12. The Great Work-c

Peter, “I dreamed that I was the vicar of God.” “And I,” said Jeshu, “that I was God himself.” “For me,” said Judas hypocritically, “I dreamed that, being in somnambulism, I arose, went softly downstairs, took the gosling from the spit, and ate it.” Thereupon they also went down, but the gosling had vanished altogether. Judas had a waking dream. This anecdote is given, not in the text of the Sepher-Toldos-Jeshu itself, but in the rabbinical commentaries on that work. The legend is a protest of Jewish positivism against Christian mysticism. As a fact, while the faithful surrendered themselves to magnificent dreams, the proscribed Israelite, Judas of the Christian civilization, worked, sold, intrigued, became rich, possessed himself of this life's realities, till he became in a position to advance the means of existence to those very forms of worship which had so long outlawed him. The ancient worshippers of the ark remained true to the cultus of the strong-box; the Exchange is now their temple, and thence they govern the Christian world. The laugh is indeed with Judas, who can congratulate himself upon not having slept like St. Peter. In archaic writings preceding the Captivity, the Hebrew TAU was cruciform, which confirms further our interpretation of the twelfth symbol of the Kabalistic Tarot. The Cross, which produces four triangles, is also the sacred sign of the duodenary, and on this account it was called the Key of Heaven by the Egyptians. So Etteilla, confused by his protracted researches for the conciliation of the analogical necessities of this symbol with his own personal opinion, in which he was influenced by the erudite Court de Gebelin, placed in the hand of his upright hanged man, by him interpreted as Prudence, a Hermetic caduceus, formed by two serpents and a Greek TAU. Seeing that he understood the necessity of the TAU or Cross on the twelfth leaf of the Book of Thoth, he should have seen also the manifold and magnificent meaning of the Hermetic Hanged Man, the Prometheus of science, the living man who touches earth by his thought alone, whose firm ground is heaven, the free and immolated adept, the revealer menaced with death, the conjuration of Judaism against Christ, which seems to be an involuntary admission of the secret divinity of the Crucified, and lastly, the sign of the work accomplished, the cycle terminated, the intermediary TAU, which resumes for the first time, before the final denary, the signs of the sacred alphabet.