A magician never suffers himself to be interrupted in his la_The Magic of the Middle Ages

engaged in contemplating the nature of spirits, in watching the heavens,

or in the elaboration of the _quinta essentia_, the final essence, with

his crucibles. Oh! what world-wide hopes, what solemn emotions, what

inexpressible tension of soul must accompany these investigations! Gold,

which rules the world, here falls from the tree of knowledge as a fruit

over-ripe into the bosom of the master. And what is gold with all the

power it possesses, and all the enjoyment it commands, compared with the

ability to control heaven and earth and the spirits of hell, compared

with the capacity to summon by the means of lustrations, seals, characters

and exorcisms the angels hovering in the higher spheres, or tame to

obedience the demons which fill the immensity of space? And what again is

this power compared with the pure celestial knowledge to which magic

delivers the key? a knowledge as much transcending the wisdom of angels as

the son's place in his father's house is superior to a servant's!

Perchance the magician at this very moment is deeply absorbed in some

investigation, and within a hair's breadth of the revelation of some new

and dazzling truth. Let us consider before we venture to ask admittance.

Let us pause a moment before this iron-bound door, and recover our breath.

Ye men of science in this nineteenth century, how miserable you would be

had you not once for all determined to limit your hopes to a minimum! To

die when you have gleaned and contributed but a single straw to the

harvest of science, is the fate to which you subject yourselves. The one

among you who has brought to notice a hitherto unknown snail or flower,

deems himself not to have lived in vain. To have discovered a formula

under which a group of phenomena can be arranged, is already a triumph.

This resignation which makes each one among you, even the greatest, only

an insignificant detail-worker upon the immense labor whose completion you

contemplate at an infinite remove, and the very outlines of which you

ignore,--this resignation is sublime, though supremely painful to the

aspiring soul. The individual laborer for his part abstains from all hope

of seeing the whole truth, and works for his generation and futurity. Even

the philosopher who undertakes to explain the framework of the macrocosm,

does not see in his system a final solution of the "problem of cosmical

explanation," but only a link in the long chain of development. He

foresees the fall of his theories, satisfied, perhaps, if the traces of

his error keep his successor on a straighter path. It is the race and not

the individual which works in your work; which continues it when you have

grown weary and been forgotten. It is a collective activity like that of

ants and bees. But the magician stands alone! To be sure he receives what

the past may offer,--but only to enclose himself with this treasure, and

improve it by the immense wealth of his own mind. He believes in this

immensity. He believes that the powers of all the generations are stored

up in the bosom of the individual, and he hopes to accomplish alone what

you faint-heartedly leave to the multitude of incalculable centuries!

* * * * *

We knocked upon the door ponderous with its bolts of iron. It opened as by

an unseen hand. No servant interposed either welcome or remonstrance as we

mounted the dark spiral stairs. Unannounced we entered the hall of the

great magician. Along the arched ceiling of the rooms whose green

lead-fastened window panes admitted but a scanty light, floated a fragrant

vapor from the cell in the extreme background, where we could see the

magician himself clad in a snow-white mantle reaching to his feet, and

standing solemnly beside an incense-altar. Upon his head he wore a diadem

on which was engraved the unspeakable name, _Tetragrammaton_, and in his

hand he held a metallic plate which, as we soon learned, was made of

electrum and signed with the signatures of coming centuries.

We paused and stammered a word of excuse for the interruption we had

caused him. A smile of satisfaction broke upon his face when he had

momentarily surveyed us, and he bade us welcome.

"You are the very persons whose arrival I have been expecting, and whom it

has cost me much trouble to summon," he said. "You are the spirits of the

nineteenth century, conjured to appear before a man of the fifteenth. You

are called from the ante-chambers where the souls of the unborn await

their entrance upon earth. But the images of the century to which your

future mortal life belongs dwell in the depths of your consciousness.

These images you shall show me. It is for this that I have summoned you,

for I wish to cast a glance into the future."

