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

Evocations of knowledge and intelligence are made with more solemn ceremonies. If concerned with a celebrated personage, we must meditate for twenty-one days upon his life and writings, form an idea of his appearance, converse with him mentally, and imagine his answers ; carry his portrait, or at least his name, about us ; follow a vegetable diet for twenty-one days, and a severe fast during the last seven. We must next construct the magical oratory, described in the thirteenth chapter of our Doctrine. This oratory must be invariably darkened; but if we operate in the daytime, we may leave a narrow aperture on the side where the sun will shine at the hour of evocation, and place a triangular prism before this opening, and a crystal globe, filled with water, before the prism. If the operation be arranged for night, the magic lamp must be so placed that its single ray shall fall upon the altar smoke. The purpose of these preparations is to furnish the magic agent with elements of corporeal appearance, and to ease as much as possible the tension of imagination, which could not be exalted without danger into the absolute illusion of dream. For the rest, it will be easily understood that a beam of sunlight, or the ray of a lamp, coloured variously, and falling upon curling and irregular smoke, can in no way create a perfect image. The chafing-dish containing the sacred fire should be in the centre of the oratory, and the altar of perfumes hard by.

The operator must turn towards the east to pray, and the west to invoke ; he must be either alone or assisted by two persons preserving the strictest silence ; he must wear the magical vestments, which we have described in the seventh chapter, and must be crowned with vervain and gold. He should bathe before the operation, and all his under garments must be of the most intact and scrupulous cleanliness. The ceremony should begin with a prayer suited to the genius of the spirit about to be invoked, and one which would be approved by himself if he still lived. For example, it would be impossible to evoke Voltaire by reciting prayers in the style of St Bridget. For the great men of antiquity, we may use the hymns of Cleanthes or Orpheus, with the adjuration terminating the Golden Verses of Pythagoras. In our own evocation of Apollonius, we used the magical philosophy of Patricius for the ritual, containing the doctrines of Zoroaster and the writings of Hermes Trismegistus. We recited the Nuctemeron of Apollonius in Greek with a loud voice, and added the following conjuration : —

Vouchsafe to be present, 0 Father of All, and thou Thrice Mighty Hermes, Conductor of the Dead. Asclepius, son of Hephaistus, Patron of the Healing Art : and thou Osiris, Lord of strength and vigour, do thou thyself be present too. Arnebascenis, Patron of Philosophy, and yet again Asclepius, son of Imuthe, who presidest over poetry . . . Apollonius, Apollonius, Apollonius ! Thou teachest the Magic of Zoroaster, son of Oromasdes; and this is the worship of the Gods. For the evocation of spirits belonging to religions issued from Judaism, the following kabbalistic invocation of Solomon should be used, either in Hebrew, or in any other tongue with which the spirit in question is known to have been familiar : — Powers of the Kingdom, be ye under my left foot and in my right hand ! Glory and Eternity, take me by the two shoulders, and direct me in the paths of victory ! Mercy and Justice, be ye the equilibrium and splendour of my life ! Intelligence and Wisdom, crown me ! Spirits of Malchdth, lead me betwixt the two pillars upon which rests the whole edifice of the temple ! Angels of Ketsah and Hod, strengthen me upon the cubic stone of Jesod ! 0 Gedulael ! 0 Geburael ! 0 Tiphereth ! Binael, be thou my love ! Euach Hochmael, be thou my light ! Be that which thou art and thou shalt be, 0 Ketheriel !

Ischim, assist me in the name of Saddai ! Ghei'ubim, be my strength in the name of Adonai ! Beni-Elohim, be my brethren in the name of the Son, and by the powers of Zebaoth! Eldlm, do battle for me in the name of Tetrageammaton ! Malachim, protect me in the name of J OD He Vau He ! Seraphim, cleanse my love in the name of Elyoh ! Hasmalim, enlighten me with tlie splendours of Eloi and Shechinah ! Aralim, act ! Ophanim, revolve and shine ! Hajoth a Kadosh, cry, speak, roar, bellow ! Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, Saddai, Adonai, Jotchavah, Eieazereie ! Hallelu-jah, Hallelu-jah, Hallelu-jah. Amen. pa.

It should be remembered above all, in conjurations, that the names of Satan, Beelzebub, Adramelek, and others do not designate spiritual unities, but legions of impure spirits. “ Our name is legion, for we are many,” says the spirit of darkness in the Gospel. Number constitutes the law, and progress takes place inversely in hell — that is to say, the most advanced in Satanic development, and consequently the most degraded, are the least intelligent and feeblest. Thus, a fatal law drives the demons downward when they wish and believe themselves to be ascending. So also those who term themselves chiefs are the most impotent and despised of all. As to the horde of perverse spirits, they tremble before an unknown, invisible, incomprehensible, capricious, implacable chief, who never explains his laws, whose arm is ever stretched out to strike those who fail to understand him. They give this phantom the names of Baal, Jupiter, and eve^ others more venerable, which cannot, without profanation, be pronounced in hell. But this phantom is only the shadow and remnant of God, disfigured by their wilful perversity, and persisting in their imagination like a vengeance of justice and a remorse of truth. When the evoked spirit of light manifests with dejected or irritated countenance, we must offer him a moral sacrifice, that is, be inwardly disposed to renounce whatever offends him ; and before leaving the oratory, we must dismiss him, saying : “ May peace be with thee ! I have not wished to trouble thee ; do thou torment me not. I shall labour to improve myself as to anything that vexes thee. I pray, and will still pray, with thee and for thee. Pray thou also both with and for me, and return to thy great slumber, expecting that day when we shall awake together. Silence and adieu ! ”

We must not close this chapter without giving some details on black magic for the benefit of the curious. The practices of Thessalian sorcerers and Eoman Canidias are described by several ancient authors. In the first place, a pit was dug, at the mouth of which they cut the throat of a black sheep ; the psyllae and larvse presumed to' be present, and swarming round to drink the blood, were driven off with the magic sword ; the triple Hecate and the infernal gods were evoked, and the phantom whose apparition was desired was called upon three times. In the middle ages, necromancers violated tombs, composed philtres and unguents with the fat and blood of corpses combined with aconite, belladonna, and poisonous fungi; they boiled and skimmed these frightful compounds over fires nourished with human bones and crucifixes stolen from churches; they added dust of dried toads and ash of consecrated hosts ; they anointed their temples, hands, and breasts with the infernal unguent, traced the diabolical pantacles, evoked the dead beneath gibbets or in deserted graveyards. Their bowlings were heard from afar, and belated travellers imagined that legions of phantoms rose out of the earth ; the very trees, in their eyes, assumed appalling shapes ; fiery orbs gleamed in the thickets ; frogs in the marshes seemed to echo mysterious words of the Sabbath with croaking voices. It was the magnetism of hallucination, the contagion of madness. ' '

The end of procedure in l)lack magic was to disturb reason and produce th'fe feverish excitement which emboldens to great crimes. The grimoires, formerly seized and burnt by authority everywhere, are certainly not harmless books. Sacrilege, murder, theft, are indicated or hinted as means to realisation in almost all these works. Thus, in the Great Grimoire, and its modern version, the Eed Dragon, there is a recipe entitled “ Composition of Death, or Philosophical Stone,” a broth of aqua fortis, copper, arsenic, and verdigris. There are also necromantic processes, comprising the tearing up of earth from graves with the nails, dragging out bones, placing them crosswise on the breast, then assisting at midnight mass on Christmas eve, and flying out of the church at the moment of consecration, crying ; “ Let the dead rise from their tombs ! ” — then returning to the graveyard, taking a handful of earth nearest to the coffin, running back to the door of the church, which has been alarmed by the clamour, depositing the two bones crosswise, again shouting: Let the dead rise from their tombs,” and then, if we escape being seized and shut up in a mad-house, retiring at a slow pace, and counting four thousand five hundred steps in a

straight line, which means following a broad road or scaling walls. Having traversed this space, you must lie down upon the earth, place yourself as if in a coffin, and repeat in lugubrious tones : “ Let the dead rise from their tombs ! ” Finally, call thrice on the person whose apparition you desire. Ho doubt any one who is mad enough and wicked enough to abandon himself to such operations is predisposed to all chimeras and all phantoms. Hence the recipe of the Grand Grimoire is most efficacious, but we advise none of our readers to have recourse to it. St Augustine speculates, as we have said, whether Apuleius could have been changed into an ass and then have resumed his human shape. The same doctor might have equally concerned himself with the adventure of the comrades of Ulysses, transformed into swine by Circe. In vulgar opinion, transmutations and metamorphoses have always been the very essence of magic. Now, the crowd, being the echo of opinion, which is queen of the world, is never perfectly right nor entirely wrong. Magic really changes the nature of things, or, rather, modifies their appearances at pleasure, according to the strength of the operator’s will and the fascination of ambitious adepts. Speech creates its form, and when a person, held infallible, confers a name upon a given thing, he really transforms that thing into the substance signified by the name. The masterpiece of speech and of faith, in this order, is the real transmutation of a substance without change in its appearances.

Had Apollonius offered a cup of wine to his disciples, and said to them : “ This is my blood, of which ye shall drink henceforth to perpetuate my life within you ; ” and had his disciples through centuries believed that they continued the transformation by repeating the same words ; had they taken the wine, despite its odour and taste, for the real, human, and living blood of Apollonius, we should have to acknowledge this master in theurgy as the most accomplished of enchanters and most potent of all the magi. It would remain for us then to adore him.

Now, it is well known that mesmerists impart for their somnambulists any taste that they choose to plain water, and if we assume a magus having sufficient command over the astral fluid to magnetize at the same moment a whole assembly of persons, otherwise prepared for magnetism by adequate over-excitement, we shall be in a position to explain readily, not indeed the Gospel miracle of Cana, but works of the same class. Are not the fascinations of love, which result from the universal magic of nature, truly prodigious, and do they not actually transform persons and things ? Love is a dream of enchantments that transfigures the world ; all becomes music and fragrance, all intoxication and felicity. The beloved being is beautiful, is good, is sublime, is infallible, is radiant, beams with health and happiness. When the dream ends we seem to have fallen from the clouds ; we are inspired with disgust for the brazen sorceress who took the place of the lovely Melusine, for the Thersites whom we deemed was Achilles or Nereus. What is there we cannot cause the person who loves us to believe ? But also what reason or justice can we instil into those who no longer love us ? Love begins magician and ends sorcerer. After creating the illusions of heaven on earth, it realises those of hell ; its hatred is absurd like its ardour, because it is passional, that is, subject to influences which are fatal for it. Bor this cause it has been proscribed by sages, who declare it to be the enemy of reason. Are they to be envied or commiserated for thus condemning, doubtless without understanding, the most alluring of ill-doers ? All that can be said is that when they spoke thus, they either had not yet loved or they loved no longer.

Things that are external are for us what our word internal makes them. To believe that we are happy is to be happy ; what we esteem becomes precious in proportion to the estimation itself : this is the sense in which we can say that magic changes the nature of things. The “ Metamorphoses ” of Ovid are true, but they are allegorical, like the “ Golden Ass ” of rare Apuleius. The life of beings is a progressive transformation, and its forms can be determined, renewed, prolonged further, or destroyed sooner. If the doctrine of metempsychosis were true, might one not say that the debauch represented by Circe really and materially changes men into swine ; for, on this hypothesis, the retribution of vices would be a relapse into animal forms that correspond to them ? Now, metempsychosis, which has frequently been misinterpreted, has a perfectly true side ; animal forms communicate their sympathetic impressions to the astral body of man, which speedily reacts on his aptitudes according to the force of his habits. A man of intelligent and passive mildness assumes the inert physiognomy and ways of a sheep, but in somnambulism it is a sheep that is seen, and not a man with a sheepish countenance, as the ecstatic and learned Swedenborg experienced a thousand times. In the kabbalistic book of Daniel the seer, this mystery is represented by the legend of Nabuchodonsor changed into a beast, which, after the common fate of magical allegories, has been mistaken for an actual history. In this way, we can really transform men into animals and animals into men ; we can metamorphose plants and alter their virtue ; we can endow minerals with ideal properties ; it is all a question of willing. We can equally render ourselves visible or invisible at will, and this helps us to explain the mysteries of the ring of G-yges.

