The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES The hand refuses to write the rest. It is a mixture of brutalizing practices and revolting crimes, so constituted as to kill for evermore judgment and conscience.? But in order to communicate with the phantom of abso- lute evil, to realize that phantom to the point of seeing and touching it, is it not necessary to be without conscience and without judgment? There is doubtless the secret of this incredible perversity, of this murderous fury, of this unwholesome hate against all order, all ministry, all hierarchy, of this fury, above all, against the dogma which sanctifies peace, obedience, gentleness, purity, under so touching an emblem as that of a mother. This wretch thought himself sure not to die. The Emperor, thought he, would be obliged to pardon him; an honourable exile awaited him; his crime would give him an enormous celebrity; his reveries would be bought for their weight in gold by the booksellers. He would become immensely rich, attract the notice of a great lady, and marry beyond the seas. It is by such promises that the phantom of the devil, long ago, lured Gilles de Laval, Seigneur of Retz, and made him wade from crime to crime. A man capable of evoking the devil, according to the rites of the grimoive of Honorius, has gone so far upon the road of evil that he is disposed to all kinds of hallucinations, and all lies. So, Verger slept in blood, to dream of I know not what abomin- able pantheon ; and he awoke upon the scaffold. But the aberrations of perversity do not constitute an insanity; the execution of this wretch proved it. 1 The great painter, dipping his brush in earthquake and eclipse, employs an excess of yellow.—O. M. N 177