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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The History of Magic," Éliphas Lévi masterfully weaves an intricate tapestry of the arcane, tracing the evolution of magical practices from ancient civilizations to the modern era. His literary style is both erudite and evocative, embodying the Romantic spirit while firmly grounding his discussions in historical context. Lévi delves into the philosophical underpinnings of magic, examining its intersections with religion, science, and the esoteric traditions of the West, thus inviting readers to explore the relationship between knowledge and mystical experience. Éliphas Lévi, a pivotal figure in the 19th-century occult revival, was shaped by a profound interest in the interplay of mysticism and reason. His experiences and studies in various religious, philosophical, and magical traditions inspired him to document the evolution of magical thought, reflecting the intellectual currents of his time. Lévi's background in literature and his engagements with influential thinkers cultivated his unique perspective that redefined the public understanding of magic as a symbolic and transformative practice. Readers who seek to deepen their understanding of magic's rich history and its philosophical implications will find "The History of Magic" an invaluable resource. Lévi's comprehensive approach not only enriches contemporary discussions of the occult but also challenges the modern reader to reconsider the enduring power of magical thought in both historical and personal contexts. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The History of Magic
Table of Contents
Introduction
At its core, The History of Magic presents magic as a perennial wisdom tradition struggling to reconcile the unseen with the claims of religion, science, and human reason. Éliphas Lévi invites readers into a grand survey of ideas, rituals, and symbols that have shaped occult thought across civilizations. Rather than treating magic as mere superstition, he approaches it as a language of correspondences and a repository of metaphysical inquiry. The result is a work that seeks coherence amid contradiction, tracing how spiritual imagination and disciplined study have met, clashed, and mingled through the ages. This introduction prepares readers for a demanding yet rewarding journey through doctrine, legend, and critique, where intellectual curiosity is matched by moral seriousness.
The History of Magic is a nonfiction study of esoteric history and ideas, originally published in French in the mid nineteenth century. Written by Éliphas Lévi, the influential French occultist also known as Alphonse Louis Constant, the book surveys the claims and practices associated with magic as they appear in religious, philosophical, and cultural contexts. It belongs to a period when European scholars and seekers revisited antiquity, medieval learning, and Renaissance hermeticism with renewed intensity. The work has circulated widely beyond France through subsequent translations, helping to cement Lévi’s reputation as a pivotal voice in the modern discussion of Western occult traditions.
Lévi organizes his material as a historical panorama, moving from ancient priesthoods to the alchemists and mystics of later centuries, and on to currents closer to his own era. He reads myths, scriptures, and reports less as literal chronicles than as symbolic testimonies to a consistent, if veiled, philosophy. The book offers an experience that is part history of ideas, part theological meditation, and part polemic. Its voice is authoritative and rhetorical, its mood earnest, sometimes combative, yet animated by a desire to reconcile disparate sources. Readers encounter a narrative shaped by synthesis more than by archival documentation or narrow academic method.
Lévi writes with a cadence that blends sermon, lecture, and visionary sketch. He favors sweeping connections, luminous metaphors, and moral framing, placing ethical responsibility at the center of magical discourse. The prose moves confidently between antiquity and the nineteenth century, insisting that symbols carry an intelligible structure that can be read by the trained mind. At the same time, he challenges the materialist skepticism prevalent in his time, arguing for a spiritual interpretation of phenomena that many dismissed as superstition. The mood is not antiquarian nostalgia but engaged interpretation, seeking meaning that bridges religious devotion, philosophical reason, and practical experiment.
Key themes include the continuity of a prisca theologia or perennial philosophy, the discipline of will and imagination, and the interdependence of ritual, symbol, and ethics. Lévi repeatedly tests the boundaries between legitimate initiation and dangerous illusion, proposing criteria by which claims of power might be weighed. He treats traditions such as Kabbalah, alchemy, and ceremonial practice as structured languages rather than curiosities. The book also scrutinizes the relationship between institutional religion and esoteric inquiry, exploring conflict and complementarity. Throughout, magic emerges less as spectacle than as a demanding intellectual and moral path oriented toward knowledge, responsibility, and inner transformation.
Readers today may find the book valuable as both a window onto nineteenth century esoteric scholarship and a catalyst for interdisciplinary reflection. It influenced the subsequent occult revival and contributed to the vocabulary of later ceremonial and symbolic systems. Beyond specialist circles, its questions remain timely: What counts as knowledge when confronting experiences at the edge of explanation? How do myths and symbols encode shared human intuitions? Where do scientific inquiry, religious practice, and imaginative art overlap? Engaging with Lévi encourages careful reading of sources, skepticism toward simplistic dismissals or credulous acceptance, and attention to the ethical stakes of seeking hidden knowledge.
Approached on its own terms, The History of Magic rewards patience and dialogue rather than hurried agreement. It invites readers to trace patterns across cultures while noticing the author’s nineteenth century assumptions and limits. Taking it as a historical essay in interpretation, not a definitive archive, clarifies both its strengths and its controversies. For newcomers, it offers a structured introduction to major currents of Western esotericism; for seasoned readers, it provides a touchstone for comparing methods and claims. Above all, it presents a model of engaged reading, where critical intelligence and imaginative sympathy work together to make sense of the hidden.
Synopsis
The History of Magic presents a chronological survey of magical ideas as a perennial philosophy linking religion, science, and symbolism. Lévi frames magic as the science of hidden forces and a discipline of will and knowledge, proposing a unifying doctrine behind ancient wisdom traditions. He outlines guiding notions such as correspondences, the power of symbols, and a universal medium often termed the astral light. The book’s method is comparative, moving across civilizations and texts to show continuities of doctrine. It seeks to distinguish legitimate sacred science from superstition or malefic practices, while interpreting myths, rites, and miracles as coded expressions of a single esoteric tradition.
The narrative begins with the Orient, where priestly castes are depicted as custodians of a primordial science. Chaldea, Egypt, India, and Persia provide early frameworks of astrology, theurgy, and ritual law. Figures such as Zoroaster and Hermes serve as emblematic sages whose teachings encode metaphysical principles in myths and images. Lévi emphasizes numerical and symbolic alphabets that organize doctrine into practical and contemplative paths. Sacred architecture, temple liturgies, and hieroglyphic systems are presented as structured methods for aligning human will with cosmic order. Early oracles and initiatory tests illustrate how power was bound to ethics, secrecy, and disciplined imagination.
