The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES assistance rises a holier and greater law: it is universal assistance, it is charity. We all admire and love Saint Vincent de Paul, but we have also a secret weakness for the cleverness, the presence of mind, and, above all, the audacity of Cartouche. The avowed accomplices of our passions may disgust us by humiliating us; at our own risk and peril our pride will teach us how to resist them. But what is more dangerous for us than our hypocritical and hidden accomplices? They follow us like sorrow, await us like the abyss, surround us like infatuation. We excuse them in order to excuse ourselves, defending them in order to defend ourselves, justifying them in order to justify ourselves, and we submit to them finally because we must, because we have not the strength to resist our inclinations, because we lack the will to do so. They have possessed themselves of our ascendant, as Paracelsus says, and where they wish to lead us we shall go. They are our bad angels. We know it in the depths of our consciousness; but we put up with them, we have made ourselves their servants that they also may be ours. Our passions, treated tenderly and flattered, have become slave-mistresses ; and those who serve our passions our valets, and our masters. We breathe out our thoughts and breathe in those of others imprinted in the astral light which has become their electro-magnetic atmosphere: and thus the companionship of the wicked is less fatal to the good than that of vulgar, cowardly, and tepid beings. Strong antipathy warns us easily, and saves us from the contact of gross vices ; it is not thus with disguised vices vices to a certain extent diluted 249