SOME FAMOUS SORCERERS AND MAGICIANS
Amidst a great multiplicity of commentaries and studies on the work of
Dante, no one, that we are aware, has signalised its characteristic
in chief. The masterpiece of the glorious Ghibelline is a declaration
of war against the papacy by a daring revelation of mysteries. The
epic of Dante is Johannite and Gnostic; it is a bold application of
Kabalistic figures and numbers to Christian dogmas, and is further
a secret negation of the absolute element therein; his visit to the
supernatural worlds takes place like an initiation into the Mysteries
of Eleusis and Thebes. He is guided and protected by Virgil amidst the
circles of the new Tartarus, as if the tender and melancholy prophet of
the destinies of the son of Pollio were, in the eyes of the Florentine
poet, the illegitimate yet true father of the Christian epic. Thanks to
the pagan genius of Virgil, Dante emerges from that gulf above the door
of which he had read the sentence of despair; he escapes by standing
on his head, which means by reversing dogma. So does he ascend to the
light, using the demon himself, like a monstrous ladder; by the force
of terror he emerges from terror, from the horrible by the power of
horror. He seems to testify that hell is without egress for those only
who cannot go back on themselves; he takes the devil against the grain,
if I may use so familiar an expression, and attains emancipation by
audacity.[258] This is truly protestantism surpassed, and the poet of
Rome’s enemies has already divined Faust ascending to heaven on the
head of the defeated Mephistopheles. Observe also that the hell of
Dante is but a negative purgatory, by which is meant that his purgatory
seems to take form in his hell, as if in a mould; it is like the lid
or stopper of the gulf, and it will be understood that the Florentine
titan in scaling Paradise meant to kick purgatory into hell.[259]
His heaven is composed of a series of Kabalistic circles divided by
a cross, like the pantacle of Ezekiel; in the centre of this cross
a rose blossoms, thus for the first time manifesting publicly and
almost explaining categorically the symbol of the Rosicrucians. We say
for the first time because William of Lorris, who died in 1260, five
years before the birth of Dante, did not complete the _Romance of the
Rose_, his mantle falling upon Clopinel some fifty years later. It
will be discovered with a certain astonishment that the _Romance of
the Rose_ and the _Divine Comedy_ are two opposite forms of a single
work—initiation by independence of spirit, satire on all contemporary
institutions and an allegorical formula of the grand secrets of the
Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross.
These important manifestations of occultism coincide with the fall of
the Templars, since Jean de Meung, or Clopinel, a contemporary of Dante
in the old age of the latter, flourished during his best years at the
court of Philip the Fair. The _Romance of the Rose_ is the epic of
old France, a profound work in a trivial form, a revelation of occult
mysteries as instructed as that of Apuleius. The roses of Flamel, Jean
de Meung and Dante belong to the same bush.
A genius like Dante could not be an arch-heretic. Great men give an
impetus to intelligence, and the impetus takes effect subsequently
in activities which are started by restless mediocrities. It may
have been that Dante was never read and he would assuredly not have
been understood by Luther. This notwithstanding, the mission of the
Ghibellines, made fruitful by the potent thought of the poet, raised up
the empire against the papacy by slow degrees; it was continued from
century to century under various names, and in the end it made Germany
protestant. It was certainly not Luther who produced the Reformation;
it was the latter which took possession of Luther and impelled him
forward. This square-shouldered monk could boast only obstinacy and
daring, but he was the needful instrument for revolutionary ideas.
Luther was the Danton of anarchic theology; superstitious and rash,
he believed that he was obsessed by the devil; it was the devil who
dictated his arguments against the Church, made him declaim, spout
nonsense, and above all things write. The inspiring genius of all the
Cains asked nothing at that time but ink, preassured that, given this
fluid flowing from the pen of Luther, there would be presently a sea of
blood. Luther was conscious of the fact, and he hated the devil because
he was another master; one day he threw the ink-horn at his head, as
if to satiate him by the violent libation. The episode recalls that
jocular regicide who daubed his accomplices with ink when he signed the
death-warrant of Charles I.
