CHAPTER VII

THE HOLY KABALAH

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 priesthood, 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.[63] 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 morality 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 contained therein.[64] 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 יהוה, 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.[65] (2) אדני, ADNI, meaning Lord and pronounced by us ADONAI.[66] (3) אהיה AHIH, which signifies Being and is pronounced by us EIEIE.[67] (4) אגלא, AGLA, pronounced as it is written and comprising hieroglyphically all mysteries of the Kabalah.[68]

[Illustration: PANTACLE OF KABALISTIC LETTERS]

The letter _Aleph_, א, 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_, ג, is third in the alphabet; it expresses the triad numerically, and hieroglyphically it signifies childbirth, fruitfulness. Lamed, ל, 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 frequently 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.[69]

It has been said in the _Doctrine of Transcendental Magic_ that the name Jehovah resolves into seventy-two explicatory names, called _Shemahamphorash_.[70] 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.[71]

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 again 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 extra-atural 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 opposite. 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.[72] 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.[73] 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 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.[74] 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.[75] 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.[76] 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.[77]

Ecstasy may so exalt the powers of 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 aerial 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 may 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.[78]

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 _larvæ_ 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 ill-starred Abbé de Villars, who jested with these terrible revelations, paid for his imprudence with his life.[79] 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 everywhere 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.[80]

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.[81] 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.[82] The hypothetical origin of _larvæ_, according to the masters, is here indicated with sufficient clearness and further explanation may be spared.

Such _larvæ_ 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 _larvæ_ 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 _larvæ_, 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.

## BOOK II

_FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMAS_

ב—BETH

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