The Hebrew tradition is treated as a central pillar of authentic magic. Mosaic law, prophetic vision, and the temple cult are described as a synthesis of ritual power and revelation. Kabbalistic doctrine, with its emphasis on the divine name and creative letters, provides a theoretical grammar of creation, number, and speech. Lévi highlights the Tetragrammaton, the sefirotic structure, and the practice of interpreting scripture through layered senses. Solomon becomes a model of wise governance and symbolic mastery, associated with seal, key, and judgment. Magic is thus framed as lawful theurgy under divine principle, contrasted with illicit enchantment that seeks power without wisdom.
Turning to Greece and Rome, the book presents Pythagorean number theory, Orphic initiations, and Platonic metaphysics as continuations of earlier sacred science. The mysteries of Eleusis and Dionysus exemplify ritual drama that educates the soul through symbol. Later Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus refine theurgy as a disciplined ascent, joining ritual technique with philosophical contemplation. Astrology, harmonics, and an animated cosmos underpin practices that aim to reconcile fate and freedom. Classical accounts of oracles, prodigies, and healing shrines are read as applications of doctrine concerning correspondences between celestial orders, natural forces, and the moral and mental dispositions of practitioners.
The Christian era is presented as a transformation rather than a repudiation of sacred science. The Gospel miracles and the sacramental system are interpreted within a theurgic logic of signs made effective by faith and intention. The book surveys conflicts with Gnostics, magicians such as Simon Magus, and later heresies to show how authority sought to regulate spiritual powers. Medieval controversies, including accusations against the Templars and discussions of images and relics, are treated through symbolic analysis. Lévi situates ecclesial rites within a hierarchy of legitimate magic, while noting how misunderstandings of symbolism fostered prosecutions, fears of idolatry, and polemics about demons and enchantment.
Medieval magic is depicted as both scholarly and popular. Learned pursuits include alchemy, astrology, and natural philosophy associated with figures like Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Raymond Lully. Alchemy is framed as a double work, material and spiritual, governed by purification, proportion, and the search for a universal medicine. Alongside these traditions, grimoires, conjurations, and legends of the witches sabbath appear as divergent currents. The pentagram, seals, and planetary hours stand as technical operators within a moral framework distinguishing white from black magic. The period illustrates tensions between experiment and orthodoxy, and between lawful invocation and practices condemned as sorcery.
Renaissance and early modern chapters survey the revival of Hermetic and Kabbalistic studies. Humanists such as Ficino and Pico propose a dignified natural magic harmonized with theology. Trithemius, Agrippa, Paracelsus, and John Dee develop doctrines of signatures, angelic hierarchies, and the virtues of numbers and words. Prophetic and interpretive arts, including those associated with Nostradamus, are placed within a broader philosophy of cycles and correspondences. The book notes Rosicrucian legends and secret fraternities promoting reform through knowledge and virtue. Across these exemplars, practice is shown to depend on disciplined will, symbolic literacy, and a method that unites medicine, cosmology, and moral intention.
Modern developments emphasize magnetism, vision, and social currents. Mesmerism and animal magnetism are presented as empirical windows onto the universal medium alluded to by earlier sages. Swedenborg exemplifies visionary science, while Cagliostro and various illuminist circles illustrate ritual innovation. French and German mystical currents, including Martinez de Pasqually and Saint Martin, explore reintegration and the inward temple. Secret societies and political upheavals are read as expressions of a magical chain that transmits influence through belief, example, and collective will. These chapters argue that modern phenomena neither abolish nor supersede the tradition, but instead restate perennial methods in contemporary terms.
The concluding synthesis defines magic as the disciplined use of will, imagination, and knowledge in conformity with moral law and cosmic order. Lévi reiterates that symbols, especially sacred names and numbers, are operative keys when handled with purity and method. Miracles are explained as lawful effects of hidden causes, not violations of nature. The work urges discrimination between true theurgy and manipulative practices, and it proposes concord between religion and science through a shared esoteric core. The overall message presents a continuous history in which doctrines adapt in form yet retain a common aim: the wise governance of forces that link mind, nature, and the divine.
Historical Context
Éliphas Lévi’s The History of Magic (Histoire de la magie) appeared in Paris in 1860, under the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852–1870), when Catholic ultramontanism, positivist science, socialist memory, and occult revival collided. Written after the upheavals of 1848 and amid intensified censorship and police oversight, the book reflects a Parisian milieu of salons, Masonic lodges, spiritist séances, and learned societies. Though it surveys antiquity to modernity, its interpretive frame is distinctly mid-nineteenth-century France: reconciling faith and reason, authority and liberty, through a universal esoteric philosophy. Lévi, a former seminarian and radical pamphleteer turned occult philosopher, used the capital’s debates to synthesize Kabbalah, Hermetism, and magnetism into a historical argument.
The French Revolution of 1789 and its sequels—Constitutional Monarchy (1789–1792), the Terror (1793–1794), Napoleonic rule (1799–1815)—reshaped France’s political theology. Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), dechristianization and the Cult of Reason (1793), and the 1801 Concordat reframed relations between altar and throne. Lévi reads these convulsions as a struggle over the symbolic priesthood of society, where “magical” sovereignty (ritual, myth, law) shifts from Church to Nation. In The History of Magic, revolutionary rites become secularized liturgies, and he interprets the pendulum between Jacobinism and Caesarism as an occult lesson on equilibrium: the necessary balance of authority and liberty to prevent social enchantment from turning tyrannical.
The 1848 Revolution in Paris (22–24 February) toppled Louis-Philippe and inaugurated the Second Republic, soon shaken by the June Days (23–26 June 1848) and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s election in December. His coup d’état of 2 December 1851 paved the way for the Second Empire. Lévi, born Alphonse-Louis Constant, had earlier embraced socialist causes and was imprisoned in 1841 for La Bible de la liberté. The failures and repressions of 1848–1851 impelled his philosophical turn: after travels to London (1853–1855) and publication of Dogme et rituel (1854–1856), he recast social reform as initiatic reform. The History of Magic refracts 1848’s hopes and disillusionment, proposing esoteric ethics as a corrective to volatile mass politics.
The suppression of the Knights Templar under Philip IV of France began with mass arrests on 13 October 1307, followed by papal intervention under Clement V, the Council of Vienne (1311–1312), and formal dissolution in 1312. Grand Master Jacques de Molay was executed in Paris on 18 March 1314. These events—rooted in royal debt, ecclesiastical politics, and inquisitorial procedure—became a touchstone for accusations of heresy and clandestine rites. Lévi reinterprets the Templars as custodians of a veiled tradition, rejecting charges of idolatry (Baphomet) as political calumny and symbolic misreading. In The History of Magic, their fall exemplifies how states weaponize superstition against unorthodox knowledge, a pattern he applies to other persecuted esoteric currents.
