by Eliphas Levi
After the marvellous Golden Ass of Apuleius, we find no more magical epics. Science, conquered in Alexandria by the fanaticism of the murderers of Hypatia, became Christian, or rather concealed itself under Christian veils with Ammonius, Synesius and the-pseudonymous author of the books of Dionysius the Areopagite. In such times it was necessary to exonerate miracles under the pretence of superstition and science by an unintelligible language. Hieroglyphic writing was revived; pantacles and characters were invented to summarize an entire doctrine by a sign, a whole sequence of tendencies and revelations in a word. What was the end of the aspirants to knowledge? They sought the secret of the Great Work, the Philosophical Stone, the perpetual motion, the quadrature of the circle, the Universal Medicine—formulae which often saved them from persecution and hatred by causing them to be taxed with madness, but all signifying one of the phases of the Great Magical Secret, as we shall show later on. This absence of epics continues till our Romance of the Rose; but the rose-symbol, which expresses also the mysterious and magical sense of Dante's poem, is borrowed from the transcendent Kabalah, and it is time that we should have recourse to this vast and hidden source of universal philosophy.
The Bible, with all its allegories, gives expression to the religious knowledge of the Hebrews only in an incomplete and veiled manner. The book which we have mentioned, the hieratic characters of which we shall explain subse quently, that book which William Postel names the Genesis of Enoch, existed certainly before Moses and the prophets, whose doctrine, fundamentally identical with that of the ancient Egyptians, had also its exotericism and its veils. When Moses spoke to the people, says the sacred book allegorically, he placed a veil over his face, and he removed it when communing with God: this accounts for the alleged Biblical absurdities which so exercised the satirical powers of Voltaire. The books were written only as memorials of tradition and in symbols that were unintelligible to the profane. The Pentateuch and the poems of the prophets were, moreover, elementary works, alike in doctrine, ethics and liturgy; the true secret and traditional philosophy was not committed to writing until a later period and under veils even less transparent. Thus arose a second and un known Bible, or rather one which was not comprehended by Christians, a storehouse, so they say, of monstrous absurdities—for in this case believers, involved by the same ignorance, speak the language of sceptics—but a monument, as we affirm, which comprises all that philosophical and religious genius has ever accomplished or imagined in the sublime order, a treasure encompassed by thorns, a diamond concealed in a rude and opaque stone: our readers will have guessed already that we refer to the Talmud. How strange is the destiny of the Jews, those scapegoats, martyrs and saviours of the world, a people full of vitality, a bold and hardy race, which persecutions have preserved intact, because it has not yet accomplished its mission! Do not our apostolical traditions declare that after the decline of faith among the Gentiles salvation shall again come forth out of the house of Jacob, and that then the crucified Jew Who is adored by the Christians will give the empire of the world into the hands of God His Father?
On penetrating into the sanctuary of the Kabalah one is seized with admiration in the presence of a doctrine so logical, so simple and at the same time so absolute. The essential union of ideas and signs; the consecration of the most fundamental realities by primitive characters; the trinity of words, letters and numbers;1 a philosophy simple as the alphabet, profound and infinite as the Word; theorems more complete and luminous than those of Pythagoras; a theology which may be summed up on the fingers;2 an infinite which can be held in the hollow of an infant's hand; ten figures and twenty-two letters, a triangle, a square and a circle: such are the elements of the Kabalah. Such also are the component principles of the written Word, reflection of that spoken Word which created the world! All truly dogmatic religions have issued from the Kabalah and return therein. Whatsover is grand or scientific in the religious dreams of the illuminated, of Jacob Böhme, Swedenborg, Saint-Martin and the rest, is borrowed from the Kabalah; all Masonic associations owe to it their secrets and their symbols. The Kabalah alone consecrates the alliance of universal reason and the Divine Word; it establishes by the counterpoise of two forces in apparent opposi tion, the eternal balance of being; it alone reconciles reason with faith, power with liberty, science with mystery: it has the keys of the present, past and future!
