Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

Duplicate headings of the seven BOOKS have been removed.

THE HISTORY OF MAGIC

James Hyatt

ÉLIPHAS LÉVI

THE
HISTORY OF MAGIC

INCLUDING A CLEAR AND PRECISE EXPOSITION
OF ITS PROCEDURE, ITS RITES AND
ITS MYSTERIES

BY

ÉLIPHAS LÉVI
(ALPHONSE LOUIS CONSTANT)

Opus hierarchicum et catholicum
(Definition of the Great Work, according to Heinrich Khunrath)

TRANSLATED, WITH A PREFACE AND NOTES, BY
ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE

THE ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS ARE INCLUDED
AND PORTRAITS OF THE AUTHOR

Second Edition

LONDON
WILLIAM RIDER & SON, LIMITED
CATHEDRAL HOUSE, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
1922

Copyright

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

In several casual references scattered through periodical literature, in the biographical sketch which preceded my rendering of Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie and elsewhere, as occasion prompted, I have put on record an opinion that the History of Magic, by Alphonse Louis Constant, written—like the majority of his works—under the pseudonym of Éliphas Lévi, is the most arresting, entertaining and brilliant of all studies on the subject with which I am acquainted. So far back as 1896 I said that it was admirable as a philosophical survey, its historical inaccuracies notwithstanding, and that there is nothing in occult literature which can suffer comparison therewith. Moreover, there is nothing so comprehensive in the French language, while as regards ourselves it must be said that—outside records of research on the part of folk-lore scholarship—we have depended so far on a history by Joseph Ennemoser, translated from the German and explaining everything, within the domain included under the denomination of Magic, by the phenomena of Animal Magnetism. Other texts than this are available in that language, but they have not been put into English; while none of them has so great an appeal as that which is here rendered into our tongue. Having certified so far regarding its titles, it is perhaps desirable to add, from my own standpoint, that I have not translated the book merely because it is entertaining and brilliant, or because it will afford those who are concerned with Magic in history a serviceable general account. The task has been undertaken still less in the interests of any who may have other—that is to say, direct occult—reasons for acquaintance with “its procedure, its rites and its mysteries.” I have no object in providing unwary and foolish seekers with material of this kind, and it so happens that the present History does not fulfil the promise of its sub-title in these respects, or at least to any extent that they would term practical in their folly. Through all my later literary life I have sought to make it plain, as the result of antecedent years spent in occult research, that the occult sciences—in all their general understanding—are paths of danger when they are not paths of simple make-believe and imposture. The importance of Éliphas Lévi’s account at large of the claims, and of their story throughout the centuries, arises from the fact (a) that he is the authoritative exponent-in-chief of all the alleged sciences; (b) that it is he who, in a sense, restored and placed them, under a new and more attractive vesture, before public notice at the middle period of the nineteenth century; (c) that he claimed, as we shall see, the very fullest knowledge concerning them, being that of an adept and master; but (d) that—subject to one qualification, the worth of which will be mentioned—it follows from his long examination that Magic, as understood not in the streets only but in the houses of research concerning it, has no ground in the truth of things, and is of the region of delusion only. It is for this reason that I have translated his History of Magic, as one who reckons a not too gracious task for something which leans toward righteousness, at least in the sense of charity. The world is full at this day of the false claims which arise out of that region, and I have better reasons than most even of my readers can imagine to undeceive those who, having been drawn in such directions, may be still saved from deception. It is well therefore that out of the mouth of a master we can draw the fullest evidence required for this purpose.

In the present prefatory words I propose to shew, firstly, the nature of Éliphas Lévi’s personal claims, so that there may be no misconception as to what they were actually, and as to the kind of voice which is speaking; secondly, his original statement of the claims, nature and value of Transcendental Magic; and, thirdly, his later evidences on its phenomenal or so-called practical side, as established by its own history. In this manner we shall obtain his canon of criticism, and I regard it as valuable, because—with all his imperfections—he had better titles of knowledge at his own day than any one, while it cannot be said that his place has been filled since, though many workers have risen up in the same field of inquiry and have specialised in the numerous departments which he covered generally and superficially.

Before entering upon these matters it may be thought that I should speak at some length of the author’s life; but the outlines have been given already in an extended introduction prefixed to a digest of his writings which I published many years ago under the title of Mysteries of Magic, and again, but from another point of view, in the preface to the Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic already mentioned. The latter will be made available shortly in a new annotated edition. For the rest, an authoritative life of Éliphas Lévi has been promised for years in France, but is still delayed, and in its absence the salient biographical facts are not numerous,

In the present place it will be therefore sufficient to say that Alphonse Louis Constant was born at Paris in 1810, and was the son of a shoemaker, apparently in very poor circumstances. His precocity in childhood seemed to give some promise of future ability; he was brought to the notice of a priest belonging to his parish, and this in its turn led to his gratuitous education at Saint-Sulpice, obviously with a view to the priesthood. There his superiors must have recognised sufficient traces of vocation, according to the measures of the particular place and period, for he proceeded to minor orders and subsequently became a deacon. He seems, however, to have conceived strange views on doctrinal subjects, though no particulars are forthcoming, and, being deficient in gifts of silence, the displeasure of authority was marked by various checks, ending finally in his expulsion from the Seminary. Such is one story at least, but an alternative says more simply that he relinquished the sacerdotal career in consequence of doubts and scruples. Thereafter he must, I suppose, have supported himself by some kind of teaching, and by obscure efforts in literature. Of these latter the remains are numerous, though their value has been much exaggerated for bookselling purposes in France. His adventures with Alphonse Esquiros over the gospel of the prophet Ganneau are told in the pages that follow, and are an interesting biographical fragment which may be left to speak for itself. He was then approaching the age of thirty years. I have failed to ascertain at what period he married Mlle. Noémy, a girl of sixteen, who became afterwards of some repute as a sculptor, but it was a runaway match and in the end she left him. It is even said that she succeeded in a nullity suit—not on the usual grounds, for she had borne him two children, who died in their early years if not during infancy, but on the plea that she was a minor, while he had taken irrevocable vows. Saint-Sulpice is, however, a seminary for secular priests who are not pledged to celibacy, though the rule of the Latin Church forbids them to enter the married state.

In or about the year 1851 Alphonse Louis Constant contributed a large volume to the encyclopædic series of Abbé Migne, under the title of Dictionnaire de Littérature Chrétienne. He is described therein as ancien professeur au petit Séminaire de Paris, and it is to be supposed that his past was unknown at the publishing bureau. The volume is more memorable on account of his later writings than important by its own merits. As a critical work, and indeed as a work of learning, it is naturally quite negligible, like most productions of the series, while as a dictionary it is disproportioned and piecemeal; yet it is exceedingly readable and not unsuggestive in its views. There is no need to add that, as the circumstances of the case required, it is written along rigid lines of orthodoxy and is consequently no less narrow, no less illiberal, than the endless volumes of its predecessors and successors in the same field of industry. The doubting heart of Saint-Sulpice had become again a convinced Catholic, or had assumed that mask for the purpose of a particular literary production. Four years later, however, the voice of the churchman, speaking the characteristic language of the Migne Encyclopædias, was succeeded by the voice of the magus. The Doctrine of Transcendental Magic appeared in 1855, the Ritual in 1856, and henceforth Alphonse Louis Constant, under the pseudonym of Éliphas Lévi, which has become almost of European celebrity, was known only as an exponent of occult science. It is these works which more especially embody his claims in respect of the alleged science and in respect of his own absolute authority thereon and therein. Various later volumes, which followed from his pen in somewhat rapid succession, are very curious when compared with the Doctrine and Ritual for their apparent submission to church authority and their parade of sincere orthodoxy. I have dealt with this question at length in my introduction to the Mysteries of Magic, and I shall be dispensed therefore from covering the same ground in the present place. Such discrepancy notwithstanding, Éliphas Lévi became, in a private as well as in a public sense, a teacher of occult science and of Kabalism as its primary source: it was apparently his means of livelihood. He was in Paris during the siege which brought the Franco-German war to its disastrous close, and he died in 1875, fortified by the last rites of the Catholic Church. He left behind him a large sheaf of manuscripts, many of which have been published since, and some await an editor.

Passing now to the subject-in-chief of this preface, it is affirmed as follows in the Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic:—(1) There is a potent and real Magic, popular exaggerations of which are actually below the truth. (2) There is a formidable secret which constitutes the fatal science of good and evil. (3) It confers on man powers apparently superhuman. (4) It is the traditional science of the secrets of Nature which has been transmitted to us from the Magi. (5) Initiation therein gives empire over souls to the sage and full capacity for ruling human wills. (6) Arising apparently from this science, there is one infallible, indefectible and truly catholic religion which has always existed in the world, but it is unadapted for the multitude. (7) For this reason there has come into being the exoteric religion of apologue, fable and wonder-stories, which is all that is possible for the profane: it has undergone various transformations, and it is represented at this day by Latin Christianity under the obedience of Rome. (8) Its veils are valid in their symbolism, and it may be called valid for the crowd, but the doctrine of initiates is tantamount to a negation of any literal truth therein. (9) It is Magic alone which imparts true science.

Hereof is what may be termed the theoretical, philosophical or doctrinal part, the dogma of “absolute science.” That which is practical follows, and it deals with the exercise of a natural power but one superior to the ordinary forces of Nature. It is to all intents and purposes comprised in a Grimoire of Magic, and is a work of ceremonial evocations—whether of elementary spirits, with the aid of pantacles, talismans and the other magical instruments and properties; whether of spirits belonging ex hypothesi to the planetary sphere; whether of the shades or souls of the dead in necromancy. These works are lawful, and their results apparently veridic, but beyond them is the domain of Black Magic, which is a realm of delusion and nightmare, though phenomenal enough in its results. By his dedications Éliphas Lévi happened to be a magus of light.

It will be observed that all this offers a clear issue, and—for the rest—the Grimoire of Transcendental Magic, according to Éliphas Lévi, does not differ generically from the Key of Solomon and its counterparts, except in so far as the author has excised here and enlarged there, in obedience to his own lights. He had full authority for doing so on the basis of his personal claims, which may be summarised at this point. (1) He has discovered “the secret of human omnipotence and indefinite progress, the key of all symbolism, the first and final doctrine.” (2) He is alchemist as well as magician, and he makes public the same secret as Raymund Lully, Nicholas Flamel and probably Heinrich Khunrath. They produced true gold, “nor did they take away their secret with them.” (3) And finally: “at an epoch when the sanctuary has been devastated and has fallen into ruins, because its key has been thrown over the hedge, to the profit of no one, I have deemed it my duty to pick up that key, and I offer it to him who can take it: in his turn he will be doctor of the nations and liberator of the world.”

It must be said that these claims do not rest on a mere theory or practice of ceremonial evocations. There is no question that for Éliphas Lévi his secret doctrine of occult science is contained in a hypothesis concerning an universal medium denominated the Astral Light, which is neither more nor less than the odylic force of Baron Reichenbach, as the French writer himself admits substantially, but it is dilated in his speculation and issues therein greatly transformed as follows. (1) It is an universal plastic mediator, a common receptacle for vibrations of movement and images of form: it may be called the Imagination of Nature. (2) It is that which God created when He uttered the Fiat Lux. (3) It is the great medium of occult force, but as such it is a blind force, which can be used for good or evil, being especially obedient to the light of grace. (4) It is the element of electricity and lightning. (5) The “four imponderable fluids” are diverse manifestations of this one force, which is “inseparable from the First Matter” and sets the latter in motion. (6) It is now resplendent, now igneous, now electric, now magnetic. (7) It has apparently two modes, which tend to equilibrium, and to know the middle point of this equilibrium seems to be the attainment of the Great Work. (8) It is “ethereal in the infinite, astral in stars and planets, metallic, specific or mercurial in metals, vegetable in plants, vital in animals, magnetic or personal in men.” (9) It is extracted from animals by absorption and from men by generation. (10) In Magic it is the glass of visions, the receptacle of all reflections. The seer has his visions therein, the diviner divines by its means and the magus evokes spirits. (11) When the Astral Light is fixed about a centre by condensation it becomes the Philosophical Stone of Alchemy, in which form it is an artificial phosphorus, containing the concentrated virtues of all generative heat. (12) When condensed by a triple fire it resolves into oil, and this oil is the Universal Medicine. It can then only be contained in glass, this being a non-conductor.

Again, here is a clear issue at its value, and I make this qualification because the Astral Light is, as I have said, a speculation, and personally I neither know nor care whether such a fluid exists, or, in such case, whether it is applicable to the uses indicated. It is enough that Éliphas Lévi has made his affirmations concerning it in unmistakable language.

Let us pass therefore to the Histoire de la Magie, though I have been borrowing from it already in respect of the putative universal fluid. Magic therein is still the science of the ancient Magi; it is still the exact and absolute science of Nature and her laws, because it is the science of equilibrium. Its secret, the secret of occult science, is that of God’s omnipotence. It comprises all that is most certain in philosophy, all that is eternal and infallible in religion. It is the Sacerdotal Art and the Royal Art. Its chief memorial is found in Kabalism, but it derives apparently from primeval Zoroastrian doctrine, of which Abraham seems to have been a depositary. This doctrine attained its perfection in Egypt. Thereafter, on its religious side, the succession appears to have been: (a) from Egypt to Moses; (b) from Moses to Solomon, through certain custodians of the secret law in Jewry; (c) from the Temple at Jerusalem to St. Peter’s at Rome, though the method of transition is obscure—as that which was affirmed previously is still maintained, namely, that Rome has lost the Kabalistic Keys. It is naturally left to our conjecture as to when the Church possessed them—from Éliphas Lévi’s point of view, perhaps in the days of Dionysius, perhaps in those of Synesius, but not from my standpoint, and so the question remains.

Now, if these things do not differ specifically from the heads of the previous testimony, on the surface and in the letter thereof, it is no less certain that there is a marked distinction alike in general atmosphere and inward spirit. About this all can satisfy themselves who will compare the two texts, and I need not insist on it here. What, however, in the Histoire de la Magie, has befallen that practical side which, after all the dreamings, the high and decorative philosophy, the adornments—now golden, now meretricious—was the evidence, term and crown of the previous work? Those who are reading can again check me; but my answer is this: whether the subject of the moment is the art of evoking spirits, whether it is old cases of possession, whether it is witchcraft or necromancy, whether it is modern phenomena like direct-writing, table-rapping and the other occurrences of spiritism, as they were known to the writer and his period, they have one and all fallen under the ban of unreserved condemnation. It is not that they are imposture, for Éliphas Lévi does not dispute the facts and derides those who do, but they belong to the abyss of delusion and all who practise them are workers of madness and apostles of evil only. The advent of Christianity has put a decisive period to every activity of Magic and anathema has been pronounced thereon. It is from this point of view that Lévi takes the disciple through each century of the subject, sometimes indeed explaining things from the standpoint of a complete sceptic, sometimes as Joseph Ennemoser might himself have explained them, but never—no, not once—like the authorised exponent of practical Magic who has tried the admirable and terrifying experiments, who returns to say that they are true and real, which is the testimony of the Doctrine and Ritual, if these volumes can be held to signify anything. Necromancy as a science of the abyss; spiritism as the abyss giving up every form of delusion; sorcery, witchcraft, as rich indeed in testimony but to human perversity alone, apart from intervention of diabolism belonging to the other world—I testify with my whole heart to the truth of these accusations, though I do not believe that the unseen world is so utterly cut off from the world of things manifest as Éliphas Lévi considered in his own paradoxical moods. But once more—what has become of Magic? What has happened to the one science which is coeval with creation itself, to the key of all miracles and to almost omnipotent adeptship? They are reduced as follows: (a) to that which in its palmary respects is the “sympathetic and miraculous physics” of Mesmer, who is “grand as Prometheus” because of them; (b) to a general theory of hallucination, when hallucination has been carried, by self-induced delusion or otherwise, to its ne plus ultra degree; and (c) but I mention this under very grave reserves, because—for the life of me—I do not understand how or why it should remain—to the physical operations of alchemy, which are still possible and actual under the conditions set forth in the speculation concerning the Astral Light. It is not as such, one would say, a thaumaturgic process, unless indeed the dream should rule—as it tends to do—that fulfilment depends on an electrifying power in the projected will of the adept. In any case, the ethical transliteration of alchemical symbolism is seemingly a more important aspect of this subject.

I need not register here that I disbelieve utterly in Lévi’s construction of the art of metallic transmutation, or that I regard his allegorising thereon as a negligible product when it is compared with the real doctrine of Hermetic Mysticism; but this is not the point at issue. The possessor of the Key of Magic, of the Kabalistic Keys, thrown aside or lost by the Church, comes forward to tell us that after the advent of Christ “magical orthodoxy was transfigured into the orthodoxy of religion”; that “those who dissented could be only illuminati and sorcerers”; that “the very name of Magic must be interpreted only according to its evil sense”; that we are forbidden by the Church to consult oracles, and that this is “in its great wisdom”; that the “fundamental dogma of transcendental science ... attained its plenary realisation in the constitution of the Christian world,” being the equilibrium between Church and State. All that is done outside the lawful hierarchy stands under an act of condemnation; as to visions, all fools are visionaries; to communicate with the hierarchy of unseen intelligence, we must seek the natural and mathematical revelations set forth in Tarot cards, but it cannot be done without danger and crime; while mediums, enchanters, fortune-tellers, and casters of spells “are generally diseased creatures in whom the void opens.” Finally, as regards the philosophical side of Magic, its great doctrine is equilibrium; its great hypothesis is analogy; and in the moral sense equilibrium is the concurrence of science and faith.

What has happened to a writer who has thus gone back on his own most strenuous claims? One explanation is—and long ago I was inclined to it on my own part—that Éliphas Lévi had passed through certain grades of knowledge in a secret school of the Instituted Mysteries; that he was brought to a pause because of disclosures contained in his earlier books; and that he had been set to unsay what he had affirmed therein. I know now by what quality of school—working under what titles—this report was fabricated, and that it is the last with which I am acquainted to be accepted on its own statements, either respecting itself or any points of fact. An alternative is that Éliphas Lévi had spoken originally as a Magus might be supposed to speak when trafficking in his particular wares, which is something like a quack doctor describing his nostrums to a populace in the market-place, and that his later writings represent a process of retrenchment as to the most florid side of his claims. This notion is apart from all likelihood, because it offers no reason for the specific change in policy, while—if it be worth while to say so—I do not regard Lévi as comparable to a quack doctor. I think that he had been a student of occult literature and history for a considerable period, in a very particular sense; that he believed himself to have discovered a key to all the alleged phenomena; that he wrote the Doctrine and Ritual in a mood of enthusiasm consequent thereupon; that between the appearance of these volumes and that of the Histoire de la Magie he had reconsidered the question of the phenomena, and had come to the conclusion that so far from being veridic in their nature they were projected hallucinations variously differentiated and in successively aggravated grades; but that he still regarded his supposed universal fluid as a great provisional hypothesis respecting thaumaturgic facts, and that he still held to his general philosophy of the subject, being the persistence of a secret tradition from remote times and surviving at the present day (1) in the tenets of Kabalism and (2) in the pictorial symbols of the Tarot.

It is no part of my province in the present connection to debate his views either on the fact of a secret tradition or on the alleged modes of its perpetuation: my standpoint is known otherwise and has been expressed fully elsewhere. But in the explanation just given I feel that I have saved the sincerity of one who has many titles to consideration, who is still respected by many, and for whom my own discriminating sympathy has been expressed frequently in no uncertain way: I have saved it so far at least as can be expected. One does not anticipate that a Frenchman, an occultist and a magus is going to retract distinctly under the eye of his disciples, more especially when he has testified so much. I feel further that I have justified the fact of the present translation of a work which is memorable in several respects, but chiefly as the history of a magic which is not Magic, as a testimony which destroys indeed the whole imputed basis of its subject. It does not follow that Lévi’s explanation of physical phenomena, especially of the modern kind, is always or generally correct; but some of it is workable in its way, and my purpose is more than served if those who are drawn toward the science of the mystics may be led hereby to take warning as to some of the dangers and false-seemings which fringe that science.

A few things remain to be said. Readers of his History must be prepared for manifold inaccuracies, which are to be expected in a writer like Éliphas Lévi. Those who know anything of Egypt—the antiquities of its religion and literature—will have a bad experience with the chapter on Hermetic Magic; those who know eastern religion on its deeper side will regard the discourse on Magic in India as title-deeds of all incompetence; while in respect of later Jewish theosophy I have had occasion in certain annotations to indicate that Lévi had no extensive knowledge of those Kabalistic texts on the importance of which he dwells so much and about which he claims to speak with full understanding. He presents, however, some of their lesser aspects.

As regards the religion of his childhood, I feel certainly that it appealed to him strongly through all his life, and in the revulsion which seems to have followed the Doctrine and Ritual he was drawn back towards it, but rather as to a great hierarchic system and a great sequence of holy pageants, of living symbolism. Respecting the root-matter of its teachings, probably he deceived himself better than he fooled his readers. In a multitude of statements and in the spirit of the text throughout, it is certain that the Histoire de la Magie offers “negation of dogma” on its absolute side. We obtain a continual insight into free sub-surface opinions, ill-concealed under external conformity to the Church, and we get also useful side-lights on the vanity of the author’s sham submissions. In this manner, we know exactly what quality of sentiment led him to lay all his writings at the foot of the seat of Peter, for Peter to decide thereon. It is needless to add that his constructions of doctrine throughout are of the last kind that would be commended to the custodians of doctrine. At the same time there is very little doubt that he believed genuinely in the necessity of a hierarchic teaching; that, in his view, it reposed from a very early period in certain sanctuaries of initiation; that the existence of these is intimated in the records of the Mosaic dispensation; that they were depositaries of science rather than revelation; that Kabalistic literature is one of their witnesses; but that the sanctuaries were everywhere in the world, Egypt and Greece included. Of all these the Church of Christ is the heir, and though it may have lost the keys of knowledge, though it mistakes everywhere the sign for the thing signified, it is—from his standpoint—entitled to our respect as a witness and at least to qualified obedience.

I think that Éliphas Lévi has said true things and even great things on the distinctions and analogies between science and faith, but the latter he understood as aspiration, not as experience. A long essay on the mystics, which is perhaps his most important contribution to the Dictionnaire de Littérature Chrétienne, indicates that he was thinly acquainted with the mind of Suso, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa and St. Francis of Sales. Accordingly he has a word here and there on the interior life and its secrets, but of that which remains for the elect in the heights of sanctity he had no consciousness whatever. For him the records of such experience are literature and mystic poetry; and as he is far from the term herein, so is he remote also when he discourses of false mystics, meaning Gnostic sects, Albigensian sects, illuminati so-called and members of secret heretical societies representing reformed doctrine. As the religion of the mystics is my whole concern in literature, let me add that the true idea of religion is not constituted by “universal suffrage” (see text, p. 517), but by the agreement of those who have attained in the Divine experience that which is understood by attainment.

In conclusion, after we have set aside, on the warrants of this History, the phenomenal side of Magic, that which may be held to remain in the mind of the author is Transcendental Magic—referred to when I spoke of a qualification earlier in these remarks; but by this is to be understood so much of the old philosophical systems as had passed within his consciousness and had been interpreted therein. It will be unacceptable to most readers at this day, but it has curious aspects of interest and may be left to stand at its value.

A. E. WAITE.

PORTRAIT OF ÉLIPHAS LÉVI, TAKEN AFTER DEATH

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE HISTORY OF MAGIC

INTRODUCTION

Magic has been confounded too long with the jugglery of mountebanks, the hallucinations of disordered minds and the crimes of certain unusual malefactors. There are otherwise many who would promptly explain Magic as the art of producing effects in the absence of causes; and on the strength of such a definition it will be said by ordinary people—with the good sense which characterises the ordinary, in the midst of much injustice—that Magic is an absurdity. But it can have no analogy in fact with the descriptions of those who know nothing of the subject; furthermore, it is not to be represented as this or that by any person whomsoever: it is that which it is, drawing from itself only, even as mathematics do, for it is the exact and absolute science of Nature and her laws.

Magic is the science of the ancient magi; and the Christian religion, which silenced the counterfeit oracles and put a stop to the illusions of false gods, does, this notwithstanding, revere those mystic kings who came from the East, led by a star, to adore the Saviour of the world in His cradle. They are elevated by tradition to the rank of kings, because magical initiation constitutes a true royalty; because also the great art of the magi is characterised by all adepts as the Royal Art, as the Holy Kingdom—Sanctum Regnum. The star which conducted the pilgrims is the same Burning Star which is met with in all initiations. For alchemists it is the sign of the quintessence, for magicians it is the Great Arcanum, for Kabalists the sacred pentagram. Our design is to prove that the study of this pentagram did itself lead the magi to a knowledge of that New Name which was to be exalted above all names and to bend the knees of all beings who were capable of adoration. Magic, therefore, combines in a single science that which is most certain in philosophy, which is eternal and infallible in religion. It reconciles perfectly and incontestably those two terms, so opposed on the first view—faith and reason, science and belief, authority and liberty. It furnishes the human mind with an instrument of philosophical and religious certitude as exact as mathematics, and even accounting for the infallibility of mathematics themselves.

An Absolute exists therefore in the realms of understanding and faith. The lights of human intelligence have not been left by the Supreme Reason to waver at hazard. There is an incontestable truth; there is an infallible method of knowing that truth; while those who attain this knowledge, and adopt it as a rule of life, can endow their will with a sovereign power which can make them masters of all inferior things, all wandering spirits, or, in other words, arbiters and kings of the world.

If such be the case, how comes it that so exalted a science is still unrecognised? How is it possible to assume that so bright a sun is hidden in a sky so dark? The transcendental science has been known always, but only to the flowers of intelligence, who have understood the necessity of silence and patience. Should a skilful surgeon open at midnight the eyes of a man born blind, it would still be impossible to make him realise the nature or existence of daylight till morning came. Science has its nights and its mornings, because the life which it communicates to the world of mind is characterised by regular modes of motion and progressive phases. It is the same with truths as it is with radiations of light. Nothing which is hidden is lost, but at the same time nothing that is found is absolutely new. The seal of eternity is affixed by God to that science which is the reflection of His glory.

