" THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES
(LA CLEF DES GRANDS MYSTERES) BY ELIPHAS LEVI THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES ACCORDING TO ENOCH, ABRAHAM, HERMES TRISMEGISTES AND SOLOMON BY ELIPHAS LEVI TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALEISTER CROWLEY {Illustration on this page described (located at the left): This is an elaborate symbol in the form of a barrel key. The shank is vertical and to the bottom. Three flat bits extend to the right, with three projections at the upper edge of each. There is a large circular ring at top. Down the shank, from top: "R" inverted, Sun, Moon, Mercury, circle (probably for Mars), Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. Above the top bit: "DEUS", on that bit "rouge". Above the middle bit: "HOMO", on that bit "blanc". Above the bottom bit: "TORA", on that bit "bleu". The ring has a "T" above the top, "A" to right and "O" to left (with the "R" on the shank, "TORA"). Outside at the upper left, a cup, upper right a Pantacle, lower right a dagger and lower left a wand. On the ring itself, the numbers from 1 to 20 arch over the top half, left to right and the Alphabet in capital letters on the lower half from left to right. Inside, the ring is quartered by horizontal and vertical diameters. The left upper quadrant has the sign of Aquarius, upper right the eagle head of Scorpio, lower right the sign of Leo and lower left the bull's head of Taurus. In the center there is a hexagram made up of two triangles, one apex to bottom and the other to top. The outer three triangular points of the inverted triangle are shaded. In the heptagon formed in the center is HB:YodHeh-Vau-Heh} "Religion says: --- 'Believe and you will understand.' Science comes to say to you: --- 'Understand and you will believe.' "At that moment the whole of science will change front; the spirit, so long dethroned and forgotten, will take its ancient place; it will be demonstrated that the old traditions are all true, that the whole of paganism is only a system of corrupted and misplaced truths, that it is sufficient to cleanse them, so to say, and to put them back again in their place, to see them shine with all their rays. In a word, all ideas will change, and since on all sides a multitude of the elect cry in concert, 'Come, Lord, come!' why should you blame the men who throw themselves forward into that majestic future, and pride themselves on having foreseen it?" (J. De Maistre, "Soirees de St. Petersbourg.")
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE IN the biographical and critical essay which Mr. Waite prefixes to his "Mysteries of Magic" he says: "A word must be added of the method of this digest, which claims to be something more than translation and has been infinitely more laborious. I believe it to be in all respects faithful, and where it has been necessary or possible for it to be literal, there also it is invariably literal." We agree that it is either more or less than translation, and the following examples selected at hazard in the course of half-an-hour will enable the reader to judge whether Mr. Waite is acquainted with either French or English: "Gentilhomme" --- "Gentleman." "The nameless vice which was reproached "against" the Templars." "Certaines circonstances ridicules et un proces en escroquerie" --- "Certain ridiculous processes and a swindling lawsuit." "Se mele de dogmatiser" --- "Meddles with dogmatism." "La vie pour lui suffisait a l'expiation des plus grands crimes, puis qu'elle etait la consequence d'un arret de mort" --- "According to him life was sufficient for the greatest crimes, since "these" were the result of a death sentence." "Vos meilleurs amis ont du concevoir des inquietudes" --- "Your best friends have been reasonably anxious." (The mistranslation here turns the speech into an insult.) {v} "Sacro-sainte" --- "Sacred and saintly." "Auriculaire" --- "Index." "N'avez vous pas obtenu tout ce que vous demandiez, et plus que vous ne demandiez, car vous ne m'aviez pas parle d'argent?" --- "Have you not had all and more than you wanted, and there has been no question of remuneration?" (This mistranslation makes nonsense of the whole passage.) "Eliphas n'etait pas a la question" --- "Eliphas was not under cross- examination." "Mauvais plaisant" --- "Vicious jester." "Si vous n'aviez pas ... vous deviendriez" --- "If you have not ... you may become." (This mistranslation turns a compliment into an insult.) "An awful and ineffaceable tableaux." "Peripeties" --- "Circumstances." "Il avait fait partie du clerge de Saint Germain l'Auxerrois" --- "He was of the Society of St. Germain l'Auxerrois." "Bruit de tempete" --- "Stormy sound." We are obliged to mention this matter, as Mr. Waite (by persistent self- assertion) has obtained the reputation of being trustworthy as an editor. On the contrary, he not only mutilates and distorts his authors, but, as demonstrated above, he is totally incapable of understanding their simplest phrases and even their commonest words. {vi}
