The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES ourselves; it will be done to us as we have believed; that is to say, we create ourselves in the image of our ideal. “Those who make their gods become like unto them,” says the psalmist, ‘‘and all they that put their trust in them.” The divine ideal of the ancient world made the civilization which came to an end, and one must not despair of seeing the god of our barbarous fathers become the devil of our more enlightened children. One makes devils with cast-off gods,' and Satan is only so incoherent and so formless because he is made up of all the rags of ancient theogonies. He is the sphinx without a secret, the riddle without an answer, the mystery without truth, the absolute without reality and without light. Man is the son of God because God, manifested, realized, and incarnated upon earth, called Himself the Son of man. It is after having made God in the image of His intelligence and of His love, that humanity has understood the sublime Word who said “ Let there be light!” Man is the form of the divine thought, and God is the idealized synthesis of human thought. Thus the Word of God reveals man, and the Word of man reveals God. Man is the God of the world, and God is the man of heaven. Before saying ‘God wills,” man has willed. In order to understand and honour Almighty God, man must first be free. Had he obeyed and abstained from the fruit of the tree of knowledge through fear, man would have been innocent and 2 Christianity has fallen, and so Christ has already become the ‘devil’ to such thinkers as Nietzsche and Crowley.—O. M. c 17