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Let us now have recourse to the origin of true science by recurring to the Holy Kabalah, or tradition of the children of Seth, taken from Chaldea by Abraham, communicated by Joseph to the Egyptian priest-hood, ingarnered by Moses, concealed by symbols in the Bible, revealed by the Saviour to St. John, and embodied in its fulness in hieratic images, analogous to those of all antiquity, in the Apocalypse of this Apostle.

Whatsoever was in kinship with idolatry was held in detestation by the Kabalists, which notwithstanding, God is represented by them under a human figure, but it is purely hieroglyphical. For them He is the intelligent, the loving, the living infinite. He is neither the totality of all beings, nor being in abstraction, nor a being who is philosophically definable. He is in all things, being more and greater than all. His very name is ineffable, and yet this name gives expression only to the human ideal of His divinity.1 It is not possible for man to understand God in Himself. He is the absolute of faith, but the absolute of reason is Being. Being is self-existent and is because it is. The cause of Being is Being itself. It is matter of legitimate speculation why this or that exists, but it would be absurd to inquire why Being is, for it would be to postulate Being as antecedent to Being.

It is demonstrated by reason and science that the modes of existence in Being are equilibrated in accordance with harmonious and hierarchic laws. Now the hierarchy is graduated on an ascending scale, becoming more and more monarchic. At the same time reason cannot pause in the presence of one absolute chief without being overwhelmed by the heights which it discerns above this supreme king; it takes refuge therefore in silence and gives place to adoring faith. That which is certain, for science and for reason alike, is that the idea of God is the grandest, most holy and most serviceable of all aspirations in man; that mortality and its eternal sanction repose on this belief. In humanity it is therefore the most real phenomenon of being, and if it were false, therefore, Nature would formulate the absurd, the void would affirm life, and it might be said at one and the same time that there was God and there was no God. It is to this philosophical and incontestable reality, or otherwise the notion of Deity, that the Kabalists give a name, and all other names are contain2 The ciphers of this name produce all numbers and the hieroglyphical forms of its letters give expression to all laws of Nature, with all that is therein. We shall not recur in this place to that which has been dealt with already as regards the divine Tetragram in the Doctrine of Transcendental Magic; but it may be added that the Kabalists inscribe it in four chief ways : (1) as JHVH, which is spelt but not pronounced. The consonants are YOD, HE, VAU, HE, and they are rendered as JEHOVAH by us in opposition to all analogy, for the Tetragrammaton so disfigured is composed of six letters.3 (2) ADNI, meaning Lord and pronounced by us ADONAI.4 (3) AHIH, which signifies Being and is pronounced by us EIEIE!5 (4) AGLA, pronounced as it is written and comprising hieroglyphically all mysteries of the Kabalah.6

The letter Aleph, is the first of the Hebrew alphabet, and expressing as it does unity, it represents hieroglyphically the dogma of Hermes : that which is above is analogous to that which is below. In consonance with this the letter has two arms, one of which points to earth and the other to heaven with an identical gesture. The letter Gimel, , is third in the alphabet; it expresses the triad numerically, and hieroglyphically it signifies childbirth, fruitfulness. Lamed, is the twelfth letter and is an expression of the perfect cycle. Considered as a hieroglyphical sign it represents the circulation of the perpetual movement and the relation of the radius to the circumference. The duplicated Aleph represents the synthesis. Therefore the name AGLA signifies: (1) unity, which accomplishes by the triad the cycle of numbers, leading back to unity. (2) The fruitful principle of Nature, which is one therewith. (3) The primal truth which fertilises science and restores it to unity. (4) Syllepsis, analysis, science and synthesis. (5) The Three Divine Persons Who are one God; the secret of the Great Work, which is the fixation of the Astral Light by a sovereign act of will and is represented by the adepts as a serpent pierced with an arrow, thus forming the letter Aleph. (6) The three operations of dissolution, sublimation and fixation, corresponding to the three essential substances, Salt, Sulphur and Mercury—the whole being expressed by the letter Gimel. (7) The twelve keys of Basil Valentine, represented by Lamed. (8) Finally, the Work accomplished in conformity with its principle and reproducing the said principle.