In the first place, let us remove from the mind of our readers all supposition of the absurd ; that is, of an effect devoid of cause or contradicting its cause. To become invisible one of three things is necessary — the interposition of some opaque medium between the light and our body, or between our body and the eyes of the spectators, or the fascination of the eyes of the spectators in such a manner that they cannot make use of their sight. Of these methods, the third only is magical. Have we not all of us observed that under the government of a strong preoccupation we look without seeing and hurt ourselves against objects in front of us ? “ So do, that seeing they may not see,” said the great Initiator, and the history of this grand master tells us that one day, finding himself on the point of being stoned in the temple, he made himself invisible and went out. There is no need to repeat here the mystifications of popular grimoires about the ring of invisibility. Some ordain that it shall be composed of fixed mercury, enriched by a small stone which it is indispensable to find in a pewit’s nest, and kept in a box of the same metal. The author of the “ Little Albert ” ordains that this ring should be composed of hairs torn from the head of a raging hyena, which recalls the history of the bell of Eodilard. The only writers who have discoursed seriously of the ring of Gyges are Jamblichus, Porphyry, and Peter of Apono. What they say is evidently

allegorical, and the representation which they give, or that which can be made from their description, proves that they are really speaking of nothing but the great magical arcanum. One of the figures depicts the universal movement, harmonic and equilibrated in imperishable being ; another, which should be formed from an amalgam of the seven metals, calls for a description in detail. It has a double collet and two precious stones — a topaz, constellated with the sign of the sun, and an emerald with the sign of the moon ; it should bear on the inner side the occult characters of the planets, and on the outer their known signs, twice repeated and in kabbalistic opposition to each other ; that is, five on the right and five on the left ; the signs of the sun and moon resuming the four several intelligences of the seven planets. Now, this configuration is no other than that of a pantacle signifying all the mysteries of magical doctrine, and here is the occult significance of the ring : to exercise the omnipotence, of which ocular fascination is one of the most difficult demonstrations to give, we must possess all science and know how to inake use of it.

Fascination is fulfilled by magnetism. The magus inwardly forbids a whole assembly to see him, and it does not see him. In this manner he passes through guarded gates, and departs from prison in the face of his petrified gaolers. At such times a strange numbness is experienced, and they recall having seen the magus as if in a dream, but never till after he has gone. The secret of invisibility, therefore, wholly consists in a power which is capable of definition — that of distracting or paralysing attention, so that the light reaches the visual organ without impressing the eye of the soul. To exercise this power we must possess a will accustomed to sudden and energetic actions, great presence of mind, and skill no less great in causing diversions among the crowd. Let a man, for example, who is being pursued by his intending murderers, dart into a side street, return immediately, and advance with perfect calmness towards his pursuers, or let him mix with them and seem to be engaged in the chase, and he will certainly make himself invisible. A priest who was being hunted in '93, with the intention of hanging him from a lamp-post, fled down a side street, assumed a stooping gait, and leaned against a corner, with an intensely preoccupied expression ; the crowd of his enemies swept past ; not one saw him, or, rather, it never struck anyone to recognise him ;

it was so unlikely to be he ! The person who desires to be seen always makes himself observed, and he who would remain unnoticed effaces himself and disappears. The true ring of Gyges is the will; it is also the rod of transformations, and by its precise and strong formulation it creates the magical word. The omnipotent terms of enchantments are those which express this creative power of forms. The tetragram, which is the supreme word of magic, signifies : “ It is that which it shall be,” and if we apply it to any transformation whatsoever with full intelligence, it will renew and modify all things, even in the teeth of evidence and common sense. The hoc est of the Christian sacrifice is a translation and application of the tetragram ; hence this simple utterance operates the most complete, most invisible, most incredible, and most clearly affirmed of all transformations. A still stronger word than that of transformation has been judged necessary by councils to express the marvel, that of traTisuhstantiation.

The Hebrew terms nin', n'nx, have been considered by all kabbalists as the keys of magical transformation. The Latin words, est, sit, esto, fiat, have the same force when pronounced with full understanding. M. de Montalembert seriously relates, in his legend of St Elizabeth of Hungary, how one day this saintly lady, surprised by her noble husband, from whom she sought to conceal her good works, in the act of carrying bread to the poor in her apron, told him that she was carrying roses, and it proved on investigation that she had spoken truly; the loaves had been changed into roses. This story is a most gracious magical apologue, and signifies that the truly wise man cannot lie, that the word of wisdom determines the form of things, or even their substance independently of their forms. Why, for example, should not the noble spouse of St Elizabeth, a good and firm Christian like herself, and believing implicitly in the real presence of the Saviour in true human body upon an altar where he beheld only a wheaten host, why should he not believe in the real presence of roses in his wife’s apron under the appearances of bread ? She exhibited him loaves undoubtedly, but as she had said that they were roses, and as he believed her incapable of the smallest falsehood, he saw and wished to see roses only. This is the secret of the miracle. Another legend narrates how a saint, whose name has escaped me, finding nothing to eat on a Lenten day or a Friday, commanded the fowl to become a fish, and it became a fish.

The parable needs no interpretation, and it recalls a beautiful story of St Spiridion of Tremithonte, the same who evoked the soul of his daughter Irene. One Good Friday a traveller reached the abode of the holy bishop, and as bishops in those days took Christianity in earnest, and were consequently poor, Spiridion, who fasted religiously, had in his house only some salted bacon, which had been made ready for Easter. The stranger was overcome with fatigue and famished with hunger ; Spiridion offered him the meat, and himself shared the meal of charity, thus transforming the very flesh which the Jews regard as of all most impure into a feast of penitence, transcending the material law by the spirit of the law itself, and proving himself a true and intelligent disciple of the man-God, who hath established his elect as the monarchs of nature in the three worlds.

We return once more to that terrible number fifteen, symbolised in the Tarot by a monster throned upon an altar, mitred and horned, having a woman’s breasts and the generative organs of a man — a chimera, a malformed sphinx, a synthesis of monstrosities ; below this figure we read a frank and simple inscription — The Devil. Yes, we confront here the phantom of all terrors, the dragon of all theogonies, the Ariman of the Persians, the Typhon of the Egyptians, the Python of the Greeks, the old serpent of the Hebrews, the fantastic monster, the nightmare, the Croquemitaine, the gargoyle, the great beast of the middle ages, and, worse than all this, the Baphomet of the Templars, the bearded idol of the alchemists, the obscene deity of Mendes, the goat of the Sabbath. The frontispiece to this Ritual reproduces the exact figure of the terrible emperor of night, with all his attributes and all his characters. Let us state now for the edification of the vulgar, for the satisfaction of M. le Comte de Mirville, for the justification of the demonologist Bodin, for the greater glory of the Church, which persecuted Templars, burnt magicians, excommunicated Ereemasons, &c. — let us state boldly and precisely that all the inferior initiates of the occult sciences and profaners of the great arcanum, not only did in the past, but do now, and will ever, adore what is signified by this alarming symbol. Yes, in our profound conviction, the Grand Masters of the Order of the Templars worshipped the Baphomet, and caused it to be worshipped by their adepts ; yes, there existed in the past, and there may be still in the present, assemblies which are presided over by this figure, seated on a throne and having a flaming torch between the horns ; but the adorers of this sign do not

consider, as do we, that it is tlie representation of the devil ; on the contrary, for them it is that of the god Pan, the god of our modern schools of philosophy, the god of the Alexandrian theurgic school, and of our own mystical Neoplatonists, the god of Lamartine and Victor Cousin, the god of Spinoza and Plato, the god of the primitive Gnostic schools ; the Christ also of the dissident priesthood ; this last qualification, ascribed to the goat of black magic, will not astonish students of religious antiquities who are acquainted with the phases of symbolism and doctrine in their various transformations, whether in India, Egypt, or Judea. The bull, the dog, and the goat are the three symbolical animals of Hermetic magic, resuming all the traditions of Egypt and India. The bull represents the earth or salt of the philosophers ; the dog is Hermanubis, the Mercury of the sages, fluid, air, and water ; the goat represents fire, and is at the same time the symbol of generation. Two goats, one pure and one impure, were consecrated in Judea ; the first was sacrificed in expiation for sins ; the other, loaded with those sins by imprecation, was set at liberty in the desert — a strange ordinance, but one of deep symbolism, reconciliation by sacrifice and expiation by liberty ! How, all the fathers of the Church, who have concerned themselves with Jewish symbolism, have recognised in the immolated goat the figure of him who assumed, as they say, the very form of sin.

Hence the Gnostics were not outside symbolical traditions when they gave Christ the Liberator this same mystical figure. All the Kabbalah and all magic, as a fact, are divided between the cultus of the immolated and that of the emissary goat. There is, therefore, the magic of the sanctuary and that of the wilderness, the white and the black Church, the priesthood of public assemblies and the sanhedrim of the Sabbath. The goat which is represented in our frontispiece bears upon his forehead the sign of the pentagram with one point in the ascendant, which is sufficient to distinguish him as a symbol of the

light ; he makes the sign of occultism with both hands^ pointing upward to the white moon of Chesed, and downward to the black moon of Gehurah. This sign expresses the perfect harmony of mercy with justice. One of the arms is feminine and the other masculine, as in the androgyne of Khunrath, whose attributes we have combined with those of our goat, since they are one and the same symbol. The torch of intelligence burning between the horns is the magical light of universal equilibrium; it is also the type of the soul exalted above matter, even while connecting with matter, as the flame connects with the torch. The hideous head of the animal expresses horror of sin, for which the material agent, alone responsible, must alone and for ever bear the penalty, because the soul isimpassible in its nature, and can suffer only by materialising. The caducous, which replaces the generative organ, represents eternal life ; the scale-covered belly typifies water ; the circle above it is the atmosphere ; the feathers still higher up signify the volatile ; lastly, humanity is depicted by the two breasts and the androgyne arms of this sphinx of the occult sciences. Behold the shadows of the infernal sanctuary dissipated ! Behold the sphinx of mediaeval terrors divined and cast from his throne ! Quomodo ceddistiy Lucifer !

The dread Baphomet henceforth, like all monstrous idols, enigmas of antique science and its dreams, is only an innocent and even pious hieroglyph. How should man adore the beast, since he exercises a sovereign power over it ? Let us affirm, for the honour of humanity, that it has never adored dogs and goats any more than lambs and pigeons. In the hieroglyphic order, why not a goat as much as a lamb ? On the sacred stones of Gnostic Christians of the Basilidean sect, are representations of Christ under the diverse figures of kabbalistic animals — sometimes a bird, at others a lion, and, again, a lion or bull-headed serpent ; but in all cases He bears invariably the same attributes of light, even as our goat, who cannot be confounded with fabulous images of Satan, owing to his sign of the pentagram. Let us assert most strongly, to combat the remnants of Manichicanism which are daily appearing among Christians, that as a superior personality and power Satan does not exist. He is the personification of all errors, perversities, and, consequently, weaknesses. If God may be defined as He who necessarily exists, may we not define His antagonist and enemy as he who necessarily does not exist ? The absolute affirmation of good implies the absolute negation of evil ; so also in the light shadow itself is luminous. Thus, erring spirits are good to the extent of their participation in being and in truth. There are no shadows without reflections, no nights without moon, phosphorescence, and stars. If hell be just, it is good. Ho one has ever blasphemed God. The insults and mockeries addressed to His disfigured images attain Him not.

We have named Manichseanism, and it is by this monstrous heresy that we shall explain the aberrations of black magic. The misconstrued doctrine of Zoroaster and the magical law of two forces constituting universal equilibrium, have caused some illogical minds to imagine a negative divinity, subordinate but hostile to the active divinity. Thus, the impure duad comes into being. Men were mad enough to halve God ; the star of Solomon was separated into two triangles, and the Manichseans imagined a trinity of night. This evil God, product of sectarian fancies, inspired all manias and all crimes. Sanguinary sacrifices were offered him ; monstrous idolatry replaced the true religion; black magic traduced the transcendent and luminous magic of true adepts, and horrible conventicles of sorcerers, ghouls, and stryges took place in caverns and desert places, for dementia soon changes into frenzy, and from human sacrifices to cannibalism there is only one step. The mysteries of the Sabbath have been variously described, but they figure always in grimoires and in magical trials ; the revelations made on the subject may be classified under three heads — 1. those referring to a fantastic and imaginary Sabbath ; 2. those which betray the secrets of the occult assemblies of veritable adepts ; 3. revelations of foolish and criminal gatherings, having for their object the operations of black magic. For a large number of unhappy men and women, given over to these mad and abominable practices, the Sabbath was but a prolonged nightmare, where dreams appeared realities, and were induced by means of potions, fumigations, and narcotic frictions.

