Dogma and Ritual of High Magic Part I - Eliphas Levi 1896

Divination

DENTES FURCA AMENS

The Author of this book has dared many things in his life, and never has fear retained his thought a prisoner. It is not at the same time without legitimate dread that he approaches the end of the magical doctrine. It is a question now of revealing, or rather reveiling, the Great Secret, the terrible secret, the secret of life and death, expressed in the Bible by those formidable and symbolical words of the serpent, who was himself symbolical: I. NEQUAQUAM MORIEMINI; II. SED ERITIS; III. SICUT DII; IV. SCIENTES BONUM ET malum. One of the privileges which belong to the initiate of the Great Arcanum, and that which sums them all, is DIVINATION. According to the vulgar comprehension of the term, to divine signifies to conjecture what is unknown, but its true sense is ineffable in its sublimity. To divine (divinare) is to exercise divinity. The word divinus in Latin signifies something far different from divus, which is equivalent to man-god. Devin, in French, contains the four letters of the word DIEU (God), plus the letter N, which corresponds in its form to the Hebrew AlEPH . and kabalistically and hieroglyphically expresses the Great Arcanum, the Tarot symbol of which is the Juggler. Whosoever understands perfectly the absolute numeral value of M multiplied by N, with the grammatical force of the N final in words which signify SCIENCE, ART or POWER, who subsequently adds the five letters of the word DEVIN, in such a way as to make five go into four, four into three, three into two and two into one, such a person, by translating the resultant number into primitive Hebrew characters, will write the occult name of the Great Arcanum, and will possess a word of which the Sacred Tetragram itself is only the equivalent and the image.

To be a diviner, according to the force of the term, is hence to be divine, and something more mysterious still. Now, the two signs of human divinity, or of divine humanity, are prophecies and miracles. To be a prophet is to see beforehand the effects which exist in causes, to read in the Astral Light; to work miracles is to act upon the Universal Agent and subject it to our will. The author of this book will be asked whether he is a prophet and thaumaturge. Let inquirers recur to all that he wrote before certain events took place in the world; and as to anything else that he may have said or done, would anyone believe his mere word if he made a sensational statement? Furthermore, one of the essential conditions of divination is not to be coerced, not to suffer temptation - in other words, not to be put to the test. Never have the masters of science yielded to the curiosity of anyone. The sibyls burned their books when Tarquin refused to appraise them at their proper value; the Great Master was silent when He was asked for a sign of His Divine Mission; Agrippa perished of want rather than obey those who demanded a horoscope. To furnish proofs of science to those who suspect the very existence of science is to initiate the unworthy, to profane the gold of the sanctuary, to deserve the excommunication of sages and the fate of betrayers.

The essence of divination, that is to say, the Great Magical Arcanum, is represented by all the symbols of science, and is connected intimately with the one and primeval doctrine of Hermes. In philosophy, it gives absolute certitude; in religion, the universal secret of faith; in physics, the composition, decomposition, recomposition, realization and adaptation of Philosophical Mercury, called AzOTH by the alchemists; in dynamics it multiplies our forces by those of perpetual motion; it is at once mystical, metaphysical and material, with correspondent effects in the three worlds; it procures charity in God, truth in science and gold in riches, for metallic transmutation is at once an allegory and reality, as all the adepts of true science are perfectly well aware. Yes, gold can be made really and materially by means of the Stone of the Sages, which is an amalgam of Salt, Sulphur and Mercury, thrice combined in AzOTH by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation. Yes, the operation is often easy and may be accomplished in a day, an instant; at other times it requires months and years. But to succeed in the Great Work, one must be divinus - a diviner, in the kabalistic sense of the term - and it is indispensable to have renounced, in respect of personal interest, the advantage of wealth, so as to become its dispenser.

