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To explain Holy Scripture from the religious and dogmatic standpoint forms no part of our warrant. Subject above all things to the hierarchic order, we surrender theology to the doctors of the Church and we render to human science whatsoever is included in the domain of experience and reason. Therefore on those occasions when we may appear to be risking a new application of some biblical passage, it is always with proper respect for ecclesiastical decisions. We do not dogmatise on our own part, and we submit our observations and researches to the lawful authorities.

On reading the earliest history of the human race in the sacred work of Moses, that which strikes one at once is the description of the Earthly Paradise, which is summarised in the figure of a perfect pantacle. It is circular or square, since it is watered equally by four rivers arranged in the form of a cross, while in the centre are found two trees representing knowledge and life, stable intelligence and progressive motion, wisdom and creation.1 The serpent of Asclepios and Hermes is coiled about the Tree; beneath its shadow are the man and woman, active and passive, intelligence and love. The serpent, symbolising the primal attraction and the central fire of the earth, tempts her who is the weaker, and she causes the man to succumb; yet to the serpent she yields only in order that she may overcome it subsequently: one day she will crush the head of it by giving a Saviour to the world. All science is represented in this admirable scene.2 The man abdicates the realm of intelligence by yielding to the solicitations of the sensitive part; he profanes the fruit of knowledge, which should be the sustenance of the soul, by applying it to the uses of unjust and material satisfaction; he loses in consequence the sense of harmony and of truth. He is clothed thereafter with the skin of a beast, because the physical form takes shape sooner or later, and invariably, in correspondence to moral dispositions. He is cast out of the circle which is watered by the four rivers of life, and a cherub, armed with an ever-moving, burning sword, prevents his return into the domain of unity.

As we have observed in the Doctrine of Magic, Voltaire discovered that the Hebrew word for cherub signifies a bull, and was highly amused at the story. He might have been less entertained had he recognised in the angel with the head of a bull the image of an obscure symbolism and in the revolving sword of fire those flashes of ill-understood and illusory truth which provided, after the Fall, a pretext to the idolatry of nations. The burning sword typified also that light which man knew no longer how to direct, so that, instead of governing its force, he was made subject to its fatal influence. The great magical work, understood in an absolute sense, is the conquest and direction of the burning sword, and the cherub is the angel or soul of the earth, represented invariably under the figure of a bull in the Ancient Mysteries. Hence in Mithraic symbolism, the master of light is seen vanquishing the bull of earth and plunging into his flank that sword which sets free the life, represented by drops of blood.

The first consequence of Eve's sin is the death of Abel. By separating love from understanding she separated it also from power, and this, reduced to blindness and in the bondage of earthly desires, became jealous of love and slew it. The children of Cain perpetuated the crime of their father; the daughters whom they brought into the world were disastrously beautiful, but, being void of love, they were born for the damnation of angels3 and for the scandal of the descendants of Seth.

After the deluge, and as a sequel to the prevarication of Ham, some part of the mystery of which has been already indicated, the children of men attempted to realise an insensate project, by constructing an universal pantacle and palace. It was a vast experiment in socialistic equality, and the phalansterium of Fourier is a sorry conception in comparison with the tower of Babel.4 The latter was an active protestation against the hierarchy of knowledge, a citadel built against floods and tempests, a promontory from the elevation of which the deified people would soar above the atmosphere and its commotions. But one does not ascend to knowledge on ladders of stone; the hierarchic degrees of the spirit are not built with mortar like the stories of a tower. Against such a materialised hierarchy anarchy itself protested, and men ceased to understand one another—a fatal lesson and one misinterpreted utterly by those who in our own days have dreamed of another Babel. The negations of equality give answer to doctrines which are hierarchic only in the sense of brutality and materialism. Whenever the human race builds such a tower, the summit will be contested and the multitude will desert the base. To satisfy all ambitions, the summit must be broader than the base and the result an unstable edifice which will collapse at the smallest shock.

