Transcendental Magic — Éliphas Lévi
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p. 267agent must be assimilated and incorporated. Paracelsus, Kaymund Lully, and Nicholas Flamel seem alone to have perfectly understood this mystery. Basil Valentine and Trevisan indicate it after an incomplete manner, which might be capable of another interpretation.
But quite the most curious things which we have found on this subject are indicated by the mystical figures and magical legends in a book of Henry Khunrath, entitled Amphitheatrum Sapientice jflternce. Khunrath represents and resumes the most learned Gnostic schools, and connects in symbology with the mysticism of Synesius.
He affects Christianity in expressions and in signs, but it is easy to see that his Christ is the Abraxas, the luminous pentagram radiating on the astronomical cross, the incarnation in humanity of the sovereign sun celebrated by the Emperor Julian ; it is the luminous and living manifestation of that Ruach-Elohim which, according to Moses, brooded and worked upon the bosom of the waters at the birth of the world ; it is the man-sun, the monarch of light, the supreme magus, the master and conqueror of the serpent, and in the four-fold legend of the evangelists, Khunrath finds the allegorical key of the great work.
One of the pantacles of his magical book represents the philosophical stone erected in the middle of a fortress surrounded by a wall in which there are twenty impracticable gates. One alone conducts to the sanctuary of the great work. Above the stone there is a triangle placed upon a winged dragon, and on the stone is graven name of Christ qualified as the symbolical image of all iture.
" It is by him alone," he adds, " that thou canst )btain the universal medicine for men, animals, vegetables, id minerals. The winged dragon, ruled by the triangle, ipresents, therefore, the Christ of Khunrath ; that is, the >vereign intelligence of light and life ; it is the secret of pentagram ; it is the highest dogmatic and practical lystery of traditional magic. Thence unto the grand and rer incommunicable maxim there is only one step. The kabbalistic figures of Abraham the Jew, which
268 THE RITUAL OF TKANSCENDENT MAGIC imparted to Flamel the first desire for knowledge, are no other than the twenty-two keys of the Tarot, elsewhere initiated and resumed in the twelve keys of Basil Valentine.
There the sun and moon reappear under the figures of emperor and empress ; Mercury is the juggler ; the Great Hierophant is the adept or abstractor of the quintessence ; death, judgment, love, the dragon or devil, the hermit or lame elder, and, finally, all the remaining symbols are there found with their chief attributes, and almost in the same order.
It could have scarcely been otherwise, since the Tarot is the primeval book and the keystone of the occult sciences ; it must be Hermetic, because it is kabbalistic, magical, and theosophical. So, also, we find in the combination of its twelfth and twenty-second keys, superposed one upon the other, the hieroglyphic revelation of the solution of the grand work and its mysteries.
The twelfth key represents a man hanging by one foot from a gibbet composed of three trees or posts, forming the Hebrew letter fl ; the man's arms constitute a triangle with his head, and his entire hieroglyphical shape is that of a reversed triangle surmounted by a cross, an alchemical symbol known to all adepts, and representing the accomplishment of the great work.
The twenty-second key, which bears the number twenty-one, because the fool which precedes it carries no numeral, represents a youthful female divinity slightly veiled and running in a flowering circle, supported at four corners by the four beasts of the Kabbalah.
In the Italian Tarot this divinity has a rod in either hand ; in the Besanson Tarot, the two wands are in one hand while the other is placed upon her thigh, both equally remarkable symbols of magnetic action, either alternate in its polarisation, or simultaneous by opposition and transmission. The great work of Hermes is, therefore, an essentially magical operation, and the highest of all, for it supposes the absolute in science and volition.
There is light in gold, gold in light, and light in all things. The intelligent will, which assimilates the light, directs in this manner the p. 269operations of substantial form, and uses chemistry solely as a secondary instrument. The influence of human will and intelligence upon the operations of nature, dependent in part on its labour, is otherwise a fact so real that all serious alchemists have succeeded in proportion to their knowledge and their faith, and have reproduced their thought in the phenomena of the fusion, salification, and recomposition of metals.
Agrippa, who was a man of immense erudition and fine genius, but pure philosopher and sceptic, could not transcend the limits of metallic analysis and synthesis.
Etteilla, a confused, obscure, fantastic, but persevering kabbalist, reproduced in alchemy the eccentricities of his misconstrued and mutilated Tarot ; metals in his crucibles assumed extraordinary forms, which excited the curiosity of all Paris, with no greater profit to the operator than the fees which were paid by his visitors.
An obscure bellowsblower of our own time, who died mad, poor Louis Cambriel, really cured his neighbours, and, by the evidence of all his parish, brought back to life a smith who was his friend. For him the metallic work took the most inconceivable and apparently illogical forms.
One day he beheld the figure of God himself in his crucible, incandescent like the sun, transparent as crystal, his body composed of triangular conglomerations, which Cambriel naively compared to quantities of tiny pears.
One of our friends, who is a learned kabbalist, but belongs to an initiation which we regard as erroneous, performed recently the chemical operations of the great work, and succeeded in weakening his eyes through the excessive brilliance of the Athanor. He created a new metal which resembles gold, but is not gold, and hence has no value.
Eaymund Lully, Nicholas Flamel, and most probably Henry Khunrath, made true gold, nor did they take away their secret with them, for it is enclosed in their symbols, and they have further indicated the sources from which they drew for its discovery and for the realisation of its effects. It is this same secret which we now ourselves make public.
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