HISTORY OF MAGIC.

the eternity of punishment.

"God," they said, "can take infinite vengeance for a finite offense, because if the nature of the offender has limits, the greatness of the offended has none."

By this logic and under this pretext, an emperor of the earth should punish with death the irrational child who might by mistake soil the edge of his purple robe. No, such are not the prerogatives of greatness, and Saint Augustine understood them better when he wrote: "God is patient because he is eternal!"

In God everything is justice, because everything is goodness; he never forgives in the manner of men, because he cannot become angry like them. But evil being by its nature incompatible with good, as night is with day, as dissonance is with harmony, and man being furthermore inviolable in his freedom, every error is expiated, every evil is punished by a proportional suffering. It is useless to call Jupiter to our aid when our cart is stuck in the mud; if we do not take up the shovel and the pickaxe like the wagoner in the fable, Heaven will not pull us out of the rut. "Help yourself, and Heaven will help you!" Thus is explained, in a completely rational and purely philosophical manner, the possible and necessary eternity of punishment, with a narrow path open to man to escape it: that of repentance and work!

By conforming to the rules of eternal force, man can assimilate himself to the creative power and become a creator and preserver like it. God has not limited to a restricted number of rungs the luminous ladder of Jacob. Everything that nature has made inferior to man, she submits to man. It is up to him to enlarge his domain by always climbing! Thus the length and

INTRODUCTION.

even the perpetuity of life, the atmosphere and its storms, the earth and its metallic veins, light and its prodigious mirages, the night and its dreams, death and its phantoms: all this obeys the royal scepter of the mage, the shepherd's staff of Jacob, the lightning rod of Moses. The adepte an initiate into the secret sciences makes himself king of the elements, transformer of metals, arbiter of visions, director of oracles, and finally master of life, within the mathematical order of nature and in accordance with the will of the supreme intelligence. This is magic in all its glory! But who in our century will dare to put faith in our words? Only those who wish to study loyally and know frankly, for we no longer hide the truth under the veil of parables or hieroglyphic signs. The time has come when everything must be told, and we propose to tell everything.

We are going to discover not only this science that is always occult original: "occulte", meaning hidden or secret. which, as we have said, hid itself under the shadows of the ancient mysteries; which was poorly revealed, or rather unworthily disfigured by the Gnostics; which one glimpses beneath the obscurities covering the alleged crimes of the Templars; and which one finds wrapped in now impenetrable enigmas in the rites of high Masonry. But we are also going to bring into the light of day the fantastic king of the Sabbath the legendary assembly of witches, and show ghastly realities at the heart of black magic itself, which has long been abandoned to the mockery of the children of Voltaire The 18th-century French philosopher known for his wit and skepticism..

For a great number of readers, magic is the science of the devil. No doubt. Just as the science of light is that of shadow.

We first boldly confess that the devil does not