by Eliphas Levi
Now, created spirits, being called to emancipation by trial, are placed from their birth between these four forces, two positive and two negative, and have it in their power to affirm or deny good, to choose life or death. To discover the fixed point, that is, the moral centre of the Cross, is the first problem which is given them to resolve; their initial conquest must be that of their own liberty. They begin by being drawn, some to the North, others to the South; some to the right, others to the left; and in so far as they are not free, they cannot have the use of reason, nor can they take flesh otherwise than in animal forms. These unemancipated spirits, slaves of the four elements, are those which the Kabalists call elementary daimons, and they people the elements which correspond to their state of servitude. Sylphs, undines, gnomes and salamanders really exist therefore, some wandering and seeking incarnation, others incarnate and living on this earth. These are vicious and imperfect men.1 We shall return to this subject in the fifteenth chapter, which'treats of enchantments and demons.
That is also an occult tradition by which the ancients were led to admit the existence of four ages in the world, only it was not made known to the vulgar that these ages are successive and are renewed, like the four seasons of the year. Thus, the golden age has passed, and it is yet to come. This, however, belongs to the spirit of prophecy, and we shall speak of it in the ninth chapter, which is concerned with the initiate and the seer.2 If we now add the idea of unity to the tetrad, we shall have, together and separately, the conceptions of the divine synthesis and analysis, the god of the initiates and that of the profane. Here the doctrine becomes more popular, as it passes from the domain of the abstract: the grand hierophant intervenes.
1 “The quaternary is represented by the four rivers of Eden, issuing from a single source and watering the whole Paradise in the form of the Cross. The first is Pison, a name which signifies light, and it compasses the land of Havilah or Benediction, depositing the gold of truth thereon. Opposite thereto is Euphrates, river of captivity and error. The third is Gihon, encompassing Ethiopia, and opposite this last is Tigris, where young Tobias found the wondrous fish, symbol of occult science and the Universal Medicine. The two last rivers represent life and death, as the two first figure truth and falsehood. . . . Paradise, or the Garden of Eden, is a pentacle or synthetic sign of all primeval science.”—Correspondence with Baron Spédalieri, No. 67. Compare Genesis ii, 11-14. According to La Clef des Grands Mystères, p. 21, the quaternary or tetrad is “the number of force”.
2 It is quite certain that the HE primal of the Sacred Name does not correspond to the Word, nor the HE final to Its creation. In Zoharic theosophy the VAU is the Divine Son, and may be said therefore to correspond by analogy to the LOGOS of Greek philosophy. He is indeed called the Eternal Word of the Father.
1 “The Universal Agent is the Universal Light or Ether, with its four astral and magnetic forces.”—Fables et Symboles, p. 366.
2 “All has been created by the light; form is preserved therein and reproduced therefrom. The vibrations of light are the principle of universal movement. It is by light that the suns are bound up one with another and intermingle their rays like electrical chains. Men and things are magnetized like the suns by light, and by the electro-magnetic chains of sympathies and affinities they intercommunicate from end to end of the world, embrace or smite, heal or wound in obedience to a law which is not less prodigious and secret because it is also natural. Herein is the secret of Magic—that science and first of sciences which comes down from the Magi.”—La Clef ties Grands Mystères, pp. 213, 214.
1 “All magic is in a word and this word—pronounced kabalistically—is stronger than all powers of heaven, earth and hell. Nature is commanded with the word JOD, HE, VAU, HE; ADONAI conquers kingdoms; and the occult forces which constitute the empire of Hermes are obedient to him who can utter the Incommunicable Name AGLA according to science.”—La Clef des Grands Mystères, pp. 260, 261.
1 This notion is comparable to Éliphas Lévi's recipe for squaring the circle He has forgotten that his watch would wear out, when there would be an end to its perpetual motion.
