by Sax Rohmer
“Do you know why the Temple of Solomon was destroyed?
“These events have been necessary because the Great Arcanum of the Knowledge of Good and of Evil has been revealed.
“Angels have fallen because they have attempted to divulge this Great Secret. It is the secret of Life, and when its first word is betrayed that word becomes fatal. If the Devil himself were to utter that word, he would die.”
This word, we are told, will destroy each one who speaks it and every one who hears it spoken. If it were spoken aloud in the hearing of the people of a town, that town would be given over to anathema. If that word were to be whispered beneath the dome of a temple, then within three days the temple doors would fly open, a Voice would utter a cry, the divine occupant would depart, and the building would fall in ruins. No refuge could be found for one who revealed it: if he mounted to the topmost part of a tower, the lightning flash would strike him; if he tried to hide himself in the caverns of the earth, a torrent would whirl him away; if he sought refuge in the house of a friend, he would be betrayed; if in the arms of the wife of his bosom, she would desert him in affright.
In his passion of despair he would renounce his science and knowledge, and, condemning himself to the same blindness as did Œdipus, would shriek out—” I have profaned the bed of my mother!”
“Happy is the man who solves the Enigma of the Sphinx, but wretched is he who retails the answer to another.”
He who has solved the secret and guards its secrecy is described as the “King of Earth”; he disdains mere riches, is inaccessible to any suffering or fear from destiny; he could wait with a smile the crash of worlds. This secret is, moreover, profaned and falsified by its mere revelation, and never yet has a just or a true idea come from its betrayal. “Those who possess it have found it. Those who pronounce it for others to hear have lost it — already.”
Those who would understand the mysteries and perform miracles are warned by Eliphas Lévi to weigh well their knowledge and power ere entering upon the attempt; for if they be in any way deficient, he says, they stand upon the brink of an abyss.
“But if you have secured the Lamp and Wand of Initiation, if you are cognizant of the secrets of the Nine, if you never speak to God without the Light which proceeds from Him, if you have received the mystical baptism of the Four Elements, if you have prayed upon the Seven Mountains, if you know the mode of motion of the Double Sphinxed Chariot, if you have grasped the dogma of why Osiris was a black god, if you are free, if you are a King, if you are in truth a priest in the Temple of Solomon — act without fear, and speak, for your words will be all-powerful in the spiritual kingdom....”
Furthermore, however, it is necessary to know the names and powers of the twelve precious jewels which are included in the crown of gold of the sun, and the names of the chief powers of the moon. Also, one must be familiar with the keys of the Fifty Gates, the secret of the Thirty-two Paths, and the characters of the Seven Spirits.
Incense plays a very important part in ritualistic sorcery, as it played an important part in Egyptian sorcery. Thus: — for conjurations on Sunday the incense should be cinnamon, frankincense, saffron, and red sandal-wood. For Monday: camphor, white sandal-wood, amber, and cucumber seeds. For Thursday: — ambergris, cardamom, “grains of paradise,” balm, mace, and saffron; and so on.
It may be of interest to mention here the constituents of Kyphi, the celebrated incense of Ancient Egypt. A recipe for its preparation is contained in the Ebers papyrus, and Ebers says that three different varieties were made up by L. Voigt, a Berlin chemist. That from the formula of Dioscorides was the best. It consisted of resin, wine, Rad. Galangœ, juniper berries, root of aromatic rush, asphaltum, mastic, myrrh, Burgundy grapes, and honey.
Lévi says of the Seal of Solomon:
“It consists in the interlaced triangles; the erect triangle is of flame colour, the inverse triangle is coloured blue. In the centre space there may be drawn a Tau cross and three Hebrew Yods, or a crux ansata (ankh), or the Triple Tau of the Arch-masons. He who with Intelligence and Will is armed with this emblem has need of no other thing; he should be all-potent, for this is the perfect sign of the Absolute.”