The scattering of men was the first result of the curse pronounced against the profane descendants of Ham, but the race of Canaan bore in a particular manner the burden of the malediction in question, which at a later period made all their posterity anathema.5 That chastity which is the guardian of the family is also the distinctive character of hierarchic initiations; profanation and revolt are always unclean; they tend to promiscuity and infanticide. Desecration of the mysteries of birth and destruction of children were the basis of the religions of ancient Palestine, given over to the horrible rites of Black Magic; the black god of India, the monstrous priapic Rutrem, reigned therein under the name of Belphegor. The Talmudists and the Platonic Jew Philo recite things so shameful respecting the worship of this idol that they appeared incredible to the learned lawyer Seldenus. It is said to have been a bearded image, with gaping mouth and a tongue like a gigantic phallus; the worshippers exposed themselves without shame in the presence of such a visage and presented offerings of excrement. The idols of Moloch and Chamos were murderous machines which sometimes crushed unfortunate little children against their brazen breasts and sometimes consumed them in their red-hot arms. There was dancing to the sound of trumpets and tambourines, so that the cries of the victims were stifled, and these dances were led by the wretched mothers. Incest, sodomy and bestiality were the authorised practices among these infamous people, and even formed part of the sacred rites.

Such is the fatal consequence of doing violence to universal harmony; one does not sin against truth with impunity. In revolt against God, man is driven to the outrage of Nature, despite himself. Identical causes ever produce the same effects, and the Sabbath of the Sorcerers in the middle ages was but a repetition of the festivals of Chamos and Belphegor. It is against such crimes that a decree of eternal death is pronounced by Nature itself. Worshippers of black gods, apostles of promiscuity, preachers of public wantonness, enemies of the family and hierarchy, anarchists in religion and politics are enemies of God and humanity; not to isolate them from the world is to consent that the world shall be poisoned, or such at least was the view of inquisitors; but we are far on our own part from desiring to re-establish the cruel executions of the middle ages. In proportion as society shall become more truly Christian it will realise more fully that we must heal those who are diseased and not destroy them; now, criminal instincts are surely the most appalling of mental maladies.

It must not be forgotten that transcendental Magic is called the Sacerdotal Art and the Royal Art; in Egypt, Greece and Rome it shared the grandeur and decadence of the kingdom and the priesthood. Every philosophy which is at issue with the cultus and its mysteries is baneful to the great political powers, for these, in the eyes of the multitude, lose in grandeur if they cease to be symbols of Divine power. Every crown is broken which comes into collision with the tiara. The eternal dream of Prometheus is to steal fire from heaven and cast down the gods therefrom. The popular Prometheus, unbound on Caucasus by Hercules, who typifies labour, will ever bear about with him his rivets and chains; he will carry his undying vulture, fastened on his gaping wound, till he shall learn obedience at the feet of Him, Who, being born the King of kings and God of gods, has elected in His turn to be nailed in hands and feet and pierced in the side for the conversion of all rebellious spirits.

By opening the career of power to intrigue, republican institutions endangered the principles of the hierarchy. The task of forming kings was confided no longer to the hierarchy and was either replaced by right of inheritance—which abandons the throne to the unequal chances of birth—or by popular election—which sets aside religious influence to establish the monarchy on a basis of republican principles. Those governments which presided successively over the triumphs and humiliations of Greek and Roman states were formed in this manner. The science reserved to the sanctuaries fell into neglect, and men of boldness or genius, who had not been accepted by those who dispense initiation, devised another science in opposition to that of the priests, substituting doubt or denial for the secrets of the temple. In the excess of their adventurous imagination such philosophers were landed quickly in absurdity and laid upon Nature the blame which belonged to their own systems. Heraclitus fell a-weeping, Democritus took refuge in laughter, and the one was a fool like the other. Pyrrhon ended by believing in nothing, which can scarcely exonerate him for the fact that he knew nothing. Into this philosophical chaos Socrates brought a certain light and good sense, by affirming the existence of pure and simple morality. But what does morality profit in the absence of religion? The abstract Deism of Socrates was interpreted by the people as atheism. It came about, however, that Plato, the disciple of Socrates, attempted to supply that system of doctrine which was wanting in the latter and of which indeed he had never dreamed.

