Transcendental Magic II: The Ritual (Éliphas Lévi) · 119 of 123 · tr. A.E. Waite
22. The Book Of Hermesl
In the schools of seers the terrestrial globe was represented by an egg of pasteboard or painted wood, and when young children were asked, ‘What is this egg?’ they answered, ‘It is the earth.’ Those older children, the barbarians, hearing this, repeated, after the little children of the seers: ‘The world is an egg.’ But they understood thereby the physical, material world, while the seers meant the geographical, ideal, image-world, created by mind and the logos.
As a fact, the priests of Egypt represented mind, intelligence, Kneph, with an egg placed upon his lips, to express clearly that the egg was here only a form of comparison, an image, a mode of speech.
Choumountou, the philosopher of the Ezour-Veda, explains after the same manner to the fanatic Biache what must be understood by the golden egg of Brahma.” We must not despair altogether of a period which still concerns itself with these serious and reasonable researches; we have therefore cited these pages of M.
Chaho with great mental satisfaction and profound sympathy.
Here is no longer the negative and desolating criticism of Dupuis and Volney, but an effort towards one faith and one worship connecting all the future with all the past; it is an apology for all great men accused falsely of superstition and idolatry; it, is, finally, the justification of God Himself, that Sun of intelligences Who is never veiled for upright souls and pure hearts.
“Great and pre-eminent is the seer, the initiate, the elect of Nature and of supreme reason,” cries the author once more, in concluding what we have just cited.
“His alone is that faculty of imitation which is the principle of his perfection, while its inspirations, swift as a lightning flash, direct creations and discoveries.
His alone is a perfect Word of rightness, propriety, flexibility, wealth, creating harmony of thought by physical reaction-of thought, whereof the perceptions, as yet independent of language, ever reflect Nature exactly reproduced in its impressions, well judged and well expressed in its correspondences.
His alone are light, science, truth, because imagination, confined to its passive secondary part, never governs reason, the natural logic which results from the comparison of ideas; which come into being, extend in the same proportion as his needs, and which the circle of his knowledge enlarges thus by degrees without intermixture of false judgements and errors.
His alone is a light infinitely progressive, because the rapid increase of population, after terrestrial renovations, establishes in a few centuries a new society in all the imaginable moral and political correspondences of its destiny.
We might add, in fine, that his alone is absolute light.
The man of our time is immutable in himself; he changes no more than Nature, in which he is rooted.
The social conditions which surround him alone determine the degree of his perfection, of which the bounds are virtue, holiness of man and his happiness in the law.
“ After such elucidations, will anyone ask the utility of the occult sciences?
Will they treat with the disdain of mysticism and illuminism these living mathematics, these proportions of ideas and forms, this revelation permanent in the universal reason, this emancipation of mind, this immutable basis provided for faith, this omnipotence revealed to will?
Children in search of illusions, are you disappointed because we offer you marvels?
Once a man said to us, “Raise up the devil, and I will believe in you.” We answered, “You ask too little; we will not make the the devil appear but rather vanish from the whole world: we will chase him from your dreams!” The devil is ignorance, darkness, chaotic thought, deformity.
Awake, sleeper of the Middle Ages!
See you not that it is day?
See you not the light of God filling all Nature?
Themes
◆Correspondencecosmology
The Hermetic axiom that the structure of the cosmos is reflected at every scale — 'as above, so below; as within, so without' — making each level a legible map of the others.
The text explicitly references 'correspondences' multiple times, including 'well expressed in its correspondences' and 'moral and political correspondences'.
Narratives or doctrines of cosmic origin — how heaven, earth, and the primordial deities first came into being. The Kojiki's deities born alone on the Plain of High Heaven, Voluspo's Ginnungagap, Genesis's tohu wa-bohu, the Timaeus's Demiurge fashioning the Receptacle, the Hesiodic Theogony, the Kalevala's egg-cosmogony, Egyptian Nun-and-Atum. Distinct from emanation_hierarchy (structural-ontological cascade), letters_of_creation (mechanism of creation), and apocatastasis/frashokereti (end-state restoration); cosmogony is temporally-narrative beginning.
The text discusses the 'egg' cosmogony in Egyptian and Vedic traditions as a representation of the world's origin.
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.
The devil is defined not as a being but as 'ignorance, darkness, chaotic thought', aligning with evil as the absence of light/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 egg symbol represents both the terrestrial globe and the ideal image-world, reflecting the human mind's capacity to mirror nature.
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.
The 'perfect Word' is described as creating harmony and having causal power over thought and nature.