The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES or wounded. At that time, in Normandy, the magnetic ill- nesses of mediums were hardly known, and this unhappy sleep-walker, who ought to have been cared for and cured, was roughly treated and even beaten, not even in his fluidic appearance, but in his proper person, by the Vicar himself. That is, one must agree, a singular kind of exorcism! If those violences really took place, and if they may be imputed to a Churchman whom one considers, and who may be, for all we know, very good and very respectable, let us admit that such writers as MM. de Mirville and Gougenet Desmousseaux make themselves not a little his accomplices ! The laws of physical life are inexorable, and in his animal nature man is born a slave to fatality; it is by dint of strug- gles against his instincts that he may win moral freedom. Two different existences are then possible for us upon the earth ; one fatal, the other free. The fatal being is the toy or instrument of a force which he does not direct. Now, when the instruments of fatality meet and collide, the stronger breaks or carries away the weaker ; truly emancipated beings fear neither bewitchments nor mysterious influences. You may reply that an encounter with Cain may be fatal for Abel. Doubtless; but such a fatality is an advantage to the pure and holy victim, it is only a misfortune for the assassin. Just as among the righteous there is a great community of virtues and merits, there is among the wicked an absolute solidarity of fatal culpability and necessary chastisement. Cri meresides in the tendencies of the heart. Circumstances which are almost always independent of the will are the only causes of the gravity of the acts. If fatality had made Nero 253