CHAPTER VI
SOME KABALISTIC PAINTINGS AND SACRED
EMBLEMS
IN obedience to the Saviour's formal precept, the primitive Church did not expose its Most Holy Mysteries to the chance of profanation by the crowd. Admission to Baptism and the Eucharist was in virtue of progressive initiations; the sacred books were also held in concealment, their free study and, above all, interpretation being reserved to the priesthood. Moreover, images were fewer and less explicit in character. The feeling of the time refrained from reproducing the figure of Christ Himself, and the paintings on the catacombs were, for the most part, Kabalistic emblems. There was the Edenic Cross with the four rivers, where harts came to drink; the mysterious fish of Jonah was replaced frequently by a two-headed serpent; a man rising from a chest recalls pictures of Osiris.1 All these allegories at a later period fell under proscription, owing to the Gnosticism which misapplied them, materialising and debasing the holy traditions of the Kabalah.
The name of Gnostic was not always rejected by the Church. Those fathers whose doctrine was allied to the traditions of St. John frequently made use of this title to designate the perfect Christian. Apart from the great Synesius, who was a finished Kabalist but of questionable orthodoxy, St. Irenæus and St. Clement of Alexandria applied it in this sense. The false Gnostics were all in revolt against the hierarchic order, seeking to level the sacred science by its general diffusion, to substitute visions for understanding, personal fanaticism for hierarchic religion, and especially the mystical licence of sensual passions for that wise Christian sobriety and obedience to law which are the mother of chaste marriages and saving temperance.
The induction of ecstasy by physical means and the substitution of somnambulism for sanctity—these were the invariable tendency of those Cainite sects which perpetuated the Black Magic of India. The Church could do no less than condemn them energetically, and it did not swerve from its mission; it is only regrettable that the good grain of science often suffered when the spade was driven and the flame kindled in fields overgrown by tares.
Enemies of generation and the family, the false Gnostics sought to insure sterility by increasing debauch; their pretence was to spiritualise matter, but actually they materialised spirit, and this in the most repulsive manner. Their theology abounds in the copulation of Eons and in voluptuous embraces.1 Like the Brahmans, they worshipped death under the symbol of the lingam; their creation was an infinite onanism and their redemption an eternal abortion.
Looking to escape from the hierarchy by the help of miracle—as if miracle apart from the hierarchy proved anything but disorder or rascality, the Gnostics, from the days of Simon Magus, were great workers of prodigies. Substituting the impure rites of Black Magic for the established worship, they caused blood to appear instead of the Eucharistie wine and substituted cannibal communions for the peaceful and pure supper of the Heavenly Lamb.2 The arch-heretic Marcos, a disciple of Valentinus, said Mass with two chalices; he poured wine into the smaller and on pronouncing a magical formula the larger vessel was filled with a liquor like blood, which swelled up seething. He was not a priest, and he sought to prove in this manner that God had invested him by a miraculous ordination.3 He incited all his disciples to perform the same marvel in his presence. It was women more especially whose success was parallel to his own, but when they passed subsequently into convulsions and ravishment, Marcos breathed upon them, communicating his own mania, so that they covenanted to forget for his sake, and for that of religion, not only all prudence but all decency.
Such intervention of women in the priesthood was always the dream of false Gnostics, for in so equalising the sexes they introduced anarchy into the family and raised a stumbling-block in the path of society. Maternity is the true priesthood of women; modesty is the ritual of the fireside and the religion thereto belonging. This the Gnostics failed to understand, or they understood it too well rather, and in misguiding the sacred instincts of the mother they cast down the barrier which stood between them and complete liberty for their desires.4
The sorry candour of lewdness was not, however, a gift possessed by all. On the contrary, the Montanists, among other Gnostics, exaggerated morality in order to make it impracticable. Montanus himself, whose acrid doctrines inveigled the paradoxical and extremist genius of Tertullian, was given over, with Priscilla and Maximilla, his prophetesses, or—as we should now say—his somnambulists, to all the boundless licentiousness of frenzy and ecstasy. The natural penalty of such excesses was not wanting to their authors; they ended in raving madness and suicide.
The doctrine of the Marcosians was a profound and materialised Kabalah; they dreamed that God had created everything by means of the letters of the alphabet; that these letters were as so many divine emanations, having the power of generating beings; that words were all-powerful and worked wonders virtually, as also in literal reality.1 All this is true in a certain sense, but not in that of the Marcosian heresy. The heretics in question supplemented actualities by hallucinations and believed that they went invisible because they were transported mentally where they wished in the somnambulistic state. In the case of false mystics, life and dream are frequently so confused together that the predominant dream-state invades and submerges reality: it is then uttermost rule of folly. The natural function of imagination is to evoke images and forms, but in a condition of abnormal exaltation it can also exteriorise forms, as proved by the phenomena of monstrous pregnancies and a host of analogous facts which official science would do more wisely to study rather than deny stubbornly. Of such are the disorderly creations which religion brands justly under the name of diabolical miracles, and of such were those of Simon, the Menandrians and Marcos.
