CHAPTER VII
SUPERSTITIONS RELATING TO THE DEVIL
WE have borne witness to the sobriety of decisions pronounced by the Church respecting the genius of evil; she has recommended her children not to be in fear concerning him, not to be preoccupied about him and not even to pronounce his name. This notwithstanding, the propensity of diseased imaginations and weak minds towards the monstrous and the horrible lent, during the evil days of the middle ages, a formidable importance and most portentous forms to the darksome being who deserves nothing but oblivion, because he has rejected truth and light for ever. This seeming realisation of the phantom expressing perversity was an incarnation of human frenzy; the devil became the nightmare of cloisters, the human mind fell a prey to its own fear and, though supposed to be reasonable, trembled at the chimeras which it had evoked. A black and deformed monster spread its bat-wings between heaven and earth, to prevent youth and life from trusting in the promises of the sun and the still peace of the stars. This harpy of superstition poisoned all things with its breath, infected all by its contact. There was dread over eating and drinking lest the eggs of the reptile should be swallowed; to look upon beauty was to court perhaps an illusion begotten of the monster; to laugh suggested the sneer of the eternal tormentor as a funereal echo; to weep pictured him insulting the mourner's tears. The devil seemed to keep God imprisoned in heaven while he imposed blasphemy and despair upon men on earth.
Superstitions lead quickly into absurdity and mental alienation; nothing is more deplorable and more irksome than the multitudinous accounts with which popular writers on the history of Magic have burdened their compilations. Peter the Venerable beheld the devil leering in lavatories; another maker of chronicles recognised him under the form of a cat, which, however, resembled a dog and skipped like a monkey; a certain lord of Corasse was served by an imp named Orthon, which appeared as a sow, but exceedingly emaciated and indeed almost fleshless. The prior of St. Germain des Prés, named William Edeline, testifies that he saw him in the form of a sheep which, as it seemed to him, must be kissed below the tail, as a mark of reverence and honour.
Wretched old women confessed that he had been their lover; the marshal Trivulce died of terror, while protecting himself by cut and thrust against the devils swarming in his room. Hundreds of wretched idiots and fools were burnt on admitting their former commerce with the malignant spirit; rumours of incubi and succubi were heard on all sides; judges deliberated gravely on revelations which should have been referred to doctors; moreover, they were actuated by the irresistible pressure of public opinion, and indulgence towards sorcerers would have exposed magistrates themselves to all the popular fury. The persecution of fools made folly contagious and the maniacs tore one another to pieces; people were beaten to death, burnt by slow fire, plunged into icy water in the hope of compelling them to break the spells which they had cast, while justice intervened only to complete on the stake what had begun in the blind rage of the multitude.
In recounting the history of Gilles de Laval we have indicated sufficiently that Black Magic may be not only a real crime but the gravest of all offences; unfortunately the method of the times confused the diseased with malefactors and punished those who should have been cared for with patience and charity.
At what point does man's responsibility begin and at what point does it end? The problem is one which may well disturb frequently the virtuous depositories of human justice. Caligula, son of Germanicus, appeared to have inherited all the virtues of his father, but his reason was distracted by poison and he became the terror of the world. Was he in reality guilty, and ought not his crimes to be laid at the doors of those base Romans who obeyed instead of imprisoning him?
Father Hilarion Tissot, who has been mentioned previously, goes further than ourselves and would include even voluntary crime in the category of madness, but unfortunately he explains madness itself as obsession of the evil spirit. We might ask this good ecclesiastic what he would think of the father of a family who after shutting his door on a wastrel known to be capable of every kind of evil, should give him leave to frequent, advise, abduct and obsess his own little children? Let us therefore admit, so as to be truly Christian, that the devil, whomsoever he may be, obsesses only those who give themselves voluntarily to him, and that such are responsible for everything which he may prompt them to do, even as a drunken man is held liable rightly for the disorders of which he may be guilty under the influence of drink. Drunkenness is a transient madness and madness is a permanent intoxication; both are caused by a phosphoric congestion of the cerebral nerves, which destroys our etheric equilibrium and deprives the soul of its instrument of precision. The spiritual and personal soul then resembles Moses bound and swaddled in his cradle of rushes, and abandoned to the rocking of the Nile waters. It is carried away by the fluidic and material soul of the world, that mysterious water over which the Elohim brooded when the Divine Word was formulated by the luminous sentence: “Let there be light.”
The soul of the world is a force which tends automatically to equilibrium; either will must predominate over it or it conquers the will. It is tormented by any incomplete life, as if this were a monstrosity, and it strives therefore to absorb intellectual abortions. Hence maniacs and hallucinated people experience an irresistible yearning for destruction and death; annihilation seems to them a blessing, and they would not only attain death on their own part but would delight in witnessing that of others. They realise that life is escaping them; consciousness stings and goads them to despair; their very existence is a perception of death, and it is hell-torment. One hears an imperious voice commanding him to kill his son in the cradle. He struggles, he weeps, he flees, but ends by taking a hatchet and slaying the child. Another, and this terrible story is a thing of recent occurrence, is driven by voices crying for hearts; he beats his parents to death, opens their breasts, tears out their hearts and begins to devour them. Whosoever of his free will is guilty of an evil action offers by that fact an earnest to eternal destruction and cannot foresee whither this fatal bargain will lead him.
