22. The Book Of Hermesm

Where now will the destroyed prince of perdition dare to show himself? It remains for us to state our conclusions and to define the end and import of this work in the religious and philosophical order, and in the order of positive and material realizations. As regards the religious order, we have demonstrated that the practices of worship cannot be indifferent that the Magic of religions is in their Rites, that their moral force is in the triadic hierarchy and that the base, principle and synthesis of hierarchy is unity. We have demonstrated the universal unity and orthodoxy of dogma, vested successively in various allegorical veils, and we have followed the truth saved by Moses from profanation in Egypt, preserved in the Kabalah of the prophets, emancipated by the Christian school from the slavery of the Pharisees, attracting all the poetic and generous aspirations of Greek and Roman civilization, protesting against a new Pharisaism more corrupt than the first, with the great saints of the Middle Ages and the bold thinkers of the Renaissance. We have exhibited, I say, that truth which is always universal, always living, alone conciliating reason and faith, science and obedience-the truth of being demonstrated by being, of harmony proved by harmony, of reason manifested by reason. By revealing for the first time to the world the Mysteries of Magic we have not sought to revive practices entombed beneath the ruins of ancient civilizations, but would say to humanity in this our own day that it is called also to make itself immortal and omnipotent by its works. Liberty does not offer itself but must be seized, says a modern writer: it is the same with science, for which reason to divulge absolute truth is never useful to the vulgar. But at an epoch when the sanctuary has been devastated and has fallen into ruins, because its key has been thrown into the ditch, to the profit of no one, I have deemed it my duty to pick up that key, and I offer it to him who can take it: in his turn he will be doctor of nations and liberator of the world. Fables and leading-strings are needed, and will be needed always by children; but it is not necessary that those who hold the leading-strings should be children also, lending a ready ear to fables. Let the most absolute science, let the highest reason, be the property of the chiefs of the people; let the Priestly Art and the Royal Art assume once more the double sceptre of antique initiations, and the world will re-issue from chaos. Burn no more holy images, destroy no more temples; temples and images are necessary for man; but drive out the merchants from the House of Prayer; let the blind no longer be leaders of the blind; reconstruct the hierarchy of intelligence and holiness; recognize only those who know as the teachers of those who believe. Our book is catholic, and if the revelations it contains are likely to alarm the conscience of the simple, we are consoled by the thought that they will not read it. We write for unprejudiced men and have no wish to flatter irreligion any more than fanaticism. If there be anything essentially free and inviolable in the world, it is belief. By science and persuasion we must endeavour to lead bewrayed imaginations from the absurd, but it would be investing their errors with all the dignity and truth of the martyr to either threaten or constrain them. Faith is nothing but superstition and folly if it have not reason for its basis, and we cannot suppose that which we do not know except by analogy drawn from the realm of knowledge. To define that which lies outside all experience is presumptuous ignorance; to affirm positively that which we do not know is to lie. So is faith an aspiration and desire. Amen; I desire it to be so: such is the last word of all professions of faith.