Transcendental Magic

by Eliphas Levi

  XXI X

  DIVINATION

  DENTES FURCA AMENS

  THE author of this book has dared many things in his life, and never has fear retained his thought a prisoner. It is not at the same time without legitimate dread that he approaches the end of the magical doctrine. It is a question now of revealing, or rather reveiling, the Great Secret, the terrible secret, the secret of life and death, expressed in the Bible by those formidable and symbolical words of the serpent, who was himself symbolical: I. NEQUAQUAM MORIEMINI; II. SED ERITIS; III. SICUT DII; IV. SCIENTES BONUM ET MALUM. One of the privileges which belong to the initiate of the Great Arcanum, and that which sums them all, is DIVINATION. According to the vulgar comprehension of the term, to divine signifies to conjecture what is unknown, but its true sense is ineffable in its sublimity. To divine (divinare) is to exercise divinity. The word divinus in Latin signifies something far different from divus, which is equivalent to man-god. Devin, in French, contains the four letters of the word DIEU (God), plus the letter N, which corresponds in its form to the Hebrew ALEPH , and kabalistically and hieroglyphically expresses the Great Arcanum, the Tarot symbol of which is the Juggler. Whosoever understands perfectly the absolute numeral value of multiplied by N, with the grammatical force of the N final in words which signify SCIENCE, ART OR POWER, who subse quently adds the five letters of the word DEVIN, in such a way as to make five go into four, four into three, three into two and two into one, such a person, by translating the resultant number into primitive Hebrew characters, will write the occult name of the Great Arcanum, and will possess a word of which the Sacred Tetragram itself is only the equivalent and the image.1

  To be a diviner, according to the force of the term, is hence to be divine, and something more mysterious still. Now, the two signs of human divinity, or of divine humanity, are prophecies and miracles. To be a prophet is to see beforehand the effects which exist in causes, to read in the Astral Light; to work miracles is to act upon the Universal Agent and subject it to our will. The author of this book will be asked whether he is a prophet and thaumaturge. Let inquirers recur to all that he wrote before certain events took place in the world; and as to anything else that he may have said or done, would anyone believe his mere word if he made a sensational statement? Furthermore, one of the essential conditions of divination is not to be coerced, not to suffer temptation—in other words, not to be put to the test. Never have the masters of science yielded to the curiosity of anyone. The sibyls burned their books when Tarquin refused to appraise them at their proper value; the Great Master was silent when He was asked for a sign of His Divine Mission; Agrippa perished of want rather than obey those who demanded a horoscope.2 To furnish proofs of science to those who suspect the very existence of science is to initiate the unworthy, to profane the gold of the sanctuary, to deserve the excommunication of sages and the fate of betrayers.

  The essence of divination, that is to say, the Great Magical Arcanum, is represented by all the symbols of science, and is connected intimately with the one and primeval doctrine of Hermes. In philosophy, it gives absolute certitude; in religion, the universal secret of faith; in physics, the composition, decomposition, recomposition, realization and adaptation of Philosophical Mercury, called AZOTH by the alchemists; in dynamics it multiplies our forces by those of perpetual motion; it is at once mystical, metaphysical and material, with correspondent effects in the three worlds; it procures charity in God, truth in science and gold in riches, for metallic transmutation is at once an allegory and reality, as all the adepts of true science are perfectly well aware. Yes, gold can be made really and materially by means of the Stone of the Sages, which is an amalgam of Salt, Sulphur and Mercury, thrice combined in AZOTH by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation.1 Yes, the operation is often easy and may be accomplished in a day, an instant; at other times it requires months and years. But to succeed in the Great Work, one must be divinus— a diviner, in the kabalistic sense of the term—and it is indispensable to have renounced, in respect of personal interest, the advantage of wealth, so as to become its dispenser. Raymund Lully enriched sovereigns, planted Europe with institutions and remained poor. Nicholas Flamel, who in spite of his legend is really dead, only attained the Great Work when asceticism had detached him completely from riches. He was initiated by a suddenly imparted under standing of the book Aesh Mezareph, written in Hebrew by the Kabalist Abraham, possibly the compiler of the Sepher Yetzirah2. Now this understanding was for Flamel an intuition deserved, or rather, rendered possible, by the personal preparations of the adept. I believe that I have spoken sufficiently.

