Éliphas Lévi
The Great Secret 3.10
1868
trans. Jason Colavito
2018
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NOTE |
Éliphas Lévi was the pen name of Alphonse Louis Constant (1810–1875), an occultist and practitioner of magic. Best known for identifying the alleged Templar idol Baphomet with a goat-headed man, Lévi influenced the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft through a collection of his works translated into English by A. E. Waite. The following chapter from the third volume of his Le Grand Arcane (The Great Secret) has a distinctly Lovecraftian air to it as it discusses the transdimensional power of disembodied supernatural godlike beings. But it also represents an early effort to apply the myth of the Watchers and the Giants to the realm of ceremonial magic. The Great Secret was written in 1868 but not published until 1898, under a title chosen by the publisher. The whole of the Great Secret was translated from the French in 2000, but since this translation is under copyright, I have translated this chapter anew, with the exception of a long passage near the end on the history of Satan.
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X: The Magnetism of Evil
One single spirit fills infinity. It is that of God, whom nothing limits or partitions, the one who is everywhere without being confined anywhere.
The created spirits can only live under sheaths which are proportional to their environment, which realize their action by limiting it and prevent them from being absorbed into the infinite.
Throw a drop of fresh water into the sea, and it will become lost unless it is preserved by an impermeable envelope.
There are therefore no spirits without such envelopes and without form; these forms are relative to the environment in which they live, and in our atmosphere, for example, there can be no other spirits than those of men with the bodies in which we see them and those of animals whose destiny and nature we do not yet know.
Do the stars have souls? And does the earth we inhabit have a conscience and thoughts of its own? We do not know, but we cannot prove any error in those who have tried to suppose it.
Some exceptional phenomena have been explained by spontaneous manifestations of the soul of the Earth and, as we have often noticed a kind of antagonism in these manifestations, it has been concluded that the soul of the Earth is multiple. This is revealed by four elementary forces that can be summed up in two and balanced by three, which is one of the solutions to the great Riddle of the Sphinx.
According to the ancient hierophants, matter is only the substratum of created spirits. God does not create it directly. From God emanate the powers, the Elohim that constitute heaven and earth, and according to their doctrine, we should thus understand the first sentence of Genesis: “Bereschith, the head or the first principle, Bara created, Elohim the powers, V’eth ha aretz, who are or who make (implied) heaven and earth.” We admit that this translation seems to us more logical than that which would give a verb Bara used in the singular with the nominative plural Elohim.
These Elohim, or these powers, would be the great souls of the worlds whose forms would be the substance specified in their elemental virtues. God, in order to create a world, would have bound together four djinn who, when struggling, would have first produced chaos and who, forced to rest after the struggle, would have created the harmony of the elements; thus, the Earth imprisoned the fire and swelled to escape the invasions of the water. The air escaped from the caves and enveloped the Earth and the water, but the fire still struggles against the earth and erodes it; the water invades the Earth and goes up in clouds in the sky; the air is irritated, and to chase away the clouds, it forms currents and storms. The great law of equilibrium, which is the will of God, prevents the fighting from destroying the worlds before the time marked for their transfigurations.
Worlds, like the Elohim, are linked together by magnetic chains that their revolt seeks to break. The suns are rivals of the suns, and the planets exert themselves against the planets by opposing the chains of attraction, an equal energy of repulsion to defend themselves from the absorption and to preserve for each one its existence.
These colossal forces have sometimes taken a form and appeared in the guise of giants. They are the Egregores of the Book of Enoch, terrible creatures for whom we are as the infusoria or the microscopic insects which swarm between our teeth and on our epidermis are to us. The Egregores crush us without pity because they ignore our existence; they are too big to see us, and too limited to guess our existence.
This explains the planetary convulsions that engulf populations. We know too well that God does not save the innocent fly when a cruel and stupid child tears off its legs and wings, and that Providence does not intervene in favor of the anthill which a passerby destroys and obliterated with kicks.
Because the organs of a mite escape the analysis of man due to their size, man thinks himself entitled to suppose that, in the face of eternal nature, his existence is much more precious than that of a mite! Alas! Camoëns probably had more genius than the Egregor Adamastor; but could the giant Adamastor, crowned with clouds, having waves for his belt, and hurricanes for his cloak, conceive of the poems of Camoëns?
The oyster seems good to eat, but we suppose that it is not conscious of itself, that consequently it does not suffer, and, without the slightest regret, we devour it alive. We throw live crayfish and lobsters into the boiling water because, being cooked in this way, they have a firmer flesh and a more appetizing taste.
