Transcendental Magic

by Eliphas Levi

The Pantacle, being a complete and perfect synthesis expressed by a single sign, serves to focus all intellectual force into a glance, a recollection, a touch. It is, so to speak, a starting-point for the efficient projection of will. Nigromancers and goëtic magicians traced their infernal Pantacles on the skin of the victims they immolated. The sacrificial ceremonies, the manner of skinning the kid, then of salting, drying and bleaching the skin, are given in a number of Clavicles and Grimoires. Some Hebrew Kabalists fell into similar follies, forgetting the anathemas pronounced in the Bible against those who sacrifice on high places or in the caverns of the earth. All spilling of blood operated cere monially is abominable and impious, and since the death of Adonhiram the Society of true Adepts has a horror of blood—Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine.

  The initiatory symbolism of Pantacles adopted through out the East is the key of all ancient and modern mythologies. Apart from knowledge of the hieroglyphic alphabet, one would be lost among the obscurities of the Vedas, the Zend-Avesta and the Bible. The tree which brings forth good and evil, the source of the four rivers, one of which waters the land of gold—that is, of light—and another flows through Ethiopia, or the kingdom of darkness; the magnetic serpent who seduces the woman, and the woman who seduces the man, thus making known the law of attraction; subsequently the Cherub or Sphinx placed at the gate of the Edenic sanctuary, with the fiery sword of the guardians of the symbol;1 then regeneration by labour and propagation by sorrow, which is the law of initiations and ordeals; the division of Cain and Abel, which is the same symbol as the strife of Anteros and Eros; the ark borne upon the waters of the deluge like the coffer of Osiris; the black raven which does not return and the white dove which does, a new setting forth of the dogma of antagonism and balance—all these magnificent kabalistic allegories of Genesis, which, taken literally and accepted as actual histories, merit even more derision and contempt than Voltaire heaped upon them, become luminous for the initiate, who still hails with enthusiasm and love the perpetuity of true doctrine and the universality of initiation, identical in all sanctuaries of the world.

  The five books of Moses, the Prophecy of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse of St John are the three kabalistic keys of the whole Biblical edifice. The sphinxes of Ezekiel are identical with those of the sanctuary and the ark, being a fourfold reproduction of the Egyptian Tetrad; the wheels revolving in one another are the harmonious spheres of Pythagoras; the new temple, the plan of which is given according to exact kabalistic measures, is the type of the labours of primitive Masonry. St John in his Apocalypse reproduces the same images and the same numbers, and reconstructs the Edenic world ideally in the New Jerusalem; but at the source of the four rivers the Solar Lamb replaces the mysterious tree. Initiation by toil and blood has been accomplished, and there is no more temple because the light of truth is diffused universally and the world has become the Temple of Justice. This splendid final vision of the Holy Scriptures, this divine Utopia which the Church has referred with good reason for its realization to a better life, has been the pitfall of all ancient arch-heretics and of many modern idealists. The simultaneous emancipation and absolute equality of all men involve the arrest of progress and consequently of life; in a world where all are equal there could no longer be infants or the aged; birth and death could not be therefore admitted. This is sufficient to demonstrate that the New Jerusalem is no more of this world than the Primeval Paradise, wherein there was no knowledge of good or evil, of liberty, of generation or of death. The cycle of our religious symbolism begins and ends therefore in eternity.

  Dupuis and Volney lavished their great erudition to discover this relative identity of all symbols and arrived at the negation of every religion. We attain by the same path to an affirmation diametrically opposed; we recognize with admiration that there have never been any false religions in the civilized world; that the Divine Light, the splendour of the Supreme Reason of the Logos, of that Word which enlightens every man coming into the world, has been no more wanting to the children of Zoroaster than to the faithful sheep of St Peter; that the permanent, the one, the universal revelation, is written in visible Nature, explained in reason, and completed by the wise analogies of faith; that there is, finally, but one true religion, having one doctrine and one legitimate belief, even as there is but one God, one reason and one universe; that revelation is obscure for no one, since the whole world understands more or less both truth and justice, and since all that is possible can only exist analogically to all that is. BEING IS BEING, .

