10. The Key Of Occultisma

Let us now examine the question of Pantacles, for all magical virtue is there, since the secret of force is in the intelligence which directs. We have given the symbol and interpretation of the Pantacles of Pythagoras and Ezekiel, so that we have no need to recur to these; we shall prove in a later chapter that all the instruments of Hebrew worship were Pantacles, and the first and final word of the Bible was graven by Moses in gold and in brass on the tabernacle and on all its accessories. But each Magus can and should have his individual Pantacle, for, understood accurately, a Pantacle is the perfect summary of a mind. Hence we find in the Magical Calendars of Tycho Brahe and Duchentau, the Pantacles of Adam, Job, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and of all the other great prophets who have been, each in his turn, the kings of the Kabalah and the grand rabbins of science. The Pantacle, being a complete and perfect synthesis expressed by a single sign, serves to focus all intellectual force into a glance, a recollection, a touch. It is, so to speak, a starting-point for the efficient projection of will. Nigromancers and goetic magicians traced their infernal Pantacles on the skin of the victims they immolated. The sacrificial ceremonies, the manner of skinning the kid, then of salting, drying and bleaching the skin, are given in a number of Clavicles and Grimoires. Some Hebrew Kabalists fell into similar follies, forgetting the anathemas pronounced in the Bible against those who sacrifice on high places or in the caverns of the earth. All spilling of blood operated ceremonially is abominable and impious, and since the death of Adonhiram the Society of true Adepts has a horror of blood - Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine. The initiatory symbolism of Pantacles adopted throughout the East is the key of all ancient and modern mythologies. Apart from knowledge of the hieroglyphic alphabet, one would be lost among the obscurities of the Vedas, the Zend-Avesta and the Bible. The tree which brings forth good and evil, the source of the four rivers, one of which waters the land of gold - that is, of light - and another flows through Ethiopia, or the kingdom of darkness; the magnetic serpent who seduces the woman, and the woman who seduces the man, thus making known the law of attraction; subsequently the Cherub or Sphinx placed at the gate of the Edenic sanctuary, with the fiery sword of the guardians of the symbol; then regeneration by labour and propagation by sorrow, which is the law of initiations and ordeals; the division of Cain and Abel, which is the same symbol as the strife of Anteros and Eros; the ark borne upon the waters of the deluge like the coffer of Osiris; the black raven which does not return and the white dove which does, a new setting forth of the dogma of antagonism and balance - all these magnificent kabalistic allegories of Genesis, which, taken literally and accepted as actual histories, merit even more derision and contempt than Voltaire heaped upon them, become luminous for the initiate, who still hails with enthusiasm and love the perpetuity of true doctrine and the universality of initiation, identical in all sanctuaries of the world. The five books of Moses, the Prophecy of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse of St. John are the three kabalistic keys of the whole Biblical edifice.