Alternative Religion/ Library

Such actually are the issues of occult philosophy, and we are in a position to meet the charge of insanity or the suspicion of imposture when we affirm that these privileges are real. To demonstrate this is the sole end of our work on occult Philosophy. The Philosophical Stone, the Universal Medicine, the transmutation of metals, the quadrature of the circle and the secret of perpetual motion are neither mystifications of science nor dreams of delusion. They are terms which must be understood in their proper sense; they formulate the varied applications of one and the same secret, the several aspects of a single operation, which is defined in a more comprehensive manner under the name of the Great Work. Furthermore, there exists in Nature a force which is immeasurably more powerful than steam, and a single man, who is able to adapt and direct it, might change thereby the face of the whole world. This force was known to the ancients; it consists in a Universal Agent having equilibrium for its supreme law, while its direction is concerned immediately with the Great Arcanum of Transcendental Magic.1 By the direction of this agent it is possible to modify the very order of the seasons; to produce at night the phenomena of day; to correspond instantaneously between one extremity of the earth and the other; to see, like Apollonius, what is taking place on the other side of the world; to heal or injure at a distance; to give speech a universal success and reverberation. This agent, which barely manifests under the uncertain methods of Mesmer's followers, is precisely that which the adepts of the Middle Ages denominated the First Matter of the Great Work. The Gnostics represented it as the fiery body of the Holy Spirit; it was the object of adoration in the Secret Rites of the Sabbath and the Temple, under the hieroglyphic figure of Baphomet or the Androgyne of Mendes. All this will be proved. Here then are the secrets of occult philosophy, and such 1 It is described elsewhere ^I as a substance diffused through infinity; as that one substance which is heaven or earth, that is, fixed or volatile according to its degrees of polarization; ³ as the Great Telesma of Hermes Trismegistus; as that which God created before all things when he said: Let there be light; at once substance and movement, a fluid and a perpetual vibration. It moves in virtue of an inherent force which is called Magnetism; in the infinite it is ether or ethereal light; it becomes Astral Light in the stars which it magnetizes; in organized beings it is magnetic light or fluid; and in man it forms the astral body or Plastic mediator "The will of intelligent beings acts directly on this light and thereby on all Nature. It is the common mirror of all thoughts and forms; the images of all that has been are preserved therein and sketches of things to come. for which reason it is the instrument of thaumaturgy and divination."--La Clef des Grands Mysteres, pp.117,118 is Magic in history. Let us glance at it now as it appears in its books and its acts, in its Initiations and its Rites. The key of all magical allegories is found in the tablets which we have mentioned, and these tablets we regard as the work of Hermes. About this book, which may be called the keystone of the whole edifice of occult science, are grouped innumerable legends that are either its partial translation or its commentary reproduced perpetually, under a thousand varied forms. Sometimes the ingenious fables combine harmoniously into a great epic which characterizes an epoch, though how or why is not clear to the uninitiated.

Thus, the fabulous history of the Golden Fleece resumes and also veils the Hermetic and magical doctrines of Orpheus; and if we recur only to the mysterious poetry of Greece, it is because the sanctuaries of Egypt and India to some extent dismay us by their resources, leaving our choice embarrassed in the midst of such abundant wealth. We are eager, moreover, to reach the Thebaid at once, that dread synthesis of all doctrine, past, present and future; that--so to speak--infinite fable, which reaches, like the Deity of Orpheus, to either end of the cycle of human life. Extraordinary fact! The seven gates of Thebes, attacked and defended by seven chiefs who have sworn upon the blood of victims, possess the same significance as the seven seals of the Sacred Book interpreted by seven genii and assailed by a monster with seven heads, after being opened by a Lamb which liveth and was dead, in the allegorical work of St John. The mysterious origin of Oedipus, found hanging on the tree of Cithaeron like a bleeding fruit, recalls the symbols of Moses and the narratives of Genesis.

He makes war upon his father, whom he slays without knowing--tremendous prophecy of the blind emancipation of reason apart from science. Thereafter he meets with the sphinx, that symbol of symbols, the eternal enigma of the vulgar, the granite pedestal of the sciences of the sages, the Voracious and silent monster whose unchanging form expresses the one dogma of the Great Universal Mystery.

