Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 381devil appear bub vanish from the whole world ; we will chase him from your dreams ! " The devil is ignorance, darkness, chaotic thought, deformity. Awake, sleeper of the middle ages ! See you not that it is day ? See you not the light of God filling all nature ? Where now will the destroyed prince of perdition dare to shew himself ?
It remains for us to state our conclusions and to define the end and application of this work in the religious and philosophical order, and in the order of positive and material realisations.
As regards the religious order, we have demonstrated that the practices of religious worships cannot be indifferent, that the magic of religions is in their rites, that their moral force is in the triadic hierarchy, and that the base, principle, and synthesis of the hierarchy is unity.
We have demonstrated the universal unity and orthodoxy of dogma, clothed successively with various allegorical veils, and we have followed the truth saved by Moses from profanation in Egypt, preserved in the kabbalah of the prophets, emancipated by the Christian school from the slavery of the pharisees, attracting all the poetic and generous aspirations of Greek and Roman civilisation, protesting against a new pharisaism more corrupt than the first, with the great saints of the middle ages and the bold thinkers of the Eenaissance.
We have exhibited, I say, that truth always universal, always living, alone conciliating reason and faith, science and submission ; the truth of being demonstrated by being, of harmony demonstrated by harmony, of reason manifested by reason.
By revealing for the first time to the world the mysteries of magic we have not sought to revive practices entombed beneath the ruins of ancient civilisations, but would say to humanity in our day that it is also called to create itself immortal and omnipotent by its works. Liberty does not offer itself, it must be seized, says a modern writer : it is the same with science, for which reason to divulge absolute truth is never useful to the vulgar. But at an epoch when the sanctuary p. 382has been devastated and has fallen into ruins, because its key has been thrown over the hedges to the profit of no one, I have deemed it my duty to pick up that key, and I offer it to him who can take it ; in his turn he will be •doctor of the nations and liberator of the world.
Fables and leading-strings are needed, and will always be needed by children, but it is not necessary that those who hold the leading-strings should also be children, lending a ready ear to fables. Let the most absolute science, let the highest reason, become the possession of the chiefs of the people; let the priestly art and the royal art take up once more the double sceptre of antique initiations, and the world will reissue from chaos.
Burn no more holy images, destroy no more temples ; temples and images are necessary for man ; but drive out the merchants from the house of prayer; let the blind no longer be leaders of the blind ; reconstruct the hierarchy of intelligence and holiness, and recognise only those who know as the teachers of those who believe.
Our book is catholic, and if the revelations it contains are likely to alarm the conscience of the simple, we are consoled by the thought that they will not read them. We write for unprejudiced men, and have no wish to natter irreligion any more than fanaticism. If there be anything essentially free and inviolable in the world, it is belief.
By science and persuasion we must endeavour to lead bewrayed imaginations from the absurd, but it would be investing their errors with all the dignity and truth of the martyr to either threaten or constrain them. Faith is nothing but superstition and folly if it have not reason for its basis, and we cannot suppose that which we do not know except by analogy with what we know.
To define what we are unacquainted with is presumptuous ignorance ; to affirm positively what one does not know is to lie. So is faith an aspiration and a desire. So be it ; I desire it to be so ; such is the last word of all professions of faith. Faith, hope, and charity are three such inseparable sisters that they can be taken one for another. Thus, in p. 383religion, universal and hierarchic orthodoxy, restoration of temples in all their spendour, re-establishment of all ceremonies in their primitive pomp, hierarchic instruction of symbols, mysteries, miracles, legends for children, light for grown men who will beware of scandalising little ones in the symplicity of their faith ; this in religion is our whole utopia, and it is also the desire and need of humanity.
Coming now to philosophy, our own is that of realism and positivism. Being is by reason of the being of which no one doubts. All exists for us by science. To know is to be. Science and its object become identified in the intellectual life of him who knows. To doubt is to be ignorant. Now, a thing of which we are ignorant does not as yet exist for us. To live intellectually is to learn. Being developes and amplifies by science.
The first conquest of science, and the first result of the exact sciences, is the sentiment of reason. The laws of nature are algebraic. Thus, the sole reasonable faith is the adhesion of the student to theorems, the entire essential justice of which is outside his knowledge, though its applications and results are sufficiently demonstrated to his mind.
Thus, the true philosopher believes in what is, and does not admit & posteriori that all is reasonable. But no more charlatanism in philosophy, no more empiricism, no more system ! The study of being and its compared realities ! A metaphysic of nature! Then away with mysticism! No more dreams in philosophy ; philosophy is not a poesy, but the pure mathematics of realities, physical and moral.
Leave unto religion the freedom of its infinite aspirations, and let it leave in turn to science the exact conclusions of absolute experimentalism. Man is the son of his works ; he is what he wills to be ; he is the image of the God he makes ; he is the realisation of his ideal. Should his ideal want basis, the whole edifice of his immortality collapses. Philosophy is not the ideal, but it serves as a foundation for the ideal.
The known is for us the measure of the unknown ; by the visible we appreciate the invisible ; sensations are to thoughts even as thoughts
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