10. The Kabalaha

MALKUTH PRINCIPIUM PHALLUS ALL religions have preserved the remembrance of a primitive book, written in hieroglyphs by the sages of the earliest epoch of the world. Simplified and vulgarized in later days, its symbols furnished letters to the art of writing, characters to the Word, and to occult philosophy its mysterious signs and pantacles. This book, attributed by the Hebrews to Enoch, seventh master of the world after Adam; by the Egyptians to Hermes Trismegistus; by the Greeks to Cadmus, the mysterious builder of the Holy City: this book was the symbolical summary of primitive tradition, called subsequently Kabalah or Cabala, meaning reception. The tradition in question rests altogether on the one dogma of Magic: the visible is for us the proportional measure of the invisible. Now the ancients, observing that equilibrium is the universal law in physics, and is consequent on the apparent opposition of two forces, argued from physical to metaphysical equilibrium, and maintained that in God, that is, in the First Living and Active Cause, there must be recognized two properties which are necessary one to another - stability and motion, necessity and liberty, rational order and volitional autonomy, justice and love, whence also severity and mercy. And these two attributes were personified, so to speak, by the kabalistic Jews under the names of GEBURAH and CHESED. Above GEBURAH and CHESED abides the Supreme Crown, the equilibrating power, principle of the world or equilibrated kingdom, which we find mentioned under the name of MALKUTH in the occult and kabalistic versicle of the Paternoster to which we have already referred. But GEBURAH and CHESED, maintained in equilibrium by the Crown above and the KINGDOM below, constitute two principles, which may be considered either from an abstract point of view or in their realization. In their abstract or idealized sense, they take the higher names of CHOKMAH, Wisdom, and BlNAH, Intelligence. Their realization is stability and progress, that is, eternity and victory - HOD and NETSAH. Such, according to the Kabalah, is the groundwork of all religions and all sciences - a triple triangle and a circle, the notion of the triad explained by the balance multiplied by itself in the domains of the ideal, then the realization of this conception in forms. Now, the ancients attached the first notions of this simple and impressive theology to the very idea of numbers, and qualified the figure of the first decade after the following manner: 1. KETHER. -- The Crown, the equilibrating power. 2. CHOKMAH.-Wisdom, equilibrated in its unchangeable order by the initiative of intelligence. 3. BINAH.-Active Intelligence, equilibrated by Wisdom. 4. CHESED.-Mercy, which is Wisdom in its secondary conception, ever benevolent because it is strong. 5. GEBURAH.-Severity, necessitated by Wisdom itself, and by goodwill. To permit evil is to hinder good. 6. TIPHERETH.-Beauty, the luminous conception of equilibrium in forms, intermediary between the Crown and the Kingdom, mediating principle between Creator and creation - a sublime conception of poetry and its sovereign priesthood! 7. NETSAH. - Victory, that is, eternal triumph of intelligence and justice. 8. HOD.-Eternity of the conquests achieved by mind over matter, active over passive, life over death. 9. JESOD. The Foundation, that is, the basis of all belief and all truth otherwise, the Absolute in philosophy. 10.