[5] According to the Zohar, Pt. I., fol. 21a, 21b, it was with the guardian angel of Esau that Jacob wrestled at the place which he named Peniel. The angel could not prevail against Jacob because the latter derived his strength from the Supreme Light, Kether, and from Chokmah, which is the second hypostasis. He therefore smote Jacob on the right thigh, which signifies the seventh Sephira, or Netzach.
[6] The more usual argument of high orthodox theology in the Latin school is that a sin against the Infinite Being is one of infinite culpability. If it were suggested in rejoinder that it must be one of infinite inconsequence, so far as that Being is concerned, it might not be more reasonable than the argument, but it would do less outrage to logic.
[7] It is to be noted, however, that there was mockery of its kind in the middle ages, that Satan and his emissaries in folk-lore appear under ridiculous lights. There is the prototypical story of the devil who gave a course of lectures on Black Magic at the University of Salamanca and demanded, as a consideration, the soul of one of his hearers; but he was cheated with the student’s shadow.
[8] In his earlier work, The Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic, Éliphas Lévi affirms (a) on the authority of a writer whom he does not name, that the devil is God, as understood by the wicked; (b) on another authority, that the devil is composed of God’s ruins; (c) that the devil is the Great Magical Agent employed for evil purposes by a perverse will; (d) that he is death masquerading in the cast-off garments of life; (e) that Satan, Beelzebub, Adramelek, &c., do not designate spiritual unities, but legions of impure spirits.
[9] In speaking of evil and a possible Prince of Darkness, it is necessary to proceed carefully, if we are confined, like Éliphas Lévi, within the measures of a theory of opposites. The definition of evil as the absence of rectitude is entirely insufficient to cover the facts of experience; it is that indeed, but it is also as much more as may be necessary to account for its positive and active side. The truth is that positive and negative are on both sides of the eternal balance of things postulated by the theory. So far as it goes, evil is the absence of rectitude, and, so far as it goes also, rectitude is the absence of evil; but the vital aspects of good and bad have slipped between the fingers of definition in both cases.
[10] Saint-Martin recognises the existence of an astral region, which is apparently that of sidereal rule. There is, in his view a certain science of this region, and of this the active branch is theurgic, while the passive engenders somnambulism. These divisions constitute the elementary science of the astral, but above these there is one which is more fatal and dangerous, of which he refuses to speak. There is no Martinistic doctrine concerning the Astral Light, understood as an universal medium. Éliphas Lévi seems to have used the term Martinism in a general sense, as if it included the school of Martines de Pasqually. Pasqually, however, has no doctrine concerning the Astral Light. Modern French Martinism has read it into Saint-Martin’s rather ridiculous “epico-magical poem” or allegory, called Le Crocodile, much as another school of experiment might find therein a veiled account of the Akasic records and the mode of their study. I refer to the story of Atlantis, which begins at Chant 64 and occupies a large part of the book. The account of the Chair of Silence is very curious in this connection.
[11] If the word is of Greek origin it seems to connect with the idea of watchers rather than leaders. Cf. [Greek ho egrêgoros] = Vigil, in the Septuagint.
[12] The Kabalistic explanation is (a) that Egyptian Magic was real Magic; (b) that its wisdom was of the lowermost degree only; (c) that it was overcome by the superior degrees, by which the serpent above, or Metatron, dominates the serpent below, namely, Samael. See Zohar, Part II., fol. 28a.
[13] Elsewhere Éliphas Lévi suggests that Pharaoh’s magicians refused rather than failed and that the production of flies was beneath the dignity of their Magic.
[14] It should be mentioned that this enumeration is in the reverse order of chronology, and it is not, as it happens, even in accordance with what may be called traditional chronology. Legend says—and Éliphas Lévi himself mentions subsequently—that the Sepher Yetzirah was the work of Abraham and that the Zohar is in its root-matter a literal record of discourses delivered by R. Simeon Ben Jochai, after the fall of Jerusalem, A.D. 70. The Jerusalem and Babylon Talmuds are admittedly growths of some centuries.