Herein is the origin of that Kabalistic tradition which comprises all Magic in a single word. To know how this word is read and how also it is pronounced, or literally to understand its mysteries and translate the knowledge into action, is to have the key of miracles. In pronouncing the word AGLA it is said that one must turn to the East, which means union of intention and knowledge with oriental tradition. It should be remembered further that, according to Kabalah; the perfect word is the word realised by acts, whence comes that expression which recurs freqently in the Bible: facere verbum, to make a word—that is, in the sense of performing an act. To pronounce the word AGLA Kabalistically is therefore to pass all tests of initiation and accomplish all its works.7

It has been said in the Doctrine of Transcendental Magic that the name Jehovah resolves into seventy-two explicatory names, called Shemaham-phorash.8 The art of employing these seventy-two names and discovering therein the keys of universal science is the art which is called by Kabalists the Keys of Solomon. As a fact, at the end of the collections of prayers and evocations which bear this title there are found usually seventy-two magical circles, making thirty-six talismans, or four times nine, being the absolute number multiplied by the tetrad. Each of these talismans bears two of the two-and-seventy names, the sign emblematical of their number and that of the four letters of Tetragrammaton to which they correspond. From this have originated the four emblematical Tarot suits: the Wand, representing the Yod; the Cup, answering to the He; the Sword, referable to the Vau; and the Pentacle, in correspondence with the final He. The complement of the denary has been added in the Tarot, thus repeating synthetically the character of unity.9

Pantacle of Kabalistic Letters

The popular traditions of Magic affirm that he who possesses the Keys of Solomon can communicate with spirits of all grades and can exact obedience on the part of all natural forces. These Keys, so often lost, and as often recovered, are no other than the talismans of the seventy-two names and the mysteries of the thirty-two hieroglyphical paths, reproduced by the Tarot. By the aid of these signs and by their infinite combinations, which are like those of numbers and letters, it is possible to arrive at the natural and mathematical revelation of all secrets of Nature, and it is in this sense that communication is established with the whole hierarchy of intelligence.

The Kabalists in their wisdom were on their guard against the dreams of imagination and hallucinations of the waking state. Therefore they avoided in particular all unhealthy evocations which disturb the nervous system and intoxicate reason. Makers of curious experiments in phenomena of extranatural vision are no better than the eaters of opium and hasheesh. They are children who injure themselves recklessly. It may happen that one is overtaken by intoxication; we may even so far forget ourselves voluntarily as to seek the experience of drunkenness, but for the man who respects himself a single instance suffices. Count Joseph de Maistre says that one of these days we shall deride our present stupidity, much as we deride the barbarity of the middle ages. What would he think, did he see our table-turners or listen to makers of hypotheses concerning the world of spirits? Poor creatures that we are, we escape from one absurdity by rushing over to its oppositt. The eighteenth century thought that it protested against superstition by denying religion, and we in return testify to the impiety of that period by believing in old wives' fables. Is it impossible to be a better Christian than Voltaire and still not believe in ghosts? The dead can no more revisit this earth which they have quitted than a child can return into the womb of its mother.10 That which we call death is birth into a new life. Nature does not repeat what it has once done in the order of necessary progression through the scale of existence, and she cannot bely her own fundamental laws. Limited by its organs and served by these, the human soul can enter into communication with things of the visible world only by the intermediation of these organs. The body is an envelope adjusted to the physical environments in which the soul abides here. By confining the action of the soul it makes her activity possible. In the absence of body the soul would be everywhere, and yet in so attenuated a sense that it could act nowhere, but, lost in the infinite, would be swallowed up and annihilated in God.11 Imagine a drop of fresh water shut up in a globule and cast in the sea; as long as that sheath is preserved intact, the drop of water will subsist in its separate form, but let the globule be broken and where shall we look for the drop in the vast sea?

