The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX and what we have understood through deciphering the qabalistic characters, and the allegories of which he makes use in his work: The human soul is material; the divine sevs is offered to it to immortalize it and to make it live spiritually and indi- vidually, but its natural substance is fluidic and collective. There are, then, in man, two lives: the individual or reasonable life, and the common or instinctive life. It is by this latter that one can live in the bodies of others, since the universal soul, of which each nervous organism has a separate consciousness, is the same for all. We live in a common and universal life in the embryonic state, in ecstasy, and-in sleep. In sleep, in fact, reason does not act, and logic, when it mingles in our dreams, only does so by chance, in accordance with the accidents of purely physical reminiscences. In dreams, we have the consciousness of the universal life; we mingle ourselves with water, fire, air, and earth; we fly like birds; we climb like squirrels ; we crawl like serpents ; we are intoxicated with astral light; we plunge into the common reservoir, as happens in a more complete manner in death; but then (and it is thus that Paracelsus explains the mysteries of the other life) the wicked, that is to say, those who have allowed themselves to be dominated by the instincts of the brute to the prejudice of human reason, are drowned in the ocean of the common life with all the anguish of eternal death; the others swim upon it, and enjoy for ever the riches of that fluid gold which they have succeeded in dominating. This identity of all physical life permits the stronger 214