16. Witchcraft And Spellsc

Say to a reasonable man that equilibrium is the law of motion and life, that liberty, which is moral equilibrium, rests upon an eternal and immutable distinction between true and false, between good and bad; tell him that, endowed as he is with free will, he must place himself by his works in the empire truth and goodness, or slide back eternally like the rock Sisyphus, into the chaos of falsehood and evil; then he will understand the doctrine, and if you term truth and goodness heaven, falsehood and evil hell, he will believe in your heaven and hell, over which the Divine Ideal rests calm, perfect and inaccessible to either wrath or offence, because he will understand that if in principle hell be eternal as liberty, it cannot in fact be more than a temporary agony souls, because it is an expiation, and the idea of expiation necessarily supposes that of reparation and destruction of evil. This said, not with dogmatic intention, which is outside our province, but to indicate the moral and reasonable remedy for the bewitchment of consciences by the terrors of the life beyond, let us speak of the means of escaping the baleful influences of human wrath. The first among all is to be reasonable and just, giving no opportunity or excuse to anger. A legitimate indignation is greatly to be feared; make haste therefore to acknowledge and expiate your faults. Should anger persist after that, then it certainly proceeds from vice; seek to know what vice and unite yourself strongly to the magnetic currents of the opposite virtue. The bewitchment will have no further power upon you. Wash carefully the clothes which you have finished with before giving them away; otherwise, burn them; never use a garment which has belonged to an unknown person without purifying it by water, sulphur and such aromatics as camphor, incense, amber, etc. A potent means of resisting bewitchment is not to fear it; it acts after the manner of contagious maladies. In times of epidemic, the terror-struck are the first to be attacked: The secret of not fearing an evil is not to think about it, and my advice is completely disinterested since I give it in a work on Magic of which I am the author, when I urge upon persons who are nervous, feeble, credulous, hysterical, superstitious devotees, foolish, without energy and without will, never to open a book on Magic, to close this one if they have opened it, to turn a deaf ear to those who talk of the occult sciences, to deride them, never to believe in them and to drink water as said the great pantagruelist magician, the excellent cure of Meudon. As for the wise - and it is time that we turned to them after making an allowance for the foolish - they have scarcely any sorceries to fear save those of fortune; but seeing that they are priests and physicians, they may be called upon to cure the bewitched, and this should be their method of procedure. They must persuade such a person to do some act of goodness to his tormentor, render him some service which he cannot refuse, and lead him directly or otherwise to the communion of salt. A person who believes himself bewitched by the execration and interment of the toad must carry about him a living toad in a horn box. For the bewitchment of the pierced heart, the afflicted individual must be made to eat a lamb's heart seasoned with sage and onion, and to carry a Talisman of Venus or of the Moon in a satchel filled with camphor and salt.