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The apocryphal Book of Enoch says that there were angels who consented to fall from heaven that they might have intercourse with the daughters of earth.1 “For in those days the sons of men having multiplied, there were born to them daughters of great beauty. And when the angels, or sons of heaven, beheld them, they were filled with desire; wherefore they said to one another: ‘Come, let us choose wives from among the race of man, and let us beget children.' Their leader, Samyasa, answered thereupon and said: ‘Perchance you will be wanting in the courage needed to fulfil this resolution, and then I alone shall be answerable for your fall.' But they swore that they would in no wise repent and that they would achieve their whole design. Now there were 200 who descended on Mount Armon, and it was from this time that the mountain received its designation, which signifies Mount of the Oath. Hereinafter follow the names of those angelic leaders who descended with this object: Samyasa, chief among all, Urakabarameel, Azibeel, Tamiel, Ramuel, Danel, Azkeel, Sarakuyal, Asael, Armers, Batraal, Anane, Zavebe, Samsaveel, Ertrael, Turel, Jomiael, Arazial. They took wives, with whom they had intercourse, to whom also they taught Magic, the art of enchantment and the diverse properties of roots and trees. Amazarac gave instruction in all secrets of sorcerers; Barkaial was the master of those who study the stars; Akibeel manifested signs; and Azaradel taught the motions of the moon”.

This legend of the Kabalistic Book of Enoch is a variant account of the same profanation of Mysteries which we meet with under another form of symbolism in the history of the sin of Adam. Those angels, the sons of God, of whom Enoch speaks, were initiates of Magic, and it was this that they communicated to profane men, using incautious women as their instruments. They split upon the rock of sense-attraction, becoming enamoured of the female sex, and the secrets of royalty and priesthood were extracted from them unawares. Primitive civilisation collapsed as a consequence, and the giants, who typified brute force and unbridled appetite, fought together for the world, which escaped only by immersion in the waters of the deluge, wherein all traces of the past were effaced. This deluge symbolised that universal confusion into which humanity is brought of necessity when it ignores and does outrage to the harmonies of Nature.2 There is kinship between the fall of Samyasa and that of Adam; the lure of sense seduced both; both profaned the Tree of Knowledge; and both were driven far away from the Tree of Life. It is needless here to discuss the views, or rather the simplicity, of those who take everything literally and believe that knowledge and life were once manifested under the form of trees; let us confess rather and only to the deep meaning of sacred symbols. The Tree of Knowledge does actually inflict death when its fruit is eaten; that fruit is the adornment of this world; those golden apples are the glitter of earth.

In the Arsenal Library there is a very curious manuscript entitled The Book of the Penitence of Adam, and herein Kabalistic tradition is presented under the guise of legend to the following effect: “Adam had two sons—Cain, who signifies brute force, and Abel, the type of intelligence and mildness. Agreement was impossible between them; they perished at each other's hands; and their inheritance passed to a third son, named Seth.” Here is the conflict of two opposing forces diverted to the advantage of a synthetic and united force. “Now Seth, who was just, was permitted to approach as far as the entrance of the Earthly Paradise, without being threatened by the Kerub and his flaming sword.” In other words, Seth represented primeval initiation. “It came to pass in this manner that Seth beheld the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, incorporated together after such a manner that they formed but a single tree”—signifying the harmony of science and religion in the transcendental Kabalah. “And the angel gave him three seeds containing the vital power of the said tree.” The reference is here to the Kabalistic triad. “When Adam died, Seth, in obedience to the directions of the angel, placed the three seeds in the mouth of his father, as a token of eternal life. The saplings which sprang up from these, became the Burning Bush, in the midst of which God communicated to Moses his Eternal Name

signifying He Who is and is to come. Moses plucked a triple branch of the sacred bush and used it as his miraculous wand. Although separated from its root, the branch continued to live and blossom, and it was subsequently preserved in the Ark.3 King David planted the branch on Mount Zion, and Solomon took wood from each section of the triple trunk to make the two pillars, Jachin and Boaz, which were placed at the entrance of the Temple. They were covered with bronze, and the third section was inserted at the threshold of the chief gate. It was a talisman which hindered things unclean from entering within. But certain nefarious Levites removed during the night this obstacle to their unholy freedom and cast it, loaded with stones, to the bottom of the Temple reservoir. From this time forward an angel of God troubled the waters of the pool, imparting to them a miraculous value, so that men might be distracted from seeking the tree of Solomon in its depths. In the days of Jesus Christ the pool was cleansed and the Jews, finding the beam of wood, which in their eyes seemed useless, carried the latter outside the town and threw it across the brook Cedron. It was over this bridge that our Saviour passed after his arrest at night in the Garden of Olives. His executioners cast him from it into the water; and then in their haste to prepare the instrument-in-chief of His passion, they took the beam with them, which was made of three kinds of wood, and formed the cross therewith.”4

