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

Summary and General Key of The Four Secret Sciences

SIGNA TROT PAN

Let us now summarize the entire science by its principles. Analogy is the final word of science and the first word of faith. Harmony consists in equilibrium, and equilibrium subsists by the analogy of contraries. Absolute unity is the supreme and final reason of things. Now, this reason can be neither one person nor three persons: it is a reason, and reason at the highest. To create equilibrium we must separate and unite - separate by the poles, unite by the centre. To reason upon faith is to destroy faith; to create mysticism in philosophy is to assail reason. Reason and faith, by their nature, mutually exclude one another, but they unite by analogy. Analogy is the sole possible mediator between finite and infinite. Dogma is the ever-ascending hypothesis of a presumable equation. For the ignorant, it is the hypothesis which is the absolute affirmation, and the absolute affirmation which is hypothesis. Hypotheses are necessary in science, and he who seeks to verify them enlarges science without decreasing faith, for on the farther side of faith is the infinite. We believe in that which we do not know, but which reason leads us to admit. To define and circumscribe the object of faith is therefore to formulate the unknown. Professions of faith are formulations of the ignorance and aspirations of man. The theorems of science are monuments of his conquests. The man who denies God is not less fanatical than he who defines Him with pretended infallibility. God is commonly defined by the enumeration of all that He is not. Man makes God by an analogy from the lesser to the greater, whence it results that the conception of God by man is ever that of an infinite man who makes man a finite god. Man can realize that which he believes in the measure of that which he knows, by reason of that which he knows not, and he can accomplish all that he wills in the measure of that which he believes and by reason of that which he knows. The analogy of contraries is the relation of light and shade, of height and hollow, of plenum and void. Allegory, the mother of all dogmas, is the substitution of impressions for dies, of shadows for realities. It is the fable of truth and the truth of fable. One does not invent a dogma, one veils a truth, and a shade for weak eyes is produced. The initiator is not an impostor, he is a revealer, that is, following the meaning of the Latin word revelare, a man who veils afresh. He is the creator of a new shadow.

Analogy is the key of all secrets of Nature and the sole fundamental reason of all revelations. That is why religions seem to be written in the heavens and in all Nature, which is just as it should be, for the work of God is the book of God, the expression of Whose thought should be seen in that which He writes, and so also of His being, since we conceive Him only as supreme thought. Dupuis and Volney saw only a plagiarism in this splendid correspondence, which should have led them to acknowledge the catholicity, that is, the universality of the primeval, one, magical, kabalistic and immutable doctrine of revelation by analogy. Analogy yields all forces of Nature to the Magus; analogy is the quintessence of the Philosophical Stone, the secret of perpetual motion, the quadrature of the circle, the Temple resting on the two pillars JAKIN and BOAZ, the key of the Great Arcanum, the root of the Tree of Life, the science of good and evil. To find the exact scale of correspondences in things appreciable by science is to fix the bases of faith and thus become possessed of the rod of miracles. Now, there exists a principle and a rigorous formula, which is the Great Arcanum. Let the wise man seek it not, since he has already found it; let the profane seek for ever: they will never find.

Metallic transmutation takes place spiritually and materially by the positive key of analogies. Occult medicine is simply the exercise of the will applied to the very source of life, to that Astral Light the existence of which is a fact, which has a movement conformed to calculations having the Great Magical Arcanum for their ascending and scale. This Universal Arcanum, the final and eternal secret of transcendent initiation, is represented in the Tarot by a naked girl, who touches the earth only by one foot, has a magnetic rod in each hand, and seems to be running in a crown held up by an angel, an eagle, a bull and a lion. Fundamentally, the figure is analogous to the cherub of Jekeskiel, of which a representation is given, and to the Indian symbol of ADDA-NARI, which again is analogous to the ADONAI of Jekeskiel, who is vulgarly called Ezekiel. The comprehension of this figure is the key of all occult sciences. Readers of my book must already understand it philosophically if they are at all familiar with the symbolism of the Kabalah. It remains for us now to realize what is the second and more important operation of the Great Work. It is something undoubtedly to find the Philosophical Stone, but how is it to be ground into the powder of projection? What are the uses of the Magical Wand? What is the real power of the Divine Names in the Kabalah? The initiates know, and those who are deserving of initiation will know in turn if they discover the Great Arcanum by means of the very numerous and precise indications which we have given them. Why are these simple and pure truths for ever and of necessity concealed? Because the elect of intelligence are always few on earth and are encompassed by the foolish and wicked, like Daniel in the den of lions. Moreover, analogy instructs us in the laws of the hierarchy, and absolute science, being an omnipotence, must be the exclusive possession of the most worthy. The confusion of the hierarchy is the actual destruction of societies, for then the blind become leaders of the blind, according to the word of the Master. Give back initiation to priests and kings, and order will come forth anew. So, in my appeal to the most worthy, and in exposing myself to all the dangers and anathemas which threaten revealers, I believe myself to have done a great and useful thing, directing the breath of God living in humanity upon the social chaos, and creating priests and kings for the world to come.

A thing is not just because God wills it, but God wills it because it is just, said the angel of the schools. It is as if he said: The Absolute is reason. Reason is self-existent; it is because it is, and not because we suppose it; it is, or nothing is; and how should one desire anything to exist apart from reason? Madness itself does not occur without it. Reason is necessity, is law, is the rule of all liberty and the direction of all initiative. If God exists, it is by reason. The conception of an absolute God outside or independent of reason is the idol of Black Magic and the phantom of the fiend. The demon is death masquerading in the tattered garments of life, the spectre of Hirrenkesept throned upon the rubbish of ruined civilizations, and concealing a loathsome nakedness by the cast-off clothes of the incarnations of Vishnu.

Here ends the Doctrine of Transcendental Magic