The history of magic

by Éliphas Lévi

EXPLANATORY DIAGRAM OF THE ASTRONOMICAL AND ALPHABETICAL TABLET OF BEMBO

We are told by Moses that the Israelites carried away the sacred vessels of the Egyptians when they came out of the land of bondage. The account is allegorical, for the great prophet would scarcely have encouraged his people in an act of theft; the sacred vessels in question were the mysteries of Egyptian knowledge, acquired by Moses himself at the court of Pharaoh. We are by no means suggesting that the miracles of this man of God are referable to Magic; but we know on the authority of the Bible that Jannes and Mambres, who were the magicians of Pharaoh and consequently grand hierophants of Egypt, began by performing in virtue of their art wonders which were similar to those of Moses. They transformed wands into serpents and serpents again into wands, which might be explicable by prestige or fascination; they changed water into blood; they produced a swarm of frogs in a moment; but they could not cause flies to appear or other parasitic insects, for reasons which we have explained already, as also the manner in which they were forced to confess themselves vanquished.

Moses triumphed and led the Israelites out of the land of bondage. It was at this period that true science became lost to Egypt, for the priests, abusing the implicit confidence of the people, allowed that knowledge to degenerate into brutalising idolatry. Such is the rock of peril for esoteric science; the truth must be veiled, yet not hidden from the people; symbolism must not be disgraced by a lapse into absurdity; the sacred veil of Isis must be preserved in its beauty and dignity. It was over this that the Egyptian priesthood failed; the vulgar and the foolish understood the hieroglyphic forms of Isis and Hermanubis as real things, so that Osiris was understood to be an ox, while the wise Hermes was a dog. The transformed Osiris masqueraded in the fantastic guise of the bull of Apis, nor did the priests hinder the people from adoring flesh intended for their kitchens. It was time to save the holy traditions; Moses established a new nation and forbade all worship of images; but the people unfortunately had dwelt long among idolaters and memories of the bull of Apis remained with them in the desert. We know the history of that Golden Calf to which the children of Israel have been always a little addicted. Moses, however, did not wish the sacred hieroglyphics to pass out of memory, and he sanctified them by their consecration to the purified worship of the true God. We shall see how all objects which entered into the cultus of Jehovah were symbolic in character and recalled the venerable signs of primæval revelation. But we must first finish with the Gentiles and follow through pagan civilisation the story of materialised hieroglyphics and of ancient rites degenerated.

CHAPTER V
MAGIC IN GREECE

We pass now to the period when the exact sciences of Magic assumed their natural external form, being that of beauty. We have seen in the Zohar how the human prototype rose in heaven and was reflected below in the waters of being. This ideal man, this shadow of the pantomorphic god, this virile phantom of perfect form was not destined to dwell alone in the world of symbolism. There was given to him a companion under the beneficent sky of Hellas. The celestial Venus, the chaste and fruitful Venus, the triple mother of the three Graces, rose in her turn, no longer from the sleeping deeps of chaos, but from the living and flowing waves of that echoing archipelago of poetry, where islands embroidered with green trees and flowers seem as the vessels of gods.

The magical septenary of Chaldea passes into music on the seven strings of the Orphic lyre. It is harmony which transforms the woods and wildernesses of Greece. To the melody of the songs of Orpheus, the rocks are smoothed, the oaks sway in measures and the wild beasts become subject to man. By such magic did Amphion raise up the walls of Thebes—that wisdom-city of Cadmus, the city of initiation, itself a pantacle like the seven wonders of the world. As Orpheus gave life to numbers, so Cadmus bound thought to the sigils of letters. The one established a nation dedicated to all things beautiful, and for that nation the other provided a native land, corresponding to its genius and its love.

In the ancient Greek traditions, Orpheus is numbered among the heroes of the Golden Fleece, who were the primeval conquerors of the Great Work. The Golden Fleece is the vesture of the sun itself; it is light in application to the needs of man; it is the grand secret of magical works; it is in fine, initiation as this should be understood essentially; and it was the quest of these or this which carried the allegorical heroes into a mystic Asia. On the other hand, Cadmus was a voluntary exile from the glorious Thebes of Egypt; he brought into Greece the knowledge of letters and that harmony of which they are images. The new Thebes, the typical city of wisdom, was built to the measures of that harmony, for science consists in the rhythmic correspondence between hieroglyphical, phonetic and numeral characters, the inherent motion of which follows the eternal laws of mathematics. Thebes is circular and its citadel is square; like the sky of Magic, it has seven gates, and its legend was destined to become the epic of occultism and the foreshadowed history of human genius.

All these mysterious allegories, all these inspired traditions, are the soul of Greek civilisation; but we must be dissuaded from seeking the real history of their poetic heroes otherwise than in the transformations of oriental history carried into Greece by unknown hierophants. It was only the history of ideas which was written by the great of those days, and they were at little pains to acquaint us with the human struggles belonging to the birth of empires. Homer followed in their path, marshalling the gods, who are the immortal types of thought; it was in this sense that a world’s upheaval followed on the frown of Jupiter. If Greece carried fire and sword into Asia, it was to avenge the profanations of science and virtue in their sacrifice to lust; it was to restore the empire of the world to Minerva and Juno, in despite of that sensuous Venus who ruined her devoted lovers. Such is the sublime mission of poetry, which substitutes gods for men, or causes in place of effects and eternal concepts for the sorry incarnations of greatness on earth. Ideas raise up and they also cast down empires; a faith of some kind is at the root of all grandeur, and in order that faith may be poetry, or in other words creative, it must be founded on truth. The only history which is worthy to occupy the wise is that of the light which is victorious over darkness for ever. That which is called a civilisation is one great day of this sun.

The fable of the Golden Fleece connects Hermetic Magic with Greek initiations. The Golden Fleece of the solar ram, which must be obtained by those or by him who would possess universal sovereignty, is figurative of the Great Work. The Argonautic vessel, built of timber from the prophetic oaks of Dodona, the speaking vessel, is the ship of the mysteries of Isis, the ark of life-force and renewal, the coffer of Osiris, the egg of divine regeneration. The adventurer Jason is he who is prepared for initiation, but he is a hero in his valour only; he has all the inconstancy and all the weakness of humanity, but he takes with him the personifications of all power. Hercules, who signifies brute force, has no real part in the work, for he goes astray from the path in pursuit of his unworthy loves. The others arrive in the land of initiation, of Colchis, where the remnant of Zoroastrian secrets is still preserved. The question is how to obtain the key of these mysteries, and science is once again betrayed by a woman. Medea delivers to Jason the arcana of the Great Work, with the kingdom and the life of her father; for it is a fatal law of the occult sanctuary that the revelation of its secrets entails death upon him who has proved unable to preserve them. Medea informs Jason of the monsters with which he must do battle and of that which will ensure his victory. There is firstly the winged serpent of earth, the astral fluid which must be seized and fixed; its teeth must be drawn and sown in a waste place, which has been previously ploughed by the bulls of Mars. The dragon’s teeth are those acids[55] which dissolve the metallic earth after its preparation by a double fire and by the earth’s magnetic forces. A fermentation follows, comparable to a great battle; the impure is devoured by the impure, and the splendid Fleece is the reward of the adept.