Renaissance and early modern Europe saw the entanglement of learned magic and emergent science. Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum (1463), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s 900 Theses (1486) synthesized Kabbalah and Christianity, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa issued De occulta philosophia (1531). Paracelsus (1493–1541) revolutionized medicine; John Dee (1527–1608/9) conducted angelic scrying with Edward Kelley from 1582; Giordano Bruno was executed in Rome on 17 February 1600. Meanwhile, witch persecutions spiked—Malleus Maleficarum (1487), the Würzburg and Bamberg trials (1626–1631), and Loudun (1634). Lévi valorizes the magus as a philosopher of nature prematurely condemned, arguing that The History of Magic rescues these figures from theological and legal misprision to restore their experimental and symbolic aims.
Mesmerism, originating with Franz Anton Mesmer’s Parisian demonstrations (from 1778), posited a universal fluid—animal magnetism—eliciting trance and cures. The Royal Commission of 1784, including Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, and Jean-Sylvain Bailly, attributed effects to imagination, while the Marquis de Puységur (1784) described artificial somnambulism. Despite controversy, magnetism persisted in medicine and parapsychology across the nineteenth century. Lévi assimilates magnetism into his doctrine of the astral light, a mediating force explaining magic’s operations. In The History of Magic, he historicizes these debates to show continuities between ancient theurgies, Renaissance talismans, and modern hypnosis, turning a contested medical practice into evidence for a perennial esoteric physics.
Transatlantic spiritualism—sparked by the Fox sisters’ rappings at Hydesville, New York, in 1848—reached London and Paris by the early 1850s. In France, Allan Kardec (Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail) systematized spiritist doctrine in Le Livre des Esprits (1857), and séances proliferated in salons under Napoleon III. Lévi engaged yet critiqued this milieu: in 1854, during a London period, he attempted an evocation of Apollonius of Tyana, later interpreting such phenomena as projections through the astral light rather than literal ghosts. The History of Magic addresses spiritualism to discipline credulity, distinguishing mediumistic automatisms from initiatic practices and warning how mass enthusiasm can devolve into a new superstition.
As social and political critique, The History of Magic indicts authoritarian dogma and reductive materialism alike. By recounting inquisitions, witch hunts, and the Templars’ downfall, Lévi exposes the collusion of throne and altar in criminalizing dissenting knowledge. He also scrutinizes the crowd psychology of 1789 and 1848, arguing that unbalanced liberty breeds terror as surely as unbalanced authority breeds repression. Against both ultramontanism (crystallizing in Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, 1864) and positivism, he proposes an ethic of equilibrium, merit, and initiation that transcends class divides. The book thus reimagines political order as a moral-ritual contract, where justice safeguards inquiry and power is bound by conscience.
The History of Magic
THE HISTORY OF MAGIC
INTRODUCTION
Magic has been confounded too long with the jugglery of mountebanks[1], the hallucinations of disordered minds and the crimes of certain unusual malefactors. There are otherwise many who would promptly explain Magic as the art of prod[6]ucing effects in the absence of causes; and on the strength of such a definition it will be said by ordinary people—with the good sense which characterises the ordinary, in the midst of much injustice—that Magic is an absurdity. But it can have no analogy in fact with the descriptions of those who know nothing of the subject; furthermore, it is not to be represented as this or that by any person whomsoever: it is that which it is, drawing from itself only, even as mathematics do, for it is the exact and absolute science of Nature and her laws.
Magic is the science of the ancient magi; and the Christian religion, which silenced the counterfeit oracles and put a stop to the illusions of false gods, does, this notwithstanding, revere those mystic kings who came from the East, led by a star, to adore the Saviour of the world in His cradle. They are elevated by tradition to the rank of kings, because magical initiation constitutes a true royalty; because also the great art of the magi is characterised by all adepts as the Royal Art, as the Holy Kingdom—Sanctum Regnum[2]. The star which conducted the pilgrims is the same Burning Star which is met with in all initiations. For alchemists it is the sign of the quintessence, for magicians it is the Great Arcanum, for Kabalists[3] the sacred pentagram. Our design is to prove that the study of this pentagram did itself lead the magi to a knowledge of that New Name which was to be exalted above all names and to bend the knees of all beings who were capable of adoration. Magic, therefore, combines in a single science that which is most certain in philosophy, which is eternal and infallible in religion. It reconciles perfectly and incontestably those two terms, so opposed on the first view—faith and reason, science and belief, authority and liberty. It furnishes the human mind with an instrument of philosophical and religious certitude as exact as mathematics, and even accounting for the infallibility of mathematics themselves.
An Absolute exists therefore in the realms of understanding and faith. The lights of human intelligence have not been left by the Supreme Reason to waver at hazard. There is an incontestable truth; there is an infallible method of knowing that truth; while those who attain this knowledge, and adopt it as a rule of life, can endow their will with a sovereign power which can make them masters of all inferior things, all wandering spirits, or, in other words, arbiters and kings of the world.
If such be the case, how comes it that so exalted a science is still unrecognised? How is it possible to assume that so bright a sun is hidden in a sky so dark? The transcendental science has been known always, but only to the flowers of intelligence, who have understood the necessity of silence and patience. Should a skilful surgeon open at midnight the eyes of a man born blind, it would still be impossible to make him realise the nature or existence of daylight till morning came. Science has its nights and its mornings, because the life which it communicates to the world of mind is characterised by regular modes of motion and progressive phases. It is the same with truths as it is with radiations of light. Nothing which is hidden is lost, but at the same time nothing that is found is absolutely new. The seal of eternity is affixed by God to that science which is the reflection of His glory.
The transcendental science, the absolute science is assuredly Magic, though the affirmation may seem utterly paradoxical to those who have never questioned the infallibility of Voltaire—that marvellous smatterer who thought that he knew so much because he never missed an opportunity for laughter instead of learning. Magic was the science of Abraham and Orpheus, of Confucius and Zoroaster, and it was magical doctrines which were graven on tables of stone by Enoch and by Trismegistus. Moses purified and re-veiled them—this being the sense of the word reveal. The new disguise which he gave them was that of the Holy Kabalah—that exclusive heritage of Israel and inviolable secret of its priests.[1] The mysteries of Eleusis and of Thebes preserved among the Gentiles some of its symbols, but in a debased form, and the mystic key was lost amidst the apparatus of an ever-increasing superstition. Jerusalem, murderer of its prophets and prostituted over and over again to false Assyrian and Babylonian gods, ended by losing in its turn the Sacred Word, when a Saviour, declared to the magi by the holy star of initiation, came to rend the threadbare veil of the old temple, to endow the Church with a new network of legends and symbols—ever concealing from the profane and always preserving for the elect that truth which is the same for ever.
