Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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Dogma is only divine inasmuch as it is truly human — that is to say, in so far as it sums up the highest reason of humanity; so also the Master, whom we term the Man- God, called Himself the Son of Man. Eevelation is the expression of belief accepted and formulated by universal reason in the human word, on which account it is said that the divinity is human and the humanity divine in the Man- God.
We affirm all this philosophically, not theologically, without infringing in any way on the teaching of the Church, which condemns, and must always condemn, magic. Paracelsus and Agrippa did not set up altar against altar, but bowed to the ruling religion of their time ; to the elect of science, the things of science ; to the faithful, the things of faith.
In his hymn to the royal Sun, the Emperor Julian gives a theory of the triad which is almost identical with that of the illuminated Swedenborg.
The sun of the divine world is the infinite, spiritual, and uncreated light, which is verbalised, so to speak, in the philosophical world, and becomes the fountain of souls and of truth ; then it incorporates and becomes visible light in the sun of the third world, the central sun of our suns, of which the fixed stars are the ever-living sparkles.
The Kabbalists compare the spirit to a substance which remains fluid in the divine medium, and under the influence of the essential light, its exterior, however, becoming solidified, like wax, when exposed to the air in the colder realms of reasoning or of visible forms. These shells, envelopes petrified or carnified, were such an expression possible, are the source of p. 48errors or of evil which connect with the heaviness and hardness of the animal envelopes. In the book " Zohar," and in that of the " Eevolution of Souls," perverse spirits or evil demons are never named otherwise than as shells — cortices. The cortices of the world of spirits are transparent, while those of the material world are opaque.
Bodies are only temporary shells, whence souls have to be liberated ; but those which in this life obey the body compose for themselves an interior body or fluidic shell, which, after death, becomes their prison-house and torment, until the time arrives when they succeed in dissolving it in the warmth of the divine light, towards which, however, the burden of their grossness hinders them from ascending.
Indeed, they can do so only after infinite struggles, and by the mediation of the just, who stretch forth their hands towards them. During the whole period of the process they are devoured by the interior activity of the captive spirit, as in a burning furnace.
Those who attain the pyre of expiation burn themselves thereon, like Hercules upon Mount Etna, and so are delivered from their sufferings, but the courage of the majority fails before this ordeal, which seems to them a second death more appalling than the first, and so they remain in hell, which is, rightly and actually, eternal ; but therein souls are never precipitated, nor are they ever retained despite themselves.
The three worlds correspond together by means of the thirty-two paths of light which are the steps of the sacred ladder ; every true thought corresponds to a divine grace in heaven and a good work on earth ; every grace of God manifests a truth, and produces one or many acts ; reciprocally, every act affects a truth or falsehood in the heavens, a grace or a punishment.
When a man pronounces the tetragram — say, the Kabbalists — the nine heavens sustain a shock, and then all spirits cry out one upon another: " Who is it thus disturbing the kingdom of heaven ? " Then does the earth communicate unto the first heaven the sins of the rash being who takes the Eternal Name
THE TRIANGLE OF SOLOMON 49 in vain, and the accusing word is transmitted from circle to circle, from star to star, and from hierarchy to hierarchy. Every speech possesses three senses, every act has a triple bearing, every form a triple idea, for the absolute corresponds from world to world by its forms. Every determination of human will modifies nature, affects philosophy, and is written in heaven.
There are therefore two fatalities, the one resulting from the Uncreated Will in its accord with wisdom, the other from created wills according with the necessity of secondary causes in their correspondence with the First Cause.
There is hence nothing indifferent in life, and our apparently most simple resolutions frequently determine an incalculable series of benefits or evils, above all in the affinities of our diaphane with the great magical agent, as we shall explain elsewhere.
The triad, being the fundamental principle of the whole Kabbalah, or sacred tradition of our fathers, was necessarily the fundamental dogma of Christianity, the apparent dualism of which it explains by the intervention of a harmonious and all-powerful unity. Christ did not put his teaching into writing, and only revealed it in secret to his favoured disciple, the one kabbalist, and he a great kabbalist, among the apostles.
So is the apocalypse the book of the gnosis or secret doctrine of the first Christians, the key of which doctrine is indicated by an occult versicle of the Lord's Prayer, which the Vulgate leaves untranslated, while in the Greek rite, which preserves the traditions of St John, the priests only are permitted to pronounce it.
This versicle, completely kabbalistic, is found in the text of the Gospel according to St Matthew, and in several Hebrew copies. The sacred word Malchuth substituted for Kether, which is its kabbalistic correspondent, and the balance of Geburah and Chesed, repeating itself in the circles or heavens called eons by the Gnostics, provide the keystone of the whole Christian temple in this occult versicle. It has been retained by Protestants in their New Testament, without their D
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