by Eliphas Levi
A thing is not just because God wills it, but God wills it because it is just, said the angel of the schools. It is as if he said: The Absolute is reason. Reason is self-existent; it is because it is, and not because we suppose it; it is, or nothing is; and how should one desire anything to exist apart from reason? Madness itself does not occur without it. Reason is necessity, is law, is the rule of all liberty and the direction of all initiative. If God exists, it is by reason. The conception of an absolute God outside or independent of reason is the idol of Black Magic and the phantom of the fiend. The demon is death masquerading in the tattered garments of life, the spectre of Hirrenkesept throned upon the rubbish of ruined civilizations, and concealing a loath some nakedness by the cast-off clothes of the incarnations of Vishnu.
1 “The less we define God, the more are we compelled to belief in Him. To deny the undefined and unknown God, existent and intelligent principle of being and intelligence, is the most vague and absurd of negations. Hence Proudhon, that incarnate contradiction, affirmed with reason that atheism is a negative dogma and constitutes the most ridiculous of all faiths, otherwise, the irreligious belief. But a God defined being of necessity a finite God, every religion which pretends to have been revealed in a positive and particular way, collapses when reason touches it.”—La Science des Esprits, pp. 6, 7.
1 “The law of analogies became a matter of blind and fanatical faith for Kabalists of the second order, and all superstitions charged against adepts of occult sciences can be referred thereto. Their line of reasoning was as follows: (1) The sign expresses the thing. (2) A thing is the virtue of its sign. (3) There is an analogical correspondence between the sign and the thing signified. (4) The more perfect the sign, the more complete is the correspondence. (5) To utter a word is to evoke a thought and make it present: e.g., to name God is to manifest God. (6) Speech acts on souls, and these react on bodies, whence it is possible to intimidate, console, make ill, cure, even kill and resuscitate by the power of words. (7) To pronounce a name is to create or invoke a being. (8) The name contains the verbal or spiritual doctrine of the actual being (9) When the soul evokes a thought the sign of that thought inscribes itself in the (Astral) Light. (10) To invoke is to adjure, or swear by a name: it is to make an act of faith in such name and communicate with the virtue which it represents. (11) It follows that words are of themselves either good or bad, poisonous or healthful. (12) The most dangerous of all are vain and inconsiderate words, because they are voluntary abortions of thought. (13) An useless word is a crime against the spirit of intelligence, an intellectual infanticide. (14) For every person things are that which he makes them by naming them: each man's word is an imprecation or a habitual prayer. (15) To speak well is to live well. (16) A beautiful style is an aureole of sanctity. From these principles, some of which are true, some hypothetical, and from the more or less exaggerated consequences to which they led, the superstitious Kabalists had absolute confidence in enchantments, evocations, conjurations and mysterious orisons. Moreover, as faith never fails to work prodigies, so it never wanted apparitions, oracles, marvellous cures and sudden and strange diseases. In such manner did a simple and sublime philosophy degenerate into the secret science of Black Magic.”—La Clef des Grands Mystères, pp. 205, 206.
THE RITUAL OF TRANSCENDENTAL MAGIC
THE SABBATIC GOAT
INTRODUCTION
KNOWEST thou that old queen of the world who is on the march always and wearies never? Every uncurbed passion, every selfish pleasure, every licentious energy of humanity, and all its tyrannous weakness, go before the sordid mistress of our tearful valley, and, scythe in hand, these indefatigable labourers reap their eternal harvest. That queen is old as time, but her skeleton is concealed in the wreckage of women's beauty, which she abstracts from their youth and love. Her skull is adorned with lifeless tresses that are not her own. Spoliator of crowned heads, she is embellished with the plunder of queens, from the star-begemmed hair of Berenice to that—white, but not with age—which the executioner sheared from the brow of Marie Antoinette. Her livid and frozen body is clothed in faded garments and tattered winding-sheets. Her bony hands, covered with rings, hold diadems and chains, sceptres and crossbones, jewels and ashes. When she goes by, doors open of themselves; she passes through walls; she penetrates to the cabinets of kings; she surprises the extortioners of the poor in their most secret orgies; she sits down at their board, pours out their wine, grins at their songs with her gumless teeth, takes the place of the lecherous courtesan hidden behind their curtains. She delights to hover about sleeping voluptuaries; she seeks their caresses, as if she hoped to grow warm in their embrace; but she freezes all those whom she touches and herself never kindles. At times, notwithstanding, one would think her seized with frenzy; she stalks slowly no longer; she runs; if her feet are too slow, she spurs a pale horse and charges all breathless through multitudes. Murder rides with her on a russet charger; shaking his mane of smoke, fire flies before her with wings of scarlet and black; famine and plague follow on diseased and emaciated steeds, gleaning the few sheaves which remain to complete her harvest.
