Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi

p. 109punishment threatens betrayers of the great arcanum. Finally, for Kabbalistic Jews, the hanged man, who corresponds to their twelfth doctrine, that of the promised Messiah, is a protestation against the Saviour acknowledged by Christians, and they seem to say unto him still : — How canst thou save others, since thou canst not save thyself ?

In the Sepher - Toldos - Jeschu, an anti-christian rabbinical compilation, there occurs a singular parable. Jeschu, says the rabbinical author of the legend, was travelling with Simon-Barjona and Judas Iscariot. Late and weary they came to a lonely house, and, being very hungry, could find nothing to eat except an exceedingly lean gosling. It was insufficient for three persons, and to divide it would be to sharpen without satisfying hunger.

They agreed to draw lots, but as they were heavy with sleep, " Let us first of all slumber," said Jeschu, " whilst the supper is preparing ; when we wake we will tell our dreams, and he who has had the most beautiful dream shall have the whole gosling to his own share. So it was arranged ; they slept and they woke. As for me, said St Peter, I dreamed that I was the vicar of God. And I, said Jeschu, that I was God himself.

For me, said Judas hypocritically, I dreamed that, being in somnambulism, I arose, went softly downstairs, took the gosling from the spit, and ate it. Thereupon they also went down, but the gosling had completely vanished. Judas had a waking dream. This anecdote is given, not in the text of the Sepher- Toldos-Jeschu itself, but in the rabbinical commentaries on that work. The legend is a protest of Jewish positivism against Christian mysticism.

As a fact, while the faithful surrendered themselves to magnificent dreams, the proscribed Israelite, Judas of the Christian civilisation, worked, sold, intrigued, became rich, possessed himself of this life's realities, so that he became in a position to advance the means of existence to the very forms of worship which had so long outlawed him. The ancient adorers of the ark remained true to the cultus of the strong box ; the exchange is now 2p. 110their temple, and thence they govern the Christian world. The laugh is indeed with Judas, who can congratulate himself upon not having slept like St Peter. In archaic writings preceding the Captivity, the Hebrew tau was cruciform, which further confirms our interpretation of the twelfth plate of the Kabbalistic Tarot.

The cross, which produces four triangles, is also the sacred sign of the duodenary, and on this account it was called the Key of heaven by the Egyptians.

So Etteilla, confused by his protracted researches for the conciliation of the analogical necessities of this symbol with his own personal opinion, in which he was influenced by the erudite Court de Gebelin, placed in the hand of his upright hanged man, by him interpreted as Prudence, a Hermetic caduceus, formed by two serpents and a Greek tau.

Seeing that he understood the necessity for the tau or cross on the twelfth leaf of the book of Thoth, he should also have seen the multiple and magnificent meaning of the Hermetic hanged man, the Prometheus of science, the living man who makes contact with earth by his thought alone, whose firm ground is heaven, the free and immolated adept, the revealer menaced with death, the conjuration of Judaism against Christ, which seems to be an involuntary admission of the secret divinity of the Crucified, lastly, the sign of the work accomplished, the cycle terminated, the intermediary tau, which resumes for the first time, before the final denary, the signs of the sacred alphabet.