Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 4speaks, the moon falls blood-red from heaven ; the dead rise in their graves and articulate ominous words as the night wind blows through their skulls.
Mistress of love or of hate, the science can dispense paradise or hell at its pleasure to human hearts ; it disposes of all forms, and distributes beauty or ugliness ; with the rod of Circe it alternately changes men into brutes and animals into men ; it even disposes of life or death, and can confer wealth on its adepts by the transmutation of metals and immortality by its quintessence or elixir compounded of gold and light.
Such was magic from Zoroaster to Manes, from Orpheus to Apollonius of Tyana, when positive Christianity, at length victorious over the brilliant dreams and titanic aspirations of the Alexandrian school, dared to launch its anathemas publicly against this philosophy, and thus forced it to become more occult and mysterious than ever.
Moreover, strange and alarming rumours began to circulate concerning initiates or adepts ; these men were everywhere surrounded by an ominous influence ; they killed or drove mad those who allowed themselves to be carried away by their honeyed eloquence or by the fame of their learning.
The women whom they loved became Stryges, their children vanished at their nocturnal meetings, and men whispered shudderingly and in secret of bloody orgies and abominable banquets. Bones had been found in the crypts of ancient temples, shrieks had been heard in the night, harvests withered and herds sickened when the magician passed by.
Diseases which defied medical skill at times appeared in the world, and always, it was said, beneath the envenomed glance of the adepts. At length an universal cry of execration went up against magic, the mere name became a crime, and the common hatred was formulated in this sentence : " Magicians to the flames!" as it was shouted some centuries earlier: " To the lions with the Christians !
" Now the multitude never conspires except against real powers ; it possesses not the knowledge of what is true, but it has the instinct of what is strong. It remained for the eighteenth century to p. 5deride both Christians and magic, while infatuated with the homilies of Eousseau and the illusions of Cagliostro.
Science, notwithstanding, is at the basis of magic, as at the foundation of Christianity there is love, and in the Gospel symbols we see the Word incarnate adored in his cradle by three magi, led thither by a star (the triad and the sign of the microcosm), and receiving their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, a second mysterious triplicity, under which emblem the highest secrets of the Kabbalah are allegorically contained.
Christianity owes, therefore, no hatred to magic, but^luiman^ ignorance has ever stood in fear of the unknown. The science was driven into hiding to escape the impassioned assaults of a blind love ; it clothed itself with new hieroglyphics, dissimulated its labours, denied its hopes. Then it was that the jargon of alchemy was created, a permanent deception for the vulgar, a living language only for the true disciple of Hermes.
Extraordinary fact ! Among the sacred books of the Christians there are two works which the infallible Church makes no claim to understand and has never attempted to explain ; these are the prophecy of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse, two Kabbalistic Keys assuredly reserved in heaven for the commentaries of magician Kings, books sealed with seven seals for faithful believers, yet perfectly plain to an initiated infidel of the occult sciences.
There is also another book, but, although it is popular in a sense and may be found everywhere, this is of all most occult and unknown, because it has the key of all others ; it is in public evidence without being known to the public; no one dreams of seeking it where it actually is, and elsewhere it is lost labour to look for it.
This book, possibly anterior to that of Enoch, has never been translated, but is still preserved unmutilated in primeval characters, on detached leaves, like the tablets of the ancients. A distinguished scholar has revealed, though no one has observed it, not indeed its secret, but its antiquity and singular preservation ; another scholar, but of a mind more fantastic than judicious, passed thirty years in the p. 6study of this book, and has merely suspected its whole importance.
It is, in fact, a monumental and extraordinary work, strong and simple as the architecture of the pyramids, and consequently enduring like those — a book which is the sum of all the sciences, which can resolve all problems by its infinite combinations, which speaks by evoking thought, is the inspirer and regulator of all possible conceptions, the masterpiece perhaps of the human mind, assuredly one of the finest things bequeathed to us by antiquity, an universal key, the name of which has been explained and comprehended only by the learned William Postel, an unique text, whereof the initial characters alone exalted the devout spirit of Saint Martin into ecstasy, and might have restored reason to the sublime and unfortunate Swedenborg.
We shall speak of this book later on, and its mathematical and precise explanation will be the complement and crown of our conscientious undertaking.
The original alliance of Christianity and the science of the magi, once it is thoroughly demonstrated, will be a discovery of no second-rate importance, and we question not that the serious study of magic and the Kabbalah will lead earnest minds to the reconciliation of science and dogma, of reason and faith, heretofore regarded as impossible.
We have said that the Church, whose special office is the custody of the Keys, does not pretend to possess those of the Apocalypse or of Ezekiel.
In the opinion of Christians the scientific and magical clavicles of Solomon are lost ; yet, at the same time, it is certain that, in the domain of intelligence ruled by the Word, nothing which has been written can perish ; things which men cease to understand simply cease to exist for them, at least in the order of the Word, and they enter then into the domain of enigma and mystery.
Furthermore, the antipathy, and even open war, of the official church against all that belongs to the realm of magic, which is a kind of personal and emancipated priesthood, is allied with necessary and even with inherent causes in the social and hierarchic constitution of Christian
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