Part 6

"The air of the evening is cool. I close the window, move my study lamp to this table, and ask you to be seated around it. We must consult concerning the invitation, in which we must follow the directions given in this cabalistic manuscript.

"You have found from the table I first showed you that it is the orders of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones which are related by a reciprocal activity to Mars. But these three orders constitute the highest celestial hierarchy, which remain constantly in the presence of God and must not be summoned hither even if we were able to do so. We may only implore their assistance. The orders of Dominions, Powers and Empires are the only intelligences connected with the stars. Among them we must address ourselves to the spirits of Mars, since Mars is the regent of this year, this day and of the intended incantation. The choice between the good and the evil spirits ruled by Mars is still open; but since it is not our purpose to invoke by supplication but to compel by conjuration, we must choose the wicked. This is no sin: it is only danger. It gives joy to the good angels to see the power of God's image over their adversaries. But we can not force the whole host of Mars' demons to appear in our circle. We must select one only among their legion and this one must be well chosen. It is therefore necessary to know his name, for with spirits, far more than men and terrestrial things, the name implies the essence and the qualities of the named. The Cabala teaches us the infinite significance of words and names. It proclaims and demonstrates the mysteries which dwell in all the holy names of God; it reveals to us the mysteries in the appellations of angels; it shows us that even the names of men are intimately related to the place in creation and the temporal destiny of those who bear them. Even names of material things show, though less distinctly, a connection between the sound and the thing itself or its nature. Who can hear, for instance, the words wind, or swing, without perceiving in the very sound something airy or oscillating? Who can hear stand, and strong, without perception of something stable and firm?

"Let us hasten to find the name of the demon who is to be summoned. Astrology as well as the Cabala gives various methods for this purpose. Let us choose the simplest, which is perhaps also the most efficient.

"I must commence our work by pointing out the significance of number 72. To this number correspond the seventy-two languages, the seventy-two elders of the synagogue, the seventy-two interpreters of the Old Testament and the seventy-two disciples of our Lord. This number is also closely connected with the sacred number twelve. If the twelve signs of the Zodiac are divided into six parts, we obtain the seventy-two so-called celestial quinaries, into which the seventy-two mystical names of God, his 'schemhamphoras,' infuse their power and which are each of them presided over by an angel-prince. The same number also corresponds to the joints of the human frame; and there are many other correspondences.

"Well, while the Cabalists were searching out the sacred inner meaning of the Bible; while they proceeded slowly, starting with the 'In the beginning,' and stopping at every word, every letter, and found in every word and every letter a mine of secrets, they finally, after the lapse of centuries, came as far as to the 19th verse in the 14th chapter of Exodus, commencing: 'And the angel of God, which went before the camp of Israel arose.' The cabalistical rule which says wherever, in the Bible, an angel is spoken of, there is also the name of an angel hidden among the Hebrew letters of the verse, admonished them to pause and consider. They had at first no idea of the extraordinary discovery they were now on the point of making. But their attention was attracted by the fact that there were seventy-two letters in the verse (in the Hebrew text). Still more surprised were they when they found that even the following verse, the 20th, contained exactly seventy-two letters; and then surprise grew into awe when even the 21st verse showed the same number. In the Bible there is no fortuity: a great secret was hidden here. Finally, by placing the three verses, letter by letter (the middle verse written from left to right, the others conversely), above one another, God's seventy-two mystical names 'schemhamphoras' each consisting of three letters, from the three verses, was discovered. These names, provided with the suffix el or jah, are also the names of the seventy-two quinary angels, of which God has said that his name is in them.

"Here in this cabalistic manuscript these names are preserved. Let us select one of them at random. My eye happens to fall upon Mizrael first. We will take that. This high name of an angel which we may not invoke, will give us the key to the name of the demon which is to appear presently. Here is the table that will help us. The three root-consonants of the word Mizra(el) correspond to three others in the planet Mars, which contain the name--let us pronounce it silently, let us merely whisper it, for it is the name of the desired demon--Tekfael!

