CHAPTER VII
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
IT remains for us to summarise and conclude. To summarise the history of a science is to summarise the science itself, and we are therefore to recapitulate the great principles of initiation, as preserved and transmitted through all the ages. Magical science is the absolute science of equilibrium. It is essentially religious; it presided at the formation of dogmas in the antique world and has been thus the nursing mother of all civilisations. O chaste and mysterious mother who, in giving milk of poetry and inspiration to the dawning generations, didst cover thy face and breast. Before all things she directs us to believe in God and to adore without seeking to define Him, since a God in definition is to some extent a finite God. And after Deity she points to eternal mathematics and equilibrated forces as to the sovereign principles of things. It is said in the Bible that God has ordered all things according to weight, number and measure. Omnia in pondere et numero et mensura disposuit Deus. Weight is equilibrium, number is quantity, measure is proportion—these three, and these are the eternal or divine basis of the science of Nature. Here now is the formula of equilibrium : Harmony results from the analogy of contraries. Number is the scale of analogies, the proportion of which is measure. The entire occult philosophy of the Zohar might be termed the science of equilibrium.1 The key of numbers is found in the Sepher Yetzirah; their generation is analogous to the affiliation of ideas and the production of forms. On this account the illuminated hierophants of the Kabalah combined the hieroglyphic signs of numbers, ideas and forms in their sacred alphabet. The combinations of this alphabet give equations of ideas, and comprise by way of indication all possible combinations in natural forms. According to Genesis, God made man in His image, but as man is the living synthesis of creation, it follows that creation itself is made in the likeness of God. There are three things in the universe—the Spirit, the plastic mediator and matter. The ancients assigned to spirit, as its immediate instrument, that igneous fluid to which they gave the generic name of Sulphur; to the plastic mediator they assigned the name of Mercury, because of the symbolism represented by the Caduceus; to matter they gave the name of Salt, because of the fixed salt which remains after combustion, resisting the further action of fire. Sulphur was compared with the Father on account of the generative action of fire; Mercury with the Mother, because of its power of attraction and reproduction; and Salt, in fine, was the Child, or that substance which is subjected to education by Nature. For them also the creative substance was one, and the name which they gave it was Light. Positive or igneous light was volatile Sulphur; light in the negative state, or made visible by the vibrations of fire, was the fluidic or ethereal Mercury; and light neutralised, or shadow, the coagulated or fixed composite under the form of earth, was termed Salt.
After such manner did Hermes Trismegistus formulate his symbol, which is called the Emerald Tablet : “That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above for the operations of the wonders of the one thing.”1 This means that the universal movement is produced by the analogies of fixed and volatile, the volatile tending to be fixed and the fixed to become volatile, thus producing a continual exchange between the modes of the one substance, and from the fact of the exchange the combinations of universal form in everlasting renewal.
The fire is Osiris, or the sun; the light is Isis, or the moon; they are the father and mother of that grand Telesma which is the universal substance—not that they are its creators, but rather its generating powers, the combined effort of which produces the fixed or earth, whence Hermes says that this force has reached its plenary manifestation when earth has been formed therefrom. Osiris is not therefore God, even for the great hiero-phants of the Egyptian sanctuary; he is the igneous or luminous shadow of the intellectual principle of life, and hence in the supreme moment of initiation a flying voice whispered in the ear of the adept that dubious revelation: “Osiris is a black god.” Woe to the recipient whose understanding had not been raised by faith above the purely physical symbols of Egyptian revelation. Such words would become for him a formula of atheism, and his mind would be struck with blindness. But for the believer, more exalted in intelligence, those same words sounded like an earnest of the most sublime hopes. It was as if the initiator said to him: “My child, you mistake a lamp for the sun, but that lamp is only a star of night. Still, the true sun exists; leave therefore the night and seek the day.”
That which the ancients understood by the four elements in no wise signified simple bodies, but rather the four elementary manifestations of the one substance. These modes were represented by the sphinx, its wings corresponding to air, the woman's breasts to water, the body of the bull to earth, and the lion's claws to fire. The one substance, thrice threefold in essential mode and tetradic in the form of manifestation—such is the secret of the three pyramids, triangular in respect of their elevation, square at the base and guarded by the sphinx. In raising these monuments Egypt attempted to erect the Herculean pillars of universal science. Sands have accumulated, centuries have passed, but the pyramids in their eternal greatness still propound to the nations that enigma of which the solution is lost. As to the sphinx, it seems to have sunk in the dust of ages. The great empires of Daniel have reigned by turn upon the earth and have gone down into the tomb, overwhelmed by their own weight. Conquests on the field of battle, monuments of labours, results of human passions—all are engulfed with the symbolic body of the sphinx; now only the human head rises over the desert sands as if looking for the universal empire of thought.