By what terrible law does God thus abandon the weak to the strong, and the little to the great, without the ogre having the same idea about the tortures he inflicts on the puny beings he devours?
And who assures us that someone will come to our defense against the beings stronger and greedy than we are? The stars act and react on each other; their equilibrium is formed by bonds of love and thrusts of hate. Sometimes the resistance of a star breaks, and it is attracted to a sun that devours it; sometimes, another feels its force of attraction expire in it and it is thrown out of its orbit by the whirling of the universes. Loving stars come closer and give birth to new stars. Infinite space is the great city of suns; they consult one another and address each other with telegrams of light. There are stars that are sisters, there are others who are rivals. The souls of the stars, chained by the necessity of their regular race, can exercise their freedom by diversifying their emanations.
When the Earth is irritable, it makes men furious and unleashes plagues on its surface; it then sends to the planets that it does not like a poisoned magnetism, but, they revenge themselves, by sending back war. Venus pours upon her the venom of bad morals; Jupiter excites kings against each other; Mercury unleashes the serpents of his caduceus against men; the Moon makes them mad, and Saturn drives them to despair. These loves and angers of the stars are the basis of all astrology, now, perhaps, too much disdained. Has not the spectral analysis of Bunsen proved, quite recently, that each star has its magnetization determined by a special and particular metallic base, and that there are, in the sky, scales of attraction like ranges of colors? There may therefore exist, and certainly do exist, between the celestial globes, magnetic influences which obey, perhaps, the will of these planets if we suppose them endowed with intelligence or dominated by djinn whom the ancients named the Watchmen of the Sky, or the Egregores.
The study of nature causes us to see contradictions that astonish us. Everywhere we meet the proofs of an infinite intelligence, but often we also have to recognize the action of perfectly blind forces. Plagues are disorders which cannot be attributed to the principle of eternal order. The plagues, the floods, the famines—these are not the decrees of God. To attribute them to the devil, that is to say, to a damned angel, whom God permits to make evil work, is to suppose a hypocritical God who, in order to do evil, hides himself behind a responsible, depraved agent. So, we ask: Where do these disorders come from? From the error of second causes. But if the second causes are capable of error, it is because they are intelligent and autonomous, and here we have in full the doctrine of the Egregores.
According to this doctrine, the stars take no notice of the parasites that swarm on their skin and would only care about their own hatreds and loves. Our sun, whose spots mark the beginning of its cooling, is slowly, but fatally, driven towards the constellation of Hercules. One day, it will lack light and heat because the stars are aging and must die like us. It will no longer have the strength to repel the planets that will rush in and dash themselves on it, and this will be the end of our universe. But a new universe will be formed from its debris. A new creation will come out of chaos and we will be reborn, in a new species, able to fight more against the stupid greatness of Egregores, and it will be so until the Great Adam is reconstituted. This spirit of the spirits, this form of forms, this collective giant which epitomizes the whole of creation. This Adam, who, according to the Kabbalists, conceals the sun behind his heel, hides stars in the tufts of his beard, and when he wants to walk, touches the Orient with one foot, and on the Occident with the other.
The Egregores are the Anakim of the Bible or rather, following the Book of Enoch, they are their fathers. These are the Titans of fable and we find them in all religious traditions.
It is they who, by fighting, launch fireballs into space, ride astride the comets, and rain falling stars and fire-balls. The air becomes unhealthy, the waters are corrupt, the earth trembles and the volcanoes burst with fury when these monsters are angry or sick. Sometimes, when returning late on summer nights, the inhabitants of the valleys of the south [of France] see with horror the colossal form of a motionless man who sits on the plateau of the mountains and bathes his feet in some lonely lake; they pass by making the sign of the cross and imagine they have seen Satan when they have met only the pensive shade of an Egregore.
These Egregores, if one had to admit their existence, would be the plasticine agents of God, the living cogs of the creative machine, multiform as Proteus but still chained to their elemental substance. They would know the secrets of which immensity robs us but would be ignorant of the things we know. The evocations of ancient magic are addressed to them, and the weird names given them in Persia or Chaldea are still preserved in ancient grimoires.
The Arabs, poetic protectors of the primitive traditions of the East, still believe in these gigantic djinn. There are white ones and black ones; the blacks are unhealthy and call themselves Afreets. Muhammad has kept these djinn as well as angels so big that the wind from their wings sweep the worlds through space. We admit that we do not care for this infinite multitude of intermediate beings who hide us from God and seem to make Him useless. If the chain of spirits always grows its links larger as it reaches upward to God, we see no reason for it to ever stop growing because it will always progress toward the infinite without ever being able to touch it. We have billions of gods to conquer or to bow to without ever being able to achieve freedom and peace. This is why we reject definitively and absolutely the mythology of the Egregores.