"The sum of the numerical value of the letters in this name is 488. A remarkable number, every figure reminding us of the mystical four, of the elements and of their correspondences! We shall commune with one of the mightiest and most terrible among the demons. On the waxen tablet with an iron frame, I now inscribe the name of the demon, adding the number 488, and these peculiar strokes which make up his signature. Time does not allow me to tell you now the rules by which the signature is formed from the name.

"The preparations are now completed, it only remains to order the apparatus, and to array ourselves. When we have put our implements in order, consecrated the room, cleansed ourselves by a bath, put on the white robe, wrapped a red mantle around (for red is the color of Mars), buckled the girdle of Mars about our waists, assumed the diadem, the breast-plates and the rings, I kindle on the altar my magical light, and the fire for incense, and draw the magical circle. Then an intense prayer for the protection of God, then the incantation.

"Here is the conjuration-book, the so-called Conjurer of Hell. I open at the page on which the martial incantations begin. The book is placed within the circle. When needed, I grasp it with the left hand; I hold the staff with my right."...

The Gothic room in which the incantation was to take place, presented a strange and at the same time solemn and awful aspect. The magician had arranged with practiced hand the things before mentioned. The skulls, the bones of men and beasts, the murderous weapons and the martial essence-flasks, the various and indescribable fragments from all the kingdoms of nature formed, nearest to the walls, different figures, triangles, squares and pentagons. Red drapery was hung over the naked walls. In the midst of the room and inside the circularly arranged pentagram were the fire and incense-altar with holy water. On a table in the rear, but partly within the circle, the magical lights were burning, and diffused an uncertain whitish-yellow light over the objects. Near the candlestick were the two bells. We were arrayed in our garments. The face of my companion was pale as death: probably mine also.

"Courage, fortitude! ... or you are lost!" whispered the magician, whose eye beamed with a dark, solemn determination, and whose every feature expressed at this moment a terrible resolution.

These were his last words before the incantation. We were allowed to answer nothing. I tried to be courageous, but my soul was shaken by a dreadful expectation. The prayer and religious ceremonies which we had performed after the bath and change of dress, had not diminished but only intensified this feeling.

The night wind shook the windows hidden behind the heavy draperies. It seemed as if ghosts from another world had been lurking behind the gently waving curtains.

Even the skulls appeared to me to bode from their sunken, vacant eyes, the arrival of something appalling. One of them attracted my attention for a long time, or rather exercised on me the same influence which the eye of the rattle-snake is said to have upon the bird which he approaches to devour. I noticed in the eye a metallic lustre. It was the gleam of the light reflected from a martial stone fastened in the skull.

In the mean time the magician had seized the blood-stained sword, and drew, murmuring a prayer the while, a threefold magical circle around the pentagram. Between the circumferences he wrote the names of the angels of the year, the season, the day and the hour. Towards the east he made the sign of Alpha, towards the west of Omega. Then he divided the circle by a cross into four fields. He assigned two of them, those behind him, to me and my companions. They were large enough to kneel upon. We were strictly enjoined not to leave them, not to allow even a fold of our mantles to wave outside the circle. Forgetfulness in this respect would cost us our lives. The magician put aside his sword in a triangle outside of the circle. He sprinkled himself and us with holy water, read formularies over the incense and the thorn twigs, and kindled them. This was the sign for us to give ourselves to prayer. We must not cease praying until we had heard the first word of the incantation. The incense spread, as it were, a dim transparent veil over the room. Here and there it was condensed into strange figures: now human, now fantastic animal shapes arose against the vaulted wall and sank again.

There must have been something narcotical in those vapory clouds. I looked at them in a half dreaming state while my lips repeated inaudibly the enjoined prayers.

I was aroused from this condition by the first word of the incantation which struck my soul like a thunder-bolt, and awakened me to full consciousness of my position and of the significance of the hour. The blood in my veins seemed changed to ice.

The magician stood before me, tall, erect and commanding. He had taken the incantation-book and now read from it with a hollow voice the first citation, which begins with a long formulary invoking the different mystical names of God.