Divine or die—such was the terrible dilemma proposed by the sphinx to the Candidates for Theban royalty. The reason is that the secrets of science are actually those of life; the alternatives are to reign or to serve, to be or not to be. The natural forces will break us if we do not put them to use for the conquest of the world. There is no mean between the height of kinghood and the abyss of the victim state, unless we are content to be counted among those who are nothing because they ask not why or what they are.
The composite form of the sphinx also represents by hieroglyphical analogy the four properties of the universal agent—that is to say, the Astral Light—dissolving, coagulating, heating and cooling. These four properties, directed by the will of man, can modify all phases of Nature, producing life or death, health or disease, love or hatred, wealth even or poverty, in accordance with the given impulsion. They can place all the reflections of the light at the service of imagination; they are the paradoxical solution of the wildest questions which can be set for Transcendental Magic. Specimens of these paradoxical questions shall here follow, together with the answers thereto: (I) Is it possible to escape death? (2) Is there such a thing as the Philosophical Stone, and what must be done to find it? (3) Is it possible to be served by spirits? (4) What is meant by the Key, Ring and Seal of Solomon? (5) Is it possible to predict the future by reliable calculations? (6) Can good or evil be worked at will by means of magical power? (7) What must be done to become a true magician? (8) What are the precise forces put in operation by Black Magic?
We term these questions paradoxical because they are outside all that is understood as science, while at the same time they seem negatived by faith. If propounded by an uninitiated person they are merely foolhardy, while their complete solution, if given by an adept, would seem like a sacrilege. God and Nature alike have closed the Sanctuary of Transcendent Science, and this in such a manner that, beyond a certain limit, he who knows would speak to no purpose, because he would not be understood. The revelation of the Great Magical Secret is therefore happily impossible. The replies which we are about to give will be the last possible expression of the word in Magic, and they will be put in all clearness, but we do not guarantee to make them comprehensible to our readers.
In respect of the first and second, it is possible to escape death after two manners—in time and in eternity. We escape it in time by the cure of diseases and by avoiding the infirmities of old age; we escape it in respect of eternity by perpetuating in memory personal identity amidst the transformations of existence. Let it be certified (I) that the life resulting from motion can only be maintained by the succession and the perfecting of forms; (2) that the science of perpetual motion is the science of life; (3) that the purpose of this science is the correct apprehension of equilibrated influences; (4) that all renewal operates by destruction, each generation therefore involving a death and each death a generation. Let us now further certify, with the ancient sages, that the universal principle of life is a substantial movement or a substance which is eternally and essentially moved and mover, invisible and impalpable, in a volatile state and manifesting materially when it becomes fixed by the phenomena of polarisation. This substance is indefectible, incorruptible and consequently immortal; but its manifestations in the world of form are subject to eternal mutation by the perpetuity of movement. Thus all dies because all lives, and if it were possible to make any form eternal, then motion would be arrested and the only real death would be thus created. To imprison a soul for ever in a mummified human body, such would be the terrible solution of that magical paradox concerning pretended immortality in the same body and on the same earth. All is regenerated by the universal dissolvent of the first substance. The force of this dissolvent is concentrated in the quintessence—that is to say, at the equilibrating centre of a dual polarity. The four elements of the ancients are the four forces of the universal magnet, represented by the figure of a cross, which cross revolves indefinitely about its own centre and so propounds the enigma respecting the quadrature of the circle. The Creative Word speaks from the middle of the cross and cries: “It is finished.” It is in the exact proportion of the four elementary forms that we must seek the Universal Medicine of bodies, even as the Medicine of the Soul is offered by religion in Him Who gives Himself eternally on the cross for the salvation of the world. The magnetic state and polarisation of the heavenly bodies results from their equilibrated gravitation about suns, which are the common reservoirs of their electro-magnetism. The vibration of the quintessence about common reservoirs manifests by light, and the polarisation of light is revealed by colours. White is the colour of the quintessence; this colour condenses towards its negative pole as blue and becomes fixed as black; while it condenses towards its positive pole as yellow and becomes fixed as red. Thus centrifugal life proceeds always from black to red, passing by white, and centripetal life returns from red to black, following the same path. The four intermediates or mixed hues produce with the three primary colours what are called the seven colours of the prism and the solar spectrum. These seven colours form seven atmospheres or seven luminous zones round each sun, and the planet which is dominant in each zone is magnetised in a manner analogous to the colour of its atmosphere. In the depths of the earth, metals are formed like planets in the sky, by the particular influences of a latent light which decomposes when traversing certain regions. To take possession of a subject in which the metallic light is latent, before it becomes specialised, and drive it to the extreme positive pole—that is to say, to the live red—by the help of a fire derived from the light itself—such is the secret in full of the Great Work. It will be understood that this positive light at its extreme degree of condensation is life itself in a fixed state, serving as a universal dissolvent and as a medicine for all Kingdoms of Nature. But to extract from marcassite, stibium and philosophical arsenic the living and bisexual metallic sperm, we must have a prime dissolvent which is a mineral saline menstruum, and there must be, moreover, the concurrence of magnetism and electricity. The rest proceeds of itself in a single vessel, being the athanor, and by the graduated fire of one lamp. The adepts say that it is a work of women and children.
