Transcendental Magic

by Eliphas Levi

  Faith is nothing but superstition and folly if it have not reason for its basis, and we cannot suppose that which we do not know except by analogy drawn from the realm of knowledge.1 To define that which lies outside all experience is presumptuous ignorance; to affirm positively that which we do not know is to lie. So is faith an aspiration and desire. Amen; I desire it to be so: such is the last word of all professions of faith. Faith, hope and charity are three such inseparable sisters that they may be taken one for another. Thus in religion universal and hierarchic orthodoxy, restora tion of temples in all their splendour; re-establishment of high ceremonial in its primitive pomp; hierarchic instruc tion of symbols, mysteries, miracles; legends for children, light for grown men who will beware of scandalizing little ones in the simplicity of their faith: this in religion is our whole Utopia, as it is also the desire and need of humanity.1

  Coming now to philosophy, our own is that of realism and positivism. Being is by reason of that Being of Whom no one doubts. All exists for us by science. To know is to be. Science and its object become identified in the intellectual life of him who knows. To doubt is to be ignorant. Now, a thing of which we are ignorant does not as yet exist for us. To live intellectually is to learn. Being develops and amplifies by science. The first conquest of science, and the first result of the exact sciences, is the sentiment of reason. The laws of Nature are algebraic. Thus the sole reasonable faith is the adhesion of the student to theorems, the entire essential justice of which lies outside his know ledge, though its applications and results are demonstrated adequately to his mind. So does the true philosopher believe in that which is and does not admit a posteriori that all is reasonable.2 But no more charlatanism in philosophy, no more empiricism, no more system! The study of being and its compared realities! A metaphysic of Nature! Then away with mysticism! No more dreams in philosophy; philosophy is not poesy but pure mathematics of realities, physical and moral. Leave unto religion the freedom of its infinite aspirations, and let it leave in turn to science the exact conclusions of absolute experimentalism.

  Man is the son of his works; he is what he wills to be; he is the image of the God he makes; he is the realization of his own ideal. Should that ideal lack basis, the whole edifice of his immortality collapses. Philosophy is not the ideal, but ought to serve as its foundation. The known is for us the measure of the unknown; by the visible we appre ciate the invisible; sensations are to thoughts even as thoughts to aspirations. Science is a celestial trigonometry: one side of the absolute triangle is that Nature which is submitted to our investigations; the second is our soul, which embraces and reflects Nature; the third is the Absolute, in which our soul is magnified. No more atheism possible henceforward, for we pretend no longer to define God. God is for us the most perfect and best of intelligent beings, and the ascending hierarchy of beings demonstrates His existence amply.1 Do not let us ask for more; but, to understand Him ever better, let us grow perfect by ascending towards Him. No more ideology; being is being, and cannot perfectionize save according to real laws of being. Observe, and do not prejudge; exercise our faculties, do not falsify them; enlarge the domain of life in life; behold truth in truth! Everything is possible to him who wills only what is true! Rest in Nature, study, know, then dare; dare to will, dare to act and be silent! No more hatred of anyone. Everyone reaps what he sows. The consequence of works is fatal: to judge and chastise the wicked is for the Supreme Reason. He who enters into a blind alley must retrace his steps or be broken. Warn him gently, if he can still hear you, but human liberty must takes its course. We are not the judges of one another. Life is a battle-field. Do not pause in the warfare on account of those who fall, but avoid trampling them. Then comes the victory, and the wounded on both sides, now brothers in suffering and before humanity, will meet in the ambulances of the conquerors.

  Such are the consequences of the philosophical dogma of Hermes; such has been from all time the ethic of true adepts; such is the philosophy of the Rosicrucian inheritors of all the ancient wisdoms; such is the Secret Doctrine of those associations that are treated as subversive of the public order, and have ever been accused of conspiring against thrones and altars. The true adept, far from dis turbing the public order, is its firmest supporter. He has too great a respect for liberty to desire anarchy: child of the light, he loves harmony and knows that darkness begets confusion. He accepts everything that is and denies only what is not. He wills true religion, practical, universal, full of faith, palpable, realized in all life; he wills it to have a wise and powerful priesthood, surrounded by all the virtues and all the prestige of faith. He wills the universal orthodoxy, the absolute, hierarchic, apostolic, sacramental, incontestable and uncontested catholicity. He wills an experimental philosophy, real, mathematical, modest in its conclusions, untiring in its researches, scientific in its-progress. Who, therefore, can be against us if God and reason are with us? Does it matter if man prejudge and slander us? Our entire justification is in our thoughts and our works. We come not, like Oedipus, to destroy the sphinx of symbolism; we seek, on the contrary, to resuscitate it. The sphinx devours only blind interpreters; and he who slays it has not known how to divine it properly; it must be subdued, enchained and compelled to follow us. The sphinx is the living palladium of humanity, it is the conquest of the King of Thebes; it would have been the salvation of Oedipus, had Oedipus understood its whole enigma!