Baptista Porta, whom we have already signalised as a mystifier, gives in his ‘"Natural Magic,” a pretended recipe for the sorcerer’s unguent, by means of which they were transported to the Sabbath. It is a composition of child’s fat, of aconite boiled with poplar leaves, and some other drugs, the whole mixed with soot, which could not contribute to the beauty of the naked sorceresses who repaired to the scene anointed with this pomade. There is another and more serious recipe given by Baptista Porta, which we transcribe in Latin to preserve its grimoire character. Recipe : suim, acorum vulgar e, pentaphyllon, verspertillionis sanguinem solanum somniferum, et oleum, the whole boiled and incorporated to the consistence of an unguent. We infer that compositions containing opiates, the pith of green hemp, datura-stramonium or laurel-almond, would enter quite as successfully into such preparations. The fat or blood of night-birds added to these narcotics, with black magical ceremonies, would impress imagination and determine the direction of dreams. To Sabbaths dreamed in this manner we must refer the accounts of a goat issuing from pitchers and going back into them after the ceremony ; infernal powders obtained from the ordure of this goat, who is called Master Leonard; banquets where abortions are eaten without salt and boiled with serpents and toads ; dances, in which monstrous animals or men and women with impossible shapes, take part ; unbridled debauches where incubi project cold sperm. Nightmare alone could produce or explain such scenes. The unfortunate cure, Gaufridy, and his abandoned penitent, Madeline de la

Palud, went mad through kindred delusions, and were burned for persisting in affirming them. We must read the depositions of these diseased beings during their trial to understand the extent of the aberration possible to an afflicted imagination. But the Sabbath was not always a dream ; it did exist in reality ; even now there are secret nocturnal assemblies for the practice of the rites of the old world, some of which assemblies have a religious and social object, while that of others is concerned with orgies and conjurations. From this two-fold point of view we propose to consider and condemn the true Sabbath, of the magic of light in one case and the magic, of darkness in the other. When Christianity proscribed the public exercise of the ancient worships, the partisans of the latter were compelled to meet in secret for the celebration of their mysteries. Initiates presided over these assemblies, and soon established among the varieties of the worships a kind of orthodoxy, more easily facilitated by the aid of magical truth, because proscription unites wills and gathers up the bonds of brotherhood between men. Thus, the mysteries of Isis, of Ceres Eleusinia, of Bacchus, combined with those of the good goddess and primeval Druidism. The meetings took place usually between the days of Mercury and Jupiter, or between those of Venus and Saturn ; the proceedings included the rites of initiation, exchange of mysterious signs, singing of symbolical hymns, the cementing of union at the banqueting board, the successive formation of the magical chain at table and in the dance ;

and, finally, the meeting broke up after renewing pledges in the presence of the chiefs and receiving instructions from them. The candidate for the Sabbath was led, or rather carried, to the assembly, with his eyes covered by the magical mantle in which he was completely enveloped, he was led between immense fires, while alarming noises were made about him. When his face was bared, he found himself surrounded by infernal monsters, and in the presence of a colossal and hideous goat which he was commanded to adore. All these ceremonies

were tests of his force of character and confidence in his initiators. The final ordeal was most decisive of all because it was at first sight humiliating and ridiculous to the mind of the candidate ; he was commanded without circumspection to kiss respectfully the posterior of the goat ; if he refused, his head was again covered, and he was transported to a distance from the assembly with such extraordinary rapidity that he believed himself whirled through the air; if he assented, he was taken round the symbolical idol, and there found, not a repulsive and obscene object, but the young and gracious countenance of a priestess of Isis or Maia, who gave him a maternal salute, and he was then admitted to the banquet. As to the orgies which in many such assemblies followed the banquet, we must beware of believing that they were generally permitted at these secret agapae ; at the same time it is known that a number of gnostic sects practised them in their conventicles during the early centuries of Christianity. That the flesh had its protestants in those ages of asceticism and compression of the senses was inevitable, and can occasion no surprise, but we must not accuse transcendent magic of the irregularities it has never authorised. Isis is chaste in her widowhood ; Diana Panthea is a virgin ; Hermanubis, possessing both sexes, can satisfy neither ; the Hermetic hermaphrodite is pure ;

Apollonius of Tyana never yielded to the seductions of pleasure ; the Emperor Julian was a man of rigid continence ; Plotinus of Alexandria was ascetic in the manner of his life ; Paracelsus was such a stranger to foolish love that his sex was suspected ; Raymund Lully was initiated in the final secrets of science only after a hopeless passion which made him chaste for ever. It is also a magical tradition that pantacles and talismans lose all their virtue when he who wears them enters a house of prostitution or commits an adultery. The Sabbath of orgies must not therefore be considered as that of the veritable adepts.

With regard to the term Sabbath, some have traced it to the name of Sabasius, and other etymologies have been imagined. The most simple, in our opinion, connects it with the Jewish Sabbath, for it is certain that the Jews, the most faithful depositaries of the secrets of the Kabbalah, were almost invariably the great masters in magic during the middle ages. The Sabbath was therefore the Sunday of the Kabbalists, the day of their religious festivals, or rather the night of their regular assembly. This feast, surrounded with mysteries, had the vulgar timidity for its safeguard and escaped persecution by terror. As to the diabolical Sabbath of necromancers, it was a counterfeit of that of the magi, an assembly of malefactors who exploited idiots and fools. There horrible rites were practised and abominable potions compounded, there sorcerers and sorceresses laid their plans and instructed one another for the common support of their reputation in prophecy and divination ; at that period diviners were generally consulted and followed a lucrative profession while exercising a real power. Such institutions neither had nor could possess any regular rites ; everything depended on the caprice of the chiefs and the vertigo of the assembly. What was narrated by some who had been present at them served as a type for all nightmares of hallucination and from this chaos of impossible realities and demoniac dreams have issued the revolting and foolish histories of the Sabbath which figure in magical processes and in the books of such writers as Spranger, Delancere, Delrio, and Bodin.

The rites of the Gnostic Sabbath were imported into Germany by an association which took the name of Mopses. It replaced the Kabbalistic goat by the Hermetic dog, and the candidate, male or female, for the order initiated women, was brought in with eyes bandaged ; the same infernal noise was made in their neighbourhood, which surrounded the name of Sabbath with so many inexplicable rumours ; they were asked whether they were afraid of the devil, and were abruptly required to choose between kissing the posterior of the grand master and that of a small silk- covered figure of a dog, which was substituted for the old grand idol of the goat of Mendes. The sign of recognition was a ridiculous grimace, which recalls the phantasmagoria of the ancient Sabbath and the masks of the assistants. For the rest, their doctrine is summed up in the cultus of love and license. The association came into existence when the Eoman Church was persecuting Freemasonry. The Mopses pretended to recruit only among Catholics, and for the oath at reception they substituted a solemn engagement upon honour to reveal no secrets of the order. It was more effectual than any oath, and left nothing for religion to object.

The name of the Templar Baphomet, which should be spelt Kabbalistically backwards, is composed of three abbreviations : Tem. OHP. ab., Temjpli omnium Jwminum jpacis abbas, “ the father of the temple of universal peace among men.” According to some, the Bahomet was a monstrous head ; according to others, a demon in the form of a goat. A sculptured coffer was disinterred recently in the ruins of an old commandery of the temple, and antiquaries observed upon it a baphometic figure, corresponding by its attributes to the goat of Mendes and the androgyne of Khunrath. It was a bearded figure with a female body, holding the sun in one hand and the moon in the other, attached to chains. Now, this virile head is a beautiful allegory which attributes to thought alone the initiating and creating principle. Here the head represents spirit and the body matter. The orbs enchained to the human form, and directed by that nature of which intelligence is the head, are also magnificently allegorical. The sign all the same was discovered to be obscene and diabolical by the learned men who examined it. Can we be surprised after this at the spread of mediaeval superstition in our own day ! One thing only surprises me, that, believing in the devil and his agents, men do not rekindle the faggots. M. Veuillot is logical and demands it ; one should honour men who have the courage of their opinions.

Pursuing our curious researches, we come now to the most horrible mysteries of the grimoire, those which are concerned with the evocations of devils and pacts with hell. After attributing a real existence to the absolute negation of goodness, after having enthroned the absurd and created a god of falsehood, it remained for human folly to invoke the impossible idol, and this maniacs have done. We were lately informed that the most reverend Father Ventura, formerly Superior of the Theatines, Bishops’ Examiner, etc., after reading our Doctrine, declared that the kabbalah was, in his opinion, an invention of the devil, and that the star of Solomon was another diabolical device to persuade the world that Satan was the same as God. See what is taught seriously by the masters in Israel ! The ideal of nothingness and night inventing a sublime philosophy which is the universal basis of faith and the keystone of all temples ! The demon placing his signature by the side of God’s ! My venerable masters in theology, you are greater sorcerers than you or others are aware, and He who said : “ The devil is a liar like his father,” would have had some observations to make on the decisions of your reverences.

The evokers of the devil must before all things belong to a religion which admits a devil, creator and rival of God. To invoke a power, we must believe in it. Given this firm faith in the religion of the devil, we must proceed as follows to enter into correspondence with this pseudo-Deity: In the circle of its action, every word creates that which it affirms. He who affirms the devil, creates or makes the devil. Conditions of Success in Infernal Evocations. 1, Invincible obstinacy; 2, a conscience at once hardened to crime and most subject to remorse and fear ; 3, affected or natural ignorance ; 4, blind faith in all that is incredible ; 5, a completely false idea of God. We must afterwards — (a) Profane the ceremonies of the cultus in which we believe ; (b) offer a bloody sacrifice ; (c) procure the magic fork, which is a branch of a single beam of hazel or almond, cut at one blow with the new knife used for the sacrifice. It must terminate in a fork, which must be armoured with iron or steel made from the blade of the before-mentioned knife. A fast of fifteen days must be observed, taking a single unsalted repast after sundown ; this repast should consist of black bread and blood seasoned with unsalted spices or black beans and milky and narcotic herbs. We must get drunk every five days, after sundown, on wine in which five heads of black poppies and five ounces of pounded hemp seed have been steeped for five hours, the infusion being strained through a cloth woven by a prostitute ;

strictly speaking, the first cloth which comes to hand may be used, should it have been woven by a woman. The evocation should be performed on the night between Monday and Tuesday, or that between Friday and Saturday. A solitary and condemned spot must be chosen, such as a cemetery haunted by evil spirits, an avoided ruin in the country, the vaults of an abandoned convent, a place where some murder has been committed, a druidic altar or an Old temple of idols. A black seamless and sleeveless robe must be provided ; a leaden cap emblazoned with the signs of the moon, Venus, and Saturn ; two candles of human fat set in black wooden candlesticks, carved in the shape of a crescent ; two crowns of vervain ; a magical sword with a black handle ; the magical fork ; a copper vase containing the blood of the victim ; a censer holding the perfumes, namely, incense, camphor, aloes, ambergris, and storax, kneaded with the blood of a goat, a mole, and a bat ; four nails taken from the coffin of an executed criminal ; the head of a black cat which has been nourished on human flesh for five days ; a bat drowned in blood ; the horns of a goat

Goetic Ciecle of Black Evocations and Pacts. cum quo puclla concubuerit ; and the skull of a parricide. All these hideous and scarcely obtainable objects having been collected, they must be arranged as follows : A perfect circle is traced by the sword, with a break, or way of issuing, on one side ; a triangle is drawn in the circle, and the pantacle thus formed is coloured with blood ; at one of the angles of the triangle a chafing-dish is placed, and this should have been included among the indispensable objects already enumerated; at the opposite base of the triangle three little circles are described for the operator and his two assistants ; behind that of the operator the sign of the labarum or monogram of Constantine is drawn, not with the blood of the victim, but with the operator’s own blood. The operator and his assistants must have bare feet and covered heads. The skin of the immolated victim must be also brought to the place, and, being cut into strips, must be placed within the circle, forming a second and inner circle, fixed at four corners by the four nails from the coffin already mentioned. Hard by the nails, but outside the circle, must be placed the head of the cat, the human or rather inhuman skull, the horns of the goat, and the bat ; they must be sprinkled with a branch of birch dipped in the blood of the victim, and then a fire of cypress and alderwood must be lighted, the two magical candles being placed on the right and left of the operator, encircled with the wreaths of vervain.

