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LIBER
777
vel
P
ROLEGOMENA
S
YMBOLICA
AD
S
YSTEMAM
S
CEPTICO
-M
YSTICÆ
V
IÆ
E
XPLICANDÆ
F
UNDAMENTUM
H
IEROGLYPHICUM
S
ANCTISSIMORUM
S
CIENTÆ
S
UMMÆ
:
V
A\A\
publication in Class B
777
T
HE FOLLOWING
is an attempt to systematise alike the data of mysticism and the
results of comparative religion.
The sceptic will applaud our labours, for that the very catholicity of the symbols
denies them any objective validity, since, in so many contradictions, something must
be false; while the mystic will rejoice equally that the self-same catholicity all-
embracing proves that very validity, since after all something must be true.
Fortunately we have learnt to combine these ideas, not in the mutual toleration of sub-
contraries, but in the affirmation of contraries, that transcending of the laws of
intellect which is madness in the ordinary man, genius in the Overman who hath
arrived to strike off more fetters from our understanding. The savage who cannot
conceive of the number six, the orthodox mathematician who cannot conceive of the
fourth dimension, the philosopher who cannot conceive of the Absolute—all these are
one; all must be impregnated with the Divine Essence of the Phallic Yod of
Macroprosopus, and give birth to their idea. True (we may agree with Balzac), the
Absolute recedes; we never grasp it; but in the travelling there is joy. Am I no better
than a staphylococcus because my ideas still crowd in chains?
But we digress.
The last attempts to tabulate knowledge are the
Kabbala Denudata
of Knorr von
Rosenroth (a work incomplete and, in some of its parts, prostituted to the service of
dogmatic interpretation), the lost symbolism of the Vault in which Christian
Rosenkreutz is said to have been buried, some of the work of Dr. Dee and Sir Edward
Kelly, some very imperfect tables in Cornelius Agrippa, the “Art” of Raymond Lully,
some of the very artificial effusions of the esoteric Theosophists, and of late years the
knowledge of the Order Rosæ Rubeæ et Aureæ Crucis and the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn. Unluckily, the leading spirit in these latter societies
1
found that his
prayer, “Give us this day our daily whisky, and just a wee drappie mair for luck!” was
sternly answered, “When you have given us this day our daily Knowledge-lecture.”
Under these circumstances Daath got mixed with Dewar, and Beelzebub with
Buchanan.
But even the best of these systems is excessively bulky; modern methods have enabled
us to concentrate the substance of twenty thousand pages in two score.
The best of the serious attempts to systematise the results of Comparative Religion is
that made by Blavatsky. But though she had an immense genius for acquiring facts,
she had none whatever for sorting and selecting the essentials.
Grant Allen made a very slipshod experiment in this line; so have some of the
polemical rationalists; but the only man worthy of our notice is Frazer of the Golden
Bough. Here again, there is no tabulation; for us it is left to sacrifice literary charm,
and even some accuracy, in order to bring out the one great point.
i
This: That when a Japanese thinks of Hachiman, and a Boer of the Lord of Hosts, they
are not two thoughts, but one.
The cause of human sectarianism is not lack of sympathy in thought, but in speech;
and this it is our not unambitious design to remedy.
Every new sect aggravates the situation. Especially the Americans, grossly and
crapulously ignorant as they are of the rudiments of human language, seize like
mongrel curs upon the putrid bones of their decaying monkey-jabber, and gnaw and
tear them with fierce growls and howls.
The mental prostitute, Mrs. Eddy (for example), having invented the idea which
ordinary people call “God,” christened it “Mind,” and then by affirming a set of
propositions about “Mind,” which are only true of “God,” set all hysterical, dyspeptic,
crazy Amurrka by the ears. Personally, I don’t object to people discussing the
properties of four-sided triangles; but I draw the line when they use a well-known
word, such as pig, or mental healer, or dung-heap, to denote the object of their
paranoiac fetishism.
Even among serious philosophers the confusion is very great. Such terms as God, the
Absolute, Spirit, have dozens of connotations, according to the time and place of the
dispute and the beliefs of the disputants.
Time enough that these definitions and their inter-relation should be crystallised, even
at the expense of accepted philosophical accuracy.