THE PENTAGRAM OF THE ABSOLUTE

The transcendental science, the absolute science is assuredly Magic, though the affirmation may seem utterly paradoxical to those who have never questioned the infallibility of Voltaire—that marvellous smatterer who thought that he knew so much because he never missed an opportunity for laughter instead of learning. Magic was the science of Abraham and Orpheus, of Confucius and Zoroaster, and it was magical doctrines which were graven on tables of stone by Enoch and by Trismegistus. Moses purified and re-veiled them—this being the sense of the word reveal. The new disguise which he gave them was that of the Holy Kabalah—that exclusive heritage of Israel and inviolable secret of its priests.[1] The mysteries of Eleusis and of Thebes preserved among the Gentiles some of its symbols, but in a debased form, and the mystic key was lost amidst the apparatus of an ever-increasing superstition. Jerusalem, murderer of its prophets and prostituted over and over again to false Assyrian and Babylonian gods, ended by losing in its turn the Sacred Word, when a Saviour, declared to the magi by the holy star of initiation, came to rend the threadbare veil of the old temple, to endow the Church with a new network of legends and symbols—ever concealing from the profane and always preserving for the elect that truth which is the same for ever.

It is this that the erudite and ill-starred Dupuis should have found on Indian planispheres and in tables of Denderah; he would not have ended by rejecting the truly catholic or universal and eternal religion in the presence of the unanimous affirmation of all Nature, as well as all monuments of science throughout the ages.[2] It was the memory of this scientific and religious absolute, of this doctrine summarised in a word, of this word alternately lost and recovered, which was transmitted to the elect of all antique initiations. Whether preserved or profaned in the celebrated Order of the Temple, it was this same memory handed on to secret associations of Rosicrucians, Illuminati and Freemasons which gave a meaning to their strange rites, to their less or more conventional signs, and a justification above all to their devotion in common, as well as a clue to their power.

That profanation has befallen the doctrines and mysteries of Magic we have no intention to deny; repeated from age to age, the misuse itself has been a great and terrible lesson for those who made secret things unwisely known. The Gnostics caused the Gnosis to be prohibited by Christians, and the official sanctuary was closed to high initiation. The hierarchy of knowledge was thus compromised by the intervention of usurping ignorance, while the disorders within the sanctuary were reproduced in the state, for, willingly or otherwise, the king always depends from the priest, and it is towards the eternal adytum of divine instruction that earthly powers will ever look for consecration and for energy to insure their permanence.

The key of science has been thrown to children; as might have been expected, it is now, therefore, mislaid and practically lost. This notwithstanding, a man of high intuitions and great moral courage, Count Joseph de Maistre, who was also a resolute catholic, acknowledging that the world was void of religion and could not so remain, turned his eyes instinctively towards the last sanctuaries of occultism and called, with heartfelt prayers, for that day when the natural affinity which subsists between science and faith should combine them in the mind of a single man of genius. “This will be grand,” said he; “it will finish that eighteenth century which is still with us.... We shall talk then of our present stupidity as we now dilate on the barbarism of the Middle Ages.”

The prediction of Count Joseph de Maistre is in course of realisation; the alliance of science and faith, accomplished long since, is here in fine made manifest, though not by a man of genius. Genius is not needed to see the sun, and, moreover, it has never demonstrated anything but its rare greatness and its lights inaccessible to the crowd. The grand truth demands only to be found, when the simplest will be able to comprehend it and to prove it also at need. At the same time that truth will never become vulgar, because it is hierarchic and because anarchy alone humours the bias of the crowd. The masses are not in need of absolute truths; were it otherwise, progress would be arrested and life would cease in humanity; the ebb and flow of contrary ideas, the clash of opinions, the passions of the time, ever impelled by its dreams, are necessary to the intellectual growth of peoples. The masses know it full well, and hence they desert so readily the chair of doctors to collect about the rostrum of mountebanks. Some even who are assumed to be concerned in philosophy, and that perhaps especially, too often resemble the children playing at charades, who hasten to turn out those who know the answer already, lest the game should be spoiled by depriving the puzzle of the questions of all its interest.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” has been said by Eternal Wisdom. Purity of heart therefore purifies intelligence, and rectitude of will makes for precision in understanding. Whosoever prefers truth and justice before all things shall have justice and truth for his reward, because supreme Providence has endowed us with freedom in order that we may attain life; and very truth, all its exactitude notwithstanding, intervenes only with mildness, never does outrage to tardiness or violence to the errors of our will when it is beguiled by the allurements of falsehood.

It remains, however, according to Bossuet, that antecedent to anything which may please or repel our senses, there is a truth, and it is by this that our conduct should be governed, not by our appetites. The Kingdom of Heaven is not the empire of caprice, either in respect of man or God. “A thing is not just because it is willed by God,” said St. Thomas, “but God wills it because it is just.” The Divine Balance rules and necessitates eternal mathematics. “God has made all things with number, weight and measure”—here it is the Bible speaking.[3] Measure an angle of creation, make a proportionally progressive multiplication, and all infinity shall multiply its circles, peopled by universes, passing in proportional segments between the extending symbolical arms of your compass. Suppose now that, from whatever point of the infinite above you, a hand holds another compass or square, then the lines of the celestial triangle will meet of necessity those of the compass of science and will form therewith the mysterious star of Solomon.[4]

“With what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again,” says the Gospel. God does not strive with man that He may crush man by His grandeur, and He never places unequal weights in His balance. When He would test the strength of Jacob, He assumes the form of man; the patriarch withstands the onset through an entire night; at the end there is a blessing for the conquered and, in addition to the glory of having sustained such a struggle, he is given the national title of Israel, being a name which signifies—Strong against God.[5]

We have heard Christians more zealous than instructed hazarding a strange explanation of the dogma concerning eternal punishment by suggesting that God may avenge infinitely an offence which itself is finite, because if the offender is limited the grandeur of the offended being is not. An emperor of the world might, on the strength of a similar pretext, sentence to death some unreasoning child who had soiled accidentally the hem of his purple. Far otherwise are the prerogatives of greatness, and St. Augustine understood them better when he said that “God is patient because He is eternal.” In God all is justice, seeing that all is goodness; He never forgives after the manner of men, for He is never angered like them; but evil being, by its nature, incompatible with good, as night is with day, as discord is with harmony, and the liberty of man being furthermore inviolable, all error is expiated and all evil punished by suffering proportioned thereto. It is vain to invoke the help of Jupiter when our cart is stuck in the mud; unless we take pick and shovel, like the waggoner in the fable, Heaven will not draw us out of the rut. Help yourself and God will help you. In such a reasonable and wholly philosophical way is explained the possible and necessary eternity of punishment, with still a narrow way open for man to escape therefrom—being that of toil and repentance.[6]

It is by conformity with the rules of eternal power that man may unite himself to the creative energy and become creator and preserver in his turn. God has not limited narrowly the number of rounds on Jacob’s ladder of light. Whatsoever Nature has constituted inferior to man is thereby to him made subject: it is for man to extend his domain in virtue of continual ascent. Length and even perpetuity of life, the field of air and its storms, the earth and its metallic veins, light and its wondrous illusions, darkness and the dreams thereof, death and its ghosts—all these do therefore obey the royal sceptre of the magi, the shepherd’s staff of Jacob and the terrible wand of Moses. The adept becomes king of the elements, transmuter of metals, interpreter of visions, controller of oracles, master of life in fine, according to the mathematical order of Nature and conformably to the will of the Supreme Intelligence. This is Magic in all its glory. But is there anyone who in these days will dare to give credence to such words? The answer is—those who will study loyally and attain knowledge frankly. We make no attempt to conceal truth under the veil of parables or hieroglyphical signs; the time has come when everything should be told, and we propose to tell everything. It is our intention, in short, to unveil that ever secret science which, as we have indicated, is hidden behind the shadows of ancient mysteries, which the Gnostics betrayed clumsily, or rather disfigured unworthily, which is recognised dimly under the darkness shrouding the pretended crimes of Templars, which is met with once again beneath the now impenetrable enigmas of High-Grade Masonic Rites. We purpose further to bring into open day the fantastic King of the Sabbath, to expose the very roots of Black Magic and its frightful realities, long since surrendered to the derision of the grand-children of Voltaire.

For a great number of readers Magic is the science of the devil—even as the science of light is identified with that of darkness. We confess boldly at the outset that we are not in terror of the devil. “My fear is for those who fear him,” said St. Teresa. But we testify also that he does not prompt our laughter and that the ridicule of which he is often the object seems to us exceedingly misplaced. However this may be, it is our intention to bring him before the light of science. But the devil and science—the apposition of two names so strangely incongruous—must seem to have disclosed the whole intent in view. If the mystic personification of darkness be thus dragged into light, is it not to annihilate the phantom of falsehood in the presence of truth? Is it not to dispel in the day all formless monsters of the night? Superficial persons will think so and will condemn without hearing. Ill-instructed Christians will conclude that we are sapping the fundamental dogma of their ethics by decrying hell; and others will question the utility of combating error in which, as they imagine, no one believes longer. It is, therefore, important to enunciate our object clearly and establish our principles solidly.

We say, therefore, to Christians that the author of this book is a Christian like yourselves. His faith is that of a catholic strongly and deeply convinced; for this reason he does not come forward to deny dogmas, but to combat impiety under its most pernicious forms, which are those of false belief and superstition. He comes to drag from the darkness the black successor of Ahriman, in order to expose in broad day his colossal impotence and redoubtable misery. He comes to make subject the age-long problem of evil to the solutions of science, to uncrown the king of hell and to bow down his head at the foot of the cross. Is not virginal and maternal science—that science of which Mary is the sweet and luminous image—destined like her to crush the head of the old serpent?

The author, on the other hand, would say to pretended philosophy: Why seek to deny that which you cannot understand? Is not the unbelief which affirms in the face of the unknown more precipitate and less consoling than faith? Does the dreadful form of personified evil only prompt you to smile? Hear you not the ceaseless sobbing of humanity which writhes and weeps in the crushing folds of the monster? Have you never heard the atrocious laugh of the evil-doer who is persecuting the just man? Have you never experienced in yourselves the opening of those infernal deeps which the genius of perversity furrows in every soul? Moral evil exists—such is the unhappy truth; it reigns in certain spirits; it incarnates in certain men; it is therefore personified, and thus demons exist; but the most wicked of these demons is Satan. More than this I do not ask you to admit, and it will be difficult for you to grant me less.

Let it be otherwise and clearly understood that science and faith render mutual support to one another only in so far as their respective realms remain inviolably distinct. What is it that we believe? That which we do not know absolutely, though we may yearn for it with all our strength. The object of faith is not more than an indispensable hypothesis for science; the things which are in the domain of knowledge must never be judged by the processes of faith, nor, conversely, the things of faith according to the measures of science. The end of faith is not scientifically debatable. “I believe because it is absurd,” said Tertullian; and this utterance—paradoxical on the surface as it is—belongs to the highest reason. As a fact, beyond all that we can suppose rationally there is an infinite towards which we aspire with unquenchable thirst, and it eludes even our dreams. But is not the infinite itself an absurdity for our finite appreciation? We feel all the same that it is; the infinite invades us, overflows us, renders us dizzy at its abysses and crushes us by its awful height.

Scientifically probable hypotheses are one and all the last half-lights or shadows of science; faith begins where reason falls exhausted. Beyond human reason there is that Reason which is Divine—for my weakness a supreme absurdity, but an infinite absurdity which confounds me, and in which I believe.

The good alone is infinite; evil is not; and hence if God be the eternal object of faith, then the devil belongs to science. In which of the catholic creeds is there any question concerning him? Would it not be blasphemy to say that we believe in him? In Holy Scripture he is named but not defined. Genesis makes no allusion to a reputed revolt of angels; it ascribes the fall of Adam to the serpent, as to the most subtle and dangerous of living beings. We are acquainted with Christian tradition on this subject; but if that tradition is explicable by one of the greatest and most diffused allegories of science, what can such solution signify to the faith which aspires only to God, which despises the pomps and works of Lucifer?

Lucifer—Light-Bearer—how strange a name, attributed to the spirit of darkness! Is it he who carries the light and yet blinds feeble souls? The answer is yes, unquestionably; for traditions are full of divine disclosures and inspirations. “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light,” says St. Paul. And Christ Himself said: “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” So also the prophet Isaiah: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning.” Lucifer is then a fallen star—a meteor which is on fire always, which burns when it enlightens no longer. But is this Lucifer a person or a force, an angel or a strayed thunderbolt? Tradition supposes that it is an angel, but the Psalmist says: “Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire.” The word angel is applied in the Bible to all messengers of God—emissaries or new creations, revealers or scourges, radiant spirits or brilliant objects. The shafts of fire which the Most High darts through the clouds are angels of His wrath, and such figurative language is familiar to all readers of eastern poetry.

Having been the world’s terror through the period of the middle ages, the devil has become its mockery.[7] Heir to the monstrous forms of all false gods cast down successively from their thrones, the grotesque scarecrow has turned into a mere bugbear through very deformity and hideousness. Yet observe as to this that those only dare to laugh at the devil who know not the fear of God. Can it be that for many diseased imaginations he is God’s own shadow, or is he not often the idol of degenerate souls who only understand supernatural power as the exercise of cruelty with impunity?

But it is important to ascertain whether the notion of this evil power can be reconciled with that of God—in a word, whether the devil exists, and in such case what he is. There is no longer any question of superstition or of ridiculous invention; it is a question of religion alone and hence of the whole future, with all the interests, of humanity.

Strange reasoners indeed are we: we call ourselves strong-minded when we are indifferent to everything except material advantages, as, for example, money; and we leave to their own devices the ideas which are mothers of opinions and may, or at least can, by their sudden veering, upset all fortunes. A conquest of science is much more important than the discovery of a gold mine. Given science, gold is utilised in the service of life; given ignorance, wealth furnishes only destroying weapons.

For the rest, it is to be understood absolutely that our scientific revelations pause in the presence of faith, that—as Christian and Catholic—our work is submitted entirely to the supreme judgment of the Church. This said, to those who question the existence of a devil, we would point out that whatsoever has a name exists; speech may be uttered in vain, but in itself it cannot be vain, and it has a meaning invariably. The Word is never void, and if it be written that it is in God, as also that it is God, this is because it is the expression and the proof of being and of truth. The devil is named and personified in the Gospel, which is the Word of truth; he exists therefore and can be considered as a person. But here it is the Christian who defers: let science or reason speak; these two are one.[8]

Evil exists; it is impossible to doubt it; we can work good or evil. There are beings who work evil knowingly and willingly. The spirit which animates these beings and prompts them to do ill is bewrayed, turned aside from the right road, and thrown across the path of good as an obstacle; this is the precise meaning of the Greek word diabolos, which we render as devil. The spirits who love and perform evil are accidentally bad. There is therefore a devil who is the spirit of error, wilful ignorance, vertigo; there are beings under his obedience who are his envoys, emissaries, angels; and it is for this reason that the Gospel speaks of an eternal fire which is prepared, and in a sense predestined, for the devil and his angels. These words are themselves a revelation, so let us search their meaning, giving, in the first place, a concise definition of evil. Evil is the absence of rectitude in being. Moral evil is falsehood in action, as the lie is a crime in speech. Injustice is of the essence of lying, and every lie is an injustice. When that which we utter is just, there is no falsity. When that which we do is equitable and true in mode, there is no sin. Injustice is the death of moral being, as lying is the poison of intelligence. The false spirit is therefore a spirit of death. Those who hearken to him become his dupes and are by him poisoned. But if we had to take his absolute personification seriously, he would be himself absolutely dead and absolutely deceived, which means that the affirmation of his existence must imply a patent contradiction. Jesus said that the devil is a liar like his father. Who then is the father of the devil? Whosoever gives him a personal existence by living in accordance with his inspirations; the man who diabolises himself is the father of the incarnate spirit of evil. But there is a rash, impious and monstrous conception, traditional like the pride of the Pharisees, and in fine there is a hybrid creation which armed the paltry philosophy of the eighteenth century with an apparent defence. It is the false Lucifer of the heterodox legend—that angel proud enough to think that he was God, brave enough to buy independence at the price of eternal torment, beautiful enough to worship himself in the plenary Divine Light; strong enough to reign still in darkness and in dole and to make a throne of his inextinguishable fire. It is the Satan of the heretical and republican Milton, the pretended hero of black eternities, calumniated by deformity, bedecked with horns and talons which would better become his implacable tormentor. It is the devil who is king of evil, as if evil were a kingdom, who is more intelligent than the men of genius that fear his wiles. It is (a) that black light, that darkness with eyes, that power which God has not willed but which no fallen creature could create; (b) that prince of anarchy served by a hierarchy of pure spirits;[9] (c) that exile of God who on earth seems, like Him, everywhere, but is more tangible, is more for the majority in evidence, and is served better than God himself; (d) that conquered one, to whom the victor gives his children that he may devour them; (e) that artificer of sins of the flesh, to whom flesh is nothing, and who therefore can be nothing to flesh, unless indeed he be its creator and master, like God; (f) that immense, realised, personified and eternal lie; (g) that death which cannot die; (h) that blasphemy which the Word of God will never silence; (i) that poisoner of souls whom God tolerates by a contradiction of His omnipotence or preserves as the Roman emperors guarded Locusta among the trophies of their reign; (k) that executed criminal, living still to curse his Judge and still have a cause against him, since he will never repent; (l) that monster accepted as executioner by the Sovereign Power, and who, according to the forcible expression of an old catholic writer, may term God the God of the devil by describing himself as a devil of God.

Such is the irreligious phantom which blasphemes religion. Away with this idol which hides our Saviour. Down with the tyrant of falsehood, the black god of Manicheans, the Ahriman of old idolaters. Live God and His Word incarnate, who saw Satan fall from heaven. And live Mary, the Divine Mother, who crushed the head of the infernal serpent.

So cry with one voice the traditions of saints, and so cry faithful hearts. The attribution of any greatness whatsoever to a fallen spirit is a slander on Divinity; the ascription of any royalty whatsoever to the rebel spirit is to encourage revolt and be guilty, at least in thought, of that crime which the horror of the middle ages termed sorcery. For all the offences visited with death on the old sorcerers were real crimes and were indeed the greatest of all. They stole fire from heaven, like Prometheus; they rode winged dragons and the flying serpent, like Medea; they poisoned the breathable air, like the shadow of the manchineel tree; they profaned sacred things and even used the body of the Lord in works of destruction and malevolence.

How is all this possible? Because there is a composite agent, a natural and divine agent, at once corporeal and spiritual, an universal plastic mediator, a common receptacle for vibrations of movement and images of form, a fluid and a force which may be called, in a sense at least, the imagination of Nature. By the mediation of this force every nervous apparatus is in secret communication together; hence come sympathy and antipathy, hence dreams, hence the phenomena of second sight and extra-natural vision. This universal agent of Nature’s works is the Od of the Jews and of Reichenbach, the Astral Light of the Martinists,[10] which denomination we prefer as the more explicit.

The existence and possible employment of this force constitute the great secret of Practical Magic; it is the Wand of Thaumaturgy and the Key of Black Magic. It is the Edenic serpent who transmitted to Eve the seductions of a fallen angel. The Astral Light warms, illuminates, magnetises, attracts, repels, vivifies, destroys, coagulates, separates, breaks and conjoins everything, under the impetus of powerful wills. God created it on the first day, when He said: “Let there be light.” This force of itself is blind but is directed by Egregores, that is, by chiefs of souls, or, in other words, by energetic and active spirits.[11]

Herein is the complete explanatory theory of prodigies and miracles. How, as a fact, could good and bad alike compel Nature to reveal her hidden forces, how could there be divine and diabolical miracles, how could the reprobate and bewrayed spirit have more power in certain ways and cases than the just spirit, which is in truth so powerful in simplicity and wisdom, unless we postulate an instrument which all can use, upon certain conditions, but some for the great good and others for the great evil?

Pharaoh’s magicians accomplished at first the same miracles as Moses. The instrument which they used was therefore the same; the inspiration alone differed; when they confessed themselves conquered, they proclaimed that, for them, human powers had reached their limit, and that there must be something superhuman in Moses.[12] This took place in Egypt, that mother of magical initiations, that land where it was all occult science, hierarchic and sacred instruction. Was it, however, more difficult to make flies appear than frogs? No, assuredly; but the magicians knew that the fluidic projection by which the eyes are biologised cannot proceed beyond certain bounds, and these had been passed already by Moses.[13]

A particular phenomenon occurs when the brain is congested or overcharged by Astral Light; sight is turned inward, instead of outward; night falls on the external and real world, while fantastic brilliance shines on the world of dreams; even the physical eyes experience a slight quivering and turn up inside the lids. The soul then perceives by means of images the reflection of its impressions and thoughts. This is to say that the analogy subsisting between idea and form attracts in the Astral Light a reflection representing that form, configuration being the essence of the vital light; it is the universal imagination, of which each of us appropriates a lesser or greater part according to our grade of sensibility and memory. Therein is the source of all apparitions, all extraordinary visions and all the intuitive phenomena peculiar to madness or ecstasy.

The appropriation or assimilation of the light by clairvoyant sensibility is one of the greatest phenomena which can be studied by science. It may be understood in a day to come that seeing is actually speaking and that the consciousness of light is a twilight of eternal life in being. The word of God Himself, Who creates light, and is uttered by all intelligence that conceives of forms and seeks to visualise them. “Let there be light.” Light in the mode of brightness exists only for eyes which look thereon, and the soul enamoured with the pageant of universal beauty, and fixing its attention on that luminous script of the endless book which is called things manifest, seems to cry on its own part, as God at the dawn of the first day, the sublime and creative words: Fiat lux.

We do not all see with the same eyes, and creation is not for all the same in colour and form. Our brain is a book printed within and without, and with the smallest degree of excitement, the writing becomes blurred, as occurs continually in cases of intoxication and madness. Dream then triumphs over real life and plunges reason in a sleep which knows no waking. This condition of hallucination has its degrees; all passions are intoxications; all enthusiasms are comparative and graduated manias. The lover sees only infinite perfections encompassing that object by which he is fascinated. But, unhappy infatuation of voluptuaries, to-morrow this odour of wine which allures him will become a repugnant reminiscence, causing a thousand loathings and a thousand disgusts.

To understand the use of this force, but never to be obsessed and never overcome thereby, is to trample on the serpent’s head, and it is this which we learn from the Magic of Light; in such secrets are contained all mysteries of magnetism, which name can indeed be applied to the whole practical part of antique Transcendental Magic. Magnetism is the wand of miracles, but it is this for initiates only; for rash and uninstructed people, who would sport with it or make it subserve their passions, it is as dangerous as that consuming glory which, according to the allegorical fable, destroyed the too ambitious Semele in the embraces of Jupiter.

One of the great benefits of magnetism is that it demonstrates by incontestable facts the spirituality, unity and immortality of the soul; and these things once made certain, God is manifested to all intelligences and all hearts. Thereafter, from the belief in God and from the harmonies of creation, we are led to that great religious harmony which does not exist outside the miraculous and lawful hierarchy of the Catholic Church, for this alone has preserved all traditions of science and faith.

THE GREAT SYMBOL OF SOLOMON

The primal tradition of the one and only revelation has been preserved under the name of Kabalah by the priesthood of Israel. Kabalistic doctrine, which is that of Transcendental Magic, is contained in the Sepher Yetzirah, the Zohar and the Talmud.[14] According to this doctrine, the absolute is Being, and therein is the Word, which expresses the reason of Being and of life. The principle therefore is that Being is being, אהיה אשד אהיה. In the beginning the Word was, which means that it is, has been and shall be; and this is reason which speaks. In the beginning was the Word. The Word is the reason of belief, and therein also is the expression of that faith which gives life to science. The Word, or Logos, is the wellspring of logic. Jesus is the Incarnate Word. The concord of reason with faith, of science with belief, of authority with liberty, has become in these modern days the real enigma of the sphinx. Coincidentally with this great problem there has come forward that which concerns the respective rights of man and woman. This was inevitable, for between the several terms of a great and supreme question, there is a constant analogy, and the difficulties, like the correspondences, are invariably the same. The loosening of this Gordian knot of philosophy and modern politics is rendered apparently paradoxical, because in order to effect an agreement between the terms of the required equation, there is always a tendency to confuse the one with the other. If there is anything that deserves to be called supreme absurdity, it is to inquire how faith becomes a reason, reason a belief and liberty an authority; or reciprocally, how the woman becomes a man and the man a woman. The definitions themselves intervene against such confusion, and it is by maintaining a perfect distinction between the terms, and so only, that we can bring them into agreement. The perfect and eternal distinction between the two primal terms of the creative syllogism, for the demonstration of their harmony in virtue of the analogy of opposites, is the second great principle of that occult philosophy veiled under the name of Kabalah and indicated by all sacred hieroglyphics of the old sanctuaries, as by the rites, even now understood so little, of ancient and modern Masonry.

We read in Scripture that Solomon erected two brazen columns before the door of his Temple, one of them being called Jachin and the other Boaz, meaning the strong and the weak.[15] These two pillars represented man and woman, reason and faith, power and liberty, Cain and Abel, right and duty. They were pillars of the intellectual and moral world, the monumental hieroglyphic of the antinomy inevitable to the grand law of creation. The meaning is that every force postulates a resistance on which it can work, every light a shadow as its foil, every convex a concave, every influx a receptacle, every reign a kingdom, every sovereign a people, every workman a first matter, every conqueror something to overcome. Affirmation rests on negation, the strong can only triumph because of weakness, the aristocracy cannot be manifested except by rising above the people. For the weak to become strong, for the people to acquire an aristocratic position, is a question of transformation and of progress, but it is without prejudice to the first principles; the weak will be ever the weak and it matters nothing if they are not always the same persons. The people in like manner will ever remain the people, the mass which is ruled and is not capable of ruling. In the vast army of inferiors, every personal emancipation is an automatic desertion, which, happily, is imperceptible because it is replaced, also automatically; a king-nation or a people of kings would presuppose the slavery of the world and anarchy in a single city, outside all discipline, as at Rome in the days of its greatest glory. A nation of sovereigns would be inevitably as anarchic as a class of experts or of scholars who deemed that they were masters; there would be none to listen; all would dogmatise and all give orders at once.