Here we breathe deeply and wipe our forehead like a man who awakens after a painful dream. We contemplate the sky full of stars but empty of ghosts and with an indescribable relief in our heart, we repeat these first words of the Nicene Creed in full voice: Credo in unum Deum.
Falling [from Heaven] with the Egregores and the Afreets, Satan blazes for a moment in the sky and disappears like a flash. Videbam Satanam sicut fulgures (or fulgur) de coelo cadentem.
The giants of the Bible were taken under by the flood. The Titans of fable were crushed under the mountains they had piled up. Jupiter is no more than a star, and all the gigantic phantasmagoria of the old world is nothing more than a colossal burst of laughter which is named Gargantua in Rabelais.
[…]
The magnetism of evil can also receive impressions from beyond the grave, but only by the perverse aspirations of the living, since the dead whom God punishes have neither power nor the effective will to do evil. Under the hand of God’s justice, we sin no more once we die.
What we deny is the existence of a powerful djinn, of a kind of black God, of a dark monarch having the power to do evil after God has reproved him. King Satan is for us an impious fiction despite all the poetry and grandeur he embodies in Milton’s poem. The guiltiest of the fallen spirits must have fallen lower than the others and must be, more than the others, chained by the justice of God. Earthly prisons certainly have their “kings,” who still exert a certain influence on the criminal world, but this is due to the inadequacy of the means of surveillance or repression employed by human justice. The justice of God cannot be deceived.
In the apocryphal Book of Enoch, we read that these black Egregores were incarnated to seduce the women of the Earth and begot the giants on them. The real Egregores, that is to say, the Night Watchmen, in whom we would like to believe, are the stars of the sky with their eyes always sparkling. They are the angels who rule the stars and who are like shepherds for the souls who inhabit them. We also like to think that every nation has its protecting angel or djinn, which can be that of one of the planets in our system. Thus, according to the poetic traditions of the Kabbalah, Michael, the angel of the Sun, is that of the people of God. Gabriel, the angel of the moon, protects the peoples of the East who carry the crescent on their flag. Mars and Venus together govern France. Mercury is the djinn of Holland and England. Saturn is the djinn of Russia. All this is possible, though doubtful, and can be used for the hypotheses of astrology or the fictions of the epic.
The reign of God is an admirable government where everything subsists in a hierarchy and where anarchy destroys itself. If there are prisons in His empire for guilty spirits, only God is their Master and presumably ensures that they are governed by angels who are both severe and good. The convicts are not allowed to torture one another. Otherwise, God would be less wise and less good than men. And what would be said of a prince of the land who would choose a brigand of the worst kind for the director of his prisons, frequently allowing him to go out to continue his crimes, and to give honest people frightful examples and pernicious counsel?
The created spirits can only live under sheaths which are proportional to their environment, which realize their action by limiting it and prevent them from being absorbed into the infinite.
Throw a drop of fresh water into the sea, and it will become lost unless it is preserved by an impermeable envelope.
There are therefore no spirits without such envelopes and without form; these forms are relative to the environment in which they live, and in our atmosphere, for example, there can be no other spirits than those of men with the bodies in which we see them and those of animals whose destiny and nature we do not yet know.
Do the stars have souls? And does the earth we inhabit have a conscience and thoughts of its own? We do not know, but we cannot prove any error in those who have tried to suppose it.
Some exceptional phenomena have been explained by spontaneous manifestations of the soul of the Earth and, as we have often noticed a kind of antagonism in these manifestations, it has been concluded that the soul of the Earth is multiple. This is revealed by four elementary forces that can be summed up in two and balanced by three, which is one of the solutions to the great Riddle of the Sphinx.
According to the ancient hierophants, matter is only the substratum of created spirits. God does not create it directly. From God emanate the powers, the Elohim that constitute heaven and earth, and according to their doctrine, we should thus understand the first sentence of Genesis: “Bereschith, the head or the first principle, Bara created, Elohim the powers, V’eth ha aretz, who are or who make (implied) heaven and earth.” We admit that this translation seems to us more logical than that which would give a verb Bara used in the singular with the nominative plural Elohim.
These Elohim, or these powers, would be the great souls of the worlds whose forms would be the substance specified in their elemental virtues. God, in order to create a world, would have bound together four djinn who, when struggling, would have first produced chaos and who, forced to rest after the struggle, would have created the harmony of the elements; thus, the Earth imprisoned the fire and swelled to escape the invasions of the water. The air escaped from the caves and enveloped the Earth and the water, but the fire still struggles against the earth and erodes it; the water invades the Earth and goes up in clouds in the sky; the air is irritated, and to chase away the clouds, it forms currents and storms. The great law of equilibrium, which is the will of God, prevents the fighting from destroying the worlds before the time marked for their transfigurations.
