La Clef de la magie noire, tome 2

This hugely influential book has somehow not been translated into English From French. I spent the better part of November 2020 translating a single chapter using a series of deep learning tools trained on older texts, which produced acceptable results. The chapter in question was de Guaita's interpretation of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin's The Crocodile, an allegory of the French Revolution. De Guaita, and his accomplished secretary Oswald Wirth, draw up a connection between The Crocodile's Ourdeck story of discovering the pentagon forms in the Hierophant's underground site with Eliphas Levi's Gnostic blazing star and its inverse. Much of the conception of black magic in late 19th-century ceremonial lodge culture was simply a tactic to divert the Church's scrutiny away from Christian mysticism such as Martinism (and Illuminism) towards their supposed common enemy, the forces of darkness. By inverting this ancient symbol of Light, the dark practitioner would evoke demons or worse upon our world.

The illustration for this inverse blazing star was eventually picked up by Maurice Bessy in his 1964 mass-market book “A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural” under the heading “The Satanic Sciences”. A French graphic designer decided to grab this particular drawing of the “upside down pentagram” from hundreds of illustrations in the book to serve as the cover image. A copy of Bessy's book floated around Anton LeVey's Black House until LaVey and friends decided the image on this book would be the basis of their new religion called the Church of Satan, scaring far too many people since the publication of The Satanic Bible in 1969. LaVey popularly conflated this symbol with that of Baphomet and perhaps the Goat of Mendes, and is the basis of their ongoing copyright claim to the image to this day.

I was drawn to this story because an edition of Bessy's book was in my grandparent's basement during my entire childhood. I read through it often before and during the 80's “satanic panic” and was quite confused when the symbol became an icon of fear, censorship, and confusion. LaVey seemed to have appropriated this “sigil” and then married it to his counterculture San Francisco experimentations, which attracted anyone looking to somehow buck the status quo.

There are perhaps three or more morals to this story. One, occult fashionistas create new meaning by taking signifiers of yore and pumping them full of their own modern ideas. Two, things are scary when you believe they are true. Three, whether spiritual or secular, question everything you hold to be true because it just might be made up!