  In the positive and material order, what must be con cluded from this work? Is Magic a force which science may abandon to the boldest and wickedest? Is it a cheat and falsehood invented by rogues to cozen the ignorant and feeble? Is Philosophical Mercury the exploitation of credulity by address? Those who understand us know already how to answer these questions. In these days, Magic can be no longer the art of fascinations and illusions: those only who wish to be deceived can be deceived now. But the narrow and rash incredulity of the last century is denied in totality by Nature herself. We are environed by prophecies and miracles; unbelief once denied them unwisely; now, science explains them. No, M. le Comte de Mirville, a lost spirit is not allowed to disturb the empire of God! No, things unknown cannot be explained by things impossible! No, invisible beings are not permitted to deceive, torment, seduce and even kill the living creatures of God, poor human beings, so ignorant, as it is, so weak, scarce able to combat their own delusions! Those who told you all this in your childhood, M. le Comte, have deceived you, and if you were child enough once to listen, be man enough now to disbelieve. Man is himself the creator of his heaven and hell, and there are no demons except our own follies. Minds chastised by truth are corrected by that chastisement, and dream no more of disturbing the world. If Satan exist, he can be only the most unfortunate, most ignorant, most humiliated and most impotent of beings. The existence of a universal agent of life, a living fire, an Astral Light, is demonstrated by facts. Magnetism enables us to understand today the miracles of old Magic; the facts of second sight, aspirations, sudden cures, thought-reading, are now admitted and familiar things, even for our children. But the tradition of the ancients has been lost; discoveries have been regarded as new; the last word is sought on observed phenomena; minds are agitated over meaningless manifestations; fascina tions are experienced without being understood. We say, therefore, to table-turners: These prodigies are not novel; you can perform even greater wonders if you study the laws of Nature.1 And what will follow a new acquaintance with these powers? A new career opened to the activity and intelligence of man, the battle of life reorganized with arms more perfect and opportunity restored to the flower of intelligence of becoming once more the masters of all destinies, by providing true priests and great kings for the world to come!

  1 “JOD is God; HE is the Light of Glory; VAU is Eternal Love; He final is creation, or the Creative Principle.”—Letters to Baron Spédalieri, No. 60. As against Lévi's inchoate admixture of symbols in explaining the letters of the Sacred Name, it should be said that in Zoharic Kabalism JOD is the Supernal Father in CHOKMAH
, HE the Supernal Mother in BINAH, VAU the Son begotten from their mystical union, and He final the Sister and Bride of the Son who came forth with Him.

  1 It was not “represented” by Postel but by his editor Frankenberg in 1646, who thought with reason that Poste's Key required another to explain it. He added therefore a kind of appendix to the CLAVIS and also a diagram, of which Lévi is speaking in his loose manner. It is this which exhibits the four letters constituting the words ROTA, TORA, TARO and ORAT. The elucidation in any case has nothing to do with Tarot cards.

  1 There is a sense in which this statement represents the main thesis of Lévi respecting the Secret Tradition in Israel. It must be taken therefore as his serious and considered view, but its sole foundation is that there are 22 Hebrew letters and 22 Tarot Trumps Major. They belong to one another as much and as little as the 22 chapters of the Apocalypse connect with either. So also the analogies instituted between the word Taro and the Monogram of Christ are referable to the world of fantasy.

  1 There is not the least reason to suppose that the Hermit represents Prudence: it is indeed an arbitrary suggestion, and the cardinal virtues remain imperfect in the sequence of Trumps Major. It has been speculated that there is a missing card, which might account for other discrepancies and clear up the problem as to the true place of the Fool.

  1 The following supplementary indications concerning a few of the Tarot Trumps Major have been gleaned from scattered references in the Correspondence with Baron Spédalieri. THE JUGGLER signifies the primary intelligence of symbols and numbers; the nimbus with which he is crowned is the light of life equilibrated—like the serpents of Hermes—by the antagonism of motion. THE FEMALE POPE wears a tiara with three crowns because she is Queen of the three worlds. The Pillars of the Temple in the fifth card are CHOKMAH and HOD; the two ministers are BINAH and NETZAH; the triple crown of The Pope or Hierophant represents KETHER, TIPHEHETH and YESOD; the triple Cross in his hand symbolizes ASSIAH, YETZIRAH and BRIAH. THE EMPEROR bears the sacred sign of the Septenary, because the Holy Tetragram comprises Three Persons and four relations, as the solar spectrum contains three colours and four primary shades, a phenomenon which is reproduced by analogy in the musical scale. The entire figure is the signature of AOUR, or Universal Light, understood in its activity. It is the Sulphur of Hermetic philosophers, i.e. the motive principle of Nature, or universal heat. It is the OD-force. THE HANGED MAN, or twelfth Trump Major, represents the Elixir of Life. The explanation of the Pillars and ministers in the fifth card makes chaos of the Tree of Life.

  1 “The four wings which covered the Propitiatory express symbolically the four celestial currents of the Universal Agent at the four corners of the world of humanity, and the four wings which adorn the walls of the Ark signify that the things above are in analogy with things below.”—Les Mystères de la Kabbale, p. 36.

  1 According to the Authorized Version, there were two ends of the Mercy-Seat and a cherub was to be placed at each. It was directed, moreover, that they should “look one to another.” The Vulgate is in substantial agreement, except that verse 19 is compressed and reads: Cherub unus sit in latera una, et alter in altero.