The formula of evocation can now be pronounced, as they are found in the magical elements of Peter of Apono, or in the grimoires,. whether printed or manuscript. That of the Grand Grimoire, reproduced in the vulgar Eed Dragon, has been wilfully altered, and should be read as follows : “ By Adonai Eloim, Adona'i Jehova, Adonai Sabaoth, Metraton On Agla Adonai Mathon, the pythonic word, the mystery of the salamander, the assembly of the sylphs, the grotto of the gnomes, the demons of the heaven of Gad, Almousin, Gioor, Jehosua, Evam, Zariatnatmik, Come, Come, Come ! ”

The grand appellation of Agrippa consists only in these words: Dies Mies Jeschet Boenedoesef Douvema EniTEMAUS. We make no pretence of understanding their meaning ; possibly they possess none, assuredly none which is reasonable, since they avail in evoking the devil, who is the sovereign unreason. Picus de Mirandola, no doubt from the same motive, affirms that in black magic the most barbarous and unintelligible words are the most efficacious and the best. The conjurations are repeated in a louder voice, accompanied by imprecations and menaces, until the spirit replies. He is commonly preceded by a violent wind which seems to make the whole country resound. Then domestic animals tremble and hide away, the assistants feel a breath upon their faces, and' their hair, damp with cold sweat, rises upon their heads. The grand and supreme appellation, according to Peter of Apono, is as follows : — “ Hemen-Etan ! Hemen-Etan ! Hemen-Etan ! El* Ati* Titeip* Aozia* Hyn* Teu* Minosel* Achadon* vay* vaa* Eye* Aaa* Eie* Exe* A EL EL EL A Hy ! Hau ! Hau ! Hau! Hau! Va ! Va ! Va ! Va ! CHAVAJOTH. Aie Saraye, aie Saraye, aie Saraye ! By Eloym, Archima, Eabur, Bathas over Abrac, flowing down, coming from above Abeor upon Aberer Ohavajoth ! ChavajotJi ! Chavajoth ! I command thee by the Key of Solomon and the great name Semhamphoras.”

The ordinary signs and signatures of demons are given below : — But they are those of the inferior demons, and here follow the official signatures of the princes of hell, attested judicially — ^judicially, 0 M. le Comte de Mirville ! — and preserved in the archives of justice as convicting evidences for the trial of the unfortunate Urbain Grandier. These signatures appear under a pact of which Collin de Plancy gives a facsimile reproduction in the Atlas of his “ Infernal Dictionary.” It has this marginal note : “ The draught is in hell, in the secretary of Lucifer,” a valuable item of information about a locality but imperfectly known, and belonging to a period approximate to our own, though anterior to the trial of the young Labarre and Etalonde, who, as every one knows, were contemporaries of Voltaire. Evocations were frequently followed by pacts written on parchment of goat skin with an iron pen and blood drawn from the left arm. The document was in duplicate ; one copy was carried ofif by the fiend and the other swallowed by the wilful reprobate. The reciprocal engagements were that the demon should serve the sorcerer during a given period of years, and that the sorcerer should belong to the

demon after a determinate time. The Church in her exorcisms has consecrated the belief in all these things, and it may be said that black magic and its darksome prince are the true, living, and terrible creation of Koman Catholicism ; that they are even its special and characteristic work, for priests invent not God. So do true Catholics cleave from the bottom of their hearts to the consecration and even the regeneration of this great work, which is the philosophical stone of the official and positive cultus. In thieves’ slang the devil is called the haker by malefactors ; all our desire, and we speak no longer from the standpoint of the magus, but as a devoted child of Christianity and of that Church to which we owe our earliest education and our first enthusiasms— all our desire, we say, is that the phantom of Satan may no longer be able to be termed the taker for the ministers of morality and the representatives of the highest virtue. "Will they appreciate our intention and forgive the boldness of our aspirations in consideration of our devoted intentions and the sincerity of our faith ? The devil-making magic which dictated the Grimoire of Pope Honorius, the Enchiridion of Leo III., the exorcisms of the Eitual, the verdicts of inquisitors, the suits of Laubardement, the articles of the Veuillot brothers, the books of MM. de Ealloux, de Montalembert, de Mirville, the magic of sorcerers and of pious persons who are not sorcerers, is something truly to be condemned in the one and infinitely deplored in the other. It is above all to combat these unhappy aberrations of the human mind by their exposure that we have published this book. May it further the holy cause !

But we have not yet exhibited these impious devices in all their turpitude, and in all their monstrous folly ; we must remove the blood-stained filth of perished superstitions ; we must tax the annals of demonomania, so as to conceive of certain crimes which imagination alone could not invent. The Kabbalist Bodin, Israelite by conviction and Catholic by necessity, had no other intention in his Demonomania of Sorcerers ” than to impeach Catholicism in its works, and to undermine it in the greatest of all its doctrinal abuses. The treatise of Bodin is profoundly machiavellic, and strikes at the heart of the institutions and persons it appears to defend. It would be difficult to imagine without reading his vast mass of sanguinary and hideous histories, acts of revolting superstition, sentences and executions of stupid ferocity. “ Burn all ! ” the inquisitors seemed to cry. “ God wiU distinguish His own ! ” Poor fools, hysterical women, and idiots, were accordingly burned without mercy for the crime of magic, while, at the same time, great criminals escaped this unjust and sanguinary justice. Bodin gives us to understand this by recounting such anecdotes as that which he connects with the death of Charles IX. It is an almost unknown abomination, and one which has not, so far as we know, tempted the skill of any romancer, even at the periods of the most feverish and deplorable literature.

Attacked by a disease of which no physician could discover the cause or explain the frightful symptoms. King Charles IX. was dying. The Queen-Mother, who ruled him entirely, and had everything to lose under another reign — the Queen-Mother, who has been suspected as the author of the disease, because concealed devices and unknown interests have always been attributed to her who was capable of anything— consulted her astrologers, and then had recourse to the foulest form of magic, the Oracle of the Bleeding Head, for the sufferer’s condition grew worse and more desperate daily. The infernal operation was performed in the following way. A child was selected, of beautiful appearance and innocent manners ; he was prepared for his first communion by the almoner of the palace. When the day or rather night of the sacrifice arrived, a monk, an apostate Jacobin, given over to the occult works of black magic, celebrated the Mass of the Devil at midnight, in the sick-room, and in the presence only of Catherine de Medicis and her trusted confidants. It was offered before the image of the demon, having a crucifix upside down under its feet, and the sorcerer consecrated two hosts, one black and one white. The white was given to the child, who was brought in clothed as for baptism, and was murdered on the steps of the altar immediately after his communion. His head, cut by one blow from the body, was set palpitating upon the great black host which covered the bottom of the paten, and then transported to a table where mysterious lamps were burning.

The exorcism began, an oracle was besought of the demon, and an answer by the mouth of the head to a secret question which the king dared not make aloud, and had confided to no one. A strange and feeble voice, which had nothing human about it, was presently heard in the poor little martyr’s head, saying in Latin : Fiim patior ; “ I am forced.” At this reply, which doubtless announced to the sick man that hell no longer protected him, a horrible trembling seized the monarch, his arms stiffened, and he cried in a hoarse voice : “ Away with that head ! Away with that head ! ” and so continued screaming till he gave up the ghost. His attendants, who were not in the confidence of the frightful mystery, believed that he was pursued by the phantom of Coligny, and that he saw the head of the illustrious admiral ; what tormented the dyingman was not, however, a remorse, hut a hopeless terror and an anticipated Hell.

This darksome magical legend of Bodin recalls the abominable practices and deserved fate of Gilles de Laval, lord of Betz, who passed from asceticism to black magic, and offered the most revolting sacrifices to conciliate the favour of Satan. This madman confessed at his trial that Satan had frequently appeared to him, but had always deceived him by promises of treasures which he had never given. It transpired from the judicial informations that several hundred unfortunate children had fallen victims to the cupidity and atrocious fancies of this monster. What sorcerers and necromancers sought above all in their evocations of the impure spirit was that magnetic power which is the possession of the true adept, but was desired by them only that they might shamefully abuse it. The folly of sorcerers was an evil folly, and one of their chief ends was the power of bewitchments or harmful influences. We have set down in our Doctrine what we think upon the subject of bewitchment, and how it seems to us a dangerous and real power. The true magus bewitches without ceremonial, and by his mere reprobation, those whom he condemns and considers it necessary to punish ; his forgiveness even bewitches those who do him wrong, and never do the enemies of initiates carry far the impunity of their injustice. We have ourselves witnessed numerous examples of this fatal law. The murderers of martyrs always perish miserably, and the adepts are martyrs of intelligence ;

Providence seems to scorn those who despise them, and to slay those who would deprive them of life. The legend of the Wandering Jew is the popular poetry of this arcanum. A wise man was driven by a nation to his doom ; it bade him “ Go on ! ” when he wished to rest for a moment. What is the consequence ? A similar condemnation overtakes the nation itself; it is proscribed bodily; men have cried to it: “ Get on ! Get on ! ” for centuries, and it has found no pity and no repose.

A man of learning had a wife whom he loved wildly and passionately in the exaltation of his tenderness ; he honoured her with blind confidence, and trusted her entirely. Vain of her beauty and understanding, this woman became jealous of her husband’s superiority, and began to hate him. Some time after she deserted him, disgracing herself with an old, ugly, stupid, and immoral man. This was the beginning of her punishment, but it did not end there. The man of learning solemnly pronounced the following sentence upon her: “I take back your understanding and your beauty." A year after she was no longer recognised by those who had known her ; she had lost her plumpness, and reflected in her countenance the hideousness of her new affections. Three years later she was ugly; seven years later she was deranged. This happened in our own time, and we were acquainted with both persons. The magus condemns, after the manner of the skilful physician, and for this reason there is no appeal from his sentence when it has once been pronounced against a guilty person. There are no ceremonies and no invocations ; he simply abstains from eating at the same table, or if forced to do so, he neither accepts nor offers salt. But the bewitchments of sorcerers are of another kind, and may be compared to an actual poisoning of some current of astral light. They exalt their will by ceremonies till it becomes venomous at a distance ;

but, as we have observed in our Doctrine, they more often expose themselves, to be the first that are killed by their infernal machinery. Let us here stigmatise some of their guilty proceedings. They procure the hair or garments of the person whom they seek to execrate ; they next select some animal, which seems to them symbolic of the person, and, by means of the hair or garments, they place it in magnetic connection with him or her. They give it the same name, and then slay it with one blow of the magic knife. They cut open the breast, tear out the heart, wrap it, while still palpitating, in the magnetised objects, and hourly, for the space of three days, they drive nails, red hot pins, or long thorns therein, pronouncing maledictions upon the name of the bewitched person. They are persuaded, and often rightly, that the victim of their infamous operations experiences as many tortures as if his own heart had been pierced at all points. He begins to waste away, and after a time dies of an unknown disease.

Another bewitchment, made use of in country places, consists in consecration of nails to works of hatred by means of the stinking fumigations of Saturn and invocations of the evil genii; then, in following the footsteps of the person whom it is sought to torment, and nailing crosswise every imprint of his feet which can be traced upon the earth or sand. Yet another and more abominable practice. A fat toad is selected; it is baptised; the name and surname of the person to be accursed is given it ; it is made to swallow a consecrated host, over which the formulae of execration have been pronounced. The animal is then wrapped in the magnetised objects, tied with the hairs of the victim, upon which the operator has previously spat, and buried at the threshold of the bewitched person’s door, or at some point where he is obliged to pass daily. The elementary spirit of the toad will become a nightmare and vampire, haunting the dreams of the victim, unless, indeed, he should know how to send it back to the operator. Let us pass now to bewitchments by waxen images. The sorcerers of the middle ages, eager to please by their sacrileges him whom they regarded as their master, mixed baptismal oil and the ashes of consecrated hosts with a modicum of wax. Apostate priests were never wanting to deliver them the treasures of the Church. With the accursed wax they formed an image as much as possible resembling the person whom they desired to bewitch.