The heat, light, electricity and magnetism of modern chemists and physicists were for the ancients elementary phenomenal manifestations of one substance, called Aour, Od and Ob—that is to say, 
. Od is the active, Ob the passive, and Aour is the name of the bisexual and equilibrated composite which is signified when the Hermetic philosophers speak of gold. Vulgar gold is metalised. Aour and philosophical gold is the same Aour in the state of a soluble gem. Theoretically, according to the transcendental science of antiquity, the Philosophical Stone which heals all diseases and accomplishes the transmutation of metals exists therefore incontestably. Does it, however, or can it, exist in fact? If we answer this in the affirmative, no one will believe, and the simple statement shall stand as a paradoxical solution of the paradoxes expressed by the two first questions, without dealing with the problem as to what must be done in order to find the Philosophical Stone. M. de la Palisse would reply in our place that in order to find one must of necessity seek, unless indeed discovery is a matter of chance. Enough has been said to direct and facilitate research.
The third and fourth questions concern the ministry of spirits and the Key, Seal and Ring of Solomon. When the Saviour of the world, at His temptation in the desert, overcame the three lusts which keep the soul in bondage—that is to say, the lust of the appetites, lust of ambition and lust of greed—it is written that the angels came down to serve Him. The explanation is that spirits are subject to the sovereign spirit, and he is the sovereign spirit who binds the rebellious turbulence and unlawful propensities of the flesh. It should be noted at the same time that to reverse the natural order of communication subsisting between things which are is opposed to the law of Providence. We do not find that the Saviour of the world and His apostles evoked the souls of the dead. The immortality of the soul, being one of the most consoling dogmas of religion, is reserved for the aspirations of faith and will never be proved by facts accessible to the criticism of science. Loss of reason, or its distraction at the very least, is hence and will be always the penalty for those who dare to pry into the other life with the eyes of this world only. Hence also magical traditions always represent the spirits of the dead as responding to evocations with sad and angry countenances. They complain of being troubled in their repose and they proffer only reproaches and menaces. The Keys of Solomon are religious and rational forces expressed by signs, and their use is not so much in the evocation of spirits as to shield us from aberration in experiences relative to the occult sciences. The Seal is the synthesis of the Keys and the Ring indicates its use. The Ring of Solomon is at once round and square and it represents the mystery of the quadrature of the circle. It is composed of seven squares so arranged that they form a circle. Their bezels are round and square, one being of gold and the other of silver. The Ring should be a filagree of the seven metals. In the silver setting a white stone is placed and in the gold one there is a red stone. The white stone bears the sign of the Macrocosm, while the Microcosm is on the red stone. When the Ring is worn upon the finger, one of the stones should be turned inwards and the other outward, accordingly as it is desired to command spirits of light or darkness. The plenary powers of this Ring can be accounted for in a few words. The will is omnipotent when armed with the living forces of Nature. Thought is idle and dead until it manifests by word or sign; it can therefore neither spur nor direct will. The sign, being the indispensable form of thought, is the necessary instrument of will. The more perfect the sign the more powerfully is the thought formulated, and the will is consequently directed with more force. Blind faith moves mountains, and what therefore would be possible to faith if enlightened by complete and indubitable science? If the soul could concentrate its plenary understanding and energy in the utterance of a single word, would not that word be all-powerful? The Ring of Solomon, with its double seal, typifies all science and faith of the Magi expressed by one sign. It symbolises the powers of heaven and earth and the sacred laws which rule them, whether in the celestial Macrocosm or in the Microcosm of man. It is the talisman of talismans and the pantacle which is above pantacles. As a sign of life it is omnipotent, but it is without efficacy as a dead sign: intelligence and faith, the intelligence of Nature and faith in its eternally Active Cause—of such is the life of signs.