The radical emancipation of womanhood falls within the same category. If, integrally and radically, the woman leaves the passive and enters the active condition, she abdicates her sex and becomes man, or rather, as such a transformation is impossible physically, she attains affirmation by a double negation, placing herself outside both sexes, like a sterile and monstrous androgyne. These are strict consequences of the great Kabalistic dogma respecting that distinction of contraries which reaches harmony by the analogy of their proportions. This dogma once recognised, and the application of its results being made universally by the law of analogies, will mean a discovery of the greatest secrets concerning maternal sympathy and antipathy; it will mean also a discovery of the science of government in things political, in marriage, in all branches of occult medicine, whether magnetism, homœopathy, or moral influence. Moreover, and as it is intended to explain, the law of equilibrium in analogy leads to the discovery of an universal agent which was the Grand Secret of alchemists and magicians in the middle ages. It has been said that this agent is a light of life by which animated beings are rendered magnetic, electricity being only its accident and transient perturbation, so to speak. The practice of that marvellous Kabalah to which we shall turn shortly, for the satisfaction of those who look, in the secret sciences, after emotions rather than wise teachings, reposes entirely in the knowledge and use of this agent.

The religion of the Kabalists is at once hypothesis and certitude, for it proceeds from known to unknown by the help of analogy. They recognise religion as a need of humanity, as an evident and necessary fact, and it is this alone which for them is divine, permanent and universal revelation. They dispute about nothing which is, but they provide the reason for everything. So also their doctrine, by distinguishing clearly the line of demarcation which must exist for ever between science and faith, provides a basis for faith in the highest reason, guaranteeing its incontestable and permanent duration. After this come the popular forms of doctrine, which alone can vary and alone destroy one another; the Kabalist is not only undisturbed by trivialities of this kind, but can provide on the spot a reason for the most astonishing formulæ. It follows that his prayer can be joined to that of humanity at large, to direct it by illustrations from science and reason and draw it into orthodox channels. If Mary be mentioned, he will revere the realisation in her of all that is divine in the dreams of innocence, all that is adorable in the sacred enthusiasm of every maternal heart. It is not he who will refuse flowers to adorn the altars of the Mother of God, or white banners for her chapels, or even tears for her ingenuous legends. It is not he who will mock at the new-born God weeping in the manger or the wounded victim of Calvary. He repeats nevertheless, from the bottom of his heart, like the sages of Israel and the faithful believers of Islam: There is no God but God. For the initiates of true science, this signifies: There is but one Being, and this is Being. But all that is expedient and touching in beliefs, but the splendour of rituals, the pageant of divine creations, the grace of prayers, the magic of heavenly hopes—are not these the radiance of moral life in all its youth and beauty? Could anything alienate the true initiate from public prayers and temples, could anything raise his disgust or indignation against religious forms of all kinds, it would be the manifest unbelief of priests or people, want of dignity in the ceremonies of the cultus—in a word, the profanation of holy things. God is truly present when He is worshipped by recollected souls and feeling hearts; He is absent, sensibly and terribly, when discussed without light or zeal—that is to say, without understanding or love.

The adequate conception of God according to instructed Kabalism is that which was revealed by St. Paul when he said that to attain God we must believe that He is and that He recompenses those who seek Him out. So is there nothing outside the idea of being, in combination with the idea of goodness and justice: these alone are absolute. To say that there is no God or to define what He is, constitutes equal blasphemy. Every definition of God hazarded by human intelligence is a recipe of religious empiricism, out of which superstition will subsequently extract a devil.

In Kabalistic symbolism the representation of God is always by a duplicated image—one erect, the other reversed; one white, and the other black.[16] In such manner did the sages seek to express the intelligent and vulgar conceptions of the same idea—that of the God of light and the God of shadow. To the miscomprehension of this symbol must be referred the Persian Ahriman—that black but divine ancestor of all demons. The dream of the infernal king is but a false notion of God.

Light in the absence of shadow would be invisible for our eyes, since it would produce an overpowering brilliance equal to the greatest darkness. In the analogies of this physical truth, understood and considered adequately, a solution will be found for one of the most terrible of problems, the origin of evil. But to grasp it fully, together with all its consequences, is not meant for the multitude, who must not penetrate so readily into the secrets of universal harmony. It was only after the initiate of the Eleusinian mysteries had passed victoriously through all the tests, had seen and touched the holy things, that, if he were judged strong enough to withstand the last and most dreadful secret, a veiled priest passed him at flying pace and uttered in his ear the enigmatic words: Osiris is a black god. So was Osiris—of whom Typhon is the oracle—and so was the divine religious sun of Egypt, eclipsed suddenly, becoming the shadow of that grand, indefinable Isis who is all that has been and shall be, and whose eternal veil has no one lifted.

Light is the active principle for Kabalists, while darkness is analogous to the passive principle, for which reason they regarded the sun and moon as emblems of the two divine sexes and the two creative forces. So also they attributed to woman the first temptation and sin, and subsequently the first labour—the maternal labour of redemption: it is from the bosom of the dark itself that light is reborn. The void attracts the plenum, and thus the abyss of poverty and wretchedness, pretended evil, seeming nothingness and the ephemeral rebellion of creatures, attracts eternally an ocean of being, wealth, mercy and love. This interprets the symbol of the Christ descending into hell after pouring out upon the cross all immensities of the most marvellous forgiveness.

By the same law of harmony in the analogy of opposites the Kabalists explain also all mysteries of sexual love. Why is this passion more permanent between two unequal natures and two contrary characters? Why is there in love one always who immolates and one who is victim? Why are the most obstinate passions those the satisfaction of which would seem impossible? By this law also they would have decided once and for ever the question of precedence between the sexes, as brought forward in all seriousness by the Saint-Simonism of our own day. The natural strength of woman being that of inertia or resistance, they would have ruled that modesty is the most imprescriptible of her rights, and hence that she must neither perform nor desire anything demanding a species of masculine boldness. Nature has otherwise provided to this end by giving her a soft voice, not to be heard in large assemblies, unless raised to a ridiculously discordant pitch. She who would aspire to the functions of the opposite sex must forfeit thereby the prerogatives of her own. We know not to what point she may arrive in the ruling of men, but it is certain at least that in reaching it she will lose the love of men and, that which will be more cruel for her, the love of children.

The conjugal law of the Kabalists[17] furnishes further, by analogy, a solution of the most interesting and difficult problem of modern philosophy, being the agreement between reason and faith, authority and liberty of conscience, science and belief. If science be the sun, belief is the moon—a reflection of day amidst night. Faith is the supplement of reason in the darkness left by science before and behind it. It emanates from reason but can neither be confounded therewith nor bring it to confusion. The trespasses of reason upon faith or of faith upon reason are eclipses of sun or moon. When they come about, both source and reflector of light are rendered useless.

Science perishes on account of systems which are no other than beliefs and faith succumbs to reason. In order to sustain the edifice, the two pillars of the temple must be parallel and separate. When they are brought by force together, as Samson brought them, they are thrown down, and the whole building collapses on the blind zealot or revolutionary, whose personal or national resentment has destined him beforehand to death. The struggles between the spiritual and temporal powers at all periods of humanity have been quarrels over domestic management. The papacy has been a jealous mother, seeking to supplant a husband in the temporal power, and she has lost the confidence of her children, while the temporal power in its usurpation of the priesthood is not less ridiculous than a man who should pretend to know better than a mother how to manage the home and nursery. The English, for example, from the moral and religious point of view, are like children swaddled by men, as we may appreciate by their spleen and dulness.

If religious doctrine is comparable to a nurse’s story, on the understanding that it is ingenious and beneficial morally, it is perfectly true for the child, and the father would be very foolish to contradict it. Give therefore to mothers a monopoly in tales of faerie, in songs and household solicitudes. Maternity is a type of the priesthoods, and it is because the Church must be a mother only that the catholic priest renounces the right of man and transfers in advance to herself his claim on fatherhood. It must never be forgotten that the papacy is either nothing or that it is the universal mother. It may be even that Pope Joan, out of which protestants have constructed a tale of scandal, is only an ingenious allegory, and when sovereign pontiffs have ill-used Emperors and Kings, it has been Pope Joan trying to beat her husband, to the great scandal of the Christian world. So also schisms and heresies have been other conjugal quarrels; the Church and Protestantism speak evil one of another, lament one another, make a show of avoiding and being weary one of another, like spouses living apart.

It is by the Kabalah, and this alone, that all is explained and reconciled. All other doctrines are vivified and made fruitful thereby; it destroys nothing but, on on the contrary, gives reason to all that is. So all the forces of the world are at the service of this one and supreme science, while the true Kabalist can make use at his pleasure, without hypocrisy and without falsehood, of the science possessed by the wise and the zeal of believers. He is more catholic than M. de Maistre, more protestant than Luther, more Jewish than the chief rabbi, and a prophet more than Mahomet. Is he not above systems and the passions which darken truth? Can he not at will bring together their scattered rays, so variously reflected in all the fragments of that broken mirror which is universal faith—fragments which are taken by men for so many opposite beliefs? There is one being, one law and one faith, as there is only one race of man— אהיה אשר אהיה .

On such intellectual and moral heights it will be understood that the human mind and heart enter into the deep peace. “Peace profound, my brethren”—such was the master-word of High-Grade Masonry, being the association of Kabalistic initiates.[18]

The war which the Church has been forced to make against Magic was necessitated by the profanations of false Gnostics, but the true science of the Magi is catholic essentially, basing all its realisation on the hierarchic principle. Now, the only serious and absolute hierarchy is found in the Catholic Church, and hence true adepts have always shewn for it the deepest respect and obedience. Henry Khunrath alone was a resolute protestant, but in this he was a German of his period rather than a mystic citizen of the eternal Kingdom.[19]

The essence of anti-christianity is exclusion and heresy; it is the partition of the body of Christ, according to the beautiful expression of St. John: Omnis spiritus qui solvit Christum hic Antichristus est. The reason is that religion is charity and that there is no charity in anarchy. Magic had also its anarchists, its makers and adherents of sects, its thaumaturgists and sorcerers. Our design is to vindicate the legality of the science from the usurpations of ignorance, fraud and folly; it is in this respect more especially that our work will stand to be useful, as it will be also entirely new. So far the History of Magic has been presented as annals of a thing prejudged, or as chronicles—less or more exact—of a sequence in phenomena, seeing that no one believed that Magic belonged to science. A serious account of this science in its rediscovery, so to speak, must set forth its developments or progress. We are walking in open sanctuary instead of among ruins, and we find that the Holy Places, so long buried under the débris of four civilisations, have been preserved more wonderfully than the mummified cities which excavation has unearthed, in all their dead beauty and desolate majesty, beneath the lava of Vesuvius.

Bossuet in his magnificent work has shewn us religion bound up everywhere with history; but what would he have said had he known that a science which, in a sense, was born with the world, provides an explanation of primeval dogmas, belonging to the one and universal religion, in virtue of their combination with the most incontestable theorems of mathematics and reason? Dogmatic Magic is the key of all secrets as yet unfathomed by the philosophy of history, while Practical Magic alone opens the Secret Temple of Nature to that power of human will which is ever limited, yet ever progressive.

We are far from any impious pretence of explaining the mysteries of religion by means of Magic, but our intention is to indicate after what manner science is compelled to accept and revere those mysteries.[20] It shall be said no longer that reason must humble itself in the presence of faith; on the contrary, it must do honour to itself by believing, since it is faith which saves reason from the horrors of the void on the brink of the abyss, and it is its bond of union with the infinite. Orthodoxy in religion is respect for the hierarchy as the sole guardian of unity. Let us therefore not fear to repeat that Magic is essentially the Science of the Hierarchy, remembering clearly that, before all things else, it condemns anarchic doctrines, while it demonstrates, by the very laws of Nature, that harmony is inseparable both from power and authority.

The chief attraction of Magic for the great number of curious persons is that they see therein an exceptional means for the satisfaction of their passions. The unbeliever’s horizon is of the same order. The avaricious would deny that there is any secret of Hermes corresponding to the transmutation of metals, for otherwise they would buy it and so enjoy wealth. But they are fools who believe that such a secret is sold. Of what use would be money to those who could make gold? That is true, says the sceptic, but if you, Éliphas Lévi, possessed it, would you not be richer than we are? Who has told you that I am poor? Have I asked for anything at your hands? Where is the sovereign in the world who can boast that he has acquired from me any secret of science? Where is the millionaire whom I have given reason to believe that I would set my fortune against his? When we look at earthly wealth from beneath it, we may yearn for it as the sovereign felicity, but it is despised when we consider it from above and when one realises how little temptation there can be to recover that which has been dropped as if it were hot iron.

But apart from this, a young man will exclaim that if magical secrets were true, he would attain them that he might be loved by all women. Nothing of the sort; a day will come, poor child, when it will be too much to be loved by one of them, for sensual desire is a dual orgie, the intoxication of which causes disgust to supervene quickly, after which anger and separation follow. There was once an old idiot who would have liked to have become a magician in order to upset the world. But if you were a magician, my hero, you would not be an imbecile, and before the tribunal of your conscience you would find no extenuating circumstances, did you become a criminal.

The Epicurean, on his part, demands the recipes of Magic, that he may enjoy for ever and suffer nothing at all. In this case the science itself intervenes and says, as religion also says: Blessed are those who suffer. But that is the reason why the Epicurean has lost faith in religion. “Blessed are those who mourn”—but the Epicurean scoffs at the promise. Hear now what is said by experience and by reason. Sufferings test and awaken generous sentiments; pleasures promote and fortify base instincts. Sufferings arm against pleasure; enjoyment begets weakness in suffering. Pleasure squanders; pain ingarners. Pleasure is man’s rock of peril; the pain of motherhood is woman’s triumph. Pleasure fertilises and conceives but pain brings forth.[21] Woe to him who cannot and will not suffer; he shall be overwhelmed by pain. Nature drives unmercifully those who will not walk; we are cast into life as into an open sea: we must swim or drown. Such are the laws of Nature, as taught by Transcendent Magic. And now reconsider whether one can become a magician in order to enjoy everything and suffer nothing. Yet the world will ask: In such case, what profits Magic? What would the prophet Balaam have replied to his she-ass had the patient brute asked him what profits intelligence? What would Hercules have answered to a pigmy if he had inquired what profits strength? We do not compare worldly people to pigmies and still less to Balaam’s ass: it would be wanting in politeness and good taste. We say therefore, with all possible graciousness, to such brilliant and amiable people, that for them Magic is absolutely useless, it being understood further that they will never take it seriously. Our work is addressed to souls that toil and think. They will find an explanation therein of whatsoever has remained obscure in our Doctrine and Ritual. On the pattern of the Great Masters, we have followed the rational order of sacred numbers in the plan and division of our works, for which reason this History of Magic is arranged in seven books, having seven chapters in each. The first book is dedicated to the Sources of Magic; it is the genesis of that science, and we have provided it with a key in the letter Aleph expressing Kabalistically the original and primal unity. The second book contains historical and social formulæ of the magical word in antiquity; its seal is the letter Beth, symbolising the duad as an expression of the word which realises, the special character of the Gnosis and occultism. The third book is concerned with the realisations of antique science in Christian society. It shews after what manner, even for science itself, the word takes flesh. The number three is that of generation, of realisation, and the key of this book is the letter Gimel, a hieroglyph of birth. We are introduced in the fourth book to the civilising power of Magic among barbarous races, to the natural productions of this science amidst peoples still in their childhood, to the mysteries of Druids and their miracles, to the legends of bards, and it is shewn after what manner these things concurred in the formation of modern societies, thus preparing a brilliant and permanent victory for Christianity. The number four expresses Nature and force, while the letter Daleth, which stands for it in the Hebrew alphabet, is represented in that of the Kabalists by an emperor on his throne. The fifth book is consecrated to the sacerdotal era of the middle ages, and we are present at the dissensions and struggles of science, the formation of secret societies, their unknown achievements, the secret rites of grimoires, the mysteries of the Divine Comedy, the divisions within the sanctuary which must lead later on to a glorious unity. The number five is that of the quintessence, religion and the priesthood; its character is the letter He, represented in the magical alphabet by the symbol of a high priest. The sixth book exhibits the intervention of Magic in the work of the Revolution. The number six is that of antagonism and strife in preparation for universal synthesis, and the corresponding letter is Vau, symbol of the creative lingam and the reaper’s sickle. The seventh book is synthetic, containing an exposition of modern workings and discoveries, new theories on light and magnetism, the revelation of the great Rosicrucian secret, the explanation of mysterious alphabets, the science of the word and its magical works, in fine, the summary of the science itself, including an appreciation of what has been accomplished by contemporaneous mystics. This book is the complement and the crown of the work, as the septenary is the crown of numbers, uniting the triangle of idea to the square of form. Its corresponding letter is Zain, and the Kabalistic hieroglyphic is a victor mounted on a chariot, drawn by two sphinxes.[22]

Far from us be the ridiculous vanity of posing as a Kabalistic victor; it is the science alone which should triumph; and that which we expose before the intelligent world, mounted on the cubic chariot and drawn by sphinxes, is the Word of Light, the Divine Fulfiller of the Mosaic Kabalah, the human Sun of the Gospel, that man-God who has come once as Saviour and will manifest soon as Messiah, that is, as definitive and absolute king of temporal institutions. It is this thought which animates our courage and sustains our hope. But now it remains to submit all our conceptions, all our discoveries and all our labours to the infallible judgment of the hierarchy. To the authorised men of science be that which belongs to science, but the things which connect with religion are set apart to the Church alone and to that one hierarchic Church, the preserver of unity, which has been catholic, apostolic and Roman from the days of Christ Jesus to our own. To scholars our discoveries, to bishops our aspirations and beliefs. Woe to the child who believes himself wiser than his parents, to the man who acknowledges no masters, to that dreamer who thinks and prays by himself. Life is an universal communion and in such communion do we find immortality. He who isolates himself is given over to death thereby and an eternity of isolation would be eternal death.

Éliphas Lévi.

BOOK I
THE DERIVATIONS OF MAGIC
א—ALEPH

CHAPTER I
FABULOUS SOURCES

The apocryphal Book of Enoch says that there were angels who consented to fall from heaven that they might have intercourse with the daughters of earth.[23] “For in those days the sons of men having multiplied, there were born to them daughters of great beauty. And when the angels, or sons of heaven, beheld them, they were filled with desire; wherefore they said to one another: ‘Come, let us choose wives from among the race of man, and let us beget children.’ Their leader, Samyasa, answered thereupon and said: ‘Perchance you will be wanting in the courage needed to fulfil this resolution, and then I alone shall be answerable for your fall.’ But they swore that they would in no wise repent and that they would achieve their whole design. Now there were 200 who descended on Mount Armon, and it was from this time that the mountain received its designation, which signifies Mount of the Oath. Hereinafter follow the names of those angelic leaders who descended with this object: Samyasa, chief among all, Urakabarameel, Azibeel, Tamiel, Ramuel, Danel, Azkeel, Sarakuyal, Asael, Armers, Batraal, Anane, Zavebe, Samsaveel, Ertrael, Turel, Jomiael, Arazial. They took wives, with whom they had intercourse, to whom also they taught Magic, the art of enchantment and the diverse properties of roots and trees. Amazarac gave instruction in all secrets of sorcerers; Barkaial was the master of those who study the stars; Akibeel manifested signs; and Azaradel taught the motions of the moon.”

This legend of the Kabalistic Book of Enoch is a variant account of the same profanation of Mysteries which we meet with under another form of symbolism in the history of the sin of Adam. Those angels, the sons of God, of whom Enoch speaks, were initiates of Magic, and it was this that they communicated to profane men, using incautious women as their instruments. They split upon the rock of sense-attraction, becoming enamoured of the female sex, and the secrets of royalty and priesthood were extracted from them unawares. Primitive civilisation collapsed as a consequence, and the giants, who typified brute force and unbridled appetite, fought together for the world, which escaped only by immersion in the waters of the deluge, wherein all traces of the past were effaced. This deluge symbolised that universal confusion into which humanity is brought of necessity when it ignores and does outrage to the harmonies of Nature.[24] There is kinship between the fall of Samyasa and that of Adam; the lure of sense seduced both; both profaned the Tree of Knowledge; and both were driven far away from the Tree of Life. It is needless here to discuss the views, or rather the simplicity, of those who take everything literally and believe that knowledge and life were once manifested under the form of trees; let us confess rather and only to the deep meaning of sacred symbols. The Tree of Knowledge does actually inflict death when its fruit is eaten; that fruit is the adornment of this world; those golden apples are the glitter of earth.

THE MAGICAL HEAD OF THE ZOHAR

In the Arsenal Library there is a very curious manuscript entitled The Book of the Penitence of Adam, and herein Kabalistic tradition is presented under the guise of legend to the following effect: “Adam had two sons—Cain, who signifies brute force, and Abel, the type of intelligence and mildness. Agreement was impossible between them; they perished at each other’s hands; and their inheritance passed to a third son, named Seth.” Here is the conflict of two opposing forces diverted to the advantage of a synthetic and united force. “Now Seth, who was just, was permitted to approach as far as the entrance of the Earthly Paradise, without being threatened by the Kerub and his flaming sword.” In other words, Seth represented primeval initiation. “It came to pass in this manner that Seth beheld the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, incorporated together after such a manner that they formed but a single tree”—signifying the harmony of science and religion in the transcendental Kabalah. “And the angel gave him three seeds containing the vital power of the said tree.” The reference is here to the Kabalistic triad. “When Adam died, Seth, in obedience to the directions of the angel, placed the three seeds in the mouth of his father, as a token of eternal life. The saplings which sprang up from these, became the Burning Bush, in the midst of which God communicated to Moses his Eternal Name—

אהיה אשר אהיה

signifying He Who is and is to come. Moses plucked a triple branch of the sacred bush and used it as his miraculous wand. Although separated from its root, the branch continued to live and blossom, and it was subsequently preserved in the Ark.[25] King David planted the branch on Mount Zion, and Solomon took wood from each section of the triple trunk to make the two pillars, Jachin and Boaz, which were placed at the entrance of the Temple. They were covered with bronze, and the third section was inserted at the threshold of the chief gate. It was a talisman which hindered things unclean from entering within. But certain nefarious Levites removed during the night this obstacle to their unholy freedom and cast it, loaded with stones, at the bottom of the Temple reservoir. From this time forward an angel of God troubled the waters of the pool, imparting to them a miraculous value, so that men might be distracted from seeking the tree of Solomon in its depths. In the days of Jesus Christ the pool was cleansed and the Jews, finding the beam of wood, which in their eyes seemed useless, carried the latter outside the town and threw it across the brook Cedron. It was over this bridge that our Saviour passed after his arrest at night in the Garden of Olives. His executioners cast him from it into the water; and then in their haste to prepare the instrument-in-chief of His passion, they took the beam with them, which was made of three kinds of wood, and formed the cross therewith.”[26]

This allegory embodies all the great traditions of the Kabalah and the secret Christian doctrine of St. John, which is now utterly unknown. It follows that Seth, Moses, David, Solomon and Christ obtained from the same Kabalistic Tree their royal sceptres and pontifical crooks. We can understand in this manner why the Christ was adored in His manger by the Magi. Let us recur, however, to the Book of Enoch, as greater authority attaches to it than can be attributed to an unknown manuscript; the former is cited in the New Testament by the Apostle St. Jude. Tradition refers the invention of letters to Enoch, and it is to him that we must therefore trace back the teachings embodied in the Sepher Yetzirah, which is the elementary work of the Kabalah, its compiler—according to the Rabbins—being the patriarch Abraham, as the heir of the secrets of Enoch and as the father of initiation in Israel. Enoch would seem in this manner to be identical with the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, while the famous Book of Thoth, written throughout in hieroglyphics and in numbers, would be that occult Bible, anterior to the book of Moses and full of mysteries, to which the initiated William Postel alludes so frequently throughout his works, under the title of the Genesis of Enoch.[27]

The Bible says that Enoch did not die, but that God translated him from one life to another. He is to return and confound Anti-Christ at the end of time, when he will be one of the last martyrs, or witnesses of truth, mentioned in the Apocalypse of St. John. That which is said of Enoch in this respect has been said also of all the great initiators recorded in Kabalism. St. John himself, according to the primitive Christians, was saved from death, and it was long thought that he could be seen breathing in his tomb.[28] The explanation is that the absolute science of life preserves against death, as the instinct of the people has always led them to divine. However this may be, the extant memorials of Enoch are contained in two books, one of which is hieroglyphic and the other of the nature of allegory. The first comprises the hieratic keys of initiation, while the second is the history of a great profanation which caused the destruction of the world and the reign of chaos after that of the giants.

St. Methodius, a bishop in the early days of Christianity, whose writings are found in the collection of the Fathers of the Church, has left a prophetic Apocalypse which unfolds the world’s history in a series of visions. It is not included among the saint’s acknowledged writings, but it was preserved by the Gnostics and has been printed in the Liber Mirabilis under the assumed name of Bermechobus, which illiterate compositors have substituted in place of Bea-Methodius, an abbreviation of Beatus Methodius.[29] This book corresponds in several respects with the allegorical treatise entitled The Penitence of Adam. It tells how Seth migrated eastward with his family and so reached a mountain in the vicinity of the Earthly Paradise. This was the country of initiates, whilst the posterity of Cain invented a spurious or debased Magic in India, the land of fratricide, and put witchcraft into the hands of the reckless.

St. Methodius predicts in a later place the struggles and successive predominance of the Ishmaelites, being the name given in his apocalypse to those who conquered the Romans; of the Franks, who overcame the Ishmaelites; and then of a great race from the North whose invasion will precede the personal reign of Anti-Christ. An universal kingdom will be founded thereafter and will fall into the hands of a French prince, after which there will be the reign of justice for a long period of years. We are not concerned with prophecy in the present place, but it is desirable to note the distinction between good and evil Magic, between the Sanctuary of the Sons of Seth and the profanation of science by the descendants of Cain.[30] Transcendental knowledge, as a fact, is reserved for those who are masters of their passions, and virgin Nature does not deliver the keys of her nuptial chamber to adulterers.

There are two classes—freemen and slaves; man is born in the bondage of his passions, but he can reach emancipation through intelligence. Between those who are free already and those who as yet are not there is no equality possible. The part of reason is to rule and of instinct to obey. On the other hand, if you impose on the blind the office of leading the blind, both will end in the abyss. We should never forget that liberty does not consist in the licence of passion emancipated from law, which licence would prove the most hideous of tyrannies; liberation consists in willing obedience to law; it is the right to do ones duty, and only just men can be called free. Now, those who are in liberation should govern those who are in bondage, and slaves are called to be released, not from the government of the free but from the yoke of brutal passions, as a consequence of which they cannot exist without masters.

