The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES The devil is the giddiness of the intelligence stupefied by the irresolution of the heart. It is a monomania of nothingness, the lure of the abyss; independently of what it may be according to the decisions of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman faith, which we have not the temerity to touch. As to the reproduction of signs and characters by that universal fluid, which we call astral light, to deny its possi- bility would be to take little account of the most ordinary phenomena of Nature. The mirage in the steppes of Russia, the palace of Morgan le Fay, the figures printed naturally in the heart of stones which Gaffarel calls gamahés, the monstrous deformities of certain children caused by impressions of the nightmares of their mothers, all these phenomena and many others prove that the light is full of reflections and images which it projects and reproduces according to the evocations of the imagination, of memory, or of desire. Hallucination is not always an objectless reverie: as soon as every one sees a thing it is certainly visible; but if this thing is absurd one must rigorously conclude that everybody is deceived or halluci- nated by a real appearance. To say (for example) that in the magnetic parties of Mr. Home real and living hands come out of the tables, true hands which some see, others touch, and by which still others feel themselves touched without seeing them, to say that these really corporeal hands are hands of spirits, is to speak like children or madmen; it implies a contradiction in terms. But to deem that such or such apparitions, such or such sensations, are produced, is simply to be sincere, and to mock 223