Transcendental Magic

by Eliphas Levi

  Now, there are two Hermetic operations, the one spiritual, the other material, and these are mutually dependent. For the rest, all Hermetic science is contained in the doctrine of Hermes, which is said to have been originally inscribed upon an emerald tablet. Its first articles have been already expounded, and those follow which are concerned with the operation of the Great work:

  “Thou shalt separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross, gently, with great industry. It rises from earth to heaven, and again it descends from heaven to earth, and it receives the power of things above and of things below. By this means shalt thou obtain the glory of the whole world, and all darkness shall depart from thee. It is the strong power of every power, for it will overcome all that is subtle and penetrate all that is solid. Thus was the world created.”

  To separate the subtle from the gross, in the first operation, which is wholly inward, is to liberate the soul from all prejudice and all vice, which is accomplished by the use of Philosophical Salt, that is to say, wisdom; of Mercury, that is, personal skill and application; finally, of Sulphur, representing vital energy and fire of will. By these are we enabled to change into spiritual gold things which are of all least precious, even the refuse of the earth. In this sense we must interpret the parables of the choir of philosophers, Bernard Trevisan, Basil Valentine, Mary the Egyptian and other prophets of alchemy; but in their works, as in the Great Work, we must separate skilfully the subtle from the gross, the mystical from the positive, allegory from theory. If we would read them with profit and understanding, we must take them first of all as allegorical in their entirety, and then descend from allegories to realities by the way of the correspondences or analogies indicated in the one dogma: That which is above is proportional to that which is below, and reciprocally. The word Art when reversed, or read after the manner of sacred and primitive characters from right to left, gives three initials which express the different grades of the Great Work. T signifies triad, theory and travail; R, realization; A, adaptation. In the twelfth chapter of the “Ritual”, we shall give the processes of adaptation in use among the great masters, especially that which is contained in the Hermetic Fortress of Henry Khunrath.1 We may refer our readers also to an admirable treatise attributed Hermes Trismegistus and entitled “Minerva Mundi.”1 It is found only in certain editions of Hermes and contains, in allegories full of profundity and poetry, the doctrine of individual self-creation, or the creative law consequent on the harmony between two forces which are termed fixed and volatile by alchemists, and are necessity and liberty in the absolute order. The diversity of the forms which abound in Nature is explained, in this treatise, by the diversity of spirits, and monstrosity by divergence of efforts. Its study and understanding are indispensable for all adepts who would fathom the mysteries of Nature and devote themselves seriously to the search after the Great Work.2

  When the masters in alchemy say that little time and money are needed to accomplish the works of science, above all when they affirm that one vessel is alone needed, when they speak of the great and unique Athanor which all can use, which is ready to each man's hand, which all possess without knowing it, they allude to philosophical and moral alchemy. As a fact, the strong and resolute will can arrive in a short time at absolute independence, and we are all in possession of the chemical instrument, the great and sole Athanor which answers for the separation of the subtle from the gross and the fixed from the volatile. This instrument, complete as the world and precise as mathematics, is represented by the sages under the emblem of the Pentagram or five-pointed star, which is the abso lute sign of human intelligence. I will follow the example of the wise by forbearing to name it: it is too easy to divine.

  The Tarot symbol which corresponds to this chapter was misconstrued by Court de Gebelin and Etteilla, who regarded it as the blunder of a German cardmaker. It represents a man with his hands bound behind him, having two bags of money attached to the armpits, and suspended by one foot from a gibbet formed by the trunks of two trees, each with the stumps of six lopped branches, and by a cross- piece, thus completing the figure of the Hebrew TAU . The legs of the victim are crossed, while his head and elbows form a triangle. Now, the triangle surmounted by a cross signifies in alchemy the end and perfection of the Great Work, a meaning which is identical with that of the letter Tau, the last of the sacred alphabet. This Hanged Man is, consequently, the adept, bound by his engagements and spiritualized, that is, having his feet turned towards heaven. He is also the antique Prometheus, expiating by everlasting torture the penalty of his glorious theft. Vulgarly, he is the traitor Judas, and his punishment is a menace to betrayers of the Great Arcanum. Finally, for Kabalistic Jews, the Hanged Man, who corresponds to their twelfth dogma, that of the promised Messiah, is a protestation against the Saviour acknowledged by Christians, and they seem to say unto Him still: How canst Thou save others, since Thou couldst not save Thyself?1

  In the Sepher-Toldos-Jeshu, an anti-Christian rabbinical compilation, there occurs a singular parable. Jeshu, says the rabbinical author of the legend, was travelling with Simon-Barjona and Judas Iscariot. Late and weary they came to a lonely house, and, being very hungry, could find nothing to eat except an exceedingly lean gosling. It was insufficient for three persons, and to divide it would be to sharpen without satisfying hunger. They agreed to draw lots, but as they were heavy with sleep: “Let us first of all slumber,” said Jeshu, “whilst the supper is preparing; when we wake we will tell our dreams, and he who has had the most beautiful dream shall have the whole gosling to his own share.” So it was arranged; they slept and they woke. “As for me,” said St Peter, “I dreamed that I was the vicar of God.” “And I,” said Jeshu, “that I was God himself.” “For me,” said Judas hypocritically, “I dreamed that, being in somnambulism, I arose, went softly downstairs, took the gosling from the spit, and ate it.” Thereupon they also went down, but the gosling had vanished altogether. Judas had a waking dream.