2. The principal sources of our tables have been the philosophers and traditional
systems referred to above, as also, among many others, Pietri di Abano,
2
Lilly, Eliphaz
Levi, Sir R. Burton, Swami Vivekananda, the Hindu, Buddhist, and Chinese Classics,
the Qúran and its commentators, the Book of the Dead, and, in particular, original
research. The Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist, Moslem and Egyptian systems have never
before been brought into line with the Qabalah; the Tarot has never been made public.
Eliphaz Levi knew the true attributions but was forbidden to use them.
*
All this secrecy is very silly. An indicible Arcanum is an arcanum that
cannot
be
revealed. It is simply bad faith to swear a man to the most horrible penalties if he
betray . . ., etc., and then take him mysteriously apart and confide the Hebrew
Alphabet to his safe keeping.
3
This is perhaps only ridiculous; but it is a wicked
imposture to pretend to have received it from Rosicrucian manuscripts which are to be
found in the British Museum. To obtain money on these grounds, as has been done by
certain moderns, is clear (and, I trust, indictable) fraud.
The secrets of Adepts are not to be revealed to men. We only wish they were. When
a man comes to me and asks for the Truth, I go away and practice teaching the
Differential Calculus to a Bushman; and I answer the former only when I have
succeeded with the latter. But to withhold the Alphabet of Mysticism from the learner
is the device of a selfish charlatan. That which can be taught shall be taught, and that
which cannot be taught may at last be learnt.
*
This is probably true, though in agreement with the statement of the traducer of Levi’s
doctrine and the vilifier of his noble personality.
ii
3. As a weary but victorious warrior delights to recall his battles—Fortisan hæc olim
meminisse juvabit
*
—we would linger for a moment upon the difficulties of our task.
The question of sacred alphabets has been abandoned as hopeless. As one who should
probe the nature of woman, the deeper he goes the rottener it gets; so that at last it is
seen that there is no sound bottom. All is arbitrary;
†
withdrawing out caustics and
adopting a protective treatment, we point to the beautiful clean bandages and ask the
clinic to admire! To take one concrete example: the English T is clearly equivalent in
sound to the Hebrew
t
, the Greek
t
, the Arabic
P
and the Coptic
t
, but the numeration
is not the same. Again, we have a clear analogy in shape (perhaps a whole series of
analogies), which, on comparing the modern alphabets with primeval examples,
breaks up and is indecipherable.
The same difficulty in another form permeates the question of gods.
Priests, to propitiate their local fetish, would flatter him with the title of creator;
philosophers, with a wider outlook, would draw identities between many gods in order
to obtain a unity. Time and the gregarious nature of man have raised gods as ideas
grew more universal; sectarianism has drawn false distinctions between identical gods
for polemical purposes.
Thus, where shall we put Isis, favouring nymph of corn as she was? As the type of
motherhood? As the moon? As the great goddess Earth? As Nature? As the Cosmic
Egg from which all Nature sprang? For as time and place have changed, so she is all
of these!
What of Jehovah, that testy senior of Genesis, that lawgiver of Leviticus, that Phallus
of the depopulated slaves of the Egyptians, that jealous King-God of the times of the
Kings, that more spiritual conception of the Captivity, only invented when all
temporal hope was lost, that mediæval battleground of cross-chopped logic, that Being
stripped of all his attributes and assimilated to Parabrahman and the Absolute of the
Philosopher?
Satan, again, who in Job is merely Attorney-General and prosecutes for the Crown,
acquires in time all the obloquy attaching to that functionary in the eyes of the
criminal classes, and becomes a slanderer. Does any one really think that any angel is
such a fool as to try to gull the Omniscient God into injustice to his saints?
Then, on the other hand, what of Moloch, that form of Jehovah denounced by those
who did not draw huge profit from his rites? What of the savage and morose Jesus of
the Evangelicals, cut by their petty malice from the gentle Jesus of the Italian
children? How shall we identify the thaumaturgic Chauvinist of Matthew with the
metaphysical Logos of John? In short, while the human mind is mobile, so long will
the definitions of all our terms vary.
*
[
Lat.
approx. “perhaps it will be pleasant to remember these things one day.”]
