PREFACE
We shall exhibit true religion with such characters, that
no one, believer or unbeliever, can fail to recognize it; that
will be the absolute in religion. We shall establish in
philosophy the immutable characters of that Truth, which is
in science, reality; in judgment, reason; and in ethics,
justice. Finally, we shall acquaint you with the laws of
Nature, whose equilibrium is stability, and we shall show how
vain are the phantasies of our imagination before the fertile
realities of movement and of life. We shall also invite the
great poets of the future to create once more the divine
comedy, no longer according to the dreams of man, but
according to the mathematics of God.
Mysteries of other worlds, hidden forces, strange revela-
tions, mysterious illnesses, exceptional faculties, spirits,
apparitions, magical paradoxes, hermetic arcana, we shall
say all, and we shall explain all. Who has given us this
power? We do not fear to reveal it to our readers.
There exists an occult and sacred alphabet which the
Hebrews attribute to Enoch, the Egyptians to Thoth or to
Hermes Trismegistus, the Greeks to Cadmus and to Pala-
medes. This alphabet was known to the followers of Pytha-
goras, and is composed of absolute ideas attached to signs
and numbers ; by its combinations, it realizes the mathematics
of thought. Solomon represented this alphabet by seventy-
two names, written upon thirty-six talismans. Eastern
initiates still call these the “little keys” or clavicles of
Solomon. These keys are described, and their use explained,
in a book the source of whose traditional dogma is the
patriarch Abraham. This book is called the Sepher Yetzirah ;
with the aid of the Sepher Yetzirah one can penetrate the
xiii