The Equinox (Volume I, Number X)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES we find traces of them in Hesiod, who expressly forbids that linen, stained by a pollution of any sort, should be dried before a fire. Persons who are obsessed by phantoms are usually exalted by too rigorous celibacy, or weakened by excesses. Fluidic phantoms are the abortions of the vital light; they are plastic media without body and without spirit, born from the excesses of the spirit and the disorders of the body. These wandering media may be attracted by certain degenerates who are fatally sympathetic to them, and who lend them at their own cost a factitious existence of a more or less durable kind. They then serve as supplementary instru- ments to the instinctive volitions of these degenerates : never to cure them, always to send them farther astray, and to hallucinate them more and more. If corporeal embryos can take the forms which the imagination of their mothers gives them, the wandering fluidic embryos ought to be prodigiously variable, and to transform themselves with an astonishing facility. Their tendency to give themselves a body in order to attract a soul, makes them condense and assimilate naturally the corporeal molecules which float in the atmosphere. Thus, by coagulating the vapour of blood, they remake blood, that blood which hallucinated maniacs see floating upon pictures or statues. But they are not the only ones to see it. Vintras and Rose Tamisier are neither impostors nor myopics; the blood really flows; doctors examine it, analyse it; it is blood, real human blood: whence comes it? Can it be formed spontaneously in the atmosphere? Can it naturally flow from a marble, from a painted canvas or a host? No, Q2 227