Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 13tempests, cures the diseased by his touch, and raises the dead ! " At the same time, there are certain things which have been sealed by Solomon with his triple seal. It is enough that the initiates know, and as for others, whether they deride, doubt, or believe, whether they threaten or fear, what matters it to science or to us ?
" Such are actually the issues of occult philosophy, and we are in a position to withstand an accusation of insanity or a suspicion of imposture when we affirm that all these privileges are real. To demonstrate this is the sole end of our work on occult philosophy.
The philosophical stone, the universal medicine, the transmutation of metals, the quadrature of the circle, and the secret of perpetual motion, are thus neither mystifications of science nor dreams of madness.
They are terms which must be understood in their veritable sense ; they are expressions of the different applications of one same secret, the several characteristics of one same operation, which is defined in a more comprehensive manner under the name of the great work.
Furthermore, there exists in nature a force which is immeasurably more powerful than steam, and by means of which a single man, who knows how to adapt and direct it, might upset and alter the face of the world. This force was known to the ancients ; it consists in an universal agent having equilibrium for its supreme law, while its direction is concerned immediately with the great arcanum of transcendent magic.
By the direction of this agent it is possible to change the very order of the seasons ; to produce at night the phenomena of day ; to correspond instantaneously between one extremity of the earth and the other ; to see, like Apollonius, what is taking place on the other side of the world ; to heal or injure at a distance ; to give speech an universal success and reverberation.
This agent, which barely manifests under the uncertain methods of Mesmer's followers, is precisely that which the adepts of the middle ages denominated the first matter of the great work. The
p. 14Gnostics represented it as the fiery body of the Holy Spirit ; it was the object of adoration in the secret rites of the Sabbath and the Temple, under the hieroglyphic figure of Baphomet or the Androgyne of Mendes. All this will be proved.
Such are the secrets of occult philosophy, such is magic in history ; let us now glance at it as it appears in its books and its achievements, in its initiations and its rites. The key of all magical allegories is found in the tablets we have already mentioned, and these tablets we regard as the work of Hermes.
About this book, which may be called the keystone of the whole edifice of occult science, are grouped innumerable legends which are either its partial translation or its commentary renewed endlessly under a thousand different forms. Sometimes these ingenious fables combine harmoniously into a great epic which characterises an epoch, though how or why is not clear to the uninitiated.
Thus, the fabulous history of the Golden Fleece both resumes and veils the Hermetic and magical doctrines of Orpheus, and if we recur only to the mysterious poetry of Greece, it is because the sanctuaries of Egypt and India to some extent dismay us by their resources, and leave our choice embarrassed in the midst of such abundant wealth.
We are eager, moreover, to reach the Thebaid at once, that dread synthesis of all doctrine, past, present, and future, that, so to speak, infinite fable, which comprehends, like the Deity of Orpheus, the two extremities of the cycle of human life. Extraordinary fact !
The seven gates of Thebes, attacked and defended by seven chiefs who have sworn upon the blood of victims, possess the same significance as the seven seals of the sacred book interpreted by seven genii, and assailed by a monster with seven heads, after being opened by a living yet immolated lamb, in the allegorical work of St John.
The mysterious origin of (Edipus, found suspended from the tree of Cytheron like a bleeding fruit, recalls the symbols of Moses and the narratives of Genesis. He makes war upon his father, whom he slays without knowing — alarming prophecy of p. 15the blind emancipation of reason without science ; he then meets with the sphinx — the sphinx, that symbol of symbols, the eternal enigma of the vulgar, the granite pedestal of the science of the sages, the voracious and silent monster whose invariable form expresses the one dogma of the great universal mystery. How is the tetrad changed into the duad and explained by the triad ?
In more common but more emblematic terms, what is that animal which in the morning has four feet, two at noon, and three in the evening ? Philosophically speaking, how does the doctrine of elementary forces produce the dualism of Zoroaster, while it is summed by the triad of Pythagoras and Plato ? What is the ultimate reason of allegories and numbers, the final message of all symbolisms ?
QEdipus replies with a simple and terrible word which destroys the sphinx and makes the diviner King of Thebes ; the answer to the enigma is Man ! . . . Unfortunate !
He has seen too much, and yet with insufficient clearness ; he must presently expiate his calamitous and imperfect clairvoyance by a voluntary blindness, and then vanish in the midst of a storm, like all civilisations which may at any time divine the answer to the riddle of the sphinx without grasping its whole import and mystery. Everything is symbolical and transcendental in this titanic epic of human destinies.
The two hostile brethren express the second part of the grand mystery divinely completed by the sacrifice of Antigone; then comes the last war; the brethren slay one another, Capaneus is destroyed by the lightning which he defies, Amphiaraiis is swallowed by the earth, and all these are so many allegories which, by their truth and their grandeur, astonish those who can penetrate their triple hieratic sense. ^Eschylus, annotated by Ballanche, gives only a weak notion concerning them, whatever the primeval sublimities of the Greek poet or the beauty of the French critic.
The secret book of antique initiation was not unknown to Homer, who outlines its plan and chief figures on the shield of Achilles, with minute precision. But the gracious fictions
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