It is this that the erudite and ill-starred Dupuis should have found on Indian planispheres and in tables of Denderah; he would not have ended by rejecting the truly catholic or universal and eternal religion in the presence of the unanimous affirmation of all Nature, as well as all monuments of science throughout the ages.[2] It was the memory of this scientific and religious absolute, of this doctrine summarised in a word, of this word alternately lost and recovered, which was transmitted to the elect of all antique initiations. Whether preserved or profaned in the celebrated Order of the Temple, it was this same memory handed on to secret associations of Rosicrucians, Illuminati and Freemasons which gave a meaning to their strange rites, to their less or more conventional signs, and a justification above all to their devotion in common, as well as a clue to their power.
That profanation has befallen the doctrines and mysteries of Magic we have no intention to deny; repeated from age to age, the misuse itself has been a great and terrible lesson for those who made secret things unwisely known. The Gnostics caused the Gnosis to be prohibited by Christians, and the official sanctuary was closed to high initiation. The hierarchy of knowledge was thus compromised by the intervention of usurping ignorance, while the disorders within the sanctuary were reproduced in the state, for, willingly or otherwise, the king always depends from the priest, and it is towards the eternal adytum of divine instruction that earthly powers will ever look for consecration and for energy to insure their permanence.
The key of science has been thrown to children; as might have been expected, it is now, therefore, mislaid and practically lost. This notwithstanding, a man of high intuitions and great moral courage, Count Joseph de Maistre, who was also a resolute catholic, acknowledging that the world was void of religion and could not so remain, turned his eyes instinctively towards the last sanctuaries of occultism and called, with heartfelt prayers, for that day when the natural affinity which subsists between science and faith should combine them in the mind of a single man of genius. “This will be grand,” said he; “it will finish that eighteenth century which is still with us.... We shall talk then of our present stupidity as we now dilate on the barbarism of the Middle Ages.”
The prediction of Count Joseph de Maistre is in course of realisation; the alliance of science and faith, accomplished long since, is here in fine made manifest, though not by a man of genius. Genius is not needed to see the sun, and, moreover, it has never demonstrated anything but its rare greatness and its lights inaccessible to the crowd. The grand truth demands only to be found, when the simplest will be able to comprehend it and to prove it also at need. At the same time that truth will never become vulgar, because it is hierarchic and because anarchy alone humours the bias of the crowd. The masses are not in need of absolute truths; were it otherwise, progress would be arrested and life would cease in humanity; the ebb and flow of contrary ideas, the clash of opinions, the passions of the time, ever impelled by its dreams, are necessary to the intellectual growth of peoples. The masses know it full well, and hence they desert so readily the chair of doctors to collect about the rostrum of mountebanks. Some even who are assumed to be concerned in philosophy, and that perhaps especially, too often resemble the children playing at charades, who hasten to turn out those who know the answer already, lest the game should be spoiled by depriving the puzzle of the questions of all its interest.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” has been said by Eternal Wisdom. Purity of heart therefore purifies intelligence, and rectitude of will makes for precision in understanding. Whosoever prefers truth and justice before all things shall have justice and truth for his reward, because supreme Providence has endowed us with freedom in order that we may attain life; and very truth, all its exactitude notwithstanding, intervenes only with mildness, never does outrage to tardiness or violence to the errors of our will when it is beguiled by the allurements of falsehood.
It remains, however, according to Bossuet, that antecedent to anything which may please or repel our senses, there is a truth, and it is by this that our conduct should be governed, not by our appetites. The Kingdom of Heaven is not the empire of caprice, either in respect of man or God. “A thing is not just because it is willed by God,” said St. Thomas, “but God wills it because it is just.” The Divine Balance rules and necessitates eternal mathematics. “God has made all things with number, weight and measure”—here it is the Bible speaking.[3] Measure an angle of creation, make a proportionally progressive multiplication, and all infinity shall multiply its circles, peopled by universes, passing in proportional segments between the extending symbolical arms of your compass. Suppose now that, from whatever point of the infinite above you, a hand holds another compass or square, then the lines of the celestial triangle will meet of necessity those of the compass of science and will form therewith the mysterious star of Solomon.[4]
“With what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again,” says the Gospel. God does not strive with man that He may crush man by His grandeur, and He never places unequal weights in His balance. When He would test the strength of Jacob, He assumes the form of man; the patriarch withstands the onset through an entire night; at the end there is a blessing for the conquered and, in addition to the glory of having sustained such a struggle, he is given the national title of Israel, being a name which signifies—Strong against God.[5]
We have heard Christians more zealous than instructed hazarding a strange explanation of the dogma concerning eternal punishment by suggesting that God may avenge infinitely an offence which itself is finite, because if the offender is limited the grandeur of the offended being is not. An emperor of the world might, on the strength of a similar pretext, sentence to death some unreasoning child who had soiled accidentally the hem of his purple. Far otherwise are the prerogatives of greatness, and St. Augustine understood them better when he said that “God is patient because He is eternal.” In God all is justice, seeing that all is goodness; He never forgives after the manner of men, for He is never angered like them; but evil being, by its nature, incompatible with good, as night is with day, as discord is with harmony, and the liberty of man being furthermore inviolable, all error is expiated and all evil punished by suffering proportioned thereto. It is vain to invoke the help of Jupiter when our cart is stuck in the mud; unless we take pick and shovel, like the waggoner in the fable, Heaven will not draw us out of the rut. Help yourself and God will help you. In such a reasonable and wholly philosophical way is explained the possible and necessary eternity of punishment, with still a narrow way open for man to escape therefrom—being that of toil and repentance.[6]
It is by conformity with the rules of eternal power that man may unite himself to the creative energy and become creator and preserver in his turn. God has not limited narrowly the number of rounds on Jacob’s ladder of light. Whatsoever Nature has constituted inferior to man is thereby to him made subject: it is for man to extend his domain in virtue of continual ascent. Length and even perpetuity of life, the field of air and its storms, the earth and its metallic veins, light and its wondrous illusions, darkness and the dreams thereof, death and its ghosts—all these do therefore obey the royal sceptre of the magi, the shepherd’s staff of Jacob and the terrible wand of Moses. The adept becomes king of the elements, transmuter of metals, interpreter of visions, controller of oracles, master of life in fine, according to the mathematical order of Nature and conformably to the will of the Supreme Intelligence. This is Magic in all its glory. But is there anyone who in these days will dare to give credence to such words? The answer is—those who will study loyally and attain knowledge frankly. We make no attempt to conceal truth under the veil of parables or hieroglyphical signs; the time has come when everything should be told, and we propose to tell everything. It is our intention, in short, to unveil that ever secret science which, as we have indicated, is hidden behind the shadows of ancient mysteries, which the Gnostics betrayed clumsily, or rather disfigured unworthily, which is recognised dimly under the darkness shrouding the pretended crimes of Templars, which is met with once again beneath the now impenetrable enigmas of High-Grade Masonic Rites. We purpose further to bring into open day the fantastic King of the Sabbath, to expose the very roots of Black Magic and its frightful realities, long since surrendered to the derision of the grand-children of Voltaire.
