Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual (Dogme et rituel de la haute magie)

Of all the arts which have originated in ancient magian wisdom astrology is now the most misunderstood. No one believes any longer in the universal harmonies of nature and in the necessary interlacing of all effects with all causes. Moreover, true astrology, that which connects with the unique and universal dogma of the Kabbalah, became profaned among the Greeks and among the Eomans of the decline. The doctrine of the seven spheres and the three mobilies, primitively issuing ,from the sephirotic decade, the character of the planets governed by angels, whose names have been changed into those of Pagan divinities, the influence of the spheres on one another, the destiny attached to numbers, the scale of proportion between the celestial hierarchies corresponding to the human hierarchies — all this has been materialised and degraded into superstition by genethliacal soothsayers and erecters of horoscopes during the decline and the middle ages. The restoration of astrology to its primitive purity would be, in a sense, the creation of an entirely new science ; here let us attempt merely to indicate its first principles, with their more immediate and approximate consequences. We have said that the astral light receives and preserves the impressions of all visible things ; it follows from this that the daily position of the heaven is reflected in this light, which, being the chief agent of life, operates the conception, gestation, and birth of children by a sequence of apparatuses naturally designed to this end. Now, if this light be sufficiently prodigal of images to impart to the fruit of the womb the visible imprints of a maternal fantasy or appetite, still more will it transmit to the plastic and indeterminate

temperament of a newly -born child the atmospheric impressions and diverse influences which, in the entire planetary system, are consequent at a given moment upon such or such particular aspect of the stars. Nothing is indifferent in nature ; a stone more or a stone less upon a road may break or completely modify the destinies of the greatest men or even the largest empires ; still more must the position of this or that star in the sky have an influence on the child who is born, who enters by the very fact of his birth into the universal harmony of the sidereal world. The stars are bound to one another by the attractions which hold them in equilibrium and cause them to move with uniformity through space. From all spheres . unto all spheres there stretch these indestructible threads of light, and there is no point upon any planet to which one of them is not attached. The true adept in astrology must, therefore, give heed to the precise time and place of the birth which is in question ; then, after an exact calculation of the astral influences, it remains for him to compute the chances of estate, that is to say, the advantages or hindrances which the child must one day meet with by reason of position, relatives, inherited tendencies, and hence natural proclivities, in the fulfilment of his destinies. Finally, he will still have to take into consideration human liberty and its initiative, should the child eventually come to be a true man, and to isolate himself by an intrepid will from fatal influences and from the chain of destiny. It will be seen that we do not allow too much to astrology, but so much as we leave it is indubitable ; it is the scientific and magical calculus of probabilities.

Astrology is as ancient as astronomy, and indeed it is more ancient ; all seers of lucid antiquity have accorded it their fullest confidence ; now, we must not condemn and reject in a shallow manner anything which comes before us protected and supported by such imposing authorities. Long and patient observations, conclusive comparisons, frequently repeated experiences, must have led the old sages to their decisions, and to refute them the same labour must be undertaken from an opposite standpoint. Paracelsus was perhaps the last of the great practical astrologers ; he cured diseases by talismans formed under astral influences ; he distinguished upon all bodies the mark of their dominant star ; there, according to him, was the true universal medicine, the absolute science of nature, lost by man’s own fault, and recovered only by a small number of initiates. To recognise the sign of each star upon men, animals, and plants, is the true natural science of Solomon, that science which is said to be lost, but the principles of which are preserved notwithstanding, as are all other secrets, in the symbolism of the Kabbalah. It will be readily understood that in order to read the stars one must know the stars themselves ; now, this knowledge is obtained by the kabbalistic domification of the sky and by the understanding of the celestial planisphere, recovered and explained by Gaffarel. In this planisphere the constellations form Hebrew letters, and the mythological figures may be replaced by the symbols of the Tarot.

To this same planisphere Gaffarel refers the origin of patriarchal writing, and in the chains of starry attraction the first lineaments of primitive characters may very well have been found, in which case the celestial book would have served as the model of Henoch’s, and the kabbalistic alphabet would have been the synopsis of the entire sky. This is not wanting in poetry, nor, above all, in probability, and the study of the Tarot, which is evidently the primitive and hieroglyphic work of Henoch, as was divined by the erudite William Postel, is sufficient to convince us hereof.

The signs imprinted in the astral light by the reflection and attraction of the stars is reproduced, therefore, as the sages have discovered, on all bodies which are formed by the conjunction of that light. Men bear the signs of their star on their forehead chiefly, and in their hands ; animals in their whole form, and in their individual signs ; plants in their leaves and seed ; minerals in their veins and their grain. The study of these characters was the entire life- work of Paracelsus, and the figures on his talismans are the result of his researches ; he has, however, left us no key to them, so that the astral kabbalistic alphabet with its correspondences still remains to be done ; as regards publicity, the science of unconventional magical writing stopped with the planisphere of Gaffarel. The serious art of divination rests wholly in the knowledge of these signs. Chiromancy is the art of reading the writing of the stars in the lines of the hand, and physiognomy seeks the same or analogous characters upon the countenance of its inquirers. As a fact, the lines formed on the human face by nervous contractions are determined fatally, and the radiation of the nervous tissue is absolutely analogous to those networks which are formed between the worlds by the chains of starry attraction. The fatalities of life are, therefore, written necessarily in our wrinkles, and a first glance frequently reveals upon the forehead of a stranger either one or more of the mysterious letters of the kabbalistic planisphere.

Should the letter be jagged and laboriously inscribed, there has been a struggle between will and fatality, and in his most powerful emotions and tendencies, the individual’s entire past manifests to the magus ; from this it becomes easy to conjecture the future, and if events occasionally deceive the sagacity of the diviner, he who has consulted him will remain none the less astounded and convinced by the superhuman knowledge of the adept.

The human head is formed upon the model of the celestial spheres ; it attracts and it radiates, and in the conception of a child, this it is which first forms and manifests. Hence the head is subject in an absolute manner to astral influence, and evidences its several attractions by its diverse protuberances. The final word of phrenology is to be found, therefore, in scientific and purified astrology, the problems of which we point out to the patience and good faith of scholars. According to Ptolemy, the sun dries up and the moon moistens; according to the kabbalists, the sun represents rigorous Justice, while the moon is in sympathy with Mercy. It is the sun which produces storms, and, by a kind of gentle atmospheric pressure, the moon occasions the ebb and flow, or, as it were, the respiration of the sea. We read in the Zohar, one of the great sacred books of the Kabbalah, that “ the magical serpent, the son of the Sun, was about to devour the world, when the Sea, daughter of the Moon, set her foot upon his head and subdued him.” For this reason, among the ancients, Venus was the daughter of the Sea, as Diana was identical with the Moon. Hence also the name of Mary signifies star or salt of the sea. To consecrate this kabbalistic doctrine in the belief of the vulgar, it is said in prophetic language : The woman shall crush the serpent’s head.

Jerome Cardan, one of the boldest students, and, beyond contradiction the most skilful astrologer of his time — Jerome Cardan, who, if we accept the legend of his death, was a martyr to his faith in astrology, has left behind him a calculation by means of which any one can foresee the good or evil fortune special to all the years of his life. His theory was based upon his own experiences, and he assures us that the calculation never deceived him. To ascertain the fortune of a given year, he sums up the events of those which have preceded it by 4, 8, 12, 19, and 30 ; the number 4 is that of realisation ; 8 is the number of Venus or natural things ; 12 belongs to the cycle of Jupiter, and corresponds to successes ; 1 9 has reference to the cycles of the Moon and of Mars ; the number 3 0 is that of Saturn or Fatality. Thus, for example, I desire to ascertain what will befall me in this present year 1855 ; I pass in review the decisive events in the order of life and progress which occurred four years ago ; the natural felicity or misfortune of eight years back ; the successes or failures of twelve years since ; the vicissitudes and miseries or diseases which overtook me nineteen years from now, and my tragic or fatal experiences of thirty years back. Then, taking into account irrevocably accomplished facts and the advance of time, I calculate the

chances analogous to those which I owe already to the influence of the same planets, and I conclude that in 1851 I had employment which was moderately but sufficiently remunerative, with some embarrassment of position ; in 1847 I was violently separated from my family, with great attendant sufferings for mine and me ; in 1843 I travelled as an apostle, addressing the people, and suffering the persecution of ill- meaning persons; briefly, I was at once honoured and proscribed. Finally, in 1825 family life came to an end for me, and I engaged definitely in a fatal path which led me to science and misfortune. I may therefore suppose that I shall this year experience toil, poverty, vexation, heart-exile, change of place, publicity, and contradictions, with some eventuality which will be decisive for the rest of my life ; every indication in the present leads me to endorse this forecast. Hence I conclude that, for myself and for this year, experience completely confirms the precision of Cardan’s astrological calculus, which, furthermore, connects with the climacteric years of ancient astrologers. This term signifies arranged in scales or calculated on the degrees of a scale. Johannes Trithemius in his book on Secondary Causes has very curiously computed the return of fortunate or calamitous years for all the empires of the world. In the twenty-first chapter of our Eitual we shall give an exact analysis of this work, one even more clear than the original, together with a continuation of the labour of Trithemius to our own days and the application of his magical scale to contemporary events, so as to deduce the most striking probabilities relative to the immediate future of France, Europe, and the world.

According to all the grand masters in astrology, comets are the stars of exceptional heroes, and they only visit earth to signalise great changes ; the planets preside over collective existences and modify the destinies of mankind in the aggregate ; the fixed stars, more remote and more feeble in their action, attract individuals and determine their ten- dencies ; sometimes a group of stars combine to influence the destinies of a single man, while often a great number of souls are drawn by the distant rays of the same sun. When we die, our interior light in departing follows the attraction of its star, and thus it is that we live again in other universes, where the soul makes for itself a new garment, analogous to the development or diminution of its beauty ; for our souls, when separated from our bodies, resemble revolving stars ; they are globules of animated light which always seek their centre for the recovery of their equilibrium and their true movement. Before all things, however, they must liberate themselves from the folds of the serpent, that is, the unpurified astral light which envelopes and imprisons them, unless the strength of their will can lift them beyond its reach. The immersion of the living star in the dead light is a frightful torment, comparable to that of Mezentius. Therein the soul freezes and burns at the same time, and has no means of getting

free except by re-entering the current of exterior forms and assuming a fleshly envelope, then energetically battling against instincts to strengthen that moral liberty which will permit it at the moment of death to break the chains of earth and wing its flight in triumph towards the star of consolation which has smiled in light upon it. Following this clue, we can understand the nature of the fire of hell, which is identical with the demon or the old serpent ; we can gather also wherein consist the salvation and reprobation of men, all called and all successively elected, but in small number, after having risked falling into the eternal fire through their own fault.

Such is the great and sublime revelation of the magi, a revelation which is the mother of all symbols, of all dogmas, of all religions. We can realise already how far Dupuis was mistaken in regarding astronomy as the source of every cultus. It is astronomy, on the contrary, which has sprung from astrology, and primitive astrology is one of the branches of the holy Kabbalah, the science of sciences, and the religion of religions. Hence upon the seventeenth page of the Tarot we find an admirable allegory — a naked woman, typifying Truth, Nature, and Wisdom at one and the same time, turns two ewers towards the earth, and pours out fire and water upon it ; above her head glitters the septenary, starred about an eight-pointed star, that of Venus, symbol of peace and love ; the plants of earth are flourishing around the woman, and on one of them the butterfly of Psyche has alighted ; this emblem of the soul is replaced in some copies of the sacred book by a bird, which is a more Egyptian and probably a more ancient symbol. In the modern Tarot the plate is entitled the Glittering Star ; it is analogous to a number of Hermetic symbols, and is also in correspondence with the Blazing Star of Masonic initiates, which expresses most of the mysteries of Eosicrucian secret doctrine.

We have now to grapple with the most criminal abuse to which magical sciences can be put, namely, venomous magic, or, rather, sorcery. Let it be here understood that we write not to instruct but to warn. If human justice, instead of punishing the adepts, had only proscribed the nigromancers and poisoning sorcerers, it is certain, as we have previously remarked, that its severity would have been well placed, and that the most severe penalties could never be excessive in the case of such criminals. At the same time it must not be supposed that the right of life and death which secretly belongs to the magus has always been exercised to satisfy some infamous vengeance, or some cupidity more infamous still ; in the middle ages, as in the ancient world, magical associations have frequently struck down or destroyed slowly the revealers or profaners of mysteries, and when the magic sword has refrained from striking, when the spilling of blood was dangerous, then Aqua Toffana, poisoned nosegays, the shirt of Nessus, and other deadly instruments, still stranger and still less known, were used to carry out sooner or later the terrible sentence of the free judges. We have said that there is in magic a great and indicible arcanum, which is never mentioned among adepts, which the profane above aU must be prevented from divining ; in former times, whosoever revealed, or caused the key of this supreme secret to be discovered by others through imprudent revelations, was condemned immediately to death, and was often driven to execute the sentence himself.