After this funereal procession come two little children, radiating with smiles and life, the intelligence and love of the coming century, the dual genius of a new-born humanity. The shadows of death fold up before them, as does night before the morning star; with nimble feet they skim the earth and sow with full hands the hope of another year. But death will come no more, impiteous and terrible, to mow like dry grass the ripe blades of the new age; it will give place to the angel of progress, who will gently liberate souls from mortal chains, so that they may ascend to God. When men know how to live they will die no longer; they will transform like the chrysalis, which becomes a splendid butterfly. The terrors of death are daughters of ignorance, and death herself is only hideous by reason of the rubbish which covers her, and the sombre hues with which her images are surrounded. Death, truly, is the birth-pang of life. There is a force in Nature which dieth not, and this force perpetually transforms beings to preserve them. It is the reason or word of Nature. In man also there is a force analogous to that of Nature, and it is the reason or word of man. The word of man is the expression of his will directed by reason, and it is omnipotent under this leading, for it is analogous to the word of God Himself. By the word of his reason man becomes conqueror of life, and can triumph over death. The entire life of man is either the parturition or miscarriage of his word. Human beings who die without having understood or formulated the word of reason, die devoid of eternal hope. To withstand successfully the phantom of death, we must be identified with the realities of life. Does it signify to God if an abortion wither, seeing that life is eternal? Does it signify to Nature if unreason perish, since reason which never perishes still holds the keys of life? The just and terrible force which destroys abortions eternally was called by the Hebrews Samael; by other easterns, Satan; and by the Latins, Lucifer. The Lucifer of the Kabalah is not an accursed and ruined angel; he is the angel who enlightens, who regenerates by fire; he is to the angels of peace what the comet is to the mild stars of the spring-time constellations. The fixed star is beautiful, radiant and calm; she drinks the celestial perfumes and gazes with love upon her sisters; clothed in her glittering robe, her forehead crowned with diamonds, she smiles as she chants her morning and evening canticle; she enjoys an eternal repose which nothing can disturb, and moves solemnly forward without departing from the rank assigned her among the sentinels of light. But the wandering comet, dishevelled and of sanguinary aspect, plunges hurriedly from the depths of heaven and flings herself athwart the peaceful spheres, like a chariot of war between the ranks of a procession of vestals; she dares to face the burning spears of the solar guardians, and, like a bereft spouse who seeks the husband of her dreams during widowed nights, she penetrates even unto the inmost sanctuary of the god of day; again she escapes, exhaling the fires which consume her and trailing a long conflagration behind; the stars pale at her appro
ach; constellate flocks, pasturing on flowers of light in the vast meadows of the sky, seem to flee before her terrible breath. The grand council of spheres assembles, and there is universal consternation; at length the loveliest of the fixed stars is commissioned to speak in the name of all the firmament and offer peace to the headlong vagabond.
“My sister,” she thus commences, “why dost thou disturb the harmony of the spheres? What evil have we wrought thee? And why, instead of wandering wildly, dost thou not fix thy place like us in the court of the sun? Why dost thou not chant with us the evening hymn, clothed like ourselves in a white garment, fastened at the breast with a diamond clasp? Why float thy tresses, adrip with fiery sweat, through the mists of the night? Ah, wouldst thou but take thy place among the daughters of heaven, how much more beautiful wouldst thou be! Thy face would burn no longer with the toil of thine incredible flights; thine eyes would be clear, thy smiling countenance white and red like that of thy happy sisters; all the stars would know thee, and, far from fearing thy flight, would rejoice at thine approach; for then thou wouldst be made one with us by the indestructible bonds of universal harmony, and thy peaceful existence would be one voice more in the canticle of infinite love.”
And the comet replies to the fixed star: “Believe not, 0 my sister, that I am permitted to wander at will and vex the harmony of the spheres! God hath appointed my path, even as thine, and if it appear to thee uncertain and vagrant, it is because thy beams cannot penetrate far enough to take in the circumference of the ellipse which has been allotted for my course. My fiery hair is God's beacon; I am the messenger of the suns, and I renew my strength continually in their burning heat, that I may dispense it on my journey to young worlds which have as yet insufficient warmth, and to ancient stars which have grown cold in their solitude. If I weary in my long travellings, if my beauty be less mild than thine own, and if my garments are not unspotted, yet am I a noble daughter of heaven, even as thou art. Leave me the secret of my terrible destiny, leave me the dread which surrounds me, curse me even if thou canst not comprehend; I shall none the less accomplish my work, and continue my career under the impulse of the breath of God! Happy are the stars which rest, which shine like youthful queens in the peaceful society of the universe! 1 am the proscribed, the eternal wanderer, who has infinity for domain. They accuse me of setting fire to the planets, the heat of which I renew; they accuse me of terrifying the stars which I enlighten; they chide me with breaking in upon universal harmony, because I do not revolve about their particular centres, though I join them one with another, directing my gaze towards the sole centre of all the suns. Be reassured, therefore, O beauteous fixed star! I shall not impoverish thy peaceful light; rather I shall expend in thy service my own life and heat. I shall disappear from heaven when I shall have consumed myself, and my doom will have been glorious enough! Know that various fires burn in the temple of God, and do all give Him glory: ye are the light of golden candelabra; I am the flame of sacrifice. Let us each fulfil our destinies.”