  This anecdote is given, not in the text of the Sepher-Toldos-Jeshu itself, but in the rabbinical commentaries on that work.1 The legend is a protest of Jewish positivism against Christian mysticism. As a fact, while the faithful surrendered themselves to magnificent dreams, the proscribed Israelite, Judas of the Christian civilization, worked, sold, intrigued, became rich, possessed himself of this life's realities, till he became in a position to advance the means of existence to those very forms of worship which had so long outlawed him. The ancient worshippers of the ark remained true to the cultus of the strong-box; the Exchange is now their temple, and thence they govern the Christian world. The laugh is indeed with Judas, who can congratulate himself upon not having slept like St Peter.

  In archaic writings preceding the Captivity, the Hebrew Tau was cruciform, which confirms further our interpretation of the twelfth symbol of the Kabalistic Tarot. The Cross, which produces four triangles, is also the sacred sign of the duodenary, and on this account it was called the Key of Heaven by the Egyptians. So Etteilla, confused by his protracted researches for the conciliation of the analogical necessities of this symbol with his own personal opinion, in which he was influenced by the erudite Court de Gebelin, placed in the hand of his upright hanged man, by him interpreted as Prudence, a Hermetic caduceus, formed by two serpents and a Greek TAU. Seeing that he understood the necessity of the Tau or Cross on the twelfth leaf of the Book of Thoth, he should have seen also the manifold and magnificent meaning of the Hermetic Hanged Man, the Prometheus of science, the living man who touches earth by his thought alone, whose firm ground is heaven, the free and immolated adept, the revealer menaced with death, the conjuration of Judaism against Christ, which seems to be an involuntary admission of the secret divinity of the Crucified, and lastly, the sign of the work accomplished, the cycle terminated, the intermediary TAU, which resumes for the first time, before the final denary, the signs of the sacred alphabet.1

  1 “The number twelve is cyclic.”—La Clef des Grands Mystères, p. 47.

>   2 It would be difficult to cite worse instances in support of the alleged “scientific fact”. There is a very strong feeling on the part of scholarship that the Flamel legend is a comparatively late invention; while the alchemical tracts which pass under the name of Lully are the work of a writer who assumed the name falsely, and the evidence for his transmutations rests upon his own claims and another forged document by an alleged Abbot of Westminster. See my Raymond Lully: Illuminated Doctor, Alchemist and Christian Mystic, 1922.

  1 See No. 3 of the folding plates appended to Khunrath's Amphiteatrum Sapientæ Aeternæ. Hanover, 1609.

  1 Otherwise, “The Virgin of the World.” See Mead's Thrice Greatest Hermes, 3 vols., and L. Ménard's Hermès Trismégiste, 1867.

  2 “The great Work is not the chimerical art of creating gold; it is that of directing the natural fire as a gardener directs water to nourish his plants. In this manner minerals are not created but matured.”—Correspondence with Baron Spédalieri, No. 17.

  1 Lévi says otherwise that the HANGED MAN signifies the completion of the Great Work.—Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum, p. 45.

  1 He has begun by saying that the “singular parable” occurs in Sepher-Toldos-Jeshu and now transfers it to a source which no one can check. In the absence of all reference one can say only that it does not sound like a Jewish parable.

  1 This is exceedingly obscure, and “an intermediary TAU” is of course nonsense in Hebrew. But Lévi is trying to say that the Hanged Man is suspended from a gallows like a TAU, though his symbol is referable otherwise to the letter Lamed, according to his invented tabulation, which happens, however, to be wrong. He calls it intermediate because it is midwise in his Tarot sequence, according to which the TAU proper of the alphabet answers to the symbol of the World, being the last of the Trumps Major.