  Divination is therefore an intuition, and the key of this intuition is the universal and magical doctrine of analogies. By means of these analogies the Magus interprets visions, as did the patriarch Joseph in Egypt, according to Biblical history. The analogies in the reflections of the Astral Light are as exact as the shades of colour in the solar spectrum, and can be calculated and explained with great accuracy.1 It is, however, indispensable to know the dreamer's degree of intellectual life, which, indeed, he will himself reveal completely by his own dreams and in a manner that will astonish himself.

  Somnambulism, presentiments and second sight are simply an accidental or induced disposition to dream in a voluntary or awakened sleep—that is, to perceive the analogous reflections of the Astral Light, as we shall explain to demonstration in our “Ritual”, when providing the long sought method of regularly producing and directing magnetic phenomena. As to divinatory instruments, they are simply a means of communication between diviner and consultant, serving merely to fix the two wills upon the same sign. Vague, complex, shifting figures help to focus reflections of the astral fluid, and it is thus that lucidity is procured by coffee-grouts, mists, the white of egg, etc., which evoke fatidic forms, existing only in the TRANSLUCID —that is, in the imagination of the operators. Vision in water is operated by the dazzlement and fatigue of the optic nerve, which then resigns its functions to the TRANSLUCID and produces a brain-illusion, in which reflections of the Astral Light are taken for real images. Hence nervous persons, of weak sight and lively imagination, are best fitted for this species of divination, which indeed is most successful when exercised by children. Let us not misinterpret, however, the function which we attribute to imagination in divinatory arts. It is by imagination assuredly that we see, and this is the natural aspect of the miracle; but we see true things, and in this consists the marvellous aspect of the natural work.1 We appeal to the experience of all veritable adepts. The author of this book has tested every kind of divination, and has obtained results invariably in proportion to the exactitude of his scientific operations and the good faith of his consultants.

  The Tarot, that miraculous work which inspired all the sacred books of antiquity, is the most perfect instrument of divination, by reason of the analogical precision of its figures and numbers. It can be employed with complete confidence. Its oracles are always rigorously true, at least in a certain sense, and even when it predicts nothing it reveals secret things and gives the most wise counsel to its querents. Alliette, who, in the last century, from a hairdresser became a Kabalist, and kabalistically called himself Etteilla, reading his name backwards after the manner of Hebrew, Alliette, I say, after thirty years of meditation over the Tarot, was on the threshold of discovering everything that is concealed in this extraordinary work; but he ended only by misplacing the keys, through want of their proper understanding, and inverted the order and character of the figures, though without entirely destroying their analogies, so great are the sympathy and correspondence which exist between them. The writings of Etteilla, now very rare, are obscure, weari some and barbarous in style; they have not all been printed, and some manuscripts of this father of modern cartomancers are in the hands of a Paris bookseller who has been good enough to let us examine them. Their most remarkable points are the obstinate perseverance and incontestable good faith of the author, who all his life perceived the grandeur
of the occult sciences, but was destined to die at the gate of the sanctuary without ever penetrating behind the veil. He had little esteem for Agrippa, made much of Jean Belot and knew nothing of the philosophy of Paracelsus; but he possessed a highly-trained intuition and great persistence of will, though his fancy exceeded his judgement. His endowments were insufficient for a Magus and more than were needed for a skilful and accredited diviner of the vulgar order. Hence Etteilla had a fashionable success which a more accomplished magician would perhaps have been wrong to renounce, but assuredly would not have claimed.

  When delivering at the end of our “Ritual” a last message upon the Tarot, we shall show the complete method of reading and hence of consulting it, not only on the probable chances of destiny but also, and above all, upon problems of philosophy and religion, concerning which it provides a solution as invariably certain as it is admirable in its precision, if explained in the hierarchic order of the analogy of the three worlds with the three colours and the four shades which compose the sacred septenary. All this belongs to the positive practice of Magic, and can be only indicated summarily and established theoretically in the present first part, which is dedicated to the doctrine of Transcendental Magic and the philosophical and religious key of the exalted sciences, known, or unknown rather, under the name of occult.

