CHAPTER V
MAGICIANS
THAT fundamental dogma of transcendental science which consecrates the eternal law of equilibrium attained its plenary realisation in the constitution of the Christian world. Two living pillars—the Pope and Emperor—supported the structure of civilisation. But the empire suffered partition when it slipped from the feeble hands of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald. The temporal power, abandoned to the chances of conquests or intrigue, lost the providential unity which kept it in harmony with Rome. The Pope had often to intervene as grand justiciary and, at his proper risk and peril, he restrained the ambitions and audacity of many competitive sovereigns.
Excommunication was at that time a terrible penalty, for it was sanctioned by universal belief, and it produced phenomena which awed the crowd, being mysterious effects of the magnetic current of condemnation. There is the example of Robert the Pious, who, having incurred this terrible penalty by an unlawful marriage, became the father of a monstrous child, similar to those effigies of demons which mediaeval art represented in such ridiculous aspects of deformity. The melancholy fruit of a forbidden union bore witness at least to the tortured conscience and frightful dreams by which the mother was possessed. Robert accepted the event as a proof of the wrath of God and submitted to the papal judgment. Renouncing a marriage which the Church declared incestuous, he repudiated Bertha to espouse Constance of Provence, and it remained for him to recognise in the questionable morals and arrogant character of his new bride a second chastisement of heaven.
The makers of chronicles at the period were enamoured of diabolical legends, but their records exhibit more of credulity than of good taste. Every monkish malady, every unhealthy nightmare of nuns, is looked upon as a case of veridic apparition. The result is repellent phantasmagoria, stupid allocutions, impossible transfigurations, to which the artistic spirit of Cyrano de Bergerac is the one thing wanting to render them entertaining creations. From the reign of Robert to that of St. Louis there is nothing, however, which seems to deserve recounting.1
The famous Rabbi Jechiel, great Kabalist and truly remarkable physician, lived in the*reign of St. Louis. All that is told of his lamp and magical nail goes to prove that he had discovered electricity, or was at least acquainted with its most important uses.1 Ancient as that of Magic, the knowledge of this force was transmitted as one of the keys of the greater initiation. When the night came a radiant star appeared in the lodging of Jechiel, the light being so brilliant that no eye could gaze thereon without being dazzled, while the beam that it darted was tinted with rainbow colours. It was never known to fail and it was never replenished with oil or other combustible substance extant at that time. When importunity or ill-intentioned curiosity sought to intrude on Jechiel by knocking persistently at his door, the Rabbi struck a nail fixed in his cabinet, producing simultaneously a blue spark on the head of the nail and the door-knocker. The ill-advised person was shaken in such a manner that he cried for mercy, believing that the earth was opening under his feet. One day a hostile mob swarmed about the entrance, uttering murmurs and menaces, while they stood with interlaced arms to resist the commotion and supposed quaking of the ground. The boldest among them plied furiously at the knocker, but Jechiel pressed his nail; in a moment the assailants were tumbled one over another and fled crying out like people who have been burnt. They were quite sure that the earth had opened and swallowed them as far as the knees; they knew not how they got out; but nothing would persuade them to return and renew the attack. The sorcerer thus earned quietude by the terror which he diffused.
St. Louis, great Catholic as he was, was also a great king, and wishing to know Jechiel, he summoned him to his court,2 had several conversations with him, was satisfied fully by his explanations, protected him from his enemies, and during the rest of his life ever failed to testify esteem for him and to act benevolently towards him.
Albertus Magnus lived at the same period, and he still passes among the people as grand master of all magicians.3 Historians of the time affirm that he possessed the Philosophic Stone,4 and that after studying for thirty years he had succeeded in solving the problem of the android—in other words, that he had fabricated an artificial man who was endowed with life and speech, who could, in fact, answer questions with such precision and subtlety that St. Thomas Aquinas, infuriated at being unable to silence the image, broke it with a blow of his stick. Such is the popular fable; let us now see what it signifies.