The profound study of natural mysteries may alienate the casual observer from God because mental fatigue paralyses the aspirations of the heart. It is in this sense that the occult sciences may be dangerous and even fatal for certain personalities. Mathematical exactitude, the absolute rigour of natural laws, their harmony and simplicity, suggest to many an inevitable, eternal, inexorable mechanism, and for such as these Providence recedes behind the iron wheels of a clock in perpetual motion. They fail to reflect on the indubitable fact of freedom and autocracy in thinking beings. A man disposes at his will of creatures organised like himself; he can snare birds in the air, fish in the water and wild beasts in the forest; he can cut down or burn entire forests; he can mine and blast rocks, or even mountains; he can modify all forms about him; and yet, notwithstanding the supreme analogies of Nature, he refuses to believe that other intelligent beings might at their will disintegrate and consume worlds, extinguish suns by a breath or reduce them to starry dust—beings so great that they are too much for our faculty of sight, even as we, in our turn, are probably inappreciable to the eye of the mite or worm. And if such beings exist without the universe being destroyed a thousand times over, must we not admit that they are under obedience to a supreme will, a wise and omnipotent force, which forbids them to annihilate worlds, even as it forbids us to destroy the swallow's nest and the chrysalis of the butterfly? For the Magus who is conscious of this power in the deep places of his nature, and who discerns in universal law the instruments of eternal justice, the Seal of Solomon, his Keys and his Ring are tokens of supreme royalty.
The next questions concern the prediction of things to come by means of reliable calculations and the working of good or evil by magical influence. The answers are in this wise. Two chess players of equal skill being seated at a table and having opened the game, which of them will win? Assuredly the more watchful of the two. If I knew the preoccupations of both, I could foresee certainly the result of their match. To foresee is to win at chess, and it is the same in the game of life. In life nothing comes by chance; chance is the unforeseen, but that which the ignorant fail to perceive in advance has been accounted for already by the sage. All events, like all forms, result either from a conflict or from a balancing of forces, which forces can be represented by numbers. The future may thus be determined in advance by calculation. Every extreme action is counterpoised by an equivalent reaction. So laughter presages tears, and for this reason our Saviour said: “Blessed are those who mourn.” He said also, and again for the same reason: “He that exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” Today Nebuchadnezzar is a god; tomorrow he will be changed into a beast. Today Alexander makes his triumphal entry into Babylon and has incense offered to him on all the altars; but tomorrow he will die in a state of degraded drunkenness. The future is in the past, and the past is also in the future. When genius foresees, it remembers. Effects are linked together so inevitably and so exactly to their causes, and become on their own part the causes for further effects in such conformity with the first as regards their manner of production, that a single fact may reveal to a seer an entire succession of mysteries. The coming of Christ makes that of Anti-Christ a certainty; but the advent of Anti-Christ will precede the triumph of the Holy Spirit. The money-seeking epoch in which we now live is the precursor of more lavish charities and of greater good works than the world has yet known.
But it must be understood that the will of man modifies blind causes and that a single impetus started by him may change the equilibrium of an entire world. If such is man's power in the world under his dominion, what must be that of the intelligences which rule the suns? The least of the Egregores, with a breath, and by dilating suddenly the latent caloric of our earth, might shatter and reduce it into a cloud of dust. Man also can dissipate by a breath all the happiness of one of his kind. Human beings are magnetised like worlds; like suns, they irradiate their particular light; some are more absorbent, some give forth more freely. No one is isolated in this world; each is a fatality or a providence. Augustus and Cinna encounter; both are proud and implacable; and hereof is fatality. That fatality makes Cinna seek to slay Augustus, who is impelled as fatally to punish him; but he elects to forgive. Here fatality is changed into providence, and the epoch of Augustus, inaugurated by this sublime beneficence, was worthy to witness the birth of Him Who said : “Forgive your enemies.” By extending his mercy to Cinna, Augustus atoned for all the revenge of Octavius. So long as man is subject to the dictates of fatality, he is profane—that is to say, a man who must be excluded from the sanctuary of knowledge, because in his hands knowledge would become a terrible instrument of destruction. On the contrary, the man who is free, who governs by understanding the blind instincts of life, is essentially a preserver and repairer, for Nature is the domain of his power and the temple of his immortality. When the uninitiated seeks to do good the result is evil. On the other hand, the true initate can never will to do evil; if he strikes it is to chastise and to cure. The breath of the uninitiated is deadly, that of the initiate is life-giving. He who is profane suffers that others may suffer also, but the initiate endures in order that others may be spared. He who is profane steeps his arrows in his own blood and poisons them; he who is initiated cures the most cruel wounds by a single drop of his blood.
