11. The Magic Chain-c

I will go further and affirm that magical circles and magnetic currents establish themselves, and have an influence, according to fatal laws, upon those on whom they can act. Each one of us is drawn within a sphere of relations which constitutes his world and to the influence of which he is made subject. The lawgiver of the French Revolution, that man whom the most spiritual nation in the whole world acknowledged as the incarnation of human reason, Jean Jacques Rousseau, was drawn into the most lamentable action of his life, the desertion of his children, by the magnetic influence of a libertine circle and a magical current of table-d'hote. He describes it simply and ingenuously in his Confessions, but it is a fact which has remained unobserved. Great circles very often make great men, and vice versa. There are no unrecognized geniuses, there are eccentric men, and the term would seem to have been invented by an adept. The man who is eccentric in his genius is one who attempts to form a circle by combating the central attractive force of established chains and currents. It is his destiny to be broken or to succeed. Now, what is the twofold condition of success in such a case? A central point of stability and a persistent circular action of initiative. The man of genius is one who has discovered a real law and is possessed thereby of an invincible active and directing force. He may die in the midst of his work but that which he has willed comes to pass in spite of his death, and is indeed often insured thereby, because death is a veritable assumption for genius. “When I shall be lifted up from the earth,” said the greatest of the initiators, “I will draw all men after me.” The law of magnetic currents is that of the movement of the Astral Light itself, which is always double and augments in a contrary direction. A great action invariably paves the way for a reaction of equal magnitude, and the secret of phenomenal successes consists entirely in the foreknowledge of reactions. Thus did Chateaubriand, penetrated with disgust at the Saturnalia of the Revolution, foresee and prepare the immense vogue of his Genius of Christianity. To oppose one's self to a current at the beginning of its career is to court being destroyed by that current, like the great and unfortunate Emperor Julian; to oppose one's self to a current which has run its course is to take the lead of a contrary current. The great man is he who comes seasonably and knows how to innovate opportunely. In the days of the apostles, Voltaire would have found no echo for his utterances, and might have been merely an ingenious parasite at the banquets of Trimalcyon. Now, at the epoch wherein we live, everything is ripe for a fresh outburst of evangelical zeal and Christian self-devotion, precisely by reason of the prevailing general disillusion, egoistic positivism and public cynicism of the coarsest interests. The success of certain books and the mystical tendencies of minds are unequivocal symptoms of this widespread disposition. We restore and we build churches only to realize more keenly that we are void of belief, only to long the more for it; once again does the whole world await its Messiah, and he will not delay his advent. Let a man, for example, come forward, who by rank or by fortune is placed in an exalted position - a pope, a king, even a Jewish millionaire - and let this man sacrifice publicly and solemnly all his material interests for the weal of humanity; let him make himself the saviour of the poor, the promulgator and even the victim of doctrines of renunciation and charity, and he will draw round him an immense following: he will accomplish a complete moral revolution in the world.