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.
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