For a great number of readers Magic is the science of the devil—even as the science of light is identified with that of darkness. We confess boldly at the outset that we are not in terror of the devil. “My fear is for those who fear him,” said St. Teresa. But we testify also that he does not prompt our laughter and that the ridicule of which he is often the object seems to us exceedingly misplaced. However this may be, it is our intention to bring him before the light of science. But the devil and science—the apposition of two names so strangely incongruous—must seem to have disclosed the whole intent in view. If the mystic personification of darkness be thus dragged into light, is it not to annihilate the phantom of falsehood in the presence of truth? Is it not to dispel in the day all formless monsters of the night? Superficial persons will think so and will condemn without hearing. Ill-instructed Christians will conclude that we are sapping the fundamental dogma of their ethics by decrying hell; and others will question the utility of combating error in which, as they imagine, no one believes longer. It is, therefore, important to enunciate our object clearly and establish our principles solidly.
We say, therefore, to Christians that the author of this book is a Christian like yourselves. His faith is that of a catholic strongly and deeply convinced; for this reason he does not come forward to deny dogmas, but to combat impiety under its most pernicious forms, which are those of false belief and superstition. He comes to drag from the darkness the black successor of Ahriman, in order to expose in broad day his colossal impotence and redoubtable misery. He comes to make subject the age-long problem of evil to the solutions of science, to uncrown the king of hell and to bow down his head at the foot of the cross. Is not virginal and maternal science—that science of which Mary is the sweet and luminous image—destined like her to crush the head of the old serpent?
The author, on the other hand, would say to pretended philosophy: Why seek to deny that which you cannot understand? Is not the unbelief which affirms in the face of the unknown more precipitate and less consoling than faith? Does the dreadful form of personified evil only prompt you to smile? Hear you not the ceaseless sobbing of humanity which writhes and weeps in the crushing folds of the monster? Have you never heard the atrocious laugh of the evil-doer who is persecuting the just man? Have you never experienced in yourselves the opening of those infernal deeps which the genius of perversity furrows in every soul? Moral evil exists—such is the unhappy truth; it reigns in certain spirits; it incarnates in certain men; it is therefore personified, and thus demons exist; but the most wicked of these demons is Satan. More than this I do not ask you to admit, and it will be difficult for you to grant me less.
Let it be otherwise and clearly understood that science and faith render mutual support to one another only in so far as their respective realms remain inviolably distinct. What is it that we believe? That which we do not know absolutely, though we may yearn for it with all our strength. The object of faith is not more than an indispensable hypothesis for science; the things which are in the domain of knowledge must never be judged by the processes of faith, nor, conversely, the things of faith according to the measures of science. The end of faith is not scientifically debatable. “I believe because it is absurd,” said Tertullian; and this utterance—paradoxical on the surface as it is—belongs to the highest reason. As a fact, beyond all that we can suppose rationally there is an infinite towards which we aspire with unquenchable thirst, and it eludes even our dreams. But is not the infinite itself an absurdity for our finite appreciation? We feel all the same that it is; the infinite invades us, overflows us, renders us dizzy at its abysses and crushes us by its awful height.
Scientifically probable hypotheses are one and all the last half-lights or shadows of science; faith begins where reason falls exhausted. Beyond human reason there is that Reason which is Divine—for my weakness a supreme absurdity, but an infinite absurdity which confounds me, and in which I believe.
The good alone is infinite; evil is not; and hence if God be the eternal object of faith, then the devil belongs to science. In which of the catholic creeds is there any question concerning him? Would it not be blasphemy to say that we believe in him? In Holy Scripture he is named but not defined. Genesis makes no allusion to a reputed revolt of angels; it ascribes the fall of Adam to the serpent, as to the most subtle and dangerous of living beings. We are acquainted with Christian tradition on this subject; but if that tradition is explicable by one of the greatest and most diffused allegories of science, what can such solution signify to the faith which aspires only to God, which despises the pomps and works of Lucifer?
Lucifer—Light-Bearer—how strange a name, attributed to the spirit of darkness! Is it he who carries the light and yet blinds feeble souls? The answer is yes, unquestionably; for traditions are full of divine disclosures and inspirations. “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light,” says St. Paul. And Christ Himself said: “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” So also the prophet Isaiah: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning.” Lucifer is then a fallen star—a meteor which is on fire always, which burns when it enlightens no longer. But is this Lucifer a person or a force, an angel or a strayed thunderbolt? Tradition supposes that it is an angel, but the Psalmist says: “Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire.” The word angel is applied in the Bible to all messengers of God—emissaries or new creations, revealers or scourges, radiant spirits or brilliant objects. The shafts of fire which the Most High darts through the clouds are angels of His wrath, and such figurative language is familiar to all readers of eastern poetry.
Having been the world’s terror through the period of the middle ages, the devil has become its mockery.[7] Heir to the monstrous forms of all false gods cast down successively from their thrones, the grotesque scarecrow has turned into a mere bugbear through very deformity and hideousness. Yet observe as to this that those only dare to laugh at the devil who know not the fear of God. Can it be that for many diseased imaginations he is God’s own shadow, or is he not often the idol of degenerate souls who only understand supernatural power as the exercise of cruelty with impunity?
But it is important to ascertain whether the notion of this evil power can be reconciled with that of God—in a word, whether the devil exists, and in such case what he is. There is no longer any question of superstition or of ridiculous invention; it is a question of religion alone and hence of the whole future, with all the interests, of humanity.