The Twenty-first Key of the Tarot, surrounded by Mystic andMasonic Seals

The doctrine of Plato was epoch-making in the history of human genius, but it was not his own invention, for, realising that there is no truth apart from religion, he went to consult the priests of Memphis and to obtain initiation into their Mysteries. He is even credited with a knowledge of the Jewish sacred books.6 In Egypt, however, his initiation could have been imperfect only, for the priests by that time had forgotten themselves the import of their primeval hieroglyphics, as is indicated by the history of that priest who spent three days in deciphering a hieratic inscription found in the tomb of Alcmene and sent by Agesilaus, King of Sparta. Cornuphis, who was doubtless the most learned among the hierophants, consulted the old collections of signs and characters; in the end he found that the inscription was in the script of Proteus, being the Grecian name of the Book of Thoth, consisting of movable hieroglyphics, capable of variations as numerous as there are possible combinations of characters, numbers and elementary figures. But the Book of Thoth, being the key of oracles and the elementary work on science, should not have involved such long research before its signs were identified, if Cornuphis had been really proficient in the Sacerdotal Art. Another proof that primeval truths were obscured at this period is the fact that the oracles which registered their protest on the subject were in a style that was understood no longer.

After his return from Egypt, Plato was journeying with Simmias on the confines of Caria when he was met by some men of Delos, who begged him to interpret an oracle of Apollo. It declared that to make an end of the woes in Greece the cubic stone must be doubled. The attempt had been made with a stone kept in the temple of Apollo; but the work of doubling it on every side resulted in a polyhedron having twenty-five surfaces; to restore the cubic form they had to increase it twenty-six times the original volume of the stone, by a process of successive doubling. Plato sent back the emissaries to the mathematician Eudoxus,7 saying that the oracle had counselled the study of geometry. Whether he did not himself understand the deep sense of the symbol or disdained to unveil it to the ignorant are points which must be left to conjecture; but that which is certain is that the cubic stone and its multiplication explains all secrets of sacred numbers, including the mystery of perpetual motion, hidden by adepts and pursued by fools under the name of squaring the circle.8 By this cubic agglomeration of twenty-six cubes about a single central cube, the oracle indicated to the Delians not only the elements of geometry but the key of creative harmonies, explained by the inter-relation of forms and numbers. The plan of all great allegorical temples throughout antiquity is found in the multiplication (a) of the cube by the cross, (b) about which a circle is described, and then (c) the cubic cross moving in a globe. These notions, which are rendered more intelligible by a diagram, have been handed on to our own days in Masonic initiations, and they are a perfect justification of the name attributed to the modern societies in question, for they are also the root-principles of architecture and the science of building.

The Delians thought to answer the geometrical question by reducing their multiplication by half, but they had already obtained eight times the volume of their cubic stone. For the rest, the number of their experiments may be extended at will, for the story itself is probably a problem set to his disciples by Plato. If the utterance of the oracle has to be taken as a fact, we can find a still deeper meaning in it: to double the cubic stone is to extract the duad from unity, form from idea, action from thought. It is to realise in the world the exactitude of eternal mathematics, to establish politics on the basis of exact sciences, to harmonise religious dogma with the philosophy of numbers.

