"That the universe is a triple harmony, as the Godhead is a Trinity, you
are aware. We live in the elemental world; over our head the celestial
space, with its various spheres, revolves; and above this, finally, God is
enthroned in the purely spiritual world of ideas. The unhappy scientists
of your century have in their narrow prejudice separated these worlds from
one another (but by crowding together the celestial and the elementary).
Your so-called students of nature investigate only the elementary world,
and your so-called philosophers only the ideal; but the former with all
their delving in the various forms of matter, never reach the realm of the
spiritual, but are rather led to disavow its existence; and the latter can
never from the dim world of ideas summon up the concrete wealth of nature.
In vain your students of nature imagine that in physiology, or your
philosophers that in anthropology, they shall find the transition from
one world to the other. We magicians, on the contrary, study these worlds
as a unit. We find them combined by two mighty bonds: those of
correspondence and causality. All things in the elementary world have
their antitype in the celestial, and all celestial things have their
corresponding ideas. These correspondences are strung from above downwards
as strings on the harp of the universe, and on that harp the causalities
move up and down like the fingers of a player. While your students of
nature seek the chains of causality in only one direction, the horizontal,
that which runs through things on the same level, that which connects
things in one and the same elementary world; we, the students of magic,
search with still greater diligence those perpendicular chains of
causality which run through and combine corresponding objects in the three
worlds. Our manner of investigating this perpendicular series resembles
your method of examining the horizontal but slightly, if at all. What
unnecessary trouble your induction causes you! You wish to investigate the
nature of some manifestation of force, for instance; you analyze it with
great painstaking into different factors, you strive to isolate each of
these factors and to cause them to act each its own part, to find out what
each has contributed to the common expression of force. We meet with no
such hindrances. A secret tradition has presented to us our perpendicular
lines of causality almost entire, and we are able to fill up the lacunæ of
this tradition by an investigation which is not impeded with any great
difficulties. This investigation relies on the resemblances of things, for
this similarity is derived from a correspondence, and causality is
interwoven with correspondence. Thus, for instance, we judge from the
resemblance between the splendor of gold and that of the sun that gold has
its celestial correspondence in that luminary, and sustains to it a causal
relation. Another example: the two-horned beetle bears a causal relation
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account