The device of Luther was: “Turk rather than papist;” and as a fact
protestantism at its root is, like Islamism, simple Deism organised
into a conventional cultus, or if it differs therefrom it is only by
its remnants of catholicism imperfectly effaced. From the standpoint of
the negation of catholic dogma, the protestants are Moslems with a few
superstitions the more and a prophet the less.
Men renounce God less unwillingly than they give up the devil, as the
apostates of all times have proved abundantly. Speedily subdivided by
anarchy, the disciples of Luther had but one bond of belief in common;
all had faith in Satan, and this spectre, magnifying in proportion as
their spirit of revolt took them the farther from God, reached terrible
proportions at last. Carlostad, archdeacon of Würtemberg, being one day
in the pulpit, saw a black man enter the temple, take a seat in front
of him and stare at him with dreadful fixity through the entire length
of his sermon. He became anxious, left the pulpit and questioned the
assistants; but no one had seen the phantom. Carlostad returned home
in a state of dismay; he was met by the youngest of his sons, who said
that a stranger in black had inquired for him and promised to return in
three days. There was no room for doubt in the mind of the hallucinated
archdeacon; that stranger was the spectre of his vision. A fever was
brought on by his terror, he retired to bed and died before the third
day.
These unhappy heretics were afraid of their own shadows; their
consciences had remained catholic and consigned them to hell without
pity. Walking one evening with his wife Catherine de Bora, Luther
looked up to heaven, which was bright with stars, and said in an
undertone, as he sighed deeply: “Ah, beautiful sky, which I shall
never see!” “What!” exclaimed his wife. “Do you then think that you are
condemned?” Luther answered: “Who knows whether God will not punish
us for having been unfaithful to our vows?” Supposing that Catherine,
seeing his lack of self-confidence, had cursed and left him, it may
be that the reformer, overcome by the Divine Warning, would have
recognised his criminal offence in betraying that Church which was his
first spouse and would have turned weeping towards the cloister which
he had left wilfully. But God, Who withstands the proud, doubtless
found him unworthy of this saving affliction. The sacrilegious comedy
of Luther’s marriage was the providential punishment of his pride, and
as he remained obstinate in his sin, that punishment was always with
him and derided him to the end. He died between the devil and his wife,
appalled at the one and exceedingly embarrassed by the other.
Corruption and superstition are well paired together. The epoch of the
dissolute Renaissance, equally persecuting and credulous, was certainly
not that of the second birth of reason. Catherine de Médicis was a
sorceress, Charles IX consulted necromancers, Henry III played at
devotion and debauch. It was the heyday then of astrologers, though a
few of them were tortured from time to time, to make them change their
predictions. There were, moreover, the court sorcerers, who dabbled a
little in poisoning and deserved the hangman’s rope. _Trois-Échelles_,
the magician of Charles IX, was a juggler and rogue; one day he made
confession to the King and his misdeeds were not peccadillos; the King
forgave him, but promised his cure on the gallows if he had a relapse;
he did relapse, and was hanged in due course.[260]
When the League vowed the death of the weakly and miserable Henri III
it had recourse to witchcraft and Black Magic. L’Étoile[261] declares
that a wax image of the King was set on the altars where priests of the
League said Mass, and that the image was stabbed with a knife during
a prayer embodying maledictions and anathemas. When the King failed
to die with sufficient celerity, it was concluded that he was also a
sorcerer. Pamphlets were published representing Henri III as holding
conventions where the crimes of Sodom and Gomorrah were but the prelude
of more frightful and unheard of outrages. Included among the King’s
minions there was said to be one who was the devil in person, and young
virgins were abducted and prostituted by force to Beelzebub.[262]
The people believed these fables, and a fanatic was found at last
to execute the threats of sorcery. Jacques Clément suffered from
visions and imperious voices, which commanded him to kill the King;
he sought regicide like a martyr and died laughing like the heroes of
Scandinavian mythology. Scandal-mongering chronicles have pretended
that a great lady of the court supplemented the inspirations of the
monk’s solitude by the magnetism of her caresses; but the anecdote is
wanting in probability. It was the monk’s continence which promoted
his exaltation, and had he begun to lead the blind life of passion an
unsatiable appetite for pleasure would have possessed his entire nature
and he would not have been willing to die.
