The history of magic

by Éliphas Lévi

China was practically unknown to the outside world until the end of the seventeenth century, when its vast empire, explored in part by our missionaries, began to be revealed by them and appeared like a necropolis of all sciences in the past. The Chinese may be compared to a race of mummies; nothing progresses with them, for they live in the immobility of their traditions, from which the spirit and the life have long since withdrawn. They know nothing any longer, but they have a vague recollection of everything. The genius of China is the dragon of the Hesperides—which defends the golden apples in the garden of science. Their human type of divinity, instead of conquering the dragon, like Cadmus, cowers fascinated and magnetised by the monster who flashes before it a changing mirage of its scales. Mystery alone is alive in China, science is in a state of lethargy, or at least is in a deep sleep and speaks only in dream. We have said that the Chinese Tarot is based on the same Kabalistic and absolute data as the Hebrew Sepher Yetzirah; but China has also a hieroglyphical book consisting exclusively of combinations of two figures; this is the Y-Kim,[298] attributed to the emperor Fo-Hi, and M. de Maison, in his Letters on China, states that it is utterly indecipherable. Its difficulties however are not greater than those of the Zohar, of which it appears to be a curious complement and is indeed a valuable appendix thereto. The Zohar explains the work of the Balance, or of universal equilibrium, and the Y-Kim is the hieroglyphic and ciphered demonstration thereof. The key of the work is a pantacle known as the Trigrams of Fo-Hi. According to a legend related in the Vay-Ky, a collection of great authority in China, composed by Leon-Tao-Yuen, under the dynasty of the Soms, some seven or eight hundred years ago, the emperor Fo-Hi was meditating one day on the bank of a river about the great secrets of Nature, when he saw a sphinx come out of the water, meaning an allegorical animal, having the composite form of a horse and a dragon. Its head was elongated like that of a horse, it had four feet and ended in the tail of a serpent; the back was covered with scales, on each of which there shone the symbol of the mysterious Trigrams; they were smaller towards the extremities than those on the breast and back, but were in perfect harmony throughout. The dragon was reflected in the water but with all its characteristics inverted. This serpentine horse, the inspirer or rather the bearer of inspirations, like the Pegasus of Greek mythology, that symbol of universal light, or like the serpent of Kronos, initiated Fo-Hi into universal science. The Trigrams served as the introduction; he numbered the scales and combined the Trigrams in such a manner that he conceived a synthesis of the sciences compared and united with one another by the pre-existent and necessary harmonies of Nature. The tables of the Y-Kim were the result of this marvellous combination. The numbers of Fo-Hi are the same as those of the Kabalah, while his pantacle is analogous to that of Solomon, as explained already in our Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic.[299] His tables correspond to the thirty-two Paths and the fifty Gates of Light; consequently the Y-Kim cannot be obscure for those who have the key of the Sepher Yetzirah and Zohar.[300]

The science of absolute philosophy has therefore existed in China; the Kims are commentaries on this Absolute which is hidden from the profane, and their relation to the Y-Kim is like that of the Pentateuch of Moses to the Revelations in the Sepher Dzenioutha, which is the Book of Mysteries and the key of the Hebrew Zohar.[301] Kong-fu-tzee, or Confucius, was the revealer or veiler of this Kabalah, the existence of which he might have denied, to turn the researches of the profane into a wrong path, just as that learned Talmudist Maimonides denied the realities of the Key of Solomon. After Confucius came the materialistic Fo, who substituted the traditions of Indian sorcery for the remnants of Egyptian Transcendental Magic. The cultus of Fo paralysed the progress of the sciences in China, and the abortive civilisation of this great people collapsed into routine and stupor.

A philosopher of sagacity and admirable profundity, the learned Leibnitz, who deserved most assuredly initiation into the supreme truths of absolute science, thought that he could discern in the Y-Kim his own discovery of the differential calculus, while in the straight and divided line he recognised the characters 1 0, employed in his own calculations. He was on the threshold of the truth, but, seeing it in only one of its details, he could not grasp it as a whole.

The most important discoveries on religious antiquities in China have been the result of theological disputes.[302] This came about through the question whether the Jesuits were justified in permitting the worship of heaven and ancestral worship among the Chinese who were converted to Christianity—in other words, whether the educated Chinese regarded their heaven as God or simply as space and Nature. It was reasonable to have recourse to the educated themselves and to public good sense, but these do not constitute theological authorities. There was therefore much debate, much writing and more intriguing; the Jesuits were fundamentally right but were wrong in their mode of procedure, with the result that fresh difficulties were created which have not been yet overcome and which still continue in China to cost the blood of our indefatigable martyrs.

