Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi

p. 56second advent and final triumph of the Man-God. This again is a vigorous and kabbalistical conclusion contained in the Gospel premises. Hence the Christian prophecy comprises a fourfold revelation : 1. Fall of the old world and triumph of the Gospel under the first advent; 2. Great apostasy and coming of Antichrist; 3. Fall of Antichrist and recurrence to Christian ideas ; 4. Definitive triumph of the Gospel, or Second Advent, designated under the name of the Last Judgment. This fourfold prophecy contains, as will be seen, two affirmations and two negations, the idea of two ruins or universal deaths and of two resurrections ; for to every conception which appears upon the social horizon an east and a west, a zenith and a nadir, may be ascribed without fear of error. Thus is the philosophical cross the key of prophecy, and all gates of science may be opened with the pantacle of Ezekiel, the centre of which is a star formed by the interlacement of two crosses.

Does not human life present itself also under these four phases or successive transformations — birth, life, death, immortality ? And remark here that the immortality of the soul, necessitated as a complement of the tetrad, is kabbalistically proved by analogy, which is the sole dogma of truly universal religion, as it is the key of science and the universal law of nature. As a fact, death can be no more an absolute end than birth is a real beginning. Birth proves the pre-existence of the human being, since nothing is produced from nothing, and death proves immortality, since being can no more cease to be being than nothingness can cease to be nothingness. Being and nothingness are

THE TETRAGRAM 5*7 two absolutely irreconcileable ideas, with this difference, that the idea of nothingness, which is altogether negative, issues from the idea itself of being, whence nothingness cannot even be understood as an absolute negation, whilst the notion of being can never be referred to that of nothingness, and still less can it come forth therefrom.

To say that the world has been produced out of nothing is to advance a monstrous absurdity. All that is proceeds from what has been, and consequently nothing that is can ever more cease to be. The succession of forms is produced by the alternatives of movement ; they are the phenomena of life which replace one another without destroying themselves. All things change ; nothing perishes.

The sun does not die when it vanishes from the horizon ; even the most fluidic forms are immortal, subsisting always in the permanence of their raison d'etre, which is the combination of the light with the aggregated potences of the molecules of the first substance.

Hence they are preserved in the astral fluid, and can be evoked and reproduced according to the will of the sage, as we shall see when treating of second sight and the evocation of memories in necromancy or other magical works. We shall return to the great magical agent in the fourth chapter of the Ritual, where we shall complete our indications of the characteristics of the great arcanum, and of the means of recovering this tremendous power.

Here let us add some words about the four magical elements and elementary spirits. The magical elements are : in alchemy, salt, sulphur, mercury, and azoth ; in Kabbalah, the macroprosopus, the microprosopus, and the two mothers ; in hieroglyphics, the man, eagle, lion, and bull ; in old physics, according to vulgar names and notions, air, water, earth, and fire.

But in magical science we know that water is not ordinary water, fire is not simply fire, &c. These expressions conceal a more recondite meaning. Modern science has decomposed the four elements of the ancients, and reduced them to a number of so-called simple bodies. That which is simple, however, is the primitive substance

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THE DOCTRINE OP TRANSCENDENT MAGIC

properly so-called; there is therefore only one material element, which always manifests by the tetrad in its forms. We shall therefore preserve the wise distinction of elementary appearances admitted by the ancients, and shall recognise air, fire, earth, and water as the four positive and visible elements of magic. The subtle and the gross, the swift and slow dissolvent, or the instruments of heat and cold, constitute, in occult physics, the two positive and negative principles of the tetrad, and should be thus tabulated : —

Azoth. Eagle. Air.

Sulphur. Lion. Fire.

Mercury i Man. Water.

Salt. Bull. Earth.

Thus, air and earth represent the male principle ; fire and water are referable to the female principle, since the philosophical cross of pantacles, as already affirmed, is a primitive and elementary hieroglyph of the lingam of the gymnosophists. To these four elementary forms correspond the four following philosophical ideas — Spirit, Matter, Motion, Rest. As a fact, all science is comprised in the understanding of these four things, which alchemy has reduced to three — the Absolute, the Fixed, and the Volatile — referred by the Kabbalah to the essential idea of God, who is absolute reason, necessity, and liberty, a threefold notion expressed in the occult books of the Hebrews. Under the names of n their power to bh. To discover