They clothed this image with garments similar to his, they administered to it the sacraments which he received, then they called down upon its head all maledictions which could express the hatred of the sorcerer, inflicting daily imaginary tortures upon it, soas to reach and torment by sympathy the person represented by the image. This bewitchment is more infallible if the hair, blood, and, above all, a tooth of the victim can be procured. It was this which gave rise to the proverbial saying : You have a tooth against me. There is also bewitchment by the glance, called the jettatura, or evil eye, in Italy,

During our civil wars, a shopkeeper had the misfortune to denounce one of his neighbours, who, after a period of detention, was set at liberty, but with his position lost. His sole vengeance was to pass twice daily the shop of his denouncer, whom he regarded fixedly, saluted, and went on. Some little time after, the shopkeeper, unable to bear the torment of this glance any longer, sold his goods at a loss, and changed his neighbourhood, leaving no address. In a word, he was ruined. A threat is a real bewitchment, because it acts powerfully on the imagination, above all, when the latter receives with facility the belief in an occult and unlimited power. The terrible menace of hell, that bewitchment of humanity during so many centuries, has created more nightmares, more nameless diseases, more furious madness, than all vices and all excesses combined. This is what the Hermetic artists of the middle ages represented by the incredible and unheard-of monsters which they carved at the doors of basilicas. But bewitchment by threat produces an effect altogether contrary to the intentions of the operator when it is evidently a vain threat, when it does outrage to the legitimate pride of the menaced person, and consequently provokes his resistance, or, finally, when it is ridiculous by its atrocity. The sectaries of hell have discredited heaven. Say to a reasonable man that equilibrium is the law of motion and life, and that liberty, which is moral equilibrium, rests upon an eternal and immutable distinction between true and false, between good and bad ;

tell him that, endowed as he is with free will, he must place himself by his works in the empire of truth and goodness, or relapse eternally, like the rock of Sisyphus, into the chaos of falsehood and evil ; then he will understand the doctrine, and if you term truth and goodness heaven, falsehood and evil hell, he will believe in your heaven and hell, over which the divine ideal rests calm, perfect, and inaccessible to either wrath or offence, because he will understand that if in principle hell be eternal as liberty, it cannot in fact be more

than a temporary agony for souls, because it is an expiation, and the idea of expiation necessarily supposes that of reparation and destruction of evil. This much said, not with dogmatic intention, which is outside our province, but to indicate the moral and reasonable remedy for the bewitchment of consciences by the terrors of the life beyond, let us speak of the means of escaping the baleful influences of human wrath. The first among all is to be reasonable and just, giving no opportunity or excuse to anger. A lawful indignation is greatly to be feared ; make haste therefore to acknowledge and expiate your faults. Should anger persist after that, then it certainly proceeds from vice ; seek to know what vice, and unite yourself strongly to the magnetic currents of the opposite virtue. The bewitchment will then have no further power upon you. Wash carefully the clothes which you have finished with before giving them away ; otherwise, burn them ; never use a garment which has belonged to an unknown person without purifying it by water, sulphur, and such aromatics as camphor, incense, amber, &c. A great means of resisting bewitchment is not to fear it ; it acts after the manner of contagious maladies. In times of epidemic, the terror-struck are the first to be attacked. The secret of not fearing an evil is not to think about it, and my advice is completely disinterested since I give it in a book on magic of which I am the author, when I strongly urge upon persons who are nervous, feeble, credulous, hysterical, superstitious devotees, foolish, without energy and without will, never to open a book on magic, and to close this one if they have opened it, to turn a deaf ear to those who talk of the occult sciences, to deride them, never to believe in them, and to drink water, as said the great pantagruelist magician, the excellent curd of Meudon.

As for the wise — and it is time that we turned to them after espousing the cause of the foolish — they have scarcely any sorceries to fear save those of fortune, but seeing that they are priests and physicians, they may be called upon to cure the bewitched, and this should be their method of procedure. They must persuade a bewitched person to do some act of goodness to his bewitcher, render him some service which he cannot refuse, and lead him directly or otherwise to the communion of salt. A person who believes himself bewitched by the execration and interment of the toad must carry about him a living toad in a horn box. Tor the bewitchment of the pierced heart, the afflicted individual must be made to eat a lamb’s heart seasoned with sage and onion, and to carry a talisman of Venus or of the moon in a satchel filled with camphor and salt. For bewitchment by the waxen figure, a more perfect figure must be made, as much as possible in the likeness of the person; seven talismans must be hung round the neck ; it must be set in the middle of a great pantacle representing the pentagram, and must each day be rubbed slightly with a mixture of oil and balm, after reciting the Conjuration of the Four to turn aside the influence of elementary spirits. At the end of seven days the image must be burnt in consecrated fire, and one may rest assured that the figure fabricated by the bewitcher will at the same moment lose all its virtue.

We have already mentioned the sympathetic medicine of Paracelsus, who medicated waxen limbs and operated upon the discharges of blood from wounds for the cure of the wounds themselves. This system permitted the employment of more than usually violent remedies, and his chief specifics were sublimate and vitriol. We believe that homoeopathy is a reminiscence of the theories of Paracelsus and a return to his wise practices. But we shall follow up this subject in a special treatise exclusively consecrated to occult medicine. Contracts by parents forestalling the future of their children are bewitchments which cannot be too strongly condemned ; children dedicated in white, for example, scarcely ever prosper ; those who were formerly dedicated to celibacy fell commonly into debauch, or ended in despair and madness. Man is not permitted to do violence to destiny, still less to impose bonds upon the lawful use of liberty. As a supplement or appendix to this chapter, we will add a few words about mandragores and androids, which several writers on magic confound with the waxen images serving the purposes of bewitchment. The natural mandragore is a filamentous root which, more or less, presents as a whole either the figure of a man, or that of the virile members. It is slightly narcotic, and an aphrodisiacal virtue was ascribed to it by the ancients, who represented it as being sought by Thessalian sorcerers for the composition of philtres. Is this root the umbilical vestige of our terrestrial origin ?

We dare not seriously affirm it, but all the same it is certain that man came out of the slime of the earth, and his first appearance must have been in the form of a rough sketch. The analogies of nature make this notion necessarily admissible, at least as a possibility. The first men were, in this case, a family of gigantic, sensitive mandragores, animated by the sun, who rooted themselves up from the earth ; this assumption not only does not exclude, but, on the contrary, positively supposes, creative will and the providential co-operation of a first cause, which we have REASON to call God.

Some alchemists, impressed by this idea, speculated on the culture of the mandragore, and experimented in the artificial reproduction of a soil sufficiently fruitful and a sun sufficiently active to humanise the said root, and thus create men without the concurrence of the female. Others, who regarded humanity as the synthesis of animals, despaired about vitalising the mandragore, but they crossed monstrous pairs and projected human seed into animal earth, only for the production of shameful crimes and barren deformities. The third method of making the android was by galvanic machinery. One of these almost intelligent automata was attributed to Albertus Magnus, and it is said that St Thomas ■destroyed it with one blow from a stick because he was perplexed by its answers. This story is an allegory ; the android was primitive scholasticism, which was broken by the Summa of St Thomas, the daring innovator who first substituted the absolute law of reason for arbitrary divinity, by formulating that axiom which we cannot repeat too often, since it comes from such a master : “ A thing is not iust because God wills it, but God wills it because it is just.” The real and serious android of the ancients was a secret which they kept hidden from all eyes, and Mesmer was the first who dared to divulge it ; it was the extension of the will of the magus into another body, organised and served by an elementary spirit ; in more modern and intelligible terms, it was a magnetic subject.

We have finished with inf emus, and we breathe the fresh air freely as we return to daylight after traversing the crypts of black magic. Get thee behind us, Satan ! We renounce thee, with all thy pomps and works, and still more with all thy deformities, thy meanness, thy nothingness, thy deception ! The Great Initiator beheld thee fall from heaven like a thunderbolt. The Christian legend changes thee, making thee set thy dragon’s head mildly beneath the foot of the mother of God. Thou art for us the image of unintelligence and mystery; thou art unreason and blind fanaticism ; thou art the inquisition and its hell ; thou art the god of Torquemada and Alexander VI. ; thou hast become the sport of children, and thy final place is at the side of Polichinello ; henceforth thou art only a grotesque character in our foreign theatres, and a means of instruction in a few so-called religious markets. After the sixteenth key of the Tarot, which represents the downfall of Satan’s temple, we find on the seventeenth leaf a magnificent and gracious emblem. A naked woman, a young and immortal maid, pours out upon the earth the juice of. universal life from two ewers, one of gold and one of silver ; hard by there is a flowering shrub, on which rests the butterfly of Psyche ; above her shines an eight-pointed star with seven other stars around it. I believe in eternal life ! ” Such is the final article of the Christian symbol, and this alone is a profession of faith.

The ancients, when they compared the calm and peaceful immensity of heaven, thronged with innumerable lights, to the tumults and darkness of this world, believed themselves to have discovered in that beautiful book, written in letters of gold, the final utterance of the enigma of destinies ; in imagination they drew lines of correspondence between these shining points of the divine writing, and it is said that the first constellations marked out by the shepherds of Chaldea were also the first letters of the kabbalistic alphabet. These characters, expressed first of all by means of lines, then enclosed in hieroglyphic figures, would, according to M. Moreau de Dammartin, author of a very curious treatise on alphabetic characters, have determined the ancient magi in the choice of the Tarot figures, which are taken by this man of learning, as by ourselves, for an essentially hieratic and primitive book. Thus, in his opinion, the Chinese tsm, the Hebrew aleph, and the Greek alpha, expressed hieroglyphically by the figure of the juggler, would be borrowed from the constellation of the crane, in the vicinity of the celestial fish, a sign of the eastern hemisphere. The Chinese tcheou, the Hebrew beih, and the Latin B, corresponding to Pope Joan or Juno, were formed after the head of the Pam ; the Chinese yn, the Hebrew ghimel, and the Latin G, represented by the Empress, would be derived from the constellation of the Great Bear, &c. The kabbalist Gaffarel, whom we have cited more than once, erected a planisphere, in which aP the constellations form Hebrew letters ; but we confess that

the configurations are frequently arbitrary in the highest degree, and upon the indication of a single star, for example, we can see no reason why a T should be traced rather than a 1 or a I ; four stars will also give indifferently a n, n, or n, as well as an N- We are therefore deterred from reproducing a copy of Gaffarel’s planisphere, examples of which are, moreover, not exceedingly rare. It was included in the work of Montfau9on on the religions and superstitions of the world, and also in the treatise upon magic published by the mystic Eckartshausen. Scholars, moreover, are unagreed upon the configuration of the letters of the primitive alphabet. The Italian Tarot, of which the lost Gothic originals are much to be regretted, connects by the disposition of its figures with the Hebrew alphabet in use after the captivity, and known as the Assyrian alphabet ; but there are fragments of anterior Tarots where the disposition is different. There should be no conjecture in matters of research, and hence we suspend our judgment in the expectation of fresh and more conclusive discoveries. As to the alphabet of the stars, we believe it to be intuitive, like the configuration of clouds, which seem to assume any form that imagination lends them. Star-groups are like points in geomancy or the pasteboards of cartomancy. They are a pretext for selfmagnetising, an instrument i»feo fix and determine native intuition.

Thus, a kabbalist, f^iliar with mystic hieroglyphics, will perceive signs in the stars which will not be discerned by a simple shepherd, but the shepherd, on his part, will observe combinations that will escape the kabbalist. Country people substitute a rake for the belt and sword of Orion, while a kabbalist recognises in the same sign as a whole all the mysteries of Ezekiel, the ten sephiroth arranged in a triadic manner, a central triangle formed of four stars, then a line of three stars making the jod, and the two figures taken together expressing the mysteries of Bereschith ; finally, four stars constituting the wheels of Mercavah, and completing the divine chariot. Looked at after another manner, and arranging other ideal lines, he will notice a well-formed

yhvmcl placed above a in a large daleth, a symbol typifying the strife between good and evil, with the final triumph of good. As a fact, the gliimel superposed on the jod is the triad produced by unity, the manifestation of the divine Word, whilst the reversed daleth is the triad composed of the evil duad multiplied by itself. Thus regarded, the figure of Orion would be identical with that of the angel Michael doing battle with the dragon, and the appearance of this sign, so understood, would be, for the kabbalist, a portent of victory and happiness. A long contemplation of the sky exalts the imagination, and then the stars respond to our thoughts. The lines drawn mentally from one to another by the primitive observers must have given man his first notions of geometry. Accordingly, as our soul is troubled or at rest, the stars seem burning with menace or sparkling with hope. The sky is thus the mirror of the human soul, and when we think that we are reading in the stars it is in ourselves we read. Gaffarel, applying the prophecies of celestial writing to the destinies of empires, says that not in vain did the ancients place all signs of evil augury in the northern region of the sky ; calamities have been in all ages regarded as coming from the north to spread themselves over the earth by the invasion of the south.

“ For this reason,” he tells us, “ the ancients represented in the northern parts of the heaven a serpent or dragon near two bears, since these animals are the true hieroglyphs of tyranny, pillage, and all oppression. As a fact, glance at history, and you will see that all great devastations proceed from the north. The Assyrians or Chaldeans, incited by Nabuchodonosor or Salmanasor, exhibited this truth in abundance by the destruction of the most splendid and most holy temple and city in the universe, and by the complete overthrow of a people whom God himself had taken under his special protection, of whom he specially termed himself father. And that other Jerusalem, Eome the blessed, has not it, too, experienced frequently the violence of this evil northern race, when it beheld its altars demolished and the towers of its proud edifices brought level with the foundations, through the cruelty of Alaric, Genseric, Attila, and the other princes of the Goths, Huns, Vandals, and Alain. . . . Very properly, therefore, in the secrets of this celestial writing, do we read calamities and misfortunes on the northern side, since a septentrione pandetur omne malum. How, the word nnsn, which we translate hj pandetur, is also equivalent of the depingetur or saribetur, and the prophecy signifies equally: All the misfortunes of the world are written in the northern sky.”

