Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi

p. 255perishing, has been caused by the neglect of initiation, with its ordeals and its mysteries. Men, whose zeal was greater than their science, carried away by the popular maxims of the Gospel, came to believe in the primitive and absolute equality of men.

A famous hallucint, the eloquent and unfortunate Eousseau, propagated this paradox with all the magic of his style — that society alone depraves men — much as if he had said that competition and emulation in labour renders workmen idle. The essential law of nature, that of initiation by works and of voluntary and toilsome progress, has been fatally misconstrued ; masonry has had its deserters, as Catholicism its apostates.

What has been the consequence ? The substitution of the steel plane for the intellectual and symbolical plane. To preach equality to what is beneath, without instructing it how to rise upward, is not this binding us to descend ourselves ? And hence we have descended to the reign of the carmagnola, the sanscullotes, and Marat. To restore tottering and distracted society, the hierarchy and initiation must be again established.

The task is difficult, but the whole intelligent world feels that it is necessary to undertake it. Must we pass through another deluge before succeeding ? We earnestly trust not, and this book, perhaps the greatest but not the last of our audacities, is an appeal unto all that is yet alive for the reconstitution of life in the very middle of decomposition and death.

256 THE EITUAL OF TRANSCENDENT MAGIC CHAPTER X THE KEY OF OCCULTISM LET us now examine the question of pantacles, for all magical virtue is there, since the secret of force is in the intelligence which directs.

We have already given the symbol and interpretation of the pantacles of Pythagoras and Ezekiel, so that we have no need to recur to these ; we shall prove in a later chapter that all the instruments of Hebrew worship were pantacles, and that the first and final word of the Bible was written in gold and in brass by Moses, in the tabernacle and on all its accessories.

But each magus can and should have his individual pantacle, for, understood accurately, a pantacle is the perfect summary of a mind. Hence we find in the magical calendars of Tycho Brahe and Duchentau, the pantacles of Adam, Job, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and of all the other great prophets who have been, each in his turn, the kings of the Kabbalah and the grand rabbins of science.

The pantacle, being a complete and perfect synthesis, expressed by a single sign, serves to focus all intellectual strength into a glance, a recollection, a touch. It is, so to speak, a starting-point for the efficient projection of the will. Nigromancers and goetic magicians traced their infernal pantacles on the skin of the victims they immolated.

The sacrificial ceremonies, the manner of skinning the kid, then of salting, drying, and whitening the skin, are given in a number of clavicles and grimoires. Some Hebrew kabbalists fell into similar follies, forgetting the anathemas pronounced in the Bible against those who sacrifice on high places or in the caverns of the earth.

All spilling of blood operated ceremonially is abominable and impious, and since the death of Adonhiram the Society of true Adepts has a horror of blood — Ecclesia abhorret h sanguine. The initiatory symbolism of pantacles adopted throughout

THE KEY OF OCCULTISM 257 the east is the key of all ancient and modern mythologies. Apart from the knowledge of the hieroglyphic alphabet, one would be lost among the obscurities of the Vedas, the Zend- Avesta, and the Bible.

The tree which brings forth good and evil, the source of the four rivers, one of which waters the land of gold, that is, of light, and another flows through Ethiopia, or the kingdom of darkness ; the magnetic serpent who seduces the woman, and the woman who seduces the man, thus making known the law of attraction ; subsequently the Cherub or Sphinx placed at the gate of the Edenic sanctuary, with the fiery sword of the guardians of the symbol ; then regeneration by labour and propagation by sorrow, which is the law of initiations and ordeals ; the division of Cain and Abel, which is the same symbol as the strife of Anteros and Eros ; the ark borne upon the waters of the deluge like the coffer of Osiris ; the black raven who does not return and the white dove who does, a new setting forth of the dogma of antagonism and balance — all these magnificent kabbalistic allegories of Genesis, which, taken literally, and accepted as actual histories, merit even more derision and contempt than Voltaire heaped upon them, become luminous for the initiate, who still hails with enthusiasm and love the perpetuity of the true doctrine and the universality of initiation identical in all sancluaries of the world.

The five books of Moses, the prophecy of Ezekiel, and the ipocalypse of St John are the three kabbalistic keys of the rhole Biblical edifice.

The sphinxes of Ezekiel are identical tith those of the sanctuary and the ark, and are a quadruple >roduction of the Egyptian tetrad ; the wheels revolving one another are the harmonious spheres of Pythagoras ; le new temple, the plan of which is given according to wholly kabbalistic measures, is the type of the labours of imitive masonry.

St John, in his Apocalypse, reproduces the same images and the same numbers, and reconstructs the Edenic world ideally in the New Jerusalem ; but at the source of the four rivers the solar lamb replaces the mysteri- E