This allegory embodies all the great traditions of the Kabalah and the secret Christian doctrine of St. John, which is now utterly unknown. It follows that Seth, Moses, David, Solomon and Christ obtained from the same Kabalistic Tree their royal sceptres and pontifical crooks. We can understand in this manner why the Christ was adored in His manger by the Magi. Let us recur, however, to the Book of Enoch, as greater authority attaches to it than can be attributed to an unknown manuscript; the former is cited in the New Testament by the Apostle St. Jude. Tradition refers the invention of letters to Enoch, and it is to him that we must therefore trace back the teachings embodied in the Sepher Yetzirah, which is the elementary work of the Kabalah, its compiler—according to the Rabbins—being the patriarch Abraham, as the heir of the secrets of Enoch and as the father of initiation in Israel. Enoch would seem in this manner to be identical with the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, while the famous Book of Enoch, written throughout in hieroglyphics and in numbers, would be that occult Bible, anterior to the book of Moses and full of mysteries, to which the initiated William Postel alludes so frequently throughout his works, under the title of the Genesis of Enoch.5

The Bible says that Enoch did not die, but that God translated him from one life to another. He is to return and confound Anti-Christ at the end of time, when he will be one of the last martyrs, or witnesses of truth, mentioned in the Apocalypse of St. John. That which is said of Enoch in this respect has been said also of all the great initiators recorded in Kabalism. St. John himself, according to the primitive Christians, was saved from death, and it was long thought that he could be seen breathing in his tomb.6 The explanation is that the absolute science of life preserves against death, as the instinct of the people has always led them to divine. However this may be, the extant memorials of Enoch are contained in two books, one of which is hieroglyphic and the other of the nature of allegory. The first comprises the hieratic keys of initiation, while the second is the history of a great profanation which caused the destruction of the world and the reign of chaos after that of the giants.

St. Methodius, a bishop in the early days of Christianity, whose writings are found in the collection of the Fathers of the Church, has left a prophetic Apocalypse which unfolds the world's history in a series of visions. It is not included among the saint's acknowledged writings, but it was preserved by the Gnostics and has been printed in the Liber Mirabilis under the assumed name of Bermechobus, which illiterate compositors have substituted in place of Bea-Methodius, an abbreviation of Beatus Methodius.7 This book corresponds in several respects with the allegorical treatise entitled The Penitence of Adam. It tells how Seth migrated eastward with his family and so reached a mountain in the vicinity of the Earthly Paradise. This was the country of initiates, whilst the posterity of Cain invented a spurious or debased Magic in India, the land of fratricide, and put witchcraft into the hands of the reckless.

St. Methodius predicts in a later place the struggles and successive predominance of the Ishmaelites, being the name given in his apocalypse to those who conquered the Romans; of the Franks, who overcame the Ishmaelites; and then of a great race from the North whose invasion will precede the personal reign of Anti-Christ. An universal kingdom will be founded thereafter and will fall into the hands of a French prince, after which there will be the reign of justice for a long period of years. We are not concerned with prophecy in the present place, but it is desirable to note the distinction between good and evil Magic, between the Sanctuary of the Sons of Seth and the profanation of science by the descendants of Cain.8 Transcendental knowledge, as a fact, is reserved for those who are masters of their passions, and virgin Nature does not deliver the keys of her nuptial chamber to adulterers.

There are two classes—freemen and slaves; man is born in the bondage of his passions, but he can reach emancipation through intelligence. Between those who are free already and those who as yet are not there is no equality possible. The part of reason is to rule and of instinct to obey. On the other hand, if you impose on the blind the office of leading the blind, both will end in the abyss. We should never forget that liberty does not consist in the licence of passion emancipated from law, which licence would prove the most hideous of tyrannies; liberation consists in willing obedience to law; it is the right to do one's duty, and only just men can be called free. Now, those who are in liberation should govern those who are in bondage, and slaves are called to be released, not from the government of the free but from the yoke of brutal passions, as a consequence of which they cannot exist without masters.

