The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX and become almost lovable. An honest woman will experience nothing but disgust in the society of a prostitute, but she has everything to fear from the seductions of a coquette. One knows that madness is contagious, but the mad are more particularly dangerous when they are amiable and sympathetic. One enters little by little into their circle of ideas, one ends by understanding their exaggerations, while partaking their enthusiasms, one grows accustomed to their logic that has lost its way, one ends by finding that they are not as mad as one thought at first. Thence to believing that they alone are right there is but one step. One likes them, one approves of them, one is as mad as they are. The affections are free and may be based on reason, but sympathies are of fatalism, and very frequently unreasonable. They depend on the more or less balanced attractions of the magnetic light, and act on men in the same way as upon animals. One will stupidly take pleasure in the society of a person in whom is nothing lovable, because one is mysteriously attracted and dominated by him. And often enough, these strange sympathies began by lively antipathies; the fluids repelled each other at first, and subsequently became balanced. The equilibrating speciality of the plastic medium of every person is what Paracelsus calls his ascendant, and he gives the name of fagum to the particular reflection of the habitual ideas of each one in the universal light. One arrives at the knowledge of the ascendant of a person by the sensitive divination of the fagum, and by a persistent direction of the will. One turns the active side of one’s own ascendant towards the passive side of the ascendant of 250