Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 33man who is prepared to die rather than renounce truth and justice is most truly living, for immortality abides in his soul. To find or to form such men was the end of all ancient initiations.
Pythagoras disciplined his pupils by silence and all kinds of self-denial ; candidates in Egypt were tried by the four elements; and we know the selfinflicted austerities of fakirs and brahmans in India for attaining the kingdom of free will and divine independence.
All macerations of asceticism are borrowed from the initiations of ancient mysteries ; they have ceased because those qualified for initiation, no longer finding initiators, and the leaders of conscience becoming in the lapse of time as uninstructed as the vulgar, the blind have grown weary of following the blind, and no one has cared to pass through ordeals the end of which was now only in doubt and despair ; for the path of light was lost.
To succeed in performing something we must know what it is proposed to do, or at least must have faith in some one who does know it. But shall I stake my life on a venture, or follow someone at chance who himself knows not where he is going ? We must not set out rashly along the path of the transcendent sciences, but, once started, we must reach the end or perish.
To doubt is to become a fool ; to pause is to fall ; to recoil is to cast one's self into an abyss. You, therefore, who are undertaking the study of this book, if you persevere with it to the close and understand it, it will make you either a monarch or a madman. Do what you will with the volume, you will be unable to despise or to forget it.
If you are pure, it will be your light ; if strong, your arm ; if holy, your religion ; if wise, the rule of your wisdom. But if you are wicked, for you it will be an infernal torch ; it will lacerate your breast like a poniard ; it will rankle in your memory like a remorse ; it will people your imagination with chimeras, and will drive you through folly to despair.
You will endeavour to laugh at it, and will only gnash your teeth ; this book will be the file in the fable which the serpent tried to bite, but it destroyed all his teeth. c
34 THE DOCTEINE OF TRANSCENDENT MAGIC Let us now enter on the series of initiations. I have said that revelation is the word. As a fact, the word, or speech, is the veil of being and the characteristic sign of life. Every form is the veil of a word, because the idea which is the mother of the word is the sole reason for the existence of forms. Every figure is a character, every character derives from and returns into a word.
For this reason the ancient sages, of whom Trismegistus is the organ, formulated their sole dogma in these terms : — " That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above.
In other words, the form is proportional to the idea ; the shadow is the measure of the body calculated with its relation to the luminous ray ; the scabbard is as deep as the sword is long ; the negation is in proportion to the contrary affirmation ; production is equal to destruction in the movement which preserves life ; and there is no point in infinite space which may not be regarded as the centre of a circle having an extending circumference indefinitely receding into space.
Every individuality is, therefore, indefinitely perfectible, since the moral order is analogous to the physical, and since we cannot conceive any point as unable to dilate, increase, and radiate in a philosophically infinite circle. What can be affirmed of the soul in its totality may be affirmed of each faculty of the soul. The intelligence and will of man are instruments of incalculable power and capacity.
But intelligence and will possess as their help-mate and instrument a faculty which is too imperfectly known, the omnipotence of which belongs exclusively to the domain of magic. I speak of the imagination, which the Kabbalists term the Diaphane, or the Translucid.
Imagination, in effect, is like the soul's eye; therein forms are outlined and preserved; thereby we behold the reflections of the invisible world ; it is the glass of visions and the apparatus of magical life ; by its intervention we heal diseases, modify the seasons, drive death away from the living, and raise the dead to life, because it is the imagination which exalts the will and gives p. 35it a hold upon the universal agent. Imagination determines the shape of the child in its mother's womb, and decides the destiny of men ; it lends wings to contagion, and directs the weapons of warfare. Are you exposed in battle ? Believe yourself to be invulnerable, like Achilles, and you will be so, says Paracelsus. Fear attracts bullets, but they are repelled by courage.
It is well known that persons with amputated limbs feel pain in the very members which they possess no longer. Paracelsus operated upon living blood by medicating the product of a bleeding; he cured headache at a distance by treating hair cut from the patient.
By the science of the imaginary unity and solidarity of all parts of the body, he anticipated and outstripped all the theories, or rather all the experiences, of our most celebrated magnetisers. Hence his cures were miraculous, and to his name of Philip Theophrastus Bombast, he deserved the addition of Aureolus Paracelsus, with the further epithet of divine ! Imagination is the instrument of the adaptation of the word.
Imagination applied to reason is genius. Eeason is one, as genius is one, in the multiplicity of its works. There is one principle, there is one truth, there is one reason, there is one absolute and universal philosophy. Whatsoever is subsists in unity considered as beginning, and returns into unity considered as end. One is in one ; that is to say, all is in all.
Unity is the principle of numbers ; it is also the principle of motion, and, consequently, of life. The entire human body is summed up in the unity of a single organ, which is the brain. All religions are summed up in the unity of a single dogma, which is the affirmation of being and its equality with itself, which constitutes its mathematical value.
There is only one dogma in magic, and it is this : — The visible is the manifestation of the invisible, or, in other terms, the perfect word, in things appreciable and visible, bears an exact proportion to the things which are inappreciable by our senses and unseen by our eyes. The magus uplifts one hand towards heaven and points down the other to earth, and he says : " Above, immensity : Below,
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