Worlds, like the Elohim, are linked together by magnetic chains that their revolt seeks to break. The suns are rivals of the suns, and the planets exert themselves against the planets by opposing the chains of attraction, an equal energy of repulsion to defend themselves from the absorption and to preserve for each one its existence.
These colossal forces have sometimes taken a form and appeared in the guise of giants. They are the Egregores of the Book of Enoch, terrible creatures for whom we are as the infusoria or the microscopic insects which swarm between our teeth and on our epidermis are to us. The Egregores crush us without pity because they ignore our existence; they are too big to see us, and too limited to guess our existence.
This explains the planetary convulsions that engulf populations. We know too well that God does not save the innocent fly when a cruel and stupid child tears off its legs and wings, and that Providence does not intervene in favor of the anthill which a passerby destroys and obliterated with kicks.
Because the organs of a mite escape the analysis of man due to their size, man thinks himself entitled to suppose that, in the face of eternal nature, his existence is much more precious than that of a mite! Alas! Camoëns probably had more genius than the Egregor Adamastor; but could the giant Adamastor, crowned with clouds, having waves for his belt, and hurricanes for his cloak, conceive of the poems of Camoëns?
The oyster seems good to eat, but we suppose that it is not conscious of itself, that consequently it does not suffer, and, without the slightest regret, we devour it alive. We throw live crayfish and lobsters into the boiling water because, being cooked in this way, they have a firmer flesh and a more appetizing taste.
By what terrible law does God thus abandon the weak to the strong, and the little to the great, without the ogre having the same idea about the tortures he inflicts on the puny beings he devours?
And who assures us that someone will come to our defense against the beings stronger and greedy than we are? The stars act and react on each other; their equilibrium is formed by bonds of love and thrusts of hate. Sometimes the resistance of a star breaks, and it is attracted to a sun that devours it; sometimes, another feels its force of attraction expire in it and it is thrown out of its orbit by the whirling of the universes. Loving stars come closer and give birth to new stars. Infinite space is the great city of suns; they consult one another and address each other with telegrams of light. There are stars that are sisters, there are others who are rivals. The souls of the stars, chained by the necessity of their regular race, can exercise their freedom by diversifying their emanations.
When the Earth is irritable, it makes men furious and unleashes plagues on its surface; it then sends to the planets that it does not like a poisoned magnetism, but, they revenge themselves, by sending back war. Venus pours upon her the venom of bad morals; Jupiter excites kings against each other; Mercury unleashes the serpents of his caduceus against men; the Moon makes them mad, and Saturn drives them to despair. These loves and angers of the stars are the basis of all astrology, now, perhaps, too much disdained. Has not the spectral analysis of Bunsen proved, quite recently, that each star has its magnetization determined by a special and particular metallic base, and that there are, in the sky, scales of attraction like ranges of colors? There may therefore exist, and certainly do exist, between the celestial globes, magnetic influences which obey, perhaps, the will of these planets if we suppose them endowed with intelligence or dominated by djinn whom the ancients named the Watchmen of the Sky, or the Egregores.
The study of nature causes us to see contradictions that astonish us. Everywhere we meet the proofs of an infinite intelligence, but often we also have to recognize the action of perfectly blind forces. Plagues are disorders which cannot be attributed to the principle of eternal order. The plagues, the floods, the famines—these are not the decrees of God. To attribute them to the devil, that is to say, to a damned angel, whom God permits to make evil work, is to suppose a hypocritical God who, in order to do evil, hides himself behind a responsible, depraved agent. So, we ask: Where do these disorders come from? From the error of second causes. But if the second causes are capable of error, it is because they are intelligent and autonomous, and here we have in full the doctrine of the Egregores.
According to this doctrine, the stars take no notice of the parasites that swarm on their skin and would only care about their own hatreds and loves. Our sun, whose spots mark the beginning of its cooling, is slowly, but fatally, driven towards the constellation of Hercules. One day, it will lack light and heat because the stars are aging and must die like us. It will no longer have the strength to repel the planets that will rush in and dash themselves on it, and this will be the end of our universe. But a new universe will be formed from its debris. A new creation will come out of chaos and we will be reborn, in a new species, able to fight more against the stupid greatness of Egregores, and it will be so until the Great Adam is reconstituted. This spirit of the spirits, this form of forms, this collective giant which epitomizes the whole of creation. This Adam, who, according to the Kabbalists, conceals the sun behind his heel, hides stars in the tufts of his beard, and when he wants to walk, touches the Orient with one foot, and on the Occident with the other.