Confess with us now for a moment to the truth of the transcendental sciences. Suppose that there does actually exist a force which can be mastered and by which the miracles of Nature are made subservient to the will of man. Tell us, in such case, whether the secrets of wealth and the bonds of sympathy can be entrusted to brutal greed; the art of fascination to libertines; the supremacy over other wills to those who cannot attain the government of their proper selves. It is terrifying to reflect upon the disorders which would follow from such a profanation; some cataclysm is needed to efface the crimes of earth when all are steeped in slime and blood. Now, it is this state of things that is indicated by the allegorical history of the fall of the angels, according to The Book of Enoch; it is this which was the sin of Adam, and hereof are its fatal consequences. Of such also was the Deluge and its wreckage; of such at a later period the malediction of Canaan. The revelation of occult secrets is typified by the insolence of that son who exposes his fathers nakedness. The intoxication of Noah is a lesson for the priesthood of all ages. Woe to those who lay bare the secret of divine generation to the impure gaze of the crowd. Keep the sanctuary shut, all ye who would spare your sleeping father the mockery of the imitators of Ham.[31]

Such is the tradition of the children of Seth respecting the laws of the human hierarchy; but the latter were not acknowledged by the family of Cain. The Cainites of India invented a genesis to consecrate the oppression of the strong and to perpetuate the ignorance of the weak. Initiation became an exclusive privilege of the high castes, and entire races of humanity were doomed to unending servitude on the pretence of inferior birth: they issued, as it was said, from the feet or knees of Brahma. Now, Nature engenders neither slaves nor kings, but all men indifferently are born to labour. He who pretends that man is perfect at birth but is degraded and perverted by society is the wildest of anarchists, though he may be the most poetic of maniacs. But in vain was Jean Jacques a sentimentalist and dreamer; his deep implicit of misanthropy, when explicated by the logic of fanatical partisans, bore fruits in hate and destruction. The consistent architects of the Utopia imagined by the susceptible philosopher of Geneva were Robespierre and Marat.

Society is no abstract personality that can be rendered responsible separately for the stubbornness of man; society is the association of men; it is defective by reason of their vices and sublime in respect of their virtues; but in itself it is holy, like the religion which is bound up inseparably therewith. Is not religion, as a fact, an association of the highest aspirations and the most generous endeavours? After this manner does the blasphemy of anti-social equality and of right in the teeth of duty give answer to the lie about castes privileged by Nature; Christianity alone has solved the problem by assigning supremacy to self-sacrifice and by proclaiming him as the greatest who offers up his pride for society and his appetites for the sake of the law.

Though they were the depositaries of the tradition of Seth, the Jews did not preserve it in all its purity, and were infected by the unjust ambitions of the posterity of Cain. Believing that they were a chosen people, they deemed that God had allotted them truth as a patrimony rather than as a security held in trust for humanity at large.[32] Side by side with the sublime traditions of the Sepher Yetzirah, we meet with very curious revelations among the Talmudists. For example, they do not shrink from ascribing the idolatry of the Gentiles to the patriarch Abraham himself; they say that to the Israelites he bequeathed his inheritance, namely, the knowledge of the true Divine Names; in a word, the Kabalah was the lawful and hereditary property of Isaac; but the patriarch gave, as they tell us, certain presents to the children of his concubines; and by such presents they understand veiled dogmas and cryptic names, which became materialised speedily, and were transformed into idols.[33] False religions and their absurd mysteries, oriental superstitions, with all their horrible sacrifices—what a gift from a father to his disowned family. Was it not sufficient to drive Hagar with her son into the desert? To their one loaf and their pitcher of water must he add the burden of falsehood, as a torment and poison in their exile?

The glory of Christianity is that it called all men to truth, without distinction of races and castes, though not without distinction in respect of intelligence and of virtue. “Cast not your pearls before swine,” said the Divine Founder of Christianity, “lest treading them under foot, they turn and rend you.” The Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John, which comprises all the Kabalistic secrets concerning the doctrine of Christ Jesus, is a book no less obscure than the Zohar. It is written hieroglyphically in the language of numbers and images, and the Apostle appeals frequently to the knowledge of initiates. “Let him understand who has knowledge—let him who understands compute”—he says frequently, after reciting an allegory or giving a mystic number. St. John, the beloved disciple and depositary of all the secrets of the Saviour, did not therefore write to be understood by the multitude.

The Sepher Yetzirah, the Zohar and the Apocalypse are the masterpieces of occultism; they contain more meanings than words; their method of expression is figurative, like poetry, and exact, like numerical formulæ. The Apocalypse summarises, completes and surpasses all the science of Abraham and Solomon, as we will prove by explaining the Keys of the transcendent Kabalah.

It is not less astonishing to observe at the beginning of the Zohar[34] the profundity of its notions and the sublime simplicity of its images. It is said as follows: “The science of equilibrium is the key of occult science. Unbalanced forces perish in the void. So passed the kings of the elder world, the princes of the giants. They have fallen like trees without roots, and their place is found no more. Through the conflict of unbalanced forces, the devastated earth was void and formless, until the Spirit of God made for itself a place in heaven and reduced the mass of waters. All the aspirations of Nature were directed then towards unity of form, towards the living synthesis of equilibrated forces; the face of God, crowned with light, rose over the vast sea and was reflected in the waters thereof. His two eyes were manifested, radiating with splendour, darting two beams of light which crossed with those of the reflection. The brow of God and His eyes formed a triangle in heaven, and its reflection formed a second triangle in the waters. So was revealed the number six, being that of universal creation.”

The text, which would be unintelligible in a literal version, is translated here by way of interpretation. The author makes it plain that the human form which he ascribes to Deity is only an image of his meaning and that God is beyond expression by human thought or representation by any figure. Pascal said that God is a circle, of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. But how is one to imagine a circle apart from its circumference? The Zohar adopts the antithesis of this paradoxical image and in respect of the circle of Pascal would say rather that the circumference is everywhere, while that which is nowhere is the centre. It is however to a balance and not to a circle that it compares the universal equilibrium of things.[35] It affirms that equilibrium is everywhere and so also is that central point where the balance hangs in suspension. We find that the Zohar is thus more forcible and more profound than Pascal.

THE GREAT KABALISTIC SYMBOL OF THE ZOHAR

Its author continues as follows his sublime dream. That synthesis of the word, formulated by the human figure, ascended slowly and emerged from the water, like the sun in its rising. When the eyes appeared, light was made; when the mouth was manifested, there was the creation of spirits and the word passed into expression. The entire head was revealed, and this completed the first day of creation. The shoulders, the arms, the breast arose, and thereupon work began. With one hand the Divine Image put back the sea, while with the other it raised up continents and mountains. The Image grew and grew; the generative organs appeared, and all beings began to increase and multiply. The form stood at length erect, having one foot upon the earth and one upon the waters. Beholding itself at full length in the ocean of creation, it breathed on its own reflection and called its likeness into life. It said: Let us make man—and thus man was made. There is nothing so beautiful in the masterpiece of any poet as this vision of creation accomplished by the prototype of humanity. Hereby is man but the shadow of a shadow, and yet he is the image of divine power. He also can stretch forth his hands from East to West; to him is the earth given as a dominion. Such is Adam Kadmon, the primordial Adam of the Kabalists. Such is the sense in which he is depicted as a giant; and this is why Swedenborg, haunted in his dreams by reminiscences of the Kabalah, says that entire creation is only a titanic man and that we are made in the image of the universe.

The Zohar is a genesis of light; the Sepher Yetzirah is a ladder of truth. Therein are expounded the two-and-thirty absolute symbols of speech—being numbers and letters. Each letter produces a number, an idea and a form, so that mathematics are applicable to forms and ideas, even as to numbers, in virtue of an exact proportion and a perfect correspondence. By the science of the Sepher Yetzirah the human mind is rooted in truth and in reason; it accounts for all progress possible to intelligence by means of the evolution of numbers. Thus does the Zohar represent absolute truth, while the Sepher Yetzirah furnishes the method of its acquisition, its discernment and application.

CHAPTER II
MAGIC OF THE MAGI

It is within probability that Zoroaster is a symbolical name, like that of Thoth or Hermes. According to Eudoxus and Aristotle, he flourished 6000 years before the birth of Plato, but others say that he antedated the siege of Troy by about 500 years. He is sometimes represented as a king of the Bactrians, but the existence of two or three distinct Zoroasters is also one of the speculations.[36] Eudoxus and Aristotle alone would seem to have realised that his personality was magical, and this is why they have placed the Kabalistic epoch of an entire world between the birth of his doctrine and the theurgic reign of Platonic philosophy. As a fact, there are two Zoroasters, that is to say, two expounders of mysteries, one being the son of Ormuzd and the founder of an enlightened instruction, the other being the son of Ahriman and the author of a profanatory unveiling of truth. Zoroaster is the incarnate word of the Chaldeans, the Medes and the Persians; his legend reads like a prophecy concerning that of Christ, and hence it must be assumed that he had also his Anti-Christ, in accordance with the magical law of universal equilibrium.

To the false Zoroaster must be referred the cultus of material fire and that impious doctrine of divine dualism which produced at a later period the monstrous Gnosis of Manes and the false principles of spurious Masonry. The Zoroaster in question was the father of that materialised Magic which led to the massacre of the Magi and brought their true doctrine at first into proscription and then oblivion. Ever inspired by the spirit of truth, the Church was compelled to condemn—under the names of Magic, Manicheanism, Illuminism and Masonry—all that was in kinship, remote or approximate, with the primitive profanation of the mysteries. One signal example is the history of the Knights Templar, which has been misunderstood to this day.

The doctrines of the true Zoroaster are identical with those of pure Kabalism, and his conceptions of divinity differ in no wise from those of the fathers of the Church. It is the names only that vary; for example, the triad of Zoroaster is the Trinity of Christian teaching, and when he postulates that Triad as subsisting without diminution or division in each of its units, he is expressing in another manner that which is understood by our theologians as the circumincession of the Divine Persons. In his multiplication of the Triad by itself, Zoroaster arrives at the absolute reason of the number 9 and the universal key of all numbers and forms. But those whom we term the three Divine Persons, are called the three depths by Zoroaster. The first, or that of the Father, is the source of faith; the second, being that of the Word, is the well of truth; while the third, or creative action, is the font of love. To check what is here advanced, the reader may consult the commentary of Psellus on the doctrine of the ancient Assyrians: it may be found in the work of Franciscus Patricius on Philosophical Magic p. 24 of the Hamburg edition, which appeared in 1593.

Zoroaster established the celestial hierarchy and all the harmonies of Nature on his scale of nine degrees. He explains by means of the triad whatsoever emanates from the idea and by the tetrad all that belongs to form, thus arriving at the number 7 as the type of creation. Here ends the first initiation and the scholastic hypotheses begin; numbers are personified and ideas pass into emblems, which at a later period become idols. The Synoches, the Teletarchæ and the Fathers, ministers of the triple Hecate; the three Amilictes and the threefold visage of Hypezocos—all these intervene; the angels follow in their order, the demons and lastly human souls. The stars are images and reflections of intellectual splendours; the material sun is an emblem of the sun of truth, which itself is a shadow of that first source whence all glory springs. This is why the disciples of Zoroaster saluted the rising day and so passed as sun-worshippers among barbarians.

Such were the doctrines of the Magi, but they were the possessors in addition of secrets which gave them mastery over the occult powers of Nature. The sum of these secrets might be termed transcendental pyrotechny, for it was intimately related to the deep knowledge of fire and its ruling. It is certain that the Magi were not only familiar with electricity but were able to generate and direct it in ways that are now unknown. Numa, who studied their rites and was initiated into their mysteries, possessed, according to Lucius Pison, the art of producing and controlling the lightning. This sacerdotal secret, which the Roman initiator would have reserved to the kings of Rome, was lost by Tullus Hostilius, who mismanaged the electrical discharge and was destroyed. Pliny relates these facts on the authority of an ancient Etruscan tradition and mentions that Numa directed his battery with success against a monster named Volta, which was ravaging the district about Rome. In reading this story, one is almost tempted to think that Volta, the discoverer, is himself a myth and that the name of Voltaic piles goes back to the days of Numa.

All Assyrian symbols connect with this science of fire, which was the great secret of the Magi; on every side we meet with the enchanter who slays the lion and controls the serpents. That lion is the celestial fire, while the serpents are the electric and magnetic currents of the earth. To this same great secret of the Magi are referable all marvels of Hermetic Magic, the extant traditions of which still bear witness that the mystery of the Great Work consists in the ruling of fire.

The learned Patricius published in his Philosophical Magic the Oracles of Zoroaster, collected from the works of Platonic writers—from Proclus on Theurgy, from the commentaries on the Parmenides, commentaries of Hermias on the Phædrus and from the notes of Olympiodorus on the Philebos and Phaidon.[37] These Oracles are firstly a clear and precise formulation of the doctrine here stated and secondly the prescriptions of magical ritual expressed in such terms as follow.

Demons and Sacrifices

We are taught by induction from Nature that there are incorporeal dæmons and that the germs of evil which exist in matter turn to the common good and utility. But these are mysteries which must be buried in the recesses of thought. For ever agitated and ever leaping in the atmosphere, the fire can assume a configuration like that of bodies. Let us go further and affirm the existence of a fire which abounds in images and reflections. Term it, if you will, a superabundant light which radiates, which speaks, which goes back into itself. It is the flaming courser of light, or rather it is the stalwart child who overcomes and breaks in that heavenly steed. Picture him as vested in flame and emblazoned with gold, or think of him naked as love and bearing the arrows of Eros. But if thy meditation prolongeth itself, thou wilt combine all these emblems under the form of the lion. Thereafter, when things are no longer visible, when the Vault of Heaven and the expanse of the universe have dissolved, when the stars have ceased to shine and the lamp of the moon is veiled, when the earth trembles and the lightning plays around it, invoke not the visible phantom of Nature’s soul, for thou must in no wise behold it until thy body has been purified by the holy ordeals. Enervators of souls, which they distract from sacred occupations, the dog-faced demons issue from the confines of matter and expose to mortal eyes the semblances of illusory bodies. Labour round the circles described by the rhombus of Hecate. Change thou nothing in the barbarous names of evocation, for they are pantheistic titles of God; they are magnetised by the devotion of multitudes and their power is ineffable. When after all the phantoms thou shalt behold the shining of that incorporeal fire, that sacred fire the darts of which penetrate in every direction through the depths of the world—hearken to the words of the fire.[38]

These astonishing sentences, which are taken from the Latin of Patricius, embody the secrets of magnetism and of things far deeper, which it has not entered into the heart or people like Du Potet and Mesmer to conceive. We find (a) the Astral Light described perfectly, together with its power of producing fluidic forms, of reflecting language and echoing the voice; (b) the will of the adept signified by the stalwart child mounted on a white horse—a symbol met with in an ancient Tarot card preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale;[39] (c) the dangers of hallucination arising from misdirected magical works; (d) the raison d’être of enchantments accomplished by the use of barbarous names and words; (e) the magnetic instrument termed rhombos,[40] which is comparable to a child’s humming top; (f) the term of magical practice, which is the stilling of imagination and of the senses into a state of complete somnambulism and perfect lucidity.[41]

It follows from this revelation of the ancient world that clairvoyant extasis is a voluntary and immediate application of the soul to the universal fire, or rather to that light—abounding in images—which radiates, which speaks and circulates about all objects and every sphere of the universe. This application is operated by the persistence of will liberated from the senses and fortified by a succession of tests. Herein consisted the beginning of magical initiation. Having attained the power of direct reading in the light, the adept became a seer or prophet; then, having established communication between this light and his own will, he learned to direct the former, even as the head of an arrow is set in a certain direction. He communicated at his pleasure either strife or peace to the souls of others; he established intercourse at a distance with those fellow-adepts who were his peers; and, in fine, he availed himself of that force which is represented by the celestial lion. Herein lies the meaning of those great Assyrian figures which hold vanquished lions in their arms. The Astral Light is otherwise represented by gigantic sphinxes, having the bodies of lions and the heads of Magi. Considered as an instrument made subject to magical power, the Astral Light is that golden sword of Mithra used in his immolation of the sacred bull. And it is the arrow of Phœbus which pierced the serpent Python.

Let us now reconstruct in thought the great metropolitan cities of Assyria, Babylon and Nineveh; let us restore to their proper place the granite colossi; let us formulate the massive temples, held up by elephants and sphinxes; let us raise once more those obelisks from which dragons look down with shining eyes and wings outspread. Temples and palaces tower above these wondrous piles. For ever concealed, but manifested also for ever by the fact of their miracles, the priesthood and the royalty, like visible divinities of earth, abide therein. The temple is surrounded with clouds or glows with supernatural brilliance at the will of the priests; now it is dark in the daylight and again the night is enlightened; the lamps of the temple spring of themselves into flame; the gods are radiant; the thunders roll; and woe to that impious person who may have invoked on his own head the malediction of initiates. The temples protect the palaces and the king’s retainers do battle for the religion of the Magi. The monarch himself is sacred; he is a god on earth; the people lie prone as he passes; and the maniac who would attempt to cross the threshold of his palace falls dead immediately, by the intervention of an invisible hand, and without stroke of mace or sword. He is slain as if by the bolt, blasted by fire from heaven. What religion and what power. How mighty are the shadows of Nimrod, of Belus, of Semiramis. What can surpass these almost fabulous cities, where such mighty royalties were enthroned—these capitals of giants, capitals of magicians, of personalities identified by tradition with angels and still termed sons of God or princes of heaven. What mysteries have been put to sleep in these sepulchres of past nations; and are we better than children when we exalt our enlightenment and our progress, without recalling these startling memorials?

In his work on Magic,[42] M. Du Potet affirms, with a certain timidity, that it is possible to overwhelm a living being by a current of magnetic fluid. Magical power extends beyond this limit, but it is not confined within the measures of the putative magnetic fluid. The Astral Light as a whole, that element of electricity and of lightning, can be placed at the disposition of human will. What must be done, however, to acquire this formidable power? Zoroaster has just told us; we must know those mysterious laws of equilibrium which subjugate the very powers of evil to the empire of good. We must have purified our bodies by sacred trials, must have conquered the phantoms of hallucination and taken hold bodily of the light, imitating Jacob in his struggle with the angel. We must have vanquished those fantastic dogs which howl in the world of dreams. In a word, and to use the forcible expression of the Oracle, we must have heard the light speak. We are then its masters and can direct it, as Numa did, against the enemies of the Holy Mysteries. But if in the absence of perfect purity and if under the government of some animal passion, by which we are still subjected to the fatalities of tempestuous life, we proceed to this kind of work, the fire which we kindle will consume ourselves; we shall fall victims to the serpent which we unloose and shall perish like Tullus Hostilius.

It is not in conformity with the laws of Nature for man to be devoured by wild beasts. God has armed him with the power of resistance; his eyes can fascinate them, his voice restrain, his sign bring them to a pause. We know indeed, as a literal fact, that the most savage animals quail before a steady human glance and seem to tremble at the human voice. The explanation is that they are paralysed and awe-stricken by projections of the Astral Light. When Daniel was accused of imposture and false Magic, both he and his accusers were subjected by the king of Babylon to an ordeal of lions. Such beasts attack those only who fear them or of whom they are themselves afraid. It is utterly certain that the tiger will recede before the magnetic glance of a brave man, although the latter may be disarmed.

The Magi utilised this power and the kings of Assyria kept tigers, leopards and lions in their gardens, in a state of docility. Others were reserved in vaults beneath the temples for use in the ordeals of initiation. The symbolic bas-reliefs are the proof; they depict trials of strength between men and animals, and the adept, clothed in his priestly garb, controls the brutes by a glance of his eye and stays them with his hand. When such animals are depicted in one of the forms ascribed to the sphinx, they are doubtless symbolical, but in other representations the brute is of the natural order, and then the struggle seems to illustrate a theory of actual enchantment.

Magic is a science; to abuse is to lose it, and it is also to destroy oneself. The kings and priests of the Assyrian world were too great to be free from this danger, if ever they fell; as a fact, pride did come upon them and they did therefore fall. The great magical epoch of Chaldea is anterior to the reigns of Semiramis and Ninus. At this time religion had begun already to materialise and idolatry to prevail. The cultus of Astarte succeeded that of the heavenly Venus and royalty arrogated to itself divine attributes under the names of Baal and of Bel, or Belus. Semiramis made religion subservient to politics and conquests, replacing the old mysterious temples by ostentatious and ill-advised monuments. This notwithstanding, the magical idea continued to prevail in art and science, sealing the constructions of that epoch with the characteristics of inimitable power and grandeur. The palace of Semiramis was a building synthesis of entire Zoroastrian dogma, and we shall recur to it in explaining the symbolism of those seven masterpieces of antiquity which are called the wonders of the world.

The priesthood became secondary to the empire as the result of an attempt to materialise its own power. The fall of the one was bound to involve the other, and it came to pass under the effeminate Sardanapalus. This prince, abandoned to luxury and indolence, reduced the science of the Magi to the level of one of his courtesans. What purpose did marvels serve if they failed in ministration to pleasure? Compel, O enchanters, compel the winter to produce roses; double the savour of wine; apply your power over the light to make the beauty of women shine like that of divinities. The Magi obeyed and the king passed from intoxication to intoxication. But it came about that war was declared and that the enemy was already on the march. That enemy might signify little to the sybarite steeped in his pleasures. But it was ruin, it was infamy, it was death. Now Sardanapalus did not fear death, since for him it was an endless sleep, and he knew how to avoid the toils and humiliations of servitude. The last night came; the victor was already upon the threshold; the city could stand out no longer; the kingdom of Assyria must end on the morrow. The palace of Sardanapalus was illuminated and blazed with such splendour that it lightened all the consternated city. Amidst piles of precious stuffs, amidst jewels and golden vessels, the king held his final orgie. His women, his favourites, his accomplices, his degenerate priests surrounded him; the riot of drunkenness mingled with the music of a thousand instruments; the tame lions roared; and a smoke of perfumes, going up from the vaults of the palace, enveloped the whole edifice in a heavy cloud. But tongues of fire began to penetrate the cedar panelling; the frenzied songs were replaced by cries of terror and groans of agony. The magic which, in the hands of its degraded adepts, could not safeguard the empire of Ninus, did at least mingle its marvels to emblazon the terrible memories of this titanic suicide. A vast and sinister splendour, such as the night of Babylon had never seen, seemed suddenly to set back and enlarge the vault of heaven; a noise, like all the thunders of the world pealing together, shook the earth, and the walls of the city collapsed. Thereafter a deeper night descended; the palace of Sardanapalus melted, and when the morrow came his conqueror found no trace of its riches, no trace even of the king’s body and all his luxuries.

So ended the first empire of Assyria, and the civilisation founded of old by the true Zoroaster. Thus also ended Magic, properly so called, and the reign of the Kabalah began. Abraham on coming out from Chaldea carried its mysteries with him. The people of God increased in silence, and we shall meet before long with Daniel confounding the miserable enchanters of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar.[43]

CHAPTER III
MAGIC IN INDIA

We are told by Kabalistic tradition that India was peopled by the descendants of Cain, and thither at a later period migrated the descendants of Abraham and Keturah; in any case it is, above all others, the country of Göetia and illusionary wonders. Black Magic has been perpetuated therein, as well as the original traditions of fratricide imposed by the powerful on the weak, continued by the dominant castes and expiated by the pariahs. It may be said of India that she is the wise mother of all idolatries. The dogmas of her gymnosophists would be keys of highest wisdom if they did not open more easily the gates leading to degradation and death. The astounding wealth of Indian symbolism seems to suggest that it is anterior to all others, and this is supported by the primeval freshness of its poetic conceptions. But the root of its tree seems to have been devoured by the infernal serpent. That deification of the devil against which we have already entered an energetic protest is displayed in all its grossness. The terrible Trimurti of the Brahmans comprises a Creator, a Destroyer and a Preserver. Their Adhi-nari, who represents the Divine Mother, or Celestial Nature, is called also Bohani, to whom the thugs or stranglers make votive offerings of their murders. Vishnu, the preserver, incarnates only to destroy an inferior devil, who is always brought back to life by the intervention of Siva or Rudra, the god of death. One is conscious that Siva is the apotheosis of Cain, but there is nothing in all this mythology which recalls the mildness of Abel. The mysteries of India are notwithstanding grandiose in their poetry and singularly profound in their allegories; but they are the Kabalah in profanation, and hence so far from sustaining the soul and leading it to supreme wisdom, Brahminism, with its learned theories, plunges it into gulfs of madness.

THE INDIAN AND JAPANESE MYSTERY OF UNIVERSAL EQUILIBRIUM AND THE EGYPTIAN PANTOMORPHIC IYINX

It was from the false Kabalism of India that the Gnostics borrowed their reveries—by turns horrible and obscene; it is also Indian Magic, manifesting on the threshold of the occult sciences with a thousand deformities, which terrifies reasonable minds and provokes the anathemas of all the understanding churches. It is this false and dangerous knowledge, so often confounded by the ignorant and by smatterers with true science, which has involved all that bears the name of occultism in a general condemnation, to which the author of these pages himself subscribed sincerely before he had attained the key of the magical sanctuary. For theologians of the Vedas, God manifests as force only; all progress and all revelations are determined by conquest; Vishnu incarnates in monstrous leviathans of the sea and in enormous wild boars, which mould the primeval earth with their snouts.

Still it is a marvellous pantheistic genesis and the authors of its fables are lucid at least in their somnambulism. The ten Avatars of Vishnu correspond numerically to the Sephiroth of the Kabalah. The god in question assumed successively three animal or elementary forms of life, after which he became a sphinx and then a human being. He appeared next as Brahma and in a guise of assumed humility possessed the whole earth. He was a child on another occasion, and as such the consoling angel of the patriarchs. After this he assumed the mask of a warrior and gave battle to the oppressors of the world. Again he was embodied as diplomacy, opposing it to violence, and seems at this point to have abandoned the human form to assume the agility of the monkey. Diplomacy and violence consumed one another, and the world awaited some intellectual and moral redeemer. Vishnu thereupon incarnated as Krishna. He was proscribed even in his cradle, beside which there watched the symbolical ass. He was carried far away to save him from the power of his enemies; he attained manhood and preached the doctrine of mercy and good works. He descended into hell, bound the infernal serpent and returned gloriously to heaven. His annual festival is in August, under the sign of the Virgin. Here is astonishing intuition concerning Christian mysteries and so much the more impressive when we remember that the sacred books of India passed into writing many centuries before the Christian era. To the revelation of Krishna succeeded that of Buddha, who married the purest religion to philosophy of the highest kind. The happiness of the world was thus held to be secured and there was nothing further to expect, pending the tenth and final incarnation, when Vishnu will return in his proper form, leading the horse of the last judgment—that dread steed whose fore foot is raised always and when it is set down the world will be strewn in atoms.