I was seized with a strange, almost horrid feeling. I now remembered that

I and my companions had transported ourselves, by the use of means which

stirs up the entire reproductive forces of the imagination, from the

actual nineteenth century, back to the long-past fifteenth, that we might

see it live before our eyes, not in dissevered traits as a past age is

wont to be preserved in books, but in the completeness of its own

multi-formity. Who was right, the magician or myself? Which was the one

only seemingly living, he or I? At what hour did the hand on the clock of

time point at that moment? Granted that time is absolutely nothing but a

conceptual form without independent reality; as long as I live in time I

believe in its ordered course, and do not wish to see its golden thread

entangled. I did not wish that the spirit which I had summoned should be

my master and degrade me to a product of his own imagination. I summoned

courage and exclaimed:--

"We have wandered through many cities, great magician, to find you. We

finally stand in this your sanctuary. We see these gloomy Gothic arches

over our heads; we see your venerable figure before us; we behold these

folios and strange instruments which surround you; we look out through

these windows and behold on one side towers and house-tops, on the other

fields, meadows and the huts of serfs, and yonder in the distance the

castle of a knight who is suspected of night-attacks upon the trains of

the merchants as they approach the city. All these things stand real and

present before our eyes: but, nevertheless, great magician, it is all,

yourself included, a product of _our_ magic, of the power of our own

imagination, not of _your_ magic. It is in order to make some acquaintance

with the latter that we are come. It is not we who are to answer your

questions, but you ours."

The magician smiled. He persisted in his view, and I in mine. The

contested question could not be decided, and it was laid aside. But along

with my consciousness of belonging to a period of critical activity, my

doubts had awakened--my vivid hope a moment ago of finding in magic the

key of all secrets, was fast fading away.

I looked around in this home of the magician. On his writing-desk lay a

parchment on which he had commenced to write down the horoscope of the

following year. Beside the desk was a celestial globe with figures painted

in various colors. In a window looking towards the south hung an

astrolabe, to whose alidade a long telescope (of course without lenses)

was attached. The book-case contained a not inconsiderable number of

folios: Versio Vulgata, some volumes of the fathers, Virgil, Dionysius

Areopagita, Ptolemy, the hymns of Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus,

Jamblichus, Pliny's Natural History, a large number of works partly in

Arabic upon astrology and alchemy, also a few Hebrew manuscripts, and so

on. These and other such things were to be found in his observatory,

which was also his studio and sleeping-room. Next to the observatory was

the alchemical laboratory with a strangely appointed oven filled with

singular instruments reminding me again of Faust's complaint:--

=Ihr Instrumente freilich spottet mein,

Mit Rad und Kaemmen, Walz und Buegel.

Ich stand am Thor, ihr solltet Schluessel sein;

Zwar euer Bart ist kraus, doch hebt Ihr nicht die Riegel.=

While we lingered here our host informed us that for the present he had

suspended his experiments in alchemy. He hoped to find his _quinta

essentia_ by a shorter process than the combination of substances and

distillation, which had exhausted already so many investigators and led so

few to success. He acknowledged that he had himself advanced no farther in

the art of the adepts than the extraction from "philosophic earth" mixed

with "philosophic water" of just so much, and no more, gold than he had

employed at the beginning of the experiment.[29] In spite of this,

however, he worked daily before his oven, melting and purifying such

metals as he needed for his planet-medallions, amulets and magical rings,

and above all in preparing that effective alloy which is called electrum.

From his laboratory our host conducted us into two other apartments with

arched ceilings, forming a sort of museum of most extraordinary

curiosities,--skeletons and dried limbs of various animals: fishes, birds,

lizards, frogs, snakes, etc.; herbs and differently colored stones; whole

and broken swords; nails extracted from coffins and gallows; flasks

containing I know not what,--all arranged in groups under the signs of the

different planets. We beheld before us the wonderful and rich apparatus of

practical magic arranged according to rules of which we were entirely

ignorant,--rules which we had vainly sought in all the treatises of

modern times upon the occult sciences of the Middle Ages, rules which

might perhaps contain the simple principles underlying their confusion.

Evening was drawing on. The sun was sinking behind the western hills. It

was beginning to grow dark among the arches where the great magician had

imprisoned himself among dead and withered relics,--fragments broken from

the great and living world without. We returned to his observatory. He

opened a window and contemplated with dreamy glances the stars which were

kindling one after another in the heavens. The twilight is a favorable

time for conversation of the kind for which we had been preparing

ourselves. We were soon settled in comfortable, roomy arm-chairs and

discoursing earnestly,--we, the man of the fifteenth century, and the

unborn souls of the nineteenth, whom he had summoned that he might look

into the future, and who now used him to look back into the past. He spoke

to us of his science....