The last questions are what must be done to become a true magician and in what precisely do the powers of Black Magic consist? Now, he who disposes of the secret forces of Nature and yet does not risk being crushed by them—he is a true magician. He is known by his works and by his end which is always a great sacrifice. Zoroaster created the primitive doctrine and civilisations of the East, after which he vanished in a tempest like Œdipus. Orpheus gave poetry to Greece and with that poetry the beauty of all high things; he then perished in an orgy in which he refused to join. All his virtues notwithstanding, Julian was only an initiate of Black Magic; his death was that of a victim and not of a martyr; it was an annihilation and a defeat : he failed to understand his epoch. Though acquainted with the Doctrine of Transcendental Magic, he misapplied the Ritual. Apollonius of Tyana and Synesius were simply wonderful philosophers; they cultivated the true science but did nothing for posterity. At their period the Magi of the Gospel reigned in the three parts of the known world, and the oracles were silenced by the cries of the babe of Bethlehem. The King of Kings, the Magus of all Magi, had come into the world and the ritual-worships, the laws, the empires, all were changed. There is a void in the world of marvels between Jesus Christ and Napoleon. That incarnate word of battle, that armed Messiah who was the bearer of the last name, came blindly and unconsciously to complete the Christian message. This revelation had so far taught us how to die, but the Napoleonic civilisation has shown us how to conquer. The two messages—sacrifice and victory, how to suffer, to die, to strive and to overcome—contrary as they are in appearance—comprise in their union the great secret of honour. Cross of the Saviour and cross oí valour, you are incomplete when apart from one another, for only he knows how to conquer who has learned self-devotion, even to death, and how can this be attained except by belief in eternal life? Though he died in appearance, Napoleon is destined to return in the person of one who will realise his spirit. Solomon and Charlemagne will return also in the person of a single monarch; and then St. John the Evangelist, who according to tradition shall be reborn at the end of time, will appear as sovereign pontiff, the apostle of understanding and of love. The combination of these two rulers, announced by all the prophets, will bring about the wonder of the world's regeneration. The science of the true magician will be then at its zenith, for so far our workers of miracles have been for the most part sorcerers and bondsmen—that is to say, the blind instruments of chance. Now, the masters whom fatality casts upon the world are soon overthrown thereby, and those who conquer in the name of their passions shall fall the prey of those passions. When Prometheus in his jealousy of Jupiter stole the thunderbolts of the gods, he sought to create an immortal eagle, but what he made and immortalised was a vulture. We hear in another fable of that impious king Ixion, who would have ravished the queen of heaven, but that which he received in his arms was a faithless cloud, and he was bound by fiery serpents to the inexorable wheel of destiny. These profound allegories are a warning to false adepts, profaners of Magic Science and partisans of Black Magic. The power of Black Magic is a contagion of vertigo and an epidemic of unreason. The fatality of passion is like a fiery serpent which twists and writhes about the world devouring the souls therein. But intelligence—peaceable, smiling and full of love—represented by the Mother of God, sets her foot upon its head. Fatality consumes itself and is that old serpent of Kronos eternally devouring its tail. Rather there are two hostile serpents striving one with another, until such time as harmony intervenes to enchant them and make them interlace peaceably around the caduceus of Hermes.