1 “Antichrist is the shadow, the offset, the proof of Christ. . . . He is the pride of domination and despotism of thought. . . . He is that which divides instead of uniting men; he is the spirit of contention . . . the priest who curses instead of blessing, alienates instead of drawing, scandalizes instead of edifying, damns instead of saving.”—La Clef des Grands Mystères, pp. 39, 40.
1 See, however, La Clef des Grands Mystères, p. 230, which unfolds the following view, claiming the authority of Paracelsus: “The human soul is material; the divine mens is offered thereunto, that it may be immortalized, may live spiritually and individually; but in respect of natural substance it is fluidic and collective. Man has two lives therefore, individual or reasonable and common or instinctive.” Lévi pretends that Paracelsus reserved this doctrine solely for initiates and that he on his own part had come to understand it by deciphering the kabalistic characters and decoding the allegories made use of by the sage of Hohenheim. All this, however, is reverie and no one forgot his alleged discovery quicker than Lévi himself, for in the Epilogue to La Clef he speaks of God having created his, Lévi's, soul immortal. We may contrast, however, Le Livre des Sages, p. 77: “The Talmud states that the souls of those who have not believed in immortality will not be immortal. It is faith only which gives personal immortality; science and reason affirm only collective immortality.” . . . But after even this there remained something to say, and in Les Portes de L'Avenir we find the following speculations: “For the souls of all living beings there is a collective immortality and for the souls of the flower of mankind there is the possibility of personal immortality, to attain which death must be overcome and destroyed. The small number of the elect is explained hereby: it is the Great Secret of Jesus Christ.”—Loc. cit., xix, xx
1 This undertaking is not fulfilled in the place referred to.
2 The four living creatures of Ezekiel's vision are referred to elsewhere as follows: (1) The Eagle to air, intelligence, spirit and soul; (2) The man to water, knowledge, life and light; (3) The Lion to fire, force, action and movement; (4) The Bull to earth, toil, resistance and form. “The human face was in the centre, because man is the synthesis of forms and the intelligent centre of creation. The four creatures corresponded to the four letters JOD, HE, VAU, HE, to the four cardinal points, the four elements and to the mineral, vegetable, animal and human kingdoms.”—Les Mystères de la Kabbale, pp. 23 et seq.
1 The Sephirotic enumeration which follows is not that of the Tree of Life in Kabalism, as it reverses the order in the worlds of BRIAH and YETZIRAH. Moreover, CHESED, GEBURAH and TIPHERETH are not the moral world in the mind of the Secret Tradition, but are called that of CREATION. NETSAH, HOD and JESOD belong to the scheme of Formation and are certainly not physical. MALKUTH IS THE manifest world.
2 “There are four major prophets, four evangelists, four great doctors in the Greek and four in the Latin Church, four angles bound to the four corners of the world. . . . Revelation is manifested by four laws—those of Nature, Fear, Grace and Intelligence. Spiritual progress passes through four stages—penitence, faith, hope and charity. The moral virtues are also four in number—Justice, Strength, Temperance and Prudence. All these forms of the tetrad are in correspondence one with another and serve as commentary on the hieroglyphical revelation contained in the grand and mysterious on the hieroglyphical revelation contained in the grand and mysterious Schema”—i, e. JOD, HE, VAU, HE,—Correspondence with Baron Spédalieri, No. 54.
1 It has just been remarked that these unemancipated spirits, these slaves of the elements, these beings devoid of free will can be incarnated only as animals.
2 There is no recurrence to the subject of the golden age at the place specified.
V E1
THE PENTAGRAM
GEBURAH ECCE
HEREUNTO we have exposed the magical dogma in its
more arid and abstruse phases; now the enchantments begin; now we can proclaim wonders and reveal most secret things. The Pentagram signifies the domination of the mind over the elements, and the demons of air, the spirits of fire, the phantoms of water and ghosts of earth are enchained by this sign. Equipped therewith, and suitably disposed, you may behold the infinite through the medium of that faculty which is like the soul's eye, and you will be ministered unto by legions of angels and hosts of fiends.