In our own days a false Gnostic named Vintras, at present a refugee in London, causes blood to appear in empty chalices and on sacrilegious hosts. The unhappy being then passes into ecstasies, after the manner of Marcos, prophesies the downfall of the hierarchy and the coming triumph of a pretended priesthood, given up to unrestricted intercourse and unbridled love.2
After the protean pantheism of the Gnostics came the dualism of Marcos, formulating as religious dogma the false initiation prevalent among the pseudo-Magi of Persia. The personification of evil produced a God in competition with God Himself, a King of Darkness as well as a King of Light, and there is referable to this period that pernicious doctrine of the ubiquity and sovereignty of Satan against which we register our most energetic protest. We make no pretence in this place of denying or affirming the tradition concerning the fall of angels, deferring herein, as in all that concerns faith, to the supreme and infallible decisions of the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church. But assuming that the fallen angels had a leader prior to that apostasy, the event in question could not do otherwise than precipitate them into total anarchy, tempered only by the inflexible justice of God. Separated from that Divinity which is the source of all power, and more guilty by far than the others, the prince of angels in rebellion could be nothing but the last and most impotent of all outcasts.
But if there be a force in Nature which attracts those who forget God towards sin and death, such force is no other than the Astral Light, and we do not decline to recognise it as an instrument in subservience to fallen spirits. We shall recur to this subject, prepared with a complete explanation, so that it may be intelligible in all its bearings and all its orthodoxy.1 The revelation of a great secret of occultism thus effected will make evident the danger of evocations, all curious experiences, abuses of magnetism, table-turning and whatever connects with wonders and hallucinations.
Arius had prepared the way for Manicheanism by his hybrid creation of a Son of God distinct from God Himself. It was equivalent to the hypothesis of dualism in Deity, inequality in the Absolute, inferiority in Supreme Power, the possibility of conflict between the Father and the Son, and even its necessity. These considerations, and the disparity between the terms of the divine syllogism, make inevitable the rejection of the notion. Is there any question whether the Divine Word can be good or evil—can be either God or the devil? But this was the great dilemma involved by the addition of a diphthong to the Greek word 
by which it was changed to In declaring the Son consubstantial with the Father, the Council of Nicæa saved the world, though the truth can be realised only by those who know that principles in reality constitute the equilibrium of the universe.
Gnosticism, Arianism, Manicheanism came out of the Kabalah misconstrued. The Church was therefore right in forbidding to its faithful the study of a science so dangerous; the keys thereof should be reserved solely to the supreme priesthood. The secret tradition would appear as a fact to have been preserved by sovereign pontiffs, at least till the papacy of Leo III, to whom is attributed an occult ritual said to have been presented by him to the Emperor Charlemagne. It contains the most secret characters of the Keys of Solomon. This little work, which should have been kept in concealment, came into circulation later on, necessitating its condemnation by the Church, and it has passed consequently into the domain of Black Magic. It is known under the name of the Enchiridion of Leo III, and we are in possession of an old copy which is exceedingly rare and curious.1
The loss of the Kabalistic keys could not entail that of the infallibility of the Church, which is ever assisted by the Holy Spirit, but it led to great obscurity in exegesis, the sublime imagery of Ezekiel's prophecy and the Apocalypse of St. John being rendered completely unintelligible. May the lawful successors of St. Peter accept the homage of this book and bless the labours of their humblest child, who, believing that he has found one of the keys of knowledge, comes to lay it at the feet of those who alone have the right to open and to shut the treasures of understanding and of faith.
1 In one of the pictorial symbols of Alchemy the head of the winged solar man is represented rising from a chest. It is a recurring image.
1 It is obvious that Éliphas Lévi pictures only the dark side of Gnosticism; he says nothing and perhaps knew nothing of the higher aspects. His stricture on the copulation of Eons reads strangely for a defender of Kabalism, seeing that the Zohar abounds in similar images.
2 This statement requires to be checked by a French authority of the period, with whom Éliphas Lévi could not fail to be acquainted. I refer to Jacques Matter and his Histoire Critique du Gnoslicisme, a second and enlarged edition of which was published in 1843. According to the testimony of this writer: (a) Some Gnostics rejected the Eucharist entirely; (b) Those who preserved it never taught the real communication of man in the flesh and blood of the Saviour; (c) for them it was an emblem of their mystic union with a being belonging to the Pleroma; (d) The wonder-working Eucharist was particular to Marcos, but according to St. Irenæs it was the result of trickery; (e) He filled chalices with wine and water, pronounced over them a formula of his own, and caused these liquids to appear purple and ruby in colour. Op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 344-346.
3 This assertion is merely a matter of inference.
4 The materials here embodied come direct from Matter, and the last sentence is almost in his own words. The earlier writer says that he caused women to bless the chalice. Nothing is said as to the intervention of men, other than Marcos, in the celebration
1 The dream ascribed to Marcos and his followers is that, however, of the Zohar, the opening section of which describes the letters of the Hebrew alphabet as coming before God in succession, praying to be used in the work of creation which was about to begin. They were set aside in their turn for the reason applying to each, with the exception of Beth, which was taken as the basis of the work, while Aleph was installed as the first of all the letters, the Master of the Universe affirming that His own Divine Unity was in virtue of this letter. The meaning was that Aleph corresponds to the No. i. This, says the Zohar, with ingenuous subtlety, is why the two first words of Scripture have Beth as their initial and the two next words have Aleph.—Zohar, Part I, fols. 2b-3b.
2 It will be seen in a later section that this charge against Vintras rests upon the evidence of persons expelled from the sect which he founded, and, so far as I am aware, it has not been put forward seriously
1 The question. however, stood over until the appearance of La Clef des Grands Mystères, a considerable part of which is embodied in the digest of Lévi's writings which I published long since as The Mysteries of Magic. The Astral Light is explained as “magnetised electricity”—as already quoted.
1 In my Book of Ceremonial Magic I have given full opportunities for the judgment of this so-called occult ritual, which should certainly have been kept in concealment, or better still allowed to perish, not on account of its secrets but because it is in all respects worthless, and its ascription to Leo III an insult to that pontiff.