The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX the little finger, is equivalent, in the sacred hieroglyphic language, to the exclusive affirmation of passion and diplomacy. It is the perverted and material translation of that great word of St. Augustine: ‘Love, and do what you will!” Compare now this sign with the doctrine of Mr. Madrolle: Ze most imperfect and the most apparently guilty act of love is worth more than the best of prayers. And you will ask yourself what is that force which, independently of the will, and of the greater or less knowledge of man (for Vintras is a man of no education), formulates its dogmas with signs buried in the rubbish of the ancient world, re-discovers the mysteries of Thebes and of Eleusis, and writes for us the most learned reveries of India with the occult alphabets of Hermes ? What is that force? I will tell you. But I have still plenty of other miracles to tell; and this article is like a judicial investigation. We must, before anything else, complete it. However, we may be permitted, before proceeding to other accounts, to transcribe here a page from a German dluminé, the work of Ludwig Tieck : “Tf, for example, as an ancient tradition informs us, some of the angels whom God had created fell all too soon, and if these, as they also say, were precisely the most brilliant of the angels, one may very well understand by this ‘fall’ that they sought a new road, a new form of activity, other occupations, and another life than those orthodox or more passive spirits who remained in the realm assigned to them, and made no use of liberty, the appanage of all of them. ‘Their ‘fall’ was that weight of form which we now-a-days call reality, and which is a protest on the part of individual existence against 152