Raymund Lully enriched sovereigns, planted Europe with institutions and remained poor. Nicholas Flamel, who in spite of his legend is really dead, only attained the Great Work when asceticism had detached him completely from riches. He was initiated by a suddenly imparted understanding of the book Aesh Mezareph, written in Hebrew by the Kabalist Abraham, possibly the compiler of the Sepher Yetzirah. Now this understanding was for Flamel an intuition deserved, or rather, rendered possible, by the personal preparations of the adept. I believe that I have spoken sufficiently. Divination is therefore an intuition, and the key of this intuition is the universal and magical doctrine of analogies. By means of these analogies the Magus interprets visions, as did the patriarch Joseph in Egypt, according to Biblical history. The analogies in the reflections of the Astral Light are as exact as the shades of colour in the solar spectrum, and can be calculated and explained with great accuracy. It is, however, indispensable to know the dreamer's degree of intellectual life, which, indeed, he will himself reveal completely by his own dreams and in a manner that will astonish himself. Somnambulism, presentiments and second sight are simply an accidental or induced disposition to dream in a voluntary or awakened sleep - that is, to perceive the analogous reflections of the Astral Light, as we shall explain to demonstration in our "Ritual", when providing the long-sought method of regularly producing and directing magnetic phenomena. As to divinatory instruments, they are simply a means of communication between diviner and consultant, serving merely to fix the two wills upon the same sign.

Vague, complex, shifting figures help to focus reflections of the astral fluid, and it is thus that lucidity is procured by coffee-grouts, mists, the white of egg, etc., which evoke fatidic forms, existing only in the TRANSLUCID - that is, in the imagination of the operators. Vision in water is operated by the dazzlement and fatigue of the optic nerve, which then resigns its functions to the TRANSLUCID and produces a brain illusion, in which reflections of the Astral Light are taken for real images. Hence nervous persons, of weak sight and lively imagination, are best fitted for this species of divination, which indeed is most successful when exercised by children. Let us not misinterpret, however, the function which we attribute to imagination in divinatory arts. It is by imagination assuredly that we see, and this is the natural aspect of the miracle; but we see true things, and in this consists the marvellous aspect of the natural work.

We appeal to the experience of all veritable adepts. The author of this book has tested every kind of divination, and has obtained results invariably in proportion to the exactitude of his scientific operations and the good faith of his consultants. The Tarot, that miraculous work which inspired all the sacred books of antiquity, is the most perfect instrument of divination, by reason of the analogical precision of its figures and numbers. It can be employed with complete confidence. Its oracles are always rigorously true, at least in a certain sense, and even when it predicts nothing it reveals secret things and gives the most wise counsel to its querents. Alliette, who, in the last century, from a hairdresser became a Kabalist, and kabalistically called himself Etteilla, reading his name backwards after the manner of Hebrew, Alliette, I say, after thirty years of meditation over the Tarot, was on the threshold of discovering everything that is concealed in this extraordinary work; but he ended only by misplacing the keys, through want of their proper understanding, and inverted the order and character of the figures, though without entirely destroying their analogies, so great are the sympathy and correspondence which exist between them.

The writings of Etteilla, now very rare, are obscure, wearisome and barbarous in style; they have not all been printed, and some manuscripts of this father of modern cartomancers are in the hands of a Paris bookseller who has been good enough to let us examine them. Their most remarkable points are the obstinate perseverance and incontestable good faith of the author, who all his life perceived the grandeur of the occult sciences, but was destined to die at the gate of the sanctuary without ever penetrating behind the veil. He had little esteem for Agrippa, made much of Jean Belot and knew nothing of the philosophy of Paracelsus; but he possessed a highly-trained intuition and great persistence of will, though his fancy exceeded his judgement. His endowments were insufficient for a Magus and more than were needed for a skilful and accredited diviner of the vulgar order. Hence Etteilla had a fashionable success which a more accomplished magician would perhaps have been wrong to renounce, but assuredly would not have claimed.

When delivering at the end of our "Ritual" a last message upon the Tarot, we shall show the complete method of reading and hence of consulting it, not only on the probable chances of destiny but also, and above all, upon problems of philosophy and religion, concerning which it provides a solution as invariably certain as it is admirable in its precision, if explained in the hierarchic order of the analogy of the three worlds with the three colours and the four shades which compose the sacred septenary. All this belongs to the positive practice of Magic, and can be only indicated summarily and established theoretically in the present first part, which is dedicated to the doctrine of Transcendental Magic and the philosophical and religious key of the exalted sciences, known, or unknown rather, under the name of occult.