"My knowledge is not of myself. Far, far away behind these hills, behind

the snowy summits of the Alps, behind the mountains of the

'farthest-dwelling Garamantes,' on nameless heights which disappear among

the clouds, the temple of truth was built long ago over the fountain from

which life flows. That this temple is demolished we well know; only the

first human pair has wandered through its sacred halls. But he who

desires, who yearns and has patience, can sit down by the margin of the

stream of Time and grasp and draw ashore some of the cedar-beams from the

ruined temple drifting upon the billows, and from the form of the

fragments may determine the structure of the whole. All wisdom has its

roots in the past, and the farther we penetrate antiquity, the richer the

remains we find of a highest human wisdom. What is Albertus Magnus with

his profound knowledge in comparison with the angelic wisdom of Dionysius

Areopagita, and what is the latter compared with that of the prophet who

denounced his woes over Nineveh and Babylon? And yet these divinely

commissioned men would gladly have been taught by the seventy elders who

were allowed with Moses to approach the mountain where God chose to reveal

himself, there receiving the mystic knowledge of the Cabala. On Sinai,

however, God's secret was veiled in clouds, lightnings and terror; Moses

himself was permitted to see him only 'from behind'--did not obtain a

morning-knowledge (a knowledge _a priori_, an analogy-seeking pupil of

Schelling would have called it), but an evening-knowledge (knowledge _a

posteriori_, he would have added). The morning-knowledge was shown only to

the man of the dawn of time and was extinguished at the first sin. From

that time every successive generation has deteriorated from its

predecessor:

"'_Aetas parentum, pejor avis, tulit

Nos nequiores, mox daturos

Progeniem vitiosiorem_,'

and with the darkness of sin reason is plunged into constantly blacker

depths. The individual seeker after truth may gain enlightenment, but for

himself alone, not for humanity. Therefore a magician confines the wisdom

he acquires to his own bosom, or imparts it to a single pupil, or buries

it under obscure expressions which he commits to parchment; but he neither

can nor will impart it without reserve to humanity whose path appears to

lead downward into a constantly deeper night.

"Even the theologians speak of the pristine wisdom,--the theologians with

whom we, who practice the occult science, agree far more than the simple

and suspicious among them think. What remained, in the time of Noah, of

pristine wisdom was saved with him in the ark. His first-born obtained as

his portion the fairest wisdom. Prophecy, the Cabala, and the Gospel

belong to the sons of Shem, the Jews. But even Ham and Japhet were not

left destitute. It was the priest of the sons of Ham that guarded the

secrets of Isis,--secrets before which even we Christians must bow in the

dust; for the Old Testament does not hesitate to exalt the wisdom of the

Egyptians and recognize Moses as a pupil from their school. Hermes

Trismegistus was an Egyptian, and we magicians who know that he transmuted

whatever he chose into gold and precious stones, are not astonished when

the apostle Paul speaks of the treasures of Egypt, or at what travellers

relate of its pyramids and other giant works, or when Pliny estimates the

number of its cities at twenty thousand, or when Marcellinus is amazed at

the immense treasures which Cambyses carried away from it, for all this

was a creation of the art of Hermes Trismegistus.[30] Even the portion of

the children of Japhet was not insignificant. It was divided between the

treasury of Zoroaster and that of the Eleusinian mysteries. Some coins of

this treasure fell into the hands of Plato and Aristotle and have from

them come into the possession of Porphyrius, Jamblichus, and the

theosophists and scholastics. It is this diffused illumination--that of

the Bible (its inner, secret meaning) the Cabala and fragments of

Egyptian, Persian and Grecian wisdom--which are collected and united in

the magic of learning. These are the ancestors of my science. Has it not a

pedigree more noble than that of any royal family?

"I heard you mention something about the necessity for a science of

investigation without presupposition. Would you then really presume to be

the judge of all that past generations have thought, believed and

transmitted as a sacred inheritance to those that follow? Do you not

shrink before the idea that human hunger for truth must have been

satisfied from Adam to our own days by nothing but illusions? that you are

the children and children's children of mere idiots who have fixed their

hopes, their faith, and their convictions on baseless falsehoods? Put

your godless plan of investigation to the test! Do it openly, and the

theologians will burn you! Do it in secret, and you will finally crave the

stake as a liberator from the terrible void such a science would leave in

your own soul! No, the magician believes just as devoutly as the

theologian. Only in the mellow twilight of faith can he undertake those

operations whose success is a confirmation of the truth of his faith. Or

do you require stronger corroboration of the genuineness of his tenets

than what I find when I read in these stars which wander silently past my

window, the fates of men, and see these fates accomplished; when, with the

potency of magical means, I summon angels, and demons, and the souls of

dead and unborn men to reveal themselves before my eyes, and they appear?

