Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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SUMMARY AND KEY OF THE FOUR SECRET SCIENCES 165 When uttering at the end of our Eitual a last word upon the Tarot, we shall show the complete method of reading and hence of consulting it, not only on the probable chances of destiny, but also, and above all, upon the problems of philosophy and religion, concerning which it provides a solution which is invariably certain and also admirable in its precision, when explained in the hierarchic order of the analogy of the three worlds with the three colours and the four shades which compose the sacred septenary. All this belongs to the positive practice of magic, and can only be summarily indicated and established theoretically in the present first part, which is concerned exclusively with the doctrine of transcendent magic, and the philosophical and religious key of the transcendent sciences, known, or rather not known, under the name of occult.
22 n Z SUMMAKY AND GENERAL KEY OF THE FOUR SECRET SCIENCES SIGNA THOT PAN LET us now sum up the entire science by its principles. Analogy is the final word of science and the first word of faith. Harmony consists in equilibrium, and equilibrium subsists by the analogy of contraries. Absolute unity is the supreme and final reason of things. Now, this reason can neither be one person nor three persons ; it is a reason, and reason eminently. To create equilibrium, we must separate and unite — separate by the poles, unite by the centre. To reason upon faith is to destroy faith ; to create
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SUMMAKY AND KEY OF THE FOUK SECRET SCIENCES 16? mysticism in philosophy is to assail reason. Eeason and faith, by their nature, mutually exclude one another, and they unite by analogy. Analogy is the sole possible mediator between the finite and infinite. Dogma is the ever ascending hypothesis of a presumable equation. For the ignorant, it is the hypothesis which is the absolute affirmation, and the absolute affirmation which is hypothesis.
Hypotheses are necessary in science, and he who seeks to realise them enlarges science without decreasing faith, for on the further side of faith is the infinite. We believe in what we do not know, but what reason leads us to admit. To define and circumscribe the object of faitli is, therefore, to formulate the unknown. Professions of faith are formulations of the ignorance and aspirations of man.
The theorems of science are monuments of his conquests. The man who denies God is not less fanatical than he who defines him with pretended infallibility. God is commonly defined by the enumeration of all that He is not. Man makes God by an analogy from the lesser to the greater, whence it results that the conception of God by man is ever that of an infinite man who makes man a finite God.
Man can realise that which he believes in the measure of that which he knows, and by reason of that which he does not know, and he can accomplish all that he wills in the measure of that which he believes and by reason of that which he knows. The analogy of contraries is the connection of light and shade, of height and hollow, of plenum and void.
Allegory, the mother of all dogmas, is the substitution of impressions for seals, of shadows for realities. It is the fable of truth and the truth of fable. One does not invent a dogma, one veils a truth, and a shade for weak eyes is produced. The initiator is not an impostor, he is a revealer, that is, following the meaning of the Latin word revelare, a man who veils afresh. He is the creator of a new shade. Analogy is the key of all secrets of nature and the sole fundamental reason of all revelations. This is why religions p. 168seem to be written in the heavens and in all nature ; this is just as it should be, for the work of God is the book of God, and in what He writes should be discerned the expression of His thought, and consequently of His being, since we conceive Him only as the supreme thought.
Dupuis and Volney saw only a plagiarism in this splendid analogy, which should have led them to acknowledge the catholicity, that is, the universality of the primeval, one, magical, kabbalistic, and immutable doctrine of revelation by analogy.
Analogy yields all the forces of nature to the magus ; analogy is the quintessence of the philosophical stone, the secret of perpetual motion, the quadrature of the circle, the temple resting on the two pillars JAKIN and BOHAS, the key of the great arcanum, the root of the tree of life, the science of good and evil.
To find the exact scale of analogies in things appreciable by science is to fix the bases of faith and thus become possessed of the rod of miracles. Now, there is a principle and rigorous formula, which is the great arcanum. Let the wise man seek it not, since he has already found it ; let the profane seek for ever, and they will never find it. Metallic transmutation takes place spiritually and materially by the positive key of analogies.
Occult medicine is simply the exercise of the will applied to the very source of life, to that astral light the existence of which is a fact, which has a movement conformed to calculations having the great magical arcanum for their ascending and descending scale.
This universal arcanum, the final and eternal secret of transcendent initiation, is represented in the Tarot by a naked girl, who touches the earth only by one foot, has a magnetic rod in each hand, and seems to be running in a crown held up by an angel, an eagle, a bull, and a lion.
Fundamentally, the figure is analogous to the cherub of Jekeskiel, of which a representation is here given, and to the Indian symbol of Addhanari, which again is analogous to the ado-nai of Jekeskiel, who is vulgarly called Ezekiel. The comprehension of this figure is the key of all
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