  1 The only commentary which need be made on this puzzle is that the numerical value of ALEPH is always and only 1, the multiplication of which by another number does not increase the latter. See, however, Lévi's History of Magic, according to which the one word hidden in every Sanctuary is AGLA.

  2 This is an obscure question. The demand is supposed to have been that of the French Queen-Mother. Mr Lewis Spence says that in his last days and when on his way to Lyons, having been banished by Charles V, Emperor of Germany, Cornelius Agrippa was “seized by order of Francis, the French King, and thrown into prison for the publication of certain correspondence that discredited the Queen-Mother.”—Cornelius Agrippa, pp. 59, 60. The subject-matter of this correspondence does not emerge.

  1 See, however, p. 211, according to which Sulphur, Mercury and Salt compose the AZOTH of the sages. We have seen otherwise that AZOTH is a name of the Astral Light. Whether or not it is possible to make gold “really and materially”, it is obvious that Lévi was in a state of considerable uncertainty about the Great Magical Agent by means of which it must be accomplished.

  2 The Aesh Mezareph is known only by numerous extracts from a work under this title which were incorporated by Knorr von Rosenroth into the “Apparatus” of his Kabbala Denudata. The authorship is past speculation. According to his story, taken at its face value, Nicholas Flamel learned the secret of transmuting metals from a manuscript of an alleged Rabbi Abraham. The description of this work by pseudo-Flamel is certainly not a description of Aesh Mezareph. Finally, to suggest that Aesh Mezareph was by the author of Sepher Yetzirah is the worst kind of nonsense. There is no reason to suppose that the first was earlier than the sixteenth century, but the second is pre-Zoharic. The success of the Flamel romance brought several alchemical Abrahams into existence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See p. 212 of the present volume where “the master of Nicholas Flamel” is credited idly with the authorship of an “occult commentary on the Sepher Yetzirah”. It is really a variant version of the Paths of WISDOM, which are ascribed—like the text itself—to the patriarch Abraham, and the variant to another Abraham—not to a putative alchemist.

  1 “As there is a latent heat which determines the molecular polarization of bodies, so is there a latent light that manifests itself in us by a sort of internal phosphorescence. It is this which illumines and colours the phantoms of our visions and our dreams, and exhibits to us in the absence of all external light such astounding photographic pictures. It is by means of this light that we read in the memory of Nature, or in the general reservoir of impressions and forms, the rudimentary germ of the future in the archives of the past. Somnambulism is immersion of thought in this light invisible to waking eyes; and in this universal bath, wherein are reflected all presentiments and all memories, minds meet and interpenetrate each other. Thus it is that one can guess, translate and explain the ideas of another. It is thus that the brain of one becomes for another an open book. . . . The wonders of lucid somnambulism have no other cause.”—Paradoxes of the Highest Science, p. 55.

  1 The value of this statement transpired subsequently. According to Le Grand Arcane, fools are static visionaries, and with other persons a waking vision is an attack of madness. “The art of evocations is that of provoking a paroxysm of induced mania. Moreover, all vision is of the nature of dream, a fiction of our own dementia, a vapour of our disordered imaginations projected into the Astral Light. It is we who appear to ourselves disguised as phantoms, corpses or demons.”—Loc. cit., p. 48.