We may note herein the presence of the sacred numbers and prophetic calculations of the Magi. Gymnosophists and Zoroastrian initiates drew from the same sources, but it was the false and black Zoroaster who remained master of theology in India. The final secrets of this degenerate doctrine are pantheism and its legitimate consequence, being absolute materialism masquerading as the absolute negation of matter. But what, it may be asked, does it signify whether spirit is materialised or matter spiritualised so long as the equality and identity of the two terms are postulated? But the consequence of such pantheism is, however, mortal to ethics: there are neither crimes nor virtues in a world where all is God. We may expect after such teachings a progressive degradation of the Brahmans into a fanatical quietism; but as yet the end was not reached. It remained for their great magical ritual, the Indian book of occultism, otherwise the Oupnek’hat, to furnish the physical and moral means of consummating the work of their stupefaction and arriving by a graduated method at that raving madness termed by their sorcerers the Divine State. The work in question is the progenitor of all grimoires and the most curious among the antiquities of Göetia. It is divided into fifty sections and is a darkness spangled with stars. Sublime maxims are blended with false oracles.[44] At times it reads like the Gospel of St. John, as, for example, in the following extracts from the eleventh and forty-eighth sections.

“The angel of creative fire is the word of God, which word produced the earth and the vegetation that issues therefrom, together with the heat which ripens it. The word of the Creator is itself the Creator and is also His only Son.” Now, on the other hand, the reveries are worthy only of the most extravagant arch-heretics: “Matter being only a deceptive appearance, the sun, the stars and the very elements are genii, while animals are demons and man is a pure spirit deceived by the illusions of forms.” We are perhaps sufficiently edified by these extracts in respect of doctrinal matters and may proceed to the Magical Ritual of the Indian enchanters.

“In order to become God, the breath must be retained—that is to say, it must be inhaled as long as possible, till the chest is well distended—and in the second place, the divine Om must be repeated inwardly forty times while in this state. Expiration, in the third place, follows very slowly, the breath being mentally directed through the heavens to make contact with the universal ether. Those who would succeed in this exercise must be blind, deaf and motionless as a log of wood. The posture is on knees and elbows, with the face turned to the North. One nostril is stopped with a finger, the air is inhaled by the other, which is then also closed, the action being accompanied by dwelling in thought on the idea that God is the Creator, that He is in all animals, in the ant even as in the elephant. The mind must be absorbed in these thoughts. Om is at first recited twelve times and afterwards twenty-four times during each inspiration, and then as rapidly as possible. This regimen must be continued for three months—without fear, without remission, eating and sleeping little. In the fourth month the Devas will manifest; in the fifth you will have acquired all qualities of the Devatas; in the sixth you will be saved and will have become God.”

What seems certain is that in the sixth month the fanatic who is sufficiently imbecile to persevere in such a practice will be dead or insane. If, however, he should really survive this exercise in mystic breathing, the Oupnek’hat does not leave him in the happy position mentioned but makes him pass to other experiences.

“With the end of one finger close the anus, and then draw the breath from below upwards on the right side; make it circulate three times round the second centre of the body; thence bring it to the navel, which is the third centre; then to the fourth, which is the middle of the heart; subsequently to the throat, which is the fifth; and finally to the sixth, which is the root of the nose. There retain the breath: it has become that of the universal soul.”

This seems simply an auto-hypnotic method of inducing a certain cerebral congestion. But the author of the treatise continues:

“Think therefore of the great Om, which is the name of the Creator and is that universal, pure and indivisible voice which fills all things. This voice is the Creator Himself, Who becomes audible to the contemplative after ten manners. The first sound is like that of a little sparrow; the second is twice the first in volume; the third is like the sound of a cymbal; the fourth is as the murmur of a great shell; the fifth is comparable to the song of the Indian lyre; the sixth is like the sound of the instrument called tal; the seventh resembles the sound of a bacabou flute, held close to the ear; the eighth is like that of the instrument called Pakaoudj, which is struck with the hand; the ninth is like the sound of a little trumpet and the tenth like that of a thunder cloud. At each of these sounds the contemplative passes through different states, and at the tenth he becomes God. At the first sound the hairs of his whole body rise erect; at the second, his limbs become torpid; at the third, he feels through all his frame the kind of exhaustion which follows the intercourse of love; at the fourth, his head swims and he is as one intoxicated; at the fifth, the life-force flows back into his brain; at the sixth, this force descends into him and he is nourished thereon; at the seventh, he becomes the master of vision, can see into the hearts of others, and hears the most distant voices; at the ninth he becomes so ethereal that he can pass wheresoever he will and can see without being seen, like the angels; at the tenth, he becomes the universal and indivisible voice. He is the great creator, the eternal being, exempt from all and, having become the perfect peace, he dispenses peace to the world.”

What is noticeable in these most curious extracts is their exhaustive description of phenomena which characterise lucid somnambulism combined with a complete practice of auto-hypnosis; it is the art of inducing ecstasy by tension of the will and fatigue of the nervous system. We recommend therefore to mesmerists a careful study of the mysteries of the Oupnek’hat. The graduated use of narcotics and of a scale of coloured discs will produce effects analogous to those described by the Indian sorcerer. M. Ragon has provided the recipe in his work on La Maçonnerie Occulte.[45] The Oupnek’hat gives a simpler method of losing consciousness and arriving at ecstasy; it is to look with both eyes at the end of the nose and to maintain this act, or rather this grimace, until paralysis of the optic nerve supervenes. All such practices are equally painful, dangerous and ridiculous; we are far from recommending them to anyone; but we do not question that in a shorter or longer time, according to the sensibility of the subjects, they will induce ecstasy, catalepsy and even a dead swoon. In order to obtain vision and the phenomena of second sight, a state must be reached which is akin to that of sleep, death and madness. It is in this that the Indians excel and it is perhaps to their secrets that we must refer the strange power of certain American mediums.

Black Magic may be defined as the art of inducing artificial mania in ourselves and in others; but it is also and above all the science of poisoning. What is however generally unknown, and the discovery in our days is due to M. Du Potet, is that it is possible to destroy life by the sudden congestion or withdrawal of the Astral Light. This may take place when, through a series of almost impossible exercises, similar to those described by the Indian sorcerer, our nervous system, having been habituated to all tensions and fatigues, has become a kind of living galvanic pile, capable of condensing and projecting powerfully that light which intoxicates or destroys.

We are not, however, at the end of the Oupnek’hat and its magical wonders; there is a final arcanum which the darksome hierophant entrusts to his initiates as the supreme secret of all; it is actually the shadow and reverse side of the great mystery of Transcendent Magic. Now, the latter is the absolute in morality and consequently in the direction of activity and in freedom. On the other hand, that of the Oupnek’hat is the absolute in immorality, in fatality and in deadly quietism: it is expressed as follows by the author of the Indian work: “It is lawful to lie in order to facilitate marriages, to exalt the virtues of a Brahman or the good qualities of a cow. God is truth, and in Him shadow and light are one. Whosoever is acquainted with this truth never lies, for his very falsehood turns true. Whatever sin he commits, whatever evil he performs, he is never guilty; if he committed a double parricide; if he killed a Brahman initiated into the mysteries of the Vedas; in a word, whatever he did, his light would not be impaired, for God says: I am the Universal Soul; in Me are good and evil, which are moderated one by the other; he who knows this cannot sin, for he is universal even as Myself.”

Such doctrines are incompatible with civilisation, and furthermore, by stereotyping its social hierarchy, India has imbedded anarchy in the castes, whereas social life is a question of exchange. Now, exchange is impossible when everything belongs to a few and nothing to others. What do social gradations signify in a putative civil state wherein no one can fall or rise? Herein is the long-delayed punishment of the fratricide; it is one which involves his entire race and condemns it to death. Should some alien, proud and egotistic nation intervene, it will sacrifice India—even as oriental legends tell us that Cain was killed by Lamech. Woe, notwithstanding to the murderer of Cain—so say the sacred oracles of the Bible.

CHAPTER IV
HERMETIC MAGIC

It is in Egypt that Magic attains the grade of completion as an universal science and is formulated as a perfect doctrine. As a summary of all the dogmas which obtained in the ancient world, nothing surpasses and indeed nothing equals those few paragraphs graven on precious stone by Hermes and denominated the Emerald Tablet. Unity of being and unity in the harmony of things, according to the ascending and descending scales; progressive and proportional evolution of the Word; immutable law of equilibrium and graduated progress of universal analogies; correspondence between the idea and its expression providing a measure of likeness between Creator and created; essential mathematics of the infinite, proved by the dimensions of a single angle in the finite: all this is expressed by the one proposition: “that which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above, for the fulfilment of the wonders of the one thing.” Hereunto are added the revelation and illuminating description of the creative agent, the pantomorphic fire, the great medium of occult force—in a word, the Astral Light.

“The sun is its father and the moon its mother; the wind has borne it in the belly thereof.” It follows that this light has emanated from the sun and has received form and rhythmical movement from the influences of the moon, while the atmosphere is its receptacle and prison. “The earth is its nurse”—that is to say, it is equilibrated and set in motion by the central heat of the earth. “It is the universal principle, the Telesma of the world.”

Hermes goes on to set forth in what manner this light, which is also a force, can be applied as a lever, as an universal dissolvent and as a formative and coagulative agent; how also this light must be extracted from the bodies in which it lies latent in order to imitate all the artifices of Nature by the aid of its diverse manifestations as fire, motion, splendour, radiant gas, scalding water or finally igneous earth. The Emerald Tablet contains all Magic in a single page.[46] The other works attributed to Hermes,[47] such as the Divine Pymander, Asclepius, Minerva of the World, &c. are generally regarded by critics as productions of the School of Alexandria; but they contain notwithstanding the Hermetic traditions which were preserved in theurgic sanctuaries. For those who possess the keys of symbolism the doctrines of Hermes can never be lost; amidst all their ruin, the monuments of Egypt are as so many scattered leaves which can be collected and the book of those doctrines thus reconstructed entirely. In that vast book the capital letters are temples and the sentences are cities punctuated with obelisks and by the sphinx.

The physical division of Egypt was itself a magical synthesis, and the names of its provinces corresponded to the ciphers of sacred numbers. The realm of Sesostris was divided into three parts; of these Upper Egypt, or the Thebaid, was a type of the celestial world and the land of ecstasy; Lower Egypt was the symbol of earth; while Middle or Central Egypt was the land of science and of high initiation. Each of these parts was subdivided into ten provinces, called Nomes, and was placed under the particular protection of a god. There were therefore 30 gods and they were grouped by threes, giving symbolical expression in this manner to all possible conceptions of the triad within the decad, or otherwise to the threefold material, philosophical and religious significance of absolute ideas attached primitively to numbers. We have thus the triple unity or the first triad, the triple binary[48] formed by the first triad and its reflection, being the Star of Solomon; the triple triad or the complete idea under each of its three forms; the triple quaternary, being the cyclic number of astral revolutions, and so onward. The geography of Egypt under Sesostris is therefore a pantacle or symbolical summary of the entire magical dogma originating with Zoroaster and rediscovered or formulated more precisely by Hermes.

In this manner did the land of Egypt become as a great volume and the instructions contained therein were multiplied by translation into pictures, sculptures, architecture through the length and breadth of the towns and in all temples. The very desert had its eternal teachings, and its word of stone was set squarely on the foundations of the pyramids. The pyramids themselves stood like boundaries of the human intelligence, in the presence of which the colossal sphinx meditated age after age, sinking by insensible degrees into the desert sand. Even at this day its head, defaced by the work of time, still emerges from its sepulchre, as if waiting expectantly the signal for its complete entombment at the coming of a human voice revealing to a new world the problem of the pyramids.

Egypt from our standpoint is the cradle of science and of wisdom, for it clothed with images the antique dogma of the first Zoroaster more exactly and more purely, if not more richly, than those of India. The Sacerdotal Art and the Royal Art made adepts by initiation in Egypt, and such initiation was not restricted within the egotistic limits of caste. We know that a Jewish bondsman himself attained not only initiation but the rank of minister in chief, perhaps even of Grand Hierophant, for he espoused the daughter of an Egyptian priest, and there is evidence that the priesthood in that country tolerated no misalliance. Joseph realised in Egypt the dream of communism; he established the priesthood and the state as sole proprietors and thus sole arbiters of labour and wealth. In this way he abolished distress and turned the whole of Egypt into a patriarchal family. It is a matter of common knowledge that his elevation was due to skill in the interpretation of dreams, a science which even devout Christians now refuse to credit, though they recognise that the Bible, which narrates the wonderful divinations of Joseph, is the word of the Holy Spirit. The science of Joseph was none other than a comprehension of the natural analogies which subsist between ideas and images, or between the Word and its symbols. He knew that the soul when immersed by sleep in the Astral Light, perceives the reflections of its most secret thoughts and even of its presentiments; he knew further that the art of translating the hieroglyphics of sleep is the key of universal lucidity, seeing that all intelligent beings have revelations in dreams.

The basis of absolute hieroglyphical science was an alphabet in which deities were represented by letters, letters represented ideas, ideas were convertible into numbers, and numbers were perfect signs. This hieroglyphical alphabet was the great secret which Moses enshrined in his Kabalah; its Egyptian origin is commemorated in the Sepher Yetzirah, in which it is referred to Abraham. Now this alphabet is the famous Book of Thoth, and it was divined by Court de Gebelin that it has been preserved to our own day in the form of Tarot cards. It passed later on into the hands of Etteilla, who interpreted it in the wrong sense, for even a study extending over thirty years could not atone for his want of common sense or supply deficiencies in his education. The record exists still among the drift and waste of Egyptian monuments; and its most curious, most complete key is found in the great work on Egypt by Athanasius Kircher. It is the copy of an Isiac tablet which belonged to the celebrated Cardinal Bembo. The tablet in question is of copper with figures in enamel, and it has been unfortunately lost. The copy supplied by Kircher is, however, exact.[49] The learned Jesuit divined that it contained the hieroglyphic key of sacred alphabets, though he was unable to develop the explanation. It is divided into three equal compartments; above are the twelve houses of heaven and below are the corresponding distributions of labour throughout the year, while in the middle place are twenty-one sacred signs answering to the letters of the alphabet. In the midst of all is a seated figure of the pantomorphic Iynx, emblem of universal being[50] and corresponding as such to the Hebrew Yod, or to that unique letter from which all other letters were formed. The Iynx is encircled by the Ophite triad, answering to the Three Mother Letters of the Egyptian and Hebrew alphabets.[51] On the right are the ibimorphic and serapian triads; on the left are those of Nepthys and Hecate, representing active and passive, fixed and volatile, fructifying fire and generating water. Each pair of triads in conjunction with the centre produces a septenary, and a septenary is contained in the centre. The three septenaries furnish the absolute number of the three worlds, as well as the complete number of primitive letters, to which a complementary sign is added, like zero to the nine numerals. The ten numbers and the twenty-two letters are termed in Kabalism the Thirty-two Paths of Wisdom, and their philosophical description is the subject of that venerated primæval book known as the Sepher Yetzirah, the text of which will be found in the collection of Pistorius and elsewhere.[52] The alphabet of Thoth is the original of our Tarot only in an indirect manner, seeing that the latter is of Jewish origin in the extant copies and that its pictures are not older than the reign of Charles VII. The cards of Jacquemin Gringonneur are the first Tarots of which we have any knowledge, but they reproduce symbols belonging to the highest antiquity. The game in its modern form was an experiment on the part of astrologers to restore the king, who has been mentioned, to reason.[53] The oracles of the Tarot give answers as exact as mathematics and measured as the harmonies of Nature. Such answers result from the varied combination of the different signs. But it requires a considerable exercise of reason to make use of an instrument belonging to reason and to science; the poor king, in his childish condition, saw only the playthings of an infant in the artist’s pictures and he turned the mysterious Kabalistic alphabet[54] into a game of cards.

EXPLANATORY DIAGRAM OF THE ASTRONOMICAL AND ALPHABETICAL TABLET OF BEMBO

We are told by Moses that the Israelites carried away the sacred vessels of the Egyptians when they came out of the land of bondage. The account is allegorical, for the great prophet would scarcely have encouraged his people in an act of theft; the sacred vessels in question were the mysteries of Egyptian knowledge, acquired by Moses himself at the court of Pharaoh. We are by no means suggesting that the miracles of this man of God are referable to Magic; but we know on the authority of the Bible that Jannes and Mambres, who were the magicians of Pharaoh and consequently grand hierophants of Egypt, began by performing in virtue of their art wonders which were similar to those of Moses. They transformed wands into serpents and serpents again into wands, which might be explicable by prestige or fascination; they changed water into blood; they produced a swarm of frogs in a moment; but they could not cause flies to appear or other parasitic insects, for reasons which we have explained already, as also the manner in which they were forced to confess themselves vanquished.

Moses triumphed and led the Israelites out of the land of bondage. It was at this period that true science became lost to Egypt, for the priests, abusing the implicit confidence of the people, allowed that knowledge to degenerate into brutalising idolatry. Such is the rock of peril for esoteric science; the truth must be veiled, yet not hidden from the people; symbolism must not be disgraced by a lapse into absurdity; the sacred veil of Isis must be preserved in its beauty and dignity. It was over this that the Egyptian priesthood failed; the vulgar and the foolish understood the hieroglyphic forms of Isis and Hermanubis as real things, so that Osiris was understood to be an ox, while the wise Hermes was a dog. The transformed Osiris masqueraded in the fantastic guise of the bull of Apis, nor did the priests hinder the people from adoring flesh intended for their kitchens. It was time to save the holy traditions; Moses established a new nation and forbade all worship of images; but the people unfortunately had dwelt long among idolaters and memories of the bull of Apis remained with them in the desert. We know the history of that Golden Calf to which the children of Israel have been always a little addicted. Moses, however, did not wish the sacred hieroglyphics to pass out of memory, and he sanctified them by their consecration to the purified worship of the true God. We shall see how all objects which entered into the cultus of Jehovah were symbolic in character and recalled the venerable signs of primæval revelation. But we must first finish with the Gentiles and follow through pagan civilisation the story of materialised hieroglyphics and of ancient rites degenerated.

CHAPTER V
MAGIC IN GREECE

We pass now to the period when the exact sciences of Magic assumed their natural external form, being that of beauty. We have seen in the Zohar how the human prototype rose in heaven and was reflected below in the waters of being. This ideal man, this shadow of the pantomorphic god, this virile phantom of perfect form was not destined to dwell alone in the world of symbolism. There was given to him a companion under the beneficent sky of Hellas. The celestial Venus, the chaste and fruitful Venus, the triple mother of the three Graces, rose in her turn, no longer from the sleeping deeps of chaos, but from the living and flowing waves of that echoing archipelago of poetry, where islands embroidered with green trees and flowers seem as the vessels of gods.

The magical septenary of Chaldea passes into music on the seven strings of the Orphic lyre. It is harmony which transforms the woods and wildernesses of Greece. To the melody of the songs of Orpheus, the rocks are smoothed, the oaks sway in measures and the wild beasts become subject to man. By such magic did Amphion raise up the walls of Thebes—that wisdom-city of Cadmus, the city of initiation, itself a pantacle like the seven wonders of the world. As Orpheus gave life to numbers, so Cadmus bound thought to the sigils of letters. The one established a nation dedicated to all things beautiful, and for that nation the other provided a native land, corresponding to its genius and its love.

In the ancient Greek traditions, Orpheus is numbered among the heroes of the Golden Fleece, who were the primeval conquerors of the Great Work. The Golden Fleece is the vesture of the sun itself; it is light in application to the needs of man; it is the grand secret of magical works; it is in fine, initiation as this should be understood essentially; and it was the quest of these or this which carried the allegorical heroes into a mystic Asia. On the other hand, Cadmus was a voluntary exile from the glorious Thebes of Egypt; he brought into Greece the knowledge of letters and that harmony of which they are images. The new Thebes, the typical city of wisdom, was built to the measures of that harmony, for science consists in the rhythmic correspondence between hieroglyphical, phonetic and numeral characters, the inherent motion of which follows the eternal laws of mathematics. Thebes is circular and its citadel is square; like the sky of Magic, it has seven gates, and its legend was destined to become the epic of occultism and the foreshadowed history of human genius.

All these mysterious allegories, all these inspired traditions, are the soul of Greek civilisation; but we must be dissuaded from seeking the real history of their poetic heroes otherwise than in the transformations of oriental history carried into Greece by unknown hierophants. It was only the history of ideas which was written by the great of those days, and they were at little pains to acquaint us with the human struggles belonging to the birth of empires. Homer followed in their path, marshalling the gods, who are the immortal types of thought; it was in this sense that a world’s upheaval followed on the frown of Jupiter. If Greece carried fire and sword into Asia, it was to avenge the profanations of science and virtue in their sacrifice to lust; it was to restore the empire of the world to Minerva and Juno, in despite of that sensuous Venus who ruined her devoted lovers. Such is the sublime mission of poetry, which substitutes gods for men, or causes in place of effects and eternal concepts for the sorry incarnations of greatness on earth. Ideas raise up and they also cast down empires; a faith of some kind is at the root of all grandeur, and in order that faith may be poetry, or in other words creative, it must be founded on truth. The only history which is worthy to occupy the wise is that of the light which is victorious over darkness for ever. That which is called a civilisation is one great day of this sun.

The fable of the Golden Fleece connects Hermetic Magic with Greek initiations. The Golden Fleece of the solar ram, which must be obtained by those or by him who would possess universal sovereignty, is figurative of the Great Work. The Argonautic vessel, built of timber from the prophetic oaks of Dodona, the speaking vessel, is the ship of the mysteries of Isis, the ark of life-force and renewal, the coffer of Osiris, the egg of divine regeneration. The adventurer Jason is he who is prepared for initiation, but he is a hero in his valour only; he has all the inconstancy and all the weakness of humanity, but he takes with him the personifications of all power. Hercules, who signifies brute force, has no real part in the work, for he goes astray from the path in pursuit of his unworthy loves. The others arrive in the land of initiation, of Colchis, where the remnant of Zoroastrian secrets is still preserved. The question is how to obtain the key of these mysteries, and science is once again betrayed by a woman. Medea delivers to Jason the arcana of the Great Work, with the kingdom and the life of her father; for it is a fatal law of the occult sanctuary that the revelation of its secrets entails death upon him who has proved unable to preserve them. Medea informs Jason of the monsters with which he must do battle and of that which will ensure his victory. There is firstly the winged serpent of earth, the astral fluid which must be seized and fixed; its teeth must be drawn and sown in a waste place, which has been previously ploughed by the bulls of Mars. The dragon’s teeth are those acids[55] which dissolve the metallic earth after its preparation by a double fire and by the earth’s magnetic forces. A fermentation follows, comparable to a great battle; the impure is devoured by the impure, and the splendid Fleece is the reward of the adept.

So ends the magical romance of Jason and that of Medea follows, for Greek antiquity sought to include in this history the complete epic of occult science. Hermetic Magic is succeeded by göetia, parricide, fratricide, infanticide, sacrificing all to its passions but never enjoying the harvest of its crimes. Medea betrays her father like Ham and assassinates her brother like Cain. She stabs her children, poisons her rival and reaps the hatred of him whose love she has coveted. It may be surprising on the surface that Jason does not gain in wisdom by the mastery of the Golden Fleece, but it must be remembered that he owes the discovery of its secrets to treason only. He is a ravisher after the manner of Prometheus and not an adept like Orpheus; he is in search of wealth and power rather than of knowledge. Hence he perishes miserably, for the inspiring and sovereign virtues of the Golden Fleece will be never understood except by the disciples of Orpheus.

Prometheus, the Golden Fleece, the Thebaid, the Iliad and the Odyssey—these five great epics, full of the mysteries of Nature and human destinies, constitute the bible of ancient Greece, a cyclopean monument, a Pelion piled upon an Ossa, masterpiece over masterpiece, form on form, beautiful as light itself and throned upon eternal thoughts, sublime in truth. It was however at their proper risk and peril that the hierophants of poetry committed to the Greek people these marvellous fictions in which truth was shrined. Aeschylus who dared to depict the Titanic struggles, superhuman woes and divine hopes of Prometheus—Aeschylus, the awe-inspiring poet of the family of Œdipus—was accused of betraying and profaning the mysteries and escaped with difficulty a severe condemnation. We are unable at this day to realise his whole intent, which was a dramatic trilogy embracing the entire symbolic history of Prometheus. It follows that he exhibited to the assembled people how Prometheus was delivered by Alcides and how Jupiter was cast from his throne. The omnipotence of genius in its suffering and the decisive victory of patience over power are fine no doubt, but the crowd might see therein the future triumph of impiety and anarchy. Prometheus overcoming Jupiter might be understood as the people destined to be liberated one day from their priests and kings; and guilty hopes might count for much in the prodigal applause accorded to him who unveiled this prospect imprudently. To the leanings of dogma towards poetry we owe the masterpieces in question, and we are not therefore to be counted among the austere initiates who would wish, like Plato, to crown and then exile the poets; for the true poets are ambassadors of God on earth and those who cast them forth deserve no blessing from heaven.

