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

The Key of Occultism

Let us now examine the question of Pantacles, for all magical virtue is there, since the secret of force is in the intelligence which directs. We have given the symbol and interpretation of the Pantacles of Pythagoras and Ezekiel, so that we have no need to recur to these; we shall prove in a later chapter that all the instruments of Hebrew worship were Pantacles, and the first and final word of the Bible was graven by Moses in gold and in brass on the tabernacle and on all its accessories. But each Magus can and should have his individual Pantacle, for, understood accurately, a Pantacle is the perfect summary of a mind. Hence we find in the Magical Calendars of Tycho Brahe and Duchentau, the Pantacles of Adam, Job, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and of all the other great prophets who have been, each in his turn, the kings of the Kabalah and the grand rabbins of science.

The Pantacle, being a complete and perfect synthesis expressed by a single sign, serves to focus all intellectual force into a glance, a recollection, a touch. It is, so to speak, a starting-point for the efficient projection of will. Nigro-mancers and goetic magicians traced their infernal Pantacles on the skin of the victims they immolated. The sacrificial ceremonies, the manner of skinning the kid, then of salting, drying and bleaching the skin, are given in a number of Clavicles and Grimoires. Some Hebrew Kabalists fell into similar follies, forgetting the anathemas pronounced in the Bible against those who sacrifice on high places or in the caverns of the earth. All spilling of blood operated ceremonially is abominable and impious, and since the death of Adonhiram the Society of true Adepts has a horror of blood - Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine.

The initiatory symbolism of Pantacles adopted throughout the East is the key of all ancient and modern mythologies. Apart from knowledge of the hieroglyphic alphabet, one would be lost among the obscurities of the Vedas, the Zend-Avesta and the Bible. The tree which brings forth good and evil, the source of the four rivers, one of which waters the land of gold - that is, of light - and another flows through Ethiopia, or the kingdom of darkness; the magnetic serpent who seduces the woman, and the woman who seduces the man, thus making known the law of attraction; subsequently the Cherub or Sphinx placed at the gate of the Edenic sanctuary, with the fiery sword of the guardians of the symbol; then regeneration by labour and propagation by sorrow, which is the law of initiations and ordeals; the division of Cain and Abel, which is the same symbol as the strife of Anteros and Eros; the ark borne upon the waters of the deluge like the coffer of Osiris; the black raven which does not return and the white dove which does, a new setting forth of the dogma of antagonism and balance - all these magnificent kabalistic allegories of Genesis, which, taken literally and accepted as actual histories, merit even more derision and contempt than Voltaire heaped upon them, become luminous for the initiate, who still hails with enthusiasm and love the perpetuity of true doctrine and the universality of initiation, identical in all sanctuaries of the world.

The five books of Moses, the Prophecy of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse of St. John are the three kabalistic keys of the whole Biblical edifice. The sphinxes of Ezekiel are identical with those of the sanctuary and the ark, being a fourfold reproduction of the Egyptian Tetrad; the wheels revolving in one another are the harmonious spheres of Pythagoras; the new temple, the plan of which is given according to exact kabalistic measures, is the type of the labours of primitive Masonry. St. John in his Apocalypse reproduces the same images and the same numbers, and reconstructs the Edenic world ideally in the New Jerusalem; but at the source of the four rivers the Solar Lamb replaces the mysterious tree. Initiation by toil and blood has been accomplished, and there is no more temple because the light of truth is diffused universally and the world has become the Temple of Justice. This splendid final vision of the Holy Scriptures, this divine Utopia which the Church has referred with good reason for its realization to a better life, has been the pitfall of all ancient arch-heretics and of many modern idealists. The simultaneous emancipation and absolute equality of all men involve the arrest of progress and consequently of life; in a world where all are equal there could no longer be infants or the aged; birth and death could not be therefore admitted. This is sufficient to demonstrate that the New Jerusalem is no more of this world than the Primeval Paradise, wherein there was no knowledge of good or evil, of liberty, of generation or of death. The cycle of our religious symbolism begins and ends therefore in eternity.

Dupuis and Volney lavished their great erudition to discover this relative identity of all symbols and arrived at the negation of every religion. We attain by the same path to an affirmation diametrically opposed; we recognize with admiration that there have never been any false religions in the civilized world; that the Divine Light, the splendour of the Supreme Reason of the Logos, of that Word which enlightens every man coming into the world, has been no more wanting to the children of Zoroaster than to the faithful sheep of St. Peter; that the permanent, the one, the universal revelation, is written in visible Nature, explained in reason, and completed by the wise analogies of faith; that there is, finally, but one true religion, having one doctrine and one legitimate belief, even as there is but one God, one reason and one universe; that revelation is obscure for no one, since the whole world understands more or less both truth and justice, and since all that is possible can only exist analogically to all that is. BEING IS BEING,

The apparently bizarre figures presented by the Apocalypse of St. John are hieroglyphics, like those of all oriental mythologies, and can be comprised in a series of Pantacles. The Initiator clothed in white, standing between seven golden candlesticks and holding seven stars in His hand, represents the unique doctrine of Hermes and the universal analogies of the light. The Woman clothed with the Sun and crowned with twelve stars is the celestial Isis, or the Gnosis; the serpent of material life seeks to devour her child, but she takes unto herself the wings of the eagle and flies away into the desert - a protestation of the prophetic spirit against the materialism of official religion. The mighty angel with the face of a sun, a rainbow for nimbus and a cloud for vestment, having pillars of fire for his legs, and setting one foot upon the earth and another on the sea, is truly a kabalis-tic PANTHEA. His feet represent the equilibrium of BRIAH, or the world of forms; his legs are the two Pillars of the Masonic Temple, JAKIN and BOAZ; his body, veiled by clouds, from which issues a hand holding a book, is the sphere of YETZIRAH, or initiatory ordeals; his solar head, crowned with the radiant septenary, is the world of ATZILUTH, or perfect revelation; and we can only express our astonishment that Hebrew Kabalists have not recognized and explained this symbolism, which so closely and inseparably connects the Highest Mysteries of Christianity with the secret but invariable doctrine of all the masters in Israel. The beast with seven heads, in the symbolism of St. John, is the material and antagonistic negation of the luminous septenary; the Babylonian harlot corresponds after the same manner to the Woman clothed with the Sun; the four horsemen are analogous to the four allegorical living creatures; the seven angels with their seven trumpets, seven cups and seven swords characterize the absolute of the struggle of good against evil by speech, by religious association and by force. Thus are the seven seals of the occult book opened successively, and universal initiation is accomplished. The commentators who have sought anything else in this book of the transcendent Kabalah have lost their time and their trouble only to render themselves ridiculous. To discover Napoleon in the angel Apollyon, Luther in the star which falls from heaven, Voltaire or Rousseau in the grasshoppers armed like warriors, is merely high fantasy. It is the same with all the violence done to the names of celebrated persons so as to make them numerically equivalent to that fatal number 666, which we have already explained sufficiently. When we think that men like Bossuet and Newton amused themselves with such chimeras, we can understand that humanity is not so acute in its genius as might be supposed from the bearing of its vices.