In creating spirits, God could endow them with self-conscious personality only by their restriction in an envelope, so as to centralise their action and by restriction save it from being lost. When the soul separates from the body it changes environment of necessity, since it changes the envelope.12 It goes forth clothed only in the astral form, or vehicle of light, ascending in virtue of its nature above the atmosphere, as air rises from the water in escaping from a broken vessel. We say that the soul ascends because the vehicle ascends and because action and consciousness are both attached thereto.13 The atmospheric air becomes solid for luciform bodies which are infinitely rarer than itself, and they could only come down by assuming a grosser vehicle. Where would they obtain this in the region above our atmosphere? They could only return to earth by means of another incarnation, and such return would be a lapse, for they would be renouncing the state of free spirit and renewing their novitiate. The possibility of such a return is not admitted, moreover, by the catholic religion.

The doctrine here set forth is formulated by the Kabalists in a single axiom: The spirit clothes itself to come down and unclothes itself to go up. The life of intelligence is ascensional. In the body of its mother the child has a vegetative life and draws nourishment through a cord to which it is attached, as the tree is attached to the earth by its root and is also nourished thereby. When the child passes from vegetative to instinctive and animal life, the cord breaks and henceforth he has free motion. When the child becomes man he escapes from the trammels of instinct and can act as a reasonable being. When the man dies he is liberated from the law of gravitation, by which he has been previously bound to earth. When the soul has expiated its offences it grows strong enough to emerge from the exterior darkness of the terrestrial atmosphere and mount towards the sun.14 The unending ascent of the sacred ladder begins therein, for the eternity of the elect cannot be a state of idleness; they pass from virtue to virtue, from bliss to bliss, from victory to victory, from glory to glory. There is no break in the chain, and those of the superior degrees can still exercise an influence on those who are below, but it is in harmony with the hierarchic order and after the same way that a king who rules wisely does good to the humblest of his subjects. From stage to stage the prayers arise and the graces pour down, never mistaking the path. But spirits who have once gone up cannot again come down, for in proportion to their ascent the zones solidify below them. The great gulf is fixed, says Abraham, in the parable of the rich man, so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot.15

Ecstasy may so exalt the powers to the star-body that it can draw the material body after it, thus proving that the destiny of the soul is to ascend. The stories of aërial levitation are possible, but there is no instance of a man being able to live under the earth or in water. It would be not less impossible for a soul in separation from the body to subsist for a single moment in the density of our atmosphere. Therefore departed beings are not about us, as spiritists suppose. Those whom we love may see us and to us many still manifest, but only by mirage and reflection in the common mirror of the Astral Light. Furthermore, they can take interest no longer in mortal things; they hold to us only by that which is highest in our feelings and is in correspondence with their eternal mode.16

Such are the revelations of Kabalism as imbedded in the mysterious book of the Zohar; for science they are of course hypothetical, but they rest on a series of exact inductions and these inductions are drawn from facts uncontested by science.

We are brought at this point into touch with one of the most dangerous secrets in the domain of Magic, being the more than probable hypothesis concerning the existence of those fluidic larva known in ancient theurgy under the name of elementary spirits. Something has been said upon the subject in The Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic, and the illstarred Abbé de Villars, who jested with these terrible revelations, paid for his imprudence with his life.17 The reason that the secret is dangerous is because it verges on the great magical arcanum. The truth is that the evocation of elementary spirits implies power to coagulate fluids by a projection of the Astral Light, and this power, so directed, can produce only disorders and misfortunes, as will be shewn at a later stage. Meanwhile, the grounds of the hypothesis and the evidence of its probability follow: Spirit is everywhere, and is that which animates matter; it overcomes the force of gravity by perfecting the vehicle which is its form. We see every-where around us how form develops with instincts, till intelligence and beauty are attained: these are efforts of the light attracted by the charm of the spirit; they are part of the mystery of progressive and universal generation.