  The apparently bizarre figures presented by the Apoca lypse of St John are hieroglyphics, like those of all oriental mythologies, and can be comprised in a series of Pantacles. The Initiator clothed in white, standing between seven golden candlesticks and holding seven stars in His hand, represents the unique doctrine of Hermes and the universal analogies of the light. The Woman clothed with the Sun and crowned with twelve stars is the celestial Isis, or the Gnosis; the serpent of material life seeks to devour her child, but she takes unto herself the wings of the eagle and flies away into the desert—a protestation of the prophetic spirit against the materialism of official religion. The mighty angel with the face of a sun, a rainbow for nimbus and a cloud for vestment, having pillars of fire for his legs, and setting one foot upon the earth and another on the sea, is truly a kabalistic PANTHEA. His feet represent the equili brium of Briah, or the world of forms;1 his legs are the two Pillars of the Masonic Temple, JAKIN and BOAZ; his body, veiled by clouds, from which issues a hand holding a book, is the sphere of YETZIRAH, or initiatory ordeals; his solar head, crowned with the radiant septenary, is the world of ATZILUTH, or perfect revelation; and we can only express our astonishment that Hebrew Kabalists have not recognized and explained this symbolism, which so closely and inseparably connects the Highest Mysteries of Christianity with the secret but invariable doctrine of all the masters in Israel. The beast with seven heads, in the symbolism of St John, is the material and antagonistic negation of the luminous septenary; the Babylonian harlot corresponds after the same manner to the Woman clothed with the Sun; the four horsemen are analogous to the four allegorical living creatures; the seven angels with their seven trumpets, seven cups and seven swords characterize the absolute of the struggle of good against evil by speech, by religious association and by force. Thus are the seven seals of the occult book opened successively, and universal initiation is accomplished. The commentators who have sought anything else in this book of the transcendent Kabalah have lost their time and their trouble only to render themselves ridiculous. To discover Napoleon in the angel Apollyon, Luther in the star which falls from heaven, Voltaire or Rousseau in the grasshoppers armed like warriors, is merely high fantasy. It is the same with all the violence done to the names of celebrated persons so as to make them numerically equivalent to that fatal number 666, which we have already explained sufficiently. When we think that men like Bossuet and Newton amused themselves with such chimeras, we can understand that humanity is not so acute in its genius as might be supposed from the bearing of its vices.

  1 According to Les Mystères de la Kabbale, p. 15, the centre of Eden—signifying presumably the Tree of Life which stood in the midst of the Garden—is “the sole source of the sole principle which puts forth all forms of Nature.”

  1 In this and what follows the arrangement of the Tree of Life in Kabalism passes into utter confusion. Lévi must have intended to say that the feet of the symbolical angel represent MALKUTH, which is actually the world of external forms. BRIAH would then represent the heart. Compare the Tree of Life in its correspondence to the human figure, given by Athanasius Kircher in Oedipus Aegyptiacus.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE TRIPLE CHAIN

  THE Great Work in Practical Magic, after the education of the will and the personal creation of the Magus, is the formation of the magnetic chain, and this secret is truly that of priesthood and of royalty. To form the magnetic chain is to originate a current of ideas which produces faith and draws a large
number of wills in a given circle of active manifestation. A well-formed chain is like a whirlpool which sucks down and absorbs all. The chain may be established in three ways—by signs, by speech and by contact. The first is by inducing opinion to adopt some sign as the representation of a force. Thus, all Christians communicate by the Sign of the Cross, Masons by that of the square beneath the sun, the Magi by that of the Microcosm, made by extending the five fingers, etc. Once accepted and propagated, signs acquire force of themselves. In the early centuries of our era, the sight and making of the Sign of the Cross was enough to bring proselytes to Christianity. What is called the miraculous medal continues in our own days to effect a great number of conversions by the same magnetic law. The vision and illumination of the young Israelite, Alphonse de Ratisbonne, is the most remarkable fact of this kind. Imagination is creative not only within us but without us by means of our fluidic projections, and undoubtedly the phenomena of the Labarum of Constantine and the Cross of Migné should be attributed to no other cause.