Whilst religious wars incarnadined the world, secret illuministic
associations, which were nothing but theurgic and magical schools, were
incorporated in Germany. The most ancient of these seems to have been
that of the Rosicrucians, whose symbols go back to the times of the
Guelphs and the Ghibellines, as we see by the allegories in the poem of
Dante and by the emblems in the _Romance of the Rose_.
The rose, which from all times has been the type of beauty, life, love
and pleasure, expressed mystically the secret thought of all protests
manifested at the Renaissance.[263] It was the flesh in rebellion
against the oppression of spirit; it was Nature testifying that, like
grace, she was a daughter of God; it was love refusing to be stifled by
the celibate; it was life in revolt against sterility; it was humanity
aspiring towards natural religion, full of reason and love, founded
on the revelations of the harmony of being, of which the rose, for
initiates, was the living floral symbol. It is in truth a pantacle; the
form is circular, the leaves of the corolla are heart-shaped and rest
harmoniously on one another; its tint offers the most harmonious shades
of the primitive colours; its calyx is of purple and gold. We have seen
that Flamel, or rather the _Book of Abraham the Jew_, represents it
as the hieroglyphical sign of the fulfilment of the Great Work.[264]
Here is the key to the romance of Clopinel and William de Lorris. The
conquest of the rose was the problem offered by initiation to science,
whilst religion was at work to prepare and to establish the universal,
exclusive and final triumph of the Cross.
The problem proposed by high initiation was the union of the
Rose and the Cross, and in effect occult philosophy, being the
universal synthesis, must take into account all phenomena of being.
Considered solely as a physiological fact, religion is the revelation
and satisfaction of a need of souls. Its existence as a fact is
scientific, and to deny it would be a denial of humanity itself. No
one has invented it; like laws and civilisations, it is formed by
the necessities of moral life. From this merely philosophical and
restrained standpoint, religion must be regarded as fatal if one
explains all by fatality, and as Divine if one confesses to a Supreme
Intelligence as the mainspring of natural laws.[265] Hence it follows
that the characteristic of every religion, properly so called, being
to depend directly from Divinity by a supernatural revelation—no other
mode of transmission providing a sufficient sanction of dogma—it must
be concluded that the true natural religion is religion that has been
revealed; this is to say, it is natural to adopt a religion only on the
understanding that it has been revealed, every true religion exhorting
sacrifices, and man having neither the power nor right to impose the
same on his fellow-creatures, outside and especially above the ordinary
conditions of humanity.
Proceeding from this strictly rational principle, the Rosicrucians
were led to respect the dominant hierarchic and revealed religion.
They could be therefore no more the enemies of the papacy than of
legitimate monarchy, while if they conspired against popes and kings,
it was because they considered these or those personally as apostates
in respect of duty and supreme abettors of anarchy.[266] What in fact
is a despot—whether spiritual or temporal—but a crowned anarchist?
It is possible to explain in this manner the protestantism and even
radicalism of certain great adepts, who were assuredly more catholic
than some popes and more monarchic than some kings—of certain eccentric
adepts, such as Henry Khunrath and the true _illuminati_ of his school.
By all but those who have made a particular study of the occult
sciences, Khunrath is practically unknown; he is a master
notwithstanding, and one of the first rank. He is a sovereign prince of
the Rosy Cross, worthy in all respects of this scientific and mystical
title.[267] His pantacles are splendid as the light of the _Book of
Splendour_, called _Zohar_; they are learned as Trithemius, precise
like Pythagoras, complete in their disclosure of the Great Work as the
book of Abraham and Nicholas Flamel.
