17. The Writing Of The Starsa

WE have finished with infernus, and we breathe the fresh air freely as we turn to daylight after traversing the crypts of Black Magic. Get thee behind us, Satan! We renounce thee, with all thy pomps and works, and still more with all thy deformities, thy meanness, thy nothingness, thy deception! The Great Initiator beheld thee fall from heaven like a thunderbolt. The Christian legend changes thee, making thee set thy dragon's head mildly beneath the foot of the Mother of God. Thou art for us the image of unintelligence and mystery; thou art unreason and blind fanaticism; thou art the inquisition and its hell; thou art the god of Torquemada and Alexander VI; thou hast become the sport of children, and thy final place is at the side of Polichinello. Henceforth thou art only a grotesque figure in our travelling booths and a means of instruction in a few so-called religious markets. After the sixteenth Key of the Tarot, which represents the downfall of Satan's temple, we find on the seventeenth leaf a magnificent and gracious emblem. a naked woman, a young and immortal maid, pours down on earth the water of universal life from two ewers, one of gold and one of silver. Hard by there is a flowering shrub, on which rests the butterfly of Psyche; above shines an eight-pointed star with seven other stars around it. “I believe in eternal life!” Such is the final article of the Christian symbol, and this of itself is a full profession of faith. When they compared the calm and peaceful immensity of heaven, thronged with immovable lights, to the tumults and darkness of this world, the ancients believed themselves to have discovered in that beautiful book, written in letters of gold, the final utterance of the enigma of destinies. In imagination they drew lines of correspondence between these shining points of divine writing; and it is said that the first constellations marked out by the shepherds of Chaldea were also the first letters of the kabalistic alphabet. These characters, expressed first of all by means of lines, then enclosed in hieroglyphic figures, would, according to M. Moreau de Dammartin, author of a very curious treatise on alphabetic characters, have determined the ancient Magi in the choice of the Tarot figures, which are considered by this man of learning, as by ourselves, an essentially hieratic and primitive book. Thus, in his opinion, the Chinese TSEU, the Hebrew ALEPH and the Greek ALPHA expressed hieroglyphically by the figure of the juggler, would be borrowed from the constellation of the Crane, in the vicinity of the celestial Fish, a sign of the eastern hemisphere. The Chinese TCHEOU, the Hebrew BETH and the Latin B, corresponding to Pope Joan or Juno, were formed from the head of the Ram; the Chinese YN, the Hebrew GHIMEL and the Latin G, represented by the Empress, would be derived from the constellation of the Great Bear, etc. The Kabalist Gaffarel, whom we have cited more than once, erected a planisphere in which all the constellations form Hebrew letters; but we confess that the configurations are frequently arbitrary in the highest degree, and upon the indication of a single star, for example, we can see no reason why a ד should be traced rather than a ו or ז; four stars will also give indifferently a ת, ח, or ה, as well as an א. We are deterred therefore from reproducing a copy of Gaffarel's planisphere, examples of which are, moreover, not exceedingly rare.