XI

FORTITUDE---STRENGTH---LA FORCE

Listen now to the secret of strength. A constant dropping will wear away a stone, and in the end will perforate it. The aim to which you ever devote your will power will be at length attained; you begin to succeed as soon as you begin to will success. Real will power is not a privilege in the hands of the multitude. To exercise true will power you must be free; no one of the multitude is free; to be free is to be the master of your life, and over others. To learn how to will is to learn how to exercise dominion. But to be able to exert will power you must first know; for will power applied to folly is madness, death, and hell.

To mistake the means for the end is an absurdity.

To mistake for the end that which is not even a means is the acme of absurdity.

You are the master of all the events you can overcome. Things for which you have an imperious need are masters over you.

Things you possess the right to desire, you have the power to obtain.

You must be ever watchful in the exercise of your will, and be heedful that you do not fall into a position of dependence from want of exertion, from simple idleness.

Men who are to contend together in a race must go through a long and severe training.

Magical ceremonies may be regarded as a sort of gymnastic exercise of the will power, and for this reason all the great teachers of the world have recommended them as proper and efficacious. In any religious sect only those who carry out the external observances are reckoned as real supporters of the cause.

The more one does, the more one can do in the future.

To live a life guided by the caprice of the moment is to lead the life of an animal; this may conceivably be a life of innocence, but it is a life of submission.

Those who watch, those who fast, those who pray, those who refrain from pleasure, those who place body at the command of mind, can bring all the powers of nature into subjection to their purposes. Such as these are the world's masters; such men alone do works which survive them.

Never confound the slaves of superstition and fear with such masters of nature.

To abstain from pleasant things through fear is to enslave the will; such conduct tends to lower rather than to raise your position.

To live like an anchorite, without the superstitious ignorance which leads him to such a course of life, this is wisdom indeed, and power is the reward.

Notes

The Eleventh Tarot Trump represents an erect female figure, robed and crowned, closing with her naked hands the jaws of a furious lion, and yet showing complete ease and self-possession. Its meaning is persevering strength and indomitable energy. Christian considers that it typifies that Principle which underlies the exhibition of power, and then Moral Force, and lastly Physical Force.

XII

THE HANGED MAN---LE PENDU

The number Twelve completes a cycle, and this highly mystical Trump represents the Completion of the Great Work. This startling design might be also represented by a cross above a triangle within a Tau, that is, by four multiplied by three and enshrined in a Universe.

The pack of Tarot Cards, otherwise the Book of Taro---which word is an anagram of Rota, a wheel or cycle---consists in truth of a magical, hieroglyphic and kabalistic alphabet, to which are added four decades, and four quaternions, which enshrine the mystic significance of the Wheel of Ezekiel. The true aim of the Great Work is to volatilise the fixed after having accomplished the fixation of the volatile.

By a mystical rectification and a subsequent sublimation is the Universal Medicine to be obtained, and so is also the art of the Transmutation of metals; by which art indeed even the most gross and impure substances may be at once changed into pure and living gold. But no one will succeed in this magical transmutation until he has learned to despise earthly riches, and is content with the holy poverty of the true adept. So, then, if any one attains to this sublime secret, he will treasure it with almost superhuman care, and it will so never be divulged to any other human being; it must be self attained. The secret matter of the Philosopher is composed of volatilised Salt, of Mercury which has been fixed, and of purified Sulphur; this perfected Matter is the Azoth of the philosophers. The Salt is only to be volatilised by condensation from the Seven rays of Sol, which are the respective soul essences of the seven metals. The Mercury is fixed by saturation with the Solar essence. The Sulphur is purified by the heat of the Seven luminous rays.

When a man is fully initiated he has a knowledge of all those processes, and he knows that he holds these secrets under the penalty of death. The Taro can preserve you from the danger of such punishment, by rendering you incapable of the commission of such a crime. Remember the histories of Prometheus and Tantalus. The former stole the sacred fire from heaven and transferred it to the earth. The latter violated the privacy of nature to seize the secrets of divinity. Remember also the fate of Ixion, who attempted to ravish the Queen of the Sky. Remember also the Cross and the Stake. Ponder over the long martyrdom of Raymond Lully, the inconceivable sufferings of Paracelsus, the madness of William Postel, the wandering life and miserable end of Cornelius Agrippa. Love God, gain wisdom, and preserve unutterable silence.

Notes

The Twelfth Tarot Trump, named the Hanged Man, is the most closely veiled of all Tarot hieroglyphics. Its real meaning is now known to but very few; there is the gravest doubt whether Levi knew it himself. Papus, who has produced a work on the Tarot, gives a clearly faulty explanation. Neither Etteilla nor Court de Gebelin grasped the hidden meaning. But its significance has in some cases been found by clairvoyant visions, and in a few by intuition. The key is held by such as know rightly to which Hebrew letter it belongs and the correspondences of that letter.