To become initiated into the Kabalah it is insufficient to read and to meditate upon the writings of Reuchlin, Galatinus, Kircher, or Picus de Mirandola; it is necessary to study and understand the Hebrew writers in the collection of Pistorius, the Sepher Yetzirah above all; it is essential in particular to master the great book Zohar, to investigate the collection of 1684, entitled Kabbala Denu-data, especially the treatise on “Kabalistic Pneumatics” and that on the “Revolution of Souls”; and afterwards to enter boldly into the luminous darkness of the whole dogmatic and allegorical body of the Talmud.1 We shall be then in a position to understand William Postel, and shall admit secretly that—apart from his very premature and over generous dreams about the emancipation of women—thiscelebrated, learned, illuminated man could not have been so mad as is pretended by those who have not read him.
We have sketched rapidly the history of occult philo sophy; we have indicated its sources and analysed in a few words its chief memorials. The present division of our work refers only to the science, but Magic, or rather magical power, comprehends two things, a science and a force: without the force the science is nothing, or rather it is a danger. To give knowledge to power alone, such is the supreme law of initiations. Hence did the Great Revealer say: ‘The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent only shall carry it away.’ The door of truth is closed, like the sanctuary of a virgin: he must be a man who would enter. All miracles are promised to faith, and what is faith except the audacity of will which does not hesitate in the darkness, but advances towards the light in spite of all ordeals, and surmounting all obstacles? It is unnecessary to repeat here the history of ancient initiations: the more dangerous and terrible they were, the greater was their efficacy. Hence, in those days, the world had men to govern and instruct it. The Sacerdotal Art and the Royal Art con sisted above all in ordeals of courage, discretion and will. It was a novitiate similar to that of those priests who, under the name of Jesuits, are so unpopular at the present day, but would govern the world notwithstanding, had they a truly wise and intelligent chief.
After passing our life in the search for the Absolute in religion, science and justice; after revolving in the circle of Faust, we have reached the primal doctrine and the first book of humanity. At this point we pause, having discovered the secret of human omnipotence and indefinite progress, the key of all symbolisms, the first and final doctrine: we have come to understand what was meant by that expression so often made use of in the Gospel—the Kingdom of God.
To provide a fixed point as a fulcrum for human activity is to solve the problem of Archimedes, by realizing the use of his famous lever. This it is which was accomplished by the great initiators who have electrified the world, and they could not have done so except by means of the Great and Incommunicable Secret. However, as a guarantee of its renewed youth, the symbolical phoenix never reappeared before the eyes of the world without having consumed solemnly the remains and evidences of its previous life. So also Moses saw to it that all those who had known Egypt and her mysteries should end their life in the desert; at Ephesus St Paul burnt all books which treated of the occult sciences; and in fine, the French Revolution, daughter of the great Johannite Orient and the ashes of the Templars, spoliated the churches and blasphemed the allegories of the Divine Cultus. But all doctrines and all revivals pro scribe Magic and condemn its mysteries to the flames and to oblivion. The reason is that each religion or philosophy which comes into the world is a Benjamin of humanity and insures its own life by destroying its mother. It is because the symbolical serpent turns ever devouring its own tail; it is because, as essential condi
tion of existence, a void is necessary to every plenitude, space for every dimension, an affirmation for each negation: herein is the eternal realization of the phoenix allegory.
Two illustrious scholars have preceded me along the path that I am travelling, but they have, so to speak, spent the dark night therein. I refer to Volney and Dupuis, to Dupuis above all, whose immense erudition produced only a negative work, for in the origin of all religions he saw nothing but astronomy, taking thus the symbolic cycle for doctrine and the calendar for legend. He was deficient in one branch of knowledge, that of true Magic which comprises the secrets of the Kabalah Dupuis passed through the antique sanctuaries, like the prophet Ezekiel over the plain strewn with bones, and only understood death, for want of that word which collects the virtue of the four winds and can make a living people of all the vast ossuary, by crying to the ancient symbols: ‘Arise! Take up a new form and walk!’ But the hour has come when we must have the courage to attempt what no one has dared to perform previously. Like Julian, we would rebuild the temple, and in so doing we do not believe that we shall be belying a wisdom that we venerate, which also Julian would himself have been worthy to adore, had the rancorous and fanatical doctors of his period permitted him to understand it. For us the Temple has two Pillars, on one of which Christianity has inscribed its name. We have therefore no wish to attack Christianity: far from it, we seek to explain and accomplish it. Intelligence and will have exercised alternately their power in the world; religion and philosophy are still at war with one another, but they must end in agreement. The provisional object of Christianity was to establish, by obedience and faith, a supernatural or religious equality among men, to immobilize intelligence by faith, so as to provide a fulcrum for virtue which came for the destruction of the aristocracy of science, or rather to replace that aristocracy, then already destroyed. Philosophy, on the contrary, has laboured to bring back men by liberty and reason to natural inequality, and to substitute wits for virtue by inaugurating the reign of industry. Neither of these operations has proved complete or adequate; neither has brought men to perfection and felicity. That which is now dreamed, almost without daring to hope for it, is an alliance between the two forces so long regarded as contrary, and there is good ground for desiring it, seeing that these two great powers of the human soul are no more opposed to one another than is the sex of man opposed to that of woman. Undoubtedly they differ, but their apparently contrary dispositions come only from their aptitude to meet and unite.