We have transcribed this passage at length, because it is not without application in our day, when the north once more seems to threaten Europe ; * but it is also the destiny of hoar-frost to be melted by the sun, and the darkness * This passage was written before the Crimean War. disappears of itself when the light manifests. Such is our final word of prophecy, and the secret of the future. Gaffarel adds some prognostics drawn from the stars, as, for example, the progressive weakening of the Ottoman empire ; but, as already said, his constellated letters are exceedingly arbitrary. He states, for the rest, that he derived his predictions from a Hebrew kabbalist, Eahbi Chomer, but does not himself pretend to understand him especially well. Here follows the table of magical characters traced after the zodiacal constellations by the ancient astrologers ; each of them represents the name of a genius, be he good or evil It will be known that the signs of the Zodiac correspond to various celestial influences, and consequently signify an annual alternative of good or evil. The names of the genii designated by the above characters are : For the Earn, Sataaran and Sarahid ; for the Bull,

Bagdad and Araziel; for the Twins, Sagras and Saraiel-, for the Crab, Kahdar and Phakiel ; for the Lion, Sagham and Seratiel ; for the Virgin, Iadara and Schaltiel ; for the Balance, Grasgarben and Hadakiel ; for the Scorpion, Eiehol and Saissaicl ; for the Archer, Vhnori and Saritaiel\ for the Goat, Sagdalon and Semahiel ; for the WaterBearer, Archer and Ssdkmakiel ; for the Fishes, Easamasa and Vacdbiel. The wise man, who would read the sky, must observe also the days of the moon, the influence of which is very great in astrology. The moon successively attracts and repels the magnetic fluid of the earth, and thus produces the ebb and flow of the sea ; we must, therefore, be well acquainted with its phases and be able to distinguish its days and hours. The new moon is propitious to the beginning of all magical works ; from first quarter to full moon its influence is warm ; from full moon to third quarter it is dry ; and from third quarter to last it is cold. Here follow the special characters of all the days of the moon, distinguished by the twenty-two Tarot keys and by the signs of the seven planets.

1. The Juggler, or Magus. The first day of the moon is that of the creation of the moon itself. This day is consecrated to mental enterprises, and should be favourable for opportune innovations. 2. Pope Joan, or Occult Science. The second day, the genius of which is Enediel, was the fifth of creation, for the moon was made on, the fourth day. The birds and fishes, created on this day, are the living hieroglyphs of magical analogies and of the universal doctrine of Hermes. The water and air, which were thereby filled with the forms of the Word, are the elementary figures of the Mercury of the Sages, that is, of intelligence and speech. This day is propitious to revelations, initiations, and great discoveries of science. 3. The Celestial Mother, or Empress. The third day was that of man’s creation. So is the moon called the Mother in Kabbalah when it is represented in association with the number 3. This day is favourable to generation, and generally to all productions, whether of body or mind. 4. The Emperor, or Ruler. The fourth day is baleful ; it was that of the birth of Cain ; but it is favourable to unjust and tyrannical enterprises.

5. The Pope, or Hierophant. The fifth day is fortunate; it was that of the birth of Abel. 6. The Lover, or Liberty. The sixth is a day of pride ; it was that of the birth of Lamech, who said unto his wives : “ I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt. If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.” This day is propitious for conspiracies and rebellions. On the seventh day, birth of Hebron, who gave his name to the first of the seven sacred cities of Israel. A day of religion, prayers, and success. Murder of Abel. Day of expiation. 9. The Old Man, or Hermit. Birth of Methuselah. Day of blessing for children. 10. EzehieVs Wheel of Fortune. Birth of Nabuchodonosor. Eeign of the Beast. Fatal day. Birth of Noah. Visions on this day are deceitful, but it is one of health and long life for children born on it. 12. The Victim, or Hanged Man. Birth of Samuel. Prophetic and kabbalistic day, favourable to the fulfilment of the great work. Birthday of Canaan, the accursed son of Cham. Baleful day and fatal number. 14. The Angel of ^ Temperance.

Blessing of Noah on the fourteenth day of the moon. This day is governed by the angel Cassiel of the hierarchy of Uriel. 15. Typhon, or the Devil. Birth of Ishmael. Day of reprobation and exile. 16. The Blasted Tower. Birthday of Jacob and Esau; the day also of Jacob’s predestination, to Esau’s ruin. 17. The Glittering Star. Eire from heaven burns Sodom and Gomorrah. Day of salvation for the good, and ruin for the wicked; on a Saturday dangerous. It is under the dominion of the Scorpion. Birth of Isaac. Wife’s triumph. Day of conjugal affection and good hope. Birth of Pharaoh. A beneficent or fatal day for the great of earth, according to the different merits of the great. 2 0 . The J lidgmcnt. Birth of Jonas, the instrument of God’s judgment. Propitious for divine revelations. Birth of Saul, material royalty. Danger to mind and reason. 22. Influerice of Saturn. Birth of Job. Day of trial and suffering. 23. Influence of Venue. Birth of Benjamin. Day of preference and tenderness. 24. Influemce of Jwpiter. 25. Influence of Mercury. Tenth plague of Egypt. 26. Influence of Mars. Deliverance of the Israelites, and passage of the Bed Sea, 2 7. Influence of Diana, or Hecate.

Splendid victory achieved by Judas Maccabeus. 28. Influence of the Sun. Samson carries off the gates of Gaza. Day of strength and deliverance. 29. The Fool of the Tarot. Day of failure and miscarriage in all things. We see from this rabbinical table, which John Belot and others borrowed from the Hebrew kabbalists, that these ancient masters concluded h posteriori from facts to presumable in- fluences, which is completely within the logic of the occult sciences. We see also what diverse significations are included in the twenty-two keys which form the universal alphabet of the Tarot, together with the truth of our assertions, when we say that all secrets of the Kabbalah and magic, all mysteries of the elder world, all science of the patriarchs, all historical traditions of primeval times, are enclosed in this hieroglyphic book of Thoth, Enoch, or Cadmus. An exceedingly simple method of finding celestial horoscopes by onomancy is that which we are about to describe ; it harmonises Gaffarel with our own views, and its results are most astounding in their exactitude and depth. Take a black card ; cut therein the n'ame of the person for whom you wish to make the consultation ; place this card at the end of a tube which must diminish towards the eye of the observer ; then look through it alternately towards the four cardinal points, beginning at the east and finishing at the north. Take note of all the stars which you see through the letters ;

convert these letters into numbers, and, with the sum of the addition written down in the same manner, renew the operation ; then compute the number of stars you have ; next, adding this number to that of the name, again cast up and write the sum of the two numbers in Hebrew characters. Again renew the operation ; inscribe separately the stars which you have noticed ; then find the names of all the stars in the planisphere ; classify them according to their size and brightness, choosing the most brilliant of all as the pole-star of your astrological operation ; then find, in the Egyptian planisphere, the names and figures of the genii to which these stars belong. A good example of the planisphere will be found in the atlas to the great work of Dupuis. You will then know the fortunate and unfortunate signs which enter into the name of the person, and what is their influence ; whether in childhood, which is the name traced at the east ; in youth, which is the name traced at the south ; in mature age, which is the name at the west ; in decline, which is the name at the north ; or,

finally, during the whole life, obtained from the stars which enter into the entire number formed by the addition of the letters and stars. This astrological operation is simple, easy, and requires few calculations ; it connects with the highest antiquity, and belongs evidently to primitive patriarchal magic, as will be seen by studying the works of Gaffarel and his master Eabbi Chomer. Onomantic astrology was practised by the old Hebrew kabbalists, as is proved from their observations preserved by Eabbi Chomer, Eabbi Kapol, Eabbi Abjudan, and other masters in Kabbalah. The menaces of the prophets uttered against various nations were based upon the characters of the stars found vertically over them in the permanent correspondence of the celestial and terrestrial spheres. Thus, by writing in the sky of Greece the Hebrew name of that country p' or jv, and translating the numbers, they obtained the word 3"in, which signifies destroyed, desolated. 3 1 n 2 2 8 Destroyed, Desolated. Sum 12. JAVAK. Greece. Sum 12. Hence they inferred that after a cycle of twelve periods Greece would be destroyed and desolated. A short time before the sack of Jerusalem and its temple by Nabuzardan^ the kabbalists remarked eleven stars disposed in the following manner vertically above the temple : —

All these entered into the word rPi^an, written from south to west, the term signifying reprobation and abandonment without mercy. The sum of the number of the letters is 423, exactly the period of the duration of the temple. Destruction threatened the empires of Persia and Assyria, in the shape of four vertical stars which entered into the three letters nn, Roev, and the fatal period indicated was 208 years. So, also, four stars announced to the kabbalistic rabbins of another period the fall and division of the empire of Alexander ; they entered into the word ‘iiS, Farad, to divide, 284, the number of this word, indicating the entire duration of this empire, both as to root and branches. According to Eabbi Chomer, the destinies of the Ottoman power at Constantinople would be fixed and announced beforehand by four stars, entering into the word riN3, Caah, signifying to be feeble, weak, and drawing to its end. The stars being more brilliant in the letter N, indicated a capital, and gave it the numerical value of a thousand. The three letters combined make 1025, which must be computed from the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II., a calculation which still holds out several centuries of existence to the enfeebled empire of the sultans, at present sustained by all Europe combined. The Mane Thecel Phares which Balthazar, in his intoxication, saw written on the wall of his palace by the glare of the torches, was an onomantic intuition similar to that of the rabbins.

Initiated, no doubt, by his Hebrew diviners in the reading of the stars, Balthazar operated mechanically and instinctively upon the lamps of his nocturnal feast, as he would upon the stars of heaven. Tlie three words which he had formed in his imagination soon became indelible to his eyes, and paled all the lights of his banquet. It was easy to predict an end like that of Sardanapalus to a king who abandoned himself to orgies in a besieged town.

In conclusion, we have said, and we repeat, that magnetic intuitions alone give value and reality to all kabbalistic and astrological calculations, puerile possibly, and completely arbitrary, when made without inspiration, by cold curiosity, and in the absence of a powerful will. Let us now adventure in Thessaly, the country of enchantments, Here was Apuleius deluded like the companions of Ulysses, and underwent a shameful metamorphosis. Here all is magical, — the birds that fly, the insects humming in the grass, even the trees and flowers ; here in the moonlight are brewed those poisons which compel love ; here spells are devised by the stryges to render them young and lovely like the Charites. 0 all ye youths, beware ! The art of poisoning the reason, or of philtres, seems, as a fact, if traditions may be trusted, to have developed its venomous efflorescence more abundantly in Thessaly than elsewhere ; there, also, magnetism played its most important part, for exciting or narcotic plants, bewitching and harmful animal substances, derived all their power from enchantments— that is to say, sacrifices accomplished and words pronounced by sorcerers when preparing philtres and beverages. Stimulating substances, and those in which phosphorus predominates, are naturally aphrodisiacal. Anything which acts strongly on the nervous system may determine passional exaltation, and when a skilful and persevering will knows how to direct and influence these natural tendencies, it can make use of the passions of others to the profit of its own, and will soon reduce the most independent personalities into instruments of its pleasures.

From such influence it behoves us to seek protection, and to give arms to the weak is our purpose in writing this chapter. These, in the flrst place, are the devices of the enemy. The man who seeks to compel love — we attribute such unlawful manoeuvres to men only, assuming that women can never have need of them — must in the first place make himself observed by the person whom he desires, and must contrive to impress her imagination. He must inspire her with admiration, astonishment, terror, even with horror, failing all other resources ; but at any cost he must set himself apart in her eyes from the rank of ordinary men, and, with or against her will, must make himself a place in her memory, her apprehensions, her dreams. The type of Lovelace is certainly not the admitted ideal of the type of Clarissa, but she thinks of him incessantly to condemn him, to execrate him, to compassionate his victims, to desire his conversion and repentance ; next she seeks his regeneration by devotion and forgiveness ; later on secret vanity whispers to her how grand it would be to fix the affections of a Lovelace, to love him, and yet to withstand him. Behold, then, Clarissa surprised into loving Lovelace ! She chides herself, blushes, renounces a thousand times, and loves him a thousand more; then, at the supreme moment, she forgets to resist him.

Had angels been women, as represented by modern mysticism, Jehovah, indeed, would have acted as a wise and prudent father by placing Satan at the gate of heaven. It is a serious imposition on the self-love of some amiable women to find that man fundamentally good and honourable who enamoured them when they thought him a scapegrace. The angel leaves him disdainfully, saying : “ You are not the devil ! ” Play the devil as well as you can, if you wish to allure an angel. No licence is possible to a virtuous man. " For what does he take us ? ” say the women. “ Does he think us less strict than he is ? ” But everything is forgiven in a rascal. “ What else could you expect ? ” The part of a man with high principles and of rigid character can never be a power

save with women whom no one wishes to fascinate ; the rest, without exception, adore the reprobates. It is quite the opposite with men, and this contrast has made modestywoman’s dower, the first and most natural of her coquetries. One of the distinguished physicians and most amiable men of learning in London told me last year that one of his clients, when leaving the house of a distinguished lady, observed to him : “ I have just had a strange compliment from the Marchioness of . Looking me straight in the face, she said : ‘ Sir, you will not make me flinch before your terrible glance ; you have the eyes of Satan.’ ” “ Well,” answered the doctor, smiling, “ you, of course, put your arms round her neck and embraced her ? ” “ Not at alb; I was overwhelmed by her sudden onslaught.” “ Beware how you call on her again, then, my friend, you will have fallen deeply in her estimation!” The office of executioner is commonly said to go down from father to son. Do executioners really have children ? Undoubtedly, as they never fail to get wives. Marat had a mistress who loved him tenderly, he, the loathsome leper ; but still it was that terrible Marat, who caused the world to tremble. Love, above all in a woman, may be termed a veritable hallucination ; for want of a prudent motive, it will frequently select an absurd one. Deceive Joconde for a baboon, what horror ! — Ah I but supposing it is a horror, why not perpetrate it ? It must be pleasant to be occasionally guilty of a small abomination !

