Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 89undergo that he might finish by a violent death. He remembers Swedenborg simulating madness and even losing reason in order to excuse his science ; St Martin and his hidden life ; Cagliostro, who perished forsaken in the cells of the Inquisition ; Cazotte, who ascended the scaffold. Inheritor of so many victims, he does not dare the less, but he understands better the necessity for silence. Let us follow his example ; let us learn diligently ; when we know, let us have courage, and let us be silent.
10 > K THE KABBALAH MALCHUTH PRINCIPIUM PHALLUS ALL religions have preserved the remembrance of a primitive book, written in types, by the sages of the earliest ages of the world ; simplified and vulgarised in later days, its symbols furnished letters to the art of Writing, characters to the Word, and to occult Philosophy its mysterious signs and pantacles. This book, attributed by the Hebrews to Enoch, seventh master of the world after Adam; by the Egyptians to Hermes-Trismegistus ; by the Greeks to Cadmus, the mysterious builder of the Holy City ; this book was the symbolical summary of primitive tradition, called subsequently Kabbalah or Cabala, meaning reception. The tradition in question rests altogether on the one dogma of magic : the visible is for us the proportional measure of the invisible. Now the ancients, observing that equilibrium is the universal law in physics, consequent on the apparent opposition of two forces, argued from physical to metaphysical equilibrium, and maintained that in God, that is, in the prime living and active cause, there must be recogp. 90nised two properties which are necessary to one another — stability and motion, necessity and liberty, rational order and volitional autonomy, justice and love, whence also severity and mercy. Now, these two attributes were personified, so to speak, by the Kabbalistic Jews under the names of Geburah and Chesed.
Above Geburah and Chesed abides the supreme crown, the equilibrating power, principle of the world or equilibrated kingdom, which we find mentioned under the name of Malchuth in the occult and kabbalistic versicle of the Pater-noster to which we have already referred.
But Geburah and Chesed, maintained in equilibrium by the crown above and the kingdom below, constitute two principles, which may be considered from an abstract point of view, or in their realisation. In their abstract or idealised sense, they take the higher names of Chochmah, wisdom, and Binah, intelligence. Their realisation is stability and progress, that is, eternity and victory — Hod and Netsah.
Such, according to the Kabbalah, is the groundwork of all religions and all sciences — a triple triangle and a circle, the notion of the triad explained by the balance multiplied by itself in the domains of the ideal, then the realisation of this conception in forms.
Now, the ancients attached the first notions of this simple and impressive theology to the very idea of numbers, and qualified the figures of the first decade after the following manner : — 1. Kether. — The Crown, the equilibrating power. 2. Chochmah. — Wisdom, equilibrated in its unchangeable order by the initiative of intelligence. 3. Binah. — Active intelligence, equilibrated by Wisdom. 4.
Chesed. — Mercy, which is wisdom in its secondary conception, ever benevolent because it is strong. 5. Geburah. — Austerity, necessitated by Wisdom itself, and by goodwill. To permit evil is to hinder good. 6. Tiphereth. — Beauty, the luminous conception of equilibrium in forms, intermediary between the Crown and the Kingdom, mediating principle between Creator and
THE KABBALAH
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creation. (Sublime conception of poetry and its sovereign priesthood !) 7. Netsah. — Victory, that is, eternal triumph of intelligence and justice. 8. Hod. — Eternity of the conquests achieved by mind over matter, active over passive, life over death. 9. Jesod. — The Foundation, that is, the basis of all belief and all truth — what we term the ABSOLUTE in philosophy. 10. Malchuth. — The Kingdom is the universe, entire creation, the work and mirror of God, the proof of supreme reason, the formal consequence which compels us to have recourse to virtual premisses, the enigma which has God for its answer — supreme and absolute reason. These ten primary notions attached to the ten first characters of the primitive alphabet, signifying both principles and numbers, are called the ten Sephiroth by the masters in Kabbalah. The sacred tetragam, drawn in the following manner, indicates the number, source, and correspondence of the divine names. To this name of Jotchavah, itten by these four-and-twenty signs, crowned with a iple flower of light, must be referred the twenty -four mes of heaven, and the twenty-four crowned elders in the Apocalypse. In the Kabbalah the occult principle is called the Elder, and this principle, multiplied, and, as it were, reflected, in secondary causes, creates images of itself lat is to say, so many elders as there are diverse concepions of its unique essence. These images, less perfect in pro- )rtion as they are further removed from their source, project ipon the darkness an ultimate reflection or glimmer, repre-
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