  The magic chain of speech was typified among the ancients by chains of gold, which issued from the mouth of Hermes. Nothing equals the electricity of eloquence. Speech creates the highest intelligence in the most grossly constituted masses. Even those who are too remote for actual hearing understand by sympathy and are carried away with the crowd. Peter the Hermit convulsed Europe by his cry of “God wills it!” A single word of the Emperor electrified his army and made France invincible. Proudhon destroyed socialism by his celebrated paradox: “Property is robbery.” A current saying is sufficient on occasion to demolish a reigning power. Voltaire knew this well—he who shook the world by sarcasms. So, also, he who feared neither pope nor king, neither parliament nor Bastille, was afraid of a pun. We are on the verge of fulfilling the intentions of that man whose sayings we repeat.

  The third method of establishing the magic chain is by contact. Between persons who meet frequently, the head of the current soon manifests, and the strongest will is not slow to absorb the others. The direct and positive grasp of hand by hand completes the harmony of dispositions, and it is for this reason a mark of sympathy and intimacy. Children, who are guided instinctively by Nature, form the magic chain by playing at base or rounds: then gaiety spreads, then laughter rings. Circular tables are more favourable to convivial meetings than those of any other shape. The great circular dance of the Sabbath, which concluded the mysterious assemblies of adepts in the Middle Ages, was a magic chain: it joined all in the same intentions and the same acts. It was formed by standing back to back and linking hands, the face outside the circle, in imitation of those antique sacred dances, representations of which are still found on the sculptures of old temples. The electric furs of the lynx, panther and even domestic cat, were stitched to garments, in imitation of the ancient bacchanalia. Hence comes the tradition that the Sabbath miscreants each wore a cat hung from the girdle, and that they danced in this guise.

  The phenomena of tilting and talking tables have been fortuitous exhibitions of fluidic communication by means of the circular chain. Mystification combined with it afterwards, and even educated and intelligent persons were so infatuated with the novelty that they hoaxed themselves, and became the dupes of their own absurdity. The oracles of the tables were answers more or less voluntarily suggested or extracted by chance: they resembled the conversations which we hold or hear in dreams. Other and stranger phenomena may have been exteriorized products of imaginations at work in common. We, however, by no means deny the possible intervention of elementary spirits in these occurrences, as in those of divination by cards or by dreams; but we do not believe that it has been in any sense proven, and we are therefore in no way obliged to. admit it.

  One of the most extraordinary powers of human imagination is the fulfilment of the desires of the will, or even of its apprehensions and fears. We believe easily anything that we fear or desire, says a proverb; and it is true, because desire and fear impart to imagination a realizing power, the effects of which are incalculable. How is one attacked, for example, by a disease about which one feels nervous? We have cited already the opinions of Paracelsus on this point, and have established in our doctrinal part certain occult laws confirmed by experience; but in magnetic currents, and by mediation of the chain, the realizations are all the more strange because almost invariably unexpected, at least when the chain has not been formed by an intelligent, sympathetic and powerful leader. In fact, they are the result of purely blind and fortuitous combinations. The vulgar fear of superstitious guests when they find them selves thirteen at table, and their conviction that some misfortune threatens the youngest and weakest among them, is, like most superstitions, a remnant of magical science. The duodenary, being a complete and cyclic number in the universal analogies of Nature, invariably attracts and absorbs the thirteenth, which is regarded as a sinister and superfluous number. If the grindstone of a mill be represented by the number twelve, then thirteen is that of the grain which is to be ground. On kindred considerations, the ancients established the distinctions between lucky and unlucky numbers, whence came the observance of days of good or evil augury. It is over such matters above all that imagination is creative, so that both days and numbers seldom fail to be propitious or otherwise to those who believe in their influence. Consequently, Christianity was right in proscribing the divinatory sciences, for in thus diminishing the number of blind chances it gave further scope and empire to liberty.