But here, in the first place, let us establish certain principles. There is no invisible world; there are, however, many degrees of perfection in organs. The body is the coarse and, as it were, the perishable cortex of the soul. The soul can perceive of itself, and independently of the mediation of physical organs—by means of its sensibility and its DIAPHANE —the things, both spiritual and corporeal, which are existent in the universe. Spiritual and corporeal are simply terms which express the degrees of tenuity or density in substance. What is called the imagination within us is only the soul's inherent faculty of assimilating the images and reflections contained in the living light, being the Great Magnetic Agent.2 Such images and reflections are revelations when science intervenes to reveal us their body or light. The man of genius differs from the dreamer and the fool in this only, that his creations are analogous to truth, while those of the fool and the dreamer are lost reflections and bewrayed images. Hence, for the wise man, to imagine is to see, as, for the magician, to speak is to create. It follows that, by means of the imagination, demons and spirits can be beheld really and in truth; but the imagination of the adept is diaphanous, whilst that of the crowd is opaque; the light of truth traverses the one as ordinary light passes through clear glass, and is refracted by the other, as when ordinary light impinges upon a vitreous block, full of scoriae and foreign matter. That which most contributes to the errors of the vulgar is the reflection of depraved imaginations one in the other. But in virtue of positive science, the seer knows that what he imagines is true, and the event invariably confirms his vision.1 We shall state in the Ritual after what manner this lucidity can be acquired.
It is by means of this light that static visionaries place themselves in communication with all worlds, as so frequently occurred to Swedenborg, who notwithstanding was imperfectly lucid, seeing that he did not distinguish reflections from rays, and often intermingled chimerical fancies with his most admirable dreams. We say dreams, because dream is the consequence of a natural and periodical ecstasy which we term sleep; to be in ecstasy is to sleep; magnetic somnambulism is a production and direction of ecstasy.1 The errors which occur therein are occasioned by reflections from the DIAPHANE of waking persons, and, above all, of the magnetizer. Dream is vision produced by the refraction of a ray of truth. Chimerical fantasy is hallucination occasioned by a reflection. The temptation of St Anthony, with its nightmares and its monsters, represents the confusion of reflections with direct rays. So long as the soul struggles it is reasonable; when it yields to this species of invading intoxication it becomes mad. To disentangle the direct ray, and separate it from the reflection—such is the work of the initiate. Here let us state distinctly that this work is being performed continually in the world by some of the flower of mankind; that there is hence a permanent revelation by intuition; and that there is no insuperable barrier which separates souls, because there are no sudden interruptions and no high walls in Nature by which minds can be divided from one another. All is transition and blending, wherefore, assuming the perfectibility, if not infinite at least indefinite, of human faculties, it will be understood that every person can attain to see all, and therefore to know all. There is no void in Nature: all is peopled. There is no true death in Nature: all is alive. “Seest thou that star?” asked Napoleon of Cardinal Fesch. “No, Sire.” “I see it,” said the Emperor and he most certainly did. When great men are accused of superstition, it is because they behold what remains unseen by the crowd. Men of genius differ from simple seers by their faculty of communicating sensibly to others that which they themselves perceive, and of making themselves believed by the force of enthusiasm and sympathy. Such persons are the media of the Divine Word.
