12. The Great Work-c

The kabalistic figures of Abraham the Jew, which imparted to Flamel the first desire for knowledge, are no other than the twenty-two Keys of the Tarot, imitated and resumed elsewhere in the twelve Keys of Basil Valentine, There the sun and moon reappear under the figures of Emperor and Empress; Mercury is the Juggler; the Great Hierophant is the adept or abstractor of the quintessence; Death, Judgement, Love, the Dragon or Devil, the Hermit or Lame Elder and finally all the remaining symbols are to be found with their chief attributes, almost in the same order. It could have been scarcely otherwise, since the Tarot is the primeval book and the keystone of the occult sciences: it must be Hermetic, because it is kabalistic, magical and theosophical. So also we find by combining its twelfth and twenty-second Keys, superposed one upon the other, the hieroglyphic revelation of the solution of the Grand Work and its mysteries. The twelfth Key represents a man hanging by one foot from a gibbet composed of three trees or posts, forming the Hebrew letter ; the man's arms and head constitute a triangle, and his entire hieroglyphical shape is that of a reversed triangle surmounted by a cross, an alchemical symbol known to all adepts and representing the accomplishment of the Great Work. The twenty-second Key, which bears the number twenty-one because the fool which precedes it carries no numeral, represents a youthful female divinity, veiled slightly and running in a flowering circle, supported at four corners by the four beasts of the Kabalah. In the Italian Tarot this divinity has a rod in either hand; in the Besangon Tarot, the two wands are in one hand while the other is placed upon her thigh, both equally remarkable symbols of magnetic action, either alternate in its polarization or simultaneous by opposition and transmission. The Great Work of Hermes is therefore an essentially magical operation and the highest of all, for it supposes the absolute in science and volition. There is light in gold, gold in light and light in all things. The intelligent will, which assimilates the light, directs in this manner the operations of substantial form, and uses chemistry solely as a secondary instrument. The influence of human will and intelligence upon the operations of Nature, dependent in part on its labour, is otherwise a fact so real that all serious alchemists have succeeded in proportion to their knowledge and their faith, and have reproduced their thought in the phenomena of the fusion, salification and recomposition of metals. Agrippa, who was a man of immense erudition and fine genius, but pure philosopher and sceptic, could not transcend the limits of metallic analysis and synthesis. Etteilla, a confused, obscure, fantastic but persevering Kabalist, reproduced in alchemy the eccentricities of his misconstrued and mutilated Tarot; metals in his crucibles assumed extraordinary forms, which excited the curiosity of all Paris, with no greater profit to the operator than the fees which were paid by his visitors. An obscure bellows-blower of our own time, who died mad, poor Louis Cambriel, really cured his neighbours, and, by the evidence of all his parish, brought back to life a smith who was his friend. For him the metallic work took the most inconceivable and apparently illogical forms. One day he beheld the figure of God Himself in his crucible, incandescent like the sun, transparent as crystal, his body composed of triangular conglomerations, which Cambriel naively compared to quantities of tiny pears. One of our friends, who is a learned Kabalist but belongs to an initiation which we regard as erroneous, performed recently the chemical operations of the Great Work and succeeded in impairing his sight through the excessive brilliance of the Athanor.