Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi

THE STONE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 155 tions, and discovering, by the analogies of nature, the natural and grosser gold to the possessors of the spiritual and living gold, of the true salt, the true mercury, and the true sulphur of the philosophers. To find the philosophical stone is then to have discovered the absolute, as the masters otherwise say.

Now, the absolute is that which admits of no errors, it is the fixation of the volatile, it is the rule of the imagination, it is the very necessity of being, it is the immutable law of reason and truth ; the absolute is that which is. Now that which is in some sense precedes he who is. God himself cannot be in the absence of a reason of being, and can exist only in virtue of a supreme and inevitable reason.

It is this reason which is the absolute ; it is this in which we must believe if we desire a rational and solid foundation for our faith. It may be said in these days that God is merely a hypothesis, but the absolute reason is not a hypothesis ; it is essential to being. St Thomas once said : " A thing is not just because God wills it, but God wills it because it is just.

Had St Thomas logically deduced all the consequences of this beautiful thought, he would have found the philosophical stone, and besides being the angel of the school, he would have been its reformer. To believe in the reason of God and in the God of reason is to render atheism impossible. When Voltaire said : " If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him," he felt rather than understood the reason which is in God.

Does God really exist ? There is no knowing, but we desire it to be so, and hence we believe it. Faith thus formulated is reasonable faith, for it admits the doubt of science, and, as a fact, we believe only in things which seem to us probable, though we do not know them. To think otherwise is delirium ; to speak otherwise is to talk like the illuminated or fanatical. Now, it is not to such persons that the philosophical stone is promised.

The ignoramuses who have turned primitive Christianity from its path by substituting faith for science, dream for experience, the fantastic for the real ; inquisitors who, during 2p. 156so many ages, have waged a war of extermination against magic; have succeeded in enveloping with darkness the ancient discoveries of the human mind, so that we are now groping for the key to the phenomena of nature. Now, all natural phenomena depend upon a single and immutable law, represented by the philosophical stone, and especially by its cubic form.

This law, expressed by the tetrad in the Kabbalah, furnished the Hebrews with all the mysteries of their divine Tetragram. It may be said therefore that the philosophical stone is square in every sense, like the heavenly Jerusalem of St John ; that one of its sides is inscribed with the name ntbw and the other with that of GOD ; that one of its facets bears the name of ADAM, a second that of HEVA, and the two others those of AZOT and INRI.

At the beginning of the French translation of a book by the Sieur de Nuisement on the philosophical salt, the spirit of the earth is represented standing on a cube over which tongues of flame are passing ; the phallus is replaced by a caduceus ; the sun and moon figure on the right and left breast ; he is bearded, crowned, and holds a sceptre in his hand. This is the Azoth of the sages on his pedestal of salt and sulphur.

The symbolic head of the goat of Mendes is occasionally given to this figure, and it is then the Baphomet of the Templars and the Word of the Gnostics — bizarre images which became scarecrows for the vulgar after affording food for thought to the sages, innocent hieroglyphs of thought and faith which have been a pretext for the rage of persecutions. How pitiable are men in their ignorance, but how they would despise themselves if once they came to know !