  2 There are four kabalistic worlds and their descending order is ATZILUTH, BRIAH, YETZIRAH, ASSIAH.

  1 The statement is pure fiction, arising from the fact that the TABLEAU NATUREL is divided into twenty-two sections. They contain no trace whatever of Tarot symbolism.

  1 See Les Cartes à jouer et la Cartomancie by Dieudonné Alexandre Paul Boiteau d'Ambly, Paris, 1854.

  1 “Religion comprises four things, and these four are one: (1) the infinite object of faith = JOD; faith, infinite as its object = HE; (3) the cultus which fructifies faith — VAU; believing and practising people = HE final. The Church is the outward form of religion; religion makes the Church by manifesting itself outwardly, as JOD produces HE. The Church makes religion by manifesting it. The union of the two is represented by the and the power of the Cross is poured into the chalice = HE final. The Church subsists only in virtue of four indissoluble and inseparable things: (1) a Chief, always one in the sense of the spirit and hence mysterious and divine = JOD; (2) an invariable symbol = HE; (3) a perpetual sacrifice = VAU; (4) an infallible school of instruction = HE final. The Church has a spirit and a body, like ourselves, an incorruptible spirit and a perishable body. But in the Church, the spirit renews the body, when the latter has decayed.”—Correspondence with Baron Spédalieri.

  1 “Faith is the firm adherence of the mind to its necessary and reasonable hypotheses, of which faith it can be said that this also is reason. Obstinate adherence of mind to impossible and irrational hypotheses is superstition, fanaticism and mania.”—La Science des Esprits, p. 287. Compare ibid., p. 293: “That exalted but just sentiment which imposes obedience to the flag is called honour,” and in like manner, “the sentiment, at once just and exalted, which stimulates obedience to the Church is called faith.” Lévi has offered many suggestive definitions, but that which remains over and is that alone which signifies was given long ago by St Paul, and the French Magus was not qualified to contemplate its depth and height: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” It is the only one which can open a path to experience.

  1 The commentary hereon is in one sentence of Le Grand Arcane, p. 52. The Roman Church—not, be it observed, transfigured, but Rome as it taught and was in 1868 on the eve of the Vatican Council—“alone possesses the monopoly of Transcendental Magic and its efficacious ceremonies. It charms demons with water and salt; with bread and wine it evokes God and constrains Him to become visible and palpable on earth; it imparts health and pardon with oil. It does yet more, for it creates priests and kings.” But a change came over the spirit of this dreaming, for in 1870 Éliphas Lévi knew the horrors of the siege of Paris: the world and its churches seemed falling about his ears. And this is what he wrote in those days: “Catholicism in its entirety, with its mythology, its contradictory dogmas, its lean and scowling saints, legends so gracious for the most part but sometimes barbarous, must be preserved like an old cathedral, one gargoyle of which—however monstrous or obscene—it would be a sin to disfigure. Let it be placed in the museum of great human follies which will serve as a repository to the wisdom of the future. . . . Break no idols: preserve but adore them no longer.”—Les Portes de l'Avenir, xlviii.

  2 It is possible that Lévi meant to write a priori, though I do not pretend that the emendation adds much significance to his remark. But the latter seems unintelligible as it stands.

  1 “God is the great silence of the infinite. The whole world speaks of Him and for Him, but He is represented by nothing that is said so well as by His silence and eternal calm.”—Le Livre des Sages, p. 58.

  1 “To perform miracles or persuade the multitude that one does so is much about the same thing, more especially in an age of mockery and trifling like our own.”—La Clef des Grands Mystères, p. 215.

  SUPPLEMENT TO THE RITUAL

  THE NUCTEMERON OF APOLLONIUS OF TYANA

  The Greek text was first published after an ancient manuscript, by Gilbert Gautrimis, in De Vita et Moysis, Lib. Ill, p. 206, and was reproduced subsequently by Laurentius Moshemius in his Sacred and Historico-Critical Observations, Amsterdam, 1721, It is now translated and interpreted for the first time by Éliphas Lévi.

  NUCTEMERON signifies the day of the night or the night illumined by day. It is analogous to the “Light Issuing from Darkness”, which is the title of a well-known Hermetic work. It may be translated also THE LIGHT OF OCCULTISM. This monument of transcendent Assyrian Magic is sufficiently curious to make it superfluous to enlarge on its importance. We have not merely evoked Apollonius, we have possibly resuscitated him.

  THE NUCTEMERON

  The First Hour

  In unity, the demons chant the praises of God: they lose their malice and fury.

  The Second Hour

  By the duad, the Zodiacal fish chant the praises of Go
d; the fiery serpents entwine about the caduceus and the thunder becomes harmonious.

  The Third Hour

  The serpents of the Hermetic caduceus entwine three times; Cerberus opens his triple jaw, and fire chants the praises of God with the three tongues of the lightning.

  The Fourth Hour

  At the fourth Hour the soul revisits the tombs; the magical lamps are lighted at the four corners of the circle: it is the time of enchantments and illusions.