Strange reasoners indeed are we: we call ourselves strong-minded when we are indifferent to everything except material advantages, as, for example, money; and we leave to their own devices the ideas which are mothers of opinions and may, or at least can, by their sudden veering, upset all fortunes. A conquest of science is much more important than the discovery of a gold mine. Given science, gold is utilised in the service of life; given ignorance, wealth furnishes only destroying weapons.
For the rest, it is to be understood absolutely that our scientific revelations pause in the presence of faith, that—as Christian and Catholic—our work is submitted entirely to the supreme judgment of the Church. This said, to those who question the existence of a devil, we would point out that whatsoever has a name exists; speech may be uttered in vain, but in itself it cannot be vain, and it has a meaning invariably. The Word is never void, and if it be written that it is in God, as also that it is God, this is because it is the expression and the proof of being and of truth. The devil is named and personified in the Gospel, which is the Word of truth; he exists therefore and can be considered as a person. But here it is the Christian who defers: let science or reason speak; these two are one.[8]
Evil exists; it is impossible to doubt it; we can work good or evil. There are beings who work evil knowingly and willingly. The spirit which animates these beings and prompts them to do ill is bewrayed, turned aside from the right road, and thrown across the path of good as an obstacle; this is the precise meaning of the Greek word diabolos[5], which we render as devil. The spirits who love and perform evil are accidentally bad. There is therefore a devil who is the spirit of error, wilful ignorance, vertigo; there are beings under his obedience who are his envoys, emissaries, angels; and it is for this reason that the Gospel speaks of an eternal fire which is prepared, and in a sense predestined, for the devil and his angels. These words are themselves a revelation, so let us search their meaning, giving, in the first place, a concise definition of evil. Evil is the absence of rectitude in being. Moral evil is falsehood in action, as the lie is a crime in speech. Injustice is of the essence of lying, and every lie is an injustice. When that which we utter is just, there is no falsity. When that which we do is equitable and true in mode, there is no sin. Injustice is the death of moral being, as lying is the poison of intelligence. The false spirit is therefore a spirit of death. Those who hearken to him become his dupes and are by him poisoned. But if we had to take his absolute personification seriously, he would be himself absolutely dead and absolutely deceived, which means that the affirmation of his existence must imply a patent contradiction. Jesus said that the devil is a liar like his father. Who then is the father of the devil? Whosoever gives him a personal existence by living in accordance with his inspirations; the man who diabolises himself is the father of the incarnate spirit of evil. But there is a rash, impious and monstrous conception, traditional like the pride of the Pharisees, and in fine there is a hybrid creation which armed the paltry philosophy of the eighteenth century with an apparent defence. It is the false Lucifer of the heterodox legend—that angel proud enough to think that he was God, brave enough to buy independence at the price of eternal torment, beautiful enough to worship himself in the plenary Divine Light; strong enough to reign still in darkness and in dole and to make a throne of his inextinguishable fire. It is the Satan of the heretical and republican Milton, the pretended hero of black eternities, calumniated by deformity, bedecked with horns and talons which would better become his implacable tormentor. It is the devil who is king of evil, as if evil were a kingdom, who is more intelligent than the men of genius that fear his wiles. It is (a) that black light, that darkness with eyes, that power which God has not willed but which no fallen creature could create; (b) that prince of anarchy served by a hierarchy of pure spirits;[9] (c) that exile of God who on earth seems, like Him, everywhere, but is more tangible, is more for the majority in evidence, and is served better than God himself; (d) that conquered one, to whom the victor gives his children that he may devour them; (e) that artificer of sins of the flesh, to whom flesh is nothing, and who therefore can be nothing to flesh, unless indeed he be its creator and master, like God; (f) that immense, realised, personified and eternal lie; (g) that death which cannot die; (h) that blasphemy which the Word of God will never silence; (i) that poisoner of souls whom God tolerates by a contradiction of His omnipotence or preserves as the Roman emperors guarded Locusta among the trophies of their reign; (k) that executed criminal, living still to curse his Judge and still have a cause against him, since he will never repent; (l) that monster accepted as executioner by the Sovereign Power, and who, according to the forcible expression of an old catholic writer, may term God the God of the devil by describing himself as a devil of God.
Such is the irreligious phantom which blasphemes religion. Away with this idol which hides our Saviour. Down with the tyrant of falsehood, the black god of Manicheans, the Ahriman of old idolaters. Live God and His Word incarnate, who saw Satan fall from heaven. And live Mary, the Divine Mother, who crushed the head of the infernal serpent.
So cry with one voice the traditions of saints, and so cry faithful hearts. The attribution of any greatness whatsoever to a fallen spirit is a slander on Divinity; the ascription of any royalty whatsoever to the rebel spirit is to encourage revolt and be guilty, at least in thought, of that crime which the horror of the middle ages termed sorcery. For all the offences visited with death on the old sorcerers were real crimes and were indeed the greatest of all. They stole fire from heaven, like Prometheus; they rode winged dragons and the flying serpent, like Medea; they poisoned the breathable air, like the shadow of the manchineel tree; they profaned sacred things and even used the body of the Lord in works of destruction and malevolence.
How is all this possible? Because there is a composite agent, a natural and divine agent, at once corporeal and spiritual, an universal plastic mediator, a common receptacle for vibrations of movement and images of form, a fluid and a force which may be called, in a sense at least, the imagination of Nature. By the mediation of this force every nervous apparatus is in secret communication together; hence come sympathy and antipathy, hence dreams, hence the phenomena of second sight and extra-natural vision. This universal agent of Nature’s works is the Od of the Jews and of Reichenbach, the Astral Light of the Martinists,[10] which denomination we prefer as the more explicit.
The existence and possible employment of this force constitute the great secret of Practical Magic; it is the Wand of Thaumaturgy and the Key of Black Magic. It is the Edenic serpent who transmitted to Eve the seductions of a fallen angel. The Astral Light warms, illuminates, magnetises, attracts, repels, vivifies, destroys, coagulates, separates, breaks and conjoins everything, under the impetus of powerful wills. God created it on the first day, when He said: “Let there be light.” This force of itself is blind but is directed by Egregores[4], that is, by chiefs of souls, or, in other words, by energetic and active spirits.[11]
Herein is the complete explanatory theory of prodigies and miracles. How, as a fact, could good and bad alike compel Nature to reveal her hidden forces, how could there be divine and diabolical miracles, how could the reprobate and bewrayed spirit have more power in certain ways and cases than the just spirit, which is in truth so powerful in simplicity and wisdom, unless we postulate an instrument which all can use, upon certain conditions, but some for the great good and others for the great evil?