Plato has more eloquence but less depth than Pythagoras: he aspires to reconcile the philosophy of logicians with the immutable dogmas of seers; he does not seek to vulgarise but would reconstruct science. So was his philosophy destined at a later date to provide dawning Christianity with theories prepared beforehand and with vivifying doctrines. Notwithstanding, however, that he based his theorems on mathematics, Plato was poet rather than geometrician; he was rich in harmonious forms and was prodigal of marvellous hypotheses. Aristotle, who was a calculating genius exclusively, referred everything to debate in the schools; he made everything subject to the demonstrations of numeral evolutions and the logic of calculations. Excluding the faith of Platonism, he sought to prove all and likewise to comprehend all in his categories; he turned the triad into syllogism and the binary into enthymeme. For him the chain of being became a sorites. He reduced everything to an abstraction and reasoned on everything, being itself passed into an abstraction in his process and was lost amidst the hypotheses of ontology. Plato was destined to inspire the Fathers of the Church; Aristotle to be the master of mediaeval scholastics; God knows what clouds gathered about this logic which had no faith in anything and yet set out to explain all. A second Babel was in plan and another confusion of tongues was at no far distance. Being is being and in being is the reason of being. In the beginning is the Word and the Word, or Logos, is logic formulated in speech, or spoken reason. The Word is in God and the Word is God Himself manifested to intelligence. But this is precisely a truth which exceeds all philosophies and is that, also precisely, which must be believed, under the penalty of knowing nothing and falling back into the irrational doubt of Pyrrho. As guardian of faith, the priesthood rests entirely on this ground of science, and we are compelled to salute in its reaching the Divine principle of the Eternal Word.

1 This is one construction of the symbol and is a little tinctured by Éliphas Lévi's sincere admiration for the understanding which lay behind the Romance of the Rose. The text of Genesis says that a river rose to water the Garden “and from thence it was parted and became into four heads”, or four sources of rivers. These rivers did not water the Garden but the world without, and their names are familiar in the geography of the ancient world. The mystic pantacle of Eden shews therefore an enclosure constituted by a ring or circle of water, an island like that of Avalon, which is another Garden of Apples, and the waters flow out therefrom towards the four points of heaven: they form therefore a cross, and in the centre of that cross is the Paradise. If the reader will bear in mind that, according to the secret tradition, Adam was set to grow roses in the Garden of Eden, he will understand at what place of the world the symbolism of the Rosy Cross takes its origin.

2 This is true, but it is only the science of this world in the sense that the greater includes the lesser. It is really the supernal knowledge which is called Daath in Kabalism, arising from the union of Chokmah and Binah, or Wisdom and Understanding.

3 The commentary of the Zohar on Genesis vi, 2—“the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair”—affirms that the angejs were cast out of heaven as soon as they had conceived the desire therein suggested. Aza and Azael were the chiefs of these fallen spirits. Subsequently they taught Magic to men.

4 The design of the builders, according to the Zohar, Part I, fol. 75a, was to abandon the celestial domain for that of Satan. They desired to rebuild heaven, apparently in the likeness of their own evil desires. They were the same quality of souls as the “giants in the earth in those days” and “the mighty men which were of old, men of renown”. See Genesis c. vi, v. 4 and Zohar, Part I, fol. 25b.

5 Zoharic Kabalism was dissatisfied with the visitation of the offence of Ham on his apparently innocent son, Canaan, and it accounted for the malediction pronounced upon the latter by the fact that he had removed the testes from the person of his grandfather Noah. On the surface this is a ridiculous enormity, but it is a concealed intimation that the whole Noetic myth is, like Paradise itself, a mystery of sex shadowed forth in symbolism.

6 It should be needless to say that this is a mere presumption and is not even founded on any legend concerning the travels oí Plato. He is said to have been in Egypt for a period which has been estimated at thirteen years.

7 He was a disciple of Plato who is supposed not only to have been illustrious for his knowledge of geometry but to have paid the usual pilgrim's visit to Egypt and to have returned an adept in astronomy.

8 We have, unhappily, to remember that Éliphas Lévi himself wrote a great deal, and assuredly to little purpose, on the subject of squaring the circle and on perpetual motion. Elsewhere he tells us that the revolution of a square about its centre describes a circle, and thus the circle is squared. He also invented, in imagination, a clock which wound itself up in the process of running itself down, and this was perpetual motion—presumably, unless the mechanism happened to stop working or to wear itself out. The reader may settle for himself whether in these phantasies he was in hiding like an adept or pursuing like a fool.