Why is High Priestess Moon? - Many Sins of Eliphas Levi (part one)
The Original Sin of Eliphas Levi
So at this point I was like, wait, did I miss something with Levi? And sure fucking enough, in his The Key to the Great Mysteries, the book I only glanced at first, because it feels mythical and poetical in the bits I’ve read. But, it is indeed, my own Vatican papyrus:
Beth: Reflection, thought, the moon, the angel Gabriel, prince of mysteries;
Ghimel: Love, will, Venus, the angel Anael, prince of life and death;
Daleth: Strength, power, Jupiter, Sachiel Melech, king of kings;
Caph: Violence, struggle, work Mars, Samael Zebaoth, prince of the phalanxes
Phe: Eloquence, intelligence, Mercury, Raphael, prince of sciences
Resch: Destruction and regeneration, Time, Saturn, Cassiel, king of tombs and solitudes
Tau: Truth, light, the Sun, Michael, king of the Elohim.
(Part 3, Book 1 - Mysteries of Magnetism, Chapter 3 - Mysteries of Hallucinations and the Evocation of Spirits. All of the further quotes in this mini-chapter come from here, unless stated otherwise)
This book gives the GRA-but-not-quite associations that Papus and Christian both followed!
So….. what the hell was he doing here? Is this a double blind, to make sure his students read? Is this another esoteric cover of real facts? After all, he didn’t mention the elements, or the zodiac! Is everyone fucking pranking me?
But maybe there is a method for this madness. For the purposes of this, I need to reproduce the whole section of The Key here, apologies for the lengthy citations.
The Word, or speech, being, according to initiates of this science, the entirety of revelation, the principles of the higher Kabbalah must be found contained within the very signs that compose the primitive alphabet. Now, here is what we find in all Hebrew grammars.
There is a fundamental and universal letter that generates all others. It is the letter yod. There are two other mother letters, opposite and analogous to each other: the letter aleph k and the letter mem d, according to others the letter schin .
Each combination of letters represents a series of numbers. The numbers represent absolute philosophical ideas. The letters are abbreviated hieroglyphs. Let us now examine the hieroglyphic and philosophical meanings of each of the twenty-two letters. (See Bellarmine, Reuchlin, Saint Jerome, Kabbala Denudata, the Sefer Jezirah, Father Schott's Technica Curiosa, Pico della Mirandola, and other authors, especially those in the Pistorius Collection.)
There are seven double letters: the aleph, the ghim, the daleth, the khach, the phech, the resh, and the tau.
Finally, there are twelve single letters, which are the other letters; in all, twenty-two.
Unity is represented relatively by the aleph; the ternary is represented either by the yod, the mem, the shin, or by the aleph, the mem, the shin.
The septenary by the beth, gimel, daleth, caph, phe, resch and tau.The duodenal by the other letters. The duodenal is the ternary multiplied by four; and it thus falls within the symbolism of the septenary. Each letter represents a number:
The ghim—The absolute principle, the productive being; The mem—The spirit, or the Jachin of Solomon; The Schin. —Matter, or the Bohas column.
(repeat of the previously quoted section)
The Simple. The simple letters are divided into four ternaries, each bearing the four letters of the divine tetragrammaton as its title. In the divine tetragrammaton, the yod, as we have just stated, represents the active productive principle. — The heh represents the passive productive principle, the cteïs. — The vau represents the union of the two, or the lingam. And the final heh is the image of the secondary productive principle, that is, the passive reproduction in the world of effects and forms. The twelve simple letters, divided into groups of three, reproduce the concept of the primordial triangle, with the interpretation and under the influence of each of the letters of the tetragrammaton. It is clear that the philosophy and religious dogma of Kabbalah are indicated here in a complete but veiled manner.
So, this isn’t Sefer Yetzirah. If we look at any translation, those are not features applied to SY planet attributions. It's a very hollow shell of it. For starters, the whole point of double letters is their dual nature and that they show two sides of one concept.
Seven Doubles: BGD KPRT (בגד כפרת)/ Their foundation is/ Wisdom, Wealth, Seed,/ Life, Dominance, Peace and Grace.
