breath, warns about what men have made of it.

Because the thesis of the collection is hard and simple: the forces of heaven are good; the corruption is ours. Time imprisons no one — it is we who turn limit into fatalism. Prosperity does not corrupt — it is we who turn blessing into pride. Beauty does not seduce — it is we who use it to adorn the lie. That there exist, beneath these same heavens, fallen spirits who work the corrupted version of each of these forces, the reader of the Goetia and of the Tree of Death already knows. These seven are not of them.

The seven volumes, in the order in which the planets descend from heaven to earth:

I — ARATRON (Saturn): time, limit, and maturity — and the cold rigidity a man calls wisdom.

II — BETHOR (Jupiter): blessing, greatness, and authority — and the pride that abundance feeds.

III — PHALEG (Mars): will, courage, and the defense of the weak — and the violence that disguises itself as force.

IV — OCH (Sun): light, healing, and glory — and the vanity that makes of one's own healing a throne.

V — HAGITH (Venus): beauty, love, and harmony — and the desire that possesses instead of loving.

VI — OPHIEL (Mercury): the word, intelligence, and commerce — and the manipulation that bargains away the soul.

VII — PHUL (Moon): the dream, memory, and intuition — and the illusion in which a man drowns like Narcissus.

Seven long, dense, unhurried dialogues, in which a God-fearing man asks seven God-fearing intelligences what they see when they look at us. There are no formulas, no operative seals, no promises. There is discernment — and, at the end of each topic, the author's voice separating what is light from what merely shines.

On closing the seventh volume, the reader will have traversed the whole firmament to discover one thing only: none of the seven wants to be worshipped. All point to the same place. And none of them is the destination.