The mystery of the formation of man and of his primitive appearance on earth have continually absorbed seekers after the problems of Nature. Man, as a fact, appears last in the world of fossils, and the Mosaic days of creation have deposited their successive remains, bearing witness that those days were in reality long periods of time. How then was humanity formed? Genesis testifies that God made Adam from the slime of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life—a statement the truth of which we do not question for a moment; but we repudiate notwithstanding the heretical and anthropomorphic idea of a Deity moulding clay with His fingers. God, being a pure spirit, has no hands, and He causes His creatures to develop one from another by the power which He has imparted to Nature. If, therefore, the Lord made Adam from the dust of the earth, we must understand that man came out of that earth under the Divine Influence and yet after a natural manner. The name Adam in Hebrew signifies red earth,1 but what is this earth actually? It is that which the alchemists sought, and it follows that the Great Work was not the secret of metallic transmutation—a trivial and accessory result—but the universal secret of life.2 It was the quest for the middle point of transformation, at which light becomes matter and condenses into an earth containing within itself the principle of motion and of life. It was the generalisation of the phenomenon which tinges the blood red by the creation of those innumerable corpuscles which are magnetic even as the worlds and are alive like animals. For disciples of Hermes the metals were the coagulated blood of earth, passing, like that of man, from white to black and from black to crimson, following the work of the light.3 To set this fluid in motion by means of heat and impart thereto the tingeing fructification of light by the aid of electricity—such was the first part of the work of wisdom. The end was more arduous and sublime; it was a question of recovering the adamic earth, which is the coagulated blood of the vital earth; and the supreme dream of philosophers was to accomplish the work of Prometheus by imitating the work of God—that is to say, by producing a man who should be the child of science, as Adam was child of divine omnipotence. The dream was insensate perhaps, and yet it was sublime.
Black Magic, which ever apes the Magic of Light, but takes it, as it were, backwards, was also concerned with the android, that it might be used as an instrument of passion and an oracle of hell. For this object it was requisite to outrage Nature and obtain a species of venomous fungus, full of concentrated human malice—the living realisation of all crime. For this reason magicians sought the mandragore beneath a gibbet from which some corpse was suspended; they caused it to be torn up by a dog tied to the plant, a mortal blow being inflicted on the animal. The eradication was effected by the convulsions of the agonised beast; the dog's soul passed into the plant and also attracted thereto that of the hanged man. Enough of these horrors and absurdities; those who are curious in such knowledge may consult the common Grimoire known along the countryside under the name of Little Albert. They will find further the method of making a mandragore in the form of a cock with a human face. Stupidity and impiety vie one with another in all such processes, for Nature cannot be outraged wilfully without at the same time reversing the laws of reason.
Albertus Magnus was neither infanticide nor deicide; he was neither guilty of the crime of Tantalus nor that of Prometheus; but he had succeeded in creating and arming at all points that purely scholastic theology, outcome of the categories of Aristotle and the sentences of Peter Lombard, that logic of syllogism consisting of argumentation in place of reasoning and of finding an answer for everything by subtleties concerning the terms. It was less a philosophy than a philosophical automaton, replying in an arbitrary manner and unrolling its theses like the revolution of machinery. It was in no sense the human logos, but the unvaried cry of a mechanism, the inanimate speech of an android. It was the fatal precision of machinery, in place of the free application of rational necessities. St. Thomas Aquinas,1 with one blow, shattered this scaffolding of words when he proclaimed the eternal empire of reason in that magnificent sentence which has been cited already so often: “A thing is not just because God wills it, but God wills it because it is just.” The approximate consequence of this proposition, in arguing from the greater to the lesser, was: A thing is not true because Aristotle has said it, but Aristotle could not say it reasonably unless it were true. Seek first therefore truth and justice, and the science of Aristotle shall be added unto you. Aristotle, galvanised by scholasticism, was the veritable android of Albertus Magnus, while the master's wand of St. Thomas Aquinas was the doctrine of the Summa Totius Theologia, a masterpiece of power and reason which will again be studied in our theological schools when it is proposed to return seriously to sane and healthy subjects.2
As for the Philosophical Stone bequeathed by St. Dominic3 to Albert and by the latter to St. Thomas Aquinas, we must understand it as the philosophical and religious basis of ideas prevalent at the period. Had St. Dominic been able to accomplish the Great Work he would have secured for Rome that empire of the world about which he was so jealous for the Church, and would have diverted the fire which consumed so many heretics to the heating of his own crucibles. St. Thomas changed all that he touched into gold, but this is a figure of speech only, gold being in this case an emblem of truth.
