Читать книгу The Magic of Éliphas Lévi - Eliphas Levi - Страница 21

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We have said that Egypt of old was itself a pantacle, and as much might be affirmed concerning the elder world at large. In proportion as the great hierophants were at pains to conceal their absolute science, they sought more and more to extend and multiply its symbols. The triangular pyramids, with their square bases, represented metaphysics grounded on the science of Nature; and the symbolical key of this science assumed the gigantic form of that wonderful sphinx which, in its age-long vigil at the foot of the pyramids, has hollowed for itself so deep a bed in the sand. Those seven great monuments called the wonders of the world were sublime commentaries on the pyramids and on the seven mysterious gates of Thebes. At Rhodes there was the Pantacle of the Sun, in which the god of light and truth was symbolised under a human form clothed with gold; he raised in his right hand the torch of intelligence and in his left held the shaft of activity. His feet were fixed on moles representing the eternal equilibrating forces of Nature, necessity and liberty, active and passive, fixed and volatile—in a word, the Pillars of Hercules. At Ephesus was the Pantacle of the Moon, which was the Temple of Diana Panthea, made in the likeness of the universe. It was a dome surmounting a cross, with a square gallery and a circular precinct recalling the shield of Achilles. The tomb of Mausoleus was the Pantacle of the Chaste and Conjugal Venus; in form it was after the manner of a lingam, having a square elevation and a circular precinct. In the middle place of the square rose a truncated pyramid, on which was a chariot with four horses, harnessed so as to form a cross. The Pyramids were the Pantacle of Hermes or of Mercury. The Olympian Jupiter was the Pantacle of that god. The walls of Babylon and the citadel of Semiramis were Pantacles of Mars. In fine, the Temple of Solomon—that universal and absolute pantacle destined to replace the others—was for the Gentile world the terrible Pantacle of Saturn.

The philosophical septenary of initiation, according to the mind of the ancients, may be summarised as three absolute principles, reducible to a single principle, and four elementary forms, which are one form only, the whole constituting an unity composed of form and idea. The three principles are as follows: (1) Being is being; in philosophy this signifies the identity of the idea and that which is, or truth; in religion it is the first principle, the Father. (2) Being is real; this means in philosophy the identity of knowledge and of that which is, or reality; in religion it is the Logos of Plato, the Demiourgos, the Word. (3) Being is logical; in philosophy this signifies the identity of reason and reality; in religion it is Providence, or the Divine Action by which the good is realised, the mutual love of the true and the good, called the Holy Spirit in Christianity.

The Seven Wonders of the World

The four elementary forms were the expression of two fundamental laws: resistance and motion; the fixed state, or that inertia which resists, and active life, or the volatile; in other and more general terms, matter and spirit—matter being that nothingness which is formulated by passive affirmation, spirit being the principle of absolute necessity in that which is true. The negative action of material nothing on spirit was termed the evil principle; the positive action of spirit on this same nothingness, so that it might be filled with creation and with light, was called the good principle. To these conceptions there corresponded, on the one hand, humanity and, on the other, the rational and saving life, redeeming those who are conceived in sin—that is to say, in nothingness—because of their material generation.

Such was the doctrine of secret initiation, such the admirable synthesis that the spirit of Christianity came to vivify, enlightening by its splendour, establishing divinely by its dogma and realising by its sacraments. Under the veil which was intended to preserve it this synthesis has vanished. It is destined to be recovered by man in all its primitive beauty and all its material fecundity.