How is the tetrad changed into the duad and explained by the triad? In more common but more emblematic terms,¹⁴ what is that animal which in the morning has four feet, two at noon, and three in the evening? Philosophically speaking, how does the doctrine of elementary forces pro- duce the dualism of Zoroaster, while it is summarized by the triad of Pythagoras and Plato? What is the ultimate reason of allegories and numbers, the final message of all symbolisms? Oedipus replies with a simple and terrible word which destroys the sphinx and makes the diviner King of Thebes: the answer to the enigma is MAN! . . . . .

Unfortunate! He has seen too much, and yet through a clouded glass. A little while and he will expiate his ominous and imperfect clairvoyance by a voluntary blindness, and then vanish in the midst of a storm, like all civilizations which--each in its own day--shall divine an answer to the riddle of the sphinx without grasping its whole import and mystery. Everything is symbolical and transcendental in this titanic epic of human destinies. The two antagonistic brothers formulate the second part of the Grand Mystery, completed divinely by the sacrifice of Antigone.1 There follows the last war; the brethren slay one another; Capaneus is destroyed by the lightning which he defies; Amphiaraus is swallowed by the earth; and all these are so many allegories which, by their truth and their grandeur, astonish those who can penetrate their triple hieratic sense. Aeschylus, annotated by Ballanche, gives only a weak notion concerning them, whatever the primeval sublimities of the Greek poet or the ingenuities of the French .critic.

1 The theory of Eliphas Levi concerning the Greek Mysteries was developed at a later period as follows: "The Mysteries of the ancient world were of two kinds. The Lesser Mysteries were concerned with initiation into the priesthood, while the Greater Mysteries initiated into the grand sacerdotal work, otherwise Theurgy--that dread word with a double meaning, signifying the creation of God. In Theurgy the priest was instructed how he must make gods in his own image and likeness, producing them from his own flesh and animating them with his own blood. It was the science of evocation by the sword and the theory of san- guinary phantoms. It was in these that the person initiated had to slay his initiator; it was thus that Oedipus became King of Thebes in the killing of Laius .... There was no initiation into the Greater Mysteries without effusion of blood, the purest and noblest included. It was in the crypt of the Greater Mysteries that Ninyas avenged the murder of Ninus upon his own mother. The furies and spectres of Oresres were the work of Theurgy. The Greater Mysteries were the Secret Tribunals of antiquity, in which the Free Judges of the priesthood modelled new gods out of ashes of old kings, moistened with the blood of usurpers or assassins." La Science des Esprits, pp. 216, 217. It must be said that Lesser or Greater such explanations of Mysteries are merely occult reveries, the prototype of which is to be sought in the German KRATA REPOA, a system of pretended Egyptian initiation manufactured in the eighteenth century. See my New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry, I 218-25, s.v. "Egyptian Initiation Restored". The Mysteries of Eleusis, of Bacchus, of Adonis were not seminaries of priesthoods.

The secret book of antique initiation was not unknown to Homer, who outlines its pla and chief figures on the shield of Achilles, with minute precision. But the gracious Homeric fictions replaced too soon in popular memory the simple and abstract truths of primeval revelation. Humanity clung to the form and allowed the idea to be forgotten; signs lost power in their multiplication; Magic became corrupted also at this period, and degenerated with the sorcerers of Thessaly into the most profane enchantments. The crime of Oedipus brought forth its deadly fruits, and the science of good and evil erected evil into a sacrilegious divinity. Men, weary of the light, took refuge in the shadow of bodily substance; the dream of that void which is filled by God seemed in their eyes to be greater than God Himself, and thus hell was created.

