Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi

p. 378tongues. Then Daniel came near unto one of them that stood by, and asked him the truth of all this. And it was answered him that the four beasts were four powers which should reign successively over the earth. M. Chaho proceeds to explain a variety of images, strikingly analogous, which are found in almost all sacred books. His observations at this point are worthy of remark.

" In every primitive logos, the parallel between physical correspondences and moral relations is established on the same roots. Each word carries its material and sensible definition, and this living language is as perfect and true as it is simple and natural in man the creator.

Let the seer express by the same word, slightly modified, the sun, day, light, truth, and applying the same epithet to a white sun and to a lamb, let him say, Lamb or Christ, instead of sun, and sun instead of truth, light, civilisation, and there is no allegory, but there are true correspondences seized and expressed by inspiration.

But when the children of night say in their incoherent and barbarous dialect, sun, day, light, truth, lamb, the wise correspondence so clearly expressed by the primitive logos becomes effaced and disappears, and, by simple translation, the lamb and the sun become allegorical beings, symbols. Remark, in effect, that the word allegory itself signifies, in Celtic definition, change of discourse, translation.

The observation we have made applies exactly to all barbarous cosmogonical language. Seers made use of the same inspired radical to express nourishment and instruction. Is not the science of truth the nourishment of the soul ?

Thus, the scroll of papyrus, or the book, eaten by the prophet Ezekiel ; the little volume which the angel gave as food to the author of the Apocalypse ; the festivities of the magical palace of Asgard, to which Gangler was invited by Har the Sublime ; the miraculous multiplication of seven small loaves narrated by the Evangelists of the Nazarene ; the living bread which Jesus-Sun gave his disciples to eat, saying, ' This is my body,' and a host of similar occurrences, are a repetition of the same allegory :

p. 379the life of souls who are nourished by truth — truth, which multiplies without ever diminishing, but, on the contrary, increases in the measure that it nourishes.

" Exalted by a noble sentiment of patriotism, dazzled by the idea of an immense revolution, let a revealer of hidden things come forward and seek to popularise the discoveries of science among gross and ignorant men, destitute of the most simple elementary notions ; let him say, for example, that the earth revolves, and that it is shaped like an egg ; what resource has the barbarian who hears him except to believe ?

Is it not plain that every proposition of this nature becomes for him a dogma from on high, an article of faith ? And is not the veil of a wise allegory sufficient to make it a mythos ? In the schools of seers the terrestrial globe was represented by an egg of pasteboard or painted wood, and when the young children were asked, ' What is this egg ?

' they answered, ' It is the earth/ Those older children, the barbarians, hearing this, repeated, after the little children of the seers : — ' The world is an egg. But they understood thereby the physical, material world, and the seers the geographical, ideal, image world, created by mind and the logos.

As a fact, the priests of Egypt represented mind, intelligence, Kneph, with an egg placed upon his lips, to express clearly that the egg was here only a comparison, an image, a mode of speech. Chournountou, the philosopher of the Ezour-Vedam, explains after the same manner to the fanatic Biache what must be understood by the golden egg of Brahma.

We must not wholly despair of a period which still concerns itself with these serious and reasonable researches ; we have cited these pages of M. Chaho with great mental satisfaction and profound sympathy.

Here is no longer the negative and desolating criticism of Dupuis and Volney, but tendency towards one faith and one worship connecting all the future with all the past ; it is the exoneration of all great men falsely accused of superstition and idolatry ; it is, finally, the justification of God Himself, that sun of intelligences who is never veiled for just souls and pure hearts.

p. 380" Great and pre-eminent is the seer, the initiate, the elect of nature and of supreme reason," cries the author once more, in concluding what we have just cited. " His alone is that faculty of imitation which is the principle of his perfection, while its inspirations, swift as a lightning flash, direct creations and discoveries.

His alone is a perfect Word of conformity, propriety, flexibility, wealth, creating harmony of thought by physical reaction — of thought, whereof the perceptions, still independent of language, ever reflect nature exactly reproduced in his impressions, well judged and well expressed in its correspondences.

His alone is light, science, truth, because imagination, confined to its passive secondary part, never governs reason, the natural logic which results from the comparison of ideas ; which come into being, extend in the same proportion as his needs, and because the circle of his knowledge enlarges thus by degrees without intermixture of false judgments and errors.

His alone is a light infinitely progressive, because the rapid multiplication of population, after terrestrial renovations, composes in a few centuries a new society in all the imaginable moral and political correspondences of its destiny; and we might add, his alone is absolute light. The man of our time is immutable in himself ; he changes no more than nature, in which he is rooted.

The social conditions which surround him alone determine the degree of his perfection, of which the bounds are virtue, holiness of man, and his happiness in the law. After such elucidations, will any one ask the utility of the occult sciences ?

Will they treat with the disdain of mysticism and illuminism these living mathematics, these proportions of ideas and forms, this revelation permanent in the universal reason, this emancipation of mind, this immutable basis provided for faith, this omnipotence revealed to will ? Children in search of illusions, are you disappointed because we offer you marvels ? Once a man said to us, " Raise up the devil, and I will believe in you. We answered, " You ask too little ; we will not make the