  XIII N1

  NECROMANCY

  EX IPSIS MORS

  WE have said that the images of persons and things are preserved in the Astral Light. Therein also can be evoked the forms of those who are in our world no longer, and by this means are accomplished those mysteries of Necromancy which are so contested and at the same time so real.2 The Kabalists who have discoursed concerning the world of spirits have described simply what they have seen in their evocations. Éliphas Lévi Zahed,3 who writes this book, has evoked, and he has seen. Let us state, in the first place, what the masters have written on their visions or intuitions in that which they term the light of glory. We read in the Hebrew book concerning the Revolution of Souls that there are three classes of souls—the daughters of Adam, the daughters of angels and the daughters of sin. According to the same work, there are also three kinds of spirits— captive, wandering and free. Souls are sent forth in couples; at the same time certain souls of men are born widowed, for their spouses are held captive by Lilith and Naëmah, queens of the stryges: they are souls condemned to expiate the temerity of a celibate's vow. Hence, when a man renounces the love of women from his infancy, he makes the bride who was destined for him a slave to the demons of debauch. Souls grow and multiply in heaven, as bodies do upon earth. Immaculate souls are the daughters of the kisses of angels.

  Nothing can enter heaven save that which comes from heaven. Hence, after death, the divine spirit which animated man ascends by itself above and leaves two corpses below, one upon earth, the other in the atmosphere; one terrestrial and elementary, the other aerial and sidereal, one already inert, the other still animated by the universal movement of the soul of the world, yet destined to die slowly, absorbed by the astral forces which produced it. The terrestrial body is visible; the other is unseen by the eyes of earthly and living bodies, nor can it be beheld except by the application of the Astral Light to the TRANSLUCID, which conveys its impressions to the nervous system and thus influences the organ of sight, so that it perceives the forms which are preserved and the words which are written in the book of vital light.

  When a man has lived well the astral body evaporates like a pure incense ascending towards the superior regions; but should he have lived in sin, his astral body, which holds him prisoner, still seeks the object of its passions and wishes to return to life. It torments the dreams of young girls, bathes in the stream of spilt blood and floats about the places where the pleasures of its life elapsed. It watches over treasures which it possessed and buried; it expends itself in painful efforts to make fresh material organs and so live again. But the stars draw it up and absorb it; it feels its intelligence weaken, its memory gradually vanishes, all its being dissolves.... Its former vices rise up before it, assume monstrous shapes and pursue it; they attack and devour it.... The unfortunate creature thus loses successively all the members which have ministered to his iniquities; then he dies a second time and for ever, because he loses his personality and his memory. Souls which are destined to live, but are not yet purified completely, remain captive for a longer or shorter period in the astral body, wherein they are burned by the odic light, which seeks to absorb and dissolve them. It is in order to escape from this body that suffering souls sometimes enter the organisms of the living and dwell therein in that state which Kabalists term embryonic. Now, it is these aerial bodies which are evoked by Necromancy. We enter into communion with larvae, with dead or perishing substances, by this operation. The beings in question, for the most part, cannot speak except by a ringing in our ears produced by the nervous shock to which I have referred, and commonly they can reason only by reflecting our thoughts and our reveries. To behold these strange forms we must put ourselves in an abnormal condition akin to sleep or death; in other words, we must magnetize ourselves and enter into a kind of lucid and waking somnambulism. Then Necromancy has real results, and the evocations of Magic can produce actual visions. We have said that in the Great Magical Agent, which is the Astral Light, there are preserved all impressions of things, all images formed either by rays or reflections. In this same light our dreams come to us; it is this which befools the insane and misguides their dormant judgement in pursuit of the most bizarre phantoms. To insure vision without illusion in such light, a powerful will must help us to isolate reflections and attract rays only. To dream awake is to see in the Astral Light, and the orgies of the Sabbath, described by so many sorcerers in their criminal trials, came to them solely in this manner. The preparations and the substances used to obtain this result were often horrible, as we shall see in the “Ritual”, but the result itself was never doubtful. They saw, they heard, they handled the most abominable, most fantastic, most impossible things.1 We shall return to this subject in our fifteenth chapter; at the present moment we are concerned only with evocation of the dead.