†
All symbolism is perhaps ultimately so; there is no necessary relation in thought between the
idea of a mother, the sound of the child’s cry “Ma,” and the combination of lines
ma
. This, too,
is the extreme case, since “ma” is the sound naturally just produced by opening the lips and
breathing. Hindus would make a great fuss over this true connection; but it is very nearly the
only one. All these beautiful schemes break down sooner or later, mostly sooner.
iii
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl jajeczko.pev.pl
LIBER
777
vel
P
ROLEGOMENA
S
YMBOLICA
AD
S
YSTEMAM
S
CEPTICO
-M
YSTICÆ
V
IÆ
E
XPLICANDÆ
F
UNDAMENTUM
H
IEROGLYPHICUM
S
ANCTISSIMORUM
S
CIENTÆ
S
UMMÆ
:
V
A\A\
publication in Class B
777
T
HE FOLLOWING
is an attempt to systematise alike the data of mysticism and the
results of comparative religion.
The sceptic will applaud our labours, for that the very catholicity of the symbols
denies them any objective validity, since, in so many contradictions, something must
be false; while the mystic will rejoice equally that the self-same catholicity all-
embracing proves that very validity, since after all something must be true.
Fortunately we have learnt to combine these ideas, not in the mutual toleration of sub-
contraries, but in the affirmation of contraries, that transcending of the laws of
intellect which is madness in the ordinary man, genius in the Overman who hath
arrived to strike off more fetters from our understanding. The savage who cannot
conceive of the number six, the orthodox mathematician who cannot conceive of the
fourth dimension, the philosopher who cannot conceive of the Absolute—all these are
one; all must be impregnated with the Divine Essence of the Phallic Yod of
Macroprosopus, and give birth to their idea. True (we may agree with Balzac), the
Absolute recedes; we never grasp it; but in the travelling there is joy. Am I no better
than a staphylococcus because my ideas still crowd in chains?
But we digress.
The last attempts to tabulate knowledge are the
Kabbala Denudata
of Knorr von
Rosenroth (a work incomplete and, in some of its parts, prostituted to the service of
dogmatic interpretation), the lost symbolism of the Vault in which Christian
Rosenkreutz is said to have been buried, some of the work of Dr. Dee and Sir Edward
Kelly, some very imperfect tables in Cornelius Agrippa, the “Art” of Raymond Lully,
some of the very artificial effusions of the esoteric Theosophists, and of late years the
knowledge of the Order Rosæ Rubeæ et Aureæ Crucis and the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn. Unluckily, the leading spirit in these latter societies
1
found that his
prayer, “Give us this day our daily whisky, and just a wee drappie mair for luck!” was
sternly answered, “When you have given us this day our daily Knowledge-lecture.”
Under these circumstances Daath got mixed with Dewar, and Beelzebub with
Buchanan.
But even the best of these systems is excessively bulky; modern methods have enabled
us to concentrate the substance of twenty thousand pages in two score.
The best of the serious attempts to systematise the results of Comparative Religion is
that made by Blavatsky. But though she had an immense genius for acquiring facts,
she had none whatever for sorting and selecting the essentials.
Grant Allen made a very slipshod experiment in this line; so have some of the
polemical rationalists; but the only man worthy of our notice is Frazer of the Golden
Bough. Here again, there is no tabulation; for us it is left to sacrifice literary charm,
and even some accuracy, in order to bring out the one great point.
i
This: That when a Japanese thinks of Hachiman, and a Boer of the Lord of Hosts, they
are not two thoughts, but one.
The cause of human sectarianism is not lack of sympathy in thought, but in speech;
and this it is our not unambitious design to remedy.
Every new sect aggravates the situation. Especially the Americans, grossly and
crapulously ignorant as they are of the rudiments of human language, seize like
mongrel curs upon the putrid bones of their decaying monkey-jabber, and gnaw and
tear them with fierce growls and howls.
The mental prostitute, Mrs. Eddy (for example), having invented the idea which
ordinary people call “God,” christened it “Mind,” and then by affirming a set of
propositions about “Mind,” which are only true of “God,” set all hysterical, dyspeptic,
crazy Amurrka by the ears. Personally, I don’t object to people discussing the
properties of four-sided triangles; but I draw the line when they use a well-known
word, such as pig, or mental healer, or dung-heap, to denote the object of their
paranoiac fetishism.
Even among serious philosophers the confusion is very great. Such terms as God, the
Absolute, Spirit, have dozens of connotations, according to the time and place of the
dispute and the beliefs of the disputants.
Time enough that these definitions and their inter-relation should be crystallised, even
at the expense of accepted philosophical accuracy.
