The Equinox (Volume I, Number X)

THE EQUINOX thee all the kingdoms of the world, if thou wilt fall at my feet and worship me,” the Satan of the parable said to Jesus. “Get thee behind me, Satan,” replied the Saviour; “ for it is written, Thou shalt adore God alone.” . . . “ Ext, Ext, Lama SABACHTHANI!” was what this sublime and divine adorer of God cried later. If he had replied to Satan, “I will not adore thee, and it is thou who wilt fall at my feet, for I bid thee in the name of intelligence and eternal reason,” he would not have consigned his holy and noble life to the most frightful of all tortures. The Satan of the mountain was indeed cruelly avenged! The ancients called practical magic the sacerdotal and royal art, and one remembers that the magi were the masters of primitive civilization, because they were the masters of all the science of their time. To know is to be able when one dares to will. The first science of the practical qabalist, or the magus, is the knowledge of men. Phrenology, psychology, chiromancy, the observation of tastes and of movement, of the sound of the voice and of either sympathetic or antipathetic impres- sions, are branches of this art, and the ancients were not ignorant of them. Gall and Spurzheim in our days have rediscovered phrenology. Lavater, following Porta, Cardan, Taisnier, Jean Belot and some others have divined anew rather than rediscovered the science of psychology; chiro- mancy is still occult, and one scarcely finds traces of it in the quite recent and very interesting work of d’Arpentigny. In order to have sufficient notions of it, one must remount to the qabalistic sources themselves from which the learned Cornelius Agrippa drew water. It is, then, convenient to say a few words 210