It is opportune at this point to say a few further words concerning that Hermetic science cultivated from the first Christian centuries by Ostanes, Romarius, Queen Cleopatra, the Arabian Geber, Alfarabius and Salmanas, by Morien, Artephius and Aristeus.1 Understand in an absolute manner, this science may be called the Kabalah in realisation, or the Magic of Works. It has therefore three analogous degrees—religious realisation, philosophical realisation and physical realisation. The first is the solid basis of empire and priesthood; the second is the establishment of an absolute doctrine and an hierarchic instruction; the last is the discovery and application, within the measures of the Microcosm or lesser world, of that creative law which peoples incessantly the greater universe. The law in question is one of movement combined with substance, of the fixed with the volatile, humid with solid. Its principle is divine impulsion, its instrument the universal light—ethereal in the infinite, astral in stars and planets, metallic, specific or mercurial in metals, vegetable in plants, vital in animals, magnetic or personal in men.
This light is the quintessence of Paracelsus and is either latent or active in all created substances. Such quintessence is the true elixir of life, and it is extracted from earth by cultivation; from metals by incorporation, rectification, exaltation and synthesis; from plants by distillation and coction; from animals by absorption; from men by generation; from the air by respiration. In this sense we are told by Aristeus that air must be derived from air; by Khunrath that living mercury must be obtained from the perfect man formed by the androgyne; by practically all the sages, that the medicine of metals must be derived from metals and that this medicine—though fundamentally one in all kingdoms—is graduated and specified according to forms and species. Its use is threefold—by sympathy, repulsion or equilibrium. The graduated quintessence was only the auxiliary of forces; the medicine of each kingdom must be derived from the kingdom itself, with the addition of basic mercury—terrestrial or mineral—and of synthetic living mercury, or human magnetism.
Such is the rapid and summary sketch of this science, which is vast and profound as the Kabalah, mysterious as Magic, real as the exact sciences, but too long and too often discredited by the frustrated greed of false adepts and by the obscurities with which true sages have surrounded their theories and their processes.
1 That this statement is amply justified may be seen by a reference to La Magie et la Sorcellerie en France, by T. De Cauzons, a work of considerable research published within the last few years in 4 vols. The section entitled La Magie sous les premiers Capétiens is a record of trivialities concerning diabolical manifestations and can have been included only for the sake of chronological completeness
1 The story of Rabbi Jechiel's device of self-protection is told by Bartolocci, s.v. R. Jechiel de Parisio, in the Magna Bibliotheca Rabbinica, vol. iii, pp. 834, 835. It is on the authority of R. Ghedalia ben David Iacchiia. But although Jechiel is supposed to have been a magician there was neither electricity nor magic in his process, only a kind of trap at his own door step or threshold.
2 It so happens that he went to see him and fell into the trap of the Jew. Garient is the authority for the imaginary visit to the court of St. Louis. He follows Sauval.
3 This paragraph is adapted from Garinet, Hist. de la Magie en France, p. 76.
4 Many treatises on alchemy have been fathered on Albertus Magnus, including Libellus de Alchymia and Concordanlia Philosophorum
1 According to the Zohar, Adam was formed of earth brought from the four quarters, and this is really an allusion to the symbolic correspondence between the parts of his personality and the four elements of ancient physics.
2 The universal secret which was sought by mystic Alchemy was more truly that of the life of life; it was the quest of transmutation in God.
3 The thesis of physical Alchemy was that Nature always intended to produce gold but was thwarted by the impurity of the media amidst which she worked under the earth. The inferior metals resulted. The end of Hermetic art was to complete the design of Nature and raise what is base to perfection.
1 St. Thomas Aquinas wrote eight treatises on alchemy. if the ascriptions of the literature could be trusted. They are of the same authenticity as those 0f Albertus Magnus
2 The study in question was enjoined in a particular manner by Leo XIII.
3 I do not know or have forgotten how this legend originated. but in any case no works on transmutation have been imputed to St. Dominic. which leads me to think that the story of his adeptship did not attain any considerable currency.
1 A fragment of Ostanes is included in the Byzantine collection of ancient alchemists. Romarius should read Comarius. whose tract in the same collection is supposed to be addressed to Cleopatra. Salmanas wrote on the fabrication of artificial pearls and was supposed to be an Arab. A treatise on weights and measures is attributed to Cleopatra. and there are also some Latin forgeries. The other names are well known in the literature of Alchemy