“No less is proposed, therefore, than a universal solution of all problems?”
The answer is yes, unquestionably, since we are concerned with explaining the Philosophical Stone, perpetual motion, the secret of the Great Work and of the Universal Medicine. We shall be accused of insanity, like the divine Paracelsus, or of charlatanism, like the great and unfortunate Agrippa. If the pyre of Urban Grandier be extinguished, the sullen proscriptions of silence and of calumny remain.1 We do not defy but are resigned to them. We have not sought the publication of this book of our own will, and we believe that if the time be come to bear witness, it will be borne by us or by others. We shall therefore remain calm and shall wait.
Our work is in two parts: in the one we establish the kabalistic and magical doctrine in its entirety; the other is consecrated to the cultus, that is, to Ceremonial Magic. The one is that which the ancient sages termed the Clavicle, the other that which people on the country-side still call the Grimoire. The numbers and subjects of the chapters which correspond in both parts, are in no sense arbitrary, and are all indicated in the great universal key, of which we give for the first time a complete and adequate explanation. Let this work now go its way where it will and become what Providence determines; it is finished, and we believe it to be enduring, because it is strong, like all that is reasonable and conscientious.
ÉLIPHAS LÉVI.
1 According to his posthumous Les Mystéres de la Kabbale, p. 241, Lé not only regarded the Apocalypse as a Key to the Kabalah but as a sumbolical epitome of the science of initiates.
1 “This monument is the Tarot of the Bohemians, the original of modern playing-cards. It consists of twenty-two allegorical letters and four series of ten hieroglyphics each, correspoding to the four letters of the Name Jehovah. The diverse combinations of these signs and of the number to which they correspond form as many kabalistics oracles, so that all science is contained in this mysterious book, a most simple philosophical machine, astonishing in the profundity and accuracy of its results.”—La Celf des Grands Mystéres, p.208. . . . “It alone explains all mysterious records of high initiation.”—Ibid.
2 Saint-Martin knew nothing of the Tarot, but one of his works is divided, as it happens, into twenty-two sections, being the number of the Trumps Major.
3 It should be understood that for Éliphas Lévi the Word is Reason, the Supreme Reason of God and logical understanding in man. The incarnation God on christ was the Sovereign Reason manifested in earthly life and tie “Intelligence by creative activity, which produces form; it is clothed with human form, and when this becomes the vestment of the Word and its exact expression” it is said that the Word is made flesh —La Science des Esprits, p.51.
1 He is described elsewhere as a misunderstood spiritualist, whose paganism was less idolatrous than the faith of some christians. “In his Hymn to the Sun he recognized that the Day-star is but the reflection and material shadow of that Sun of Truth which illuminated the world of intelligence and is itself only a gleam borrowed from the Absloute.” It is said also that Julian's ideas of the Church who were his contemporaries and adversaries.—La Clef des Grands Mystéres, p. 203.