Éliphas Lévi also instructs us upon the formation and consecration of the Magic Wand. He who would possess it must select the wood of an almond or nut tree which has just flowered for the first time; the bough should be cut off at one blow by the “magical sickle.” It must be bored evenly from end to end without causing any crack or injury, and a magnetized steel needle of the same length as the bough must be introduced. One end must be closed by a clear, transparent glass bead, and the other end by a similar bead of resin: the ends should be covered then with sachets of silk. Two rings must next be fitted near the middle of the wand, one of copper and one of zinc, and two lengths of fine copper chain rolled around the wand. Upon the wand should then be written the names of the Twelve Spirits of the Zodiacal Cycle, with their sigils added, as below:
Finally, upon the copper ring must be engraved in Hebrew letters, from right to left, the words “The Holy Jerusalem,” H QDSHH JRUSHLIM; and upon the zinc ring in Hebrew letters, from right to left, the words “The King Solomon,” H MLK SHLMH, Heh Melek Shelomoh.
When the wand is complete, it must be consecrated by the invocations of the Spirits of the Four Elements and the Seven Planets, by ceremonies lasting over the seven days of a week, using the special incense and prayers for each day.
The consecrated wand, in common with all magical instruments, should be kept wrapped in silk, and never allowed in contact with any colour but black. The ideal receptacle for it is a cedar or ebony box.
With this wand, duly made and fully consecrated, “the Magus can cure unknown diseases, he may enchant a person or cause him to fall asleep at will, can wield the forces of the elements and cause the Oracles to speak.”
VIII. THE SOUL OF THE WORLD
Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits — and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!
I shall now draw your attention to the philosophy of the last of the Magi, as expounded in that chapter of The Magical Ritual called “L’Amoureux”:
He enjoins us to bear in mind that equilibrium results only from the opposition of forces, the active having no existence without the passive; that light without darkness is formless; and “Yea” can win no triumph save over “Nay.” Love, also, gains added strength from hate, and hell is the hotbed of such plants as shall bear root in heaven.
He tells us, too, that the great Fluidic Agent which is called the “Soul of the World,” and which is represented with the horned head of the Cow of Isis to express animal fecundity, is a blind force.
The power which the Magus wields is composed of two opposing forces, which unite in love and disjoin in discord; love associating contraries, whilst hate makes of similars rivals and enemies. Hatred succeeds to love when by saturation the void has become filled, “unless the full cannot become empty”; but the usual result is an “equilibrated saturation, due to mutual repulsions.”
Sexual love the Magus regards as a physical manifestation; repugnance and pain may be forgotten by those who are under its sway. This is a form of inebriation arising from the attraction of two contrary fluids; and at the conjunction of the positive and negative poles there results an ecstasy and orgasm during which the loved one seems the brilliant phantom of a vision.
Our consideration is solicited for the bodily and mental disorders which result from solitude and its accompanying fluidic congestions, due to want of equilibrium: — such as nervous maladies, hysteria, hypochondriasis, megrim, vapours, and insane delusions. It becomes possible, in the light of the new wisdom, to understand the ailments of maidens, and of women of an uncertain age, of widows and of celibates.
Inspired by this natural law of equilibrium, “you may often predict the futu
re course of a life, and may cure many such ailments, often by distracting the attention when unduly fixed, and so may the Magus become as great a physician as Paracelsus, or as renowned a diviner as was Cornelius Agrippa. You will come to understand the diseases of the soul; the fact that learned and chaste persons often hunger after the pleasures of vice will be noticed, and so will it be observed that men and women steeped in vices turn at times to the consolations of virtue; and thus you may predict the occurrence of strange conversions and of unexpected sins, and great astonishment will be shown at your facility in discerning the most carefully concealed secrets of the heart and home, “Girls and women may be by such means of divination shown in dreams the forms of lover and husband; such confidantes are potent auxiliaries in magic arts; never abuse their position, never neglect their interests, for they are good gifts to the Magus. In order to possess an assured sway over the heads and hearts of women, it is essential to obtain the favour of both Gabriel, the Angel of the Moon, and of Anâel, the Angel of Venus.”
Certain female evil demons must be overcome and cast down in order that perfect equilibrium be established. Foremost of these are:
Nahémah, princess of the Succubi.
Lilith, queen of the Stryges, tempting to debauchery, and destroyer of maternal desire.
“Nahémah presides also over illicit and sterile caresses.
“Lilith rejoices in strangling in their cradles children whose origin has been soiled by the touch of Nahémah.”
The truly wise master of the Cabala, we are told, understands the concealed meaning of these names, and of such demoniac evil powers, which are also called the material envelopes or cortices or shells of the Tree of Life, soiled and blackened by the outer darkness; they are as branches which are dead, having been torn off the tree, whence issue light, life, and love.
Finally, these, according to Lévi, are some of the privileges of a Magus:
Aleph. — He sees God and is able to commune with the seven Genii around the throne.
V au. — He understands the reasons for the Present, the Past, and the Future.
Zain. — He holds the secret of what is meant by the resurrection from the dead.
A few of his powers are these:
Cheth. — The power of making the Philosopher’s Stone.
Teth. — The possession of the Universal Medicine.
Samedi. — To know in a moment the hidden thoughts of any man or woman.
Peh. — To foresee any future events which do not depend upon the will of a superior being.
Resh. — Never to feel love or hatred unless it is designed.
Shin. — To possess the secret of constant wealth, and never to fall into destitution or misery.
These privileges are the final degree of Human Perfectibility; these are open to attainment by the elect, by those who can dare, by those who would never abuse them and who know when to be silent.
IX. THE ELEMENTALS
Then said the second— “Ne’er a peevish boy
Would break the Bowl from which he drank in joy; And he that with his hand the Vessel made
Will surely not in after-wrath destroy.”
It will be seen that this form of sorcery has to do largely with the doctrine of Elemental Spirits. The existence of such intelligences has been credited from the earliest times, and the ginn and ‘efreet of Arabian lore are Elementals under another name.
There are early Assyrian incantations addressed to Elementals, and the 108th chapter of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead is called “The Chapter of Knowing the Spirits of the West.”
According to the Abbé de Villars, the air is full of an innumerable multitude of creatures of human form, somewhat fierce of aspect, but in reality tractable, great lovers of the sciences, excessively subtle, eager to serve the sage, but hostile to the fool. Their wives and daughters are beauties of a masculine type, and may be likened to the Amazons. The seas and rivers are thus inhabited as well as the air, and the beings who dwell therein were denominated Nymphs or Undines by the Adepts of the past. Few males are born to them, but the women are numerous, and they are very beautiful, so that the daughters of men cannot compare with them. The earth, too, is populated to a point within a short distance of its centre with Gnomes, who are people of a low stature, the guardians of buried treasure, of mines, and of gems. They are ingenious, amicable toward mankind, and may be commanded with ease. “They supply the Children of the Sages with the money which they need, and desire no other wages for their labours but the glory of the service.”
The Gnomides, their wives, are diminutive, but exceptionally pretty, and very quaint in their attire. Regarding the Salamanders, or igneous inhabitants of the fiery region, they serve the philosophers, but do not court their company, and their wives and daughters are even more elusive. The wives of the Salamanders, however, are more beautiful than any of the other Elemental, for their element is purer, and “you will be even more charmed with the beauty of their minds than with their physical perfections.
“Yet you cannot but pity these helpless creatures when I tell you that their souls are mortal, and that they have no hopes of enjoying that Eternal Being whom they know and religiously adore. Composed of the purest parts of the elements which they inhabit, and having no opposing qualities, they subsist, it is true, for many ages; yet what is time in comparison with eternity? They must eventually return to the abyss of oblivion. So much does this knowledge afflict them that they are frequently inconsolable. But God, whose mercy is infinite, revealed to our fathers, the philosophers, a remedy for this evil. They learned that in the same manner that man, by the alliance which he hath contracted with God, hath been made a partaker in divinity, so may the Sylphs, Gnomes, Undines, and Salamanders, by an alliance with man, be made partakers of immortality and of the bliss to which we aspire, when one of them is so happy as to be married to a sage, while Elementaries of the masculine kind can attain to the same glorious end by effecting a union with the daughters of the human race.”
This belief is responsible, of course, for the many fairy wives of fable. In the legends and folk-stories of nearly all countries, Asiatic and European, we find the enchanted-spouse motif occurring again and again, and some very curious parallels exist between such fables of the East and of the West; so that the idea of the fairy wife would appear to be common to all peoples, or traceable to some parent legend of remote antiquity.
In the medieval French romance of Mêlusine, the maiden of that name weds Raymond, on the condition that he shall never seek to see her upon a certain day in every week. To this he solemnly pledges himself. Eight sons are born of the union, and seven of these become great warriors. All goes well until the unhappy Raymond is persuaded, by the specious arguments of his brother, to break his solemn vow.
On the day of Mêlusine’s usual withdrawal from his society, he goes in search of her, and finds her in a bath, the lower part of her body having been transformed into that of a serpent! When, later, in the course of a quarrel, Raymond unjustly reproaches Mélusine as “a false serpent,” she, though against her will, takes flight through the open window in the likeness of a dragon.
This sufficiently remarkable fable becomes more remarkable still when considered side by side with “The Story of Hasan of El-Basrah” in The Thousand and One Nights. Hasan becomes enamoured of a damsel who “surpassed in her loveliness the beauties of the world, and the lustre of her face outshone the bright full moon; she surpassed the branches in the beauty of her bending motions, and confounded the mind with apprehension of incurring calumny.... She had a mouth like the seal of Suleyman, and hair blacker than the night of estrangement is to the afflicted, distracted lover, and a forehead like the new moon of the Festival of Ramadan, and eyes resembling the eyes of the gazelles, and an aquiline nose brightly shining, and cheeks like anemones, and lips like coral, and teeth like pearls strung on necklaces of native gold, and a neck like molten silver, above a figure like a willow-branch.”
This damsel
was the daughter of one of the Kings of the ginn, and when, by means not over-scrupulous, he had secured her for his wife, Hasan, like Raymond, passed many years in happiness with her. Then, in her husband’s absence, the daughter of the ginn is given access to a certain magical “dress of feathers,” contrary to the solemn injunctions of Hasan.
In the Arabian story this incident takes the place of Raymond’s intrusion upon the bath of Mélusine. For the fairy wife “took the dress and opened it, and took her child in her bosom... and became a bird... Having left a message that Hasan, if he desired to meet her again, should come to her “in the islands of WakWak” (said to lie east of Borneo), “she flew away with her children and sought her country.”
Perhaps one of the oldest myths of this class is the Hindu legend of Urvasi and Pururavas; but there is another very ancient Hindu legend, wherein Bheki, the frog, is a beautiful maiden who consents to wed a King on the extraordinary condition that he shall never show her a drop of water. Being faint, on one occasion, she is said to have asked for water, and he thoughtlessly giving her some, she immediately disappeared.
Paracelsus seems to have been responsible for the creation of the term “Undines” (the water Elementals). In Fouqué’s romance upon the subject, Undine takes the knight of her choice down into a submarine palace, where she marries him, making him promise that he will never speak angrily to her when on, or near to, any water. Needless to say, he breaks his promise.
In addition to these stories, there are numberless other fairy-wife fables in the literature of East and West, as that of King Ruzvanshah, a Persian story, and the Turkish fable of the King of Yemen, both of whom espoused daughters of the ginn. The conditions of the union are very nearly identical in every case.
One of the most uncanny creatures of the human invention, the werewolf, may be included among fairy spouses; and a belief in the existence of these was current in ancient and medieval times, and prevails to this day among many savage races, and even in out-of-the-way parts of France, Russia, and Bulgaria.