Éliphas Lévi

“ But is not the infinite itself an absurdity for our finite appreciation? We feel all the same that it is; the infinite invades us, overflows us, renders us dizzy at its abysses and crushes us by its awful height.
Scientifically probable hypotheses are one and all the last half-lights or shadows of science; faith begins where reason falls exhausted. Beyond human reason there is that Reason which is Divine—for my weakness a supreme absurdity, but an infinite absurdity which confounds me, and in which I believe. ”

“ Thereafter, when things are no longer visible, when the Vault of Heaven and the expanse of the universe have dissolved, when the stars have ceased to shine and the lamp of the moon is veiled, when the earth trembles and the lightning plays around it, invoke not the visible phantom of Nature’s soul, for thou must in no wise behold it until thy body has been purified by the holy ordeals. Enervators of souls, which they distract from sacred occupations, the dog-faced demons issue from the confines of matter and expose to mortal eyes the semblances of illusory bodies. ”

“ Hear you not the ceaseless sobbing of humanity which writhes and weeps in the crushing folds of the monster? Have you never heard the atrocious laugh of the evil-doer who is persecuting the just man? Have you never experienced in yourselves the opening of those infernal deeps which the genius of perversity furrows in every soul? Moral evil exists—such is the unhappy truth; it reigns in certain spirits; it incarnates in certain men; it is therefore personified, and thus demons exist; but the most wicked of these demons is Satan. ”

“ The magical septenary of Chaldea passes into music on the seven strings of the Orphic lyre. It is harmony which transforms the woods and wildernesses of Greece. To the melody of the songs of Orpheus, the rocks are smoothed, the oaks sway in measures and the wild beasts become subject to man. By such magic did Amphion raise up the walls of Thebes—that wisdom-city of Cadmus, the city of initiation, itself a pantacle like the seven wonders of the world. As Orpheus gave life to numbers, so Cadmus bound thought to the sigils of letters. ”

“ Distracted also are those who say that catholicism is only a dead trunk and that we must put the axe thereto. They do not see that beneath its dry bark the living tree is renewed unceasingly. Truth has no past and no future; it is eternal; it is not that which ends; it is our dream only. Hammer and hatchet, which destroy in the sight of man, are in God’s hand as the knife of a pruner, and the dead branches—being superstitions and heresies in religion, science and politics—can alone be lopped from the tree of everlasting convictions and beliefs. ”

“ We liken mania to intoxication, and seeing that the latter is nearly always voluntary, we applaud the wisdom of judges who punish the misdemeanours and crimes committed in the state of drunkenness, not regarding the voluntary loss of reason as an excuse. There may come even a day when the self-induced condition will be counted as an aggravating circumstance and when the intelligent being who by his own act sets himself outside reason will find that he is also outside the pale of law. Is not law the reason of humanity? Woe to him who gets drunk, whether with wine, pride, hatred, or even love. ”

“ He was an ill-starred lover of Nature, and Nature in her wrath armed him with eloquence as with a scourge. He dared to plead the cause of ignorance in the face of science, of savagery in the face of civilisation, of all low-life deeps in the face of all social heights. Instinctively the populace pelted this maniac, yet he was welcomed by the great and lionised by women. His success was so signal that, by revulsion, his hatred of humanity increased, and he ended in suicide as the final issue of his rage and disgust. ”

“ Thanks to the pagan genius of Virgil, Dante emerges from that gulf above the door of which he had read the sentence of despair; he escapes by standing on his head, which means by reversing dogma. So does he ascend to the light, using the demon himself, like a monstrous ladder; by the force of terror he emerges from terror, from the horrible by the power of horror. He seems to testify that hell is without egress for those only who cannot go back on themselves; he takes the devil against the grain, if I may use so familiar an expression, and attains emancipation by audacity. ”

“ The branch of acacia over the tomb of Hiram is like the cross on our altars; it is a sign of knowledge which outlives knowledge itself; it is the green sprig which presages another spring. When men have disturbed in this manner the order of Nature, Providence intervenes to restore it, as Solomon to avenge the death of the Master-Builder. He who has struck with the rule shall perish by the poignard. He who has attacked with the lever or square shall make expiation under the axe of the law: it is the eternal judgment on regicides. ”

“ Down with the tyrant of falsehood, the black god of Manicheans, the Ahriman of old idolaters. Live God and His Word incarnate, who saw Satan fall from heaven. And live Mary, the Divine Mother, who crushed the head of the infernal serpent.
So cry with one voice the traditions of saints, and so cry faithful hearts. The attribution of any greatness whatsoever to a fallen spirit is a slander on Divinity; the ascription of any royalty whatsoever to the rebel spirit is to encourage revolt and be guilty, at least in thought, of that crime which the horror of the middle ages termed sorcery. ”

“ The great work of redemption in virtue of solidarity moves on to its fulfilment. How should the victim ever be consoled for her sufferings, did she not convert her executioner? Is not forgiveness the revenge of the children of heaven? The love which has first reached the empyrean draws science after it by sympathy; Christianity uprises in its admirable synthesis. The new Eve has washed the mark from the forehead of Cain with the blood of Abel, and she weeps with joy over her two children, who hold her in their joint embrace. ”