INTRODUCTION THIS volume represents the high-water mark of the thought of Eliphas Levi. It may be regarded as written by him as his Thesis for the Grade of Exempt Adept, just as his "Ritual and Dogma" was his Thesis for the grade of a Major Adept. He is, in fact, no longer talking of things as if their sense was fixed and universal. He is beginning to see something of the contradiction inherent in the nature of things, or at any rate, he constantly illustrates the fact that the planes are to be kept separate for practical purposes, although in the final analysis they turn out to be one. This, and the extraordinarily subtle and delicate irony of which Eliphas Levi is one of the greatest masters that has ever lived, have baffled the pedantry and stupidity of such commentators as Waite. English has hardly a word to express the mental condition of such unfortunates. "Dummheit," in its strongest German sense, is about the nearest thing to it. It is as if a geographer should criticize "Gulliver's Travels" from his own particular standpoint. When Levi says that all that he asserts as an initiate is subordinate to his humble submissiveness as a Christian, and then not only remarks that the Bible and the Qur'an are different translations of the same book, but treats the Incarnation as an allegory, it is evident that a good deal of submission will be required. When he agrees with St. Augustine that a thing is not just because God wills it, but God wills it because it is just, he sees perfectly well that he is reducing God to a poetic image reflected from his own moral {vii} ideal of justice, and no amount of alleged orthodoxy can weigh against that statement. His very defence of the Catholic Hierarchy is a masterpiece of that peculiar form of conscious sophistry which justifies itself by reducing its conclusion to zero. One must begin with "one," and that "one" has no particular qualities. Therefore, so long as you have an authority properly centralized it does not really matter what that authority is. In the Pope we have such an authority ready made, and it is the gravest tactical blunder to endeavour to set up an authority opposed to him. Success in doing so means war, and failure anarchy. This, however, did not prevent Levi from ceremonially casting a papal crown to the ground and crying "Death to tyranny and superstition!" in the bosom of a certain secret Areopagus of which he was the most famous member. When a man becomes a magician he looks about him for a magical weapon; and, being probably endowed with that human frailty called laziness, he hopes to find a weapon ready made. Thus we find the Christian Magus who imposed his power upon the world taking the existing worships and making a single system combining all their merits. There is no single feature in Christianity which has not been taken bodily from the worship of Isis, or of Mithras, or of Bacchus, or of Adonis, or of Osiris. In modern times again we find Frater Iehi Aour trying to handle Buddhism. Others again have attempted to use Freemasonry. There have been even exceptionally foolish magicians who have tried to use a sword long since rusted. Wagner illustrates this point very clearly in "Siegfried." The Great Sword Nothung has been broken, and it is the {viii} only weapon that can destroy the gods. The dwarf Mime tries uselessly to mend it. When Siegfried comes he makes no such error. He melts its fragments and forges a new sword. In spite of the intense labour which this costs, it is the best plan to adopt. Levi completely failed to capture Catholicism; and his hope of using Imperialism, his endeavour to persuade the Emperor that he was the chosen instrument of the Almighty, a belief which would have enabled him to play Maximus to little Napoleon's Julian, was shattered once for all at Sedan. It is necessary for the reader to gain this clear conception of Levi's inmost mind, if he is to reconcile the "contradictions" which leave Waite petulant and bewildered. It is the sad privilege of the higher order of mind to be able to see both sides of every question, and to appreciate the fact that both are equally tenable. Such contradictions can, of course, only be reconciled on a higher plane, and this method of harmonizing contradictions is, therefore, the best key to the higher planes. It seems unnecessary to add anything to these few remarks. This is the only difficulty in the whole book, though in one or two passages Levi's extraordinarily keen sense of humour leads him to indulge in a little harmless bombast. We may instance his remarks on the "Grimoire" of Honorius. We have said that this is the masterpiece of Levi. He reaches an exaltation of both thought and language which is equal to that of any other writer known to us. Once it is understood that it is purely a thesis for the Grade of Exempt Adept, the reader should have no further difficulty. --- A. C.