1 The purport of his accusation does not transpire. See, however, my translation of Lévis History of Magic second edition, 1922, and the chapter on Knights Templar, with the speculations of which may be compared La Clef des Grands Mustéres, pp.359, 360, as follows:“The very name and attributes of Mansonry have reference to the rebuliding of the Temple, that universal drea, of Kabalism”, and here Lévi quotes appositely a dictum referred to a Master: “There is no true Israelite to the rebuliding of the dictum referred to a Master: “There is no ture Israelite for whon the Temple is not an edifice realisable immediately, for he rebuilds it in his heart,” He goes on to suggest that the Temple was therefore “a social Utopia and a symbol of perfecet government founded on the democratic hierarchy of merit and intelligence. The Templars, intitated in the East into this doctrine, were veritable and terrible consporators, whom popes and kings could not do otherwise than exterminate for the security of their own existence.“As regards building in the heart, see the Masonic Ritual of the Red Cross of Constantine. See also Werner's Sons of the Valley for the betrayal of secret things by the Knights Templar.
1 “You are reading Agrippa, and confess to a certain disappointment: did it happen that you took him for a master? He was only a bold vulgarizer, and fortunately very superficial in his studies, never possessing the keys of the Sepher Yetzirah and Zohar. He was a brave, restless and trifling soul, His work, however, is the first which did something to spread knowledge of the higher sciences. Too shallow for a Magus, he was pleased to pass as a magician and a sorcerer. He is accused even of coining flase money under the pretext of Hermetic science, and could scarcely do better, being ignorant of the natural philosophy of Hermes. This notwithstanding, his books are useful reading when one knows more and better than he did.”—Correspondence with Baron Spédalieri.
1 We may compare La Clef des Grands Mystéeres, p.241; “There is a dogma a key, a sublime tradition; and this tradition, this key, this dogma are Transcendent Magic. There alone are found the absolute of science, the eternal base of law, defence against all superstition and all error, Eden of the understanding, repose of heart and peace of soul”.
2 According to Genesis, it was the Tree of Life which was placed in the center of the garden.
1 It is described elsewhere (1) as a substance diffused through infinity; (2) as that one s
ubstance which is heaven or earth, that is, fixed or volatile according to its degress of polarization; (3) as the Great Telesma of Hermes Trismegistus; (4) as that which God created before all things when he said: Let there be light; (5) at once substance and movement, a fluid and a perpetual vibration. It moves in virtue of an inherent force which is called Magnetism; in the infinite it is ether or ethereal light; it becomes Astral Light in the stars which it magnetizes; in organized beings it is magnetic light or fluid; and in man it forms the astral body or Plastic Mediator. “The will of intelligent beings acts directly on this light and thereby on all Nature. It is the common mirror of all thoughts and forms; the images of all that has been are preserved therein and sketches of things to come, for which reason it is the instrument of thaumaturgy and divination.”—La Cleg des Grands Mystéres, pp.117, 118.
1 The theory of Éliphas Lévi concerning the Greek Mysteries was developed at a later period as follows: “The Mysteries of the ancient world were of two kinds. The Lesser Mysteries were concerened with initiation into the priesthood, while the Greater Mysteries initiated into the grand sacerdotal work, otherwise Theurgy—that dread word with a double meaning, signifying the creation of God. In Theurg—that dread word with a double meaning, signifying the creation of God. In Theurgy the priest was instructed how he must make gods in his own image and likeness, producing them from his own flesh and animatinf them with his own blood. It was the science of evocation by the sword and the theory of sanguinary phantoms. It was in these that the person initiated had to slay his initiator guinary phantoms, It was the science of evocation by the sword and the theory of sanguinary phantoms. It was in these that the person initated had to slay his initiator; it was thus that Oedipus became King of Thebes in the killing of Laius. . . . There was no initiation into the Greater Mysteries without effusion of blood, the purest and noblest included. It was in the crypt of the Greater Mysteries that Ninyas avenged the murder of Ninus upon his own mother. The furies and spectres of Orestes were the work of Theurgy. The Greater Mysteries were the Secret Tribunals of antiquity, in which the Free Judges of the priesthood modelled new gods out of ashes of old kings, moistened with the blood of usurpers or assassins.” La Science des Esprits, pp. 216, 217. It must be said that Lesser or Greater such explanations of Mysteries are merely occult reveries, the prototype of which is to be sought in the German KRATA REPOA, a system of pretended Egyptian initiation manufactured in the eighteenth century. See my New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry, 1. 218-25, s.v. “Egyptian Initiation Restored”. The Mysteries of Eleusis. of Bacchus, of Adonis were not seminaries of priesthoods.