The celebrated prophetic supper of Cazotte, described by Laharpe, has not been hitherto understood. Laharpe very naturally yielded to the temptation of surprising his readers by amplifying the details of his narrative. Everyone present at this supper, Laharpe excepted, was an initiate and a divulger, or at least profaner, of the mysteries. Cazotte, the most exalted of all in the scale of initiation, pronounced their sentence of death in the name of illuminism, and this sentence was variously but rigorously executed, even as several years and several centuries previously had occurred in the case of similar judgments against the Abb4 de Villars, Urban Grandier, and many others. The revolutionary philosophers perished as did Cagliostro deserted in the prisons of the Inquisition, as did the mystic band of Catherine Theos, as did the imprudent Scroepfer, constrained to suicide in the midst of his magical triumphs and the universal infatuation, as did the deserter Kotzebue, who was stabbed by Carl Sand, as did also so many others whose corpses have been discovered without any one being able to learn the cause of their sudden and sanguinary death. The strange allocation addressed to Cazotte when he himself was condemned by the president of the revolutionary tribunal will be readily called to mind. The Gordian Knot of the

terrible drama of ’93 is still concealed in the darkest sanctuary of the secret societies ; to adepts of good faith, who sought to emancipate the common people, were opposed adepts of another sect, attached to more ancient traditions, who fought by means analogous to those of their adversaries : the practice of the great arcanum was made impossible by unmasking its theory. The crowd understood nothing, but it mistrusted everything, and fell lower still in its discouragement ; the great arcanum became more secret than ever ; the adepts, checkmated by each other, could exercise their power neither to govern others nor to deliver themselves ; they condemned one another to the death of traitors ; they abandoned one another to exile, to suicide, to the knife and the scaffold. I shall be asked possibly whether equally terrible dangers threaten at this day the intruders into the occult sanctuary and the betrayers of its secret. Why should I answer anything to the incredulity of the inquisitive ? If I risk a violent death for their instruction, certainly they will not save me ; if they are afraid on their own account, let them abstain from imprudent research — this is all I can say to them. Let us return to venomous magic.

In his romance of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Lumas has revealed some practices of this ominous science. There is no need to traverse the same ground by repeating its melancholy theories of crime; describing how plants are poisoned ; how animals nourished on these plants have their flesh infected, and becoming in turn the food of men, cause death without leaving any trace of poison ; how the walls of houses are inoculated ; how the air is permeated by fumes which require the glass mask of St Croix for the operator ; let us leave the ancient Canidia her abominable mysteries, and refrain from investigating the extent to which the infernal rites of Sagana have carried the art of Locusta. It is enough to state that this most infamous class of malefactors distilled in conjunction the virus of contagious diseases, the venom of reptiles, and the sap of poisonous plants, that they extracted from the fungus its deadly and narcotic properties, its asphyxiating principles from datura stramonium, from the peach and bitter almond that poison one drop of which, placed on the tongue or in the ear, destroys, like a flash of lightning, the strongest and best constituted living being. The white juice of sea-lettuce was boiled with milk in which vipers and asps had been drowned. The sap of the manchineel or deadly fruit of Java was either brought back with them from their long journeys, or imported at great expense;

so also was the juice of the cassada, and so were similar poisons ; they pulverised flint, mixed with impure ashes the dried slime of reptiles, composed hideous philtres with the virus of mares on heat and similar secretions of bitches ; they mingled human blood with infamous drugs, composing an oil the mere odour of which was fatal, therein recalling the tarte bourbonnaise, of Panurge ; they even concealed recipes for poisoning in the technical language of alchemy, and the secret of the powder of projection, in more than one old book which claims to be Hermetic, is in reality that of the powder of succession. The Gi'and Grimoire, gives one in particular which is very thinly disguised under the title of Method for Making Gold; it is an atrocious decoction of verdigris, arsenic, and sawdust, which, if properly made, should immediately consume a branch that is plunged into it and eat swiftly through an iron naO.. John Baptista Porta cites in his Natural Magic a specimen of Borgia poison, but, as may be imagined, he is deceiving the vulgar, and does not divulge the truth, which would be too dangerous in such a connection. We may therefore quote his recipe to satisfy the curiosity of our readers.

The toad by itself is not venomous, but it is a sponge for poisons, and is the mushroom of the animal kingdom. Take, then, a plump toad, says Porta, and place it with vipers and asps in a globular bottle ; let poisonous fungi, fox-gloves, and hemlock be their sole nourishment during a period of several days ; then enrage them by beating, burning, and tormenting them in every conceivable manner, till they die of rage and hunger; sprinkle their bodies with powdered spurge and ground glass ; then place them in a well-sealed retort, and extract all their moisture by fire. Let the glass cool ; separate the ash of the dead bodies from the incombustible dust, which will remain at the bottom of the retort. You will then have two poisons — one liquid, the other a powder. The first will he fully as efficacious as the terrible Aqua Poffana ; the second, in a few days’ time, will cause any person, who may have a pinch of it mixed with his drink, to become, in the first place, wilted and old, and subsequently to die amidst horrible sufferings, or in a state of complete collapse. It must he admitted that this recipe has a magical physiognomy of the blackest and most revolting kind, and sickens one by its recollections of the abominable confections of Canidia and Medea. The sorcerers of the middle ages pretended to receive such powders at the Sabbath, and sold them at a high price to the malicious and ignorant.

The tradition of similar mysteries spread terror in country places, and came to act as a spell. The imagination once impressed, the nervous system once assailed, and then the victim rapidly wasted away, the very dread of his relatives and friends insuring his loss. The sorcerer or sorceress was almost invariably a species of human toad, swollen with long-enduring rancours. They were poor, repulsed by all, and consequently full of hatred. The fear which they inspired was their consolation and their revenge ; poisoned themselves by a society of which they had experienced nothing but the refuse and the vices, they poisoned in their turn all those who were weak enough to fear them, and avenged upon beauty and youth their accursed old age and their atrocious ugliness. The mere operation of these evil works, and the fulfilment of these loathsome mysteries, constituted and confirmed what was then called a compact with the devil. It is certain that the worker must have been given over body and soul to evil, and justly deserved the universal and irrevocable reprobation expressed by the allegory of hell. That human

souls could descend to such an abyss of crime and madness must assuredly astonish and grieve us ; hut is not such an abyss needed as a basis for the exaltation of the most sublime virtues ? and does not the depth of infernus demonstrate by antithesis the infinite height and grandeur of heaven ? In the North, where the instincts are more repressed and vivacious ; in Italy, where the passions are more diffusive and fiery, charms and the evil eye are still dreaded ; the jettatura is not to be braved with impunity in Naples, and persons who are unfortunately endowed with this power are even distinguished by certain exterior signs. In order to guard against it, experts affirm that horns must be carried on the person, and the common people, who take everything literally, hasten to adorn themselves with small horns, not dreaming of the sense of the allegory. These attributes of Jupiter Ammon, Bacchus, and Moses are the symbol of moral power or enthusiasm, so that the magicians mean to say that, in order to withstand the jettatura, the fatal current of instincts must be governed by a great intrepidity, a great enthusiasm, or a great thought. In like manner, almost all popular superstitions are profane interpretations of some grand maxim or marvellous secret of occult wisdom. Did not Pythagoras, in his admirable symbols, bequeath a perfect philosophy to sages, and a new series of vain observances and ridiculous practices to the vulgar ?

Thus, when he said : “ Do not pick up what falls from the table ; do not cut down trees on the great highway ; kill not the serpent when it falls into your garden,” — was he not inculcating the precepts of charity, either social or personal, under transparent allegories ? When he said : “ Do not look at yourself by torchlight in a mirror,” was he not ingeniously teaching true self-knowledge which is incompatible with factitious lights and the prejudgments of systems ? It is the same with the other precepts of Pythagoras, who, it is well known, was followed literally by a swarm of unintelligent disciples, and, indeed, amongst

our provincial superstitious observances, there are many which indubitably belong to the primitive misconception of Pythagorean symbols. Superstition is derived from a Latin word which signifies survival. It is the sign surviving the thought ; it is the dead body of a religious rite. Superstition is to initiation what the notion of the devil is to that of God. This is the sense in which the worship of images is forbidden, and in this sense also a doctrine most holy in its original conception may become superstitious and impious when it has lost its spirit and its inspiration. Then does religion, ever one, like the supreme reason, change its vestures and abandon old rites to the cupidity and roguery of priests dispossessed and metamorphosed by their wickedness and ignorance into jugglers and charlatans. We may include among superstitions those magical emblems and characters, of which the meaning is no longer understood, which are engraved by chance on amulets and talismans. The magical images of the ancients were pantacles, i.e., kabbalistic syntheses. Thus the wheel of Pythagoras is a pantacle analogous to the wheels of Ezekiel ; the two figures contain the same secrets, and belong to the same philosophy ; they constitute the key of all pantacles, and we have already discoursed concerning them.

The four beasts, or, rather, the four-headed sphinx of the same prophet are identical with an admirable Indian symbol which we have reproduced in this work, as having reference to the great arcanum. In his Apocalypse, St John followed and elaborated Ezekiel ; indeed, the monstrous figures of his wonderful book are so many magical pantacles, the key of which is easily discoverable by kabbalists. On the other hand, Christians, rejecting science in their anxiety to extend faith, sought later on to conceal the origin of their dogmas, and condemned all kabbalistic and magical books to the flames. To destroy originals gives a kind of originality to copies, as was doubtless in the mind of St Paul when, prompted beyond question by the most laudable intention, he accomplished his scientific auto-da-fi at Ephesus. In the same way, six centuries later, the true believer Omar sacrificed the Library of Alexandria to the originality of the Koran, and who knows whether in the time to come some future Apostle will not set fire to our literary museums, and confiscate the printing-press in the interest of some fresh religious infatuation, some newly accredited legend ? The study of talismans and pantacles is one of the most curious branches of magic, and connects with historical numismatics. There are Indian, Egyptian, and Greek talismans, kabbalistic medals coming from the ancient and modern Jews, Gnostic abraxas, occult tokens in use among the members of secret societies, and sometimes called counters of the Sabbath; so also there are Templar medals and jewels of Freemasonry. In his Treatise on the Wonders of Nature, Coglenius describes the talismans of Solomon and those of Eabbi Chael. Designs of many others that are most ancient will be found in the magical calendars of Tycho-Brah4 and Duchentau, and should have a place in M. Eagon’s archives of initiation, a vast and scholarly undertaking, to which we refer our readers.

The ancients adored the Sun under the figure of a black stone, which they named Elagabalus, or Heliogabalus. What did this stone signify, and how came it to be the image of the most brilliant of luminaries ? The disciples of Hermes, before promising their adepts the elixir of long life, or the powder of projection, counselled them to seek for the philosophical stone. What is this stone, and why a stone ? The great initiator of the Christians invites his believers to build on the stone, or rock, if they do not wish their structures to be demolished. He terms himself the corner-stone, and says to the most faithful of his Apostles, “ Thou art Peter {jpetrus), and upon this rock {petram) I will build my church.” This stone, say the masters in alchemy, is the true salt of the philosophers, which is the third ingredient in the composition of Azoth. Now, we know already that Azoth is the name of the great Hermetic and true philosophical agent ; furthermore, their salt is represented under the figure of a cubic stone, as may be seen in the Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine, or in the allegories of Trevisan. Once more, what is this stone actually ? It is the foundation of absolute philosophy, it is supreme and immovable reason. Before even dreaming of the metallic work, we must be fixed for ever upon the absolute principles of wisdom, we must possess that reason which is the touch-stone of truth.

Never will a man of prejudices become the king of nature and the master of transmutations. The philosophical stone is hence before all things necessary ; but how is it to be found ? Hermes informs us in his Emerald Table. We must separate the subtle from the fixed with great care and assiduous attention. Thus, we must separate our certitudes from our beliefs, and sharply distinguish the respective domains of science and faith, understanding thoroughly that we do not know things which we believe, and that we cease immediately to believe anything which we come actually to know, so that the essence of the things of faith is the unknown and the indefinite, while it is quite the reverse with the things of science. It must thence be inferred that science rests on reason and experience, whilst the basis of faith is sentiment and reason. In other words, the philosophical stone is the true certitude which human prudence assures to

conscientious researches and modest doubt, whilst religious enthusiasm ascribes it exclusively to faith. Now, it belongs neither to reason without aspirations nor to aspirations without reason ; true certitude is the reciprocal acquiescence of the reason which knows in the sentiment which believes and of the sentiment which believes in the reason which knows. The permanent alliance of reason and faith will result not from their absolute distinction and separation, but from their mutual control and their fraternal concurrence. Such is the significance of the two pillars of Solomon’s porch, one named Jakin and the other Bohas, one black and the other white. They are distinct and separate, they are even contrary in appearance, but if blind force sought to join them by bringing them close to one another, the roof of the temple would collapse ; separately, their power is one ; joined, they are two powers which destroy one another. Bor precisely the same reason the spiritual power is weakened whensoever it attempts to usurp the temporal, while the temporal power becomes the victim of its encroachments on the spirituaL Gregory YII. ruined the Papacy ; the schismatic kings have lost and will lose the monarchy. Human equilibrium requires two feet, the worlds gravitate by means of two forces, generation needs two sexes. Such is the meaning of the arcanum of Solomon, represented by the two pillars of the temple, Jakin and Bohas.

The sun and moon of the alchemists correspond to the same symbol and concur in the perfection and stability of the philosophical stone. The sun is the hieroglyphic sign of truth, because it is the visible source of light, and the rude stone is the symbol of stability. It was for this reason that the ancients took the stone Elagabalus as the actual type of the sun, and for • this also that the mediaeval alchemists pointed to the philosophical stone as the first means of making philosophical gold, that is to say, of transforming the vital forces represented by the six metals into Sol, that is, into truth and light, the first and indispensable operation of the great work, leading to the secondary adapta- tions, and discovering, by the analogies of nature, the natural and grosser gold to the possessors of the spiritual and living gold, of the true salt, the true mercury, and the true sulphur of the philosophers. To find the philosophical stone is then to have discovered the absolute, as the masters otherwise say. Now, the absolute is that which admits of no errors, it is the fixation of the volatile, it is the rule of the imagination, it is the very necessity of being, it is the immutable law of reason and truth ; the absolute is that which is. Now that which is in some sense precedes he who is. God himself cannot be in the absence of a reason of being, and can exist only in virtue of a supreme and inevitable reason. It is this reason which is the absolute ; it is this in which we must believe if we desire a rational and solid foundation for our faith. It may be said in these days that God is merely a hypothesis, but the absolute reason is not a hypothesis ; it is essential to being.

St Thomas once said : “ A thing is not just because God wills it, but God wills it because it is just.” Had St Thomas logically deduced all the consequences of this beautiful thought, he would have found the philosophical stone, and besides being the angel of the school, he would have been its reformer. To believe in the reason of God and in the God of reason is to render atheism impossible. When Voltaire said : “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him,” he felt rather than understood the reason which is in God. Does God really exist ? There is no knowing, but we desire it to be so, and hence we believe it. laith thus formulated is reasonable faith, for it admits the doubt of science, and, as a fact, we believe only in things which seem to us probable, though we do not know them. To think otherwise is delirium ; to speak otherwise is to talk like the illuminated or fanatical. Now, it is not to such persons that the philosophical stone is promised. The ignoramuses who have turned primitive Christianity from its path by substituting faith for science, dream for experience, the fantastic for the real ; inquisitors who, during

SO many ages, have waged a war of extermination against magic; have succeeded in enveloping with darkness the ancient discoveries of the human mind, so that we are now groping for the key to the phenomena of nature. Now, all natural phenomena depend upon a single and immutable law, represented by the philosophical stone, and especially by its cubic form. This law, expressed by the tetrad in the Kabbalah, furnished the Hebrews with all the mysteries of their divine Tetragram. It may be said therefore that the philosophical stone is square in every sense, like the heavenly Jerusalem of St John ; that one of its sides is inscribed with the name and the other with that of God ; that one of its facets bears the> name of Adam, a second that of Heva, and the two others those of Azot and Inri. At the beginning of the French translation of a book by the Sieur de Nuisement on the philosophical salt, the spirit of the earth is represented standing on a cube over which tongues of flame are passing ; the phallus is replaced by a caduceus ; the sun and moon figure on the right and left breast ; he is bearded, crowned, and holds a sceptre in his hand. This is the Azoth of the sages on his pedestal of salt and sulphur. The symbolic head of the goat of Mendes is occasionally given to this figure, and it is then the Baphomet of the Templars and the Word of the Gnostics — bizarre images which became scarecrows for the vulgar after affording food for thought to the sages, innocent hieroglyphs of thought and faith which have been a pretext for the rage of persecutions. How pitiable are men in their ignorance, but how they would despise themselves if once they came to know !

The majority of our physical complaints come from our moral diseases, according to the one and universal dogma, and by reason of the law of analogies. A great passion to which we abandon ourselves always corresponds to a great malady in store for us. Mortal sins are so named because they, physically and positively, cause death. Alexander the Great died of pride ; he was naturally temperate, and it was through pride that he yielded to the excess which occasioned his death. Erancis I. died of an adultery. Louis XY. died of his deer-park. When Marat was assassinated he was perishing of rage and envy. He was a monomaniac of pride, who believed himself to be the only just man, and would have slain everything that was not Marat. Several of our contemporaries died of deceived ambition after the revolution of February. So soon as any will is irrevocably confirmed in a tendency towards the absurd, the man is dead, and the rock on which he will break is not distant. It is, therefore, true to say that wisdom preserves and prolongs life. The great Master told us : “ My flesh is meat indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath everlasting life.” And when the crowd murmured. He added : “ Here the flesh profiteth nothing : the words that I speak unto you are spirit and life.” So also, when He was about to die. He attached the remembrance of His life to the sign of bread, and that of His spirit to the symbol of wine, thus instituting the communion of faith, hope, and charity. Now, it is in the same sense that the Hermetic masters have said : Make gold potable, and you will have the universal medicine — that is to say, appropriate truth to your needs.

let it become the source at which you daily drink, and you will in yourself have the immortality of the sages. Temperance, tranquillity of soul, simplicity of character, calmness and rationality of will, these things not only make man happy, but strong and well-seeming. By growth in reason and goodness man becomes immortal. We are the authors of our own destiny, and God does not save us apart from our own concurrence. There is no death for the sage; death is a phantom, made horrible by the weakness and ignorance of the vulgar. Change is the sign of motion, and motion reveals life ; if the corpse itself were dead, its decomposition would be impossible ; all its composing molecules are living, and working for their liberation.. And you dream that the spirit is set free the first so that it may cease to live ! You believe that thought and love can die when the grossest matter is imperishable ! If change ought to be called death, we die and are reborn daily, because our forms change daily. Bear, therefore, to soil or tear our garments, but do not fear to lay them by when the hour of sleep approaches.

The embalming and preservation of bodies is a superstition which is against nature ; it is an attempt to create death ; it is the forcible petrifaction of a substance which is needed by life. But, on the other hand, we must not be quick to destroy or make away with bodies; there is no abruptness in the operations of nature, and we must not risk the violent rupture of the bonds of a departing souL Death is never instantaneous ; it is, like sleep, gradual. So long as the blood has not become absolutely cold, so long as the nerves can quiver, a man is not wholly dead, and, if none of the vital organs are destroyed, the soul can be recalled, either by accident or by a strong will. A philosopher has declared that he would discredit universal testimony rather than believe in the resurrection of a dead person, but his speech was rash, for it is on the faith of universal testimony that he believed in the impossibility of resurrection. Supposing such an occurrence were proved, what would follow ? Must we deny evidence or renounce reason ? It would be absurd to say so. We should simply infer that we were wrong in supposing resurrection to be impossible. Ab actu ad posse valet consecutio.

Let us now make bold to affirm that resurrection is possible and occurs oftener than might be thought. Many persons whose deaths have been legally and scientifically attested have been subsequently found in their coffins dead indeed, but having evidently come to life and having bitten through their clenched hands so as to open the arteries and escape from their horrible agonies. A doctor would tell us that such persons were in a lethargy, and not dead. But what is lethargy ? It is the name which we give to an uncompleted death, a death which is falsified by return to life. It is easy by words to escape from a difficulty when it is impossible to explain facts. The soul is joined to the body by means of sensibility, and when sensibility ceases it is a sure sign that the soul is departing. The magnetic sleep is a lethargy or factitious death which is curable at will. The etherisation or torpor produced by chloroform is a real lethargy which ends sometimes in absolute death, when the soul, ravished by its temporary liberation, makes an effort of will to become free altogether, which is possible for those who have conquered hell, that is to say, whose moral strength is superior to that of astral attraction. Hence resurrection is possible only for elementary souls, and it is these above all who run the risk of involuntary revival in the tomb. Great men and true sages are never buried alive. The theory and practice of resurrection will be given in our Eitual ; to those, meanwhile, who may ask me whether I have raised the dead, I would say that if I replied in the affirmative they would not believe me.

It now remains for us to examine whether the abolition of pain is possible, and whether it is wholesome to employ chloroform or magnetism for surgical operations. We think, and science will acknowledge it later on, that by diminishing sensibility we diminish life, and what we subtract from pain under such circumstances turns to the profit of death. Pain bears witness to the struggle for life, and hence we observe that the dressing of the wound is excessively painful in the case of persons who are operated on under anasthetics. Now, if chloroform were resorted to at each dressing, one of two things would happen — either the patient would die, or the pain would return and continue between the dressings. Nature is not violated with impunity. The author of this book has dared many things in his life, and never has any fear retained his thought a prisoner. It is not at the same time without legitimate dread that he approaches the end of the magical doctrine. It is a question now of revealing, or rather reveiling, the Great Secret, the terrible secret, the secret of life and death, expressed in the Bible by those formidable and symbolical words of the serpent, who was himself symbolical : I. Nequaquam Moriemini ; II. Sed eritis ; III. Sicut Dn ; IV. Scientes bonum et malum. One of the privileges which belong to the initiate of the Great Arcanum, and that which sums them all, is Bimnodim. According to the vulgar comprehension of the term, to divine signifies to conjecture what is unknown, but its true sense is ineffable to the point of sublimity. To divine {divirmri) is to exercise divinity. The word divinus, in Latin, signifies something far different from divus, which is equivalent to the mangod. Bevin, in French, contains the four letters of the word Dieu

(God), plus the letter N, which corresponds in its form to the Hebrew aleph N, and kabbalistically and hieroglyphically expresses the Great Arcanum, of which the Tarot symbol is the figure of the Juggler. Whosoever understands perfectly the absolute numeral value of X multiplied by N final in words which signify science, art, or force, who subsequently adds the five letters of the word Devin, in such a way as to make five go into four, four into three, three into two, and two into one, such a person, by translating the resultant number into primitive Hebrew characters, will^ write the occult name of the Great Arcanum, and will possess a word of which the sacred Tetragram itself is only the equivalent and the image. To be a diviner, according to the force of the term, is hence to be divine, and something more mysterious still. How, the two signs of human divinity, or of divine humanity, are prophecies and miracles. To be a prophet is to see beforehand the effects which exist in causes, to read in the astral light; to work miracles is to act upon the universal agent, and subject it to our will. The author of this book will be asked whether he is a prophet and thaumaturge. Let inquirers recur to all that he wrote before certain events took place in the world ; and as to anything else that he may have said or done, would anyone believe his mere word if he made any unusual statement?

Furthermore, one of the essential conditions of divination is to be never constrained, never suffer temptation — in other words, being put to the test. Never have the masters of science yielded to the curiosity of anyone. The sibyls burned their books when Tarquin refused to appraise them at their proper value ; the great Master was silent when He was asked for a sign of His divine mission ; Agrippa perished of want rather than obey those who demanded a horoscope. To furnish proofs of science to those who suspect the very existence of the science is to initiate the unworthy, to profane the gold of the sanctuary, to deserve the excommunication of sages, and the fate of betrayers.

The essence of divination, that is to say, the Great Magical Arcanum, is represented by all symbols of the science, and is intimately connected with the one and primeval doctrine of Hermes. In philosophy, it gives absolute certitude ; in religion, the universal secret of faith ; in physics, the composition, decomposition, recomposition, realisation, and adaptation of philosophical Mercury, called Azoth by the alchemists ; in dynamics it multiplies our forces by those of perpetual motion; it is at once mystical, metaphysical, and material, with correspondent effects in the three worlds ; it procures charity in God, truth in science, and gold in riches, for metallic transmutation is at once an allegory and reality, as all the adepts of true science are perfectly well aware. Yes, gold can really and materially be made by means of the stone of the sages, which is an amalgam of salt, sulphur, and mercury, thrice combined in Azoth by a triple sublimation and a triple fixation. Yes, the operation is often easy, and may be accomplished in a day, an instant ; at other times it requires months and years. But to succeed in the great work, one must be divinus — a diviner, in the kabbalistic sense of the term — and it is indispensable that one should have renounced, in respect of personal interest, the advantage of wealth, so as to become its dispenser. Kaymund Lully enriched sovereigns, planted Europe with institutions, and remained poor. Nicholas Flamel, who, in spite of his legend, is really dead, only attained the great work when asceticism had completely detached him from riches. He was initiated by a suddenly imparted understanding of the book Asch Mezareph, written in Hebrew by the kabbalist Abraham, possibly the compiler of the Sepher Jetzirah. Now, this understanding was, for Flamel, an intuition deserved, or, rather, rendered possible, by the personal preparations of the adept. I believe I have spoken sufficiently.

Divination is, therefore, an intuition, and the key of this intuition is the universal and magical doctrine of analogies. By means of these analogies, the magus interprets visions, as did the patriarch Joseph in Egypt, according to Biblical history. The analogies in the reflections of the astral light are as exact as the shades of colour in the solar spectrum, and can be calculated and explained with great exactitude. It is, however, indispensable to know the dreamer’s degree of intellectual life, which, indeed, he will himself completely reveal by his own dreams in a manner that wiU profoundly astonish himself. Somnambulism, presentiments, and second sight are simply an accidental or induced disposition to dream in a voluntary or awakened sleep — that is, to perceive the analogous reflections of the astral light, as we shall explain to demonstration in our Eitual, v^en providing the long -sought method of regularly producing and directing magnetic phenomena. As to divinatory instruments, they are simply a means of communication between diviner and consulter, serving merely to fix the two wills upon the same sign. Yague, complex, shifting figures help to focus the reflections of the astral fluid, and it is thus that lucidity is procured by coffee-grouts, mists, the white of egg, &c., which evoke fatidic forms, existing only in the transludd — that is, in the imagination of the operators. Vision in water is worked by the dazzlement and tiring of the optic nerve, which then resigns its functions to the translucid, and produces a brain illusion in which the reflections of the astral light are taken for real images.

Hence nervous persons, of weak sight and lively imagination, are most fitted for this species of divination, which, indeed, is most successful when performed by children. Let us not here misinterpret the function which we attribute to imagination in divinatory arts. It is by imagination assuredly that we see, and this is the natural aspect of the miracle, but we see true things, and in this consists the marvellous aspect of the natural work. We appeal to the experience of all veritable adepts. The author of this book has tested all kinds of divination, and has invariably obtained results in

proportion to the exactitude of his scientific operations and the good faith of his consulters. The Tarot, that miraculous work which inspired all the sacred books of antiquity, is, by reason of the analogical precision of its figures and numbers, the most perfect instrument of divination, and can be employed with complete confidence. Its oracles are always rigorously true, at least in a certain sense, and even when it predicts nothing it reveals secret things and gives the most wise counsel to its consulters. Alliette, who, in the last century, from a hairdresser became a kabbahst, and kabbalistically called himself Etteilla, reading his name backwards after the manner of Hebrew, Alliette, I say, after thirty years of meditation over the Tarot, came very near to recovering everything that is concealed in this extraordinary work ; however, he ended only by misplacing the keys, through want of their proper understanding, and inverted the order and character of the figures without, at the same time, entirely destroying their analogies, so great are the sympathy and correspondence which exist between them. The writings of Etteilla, now very rare, are obscure, wearisome, and in style barbarous ; they have not all been printed, and some manuscripts of this father of modern cartomancers are in the hands of a Paris bookseller who has been good enough to shew them us. Their most remarkable points are the obstinate opinions and incontestible good faith of the author, who all his life perceived the grandeur of the occult sciences, but was destined to die at the gate of the sanctuary without ever penetrating behind the veil.

He had little esteem for Agrippa, made much of J ean Belot, and knew nothing of the philosophy of Paracelsus, but he possessed a highly-trained intuition, a volition most persevering, though his fancy exceeded his judgment. His endowments were insufficient for a magus and more than were needed for a skilful and accredited diviner of the vulgar order. Hence Etteilla had a fashionable success which a more accomplished magician would perhaps have been wrong to waive, but would certainly not have claimed.

When uttering at the end of our Eitual a last word upon the Tarot, we shall show the complete method of reading and hence of consulting it, not only on the probable chances of destiny, but also, and above all, upon the problems of philosophy and religion, concerning which it provides a solution which is invariably certain and also admirable in its precision, when explained in the hierarchic order of the analogy of the three worlds with the three colours and the four shades which compose the sacred septenary. All this belongs to the positive practice of magic, and can only be summarily indicated and established theoretically in the present first part, which is concerned exclusively with the doctrine of transcendent magic, and the philosophical and rehgious key of the transcendent sciences, known, or rather not known, under the name of occult. Let us now sum up the entire science by its principles. Analogy is the final word of science and the first word of faith. Harmony consists in equilibrium, and equilibrium subsists by the analogy of contraries. Absolute unity is the supreme and final reason of things. Now, this reason can neither be one person nor three persons ; it is a reason, and reason eminently. To create equilibrium, we must separate and unite — separate by the poles, unite by the centre. To reason upon faith is to destroy faith ; to create

mysticism in philosophy is to assail reason. Eeason and faith, by their nature, mutually exclude one another, and they unite by analogy. Analogy is the sole possible mediator between the finite and infinite. Dogma is the ever ascending hypothesis of a presumable equation. For the ignorant, it is the hypothesis which is the absolute affirmation, and the absolute affirmation which is hypothesis. Hypotheses are necessary in science, and he who seeks to realise them enlarges science without decreasing faith, for on the further side of faith is 'the infinite. We believe in what we do not know, but what reason leads us to admit. To define and circumscribe the object of faith is, therefore, to formulate the unknown. Professions of faith are formulations of the ignorance and aspirations of man. The theorems of science are monuments of his conquests. The man who denies God is not less fanatical than he who defines him with pretended infallibility. God is commonly defined by the enumeration of all that He is not. Man makes God by an analogy from the lesser to the greater, whence it results that the conception of God by man is ever that of an infinite man who makes man a finite God. Man can realise that which he believes in the measure of that which he knows, and by reason of that which he does not know, and he can accomplish all that he wills in the measure of that which he believes and by reason of that which he knows.

The analogy of contraries is the connection of light and shade, of height and hollow, of plenum and void. Allegory, the mother of all dogmas, is the substitution of impressions for seals, of shadows for realities. It is the fable of truth and the truth of fable. One does not invent a dogma, one veils a truth, and a shade for weak eyes is produced. The initiator is not an impostor, he is a revealer, that is, following the meaning of the Latin word revelare, a man who veils afresh. He is the creator of a new shade.

Analogy is the key of all secrets of nature and the sole fundamental reason of all revelations. This is why religions seem to be written in the heavens and in all nature ; this is just as it should be, for the work of God is the book of God, and in what He writes should be discerned the expression of His thought, and consequently of His being, since we conceive Him only as the supreme thought. Dupuis and Volney saw only a plagiarism in this splendid analogy, which should have led them to acknowledge the catholicity, that is, the universality of the primeval, one, magical, kabbalistic, and immutable doctrine of revelation by analogy. Analogy yields all the forces of nature to the magus ; analogy is the quintessence of the philosophical stone, the secret of perpetual motion, the quadrature of the circle, the temple resting on the two pillars Jakin and Bohas, the key of the great arcanum, the root of the tree of life, the science of good and evil. To find the exact scale of analogies in things appreciable by science is to fix the bases of faith and thus become possessed of the rod of miracles. Now, there is a principle and rigorous formula, which is the great arcanum. Let the wise man seek it not, since he has already found it ; let the profane seek for ever, and they will never find it.

Metallic transmutation takes place spiritually and materially by the positive key of analogies. Occult medicine is simply the exercise of the will applied to the very source of life, to that astral light the existence of which is a fact, which has a movement conformed to calculations having the great magical arcanum for their ascending and descending scale. This universal arcanum, the final and eternal secret of transcendent initiation, is represented in the Tarot by a naked girl, who touches the earth only by one foot, has a magnetic rod in each hand, and seems to be running in a crown held up by an angel, an eagle, a bull, and a lion. Fundamentally, the figure is analogous to the cherub of Jekeskiel, of which a representation is here given, and to the Indian symbol of Addhanari, which again is analogous to the ado-nai of Jekeskiel, who is vulgarly called Ezekiel. The comprehension of this figure is the key of all the occult sciences. Eeaders of my book must already understand it philosophically if they are at all familiar with the symbolism of the Kabbalah. It remains for us now to realise what is the second and more important operation of the great work. It is something undoubtedly to find the philosophical stone, but how is it to be ground into the powder of projection ? What are the uses of the magical rod ? What is the real power of the divine names in the Kabbalah ?

The initiates know, and those who are deserving of initiation will know in turii if they discover the great arcanum by means of the very numerous and precise indications which we have given them. WThy are these simple and pure truths for ever and of necessity concealed ? Because the elect of the understanding are always few on earth, and are encompassed by the foolish and wicked like Daniel in the den of lions. Moreover, analogy instructs us in the laws of the hierarchy, and absolute science, being an omnipotence, must be the exclusive possession of the most worthy. The confusion of the hierarchy is the actual destruction of societies, for then the blind become leaders of the blind, according to the word of the Master. Give back initiation to priests and kings and order will come forth anew. So, in my appeal to the most worthy, and in exposing myself to all the dangers and anathemas which threaten revealers, I believe myself to have done a great and useful thing, directing the breath of God living in humanity upon the social chaos, and creating priests and kings for the world to come.

A thing is not just because God wills it, but God wills it because it is just, said the angel of the schools. It is as if he said ; The absolute is reason. Eeason is self-existent ; it is because it is, and not because we suppose it ; it is or nothing is ; could you wish anything to exist without reason ? Madness itself does not occur without it. Eeason is necessity, is law, is the rule of all liberty and the direction of all initiative. If God exists, it is by reason. The conception of an absolute God outside or independent of reason is the idol of black magic and the phantom of the fiend. The demon is death masquerading in the cast-off garments of life, the spectre of Hirrenkesept throned upon the rubbish of ruined civilisations, and concealing a loathsome nakedness by the rejected salvage of the incarnations of Vishnu. Knowest thou that old queen of the world who is on the march always and wearies never ? Every uncurbed passion, every selfish pleasure, every licentious energy of humanity, and all its tyrannous weakness, go before the sordid mistress of our tearful valley, and, scythe in hand, these indefatigable labourers reap their eternal harvest. That queen is old as time, but her skeleton is concealed in the wreckage of women’s beauty, which she abstracts from their youth and their love. Her skull is adorned with dead tresses that are not her own.

Spoliator of crowned heads, she is embeUished with the plunder of queens, from the star-begemmed hair of Berenice to that, white without age, which the executioner sheared from the brow of Marie Antoinette. Her livid and frozen body is clothed in polluted garments and tattered winding-sheets. Her bony hands, covered with rings, hold diadems and chains, sceptres and crossbones, jewels and ashes. When she goes by, doors open of themselves ; she passes through walls ; she penetrates to the cabinets of kings ; she surprises the extortioners of the poor in their most secret orgies ; she sits down at their board, pours out their wine, grins at their songs with her gumless teeth, takes the place of the lecherous courtesan hidden behind their curtains. She delights in the vicinity of sleeping voluptuaries ; she seeks their caresses as if she hoped to grow warm in their embrace, but she freezes all those whom she touches and herself never kindles. At times, notwithstanding, one would think her seized with frenzy ; she no longer stalks slowly ; she runs ; if her feet are too slow, she spurs a pale horse, and charges all breathless through multitudes. Murder rides with her on a red charger ; shaking his mane of smoke, fire flies before her with wings of scarlet and

black ; famine and plague follow on diseased and emaciated steeds, gleaning the few sheaves which remain to complete her harvest. After this funereal procession come two little children, radiating with smiles and life, the intelligence and love of the coming century, the dual genius of a new-born humanity. The shadows of death fold up before them, as does night before the morning star ; with nimble feet they skim the earth, and sow with full hands the hope of another year. But death will come no more, impiteous and terrible, to mow like dry grass the ripe blades of the new age ; it will give place to the angel of progress, who will gently liberate souls from mortal chains, so that they may ascend to God. When men know how to live they will no longer die ; they will transform like the chrysalis, which becomes a splendid butterfly. The terrors of death are daughters of ignorance, and death herself is only hideous by reason of the rubbish which covers her, and the sombre hues with which her images are surrounded. Death, truly, is the birth-pang of life. There is a force in nature which dieth not, and this force perpetually transforms beings to preserve them. This force is the reason or word of nature. In man also there is a force analogous to that of nature, and it is the reason or word of man. The word of man is the expression of his will directed by reason, and it is omnipotent when reasonable, for then it is analogous to the word of God himself.

By the word of his reason man becomes the conqueror of life, and can triumph over death. The entire life of man is either the parturition or miscarriage of his word. Human beings who die without having understood or formulated the word of reason, die devoid of eternal hope. To withstand successfully the phantom of death, we must be identified with the realities of life. Does it signify to God if an abortion wither, seeing that life is eternal ? Does it signify to Nature if unreason perish, since reason which never perishes still holds the keys of life ? The first and terrible force which destroys abortions eternally was called by the Hebrews

Samael ; by other easterns, Satan ; and by the Latins, Lucifer. The Lucifer of the Kabbalah is not an accursed and stricken angel; he is the angel who enlightens, who regenerates by fire ; he is to the angels of peace what the comet is to the mild stars of the spring-time constellations. The fixed star is beautiful, radiant, and calm ; she drinks the celestial perfumes and gazes with love upon her sisters ; clothed in her glittering robe, her forehead crowned with diamonds, she smiles as she chants her morning and evening canticle; she enjoys an eternal repose which nothing can disturb, and solemnly moves forward without departing from the rank assigned her among the sentinels of light. But the wandering comet, dishevelled and of sanguinary aspect, comes hurriedly from the depths of heaven and fiings herself athwart the path of the peaceful spheres, like a chariot of war between the ranks of a procession of vestals ; she dares to face the burning spears of the solar guardians, and, like a bereft spouse who seeks the husband of her dreams during widowed nights, she penetrates even unto the inmost sanctuary of the god of day ; again she escapes, exhaling the fires which consume her, and trailing a long conflagration behind her ; the stars pale at her approach ; constellate flocks, pasturing on flowers of light in the vast meadows of the sky, seem to flee before her terrible breath. The grand council of spheres assembles, and there is universal consternation; at length the loveliest of the fixed stars is commissioned to speak in the name of all the firmament and offer peace to the headlong vagabond.

“ My sister,” she thus commences, “ why dost thou disturb the harmony of the spheres ? What evil have we wrought thee ? And why, instead of wandering wilfully, dost thou not fix thy place like us in the court of the sun ? Why dost thou not chant with us the evening hymn, clothed like ourselves in a white garment, fastened at the breast with a diamond clasp ? Why float thy tresses, adrip with fiery sweat, through the mists of the night ? Ah, wouldst thou but take thy place among the daughters of heaven, how much more beautiful wouldst thou be ! Thy face would burn no longer with the toil of thine incredible flights ; thine eyes would be pure, thy smiling countenance white and red like that of thy happy sisters ; all the stars would know thee, and, far from fearing thy flight, would rejoice at thine approach ; for then thou wouldst be made one with us by the indestructible bonds of universal harmony, and thy peaceful existence would be one voice more in the canticle of infinite love.” And the comet replies to the fixed star : “ Believe not, O my sister, that I am permitted to wander at will and vex the harmony of the spheres ! God hath appointed my path, even as thine, and if it appear to thee uncertain and rambling, it is because thy beams cannot penetrate far enough to take in the circumference of the ellipse which has been given me for my course.

My fiery hair is God’s beacon ; I am the messenger of the suns, and I immerse myself continually in their burning heat, that I may dispense it to young worlds on my journey which have not yet sufficient warmth, and to ancient stars which have grown cold in their solitude. If I weary in my long travellings, if my beauty be less mild than thine own, and if my garments are less unspotted, yet am I a noble daughter of heaven, even as thou art. Leave me the secret of my terrible destiny, leave me the dread which surrounds me, curse me even if thou canst not comprehend ; I shall none the less accomplish my work, and continue my career under the impulse of the breath of God I Happy are the stars which rest, which shine like youthful queens in the peaceful society of the universe ! I am the proscribed, the eternal wanderer, who has infinity for domain. They accuse me of setting fire to the planets, the heat of which I renew ; they accuse me of terrifying the stars which I enlighten ; they chide me with breaking in upon universal harmony, because I do not revolve about their particular centres, because I join them one with another, directing my gaze towards the sole centre of all the suns. Be reassured,, therefore, 0 beauteous fixed star ! I shall not impoverish

thy peaceful light ; rather I shall expend in thy service my own life and heat. I shall disappear from heaven when I shall have consumed myself, and my doom will have been glorious enough ! Know that various fires burn in the temple of God, and do all give Him glory ; ye are the light of golden candelabra ; I am the fiame of sacrifice. Let us each fulfil our destinies.” Having uttered these words, the comet tosses back her burning hair, uplifts her fiery shield, and plunges into infinite space^ seeming to be lost fqr ever. Thus Satan appeared and disappeared in the allegorical narratives of the Bible. “ How there was a day,” says the book of Job, “ when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. And the Lord said unto Satan, ‘ Whence comest thou ? ’ Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, ‘ From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.’ ” A Gnostic gospel, discovered in the east by a learned traveller of our acquaintance, explains the genesis of light to the profit of Lucifer, as follows : — The self-conscious truth is the living thought. Truth is thought as it is in itself, and formulated thought is speech. When eternal thought desired a form, it said : “ Let there be light.” How, this thought which speaks is the Word, and the Word said :

“ Let there be light,” because the Word itself is the light of minds. The uncreated light, which is the divine Word, shines because it desires to be seen ; when it says : “ Let there be light ! ” it ordains that eyes shall open ; it creates intelligences. When God said : “ Let there be light ! ” Intelligence was made, and the light appeared. How the Intelligence which God diffused by the breath of His mouth, like a star given off from the sun, took the form of a splendid angel, who was saluted by heaven under the name of Lucifer. Intelligence awakened, and comprehended its nature completely by the understanding of that utterance of the Divine Word: “Let there be light!” It felt itself to be free because God had called it into being, and, raising up

its head, with both wings extended, it replied : “ I will not be slavery.” “ Then shalt thou be suffering,” said the Uncreated Voice. “ I will be liberty,” replied the light. “ Pride will seduce thee,” said the Supreme Voice, “ and thou wilt bring forth death.” “ I needs must strive with death to conquer life,” again responded the created light. Thereupon God loosened from his bosom the shining cord which restrained the superb angel, and beholding him plunge through the night, which he furrowed with glory, He loved the offspring of His thought, and said with an ineffable smile : “ How beautiful was the light ! ” God has not created suffering ; intelligence has accepted it to be free. And suffering has been the condition imposed upon freedom of being by Him who alone cannot err, because He is infinite. Por the essence of intelligence is judgment, and the essence of judgment is liberty. The eye does not really possess light except by the faculty of closing or opening. Were it forced to be always open, it would be the slave and victim of the light, and would cease to see in order to escape the torment. Thus, created Intelligence is not happy in affirming God, except by its liberty to deny Him. Now, the Intelligence which denies, invariably affirms something, since it is asserting its liberty. It is for this reason that blasphemy glorifies God, and that hell was indispensable to the happiness of heaven.

Were the light unrepelled by shadow, there would be no visible forms. If the first angels had not encountered the depths of darkness, the child-birth of God would have been incomplete, and there could have been no separation between the created and essential light. Never would Intelligence have known the goodness of God if it had never lost Him. Never would God’s infinite love have shone forth in the joys of His mercy had the prodigal Son of Heaven remained in the house of His Father. When all was light, there was light nowhere ; it filled the breast of God, who was labouring to bring forth. And when He said : “ Let there be light ! ” He permitted the darkness to repel the light, and the

universe issued from chaos. The negation of the angel who, at birth, refused slavery, constituted the equilibrium of the world, and the motion of the spheres commenced. The infinite distances admired this love of liberty, which was vast enough to fill the void of eternal light, and strong enough to bear the hatred of God. But God could hate not the noblest of His children, and He proved him by His wrath only to confirm him in His power. So also the Word of God Himself, as if jealous of Lucifer, willed to come down from heaven and pass triumphantly through the shadows of hell. He willed to be proscribed and condemned ; He premeditated the terrible hour when He should cry, in the extreme of His agony : “ My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me ? ” As the star of the morning goes before the sun, the rebellion of Lucifer announced to new-born nature the coming incarnation of God. Possibly Lucifer, in his fall through night, carried with him a rain of suns and stars by the attraction of his glory. Possibly our sun is a demon among the stars, as Lucifer is a star among the angels. Doubtless it is for this reason that it lights so calmly the horrible anguish of humanity and the long agony of earth — because it is free in its solitude, and possesses its light.

Such were the tendencies of the heresiarchs in the early centuries. Some, like the Ophites, adored the demon under the figure of the serpent ; others, like the Cainites, justified the rebellion of the first angel like that of the first murderer. All these errors, all these shadows, all these monstrous idols of anarchy which India opposes in its symbols to the magical Trimourti, have found priests and worshippers in Christianity. The demon is nowhere mentioned in Genesis ; an allegorical serpent deceives our first parents. Here is the common translation of the sacred text : “ Mow, the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.” But this is what Moses says : mc'n n^n Ssd Q'ny rr'n Wha-Nah^sh halah hAroum mi-chol hiitaht lia-shadeli asher hdahali JhOali .^lohtra. This signifies, according to the version of Fabre d’Olivet: “ Now, original attraction (cupidity) was the entraining passion of all elementary life (the interior active power) of nature, the work of Jhoah, the Being of beings.” But herein Fabre d’Olivet is beside the true interpretation, because he was unacquainted with the grand keys of the Kabbalah. The word Nahasch, explained by the symbolical letters of the Tarot rigorously signifies :

14 3 Nun. — The power which produces combinations. 5 n Se. — The recipient and passive producer of forms. 21 Schin. — The natural and central fire equilibrated by double Thus, the word employed by Moses, read kabbalistically, gives the description and definition of that magical universal agent, represented in all theogonies by the serpent ; to this agent the Hebrews applied the name of Od when it manifested its active force, of Ob when it exhibited its passive force, and of Aour when it wholly revealed itself in its equilibrated power, producer of light in heaven and gold among metals. It is therefore that old serpent which encircles the world, and places his devouring head beneath the foot of a Virgin, the type of initiation — that virgin who presents a little new-born child to the adoration of three magi, and receives from them, in exchange for this favour, gold, myrrh, and frankincense. So does doctrine serve in all hieratic religions to veil the secret of those forces of nature which the initiate has at his disposal; religious formulae are the summaries of those words full of mystery and power which make the gods descend from heaven and yield themselves to the will of men. Judea borrowed its secrets from Egypt ; there Greece sent her hierophants, and later her theosophists, to the school of the great prophets ; the Borne of the Caesars, mined by the initiation of the catacombs, collapsed one day into the Church, and a symbolism was reconstructed with the remnants of all the worships which had been absorbed by the queen of the world. According to the Gospel narrative, the inscription

which set forth the spiritual royalty of Christ was written in Hebrew, in Greek, and in Latin ; it was the expression of the universal synthesis. Hellenism, in fact, that grand and beauteous religion of form, announced the coming of the Saviour no less than the prophets of Judaism ; the fable of Psyche was an ultra-Christian abstraction, and the cultus of the Pantheons, by rehabilitating Socrates, prepared the altars for that unity of God, of which Israel had been the mysterious preserver. But the synagogue denied its Messiah, and the Hebrew letters were effaced, at least in the blinded eyes of the Jews. The Koman persecutors dishonoured Hellenism, and it could not be restored by the false moderation of the philosopher Julian, surnamed perhaps unjustly the Apostate, since his Christianity was never sincere. The ignorance of the middle ages followed, opposing saints and virgins to gods, goddesses, and nymphs ; the deep sense of the Hellenic mysteries became less understood than ever ; Greece herself did not only lose the traditions of her ancient cultus, but separated from the Latin Church ; and thus, for Latin eyes, the Greek letters were blotted out, as the Latin letters disappeared for Greek eyes. So the inscription on the Cross of the Saviour vanished entirely, and nothing except mysterious initials remained. But when science and philosophy, reconciliated with faith, shall unite all the various symbols, then shall all the magnificences of the antique worships again blossom in the memory of men, proclaiming the progress of the human mind in the intuition of the light of God.

But of all forms of progress the •greatest will be that which, restoring the keys of nature to the hands of science, shall enchain for ever the hideous spectre of Satan, and, explaining all exceptional phenomena of nature, shall destroy the empire of superstition and idiotic credulity. To the accomplishment of this work we have consecrated our life, and do still devote it, to the most toilsome and difficult researches. We would emancipate altars by overthrowing idols ; we desire the man of intelligence to become once more the priest and king of nature.

and we would preserve by explanation all images of the universal sanctuary. The prophets spoke in parables and images, because abstract language was wanting to them, and because prophetic perception, being the sentiment of harmony or of universal analogies, translates naturally by images. Taken literally by the vulgar, these images become idols or impenetrable mysteries. The sum and succession of these images and mysteries constitute what is called symbolism. Symbolism, therefore, comes from God, though it may be formulated by men. Eevelation has accompanied humanity in all ages, has transfigured with human genius, but has ever expressed the same truth. True religion is one ; its dogmas are simple, and within the reach of all. At the same time, the multiplicity of symbols has been a book of poesy indispensable ta the education of human genuis. The harmony of outward beauties and the poetry of form had to be revealed by God to the infancy of man ; but soon Yenus had Psyche for her rival, and Psyche enchanted Love. Thus the cultus of the form perforce yielded to those ambitious dreams which already adorned the eloquent wisdom of Plato. The advent of Christ was prepared, and for this reason was expected ; it came because the world awaited it, and to become popular philosophy transformed into belief. Emancipated by this belief itself, the human mind speedily protested against the school which sought to materialise its signs, and the work of Koman Catholicism was solely the unconscious preparation for the emancipation of consciences and the establishment of the bases of universal association. All these things were the regular and normal development of divine life in humanity ; for God is the great soul of all souls, the immovable centre about which gravitate all intelligences like a cloud of stars.

Human intelligence has had its morning ; its noon will come, and the decline follow, but God will ever be the same. It seems, however, to the dwellers on the earth that the sun rises youthful and timid in the morning, shines with all its power at mid-day, and goes wearied to rest in the evening. Nevertheless, it is earth which revolves while the sun is motionless. Having faith, therefore, in human progress^ and in the stability of God, the free man respects religion in its past forms, and no more blasphemes Jupiter than Jehovah ; he still salutes lovingly the radiant image of the Pythian Apollo, and discovers its fraternal resemblance to the glorified countenance of the risen Eedeemer. He believes in the great mission of the Catholic hierarchy, and finds satisfaction in observing the popes of the middle ages who opposed religion as a check upon the absolute power of kings ; but he protests with the revolutionary centuries against the servitude of conscience which would enchain the pontifical keys ; he is more protestant than Luther, since he does not even believe in the infallibility of the Augsbourg Confession, and more catholic than the Pope, for he has no fear that religious unity will be broken by the ill-will of the courts. He trusts in God rather than Eoman policy for the salvation of the unity idea ; he respects the old age of the Church, but he has no fear that she will die ; he knows that her apparent death will be a transfiguration and a glorious assumption.

The author of this book makes a fresh appeal to the eastern magi to come forward and recognise once again that divine Master whose cradle they saluted, the great initiator of all the ages. All His enemies have fallen ; all those who condemned Him are dead ; those who persecuted Him have passed into sleep for ever ; He is for ever alive. The envious have combined against Him, agreeing on a single point the sectaries have united to destroy Him; they have crowned themselves kings and proscribed Him ; they have become hypocrites and accused Him ; they have constituted themselves judges and pronounced His sentence of death ; they have turned headsmen and executed Him ; they have forced Him to drink hemlock, they have crucified Him, they have stoned Him, they have burned Him and cast His ashes to the wind ; then they have turned scarlet with terror, for He still stood erect before them, impeaching them by His wounds and overwhelming them by the brightness of His scars. They believed that they had slain Him in His cradle at Bethlehem, but He is alive in Egypt ! They carry Him to the summit of the mountain to cast Him down ; the mob of His murderers encircles Him, and already triumphs in His certain destruction ; a cry is heard ; is not that He who is shattered on the rocks of the abyss ?

They whiten and look at one another ; but He, calm and smiling with pity, passes through the midst of them and disappears. Behold another mountain which they have just dyed with His blood ! Behold a cross, a sepulchre, and soldiers guarding His tomb ! Madmen ! The tomb is empty, and He whom they regard as ^ dead is walking peaceably between two travellers, on the road to Emmalis. Where is He ? Whither does He go ? Warn the masters of the world ! Tell the Csesars that their power is threatened ! By whom ? By a pauper who has no stone on which to lay His head, by a man of the people j condemned to the death of slaves. What insult or what madness ! It matters not. The Caesars marshal all their power ; sanguinary edicts proscribe the fugitive, everywhere scaffolds rise up, circuses open arrayed with lions and gladiators, pyres are lighted, torrents of blood flow, and the Caesars, believing themselves victorious, dare add another name to those they rehearse on their trophies ; then they die, and their own apotheosis dishonours the gods whom they defended. The hatred of the world confounds Jupiter and Nero in a common contempt. Temples transformed into tombs are cast down over the proscribed ashes, and above the debris of idols, above the ruins of empires. He only. He whom the Caesars proscribed, whom so many satellites pursued, whom so many executioners tortured. He only lives, alone reigns, alone triumphs !

Notwithstanding, His own disciples speedily misuse His name ; pride enters the sanctuary ; those who should proclaim His resurrection seek to immortalise His death, that they may feed, like the ravens, on His ever-renewing flesh. In place of imitating Him by His sacrifice and shedding their blood for their children in the faith, they chain Him in the Vatican as upon another Caucasus, and become the vultures of this divine Prometheus. But what signifies their evil dream ? They can only imprison His image ; He Himself is free and erect, proceeding from exile to exile and from conquest to conquest ; it is possible to bind a man, but not to make captive the Word of God ; speech is free, and nothing can repress it ; this living speech is the condemnation of the wicked, and hence they seek to destroy it, but it is they only who die, and the word of truth remains to judge their memory ! Orpheus may have been rent by bacchantes, Socrates may have quaffed the poisoned cup, Jesus and His apostles have perished in the utmost tortures, John Hus, Jerome of Prague, and innumerable others, have been burned; St Bartholomew and the massacres of September may have had in turn their victims ; cossacks, knouts, and Siberian deserts are still at the disposal of the Eussian Emperor, but the spirit of Orpheus, of Socrates, of Jesus, and of all martyrs will live for ever in the midst of their dead persecutors, will stand erect amidst failing institutions and collapsing empires.

It is this divine spirit, the spirit of the only Son of God, which St John represents in his apocalypse, standing between golden candlesticks, because He is the centre of all lights ; having seven stars in His hand, like the seed of a new heaven ; and sending down His speech upon the earth under the symbol of a two-edged sword. When the wise in their discouragement sleep through the night of doubt, the spirit of Christ is erect and vigilant. When the nations, weary of the labour which emancipates them, lie down and dream over their chains, the spirit of Christ is erect and protesting. When the blind partisans of sterilised religions cast themselves in the dust of old temples, the spirit of Christ is erect and praying. When the strong become weak, when virtues are corrupted, when all things bend and sink down in search of a shameful pasture, the spirit

of Christ is erect, gazing up to heaven, and awaiting the hour of His father. Christ signifies priest and king by excellence. The Christ initiator of modern times came to form new priests and new kings by science, and, above all, by charity. The ancient magi were priests and kings, and the Saviour’s advent was proclaimed to them by a star. This star was the magical pentagram, having a sacred letter at each point. It is the symbol of the intelligence which rules by unity of force over the four elementary potencies ; it is the pentagram of the magi, the blazing star of the children of Hiram, the prototype of equilibrated light ; to each of its points a ray of light ascends, and from each a ray goes forth ; it represents the grand and supreme athanor of nature, which is the body of man. The magnetic influence issues in two beams from the head, from either hand, and from either foot. The positive ray is balanced by the negative. The head corresponds with the two feet, each hand with a hand and foot, each of the two feet with the head and one hand. This ruling sign of equilibrated light represents the spirit of order and harmony ; it is the sign of the omnipotence of the magus, and hence, when broken or incorrectly drawn, it represents astral intoxication, abnormal and ill-regulated projections of the astral light, and, therefore, bewitchments, perversity, madness, and it is what the magi term the signature of Lucifer. There is another signature which also symbolises the mysteries of light, namely, the sign of Solomon, whose talismans bear on one side the impression of his seal which we have given in our Doctrine, and on the other the following signature (p. 189), which is the hieroglyphic theory of the composition of magnets, and represents the circulatory law of the lightning.

Eebellious spirits are enchained by the exhibition of the blazing five-pointed star or the seal of Solomon, because each gives them proof of their folly and threatens them with a sovereign power capable of tormenting them by their recall to order. Nothing tortures the wicked so much as goodness. Nothing is more odious to madness than reason. But if an ignorant operator should make use of these signs without knowing them, he is a blind man who discourses of light to the blind, an ass who would teach children to read. “ If the blind lead the blind,” said the great and divine Hierophant, “ both fall into the pit.” And now a final word to sum this entire introduction. If you be blind like Samson when you cast down the pillars of the temple, its ruins will crush you. To command nature we must be above nature by resistance of her attractions. If your mind be perfectly free from all prejudice, superstition, and incredulity, you will command spirits. If you do not obey blind forces, they will obey you. If you be wise like Solomon, you will perform the works of Solomon ; if you be holy like Christ, you will accomplish the works of Christ. To direct the currents of the inconstant light, we must be

established in the constant light. To command the elements, we must have overcome their hurricanes, their lightnings, their abysses, their tempests. In order to dare we must KNOW ; in order to will, we must dare ; we must v/ill to possess empire, and to reign we must be silent. Every intention which does not assert itself by deeds is a vain intention, and the speech which expresses it is idle speech. It is action which proves life and establishes will. Hence it is said in the sacred and symbolical books that men will be judged, not according to their thoughts and their ideas, but according to their works. We must act in order to he. We have, therefore, to treat in this place of the grand and terrific question of magical works ; we are concerned no longer with theories and abstractions ; we approach realities, and we are about to place the rod of miracles in the hands of the adept, saying to him at the same time : “Be not satisfied with what we tell you ; act for yourself.” We have to deal here with works of relative omnipotence, with the means of seizing upon the greatest secrets of nature and compelling them into the service of an enlightened and inflexible will.

Most known magical rituals are either mystifications or enigmas, and we are about to rend for the first time, after so many centuries, the veil of the occult sanctuary. Toreveal the holiness of mysteries is to provide a remedy for their profanation. Such is the thought which sustains our courage and enables us to face all the perils of this enterprise, possibly the most intrepid which it has been permitted the human mind to conceive and carry out. Magical operations are the exercise of a natural power, but one superior to the ordinary forces of nature. They are the result of a science and a practice which exalt human will beyond its normal limits. The supernatural is only the natural in an extraordinary grade, or it is the exalted natural ; a miracle is a phenomenon which strikes the multitude because it is unexpected ; the astonishing is that which astonishes ; miracles are effects which surprise those who are ignorant of their causes, or assign them causes which are not in proportion to such effects. Miracles exist only for the ignorant, but, as there is scarcely any absolute science among men, the supernatural can still obtain, and does so indeed for the whole world. Let us set out by saying that we believe in all miracles because we are convinced and certain, even from our own experience, of their entire possibility. There are some which we do not explain, though we regard them as no less explicable.

From the greater to the lesser, from the lesser to the greater, the consequences are identically related and the proportions progressively rigorous. But in order to work miracles we must be outside the ordinary conditions of humanity; we must either be abstracted by wisdom or exalted by madness, either superior to all passions or beyond them through ecstasy or frenzy. Such is the first and most indispensable preparation of the operator. Hence, by a providential or fatal law, the magician can only exercise omnipotence in inverse proportion to his material interest ; the alchemist makes so much the more gold as he is the more resigned to priva- • tions, and the more esteems that poverty wliich protects • the secrets of the niagnuTn opiis. Only the adept whose heart is passionless will dispose of the love and hate of those whom he would make instruments of his science ; the myth of Genesis is eternally true, and God permits the ; tree of science to be approached only by those men who are

sufficiently strong and self-denying not to covet its fruits. Ye, therefore, who seek in science a means to satisfy your passions, pause in this fatal way ; you will find nothing but madness or death. This is the meaning of the vulgar tradition that the devil ends sooner or later by strangling sorcerers. The magus must hence be impassible, sober and chaste, disinterested, impenetrable, and inaccessible to any kind of prejudice or terror. He must be without bodily defects, and proof against all contradictions and all difficulties. The first and most important of magical operations is the attainment of this rare pre-eminence. We have said that impassioned ecstasy may produce the same results as absolute superiority, and this is true as to the issue, but not as to the direction of magical operations. Passion forcibly projects the astral light and impresses unforeseen movements on the universal agent, but it cannot check with the facility that it impels, and its destiny then resembles Hippolytus dragged by his own horses, or Phalaris himself victimised by the instrument of torture which he had invented for others. Human volition realised by action is like a cannon-ball, and recedes before no obstacle. It either passes through it or is buried in it, but if it advance with patience and perseverance, it is never lost ; it is like the wave which returns incessantly and wears away iron in the end.

