The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES A useless word is a crime against the spirit of intelli- gence; it is an intellectual infanticide. Things are for every one what he makes of them by naming them. The word of every one is an impression or an habitual prayer. To speak well is to live well. A fine style is an aureole of holiness. From these principles, some true, others hypothetical, and from the more or less exaggerated consequences that they draw from them, there resulted for superstitious qabalists an absolute confidence in enchantments, evocations, conjurations and mysterious prayers. Now, as faith has always accom- plished miracles, apparitions, oracles, mysterious cures, sudden and strange maladies, have never been lacking to it. It is thus that a simple and sublime philosophy has become the secret science of Black Magic. It is from this point of view above all that the Qabalah is still able to excite the curiosity of the majority in our so distrustful and so credulous century. However, as we have just explained, that is not the true science. Men rarely seek the truth for its own sake; they have always a secret motive in their efforts, some passion to satisfy, or some greed to assuage. Among the secrets of the Qabalah there is one above all which has always tormented seekers; it is the secret of the transmutation of metals, and of the conversion of all earthly substances into gold. Alchemy borrowed all these signs from the Qabalah, and it is upon the law of the analogies resulting from the harmony of contraries that it based its operations. An immense physical secret was, moreover, hidden under the qabalistic gl