Pharaoh’s magicians accomplished at first the same miracles as Moses. The instrument which they used was therefore the same; the inspiration alone differed; when they confessed themselves conquered, they proclaimed that, for them, human powers had reached their limit, and that there must be something superhuman in Moses.[12] This took place in Egypt, that mother of magical initiations, that land where it was all occult science, hierarchic and sacred instruction. Was it, however, more difficult to make flies appear than frogs? No, assuredly; but the magicians knew that the fluidic projection by which the eyes are biologised cannot proceed beyond certain bounds, and these had been passed already by Moses.[13]
A particular phenomenon occurs when the brain is congested or overcharged by Astral Light; sight is turned inward, instead of outward; night falls on the external and real world, while fantastic brilliance shines on the world of dreams; even the physical eyes experience a slight quivering and turn up inside the lids. The soul then perceives by means of images the reflection of its impressions and thoughts. This is to say that the analogy subsisting between idea and form attracts in the Astral Light a reflection representing that form, configuration being the essence of the vital light; it is the universal imagination, of which each of us appropriates a lesser or greater part according to our grade of sensibility and memory. Therein is the source of all apparitions, all extraordinary visions and all the intuitive phenomena peculiar to madness or ecstasy.
The appropriation or assimilation of the light by clairvoyant sensibility is one of the greatest phenomena which can be studied by science. It may be understood in a day to come that seeing is actually speaking and that the consciousness of light is a twilight of eternal life in being. The word of God Himself, Who creates light, and is uttered by all intelligence that conceives of forms and seeks to visualise them. “Let there be light.” Light in the mode of brightness exists only for eyes which look thereon, and the soul enamoured with the pageant of universal beauty, and fixing its attention on that luminous script of the endless book which is called things manifest, seems to cry on its own part, as God at the dawn of the first day, the sublime and creative words: Fiat lux.
We do not all see with the same eyes, and creation is not for all the same in colour and form. Our brain is a book printed within and without, and with the smallest degree of excitement, the writing becomes blurred, as occurs continually in cases of intoxication and madness. Dream then triumphs over real life and plunges reason in a sleep which knows no waking. This condition of hallucination has its degrees; all passions are intoxications; all enthusiasms are comparative and graduated manias. The lover sees only infinite perfections encompassing that object by which he is fascinated. But, unhappy infatuation of voluptuaries, to-morrow this odour of wine which allures him will become a repugnant reminiscence, causing a thousand loathings and a thousand disgusts.
To understand the use of this force, but never to be obsessed and never overcome thereby, is to trample on the serpent’s head, and it is this which we learn from the Magic of Light; in such secrets are contained all mysteries of magnetism, which name can indeed be applied to the whole practical part of antique Transcendental Magic. Magnetism is the wand of miracles, but it is this for initiates only; for rash and uninstructed people, who would sport with it or make it subserve their passions, it is as dangerous as that consuming glory which, according to the allegorical fable, destroyed the too ambitious Semele in the embraces of Jupiter.
One of the great benefits of magnetism is that it demonstrates by incontestable facts the spirituality, unity and immortality of the soul; and these things once made certain, God is manifested to all intelligences and all hearts. Thereafter, from the belief in God and from the harmonies of creation, we are led to that great religious harmony which does not exist outside the miraculous and lawful hierarchy of the Catholic Church, for this alone has preserved all traditions of science and faith.
The primal tradition of the one and only revelation has been preserved under the name of Kabalah by the priesthood of Israel. Kabalistic doctrine, which is that of Transcendental Magic, is contained in the Sepher Yetzirah, the Zohar and the Talmud.[14] According to this doctrine, the absolute is Being, and therein is the Word, which expresses the reason of Being and of life. The principle therefore is that Being is being, אהיה אשד אהיה. In the beginning the Word was, which means that it is, has been and shall be; and this is reason which speaks. In the beginning was the Word. The Word is the reason of belief, and therein also is the expression of that faith which gives life to science. The Word, or Logos, is the wellspring of logic. Jesus is the Incarnate Word. The concord of reason with faith, of science with belief, of authority with liberty, has become in these modern days the real enigma of the sphinx. Coincidentally with this great problem there has come forward that which concerns the respective rights of man and woman. This was inevitable, for between the several terms of a great and supreme question, there is a constant analogy, and the difficulties, like the correspondences, are invariably the same. The loosening of this Gordian knot of philosophy and modern politics is rendered apparently paradoxical, because in order to effect an agreement between the terms of the required equation, there is always a tendency to confuse the one with the other. If there is anything that deserves to be called supreme absurdity, it is to inquire how faith becomes a reason, reason a belief and liberty an authority; or reciprocally, how the woman becomes a man and the man a woman. The definitions themselves intervene against such confusion, and it is by maintaining a perfect distinction between the terms, and so only, that we can bring them into agreement. The perfect and eternal distinction between the two primal terms of the creative syllogism, for the demonstration of their harmony in virtue of the analogy of opposites, is the second great principle of that occult philosophy veiled under the name of Kabalah and indicated by all sacred hieroglyphics of the old sanctuaries, as by the rites, even now understood so little, of ancient and modern Masonry.
We read in Scripture that Solomon erected two brazen columns before the door of his Temple, one of them being called Jachin and the other Boaz, meaning the strong and the weak.[15] These two pillars represented man and woman, reason and faith, power and liberty, Cain and Abel, right and duty. They were pillars of the intellectual and moral world, the monumental hieroglyphic of the antinomy inevitable to the grand law of creation. The meaning is that every force postulates a resistance on which it can work, every light a shadow as its foil, every convex a concave, every influx a receptacle, every reign a kingdom, every sovereign a people, every workman a first matter, every conqueror something to overcome. Affirmation rests on negation, the strong can only triumph because of weakness, the aristocracy cannot be manifested except by rising above the people. For the weak to become strong, for the people to acquire an aristocratic position, is a question of transformation and of progress, but it is without prejudice to the first principles; the weak will be ever the weak and it matters nothing if they are not always the same persons. The people in like manner will ever remain the people, the mass which is ruled and is not capable of ruling. In the vast army of inferiors, every personal emancipation is an automatic desertion, which, happily, is imperceptible because it is replaced, also automatically; a king-nation or a people of kings would presuppose the slavery of the world and anarchy in a single city, outside all discipline, as at Rome in the days of its greatest glory. A nation of sovereigns would be inevitably as anarchic as a class of experts or of scholars who deemed that they were masters; there would be none to listen; all would dogmatise and all give orders at once.
