Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 357any one sought him to discover a secret concerning his wife, he interrogated the dove ; concerning his children, the young boy ; concerning wealth, the eagle ; concerning strength and power, the lion ; concerning fecundity, the cherub or bull; concerning length of days, the dragon. This revelation of Philo, though depreciated by Gaffarel, is for us of the highest importance.
Here, in fact, is our key of the tetrad, and here also the images of the four symbolical animals found in the twenty-first key of the Tarot ; that is, at the third septenary, thus repeating and summarising all the symbolism expressed by the three septenaries superposed ; next, the antagonism of colours expressed by the dove and the dragon ; the circle or ROTA, formed by the dragon or serpent to typify length of days ; finally, the kabbalistic divination of the entire Tarot, as practised in later days by the Egyptian Bohemians, whose secrets were divined and recovered imperfectly by Etteilla.
We see in the Bible that the high priests consulted the Lord on the golden table of the holy ark, between the cherubs, or bull-headed and eagle-winged sphinx ; that they consulted by the help of the Theraphim, Urim, and Thummi, and by the Ephod. Now, it is known that the Ephod was a magical square of twelve numbers and twelve words engraved on precious stones.
The word TerapMm in Hebrew signifies hieroglyphs or figured signs ; the Urim and Thummi were the above and beneath, the east and west, the yes and no, and these signs corresponded to the two pillars of the Temple, JAKIN and BOHAS.
When, therefore, the high priest wished to consult the oracle, he drew by lot the Theraphim or tablets of gold, which bore the images of the four sacred words, and placed them by threes round the rational or Ephod ; that is, between the two onyx stones which served as clasps to the little chains of the Ephod. The right onyx signified Gedulah, or mercy and magnificence ; the left referred to Geburah, and signified justice and anger.
If, for example, the sign of the lion were found on the left side of the stone which bore the name of the tribe of Judah, p. 358the high priest would read the oracle thus : " The staff of the Lord is angered against Judah. If the Theraphim represented the man or cup, and were also found on the left, near the stone of Benjamin, the high priest would read : " The mercy of the Lord is weary of the offences of Benjamin, which violate Him in His love.
Whence He will pour out on him the chalice of his wrath," etc. When the sovereign priesthood ceased in Israel, when all oracles were silenced in the presence of the Word made man, and speaking by the mouth of the most popular and mildest of sages, when the ark was lost, the sanctuary profaned, and the temple destroyed, the mysteries of the Ephod and Theraphim, no longer traced on gold and precious stones, were written, or, rather, drawn, by some learned kabbalists on ivory, parchment, gilt and silvered copper, and, finally, on simple cards, which were always suspected by the official Church as enclosing a dangerous key to its mysteries.
Hence came those Tarots, the antiquity of which, revealed to the erudite Court de G-ebelin by the science of hieroglyphs and numbers, so exercised later the doubtful perspicacity and persistent investigation of Etteilla. Court de Gebelin, in the eighth volume of his "Primeval World," gives the figure of the twentytwo keys and four aces of the Tarot, and demonstrates their perfect analogy with all symbols of the highest antiquity.
He subsequently endeavours to supply their explanation, and goes astray naturally, because he does not start from the universal and sacred tetragram, the Io EVOHE of the Bacchanalia, the JOB HE VAU HE of the sanctuary, the rnrr of the Kabbalah.
Etteilla or Alliette, preoccupied entirely by his system of divination and the material profit to be derived from it, Alliette, formerly barber, having never learned French, or even orthography, pretended to reform and thus appropriate the Book of THCT.
In the Tarot, now become very scarce, which he engraved, we find the following naive advertisement on the twenty-eighth card — the eight of clubs : " Etteilla, professor of algebra and correctors (sic) of the modern blunders of the ancient book of Thot, lives in the
p. 359Eue de 1'Oseille, No. 48, Paris. Etteilla would have certainly done better not to have corrected the blunders of which he speaks ; his books have degraded the ancient work discovered by Court de Gebelin into the domain of vulgar magic and fortune-telling by cards.
He proves nothing who tries to prove too much ; Etteilla furnishes another example of this old logical axiom ; at the same time, his endeavours led him to a certain acquaintance with the Kabbalah, as may be seen in some rare passages of his unreadable works.
The true initiates who were Etteilla's contemporaries, the Eosicrucians, for example, and the Martinists, who were in possession of the true Tarot, as a work of Saint Martin proves, where the divisions are those of the Tarot, and this passage of an enemy of the Eosicrucians : " They pretend to the possession of a volume from which they can learn anything that can possibly be found in other books which now exist or may at any time be produced.
This volume is their reason, in which they find the prototype of everything that exists by the facility of analysing, making abstractions, forming a species of intellectual world, and creating all possible beings. See the philosophical, theosophical, microcosmic cards." (Conspiracy against the Catholic Religion and Sovereigns, by the author of The Veil raised for the Curious. Paris : Crapard.
1792.) The true initiates, we repeat, who held the Tarot secret among their greatest mysteries, carefully refrained from protesting against the errors of Etteilla, and left him to reveil instead of revealing the arcana of the true clavicles of Solomon. Hence it is not without profound astonishment that we have discovered intact and still unknown this key of all doctrines and all philosophies of the old world.
I speak of it as a key, and such it truly is, having the circle of four decades as its ring, the scale of 22 characters for its trunk or body, and the three degrees of the triad for its wards ; as such it was represented by Postel in his " Key of Things Kept Secret from the Foundation of the World. He indicates after the following manner
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