CONCLUSION
The most intemperate and absurd of all faiths is to believe that there is no universal and absolute intelligent principle. It is a faith, since it involves the negation of the indefinite and indefinable; it is intemperate, for it is isolating and desolating; it is absurd, because it supposes complete nothing in place of most complete perfection. In Nature all is preserved by equilibrium and renewed by activity. Equilibrium in order and activity signifies progress. The science of equilibrium and movement is the absolute science of Nature. Man by its aid can produce and direct natural phenomena as he rises ever towards intelligence that is higher and more perfect than his own. Moral equilibrium is the concurrence of science and faith, distinct in their forces but joined in their action to endow the spirit and heart of man with that rule which is reason. The science which denies faith is not less unreasonable than the faith which denies science.
The object of faith cannot be defined and still less denied by science; science, on the contrary, is itself called to substantiate the rational basis of the hypotheses of faith. An isolated belief does not constitute faith, because it lacks authority and hence moral guarantee; it tends to fanaticism and superstition. Faith is the confidence which is imparted by religion—that is to say, by the communion of belief. True religion is constituted by universal suffrage. It is therefore ever and essentially catholic—that is to say, universal. It is an ideal dictatorship proclaimed generally in the revolutionary domain of the unknown. When the law of equilibrium is understood more adequately it will put an end to all the wars and revolutions of the old world. There has been conflict between powers as between moral forces. The papacy is blamed because it clings to temporal power, but what is forgotten is the protestant tendency towards usurpation of spiritual power. So long as the royalties put forward a pretension to be popes, so long will the popes be driven, by the same law of equilibrium, to the pretension of being kings. The whole world continues to dream of unity in political power, but it does not understand the power resident in equilibrated dualism. Confronted by the royal usurpers of spiritual power, if the Pope were king no longer, he would be no longer anything. In the temporal order he is subject, like others, to the prejudgments of his time; he dare not therefore abdicate his temporal power, if such abdication would be a scandal for a considerable part of the world. When the sovereign opinion of the universe shall have proclaimed publicly that a temporal prince cannot be Pope; when the Czar of all the Russias and the King of Great Britain shall have renounced their derisive priesthood, the Pope will know that which remains to be done on his own part. Till then he must struggle, and if needs be must die, to maintain the integrity of St. Peter's patrimony.
The science of moral equilibrium will put an end to religious disputes and philosophical blasphemies. Men of understanding will be also men of religion when it comes to be recognised that religion does not impeach the freedom of conscience, and when those who are truly religious shall respect that science which recognises on its own part the existence and necessity of a universal religion. Such science will flood the philosophy of history with new light, and will furnish a synthetic plan of all the natural sciences. The law of equilibrated forces and of organic compensations will reveal a new chemistry and a new physics. So from discovery to discovery we shall work back to Hermetic philosophy, and shall be astonished at those prodigies of simplicity and brilliance which have been for so long and long forgotten.
Philosophy in that day will be exact like mathematics, for true ideas—being those which are identical with the living orders and so constituting the science of reality—shall combine with reason and justice to furnish exact proportions and equations as rigorous as numbers. Error thenceforth will be possible to ignorance alone, and true knowledge will be free from self-deception. Aestheticism will be subordinated no longer to caprices of taste which change as fashions change. If the beautiful is the splendour of the true, we shall be able to calculate without error the radiation of a light of which the source shall be certainly known and determined with exact precision. Poetry will abound no longer with foolish and subversive tendencies, nor will poets be those dangerous enchanters whom Plato crowned with flowers and banished from his republic; they will be rather magicians of reason and gracious mathematicians of harmony. Does this mean that the earth will Income an Eldorado? No, for so long as humanity exists, there will be children, meaning those who are weak, small, ignorant and poor. But society will be governed by its true masters, and there will be no irremediable evil in human life. It will be understood that the divine miracles are those of eternal order, and the phantoms of imagination will be worshipped no longer on the faith of unexplained wonders. The abnormal character of certain phenomena is only a proof of our ignorance in the presence of the laws of Nature. When God designs to communicate the knowledge of Himself He enlightens our reason and does not seek to confound or surprise it. In that day we shall know the utmost limit of the power of man who is created in the image of God; we shall realise that he also is a creator in his own sphere and that his goodness, directed by Eternal Reason, is a lower providence for beings which are placed by Nature under his influence and domination. Religion will then and for evermore have nothing to fear from progress, and will follow in the course thereof. The Blessed Vincent de Lerins, a doctor justly venerated in the golden chain of Catholicism, expresses admirably this accord between progress and conservative authority. According to him, true faith is worthy of our confidence only on account of that invariable authority which safeguards its dogmas from the caprices of human ignorance. “This notwithstanding,” adds Vincent de Lerins, “such immobility is not death; on the contrary, it preserves a germ of life for the future. That which we believe today without understanding will be understood by the future, which will rejoice in the knowledge thereof. Posteritas intellectum gratuletur, quod ante vestustas non intellectum venerabutur. If therefore we are asked whether all progress is excluded from the religion of Christ Jesus, the answer is no, assuredly, for great is the progress expected. Who indeed would be so jealous of humanity and at such enmity with God as to wish to hinder progress? But the condition is that it should be progress in reality, and not change of belief. Progress is the growth and development of each thing according to its class and its nature. Disorder is confusion and the medley of things and their nature. There must be undoubtedly a difference in the degrees of intelligence, science and wisdom, as much for men in general as for each man in particular, according to the natural succession of epochs in the Church, but only so that all be conserved and that dogma shall ever cherish the same spirit and maintain the same definition. Religion should develop souls successively, as life develops bodies which remain the same through all the stages of their growth. How great is the difference between the infantile flower of early years and the maturity of age I The old, notwithstanding, are the same in respect of personality as they were in boyhood; it is the exterior and the appearances which have changed. The limbs of an infant in the cradle are exceedingly frail, yet are they the same organs, having the same root principles, as those of the man; and this must be so, for otherwise there is deformity or death.
