With the same breath it assumed the name of Jehovah; and it is on the faith of the assertion of this personator that the names El, Eloah, Elohim, and Shaddai, have been read and interpreted in juxtaposition with Jehovah as the “Lord God Almighty.” [Then when] the name Jehovah became ineffable, the designation Adonai, “Lord,” was substituted for it, and ... it was owing to this substitution [pg 536]that the “Lord” passed from the Jewish to the Christian “Word” and World as a designation of God.[1177]
And how are we to know, the author may add, that Jehovah was not many spirits personating even that seemingly one—Jod or Jod-He?
But if the Christian Church was the first to make the existence of Satan a dogma, it was because, as shown in Isis Unveiled, the Devil—the powerful Enemy of God (?!!) had to become the corner stone and pillar of the Church. For, as a Theosophist, M. Jules Baissac, truly observes in his Satan ou le Diable:
Il fallait éviter de paraître autoriser le dogme du double principe en faisant de ce Satan créateur une puissance réelle, et pour expliquer le mal originel, on profère contre Manes l'hypothèse d'une permission de l'unique Tout-Puissant.[1178]
The choice and policy were unfortunate, anyhow. Either the personator of the lower God of Abraham and Jacob ought to have been made entirely distinct from the mystic “Father” of Jesus, or—the “Fallen” Angels should have been left unslandered by further fictions.
Every God of the Gentiles is connected with, and closely related to, Jehovah—the Elohim; for they are all One Host, whose units differ only in name in the Esoteric Teachings. Between the “Obedient” and the “Fallen” Angels there is no difference whatever, except in their respective functions, or rather in the inertia of some, and the activity of others, among those Dhyân Chohans, or Elohim, who were “commissioned to create,” i.e., to fabricate the manifested world out of the eternal material.
The Kabalists say that the true name of Satan is that of Jehovah turned upside down, for “Satan is not a black God but the negation of the white Deity,” or the Light of Truth. God is Light and Satan is the necessary Darkness or Shadow to set it off, without which pure Light would be invisible and incomprehensible.[1179] “For the Initiates,” says Éliphas Lévi, “the Devil is not a person but a creative Force, for Good [pg 537] as for Evil.” The Initiates represented this Force, which presides at physical generation, under the mysterious form of God Pan—or Nature; whence the horns and hoofs of that mythical and symbolic figure, as also the Christian “goat” of the “Witches' Sabbath.” With regard to this too, Christians have imprudently forgotten that the “goat” was also the victim selected for the atonement of all the sins of Israel, that the scape-goat was indeed the sacrificial martyr, the symbol of the greatest mystery on earth—the “fall into generation.” Only, the Jews have long forgotten the real meaning of their (to the non-initiated) ridiculous hero, selected from the drama of life in the Great Mysteries enacted by them in the desert; and the Christians have never known it.
Éliphas Lévi seeks to explain the dogma of his Church by paradoxes and metaphors, but succeeds very poorly in the face of the many volumes written by pious Roman Catholic Demonologists under the approbation and auspices of Rome, in this nineteenth century of ours. For the true Roman Catholic, the Devil or Satan is a reality; the drama enacted in the Sidereal Light according to the seer of Patmos—who desired, perhaps, to improve upon the narrative in the Book of Enoch—is as real, and as historical a fact as any other allegory and symbolical event in the Bible. But the Initiates give an explanation which differs from that given by Éliphas Lévi, whose genius and crafty intellect had to submit to a certain compromise dictated to him from Rome.
Thus, the true and “uncompromising” Kabalists admit that, for all purposes of Science and Philosophy, it is enough that the profane should know that the Great Magic Agent—called by the followers of the Marquis de St. Martin, the Martinists, the Astral Light, by the mediæval Kabalists and Alchemists the Sidereal Virgin and the Mysterium Magnum, and by the Eastern Occultists Æther, the reflection of Âkâsha—is that which the Church calls Lucifer. That the Latin scholastics have succeeded in transforming the Universal Soul and Plerôma—the Vehicle of Light and the receptacle of all forms, a Force spread throughout the whole Universe, with its direct and indirect effects—into Satan and his works, is no news to any one. But now they are prepared to give out to the above-mentioned profane even the secrets hinted at by Éliphas Lévi, without adequate explanation, for the latter's policy of veiled revelations could only lead to further superstition and misunderstanding. What, indeed, can a student of Occultism, who is a beginner, gather from the following highly poetical sentences [pg 538] of Éliphas Lévi, which are as apocalyptic as the writings of any of the Alchemists?
Lucifer [the Astral Light] ... is an intermediate force existing in all creation; it serves to create and to destroy, and the Fall of Adam was an erotic intoxication which has rendered his generation a slave to this fatal Light, ... every sexual passion that overpowers our senses is a whirlwind of that Light which seeks to drag us towards the abyss of death. Madness, hallucinations, visions, extasies, are all forms of a very dangerous excitation due to this interior phosphorus[?]. Thus light, finally, is of the nature of fire, the intelligent use of which warms and vivifies, and the excess of which, on the contrary, dissolves and annihilates.