[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.It revolves, notwithstanding, said Galileo, stamping his foot upon the earth.Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free, said the Saviour of men.It might be added: Ye shall love justice, and justice shall make you whole men.A vice is a poison, even for the body; true virtue is a pledge of longevity.The method of ceremonial bewitchments varies with times and persons; all subtle and domineering people find its secrets and its practice within themselves, without even actually calculating about them or reasoning on their sequence.Herein they follow instinctive inspirations of the Great Agent, which, as we have said, accommodates itself marvellously to our vices and our virtues.It may be generally laid down, however, that we are subjected to the wills of others according to the analogies of our tendencies and above all of our faults.To pamper the weakness of an individuality is to possess ourselves of that individuality and convert it into an instrument in the order of the same errors or depravities.Now, when two natures whose defects are analogous become subordinated one to another, the result is a sort of substitution of the stronger for the weaker, an actual obsession of one mind by the other.Very often the weaker may struggle and seek to revolt, but it falls only deeper in servitude.So did Louis XIII conspire against80The Doctrine of Transcendental MagicRichelieu and subsequently, so to speak, sought his pardon by abandoning his accomplices.We have all a ruling defect, which is for our soul as the umbilical cord of its birth in sin, and it is by this that the enemy can always lay hold upon us: for some it is vanity, for others idleness, for the majority egotism.Let a wicked and crafty mind avail itself of this means and we are lost; we may not go mad or turn idiots, but we become positively alienated, in all the force of the expression –that is, we are subjected to a foreign suggestion.In such a state one dreads instinctively everything that might bring us back to reason, and will not even lis-ten to representations that are opposed to our obsession.Here is one of the most dangerous disorders which can affect the moral nature.The sole remedy for such a bewitchment is to make use of folly itself in order to cure folly, to provide the sufferer with imaginary satisfactions in the opposite order to that wherein he is now lost.Endeavour, for example, to cure an ambitious person by making him desire the glories of heaven – mystic remedy; cure one who is dissolute by true love – natural remedy; obtain honourable successes for a vain person; exhibit unselfishness to the avaricious and procure for them legitimate profit by honourable participation in generous enterprises, etc.Acting in this way upon the moral nature, we may succeed in curing a number of physical maladies, for the moral affects the physical in virtue of the magical axiom: “That which is above is like unto that which is below.” This is why the Master said, when speaking of the par-alyzed woman: “Satan has bound her.” A disease invariably originates in a deficiency or an excess, and ever at the root of a physical evil we shall find a moral disorder.This is an unchanging law of Nature.XVII q RASTROLOGYSTELLA OS INFLEXUSOF ALL THE ARTS which have originated in ancient magian wisdom astrology is now the most misunderstood.No one believes any longer in the universal harmonies of Nature and in the necessary interconnection of all effects with all causes.Moreover, true astrology, that which derives from the unique and universal dogma of the Kabalah, became profaned among the Greeks and Romans of the decline.The doctrine of the seven spheres and the three mobiles, drawn primitively from the sephirotic decade; the character of the planets governed by angels, whose names have been changed into those of Pagan divinities; the influence of the spheres on one another; the destiny attached to numbers; the scale of proportion between the celestial hierarchies corresponding to the human hierarchies – all this has been materialized and degraded into superstition by genethliacal soothsayers and erectors of horoscopes during the decline and the Middle Ages.The restora-tion of astrology to its primitive purity would be, in a sense, the creation of an entirely new science; our present concern is only to indicate its first principles, with their more immediate and approximate consequences.We have said that the Astral Light receives and preserves the impressions of all visible things; it follows herefrom that the daily position of the heaven is reflected in this light, which, being the chief agent of life, operates the conception, gestation and birth of children by a sequence of apparatuses designed naturally to this end.Now, if this light be so prodigal of images as to impart the visible imprints of a maternal fantasy or appetite to the fruit of pregnancy, still more will it transmit to the plastic and indeterminate temperament of a newly-born child the atmospheric impressions and diverse influences which, in the entire planetary system, are consequent at a given moment upon such or such particular aspect of the stars.Nothing is indifferent in Nature: a stone more or a stone less upon a road may break or modify profoundly the destinies of the greatest men or even the largest empires; still more must the position of this or that star in the sky have an influence on the child who is born, and who enters by the very fact of his birth into the universal harmony of the sidereal world.The stars are bound to one another by the attractions which hold them in equilibrium and cause them to move with uniformity through space.From all spheres unto all spheres there stretch these indestructible networks of light, and there is no point upon any planet to which one of them is not attached.The true adept in astrology must give heed therefore to the precise time and place of the birth which is in question; then, after an exact calculation of the astral influences, it remains for him to compute the chances of estate, that is 8182The Doctrine of Transcendental Magicto say, the advantages or hindrances which the child must one day meet with by reason of position, relatives, inherited tendencies and hence natural proclivities, in the fulfilment of his destinies.Finally, he will have also to take into consideration human liberty and its initiative, should the child eventually come to be a true man and to isolate himself by strength of will from fatal influences and from the chain of destiny.It will be seen that we do not allow too much to astrology, but so much as we leave it is indubitable: it is the scientific and magical calculus of probabilities.Astrology is as ancient as astronomy, and indeed it is more ancient; all seers of lucid antiquity have accorded it their fullest confidence; and it is not for us to condemn and reject lightly anything which comes before us encompassed and supported by such imposing authorities.Long and patient observations, conclusive comparisons, frequently repeated experiments, must have led the old sages to their decisions, and to refute them the same labour must be undertaken from an opposite standpoint.Paracelsus was perhaps the last of the great practical astrologers; he cured diseases by talismans formed under astral influences; he distinguished upon all bodies the mark of their dominant star; there, according to him, was the true Universal Medicine, the Absolute Science of Nature, lost by man's own fault and recovered only by a small number of initiates [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]