THE Bible tells us that King Nebuchadnezzar, at the highest point of his power and his pride, was suddenly changed into a beast.
He fled into savage places, began to eat grass, let his beard and hair grow, as well as his nails, and remained in this state for seven years.
In our Dogme et rituel de la haute magie, we have said what we think of the mysteries of lycanthropy, or the metamorphosis of men into werewolves.
Everyone knows the fable of Circe and understands its allegory.
The fatal ascendant of one person on another is the true wand of Circe.
One knows that almost all human physiognomies bear a resemblance to one animal or another, that is to say, the signature of a specialized instinct.
Now, instincts are balanced by contrary instincts, and dominated by instincts stronger than those.
In order to dominate sheep, the dog plays upon their fear of wolves.
If you are a dog, and you want a pretty little cat to love you, you have only one means to take: to metamorphose yourself into a cat.
But how! By observation, imitation and imagination. We think that our figurative language will be understood for once, and we recommend this revelation to all who wish to magnetize: it is the deepest of all the secrets of their art.
Here is the formula in technical terms:
"To polarize one's own animal light, in equilibrated antagonism with the contrary pole."
Or:
To concentrate in one's self the special qualities of absorption in order to direct their rays towards an absorbing focus, and vice versa.
This government of our magnetic polarization may be done by the assistance of the animal forms of which we have spoken; they will serve to fix the imagination.
Let us give an example:
You wish to act magnetically upon a person polarized like yourself, which, if you are a magnetizer, you will divine at the first contact: only that person is a little less strong that you are, a mouse, while you are a rat. Make yourself a cat, and you will capture it.
In one of the admirable stories which, though he did not invent it, he has told better than anybody, Perrault puts upon the stage a cat, which cunningly induces an ogre to change himself into a mouse, and the thing is no sooner done, than the mouse is crunched by the cat. The Tales of Mother Goose, like the Golden Ass of Apuleius, are perhaps true magical legends, and hide beneath the cloak of childish fairy tales the formidable secrets of science.
It is a matter of common knowledge that magnetizers give to pure water the properties and taste of wine, liqueurs and every conceivable drug, merely by the laying-on of hands, that is to say, by their will expressed in a sign.
One knows, too, that those who tame fierce animals conquer lions by making themselves mentally and magnetically stronger and fiercer than lions.
Jules Gerard, the intrepid hunter of the African lion, would be devoured if he were afraid. But, in order not to be afraid of a lion, one must make one's self stronger and more savage than the animal itself by an effort of imagination and of will. One must say to one's self: It is I who am the lion, and in my presence this animal is only a dog who ought to tremble before me.
Fourier imagined anti-lions; Jules Gerard has realized that chimera of the phanlasterian {Fourier was a Socialist who wrote a sort of "Utopia." His social unit was the "phalanstére." --- TRANS.} dreamer.
But, one will say, in order not to fear lions, it is enough to be a man of courage and well armed.
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 pierces, 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. You are meditating upon a mystery of faith; St. Ignatius wishes, in the first place, that you should create a place, dream of it, see it, touch it. If it is hell, he gives you burning rocks to touch, he makes you swim in shadows thick as pitch, he puts liquid sulphur on your tongue, he fills your nostrils with an abominable stench, he shows you frightful tortures, and makes you hear groans superhuman in their agony; he commands your will to create all that by exercises obstinately persevered in. Every one carries this out in his own fashion, but always in the way best suited to impress him. It is not the hashish intoxication which was useful to the knavery of the Old Man of the Mountain; it is a dream without sleep, an hallucination without madness, a reasoned and willed vision, a real creation of intelligence and faith. Thence-forward, when he preaches, the Jesuit can say: "What we have seen with our eyes, what we have heard with our ears, and what our hands have handled, that do we declare unto you." The Jesuit thus trained is in communion with a circle of wills exercised like his own; consequently each of the fathers is as strong as the Society, and the Society is stronger than the world.
Last updated on the 21.June.00