Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi

p. 22treated of the occult sciences ; thus, finally, the French Kevolution, daughter of the great Johannite Orient and the ashes of the Templars, spoliated the churches and blasphemed the allegories of the divine cultus. But all doctrines and all revivals proscribe magic, and condemn its mysteries to the flames and to oblivion.

The reason is that each cultus or philosophy which comes into the world is a Benjamin of humanity which lives by the death of its mother ; it is because the symbolical serpent seems ever devouring its own tail ; it is because, as essential condition of existence, a void is necessary to every plenitude, space for every dimension, an affirmation for each negation ; it is the eternal realisation of the phoanix allegory.

Two illustrious scholars have already preceded me along the path I am travelling, but they have, so to speak, spent the dark night therein. I refer to Volney and Dupuis, to Dupuis above all, whose immense erudition has produced only a negative work, for in the origin of all religions he has seen nothing but astronomy, taking thus the symbolic cycle for doctrine and the calendar for legend.

He was deficient in one branch of knowledge, that of true magic, which comprises the secrets of the Kabbalah. Dupuis passed through the antique sanctuaries like the prophet Ezekiel over the plain strewn with bones, and only understood death, for want of that word which collects the virtue of the four winds, and can make a living people of all the vast ossuary, by crying to the ancient symbols : " Arise ! Take up a new form and walk !

" Hence the hour has come when we must have the boldness to attempt what no one has dared to perform previously. Like Julian, we would rebuild the temple, and in so doing we do not believe that we shall be belying a wisdom that we adore, which also Julian would himself have been worthy to adore, had the rancorous and fanatical doctors of his period permitted him to understand it.

For us the temple has two pillars, on one of which Christianity has inscribed its name. We have, therefore, no wish to attack Christianity; far from it, we 2p. 23seek to explain and accomplish it. Intelligence and will have alternately exercised their power in the world ; religion and philosophy are still at war in our own days, but they must end by agreeing.

The provisional object of Christianity was to establish, by obedience and faith, a supernatural or religious equality among men, and to immobilise intelligence by faith, so as to provide a fulcrum for virtue which came for the destruction of the aristocracy of science, or, rather, to replace that aristocracy already destroyed.

Philosophy, on the contrary, has laboured to bring back men by liberty and reason to natural inequality, and to substitute astuteness for virtue by inaugurating the reign of industry. Neither of the two operations has proved complete and adequate, neither has brought men to perfection and felicity.

What is now dreamed, almost without daring to hope for it, is an alliance between these two forces so long regarded as contrary, and there is good ground for desiring their union, for these two great powers of the human soul are no more opposed to one another than the sex of man is opposed to that of woman; undoubtedly they differ, but their apparently contrary dispositions come only from their aptitude to meet and unite.

" There is no less proposed, therefore, than an universal solution of all problems ? " No doubt, since we are concerned with explaining the philosophical stone, perpetual motion, the secret of the great work and of the universal medicine. We shall be accused of insanity, like the divine Paracelsus, or of charlatanism, like the great and unfortunate Agrippa.

If the pyre of Urban Grandier be extinguished, the sullen proscriptions of silence and of calumny remain. We do not brave but are resigned to them. We have not sought ourselves the publication of this book, and we believe that if the time be come to produce speech, it will be produced by us or by others. We shall therefore remain calm and wait. Our work has two parts; in the one we establish the Kabbalistic and magical doctrine in its entirety ; the other 3p. 24is consecrated to the cultus, that is, to ceremonial magic. The one is that which the ancient sages termed the clavicle, the other that which rural people still call the grimoire. The numbers and subjects of the chapters, which correspond in both parts, are in no sense arbitrary, and are all indicated in the great universal key, of which we give for the first time a complete and adequate explanation. Let this work now go its way where it wills, and become what Providence determines ; it is finished, and we believe it to be enduring, because it is strong, like all that is reasonable and conscientious. ELIPHAS LEVI.