"I confess that our science, if it is looked at only on the surface,

resembles a variegated carpet with artfully interwoven threads; but as

only a limited number of manipulations is required to produce the most

remarkable texture, so it is also but a few simple thoughts which

support all the doctrines and products of magic.

"That the universe is a triple harmony, as the Godhead is a Trinity, you

are aware. We live in the elemental world; over our head the celestial

space, with its various spheres, revolves; and above this, finally, God is

enthroned in the purely spiritual world of ideas. The unhappy scientists

of your century have in their narrow prejudice separated these worlds from

one another (but by crowding together the celestial and the elementary).

Your so-called students of nature investigate only the elementary world,

and your so-called philosophers only the ideal; but the former with all

their delving in the various forms of matter, never reach the realm of the

spiritual, but are rather led to disavow its existence; and the latter can

never from the dim world of ideas summon up the concrete wealth of nature.

In vain your students of nature imagine that in physiology, or your

philosophers that in anthropology, they shall find the transition from

one world to the other. We magicians, on the contrary, study these worlds

as a unit. We find them combined by two mighty bonds: those of

correspondence and causality. All things in the elementary world have

their antitype in the celestial, and all celestial things have their

corresponding ideas. These correspondences are strung from above downwards

as strings on the harp of the universe, and on that harp the causalities

move up and down like the fingers of a player. While your students of

nature seek the chains of causality in only one direction, the horizontal,

that which runs through things on the same level, that which connects

things in one and the same elementary world; we, the students of magic,

search with still greater diligence those perpendicular chains of

causality which run through and combine corresponding objects in the three

worlds. Our manner of investigating this perpendicular series resembles

your method of examining the horizontal but slightly, if at all. What

unnecessary trouble your induction causes you! You wish to investigate the

nature of some manifestation of force, for instance; you analyze it with

great painstaking into different factors, you strive to isolate each of

these factors and to cause them to act each its own part, to find out what

each has contributed to the common expression of force. We meet with no

such hindrances. A secret tradition has presented to us our perpendicular

lines of causality almost entire, and we are able to fill up the lacunae of

this tradition by an investigation which is not impeded with any great

difficulties. This investigation relies on the resemblances of things, for

this similarity is derived from a correspondence, and causality is

interwoven with correspondence. Thus, for instance, we judge from the

resemblance between the splendor of gold and that of the sun that gold has

its celestial correspondence in that luminary, and sustains to it a causal

relation. Another example: the two-horned beetle bears a causal relation

to the moon, which at its increase and wane is also two-horned; and if

there were any doubt of this intimate relation between them, it must

vanish when we learn that the beetle hides its eggs in the earth for the

space of twenty-eight days, or just so long time as is required for the

moon to pass through the Zodiac, but digs them up again on the

twenty-ninth, when the moon is in conjunction with the Sun.[31] Do not

smile at this method of investigation! Beware of repeating the mistake

which 'common sense' is so prone to make in seeing absurdities in truths

which happen to be beyond its horizon? Our method is founded on the idea

that there is nothing casual in nature. To be sure we accept a divine

arbitrament, but by no means a natural fortuity. Not even the slightest

similarity between existing objects is a meaningless accident! Not even

the slightest stroke in the figures by which we fix our words and thoughts

in writing is without deep significance. Every thing in the work of

nature and of man has its cause and its effect. We can not make a gesture,

nor say a word, without imparting vibrations to the whole universe, upward

and downward,--vibrations which may be strong or feeble, perceptible or

imperceptible. This principle runs through the whole of our cosmical

system, and this thought must be true even for you analyzers.

"Before explaining more fully the magical use of our series of

correspondence and causality, I wish to show you a couple of them. I shall

choose the simplest, but at the same time the most important. I commence

with

THE SCALE OF THE HOLY TETRAD. (Table I.)

_From which is found the Correspondences to the Four Elements._

------------------------------------------------------------------------

| | God's name

| [Hebrew] |(Jehovah) in

| |four letters.

|------------------------------------------------------------

AND | | | | |hierarchy.

BLISS |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

|---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

========================================================================

THE | tarius | | | |

CELESTIAL |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

|---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

========================================================================

|---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

|---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

|---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

THE |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

WORLD |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

|---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

|---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

|---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

========================================================================

|---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

========================================================================

HELL |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------

A magician never suffers himself to be interrupted in his labors, whether