APOCALYPTIC KEY
CHAPTER VII
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
It remains for us to summarise and conclude. To summarise the history of a science is to summarise the science itself, and we are therefore to recapitulate the great principles of initiation, as preserved and transmitted through all the ages. Magical science is the absolute science of equilibrium. It is essentially religious; it presided at the formation of dogmas in the antique world and has been thus the nursing mother of all civilisations. O chaste and mysterious mother who, in giving milk of poetry and inspiration to the dawning generations, didst cover thy face and breast. Before all things she directs us to believe in God and to adore without seeking to define Him, since a God in definition is to some extent a finite God. And after Deity she points to eternal mathematics and equilibrated forces as to the sovereign principles of things. It is said in the Bible that God has ordered all things according to weight, number and measure. Omnia in pondere et numero et mensura disposuit Deus. Weight is equilibrium, number is quantity, measure is proportion—these three, and these are the eternal or divine basis of the science of Nature. Here now is the formula of equilibrium: Harmony results from the analogy of contraries. Number is the scale of analogies, the proportion of which is measure. The entire occult philosophy of the Zohar might be termed the science of equilibrium.[368] The key of numbers is found in the Sepher Yetzirah; their generation is analogous to the affiliation of ideas and the production of forms. On this account the illuminated hierophants of the Kabalah combined the hieroglyphic signs of numbers, ideas and forms in their sacred alphabet. The combinations of this alphabet give equations of ideas, and comprise by way of indication all possible combinations in natural forms. According to Genesis, God made man in His image, but as man is the living synthesis of creation, it follows that creation itself is made in the likeness of God. There are three things in the universe—the Spirit, the plastic mediator and matter. The ancients assigned to spirit, as its immediate instrument, that igneous fluid to which they gave the generic name of Sulphur; to the plastic mediator, they assigned the name of Mercury, because of the symbolism represented by the Caduceus; to matter, they gave the name of Salt, because of the fixed salt which remains after combustion, resisting the further action of fire. Sulphur was compared with the Father on account of the generative action of fire; Mercury with the Mother, because of its power of attraction and reproduction; and Salt, in fine, was the Child, or that substance which is subjected to education by Nature. For them also the creative substance was one, and the name which they gave it was Light. Positive or igneous light was volatile Sulphur; light in the negative state, or made visible by the vibrations of fire, was the fluidic or ethereal Mercury; and light neutralised, or shadow, the coagulated or fixed composite under the form of earth, was termed Salt.
After such manner did Hermes Trismegistus formulate his symbol, which is called the Emerald Tablet: “That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above, for the operations of the wonders of the one thing.”[369] This means that the universal movement is produced by the analogies of fixed and volatile, the volatile tending to be fixed and the fixed to become volatile, thus producing a continual exchange between the modes of the one substance and, from the fact of the exchange, the combinations of universal form in everlasting renewal.
The fire is Osiris, or the sun; the light is Isis, or the moon; they are the father and mother of that grand Telesma which is the universal substance—not that they are its creators but rather its generating powers, the combined effort of which produces the fixed or earth, whence Hermes says that this force has reached its plenary manifestation when earth has been formed therefrom. Osiris is not therefore God, even for the great hierophants of the Egyptian sanctuary; he is the igneous or luminous shadow of the intellectual principle of life, and hence in the supreme moment of initiation a flying voice whispered in the ear of the adept that dubious revelation: “Osiris is a black god.” Woe to the recipient whose understanding had not been raised by faith above the purely physical symbols of Egyptian revelation. Such words would become for him a formula of atheism, and his mind would be struck with blindness. But for the believer, more exalted in intelligence, those same words sounded like an earnest of the most sublime hopes. It was as if the initiator said to him: “My child, you mistake a lamp for the sun, but that lamp is only a star of night. Still, the true sun exists; leave therefore the night and seek the day.”
That which the ancients understood by the four elements in no wise signified simple bodies, but rather the four elementary manifestations of the one substance. These modes were represented by the sphinx, its wings corresponding to air, the woman’s breasts to water, the body of the bull to earth, and the lion’s claws to fire. The one substance, thrice threefold in essential mode and tetradic in the form of manifestation—such is the secret of the three pyramids, triangular in respect of their elevation, square at the base and guarded by the sphinx. In raising these monuments Egypt attempted to erect the Herculean pillars of universal science. Sands have accumulated, centuries have passed, but the pyramids in their eternal greatness still propound to the nations that enigma of which the solution is lost. As to the sphinx, it seems to have sunk in the dust of ages. The great empires of Daniel have reigned by turn upon the earth and have gone down into the tomb, overwhelmed by their own weight. Conquests on the field of battle, monuments of labour, results of human passions—all are engulphed with the symbolic body of the sphinx; now only the human head rises over the desert sands as if looking for the universal empire of thought.
Divine or die—such was the terrible dilemma proposed by the sphinx to the Candidates for Theban royalty. The reason is that the secrets of science are actually those of life; the alternatives are to reign or to serve, to be or not to be. The natural forces will break us if we do not put them to use for the conquest of the world. There is no mean between the height of kinghood and the abyss of the victim state, unless we are content to be counted among those who are nothing because they ask not why or what they are.