Being is substance and life; life manifests by movement; movement is perpetuated by equilibrium; equilibrium is therefore the law of immortality. Conscience is the awareness of equilibrium, which is equity and justice. All excess, when it is not mortal, is corrected by an opposite excess; it is the eternal law of reaction; but if excess subverts all equilibrium it is lost in the outer darkness and becomes eternal death.
The soul of the earth carries with it in the vertigo of astral movement all which offers no resistance in virtue of the equilibrated forces of reason. Wherever an imperfect and ill-formed life manifests, this soul directs its energies to destroy it, just as vitality pours in to heal wounds. Hence the atmospheric disorders which occur in the nieghbourhood of certain diseased persons, hence fluidic commotions, the automatic movement of tables, lévitations, stone-throwing, and the visible and tangible projection of astral hands and féet by obsessed persons. It is Nature at work on a cancer which it is trying to extirpate, on a wound which it seeks to close, or on some vampire whose death is desired, that it may revert to the common source of life.
The spontaneous movement of inert objects can result only from the operation of forces which magnetise the earth; a spirit, or in other words a thought, can raise nothing in the absence of a lever. Were it otherwise, the—so to speak—infinite toil of Nature for the creation and perfecting of organs would be without an object. If the spirit freed from the senses could render matter obedient to its will, the illustrious dead would be the first to manifest in accordance with order and harmony, but in place of this there are only incoherent and feverish activities produced about diseased and capricious beings. These are irregular magnets which derange the soul of the earth; but when the earth is in delirium through the eruption of such abortive beings, it is because it is passing through a crisis on its own part, and through one which will end in violent commotions.
There is extraordinary puerility in some who pass for serious. There is, for example, the Marquis de Mirville,1 who refers all inexplicable phenomena to the devil. But, my dear sir, if the devil could intervene in the natural order, would he not demolish everything? By the hypothesis concerning his character, scruples could scarcely influence him. You will reply that God's power restrains, and that it does or does not is obvious; but on the first supposition the devil is rendered impotent, while on the second it is he who is master. M. de Mirville might say further that God suffers him a little while. Does he mean just enough to deceive poor men, just enough to puzzle their heads, so wooden already—as is known? In this alternative it is no longer the devil who is master; it is rather God Who is—but no, one dares not continue: to go further would be to blaspheme.
We do not understand properly the harmonies of being, which follow an ordered sequence, as the illustrious maniac Fourier well said. The spirit acts upon spirits by means of the Word; matter receives the imprints of spirit and communicates therewith by means of a perfect organism. Harmony in forms is related to harmony in ideas, and the light is the common mediator. Light is spirit and life;.it is the synthesis of colours, the accord of shadows, the harmony of forms; and its vibrations are living mathematics. But darkness and its phantastic illusions, the phosphorescent errors of slumber and words spoken in delirium—all these create nothing, realise nothing and in a word do not exist. Such things belong to the limbus of life, are vapours of astral intoxication and delusions of tired eyes. To follow these will o' the wisps is to walk in a blind alley; to believe in their revelations is to worship death: such is Nature's testimony.
Incoherence and abuse are the only messages of table-turning; they are echoes of the low-life deeps of thought, absurd and anarchic dreams, words which the scum of the people make use of to express defiance. There is a book by Baron de Guldenstubbé,1 who pretends to conduct a correspondence with the outer world. He has had answers, and such answers—obscene sketches, despairing hieroglyphics and the following Greek signature, 
, which may be translated “spirit of death”. Such is the last word of the phenomenal revelations according to American doctrine; such is doctrine itself in separation from sacerdotal authority and in the attempt to establish it independently of hierarchic control. The reality and importance of the phenomena, the good faith of those who believe them, are in no sense denied; but we must warn all who are concerned against the dangers to which they are liable if they do not prefer the spirit of wisdom, communicated divinely and hierarchically to the Church, before all these disorderly and obscure messages, in which the fluidic soul of the earth reflects automatically the mirage of intelligence and the dreams of slumbering reason.
1 The Marquis Eudes de Mirville wrote Des Esprits et de leurs Manifestations Fluidiques devant la Science Moderne, 1858, and other large books, which were highly recommended by ecclesiastical authority of the day. He saw the intervention of Satanism everywhere in psychic and occult phenomena. Remove the personality of Satan and Éliphas Lévi says exactly the same thing
1 The reference is to La Réalité des Esprits et le Phénomène Merveilleux de leur Écriture Directe,. It appeared in 1857 and is a very curious collection of materials. Long after. or in 1875. the same writer published La Morale, Universelle. which seems to be a plea for secular education.