The great Greek initiator and he who civilised it first was also its first poet, for even in allowing that Orpheus was a mystical or fabulous personality, we must believe in the existence of Musæus and attribute to him the verses which pass under the name of his master.[56] It matters little to us otherwise whether one of the Argonauts was called Orpheus or not, for the poetic creator has done more than live; he lives in immortality for ever. The Orphic fable is a complete dogma, a revelation of priestly destinies, a new ideal form of the worship of beauty. The regeneration and redemption of love are indicated already therein. Orpheus descends into hell, seeking Eurydice and must bring her back without seeing her; so must the pure man create his companion, raise her to himself by devotion and not by desire of her. It is in renouncing the object of passion that we deserve to possess the object of true love. We are already in the atmosphere of the pure dreams of Christian chivalry. But the hierophant is still a man; he falters, questions and looks. Ab miseror Eurydicem. She is lost, the error is committed, the expiation must now begin. Orpheus is widowed and remains as such in purity; the marriage with Eurydice had not attained consummation, and as the widower of one who was a virgin he rested himself in virginity. The poet is not two-hearted and children of the race of gods love once and once alone. Paternal inspirations, yearnings for an ideal which shall be found beyond the tomb, widowhood made holy in its consecration to the sacred muse. What a revelation in advance of inspirations yet to come. Orpheus, bearing in his heart a wound that nothing but death shall heal, becomes a doctor of souls and bodies; he dies at length, the victim of his chastity—the death which he suffers is that of initiators and prophets. He perishes proclaiming the unity of god and the unity also of love: this at a later period was the root of the Orphic Mysteries.

Having shewn himself raised so far above his own epoch, Orpheus earned in due course the reputation of a sorcerer and enchanter. To him, as to Solomon, were attributed the knowledge of simples and minerals, of celestial medicine and the philosophical stone. With these he was doubtless acquainted, since he personifies primitive initiation, fall and reparation in his legend—the three divisions of the great work of humanity.

Orphic initiation may, according to Ballanche, be summarised in the following manner: “Made subject in the first place to the influence of the elements, man’s own influence must afterwards govern these. Creation is the act of a divine magism which is continuous and eternal. True being resides for man in self-knowledge. Responsibility is for him a conquest and the very penalty of sin is another occasion for victory. All life is founded on death, and palingenesis is the law of reparation. Marriage is the reproduction in humanity of the great cosmogonical mystery. It should be one, as God and Nature are one. It is the unity of the Tree of Life, while debauch is division and death. Astrology is a synthesis, because the Tree of Life is a single tree and because its branches—spread through heaven and bearing flowers of stars—are in correspondence with its roots, which are hidden in earth. The knowledge of the medical and magical virtues resident in plants, metals and bodies endowed with varying degrees of life, is also a synthetic knowledge. The capacities for organisation in their various grades are revealed by a synthesis. The aggregations and affinities of metals, like the vegetative soul of plants and like all powers of assimilation, are also made known by a synthesis.”

It has been said that the beautiful is the splendour of the true, and it is therefore to this great light of Orpheus that we must ascribe the perfection of form which was manifested for the first time in Greece. To him also—as to a source—is referable the school of divine Plato, that pagan father of all high Christian philosophy. From him did Pythagoras and the illuminati of Alexandria alike derive their mysteries. Initiation does not suffer vicissitude; it is one and the same, wheresoever we meet with it through the ages. The last disciples of Martines de Pasqually are still the children of Orpheus; but they adore the Realiser of antique philosophy, Who is the incarnate Word of Christians.

We have said that the first part of the fable concerning the Golden Fleece embodies the secrets of Orphic Magic and that the second part is dedicated to judicious warnings against the abuses of Göetia or the Magic of darkness. False or Göetic Magic, known at the present day under the name of sorcery, can never rank as a science: it is the empiricism of fatality. All excessive passion produces a factitious force of which will cannot be the master, but that force is obedient to the tyranny of passion. This is why Albertus Magnus counsels us to curse no one in our wrath. It is the story of the malediction of Hippolytus by Theseus. Excessive passion is real madness, and the latter in its turn is an intoxication or congestion of Astral Light. This is why madness is contagious and why passions in general operate as a veritable witchcraft. Women are superior to men in sorcery because they are more easily transported by excess of passion. The word sorcerer clearly designates victims of chance and, so to speak, the poisonous mushrooms of fatality.

Greek sorcerers, but especially those of Thessaly, put horrible precepts to the proof and were given over to abominable rites. They were mostly women wasted by desires which they could no longer satisfy, antiquated courtesans, monsters of immorality and ugliness. Jealous of love and life, those wretched creatures found lovers only in the tombs, or rather they violated sepulchres to devour with foul caresses the icy bodies of young men. They stole children and stifled their cries by pressing them to their dangling breasts. They were known as lamiæ, stryges, empusæ; children were the objects of their envy and thus of their hatred, and they sacrificed them for this reason. Some, like that Canidia who is mentioned by Horace, buried them as far as the head and left them to die of hunger, surrounded with food which they could not reach; others cut off the heads, hands and feet, boiled their fat and grease, in copper basins, to the consistence of an ointment, which they afterwards mixed with the juice of henbane, belladonna and black poppies. With this unguent they anointed the organ which was irritated unceasingly by their detestable desires; they rubbed also their temples and arm-pits, and then fell into a lethargy full of unbridled and luxurious dreams. There is need to speak plainly—these are the origins and this is the traditional practice of Black Magic; these are the secrets which were handed down to the middle ages; and such in fine are the pretended innocent victims whom public execration, far more than the sentence of inquisitors, condemned to the flames. It was in Spain and in Italy above all that the race of stryges, lamiæ and empusæ abounded, even at a late period; those who doubt should consult the most experienced criminologists of these countries, digested by Franciscus Torreblanca,[57] Royal Advocate of the Chancelry of Granada, in his Epitome Delictorum.

Medea and Circe are the types of Malefic Magic among the Greeks. Circe is the vicious female who bewitches and debases her lovers; Medea is the brazen poisoner who dares everything and makes Nature itself the abettor of her crimes. There are actually creatures who enchant like Circe and whose proximity defiles. They can inspire nothing but brutal passions; they exhaust and then disdain you. They must be treated according to the policy of Ulysses, by compelling them to obedience through fear and by being able to leave them in the end without regret. They are beautiful, heartless monsters and their vanity is their whole life. They were depicted by antiquity in the form of syrens.

As to Medea, she is perversity incarnate, willing and working evil. She is capable of love and does not yield to fear, but her love is more terrible than her hate. She is a bad mother and the destroyer of children; she loves the night and under the rays of the moon she gathers noxious herbs for the brewing of poisons. She magnetises the air, brings dole to earth, infects water and makes even the fire venomous. Reptiles provide her with their skins; she mutters frightful words; the track of blood follows her; and mutilated limbs fall from her hands. Her counsels madden, her caresses beget horror.

Such is the woman who has sought to rise beyond the duties of her sex by familiarity with forbidden sciences. Men avoid her, children hide when she passes. She is devoid of reason, devoid of true love, and the stratagems of Nature in revolt against her are the ever-renewing torment of her pride.

CHAPTER VI
MATHEMATICAL MAGIC OF PYTHAGORAS

He who initiated Numa, and of whose proficiency in Magic something has been said already, was a personage known as Tarchon, himself the disciple of a Chaldean named Tages. Science had then its apostles who went to and fro in the world, making priests and kings therein. Not infrequently persecution itself was overruled to fulfil the designs of Providence, and so it came about toward the seventy-second Olympiad, or four generations after the reign of Numa. Pythagoras of Samos sought a refuge in Italy from the tyranny of Polycrates. The great promoter of the philosophy of numbers had visited all the sanctuaries of the world and had even been in Judæa, where he suffered circumcision[58] as the price of his admission into the mysteries of the Kabalah, communicated to him, though not without a certain reserve, by the prophets Ezekiel and Daniel. Subsequently, but again not without difficulty, he obtained Egyptian initiation, being recommended by the King Amasis. The capacities of his own genius supplemented the imperfect revelations of the hierophants, so that he became himself a master and one who expounded the mysteries.

Pythagoras defined God as a living and absolute truth clothed in light; he defined the Word as number manifested by form; and he derived all things from the Tetractys—that is to say, the tetrad. He said also that God is supreme music, the nature of which is harmony. Religion was, according to him, the highest expression of justice; medicine was the most perfect practice of science; the beautiful was harmony; force, reason; felicity, perfection; while truth in application consisted in distrusting the weakness and perversity of men.

When he made his dwelling at Crotona, the magistrates of that city, seeing that he exercised so great an influence over minds and hearts, were at first in some anxiety concerning him; but ultimately they sought his advice. Pythagoras counselled them to cultivate the muses and maintain the most perfect accord among themselves, because feuds between masters fomented rebellion among servants. Thereafter he imparted to them his grand religious, political and social precept: There is no evil which is not to be preferred before anarchy—an axiom of universal application and almost infinite depth, though one which even our own age is not as yet sufficiently enlightened to understand.

Outside the traditions of his life, the remains of Pythagoras are his Golden Verses and his Symbols, of which the former have passed into commonplaces of popular morality, so great has been their success through the ages. They have been rendered as follows:[59]—

“First worship the immortal gods, as they are established and ordained by the Law. Reverence the oath and next the heroes, full of goodness and light.... Honour likewise thy parents, and those most nearly related to thee. Of all the rest of mankind, make him thy friend who distinguishes himself by his virtue. Always give ear to his mild exhortations, and take example from his virtuous and useful actions. Avoid as much as possible hating thy friend for a slight fault. Understand that power is a near neighbour to necessity.... Overcome and vanquish these passions—gluttony, sloth, sensuality, and anger. Do nothing evil, neither in the presence of others nor privately, and above all things respect thyself. In the next place, observe justice in thy actions and in thy words.... The goods of fortune are uncertain; as they may be acquired, so may they likewise be lost. Always make this reflection, that it is ordained by destiny that all men shall die.... Support with patience thy lot, be it what it may, and never repine at it; but endeavour what thou canst to remedy it. Consider that fate does not send the greatest portion of these misfortunes to good men.... Let no man by his words, or by his deeds seduce thee; nor entice thee to say or to do what is not profitable for thyself. Consult and deliberate before thou act, that thou mayst not commit foolish actions. For it is the part of a miserable man to speak and to act without reflection. But do that which will not afflict thee afterwards, nor oblige thee to repentance. Never do anything which thou dost not understand; but learn all that thou oughtest to know, and by that means thou wilt lead a very pleasant life. In no wise neglect the health of thy body; but give it drink and meat in due measure, and also the exercise of which it has need.... Accustom thyself to a way of living that is neat and decent without luxury.... Do only the things which cannot hurt thee, and deliberate before thou dost them. Never suffer sleep to close thy eyelids, after thy going to bed, till thou hast examined by thy reason all thy actions of the day. Wherein have I done amiss? What have I done? What have I omitted that I ought to have done?”

Up to this point the Golden Verses seem to be only the instructions of a schoolmaster. They bear however a very different construction. They are the preliminary laws of magical initiation, which constitute the first part of the Great Work, that is to say, the creation of the perfect adept. This is proved by the following verses:

“I swear by him who has transmitted into our souls the Sacred Quaternion, the source of nature, whose cause is eternal. Never begin to set thy hand to any work, till thou hast prayed the gods to accomplish what thou art going to begin. When thou hast made this habit familiar to thee, thou wilt know the constitution of the Immortal Gods and of men. Even how far the different beings extend, and what contains and binds them together ..., and nothing in this world shall be hid from thee.... O Jupiter, our Father! if thou wouldst deliver men from all the evils that oppress them, shew them of what daimon they make use. But take courage; the race of men is divine.... When, having divested thyself of thy mortal body, thou arrivest at the most pure Æther, thou shalt be a god, immortal, incorruptible, and death shall have no more dominion over thee.”

Pythagoras said otherwise: “As there are three divine concepts and three intelligible realms, so is there a triple word, because hierarchic order is ever manifested by the triad. There are (a) simple speech, (b) hieroglyphical speech and (c) symbolical speech. In other terms, there is the word which expresses, there is the concealing word and, finally, there is the word that signifies: all hieratic intelligence is in the perfect science of these three degrees.” After this manner he enshrined doctrine in symbols, but eschewing personifications and images which, in his opinion, begot idolatry sooner or later. He has been even charged with detestation of poets, but it was the makers of bad verses to whom he forbade the art: “Thou who hast no harp, seek not to sing in measures,” he says in his symbols. A man so great as he could never disregard the exact correspondence between sublime thoughts and beautiful figurative expressions; indeed his own symbols are full of poetry: “Do not scatter the flowers of which crowns are made.” In such terms he exhorts his disciples never to diminish glory and never to flout that which it seems good for the world to honour.

Pythagoras was chaste, but far from commanding celibacy to his disciples he married on his own part and had children. A beautiful saying of his wife has remained in memory: she had been asked whether purification was not requisite in a woman after intercourse with a man, and in such case after what lapse of time she might regard herself as sufficiently purified to approach holy things. She replied: “Immediately, if it be with her husband; but if it be with another, never.”

The same severity of principles, the same purity of manners, qualified in the school of Pythagoras for initiation into the mysteries of Nature and so was attained that empire over self by which the elementary powers could be governed. Pythagoras possessed the faculty which by us is termed second sight and was known then as divination. Being with his disciples one day on the seashore, a vessel appeared on the horizon. “Master,” said one of the companions, “would it mean wealth if they gave me the cargo carried by that ship?” “To you it would be more than useless,” Pythagoras answered. “In such case I would keep it for my heirs.” “Would you wish to bequeathe them two corpses?” The vessel came into port and proved to be bearing the body of a man who desired to be buried in his own country.

It is related furthermore that beasts were obedient to Pythagoras. Once in the middle of the Olympic Games, he signalled to an eagle winging its way through heaven; the bird descended, wheeling circle-wise, and again took rapid flight at the master’s token of dismissal. There was also a great bear, ravaging in Apulia; Pythagoras brought it to his feet and told it to leave the country. It disappeared accordingly and when asked to what knowledge he owed such a marvellous power, he answered: “To the science of light.” Animated beings are, in fact, incarnations of light. Out of the darkness of ugliness forms emerge and move progressively towards the splendours of beauty; instincts are in correspondence with forms; and man who is the synthesis of that light whereof animals may be termed the analysis, is created to command them. It has come about, however, that in place of ruling as their master, he has become their persecutor and destroyer, so that they fear and have rebelled against him. In the presence of an exceptional will which is at once benevolent and directing they are completely magnetised, and a host of modern phenomena both can and should enable us to understand the possibility of miracles like those of Pythagoras.

Physiognomists have observed that the majority of men have a certain facial resemblance to one or another animal. It may be a matter of imagination only, produced by the impression to which various physiognomies give rise, and revealing some prominent personal characteristics. A morose man is thus reminiscent of a bear, a hypocrite has the look of a cat, and so of the rest. These kinds of judgments are magnified in the imagination and exaggerated still further in dreams, when people who have affected us disagreeably during the waking state transform into animals and cause us to experience all the agonies of nightmare. Now, animals—as much as ourselves and more even than we—are under the rule of imagination, while they are devoid of that judgment by which we can check its errors. Hence they are affected towards us according to the sympathies or antipathies which are excited by our own magnetism. They are, moreover, unconscious of that which underlies the human form and they regard us only as other animals by whom they are dominated, the dog taking his master for a dog more perfect than himself. The secret of dominion over animals lies in the management of this instinct. We have seen a famous tamer of wild beasts fascinate his lions by exhibiting a terrible countenance and acting himself as if he were a lion enraged. Here is a literal application of the popular proverb which tells us to howl with the wolves and bleat with the sheep. It must also be realised that every animal form manifests a particular instinct, aptitude or vice. If we suffer the character of the beast to predominate within us, we shall tend to assume its external guise in an ever-increasing degree and shall even come to impress its perfect image on the Astral Light; more even than this, when we fall into dreams or ecstasy, we shall see ourselves as ecstatics and somnambulists would see us and as we must appear undoubtedly in the eyes of animals. Let it happen in such cases that reason be extinguished, that persistent dreams change into madness, and we shall be turned into beasts like Nebuchadnezzar. This explains those stories of were-wolves, some of which have been legally established. The facts were beyond dispute, but the witnesses were not less hallucinated than the were-wolves themselves.[60]

Cases of coincidence and correspondence in the dream-state are neither rare nor extraordinary. Persons in the state of magnetic ecstasy can see and talk to one another from opposite ends of the earth. We ourselves may meet someone for the first time and he or she will seem to be an old acquaintance because we have encountered frequently in dream. Life is full of these curious occurrences and as regards the transformation of human beings into animals, the evidences are on every side. How many aged courtesans and gluttonous females, reduced almost to idiocy after threading all sewers of existence, are nothing but old she-cats egregiously enamoured of their tom.

Pythagoras believed above all things in the soul’s immortality and in the perpetuity of life. The endless succession of summer and winter, day and night, sleeping and waking, illustrated amply for him the phenomenon of death. For him also the particular immortality of human souls consisted in persistence of memory. He is said to have been conscious of his previous incarnations and if the report is true, it was something suggested by his reminiscences, for such a man as he could have been neither impostor nor fool.[61] It is probable that he came upon former memories in his dreams, while simple speculation and hypothesis have been constructed as positive affirmation on his part. However this may be, his thought was great, for the real life of our individuality consists in memory alone. Those waters of Lethe pictured by the ancients were the true philosophical type of death. The Bible appears to impart a divine sanction to this idea when it is said in the Book of Psalms that “the just shall be in everlasting remembrance.”[62]

CHAPTER VII
THE HOLY KABALAH

Let us now have recourse to the origin of true science by recurring to the Holy Kabalah, or tradition of the children of Seth, taken from Chaldea by Abraham, communicated by Joseph to the Egyptian priesthood, ingarnered by Moses, concealed by symbols in the Bible, revealed by the Saviour to St. John, and embodied in its fulness in hieratic images, analogous to those of all antiquity, in the Apocalypse of this Apostle.

Whatsoever was in kinship with idolatry was held in detestation by the Kabalists, which notwithstanding, God is represented by them under a human figure, but it is purely hieroglyphical. For them He is the intelligent, the loving, the living infinite. He is neither the totality of all beings, nor being in abstraction, nor a being who is philosophically definable. He is in all things, being more and greater than all. His very name is ineffable, and yet this name gives expression only to the human ideal of His divinity.[63] It is not possible for man to understand God in Himself. He is the absolute of faith, but the absolute of reason is Being. Being is self-existent and is because it is. The cause of Being is Being itself. It is matter of legitimate speculation why this or that exists, but it would be absurd to inquire why Being is, for it would be to postulate Being as antecedent to Being.

It is demonstrated by reason and science that the modes of existence in Being are equilibrated in accordance with harmonious and hierarchic laws. Now the hierarchy is graduated on an ascending scale, becoming more and more monarchic. At the same time reason cannot pause in the presence of one absolute chief without being overwhelmed by the heights which it discerns above this supreme king; it takes refuge therefore in silence and gives place to adoring faith. That which is certain, for science and for reason alike, is that the idea of God is the grandest, most holy and most serviceable of all aspirations in man; that morality and its eternal sanction repose on this belief. In humanity it is therefore the most real phenomenon of being, and if it were false therefore, Nature would formulate the absurd, the void would affirm life, and it might be said at one and the same time that there was God and there was no God. It is to this philosophical and incontestable reality, or otherwise the notion of Deity, that the Kabalists give a name, and all other names are contained therein.[64] The ciphers of this name produce all numbers and the hieroglyphical forms of its letters give expression to all laws of Nature, with all that is therein. We shall not recur in this place to that which has been dealt with already as regards the divine Tetragram in the Doctrine of Transcendental Magic; but it may be added that the Kabalists inscribe it in four chief ways: (1) as יהוה , JHVH, which is spelt but not pronounced. The consonants are YOD, HE, VAU, HE, and they are rendered as JEHOVAH by us in opposition to all analogy, for the Tetragrammaton so disfigured is composed of six letters.[65] (2) אדני, ADNI, meaning Lord and pronounced by us ADONAI.[66] (3) אהיה AHIH, which signifies Being and is pronounced by
us EIEIE.[67] (4) אגלא, AGLA, pronounced as it is written and comprising hieroglyphically all mysteries of the Kabalah.[68]

PANTACLE OF KABALISTIC LETTERS

The letter Aleph, א, is the first of the Hebrew alphabet, and expressing as it does unity, it represents hieroglyphically the dogma of Hermes: that which is above is analogous to that which is below. In consonance with this the letter has two arms, one of which points to earth and the other to heaven with an identical gesture. The letter Gimel, ג, is third in the alphabet; it expresses the triad numerically, and hieroglyphically it signifies childbirth, fruitfulness. Lamed, ל, is the twelfth letter and is an expression of the perfect cycle. Considered as a hieroglyphical sign it represents the circulation of the perpetual movement and the relation of the radius to the circumference. The duplicated Aleph represents the synthesis. Therefore the name AGLA signifies: (1) unity, which accomplishes by the triad the cycle of numbers, leading back to unity. (2) The fruitful principle of Nature, which is one therewith. (3) The primal truth which fertilises science and restores it to unity. (4) Syllepsis, analysis, science and synthesis. (5) The Three Divine Persons Who are one God; the secret of the Great Work, which is the fixation of the Astral Light by a sovereign act of will and is represented by the adepts as a serpent pierced with an arrow, thus forming the letter Aleph. (6) The three operations of dissolution, sublimation and fixation, corresponding to the three essential substances, Salt, Sulphur and Mercury—the whole being expressed by the letter Gimel. (7) The twelve keys of Basil Valentine, represented by Lamed. (8) Finally, the Work accomplished in conformity with its principle and reproducing the said principle.

Herein is the origin of that Kabalistic tradition which comprises all Magic in a single word. To know how this word is read and how also it is pronounced, or literally to understand its mysteries and translate the knowledge into action, is to have the key of miracles. In pronouncing the word AGLA it is said that one must turn to the East, which means union of intention and knowledge with oriental tradition. It should be remembered further that, according to Kabalah, the perfect word is the word realised by acts, whence comes that expression which recurs frequently in the Bible: facere verbum, to make a word—that is, in the sense of performing an act. To pronounce the word AGLA Kabalistically is therefore to pass all tests of initiation and accomplish all its works.[69]

It has been said in the Doctrine of Transcendental Magic that the name Jehovah resolves into seventy-two explicatory names, called Shemahamphorash.[70] The art of employing these seventy-two names and discovering therein the keys of universal science is the art which is called by Kabalists the Keys of Solomon. As a fact, at the end of the collections of prayers and evocations which bear this title, there are found usually seventy-two magical circles, making thirty-six talismans, or four times nine, being the absolute number multiplied by the tetrad. Each of these talismans bears two of the two-and-seventy names, the sign emblematical of their number and that of the four letters of Tetragrammaton to which they correspond. From this have originated the four emblematical Tarot suits: the Wand, representing the Yod; the Cup, answering to the He; the Sword, referable to the Vau; and the Pentacle, in correspondence with the final He. The complement of the denary has been added in the Tarot, thus repeating synthetically the character of unity.[71]

The popular traditions of Magic affirm that he who possesses the Keys of Solomon can communicate with spirits of all grades and can exact obedience on the part of all natural forces. These Keys, so often lost and as often again recovered, are no other than the talismans of the seventy-two names and the mysteries of the thirty-two hieroglyphical paths, reproduced by the Tarot. By the aid of these signs and by their infinite combinations, which are like those of numbers and letters, it is possible to arrive at the natural and mathematical revelation of all secrets of Nature, and it is in this sense that communication is established with the whole hierarchy of intelligence.

The Kabalists in their wisdom were on their guard against the dreams of imagination and hallucinations of the waking state. Therefore they avoided in particular all unhealthy evocations which disturb the nervous system and intoxicate reason. Makers of curious experiments in phenomena of extra-atural vision are no better than the eaters of opium and hasheesh. They are children who injure themselves recklessly. It may happen that one is overtaken by intoxication; we may even so far forget ourselves voluntarily as to seek the experience of drunkenness, but for the man who respects himself, a single instance suffices. Count Joseph de Maistre says that one of these days we shall deride our present stupidity, much as we deride the barbarity of the middle ages. What would he think, did he see our table-turners or listen to makers of hypotheses concerning the world of spirits? Poor creatures that we are, we escape from one absurdity by rushing over to its opposite. The eighteenth century thought that it protested against superstition by denying religion and we in return testify to the impiety of that period by believing in old wives’ fables. Is it impossible to be a better Christian than Voltaire and still not believe in ghosts? The dead can no more revisit this earth which they have quitted than a child can return into the womb of its mother.[72] That which we call death is birth into a new life. Nature does not repeat what it has once done in the order of necessary progression through the scale of existence, and she cannot bely her own fundamental laws. Limited by its organs and served by these, the human soul can enter into communication with things of the visible world only by the intermediation of these organs. The body is an envelope adjusted to the physical environments in which the soul abides here. By confining the action of the soul it makes her activity possible. In the absence of body the soul would be everywhere, and yet in so attenuated a sense that it could act nowhere, but, lost in the infinite, would be swallowed up and annihilated in God.[73] Imagine a drop of fresh water shut up in a globule and cast in the sea; as long as that sheath is preserved intact, the drop of water will subsist in its separate form, but let the globule be broken and where shall we look for the drop in the vast sea?

In creating spirits, God could endow them with self-conscious personality only by their restriction in an envelope, so to centralise their action and by restriction save it from being lost. When the soul separates from the body it changes environment of necessity, since it changes the envelope.[74] It goes forth clothed only in the astral form, or vehicle of light, ascending in virtue of its nature above the atmosphere, as air rises from the water in escaping from a broken vessel. We say that the soul ascends because the vehicle ascends and because action and consciousness are both attached thereto.[75] The atmospheric air becomes solid for luciform bodies which are infinitely rarer than itself, and they could only come down by assuming a grosser vehicle. Where would they obtain this in the region above our atmosphere? They could only return to earth by means of another incarnation, and such return would be a lapse, for they would be renouncing the state of free spirit and renewing their novitiate. The possibility of such a return is not admitted, moreover, by the catholic religion.