The light is the efficient agent of forms and life, because it is both motion and heat. When fixed and polarised about a centre, it produces a living being and draws thereafter the plastic substance needed to perfect and preserve it. This plastic substance is, in the last analysis, formed of earth and water and, with good reason, is denominated slime of the earth in the Bible. But this light is in nowise spirit, as believed by the Indian hierophants and all schools of Göetia: it is only the spirit's instrument. Nor is it the body of the protoplastes, though so regarded by theurgists of the school of Alexandria. It is the first physical manifestation of the Divine Breath. God creates it eternally, and man, who is in the image of God, modifies and seems to multiply it.18

Prometheus, says the classical fable, having stolen fire from heaven, gave life thereby to images formed of earth and water, for which crime he was blasted and chained by Jupiter. Elementary spirits, say the Kabalists in their most secret books, are children of the solitude of Adam, born of his dreams when he yearned for the woman who as yet had not been given to him by God.19 According to Paracelsus, the blood lost at certain regular periods by the female sex and the nocturnal emissions to which male celibates are subject in dream people the air with phantoms.20 The hypothetical origin of larva, according to the masters, is here indicated with sufficient clearness and further explanation may be spared.

Such larva have an aerial body formed from vapour of blood, for which reason they are attracted towards spilt blood and in older days drew nourishment from the smoke of sacrifices. They are those monstrous offspring of nightmare which used to be called incubi and succubi. When sufficiently condensed to be visible, they are as a vapour tinged by the reflection of an image; they have no personal life, but they mimic that of the magus who evokes them, as the shadow images the body. They collect above all about idiots and those immoral creatures whose isolation abandons them to irregular habits. The cohesion of parts being very slight in their fantastic bodies, they fear the open air, a great fire and above all the point of a sword. They become, in a manner, as vapourous appendages to the real bodies of their parents, since they live only by drawing on the life either of those who have created them or those who appropriate them by their evocation. It may come about in this manner that if these shadows of bodies be wounded, their parent may be maimed in real earnest, even as the unborn child may be hurt and disfigured by the imaginations of its mother. The world is full of such phenomena; they justify these strange revelations and can only be explained thereby.

Such larva draw the vital heat of persons in good health and they drain those who are weak rapidly. Hence come the histories of vampires, things of terrific reality which have been substantiated from time to time, as it is well known. This explains also why in the neighbourhood of mediums, who are persons obsessed by larva, one is conscious of a cooling in the atmosphere. Seeing that their existence is due to the illusions of imagination and divagation of the senses, such creatures never manifest in the presence of a person who can unveil the mystery of their monstrous birth.

1 Éliphas Lévi has forgotten that the word “ineffable” means something which cannot be expressed; he intended to say that, according to the Kabalists, the efficacious name was hidden.

2 All later Kabalists agree that Tetragrammaton is the root and foundation of the Divine Names. In the Sephirotic system one of the allocations makes Chokmah, or Supernal Wisdom, to correspond with the Yod of Tetragrammaton. Kether, which is the Crown, is said to have no letter attributed thereto, because the mystery of Ain Soph, the hidden abyss of the Godhead, is implied therein. However, the apex of Yod does in a sense intimate concerning Kether. He is the second letter in the Divine Tetrad, and it is ascribed to Binah, or Supernal Understanding, wherein is all life comprehended. This is the abode of the Shekinah in transcendence. The third letter is Vau, and it is said to contain the six Sephiroth from Chesed to Yesod. The second He is the fourth and last letter; it corresponds to Malkuth, or the Kingdom, wherein is the mystery of the unity of God. This is the abode of the Shekinah in manifestation. Thus, Yod, He, Vau, He, which we render Jehovah, contains all the ten Sephiroth. There are, however, other allocations.

3 Éliphas Lévi must have meant to say seven letters, but the point does not signify. According to Rosenroth, the Tetragrammaton with vowel-points is the eighth Divine Name— The points are those of Elohim and it is read as that Name. This signifies the concealment of the “Ineffable” Name, on account of the exile of Israel.

4 This is the Divine Name which is most in proximity to created things. See the excursus thereon in Kabbala Denudata, vol. i, pp. 32-41.

5 Cf. the Zohar, Part I, fol. 15a, on Exodus iii, I4: “And God said unto Moses: I am that I am”—

6 According to the Rabbinical Lexicon of Buxtorf, Agla is formed from the initial letters of the sentence = Tu potens es in sceculum. Domine. There seems to be no Kabalistic authority for its explanation by Lévi, and the word occurs very seldom in the Zohar.