The picture shows a man with his hands tied behind his back, and a rope is seen tied around his ankles, the other end being attached to a beam, so that when the card is held with its number at the top, the man appears to be hung up by his feet. Levi in his Dogme gives the following statement:-----

"This hanged man, then, is the Adept bound by his engagements, spiritualised, as is shown by his inverted position. He is Prometheus subjected to everlasting torture as a punishment for his glorious theft; or similarly he is Judas the traitor, and his sufferings threaten any one who should reveal the Great Arcanum. Lastly, to the Kabalist, this hanged man, who corresponds to his twelfth dogma, that of the Promised Messiah, is a protest against that Saviour whom the Christians worship, and they seem to be still saying to Jesus, 'How canst thou save others, thou who couldst not save thyself?' "

XIII

DEATH---LA MORT

An effort must now be made to learn the truth concerning the greatest and most consoling, yet also the most formidable of the Minor Arcana----concerning Death. Now, in truth, Death is but a phantom of your ignorance and fear. Death has no existence in the Sanctum Regnum of existence. A change, however awful, demonstrates movement, and movement is life; those only who have attempted to check the disrobing of the spirit have tried to create a real death. We all are dying and being renewed every day, because every day our bodies have changed to some extent. Be troubled lest you soil and tear your bodily raiment, your coat of skin, but fear not to leave it aside when the time has come for a period of repose from the work of this world.

Leave not your material garment for ever, until the time for your departure has come; that is, destroy not your own life, for it may be that you would awake to find yourself naked, chill, and ashamed: it may be too that such a corpse feels its own necropsy. Do not attempt to preserve the bodies of the dead, let nature do her work at once; let there be no worship of a dead body, for it represents but the ragged old clothes of a life.

Do not grieve for the beloved dead, for they are even more alive than you. If you regret the loss of their affection and support, you may still love their memory, and waft messages to them, and perchance may receive an answer; for by the aid of the Keys of Solomon the barriers of the thither world, the plane of disembodied beings, and even of the heaven, may be raised for a moment.

Understand well that the life-current of the progress of souls is regulated by a law of development, which carries the individual ever upward, and there is no tendency to a natural fall. Souls shall only fall who elect to descend and choose the evil rather than the good. The material plane on which you live is a prison to you, and if souls fall and come back to it, they become again imprisoned.

If you desire to communicate with those who have passed on, you must.

But be warned in time against many deceptions, for your fancied souls in heaven may be but phantoms of the air; elementaries, shadows of humanity energised by elemental beings; mere senseless astral forms, and of no more value than the mirage of dreams.

Necromancy, and Goetia, which is Evil Magic, do produce such shells and demons, apparitions of deceit. If, however, you are an adept of the True White Higher school, you will at all times condemn and challenge the practice of such fatal science.

The only possible mode of communion with souls of a higher sphere, who have passed beyond the terrestrial aura by reason of the change called Death, is by dream or ecstasy; but on waking to common consciousness there will be no recollection present in the mind of what has passed, because, owing to the change of plane, each idea necessarily suffers a change of form---a recurrence of the dream, or a return to the ecstasy, recalls what has gone before.

It is a curious fact that most persons fail to remember anything of good and happy dreams, even althought they do often recall dreams of sin and folly and absurdity; the reason being that these latter are more closely, and good ideals are less closely, related to our very materially minded lives on earth.

Now if the purely minded adept and pupil of the Higher Magic does seriously aspire to communion with a soul on the plane above him, the true way is as follows.

But again you must take warning that unless the aspirant is pure, and the strong with health, and wise in procedure, there will be grave risk of disordering the mind, or of catalepsy, or even of death.

Every puerile and commonplace thought must be banished from the mind, for if this be not done, and if a ceremony of such awful solemnity be entered upon lightly, frivolously, or from a vain curiosity, there will come a moment when the dread "King of Earth" will appear and punish. The mind and emotions must then be raised to a pitch of sublime exaltation proceeding from a pure and disinterested love. Bring to remembrance all the sweet sayings of the departed one, formuate her aims and good efforts, collect around you all that belonged to her and reminds you of her face, form, and personality. Observe the dates of her birth and death (and of any special events which have drawn you two together); choose such a day. Prepare for this date by daily retiring to a quiet room, if possible where she has lived, or where she has been, and pass an hour there in darkness, or at least with the eyes shut, pondering over her words and ideas, conversing in imagination with her as listening to her conceived answers. When the day comes near you must for seven days, and should for even fourteen days, abstain rigorously from useless communications with other persons, from follies, from demonstrations of affection to all others, and from every form of physical and mental excess; take but one meal a day, and drink no stimulant nor narcotic liquids.

When the fateful day has come, take a portrait of the beloved one, a sun picture is the best (photograph), or if a painting, it should be one executed with the greatest care and detail. With great care and delicacy prepare the room and the collected objects which have belonged to the deceased, make them all spotlessly clean, and give especial care to the portrait; place it in a good position, and decorate the frame with the flowers she loved. During the day you should pass several hours in the chamber alone, seated in contemplation of the portrait and the ideas and reminiscences of the dead friend.

When the even has come you must bathe, and clothe yourself in clean linen, and put on a white mantle. Enter the sacred chamber, fasten the door and perform the Conjuration of the Four Elements. Upon a chafing-dish you then burn wood of the laurel, with aloes and incense. There must be no other light in the room. When the wood and incense have burned down and the fire is at the point of extinction, then in a deep and solemn voice call three times in succession upon the name of the beloved dead one. This you must do with all your force of heart and of spirit, with intense will power; close the eyes, cover them with the hands, sink on your knees and pray.

Then at last, after a solemn pause, call softly and with sweet voice the name of the loved one three times; and open your eyes, and see----------.

Notes

The Tarot Trump, No. xiii., is named Death, and represents a human skeleton, armed with a scythe, mowing the grassy soil, upon which are seen human remains. To this Levi in his Rituel assigns the meanings dominion and power, rebirth, creation, and destruction.

P. Christian writes: "In the Divine World the meanings is constant change of form; in the Intellectual World, the ascent of human spirit to divine spheres; and in the Physical World, natural death following decay of the material envelope."