2. The principal sources of our tables have been the philosophers and traditional
systems referred to above, as also, among many others, Pietri di Abano,
2
Lilly, Eliphaz
Levi, Sir R. Burton, Swami Vivekananda, the Hindu, Buddhist, and Chinese Classics,
the Qúran and its commentators, the Book of the Dead, and, in particular, original
research. The Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist, Moslem and Egyptian systems have never
before been brought into line with the Qabalah; the Tarot has never been made public.
Eliphaz Levi knew the true attributions but was forbidden to use them.
*
All this secrecy is very silly. An indicible Arcanum is an arcanum that
cannot
be
revealed. It is simply bad faith to swear a man to the most horrible penalties if he
betray . . ., etc., and then take him mysteriously apart and confide the Hebrew
Alphabet to his safe keeping.
3
This is perhaps only ridiculous; but it is a wicked
imposture to pretend to have received it from Rosicrucian manuscripts which are to be
found in the British Museum. To obtain money on these grounds, as has been done by
certain moderns, is clear (and, I trust, indictable) fraud.
The secrets of Adepts are not to be revealed to men. We only wish they were. When
a man comes to me and asks for the Truth, I go away and practice teaching the
Differential Calculus to a Bushman; and I answer the former only when I have
succeeded with the latter. But to withhold the Alphabet of Mysticism from the learner
is the device of a selfish charlatan. That which can be taught shall be taught, and that
which cannot be taught may at last be learnt.
*
This is probably true, though in agreement with the statement of the traducer of Levi’s
doctrine and the vilifier of his noble personality.
ii
3. As a weary but victorious warrior delights to recall his battles—Fortisan hæc olim
meminisse juvabit
*
—we would linger for a moment upon the difficulties of our task.
The question of sacred alphabets has been abandoned as hopeless. As one who should
probe the nature of woman, the deeper he goes the rottener it gets; so that at last it is
seen that there is no sound bottom. All is arbitrary;
†
withdrawing out caustics and
adopting a protective treatment, we point to the beautiful clean bandages and ask the
clinic to admire! To take one concrete example: the English T is clearly equivalent in
sound to the Hebrew
t
, the Greek
t
, the Arabic
P
and the Coptic
t
, but the numeration
is not the same. Again, we have a clear analogy in shape (perhaps a whole series of
analogies), which, on comparing the modern alphabets with primeval examples,
breaks up and is indecipherable.
The same difficulty in another form permeates the question of gods.
Priests, to propitiate their local fetish, would flatter him with the title of creator;
philosophers, with a wider outlook, would draw identities between many gods in order
to obtain a unity. Time and the gregarious nature of man have raised gods as ideas
grew more universal; sectarianism has drawn false distinctions between identical gods
for polemical purposes.
Thus, where shall we put Isis, favouring nymph of corn as she was? As the type of
motherhood? As the moon? As the great goddess Earth? As Nature? As the Cosmic
Egg from which all Nature sprang? For as time and place have changed, so she is all
of these!
What of Jehovah, that testy senior of Genesis, that lawgiver of Leviticus, that Phallus
of the depopulated slaves of the Egyptians, that jealous King-God of the times of the
Kings, that more spiritual conception of the Captivity, only invented when all
temporal hope was lost, that mediæval battleground of cross-chopped logic, that Being
stripped of all his attributes and assimilated to Parabrahman and the Absolute of the
Philosopher?
Satan, again, who in Job is merely Attorney-General and prosecutes for the Crown,
acquires in time all the obloquy attaching to that functionary in the eyes of the
criminal classes, and becomes a slanderer. Does any one really think that any angel is
such a fool as to try to gull the Omniscient God into injustice to his saints?
Then, on the other hand, what of Moloch, that form of Jehovah denounced by those
who did not draw huge profit from his rites? What of the savage and morose Jesus of
the Evangelicals, cut by their petty malice from the gentle Jesus of the Italian
children? How shall we identify the thaumaturgic Chauvinist of Matthew with the
metaphysical Logos of John? In short, while the human mind is mobile, so long will
the definitions of all our terms vary.
*
[
Lat.
approx. “perhaps it will be pleasant to remember these things one day.”]
†
All symbolism is perhaps ultimately so; there is no necessary relation in thought between the
idea of a mother, the sound of the child’s cry “Ma,” and the combination of lines
ma
. This, too,
is the extreme case, since “ma” is the sound naturally just produced by opening the lips and
breathing. Hindus would make a great fuss over this true connection; but it is very nearly the
only one. All these beautiful schemes break down sooner or later, mostly sooner.
iii
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]