“The analogy obtains in the religion of Jesus Christ, for progress therein is fulfilled according to the same conditions and following similar laws. It grows with the years, with the years it increases in strength, but nothing is added to the sum total of its being. It was born complete and perfect in respect of proportions, and it grows and extends without changing. Our fathers sowed the wheat, and our nephews ought not to reap tares. The intermediate crops change nothing in the nature of the grain; we leave it perforce as we take it. Catholicism planted roses, and is it for us to substitute brambles? No, unquestionably; otherwise, woe to us. The balm and cinnamon of this spiritual paradise must not change in our hands to aconite and poison. All whatsoever which in the Church, that lovely land of God, has been sown by the fathers must be cultivated and nourished by the sons. This only must grow, and this alone blossom; but it may increase, and it should develop. As a fact, God permits that the dogmas of this heavenly philosophy shall be studied, developed, polished in a certain sense; but that which is forbidden is to change them, and that which is a crime is to prune them or to mutilate. May new light come down on them and the wise distinctions multiply, but let them ever preserve their fulness, their integrity and their native quality.”
Let us therefore take it for granted that all conquests of science in the past have been achieved for the profit of the universal Church, and, with Vincent de Lerins, let us allocate thereto the undivided heritage of all progress to come. Unto her be the great aspirations of Zoroaster and all discoveries of Hermes; hers be the Key of the Holy Arch and the Ring of Solomon, for she represents the holy and immutable hierarchy. She is stronger by reason of her struggles and is grounded by her apparent falls in still greater stability. She suffers in order that she may reign; she is cast down that she may be exalted in her rising; and she dies that she may rise again. “We must be prepared,” says Comte Joseph de Maistre, “for a great event in the divine order; we are moving towards it at an accelerated pace, which must be manifest to all observers, while striking oracles announce that the hour is at hand. Many prophecies in the Apocalypse have reference to these modern times. One writer has gone so far as to say that the event is already inaugurated and that the French nation is destined to become the great instrument of the most mighty of all revolutions. There is perhaps no truly religious man in all Europe—I speak of the educated classes—who is not in expectation of something extraordinary at this present moment. Does a general presentiment of the kind count for nothing? Go back through past ages, even to the birth of our Saviour. At that period a high and mysterious voice, beginning in the Eastern realms, proclaimed that the East was about to triumph, that a conqueror would come out of Judea, that a divine infant was given us, that He would descend from highest heaven and restore the golden age upon the earth. Such ideaswere spread abroad everywhere, and as they lent themselves to poetry, above all things, they were taken over by the greatest of Latin poets and emblazoned with brilliant hues in his Polito. To-day, as in the time of Virgil, the universe is in expectation, and how on our part shall we despise such strong persuasion, or by what right condemn those who are devoted to sacred researches on the indications of divine signs? If you seek proof of what is in store, look at the sciences themselves; consider the progress of chemistry, of astronomy also, and you will see where they are leading. Would you think, for example, that Newton takes us back to Pythagoras and that it will be proved presently that the heavenly bodies are set in motion, like human bodies, by intelligences joined thereto? We know not how, but this is what is on the point of being verified beyond all dispute. Such doctrine may seem paradoxical and even ridiculous, because current opinion imposes this view; but let us wait till the natural affinity of religion and science marry both in the mind of a single man of genius. His advent cannot be far off, and then the opinions which now seem bizarre or irrational will become axioms which no one will question, while people will talk of our present stupidity as they now speak of mediaeval superstition.”1
