21. The Science Of The Prophets-c

The Tarot was the sole book of the ancient Magi; it is the primitive Bible, as we shall prove in the following chapter, and the ancients consulted it as the first Christians at a later date consulted the Sacred Lots, that is, Bible verses selected by chance and determined by thinking of a number. Mlle. Lenormand, the most celebrated of our modern fortune-tellers, was unacquainted with the science of the Tarot, or knew it only by derivation from Etteilla, whose explanations are shadows cast upon a back-ground of light. She knew neither high Magic nor the Kabalah, but her head was filled with ill-digested erudition, and she was intuitive by instinct, which deceived her rarely. The works she left behind her are Legitimist tomfoolery, ornamented with classical quotations; but her oracles, inspired by the presence and magnetism of those who consulted her, were often astounding. She was a woman in whom extravagance of imagination and mental rambling were substituted for the natural affections of her sex; she lived and died a virgin, like the ancient druidesses of the isle of Sayne. Had Nature endowed her with beauty, she might have played easily at a remoter epoch the part of a Melusine or a Velleda. The more ceremonies are employed in the practice of divination, the more we stimulate imagination both in ourselves and in those who consult us. The CONJURATION Of THe Four, the Prayer Of Solomon, the magic sword to disperse phantoms, may then be resorted to with success; we should also evoke the genius of the day and hour of operation, and offer him a special perfume; next we should enter into magnetic and intuitive correspondence with the consultant, inquiring with what animal he is in sympathy and with what in antipathy, as also concerning his favourite flower or colour. Flowers, colours and animals connect in analogical classification with the seven genii of the Kabalah. Those who like blue are idealists and dreamers; lovers of red are material and passionate; those who prefer yellow are fantastic and capricious; admirers of green are often commercial and crafty; the friends of black are influenced by Saturn; the rose is the colour of Venus, etc. Lovers of the horse are hard-working, noble in character, and at the same time yielding and gentle; friends of the dog are affectionate and faithful; those of the cat are independent and libertine. Frank persons hold spiders in special horror; those of a proud nature are antipathetic to the serpent; upright and fastidious people cannot tolerate rats and mice, the voluptuous loathe the toad, because it is cold, solitary, hideous and miserable. Flowers have analogous sympathies to those of animals and colours, and as Magic is the science of universal analogies, a single taste, one tendency, in a given person, enables all the rest to be divined: it is an application of the analogical anatomy of Cuvier to phenomena in the moral order. The physiognomy of face and body, wrinkles on the brow, lines on hands, furnish the Magus also with precious indications. Metoposcopy and chiromancy have become separate sciences; their findings, purely empirical and conjectural, have been compared, examined and combined as a body of doctrine by Goclenius, Belot, Romphilus, Indagine and Taisnier. The work of the last-mentioned writer is the most important and complete; he combines and criticizes the observations and conjectures of all the others.