Having uttered these words, the comet tosses back her burning hair, uplifts her fiery shield and plunges into infinite space, seeming to be lost for ever.
Thus Satan appeared and disappeared in the allegorical narratives of the Bible. “Now there was a day,” says the book of Job, “when the sons of God came to present them selves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. And the Lord said unto Satan: ‘Whence comest thou?’ Then Satan answered the Lord, and said: ‘From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”
A Gnostic gospel, discovered in the East by a learned traveller of our acquaintance, explains the genesis of light to the profit of Lucifer, as follows:1
“Self-conscious truth is living thought. Truth is thought as it is in itself, and formulated thought is speech. When Eternal Thought desired a form, it said: ‘Let there be light.’ Now, this Thought which speaks is the Word, and the Word said: ‘Let there be light,’ because the Word itself is the light of minds. The uncreated light, which is the Divine Word, shines because it desires to be seen. When it says: ‘Let there be light!’ it ordains that eyes shall open; it creates intelligences. When God said: ‘Let there be light!’ Intelligence was made, and the light appeared. Now, the Intelligence which God diffused by the breath of His mouth, like a star given off from the sun, took the form of a splendid angel, who was saluted by heaven under the name of Lucifer. Intelligence awakened, and comprehended its nature completely by the understanding of that utterance of the Divine Word: ‘Let there be light!’ It felt itself to be free because God had called it into being, and, raising up its head, with both wings extended, it replied: ‘I will not be slavery.’ ‘Then shalt thou be suffering,’ said the Uncreated Voice. ‘I will be liberty,’ replied the light. ‘Pride will seduce thee,’ said the Supreme Voice, ‘and thou wilt bring forth death.’ I needs must strive with death to conquer life,' again responded the created light. Thereupon God loosed from His bosom the shining cord which restrained the superb angel, and beholding him plunge through the night, which he furrowed with glory, He loved the offspring of His thought, and said with an ineffable smile: ‘How beautiful was the light!’
“God has not created suffering; intelligence has accepted it to be free. And suffering has been the condi tion imposed upon freedom of being by Him who alone cannot err, because He is infinite. For the essence of intelligence is judgement, and the essence of judgement is liberty. The eye does not really possess light except by the faculty of closing or opening. Were it forced to be always open, it would be the slave and victim of the light, and would cease to see in order to escape the tor ment. Thus, created Intelligence is not happy in affirming God, except by its liberty to deny Him. Now, the Intelli gence which denies, invariably affirms something, since it is asserting its liberty. It is for this reason that blas phemy glorifies God and that hell was indispensable to the happiness of heaven. Were the light unrepelled by shadow, there would be no visible forms. If the first angels had not encountered the depths of darkness, the child-birth of God would have been incomplete, and there could have been no separation between the created and essential light. Never would Intelligence have known the goodness of God if it had never lost Him. Never would God's infinite love have shone forth in the joys of His mercy had the prodigal Son of Heaven remained in the House of His Father. When all was light, there was light nowhere; it filled the breast of God, who was labouring to bring it forth. And when He said: ‘Let there be light!’ He permitted the darkness to repel the light, and the universe issued from chaos. The negation of the angel who at birth refused slavery constituted the equilibrium of the world, and the motion of the spheres commenced. The infinite distances admired this love of liberty, which was vast enough to fill the void of eternal night and strong enough to bear the hatred of God. But God could hate not the noblest of His children, and He proved him by His wrath only to confirm him in His power. So also the Word of God Himself, as if jealous of Lucifer, willed to come down from heaven and pass triumphantly through the shadows of hell. He willed to be proscribed and condemned; He premeditated that terrible hour when He should cry, in the throes of His agony: ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ As the star of the morning goes before the sun, the rebellion of Lucifer announced to new-born Nature the coming incarnation of God. Possibly Lucifer, in his fall through night, carried with him a rain of suns and stars by the attraction of his glory. Possibly our sun is a demon among the stars, as Lucifer is a star among the angels. Doubtless it is for this reason that it lights so calmly the horrible anguish of humanity and the long agony of earth —because it is free in its solitude and possesses its light.”
Such were the tendencies of the heresiarchs in the early centuries. Some, like the Ophites, adored the demon under the figure of a serpent; others, like the Cainites, justified the rebellion of the first angel and that of the first murderer. All those errors, all those shadows, all those monstrous idols of anarchy which India opposes in its symbols to the
magical Trimurti, have found priests and worshippers in Christianity. The demon is mentioned nowhere in Genesis; an allegorical serpent deceives our first parents. Here is the common translation of the sacred text: “Now, the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.” But this is what Moses says: