This work is the author's testament; it is the most important, and the final, treatise by him on the occult sciences.

It is divided into three books:

This treatise needs neither introduction nor preface. The author's previous works are more than sufficient to serve as both preface and introduction.

Here is the last word on occultism and it is written as clearly as it has been possible for us to write it.

Ought this volume to be published? Can it be published? We have borne these questions in mind while writing it; but we believed that we should and could write it.

If real initiates are still to be found somewhere in the world, it is for them we have written it, and to them alone belongs the right to judge us.

ELIPHAS LEVI.
September 1868.

Magnetism is a force analogous to that of the ordinary magnet, and permeates the whole of nature.

Its characteristics are: attraction, repulsion and a balanced polarization.

Science takes account of celestial and mineral magnetism. Animal magnetism is exhibited daily in facts which science is unable to deny; but it regards them with mistrust, and rightly waits to admit them whenever analysis can be supplemented by an incontrovertible synthesis.

It is well known that the magnetic state produced by animal magnetism brings about an unusual type of sleep during which the soul of the magnetized individual falls under the domination of the magnetizer, with this peculiarity that the sleeper seems to leave his own life unoccupied and shows only those phenomena which belong to the universal life. He reflects the thoughts of others, sees without using his eyes, visits all places without any recognition of space, perceives forms much better than colours, foreshortens or confuses periods of time, speaks of the future as if it were past and of the past as if it were still to come, tells the magnetizer the latter's thoughts -- even the secret voice of his conscience, summons into his memory the people of whom he is thinking and describes them in the greatest detail, even though the clairvoyant has never seen them, speaks the language of science like a scholar and that of the imagination like a poet, diagnoses diseases and finds the remedies for them, often imparts wise advice, suffers with those who suffer and sometimes cries bitterly beforehand when revealing the distress which has to come.

These strange but incontestable facts lead us to the necessary conclusion that there is a common life shared by all souls; or at least a common mirror for every imagination and every memory, in which it is possible for us to gaze at one another like a crowd of people standing before a glass. This reflector is the odic light of Baron Reichenbach, which we call the astral light, and is the great agency of life termed od, ob and aour by the Hebrews. The magnetism controlled by the will of the operator is Od; that of passive clairvoyance is Ob: the pythonesses of antiquity were clairvoyantes intoxicated with the passive astral light. This light is called the spirit of Python in our holy books, because in Greek mythology the serpent Python is its allegorical representative.

In its double action, it is also represented by the serpent of the caduceus: the right-hand serpent is Od, the one on the left is Ob and, in the middle, at the top of the hermetic staff, shines the golden globe which represents Aour, or light in equilibrium.

Od represents life governed by free choice, Ob represents life ruled by fate. This is why the Hebrew Law-giver said: 'Woe to those who divine by Ob, because they evoke fate, which is an offence against the providence of God and the liberty of man.'

Certainly, there is a wide difference between the serpent Python, which crawled in the mud of the deluge and was shot by the sun's arrows, and that which coils around the rod of Aesculapius, just as the tempter serpent of Eden differs from the brazen serpent which cured those who were poisoned in the desert. These two antagonistic serpents really stand for those contrary forces which may be connected but never confused. Hermes' sceptre, while keeping them apart, also reconciles them, and even unites them in a way; and this is how, under the penetrating eyes of science, harmony arises from the analogy of contraries.

Necessity and Liberty, these are the two great laws of life; and properly speaking these two laws only make one, because they are both indispensable.

Necessity without liberty would be fatal, even as liberty without its necessary curb would go insane. Privilege without obligation is folly, and obligation without privilege is slavery.

The whole secret of magnetism lies here: to rule the fatality of the ob by intelligence and the power of the od so as to create the perfect balance of aour.

When an unbalanced magnetizer, who has been made the slave of fate by the passions that master him, tries to operate on the light of fate, he is like a blindfold man on a blind horse, endeavouring to spur it into a gallop in a forest full of winding tracks and cliff-edges.

The fortune-tellers, the card-readers, the clairvoyants are all of them the subjects of hallucination who make their predictions by ob.

The glass of water in hydromancy, the tarot of Etteila, the lines in the palm, etc., produce a kind of hypnotism in the seer. Thus he regards his consultant in the reflection of his own silly desires or greedy imaginations; and because he is himself a spirit without dignity or nobility of will, he divines his client's follies and suggests to him even greater ones, which is all a part of his success so he thinks.

A card-reader who counselled honesty and upright behaviour would soon lose his clientele of kept women and hysterical old maids.

The two magnetic lights may be called one the living light and the other the dead light, one the astral fluid and the other the spectral phosphorus, one the torch of discourse and the other the smoke of dreams.

To magnetize without danger, it is essential to have within oneself the light of life, that is to say it is necessary to be wise and righteous.

The man who is a slave to his passions does not magnetize, he fascinates; but in radiating his fascination he enlarges the giddy circle around him; he multiplies his spells and saps his will power more and more. He is like a spider which wears itself out and is finally caught in its own web.

Humanity has not yet known the supreme rule of reason, even today; they mistake it for each man's personal and almost always erroneous rationalizing. However, Mr de La Palice himself would tell them that he who deceives himself is not a man of reason, for reason is just the exact opposite of our errors.

The individuals and masses who are not governed by reason are the slaves of fate; fate makes public opinion and opinion is queen of the world.

Men want to be dominated, tranquillized and led away. The major cravings seem more beautiful to them than virtues do, and those whom they call great men are often the big fools. The cynicism of Diogenes pleases them like the charlatanism of Empedocles. There would be none they would admire so much as Ajax and Capaneus if Polyeucte had not been wilder still. Pyramus and Thisbe -- who killed themselves -- are the model lovers. The author of a paradox is always certain to make his name. And the world in its spite and envy has tried in vain to consign the name of Erostratus to oblivion, this name is so abnormal that it survives in their anger and imprints itself eternally on their memory!

The fools then are magnetizers or rather fascinators, and this is what makes their folly contagious. Because they have failed to measure true greatness, people get taken up with what is exotic.

Children who have not yet learnt to walk wish to be picked up and carried about.

Nobody likes wild behaviour as much as the impotent do. It is their incapacity for pleasure which makes characters like Tiberius and Messalina. The Parisian street-arab in his paradise on the boulevards would like to be a bandit and laughs uproariously on seeing Telemachus ridiculed.

Not everybody has the inclinations of drug addicts or alcoholics, but almost everyone would like to get his spirit 'high' and would be happy enough if his heart 'went on a trip'.

When Christianity imposed itself on the world by the fascination of martyrdom, a great writer of that period put the thoughts of everyone into words when he said: 'I believe because it is irrational!'

The foolishness of the Cross, as Saint Paul himself called it, was then on its invincible march. The books of the adepts were burnt, and Saint Paul at Ephesus preluded the exploits of Omar. The temples were demolished which had been the wonders of the world, and the idols which had been artistic masterpieces. People developed the taste for death and wanted to despoil their transient existence of all its ornaments so that they might withdraw from life.

A distaste for realities always goes with a love of dreams: Quam sordet tellus dum coelum aspicio! said a famous mystic. This means literally: How sordid the earth becomes when I look at the sky! How so; does your nurse, the earth, get dirty when your gaze loses itself in space? What is the earth then, if she is not a heavenly body? Perhaps she is dirty because she has to carry you around with her? No doubt if you were transported to the sun, the sun would soon appear tarnished to your finicky eye! Would the sky be a better place if it were empty? Isn't it just the point that it is so wonderful to look at because it lights up the earth by day and, in the night, shines with a countless multitude of earths and suns? What, the splended earth, the earth of immense oceans, the earth so full of trees and flowers becomes filth to you because you want to be launched into space? Believe me, you do not need to travel far for that: the void is in your spirit and in your heart!

It is the love of dreams which mixes so much suffering with the dreams of love. Love, as it is given to us by nature, is a delightful reality, but our unhealthy pride looks for something better than nature; hence the hysterical mania of the misunderstood. The thought of Charlotte, in Werther's head, is fatally transformed -- as is only inevitable -- into the shape of a pistol bullet. The outcome of preposterous love is suicide.

True love, natural love, is the miracle of magnetism. It is the intertwining of the two serpents of the caduceus. Its generation looks fated, but it is brought into being by the supreme reason which produces it according to natural laws. It is fabled that Tiresias incurred the wrath of Venus for separating two serpents who were copulating, and became a hermaphrodite: which neutralized his sexual potency; then the angry goddess struck him again, blinding him, because he had claimed for the woman that which was mainly the right of the man. Tiresias was a soothsayer who prophesied by means of the dead light. His predictions, too, announced misfortunes, and always seemed to be caused by misfortunes. This allegory sums up the entire philosophy of magnetism which we have just revealed.

Evil, in so far as it exists, is the affirmation of disorder. Now, in the presence of the eternal order, disorder is essentially transitory. In the presence of the absolute order, which is the will of God, disorder is only relative. Hence the absolute affirmation of disorder and evil is fundamentally a lie.

The absolute affirmation of evil is the denial of God, since God is the supreme and absolute source of good.

Evil is the denial of reason in the philosophical world. It is the denial of responsibility in the social world. It is opposition to the inviolable laws of nature in the physical world.

Suffering is not an evil, it is the consequence and nearly always the remedy of evil.

Nothing which is naturally inevitable can possibly be an evil. Winter, night and death are not evils. They are the natural transitions from one day to another day, from autumn to spring, from one life to another life.

Proudhon has said 'God is what is evil'; which is as much as to say: God is the devil, because the devil is usually taken as the spirit of evil. If we reverse the proposition, we get this paradoxical formula: The devil is God, or in other words: evil is God. But of course, in talking like this, the king of logicians whom we have quoted was not trying to designate the hypothetical personification of good under the name of God. He was dreaming of some impossible divinity imagined by men and we will agree that he was right in explaining his thought in this way, for the devil is the caricature of God, and that which we call evil is good, badly defined and poorly understood.

We should not know how to love evil for evil's sake, and disorder for the sake of disorder. The infringement of the laws pleases us because it seems to place us above the law. Men were not made for the law, but the law has been made for men, to paraphrase the saying of Jesus which the priests of his time found so subversive and impious, a saying which human pride could abuse so monstrously. If someone says to us that God has rights but not responsibilities because He is stronger than we are, we say that this is what we mean by an impious saying. He may even dare to add that God is everything to us, but we are nothing to Him, whereas the contrary is true. God, who is infinitely greater than us, contracted an infinite debt in putting us into the world. He has dug the pit of human weakness which only He can fill in.

The absurd baseness of tyranny in the ancient world has bequeathed us the phantom of a god who is absurd and mean, who would make an eternal miracle to force a finite being to exist through infinite sufferings.

Let us suppose for a moment that one of us has been able to create an ephemeral being and has said to it, without its being able to hear it: 'My creature, worship me!' The poor little creature scuttles about without a thought in its head. When its day is over and it dies, a necromancer says to the man that by pouring a drop of his blood on it he is able to resurrect the ephemeral creature.

The man takes offence -- I would do the same if I were in his place -- here is the resuscitated creature. What is the man going to do? I will tell you what he will do, exclaims a fanatic believer. Seeing that the creature in its former life did not have the wit to adore him, he will light a terrible brazier and hurl the creature into it, only regretting that he has not got the power to preserve its life miraculously in the midst of the flames so that it will burn eternally! -- We know that everybody will say that nowhere could such a mad fool be found as base or as wicked as that! -- Please forgive me, some of you Christians, the man in question certainly does not exist, I am convinced of that; but there does exist, in your imagination only I hasten to add, someone most cruel and base. It is your idea of God, as you explain Him, and it is of this idea that Proudhon had a thousand-fold reason for saying: (a) God (like this) is evil.

In this sense evil would be the deceitful affirmation of an evil god, and it is such a god who would be the devil or someone like him. A religion which offered such a balm for the sores of humanity would poison it instead of curing it. Spirits would be brutalized and consciences would become depraved, and the propaganda made in the name of such a god could be termed the evil magnetism. The result of falsehood is injustice, and from injustice there flows the iniquity which raises anarchy in states and in individuals; disintegration and death.

A lie cannot exist without evoking in the dead light a sort of spectral verity, and all the liars in life deceive themselves first of all in taking night for day. The anarchist thinks he is free, the thief thinks he is clever, the womanizer thinks he is enjoying himself, the dictator thinks that oppression is governing. What is required to destroy evil on the earth? Something which looks very simple: the enlightenment of the dolts and the vicious. But here all goodwill fails and all efforts founder; the vicious and the dolts have no wish to be enlightened. We have come up against that secret perversity which seems to be the root of the trouble, the relish for disorder and the attachment to error. It is our opinion that this perversity is not really something which is freely accepted and desired, but is nothing else than the poisoning of the will by the deleterious force of error.

The air we breath consists, as you know, of oxygen and nitrogen. The oxygen corresponds to the light of life and the nitrogen to the light of death. A man who was plunged into nitrogen would be unable to breathe or live; in the same way, a man who has been asphyxiated by the spectral light is no longer able to act of his own free will. It is not in the atmosphere that the great phenomenon of light takes place, it is in eyes which have been formed to see. One day, a philosopher of the positivist school, Mr Littré if I remember correctly, declared that infinity is nothing more than an endless night punctuated here and there by one or two stars. This is true, someone will say, for our eyes, which have not been made to perceive any other radiance than the light of the sun. But does not the very idea of this light appear to us when dreaming, while the earth is shrouded in night and our eyes are shut? What is the day belonging to souls? How does one see by means of thought? Would the night of our eyes exist for eyes which were constructed in some other way? And if our eyes were non-existent, would we have any awareness of the night? There are neither stars nor sun to the blind; and if we blindfold our eyes we become blind voluntarily. The perversity of the senses just like that of the faculties of the soul results from an accident or from some first offence against the laws of nature; it then becomes necessary and has the appearance of being fated. What is to be done with the blind? -- They must be taken by the hand and led. -- But what if they do not want to be led? -- Guard-rails will have to be erected. -- But suppose they knock them down? -- In that case they are not simply blind, but dangerous lunatics and the best thing to do is to let them perish if they cannot be locked up.

Edgar Allan Poe tells the amusing story of an asylum where the inmates had managed to lay hands on the attendants and keepers and had locked them in their own padded cells after making them look like wild beasts. There they are, celebrating their victory in their doctor's rooms, drinking the infirmary's wine and congratulating each other on having made such splendid recoveries. While they are carousing, their prisoners break their chains and rush them with flailing batons. They have been infuriated by the poor madmen and avenge themselves after a fashion by senseless ill-usage.

Here we have the story of modern revolutions. The feeble-minded, triumphing by sheer weight of numbers, in other words the so-called masses, imprison the wise men and make out that the latter are no better than wild beasts. Soon the prisons fall into disrepair and break down, and the wise of today, by their sufferings, escape howling and spreading terror all round. An attempt was made to impose a false god on people, and they bawl that there is no God at all. Then the apathetic, who have grown bold from fear, form a coalition to quell these frantic half-wits and inaugurate the rule of the imbeciles. We have already seen this happen.

Up to what point men are responsible for the swings and agonies which produce so many crimes, would puzzle a thinker to say. Marat is execrated and Pius V is canonized.

It is true that the awful Ghislieri did not guillotine his opponents -- he burnt them to death. Pius V was a severe man and a convinced Catholic. Marat took impartiality to the point of misery.

Both of them believed in what they were doing, but they were homicidal fools even if they were not homicidal maniacs.

Now, when some criminal folly obtains the complicity of the people it almost becomes a terrible right, and when the mob, who have not been undeceived but led astray in some other fashion, disown and abandon their hero, the loser becomes at one and the same time both scapegoat and martyr. The death of Robespierre is as fine as that of Louis XVI.

I genuinely admire that frightful inquisitor who, when assassinated by the Albigenses, wrote on the ground with his blood before he died: Credo in unum Deum! (I believe in One God).

Is war an evil? Yes, of course it is, because it is horrible. But is it an absolute evil? -- War is the travail at the birth of nations and civilizations. Who is responsible for war? Are men? No, for they are its victims. Who then? -- No one would be rash enough to say Providence; unless perhaps Count Joseph de Maistre, with his theories of why the priests have always consecrated the sword and how there has always been a mystical air associated with the bloody office of the executioner. Evil is the shadow, the foil of good. Pushing this argument too far would imply that it is negative good. Evil then, is the resistance which confirms the effort of good, and so that is why Jesus Christ was not afraid to say: 'It must needs be that scandals should come!'

There are monsters in nature, just as there are typographical faults in a fine book. What does this show? It shows that both nature and the press are blind instruments directed by intelligence; but, you will say to me, a good case overseer will correct his proofs. Yes indeed, and in nature this is the purpose of progress.

God, if I may be allowed the comparison, is like the head of the printing works and man is His overseer in the composing room.

The priests have always preached that scourages are caused by human sins, and they are right, because science has been given to man to foresee and prevent scourges. If, as is claimed, cholera arises from the corpses piled up at the mouths of the Ganges, if famine comes of cornering food, if plague is caused by dirtiness, if war is so often caused by the stupid pride of kings and the unruliness of peoples, is it not really the wickedness -- or rather the silliness -- of men which is the cause of scourges?

There is an expression that 'ideas are in the air', and one may truthfully add that vices are there too. All corruption produces putrefaction and every putrefaction has its own identifiable stench. The atmosphere which envelopes the sick is unhealthy, and the moral plague has its own atmosphere which is far more contagious. An honest heart feels at ease in the company of good men, but it is oppressed, it suffers, it is stifled when surrounded by the vicious.

In his book on the perpetual motion of souls, the Grand Rabbi Isaac Loriah says that it is necessary to take special care in using the hour preceding sleep. In fact, the soul loses its individual life for a time during sleep to immerse itself in the universal light which, as we have said, appears as two opposite currents. The sleeping entity either yields to the embraces of the serpent of Aesculapius, the vital and regenerating serpent, or lies back in the poisoned coils of the hideous Python. To sleep is to bathe in the light of life or in the phosphorescent glow of death. He who goes to sleep with thoughts of justice steeps himself in the merits of the just, but he who prepares for sleep with hatred or lies filling his mind wallows in the dead sea or soaks up the infection of the wicked.

Night is like winter time which incubates and prepares the seeds. If we have sown tares we shall not harvest wheat. He who settles down to sleep in a spirit of irreverence will not wake up in the presence of the divine blessing. It is said that night brings counsel. Undoubtedly. Good counsel to the just, and baneful impulses to the unjust. These are the teachings of Rabbi Isaac Loriah.*

We do not know how far one ought to admit this reciprocal influence between beings plunged in sleep and controlled in some fashion by involuntary attractions, so that the good improve the good, and the wicked make those who are like them worse still. It would be more comforting to think that the good nature of the just shines on the wicked to calm them down, and that the restiveness of the wicked cannot affect the soul of the just. What is certain, is that evil thoughts disturb the sleep and make it unwholesome in consequence, and that a good conscience does wonders in refreshing and resting the blood during sleep.

At the same time it is highly probable that the magnetic radiation which has been fixed during the day by the habits and the will, does not stop during the night. This is proved by the fact that our dreams are where we often act out our most secret desires. 'Only he,' says St Augustine 'has truly attained the virtue of chastity who imposes modesty even on his dreams.'

All the stars are magnetic, and all the celestial magnets act and react on one another in the planetary systems, in the universes and throughout infinity! The same holds good for the beings living on the earth.

The nature and force of the magnets is determined by the reciprocal influence of their forms on the force and of the force on their forms. It is necessary to examine and meditate on this with serious attention.

That beauty which is the harmony of forms is always associated with a great power of attraction; but there are doubtful and debatable beauties.

There are conventional beauties in line with certain tastes and certain passions. It was discovered at the court of Louis XV that the Venus de Milo had a large waist and big feet. In the East, the sultan's concubines are fat and, in the kingdom of Siam women are bought by weight.

Men are prepared to perpetrate follies for the beauty which subjugates them, whether that beauty is real or imaginary. So it is forms then which intoxicate us and exercise the empire of fatal forces over our better judgement. When our tastes are depraved we are smitten with certain imaginary beauties which are really eyesores. When the Romans became decadent they fell in love with the low brow and frog eyes of Messalina. Down here everyone makes his own kind of paradise. But this is where justice comes in: the paradise of depraved creatures is always and inevitably a hell.

It is the intentions of the will which decide the value of deeds, because it is the will which fixes the goal one sets for oneself, and it is always the goal desired and attained which governs the character of one's works. It is according to our works that God will judge us, as the Evangelist says, and not according to our deeds. Our deeds prepare, begin, carry on and finish our works. They are good when the work is good, and bad when it is bad. We have no wish to say that the end justifies the means, only that a worthy end necessitates worthy means and imparts some merit to actions of the most indifferent sort.

You do or get done the thing of which you approve because you encourage it. If your rule of conduct is false, if your aims are iniquitous, all those who think like you do behave as you would behave if you were them; and when they succeed, you think they have done well. If your actions seem to be those of a good man, while all the time your intentions are those of a scoundrel, your actions will become wicked. The prayers of the hypocrite are more impious than the blasphemies of the miscreant. To sum up, everything which promotes injustice is unjust; everything one does for justice is just and good.

We have already said that human beings are magnets which act one on another. This magnetism which is natural at first, but is afterwards settled in a mode determined by the habits of the will, groups mankind in phalanges and sets far more perhaps than Fourier imagined. Anyway, it is true to say with him that the attractions are proportional to the destinies; but he went wrong when he failed to differentiate between inevitable attractions and artificial attractions. He also believed that criminals are those who are misunderstood by society, whereas on the contrary it is they who do not understand society and have no intention of understanding it. What would he have done in his phalanstery with people whose attraction, proportional to their destiny according to him, had disrupted and tended to disintegrate the phalanstery?

In our book entitled The Science of Spirits, we have set down the traditional qabalistic classification of good and evil spirits. Superficial readers may have asked: why these names rather than others? What spirit descending from heaven, or what soul climbing back out of the abyss, has been able to reveal these hierarchical secrets of the other world? All this is nothing but the height of fantasy. But in saying so, these readers would have been deceived. This classification is not arbitrary, and if we postulate the existence of such and such spirits in the other world it is because they most certainly do exist there. Anarchy, presumption, obscurantism, fraud, hatred and unfairness are set against wise conduct, authority, intelligence, honour, kindness and justice. The Hebrew names Kether, Chokmah, Binah; the names Thamiel, Chaigidel, Satariel, etc., opposed to the names Hajoth Haccadosh, Ophanim, Aralim, etc., signify nothing else.

The same is true of all the important words and all the obscure terms of any dogma, ancient or modern; in the last analysis they enshrine the principles of eternal and incorruptible reason. It is evident, yes certain, that the masses are not yet ripe for the reign of reason and that the biggest fools or the biggest knaves among them mislead them time and again with blind creeds. Folly for folly, I can find more genuine socialism in Loyola than I can in Proudhon.

Proudhon affirms that atheism is an article of faith, the worst of all, it is true, which is why he has adopted it. He affirms that God is bad, that the social order is anarchy, that property is theft! What society is possible on such principles?

The Society of Jesus is established on the opposite principles, call them opposite errors if you like, and for centuries now it has held its own and is still strong enough to hold its own against the partisans of anarchy for years to come.

It is not perfectly balanced, it is true, but it still knows how to throw heavier weights on the scales than those of our friend Proudhon.

Men are more united in evil than they imagine. Proudhon made Veuillot what he was. Those who lit the faggots at Constance will have to answer before God for the massacres of Jean Ziska. The Protestants are responsible for the massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day because they cut the throats of the Catholics. Perhaps in reality it is Marat who has killed Robespierre, just as it is Charlotte Corday who caused her friends the Girondins to be executed. Madame Dubarry, dragged to the national abattoire like a slaughterhouse animal lowing and unwilling, no doubt had no thought that she must pay the penalty for the tortures under Louis XVI. For often our greatest crimes are those we do not realize.

When Marat said that one task or humanity is to let a little blood to prevent a bigger haemorrhage still, from whom do you think he borrowed this maxim? -- From the mild and pious Fénelon.

Not long ago the previously unpublished letters of Madame Elisabeth were printed and, in one of these letters, the angelic princess declares that all is lost unless the king has the courage to cut off three heads. Whose? She does not say, perhaps those of Philippe d'Orléans, of La Fayette and of Mirabeau! A prince of her own family, a worthy man and a great man. Little does it matter; the gentle princess would like three heads. Later on Marat was asking for three hundred thousand; between the angel and the demon there is only a difference of a few zeros.

* Isaac Loriah Traité des Révolutions des Ames (P. Chacornac, 1905).

The movement of the serpents around the caduceus indicates the formation of a chain.

This chain exists in two forms: the straight form and the circular form. Starting from the same centre it intersects innumerable circumferences by innumerable radii. The straight chain is the chain of transmission. The circular chain is the chain of participation, of diffusion, of communion, of religion. In this manner is formed that wheel, made up of several wheels turning one within another, which flashes on us from the vision of Ezekiel. The chain of transmission introduces solidarity between successive generations.

The central point is white on one side and black on the other.

The black serpent is fastened to the black side, and the white serpent is fastened to the white side. The central point represents original free will, and on its black side begins the original sin.

The current of fate starts from the black side, whereas choice of movement is attached to the white side. The central point may be allegorically represented by the moon, and the two forces by two women, one of them white and the other black.

The black woman is fallen Eve, she is the passive form, the infernal Hecate who bears the lunar crescent on her forehead. The white woman is Maia or Maria who treads under foot both the crescent moon and the head of the black serpent.

It is impossible to express the matter more clearly, because we have rested our hand on the cradle of all the dogmas. They have reverted to infancy before our very eyes, and we are wary lest we should harm them.

The doctrine of original sin, in whatever fashion it may be interpreted, assumes the pre-existence of our souls, if not in their own special life, at least in the universal life.

Now, if one can sin without knowing it in the universal life, one must needs be saved in the same way; but this is a great mystery.

The straight chain, the spoke of the wheel, the chain of transmission, produces solidarity between the generations, ensuring that the fathers are punished in their children so that, by the sufferings of the children the fathers stand a chance of being saved.

The Scriptures tell us that Christ descended into Hell and, having broken the iron locks and the doors of brass, ascended into Heaven leading captivity captive.

And the Universal Life cried out: Hosanna! For He has removed the sting of Death!

What is meant by all this? Dare one explain it? Will you be able to guess or understand it?

The ancient hierophants of Greece had another way of representing the two forces illustrated by the two serpents; this was as two children struggling with one another while holding a globe between their feet and knees.

The two children are Eros and Anteros, Cupid and Hermes, foolish love and wise love; and their everlasting fight keeps the world in equilibrium.

If one does not agree that we may have had some personal existence before our birth on earth, original sin will have to be seen as a voluntary depravity of human magnetism in our first parents, who would have broken the equilibrium of the chain by allowing a deadly predominance to the black serpent, that is to say, the astral current of the dead life; and we are suffering the consequences like children who are born with rickets owning to their parents' vices; feeling the penalty of misdoings which they did not commit themselves.

The extreme sufferings of Jesus and the martyrs, the excessive penances of the saints, were intended as a counterpoise to this lack of equilibrium; so irreparable, it must be added, that the world will one day be burnt up. Grace would be typified by the dove and the lamb; the astral current of life charged with the merits of the Redeemer or the saints.

The Devil or Tempter would be the astral current of death; the black serpent stained with all the crimes of men, scaled with their evil thoughts, loaded with the poison of their sinful desires; in other words THE MAGNETISM OF EVIL.

Now then, between good and evil an unending conflict is waged. They are irreconcilable for ever. So evil is always damned, always condemned to the torments which go with disorder, and yet, from our childhood it never ceases to entice us and to attract us to its side. Everything which mystical poetry teaches us about king Satan is perfectly explained in terms of this appalling magnetism which is so much the more terrible as it is more fatal; yet need not be feared so much by virtue, which it cannot overtake and which, by God's grace will surely resist it.

We have stated that the phenomenon of physical light manifests and takes place solely in the eyes which see it. That is to say that visibility has no existence for us without the faculty of vision.

The same is true of the intellectual light, it only exists for those intelligences which are capable of seeing it. It is that inner light for lack of which there is nothing but the outer darkness where, according to the words of Christ, there is and will always be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The enemies of the truth resemble child delinquents, overturning and putting out all the lamps, because they can scream and cry in the dark more easily.

Truth is so inseparably bound up with what is good that every evil deed freely consented to and done without a twinge of conscience, extinguishes the light of our soul and casts us out into the outer darkness.

This is the essence of mortal sin. The sinner is represented in the ancient fable by Oedipus who, having killed his father and violated his mother, ended by putting out his own eyes.

Knowledge is the father of human intelligence, and faith is its mother.

There were two trees in the Garden of Eden, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life.

It is knowledge which should and which can fertilize faith; otherwise she exhausts herself with monstrous abortions and gives birth to nothing but phantoms.

It is faith which ought to be the recompense of knowledge and the object for which he strives, without her he ends by doubting himself, becomes greatly discouraged and very soon despairing.

Thus the believers, on the one hand, who despise science and misunderstand nature, and the scientists, on the other hand, who insult, reject and would like to destroy faith, are both of them the enemies of the light and dash out to contend with one another in the outer darkness where Proudhon and Veuillot raise their voices turn and turn about, in a way which sounds worse than tears, and go on to grind their teeth.

True faith cannot possibly come into conflict with true science. Also, every explanation of dogma which science demonstrates as false ought to be rejected by faith.

We are no longer living in the days when it is the fashion to say: I believe it because it is beyond reason. We must say nowadays: I believe because it would be unreasonable not to do so; Credo quia absurdum non credere.

Science and faith are not two engines of war set on a collision course: they are the two columns destined to support the pediment of the temple of peace. It is necessary to clean the gold of the sanctuary so often tarnished by the grime of priestcraft.

Christ said: 'The words of the doctrine are spirit and life, the letter counts for nothing.' He also said: 'Judge not that ye be not judged, for with whatsoever judgment ye judge ye shall be judged, and as ye measure so shall it be meted out unto you.' What a splendid eulogy on the wisdom of reasonable doubt! And what a proclamation of liberty of conscience! In fact, one thing will be clear to anyone who likes to listen to sound sense; it is that if there is a strict law applicable to all, without the keeping of which it is impossible to be saved, this law will have to be promulgated in such a way as to leave no-one in doubt of its enactment. In such a matter, the possibility of doubt is a formal negation; and if a single man could be left in ignorance of such a law, the law would not be divine.

There are no two ways of being a decent man; and does religion matter less than probity? Certainly not, and this is why there has never been anything but one religion in the world. The schisms are only appearances. It is the fanaticism of the ignorant who mutually condemn each other which has always been irreligious and horrible.

The true religion is the universal religion; which is why Catholicism has adopted the only name which indicates the truth. Furthermore, this religion maintains orthodoxy in doctrine, the hierarchy of the powers, the efficacy of worship and the genuine magic of ceremonies. In other words it is typical and normal religion, the mother religion to which the Mosaic traditions and the ancient oracles of Hermes rightly belong. In upholding this in the face of the Pope himself if necessary, we shall be more catholic than the Pope and more protestant than Luther when occasion demands.

True religion is the inner light above all else, and religious forms so often multiply and shine with the spectral phosphorescence which is in the outer darkness; but it is necessary to respect the form even with those souls who do not understand the spirit. Science cannot and must not make reprisals against ignorance.

Fanaticism does not know why faith is reasonable, and reason, while recognizing that religion is essential, has a perfect understanding of how and why superstition is wrong.

The whole Christian and Catholic religion is based on the doctrine of grace, that is to say of free gift. Freely you have received, freely give, says Saint Paul. Religion is essentially a charitable institution. The Church is a house of refuge for the outcasts of philosophy. We may leave her, but we must never attack her. The poor who make do without public assistance have not earned themselves the right to sneer at it. The man who lives uprightly without religion deprives himself of tremendous assistance, but he is not setting himself against God. Free gifts are not replaced by punishments if we refuse them, and God is not a usurer who makes men pay interest on what they have not borrowed. Men need religion, but religion does not need men. Those who do not acknowledge the law, says Saint Paul, will be judged without the law. Now, he is not speaking here of the natural law, but of the religious law or, to be more precise, of the sacerdotal ordinances.

Beyond these truths so benign and pure, there is nothing else but that outer darkness where those are wailing whom a misconstrued religion cannot console, and where the sectarians who take hate for love are gnashing their teeth at one another.

One day, Saint Theresa had a tremendous vision. It seemed to her that she was in Hell and that she was immured within huge walls which were closing in around her in the vain attempt to suffocate her. These walls were quite tangible and have often led us to muse on that menacing saying of Christ about 'the outer darkness'. Imagine a soul which, through hatred of the light, has blinded itself like Oedipus; it has resisted all the charms of life and has always repulsed life as it has repulsed light. Here it is, hurled beyond the influence of the worlds and the brightness of the suns. It is alone in the immense darkness, where it must dwell by itself and with the other wilfully blind who resemble it, for ever. It is fixed in the shadow and suffers an eternal suffocation in the night. It seems to it that everything has been destroyed except its own sufferings, which could fill infinity.

What misery! To have had the capacity for understanding and to have persisted in the idiocy of a senseless creed! To have been able to love and to have allowed the heart to wither! Oh, just for an hour or even one minute of the most imperfect pleasures or the most fleeting loves! just a little air! A little sun! or even the moonlight and dancing on the green! A drop of life or less than a drop -- a tear! And an implacable eternity replies: What is this talk of tears: you cannot even cry! Tears are the dew of life and the oozing of the sap of love; you have exiled yourself in your egotism and have walled yourself up in death.

Ah! you wanted to be holier than God! Ah! you spat in the face of your mother, the chaste and divine nature! Ah! you have spoken ill of science, of intelligence and progress! Ah, you believed that eternal life meant looking like a corpse and dessicating oneself like a mummy! Now you are what you have made yourself, rejoice in the eternity which you have chosen -- in peace! But no, you poor people, those you call the sinners and the damned are coming to save you. We shall intensify the light, we shall pierce your wall, we shall tear you from your inertia. A swarm of cupids, or if you prefer, a legion of angels (they are made in the same way) shall spiral around you and drag you forth in festoons of flowers; and you shall protest in vain, like Mephistopheles in that marvellous philosophical drama by Goethe. In spite of yourselves, your restrictions and your pale faces, you will revive, you will love, you will know, you will see, and you will come to dance the infernal jig of Faust with us on the rubble of the last cloister!

Happy in the time of Jesus were those who wept! Happy, now, are those who can laugh, because laughter is the attribute of man, as the great prophet of the Renaissance, Rabelais, said. Laughter is forbearance; laughter is philosophy. The heavens clear when they laugh, and the great secret of divine omnipotence resides in an eternal smile!

Wisdom, morality, virtue: these are respectable words, but also vague ones; and they have been the subjects of dispute for centuries without there being any agreement on them!

I wish to be wise, but shall I remain certain of my wisdom as long as I suspect that fools are happier or even more jolly than I am?

Morality is essential; but we are all a little like children, and moralizing makes us yawn. This is because people 'try to stuff us with stupid morals which are not adapted to our nature. People lecture us on things which have nothing to do with us, and our minds wander.

Virtue is a fine thing: its name really means force, power. The world is upheld by the virtue of God. But in what does virtue consist for us? Is it a virtue to fast so as to weaken the head and emaciate the face? Shall we say that virtue is the simplicity of the worthy man who lets himself be robbed by thieves? Is abstinence for the sake of avoiding abuse a virtue? What would you think of a man who refused to walk for fear of breaking a leg? Whichever way you look at it, virtue is opposed to slackness, lethargy and impotence.

Virtue presupposes action; for the reason why is is usually contrasted with our passions is to make it clear that it is never something passive.

Not only is virtue strength, it is the governing reason behind strength. It is the equilibrant of life.

The great secret of virtue, virtuality and life, whether temporal or eternal, may be formulated thus:

The art of balancing forces so as to keep movement in equilibrium.

The equilibrium we are looking for is not that which produces immobility, but that which regulates movement. For immobility is death, and movement is life.

This motive equilibrium is that of nature itself. Nature, by balancing the decisive forces, produces the physical illness or even the apparent destruction of the poorly balanced man. Mankind rids itself of natural ills by knowing how to escape from the fatal action of the forces through an intelligent use of its liberty. We employ the word fatal here because the unforeseen and misunderstood forces look like necessary fate to the ill-balanced man.

Nature has provided for the conservation of the animals by endowing them with instinct, but she has arranged everything so that the improvident man will perish.

The animals live, so to speak, of their own accord and without effort. Man alone has to learn the way to live. Now the science of life is the science of moral balance.

The basis of this balance is to reconcile knowledge and religion, reason and feeling, energy and gentleness.

Truly invincible strength is strength without violence. Violent men are weak and shortsighted men whose efforts always come back on themselves.

Violent affection resembles hatred, and is close kin to aversion.

Violent anger ensures that one gives oneself up to one's enemies blindly. Homer's heroes, when attacking one another, made a point of hurling mutual insults in an attempt to rouse each other's fury, knowing full well that, in all probability, the more infuriated of the two would be conquered.

Fiery-tempered Achilles was foredoomed to perish miserably. He was the proudest and the bravest of the Greeks and brought nothing but disasters upon the heads of his compatriots.

What took Troy was the prudence and patience of Odysseus, who always held himself in check and never struck unless he was certain of success. Achilles stands for passion, and Odysseus stands for virtue, and we need to bear this in mind before we can understand the high philosophical and moral significance of the Homeric poems.

Without doubt, the author of these poems was an initiate of the first order, and the great secret of practical High Magic is all there in the Odyssey.

The great secret of magic, the unique and incommunicable Arcana, has for its purpose the placing of supernatural power at the service of the human will in some way.

To attain such an achievement it is necessary to KNOW what has to be done, to WILL what is required, to DARE what must be attempted and to KEEP SILENT with discernment.

Homer's Odysseus had to contend with the gods, the elements, the Cyclops, the sirens, Circe, etc. ... that is to say with all the difficulties and dangers of life.

His palace is invaded, his wife is pestered, his goods are plundered, his death is resolved on, he loses his comrades, his ships are sunk; at last, he alone is left to fight it out against the night and the sea. And single-handed he sways the gods, he escapes from the sea, he blinds the cyclops, he cheats the sirens, he masters Circe, he re-takes his palace, he rescues his wife, he slays those who were plotting his death; because he willed to see Ithaca and Penelope again, because he always knew how to extricate himself from danger, because he dared what had to be done and because he always kept silent when it was not expedient to speak.

But those who are fond of fairy-tales will say, with some disappointment, this isn't magic at all. Aren't there any talismans, or herbs or roots with which one can work marvels? Aren't there any mysterious spells which will open locked doors and conjure up spirits? Talk to us about this, and leave your commentary on the Odyssey for another occasion.

You know, my children, for there is no doubt that I have to reply to children, you know, if you have read my previous works, that I recognize the relative efficacy of spells and herbs and talismans. But these are only minor devices which are linked with the lesser mysteries. I am talking to you now about the great ethical forces and not of the material instruments. Spells belong to initiation rites, talismans are magnetic auxiliaries, roots and herbs fall within the province of occult medicine, and Homer himself did not disdain them. Moly, the lotus and nepenthe have their place in his poems, but they are there as incidental ornaments. Circe's cup could not affect Odysseus, who recognized its baleful results and knew how to avoid drinking it. The initiate into the high science of the mages has nothing to fear from sorcerers.

Those individuals who go in for ceremonial magic and stoop to consulting fortune-tellers are like the people who intend or hope to make good their lack of true religion by multiplying their acts of devotion. It would be a waste of time trying to satisfy them with sage advice.

You are all of you hiding a secret which is very easily guessed, and it is this: I have a passion which reason condemns and I prefer it to reason; that is why I consult an irrational oracle, because it tells me to keep hoping, helps me to trick my conscience, and lulls my heart into a feeling of security.

Folk of this sort, then, go to drink from a deceitful spring which, far from quenching their thirst, intensifies it. The charlatan mutters dark oracles, where one finds whatever one wants to find and departs knowing as little as ever. One returns on the morrow, and on the day after that, and in fact one always returns; which is how those who read the cards make their fortunes.

The Basilidian gnostics said that Sophia, the natural wisdom of man, fell in love with herself, as Narcissus did in the fable, looked away from her primary source and sprang out of that circle traced by the divine light which they called the pleroma. All alone in the darkness, she committed sacrileges in order to give birth to the light; and lost her blood like the woman with the issue of blood in the Gospel, giving rise to horrible monsters. The most dangerous of all follies is perverted wisdom.

Perverted hearts poison the whole of nature. The splendour of a beautiful day is no more to them than a garish distraction, and all the joys of life, which are dead for these dead souls, rise up in front of them to curse them, saying like the ghosts to Richard III: 'Despair and die.' Enthusiasm for noble causes makes them smirk and, as if they were requiting an insult, they throw the insolent sneers of Sténio and Rollon at love and beauty. It is no use dropping one's arms and blaming fate; what has to be done is to fight it and conquer. Those who succumb in this battle are those who do not know how to win or do not want to do so. Not knowing is some excuse, but it is no justification when the opportunity to learn is there. 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,' said Christ when dying. If a lack of knowledge were permissible, the Saviour's prayer would have been without justice, and His Father would have had nothing to pardon.

When one does not know, one should will to learn. To the extent that one does not know it is foolhardy to dare, but it is always well to keep silent.

The will is the practical realizer: we can do everything which we believe is a reasonable project.

In his own sphere of action, man is the image of the all-powerful God; he is able both to create and to transform.

His first task is to exercise this power on himself. When he enters the world, his faculties are a chaos, the darkness of his intellect covers the abyss of his heart, and his spirit is poised in uncertainty as if it were swept here and there by the waves.

He has been endowed with reason, but this reason is still passive and it is up to him to rouse it into activity; to let his face shine in the midst of the waves and cry: let there be light!

He develops a rational mind, he develops a conscience, he develops a heart. The divine law will express just what he has been doing, and the whole of nature will become for him exactly what he would like it to be.

Eternity will enter and remain in his memory. He will say to spirit: be matter, and to matter: be spirit, and spirit and matter will obey him!

All substance is modified by action, all action is controlled by spirit, all spirit is controlled conformably to the will, and all will is decided by some reason.

The reality of things is in their reason for existing, and this reason for things is the principle of that which is.

There is nothing other than force and matter, say the atheists. They might just as well declare that books are nothing more than paper and ink.

Matter is the adjunct of the spirit; without the spirit it would have no reason to exist, and it would not exist.

Matter is changed into spirit by the agency of our senses, and this transformation, perceptible only to our souls, is the thing we call pleasure.

Pleasure is the sensation of a divine action. Letting it thrive creates life and transforms dead compounds into living substances in the most marvellous manner.

Why does nature draw the two sexes together with so much rapture and intoxication? Because she invites them to the great work par excellence, the work of eternal fruitfulness.

What talk is that about the joys of the flesh? The flesh has neither griefs nor joys: it is but a passive instrument. Our nerves are the violin strings with which nature makes us hear and feel the music of sensual delight; and all the joys of life, even those which are most spoilt, are the exclusive share of the soul.

What is beauty, if not the imprint of spirit on matter? Does the body of the Venus de Milo need to be flesh to enchant our eyes and inflame our thoughts? Woman's beauty is the hymn of motherhood; the soft and delicate shape of her breasts never fails to remind us of the first thirst of our lips; we should like to repay them with eternal kisses for the sweet drink they gave us. Does this mean that we are in love with the flesh? Despoil them of their adorable poetry and what inspiration could one find in these 'rubber pillows' filled with glands under a skin now brown and now pink and white? And whatever would become of our most charming emotions if the hand of the lover, no longer trembling, had to arm itself with the magnifying glass of the physician or the scalpel of the anatomist?

Apuleus, in a clever fable, recounts how a blundering experimenter, having seduced the maidservant of a female magician, got from her an ointment which had been prepared by her mistress. He attempted to change himself into a bird, but only succeeded in transforming himself into an ass. He was told that to recover his original form, all that he needed to do was to feed on some roses, and his first thought was how easy this would be. However, he soon found out that roses were not made for the benefit of donkeys. Whenever he tried to get near a rose-bush, he was driven off with cudgel blows. He suffered a thousand misfortunes, and was only saved at last by the direct intervention of the gods.

Some people have suspected that Apuleus was a Christian, and have tried to read into this legend of the Ass a sly dig at the mysteries of Christianity. Eager to mount upward into the heavens, so they say, the Christians disowned science and fell under the yoke of that blind faith which caused them to be accused, in the first centuries, of worshipping the head of an ass.

Having become enslaved to a fatal asceticism, they were no longer able to get close to those natural beauties which are typified by roses. Pleasure, beauty, even nature and life themselves were anathematized by these ungracious and ignorant guides, who drove from their presence the poor ass of Bethlehem. It is at this period that the Middle Ages dreamt of 'The Romance of The Rose'. It is then that the Initiates into the sciences of antiquity, anxious to regain the rose without renouncing the cross, put the two together and adopted the name Rosae Crucis (or Rosicrucian) so that the rose was still the cross and the cross could immortalize the rose.

The only true pleasure, true beauty and genuine love belongs to the wise; who are actually the creators of their own happiness. When they abstain from something it is to learn how to use it properly and, when they deprive themselves, it is to gain some delight in exchange.

What misery is more to be pitied than that of the soul, and how well-entitled to lament are those who have impoverished their hearts! Compare the poverty of Homer with the wealth of Trimalcion, and say which of them is the poor wretch. What is the good of possessions if they pervert us, seeing that they are never really ours but will inevitably be lost or left to others? What purpose do they serve if they are not the instruments of wisdom in our hands? Are they for ministering to the wants of animal life, to brutalize us with satiety and loathing: is that the aim of our existence? Is that a positive way of life? Surely, it is the falsest and most depraved of ideals? Anyone who employs his soul about the business of fattening his carcase is already playing a fool's game; but to wear out both body and soul for the privilege of leaving behind a fortune to be squandered by a young idiot, who will surrender it into the lap of the first loose woman who gets her hands on him, is that not the height of lunacy? Yet such are the actions of responsible men who look on philosophers and poets as dreamers.

What I prize, said Curius, is not to own great wealth but to have those who do at my command, and Saint Vincent de Paul, probably without thinking of Curius's maxim, revealed its full grandeur in the service of charity. What monarch would ever have been able to found so many alms-houses or to endow so many places of refuge for the homeless? What Rothschild would have managed to find enough millions for all that? The poor priest, Vincent de Paul, was determined to do it; he spoke and riches obeyed him.

His secret lay in possessing the power which creates and transforms, a persevering will and a wise application of the most sacred laws of nature. Learn to will what God wishes, and everything you want will certainly happen.

You must also understand that contraries materialize through contraries: greed is always poor, unselfishness is always rich.

Pride provokes scorn, modesty wins praise, over-indulgence in sex kills pleasure, moderation refines and renews sensual enjoyment. You will get, every time, the opposite of whatever you want to have unfairly, and you will be repaid a hundred times over for anything you sacrifice to justice. So, if you wish to reap on the left hand, sow on the right hand; and meditate on this piece of advice, which looks like a paradox and will give you a hint of one of the greatest secrets of occult philosophy.

If you desire to attract, make a vacuum. It works by a physical law which is analogous to a moral law. The rushing streams seek the mighty deeps. The waters are the daughters of the clouds and the mountains, and always set out for the valleys. True enjoyment comes from above, as we have already said: it is desire which attracts, and desire is a bottomless pit.

That which is not attracts that which is, hence those who are most unworthy of love are sometimes the most beloved. Fullness goes looking for a vacuum, and the vacuum sucks it in. Animals and wet-nurses know this well. Pindar never loved Sappho, and Sappho had to resign herself to all the disdain of Phaon. A man and woman of genius are brother and sister: their mating would be a sort of incest; and a man who is merely a man will never fall in love with a 'bearded lady'.

Rousseau seems to have sensed this when he married a servant girl, a dull-witted and grasping virago. But he could never get Thérèse to realize his intellectual superiority, and he was obviously her inferior in the cruder aspects of existence. In their household Thérèse was the man and Rousseau was the woman. Rousseau was too proud to accept his position, and protested against Thérèse's regime by treating her children as foundlings. By doing so he set nature against him and exposed himself to the mother's revenge.

You men of genius, refrain from having children; your only legitimate offspring are your books. Never marry; reputation is your wife! Keep your virility for her; and, when you find a Heloise, do not expose yourselves to Abelard's fate for the sake of a woman!

A universe may be defined as a group of magnetized spheres which attract and repel one another. The beings produced by the different spheres share their special magnetization balanced by the universal magnetism.

Poorly balanced men are disordered or exaggerated magnets which nature weighs one against the other, until the partial error in balance has produced destruction.

Bunsen's spectrum analysis will enable science to distinguish the special features of the magnets and thus supply a scientific reason for the ancient rules of judicial astrology. The different planets of the system certainly exert a magnetic effect on our own globe and on the various constitutions of the living creatures which inhabit it.

We all absorb the celestial aromas mingled with the spirit of earth and born under the influence of diverse stars; we all have a preference for a force characterized by a particular form, for a certain bent and for a certain colour.

The Pythoness of Delphi, seated on a tripod over a crevice in the ground, drew in the astral fluid through her sexual parts, fell into a state of dementia or clairvoyance and uttered incoherent sentences which sometimes turned out to be oracles. All highly- strung natures abandoned to disorders of the passions resemble the Pythoness and breath in Python, that is to say, the evil and fatal spirit of the earth. Then they forcibly project the fluid which has penetrated them, inspiring and absorbing immediately afterwards the vital fluids of other beings; thus they exercise in rotation the malign powers, first of the evil eye and then of the vampire.

If these sick people who are suffering from this deleterious form of inhaling and exhaling take it for a power and wish to increase the accumulation and projection, they express their desires in ceremonies which are called evocations, and hoodoo, and become what were termed in former times necromancers and sorcerers.

Every appeal to some unknown and strange intelligence, whose existence has not been demonstrated, with the object of substituting its guidance for that of our own reason and of our own free will, may be looked on as intellectual suicide, for it is an appeal to folly.

Everything which resigns the will to mysterious forces, everything which makes other voices speak in us than the voices of conscience and reason, belongs to mental derangement.

The insane are static visionaries, a waking vision is a fit of madness. The art of evocation is the art of provoking an artificial fit of madness in oneself.

All visions have the nature of dreams and are illusions of unsound minds. They are clouds from a disordered imagination projected into the astral light; it is we ourselves who appear to ourselves disguised as phantoms, apparitions of the dead or as demons.

Crazed individuals seem to make nature herself delirious, within the circle of their attraction and magnetic projection: the furniture makes rapping noises and moves about, and lightweight articles are attracted or thrown at a distance. Mental specialists are well aware of this but are afraid to admit as much, because official science has not yet acknowledged that human beings can be magnets and that these magnets can be maladjusted out of order. The abbé Vianney, parish priest of Ars, believed he was being continually tormented by a demon's practical jokes; and Berbiguier, of Terre-Neuve du Thym, armed himself with long pins for sticking into goblins.

Now, the point of support exists in the resistance offered to them by undisciplined development. What renders the organization of an army impossible in democracy is that each soldier fancies himself a general. There is only one general with the Jesuits.

Obedience is the gymnastics of liberty, and before one can reach the point of doing always what one wants it is often necessary to learn to do what one does not want. What pleases us is to be in the service of fantasy; doing things we do not like is to exercise the reason and will and make them triumph.

Contraries assert and confirm themselves by contraries. Looking left when one wants to go right is an act of dissembling and prudence; but to throw some weights into the left-hand pan of the scales to make the right-hand pan rise, is to know the laws of dynamics and equilibrium.

It is the resistance which determines the quantity of the force in dynamics; but there is no resistance which cannot be worn down by persistent effort and movement: this is how the mouse gnaws through the rope and the drops of water pierce the rock.

Effort which is renewed daily builds force up and conserves it, even if the action is applied to something which is indifferent in itself or unreasonable and ridiculous into the bargain. It is hardly a serious-looking occupation to pass the beads of a rosary between one's fingers while repeating 'Hail Mary!' two or three hundred times. All the same, if a monk gets to bed without going through the rosary, he will wake up next day feeling very low, with no courage to offer the morning prayer and will be inattentive during Divine Service. Therefore the monks' confessors will keep reminding them, and with good reason, not to neglect the little things.

The grimoires and magic rituals are full of directions which are detailed and, on the face of it, ridiculous:

Eat your food without salt for ten or twenty days, sleep propped on your elbow, sacrifice a black cock at midnight at a crossroads in the middle of a forest, go to a graveyard and take a fistful of earth from a freshly occupied grave, etc., then shroud yourself in certain bizarre vestments and pronounce long and tedious conjurations. Were the authors of these books trying to make fun of their readers? Were they imparting genuine secrets to them? No, they were not joking, and their imagination of their adepts and to make them conscious of a supplementary force which exists as soon as one believes in it and always grows stronger with persistent effort. Only, it can happen by the law of the reaction of contraries that the devil is evoked by unremitting prayer to God, and that after satanic conjurations one hears the angels weep. All hell danced with bells when St Anthony recited the Psalms, and Paradise seemed to revive again before the enchantments of Albertus Magnus or Merlin.

It is because ceremonies in themselves mean very little, and everything depends on the inhaling and the exhaling. The formulas consecrated by long usage, place us in communication with the living and the dead, and when our will enters like this into the great currents it is able to arm itself with all their emanations. A servant-girl who practises may, at a given moment, deploy all the temporal might of the Church with the support of the arms of France, as was clearly shown at the time of the baptism and abduction of the Jew Mortara. All civilized Europe, in the nineteenth century protested against this act, and suffered it because a devout housemaid had willed it. But earth sent as auxiliaries to this girl the spectral emanations of the eras of Saint Dominic and Torquemada; Saint Ghislieri prayed for her. The shade of the great king who revoked the edict of Nantes gave her a sign of approbation, and the entire clerical world was ready to uphold her.

Joan of Arc, who was burnt as a witch, had in fact attracted to her the spirit of heroic France, and poured it out in a marvellous manner to electrify its army and put the English to flight. A pope rehabilitated her; it was not enough, it was necessary to canonize her. If this thaumaturge was no sorcerer she was plainly a saint. What is a sorcerer anyway? Only a thaumaturge who does not meet with the pope's approval.

Miracles are, if I may be allowed to say so, extravagances of nature produced by the excited emotions of man. They always follow the same laws. Any popular celebrity could work miracles, sometimes in fact without willing it. At the time when France idolized its kings, the French kings cured scrofula, and, in our own days the immense popularity of those picturesque and barbarian soldiers called zouaves has developed in a zouave named Jacob the faculty of healing with voice and eye. We hear that this zouave has left his corps to join the grenadiers, and we look on it as certain that the grenadier Jacob will no longer have the power which was the exclusive property of the zouave.

In Druid times, in Gaul, there were female thaumaturges called elves and fairies. To the Druids they were saints; to the Christians they were sorcerers. Joseph Balsamo, known as the divine Cagliostro to his disciples, was condemned at Rome as a heretic and warlock, for having performed miracles and issued predictions without leave from the Ordinary. Now in this the inquisitors were correct, since the Roman Church held the monopoly of High Magic and effective ceremonies. She charms demons with water and salt; she evokes God with bread and wine to gain His visible and palpable presence on earth; she uses oil to bestow health and pardon.

She does more: she creates priests and kings.

She alone understands and reveals why the kings from the triple realm of magic, the three magi, led by the blazing star, came to offer to Jesus Christ in His cradle, the gold which fascinates the eyes and conquers men's hearts, the frankincense which lifts asceticism to the brain, and the myrrh which preserves dead bodies and renders palpable, to some extent, the doctrine of immortality by showing inviolability and incorruption in death.

First of all, we shall discuss sacrifice in general.

What is sacrifice? It may be defined as the practical expression of devotion.

It is the substitution of the innocent for the guilty, in the voluntary work of expiation.

It is the generously unfair payment made by the just (who undergoes the punishment) for the dastardly injustice of the rebel (who stole a pleasure in which he had no right).

It is the temperance of the wise man, which acts as a counterweight in the universal life to the orgies of the senseless.

Such is sacrifice in reality, and such are the leading characteristics it must always preserve.

In the ancient world, sacrifice was rarely voluntary. The offender devoted to suffering what he regarded as his by right of conquest or right of property.

Now, black magic is the occult continuation of the proscribed rites of the ancient world. Immolation lies at the bottom of the mysteries of necromancy, and witchcraft with wax figures is equivalent to magical sacrifices where the evil magnetism is substituted for the faggot and the knife. In religion it is faith which saves; in black magic it is faith which kills!

We have already explained that black magic is the religion of death.

To die in another's place is the sublime sacrifice. To kill someone else to avoid death is the sacrifice of impiety. To consent to the murder of the innocent to secure impunity for our own misdeeds would be the final and most unforgivable act of cowardice, if the victim's offering were not voluntary and if this victim had not the right to offer himself as our superior and his own absolute master. This has been considered the indispensable condition for human redemption.

We are speaking here of a belief consecrated by many centuries of adoration and by the faith of millions of men and women; and as we have said that the collective and persistent word creates whatever it affirms, we are entitled to say that so it is.

Now, the sacrifice of the cross is renewed and perpetuated in that of the altar; and there, perhaps, it fills the believer with even greater awe. The divine victim is found there without even human form; he is mute and passive, given up to those who wish to take him, unresisting in the face of those who dare to desecrate him. He is a white and fragile host. He comes at the call of a bad priest and will not protest if the intention is to involve him in the most impure rites. Before Christianity appeared, the Stryges ate the flesh of slaughtered children; now they content themselves with consecrated wafers.

People are blind to the superhuman power of wickedness open to the evil votaries who abuse the sacraments. Nothing is so malignant as a communicant from the gutter press. 'He is full of bad wine', is said of the drunkard who beats his wife when he is tipsy. I once heard a so-called Catholic say that he had the God of evil. It seems that a second transubstantiation takes place in the mouths of certain communicants. God has been placed on their tongues, but it is the Devil whom they swallow.

A Catholic host is a really fearsome thing. It contains the whole of Heaven and Hell, because it is charged with the magnetism of centuries and of multitudes: a good magnetism when it is approached with true faith, a magnetism of concentrated evil when it is put to an unworthy use. Besides, nothing is so sought after and considered so powerful for casting evil spells as hosts consecrated by lawful priests, but diverted from their pious destination by sacrilegious theft.

We are descending here into the depths of the horrors of black magic, and let no-one suppose that in exposing them we wish to encourage these abominable practices.

Gilles de Laval, lord of Retz, had the Black Mass celebrated by an apostate Dominican friar, in a secret chapel at his castle of Machecoul. At the elevation a little child was slaughtered, and the field-marshal communicated with a fragment of the host soaked in the victim's blood.

The author of the grimoire of Honorius says that the person who performs works of black magic must be a priest. According to him, the best ceremonies for evoking the devil are those of Catholic worship and, in fact, on Father Ventura's own confession, the devil is born from the working of this way of worship. In a letter addressed to Mr Gougenot Des Mousseaux and published by the latter at the beginning of one of his principal works, the learned Theatine monk has not scrupled to state that the devil is the fool of the Catholic religion (at least as far as father Ventura understands it). Here are his own words:

Satan, said Voltaire, is Christianity; no Satan, no Christianity. So it follows that Satan's masterpiece is to be a success by getting his existence denied. By demonstrating the existence of Satan we restore one of the fundamental doctrines on which Christianity is based and without which it is only a word. (Letter from Father Ventura to the Chevalier Gougenot Des Mousseaux prefacing his book La Magie au XIXe siècle (Magic up to the nineteenth century).

Thus, after Proudhon had the effrontery to say 'God is evil', a priest who is supposed to be well-informed caps the thought of the atheist by saying: Christianity is Satan. And he says this in all simplicity, under the impression that he is defending the religion which he libels in such an appalling way, misrepresenting it like the simony and material considerations which have plunged some members of the clergy into a black caricature of Christianity, that of Gilles de Laval and of the grimoire of Honorius. Perhaps it was the same father who said to the Pope: 'We must not jeopardize the Kingdom of Heaven for a clod of earth'. In himself, Father Ventura is a decent man, and at times the true Christian in him gets the better of the monk and priest.

If one can concentrate on an agreed point and fasten all one's aspirations for good on a sign, one has enough faith to realize God in this sign. Such is the permanent miracle which takes place every day on the altars of true Christianity.

The same sign, when profaned and consecrated to evil, is capable of realizing evil in the same manner, and if the justified man is able to say, after his communion, Jesus Christ lives in me, or to put it another way: I am myself no longer, I am Jesus Christ, I am one with God; even the unworthy communicant can say with no less certitude and truth: I am no longer I, I am Satan.

To create Satan and to turn into Satan, this is the great arcana of black magic, and this is what the accomplice sorcerers of the lord of Retz thought they were accomplishing for him; and they did accomplish it for him, up to a certain point, by saying the devil's Mass.

Would man ever have been in danger of creating the devil, if he had never had the temerity to want to create God by giving Him a body? Have we not said that a corporeal God must necessarily cast a shadow, and that that shadow is Satan? Yes, these were our words, and we shall never say the contrary. But if the body of God is imaginary, then His shadow could not possibly be real.

The divine body is only an appearance, a veil, a cloud: Jesus knew this by faith. Let us pay homage to the Light and not give reality to the shadow, for the latter is not the object of our faith! It is the will of nature, and will always be her will, that religion shall exist on the earth. Religion germinates, flowers and fructifies in man; it is the fruit of his aspirations and his desires; it has to be governed by sovereign reason. But the aspirations of man towards the infinite, his longings for eternal good and his reason in particular, come from God!

Reason alone gives the right to liberty. Liberty and reason, these two great and essential privileges of mankind, are so closely united that oné cannot be renounced unless the use of the other is also given up. Liberty wills the triumph of reason and reason imperiously demands the reign of liberty. Liberty and reason are more important that life itself to man. It is beautiful to die for liberty, and it is sublime to be a martyr for reason, because reason and liberty are the very essence of the soul's immortality.

God Himself is the free reason of all that exists.

The devil, on the other hand, is fatal irrationalism.

To forswear one's reason or one's liberty is to disown God. To make any appeal to what is irrational or fatalistic is to evoke the devil. We have already said that the devil does exist, and that he is a thousand times more horrible and pitiless than the legends describe him, even at their most gruesome. For us and for reason, he could not possibly be the fine fallen angel of Milton, nor flashing Lucifer, trailing his starry glory through the night with here and there the glitter of lightning. Such titanic fables are impious. The true devil is the one sculptured in our cathedrals and depicted by the naive illuminators of our Gothic books. His essentially hybrid form is the synthesis of all nightmares; it is hideous, deformed and grotesque. He is fettered and binds others in fetters. He has eyes everywhere, except in his head; he has faces in his stomach, in his knees, and on his unspeakably filthy rump. He is everywhere where folly can find a footing, and everywhere he drags behind him the torments of hell.

He himself does not utter a syllable, but he makes all our vices speak; he is the ventriloquist who operates the gluttons, the Python of abandoned women. At times his voice is as impetuous as the whirlwind, at times it is as insinuating as a low hiss. To converse with our troubled brains he inserts his forked tongue into our ears and to undo our hearts he shakes his tail like an arrow. In our head he slays reason, in our hearts he poisons liberty, and he does this always and of necessity unremittingly, because he is not a person but a blind force; he is accursed, but accursed with us; he is a sinner, but he sins in us. We alone are responsible for the evil which he makes us do, because as for him, he has neither liberty nor reason.

The devil is the beast; Saint John hammers this home in his marvellous Apocalypse; but how can one comprehend the Apocalypse without the keys of the holy Qabalah?

An evocation, therefore, is an appeal to the beast, and only the beast can respond. We might add that to make the beast appear one must first form it within oneself and then project it outside. This secret is that of all the grimoires, but it was only expressed by the ancient masters in a very veiled manner.

To see the devil it is necessary to make oneself up like the devil and then look in a mirror. This is the secret in its simplicity, so that even a child could understand it. Let us add for the benefit of men that, in the mysteries of sorcerers, the devilish countenance is imprinted on the soul by the astral intermediary, and the mirror is darkness animated as the head reels.

Every evocation would be in vain if the magician did not commence by damning his soul in sacrificing for ever his liberty and his reason. It is easy to understand this. To create the beast in us it is essential to kill the man; which is what was represented previously by the sacrifice of a child, and even more distinctly by the profanation of a host. The man who elects to perform an evocation is a wretch who is embarrassed by reason and wishes to magnify in himself the bestial appetites, so that he can turn them into a magnetic centre endowed with a fatal influence. He wishes to personify unreason and fatalism; he wishes to become a disordered magnet, and an evil one too, to attract to himself the vices and the gold which feed them. It is the most terrible crime which the imagination could dream of. It is the rape of nature. It is the direct and absolute outrage thrown in the face of divinity; but also, and happily so, it is a frightfully difficult task, and most of those who have attempted it have come unstuck in the accomplishment. If a man who was strong enough and perverse enough were to evoke the devil in the required conditions, the devil would materialize. God would be held back and terror-stricken nature would be subjected to the despotism of evil.

It is said that years ago a certain man undertook this monstrous work and that he became pope. It is also related that on his deathbed he confessed to enveloping the whole Church in a web of black magic. One thing is certain: this pope was as deeply instructed as Faust, and it is claimed he was the author of several wonderful inventions. We have mentioned him already in one of our books. However, the proof, according to the legend itself, that he did not evoke the devil, that is to say, did not become the devil, is his repentance. The devil never repents.

The reason why the majority of men are mediocrities, is that they are always incomplete. Decent people sometimes do wrong, and scoundrels forget themselves at times to the extent of forming some good wish which they carry out. Now, sins against God weaken the power of God in man, and sins against the devil (by which I mean good desires and deeds) weaken the power of the devil. To exercise any exceptional power either above or below, on the right hand or the left hand, it is essential to be a whole man.

Fear and remorse in criminals are two things which originate from good, and these lead them to betray themselves. To succeed in wickedness one has to be absolutely wicked. We are assured that Mandrin heard confession from his brigands, and gave them as a penance the murder of some child or woman when they admitted to him that they had felt some pity. Nero had some good in him, he was an artistic performer, and this was his undoing. He gave up, and committed suicide in vexation at being underrated as a musician. If he had been nothing more than an emperor he would have burnt Rome a second time sooner than give way to the Senate and to Vindex; the people were on his side; he had only to shower them with gold and the praetors would have acclaimed him once more. Nero's suicide was the action of an artist trying to show off.

To succeed in turning himself into Satan would not be a complete triumph for human perversity, if immortality were not won at the same time. Prometheus can take the suffering on his rock; he knows that one day his chain will be broken and that he will dethrone Jupiter; but to be Prometheus one has to have stolen the fire of heaven, and we are not yet in reach of the fire of hell!

No, the dream of Satan is not that of Prometheus. If a rebel angel had ever been able to snatch the fire of heaven, that is to say the divine secret of life, he would be like God. Only man is sufficiently stupid and limited in intelligence to believe in the existence of a possible solution to this sort of theorem: to make what is what is not, at one and the same time; to make shadow light, death life, a lie the truth, and nothingness everything. Besides, the wild idiot who wants to realize the absolute in evil will end at last, like the careless alchemist, in a tremendous explosion which will bury him in the wreckage of his ridiculous laboratory.

An instantaneous and overwhelming death has resulted at times from infernal evocations, and one cannot help admitting that it was only too well deserved. One does not go with impunity to the limits of extreme lunacy. There are certain excesses that nature will not countenance. If sleep-walkers have sometimes died when woken with a start, if a certain degree of drunkenness causes death ... But perhaps someone will ask, what use are these retrospective warnings -- who in this day and age would dream of making evocations with a grimoire ritual? We have no reply to make to this question, for if we told everything we knew it is likely that no-one would believe us!

There are also other ways of evoking the magnetism of evil than by the rituals of the ancient world. We said in our last chapter that a Mass profaned by criminal intentions becomes an outrage offered to God and an offence by the man against his own conscience. Consulting oracles, either when the head swims in a state of hallucination, or by noting the uncontrolled movements of inert objects magnetized at random, are also forms of infernal evocation, because they are acts which tend to subordinate liberty and reason to fate. It is true that those who carry out the instructions in books of black magic are nearly always innocent by their very ignorance. They make their appeal to the beast, it is true, but it is not the ferocious beast which would serve their lusts they want. They are only asking advice of the stupid beast, as a little assistance for their own stupidity.

In the magic of light, the science of evocations is the art of magnetizing the currents in the astral light and of directing them at will. This science was that practised by Zoroaster and King Solomon, if one can believe the old traditions; but to do what was done by Zoroaster and Solomon, it is necessary to have the wisdom of Solomon and the learning of Zoroaster.

To direct and dominate the magnetism of good, it is requisite to be the best of men. To activate and precipitate the vortex of evil it is necessary to be the worst. Sincere Catholics do not doubt that the prayers of a poor recluse can change the mind of kings and settle the destinies of empires. We are far from scorning this belief, we who admit that life is collective, who acknowledge the magnetic currents and the relative omnipotence of the will.

Before the recent scientific discoveries, the phenomena of electricity and magnetism were attributed to spirits diffused in the atmosphere, and the adept who managed to influence the magnetic currents thought he was commanding spirits. But since the magnetic currents are fatalistic forces, one has to be a perfectly balanced centre oneself before one can control and balance them, which can hardly be said of the majority of these reckless sorcerers.

They were also often struck down in a violent flash by the imponderable fluid, which they were unable to neutralize. They admitted, too, that they lacked the indispensable thing for gaining absolute mastery over spirits: the Ring of Solomon.

But according to legend the ring of Solomon is still on that monarch's finger, and his body is shut up in a rock which will not break open until the last judgement.

Like all legends, this one is true. All it needs is understanding.

What is meant by the ring? -- a ring is the end of a chain, a circle to which other circles may be fastened.

Chief priests have always worn rings as a sign of their authority over the circle and over the chain of the faithful.

In our own days prelates are still invested with the ring; and, in the marriage service, the bridegroom gives the bride a ring which has been blessed and consecrated by the Church, in order to make her the mistress and controller of his household affairs and of his circle of servants.

Hence the pontifical ring and the wedding ring which has been consecrated and conferred hierarchically, represent and bring into being a certain power.

But public and social power is one thing, sympathetic, philosophical and occult power is another.

Solomon is supposed to have been sovereign pontiff of the religion of the initiates, which gave him the right to the royal prerogative of the occult priesthood, for he possessed -- so it is said -- universal knowledge, and in him alone was realized the promise of the great serpent: 'Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.'

Some say that Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes, the most rationalist of all his works, after worshipping Astarte and Chamos, the gods of heathen women he had married. In this way he would have completed his knowledge and rediscovered the magic virtue of his ring before he died. Did he really take it with him into the tomb? Another legend introduces an element of doubt at this point. It tells how the Queen of Sheba, after examining this ring with great care, had an exactly similar one made secretly; and how, while the king slept, she chanced to be near him and was able to carry out a furtive exchange of rings. She went home to the Sabeans with the true ring of Solomon, and this ring was later found by Zoroaster.

It was a gem-encrusted ring, composed of the seven great metals, and bearing the signature of the seven spirits, with a rose-red lodestone having the usual seal of Solomon engraved on one side:

and his magic seal engraved on the other:

Those who have read our books will understand this allegory.

You must look in Solomon's tomb, that is to say, in the crypts of occult philosophy, not for his ring but for his wisdom.

Assisted by wisdom and a persistent will, you will attain wisdom's supreme secret, which is free sovereignty over balanced movement. You will then be able to get the ring for yourself by having it made by a goldsmith, to whom you will have no occasion to reveal the secret. For if he does not know what he is making he will not be able to tell others.

Here is the formula for the ring:

Take a small quantity of gold and twice the amount of silver at the hours of the sun and the moon, and mix them together; add three parts similar to the first of well refined copper, four parts of tin, five of iron, six of mercury and seven of lead. Mix them all together at the hours corresponding to the metals, and make the whole into a ring with the circular part flattened and slightly broad, permitting characters to be engraved on it.

Make a square setting in this ring to hold a red lodestone mounted in a double ring of gold.

Engrave the double seal of Solomon on the stone, above and below.

Engrave the ring with the occult signs of the seven planets as illustrated in the magical Archidoxis of Paracelsus or in Agrippa's Occult Philosophy; magnetize the ring strongly by consecrating it every day for a week with the ceremonies appointed in our ritual.

The ring must then be wrapped in a silk fabric and, after fumigation, may be carried on your person.

A round piece of metal or a talisman prepared in the same manner would have as much virtue as the ring.

Anything prepared like this is a sort of reservoir of the will. It is a magnetic reflector which can prove very useful, although it is never essential.

We have stated elsewhere that the ancient rites have lost their efficacy since the advent of Christianity.

Catholic Christianity is in fact the legitimate daughter of Jesus, whom the magi adored. Catholic worship is nothing other than high magic referred to the laws of the hierarchy, which are indispensable to ensure that it is both reasonable and efficacious.

An ordinary scapular, worn by a true Christian, is a more invincible talisman than the ring and the pentacle of Solomon.

Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Man, so humble, said of Himself: 'The Queen of Sheba came from the distant East to see and listen to Solomon, and a greater than Solomon is here.'

The Mass is the most prodigious of evocations.

Necromancers evoke the dead, sorcerers evoke the devil and tremble, but the Catholic priest does not tremble to evoke the Living God!

What are all the talismans of ancient science in comparison with the consecrated wafer?

Let Solomon's skeleton sleep on in its tomb of rock, together with the ring he may have on his bony finger. Jesus Christ has risen from the dead, He lives. Take one of those silver rings as sold at the church porch, stamped with the image of the crucified and with ten rosary beads. If you are worthy to wear it, it will be more effective in your hands than the genuine ring of Solomon would be.

Magical rituals and detailed performances in worship are all for the ignorant and superstitious, and we cannot help recalling the well-known story which we shall now relate briefly, because it fits in here.

Two monks entered a thatched cottage which had been left in the care of two children, and asked to be allowed to rest and to have something to eat if that were possible. The children replied that they had nothing to give.

-- 'Ah well!' said one of the monks, 'here's a fire; just lend us a pot and a little water and we'll make ourselves some soup.'

'With what?'

'With this pebble', said the cunning friar, fetching a piece of stone. 'Don't you know, my children, that the disciples of St Francis possess the secret of pebble soup?'

Pebble soup? What a marvel for the children! They were promised that they would taste it and find it excellent.

Within the space of a few minutes the pot was got ready, the water was poured into it, the fire was stirred into a blaze, and the pebble was carefully placed in the water.

'So far so good,' said the monks, 'and now a little salt and some vegetables; bring them, there are some in your garden. Now, why not add a little smoked bacon? It will only improve the soup.

The children squatted by the hearth looking on in wonder. The pot boiled.

'Right, cut a few slices of bread and come to this tureen. My! What a smell! Lay the table, and let's dip our bread in the soup. Here's the pebble, wrap it up carefully, you may keep it for your trouble; it will never be used up and will always work. Now then, taste the soup! There! What did we tell you?'

'Oh! It's first rate!' said the little peasant children, clapping their hands.

In fact it was a good bacon and cabbage soup, which the children would never have managed to set before their guests without the bit of wonder-working with the pebble.

Magical rituals and religious ceremonies are rather like the monks' pebble. They supply the pretext and the occasion for practising virtues which, in themselves, are indispensable to the moral life of man. The good monks would not have dined without the pebble; so did some real power reside in the stone? Yes, in the imagination of the youngsters, which was set working by the ingenuity of the good fathers.

We can say this without blaming or offending anyone. The monks were sensible men, not liars. They helped the children to do good, and filled them with admiration, helping them to share a good soup; and in this connection we advise those who are feeling hungry but would find it rather too difficult (or rather too simple) to make cabbage soup, to make pebble soup instead.

We want to be clearly understood on this point. We are not trying to say that signs and rites are a big piece of humbug. They would be such if people did not need them; but we have to recognize that everyone has not the same degree of intelligence. Children have always had fairy stories told to them, and these stories will continue to be told as long as there are nurses and mothers. Children have faith and this is what saves them. Imagine a child of seven saying: 'I do not want to accept anything I cannot understand.' What could one teach such a monster? Accept what your teachers tell you to begin with, my fine fellow, then study it and, if you are not an idiot, you will understand it by-and-by.

Children need fables, the masses need fables and ceremonies; the frailty of mankind needs crutches. Blessed are those who possess the ring of Solomon, but even more blessed are those who equal or surpass Solomon in knowledge and wisdom without requiring his ring!

Some truths will ever remain mysterious for the slow-witted and the foolish; and we need not be afraid to tell them these truths, because it is quite certain that they will never understand them.

What is a fool? One who is somewhat more irrational than a dumb animal. He is a man who wants to run before he can crawl; a man who thinks he has mastered a subject as soon as he had made a little progress in it; a mathematician who looks down his nose at poetry; a poet who condemns mathematics; a painter who says that theology and the Qabalah are stuff and nonsense; an uneducated man who repudiates knowledge without taking the trouble to study it; a man who talks without knowing what he is talking about and makes assertions without certainty. Fools are the people who kill men of genius. Galileo was not condemned by the Church, but by the fools who, unfortunately, belonged to the Church. Folly is a wild beast which has the composure of innocence; it assassinates without remorse. The fool is the bear in La Fontaine's fable; he breaks his friend's head under a paving-stone to whisk away a fly; but do not try to make him admit he is at fault when things go badly wrong. Folly, like Hell and Fate, is inexorable and infallible, because it is always controlled by the magnetism of evil.

The animal is never a fool, because it openly and naturally plays the role of an animal; but man teaches folly to dogs and intelligent donkeys. The fool is the animal who despises instinct and poses as intelligent.

Progress is a possibility for the animal: it can be broken in, tamed and trained; but it is not a possibility for the fool, because the fool thinks he has nothing to learn. It is his place to dictate to others and put them right, and so it is impossible to reason with him. He will laugh you to scorn in saying that what he does not understand is not a meaningful proposition. 'Why don't I understand it, then?', he asks you, with marvellous impudence. To tell him it is because he is a fool would only be taken as an insult, so there is nothing you can say in reply. Everybody else sees it quite clearly, but he will never realize it.

Here then, at the outset, is a potent secret which is inaccessible to the majority of people; a secret which they will never guess and which it would be useless to tell them: the secret of their own stupidity.

Socrates had to drink hemlock, Aristotle was banished, Jesus was crucified, Aristophanes mocked Socrates and made the fools of Athens laugh at him, a country bumpkin got tired of hearing Aristides called the just, and Renan wrote his 'Life of Jesus' for the delectation of fools. It is owing to the almost infinite number of fools that politics is and always will be the science of double- dealing and lies. Machiavelli dared to make this known and has been quite rightly censured, for under the pretence of giving lessons to princes he betrayed them all and exposed them to the mistrust of the masses. It is important not to alert those whom one is forced to deceive.

Jesus was thinking of the base and silly masses when he said to His disciples: 'Do not throw pearls to pigs, because they will tread on them with their trotters and turn on you to tear you to pieces.'

You, then, who want to do great things, never tell anybody your inmost thoughts, not even that wife you love; and I might almost say hide them chiefly from her -- remember the story of Samson and Delilah!

As soon as a wife knows her husband through and through she stops loving him. She wants to control him and manage him. If he resists her she hates him; if he surrenders she despises him. She looks round for some other man she can probe into. Women always need the unknown and the mysterious, and their love is often nothing more than an insatiable curiosity.

Why do confessors hold such total sway over the souls, and nearly always over the hearts, of women? It is because they know all their secrets, while the women do not know those of their confessors.

Freemasonry is only so powerful in the world because of its dread secret, so wonderfully well kept that the initiates, even those who are in the highest degrees, do not know it.

The Catholic religion keeps its hold on the masses by a secret unknown to the Pope himself. It is the secret of the mysteries. The old Gnostics knew it, as indicated by their name, but they did not know how to keep silent. They wanted to popularize gnosis, and came out with ridiculous doctrines which the Church was right to condemn. Unhappily, when they were condemned, so was the entrance to the occult sanctuary and the portal keys were hurled into the abyss.

Into that pit the Hospitaliers and Templars dared to go to fetch them, at the risk of eternal damnation. Did they deserve to be damned for this in the other world? We only know that in this world the Templars were burned at the stake.

The secret doctrine of Jesus was this:

People have looked on God as overlord, and evil as the prince of this world; I, who am the Son of God, tell you: Do not go looking for God out in space, He is in our consciences and in our hearts. My Father and I are completely One, and I wish you and Me to be only one also. Let us love one another like brothers. Have only one heart and one soul. The religious law was made for man, not man for the law. The legal prescriptions are brought to the free arbitration of our reason united with faith. Believe in what is good and evil will not have you in its power.

When you come together in my Name, my Spirit will be in the midst of you. No one of you must imagine that he is the master of the others, but all must respect the decision of the assembly. Every man has to be judged by his works, and measured according to the measure he himself adopts when measuring. Each man's conscience comprises his faith, it is the power of God in him.

If you have mastered yourself, nature will obey you and you will govern the others. The faith of the just is more unshakeable than the gates of Hell, and their hope shall never be confounded.

I am you and you me, in the spirit of love which is ours, and is God. Believe this and your word will be creative. Believe this and you will perform miracles. The world will persecute you, and you will overcome the world.

The good are those who show charity and those who help the afflicted; the wicked are the hearts which are pitiless, and these will be eternally reprobated by humanity and reason.

The old forms of society, founded on falsehood shall perish; one day the Son of Man shall be enthroned above the clouds of Heaven, which are the shades of idolatry, and will pronounce a final judgement on the living and the dead.

Desire the light, for it will shine forth. Aspire after justice, for it will come. Do not seek to triumph by the sword, for murder begets murder. It is by patience and gentleness that you will become masters of yourselves and of the world.

Now read this admirable teaching in the commentaries of the sophists during the era of decadence and in those of the quibblers of the Middle Ages, and you will see some strange things extracted from it. -- If Jesus was the Son of God, how did God beget Him? Has He the same substance as God, or has He a different substance? The substance of God! What an eternal subject of dispute for presumptuous ignorance! Was He a divine person or a human person? Did He have two natures and two wills? Terrible questions these, which certainly merit excommunication or a slit throat! -- 'Jesus had one nature and two wills', said one party, but do not listen to them, they are heretics! 'Two natures, then, and one will?' -- 'No, two wills'. -- 'Then He was in opposition to Himself?' 'No, for these two wills only made one, which is called Theandric.' -- Ah, yes! In the face of this word we must say no more, especially as we have to obey the Church, which has changed into something quite different from the primitive assembly of the faithful. Jesus said that the law is made for man, but the Church says that man is made for the Church, and it is she who imposes the law. God will ratify all the decrees of the Church and will damn you all if she decides that you are all, or nearly all, of you damned. Jesus said you have to agree with the assembly, therefore it is infallible, therefore it is God, therefore if it makes up its mind that two and two make five, two and two shall make five.

If it says that the earth is still and the sun goes round it, the earth is forbidden to turn. It will tell you that God saves His elect by giving them enabling grace, and that the remainder will be damned for only receiving sufficient grace, which is sufficient in principle but is actually insufficient because of original sin; it will also inform you that the Pope saves and damns whom he pleases, since he has the keys of Heaven and Hell. Then along come the casuists with their bunches of key which do not open, but double and triple lock all the doors of all the suites of rooms planned in the Tower of Babel. O Rabelais, my master, you alone can bring a suitable panacea for all this mental aberration! An enormous peal of laughter! Come, sum all this up in one last word for us, and inform us whether a bag of wind which goes pop in a vacuum can be blown up a second time and ballasted with the marvellous quiddity of our second intentions?

Utrum chimaera in vacuum bombinans possit concidere secundum intentiones?

Other fools, other commentaries. Here come the adversaries of the Church who tell us: God is in man, which means that there is no other God than the human intellect. If man is above the religious law and finds it inconvenient, why not suppress the law? If God is us and we are brothers, all of us, if nobody has the right to set himself up as our master, why should we obey? Faith is the reason of imbeciles. Believe nothing and submit to no-one.

That's right! Be high and mighty. But you will have to fight it out, all against all and each against each. This is the war of the gods and the extermination of the human race! Alas! alas! misery and folly! ... Then more and more folly; folly and misery!

'Father, forgive them,' said Jesus, 'for they know not what they do' -- People of good sense whoever you may be, I will add, do not listen to them, for they know not what they say.

In that case they are innocent, some enfant terrible will exclaim. -- Silence, thoughtless one! Silence, in the name of Heaven, or all morality is lost! Besides, you are mistaken. If they were innocent it would be permissible to do as they do, and would you wish to imitate them? Total credulity is a folly; so it is not possible for folly to be innocent. If there are any extenuating circumstances, only God can make allowances for them.

Our species is obviously defective, and from what one hears and sees the majority of men behave as if they were not possessed of sufficient brains to be genuinely responsible. Listen to the parliamentary debates of the men whom France (the first country in the world) has honoured with her confidence.

There stands the spokesman for the opposition. Here is the minister. Each of them proves conclusively to the other that he understands absolutely nothing about affairs of State. A proves that B is a cretin, and B proves that A is a mountebank. Whom should one believe? If you are white, you will believe A; if you are red, you will believe B. But the truth, the truth! -- The truth is that A and B are two charlatans and two liars; seeing that the claims of both are doubtful, each has been able to show that the other's position is worthless. I admire their proofs, and I admire the pair of them for the way they have demolished each other. Folk can find anything they like in books, except often what the author was trying to say. Folk laugh at religion, but send their children to church. Folk make a great pretence of cynicism, and yet they are superstitious. What people fear above all is common sense, truth and reason.

Childish vanity and sordid interest lead human beings by the nose until death, the final oblivion, the last laugh. Vanity lies at the bottom of most souls. Well, what is vanity? It is emptiness. Multiply zero by itself as many times as you like and it will always be zero, add up noughts and you will get nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing, that is what the majority of men have planned for.

And these are the immortals! These souls so ridiculously deceiving and deceived are imperishable! For all these unthinking individuals Life is a supreme fall-trap over Hell! Oh! There is certainly a terrible secret as far as that is concerned: it is that of responsibility. The father answers for the children, the master for his servants, and the intelligent man for the unintelligent herd. Redemption comes through all superior men; folly suffers, but only the spirit atones.

The pain of a crushed worm or of a lacerated oyster cannot expiate.

Know then, O thou who wishest to be initiated into the great mysteries, that thou makest a pact with suffering and encounterest Hell. The vulture which gorged itself on Prometheus' entrails has fixed its eye upon thee, and the Furies, led by Mercury, are preparing the blocks of wood and the nails. Thou shalt be sacred, that is to say, consecrated to torment. Humanity has need of thine agonies.

Christ died as a young man on a cross, and all those whom He has initiated have been martyrs. Apollonius of Tyana died of the tortures inflicted on him in the prisons of Rome. Paracelsus and Agrippa led wanderer's lives and died wretchedly. William Postel died a prisoner. Saint-Germain and Cagliostro met a mysterious and probably tragic end. Sooner or later the pact has to be satisfied, either formally or tacitly. Compensation must be paid by every plunderer of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It is necessary to free oneself from the tax nature has put on miracles. A final battle with the Devil has to be faced when one ventures to be as God.

Eritis sicut dii scientes bonum et malum.*

* Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.