Éliphas Lévi on the Two Opposing Forces

Éliphas Lévi, Arthur Edward Waite (T) · Down to Earth Series · 7 pages

Éliphas Lévi in Arthur Edward Waite's translation, presented under the heading “The French Magus on the two opposing forces.” Its companion in this series, “Lévi warns the impudent,” comes from the same translator.

The argument starts from a definition: equilibrium is the consequence of two forces, and if two forces are absolutely and invariably equal the equilibrium will be immobility, and therefore the negation of life. Movement is accordingly the result of an alternate preponderance, an impulsion given to one side of a balance determining the motion of the other, so that contraries act on one another throughout nature by correspondence and analogical connection. Life is composed of an aspiration and a respiration; creation is described as the assumption of a shadow to bound light, of a void to give space to plenitude, of a passive fructified principle to sustain the active generating one; all nature is bisexual, and the movement producing the appearances of death and life is a continual generation. A series of parallel lines carries the same point through: that God loves the void he made in order to fill it, science the ignorance it enlightens, strength the weakness it supports, day the night it pursues round the world; that love is at once a thirst and a plenitude; and that he who gives receives. Knowing the law of this change is called the first principle of the great magical arcanum. Lévi then brings the argument down to the laboratory, pointing to electrical and magnetic phenomena as the material register of the same affinities and antipathies — the marriage of copper with zinc and the action of metals in the galvanic pile — and closes the passage by turning to the human body as subject, like the earth, to a dual law of attraction and radiation.

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