Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 312destiny, still less to impose bonds upon the lawful use of liberty. As a supplement or appendix to this chapter, we will add a few words about mandragores and androids, which several writers on magic confound with the waxen images serving the purposes of bewitchment. The natural mandragore is a filamentous root which, more or less, presents as a whole either the figure of a man, or that of the virile members.
It is slightly narcotic, and an aphrodisiacal virtue was ascribed to it by the ancients, who represented it as being sought by Thessalian sorcerers for the composition of philtres. Is this root the umbilical vestige of our terrestrial origin ? We dare not seriously affirm it, but all the same it is certain that man came out of the slime of the earth, and his first appearance must have been in the form of a rough sketch.
The analogies of nature make this notion necessarily admissible, at least as a possibility. The first men were, in this case, a family of gigantic, sensitive mandragores, animated by the sun, who rooted themselves up from the earth ; this assumption not only does not exclude, but, on the contrary, positively supposes, creative will and the providential co-operation of a first cause, which we have REASON to call GOD.
Some alchemists, impressed by this idea, speculated on the culture of the mandragore, and experimented in the artificial reproduction of a soil sufficiently fruitful and a sun sufficiently active to humanise the said root, and thus create men without the concurrence of the female.
Others, who regarded humanity as the synthesis of animals, despaired about vitalising the mandragore, but they crossed monstrous pairs and projected human seed into animal earth, only for the production of shameful crimes and barren deformities. The third method of making the android was by galvanic machinery.
One of these almost intelligent automata was attributed to Albertus Magnus, and it is said that St Thomas destroyed it with one blow from a stick because he was perplexed by its answers. This story is an allegory ; the p. 313android was primitive scholasticism, which was broken by the Summa of St Thomas, the daring innovator who first substituted the absolute law of reason for arbitrary divinity, by formulating that axiom which we cannot repeat too often, since it comes from such a master : " A thing is not just because God wills it, but God wills it because it is just." The real and serious android of the ancients was a secret which they kept hidden from all eyes, and Mesmer was the first who dared to divulge it ; it was the extension of the will of the magus into another body, organised and served by an elementary spirit ; in more modern and intelligible terms, it was a magnetic subject.
CHAPTEK XVII THE WRITING OF THE STARS WE have finished with infernus, and we breathe the fresh air freely as we return to daylight after traversing the crypts of black magic. Get thee behind us, Satan ! We renounce thee, with all thy pomps and works, and still more with all thy deformities, thy meanness, thy nothingness, thy deception ! The Great Initiator beheld thee fall from heaven like a thunderbolt. The Christian legend changes thee, making thee set thy dragon's head mildly beneath the foot of the mother of God. Thou art for us the image of unintelligence and mystery; thou art unreason and blind fanaticism ; thou art the inquisition and its hell ; thou art the god of Torquemada and Alexander VI. ; thou hast become the sport of children, and thy final place is at the side of Polichinello ; henceforth thou art only a grotesque ^character in our foreign theatres, and a means of instruction in a few so-called religious markets.
p. 314After the sixteenth key of the Tarot, which represents the downfall of Satan's temple, we find on the seventeenth leaf a magnificent and gracious emblem.
A naked woman, a young and immortal maid, pours out upon the earth the juice of universal life from two ewers, one of gold and one of silver ; hard by there is a flowering shrub, on which rests the butterfly of Psyche ; above her shines an eight-pointed star with seven other stars around it. " I believe in eternal life ! " Such is the final article of the Christian symbol, and this alone is a profession of faith.
The ancients, when they compared the calm and peaceful immensity of heaven, thronged with innumerable lights, to the tumults and darkness of this world, believed themselves to have discovered in that beautiful book, written in letters of gold, the final utterance of the enigma of destinies ; in imagination they drew lines of correspondence between these shining points of the divine writing, and it is said that the first constellations marked out by the shepherds of Chaldea were also the first letters of the kabbalistic alphabet.
These characters, expressed first of all by means of lines, then enclosed in hieroglyphic figures, would, according to M. Moreau de Dammartin, author of a very curious treatise on alphabetic characters, have determined the ancient magi in the choice of the Tarot figures, which are taken by this man of learning, as by ourselves, for an essentially hieratic and primitive book.
Thus, in his opinion, the Chinese tseu, the Hebrew aleph, and the Greek alpha, expressed hieroglyphically by the figure of the juggler, would be borrowed from the constellation of the crane, in the vicinity of the celestial fish, a sign of the eastern hemisphere.
The Chinese tcheou, the Hebrew betk, and the Latin B, corresponding to Pope Joan or Juno, were formed after the head of the Earn ; the Chinese ynt the Hebrew ghimel, and the Latin G, represented by the Empress, would be derived from the constellation of the Great Bear, &c. The kabbalist Gaffarel, whom we have cited more than once, erected a planisphere, in which all the constellations form Hebrew letters ; but we confess that
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