When, in the course of this work, we make use of the comecrated terms God, Heaven and Hell, let it be under- stood, once and for all, that our meaning is as far removed from that which the profane attach to them as initiation is remote from vulgar thought. God, for us, is the AZOT of the sages, the efficient and final principle of the Great Work.1 Returning to the fable of Oedipus, the crime of the King of Thebes was that he failed to understand the sphinx that he destroyed the scourge of Thebes without being pure enough to complete the expiation in the name of his people. The plague, in consequence, avenged speedily the

1 It Came about that at a later period Eliphas Levi found it advisable to elucidate this statement because he had been accused of worshipping the chemical principle azotic gas. He pointed out therefore that AZOTH was a term used by the learnet initiate Basil Valentine to signify the Universal Agent, otherwise Astral Light. It is composed of the first and last letter in the Hebrew, Greek and Latin alphabets. It symbolizes therefore beginning and end, the Absolute in the three worlds. Above science it is God; in Kabalistic philosophy it is the Absolute; in occult Physics it is the Universal Agent. The word Azoth expresses therefore three sty: ^I The Divine Hypothesis; ² Philosophical Synthesis ³Physical synthesis ---in other words, a belief, an idea and a force. If Levi, however, is relieved of one absurdity, he assumes another, for he is open to the charge of regarding the Astral Light as God. See La Science des Esprits, pp. 2, 3.

death of the monster, and the King of Thebes, forced to abdicate, sacrificed himself to the terrible manes of the sphinx, more alive and voracious than ever when it had passed from the domain of form into that of idea. Oedipus divined what was man and he put out his own eyes because he did not see what was God.1 He divulged half of the Great Arcanum, and, to save his people, it was necessary for him to bear the remaining half of the terrible secret into exile and the grave.

After the colossal fable of Oedipus we find the gracious poem of Psyche, which was certainly not invented by Apuleius. The Great Magical Arcanum reappears here under the figure of a mysterious union between a god and a weak mortal, abandoned alone and naked on a rock.

Psyche must remain in ignorance of the secret of her ideal royalty, and if she behold her husband she must lose him.

Here Apuleius commentates and interprets Moses; but did not the Elohim of Israel and the gods of Apuleius both issue from the sanctuaries of Memphis and Thebes? Psyche is the sister of Eve, or rather she is Eve spiritualized. Both desire to know and lose innocence for the honour of the ordeal. Both deserve to go down into hell, one to bring back the antique box of Pandora, the other to find and to crush the head of the old serpent, who is the symbol of time and of evil. Both are guilty of the crime which must be expiated by the Prometheus of ancient days and the Lucifer of the Christian legend, the one delivered by Hercules and the other overcome by the Saviour. The Great Magical Secret is therefore the lamp and dagger of Psyche, the apple of Eve, the sacred fire of Prometheus, the burning sceptre of Lucifer, but it is also the Holy Cross of the Redeemer. To be acquainted with it sufficiently for its abuse or divulgation is to deserve all sufferings; to know as one should alone know it, namely, to make use of and conceal it, is to be master of the Absolute.

A single word comprehends all things, and this word consists of four letters: it is the Tetragram of the Hebrews,¹⁷ the AZOT of the alchemists, the Thot of the Bohemians, or the Taro of the Kabalists. This word, expressed after so many manners, means God for the profane, man for the philosophers, and imparts to the adepts the final term of human sciences and the key of divine power; but he only can use it who understands the necessity of never revealing it. Had Oedipus, instead of killing the sphinx, overcome it, harnessed it to his chariot and thus entered Thebes, he would have been king without incest, without misfortunes and without exile. Had Psyche, by meekness and affection, persuaded Love to reveal himself, she would never have lost Love. Now, Love is one of the mythological images of the Great Secret and the Great Agent, because it postu- lates at once an action and a passion, a void and a plenitude, a shaft and a wound. The initiates will understand me, and on account of the profane I must not speak more clearly.

1 "The Grand Word of the enigma of the Spinx is God in Man and in Nature," --Le Grand Arcane, p. 230.

After the marvellous Golden Ass of Apuleius, we find no more magical epics. Science, conquered in Alexandria by the fanaticism of the murderers of Hypatia, became Christian, or rather concealed itself under Christian veils with Ammonius, Synesius and the-pseudonymous author of the books of Dionysius the Areopagite. In such times it was necessary to exonerate miracles under the pretence of superstition and science by an unintelligible language.

Next>

<Return to Start

Return to Texts Index