7 According to Petrus Galatinus, in De Arcanis Catholicæ Veritatis, the word Agla expresses the infinite power of the Divine Trinity. Like Éliphas Lévi, he gives us the separate significance of each letter and, like Buxtorf, he makes them the initials of the sentence already quoted, his rendering being: Tu potens in œternum Dominus. He terms Agla Nomen Dei, for which there seems to be as much and as little authority as there is for the suggestion that the Divina potentia is that of the Trinity.

8 A very full exposition of this Name will be found in the section entitled De Cabale Hebræorum, forming part of Kircher's magnum opus, the Œdipus Ægyptiacus. It is curious that a tract so important as this, within its own measures, and written with the uttermost simplicity, does not appear to have been translated, even into the French language.

9 I must admit that this reference escapes me. The Tarot consists of four suits of 14 cards each and there are 22 Trumps Major, making 78 cards in all.

10 The axiom has rather a convincing air, but the analogy is wrong, and the word “return” is a blunder of popular speech. The possibility of communication with those who have left this life is a question of the interpenetration of worlds. To say that the human spirit departs or comes back is a symbolic expression, like the statement that heaven is above us.

11 The analogy is again wrong and the creation of a materialistic mind. The return of the soul to God is not annihilation but life for evermore, and it is union with all life.

12 The soul sheds one envelope, in which it has prepared another.

13 This expression may tend to confusion. The consciousness and activity of the soul are manifested by means of that vehicle in which it happens to reside. It is not they that belong to the vehicle, but it is the vehicle that is used by them.

14 There is no Kabalistic authority for the sun as the abode of souls.

15 Kabalism is silent on the question of communication with those who have left this life, though tacitly it must admit the possibility on the evidence of the case of Samuel. The axiom that the spirit clothes itself to come down and unclothes itself to go up is one of the so-called conclusiones Kabbalisticœ of Picus de Mirandula, but it is found substantially in the Zohar, and as regards the descent, this is just what occurs ex hypothesi in the phenomena of spiritistic materialisations. As regards the parable of the rich man, it has nothing to do with the question of so-called spirit-return; those who were in the bosom of Abraham had as much left this life as those who were in Sheol.

16 It depends on those who have left us. What of the earthly and the evil? Why should the bond between them and us—supposing that there is a bond—be that of our highest feelings?

17 The fact is that he was assassinated; the inference is that it was by or at the instance of those whose secrets he was supposed to have betrayed. The murderers, also by inference, were said to be Brethren of the Rosy Cross. It may be mentioned that the Comte de Gabalis contains the theory of communication with elementary spirits, being those of earth, air, fire and water; but the mode of treatment suggests that itis a jeu d'esprit. The Nouveaux Entretiens sur les Sciences Secrètes, Les Genies-Assistants and Le Gnome Irréconcilable, which are supposed sequels, are forgeries of later periods.

18 Elsewhere in his works Éliphas Lévi says that the Astral Light is (a) the Od ot the Hebrews, (b) an electro-magnetic ether, (c) a vital and luminous caloric, (d) the instrument of life, (e) the instrument of the omnipotence of Adam, (/) the universal glass of visions. It follows the law of magnetic currents, is subject to fixation by a supreme projection of will-power, is the first envelope of the soul, and the mirror of imagination. He terms it also magnetised electricity. It would seem that his contemporary disciples in France have abandoned the theory of their master, or perhaps I should say rather its doctrinal part. On the other hand, it has perhaps reappeared, under theosophical auspices, as the reservoir of the akasic records.

19 There are also references to Lilith, a demon-wife of Adam, in the Zohar; she is called the instigator of chastisements and was really the wife of Samael, the evil angel. It may be added that, according to Paracelsus, the elementaries non sunt progeniti ex Adamo See Liber de Nymphis, Sulphis, Pygmœsis et Salamandris, Tract. I, cap. i.

20 In respect of male celibates, the physiological particulars referred to are the blind yearning of Nature after the nuptial state and, with a tentative reserve in respect of the life of sanctity, it is shame to those who neglect the warning or turn it to the account of sin.