Let us now specify the manner in which visions operate. All forms correspond to ideas, and there is no idea which has not its proper and peculiar form. The primordial light, which is the vehicle of all ideas, is the mother of all forms, and transmits them from emanation to emanation, merely diminished or modified according to the density of the media. Secondary forms are reflections which return to the font of the emanated light. The forms of objects, being a modification of light, remain in the light where the reflection consigns them. Hence the Astral Light, or terrestrial fluid, which we call the Great Magnetic Agent, is saturated with all kinds of images or reflections. Now, our soul can evoke these, and subject them to its DIAPHANE, as the Kabalists term it.1 Such images are always present before us, and are effaced only by the more powerful impressions of reality during waking hours, or by preoccupation of the mind, which makes our imagination inattentive to the fluidic panorama of the Astral Light. When we sleep, this spectacle presents itself spontaneously before us, and in this way dreams are produced—dreams vague and incoherent if some governing will do not remain active during the sleep, giving, even unconsciously to our intelligence, a direction to the dream, which then transforms into vision. Animal Magnetism is nothing but an artificial sleep produced by the voluntary or enforced union of two wills, one of which is awake while the other slumbers—that is, one of which directs the other in the choice of reflections for the transformation of dreams into visions and the attainment of truth by means of images. Thus, somnambulists do not actually travel to the place where they are sent by the magnetizer; they evoke its images in the Astral Light and can behold nothing which does not exist in that light. The Astral Light has a direct action on the nerves, which are its conductors in the animal economy, transmitting it to the brain. It follows that, in a state of somnambulism, it is possible to see by means of the nerves, without being dependent on radiant light, the astral fluid being a latent light, in the same way that physics recognize the existence of a latent caloric.
Magnetism between two persons is certainly a wonderful discovery, but the magnetizing of a person by himself, awakening his own lucidity and directing it himself at will, is the perfection of magical art. The secret of this Great Work does not remain for discovery; it has been known and practised by a great number of initiates, above all by the celebrated Apollonius of Tyana, who has left a theory concerning it, as we shall see in the “Ritual”. The secret of magnetic lucidity and the direction of the phenomena of magnetism depend on two things—agreement of minds and complete union of wills, in a direction which is possible and determined by science. This is for the operation of magnetism between two or more persons. Solitary magnetism requires preparations of which we have spoken in our initial chapter, when enumerating and establishing in all their difficulty the essential qualities of a veritable adept. In the following chapters we shall elucidate further this important and fundamental point.
The empire of will over the Astral Light, which is the physical soul of the four elements, is represented in Magic by the Pentagram, placed at the head of this chapter. The elementary spirits are subservient to this sign when employed with understanding, and by placing it in the circle or on the table of evocations, they can be rendered tractable, which is magically called their imprisonment. Let us explain this marvel briefly. All created beings communicate with one another by signs, and all adhere to a certain number of truths expressed by determinate forms. The perfection of forms increases in proportion to the emancipation of spirits, and those that are not overweighted by the chains of matter, recognize by intuition out of hand whether a sign is the expression of a real power or of a precipitate will. The intelligence of the wise man therefore gives value to his pantacle, as science gives weight to his will, and spirits comprehend this power immediately. Thus, by means of the Pentagram, spirits can be forced
to appear in vision, whether in the waking or sleeping state, BY THEMSELVES LEADING BEFORE OUR DIAPHANE THEIR REFLECTION, WHICH EXISTS IN THE ASTRAL LIGHT, IF THEY HAVE LIVED, OR A REFLECTION ANALOGOUS TO THEIR SPIRITUAL LOGOS IF THEY HAVE NOT LIVED ON EARTH. This explains all visions, and accounts for the dead invariably appearing to seers, either such as they were upon earth, or such as they are in the grave, never as they subsist in a condition which escapes the perceptions of our actual organism.
Pregnant women are influenced more than others by the Astral Light, which concurs in the formation of the child, and offers them incessant reminiscences of the forms that abound therein. This explains how it is that women of the highest virtue deceive the malignity of observers by equivocal resemblances. On the fruit of their marriage they impress frequently an image which has struck them in dream, and it is thus that the same physiognomies are perpetuated from generation to generation. The kabalistic usage of the Pentagram can determine therefore the appearance of unborn children, and an initiated woman might endow her son with the characteristics of Nero or Achilles, with those of Louis XIV or Napoleon. We shall indicate the method in our “Ritual”.1
The Pentagram is called in Kabalah the Sign of the Microcosm, that sign so exalted by Goethe in the beautiful monologue of Faust:
