The Serpent of Genesis: The Key to Black Magic, Hardcover

The works of Stanislas de Guaita (1861-1897) are not grimoires of witchcraft, contrary to what their titles may evoke, but, in the author's own words, Essais de sciences maudits (Essays on the Cursed Sciences), meaning that he had the ambition to take a quasi-scientific look at the subjects in question.

Stanislas de Guaita become one of the leading figures of the reborn occultism of the late XIX century in France. He was a true scholar and an important precursor of modern occultism.

This book, the second volume of the Serpent of Genesis: The Key to Black Magic, deals with black magic and the use of astral forces.

Guaita died before finishing the third volume, The Problem of Evil, although it was published posthumously, many years after his death.

The Key to Black Magic includes a Bibliographical Catalogue and an Alphabetical Index. The topics covered in its seven chapters are:

1. BALANCE AND ITS AGENT Eighth key of the Tarot: Justice. Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus (complete translation). Astral Light, or the Great Agent. Double polarity of astral light. Hieroglyphic Kabbalah.
2. THE MYSTERIES OF SOLITUDE Ninth key of the Tarot: The Hermit. The projection of the sidereal double. The ghosts of solitude. Larvae, elementals and elementaries. The natives of the Astral. Evocation of Celestial Intelligences. Arcane Equivocations of Ancient Theurgy.
3. THE WHEEL OF BECOMING Tenth key of the Tarot: the Wheel of Fortune. Arcana of the Quaternary polarization; cerebro-genital and androgynous. Descent of the Spirit into matter; sublimation of the material series towards the recovery of the spiritual life. Divinatory arts. The secret of the magic chain. The great arcane. Collective entities. Theurgic dominations. Appearances of the gods, in the ancient temples.
4. STRENGTH OF WILL Eleventh key of the Tarot: Strength. Will, one of the three great Ruling Powers of the Universe. The plastic faculty, the psychic matrix of the astral body. The theory of natural signatures. Magic practised through the action of the astral body on the imponderable fluids. Fascination, a suggestive phenomenon. Magic of word and gesture. The pentagram and the circle of evocations and spells. Rochas' experiences with bewitchment.
5. MAGIC SLAVERY Twelfth key of the Tarot: the Hangman. Meaning of the emblem. The incarnation of souls. The test of the Psyche. The symbolic fables of decay form the basis of all the ancient mysteries. Birth, true death; initiation, rebirth in spirit. Mineral signatures. Toxicology as part of the occult sciences. The four forms of magic slavery. Hominal slavery. Sorcerers: psychic magic; personality substitution. Suggestive obsession and possession. Self-suggestion. Obsession or possession of an individual by a parasitic entity. Spiritual slavery. Pact with the Devil.
6. DEATH AND ITS ARCANA Thirteenth key of the Tarot: Death. Liberation of the Psyche. The different aspects of life. The sympathetic place of life is the astral body. The astral storm. Magnetic Incubation. Religious practices and sacraments. Divorce between the psychic man who survives and the material man who decays. Constitutive principles of man. The median pact. The cone of shadow: purgatory or hell of the souls. The cranial suture and Brahma's hole. The corpse of the Second Death; the shadow, or the inane shell. Practices of Necromancy.
7. MAGIC OF TRANSMUTATIONS After the emblem of death, the Tarot presents us with the emblem of metamorphosis: Temperance. Metamorphosis as the passage from one mode of illusion to another. Animal metamorphoses. Talismans.

Alchemy. Preparatory operations. The Work itself (preparation of the stone). Multiplication of the stone. Projection.