The composite form of the sphinx also represents by hieroglyphical analogy the four properties of the universal agent, that is to say, the Astral Light—dissolving, coagulating, heating and cooling. These four properties, directed by the will of man, can modify all phases of Nature, producing life or death, health or disease, love or hatred, wealth even or poverty, in accordance with the given impulsion. They can place all the reflections of the light at the service of imagination; they are the paradoxical solution of the wildest questions which can be set for Transcendental Magic. Specimens of these paradoxical questions shall here follow, together with the answers thereto: (1) Is it possible to escape death? (2) Is there such a thing as the Philosophical Stone, and what must be done to find it? (3) Is it possible to be served by spirits? (4) What is meant by the Key, Ring and Seal of Solomon? (5) Is it possible to predict the future by reliable calculations? (6) Can good or evil be worked at will by means of magical power? (7) What must be done to become a true magician? (8) What are the precise forces put in operation by Black Magic?
We term these questions paradoxical because they are outside all that is understood as science, while at the same time they seem negatived by faith. If propounded by an uninitiated person, they are merely foolhardy, while their complete solution, if given by an adept, would seem like a sacrilege. God and Nature alike have closed the Sanctuary of Transcendent Science and this in such a manner that, beyond a certain limit, he who knows would speak to no purpose, because he would not be understood. The revelation of the Great Magical Secret is therefore happily impossible. The replies which we are about to give will be the last possible expression of the word in Magic, and they will be put in all clearness, but we do not guarantee to make them comprehensible to our readers.
In respect of the first and second, it is possible to escape death after two manners—in time and in eternity. We escape it in time by the cure of diseases and by avoiding the infirmities of old age; we escape it in respect of eternity by perpetuating in memory personal identity amidst the transformations of existence. Let it be certified (1) that the life resulting from motion can only be maintained by the succession and the perfecting of forms; (2) that the science of perpetual motion is the science of life; (3) that the purpose of this science is the correct apprehension of equilibrated influences; (4) that all renewal operates by destruction, each generation therefore involving a death and each death a generation. Let us now further certify, with the ancient sages, that the universal principle of life is a substantial movement or a substance which is eternally and essentially moved and mover, invisible and impalpable, in a volatile state and manifesting materially when it becomes fixed by the phenomena of polarisation. This substance is indefectible, incorruptible and consequently immortal; but its manifestations in the world of form are subject to eternal mutation by the perpetuity of movement. Thus all dies because all lives, and if it were possible to make any form eternal, then motion would be arrested and the only real death would be thus created. To imprison a soul for ever in a mummified human body, such would be the terrible solution of that magical paradox concerning pretended immortality in the same body and on the same earth. All is regenerated by the universal dissolvant of the first substance. The force of this dissolvant is concentrated in the quintessence—that is to say, at the equilibrating centre of a dual polarity. The four elements of the ancients are the four forces of the universal magnet, represented by the figure of a cross, which cross revolves indefinitely about its own centre and so propounds the enigma respecting the quadrature of the circle. The Creative Word speaks from the middle of the cross and cries: “It is finished.” It is in the exact proportion of the four elementary forms that we must seek the Universal Medicine of bodies, even as the Medicine of the Soul is offered by religion in Him Who gives Himself eternally on the cross for the salvation of the world. The magnetic state and polarisation of the heavenly bodies results from their equilibrated gravitation about suns, which are the common reservoirs of their electro-magnetism. The vibration of the quintessence about common reservoirs manifests by light, and the polarisation of light is revealed by colours. White is the colour of the quintessence; this colour condenses towards its negative pole as blue and becomes fixed as black; while it condenses towards its positive pole as yellow and becomes fixed as red. Thus centrifugal life proceeds always from black to red, passing by white, and centripetal life returns from red to black, following the same path. The four intermediates or mixed hues produce with the three primary colours what are called the seven colours of the prism and the solar spectrum. These seven colours form seven atmospheres or seven luminous zones round each sun, and the planet which is dominant in each zone is magnetised in a manner analogous to the colour of its atmosphere. In the depths of the earth, metals are formed like planets in the sky, by the particular influences of a latent light which decomposes when traversing certain regions. To take possession of a subject in which the metallic light is latent, before it becomes specialised, and drive it to the extreme positive pole, that is to say, to the live red, by the help of a fire derived from the light itself—such is the secret in full of the Great Work. It will be understood that this positive light at its extreme degree of condensation is life itself in a fixed state, serving as a universal dissolvant and as a medicine for all Kingdoms of Nature. But to extract from marcassite, stibium and philosophical arsenic the living and bisexual metallic sperm, we must have a prime dissolvant which is a mineral saline menstruum, and there must be, moreover, the concurrence of magnetism and electricity. The rest proceeds of itself in a single vessel, being the athanor, and by the graduated fire of one lamp. The adepts say that it is a work of women and children.