Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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16 THE DOCTEINE OF TRANSCENDENT MAGIC of Homer replaced speedily in the popular memory the simple and abstract truths of primeval revelation. Humanity clung to the form and allowed the idea to be forgotten ; signs lost power in their multiplication ; magic also at this period became corrupted, and degenerated with the sorcerers of Thessaly into the most profane enchantments.
Thejjrime of (Edipus brought forth its deadly fruits, and the science of good and evil erected evil into a sacrilegious divinity. Men, weary of the light, took refuge in the shadow of bodily substance ; the dream of the void, which is filled by God, soon appeared to be greater than God himself in their eyes, and thus hell was created.
When, in the course of this work, we make use of the consecrated terms God, Heaven, and Hell, let it be thoroughly understood, once for all, that our meaning is as far removed from that which the profane attach to them as initiation is distant from vulgar thought. God, for us, is the AZOT of the sages, the efficient and final principle of the great work.
Returning to the fable of (Edipus, the crime of the King of Thebes was that he failed to understand the sphinx, that he destroyed the scourge of Thebes without being pure enough to complete the expiation in the name of his people.
The plague, in consequence, avenged speedily the death of the monster, and the King of Thebes, forced to abdicate, sacrificed himself to the terrible manes of the sphinx, more alive and voracious than ever when it had passed from the domain of form into that of idea. (Edipus divined what was man and he put out his own eyes because he did not see what was God.
He divulged half of the great arcanum, and, to save his people, it was necessary for him to bear the remaining half of the terrible secret into exile and the tomb. After the colossal fable of (Edipus we find the gracious poem of Psyche, which was certainly not invented by Apuleius. The great magical arcanum reappears here under the figure of a mysterious union between a god and a weak mortal abandoned alone and naked on a rock. Psyche
p. 17 must remain in ignorance of the secret of her ideal royalty, and if she behold her husband she must lose him. Here Apuleius commentates and interprets Moses, but did not the Elohim of Israel and the gods of Apuleius both issue from the sanctuaries of Memphis and Thebes ? Psyche is the sister of Eve, or, rather, is Eve spiritualised. Both desire to know and lose innocence for the honour of the ordeal.
Both deserve to go down into hell, one to bring back the antique box of Pandora, the other to find and to crush the head of the old serpent, who is the symbol of time and of evil. Both are guilty of the crime which must be expiated by the Prometheus of ancient days and the Lucifer of the Christian legend, the one delivered, the other overcome, by Hercules and by the Saviour.
The great magical secret is, therefore, the lamp and dagger of Psyche, the apple of Eve, the sacred fire of Prometheus, the burning sceptre of Lucifer, but it is also the holy cross of the Eedeemer. To be acquainted with it sufficiently to abuse or divulge it is to deserve all sufferings ; to know it as one should know it, namely, to make use of and conceal it, is to be master of the absolute.
Everything is contained in a single word, which consists of four letters ; it is the Tetragram of the Hebrews, the AzpT of the alchemists, the Thot of the Bohemians, or the Taro of the Kabbalists.
This word, expressed after so many manners, means God for the profane, man for the philosophers, and imparts to the adepts the final word of human sciences and the key of divine power ; but he only can use it who understands the necessity of never revealing it.
Had (Edipus, instead of killing the sphinx, overcome it, harnessed it to his chariot, and thus entered Thebes, he would have been king without incest, without misfortunes, and without exile. Had Psyche, by meekness and affection, persuaded Love to reveal himself, she would never have lost Love.
Now, Love is one of the mythological images of the great secret and the great agent, because it at once expresses an action and a passion, a void and a plenitude, a shaft and B p. 18a wound. The initiates will understand me, and, on account of the profane, I must not speak more clearly. After the marvellous Golden Ass of Apuleius, we find no more magical epics.
Science, conquered in Alexandria by the fanaticism of the murderers of Hypatia, became Christian, or, rather, concealed itself under Christian veils with Ammonius, Synesius, and the pseudonymous author of the books of Dionysius the Areopagite. In such times it was needful to excuse miracles by the garb of superstition and science by an unintelligible language.
Hieroglyphic writing was revived ; pantacles and characters were invented to summarise an entire doctrine by a sign, a whole sequence of tendencies and revelations in a word. What was the end of the aspirants to knowledge ?
They sought the secret of the great work, or the philosophical stone, or the perpetual motion, or the quadrature of the circle, or the universal medicine — formulas which often saved them from persecution and hatred by causing them to be taxed with madness, and all signifying one of the phases of the great magical secret, as we shall shew later on.
This absence of epics continues till our Romance of the Rose ; but the rose-symbol, which expresses also the mysterious and magical sense of Dante's poem, is borrowed from the transcendent Kabbalah, and it is time that we should have recourse to this immense and concealed source of universal philosophy. The Bible, with all its allegories, gives expression to the religious knowledge of the Hebrews in only an incomplete and veiled manner.
The book which we have mentioned, the hieratic characters of which we shall explain subsequently, that book which William Postel names the Genesis of Enoch, certainly existed before Moses and the prophets, whose doctrine, fundamentally identical with that of the ancient Egyptians, had also its exotericism and its veils.
When Moses spoke to the people, says the sacred book allegorically, he placed a veil over his face, and he removed it when addressing God; this accounts for the alleged Biblical absurdities which so exercised the satirical powers
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