The radical emancipation of womanhood falls within the same category. If, integrally and radically, the woman leaves the passive and enters the active condition, she abdicates her sex and becomes man, or rather, as such a transformation is impossible physically, she attains affirmation by a double negation, placing herself outside both sexes, like a sterile and monstrous androgyne. These are strict consequences of the great Kabalistic dogma respecting that distinction of contraries which reaches harmony by the analogy of their proportions. This dogma once recognised, and the application of its results being made universally by the law of analogies, will mean a discovery of the greatest secrets concerning maternal sympathy and antipathy; it will mean also a discovery of the science of government in things political, in marriage, in all branches of occult medicine, whether magnetism, homœopathy, or moral influence. Moreover, and as it is intended to explain, the law of equilibrium in analogy leads to the discovery of an universal agent which was the Grand Secret of alchemists and magicians in the middle ages. It has been said that this agent is a light of life by which animated beings are rendered magnetic, electricity being only its accident and transient perturbation, so to speak. The practice of that marvellous Kabalah to which we shall turn shortly, for the satisfaction of those who look, in the secret sciences, after emotions rather than wise teachings, reposes entirely in the knowledge and use of this agent.
The religion of the Kabalists is at once hypothesis and certitude, for it proceeds from known to unknown by the help of analogy. They recognise religion as a need of humanity, as an evident and necessary fact, and it is this alone which for them is divine, permanent and universal revelation. They dispute about nothing which is, but they provide the reason for everything. So also their doctrine, by distinguishing clearly the line of demarcation which must exist for ever between science and faith, provides a basis for faith in the highest reason, guaranteeing its incontestable and permanent duration. After this come the popular forms of doctrine, which alone can vary and alone destroy one another; the Kabalist is not only undisturbed by trivialities of this kind, but can provide on the spot a reason for the most astonishing formulæ. It follows that his prayer can be joined to that of humanity at large, to direct it by illustrations from science and reason and draw it into orthodox channels. If Mary be mentioned, he will revere the realisation in her of all that is divine in the dreams of innocence, all that is adorable in the sacred enthusiasm of every maternal heart. It is not he who will refuse flowers to adorn the altars of the Mother of God, or white banners for her chapels, or even tears for her ingenuous legends. It is not he who will mock at the new-born God weeping in the manger or the wounded victim of Calvary. He repeats nevertheless, from the bottom of his heart, like the sages of Israel and the faithful believers of Islam: There is no God but God. For the initiates of true science, this signifies: There is but one Being, and this is Being. But all that is expedient and touching in beliefs, but the splendour of rituals, the pageant of divine creations, the grace of prayers, the magic of heavenly hopes—are not these the radiance of moral life in all its youth and beauty? Could anything alienate the true initiate from public prayers and temples, could anything raise his disgust or indignation against religious forms of all kinds, it would be the manifest unbelief of priests or people, want of dignity in the ceremonies of the cultus—in a word, the profanation of holy things. God is truly present when He is worshipped by recollected souls and feeling hearts; He is absent, sensibly and terribly, when discussed without light or zeal—that is to say, without understanding or love.
The adequate conception of God according to instructed Kabalism is that which was revealed by St. Paul when he said that to attain God we must believe that He is and that He recompenses those who seek Him out. So is there nothing outside the idea of being, in combination with the idea of goodness and justice: these alone are absolute. To say that there is no God or to define what He is, constitutes equal blasphemy. Every definition of God hazarded by human intelligence is a recipe of religious empiricism, out of which superstition will subsequently extract a devil.
In Kabalistic symbolism the representation of God is always by a duplicated image—one erect, the other reversed; one white, and the other black.[16] In such manner did the sages seek to express the intelligent and vulgar conceptions of the same idea—that of the God of light and the God of shadow. To the miscomprehension of this symbol must be referred the Persian Ahriman—that black but divine ancestor of all demons. The dream of the infernal king is but a false notion of God.
Light in the absence of shadow would be invisible for our eyes, since it would produce an overpowering brilliance equal to the greatest darkness. In the analogies of this physical truth, understood and considered adequately, a solution will be found for one of the most terrible of problems, the origin of evil. But to grasp it fully, together with all its consequences, is not meant for the multitude, who must not penetrate so readily into the secrets of universal harmony. It was only after the initiate of the Eleusinian mysteries had passed victoriously through all the tests, had seen and touched the holy things, that, if he were judged strong enough to withstand the last and most dreadful secret, a veiled priest passed him at flying pace and uttered in his ear the enigmatic words: Osiris is a black god. So was Osiris—of whom Typhon is the oracle—and so was the divine religious sun of Egypt, eclipsed suddenly, becoming the shadow of that grand, indefinable Isis who is all that has been and shall be, and whose eternal veil has no one lifted.
Light is the active principle for Kabalists, while darkness is analogous to the passive principle, for which reason they regarded the sun and moon as emblems of the two divine sexes and the two creative forces. So also they attributed to woman the first temptation and sin, and subsequently the first labour—the maternal labour of redemption: it is from the bosom of the dark itself that light is reborn. The void attracts the plenum, and thus the abyss of poverty and wretchedness, pretended evil, seeming nothingness and the ephemeral rebellion of creatures, attracts eternally an ocean of being, wealth, mercy and love. This interprets the symbol of the Christ descending into hell after pouring out upon the cross all immensities of the most marvellous forgiveness.
By the same law of harmony in the analogy of opposites the Kabalists explain also all mysteries of sexual love. Why is this passion more permanent between two unequal natures and two contrary characters? Why is there in love one always who immolates and one who is victim? Why are the most obstinate passions those the satisfaction of which would seem impossible? By this law also they would have decided once and for ever the question of precedence between the sexes, as brought forward in all seriousness by the Saint-Simonism of our own day. The natural strength of woman being that of inertia or resistance, they would have ruled that modesty is the most imprescriptible of her rights, and hence that she must neither perform nor desire anything demanding a species of masculine boldness. Nature has otherwise provided to this end by giving her a soft voice, not to be heard in large assemblies, unless raised to a ridiculously discordant pitch. She who would aspire to the functions of the opposite sex must forfeit thereby the prerogatives of her own. We know not to what point she may arrive in the ruling of men, but it is certain at least that in reaching it she will lose the love of men and, that which will be more cruel for her, the love of children.
The conjugal law of the Kabalists[17] furnishes further,