I can not repeat the quotation. The highest and the lowest, the divine and the infernal, that for whose sacredness we feel an irrepressible reverence and that for whose impiety we experience the deepest horror, were united here in the most solemn and the most terrible words that human tongue has ever stammered. Now first I began to form an idea of the power of words.

The name of the demon was not yet uttered. The nearer the moment for its pronunciation approached, the deeper became the voice of the magician. Now came the formula of invocation, and now--resounded the name Tekfael.

It appeared as if a thousand-fold but whispering echo from the vault above, from the corners of the room, from all the skulls and from the very incantation-book itself, repeated that name.

The magician became silent, the incense was condensed and assumed a reddish tint which gradually became more and more diffused. We seemed to hear the thunder rolling, at first from a distance, then nearer, finally over our heads. It was as if the tower had been shaken and the vault over our heads been rent. My knees trembled. Suddenly a flash of lightning shot through the red mass. The magician extended his staff, as if he had wished to stop it. He raised his voice anew, strong and powerful amidst the continued peals of thunder. The smoke grew thin again; from its wreaths there appeared before the magician in the immediate vicinity of the circle, and at the opposite end of his staff, a dim apparition, a figure whose first aspect bereft me of my reason. I felt as if I had fallen to the floor,--as if I had been lost....

I awakened with the perspiration of agony on my forehead, but fortunately in my own bed and in the nineteenth century. The view from my window is cheerful and enlivening. I see a river which bears proud ships, quays swarming with men, and broad streets with houses in a graceful and light renaissance style. I lived again in the present which pleased me the best, next to dreaming of the future....

They strove for something great, however, those learned magicians of the Middle Ages. Theirs was a mighty imaginative creation. It lies in ruins never to arise again; but the crumbled debris testify to the belief in an all-embracing human power and knowledge.

These learned magicians were likewise restless Faust-natures, as distinct from the usual type of the learned of their time as Faust from the pedantic gloss-proud, unaspiring milk-sop Wagner. While they paid their tribute of weakness to tradition, and formed their system on received dicta, it was among them that presentiments of the future began to stir, and a longing for a clearer light than that with which the scholastics and doctors angelici et seraphici felt themselves well contented. When the study of ancient Greece was recommencing, when the dawn of the renaissance appeared, it was these enthusiastic natures, still groping among the dreams of magic art, that first began to awake and think. It was a feeling of the insufficiency of the ruling theology and scholasticism which had driven them into the temple of "secret philosophy." Since its pillars were brought from diverse spheres of culture, distrust and fear of magic had become more universal than directly ecclesiastical; they had drunk as deeply from profane tradition as from Christian, considering them both to flow from the same divine source: their writers quote Porphyrius by the side of John, and the pretender Hermes by the side of Paul. The courage with which they tried to burst open the portals of the spirit-world served them afterwards when from the shores of their childhood's belief they were to venture out on the ocean of thought. Campanella, Vanini, Giordano Bruno, and Cardanus stand on the dividing line between dogmatico-fantastical magic and a philosophy in the sense of the old Greeks and of modern times. If already previously some magicians of the old type had died from persecution, it was not to be wondered at that such "atheists" as Vanini and Bruno must now ascend the pile.

The occult sciences of the Middle Ages with their origin not from paradise and Noah's ark, as believed by their adherents, but from an ancient Oriental culture and with their power over even the strongest and most independent souls that could arise under the influence of a Church which levels all thought, may properly remind those who are willing to forget it, of a sad but incontestable truth: That humanity may embrace during the course of many and long centuries with the most candid faith, and construct with immense labor into a system, dogmas which have been received without questioning, and which contain more of the false than of the true, the great antiquity of which does not give them more claim for validity than is possessed by the error which arose yesterday and vanished to-day. No special divine influence has saved or will save the generations from inheriting the errors less than the acquired truths of their predecessors--no other divine influence, I should say, than the impulse we feel to think for ourselves in order to attain to clearness.

IV.

THE MAGIC OF THE PEOPLE AND THE STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH AGAINST IT.