Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Eliphas Levi, Lover of Humanity

This I love:

`We will not speak of the criticism of Voltaire. That great mind was dominated by an ardent love of truth and justice, but he lacked that rectitude of heart, which the intelligence of faith gives.

Voltaire could not admit faith, because he did not know how to love. The spirit of charity did not reveal itself to that soul which had no tenderness, and he bitterly criticized the hearth of which he did not feel the warmth, and the lamp of which he did not see the light.

If religion were such as he saw it, he would have been a thousand times right to attack it, and one would be obliged to fall on one's knees before the heroism of his courage.

Voltaire would be the Messiah of good sense, the Hercules destructor of fanaticism. ... But he laughed too much to understand Him who said: "Happy are they who weep," and the philosophy of laughter will never have anything in common with the religion of tears.'

ELIPHAS LEVI -

Ordained a Catholic deacon in Paris in 1835, later author of The Dogma and Ritual of Transcendental Magic in 1855-56, later penitent and lover of Christ, who not only knew that Christ established the **way** of tears in the world of the serpent, but who knew that Christ was in his Church …

Now Eliphas Levi could be considered one of the founding fathers of the New Age movement, arguably writing the first popular books on esotericism. (He came before Blavatsky and clearly influenced her).

However all of the above serves to clarify why, although Levi encouraged Hermeticism, he could never join with the inner dynamics that go alongside so much, if not all of the New Age: the dismissal of the old to make way for the new.

Even though, with the immense and radiant heart that he had, and a mind filled with profound paradox and contradiction, he clearly saw, felt and acknowledged Voltaire’s ‘ardent love of truth and justice’, he knew, he knew, I say that destruction was not the way …

Oh Eliphas Levi, dear friend, my heart goes ever out to you …

2 comments:

Roger Buck said...

Briefly, head, he continued to probe the esoteric depth of the world.

But he renounced magic as a path of power.

Thus the Catholic anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot writes: ‘Eliphas Levi … having surpassed the bounds of ceremonial magic, concentrated on the mysticism and gnosis of Christian Hermeticism. He passed through the Faustian trial, just as Saint-Martin did'. More can be found by consulting the index of this genuinely sublime book.

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