Khunrath, who was chemist and physician, was born in 1502, and he
was forty-two years old when he attained transcendent theosophical
initiation.[268] The _Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom_, which is
the most remarkable of his works, was published in 1598, for the
approbation of the Emperor Rudolph annexed thereto was dated on
June 1 of the year in question.[269] Though professing a radical
protestantism, the author claims loudly the titles of catholic and
orthodox; he testifies that he possesses, but keeps secret as he ought,
a key to the Apocalypse, which key is one and threefold, even as
universal science. The division of the work is sevenfold, and through
these sections are distributed the seven degrees of initiation into
transcendental philosophy. The text is a mystical commentary on the
oracles of Solomon,[270] and the work ends with a series of synoptic
schedules which are the synthesis of Magic and the occult Kabalah—so
far as concerns that which can be made public in writing. The rest,
being the esoteric and inexpressible part of the science, is formulated
in magnificent pantacles carefully designed and engraved. These are
nine in number, as follows: (1) The dogma of Hermes; (2) Magical
realisation; (3) The path of wisdom and the initial procedure in
the work; (4) The Gate of the Sanctuary enlightened by seven mystic
rays; (5) A Rose of Light, in the centre of which a human figure is
extending its arms in the form of a cross; (6) The magical laboratory
of Khunrath, demonstrating the necessary union of prayer and work; (7)
The absolute synthesis of science; (8) Universal equilibrium; (9) A
summary of Khunrath’s personal doctrine, embodying an energetic protest
against all his detractors.[271] It is a Hermetic pantacle surrounded
by a German caricature, full of liveliness and ingenuous choler. The
philosopher’s enemies are depicted as insects, zanies, oxen, and
asses, the whole being decorated with Latin legends and gross German
epigrams. Khunrath is shewn on the right in the garb of a citizen,
and on the left in that of his student’s apartment; in both he makes
faces at his adversaries. As a townsman he is armed with a sword and
tramples on the tail of a serpent; as a student he is carrying a pair
of tongs and is crushing the serpent’s head. In public he demonstrates
and at home instructs, but as indicated by his gestures, the truth is
the same always and expressed with disdain for the impure breath of his
adversaries. The latter notwithstanding is so pestilential that the
birds of heaven fall dead at their feet. This exceedingly curious plate
is wanting in many copies of the work.
The book as a whole contains all mysteries of the highest initiation.
As the title announces, it is Christo-Kabalistic, Divine-magical,
physico-chemical, threefold-one, and universal. It is a true manual
of Transcendental Magic and Hermetic Philosophy. A more complete and
perfect initiation cannot be found elsewhere, unless indeed it is in
the _Sepher Yetzirah_ and _Zohar_. In the four important corollaries
which follow the explanation of the third figure, Khunrath establishes:
(1) That the cost of accomplishing the Great Work (apart from the
operator’s maintenance and personal expenses) should not exceed the sum
of thirty thalers. He adds: “I speak with authority, having learned
from one who had knowledge; those who expend more deceive themselves
and waste their money.” It follows that either Khunrath had not himself
composed the Philosophical Stone or did not wish to admit it for fear
of persecution. He proceeds to establish the duty of the adept not to
devote more than the tenth part of his wealth to his personal use,
the rest being consecrated to the glory of God and works of charity.
Finally, he affirms that the mysteries of Christianity and Nature
interpret and illuminate one another, and that the future reign of
Messiah will rest on the dual foundation of science and faith. The
oracles of the Gospel being thus confirmed by the book of Nature, it
will be possible to convince Jews and Mohammedans regarding the truth
of Christianity on the grounds of science and reason, so that—with the
help of Divine Grace—they will be converted infallibly to the religion
of unity. He ends with this maxim: “The seal of Nature and of Art is
simplicity.”