Given this transcendental knowledge of the woman, another device can be adopted to attract her notice — not to concern oneself with her, or to do so in a way which is humiliating to her self-love, treating her as a child and deriding all notion of paying court to her. The parts are then reversed ; she will move heaven and earth to tempt you ; she will initiate you into secrets which women keep back ; she will vest and unvest before you, making such observations as : “ Between women — among old friends — I liave no fear about you — you are not a man for me,” &c. Then she will watch your expression ; if she find it calm and indifferent, she will be indignant ; she will approach you under some pretext, brush you with her tresses, permit her bodice to slip open. Women, in such cases, occasionally will risk a violence, not out of desire, but from curiosity, from impatience, and from provocation. A magician of any spirit will need no other philtres than these ; he will also use flattering words, magnetic breathings, slight but voluptuous contacts, by a kind of hypocrisy, and as if unconscious. Those who resort to potions are old, idiotic, ugly, impotent. Where, indeed, is the use of the philtre ? Any one who is truly a man has always at his disposal the means of making himself loved, providing he does not seek to usurp a place which is occupied. It would be a sovereign blunder to attempt the conquest of a young and affectionate bride during the first felicities of the honeymoon, or of a fortified Clarissa already made miserable by a Lovelace, or bitterly lamenting her love.

We shall not discuss here the impurities of black magic on the subject of philtres ; we have done with the coctions of Canidia. The epodes of Horace tell us after what manner this abominable Eoman sorceress compounded her poisons, while for the sacrifices and enchantments of love, we may refer to the Eclogues of Virgil and Theocritus, where the ceremonials for this species of magical work are minutely described. Nor shall we need to reproduce the recipes of the Grimoires or of the Little Albert, which any one can consult for themselves. All these various practices connect with magnetism or poisonous magic, and are either foolish or criminal. Potions which enfeeble mind and disturb reason assure the empire already conquered by an evil will, and it was thus that the empress Casonia is said to have fixed the savage love of Caligula. Prussic acid is the most terrible agent in these envenomings of thought, and hence we should all beware of extractions with an almond flavour, and never tolerate in bedchambers the presence of laurel-almond, datura stramonium^ almond soaps or washes, and generally all perfumes in which this, odour predominates, above all, when its action on the brain [ is seconded by that of amber.

To weaken the activity of intelligence is to strengthen . proportionally the forces of unreasoning passion. Love of • that kind which the malefactors we are concerned with would inspire is a veritable stupefaction and the most j shameful of moral bondages. The more we enervate a slave,, the more incapable we make him of freedom, and here lies the true secret of the sorceress in Apuleius and the potions of Circe. The use of tobacco, by smoking or otherwise, is a dangerous auxiliary of stupefying philtres and brain poisons. Nicotine, as we know, is not less deadly than prussic acid, and is present in tobacco in larger quantities than is this acid in almonds. The absorption of one will by another frequently changes a whole series of destinies, and not for ourselves only should we watch our relations^ learning to distinguish pure from impure atmospheres, for the true philtres, and those most dangerous, are invisible ; these are the currents of vital radiating light, which, mingling and interchanging, produce attractions and sympathies,, as magnetic experiments leave no room to doubt. Tho history of the Church tells us that an arch-heretic named Marcos infatuated all women by breathing on them, but hia power was destroyed by a valiant Christian female, who forestalled him in breathing, and said to him : “ May God judge thee ! ” The curd Gaufridy, who was burnt as a sorcerer, pretended to enamour all women who came in contact with his breath. The notorious Father Girard, a Jesuit, was accused by his penitent. Mile. Cardier, of completely destroying her self-control by breathing on her. The excuse was most necessary to minimise the horrible and ridiculous nature of her accusations against this priest, whose guilt, moreover, has never been well established, though, consciously or unconsciously, he had certainly inspired an exceedingly shameful passion in the miserable girl.

“ Mile. Kanfaing, having become a widow in 16 — says Dom Calmet in his “ Treatise on Apparitions,” “ was sought in marriage by a physician named Poirot. Failing to obtain a hearing, he thereupon gave her potions to induce love, and these caused extraordinary derangements in the health of the lady, increasing to such a degree that she was believed to be possessed, and physicians, baffled by her case, recommended her for the exorcisms of the Church. Thereupon, by command of M. de Porcelets, Bishop of Toul, the following were named as her exorcists : M. Viardin, doctor in theology, the state councillor of the Duke of Lorraine, a Jesuit, and a capuchin, but in the long course of their ceremonies, almost all the clergy of Nancy, the aforesaid lord bishop, the bishop of Tripoli, suffragan of Strasbourg, M. de Nancy, formerly ambassador of the most Christian King at Constantinople and then priest of the Oratory, Charles of Lorraine, Bishop of Verdun, two Sorbonne doctors specially deputed to assist, frequently exorcised her in Hebrew, in Greek, and in Latin, and she invariably replied to them pertinently, though she herself could scarcely read even Latin. Mention is made of the certificate given by M. Nicholas de Harlay, learned in the Hebrew tongue, who recognised that Mile. Kanfaing was really possessed, that she had answered the mere motion of his lips without any uttered words, and had given numerous other proofs.

The sieur Gamier, doctor of the Sorbonne, having also commanded her several times in the Hebrew language, she replied lucidly, but in French, saying that the pact bound her to speak in ordinary language. The demon added : “Is it not sufficient for me to shew that I understand what you say ? ’’ The same doctor, addressing him in Greek, inadvertently used one case for another, whereupon the possessed woman, or rather the devil, said : “ You have blundered.” The doctor replied in Greek, “ Point out my error.” The devil answered, “ Be satisfied that I mention the mistake ; I shall tell you no more.” The doctor bade him be silent in Greek, and he retorted, “ You bid me be silent, and I will not be silent.”

This remarkable example of hysterical affection carried into the region of ecstasy and demonomania, as the consequence of a potion administered by a man who believed that he was a sorcerer, proves, better than anything we could say, the omnipotence of will and imagination reacting one upon another, and the strange lucidity of ecstatics or somnambulists, who comprehend speech by reading it in thought, though they have no knowledge of the words. I make no question as to the sincerity of the witnesses cited by Dom Calmet ; I am merely astonished that men so serious passed by the difficulty which the pretended demon experienced over answering in a tongue foreign to the sufferer. Had their interlocutor been what they understood by a demon, he would have spoken as well as understood Greek ; the one would have been as easy as the other to a spirit so learned and satirical. Dom Calmet does not stop here with his history ; he enumerates a long series of insidious questions and unserious injunctions on the part of the exercisers, and a like sequence of more or less congruous replies by the poor sufferer, who was always ecstatic and somnambulistic. It is needless to add that the excellent father draws precisely the luminous conclusions of the not less excellent M. de Mirville. The phenomena being above the comprehension of the witnesses, they were all ascribed to perdition. Splendid and instructed conclusion ! The most serious part of the business is that the physician Poirot was arraigned as a magician, confessed, like all others, under torture, and was burnt. Had he, by any potion, really attempted the reason of the woman in question, he would have deserved punishment as a poisoner ; that is the most that we can say.

But the most terrific of all philtres are the mystical exaltations of misdirected devotion. Will ever any impurities equal the nightmares of St Anthony or the tortures of St Theresa and St Angela de Poligny ? The last applied a red hot iron to her rebellious flesh, and found that the material fire was cooling to her hidden ardours. With what violence does nature cry out for that which is denied her, but is brooded over continually to increase detestation thereof ! The pretended bewitchments of Magdalen Bavan, of Miles, de la Palud, and de la Cadi^re, began with mysticism. The excessive fear of a given thing makes it almost invariably inevitable. To follow the two curves of a circle is to reach and to meet at the same point. Nicholas Remigius, criminal judge of Lorraine, who burnt alive eight hundred women as sorcerers, beheld magic everywhere ; it was his fixed idea, his mania. He was eager to preach a crusade against sorcerers, with whom Europe, in his opinion, was swarming ; in despair that his word was not taken when he affirmed that nearly everyone in the world had been guilty of magic, he ended by declaring that he was himself a sorcerer, and was burned on his own confession.

To preserve ourselves against evil influences, the first condition is therefore to forbid excitement to the imagination. All those who are prone to excitement are more or less mad, and a maniac is ever governed by his mania. Place yourself, then, above puerile fears and vague desires ; believe in supreme wisdom, and be assured that this wisdom, having given you understanding as the means of knowledge, cannot seek to lay snares for your intelligence or reason. Everywhere about you, you behold effects proportioned to their causes ; you find causes directed and modified in the domain of humanity by understanding ; in a word, you find goodness stronger and more respected than evil ; why should you assume an immense unreason in the infinite, seeing that there is reason in the finite ? Truth is hidden from no one. God is visible in His works, and He requires nothing contrary to its nature from any being, for He is himself the author of that nature. Eaith is confidence ; have confidence, not in men who malign reason, for they are fools or impostors, but in the eternal reason which is the Divine Word, that true light which is offered like the sun to the intuition of every human creature coming into this world. If you believe in absolute reason, and if you desire truth and

justice before all things, you will have no occasion to fear anyone, and you will love those only who are deserving of jj love. Your natural light will repel instinctively that of the wicked, because it will be ruled by your will. Thus, even poisonous substances, which it is possible may be adminis- i tered to you, will not affect your intelligence ; ill, indeed, they may make you, but never criminal. L What most contributes to render women hysterical is their soft and hypocritical education ; if they took more exercise, if they were instructed more frankly and fully in matters of the world, they would be less capricious, and consequently less accessible to evil tendencies. Weakness ever sympathises with vice, because vice is a weakness which assumes the mask of strength. Madness holds reason in horror, and on all subjects it delights in the exaggerations i of falsehood. In the first place, therefore, cure your diseased ; intelligence. The cause of all bewitchments, the poison of i all philtres, the power of all sorcerers, are there. As to | narcotics or other drugs which may be administered to you, it is a subject for the physician and the law, but we do not think that such enormities will be largely reproduced at this day. Lovelaces no longer stupefy Clarissas otherwise than by their gallantries, and potions, like abductions by masked men and imprisonments in subterranean dungeons, have even passed out of our romances. All these must be relegated to the Confessional of the Black Penitents or the ruins of the Castle of Udolpho.

AVe come now to that number which is attributed in the Tarot to the sign of the sun. The denary of Pythagoras and the triad multiplied by itself represent wisdom in its application to the absolute. It is with the absolute, therefore, that we are concerned here. To discover the absolute in the infinite, the indefinite, and the finite, such is the great work of the sages, that which is termed by Hermes the work of the sun. To find the immovable foundations of true religious faith, of philosophical truth, and of metallic transmutation, this is the whole secret of Hermes, this is the philosophical stone. How, this stone is both one and manifold ; it is decomposed by analysis and recomposed by synthesis. In the analysis it is a powder, the alchemical powder of projection ; before the analysis and in the synthesis it is a stone. The philosophical stone, say the masters, must not be exposed to the air, nor to the eyes of the profane ; it must be kept in concealment and preserved carefully in the most secret receptacle of the laboratory, the key of the place being always carried upon the person. He who possesses the great arcanum is truly king and is above any king, for he is inaccessible to all fears and to all vain hopes. In any malady of soul or body, a single fragment broken from the precious stone, a single grain of the divine powder, are more than sufficient for their cure. “ He that hath ears to hear, let him hear,” as the Master said.