The doctrine here set forth is formulated by the Kabalists in a single axiom: The spirit clothes itself to come down and unclothes itself to go up. The life of intelligence is ascensional. In the body of its mother, the child has a vegetative life and draws nourishment through a cord to which it is attached, as the tree is attached to the earth by its root and is also nourished thereby. When the child passes from vegetative to instinctive and animal life, the cord breaks and henceforth he has free motion. When the child becomes man, he escapes from the trammels of instinct and can act as a reasonable being. When the man dies, he is liberated from the law of gravitation, by which he has been previously bound to earth. When the soul has expiated its offences, it grows strong enough to emerge from the exterior darkness of the terrestrial atmosphere and mount towards the sun.[76] The unending ascent of the sacred ladder begins therein, for the eternity of the elect cannot be a state of idleness; they pass from virtue to virtue, from bliss to bliss, from victory to victory, from glory to glory. There is no break in the chain, and those of the superior degrees can still exercise an influence on those who are below, but it is in harmony with the hierarchic order and after the same way that a king who rules wisely does good to the humblest of his subjects. From stage to stage, the prayers arise and the graces pour down, never mistaking the path. But spirits who have once gone up cannot again come down, for in proportion to their ascent the zones solidify below them. The great gulf is fixed, says Abraham, in the parable of the rich man, so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot.[77]

Ecstasy may so exalt the powers of the star-body that it can draw the material body after it, thus proving that the destiny of the soul is to ascend. The stories of aerial levitation are possible, but there is no instance of a man being able to live under the earth or in water. It would be not less impossible for a soul in separation from the body to subsist for a single moment in the density of our atmosphere. Therefore departed beings are not about us, as spiritists suppose. Those whom we love may see us and to us may still manifest, but only by mirage and reflection in the common mirror of the Astral Light. Furthermore they can take interest no longer in mortal things; they hold to us only by that which is highest in our feelings and is in correspondence with their eternal mode.[78]

Such are the revelations of Kabalism as imbedded in the mysterious book of the Zohar; for science they are of course hypothetical, but they rest on a series of exact inductions and these inductions are drawn from facts uncontested by science.

We are brought at this point into touch with one of the most dangerous secrets in the domain of Magic, being the more than probable hypothesis concerning the existence of those fluidic larvæ known in ancient theurgy under the name of elementary spirits. Something has been said upon the subject in The Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic, and the ill-starred Abbé de Villars, who jested with these terrible revelations, paid for his imprudence with his life.[79] The reason that the secret is dangerous is because it verges on the great magical arcanum. The truth is that the evocation of elementary spirits implies power to coagulate fluids by a projection of the Astral Light, and this power, so directed, can produce only disorders and misfortunes, as will be shewn at a later stage. Meanwhile, the grounds of the hypothesis and the evidence of its probability follow: Spirit is everywhere, and is that which animates matter; it overcomes the force of gravity by perfecting the vehicle which is its form. We see everywhere around us how form develops with instincts, till intelligence and beauty are attained: these are efforts of the light attracted by the charm of the spirit; they are part of the mystery of progressive and universal generation.

The light is the efficient agent of forms and life, because it is both motion and heat. When fixed and polarised about a centre, it produces a living being and draws thereafter the plastic substance needed to perfect and preserve it. This plastic substance is, in the last analysis, formed of earth and water and, with good reason, is denominated slime of the earth in the Bible. But this light is in nowise spirit, as believed by the Indian hierophants and all schools of Göetia: it is only the spirit’s instrument. Nor is it the body of the protoplastes, though so regarded by theurgists of the school of Alexandria. It is the first physical manifestation of the Divine Breath. God creates it eternally and man, who is in the image of God, modifies and seems to multiply it.[80]

Prometheus, says the classical fable, having stolen fire from heaven, gave life thereby to images formed of earth and water, for which crime he was blasted and chained by Jupiter. Elementary spirits, say the Kabalists in their most secret books, are children of the solitude of Adam, born of his dreams when he yearned for the woman who as yet had not been given to him by God.[81] According to Paracelsus, the blood lost at certain regular periods by the female sex and the nocturnal emissions to which male celibates are subject in dream people the air with phantoms.[82] The hypothetical origin of larvæ, according to the masters, is here indicated with sufficient clearness and further explanation may be spared.

Such larvæ have an aerial body formed from vapour of blood, for which reason they are attracted towards spilt blood and in older days drew nourishment from the smoke of sacrifices. They are those monstrous offspring of nightmare which used to be called incubi and succubi. When sufficiently condensed to be visible, they are as a vapour tinged by the reflection of an image; they have no personal life, but they mimic that of the magus who evokes them, as the shadow images the body. They collect above all about idiots and those immoral creatures whose isolation abandons them to irregular habits. The cohesion of parts being very slight in their fantastic bodies, they fear the open air, a great fire and above all the point of a sword. They become, in a manner, as vapourous appendages to the real bodies of their parents, since they live only by drawing on the life either of those who have created them or those who appropriate them by their evocation. It may come about in this manner that if these shadows of bodies be wounded, their parent may be maimed in real earnest, even as the unborn child may be hurt and disfigured by the imaginations of its mother. The world is full of such phenomena; they justify these strange revelations and can only be explained thereby.

Such larvæ draw the vital heat of persons in good health and they drain those who are weak rapidly. Hence come the histories of vampires, things of terrific reality which have been substantiated from time to time, as it is well known. This explains also why in the neighbourhood of mediums, who are persons obsessed by larvæ, one is conscious of a cooling in the atmosphere. Seeing that their existence is due to the illusions of imagination and divagation of the senses, such creatures never manifest in the presence of a person who can unveil the mystery of their monstrous birth.

BOOK II
FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMAS
ב—BETH

CHAPTER I
PRIMITIVE SYMBOLISM OF HISTORY

To explain Holy Scripture from the religious and dogmatic standpoint forms no part of our warrant. Subject above all things to the hierarchic order, we surrender theology to the doctors of the Church and we render to human science whatsoever is included in the domain of experience and reason. Therefore on those occasions when we may appear to be risking a new application of some biblical passage, it is always with proper respect for ecclesiastical decisions. We do not dogmatise on our own part, and we submit our observations and researches to the lawful authorities.

On reading the earliest history of the human race in the sacred work of Moses, that which strikes one at once is the description of the Earthly Paradise, which is summarised in the figure of a perfect pantacle. It is circular or square, since it is watered equally by four rivers arranged in the form of a cross, while in the centre are found two trees representing knowledge and life, stable intelligence and progressive motion, wisdom and creation.[83] The serpent of Asclepios and Hermes is coiled about the Tree; beneath its shadow are the man and woman, active and passive, intelligence and love. The serpent, symbolising the primal attraction and the central fire of the earth, tempts her who is the weaker, and she causes the man to succumb; yet to the serpent she yields only in order that she may overcome it subsequently: one day she will crush the head of it by giving a Saviour to the world. All science is represented in this admirable scene.[84] The man abdicates the realm of intelligence by yielding to the solicitations of the sensitive part; he profanes the fruit of knowledge, which should be the sustenance of the soul, by applying it to the uses of unjust and material satisfaction; he loses in consequence the sense of harmony and of truth. He is clothed thereafter with the skin of a beast, because the physical form takes shape sooner or later, and invariably, in correspondence to moral dispositions. He is cast out of the circle which is watered by the four rivers of life, and a cherub, armed with an ever-moving, burning sword, prevents his return into the domain of unity.

As we have observed in the Doctrine of Magic, Voltaire discovered that the Hebrew word for cherub signifies a bull and was highly amused at the story. He might have been less entertained, had he recognised in the angel with the head of a bull, the image of an obscure symbolism and in the revolving sword of fire those flashes of ill-understood and illusory truth which provided, after the Fall, a pretext to the idolatry of nations. The burning sword typified also that light which man knew no longer how to direct, so that, instead of governing its force, he was made subject to its fatal influence. The great magical work, understood in an absolute sense, is the conquest and direction of the burning sword, and the cherub is the angel or soul of the earth, represented invariably under the figure of a bull in the Ancient Mysteries. Hence in Mithraic symbolism, the master of light is seen vanquishing the bull of earth and plunging into his flank that sword which sets free the life, represented by drops of blood.

The first consequence of Eve’s sin is the death of Abel. By separating love from understanding she separated it also from power, and this, reduced to blindness and in the bondage of earthly desires, became jealous of love and slew it. The children of Cain perpetuated the crime of their father; the daughters whom they brought into the world were disastrously beautiful but, being void of love, they were born for the damnation of angels[85] and for the scandal of the descendants of Seth.

After the deluge and as a sequel to the prevarication of Ham, some part of the mystery of which has been already indicated, the children of men attempted to realise an insensate project, by constructing an universal pantacle and palace. It was a vast experiment in socialistic equality, and the phalansterium of Fourier is a sorry conception in comparison with the tower of Babel.[86] The latter was an active protestation against the hierarchy of knowledge, a citadel built against floods and tempests, a promontory from the elevation of which the deified people would soar above the atmosphere and its commotions. But one does not ascend to knowledge on ladders of stone; the hierarchic degrees of the spirit are not built with mortar like the stories of a tower. Against such a materialised hierarchy anarchy itself protested, and men ceased to understand one another—a fatal lesson and one misinterpreted utterly by those who in our own days have dreamed of another Babel. The negations of equality give answer to doctrines which are hierarchic only in the sense of brutality and materialism. Whenever the human race builds such a tower, the summit will be contested and the multitude will desert the base. To satisfy all ambitions, the summit must be broader than the base and the result an unstable edifice which will collapse at the smallest shock.

The scattering of men was the first result of the curse pronounced against the profane descendants of Ham, but the race of Canaan bore in a particular manner the burden of the malediction in question, which at a later period made all their posterity anathema.[87] That chastity which is the guardian of the family is also the distinctive character of hierarchic initiations; profanation and revolt are always unclean; they tend to promiscuity and infanticide. Desecration of the mysteries of birth and destruction of children were the basis of the religions of ancient Palestine, given over to the horrible rites of Black Magic; the black god of India, the monstrous priapic Rutrem, reigned therein under the name of Belphegor. The Talmudists and the Platonic Jew Philo recite things so shameful respecting the worship of this idol, that they appeared incredible to the learned lawyer Seldenus. It is said to have been a bearded image, with gaping mouth and a tongue like a gigantic phallus; the worshippers exposed themselves without shame in the presence of such a visage and presented offerings of excrement. The idols of Moloch and Chamos were murderous machines which sometimes crushed unfortunate little children against their brazen breasts and sometimes consumed them in their red-hot arms. There was dancing to the sound of trumpets and tambourines, so that the cries of the victims were stifled, and these dances were led by the wretched mothers. Incest, sodomy and bestiality were the authorised practices among these infamous people, and even formed part of the sacred rites.

Such is the fatal consequence of doing violence to universal harmony; one does not sin against truth with impunity. In revolt against God, man is driven to the outrage of Nature, despite himself. Identical causes ever produce the same effects, and the Sabbath of the Sorcerers in the middle ages was but a repetition of the festivals of Chamos and Belphegor. It is against such crimes that a decree of eternal death is pronounced by Nature itself. Worshippers of black gods, apostles of promiscuity, preachers of public wantonness, enemies of the family and hierarchy, anarchists in religion and politics are enemies of God and humanity; not to isolate them from the world is to consent that the world shall be poisoned, or such at least was the view of inquisitors; but we are far on our own part from desiring to re-establish the cruel executions of the middle ages. In proportion as society shall become more truly Christian it will realise more fully that we must heal those who are diseased and not destroy them; now, criminal instincts are surely the most appalling of mental maladies.

It must not be forgotten that transcendental Magic is called the Sacerdotal Art and the Royal Art; in Egypt, Greece and Rome it shared the grandeur and decadence of the kingdom and the priesthood. Every philosophy which is at issue with the cultus and its mysteries is baneful to the great political powers, for these, in the eyes of the multitude, lose in grandeur if they cease to be symbols of Divine power. Every crown is broken which comes into collision with the tiara. The eternal dream of Prometheus is to steal fire from heaven and cast down the gods therefrom. The popular Prometheus, unbound on Caucasus by Hercules, who typifies labour, will ever bear about with him his rivets and chains; he will carry his undying vulture, fastened on his gaping wound, till he shall learn obedience at the feet of Him, who, being born the King of kings and God of gods, has elected in His turn to be nailed in hands and feet and pierced in the side for the conversion of all rebellious spirits.

By opening the career of power to intrigue, republican institutions endangered the principles of the hierarchy. The task of forming Kings was confided no longer to the hierarchy and was either replaced by right of inheritance—which abandons the throne to the unequal chances of birth—or by popular election—which sets aside religious influence to establish the monarchy on a basis of republican principles. Those governments which presided successively over the triumphs and humiliations of Greek and Roman states were formed in this manner. The science reserved to the sanctuaries fell into neglect, and men of boldness or genius, who had not been accepted by those who dispense initiation, devised another science in opposition to that of the priests, substituting doubt or denial for the secrets of the temple. In the excess of their adventurous imagination, such philosophers were landed quickly in absurdity and laid upon Nature the blame which belonged to their own systems. Heraclitus fell a-weeping, Democritus took refuge in laughter, and the one was a fool like the other. Pyrrhon ended by believing in nothing, which can scarcely exonerate him for the fact that he knew nothing. Into this philosophical chaos Socrates brought a certain light and good sense, by affirming the existence of pure and simple morality. But what does morality profit in the absence of religion? The abstract Deism of Socrates was interpreted by the people as atheism. It came about, however, that Plato, the disciple of Socrates, attempted to supply that system of doctrine which was wanting in the latter and of which indeed he had never dreamed.

THE TWENTY-FIRST KEY OF THE TAROT, SURROUNDED BY MYSTIC AND MASONIC SEALS

The doctrine of Plato was epoch-making in the history of human genius, but it was not his own invention, for, realising that there is no truth apart from religion, he went to consult the priests of Memphis and to obtain initiation into their Mysteries. He is even credited with a knowledge of the Jewish sacred books.[88] In Egypt, however, his initiation could have been imperfect only, for the priests by that time had forgotten themselves the import of their primeval hieroglyphics, as is indicated by the history of that priest who spent three days in deciphering a hieratic inscription found in the tomb of Alcmene and sent by Agesilaus, King of Sparta. Cornuphis, who was doubtless the most learned among the hierophants, consulted the old collections of signs and characters; in the end he found that the inscription was in the script of proteus, being the Grecian name of the Book of Thoth, consisting of movable hieroglyphics, capable of variations as numerous as there are possible combinations of characters, numbers and elementary figures. But the Book of Thoth, being the key of oracles and the elementary work on science, should not have involved such long research before its signs were identified, if Cornuphis had been really proficient in the Sacerdotal Art. Another proof that primeval truths were obscured at this period is the fact that the oracles which registered their protest on the subject were in a style that was understood no longer.

After his return from Egypt, Plato was journeying with Simmias on the confines of Caria when he was met by some men of Delos, who begged him to interpret an oracle of Apollo. It declared that to make an end of the woes in Greece the cubic stone must be doubled. The attempt had been made with a stone kept in the temple of Apollo; but the work of doubling it on every side resulted in a polyhedron having twenty-five surfaces; to restore the cubic form they had to increase it twenty-six times the original volume of the stone, by a process of successive doubling. Plato sent back the emissaries to the mathematician Eudoxus,[89] saying that the oracle had counselled the study of geometry. Whether he did not himself understand the deep sense of the symbol or disdained to unveil it to the ignorant are points which must be left to conjecture; but that which is certain is that the cubic stone and its multiplication explains all secrets of sacred numbers, including the mystery of perpetual motion, hidden by adepts and pursued by fools under the name of squaring the circle.[90] By this cubic agglomeration of twenty-six cubes about a single central cube, the oracle indicated to the Delians not only the elements of geometry but the key of creative harmonies, explained by the inter-relation of forms and numbers. The plan of all great allegorical temples throughout antiquity is found in the multiplication (a) of the cube by the cross, (b) about which a circle is described, and then (c) the cubic cross moving in a globe. These notions, which are rendered more intelligible by a diagram, have been handed on to our own days in Masonic initiations, and they are a perfect justification of the name attributed to the modern societies in question, for they are also the root-principles of architecture and the science of building.

The Delians thought to answer the geometrical question by reducing their multiplication by half, but they had already obtained eight times the volume of their cubic stone. For the rest, the number of their experiments may be extended at will, for the story itself is probably a problem set to his disciples by Plato. If the utterance of the oracle has to be taken as a fact, we can find a still deeper meaning in it; to double the cubic stone is to extract the duad from unity, form from idea, action from thought. It is to realise in the world the exactitude of eternal mathematics, to establish politics on the basis of exact sciences, to harmonise religious dogma with the philosophy of numbers.

Plato has more eloquence but less depth than Pythagoras; he aspires to reconcile the philosophy of logicians with the immutable dogmas of seers; he does not seek to vulgarise but would reconstruct science. So was his philosophy destined at a later date to provide dawning Christianity with theories prepared beforehand and with vivifying doctrines. Notwithstanding, however, that he based his theorems on mathematics, Plato was poet rather than geometrician; he was rich in harmonious forms and was prodigal of marvellous hypotheses. Aristotle, who was a calculating genius exclusively, referred everything to debate in the schools; he made everything subject to the demonstrations of numeral evolutions and the logic of calculations. Excluding the faith of Platonism, he sought to prove all and likewise to comprehend all in his categories; he turned the triad into syllogism and the binary into enthymeme. For him the chain of being became a sorites. He reduced everything to an abstraction and reasoned on everything; being itself passed into an abstraction in his process and was lost amidst the hypotheses of ontology. Plato was destined to inspire the Fathers of the Church; Aristotle to be the master of mediæval scholastics; God knows what clouds gathered about this logic which had no faith in anything and yet set out to explain all. A second Babel was in plan and another confusion of tongues was at no far distance. Being is being and in being is the reason of being. In the beginning is the Word and the Word, or Logos, is logic formulated in speech, or spoken reason. The Word is in God and the Word is God Himself manifested to intelligence. But this is precisely a truth which exceeds all philosophies and is that, also precisely, which must be believed, under the penalty of knowing nothing and falling back into the irrational doubt of Pyrrho. As guardian of faith, the priesthood rests entirely on this ground of science, and we are compelled to salute in its teaching the Divine principle of the Eternal Word.

CHAPTER II
MYSTICISM

The legitimacy of Divine Right is so rooted in the priesthood that true priesthood does not exist apart from it. Initiation and consecration are a veritable heritage. So is the sanctuary inviolable on the part of the profane and so also it cannot be seized by sectarians. For the same reason the glorious lights of divine revelation are diffused in accordance with supreme reason, because they come down in order and harmony. God does not enlighten the world by means of meteors and flashes, but He causes every planetary system to gravitate about its particular sun. It is this very harmony which vexes certain souls, who have grown impatient with duty, and it is thus that people come forward to pose as reformers of morals, having failed in coercing revelation to concur with their vices. Like Rousseau, they exclaim: “If God has spoken, why have I heard nothing?” And then presently they add: “He has spoken, but it is to me.” Such is their dream, and they end by believing it themselves. So do the makers of sects begin, and these are fomenters of religious anarchy: we would by no means condemn them to the flames, but it is certainly desirable to intern them as sufferers from contagious folly. It is precisely in this manner that those mystic schools were founded which brought about the profanation of science. We have seen how the Indian fakirs attained their so-called uncreated light, that is to say, by the help of erethism and cerebral congestion. Egypt had also its sorcerers and enchanters, while Thessaly, in the days of Greece, swarmed with conjurations and witchcraft. To enter into direct communication with deities is to suppress the priesthood and subvert the basis of the throne—a fact which is realised keenly by the anarchic instinct of pretended illuminism. It was by the allurement of licence that such conspirators looked to recruit disciples, giving absolution beforehand to every scandal in manners, on the condition of strictness in revolt and energy in protestation against sacerdotal legitimacy.[91]

The Bacchantes, who dismembered Orpheus, believed themselves inspired by a god, and they sacrificed the great hierophant to their deified drunkenness. The orgies of Bacchus were mystical tumults; the apostles of mania have always had recourse to disordered movements, frenetic agitations and horrible convulsions. From the effeminate priesthood of Bacchus to the Gnostics; from whirling dervishes to epileptics at the tomb of Paris the deacon; the characteristics of superstition and fanatic exaltation have been always the same. It has been invariably under the pretext of purifying doctrine and in the name of an exaggerated spiritualism that the mystics of all times have materialised the symbols of the cultus. It has been the same precisely with those who have profaned the science of the Magi, for transcendental Magic, as it is needful to remember, is the primeval priestly art. It condemns all that is done outside the lawful hierarchy, and it justifies the condemnation—though not the torture—of sectarians and sorcerers. The two classes are here connected intentionally, because all heretics have been evokers of spirits and phantoms, whom they have foisted upon the world as gods; all have arrogated to themselves the power of working miracles in support of their falsehoods. On these evidences they were all practisers of Göetic, that is to say, of Black Magic.

Anarchy being the point of departure and the palmary characteristic of dissident mysticism, religious concord is impossible between sectarians, and yet they are in astonishing unanimity upon a single point, being the hatred of hierarchic and lawful authority. This in reality is the whole root of their religion, as it is the sole bond which links them one to another. It is ever the crime of Ham, contempt of the family principle and outrage offered to the father, whose nakedness and shame they expose with sacrilegious mirth. All the anarchic mystics confuse the Intellectual with the Astral Light; they worship the serpent instead of doing honour to that dutiful and pure wisdom which crushes its head. So are they intoxicated by vertigo and so fall inevitably into the abyss of folly.

All fools are visionaries and may no doubt believe sincerely that they work wonders; indeed hallucination is contagious and things inexplicable occur, or seem to occur, frequently enough in their vicinity. Moreover, the phenomena of the Astral Light in the excess of its attraction or projection are themselves of a kind to confuse those who are half-educated. It is centralised in bodies and, as the result of violent molecular distention, it imparts to them so high a degree of elasticity that bones may be twisted and muscles stretched out of all measure. It forms whirlpools and waterspouts, so to speak, which levitate the heaviest bodies and can sustain them in the air for a length of time proportionate to the force of the projection. The sufferers feel on the point of bursting and cry for compression or percussion to relieve them. The most violent blows and the utmost constriction, being counterpoised by the fluidic tension, cause neither bruises nor wounds and relieve instead of crushing the patient.

As fools hold physicians in horror, so the hallucinated mystics detest wise men; they flee them in the first place and afterwards persecute them blindly, as if against their own will. In so far as they are mild and indulgent, it is in respect of vices; towards reason in submission to authority they are implacable; the most tolerant of heretics in appearance will be seized with fury and hatred, if conformity and the hierarchy are mentioned. Hence heresies have led to disturbances invariably. The false prophet must slay if he cannot pervert. He clamours for tolerance towards himself but takes good care in what sense it shall be extended to others. Protestants were loud in their outcries against the faggots and pyres of Rome at the very time that John Calvin, on the warrant of his private judgment, condemned Servetus to be burnt. The crimes of the Donatists, Circumcisionists, and others too many for enumeration, drove Catholic rulers into excess and caused the Church to abandon those who were guilty to the secular arm. Would it not be thought that Vaudois, Albigensians and Hussites were lambs if one gave heed to the groans of irreligion? Where was the innocence of those darksome Puritans of Scotland and England who brandished the dagger in one hand and their Bible in the other, while preaching the extermination of Catholics? One only Church in the midst of so many reprisals and horrors has always postulated and in principle at least has maintained its hatred of blood: this is the hierarchic and legitimate Church.[92]

EGYPTIAN SYMBOLS OF TYPHON

Now, in admitting the possibility and actuality of diabolical miracles, that Church recognises the existence of a natural force which can be applied for good or evil; and hence it has decided in its great wisdom that although sanctity of doctrine can legalise miracle, the latter of itself can never authorise novelties in religious teaching. To say that God, Whose laws are perfect and never falsify themselves, makes use of a natural instrument to produce effects which to us seem supernatural—this is to affirm the supreme reason and immutable power of God; it is to exalt our notion of His providence; and sincere Catholics should realise that such view by no means challenges His intervention in those marvels which operate in favour of truth. The false miracles caused by astral congestions have invariably an anarchic and immoral tendency, because disorder invokes disorder. So also the gods and familiars of heretics are athirst for blood and commonly extend their protection at the price of murder. The idolaters of Syria and Judea drew oracles from the heads of children torn from the bodies of the poor little victims. They dried these heads and, having placed beneath the tongues a golden lamen bearing unknown characters, they fixed them in the hollows of walls, built up a kind of body beneath them composed of magical plants secured by bands, lighted a lamp at the foot of the frightful idols, burnt incense before them and proceeded to their religious consultation. They believed that the heads spoke, and the anguish of the last cries had doubtless distracted their imaginations; moreover, as said already, blood attracts larvæ. The ancients, in their infernal sacrifices, were accustomed to dig a pit, which they filled with warm and smoking blood; then from all the deep places of the night they beheld feeble and pallid shadows ascending, descending, creeping and swarming about the cavity. With a sword’s point steeped in the same blood, they traced the circle of evocation and kindled fire of laurel, alder and cypress wood, on altars crowned with asphodel and vervain. The night seemed to grow colder and still more dark; the moon was hidden behind clouds; and they heard the feeble rustling of phantoms crowding about the circle, while dogs howled piteously over the countryside.

All must be dared in order to achieve all—such was the axiom of enchantments and their associated horrors. The false magicians were banded together by crime and believed that they could intimidate others when they had contrived to terrify themselves. The rites of Black Magic have remained revolting like the impious worships it produced; this was the case indifferently in the association of criminals who conspired against the old civilisations and among the barbaric races. There was always the same passion for darkness; there were the same profanations, the same sanguinary processes. Anarchic Magic is the cultus of death. The sorcerer devotes himself to fatality, abjures reason, renounces the hope of immortality, and then sacrifices children. He forswears marriage and is given over to barren debauch. On such conditions he enjoys the plenitude of his mania, is made drunk with iniquity till he believes that evil is omnipotent and, converting his hallucinations into reality, he thinks that his mastery has power to evoke at pleasure all death and Hades.

Barbarian words and signs unknown, or even utterly unmeaning, are the best in Black Magic.[93] Hallucination is insured more readily by ridiculous practices and imbecile evocations than by rites or formulæ which keep intelligence in a waking state. Du Potet says that he has tested the power of certain signs on ecstatics, and those which are published in his occult book, with precaution and mystery, are in analogy, if not absolutely identical, with pretended diabolical signatures found in old editions of the Grand Grimoire.[94] The same causes always produce the same effects, and there is nothing that is new beneath the moon of sorcerers, any more than under the sun of sages.

The state of permanent hallucination is death or abdication of consciousness, and one is then surrendered to all the chances comprised by the fatality of dreams. Every remembrance begets its own reflection, every evil desire creates an image, every remorse breeds a nightmare. Life becomes that of an animal, but of a peevish and tormented animal; the sense of morality and of time is alike absent; realities exist no longer; it is a general dance in the whirlpool of insensate forms. Sometimes an hour seems protracted over centuries, and again years may fly with an hour’s swiftness.