  Printing is an admirable instrument for the formation of the magic chain by the extension of speech. No book is lost; as a fact, writings go invariably precisely where they should go, and the aspirations of thought attract speech. We have proved this a hundred times in the course of our magical initiation; the rarest books have offered themselves without seeking as soon as they became indispensable. Thus have we recovered intact that universal science which so many learned persons have regarded as engulfed by a number of successive cataclysms; thus have we entered the great magical chain which began with Hermes or Enoch and will end only with the world. Thus have we been able to evoke and come face to face with the spirits of Apollonius, Plotinus, Synesius, Paracelsus, Cardanus, Cornelius Agrippa and others less or more known, but too religiously celebrated to make it possible for them to be named lightly. We con tinue their great work, which others will take up after us. But unto whom shall it be given to complete it?

  CHAPTER XII

  THE GREAT WORK

  To be ever rich, to be always young and to die never: such, from all time, has been the dream of alchemists. To change lead, mercury, and the other metals into gold, to possess the Universal Medicine and the Elixir of Life—such is the problem which must be solved to accomplish this desire and to realize this dream. Like all magical mysteries, the secrets of the Great Work have a triple meaning: they are religious, philosophical and natural. Philosophical gold in religion is the Absolute and Supreme Reason; in philosophy, it is truth; in visible nature, it is the sun: in the subterranean and mineral world, it is the purest and most perfect gold. Hence the search after the Great Work is called the Search for the Absolute, and this work itself is termed the operation of the sun.1 All masters of science recognize that it is impossible to achieve material results until we have found the plenary analogies of the Universal Medicine and the Philosophical Stone in the two superior degrees. Then, it is affirmed, is the labour simple, light and inexpensive: other wise, it consumes to no purpose the life and fortune of the bellows-blower.

  The Universal Medicine is, for the soul, supreme reason and absolute justice; for the mind, it is mathematical and practical truth; for the body, it is the quintessence, which is a combination of gold and light. In the superior world, the first matter of the Great Work is enthusiasm and activity; in the intermediate world, it is intelligence and industry; in the inferior world, it is labour; in science it is Sulphur, Mercury and Salt, which, volatilized and fixed alternately, compose the AZOTH of the sages. Sulphur corresponds to the elementary form of fire, M
ercury to air and water, Salt to earth. All masters in alchemy who have written con cerning the Great Work have employed symbolical and figurative expressions, and have been right in so doing, not only to deter the profane from operations which would be dangerous for them, but to make themselves intelligible to adepts by revealing the entire world of analogies which is ruled by the one and sovereign dogma of Hermes. For such, gold and silver are the Sun and Moon, or the King and Queen; Sulphur is the Flying Eagle; Mercury is the winged and bearded Hermaphrodite, throned upon a cube and crowned with flames; matter or Salt is the Winged Dragon; metals in the molten state are Lions of various colours; finally, the whole work is symbolized by the Pelican and Phoenix. Hermetic art is, therefore, at one and the same time, a religion, a philosophy and a natural science. Considered as religion, it is that of the ancient Magi and the initiates of all the ages; as a philosophy, its principles may be found in the school of Alexandria and in the theories of Pythagoras; as science, its principles must be sought from Paracelsus, Nicholas Flamel and Raymund Lully. The science is true only for those who accept and understand the philosophy and religion, while its processes are successful only for the adept who has attained sovereign volition, and has thus become monarch of the elementary world, for the Great Agent of the solar work is that force described in the Hermetic Symbol of the “Emerald Table”: it is universal magical power; it is the igneous spiritual motor; it is the Od of the Hebrews and the Astral Light, according to the expression which we have adopted in this work.1 There is the secret, living and philosophical fire, of which all Hermetic philosophers speak only under the most mys terious reservations; there is the universal sperm, the secret of which they guarded, representing it only under the emblem of the caduceus of Hermes. Here then is the great Hermetic Arcanum, and we reveal it for the first time clearly and devoid of mystical figures: that which the adepts term dead substances are bodies as found in Nature; living substances are those which have been assimilated and magnetized by the science and will of the operator. Therefore the Great Work is something more than a chemical operation: it is an actual creation of the human Word initiated into the power of the Word of God Himself.