Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 258ous tree. Initiation by toil and blood has been accomplished, and there is no more temple because the light of truth is universally diffused, and the world has become the temple of justice.
This splendid final vision of the Holy Scriptures, this divine Utopia which the Church has referred with good reason for its realisation to a better life, has been the pitfall of all ancient arch-heretics and of many modern idealists.
The simultaneous emancipation and absolute equality of all men involve the arrest of progress and consequently of life; in a world where all are equal there could no longer be infants or the aged ; birth and death could not therefore be admitted.
This is sufficient to demonstrate that the New Jerusalem is no more of this world than the primeval paradise, wherein there was no knowledge of good or evil, of liberty, of generation, or of death; the cycle of our religious symbolism begins and ends therefore in eternity. Dupuis and Volney lavished their great erudition to discover this relative identity of all symbols, and arrived at the negation of every religion.
We attain by the same path to a diametrically opposed affirmation, and we recognise with admiration that there have never been any false religions in the civilised world ; that the divine light, the splendour of the supreme reason of the Logos, of that word which enlightens every man coming into the world, has been no more wanting to the children of Zoroaster than to the faithful sheep of St Peter ; that the permanent, the one, the universal revelation, is written in visible nature, explained in reason, and completed by the wise analogies of faith ; that there is, finally, but one true religion, one doctrine, and one legitimate belief, even as there is but one God, one reason, and one universe ; that revelation is obscure for no one, since the whole world understands more or less both truth and justice, and since all that is possible can only exist analogically to what is. BEING is BEING,
THE KEY OF OCCULTISM 259 of St John are hieroglyphics, like those of all oriental mythologies, and can be comprised in a series of pantacles. The initiator, clothed in white, standing between seven golden candlesticks and holding seven stars in his hand, represents the unique doctrine of Hermes and the universal analogies of the light.
The woman clothed with the sun and crowned with twelve stars is the celestial Isis, or the gnosis ; the serpent of material life seeks to devour her child, but she takes unto herself the wings of the eagle and flies away into the desert — a protestation of the prophetic spirit against the materialism of official religion.
The mighty angel with the face of a sun, a rainbow for nimbus, and a cloud for vestment, having pillars of fire for his legs, and setting one foot upon the earth and another on the sea, is truly a kabbalistic Panthea.
His feet represent the equilibrium of BRIAH, or the world of forms ; his legs are the two pillars of the Masonic temple, JAKIN and BOHAS ; his body, veiled by clouds, from which issues a hand holding a book, is the sphere of JETZIRAH, or initiatory ordeals ; his solar head, crowned with the radiant septenary, is the world of ATZILUTH, or perfect revelation; and we can only be excessively astonished that Hebrew kabbalists have not recognised and made known this symbolism, which so closely and inseparably connects the highest mysteries of Christianity with the secret but invariable doctrine of all the masters in Israel.
The beast with seven heads, in the symbolism of >t John, is the material and antagonistic negation of the iminous septenary ; the Babylonian harlot corresponds ter the same manner to the woman clothed with the sun ; four horsemen are analogous to the four allegorical limals ; the seven angels with their seven trumpets, seven cups, and seven swords characterise the absolute of the struggle of good against evil by speech, by religious association, and by force.
Thus are the seven seals of the occult book successively opened, and universal initiation is accomplished. The commentators who have sought anything else in this book of the transcendent Kabbalah have lost their p. 260time and their trouble only to make themselves ridiculous. To discover Napoleon in the angel Apollyon, Luther in the star which falls from heaven, Voltaire or Rousseau in the grasshoppers armed like warriors, is merely high fantasy. It is the same with all the violence done to the names of celebrated persons so as to make them numerically equivalent to the fatal number 666, which we have already sufficiently explained ; and when we think that men like Bossuet and Newton amused themselves with such chimeras, we can understand that humanity is not so malicious in its nature as might be supposed from the complexion of its vices.
CHAPTEE XI THE TRIPLE CHAIN THE great work in practical magic, after the education of the will and the personal creation of the magus, is the formation of the magnetic chain, and this secret is truly that of priesthood and of royalty. To form the magnetic chain is to originate a current of ideas which produces faith and draws a large number of wills in a given circle of active manifestation. A well-formed chain is like a whirlpool which sucks down and absorbs all. The chain may be established in three ways — by signs, by speech, and by contact. The first is by inducing opinion to adopt some sign as the representation of a force. Thus, all Christians communicate by the sign of the cross, masons by that of the square beneath the sun, the magi by that of the microcosm, made by extending the five fingers, etc. Once accepted and propagated, signs acquire force of themselves. In the early centuries of our era, the sight and imitation of the sign of the cross was enough to make proselytes to Christianity. What is called the miraculous medal continues in our own
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