Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 19of Voltaire. The books were only written as memorials of tradition, and in symbols that were unintelligible for the profane. The Pentateuch and the poems of the prophets were, moreover, elementary works, alike in doctrine, ethics, and liturgy ; the true secret and traditional philosophy was not committed to writing until a later period, and under veils even less transparent.
Thus arose a second and unknown Bible, or rather one which was not comprehended by Christians, a storehouse, so they say, of monstrous absurdities, for, in this case, believers, confounded in the same ignorance, speak the language of sceptics ; a monument, as we affirm, which comprises all that philosophical genius and religious genius have ever accomplished or imagined in the order of the sublime; a treasure encompassed by thorns ; a diamond concealed in a rude and opaque stone : our readers will have already guessed that we refer to the Talmud.
How strange is the destiny of the Jews, those scapegoats, martyrs, and saviours of the world, a people full of vitality, a bold and hardy race, which persecutions have always preserved intact, because it has not yet accomplished its mission !
Do not our apostolical traditions declare that, after the decline of faith among the Gentiles, salvation shall again come forth out of the house of Jacob, and that then the crucified Jew who is adored by the Christians will give the empire of the world into the hands of God his Father ?
On penetrating into the sanctuary of the Kabbalah one is seized with admiration at the sight of a doctrine so logical, so simple, and, at the same time, so absolute.
The essential union of ideas and signs ; the consecration of the most fundamental realities by primitive characters ; the trinity of words, letters, and numbers ; a philosophy simple as the alphabet, profound and infinite as the Word; theorems more complete and luminous than those of Pythagoras ; a theology which may be summed up on the fingers ; an infinite which can be held in the hollow of an infant's hand ; ten figures and twenty-two letters, a triangle, p. 20a square, and a circle ; these are the entire elements of the Kabbalah. These are the component principles of the written Word, reflection of that spoken Word which created the world !
All truly dogmatic religions have issued from the Kabbalah and return therein ; whatsoever is grand or scientific in the religious dreams of all the illuminated, Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Saint Martin, &c., is borrowed from the Kabbalah ; all masonic associations owe to it their secrets and their symbols.
The Kabbalah alone consecrates the alliance of universal reason and the divine Word ; it establishes, by the counterpoise of two forces apparently opposed, the eternal balance of being ; it only reconciles reason with faith, power with liberty, science with mystery ; it has the keys of the present, past, and future !
To become initiated into the Kabbalah, it is insufficient to read and to meditate upon the writings of Eeuchlin, G-alatinus, Kirch er, or Picus de Mirandola ; it is necessary to study and to understand the Hebrew writers in the collection of Pistorius, the Septer Jetzirah above all ; it is necessary also to master the great book Zohar, read attentively in the collection of 1684, entitled Kallala Denudata, the treatise of Kabbalistic Pneumatics, and that of the Revolution of Souls ; and afterwards to enter boldly into the luminous darkness of the whole dogmatic and allegorical body of the Talmud.
Then we shall be in a position to understand William Postel, and can admit secretly that apart from his very premature and over-generous dreams about the emancipation of women, this celebrated, learned, illuminated man could not have been so mad as is pretended by those who have not read him. We have sketched rapidly the history of occult philosophy ; we have indicated its sources and analysed in a few words its principal books.
This work refers only to the science, but magic, or, rather, magical power, is composed of two things, a science and a force ; without the force the science is nothing, or, rather, it is a danger. To give knowledge to power alone, such is the supreme law of initiations. Hence did the
p. 21Great Revealer say : " The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent only shall carry it away. The door of truth is closed like the sanctuary of a virgin; he must be a man who would enter. All miracles are promised to faith, and what is faith except the audacity of a will which does not hesitate in the darkness, but advances towards the light in spite of all ordeals, and surmounting all obstacles ?
It is unnecessary to repeat here the history of ancient initiations; the more dangerous and terrible they were, the greater was their efficacy. Hence, in those days, the world had men to govern and instruct it. The sacerdotal art and the royal art consisted above all in ordeals of courage, discretion, and will.
It was a novitiate similar to that of those priests who, under the name of Jesuits, are so unpopular at the present day, but would govern the world, notwithstanding, had they a truly wise and intelligent chief. After passing our life in the search after the absolute in religion, science, and justice ; after turning in the circle of Faust, we have reached the primal doctrine and the first book of humanity.
There we pause, there we have discovered the secret of human omnipotence and indefinite progress, the key of all symbolisms, the first and final doctrine, and we have come to understand what was meant by that expression so often made use of in the Gospel — the Kingdom of God. To provide a fixed point as a fulcrum for human activity is to solve the problem of Archimedes by realising the application of his famous lever.
This it is which was accomplished by the great initiators who have electrified the world, and they could not have done so except by means of the great and incommunicable secret. However, as a guarantee of its renewed youth, the symbolical phoenix never reappeared before the eyes of the world without having solemnly consumed the remains and evidences of his previous life.
It is thus that Moses caused all those to perish in the desert who could have known Egypt and her mysteries ; thus, at Ephesus, St Paul burnt all books which
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