Now the fact is quite the reverse of this: it is the Primeval Light that creates the Word or Logos, Who in His turn creates physical light. [pg 226] For the Secret Doctrine teaches us that the reconstruction of the Universe takes place in this wise: At the periods of new generation, perpetual Motion becomes Breath; from the Breath comes forth primordial Light, through whose radiance manifests the Eternal Thought concealed in darkness, and this becomes the Word (Mantra).[418] It is That (the Mantra or Word) from which all This (the Universe) sprang into being.
Further on Éliphas Lévi says:
This [the concealed Deity] radiated a ray into the Eternal Essence [Waters of Space] and, fructifying thereby the primordial germ, the Essence expanded,[419]giving birth to the Heavenly Man from whose mind were born all forms.
The Kabalah states very nearly the same. To learn what it really teaches one has to reverse the order in which Éliphas Lévi gives it, replacing the word “above” by that of “in,” as there cannot surely be any “above” or “under” in the Absolute. This is what he says:
Above the waters the powerful breath of the Elohim; above the Breath the Light; above Light the Word, or the Speech that created it. We see here the spheres of evolution: the souls [?] driven from the dark centre (Darkness) toward the luminous circumference. At the bottom of the lowest circle is the Tohu-vah-bohu, or the chaos which precedes all manifestation [Naissances—generation]; then the region of Water; then Breath; then Light; and, lastly, the Word.
The construction of the above sentences shows that the learned Abbé had a decided tendency to anthropomorphize creation, even though the latter has to be shaped out of preëxisting material, as the Zohar shows plainly enough.
This is how the “great” Western Kabalist gets out of the difficulty: he keeps silent on the first stage of evolution and imagines a second Chaos. Thus he says:
The Tohu-vah-bohu is the Latin Limbus, or twilight of the morning and evening of life.[420] It is in perpetual motion,[421] it decomposes continually,[422] and the work of putrefaction accelerates, because the world is advancing towards regeneration.[423]The Tohu-vah-bohu of the Hebrews is not exactly the confusion of things called Chaos by the Greeks, and which is found described in the commencement of the Metamorphosis of Ovid; it is something greater and more profound; it is the foundation of religion, it is the philosophical affirmation of the immateriality of God.
Rather an affirmation of the materiality of a personal God. If a man has to seek his Deity in the Hades of the ancients—for the Tohu-vah-bohu, or the Limbus of the Greeks, is the Hall of Hades—then one can wonder no longer at the accusations brought forward by the Church against the “witches” and sorcerers versed in Western Kabalism, that they adored the goat Mendes, or the devil personified by certain spooks and Elementals. But in face of the task Éliphas Lévi had set before himself—that of reconciling Jewish Magic with Roman ecclesiasticism—he could say nothing else.
Then he explains the first sentence in Genesis: