Eliphas Levi - Transcendental Magic - Its Doctrine and Ritual

The undiscerning disciples of Zoroaster divided the duad without referring it to unity, thus separating the Pillars of the Temple and endeavouring to halve God. Conceive the Absolute as two, and you must immediately conceive it as three to recover the unity principle. For this reason, the material elements, analogous to the divine elements, are understood firstly as four, explained as two and exist ultimately as three.

Revelation is the duad; every word is double, and supposes two. The ethic which results from revelation is founded on antagonism, and this results from the duad. Spirit and form attract and repel one another, like sign and idea, fiction and truth. Supreme Reason necessitates dogma when communicating to finite intelligences, and dogma by its passage from the domain of ideas to that of forms, participates in two worlds and has inevitably two senses testifying in succession or simultaneously, that is, to the spirit and the flesh. So are there two forces in the moral region, one which attacks and one which restrains and expiates. They are represented in the mythos of Genesis by the typical personalities of Cain and Abel.

Abel oppresses Cain by reason of his moral superiority; Cain to get free immortalizes his brother by slaying him and becomes the victim of his own crime. Cain could not suffer the life of Abel, and the blood of Abel suffers not the sleep of Cain. In the Gospel the type of Cain is replaced by that of the Prodigal Son, whom his father forgives freely because he returns after having endured much.

There is mercy and there is justice in God; to the just He dispenses justice and to sinners mercy. In the soul of the world, which is the Universal Agent, there is a current of love and a current of wrath. This ambient and all-penetrating fluid; this ray loosened from the sun's splendour and fixed by the weight of the atmosphere and the power of central attraction; this body of the Holy Spirit, which we term the Universal Agent, while it was typified by the ancients under the symbol of a serpent devouring its tail; this electromagnetic ether, this vital and luminous caloric, is depicted in archaic monuments by the girdle of Isis, twice-folded in a love-knot round two poles, as well as by the serpent devouring its own tail, emblematic of prudence and of Saturn. Motion and life consist in the extreme tension of two forces. “I would thou wert cold or hot,” said the Master. As a fact, a great sinner is more really alive than is a tepid, effeminate man, and the fullness of his return to virtue will be in proportion to the extent of his errors. She who is destined to crush the serpent's head is intelligence, which ever rises above the stream of blind forces. The Kabalists call her the virgin of the sea, whose dripping feet the infernal dragon crawls forward to lick with his fierytongues, and they fall asleep in delight.

Hereof are the hieratic mysteries of the duad. But there is one, and the last of all, which must not be made known, the reason, according to Hermes Trismegistus, being the malcomprehension of the vulgar, who would ascribe to the necessities of science the immoral aspect of blind fatality. “By the fear of the unknown must the crowd be restrained,” he observes in another place; and Christ also said:

“Cast not your pearls before swine, lest, trampling them under their feet, they turn and rend you.” The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, of which the fruits are death, is the type of this hieratic secret of the duad, which would be only misconstrued if divulged, and would lead commonly to the unholy denial of free will, though it is the principle of moral life. It is hence in the essence of things that the revelation of this secret means death, and it is not at the same time the Great Secret of Magic; but the arcanum of the duad leads up to that of the tetrad, or more correctly proceeds therefrom, and is resolved by the triad, which contains the word of that enigma propounded by the sphinx, the finding of which would have saved the life, atoned for the unconscious crime and established the kingdom of Oedipus.

In the hieroglyphic work of Hermes, being the Tarot or Book of Thoth, the duad is represented either by the horns of Isis, who has her head veiled and an open book concealed partially under her mantle, or otherwise by a sovereign lady, Juno, the Greek goddess, with one hand uplifted towards heaven and the other pointed to earth, as if formulating by this gesture the one and twofold dogma which is the foundation of Magic and begins the marvellous symbols of the

“Emerald Table” of Hermes. In the Apocalypse of St. John there is reference to two witnesses or martyrs on whom prophetic tradition confers the names of Elias and Enoch-Elias, man of faith, enthusiasm, miracle; Enoch, one with him who is called Hermes by the Egyptians, honoured by the Phoenicians as Cadmus, author of the sacred alphabet and the universal key to the initiations of the Logos, father of the Kabalah, he who, according to sacred allegories, did not die like other men, but was translated to heaven, and will return at the end of time. Much the same parable is told of St. John himself, who recovered and explained in his Apocalypse the symbolism of the word of Enoch. This resurrection of St. John and Enoch, expected at the close of the ages of ignorance, will be the renovation of their doctrine by the comprehension of the kabalistic keys which unlock the temple of unity and of universal philosophy, too long occult and reserved solely for the elect, who perish at the hands of the world.

But we have said that the reproduction of the monad by the duad leads of necessity to the conception and dogma of the triad, so we come now to this great number, which is the fullness and perfect word of unity.

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CHOKMAH DOMUS GNOSIS

THE perfect word is the triad, because it supposes an intelligent principle, a speaking principle and a principle spoken. The Absolute, revealed by speech, endows this speech with a sense equivalent to itself, and in the understanding thereof creates its third self. So also the sun manifests by its light and proves or makes this manifestation efficacious by heat.

The triad is delineated in space by the heavenly zenith, the infinite height, connected with East and West by two straight diverging lines. With this visible triangle reason compares another which is invisible, but is assumed to be equal in dimension; the abyss is its apex and its reversed base is parallel to the horizontal line stretching from East to West. These two triangles, combined in a single figure, which is the six-pointed star, form the sacred symbol of Solomon's Seal, the resplendent Star of the Macrocosm. The notion of the Infinite and the Absolute is expressed by this sign, which is the grand pantacle – that is to say, the most simple and complete abridgement of the science of all things.

Grammar itself attributes three persons to the verb. The first is that which speaks, the second that which is spoken to, and the third the object. In creating, the Infinite Prince speaks to Himself of Himself. Such is the explanation of the triad and the origin of the dogma of the Trinity. The magical dogma is also one in three and three in one. That which is above is like or equal to that which is below.

Thus, two things which resemble one another and the word which signifies their resemblance make three. The triad is the universal dogma. In Magic – principle, realization, adaptation; in alchemy – azoth, incorporation, transmutation; in theology – God, incarnation, redemption; in the human soul – thought, love and action; in the family – father, mother and child. The triad is the end and supreme expression of love; we seek one another as two only to become three.