The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX parables of the ancients. This secret we have arrived at deciphering, and we shall submit its letter to the investigations of the gold-makers. Here it is: 1°. The four imponderable fluids are nothing but the diverse manifestations of one same universal agent, which is light. 2°. Light is the fire which serves for the Great Work under the form of electricity. 3°. The human will directs the vital light by means of the nervous system. In our days this is called Magnetism. 4°. The secret agent of the Great Work, the Azoth of the sages, the living and life-giving gold of the philosophers, the universal metallic productive agent, is MAGNETIZED ELECTRICITY." The alliance of these two words still does not tell us much, and yet, perhaps, they contain a force sufficient to overturn the world. We say “perhaps” on philosophical grounds, for, personally, we have no doubt whatever of the high importance of this great hermetic arcanum. We have just said that alchemy is the daughter of the Qabalah; to convince oneself of the truth of this it is sufficient to look at the symbols of Flamel, of Basil Valen- tine, the pages of the Jew Abraham, and the more or less apocryphal oracles of the Emerald Table of Hermes. Every- where one finds the traces of that decade of Pythagoras, which is so magnificently applied in the Sepher Yetzirah to the complete and absolute notion of divine things, that decade composed of unity and a triple ternary which the Rabbis have 1 In this joke, Levi indicates that he really knew the Great Arcanum; but only those who also possess it can recognize it, and enjoy the joke—O. M. 192