“ It is initiation into sin by rebellious science, into suffering by sin, into expiation and harmonious science by suffering. Human genius, represented by Faust, employs as its lackey the spirit of evil, who aspires to become master; it exhausts quickly all the delight that is attributed by imagination to unlawful love; it goes through orgies of folly; then, drawn by the charm of sovereign beauty, it rises from the abyss of disillusion to the heights of abstraction and imperishable beauty. ”

“ The secret of the occult sciences is that of Nature herself; it is the secret of the generation of angels and worlds; it is that of God’s own omnipotence. “Ye shall be as the Elohim, knowing good and evil.” So testified the serpent of Genesis, and so did the Tree of Knowledge become the Tree of Death. For six thousand years the martyrs of science have toiled and perished at the foot of this Tree, so that it may become once more the Tree of Life.
That Absolute which is sought by the foolish and found only by the wise is the truth, the reality and the reason of universal equilibrium. ”

“ All this notwithstanding, its reign is over, though it will not perish overwhelmed by a bolt from heaven; science has conquered the lightning and converted it into torches; the monster will dissolve before the brightness of science and truth; the genius of ignorance and darkness can only be blasted by the light. ”

“ To the authorised men of science be that which belongs to science, but the things which connect with religion are set apart to the Church alone and to that one hierarchic Church, the preserver of unity, which has been catholic, apostolic and Roman from the days of Christ Jesus to our own. To scholars our discoveries, to bishops our aspirations and beliefs. Woe to the child who believes himself wiser than his parents, to the man who acknowledges no masters, to that dreamer who thinks and prays by himself. Life is an universal communion and in such communion do we find immortality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The cause of all religious errors and confusions is that, in ignorance of this great law, it has been sought to make religion a philosophy and philosophy in its turn a religion, subjecting matters of faith to the processes of science, which is no less ridiculous than the subjection of science to the blind obedience of faith. It is no more the province of a theologian to affirm a mathematical absurdity or reject the demonstration of a theorem than it is the province of a man of learning, in the name of science, to oppose or maintain the mysteries of dogma. ”

“ Ordeal is the great word of life, and life itself is a serpent which brings forth and devours unceasingly. We must escape from its folds; we must set our foot upon its head. Hermes duplicated the serpent, setting it against itself, and in an eternal equilibrium, he converted it into the talisman of his power, into the glory of his caduceus.
The great ordeals of Memphis and Eleusis were designed to form kings and priests by entrusting science to strong and valiant men. ”

“ Orpheus is widowed and remains as such in purity; the marriage with Eurydice had not attained consummation, and as the widower of one who was a virgin he rested himself in virginity. The poet is not two-hearted and children of the race of gods love once and once alone. Paternal inspirations, yearnings for an ideal which shall be found beyond the tomb, widowhood made holy in its consecration to the sacred muse. What a revelation in advance of inspirations yet to come. Orpheus, bearing in his heart a wound that nothing but death shall heal, becomes a doctor of souls and bodies ”

“ They love their old castles, their old legends of the banks of the Rhine; they read with the uttermost patience the darksome treatises of their philosophy; they behold in the fogs of their sky and in the smoke of their pipes a thousand things inexpressible, by which they are initiated into the marvels of the other world. Long before there was any question of mediums and their evocations in America and France, Prussia had its illuminati and seers, who had habitual communications with the dead. ”

“ Over this light man is called, on the one hand, to assume a sovereign empire, so earning his immortality, but, on the other, he is menaced by the intoxication, absorption and eternal destruction thereof. In its devouring, avenging and fatal aspect, the Astral Light may be called the fire of hell, the serpent of legend, while the tormented sin which abounds therein, the tears and the gnashing of teeth on the part of the abortions that it consumes, the phantom of life which escapes them and seems to insult their misery—all this may be termed the devil or Satan. ”

“ Outlines that are lovely are true outlines, and the magnificence of Nature is an algebra of graces and splendours. Whatsoever is true is beautiful; all that is beautiful should be true. Heaven and hell are the equilibrium of moral life; good and evil are the equilibrium of liberty. ”

“ Virtue is ever rewarded, vice is ever punished; if the wealth of the wicked incline us at times to think that they enjoy impunity, that instrument of good and evil seeming to be given them by chance, there is woe notwithstanding to the unjust; they may possess the key of gold, but for them it opens only the gate of the tomb and hell.
All true initiates have recognised the immense value of toil and suffering. A German poet tells us that sorrow is the dog of that unknown shepherd which leads the flock of humanity. ”

“ Genius is not needed to see the sun, and, moreover, it has never demonstrated anything but its rare greatness and its lights inaccessible to the crowd. The grand truth demands only to be found, when the simplest will be able to comprehend it and to prove it also at need. At the same time that truth will never become vulgar, because it is hierarchic and because anarchy alone humours the bias of the crowd. The masses are not in need of absolute truths; were it otherwise, progress would be arrested and life would cease in humanity ”

“ An Absolute exists therefore in the realms of understanding and faith. The lights of human intelligence have not been left by the Supreme Reason to waver at hazard. There is an incontestable truth; there is an infallible method of knowing that truth; while those who attain this knowledge, and adopt it as a rule of life, can endow their will with a sovereign power which can make them masters of all inferior things, all wandering spirits, or, in other words, arbiters and kings of the world.
If such be the case, how comes it that so exalted a science is still unrecognised? ”