Seven Doubles: BGD KPRT (בגד כפרת)/ in speech and in transposition./ The transpose of Wisdom is Folly/ The transpose of Wealth is Poverty/ The transpose of Seed is Desolation/ The transpose of Life is Death/ The transpose of Dominance is Subjugation/ The transpose of Peace is War/ The transpose of Grace is Ugliness
(Sefaria GRA version)
Not only do we see no hint of duality here, we also don’t see elements applied to mother letters OR zodiac assigned to simple letters. Well, sometimes Sefirot also gets the planetary attributions, and archangel associations, so maybe it’s related to that? But which ones is he assigning planets to and in what matter? (You have 7 planets and 10 Sefirot) And how does it translate to the letters here, other than vague order?
Again, the elements are usually in order and applied to three explicitly called out mother letters. Zodiac signs also go in specific order, because they mark the progression through the year. This makes most of the template of letters over cards hardcoded. Planets are the problem here and they are the unique fingerprints of the system.
Archangels won’t help us out much, as this specific planet - archangel correspondence can be found in many grimoires. (For anyone curious here is the assignment comparison of common grimoires and explanations: Esoterica Archives, Heptamer) As for the meanings, they correspond fairly well to the planets.
But wait, what the fuck is up with applying yod to mothers? It’s categorically a simple letter! What was he doing? It’s almost like he is mistaking its meaning in Tetragrammaton, where it is the first letter, for the fact that it’s a mother letter - even though that’s just not what they even are as a category! He doesn’t even associate them with elements, but with vague spirit-matter concepts! He defends the yod thing with:
There is a main and universal letter generating all the others. It’s the iod.
But that doesn’t make it a mother letter! It’s one reading based on interpreting the unpronounceable name of God and its first letter! You are working in one specific tradition and you are ripping it apart and playing with it like it’s a tool, its categories worthless, it’s boundaries defined by just anything! Can this guy fucking read??? THREE translations of Sefer Yetzirah at your fingertips!
Finally, there are twelve simples which are the other letters; in total, twenty-two.
No, because you ripped out the yod and put it into mothers- and then
in the summary of meanings you just slid it back into simples like
nothing happened. It can’t do triple duty! “According to others it’s
either mem or shin”. Now, he literally assigned shin to the Fool,
who he sees as the corrupted folly of a man! I think that’s possibly why
he kicked out shin! But this is me ad-hoc adding my interpretations
and trying to work through the logic of this whole ordeal. It’s possibly
more likely he wanted to uphold yod as a generative principle.
Let’s now question the allegories of Genesis. «In principle (iod, the
unity of being), /Eloim, the balanced forces (Jakin and Bohas) made
heaven (spirit) and earth (matter), in other words good and evil,
affirmation and negation.» This is how the story of Moses begins.
Where did he GET THIS?
This is a system followed by the entire French Occult school as well, did noone stop and think about this? How Papus made a system out of this is anyone’s guess. (Hey, he received a papyrus scroll with a french kiss from Paul Christian so maybe he didn’t have to!)
In a bit of misdirection, he goes on to ramble about some stupid secular historian, who only sees the 7 planets and 12 zodiacs but not the correspondences/metaphors applied to them.
What Dupuis lacked to understand the universal religious dogma of Kabbalah was the science of that beautiful hypothesis, partially demonstrated and increasingly realized daily by scientific discoveries: universal analogy. Deprived of this key to the transcendental dogma, he could only see in all the gods the sun, the seven planets, and the twelve signs of the zodiac, but he did not see in the sun the image of Plato's logos, in the seven planets the seven notes of the celestial scale, and in the zodiac the quadrature of the ternary cycle of all initiations.
I think these two things, so close together, made his followers focus on Sefer Yetzirah as the main source of correspondences and ignore the fact his own attribution system is a wretched beast of abomination.
Interrogating Writings of Eliphas
But is it? I feel I’ve been so gaslit by the esoteric writers by now, I also felt a bit like “Wait, was he trolling? Being a goofy guy here?” After all, his last sentence in the section says that the philosophy is veiled. And Crowley writes this note in the translation:
This is all deliberately wrong. That Levi knew the correct attributions is evident from a M.S. annotated by himself. Levi refused to reveal these attributions, rightly enough, as his grade was not high enough, and the time is not ripe. Note the subtlety of the form of his statement. The correct attributions are in Liber 777. --- O. M.
Now Crowley is jerking off his own attributions and the size of his grade here, a classic case of esoteric ideas 101, but it did make me feel doubtful. After all, I discovered this after I was done with The Key to the Great Mysteries. What’s to say Eliphas didn’t write more?
