The Equinox (Volume I, Number I)

THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON THE KING Plunging into the ¢exebve of transcendental physics, he sought the great fulfilment, and unknowingly in the exuber- ance of his enthusiasm left the broad road of the valley and struck out on the mountain-track towards that ultimate summit which gleams with the stone of the Wise, and whose secret lies in the opening of the “Closed Eye”—the consuming of the Darkness. He who dismisses Paracelsus with a twopenny clyster, or Raymond Lully with a sixpenny reprint, is not a fool, no, no, nothing so exalted; but merely a rabbit-brained louse, who, flattering himself that he is crawling in the grey beard of Haeckel and the scanty locks of Spencer, sucks pseudo- scientific blood from the advertisement leaflets of our monthly magazines, and declares all outside the rational muckheap of a Pediculus to be both ridiculous and impossible. The Alchemist well knew the difference between the kitchen stove and the Heraclitean furnace ; and between the water in his hip-bath and “the water which wetteth not the hands.” True, much “twaddle” was written concerning balsams, and elixirs, and bloods, which, however, to the merest tyro in alchemy can be sorted from the earnest works as easily as a “ Bart’s” student can sort hair-restoring pamphlets and blackhead eradicators from lectures and essays by Lister and Miller. Thus frenziedly, at the age of twenty-two, P. set out on the Quest of the Philosopher's Stone. Visita Interiora Terre Rectificando Invenies Occultam Lapidem Veram Medicinam; this is indeed the true medicine of souls; and so P. sought the universal solvent VITRIO- LUM, and equated the seven letters in VITRIOL, SUL- 235