In 1856 the French writer Eliphas Levi set down four verbs that have been repeated in almost every book of magic since. To attain the kingdom of the wise, he wrote, four things are indispensable: an intelligence enlightened by study, a daring that nothing can check, a will that nothing can break, and a discretion that nothing can corrupt. To know, to dare, to will, to keep silent.
Levi attached the four to the four creatures of the sphinx, and later writers attached them to the four elements. They have become a kind of pocket rule for the practitioner. I return to them more often than to anything else in the modern literature, and I want to say why.
To know
The first power belongs to air, and it comes first for a reason. Before anything is attempted one has to know what one is doing: the history of the art, its symbolic language, its methods and their hazards. This is the power that study builds, and it is the one most easily acquired, since it asks only time and a library card.
But Levi does not say to be informed. He says an intelligence enlightened by study, and there is a second kind of knowing folded into the first. It is the knowledge of oneself: of one's real motives, one's actual capacities, the difference between what one would like to be true and what is. A person can know every table of correspondences by heart and be entirely ignorant in this second sense. The first knowledge without the second produces the well read fool, a figure not unknown in our field.
To will
The second power is fire. Knowledge shows what could be done. Will is the decision to do it and the persistence that carries it through. I have written elsewhere on this site that the will of the tradition is not strain but direction, and I would add here only that it is the power most often counterfeited. Excitement feels like will. So does stubbornness. So does a grand resolution made late at night.
The test is simple and humbling. What did you say you would do, and did you do it? The will that Levi means is visible in the record of a year, not in the intensity of an evening. It is built from small promises kept.
To dare
The third power is water, which surprises people. They expect daring to be fiery. But consider what is actually asked. It is one thing to know and to resolve. It is another to step off the edge of the familiar: to sit down alone in a quiet room and face one's own mind, to perform a ritual without knowing what, if anything, will come of it, to let a cherished picture of oneself dissolve. Daring is the willingness to be changed, and that is the nature of water, which yields and enters and takes the shape of what it meets.
Without daring, knowledge and will produce a careful scholar who never begins. There is always one more book to read first. I spent some years in that condition and recognize it in others at once. The cure is to do the thing, badly, today.
To keep silent
The fourth power is earth, and it is the hardest of the four and the least practiced. To keep silent is to hold what one is doing without speaking of it.
There are several reasons for the rule, and none of them is the love of mystery. The first is practical. An intention that is talked about leaks. The telling gives a little of the satisfaction that the doing was meant to give, and the pressure behind the work falls. Anyone who has announced a plan to friends and then found it strangely difficult to carry out has met this effect. The alchemists sealed their vessels for the same reason.
The second reason is that speech invites an audience, and an audience changes the work. One begins, without quite noticing, to practice for the sake of the account one will give of it. Experiences are shaped toward the telling. The diary is private for exactly this reason.
The third reason is humility. Almost nothing damages a student more than the wish to be seen as advanced, and silence starves that wish. And the fourth is respect for other people, who did not ask to hear about one's inner life and are seldom improved by it.
I need hardly say that the present age makes this power harder than Levi could have imagined. We carry in our pockets a device built to turn every private moment into a public one, and there is now a flourishing trade in the display of spiritual practice. I do not think the practice survives the display. A ritual performed for a camera is a performance. The discipline of doing something every day for a year and telling no one is, I am convinced, among the most powerful exercises open to a modern student, and it is free.
Silence does not mean deceit, and it does not mean isolation. One may speak to a trusted fellow student, as one would consult a colleague. It means that the work is kept in its vessel until it is done.
The balance of the four
The powers are meant to be held together, and each is dangerous alone. Knowledge without daring is sterile. Daring without knowledge is reckless, and accounts for most of the casualties of the occult. Will without knowledge is fanaticism. Knowledge, will and daring without silence produce the tiresome figure who has done a great deal and cannot stop telling you so, and whose attainments drain away through his mouth.
They also form a sequence, and the sequence is a circle. One learns, resolves, acts and then holds the result quietly until it has ripened, at which point it becomes something one knows, and the round begins again at a higher turn. Later writers added a fifth power at the center, to go, meaning to proceed along the way that the four together open.
As an exercise, I suggest asking which of the four you find least natural. Nearly everyone has one. The readers lack daring, the bold lack study, the enthusiasts lack persistence, and most of us, now, lack silence. That is the one to practice. An elemental inventory will tell you the same thing in another language, which is how you know the old correspondences are worth something.