First, let’s return to Dogma and Ritual of Magic, which, before I even suspected the hell I would condemn myself to, I only lightly skimmed.
These ten primary concepts, attached to the first ten characters of the
primitive alphabet, signifying both principles and numbers, are what the
masters of Kabbalah call the ten Sephiroth.
///
With the help of this purely dogmatic explanation, one can already understand the figures of the cabalistic alphabet of the Tarot. Thus, figure number 1, called the Magician, represents the active principle in the unity of divine and human self-creation; number 2, commonly called the High Priestess, represents dogmatic unity founded on numbers, it is the Kabbalah or Gnosis personified; number 3 represents divine Spirituality under the emblem of a winged woman who holds in one hand the apocalyptic eagle, and, in the other, the world suspended from the end of her scepter. The other figures are as clear and as easily explained as these first ones. (Dogma, Chapter 10 - The Kabbalah)(Fuck you)
This suggests to me that he connected letters to Sefirot and generated a planetary correspondence from that. However, based on this passage, he should just assign the first ten letters to ten Sefirot and call it a day. Not all double letters are contained in that part of the alphabet. This is a false lead for our search, a Fool’s gold. But it may yet be of worth. Levi’s thinking is so twisted that it beggars belief - in absence of anything else it remains at least an entertaining theory.
So, to theorize: he read Sefer Yetzirath and basically just forced mothers and doubles (plus the smuggled in yod) to stand for Sefirot. Levi has a simple first 10 letter scheme for his Sefirot application. He reads SY and gets to sneak in a different kind of 10. The first three get the mother letters, and thank god I don’t need them for my argument, because I am not untangling that. This is where he could have forced yod to be a mother letter, because it corresponds to Kether meaning-wise, to him. These three are seen as separate, and sometimes called supernary, by the way. The next step would be giving doubles to the lower Sefirot. And this is where my theory hits a massive snag, cause I don’t have a clue how he applied double letters to them. I try order, reverse order, Ptolemaic order (basically works on how fast the planet moves), reverse Ptolemaic order, loosely apply features he gave them, etc. Nothing hits. Nothing follows. Another wall. We turn around and seek a different way out of the labyrinth. Is there even an exit?
Another dagger is that the meaning of the double letters in The Key are unrelated to the Sefirot, and seem derived purely from the planetary features.
And this section in his treatise of Astrology (Chapter 17) in Dogma proves that Levi’s greatest act of magic will be killing me:
According to Ptolemy, the sun dries, and the moon moistens; according to the Kabbalists, the sun represents rigorous Justice, and the moon is sympathetic to Mercy.
So… this assigns Sun to Geburah/Justice, and Moon to Chesed/Mercy. Geburah NEVER connects to tau in any literature I’ve ever read. Or to the Sun. WHICH Kabbalists Levi? To venture a guess, it feels simply like an extension of Michael as archangel of Justice and well, he is connected to the Sun. But if we follow this problematic attribution, we track it to The Key to the Great Mysteries, and its Supplements. There we find the assignment of Sefirot to the alchemical metals, in Levi’s translation of the Fragments From The Asch Mezareph. And no, if you are wondering, these assignments don’t correspond to his epic prank section of attributions in the Kabbalah section in any way, in the order, or in any single logical correspondence following I can think of.
Briefly on Asch Mezareph: According to Raphael Patai and Gershom Scholem, the Aesch-Mezareph dates from the 16th or early 17th centuries. The original Hebrew text, if there was one, does not appear to have survived. The work was first published in Latin in Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala denudata, Sulzbach, 1677-1684. A translation into English was issued in W. Wynn Wescott's 'Collectanea Hermetica' series at the end of the 19th century. (https://www.alchemywebsite.com/aesch.html)
This is another massive rabbit hole by the way. Suffice to say it gave our boy another excuse to put things into a Tree of Life shape and the assignments are found below.
Numbers represent absolute philosophical ideas. The letters are abbreviated hieroglyphs. This is what he said above the section where he shows the meanings of the letters. And I strongly suspect that no matter where I look, I will not find the correct attributions. Because it’s all just one big game with uncle Levi of analogies and metaphors. He uses and plays with letters, Sefirot and Tarot as multifunctional symbols alike.
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