Man can be modified by habit, which becomes, according to the proverb, his second nature. By means of persevering and graduated athletics, the powers and activity of the body can be developed to an astonishing extent. It is the same ■ with the powers of the soul. Would you reign over yourI- selves and others ? Learn how to will. How can one . learn to will ? This is the first arcanum of magical initia- ■. tion, and it was to make it understood fundamentally that ■ the ancient depositaries of priestly art surrounded the i approaches of the sanctuary with so many terrors and illusions. They did not believe in a will until it had produced its proofs, and they were right. Power is justified by victories. Indolence and forgetfulness are enemies of will, and for this reason all religions have multiplied their observances and made their worship minute and difficult. The more we restrain ourselves for an idea, the greater is the strength we acquire within the scope of that idea. Are not mothers more partial to the children who have caused them most suffering and cost them most anxieties ? So does the power of religions reside exclusively in the inflexible will of those who practise them. So long as there is one faithful person to believe in the holy sacrifice of the Mass, there will be a priest to celebrate it for him ; and so long as there is a priest who daily recites his breviary, there will be a pope in the world.

Observances, apparently most insignificant and most foreign in themselves to the proposed end, lead, notwithstanding, to that end by education and exercise of will. If a peasant rose up every morning at two or three o’clock, and went daily a long distance from home to gather a sprig of the same herb before the rising of the sun, he would be able to perform a great number of prodigies by merely carrying this herb upon his person, for it would be the sign of his will, and would become by his will itself all that he required it to become in the interest of his desires. In order to do a thing we must believe in the possibility of our doing it, and this faith must forthwith be translated into acts. When a child says : “ I cannot,” his mother answers : “ Try.” Faith does not even try ; it begins with the certitude of completing, and it proceeds calmly, as if omnipotence were at its disposal and eternity before it. What seek you, therefore, from the science of the magi ? Dare to formulate your desire, then set to work at once, and do not cease acting after the same manner and for the same end ; what you will shall come to pass, and for you and by you it has indeed already begun. Sixtus V. said, while watching his flocks : “ I desire to be pope.” You are a beggar, and you desire to make gold ; set to work and never leave off. I promise you, in the name of science, all the treasures of Flamel and Kaymond Lully. " What is

the first thing to do ? ” Believe in your power, then act. “ But how act ? ” Eise daily at the same hour, and that early ; bathe at a spring before daybreak, and in all seasons ; never wear dirty clothes, rather wash them yourself if needful ; accustom yourself to voluntary privations, that you may be better able to bear those which come without seeking ; then silence every desire which is foreign to the fulfilment of the great work. “ What ! By bathing daily in a spring, I shall make gold ? ” You will work in order^ to make it. “ It is a mockery ! ” No, it is an arcanum. “ How can I make use of an arcanum which I fail to understand ? ” Believe and act ; you will understand later. One day a person said to me : “I would that I could be a fervent Catholic, but I am a Yoltairean. What would I not give to have faith ! ” I replied : “ Say ' I would ’ no longer ; say ‘ I will,’ and I promise you that you will believe. You tell me you are a Yoltairean, and of all the various presentations of faith that of the Jesuits is most repugnant to you, but at the same time seems the most powerful and desirable. Perform the exercises of St Ignatius again and again, without allowing yourself to be discouraged, and you will attain the faith of a Jesuit. The result is infallible, and should you then have the simplicity to ascribe it to a miracle, you deceive yourself now in thinking that you are a Yoltairean.”

An idle man will never become a magician. Magic is an exercise of all hours and all moments. The operator of great works must be absolute master of himself ; he must know how to conquer the allurements of pleasure, appetite, and sleep ; he must be insensible to success and to indignity. His life must be that of a will directed by one thought, and served by entire nature, which he will have made subject to mind in his own organs, and by sympathy in all the universal forces which are their correspondents. All faculties and all senses should share in the work ; nothing in the priest of Hermes has the right to remain idle ; intelligence must be formulated by signs and summed by characters or pantacles ; will must be determined by words, and must fulfil words by deeds ; the magical idea must be rendered into light for the eyes, harmony for the ears, perfumes for the sense of smell, savours for the palate, objects for the touch ; the operator, in a word, must realise in his whole life what he wishes to realise in the world without him ; he must become a magnet to attract the desired thing ; and when he shall be sufficiently magnetic, he must be convinced that the thing will come of itself, and without thinking of it.

It is important for the magus to be acquainted with the secrets of science, but he may know them by intuition, and without formal learning. Solitaries, living in the habitual contemplation of nature, frequently divine her harmonies, and are more instructed in their simple good sense than doctors, whose natural discernment is falsified by the sophistries of the schools. True practical magicians are almost invariably found in the country, and are frequently uninstructed persons and simple shepherds. Furthermore, certain physical organisations are better adapted than others for the revelations of the occult world ; there are sensitive and sympathetic natures, with whom intuition in the astral light is, so to speak, inborn ; certain afflictions and certain complaints can modify the nervous system, and, independently of the concurrence of the will, may convert it into a divinatory apparatus of less or more perfection ; but these phenomena are exceptional, and generally magical power should, and can, be acquired by perseverance and labour. There are also some substances which produce ecstasy, and dispose towards the magnetic sleep ; there are some whicli place at the service of imagination all the most lively and highly coloured reflections of the elementary light ; but the use of such substances is dangerous, for they commonly occasion stupefaction and intoxication. They are used, notwithstanding, but in carefully calculated quantities, and under wholly exceptional circumstances.

He who decides to devote himself seriously to magical works, after fortifying his mind against all danger of hallucination and fright, must purify himself without and within for forty days. The number forty is sacred, and its very figure is magical. In Arabic numerals it consists of the circle, which is the type of the infinite, and of the 4, which sums the triad by unity. In Eoman numerals, arranged after the following manner, it represents the sign of the fundamental doctrine of Hermes, and the character of ' the Seal of Solomon : — The purification of the magus consists in abstinence from ( coarse enjoyments, in a temperate and vegetable diet, in ref training from intoxicating drink, and in regulating the hours cof sleep. This preparation has been indicated and reprebsented in all forms of worship by a period of penitence and ttrials preceding the symbolical feasts of life-renewal. As already said, the most scrupulous external cleanliness imust be observed ; the poorest person can find spring water. ^AIl clothes, furniture, and vessels made use of must also be \3arefully washed, whether by ourselves or others. All dirt ns evidence of negligence, and negligence is deadly in magic.

I The atmosphere must be purified at rising and retiring with i perfume composed of the juice of laurels, salt, camphor, vhite resin, and sulphur, repeating at the same time the four nacred names, while turning successively towards the four tardinal points. We must divulge to no one the works that ' ve accomplish, for, as already said in the Doctrine, mystery s the exact and essential condition of all the operations of cience. The inquisitive must be misled by the pretence of other occupations and other researches, such as chemical experiments for industrial purposes, hygienic prescriptions, the investigation of some natural secrets, and so on ; but the forbidden name of magic must never be pronounced. The magus must be isolated at the beginning and difficult to approach, so that he may concentrate his power and select his points of contact, but in proportion as he is austere and inaccessible at first, so will he be popular and sought after when he shall have magnetised his chain and chosen his place in a current of ideas and of light. A laborious and poor existence is so favourable to practical initiation that the greatest masters have preferred it, even when the wealth of the world was at their disposal. Then it is that Satan, that is, the spirit of ignorance, who scorns, suspects, and detests science because at heart he fears it, comes to tempt the future master of the world by saying to him : “ If thou art the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.” Then it is that mercenary men seek to humiliate the prince of knowledge by perplexing, depreciating, or sordidly exploiting his labour ; the slice of bread that he deigns to need is broken into ten fragments, so that he may ten times stretch forth his hand. But the magus does not even smile at the absurdity, and calmly pursues his work.

So far as may be possible, we must avoid the sight of hideous objects and uncomely persons, must decline eating with those whom we do not esteem, and must live in the most uniform and studied manner. We must hold ourselves in the highest respect, and must consider that we are dethroned sovereigns who consent to existence in order to reconquer our crowns. We must be mild and considerate to all, but in social relations must never permit ourselves to be absorbed, and must withdraw from circles in which we cannot acquire some initiative. Finally, we may and should fulfil the duties and practise the rites of the cultus to which we belong. Now, of all forms of worship the most magical is that which most realises the miraculous, which bases the most inconceivable mysteries upon the highest reasons, which has lights equivalent to its shadows, which popularises miracles, and incarnates God in all mankind by faith. This religion has existed always in the world, and under many names has been ever the one and ruling religion. It has now among the nations of the earth three apparently hostile forms, which are, however, destined to unite before long for the constitution of one universal Church. I refer to the Greek orthodoxy, Eoman Catholicism, and a final transfiguration of the religion of Buddha.

We have now made it plain, as we believe, that our magic is opposed to the goetic and necromantic kinds ; it is at once an absolute science and religion, which should not indeed destroy and absorb all opinions and all forms of worship, but should regenerate and direct them by reconstituting the cu’cle of initiates, and thus providing the blind masses with wi.se and clear-seeing leaders. We are living at a period when nothing remains to destroy and everything to remake. “ Eemake what ? The past ? ” No one can remake the past. “ What, then, shall we reconstruct ? Temples and thrones ? ” To what purpose, since the former ones have been cast down ? “ You might as weU say : my house has collapsed from age, of what use is it to build another ? ” But will the house that you contemplate erecting be like that which has fallen ? No, for the one was old and the other will be new. “ Notwithstanding, it will be always a house.” What more can you wish ? Equilibrium is the consequence of two forces. If two forces are absolutely and invariably equal, the equilibrium will be immobility, and therefore the negation of life. Movement is the result of an alternate preponderance. The impulsion given to one of the sides of a balance necessarily determines the motion of the other. Thus contraries act on one another, throughout all nature, by correspondence and analogical connection.

All life is composed of an aspiration and a respiration ; creation is the assumption of a shadow to serve as a bound to light, of a void to serve as space for the plenitude, of a passive fructified principle to sustain and realise the power of the active generating principle. All nature is bisexual, and the movement which produces the appearances of death and life is a continual generation. God loves tie void which he made in order to fill it ; science loves the ignorance which it enlightens ; strength loves the weakness which it supports ; good loves the apparent evil which glorifies it ; day is desirous of night, and pursues it unceasingly round the world ; love is at once a thirst and a plenitude which must diffuse itself. He who gives receives, and he who receives gives ; movement is a continual interchange. To know the law of this change, to be acquainted with the alternative or simultaneous proportion of these forces, is to possess the first principles of the great magical arcanum, which constitutes true human divinity. Scientifically, we can appreciate the various manifestations of the universal movement through electric or magnetic phenomena. Electrical apparatuses above all materially and positively reveal the afl&nities and antipathies of certain substances. The marriage of copper with zinc, the action of all metals in the galvanic pile, are perpetual and unmistakable revelations.

Let physicists seek and find out ; ever will the kabbalists explain the discoveries of science ! The human body is subject, like the earth, to a dual law ; it attracts and it radiates ; it is magnetised by an androgyne magnetism, and reacts on the two powers of the soul, the intellectual and the sensitive, inversely, but in proportion to the alternating preponderances of the two sexes in their physical organism. The art of the magnetiser consists wholly in the knowledge and use of this law. To polarise the action and impart to the agent a bisexual and alternated force is the method still unknown and sought vainly for directing the phenomena of magnetism at will, but tact most experienced and great precision in the interior movements are required to prevent the confusion of the signs of magnetic aspiration with those of respiration ; we must also be perfectly acquainted with occult anatomy and the special temperament of the persons on whom we are operating. Bad faith and bad will in subjects constitute the gravest hindrance to the direction of magnetism. Women above all — who are essentially and invariably actresses, who take pleasure in impressing others so that they may impress themselves, and are themselves the first to be deceived when playing their neurotic melodramas — are the true black magic of magnetism. So is it for ever impossible that magnetisers who are uninitiated in the supreme secrets, and unassisted by the lights of the Kabbalah, should govern this refractory and fugitive element. To be master of woman, we must distract and deceive her skilfully by allowing her to suppose that it is she who is deceiving us. This advice, which we offer chiefly to magnetising physicians, might also find its I place and application in conjugal polity.