Rendered phosphorescent by the Astral Light, our brains swarm with innumerable reflections and images. We close our eyes, and it may happen that some brilliant, sombre or terrific panorama will unroll beneath our eyelids. He who is sick of a fever will scarcely close them through the night without being dazzled by an intolerable brightness. Our nervous system—which is a perfect electrical apparatus—concentrates the light in the brain, being the negative pole of that apparatus, or projects it by the extremities which are points designed for the circulation of our vital fluid. When the brain attracts powerfully some series of images analogous to any passion which has disturbed the equilibrium or the machine, the interchange of light stops, astral respiration ceases and the misdirected light coagulates, so to speak, in the brain. It comes about for this reason that the sensations of hallucinated persons are of the most false and perverse order. Some find enjoyment in lacerating the skin with thongs and in roasting their flesh slowly; others eat and relish things unfit for sustenance. Doctor Brierre de Boismont has collected a great series of instances, and many of them are extremely curious.[95] All excesses in life—whether through the misconstruction of good or through the non-resistance of evil—may overstimulate the brain and occasion the stagnation of light therein. Overweening ambition, proud pretence of sanctity, a continence full of scruples and desires, the indulgence of shameful passions notwithstanding repeated warnings of remorse—all these lead to syncope of reason, to morbid ecstasy, hysteria, vision, madness. The learned doctor goes on to observe that a man is not mad because he is subject to visions but because he believes in his visions rather than in ordinary sense. Hence it is obedience and authority that alone can save the mystics; if they have obstinate self-confidence there is no cure; they are excommunicated already by reason and by faith: they are the aliens of universal charity. They think themselves wiser than society; they dream of founding a religion, but they stand alone; they believe that they have secured for their private use the secret keys of life, but their intelligence is plunged already in death.

CHAPTER III
INITIATIONS AND ORDEALS

That which adepts have distinguished as the Great Work is not only the transmutation of metals but also and above all the Universal Medicine—that is to say, the remedy for all ills, including death itself. Now, the process which produces the Universal Medicine is the moral regeneration of man. It is that second birth alluded to by our Saviour in His discourse to Nicodemus, a doctor of the law. Nicodemus did not understand, and Jesus said: “Are you a master in Israel and know not these things?”—as if intending to intimate that they belonged to the fundamental principles of religious science, of which no professor could dare to be ignorant.[96]

The great mystery of life and its ordeals is represented in the celestial sphere and in the annual succession of the seasons. The four aspects of the sphinx correspond to these seasons and to the four elements. The symbolical figures on the shield of Achilles—according to the description of Homer—are analogous in their meaning to the Twelve Labours of Hercules. Like Hercules, Achilles must die, after having conquered the elements and even done battle with the gods. Hercules, on his part, triumphant over all the vices, represented by the monsters whom he fought, succumbs for a moment to love, the most dangerous of all. But he tears from his body the burning tunic of Dejanira, though the flesh comes with it from the bones; he leaves her guilty and vanquished, to die on his own part—but as one liberated and immortal.

Every thinking man is an Œdipus called to solve the enigma of the sphinx or, this failing, to die. Every initiate must become a Hercules, who, achieving the cycle of a great year of toil, shall, by sacrifices of heart and life, deserve the glory of apotheosis. Orpheus is not king of the lyre and of sacrifices till he has successively won and has learned how to lose Eurydice. Omphale and Dejanira are jealous of Hercules: one would debase him, the other yields to the counsels of an abandoned rival, and so is induced to poison him who has emancipated the world; but in the act she cures him of a far more fatal poison, which is her own unworthy love. The flame of the pyre purifies his too susceptible heart; he perishes in all his vigour and is seated victorious close to the throne of Jupiter. So also Jacob was not appointed the great patriarch of Israel till he had wrestled with an angel through the length of an entire night.

Ordeal is the great word of life, and life itself is a serpent which brings forth and devours unceasingly. We must escape from its folds; we must set our foot upon its head. Hermes duplicated the serpent, setting it against itself, and in an eternal equilibrium, he converted it into the talisman of his power, into the glory of his caduceus.

The great ordeals of Memphis and Eleusis were designed to form kings and priests by entrusting science to strong and valiant men. The price of admission to such tests was the surrender of body, soul and life into the hands of the priesthood. The candidate descended thereafter through dark subterranean regions, wherein he traversed successively among flaming pyres, passed through deep and rapid floods, over bridges thrown across abysses, holding in his hand a lamp which must not be extinguished. He who trembled, he whom fear overcame never returned to the light; but he who surmounted every obstacle intrepidly was received among the mystæ, which meant initiation into the Lesser Mysteries. He had yet to vindicate his fidelity and silence; it was only at the end of several years that he became an epopt, being a title equivalent to that of adept.[97]

Philosophy, in competition with the priesthood, imitated these practices, and put its disciples to the proof. Pythagoras exacted silence and abstinence for five years. Plato opened his schools to none but geometricians and those skilled in music; furthermore, he reserved part of his instruction to initiates, so that his philosophy had its mysteries.[98] He attributed the creation of the world to demons and represented man as the progenitor of all animals. But the demons of Plato signify the Elohim of Moses, being those powers by the combination and harmony of which the Supreme Principle created. When he represents beasts as begotten by humanity he means that they are the analysis of that living form, the synthesis of which is man. It was Plato who first proclaimed the divinity of the Word, and he appeared to foresee the approaching incarnation of this creative Word on earth; he proclaimed the sufferings and execution of the perfect just man, condemned by the iniquity of the world.

This sublime philosophy of the Word is part of the pure Kabalah, whence Plato was in no wise its inventor.[99] He makes no secret of this and he proclaims that in any science only that must be received which is in harmony with eternal truths and with the oracles of God. Dacier, from whom this quotation comes, adds that “by these eternal truths Plato signified an ancient tradition which he supposes primeval humanity to have received from God and transmitted to later generations.” It would be impossible to speak more clearly without actually naming the Kabalah: it is definition instead of name; in a sense, it is something more precise than the name itself.

Plato says otherwise that “the root-matter of this great knowledge is not to be found in books; we must seek in ourselves by means of deep meditation, discovering the sacred fire in its proper source.... This is why I have written nothing concerning these revelations and shall never even speak about them. Whosoever shall undertake to popularise them will find the attempt futile, for, except in the case of a very small number of men who have been endowed with understanding from God to discern these heavenly truths within themselves, it will render them contemptible to some, while filling others with vain and rash self-confidence, as if they were depositaries of marvels which they do not understand all the same.”[100]

To the younger Dionysius he wrote: “I must bear witness to Archedemus concerning that which is far more precious, more divine by far, and that which you desire earnestly to know, having sent him to me expressly. He gives me to understand that in your view I have not explained to you sufficiently what I hold as to the nature of the First Principle. I can only write in enigmas, so that if my letter be intercepted on land or water, he who may read it shall understand nothing: all things encompass their king, from whom they draw their being, he being the source of all good things—second for those which are second and third for those which are third.”

These few words are a complete summary of sephirotic theology.[101] The King is Ensoph—Supreme and Absolute Being. All radiates from this centre, which centre is everywhere, but we regard it after three especial manners and in three distinct spheres. In the Divine world, which is that of the First Cause, the King is one and first. In the world of science, which is that of secondary causes, the influence of the First Principle is felt, but is conceived only as first of the said causes. Therein the King manifests by the duad, which is the passive creating principle. Finally, in the third world, which is that of forms, he is revealed as perfect form, the incarnate Word, supreme goodness and beauty, created perfection. The King is therefore, at one and the same time, the first, second and third, seeing that He is all in all, centre and cause of all. Let us be silent on the genius of Plato, recognising only the exact knowledge of the initiate.

Let it therefore be said no longer that our great apostle St. John borrowed from the philosophy of Plato the proœmium of his gospel. It is Plato, on the contrary, who drew from the same sources as St. John; but he had not received that spirit which makes alive. The philosophy of him who expounded the greatest of human revelations might aspire towards the Word made man, but the gospel alone could give that Word to the world.

The Kabalah taught by Plato to the Greeks assumed at a later period the name of Theosophy and ended by embracing the whole of magical doctrine.[102] It is to this sum total of secret doctrine that all discoveries of research gravitated successively. The ambition was to pass from theory to practice and to find the realisation of words in works. The dangerous experiences of divination taught science how it might dispense with the priesthood; the sanctuary was betrayed, and men who had no mission dared to make the gods speak. It is for this reason that theurgy shared in the anathemas pronounced against Black Magic and was suspected of imitating its crimes because it could not exculpate itself from a share in its impiety. The veil of Isis is not lifted with impunity, and curiosity blasphemes faith when Divine things are concerned. “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed,” says the Great Master.

The experiments of theurgy and necromancy are always fatal for those who are abandoned to their practice. To set foot upon the threshold of the other world spells death, and it follows often in a strange and terrible manner. Vertigo supervenes, catalepsy and madness finish the work. It is unquestionable that in the presence of certain persons a disturbance takes place in the air, wainscots split, doors shake and creak. Fantastic signs and even stains, as of blood, seem to impress themselves on virgin-parchment or on linen. The nature of these signatures is always the same and they are classified by experts under the name of diabolical writings. The mere sight of such characters sends sufferers from magnetic hysteria into convulsions or ecstasy; they believe that they behold spirits, and Satan, or the genius of error, is transfigured for them into an angel of light. The pretended spirits require, as the condition of their manifestation, some kind of contact between the sexes, the putting of hand in hand, foot to foot, breathing face to face and even immodest embraces. Devotees are besotted by this kind of intoxication; they think that they are elected by God, that they are interpreters of heaven, and they regard obedience to the hierarchy in the light of fanaticism. They are the successors of the Indian race of Cain, victims of hasheesh and fakirs. They profit by no warnings, and they perish by their own act and will.

To restore sufferers of this kind the Greek priests resorted to a species of homœopathy; they terrified the patients by exaggerating the disease itself, and for this purpose they put them to sleep in the cave of Trophonius.[103] The preparation for this experience was by fastings, lustrations and vigils; the patients were then taken down into the vault and shut up in total darkness. Intoxicating gases, like those in the Grotto of the Dog near Naples, filled the cavern, and the visionary was overcome speedily. Incipient asphyxia induced frightful dreams, from which the victim was rescued in time and carried forth palpitating all over, pale and with hair on end. In this condition he or she was seated on a tripod and prophetic utterances preceded complete awakening. Experiences of this sort so distracted the nervous system that their subjects never recalled them without trembling and in future did not dare to mention evocations or phantoms. Some of them never smiled again or felt the impulse of gaiety; the general impression was so melancholy that it passed into a proverb, and it was said of anyone who did not unbend: “He has slept in the cave of Trophonius.”[104]

For the remanents of science and the recovery of its mysteries we must have recourse to the religious symbolism of antiquity rather than to the works of its philosophers. The priests of Egypt were better acquainted than ourselves with the laws of motion and of life. They could temper or promote action by reaction, and they foresaw without difficulty the realisation of effects the cause of which they had postulated. The pillars of Seth, Hermes, Solomon, Hercules symbolised in magical traditions this universal law of equilibrium, while the science of equilibrium led the initiates to that of universal gravitation about centres of life, heat and light. So in the Egyptian sacred calendars, where it is known that each month was placed under the protection of three decani or genii of ten days, the first decanate in the sign of Leo is represented by a human head with seven rays; the body has a scorpio-tail and the sign of Sagittarius is under the chin. Beneath the head is the name of Iao, and the figure was called Khnoubis, an Egyptian word which signifies gold and light. Thales and Pythagoras learned in the Egyptian sanctuaries that the earth gravitated round the sun, but they did not seek to publish the fact generally because it would have involved the revelation of a great templesecret, being the dual law of attraction and radiation, of fixity and movement, which is the principle of creation and the unfailing cause of life.[105] So also the Christian writer Lactantius, who had heard of this magical tradition, but as an effect in the absence of a cause, scoffed loudly at theurgical dreamers who believed in the motion of the earth and in antipodes, the result of which would be the fact that we walked on our heads with the feet upward, though our heads appeared to be erect. Furthermore, as he added, with the logic of children, in such case we should infallibly fall head downwards through the heaven below us. So philosophers reasoned, while priests, without answering or even smiling at their blunders, continued to write in creative hieroglyphics concerning all dogmas, all forms of poetry and all secrets of truth.

In their allegorical description of Hades, the Greek hierophants concealed the palmary secrets of Magic. We find four rivers therein, even as in the Earthly Paradise, plus a fifth, which wound seven times round the others. There was a river of sorrows and silence, called Cocytus; there was a river of forgetfulness, or Lethe; and then there was a swift and irresistible river which carried all before it, flowing in an opposite course to yet another river of fire. The two last were named Acheron and Phlegethon, one being the negative and one the positive fluid, flowing eternally each in each. The black and icy waters of Acheron smoked with the warmth of Phlegethon, while the liquid flames of the latter were covered with thick vapours by the former. Larvæ and lemures, shadowy images of bodies which have lived and of those which have yet to come, issued from these vapours by myriads; but whether they drank or not from the flood of sorrows, all desired the waters of oblivion, to bring them youth and peace. The wise alone do not seek to forget, for memory is their reward already; so also they only are truly deathless, since they only are conscious of their immortality. The tortures of Tenarus are truly divine pictures of the vices and their eternal chastisement. The greed of Tantalus, the ambition of Sisyphus, will never be expiated, since they can never be satisfied. Tantalus is athirst in the water, Sisyphus rolls a stone towards the top of a mountain, hoping to take his seat thereon, but it falls back continually and drags him down into the abyss. Ixion, unbridled in licence, would have violated the queen of heaven and was scourged by infernal furies. He did not consummate his crime, for he embraced only a phantom. The phantom may have condescended in appearance to his love and may have ministered to his passion, but when he disowned duty, when his satisfaction was at the price of sacrilege, that which he thought was love proved hatred in a mask of flowers.

It is not from beyond the tomb, it is rather in life itself that we must seek the mysteries of death. Salvation or condemnation begin here below, and this earth has also its heaven and hell. Virtue is ever rewarded, vice is ever punished; if the wealth of the wicked incline us at times to think that they enjoy impunity, that instrument of good and evil seeming to be given them by chance, there is woe notwithstanding to the unjust; they may possess the key of gold, but for them it opens only the gate of the tomb and hell.

All true initiates have recognised the immense value of toil and suffering. A German poet tells us that sorrow is the dog of that unknown shepherd which leads the flock of humanity. Learn how to suffer and learn also to die—such are the gymnastics of eternity and such is the immortal novitiate. This is the moral lesson of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and it was outlined in the allegorical Table of Cebes, which belongs to the time of Plato. An account of it has been preserved and many painters of the middle ages reconstructed the picture therefrom. It is at once a philosophical and magical monument, a perfect moral synthesis, and moreover the most audacious demonstration ever attempted of that Great Arcanum or Secret, the revelation of which must subvert heaven and earth. Our readers will unquestionably expect us to furnish its explanation, but he who has solved this enigma knows that it is inexplicable by its nature and is a sentence of death to those who take it by surprise, even as to those who reveal it.[106]

This secret is the royalty of the sage and the crown of that initiate who is represented coming down as a victor from the mount of ordeal in the beautiful allegory of Cebes. The Great Arcanum has made him master of gold and light, which fundamentally are one thing; he has solved the quadrature of the circle; he directs perpetual motion; and he possesses the Philosophical Stone. Those who are adepts will understand me. There is neither interruption in the process of Nature nor a blank space in its work. The harmonies of heaven are in correspondence with those of earth, and eternal life fulfils its evolutions in accordance with the same laws which rule in the life of a day. The Bible says that God disposes all things according to weight, number and measure, and this luminous doctrine was also that of Plato. In the Phædon he represents Socrates as discoursing on the destinies of the soul in a manner which is quite in conformity with Kabalistical traditions. Spirits purified by trial are emancipated from the laws of weight, and they soar above the atmosphere of tears; others grovel in darkness and are those who manifest to the weak or criminal. All who are liberated from the miseries of material life come back no more to contemplate its crimes or share its errors: once is truly enough.

The care taken by the ancients over the burial of the dead protested strongly against necromancy, and those who disturbed the sleep of the grave were always regarded as impious. To call back the dead would condemn them to a second death, and the dread of earnest people, belonging to old religions, lest they should remain without burial after death, was in view of the possibility that the corpse might be profaned by stryges and used in witchcraft. After death the soul belongs to God and the body to the common mother, which is earth. Woe to those who dare to invade these asylums. When the sanctuary of the tomb was disturbed, the ancients offered sacrifices to the angry manes and a holy thought lay at the root of this practice. As a fact, were it permitted anyone to attract, by means of conjurations, the souls floating in darkness but aspiring towards the light, such a person would be begetting retrograde and posthumous children, whom he must nourish with his own blood and with his own soul. Necromancers are makers of vampires, and they deserve no pity if they die devoured by the dead.

CHAPTER IV
THE MAGIC OF PUBLIC WORSHIP

Forms are the product of ideas, and they in their turn reflect and reproduce ideas. So far as sentiments are concerned, these are multiplied by association in the union of those who share them, so that all are charged with the enthusiasm common to all. It comes about in this manner that if one or another individual be deceived easily on questions of the just and the beautiful, the people at large will, this notwithstanding, continue to exalt in their minds whatsoever things are sublime, and they will do it with a longing which is itself sublime. These two great laws of Nature were known to the ancient Magi and led them to see the necessity of a public worship which should be one in its nature, imposed on all, hierarchic and symbolic in character, like all religion, splendid as truth, rich and varied as Nature, starry as heaven, odoriferous as earth—a worship in fact of the kind established afterwards by Moses, realised in all its glory by Solomon, and, once again transfigured, centralised to-day in the great metropolis of St. Peter at Rome.

Humanity as a fact has never known more than one religion and one worship. This universal light has had its uncertain reflections and its shadows, but ever after the dark night of error we behold it emerge, one and pure like the sun.

The magnificence of the cultus is the life of religion, and if Christ chose poor ministers, his sovereign divinity did not demand poor altars. Protestants have failed to understand that ritual constitutes an instruction and that a sordid or negligible god must not be created in the imagination of the multitude. The English, who lavish so much wealth on their own homes, who also affect to prize the Bible highly, would find their particular churches exceedingly cold and bare if they remembered the unparalleled pomp of Solomon’s Temple. But that which withers their forms of worship is the dryness of their own hearts; and with a cultus devoid of magic, splendour and pathos, how shall their hearts be ever informed with life? Look at their meeting-houses, which resemble town-halls, and look at those honest ministers—dressed like ushers or clerks—and who can do otherwise in their presence than regard religion as formalism and God as a justice of the peace?

Orthodoxy is the absolute character of Transcendental Magic. When truth is born into the world the star of science announces the fact to the Magi, and they come to adore the infant creator of futurity. Initiation is obtained by understanding in respect of the hierarchy, as also by the practice of obedience, and he who is initiated truly will never turn sectarian. The orthodox traditions were carried from Chaldea by Abraham; in combination with the knowledge of the true God, they reigned in Egypt at the period of Joseph. Koung-Tseu sought to establish them in China, but the imbecile mysticism of India, under the idolatrous form of the Fo cultus, was destined to prevail in that great empire. As by Abraham out of Chaldea so was orthodoxy taken out of Egypt by Moses, and in the secret traditions of the Kabalah we find a theology at once complete, perfect, unique and comparable to our own at its grandest, when seen under the light of its interpretation by the fathers and doctors of the Church—a perfect whole, including lights which it is not given to the world yet to understand. The Zohar, which is the head and crown of the Kabalistic sacred books, unveils furthermore all depths and enlightens all obscurities of ancient mythologies and of sciences concealed in the sanctuaries of eld. It is true that we must know the secret of its meaning in order to make use of it, and it is further true that the keenest intellects which are not acquainted with the secret will find the Zohar beyond all understanding and even unreadable. It is to be hoped that careful students of our works on Magic will attain the secret for themselves, that they will come in their turn to decode and thus be able to read the book which explains so many mysteries.[107]

Initiation being the necessary consequence of that hierarchic principle which is the basis of realisation in Magic, it follows that the profane, after striving vainly to force the doors of the sanctuary, have been driven to raise altar against altar and to oppose ignorant disclosures of schism to the reticence of orthodoxy. Horrible histories were circulated concerning the Magi; sorcerers and vampires cast upon them the responsibility of their own crimes; they were represented as feasting on infants and drinking human blood. Such attacks of presumptuous ignorance against the prudence of science have invariably met with success sufficient to perpetuate their use. Has not some miserable creature set forth, in I know not what pamphlet, how he has heard with his own ears, and within the precincts of a club, the author of this book demanding the blood of the wealthy to make it into puddings for the nourishment of starving people? The more monstrous the calumny, the greater the impression that it produces in the minds of fools.

Those who slandered the Magi committed themselves the enormities of which they accused them and were abandoned to all the excesses of shameless sorcery. There was everywhere the rumour of apparitions and prodigies, and the gods themselves came down in visible forms to authorise orgies. The maniacal circles of pretended illuminati go back to the bacchantes who murdered Orpheus. Since the days of those fanatical and clandestine circles where promiscuity and assassination were combined with ecstasies and prayers, a luxurious and mystical pantheism increased continually. But the fatal destinies of this consuming and destroying dogma are recorded in one of the finest fables of Greek mythology. Certain pirates of Tyre surprised Bacchus in his sleep and carried him on board their vessel, thinking that the god of inspiration had so become their slave; but on a sudden, in the open sea, their ship was transfigured, the masts became vine-stocks, the rigging branches; satyrs were seen everywhere, dancing with lynxes and panthers; the crew were seized with frenzy, they felt themselves changed into goats and cast themselves into the sea. Bacchus subsequently landed in Bœotia and repaired to Thebes, the city of initiation, where he found that Pentheus had usurped the supreme power. The latter in his turn attempted to imprison the god, but the dungeon opened of itself and the captive came forth triumphant. Pentheus was enraged and the daughters of Cadmus, transformed into Bacchantes, tore him in pieces, thinking that they were immolating a young bull.[108]

Pantheism can never form a synthesis, but must be disintegrated by the sciences, which the daughters of Cadmus typify. After Orpheus, Cadmus, Œdipus and Amphiaraüs, the great fabulous symbols of magical priesthood in Greece are Tiresias and Calchas; but the first of these was an undiscerning or faithless hierophant. Meeting on a day with two interlaced serpents, he thought that they were fighting and separated them by a stroke of his wand. He did not understand the emblem of the caduceus, and hence sought to divide the forces of Nature, to separate science from faith, intelligence from love, man from woman. He mistook their union for warfare, wounded them in the act of separation, and so lost his own equilibrium. He became alternately male and female, but neither in a perfect way, for the consummation of marriage was forbidden him.[109] The mysteries of universal equilibrium and creative law are revealed fully herein. Generation is in fact a work of the human androgyne; in their division man and woman remain sterile, as religion without science and conversely, as mildness without force and force apart from mildness, justice in the absence of mercy and mercy divorced from justice. Harmony results from the analogy of things in opposition; they must be distinguished with a view to unite them and not separated, so that we may choose between them. It is said that man shifts incessantly from black to white in his opinions and ever deceives himself. It is so of necessity, for visible and real form is black and white; it manifests itself by an alliance of light and shadow which does not confuse them together. So are all contraries in Nature married, and he who would part them risks the punishment of Tiresias. Others say that he was smitten with blindness because he had surprised Minerva naked—that is to say, he had profaned the Mysteries. This is another allegory, but it is always the same thing symbolised.

Bearing no doubt this profanation in mind, Homer depicts the shade of Tiresias wandering in Cymmerian darkness and seeking amidst other hapless shades and larvæ to quench his thirst with blood when Ulysses consulted spirits, using a ceremonial which was magical and terrific after another manner than the contortions of our own mediums, or the harmless precipitated missives of our modern necromancers.

The priesthood is almost silent in Homer, for Calchas the diviner is neither a sovereign pontiff nor a great hierophant. He seems to be in the service of kings, with an eye to their possible wrath, and he dares not speak unwelcome truths to Agamemnon till he has besought the protection of Achilles. Thus he sows division between these chiefs and brings disasters on the army. All the narratives of Homer contain important and profound lessons, and he sought in the present case to impress upon Greece the need for divine ministry to be independent of temporal influences. The priestly caste should be responsible only to the supreme pontificate, and the high priest is incapacitated if one crown be wanting in his tiara. That he may be on equality with earthly sovereigns he must be himself a temporal king; he must be king in understanding and science, king also by his divine mission. Homer seems to tell us in his wisdom that failing such a priesthood there is something wanting to the equilibrium of empires.

Theoclymenes, another diviner, who appears in the Odyssey, fills almost the part of a parasite, purchasing a not too friendly hospitality from the suitors of Penelope by a useless warning and prudently withdrawing before the disturbance which he foresees.

There is a gulf between these good and bad fortune-tellers and the sibyls dwelling unseen in their sanctuaries, which are approached in fear and trembling. This notwithstanding, the successors of Circe yield only to daring; force or subtlety must be used to enter their retreat; they must be seized by the hair, threatened with the sword and dragged to the fatal tripod. Then, crimsoning and whitening by turn, shuddering and with hair on end, they utter disconnected words, escape in a fury, scribble on the leaves of trees detached sentences forming prophetic verses when collected, and casting these leaves to the wind, they shut themselves up in their refuge and ignore any further calls. The oracle thus produced had as many meanings as the modes of its possible combination varied. Had the leaves borne hieroglyphical signs instead of words the interpretations would have been multiplied further, while destiny could have been also consulted by their chance combination, a method followed subsequently in the divinations of geomancers by means of numbers and geometrical figures.[110] It is followed also at this day by adepts of cartomancy who make use of the great magical Tarot alphabets, for the most part, without being acquainted with their values. In such operations accident only chooses the signs on which the interpreter depends for inspiration, and in the absence of exceptional intuition and second sight, the phrases indicated by the combinations of sacred letters or the revelations of the combined figures prophesy according to chance. It is insufficient to combine letters; one must know how to read. Cartomancy in its proper understanding is a literal consultation of spirits, without necromancy or sacrifices: but it postulates a good medium; it is otherwise dangerous and we do not recommend it to any one. Is the memory of our bygone misfortunes not enough to embitter the sufferings of to-day, and must we then overload them with all the anxiety of the future, by partaking in advance of the catastrophes which it is impossible to avoid?

CHAPTER V
MYSTERIES OF VIRGINITY