Contemporary with Khunrath there was another initiated doctor, Hermetic
philosopher and disciple of Paracelsian medicine; this was Oswald
Crollius, author of the _Book of Signatures, or True and Vital Anatomy
of the Greater and Lesser World_.[272] The preface to this work is a
sketch of Hermetic philosophy, exceedingly well done; Crollius seeks
to demonstrate that God and Nature have, so to speak, signed all
their works, that every product of a given natural force bears the
stamp of that force printed in indelible characters, so that he who
is initiated in the occult writings can read, as in an open book, the
sympathies and antipathies of things, the properties of substances and
all other secrets of creation. The characters of different writings
were borrowed primitively from these natural signatures existing in
stars and flowers, on mountains and the smallest pebble. The figures of
crystals, the marks on minerals, were impressions of the thought which
the Creator had in their formation. The idea is rich in poetry and
grandeur, but we lack any grammar of this mysterious language of worlds
and a methodical vocabulary of this primitive and absolute speech. King
Solomon alone is credited with having accomplished the dual labour;
but the books of Solomon are lost. The enterprise of Crollius was not
a reconstitution of these, but an attempt to discover the fundamental
principles obtaining in the universal language of the creative Word.
It was recognised on these principles that the original hieroglyphics,
based on the prime elements of geometry, corresponded to the
constitutive and essential laws of forms, determined by alternating
or combined movements, which, in their turn, were determined by
equilibratory attractions. Simples were distinguished from composites
by their external figures; and by the correspondence between figures
and numbers it became possible to make a mathematical classification
of all substances revealed by the lines of their surfaces. At the root
of these endeavours, which are reminiscences of Edenic science, there
is a whole world of discoveries awaiting the sciences. Paracelsus had
divined them, Crollius indicates them, another who shall follow will
realise and provide the demonstration concerning them. What seemed the
folly of yesterday will be the genius of to-morrow, and progress will
hail the sublime seekers who first looked into this lost and recovered
world, this Atlantis of human knowledge.
The beginning of the seventeenth century was the great epoch of
alchemy; it was the period of Philip Muller, John Torneburg, Michael
Maier, Ortelius, Poterius, Samuel Norton, Baron de Beausoleil,
David Planis Campe, Jean Duchesne, Robert Fludd, Benjamin Mustapha,
D’Espagnet, the Cosmopolite—who is in the first rank—de Nuisement, who
translated and published the Cosmopolite’s writings, John Baptist van
Helmont, Eirenæus Philalethes, Rodolph Glauber, the sublime shoemaker
Jacob Böhme.[273] The chief among these initiates were devoted to
the researches of Transcendental Magic, but they concealed most
carefully that detested name under the veil of Hermetic experiments.
The Mercury of the Wise which they desired to discover and hand on to
their disciples was the scientific and religious synthesis, the peace
which abides in the sovereign unity. The mystics themselves were but
blind believers in the true _illuminati_, while illuminism, properly so
called, was the universal science of light.
In the spring of 1623 the following strange proclamation was placarded
through the streets of Paris: “We who are the authorised messengers of
the Brothers of the Rosy Cross, making visible and invisible sojourn in
this town, by the grace of the Most High, towards Whom the hearts of
sages turn, do give instruction, without external means, in speaking
the language of the countries wherein we dwell,[274] and do rescue
men who are our fellow-workers from terror and from death. If anyone
shall seek us out of mere curiosity, he will never communicate with
us; but if he be actuated by an earnest desire to be inscribed on the
register of our fraternity, we, who are discerners of thoughts, will
make manifest to such an one the truth of our promises, so only that we
do not disclose the place of our abode, since thought in its union with
the firm will of the reader shall be sufficient to make us known to him
and him likewise to us.”
Public opinion took hold of this mysterious manifesto, and if anyone
asked openly who were those Brothers of the Rosy Cross, an unknown
personage would perchance take the inquirer apart, and say to him
gravely[275]: “Predestined to the reformation which must take place
speedily in the whole universe, the Rosicrucians are depositaries of
supreme wisdom, and as undisturbed possessors of all gifts of Nature,
they can dispense these at pleasure. In whatsoever place they may be,
they know all things which are going on in the rest of the world better
than if they were present amongst them; they are superior to hunger
and thirst and have neither age nor disease to fear. They can command
the most powerful spirits and genii. God has covered them with a cloud
to protect them from their enemies, and they cannot be seen except
by their own consent—had anyone eyes more piercing than those of the
eagle. Their general assemblies are held in the pyramids of Egypt; but,
even as the rock whence issued the spring of Moses, these pyramids
proceed with them into the desert and will follow them until they enter
the Promised Land.”