Book of Thoth Study Group #4: Evidence for the Initiated Tradition - Eliphaz Levi

Aeon418

J. Daniel Gunther believes that this drawing by Levi contains a clue that he knew the "correct" attributions.

http://www.propheticexplorer.com/images/levi_large.jpg

J. Daniel Gunther said:
Levi has carefully drawn the Ecclesiastical Sign of Benediction and surrounded it with a host of symbols and words of interest. In examining such a fascinating illustration, one must wonder what explanation Levi offers in the text of the book.

He does not offer an explanation. In fact, he doesn't mention the drawing at all except in the summary of illustrations in the front of the book. I have remarked on numerous occasions that such absences in magical books make me suspicious. If one happened to be reading a book on Magic and there is an illustration lacking any explanation - or not even mentioned at all - perhaps one should pay special attention to that. It may be that by his obvious silence the author is trying to leave a very important clue. It is a method that Crowley used extensively.
This quote is from a section dealing with Crowley's "obvious silence" around the Hierophant's inverted benediction on Atu V. But in a footnote Gunther claims that the reversed R (or is it Cyrillic?) in ADVMBRATVЯ is a clue that Levi new the attributions. In this instance R = Resh.

PER BENEDICTIONEN IHVH MALEDICTVS IHVH ADVMBRATVЯ

"By the blessing of IHVH the cursed IHVH is foreshadowed."
J. Daniel Gunther said:
Notably, the final R is reversed in the word ADVMBRATVR. Levi, who knew the correct attributions but did not divulge them, is here hinting that R = Resh, and the reversed Я = the Averse of the Sun of Atu XIX, or darkness.
 

Ross G Caldwell

Two clarifications:

It is not surprising that Crowley would try to assign the authorship to Levi, his great hero and "predecessor".

Crowley didn’t claim that Levi authored the Cipher Manuscript, just that he had probably seen it and annotated it. This is one of the bases of his belief that Levi knew the “true attribution” of the Tarot trumps to the Hebrew alphabet.

However, the claim that Levi knew the Cipher Manuscript was fostered in the earliest days of the Golden Dawn, originally made in two of Westcott’s supporting documents for his story of how the manuscript came into his hands.

The first in the chronology is a note of a purported conversation between the Reverend Adolphus Frederick Alexander Woodford and Westcott supposed to have taken place in February 1886, written by Westcott, perhaps after 1890:

Woodford reportedly speaking: “The Cipher translates into English, yet they came to me from a correspondent in France with a history that they had passed through Levi’s hands and indeed a loose page among them has a note signed A.L.C.

(quoted in Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn (1978), p. 9; “A.L.C.” was taken to mean “Alphonse Louis Constant”; however, there is no sheet of the manuscript that has a note signed “A.L.C.”, and no researcher has been able to discover such a note)

The second is in the first letter purportedly from Anna Sprengel to Westcott, who noted “Received November 26, 1887”:

“I am very glad to hear that the private papers which you describe have been found once more, they were lost by poor Abbé Constant years ago and then came into the hands of two Englishmen who applied for leave to use them.”

(translation of Albert Essinger, friend of Westcott, in Westcott’s hand; from Gilbert, The Golden Dawn Scrapbook, p. 27; first page of original reproduced in Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, p. 27)

Like the manuscripts the Book of Law itself claims a supernatural source.

The Cipher Manuscript doesn’t claim a supernatural source, or even a natural, human one. It is an anonymous, heterogenous document that speaks with its own assumed authority.

Addendum:

In the light of Crowley’s belief that Levi had seen or possessed the Cipher manuscipt, it seems that most members of the G.D. likewise did. It even appears likely that Westcott himself did not know who wrote the Cipher manuscript, even if he found them among Mackenzie’s papers. He could quite easily have believed that Mackenzie merely inherited them, given the latter’s exotic Continental connections and association with Frederick Hockley. But Mathers, one of those closest to the heart of the matter, sometimes made ambivalent assertions.

In a letter to Percy Bullock at the height of the schism in April,1900, Mathers wrote:

“I know to a nicety the capacities of of my human brain and intelligence and what these of themselves can grasp, and therefore know also when the forces of the Beyond, and the Presences of the Infinite manifest, and when the Great Adepts of the this planet, the Secret Chiefs of the Order are with me. Do you imagine that where such men as Court de Gebelin, Etteilla, Christian and Levi failed in their endeavour to discover the Tarot attributions, that I would be able of my own power and intelligence alone to lift the veil which has baffled them?”

(quoted in Howe, op. cit., p. 216; also discussed in Decker and Dummett, A History of the Occult Tarot, 1870-1970 (2002), p. 110)

Here, in 1900, he clearly states that Levi, among others, failed to find the true attributions. Therefore, Levi did not know the attributions of the Cipher manuscript.

However, in a Tarot lecture for his Alpha et Omega order, which began around 1903 (although he may have written it earlier), he clearly asserts that Levi did know them:

“Eliphaz Lévi, not only a clever man, but a deep occult student, and an initiate of the hidden knowledge, rated these singular cards at an inestimable value; and saw in them the key of all the Qabalistic and Egyptian Knowledge. Furthermore, be it remembered that he had in his possession those cypher MSS of the Order of the A.’.O.’. as a cypher note of recent date signed with the initials A.L.C. testifies; further stating that he had made use of some of the knowledge contained therein in his occult works. But he probably felt he was not at liberty to divulge the true attribution of the Tarot which was given in the cypher MSS and the attribution which he gave in the Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, and which has been accepted among the unitiated, is very different to that which has been treasured in the Order of A.’.O.’. for centuries and which we must all keep carefully concealed from the knowledge of the profane. To me and and to other fellow students who had earnestly studied the Tarot scheme of Lévi and Etteilla, the A.’.O.’. attribution came like a revelation and with it before us we could see at a glance that it contained the real secret of the Tarot, however ingenuous the theories advanced by Levi and Etteilla had seemed till then.

(“On The Tarot Trumps: Prefatory Remarks by V.H. Frater ‘S. Rioghail Mo Dhream 5°6°”, in R. A. Gilbert, ed., The Sorcerer and His Apprentice: Unknown Hermetic Writings of S.L. MacGregor Mathers and J. W. Brodie-Innes (1983), pp. 79-80; Gilbert’s note has that this is Brodie-Innes’ copy from Mathers’ manuscript copy, circa 1910)