The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX grow hot, and imaginations wild; they believe in a miracle more startling than was of old the passage of the Red Sea. The Jews form in a close column, and run towards the sea; the rear ranks push the front ranks frantically: they think they see the pretended Moses walk upon the water. A shocking disaster resulted: almost all that multitude was drowned, and the hallucination was only extinguished with the life of the greater number of those unhappy visionaries. Human thought creates what it imagines ; the phantoms of superstition project their deformities on the astral light, and live upon the same terrors which give them birth. That black giant which reaches its wings from east to west to hide the light from the world, that monster who devours souls, that frightful divinity of ignorance and fear—in a word, the devil, —is still, for a great multitude of children of all ages, a fright- ful reality. In our Dogme et rituel de la haute magie we represented him as the shadow of God, and in saying that, we still hid the half of our thought: God is light without shadow. The devil is only the shadow of the phantom of God! The phantom of God! that last idol of the earth; that anthropomorphic spectre which maliciously makes himself invisible; that finite personification of the infinite; that invisible whom one cannot see without dying—without dying at least to intelligence and to reason, since in order to see the invisible, one must be mad; the phantom of Him who has no body; the confused form of Him who is without form and with- out limit; it is in ¢Za¢ that, without knowing it, the greater number of believers believe. He who 7s essentially, purely, spiritually, without being either absolute being, or an abstract 232