According to St. Thomas, and it is a beautiful utterance: “All that God wills is just, but that which is just should not be so designated only because God wills it”—Non ex hoc dicitur justum quod Deus illud vult. The moral doctrine of the future is contained herein, and from its fruitful principle one deduction follows immediately : not only is it good from the standpoint of faith to do what is ordained by God, but even from the standpoint of reason it is excellent and rational to obey Him. Man can therefore say: I do good not only because God wills it but because I also will. The will of humanity may be thus at once free and in conformity, for reason—demonstrating in an irrecusable fashion the wisdom of the prescriptions of faith—will act on its proper impulse by following the divine law, of which reason thus becomes, as it were, the human sanction. From that time forward superstition and impiety will be no longer possible, while from these considerations it follows that in religion and in practical—that is to say, in moral—philosophy, there will be an absolute authority, and moral dogmas will alone be revealed and established. Till then we shall have the pain and consternation of seeing daily the most simple and universal questions of right and duty challenged, while if blasphemies are reduced to silence, it is one thing to impose such silence but another to persuade and convert.
So long as Transcendental Magic was profaned by the wickedness of men, the Church of necessity proscribed it. False Gnostics have discredited that name of Gnosticism which was once so pure; sorcerers have outraged the children of the Magi; but religion, that friend of tradition and guardian of the treasures of antiquity, can no longer reject a doctrine anterior to the Bible and in perfect accord with traditional respect for the past, as well as with our most vital hopes for progress in the future. The common people are initiated by toil and by faith into the right of property and knowledge. There will always be such a people, as there will be children always; but when the aristocracy, endowed with wisdom, shall become a mother to the people, the path of personal, successive, gradual emancipation will be open to all, and he that is called will thereby be enabled through his own efforts to attain the rank of the elect. This is that mystery of the future which antique initiation concealed in its dark recesses. The miracles of Nature made subject to the will of man are reserved for the elect to come. The crook of the priesthood shall become the rod of miracles; it was so in the time of Moses and of Hermes; it will be so again. The sceptre of the Magus will be that of the world's king or emperor; and that person will by right be first among men who shall have shewn himself greatest of all in knowledge and in virtue. Magic, at that time, will be no longer an occult science except for the ignorant; it will be one that is incontestable for all. Then shall universal revelation resolder one to another all links of its golden chain; the human epic will close and even the efforts of Titans will have served only to restore the altar of the true God. All forms which have clothed the divine thought successively will be reborn immortal and perfect. All those features sketched by the successive art of nations will be united to form the perfect image of God. Having been purified and brought out of chaos, dogma will give birth naturally to an infallible ethic, and the social order will be constituted on this basis. Systems which are now in warfare are dreams of the twilight; let them pass. The sun shines and the earth follows its course; distracted is he who doubts that the day is coming. Distracted also are those who say that Catholicism is only a dead trunk and that we must put the axe thereto. They do not see that beneath its dry bark the living tree is renewed unceasingly. Truth has no past and no future; it is eternal; it is not that which ends; it is our dream only. Hammer and hatchet, which destroy in the sight of man, are in God's hand as the knife of a pruner, and the dead branches—being superstitions and heresies in religion, science and politics—can alone be lopped from the tree of everlasting convictions and beliefs.
It has been the purpose of this History of Magic to demonstrate that, at the beginning, the symbols of religion were those also of science, which was then in concealment. May religion and science, reunited in the future, give help and shew love to one another, like two sisters, for theirs has been one cradle.
1 To suggest that the Zohar exists to propound and interpret a thesis of equilibrium is like saying that the vast text is written about the legend of the Edomite Kings or that it is a violent attack on Christianity, because there is, a reference to each of these subjects. The symbolism of the Balance is practically confined to a single tract imbedded in the Zohar.
1 “God stretched forth His right hand and created the world above, and He stretched forth His left hand and created the world below…. God created the world below on the model of the world above, for the image is found beneath of all that abides on high.”—Zohar, Part II, fol. 20a.
1 Joseph de Maistre: Soirées de St. Pétersbourg, 1821, p. 308