  In the spring of the year 1854 I had undertaken a journey to London, that I might escape from internal disquietude and devote myself, without interruption, to science. I had letters of introduction to persons of eminence who were anxious for revelations from the supernatural world. I made the acquaintance of several and discovered in them, amidst much that was courteous, a depth of indifference or trifling. They asked me forthwith to work wonders, as if I were a charlatan, and I was somewhat discouraged, for, to speak frankly, far from being inclined to initiate others into the mysteries of Ceremonial Magic, I had shrunk all along from its illusions and weariness. Moreover, such ceremonies necessitated an equipment which would be expensive and hard to collect. I buried myself therefore in the study of the transcendent Kabalah, and troubled no further about English adepts, when, returning one day to my hotel, I found a note awaiting me. This note contained half of a card, divided transversely, on which I recognized at once the seal of Solomon. It was accompanied by a small sheet of paper, on which these words were pencilled: “Tomorrow, at three o'clock, in front of Westminster Abbey, the second half of this card will be given you.” I kept this curious assignation. At the appointed spot I found a carriage drawn up, and as I held unaffectedly the fragment of card in my hand, a footman approached, making a sign as he did so, and then opened the door of the equipage. It contained a
lady in black, wearing a thick veil; she motioned to me to take a seat beside her, showing me at the same time the other half of the card. The door closed, the carriage drove off, and the lady raising her veil I saw that my appointment was with an elderly person, having grey eyebrows and black eyes of unusual brilliance, strangely fixed in expression. “Sir,” she began, with a strongly marked English accent, “I am aware that the law of secrecy is rigorous amongst adepts; a friend of Sir B— L—, who has seen you, knows that you have been asked for phenomena, and that you have refused to gratify such curiosity. You are possibly without the materials; I should like to show you a complete magical cabinet, but I must exact beforehand the most inviolable silence. If you will not give me this pledge upon your honour, I shall give orders for you to be driven to your hotel.” I made the required promise and keep it faithfully by not divulging the name, position or abode of this lady, whom I soon recognized as an initiate, not exactly of the first order, but still of a most exalted grade. We had a number of long conversations, in the course of which she insisted always upon the necessity of practical experience to complete initiation. She showed me a collection of magical vestments and instruments, lent me some rare books which I needed; in short, she determined me to attempt at her house the experiment of a complete evocation, for which I prepared during a period of twenty-one days, scrupulously observing the rules laid down in the thirteenth chapter of the “Ritual”.

  The preliminaries terminated on 24 July; it was proposed to evoke the phantom of the divine Apollonius and interrogate it upon two secrets, one which concerned myself and one which interested the lady. She had counted on taking part in the evocation with a trustworthy person, who, however, proved nervous at the last moment, and, as the triad or unity is indispenable for Magical Rites, I was left to my own resources. The cabinet prepared for the evocation was situated in a turret; it contained four concave mirrors and a species of altar having a white marble top, encircled by a chain of magnetized iron. The Sign of the Pentagram, as given in the fifth chapter of this work, was graven and gilded on the white marble surface; it was inscribed also in various colours upon a new white lambskin stretched beneath the altar. In the middle of the marble table there was a sma 1 copper chafing-dish, containing charcoal of alder and laurel wood; another chafing-dish was set before me on a tripod. I was clothed in a white garment, very similar to the alb of our catholic priests, but longer and wider, and I wore upon my head a crown of vervain leaves, intertwined with a golden chain. I held a new sword in one hand, and in the other the “Ritual”. I kindled two fires with the requisite prepared substances, and began reading the evocations of the “Ritual” in a voice at first low, but rising by degrees. The smoke spread, the flame caused the objects upon which it fell to waver, then it went out, the smoke still floating white and slow about the marble altar; I seemed to feel a quaking of the earth, my ears tingled, my heart beat quickly. I heaped more twigs and perfumes on the chafing-dishes, and as the flame again burst up, I beheld distinctly, before the altar, the figure of a man of more than normal size, which dissolved and vanished away. I recommenced the evocations and placed myself within a circle which I had drawn previously between the tripod and the altar. Thereupon the mirror which was behind the altar seemed to brighten in its depth, a wan form was outlined therein, which increased and seemed to approach by degrees. Three times, and with closed eyes, I invoked Apollonius. When I again looked forth there was a man in front of me, wrapped from head to foot in a species of shroud, which seemed more grey than white. He was lean, melancholy and beardless, and did not altogether correspond to my preconceived notion of Apollonius. I experienced an abnormally cold sensation, and when I endeavoured to question the phantom I could not articulate a syllable. I therefore placed my hand upon the Sign of the Pentagram, and pointed the sword at the figure, commanding it mentally to obey and not alarm me, in virtue of the said sign. The form thereupon became vague, and suddenly disappeared. I directed it to return, and presently felt, as it were, a breath close by me; something touched my hand which was holding the sword, and the arm became immediately benumbed as far as the elbow. I divined that the sword displeased the spirit, and I therefore placed it point downwards, close by me, within the circle. The human figure reappeared immediately, but I experienced such an intense weakness in all my limbs, and a swooning sensation came so quickly over me, that I made two steps to sit down, whereupon I fell into a profound lethargy, accompanied by dreams, of which I had only a confused recollection when I came again to myself. For several subsequent days my arm remained benumbed and painful. The apparition did not speak to me, but it seemed that the questions I had designed to ask answered themselves in my mind. To that of the lady an interior voice replied—Death! —it was concerning a man about whom she desired information. As for myself, I sought to know whether reconciliation and forgiveness were possible between two persons who occupied my thoughts, and the same inexorable echo within me answered—Dead!