The Egregores are the Anakim of the Bible or rather, following the Book of Enoch, they are their fathers. These are the Titans of fable and we find them in all religious traditions.
It is they who, by fighting, launch fireballs into space, ride astride the comets, and rain falling stars and fire-balls. The air becomes unhealthy, the waters are corrupt, the earth trembles and the volcanoes burst with fury when these monsters are angry or sick. Sometimes, when returning late on summer nights, the inhabitants of the valleys of the south [of France] see with horror the colossal form of a motionless man who sits on the plateau of the mountains and bathes his feet in some lonely lake; they pass by making the sign of the cross and imagine they have seen Satan when they have met only the pensive shade of an Egregore.
These Egregores, if one had to admit their existence, would be the plasticine agents of God, the living cogs of the creative machine, multiform as Proteus but still chained to their elemental substance. They would know the secrets of which immensity robs us but would be ignorant of the things we know. The evocations of ancient magic are addressed to them, and the weird names given them in Persia or Chaldea are still preserved in ancient grimoires.
The Arabs, poetic protectors of the primitive traditions of the East, still believe in these gigantic djinn. There are white ones and black ones; the blacks are unhealthy and call themselves Afreets. Muhammad has kept these djinn as well as angels so big that the wind from their wings sweep the worlds through space. We admit that we do not care for this infinite multitude of intermediate beings who hide us from God and seem to make Him useless. If the chain of spirits always grows its links larger as it reaches upward to God, we see no reason for it to ever stop growing because it will always progress toward the infinite without ever being able to touch it. We have billions of gods to conquer or to bow to without ever being able to achieve freedom and peace. This is why we reject definitively and absolutely the mythology of the Egregores.
Here we breathe deeply and wipe our forehead like a man who awakens after a painful dream. We contemplate the sky full of stars but empty of ghosts and with an indescribable relief in our heart, we repeat these first words of the Nicene Creed in full voice: Credo in unum Deum.
Falling [from Heaven] with the Egregores and the Afreets, Satan blazes for a moment in the sky and disappears like a flash. Videbam Satanam sicut fulgures (or fulgur) de coelo cadentem.
The giants of the Bible were taken under by the flood. The Titans of fable were crushed under the mountains they had piled up. Jupiter is no more than a star, and all the gigantic phantasmagoria of the old world is nothing more than a colossal burst of laughter which is named Gargantua in Rabelais.
[…]
The magnetism of evil can also receive impressions from beyond the grave, but only by the perverse aspirations of the living, since the dead whom God punishes have neither power nor the effective will to do evil. Under the hand of God’s justice, we sin no more once we die.
What we deny is the existence of a powerful djinn, of a kind of black God, of a dark monarch having the power to do evil after God has reproved him. King Satan is for us an impious fiction despite all the poetry and grandeur he embodies in Milton’s poem. The guiltiest of the fallen spirits must have fallen lower than the others and must be, more than the others, chained by the justice of God. Earthly prisons certainly have their “kings,” who still exert a certain influence on the criminal world, but this is due to the inadequacy of the means of surveillance or repression employed by human justice. The justice of God cannot be deceived.
In the apocryphal Book of Enoch, we read that these black Egregores were incarnated to seduce the women of the Earth and begot the giants on them. The real Egregores, that is to say, the Night Watchmen, in whom we would like to believe, are the stars of the sky with their eyes always sparkling. They are the angels who rule the stars and who are like shepherds for the souls who inhabit them. We also like to think that every nation has its protecting angel or djinn, which can be that of one of the planets in our system. Thus, according to the poetic traditions of the Kabbalah, Michael, the angel of the Sun, is that of the people of God. Gabriel, the angel of the moon, protects the peoples of the East who carry the crescent on their flag. Mars and Venus together govern France. Mercury is the djinn of Holland and England. Saturn is the djinn of Russia. All this is possible, though doubtful, and can be used for the hypotheses of astrology or the fictions of the epic.
The reign of God is an admirable government where everything subsists in a hierarchy and where anarchy destroys itself. If there are prisons in His empire for guilty spirits, only God is their Master and presumably ensures that they are governed by angels who are both severe and good. The convicts are not allowed to torture one another. Otherwise, God would be less wise and less good than men. And what would be said of a prince of the land who would choose a brigand of the worst kind for the director of his prisons, frequently allowing him to go out to continue his crimes, and to give honest people frightful examples and pernicious counsel?