THE GREAT HERMETIC ARCANUM

Whilst the conquests of religion in Asia were thus disputed, a great spirit of unrest was agitating Europe; the Christian faith seemed on the point of being extinguished, though on every side there was a rumour of new revelations and miracles. A man who had a definite position in science and in the world otherwise, namely, Emmanuel Swedenborg, was astonishing Sweden by his visions, and Germany was swarming with new illuminati. Dissident mysticism conspired to replace the mysteries of hierarchic religion by mysteries of anarchy; a catastrophe was in preparation and was imminent. Swedenborg, the most sincere and the mildest among the prophets of false illuminism, was not for this less dangerous than the others. As a fact, the pretence that all men are called to communicate immediately with heaven[303] replaces regular religious instruction and progressive initiation by every divagation of enthusiasm, by all excesses of imagination and of dream. The intelligent illuminati felt that religion was a great need of humanity and hence must never be destroyed; not only religion itself but the fanaticism which it carries along with it as a fatal consequence of enthusiasm inspired by ignorance, were, however, to be used as arms for the overthrow of hierarchic church authority, they recognising that from the war of fanaticism there would issue a new hierarchy, of which they hoped to be founders and chiefs. “You shall be as gods, knowing all without having the trouble of learning anything; you shall be as kings, possessing everything without the trouble of acquiring anything.” Such, in a summary form, are the promises of the revolutionary spirit to envious multitudes. The revolutionary spirit is the spirit of death; it is the old serpent of Genesis, which notwithstanding it is the father of movement and of progress, seeing that generations are renewed only by death. It is for this reason that the Indians worship Siva, the pitiless destroyer, whose symbolical form was that of physical love and material generation.

The system of Swedenborg is no other than the Kabalah, minus the principle of hierarchy;[304] it is the temple without key-stone and without base; it is a vast edifice, fortunately all airy and phantastic, for had anyone attempted to realise it on this earth it would collapse upon the head of the first child who sought, not indeed to overthrow it, but merely to lean against one of its chief pillars. To organise anarchy is the problem which the revolutionaries have undertaken to solve, and it is with them for ever; it is the rock of Sisyphus which will invariably fall back upon them. To exist for a single moment they are and will ever be compelled fatally to improvise a despotism having no other justification than necessity, and it is one which is blind and violent like anarchy. Emancipation from the harmonious monarchy of reason is attained only by passing under the disorderly dictatorship of folly.

The means proposed indirectly by Swedenborg for communication with the supernatural world constitute an intermediate state allied to dream, ecstasy and catalepsy. The illuminated Swede affirmed the possibility of such a state, without furnishing any intimation as to the practices necessary for its attainment.[305] Perhaps his disciples, in order to supply the omission, might have had recourse to Indian Ceremonial Magic, when a genius came forward to complete the prophetic and Kabalistic intuitions of Swedenborg by a natural thaumaturgy. This man was a German physician named Mesmer. It was he who had the glory of rediscovering, apart from initiation and apart from occult knowledge, the universal agent of light and its prodigies. His Aphorisms, which scholars of his time regarded as a bundle of paradoxes, will ultimately form a basis for the physical synthesis.[306]

Mesmer postulated two modes in natural being; these are substance and life, producing that fixity and movement which constitute the equilibrium of things. He recognised further the existence of a first matter, which is fluidic, universal, capable of fixity and motion; its fixation determines the constitution of substances, while its continual motion modifies and renews forms. This fluidic matter is active and passive; as passive it indraws and as active it projects itself. In virtue of this matter the world and those who dwell therein attract and repel; it passes through all by a circulation comparable to that of the blood. It maintains and renews the life of all beings, is the agent of their force and may become the instrument of their will. Prodigies are results of exceptional wills or energies. The phenomena of cohesion and elasticity, of density or subtlety in bodies, are produced by various combinations of these two properties in the universal fluid or first matter. Disease, like all physical disorders, is owing to a derangement in the normal equilibrium of the first matter in this or that organised body. Organised bodies are sympathetic or antipathetic to one another, by reason of their particular equilibrium. Sympathetic bodies may cure each other, restoring their equilibrium mutually. This capacity of bodies to equilibrate one another by the attraction or projection of the first matter, was called magnetism by Mesmer, and as it varies according to the forms in which it acts, he termed it animal magnetism when he studied its phenomena in living beings.