textual errors in the Conclusion

The Conclusion is long quotes from Lévi followed by some reflections by Wirth. Two of the long quotes are short characterizations of the 22 arcana. In the first set, item 2 is of interest (p. 201 of the 2012, 196 of the earlier). Item 1 had the sentence, "All announces an active intelligent cause" ("Tout annonce une cause active, intelligente."). Then for item 2, the published English version reads:

 2. The number serves as proof of the living unit.

The French is

2. Le nombre sert de preuve à la unité. 

My translation (also that of the English translation of Levi) would be

 2. Number serves as proof of unity.

The saying is mysterious in either case, and "Le nombre" is ambiguous between "the number"--i.e. 2, I suppose--and number as an abstraction, like unity. I think the idea is that without multiplicity there would be no concept of unity, and vice versa, but I may be wrong. There must be a translation of Lévi's original somewhere, but I can't find it.

Item 17 speaks of "Vesper and her dew"--"Vesper et sa rosée". Actually, Vesper as a god is male. English requires a gender here, whereas the French doesn't. Since he has a maiden on the card, perhaps Wirth was thinking female. He would have done better to choose Venus.

The next set has several items of interest. Its number 4 (p. 203, 198 of the earlier) speaks of "the tetragram, the quarter, the cubic stone or its base". The French has "quaternaire", for which the proper English translation would be "quaternary".

Number 6 goes, in the published English version (p. 204):

6. Linking, crochet, phallus, tangle, union, embrace, struggle, antagonism, combination, balance. 

"Crochet" in English is knitting. Probably Wirth meant "hook". Otherwise, the translation has "phallus" where the French has "lingam". Probably Lévi meant an allusion to Hinduism rather than to Greece.

Then for 8:

Balance scales, attraction and repulsion, life fear, promise and threat. 

The French has

Balance, attraît et répulsion, vie, frayeur, promesse et menace. 

The French "balance" means "scales"; in general, for the English "balance" the French would say "equilibre" (as Wirth does in item 6, at the end). However it may be that the sense of the English "balance" is not excluded. So:

Scales [Fr. balance], attraction and repulsion, life, terror, promise and threat. 

Several of the items (nos. 13, 14, 16, 16, 17, 19) speak of a "sky" of this or that planet, and, with less orthodoxy, of the soul. In Ptolemaic astronomy the planets each have a "heaven", for ten in all. The French is "ciel", which could be translated either as "sky" or "heaven" but here means "heaven". Wirth is quoting Lévi's idea that the later arcana correspond to particular heavens, in a descent from the macrocosm to the microcosm.

Next is a quote from Lévi about arranging the arcana in either a square or a triangle, and "placing the even numbers in opposition and reconciling them with the uneven numbers". "Uneven" would be more simply put as "odd". Then comes:

Thus the solution of all questions of magic is that of the pentagram, and all antimonies are explained by a harmonious unity.

Here the word "antimonies" should of course be replaced with "antinomies", exactly the same in French and English.

Then (p. 205/199) Wirth speaks in his own voice, attacking unnamed so-called "occultists" for their simple-mindedness. There is a sentence that as it reads attributes simple-mindedness to the Popess (known in this translation as the Priestess.

Did this occultist bow before the Priestess for whom nothing occult exists any more?

he French is

Se sont-ils inclinés devant la Papesse, ces occultists pour qui n'existe plus rien d'occulte? 

which means:

Did they bow before the Popess, these occultists for whom nothing occult [or hidden] exists any more? 

It is not the Popess for whom nothing hidden exists, but the occultists whom Wirth is attacking.

Wirth concludes this paragraph in another sentence whose meaning is unclear in the translation:

Lured by their faith in doctrines which have the gift of winning them, they swear in the name of Masters whose profound thought they have not understood and they erect in Perez their occultist church.

Who or where is this "Perez". Actually the word is "Pères", Fathers, as we can see:

Fasciné par leur foi en des doctrines qui ont eu le don de les séduire, ils jurent au nom de Maîtres dont ils n'ont pas saisi le pensée profonde et qu'ils érigent en Pères de leur église occultiste.

The sentence should read:

Lured by their faith in doctrines which have the gift of seducing them, they swear in the name of Masters whose profound thought they have not understood and whom they erect as Fathers of their occultist church.

Then (206/199) a feminine personification under goes a change of gender in translation. The English version has:

In the interest of human progress the time has come to unite Imagination and Reason. The female and the male must support each other in order to give the great redeeming light to the world.

A worthy sentiment. However in the French the second sentence reads:

Les deux soeurs doivent se soutenir pour octoyer au monde la grande lumière rédemptrice.

That is,

The two sisters must support each other... 

On the next page (207/200) Wirth talks, in the English, about how without imagination, we are "reducing our spirit's field of action", such that "there is some obscurantism in the philosophy of the rationalists". The word "esprit" can mean either "mind" and "spirit". Since later he talks about "notre avenir mental"--our mental future--it is clear that "mind" is the proper translation. He compares those who do not "dare to imagine" to those who stay on land due to ignorance of the laws of ocean navigation

Shall we stay on land when our mental future is on the water?

(Resterons-nous à terre alors que notre avenir mental est sur l'eau?

Finally, there is his last sentence, before his interesting Appendix. The English version has:

Turn inwards, following the precept of the Wise man who urges ou to search for the Stone hidden in the depths of self? 

But Wirth is not speaking the language of Carl Jung or religious mysticism. What he says is:

Pénètre en toi-même, fidèle au précepts du Sage qui t'angage à chercher la Pierre cachée en ton intérieure le plus profond. 

That is:

Penetrate inside yourself, faithful to the precepts of the Sage who urges you to search for the Stone hidden in your deepest interior.

The language is meant to echo alchemy. The Emerald Tablet says, "For it is able to penetrate and subdue everything subtle and everything crude and hard." And one of the alchemical emblems for which Wirth shows us the Latin says, "Visit the interior of the earth, and rectifying, you will find the hidden stone".

The Appendix of the 2012 has the title "Some Indications on the Symbolism of the Pantacles which accompany the present work". The earlier English version, like the 1966 French, had "Pentacles". The 2012 has restored the original spelling back to "Pantacles". This gesture of faithfulness to Wirth was unnecessary, as the word "pantacles" has no clear meaning in English and is not listed in any regular dictionary. The word "pentacle", however, has established itself in English as a generic word for a talisman., not only as a five-sided figure but also as a generic word for a magical talisman of a "similar" form, with the question of how similar left open. The English Oxford Dictionary, internet edition, says, for "pentacle":

A pentagram, esp. one enclosed in a circle; a talisman or magical symbol in the shape of or inscribed with a pentagram. Also, in extended use: any similar magical symbol (freq. applied to a hexagram formed by two intersecting or interlaced equilateral triangles).

As is clear from Wirth's examples, by "pantacle" he means a magical symbol, in two dimensions, of either an abstract design, a picture of something that would normally exist in three dimensions, a series of inscribed words, or a combination of these.