PREFACE On the brink of mystery, the spirit of man is seized with giddiness. Mystery is the abyss which ceaselessly attracts our unquiet curiosity by the terror of its depth. The greatest mystery of the infinite is the existence of Him for whom alone all is without mystery. Comprehending the infinite which is essentially incomprehensible, He is Himself that infinite and eternally unfathomable mystery; that is to say, that He is, in all seeming, that supreme absurdity in which Tertullian believed. Necessarily absurd, since reason must renounce for ever the project of attaining to Him; necessarily credible, since science and reason, far from demonstrating that He does not exist, are dragged by the chariot of fatality to believe that He does exist, and to adore Him themselves with closed eyes. Why? --- Because this Absurd is the infinite source of reason. The light springs eternally from the eternal shadows. Science, that Babel Tower of the spirit, may twist and coil its spirals ever ascending as it will; it may make the earth tremble, it will never touch the sky. God is He whom we shall eternally learn to know better, and, consequently, He whom we shall never know entirely. The realm of mystery is, then, a field open to the conquests of the intelligence. March there as boldly as you will, never will you diminish its extent; you will only alter {xi} its horizons. To know all is an impossible dream; but woe unto him who dares not to learn all, and who does not know that, in order to know anything, one must learn eternally! They say that in order to learn anything well, one must forget it several times. The world has followed this method. Everything which is to-day debateable had been solved by the ancients. Before our annals began, their solutions, written in hieroglyphs, had already no longer any meaning for us. A man has rediscovered their key; he has opened the cemeteries of ancient science, and he gives to his century a whole world of forgotten theorems, of syntheses as simple and sublime as nature, radiating always from unity, and multiplying themselves like numbers with proportions so exact, that the known demonstrates and reveals the unknown. To understand this science, is to see God. The author of this book, as he finishes his work, will think that he has demonstrated it. Then, when you have seen God, the hierophant will say to you: --- "Turn round!" and, in the shadow which you throw in the presence of this sun of intelligences, there will appear to you the devil, that black phantom which you see when your gaze is not fixed upon God, and when you think that your shadow fills the sky, --- for the vapours of the earth, the higher they go, seem to magnify it more and more. To harmonize in the category of religion science with revelation and reason with faith, to demonstrate in philosophy the absolute principles which reconcile all the antinomies, and finally to reveal the universal equilibrium of natural forces, is the triple object of this work, which will consequently be divided into three parts. {xii} We shall exhibit true religion with such characters, that no one, believer or unbeliever, can fail to recognize it; that will be the absolute in religion. We shall establish in philosophy the immutable characters of that Truth, which is in science, "reality;" in judgment, "reason;" and in ethics, "justice." Finally, we shall acquaint you with the laws of Nature, whose equilibrium is stability, and we shall show how vain are the phantasies of our imagination before the fertile realities of movement and of life. We shall also invite the great poets of the future to create once more the divine comedy, no longer according to the dreams of man, but according to the mathematics of God. Mysteries of other worlds, hidden forces, strange revelations, mysterious illnesses, exceptional faculties, spirits, apparitions, magical paradoxes, hermetic arcana, we shall say all, and we shall explain all. Who has given us this power? We do not fear to reveal it to our readers. There exists an occult and sacred alphabet which the Hebrews attribute to Enoch, the Egyptians to Thoth or to Hermes Trismegistus, the Greeks to Cadmus and to Palamedes. This alphabet was known to the followers of Pythagoras, and is composed of absolute ideas attached to signs and numbers; by its combinations, it realizes the mathematics of thought. Solomon represented this alphabet by seventy-two names, written upon thirty-six talismans. Eastern initiates still call these the "little keys" or clavicles of Solomon. These keys are described, and their use explained, in a book the
source of whose traditional dogma is the patriarch Abraham. This book is called the Sepher Yetzirah; with the aid of the Sepher Yetzirah one can penetrate the {xiii} hidden sense of the Zohar, the great dogmatic treatise of the Qabalah of the Hebrews. The Clavicles of Solomon, forgotten in the course of time, and supposed lost, have been rediscovered by ourselves; without trouble we have opened all the doors of those old sanctuaries where absolute truth seemed to sleep, --- always young, and always beautiful, like that princess of the childish legend, who, during a century of slumber, awaits the bridegroom whose mission it is to awaken her. After our book, there will still be mysteries, but higher and farther in the infinite depths. This publication is a light or a folly, a mystification or a monument. Read, reflect, and judge. {xiv}
THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES (LA CLEF DES GRANDS MYSTERES) BY ELIPHAS LEVI {xv}
PART I RELIGIOUS MYSTERIES PROBLEMS FOR SOLUTION I. --- To demonstrate in a certain and absolute manner the existence of God, and to give an idea of Him which will satisfy all minds. II. --- To establish the existence of a true religion in such a way as to render it incontestable. III. --- To indicate the bearing and the "raison d'etre" of all the mysteries of the one true and universal religion. IV. --- To turn the objections of philosophy into arguments favourable to true religion. V. --- To draw the boundary between religion and superstition, and to give the reason of miracles and prodigies. PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS WHEN Count Joseph de Maistre, that grand and passionate lover of Logic, said despairingly, "The world is without religion," he resembled those people who say rashly "There is no God." The world, in truth, is without the religion of Count Joseph de Maistre, as it is probable that such a God as the majority of atheists conceive does not exist. Religion is an idea based upon one constant and universal {1} fact; man is a religious animal. The word "religion" has then a necessary and absolute sense. Nature herself sanctifies the idea which this word represents, and exalts it to the height of a principle. The need of believing is closely linked with the need of loving; for that reason our souls need communion in the same hopes and in the same love. Isolated beliefs are only doubts: it is the bond of mutual confidence which, by creating faith, composes religion. Faith does not invent itself, does not impose itself, does not establish itself by any political agreement; like life, it manifests itself with a sort of fatality. The same power which directs the phenomena of nature, extends and limits the supernatural domain of faith, despite all human foresight. One does not imagine revelations; one undergoes then, and one believes in them. In vain does the spirit protest against the obscurities of dogma; it is subjugated by the attraction of these very obscurities, and often the least docile of reasoners would blush to accept the title of "irreligious man." Religion holds a greater place among the realities of life than those who do without religion --- or pretend to do without it --- affect to believe. All ideas that raise man above the animal --- moral love, devotion, honour --- are sentiments essentially religious. The cult of the fatherland and of the family, fidelity to an oath and to memory, are things which humanity will never abjure without degrading itself utterly, and which could never exist without the belief in something greater than mortal life, with all its vicissitudes, its ignorance and its misery. If annihilation were the result of all our aspirations to {2} those sublime things which we feel to be eternal, our only duties would be the enjoyment of the present, forgetfulness of the past, and carelessness about the future, and it would be rigorously true to say, as a celebrated sophist once said, that the man who thinks is a degraded animal. Moreover, of all human passions, religious passion is the most powerful and the most lively. It generates itself, whether by affirmation or negation, with an equal fanaticism, some obstinately affirming the god that they have made in their own image, the others denying God with rashness, as if they had been able to understand and to lay waste by a single thought all that world of infinity which pertains to His great name.
Philosophers have not sufficiently considered the physiological fact of religion in humanity, for in truth religion exists apart from all dogmatic discussion. It is a faculty of the human soul just as much as intelligence and love. While man exists, so will religion. Considered in this light, it is nothing but the need of an infinite idealism, a need which justifies every aspiration for progress, which inspires every devotion, which alone prevents virtue and honour from being mere words, serving to exploit the vanity of the weak and the foolish to the profit of the strong and the clever. It is to this innate need of belief that one might justly give the name of natural religion; and all which tends to clip the wings of these beliefs is, on the religious plane, in opposition to nature. The essence of the object of religion is mystery, since faith begins with the unknown, abandoning the rest to the investigations of science. Doubt is, moreover, the mortal enemy of faith; faith feels that the intervention of {3} the divine being is necessary to fill the abyss which separates the finite from the infinite, and it affirms this intervention with all the warmth of its heart, with al..."
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