Salt, sulphur, and the mercuries are only accessory elements and passive instruments of the great enterprise. Everything depends, as we have said, upon the interior rfiagnes of Paracelsus. The work consists entirely in projection, and projection is accomplished perfectly by the effective and realisable intelligence of a single word. There is but one important operation, and that is sublimation, which is nothing else, according to Geber, but the elevation of the dry substance by means of fire, with adherence to its proper vessel. He who is desirous of understanding the great word and of possessing the great arcanum, after studying the principles of our Doctrine, should read the Hermetic philosophers carefully, and he will doubtless attain initiation, as others have attained it ; but for the key of their allegories he must take the one dogma of Hermes, contained in the Emerald Table, and to classify the knowledge and direct the operation he must follow the order indicated in the kabbalistic alphabet of the Tarot, of which an absolute and complete explanation will be given in the last chapter of this work. Among the rare and priceless treatises which contain the mysteries of the great arcanum, the “ Chemical Pathway or Manual ” of Paracelsus must be placed in the first rank, as comprising all the mysteries of demonstrative physics and the most secret kabbalah. This unique manuscript is preserved in the Vatican Library ; a copy was transcribed by

Sendivogius, and was used by Baron Tschoudy when composing the Hermetic Catechism contained in his work entitled “ The Blazing Star.” This catechism, which we point out to instructed kabbalists as a substitute for the incomparable treatise of Paracelsus, expounds all the essential principles of the great work in a form so clear and complete that a person must be absolutely wanting in the quality of occult understanding if he fail in attaining the absolute truth by its study. We shall now give a succinct analysis of this work, together with a few words by way of commentary.

Eaymond Lully, one of the grand and sublime masters of science, says that before we can make gold we must have gold. Out of nothing we can make nothing ; wealth is not absolutely created ; it is increased and multiplied. Hence, let aspirants to knowledge understand thoroughly that neither miracles nor jugglers’ feats are required of the adept. Hermetic science, like all real sciences, is mathe- matically demonstrable. Even its material results are as exact as a well-worked equation. Hermetic gold is not only a true doctrine, a shadowless light, truth unalloyed with falsehood ; it is also material, actual, pure gold, the most precious which can be found in the veins of the earth, but the living gold, living sulphur, or true fire of the philosopher, must be sought in the house of mercury. This fire feeds on air ; to express its attractive and expansive power, a better comparison is impossible than that of lightning, which primally is a dry and terrestrial exhalation united to humid vapour, and afterwards, in virtue of its exaltation, assuming an igneous nature, acts on its inherent humidity, which it attracts and transmutes into its own nature, after which it falls rapidly to earth, where it is drawn by a fixed nature similar to its own. These words, enigmatic in form but clear in essence, express openly what the philosophers understand by their mercury fructified by sulphur, becoming the master and regenerator of salt ;

it is Azoth, universal magnesia, the great magical agent, the astral light, the light of life, fertilised by animic force, by intellectual energy, which they compare to sulphur on account of its affinities with divine fire. As to salt, it is absolute matter. All that is material contains salt, and all salt can be converted into pure gold by the combined action of sulphur and mercury, which at times act with such swiftness that transmutation can take place in an instant, or in an hour, without labour for the operator and almost without expense ; at other times, when the tendencies of the atmospheric media are more contrary, the operation requires several days, months, and, occasionally, even years.

As we have already said, there are two palmary natural laws — two essential laws — which, balanced one against another, produce the universal equilibrium of things. These are fixity and motion, analogous to truth and discovery in philosophy, and in absolute conception to necessity and liberty, which are the very essence of God. The Hermetic philosophers give the name of fixed to all which is ponderable, to all which tends by its nature to central rest and immobility ; whatsoever obeys more naturally and readily the law of motion, they term volatile ; and they compose their stone by analysis, that is, the volatilisation of the fixed ; then by synthesis, that is, the fixation of the volatile, which they operate by applying to the fixed, called their salt, sulphurated mercury or light of life, directed and rendered omnipotent by a secret operation. They possess themselves in this manner of all nature, and their stone is found wherever there is salt, which is equivalent to saying that no substance is foreign to the great work, and that even the most apparently contemptible and vile matters can be changed into gold, which is true in this sense, as we have said, that all contain the fundamental salt, represented in our emblems by the cubic stone itself, as may be seen in the symbolic and universal frontispiece to the keys of Basil Valentine. To know how to extract from all matter the pure salt which is concealed in it is to possess the secret of the stone.

It is, therefore, a saline stone, which the od, or universal astral light, decomposes or recomposes. It is one and many, for, like ordinary salt, it can be dissolved and incorporated with other substances. Obtained by analysis, it may be termed the universal sublimate ; recovered by the synthetic way, it is the veritable panacea of the ancients, for it cures all diseases, whether of soul or body, and is termed, in an eminent manner, the medicine of all nature. When, by means of absolute initiation, we can dispose of the forces of the universal agent, this stone is always to our hand, for its extraction is then a simple and easy operation, far dijfferent from projection or metallic realisation. The stone in its sublimated state must not be exposed to the air, which might dissolve it and spoil its virtue. Moreover, to inhale its exhalations is not devoid of danger. The wise man more readily conserves it in its natural envelopes, knowing that he can extract it by a single effort of his will, and a single application of the universal agent to the envelopes, which the kabbalists term shells. To express hieroglyphically this law of prudence, the sages of Egypt ascribed to their mercury,

personified as Hermanubis, a dog’s head, and to their sulphur, represented by the Baphomet of the temple, or prince of the Sabbath, that goat’s head which brought such odium upon the occult associations of the middle ages. For the mineral work, the first matter is exclusively mineral, but it is not a metal. It is a metallised salt. This matter is called vegetable, because it resembles a fruit, and animal, because it produces a kind of milk and blood. It alone contains the fire by which it must be dissolved. We have defined miracles as the natural effects of exceptional causes. The immediate action of the human will upon the body, or at least that action exercised without visible means, constitutes a miracle in the physical order. The influence exercised upon wills or intelligences, either suddenly or within a given time, and capable of subjugating thoughts, changing the most determined resolutions, paralysing the most violent passions — this influence constitutes a miracle in the moral order. The common error concerning miracles is to regard them as effects without causes, contradictions of nature, sudden vagaries of the divine mind, not seeing that a single miracle of this class would destroy the universal harmony, and reduce the universe to chaos. There are miracles which are impossible, even for God, namely, those which involve absurdity. Could God be absurd for one instant, neither Himself nor the world would be in existence the moment following. To expect from the divine arbiter an effect having a disproportionate cause, or even no cause at all, is what is called tempting God ; it is casting one’s self into the void. God operates by His works — in heaven by angels, and on earth by men. Hence, in the circle of

angelic action, the angels can perform all that is possible for God, and in the human circle of action men can dispose equally of divine omnipotence. In the heaven of human conceptions, it is humanity which creates God, and men think that God has made them in His image because they have made Him in theirs. The domain of man is all corporeal and visible nature on earth, and if he cannot rule suns and stars, he can at least calculate their motion, compute their distances, and identify his will with their influence ; he can modify the atmosphere, act up to a certain point upon the seasons, heal or harm his neighbours, preserve life and inflict death, the conservation of life, including resurrection in certain cases, as already established. The absolute in reason and volition is the greatest power which can be given any man to attain, and it is by means of this power that he performs what astonishes the multitude under the name of miracles. The most perfect purity of intention is indispensable te the thaumaturge, and in the next place a favourable current and unlimited confidence. The man who has come to fear nothing and desire nothing is master of all. This is the meaning of that beautiful allegory of the Gospel, wherein the Son of God, thrice victor over the unclean spirit, is ministered unto by angels in the wilderness. Nothing on earth withstands a free and rational will.

When the wise man says, “ I will/’ it is God Himself who wills, and all that He commands takes place. It is the knowledge of the physician, and the confidence placed in him, which constitute the virtue of his prescriptions, and thaumaturgy is the only real and efficacious remedy. Hence occult therapeutics are apart from all vulgar medication. It chiefly makes use of words and insufflations, and communicates by will a variousvirtue to the simplest substances — water, oil, wine, camphor,, salt. The water of homoeopathists is truly a magnetised and enchanted water, which works by means of faith. The dynamic substances added in, so to speak, infinitesimal quantities are consecrations and signs of the physician’s wilL

'VVhat is vulgarly called charlatanism is a great means of real success in medicine, assuming that it is sufficiently ekilful to inspire great confidence and to form a circle of faith. In medicine, above all, it is faith which saves. There is scarcely a village which does not possess its male or female compounder of occult medicine, and these people are almost everywhere, and invariably, more successful incomparably than pliysicians approved by the faculty. The remedies they prescribe are often strange or ridiculous, and hence answer all the better, for they exact and realise more faith on the part of patients and operators. An old merchant of our acquaintance, a man of eccentric character and exalted religious sentiment, after retiring from business, set himself to exercise gratuitously, and out of Christian charity, occult medicine in one of the Departments of France. His sole specifics were oil, insufflations, and prayers. The institution of a law-suit against him for the illegal exercise of medicine established in public knowledge that ten thousand cures had been attributed to him in the space of about five years, and that the number of his believers increased in proportions calculated to alarm all the doctors of the district. We saw also at Mans a poor nun who was regarded as slightly demented, but she healed, nevertheless, all diseases in the sun’ounding country by means of an elixir and plaster of her own invention. The elixir was taken internally, the plaster was applied outwardly, so that nothing escaped this universal panacea.

The plaster never stuck upon the skin save at the place where its application was necessary, and it rolled up and fell off by itself — such at least was asserted by the good sister and declared to be the case by the sufferers. This thaumaturge was also subjected to prosecution, for she impoverished the practice of all the doctors round about her ; she was rigidly cloistered, but it was soon found necessary to produce her at least once a week, and on the day for her consultations we have seen Sister Jane-Francis surrounded by the country folk, who had arrived overnight, awaiting their turn, lying at the convent

gate ; they had slept upon the ground, and tarried only to receive the elixir and plaster of the devoted sister. The remedy being the same in all diseases, it would appear needless for her to be acquainted with the cases of her patients, but she listened to them invariably with great attention, and only dispensed her specific after learning the nature of the complaint. There was the magical secret. The direction of the intention imparted its special virtue to the remedy, which was insignificant in itself. The elixir was spiced brandy mixed with the juice of bitter herbs ; the plaster was a compound analogous to theriac as regards colour and smell ; it was possibly electuary Burgogne pitch, but whatever the substance, it worked wonders, and the wrath of the rural folk would have been visited on those who questioned the miracles of their nun. Near Paris, also, we knew of an old gardener thaumaturge who accomplished marvellous cures by putting in his phials the juice of all the herbs of St John. He had, however, a sceptical brother, who derided the sorcerer, and the poor gardener, overwhelmed by the sarcasms of this infidel, began to doubt himself, whereupon all the miracles ceased, the sufferers lost confidence, and the thaumaturge, slandered and despairing, died mad. The Abb4 Thiers, cur4 of Vibraie, in his curious “ Treatise concerning Superstitions,” records that a woman, afflicted with an apparently aggravated ophthalmia, having been suddenly and mysteriously cured, confessed to a priest that she had betaken herself to magic.

She had long importuned a clerk, whom she regarded as a magician, to give her a talisman that she might wear, and he had at length delivered her a scroll of parchment, advising her at the same time to wash three times daily in fresh water. The priest made her give up the parchment, on which were these words : Eruat diaholus oculos tuos et re/pleat stercoriJms loca vacantia. He translated them to the good woman, who was stupefied ; but, all the same, she was cured.

Insufflation is one of the most important practices of occult medicine, because it is a perfect sign of the trans- mission of life. To inspire, as a fact, means to breathe upon some person or thing, and we know already, by the one doctrine of Hermes, that the virtue of things has created words, and that there is an exact proportion between ideas and speech, which is the first form and verbal realisation of ideas. The breath attracts or repels, accordingly, as it is warm or cold. The warm breathing corresponds to positive electricity, and the cold breathing to negative electricity. Electrical and nervous animals fear the cold breathing, and the experiment may be made upon a cat, whose familiarities are importunate. By fixedly regarding a lion or tiger and blowing in their face, they would be so stupefied as to be forced to retreat before us. Warm and prolonged insufflation restores the circulation of the blood, cures rheumatic and gouty pains, re-establishes the balance of the humours, and dispels lassitude. When the operator is sympathetic and good, it acts as a universal sedative. Cold insufflation soothes pains occasioned by congestions and fluidic accumulations. The two breathings must, therefore, be used alternately, observing the polarity of the human organism, and acting in a contrary manner upon the poles, which must be treated successfully to an opposite magnetism. Thus, to cure an inflamed eye, the one which is not affected must be subjected to a warm and gentle insufflation, cold insufflation being practised upon the suflering member at the same distance and in the same proportion.

Magnetic passes have a similar effect to insufflations, and are a real breathing by transpiration and radiation of the interior air, which is phosphorescent with vital light ; slow passes constitute a warm breathing which fortifies and raises the spirits ; swift passes are a cold breathing of dispersive nature, neutralising tendencies to congestion. The warm insufflation should be performed transversely, or from below upward ; the cold insufflation is more effective when directed downward from above.