The Equinox (Volume I, Number X)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES Werther, and therefore we wish to die! Poor children, it is not death that you need, it is life. Since you have been in the world you have died every day; is it from the cruel pleasure of annihilation that you would demand a remedy for the annihilation of your pleasures? No, life has never deceived you, you have not yet lived. What you have been taking for life is but the hallucinations and the dreams of the first slumber of death! All great criminals have hallucinated themselves on pur- pose; and those who hallucinate themselves on purpose may be fatally led to become great criminals. Our personal light specialized, brought forth, determined by our own over- mastering affection, is the germ of our paradise or of our Hell. Each one of us (in a sense) conceives, bears, and nourishes his good or evil angel. The conception of truth gives birth in us to the good genius; intentional untruth hatches and brings up nightmares and phantoms. Everyone must nourish his children; and our life consumes itself for the sake of our thoughts. Happy are those who find again immortality in the creations of their soul! Woe unto them who wear them- selves out to nourish falsehood and to fatten death! for every one will reap the harvest of his own sowing. There are some unquiet and tormented creatures whose influence is disturbing and whose conversation is fatal. In their presence one feels one’s self irritated, and one leaves their presence angry ; yet, by a secret perversity, one looks for them, in order to experience the disturbance and enjoy the malevolent emotions which they give us. Such persons suffer from the contagious maladies of the spirit of perversity. The spirit of perversity has always for its secret motive 263