Man can produce two breathings at his pleasure, one ^ warm and the other cold ; he can also project either the i active or passive light at will ; but he must acquire the { consciousness of this power by habitually dwelling thereon. IThe same manual gesture may alternately aspire and respire ^ what we are accustomed to call the fluid, and the magnetiser will himself be warned of the result of his intention by an alternative sensation of warmth and cold in the hand, or in both hands when both are being used, which sensation the subject should experience at the same time, but in a contrary sense, that is, with a wholly opposed alternative. The pentagram, or sign of the microcosmos, represents, among other magical mysteries, the double sympathy of the human extremities with each other and with the circulation of the astral light in the human body. Thus, when a man is represented in the star of the pentagram, as may be seen in the “ Occult Philosophy” of Agrippa, it should be observed that the head corresponds in masculine sympathy with the right foot and in feminine sympathy with the left foot ; that the right hand corresponds in the same way with the left hand and left foot, and reciprocally of the other hand. This must be borne in mind when making magnetic passes, if we seek to govern the whole organism and bind all members by their proper chains of analogy and natural sympathy.

The same knowledge is necessary for the use of the pentagram in the conjuration of spirits, and in the evocation of errant spirits in the astral light, vulgarly called necromancy, as we shall explain in the fifth chapter of this Eitual. But it is well to observe here that every action promotes a reaction, and that in magnetising others, or influencing them magically, we establish between them and ourselves a current of contrary but analogous influence which may subject us to them instead of subjecting them to us, as happens frequently enough in those operations which have the sympathy of love for their object. Hence it is highly essential to be on our defence while we are attacking, so as not to aspire on the left while we respire on the right. The magical androgyne depicted in the frontispiece of the Eitual has solve inscribed upon the right and COGULA on the left arm, which corresponds to the symbolical figure of the architects of the second temple, who bore their sword in one hand and their trowel in the other. While building they had also to defend their work and disperse their enemies ; nature herself does

likewise, destroying and regenerating at the same time. Now, according to the allegory of Duchentau’s Magical Calendar, man, that is to say, the initiate, is the ape of nature, who confines him by a chain, but makes him act unceasingly, imitating the proceedings and works of his divine mistress and imperishable model. The alternate use of contrary forces, warmth a-fter cold, mildness after severity, love after anger, &c., is the secret of perpetual motion and the permanence of power ; coquettes feel this instinctively, and hence they make their admirers pass from hope to fear, from joy to despondency. To operate always on the same side and in the same manner is to overweight one plate of the balance, and the complete destruction of equilibrium is the speedy result. Continual caressings beget satiety, disgust, and antipathy, just as constant coldness and severity in the long run alienate and discourage affection. An unvarying and ardent fire in alchemy calcines the first matter and not seldom explodes the hermetic vessel ; the heat of lime and mineral manure must be substituted at regular intervals for the heat of flame. And so also in magic ; the works of wrath or severity must be tempered by those of beneficence and love, and if the will of the operator be always at the same tension and directed along the same line, great weariness will ensue, together with a species of moral impotence.

Thus, the magus should not live altogether in his laboratory, among his athanor, elixirs, and pantacles. However devouring be the glance of that Circe who is called occult power, we must know how to confront her on occasion with the sword of Ulysses, and how to withdraw our lips for a time from the chalice which she offers us. A magical operation should always be followed by a rest of equal length and a distraction analogous but contrary in its object. To strive continually against nature in order to her rule and conquest is to risk reason and life. Paracelsus dared to do so, but even in the warfare itself he employed equilibrated forces and opposed the intoxication of wine to that of intelligence. So was Paracelsus a man of inspiration and miracles ; yet his life was exhausted by this devouring activity, or rather its vestment was rapidly rent and worn out ; but men like Paracelsus can use and abuse fearlessly ; they well know that they can no more die than grow old here below. Nothing induces us towards joy so effectually as sorrow ; nothing is nearer to sorrow than joy. Hence the uninstructed operator is astounded by attaining the very opposite of his proposed results, because he does not know how to cross or alternate his action ; he seeks to bewutch his enemy, and himself becomes ill and miserable ; he desires to make himself loved, and he consumes himself for women who deride him ;

he endeavours to make gold, and he exhausts all his resources ; his torture is that of Tantalus eternally ; ever does the water flow back when he stoops down to drink. The ancients in their symbols and magical operations multiplied the signs of the duad, so that its law of equilibrium might be remembered. In their evocations they invariably constructed two altars, and immolated two victims, one white and one black ; the operator, whether male or female, holding a sword in one hand and a wand in the other, had one foot shod and the other bared. At the same time, either one or three persons were required for magical works, because the duad would be immobility or death in the absence of the equilibrating motor ; and when a man and a woman participated in the ceremony, the operator was either a virgin, a hermaphrodite, or a child. I shall be asked whether the eccentricity of these rites is arbitrary, and whether its one end is the exercise of the will by the mere multiplication of difficulties in magical work ? I answer that in magic there is nothing arbitrary, because everything is ruled and predetermined by the one and universal dogma of Hermes, that of analogy in the three worlds. Each sign corresponds to an idea, and to the special form of an idea ; each act expresses a volition corresponding to a thought, and formulates the analogies of that thought and that will. The rites are, therefore, pre-

arranged by the science itself. The uninstructed person who is not acquainted with the three powers is subject to their mysterious fascination ; the sage understands those powers, and makes them the instrument of his will, but when they are accomplished with exactitude and faith, they are never ineffectual. All magical instruments must be duplicated ; there must be two swords, two wands, two cups, two chafing-dishes, two pantacles, and two lamps ; two vestments must be worn, one over the other, and they must be of contrary colours, a rule still followed by Catholic priests ; and either no metal, or two at the least, must be worn. The crowns of laurel, rue, mugwort, or vervain must, in like manner, be double ; one of them is used in evocations, while the other is burnt, the crackling which it makes and the curls of the smoke which it produces being observed like an augury. Nor is the observance vain, for in the magical work all the instruments of art are magnetised by the operator ; the air is charged with his perfumes, the fire which he has consecrated is subject to his will, the forces of nature seem to hear and answer him ; he reads in all forms the modifications and complements of his thought. He perceives the water agitated, and, as it were, bubbling of itself, the fire blazing up or extinguishing suddenly, the leaves of the garlands rustling, the magical rod moving spontaneously, and strange, unknown voices passing through the air. It was in such evocations that Julian beheld the beloved phantoms of his dethroned gods, and was appalled at their decrepitude and pallor.

I am aware that Christianity has for ever suppressed ceremonial magic, and that it severely proscribes the evocations and sacrifices of the old world. It is not, therefore, our intention to give a new ground for their existence by revealing the antique mysteries after the lapse of so many centuries. Even in this very order of phenomena, our experiences have been scholarly researches and nothing more. We have confirmed facts that we might appreciate causes, and it has never been our pretension to restore rites which are for ever destroyed. The orthodoxy of Israel, that religion which is so rational, so divine, and so ill known, condemns, no less than Christianity, the mysteries of ceremonial magic. From the standpoint of the tribe of Levi, the exercise of transcendent magic must be considered as an usurpation of the priesthood ; and the same reason has caused the proscription of operative magic by every official cultus. To demonstrate the natural foundation of the marvellous, and to produce it at will, is to annihilate for the vulgar mind that conclusive evidence from miracles which is claimed by each religion as its exclusive property and its final argument. Eespect for established religions, but room also for science ! We have passed, thank God, the days of inquisitions and pyres ; unhappy men of learning are no longer murdered on the faith of a few distraught fanatics or hysterical girls. For the rest, let it be clearly understood that our undertaking is concerned with studies of the curious, and not with an impossible propaganda. Those who may blame us for daring to term ourselves magician have nothing to fear from the example, it being wholly improbable that they will ever become sorcerers.

The Abbot Trithemius, who in magic was the master of Cornelius Agrippa, explains, in his “ Steganography,” the secret of conjurations and evocations after a very natural and philosophical manner, though possibly, for that very reason, too simply and too easily. He tells us that to evoke a spirit is to enter into the dominant thought of that spirit, and if we raise ourselves morally higher along the same line. we shall draw the spirit away with us, and it will certainly serve us. To conjure is to oppose the resistance of a current and a chain to an isolated spirit — mm jurare, to swear together, that is, to make a common act of faith. The greater the strength and enthusiasm of this faith, the more efficacious is the conjuration. This is why new-born Christianity silenced the oracles ; it only possessed inspiration, it only force. Later on, when St Peter grew old, that is, when the world believed that it had a legal case against the Papacy, the spirit of prophecy came to replace the oracles ; Savonarola, Joachim of Plores, John Hus, and so many others, by turns influenced the minds of men, and interpreted, by lamentations and menaces, the secret anxieties and rebellions of all hearts.

We may act individually when evoking a spirit, but to conjure we must speak in the name of a circle or an association ; this is the significance of the hieroglyphical circle traced round the magus who is operating, and out of which he must not pass unless he wishes at the same moment to be stripped of all his power. Let us grapple at this point with the vital and palmary question, whether the real evocation and real conjuration of spirits are things possible, and whether such possibility can be scientifically demonstrated. To the first part of the question it may be replied out of hand that everything which is not an evident impossibility can and must be admitted as provisionally possible. As to the second part, we affirm that in virtue of the great magical dogma of the hierarchy and of universal analogy, the kabbalistic possibility of real evocations can be demonstrated ; concerning the phenomenal reality consequent upon magical operations accomplished with sincerity, this is a matter of experience ; as already described, we have established it in our own persons, and by means of this Ritual we shall place our readers in a position to renew and confirm our experiences.

Nothing in nature perishes ; whatsoever has lived goes on living always under new forms ; but even the anterior forms are not destroyed, since they persist in our memory. Do we not still see in imagination the child we once knew, though now he is an old man ? The very traces which we believe to be effaced from our memory are not in reality blotted out, for a fortuitous circumstance may evoke and recall them. But after what manner do we see them ? As we have already said, it is in the astral light, which transmits them to our brain by the mechanism of the nervous system. On the other hand, all forms are proportional and analogical to the idea which has determined them.; they are the natural character, the signature of that idea, as the magi term it, and so soon as the idea is actively evoked, the form is realised and bodied forth, Schroepffer, the famous illuming of Leipsic, terrified all Germany with his evocations, and his audacity in magical experiments was so great that his reputation became an insupportable burden ; he allowed himself to be carried away by the immense current of hallucinations which he had produced ; the visions of the other world disgusted him with this, and he killed himself. His story should be a warning to those who are fascinated by ceremonial magic. Nature is not outraged with impunity, and no one can safely play with unknown and incalculable forces.

It is this consideration which has led, and will ever lead, us to withstand the vain curiosity of those who would see in order that they may believe, and we reply to them in the same words as we replied to an eminent Englishman who threatened us with his scepticism : “ You are perfectly within your right in refusing to believe ; for our own part, it will not make us more discouraged or less convinced.” To those who may assure us that they have scrupulously and boldly fulfilled all the rites, and that there has been no result, we would recommend that they should stay their hand, as it is possibly a warning of nature, who will not lend herself for them to these anomalous works ; but if they persist in their curiosity, they have only to start afresh.

The triad, being the foundation of magical doctrine, must necessarily be observed in evocations ; so is it the symbolical number of realisation and effect. The letter ^ is commonly traced upon kabbalistic pantacles which have the fulfilment of a desire for their object. It is also the sign of the scapegoat in mystic kabbalah, and Saint Martin observes that inserted in the incommunicable tetragram it forms the name of the Eedeemer It is this which the mystagogues of the middle ages represented in their nocturnal assemblies by the exhibition of a symbolical goat, carrying a lighted torch between ,its two horns. In the fifteenth chapter of the Kitual we shall describe the allegorical forms and strange cultus of this monstrous animal, which represented nature doomed to anathema but ransomed by the sign of light. The gnostic agapae and pagan priapic orgies which followed in its honour sufficiently revealed the moral consequence which the adepts drew from the exhibition. All this will be explained, together with the rites, decried and now regarded as fabulous, of the great Sabbath and of Black Magic. Within the grand circle of evocations a triangle was usually traced, and the side towards which the upper point must be directed was a matter for careful observation. If the spirit were supposed to be from heaven, the operator placed himself at the top, and set the altar of fumigations at the bottom ; but if the spirit came from the abyss this method was reversed.

Moreover, the sacred symbol of two interlaced triangles, forming the six-pointed star, known in magic as the pantacle or Seal of Solomon, must be worn upon the forehead and the breast, and graven in the right hand. Independently of these signs, the ancients, in their evocations, made use of those mystical combinations of divine names which we have reproduced in our Doctrine from the Hebrew kabbalists. The magic triangle of Pagan theo- > sophists was the celebrated ABEACADABEA, to which they attributed extraordinary virtues, and represented as follows : —