The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES No, that is not enough. One must know one’s self by heart, so to speak, to be able to calculate the leaps of the animal, divining its stratagems, avoiding its claws, foreseeing its movements, to be in a word past-master in lioncraft, as the excellent La Fontaine might have said. Animals are the living symbols of the instincts and passions of men. If you make a man timid, you change him into a hare. If, on the contrary, you drive him to ferocity, you make a tiger of him. The wand of Circe is the power of fascination which woman possesses; and the changing of the companions of Ulysses into hogs is not a story peculiar to that time. But no metamorphosis may be worked without destruction. To change a hawk into a dove, one must first kill it, then cut it to pieces, so as to destroy even the least trace of its first form, and then boil it in the magic bath of Medea. Observe how modern hierophants proceed in order to accomplish human regeneration; how, for example, in the Catholic religion, they go to work in order to change a man more or less weak and passionate into a stoical missionary of the Society of Jesus. There is the great secret of that venerable and terrible Order, always misunderstood, often calumniated, and always sovereign. Read attentively the book entitled, The Exercises of St. Ignatius, and note with what magical power that man of genius operates the realization of faith. He orders his disciples to see, to touch, to smell, to taste invisible things. He wishes that the senses should be exalted during prayer to the point of voluntary hallucination. T 273