The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES that is little more than the prolongation of old age, and one has the right to ask from the science which we profess other privileges and other secrets. To be a long time young, or even to become young again, that is what would appear desirable and precious to the majority of men. Is it possible? We shall examine the question. The famous Count of Saint-Germain is dead, we do not doubt, but no one ever saw him grow old. He appeared always of the age of forty years, and at the time of his greatest celebrity, he pretended to be over eighty. Ninon de !l’Enclos, in her very old age, was still a young, beautiful and seductive woman. She died without having grown old. Desbarrolles, the celebrated palmist, has been for a long while for everybody a man of thirty-five years. His birth certificate would speak very differently if he dared to show it, but no one would believe it. Cagliostro always appeared the same age. He pretended to possess not only an elixir which gave to the old, for an instant, all the vigour of youth; but he also prided himself on being able to operate physical regeneration by means which we have detailed and analysed in our History of Magic. Cagliostro and the Count of Saint-Germain attributed the preservation of their youth to the existence and use of the universal medicine, that medicament uselessly sought by so many hermetists and alchemists. An Initiate of the sixteenth century, the good and learned William Postel, never pretended that he possessed the great arcanum of the hermetic philosophy; and yet after having T2 275