Free Download The Paradoxes of the Highest Science By Eliphas Levi
2019 | 78 Pages | ISBN: 1912925966 | PDF | 1 MB
MANY paths lead to the mountain-top, and many and diverse are the rifts in the Veil, through which glimpses may be obtained of the secret things of the Universe.The Abbé Louis Constant, better known by his nom de plume of ÉLIPHAS LÉVI, was doubtless a seer; but, though his studies were by no means confined to this, he saw only through the medium of the kabala, the perfect sense of which is, now-a-days, hidden from all mere kabalists, and his visions were consequently always imperfect and often much distorted and confused.Moreover, he was for a considerable portion of his career a Roman Catholic priest, and as such had to keep terms, to a certain extent, with his church, and even later, when he was unfrocked, he hesitated to shock the prejudices of the public, and never succeeded in even wholly freeing himself from the bias of his early clerical training. Consequently he not only erred at times in good faith, not only constantly wrote ambiguously to avoid a direct collision with his ecclesiastical chiefs or current creeds, but he not unfrequently put forward Dogmas, which, taken in their obvious straightforward meanings, he certainly did not believe–nay, I may say, certainly knew to be false.Magic is the divinity of man conquered by science in union with faith; the true Magi are Men-Gods, in virtue of their intimate union with the divine principle. They are without fear and without desires; they are dominated by no falsehood; they share no error; they love without illusion and suffer without impatience, for they leave all to happen as it may, and repose in the quietude of the eternal thought. They lean upon religion, but religion does not weigh on them; religion is the Sphynx which obeys, but never devours them. They know what religion is, and they feel that it is necessary and eternal.Eliphas Levi was one of the most influential writers on the stream of Theosophical and Occult figures at the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th, including Blavatsky and Crowley.Paradoxes of the Highest Science reflects Levi’s efforts to reconcile his deep religious conviction — he spent part of his life as a Catholic priest (his real name was Abbe Louis Constant) — with his mature perspective from a lifetime of esoteric studies.The "Paradoxes" he surveys include "Love is the realisation of the impossible";"Liberty is obedience to the Law",and "The Imagination realises what it invents".
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