Confess with us now for a moment to the truth of the transcendental sciences. Suppose that there does actually exist a force which can be mastered and by which the miracles of Nature are made subservient to the will of man. Tell us, in such case, whether the secrets of wealth and the bonds of sympathy can be entrusted to brutal greed; the art of fascination to libertines; the supremacy over other wills to those who cannot attain the government of their proper selves. It is terrifying to reflect upon the disorders which would follow from such a profanation; some cataclysm is needed to efface the crimes of earth when all are steeped in slime and blood. Now, it is this state of things that is indicated by the allegorical history of the fall of the angels, according to The Book of Enoch; it is this which was the sin of Adam, and hereof are its fatal consequences. Of such also was the Deluge and its wreckage; of such at a later period the malediction of Canaan. The revelation of occult secrets is typified by the insolence of that son who exposes his father's nakedness. The intoxication of Noah is a lesson for the priesthood of all ages. Woe to those who lay bare the secret of divine generation to the impure gaze of the crowd. Keep the sanctuary shut, all ye who would spare your sleeping father the mockery of the imitators of Ham.9

Such is the tradition of the children of Seth respecting the laws of the human hierarchy; but the latter were not acknowledged by the family of Cain. The Cainites of India invented a genesis to consecrate the oppression of the strong and to perpetuate the ignorance of the weak. Initiation became an exclusive privilege of the high castes, and entire races of humanity were doomed to unending servitude on the pretence of inferior birth : they issued, as it was said, from the feet or knees of Brahma. Now, Nature engenders neither slaves nor kings, but all men indifferently are born to labour. He who pretends that man is perfect at birth but is degraded and perverted by society is the wildest of anarchists, though he may be the most poetic of maniacs. But in vain was Jean Jacques a sentimentalist and dreamer; his deep implicit of misanthropy when explicated by the logic of fanatical partisans, bore fruits in hate and destruction. The consistent architects of the Utopia imagined by the susceptible philosopher of Geneva were Robespierre and Marat.

Society is no abstract personality that can be rendered responsible separately for the stubbornness of man; society is the association of men; it is defective by reason of their vices and sublime in respect of their virtues; but in itself it is holy, like the religion which is bound up inseparably therewith. Is not religion, as a fact, an association of the highest aspirations and the most generous endeavours? After this manner does the blasphemy of anti-social equality and of right in the teeth of duty give answer to the lie about castes privileged by Nature; Christianity alone has solved the problem by assigning supremacy to self-sacrifice and by proclaiming him as the greatest who offers up his pride for society and his appetites for the sake of the law.

Though they were the depositaries of the tradition of Seth, the Jews did not preserve it in all its purity, and were infected by the unjust ambitions of the posterity of Cain. Believing that they were a chosen people, they deemed that God had allotted them truth as a patrimony rather than as a security held in trust for humanity at large.10 Side by side with the sublime traditions of the Sepher Yetzirah we meet with very curious revelations among the Talmudists. For example, they do not shrink from ascribing the idolatry of the Gentiles to the patriarch Abraham himself; they say that to the Israelites he bequeathed his inheritance, namely the knowledge of the true Divine Names; in a word, the Kabalah was the lawful and hereditary property of Isaac; but the patriarch gave, as they tell us, certain presents to the children of his concubines; and by such presents they understand veiled dogmas and cryptic names, which became materialised speedily, and were transformed into idols.11 False religions and their absurd mysteries, oriental superstitions, with all their horrible sacrifices—what a gift from a father to his disowned family! Was it not sufficient to drive Hagar with her son into the desert? To their one loaf and their pitcher of water must he add the burden of falsehood, as a torment and poison in their exile?

The glory of Christianity is that it called all men to truth, without distinction of races and castes, though not without distinction in respect of intelligence and of virtue. “Cast not your pearls before swine,” said the Divine Founder of Christianity, “lest treading them under foot, they turn and rend you.” The Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John, which comprises all the Kabalistic secrets concerning the doctrine of Christ Jesus, is a book no less obscure than the Zohar. It is written hieroglyphically in the language of numbers and images, and the Apostle appeals frequently to the knowledge of initiates. “Let him understand who has knowledge—let him who understands compute”—he says frequently, after reciting an allegory or giving a mystic number. St. John, the beloved disciple and depositary of all the secrets of the Saviour, did not therefore write to be understood by the multitude.

The Sepher Yetzirah, the Zohar and the Apocalypse are the masterpieces of occultism; they contain more meanings than words; their method of expression is figurative, like poetry, and exact, like numerical formulae. The Apocalypse summarises, completes and surpasses all the science of Abraham and Solomon, as we will prove by explaining the Keys of the transcendent Kabalah.

