The Equinox (Volume I, Number X)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES intervene to produce these strange phenomena. That the dead may return, it is above all necessary that they should have existed, and demons would not so easily be the dupes of our mystifications. Like all Catholics, we believe in the existence of spirits of darkness, but we know also that the divine power has given them the darkness for an eternal prison, and that the Redeemer saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning. If the demons tempt us, it is by the voluntary complicity of our passions, and it is not permitted to them to make head against the empire of God, and by stupid and useless mani- festations to disturb the eternal order of Nature. The diabolical signatures and characters, which are produced without the knowledge of the medium, are evidently not proofs of a tacit or formal pact between these degenerates and intelligences of the abyss. These signs have served from the beginning to express astral vertigo, and remain in a state of mirage in the reflections of the divulged light. Nature also has its recollections, and sends to us the same signs to correspond to the same ideas. In all this, there is nothing either supernatural or infernal. “How? do you want me to admit,” said to us the Curé Charvoz, the first vicar of Vintras, “that Satan dares to impress his hideous stigmata upon consecrated materials, which have become the actual body of Jesus Christ?” We declared immediately, that it was equally impossible for us to pronounce in favour of such a blasphemy; and yet, as we demonstrated in our articles in the Estafette, the signs printed in bleeding characters upon the hosts of Vintras, regularly consecrated by Charvoz, were those which, in 229