Transcendental Magic I: The Doctrine (Éliphas Lévi) · 8 of 96 · tr. A.E. Waite
Introduction-h
Thereafter he meets with the sphinx, that symbol of symbols, the eternal enigma of the vulgar, the granite pedestal of the sciences of the sages, the voracious and silent monster whose unchanging form expresses the one dogma of the Great Universal Mystery.
How is the tetrad changed into the duad and explained by the triad?
In more common but more emblematic terms, what is that animal which in the morning has four feet, two at noon, and three in the evening?
Philosophically speaking, how does the doctrine of elementary forces produce the dualism of Zoroaster, while it is summarized by the triad of Pythagoras and Plato?
What is the ultimate reason of allegories and numbers, the final message of all symbolisms?
Oedipus replies with a simple and terrible word which destroys the sphinx and makes the diviner King of Thebes: the answer to the enigma is Man!
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Unfortunate!
He has seen too much, and yet through a clouded glass.
A little while and he will expiate his ominous and imperfect clairvoyance by a voluntary blindness, and then vanish in the midst of a storm, like all civilizations which - each in its own day - shall divine an answer to the riddle of the sphinx without grasping its whole import and mystery.
Everything is symbolical and transcendental in this titanic epic of human destinies.
The two antagonistic brothers formulate the second part of the Grand Mystery, completed divinely by the sacrifice of Antigone.
There follows the last war; the brethren slay one another; Capaneus is destroyed by the lightning which he defies; Amphiaraus is swallowed by the earth; and all these are so many allegories which, by their truth and their grandeur, astonish those who can penetrate their triple hieratic sense.
Aeschylus, annotated by Ballanche, gives only a weak notion concerning them, whatever the primeval sublimities of the Greek poet or the ingenuities of the French critic.
The secret book of antique initiation was not unknown to Homer, who outlines its plan and chief figures on the shield of Achilles, with minute precision.
But the gracious Homeric fictions replaced too soon in popular memory the simple and abstract truths of primeval revelation.
Humanity clung to the form and allowed the idea to be forgotten; signs lost power in their multiplication; Magic became corrupted also at this period, and degenerated with the sorcerers of Thessaly into the most profane enchantments.
The crime of Oedipus brought forth its deadly fruits, and the science of good and evil erected evil into a sacrilegious divinity.
Men, weary of the light, took refuge in the shadow of bodily substance; the dream of that void which is filled by God seemed in their eyes to be greater than God Himself, and thus hell was created.
When, in the course of this work, we make use of the consecrated terms God, Heaven and Hell, let it be understood, once and for all, that our meaning is as far removed from that which the profane attach to them as initiation is remote from vulgar thought.
God, for us, is the AZOT of the sages, the efficient and final principle of the Great Work.
Returning to the fable of Oedipus, the crime of the King of Thebes was that he failed to understand the sphinx; that he destroyed the scourge of Thebes without being pure enough to complete the expiation in the name of his people.
The plague, in consequence, avenged speedily the death of the monster, and the King of Thebes, forced to abdicate, sacrificed himself to the terrible manes of the sphinx, more alive and voracious than ever when it had passed from the domain of form into that of idea.
The transformation of base substance — outer matter or the inner soul — into a purified, perfected, or 'gold' state; the magnum opus as both laboratory practice and spiritual allegory.
God is defined as the 'AZOT of the sages' and the principle of the 'Great Work,' central to alchemical tradition.
Augustinian and Plotinian doctrine that evil has no positive being of its own but is a lack, distortion, or absence of the good — denying ontological dualism while preserving moral seriousness.
Hell is described as created when the 'dream of that void which is filled by God' seemed greater than God.
Transgressive knowing acquired against divine prohibition — the Watchers' teaching of metallurgy, sorcery, and cosmetics in 1 Enoch, the Gnostic Eve narratives, the Promethean mytheme; explicitly contrasted with gnosis_direct_knowledge, which is salvific.
The 'science of good and evil' is described as erecting evil into a divinity, implying transgressive knowledge.
The human being as a small-scale image of the entire cosmos; the body, soul, and intellect mirroring the structure of the heavens and the divine — distinct from correspondence in that it makes the human the privileged mirror.
The solution to the universal mystery is identified as 'Man,' implying the human being contains the structure of the cosmos.
Numbers, proportions, and mathematical relationships as the underlying structure of divine reality.
The passage centrally features the riddle of the Sphinx involving numbers (four, two, three) and explicitly questions the transformation of the tetrad into the duad and triad.
The felt condition of exile from one's divine origin — Rumi's reed flute torn from its bed, Plotinus's 'we have forgotten,' the Gnostic forgetfulness; the affective wound that complements return_to_source and gives the return its motive.
The text describes a decline where 'primeval revelation' was forgotten and humanity clung to forms instead of ideas.
The doctrine and practice that spoken or sung word carries causal-magical force — that uttering names, formulas, songs, or incantations alters reality directly rather than merely communicating about it. Vainamoinen's runo-songs that move mountains and command iron, Norse galdr, Vedic mantra, Shinto kotodama, the magician's barbarous names in the Greek Magical Papyri, Iamblichean arcane signatures and inexplicable symbols, biblical creation-by-word. Distinct from sacred_names (the ontological power of names themselves) and prayer (address to the divine); word_power_incantation is the magical-causal efficacy of the spoken word as such.
Oedipus's reply is described as a 'simple and terrible word which destroys the sphinx,' attributing causal power to speech.