It is not less astonishing to observe at the beginning of the Zohar12 the profundity of its notions and the sublime simplicity of its images. It is said as follows: “The science of equilibrium is the key of occult science. Unbalanced forces perish in the void. So passed the kings of the elder world, the princes of the giants. They have fallen like trees without roots, and their place is found no more. Through the conflict of unbalanced forces the devastated earth was void and formless, until the Spirit of God made for itself a place in heaven and reduced the mass of waters. All the aspirations of Nature were directed then towards unity of form, towards the living synthesis of equilibrated forces; the face of God, crowned with light, rose over the vast sea and was reflected in the waters thereof. His two eyes were manifested, radiating with splendour, darting two beams of light which crossed with those of the reflection. The brow of God and His eyes formed a triangle in heaven, and its reflection formed a second triangle in the waters. So was revealed the number six, being that of universal creation.”

The text, which would be unintelligible in a literal version, is translated here by way of interpretation. The author makes it plain that the human form which he ascribes to Deity is only an image of his meaning and that God is beyond expression by human thought or representation by any figure. Pascal said that God is a circle, of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. But how is one to imagine a circle apart from its circumference? The Zohar adopts the antithesis of this paradoxical image and in respect of the circle of Pascal would say rather that the circumference is everywhere, while that which is nowhere is the centre. It is, however, to a balance and not to a circle that it compares the universal equilibrium of things.13 It affirms that equilibrium is everywhere and so also is that central point where the balance hangs in suspension. We find that the Zohar is thus more forcible and more profound than Pascal.

Its author continues as follows his sublime dream. That synthesis of the word, formulated by the human figure, ascended slowly and emerged from the water, like the sun in its rising. When the eyes appeared, light was made; when the mouth was manifested, there was the creation of spirits and the word passed into expression. The entire head was revealed, and this completed the first day of creation. The shoulders, the arms, the breast arose, and thereupon work began. With one hand the Divine Image put back the sea, while with the other it raised up continents and mountains. The Image grew and grew; the generative organs appeared, and all beings began to increase and multiply. The form stood at length erect, having one foot upon the earth and one upon the waters. Beholding itself at full length in the ocean of creation, it breathed on its own reflection and called its likeness into life. It said : Let us make man—and thus man was made. There is nothing so beautiful in the masterpiece of any poet as this vision of creation accomplished by the prototype of humanity. Hereby is man but the shadow of a shadow, and yet he is the image of divine power. He also can stretch forth his hands from East to West; to him is the earth given as a dominion. Such is Adam Kadmon, the primordial Adam of the Kabalists. Such is the sense in which he is depicted as a giant; and this is why Sweden borg, haunted in his dreams by reminiscences of the Kabalah, says that entire creation is only a titanic man and that we are made in the image of the universe.

The Great Kabalistic Symbol of the Zohar

The Zohar is a genesis of light; the Sepher Yetzirah is a ladder of truth. Therein are expounded the two-and-thirty absolute symbols of speech—being numbers and letters. Each letter produces a number, an idea and a form, so that mathematics are applicable to forms and ideas, even as to numbers, in virtue of an exact proportion and a perfect correspondence. By the science of the Sepher Yetzirah the human mind is rooted in truth and in reason; it accounts for all progress possible to intelligence by means of the evolution of numbers. Thus does the Zohar represent absolute truth, while the Sepher Yetzirah furnishes the method of its acquisition, its discernment and application.

1 The account which follows may be compared with that which is found, s.v. Apocryphes in Éliphas Lévi's Dictionnaire de Littérature Chrétienne, mentioned in my preface to the present translation. It describes the legend concerning the fall of certain angels as une assez singulière histoire. He refers also to the various extant versions of the book, and to those in particular which differ from the “primitive” codex, being (a) that which he uses, and (b) “that which St. Jude cites in his catholic epistle as an authentic” work, actually composed by the prophet Enoch, to whom it is attributed

2 The Zohar says that the Ark of Noah was a symbol of the Ark of the Covenant, that his entrance therein saved the world, and that this mystery is in analogy with the Supreme Mystery. At this point there is a sex-implicit throughout the Kabalistic commentary, and the nature of the “unbridled appetite” which brought about the deluge is identified with that sin which caused the destruction of Judah's second son, as told in Genesis c. xxxviii. See Zohar, Part I, section Toldoth Noah. It is intimated also that the souls of those who perished in the deluge were to be blotted out, like the remembrance of Amalek. Part I, fol. 25a. They will not even be included in the resurrection which shall go before the Last Judgment. Fol. 68b. At the same time the chastisement would have been suspended had Noah prayed to God like Moses, but the tradition supposes him to have asked only concerning himself. Zohar, Part III, fol. 14b. The Holy Land was not covered by the waters of the deluge Part II, fol. 197a.

