Let us put on one side the vulgar translation of the sacred texts and see what is hidden in the first chapter of Genesis.
He then gives the Hebrew text quite correctly, but transliterates it:
Bereschith Bara Eloim uth aschamam ouatti aares ouares ayete Tohu-vah-bohu.... Ouimas Eloim rai avur ouiai aour.
And he then explains:
The first word, “Bereschith,” signifies “genesis,” a word equivalent to “nature.”
“The act of generation or production,” we maintain; not “nature.” He then continues:
The phrase, then, is incorrectly translated in the Bible. It is not “in the beginning,”for it should be at the stage of the generating force,[424] which would thus exclude every idea of the ex-nihilo ... as nothing cannot produce something. The word “Eloim” or “Elohim” signifies the generating Powers, and such is the Occult sense of the first verse.... “Bereschith” (“nature” or “genesis”), “Bara” (“created”) “Eloim” (“the forces”) “Athat-ashamaim” (“heavens”) “ouath” and “oaris” (“the earth”); that is to say, “The generative potencies created indefinitely (eternally[425]) those forces that are the equilibrated opposites that we call heaven and earth, meaning the space and the bodies, the volatile and the fixed, the movement and the weight.”
Now this, if it be correct, is too vague to be understood by any one ignorant of the Kabalistic teaching. Not only are his explanations unsatisfactory and misleading—in his published works they are still worse—but his Hebrew transliteration is entirely wrong: it precludes the student, who would compare it for himself with the equivalent symbols and numerals of the words and letters of the Hebrew alphabet, from finding anything of that he might have found were the words correctly spelt in the French transliteration.
Compared even with exoteric Hindu Cosmogony, the philosophy which Éliphas Lévi gives out as Kabalistic is simply mystical Roman Catholicism adapted to the Christian Kabalah. His Histoire de la Magie shows it plainly, and reveals also his object, which he does not even care to conceal. For, while stating with his Church, that
The Christian religion has imposed silence on the lying oracles of the Gentiles and put an end to the prestige of the false gods,[426]