Introductionl

Paul burnt all books which treated of the occult sciences; and in fine, the French Revolution, daughter of the great Johannite Orient and the ashes of the Templars, spoliated the churches and blasphemed the allegories of the Divine Cultus. But all doctrines and all revivals proscribe Magic and condemn its mysteries to the flames and to oblivion. The reason is that each religion or philosophy which comes into the world is a Benjamin of humanity and insures its own life by destroying its mother. It is because the symbolical serpent turns ever devouring its own tail; it is because, as essential condition of existence, a void is necessary to every plenitude, space for every dimension, an affirmation for each negation: herein is the eternal realization of the phoenix allegory. Two illustrious scholars have preceded me along the path that I am travelling, but they have, so to speak, spent the dark night therein. I refer to Volney and Dupuis, to Dupuis above all, whose immense erudition produced only a negative work, for in the origin of all religions he saw nothing but astronomy, taking thus the symbolic cycle for doctrine and the calendar for legend. He was deficient in one branch of knowledge, that of true Magic which comprises the secrets of the Kabalah. Dupuis passed through the antique sanctuaries, like the prophet Ezekiel over the plain strewn with bones, and only understood death, for want of that word which collects the virtue of the four winds and can make a living people of all the vast ossuary, by crying to the ancient symbols: ‘Arise! Take up a new form and walk!’ But the hour has come when we must have the courage to attempt what no one has dared to perform previously. Like Julian, we would rebuild the temple, and in so doing we do not believe that we shall be belying a wisdom that we venerate, which also Julian would himself have been worthy to adore, had the rancorous and fanatical doctors of his period permitted him to understand it. For us the Temple has two Pillars, on one of which Christianity has inscribed its name. We have therefore no wish to attack Christianity: far from it, we seek to explain and accomplish it. Intelligence and will have exercised alternately their power in the world; religion and philosophy are still at war with one another, but they must end in agreement. The provisional object of Christianity was to establish, by obedience and faith, a supernatural or religious equality among men, to immobilize intelligence by faith, so as to provide a fulcrum for virtue which came for the destruction of the aristocracy of science, or rather to replace that aristocracy, then already destroyed. Philosophy, on the contrary, has laboured to bring back men by liberty and reason to natural inequality, and to substitute wits for virtue by inaugurating the reign of industry. Neither of these operations has proved complete or adequate; neither has brought men to perfection and felicity. That which is now dreamed, almost without daring to hope for it, is an alliance between the two forces so long regarded as contrary, and there is good ground for desiring it, seeing that these two great powers of the human soul are no more opposed to one another than is the sex of man opposed to that of woman. Undoubtedly they differ, but their apparently contrary dispositions come only from their aptitude to meet and unite. “No less is proposed, therefore, than a universal solution of all problems?” The answer is yes, unquestionably, since we are concerned with explaining the Philosophical Stone, perpetual motion, the secret of the Great Work and of the Universal Medicine. We shall be accused of insanity, like the divine Paracelsus, or of charlatanism, like the great and unfortunate Agrippa.