3 It was the Rod of Aaron, not that of Moses, which, according to Heb. ix, 4, was placed in the Ark of the Covenant, together with the Tables of the Law and the Pot of Manna. It is said. however. most Clearly in I Kings viii, 9. that “there was nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone. which Moses put there at Horeb”.

4 Whatever the date to which the Book of the Penitence of Adam may be referable. it represents one form of a legend which was spread widely in the middle ages. The Gospel of Nicodemus seems to have instituted the first analogy between the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of the Cross. “All ye who have died through the wood which this man”—Adam—“hath touched: all of you I will make alive again by the wood of the cross.” The legend of the triple branch, under a strange transformation, reappears in that chronicle of the Holy Graal which has been ascribed to the author. ship of Walter Map. 1'here is no end to the stories which represent Christ dying upon a tree which was a cutting from the Tree of Knowledge. This is how the Tree of Knowledge becomes the Tree of Life in Christian legend.

5 The Clavis Absconditorum à Constitutione Mundi, which is the chief work of Postel, outside his translation of the Sepher Yetrirah, affirms that Enoch was born at the time when Christ the Mediator would have been manifested in the flesh as the incarnation of perfect Virtue, supposing that man had remained in his first estate. There is no reference to a Genesis of Enoch.

6 Hic intrat vivus foveam—he, being still alive, enters the tomb, says Adam of St. Victor in his third Sequence for Dec. 27.

7 There were two canonised bishops bearing the name of Methodius at widely different periods, and as both were writers it is an open question to which of them the reference is intended. It is probably to Methodius of Olympus, who was martyred about 311. Methodius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, died in 846. There is not the least reason to suppose that the Apocalypse under the name of Bermechobus was the work of either.

8 Compare Lopukhin's Quelques Traits de l'Église Intérieure, where the sanctuary which was inaugurated by Adam is connected more especially with Abel, and was presumably maintained afterwards by Seth. In opposition thereto was the Church of Cain, which was anti-Christian from its beginning. See my introduction to Mr. Nicholson's translation, pp. 6, 7, and the text, p. 59—Some Characteristics of the Interior Church, 1912.

9 According to the Zohar, the intoxication of Noah contains a mystery of wisdom. He was really sounding the depths of that sin which was the downfall of the first man, and his object was to find a remedy. In this he failed, and “was drunken”, seeking to lay bare the divine essence, without the intellectual power to explore it. Section Toldoth Noah.

10 The Sepher Ha Zohar affirms in several places that the Law was offered to the Gentiles, and was by them refused

11 The authority for this statement is wanting. The Zohar dwells on Genesis xxi, 9 : “And Sarah saw the son of Hagar,” etc., implying that she did not acknowledge him as the son of Abraham, but of the Egyptian only. The Patriarch, however, regarded him as his own son. Sarah's desire to expel them is justified on the ground that she had seen Ishmael worshipping the stars of heaven. See Zohar, Part I, fol. 118. There is no allusion to the alleged gifts of the father, the scripture making it evident abundantly that the bread and bottle of water are for once to be understood literally.

12 Even at the period of Éliphas Lévi it did not require a rabbinical scholar or a knowledge of Aramaic to prevent any fairly informed person from suggesting that the Book of Concealed Mystery, being the text here referred to, is the beginning of the Zohar It follows the Commentary on Exodus, about midway in the whole collection, which covers the entire Pentateuch. It so happens that the little tract in question is the first of three sections rendered into Latin by Rosenroth, and this must have deceived Lévi, as a consequence of utterly careless reading. There was plenty of opportunity for correction in the kabbala Denudata, and so also in La Kabbale—an interesting but verv imperfect study by AdolpheFranck, which appeared in 1843.

13 There is no real analogy between the image attributed to Pascal and that of the Zoharic Book of Concealment. I have not verified the reference to Pascal, as the opportunity is not given by Lévi, but I have explained elsewhere that the idea was probably drawn from S. Bonaventura, who speaks of that sphœra intelligibilis, cujus centrum est ubique et circumferentia nusquam. See Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum. I have inferred that S. Bonaventura himself derived from a Hermetic book. As regards the symbolism of the Balance, the Book of Concealed Mystery says (a) that, in creating the world, God weighed in the Balance what had not been weighed previously, (b) that the Balance was suspended in a region where before there was no Balance, (c) that it served for bodies as well as souls, for beings then in existence and for those who would exist subsequently. These are the only references to this subject found in the tract.