  XXII Z

  SUMMARY AND GENERAL KEY OF THE FOUR SECRET SCIENCES

  SIGNA THOT PAN

  LET us now summarize the entire science by its principles. Analogy is the final word of science and the first word of faith. Harmony consists in equilibrium, and equilibrium subsists by the analogy of contraries. Absolute unity is the supreme and final reason of things. Now, this reason can be neither one person nor three persons: it is a reason, and reason at the highest. To create equilibrium we must separate and unite—separate by the poles, unite by the centre. To reason upon faith is to destroy faith; to create mysticism in philosophy is to assail reason. Reason and faith, by their nature, mutually exclude one another, but they unite by analogy. Analogy is the sole possible mediator between finite and infinite. Dogma is the ever-ascending hypothesis of a presumable equation. For the ignorant, it is the hypothesis which is the absolute affirmation, and the absolute affirmation which is hypothesis. Hypotheses are necessary in science, and he who seeks to verify them enlarges science without decreasing faith, for on the farther side of faith is the infinite. We believe in that which we do not know, but which reason leads us to admit. To define and circumscribe the object of faith is therefore to formulate the unknown. Professions of faith are formulations of the ignorance and aspirations of man. The theorems of science are monuments of his conquests. The man who denies God is not less fanatical than he who defines Him with pretended infallibility.1 God is commonly defined by the enumeration of all that He is not. Man makes God by an analogy from the lesser to the greater, whence it results that the conception of God by man is ever that of an infinite man who makes man a finite god. Man can realize that which he believes in the measure of that which he knows, by reason of that which he knows not, and he can accomplish all that he wills in the measure of that which he believes and by reason of that which he knows. The analogy of contraries is the relation of light and shade, of height and hollow, of plenum and void. Allegory, the mother of all dogmas, is the substitution of impressions for dies, of shadows for realities. It is the fable of truth and the truth of fable. One does not invent a dogma, one veils a truth, and a shade for weak eyes is produced. The initiator is not an impostor, he is a revealer, that is, following the meaning of the Latin word revelare, a man who veils afresh. He is the creator of a new shadow.

  Analogy is the key of all secrets of Nature and the sole fundamental reason of all revelations. That is why religions seem to be written in the heavens and in all Nature, which is just as it should be, for the work of God is the book of God, the expression of Whose thought should be seen in that which He writes, and so also of His being, since we conceive Him only as supreme thought. Dupuis and Volney saw only a plagiarism in this splendid correspondence, which should have led them to acknowledge the catholicity, that is, the universality of the primeval, one, magical, kabalistic and immutable doctrine of revelation by analogy. Analogy yields all forces of Nature to the Magus; analogy is the quintessence of the Philosophical Stone, the secret of perpetual motion, the quadrature of the circle, the Temple resting on the two pillars JAKIN and BOAZ, the key of the Great Arcanum, the root of the Tree of Lif
e, the science of good and evil. To find the exact scale of correspondences in things appreciable by science is to fix the bases of faith and thus become possessed of the rod of miracles. Now, there exists a principle and a rigorous formula, which is the Great Arcanum. Let the wise man seek it not, since he has already found it; let the profane seek for ever: they will never find.1

  Metallic transmutation takes place spiritually and materially by the positive key of analogies. Occult medicine is simply the exercise of the will applied to the very source of life, to that Astral Light the existence of which is a fact, which has a movement conformed to calculations having the Great Magical Arcanum for their ascending and scale. This Universal Arcanum, the final and eternal secret of transcendent initiation, is represented in the Tarot by a naked girl, who touches the earth only by one foot, has a magnetic rod in each hand, and seems to be running in a crown held up by an angel, an eagle, a bull and a lion. Fundamentally, the figure is analogous to the cherub of Jekeskiel, of which a representation is given, and to the Indian symbol of Adda-Nari, which again is analogous to the Ado-naï of Jekeskiel, who is vulgarly called Ezekiel. The comprehension of this figure is the key of all occult sciences. Readers of my book must already understand it philosophically if they are at all familiar with the symbolism of the Kabalah. It remains for us now to realize what is the second and more important operation of the Great Work. It is something undoubtedly to find the Philosophical Stone, but how is it to be ground into the powder of projection? What are the uses of the Magical Wand? What is the real power of the Divine Names in the Kabalah? The initiates know, and those who are deserving of initiation will know in turn if they discover the Great Arcanum by means of the very numerous and precise indications which we have given them. Why are these simple and pure truths for ever and of necessity concealed? Because the elect of intelligence are always few on earth and are encompassed by the foolish and wicked, like Daniel in the den of lions. Moreover, analogy instructs us in the laws of the hierarchy, and abso lute science, being an omnipotence, must be the exclusive possession of the most worthy. The confusion of the hierarchy is the actual destruction of societies, for then the blind become leaders of the blind, according to the word of the Master. Give back initiation to priests and kings, and order will come forth anew. So, in my appeal to the most worthy, and in exposing myself to all the dangers and anathemas which threaten revealers, I believe myself to have done a great and useful thing, directing the breath of God living in humanity upon the social chaos, and creating priests and kings for the world to come