1. The Candidated

One who neglects his moral dignity in order to obey blindly the instincts of Nature. As a fact, in the presence of danger it is natural to be afraid and seek flight: why, then, is it shameful? Because honour has erected it into a law that we must prefer our duty to our inclinations or fears. What is honour from this point of view? It is a universal presentience of immortality and appreciation of the means which can lead to it. The last trophy which a man can win from death is to triumph over the appetite for life, not by despair but by a more exalted hope, which is contained in faith, for all that is noble and honest, by the undivided consent of the world. To learn self-conquest is therefore to learn life, and the austerities of stoicism were no vain parade of freedom! To yield to the forces of Nature is to follow the stream of collective life and to be the slave of secondary causes. To resist and subdue Nature is to make for one's self a personal and imperishable life: it is to break free from the vicissitudes of life and death. Every man who is prepared to die rather than renounce truth and justice is most truly living, for immortality abides in his soul. To find or to form such men was the end of all ancient initiations. Pythagoras disciplined his pupils by silence and all kinds of self-denial; candidates in Egypt were tried by the four elements; and we know the self-inflicted austerities of fakirs and brahmans in India for attaining the kingdom of free will and divine independence. All macerations of asceticism are borrowed from the initiations of the Ancient Mysteries; they have ceased because those qualified for initiation, no longer finding initiators, and the leaders of conscience becoming in the lapse of time as uninstructed as the vulgar, the blind have grown weary of following the blind, and no one has cared to pass through ordeals the end of which was only in doubt and despair: the path of light was lost. To succeed in performing something we must know that which it is proposed to do, or at least must have faith in someone who does know it. But shall I stake my life on a venture, or follow someone at chance who himself cannot see where he is going? We must not set out rashly along the path of the transcendental sciences, but, once started, we must reach the end or perish. To doubt is to lose one's reason; to pause is to fall; to recoil is to plunge into an abyss. You, therefore, who are undertaking the study of this book, if you persevere to the end and understand it, you will be either a monarch or madman. Do what you will with the volume, you will be unable to despise or to forget it. If you are pure, it will be your light; if strong, your arm; if holy, your religion; if wise, the rule of your wisdom. But if you are wicked, for you it will be an infernal torch; it will lacerate your breast like a poniard; it will rankle in your memory like a remorse; it will people your imagination with chimeras, and will drive you through folly to despair. You will endeavour to laugh at it, and will only gnash your teeth; it will be like the file in the fable which the serpent tried to bite, but it destroyed all his teeth. Let us now enter on the series of initiations. I have said that revelation is the word. As a fact, the word, or speech, is the veil of being and the characteristic sign of life. Every form is the veil of a word, because the idea which is the mother of the word is the sole reason for the existence of forms.