WE often become sad in thinking that the most beautiful life must finish, and the approach of the terrible unknown that one calls death disgusts us with all the joys of existence.
Why be born, if one must live so little? Why bring up with so much care children who must die? Such is the question of human ignorance in its most frequent and its saddest doubts.
This, too, is what the human embryo may vaguely ask itself at the approach of that birth which is about to throw it into an unknown world by stripping it of its protective envelope. Let us study the mystery of birth, and we shall have the key of the great arcanum of death!
Thrown by the laws of Nature into the womb of a woman, the incarnated spirit very slowly wakes, and creates for itself with effort organs which will later be indispensable, but which as they grow increase its discomfort in its present situation. The happiest period of the life of the embryo is that when, like a chrysalis, it spreads around it the membrane which serves it for refuge, and which swims with it in a nourishing and preserving fluid. At that time it is free, and does not suffer. It partakes of the universal life, and receives the imprint of the memories of Nature which will later determine the configuration of its body and the form of its features. That happy age may be called the childhood of the embryo.
Adolescence follows; the human form becomes distinct, and its sex is determined; a movement takes place in the maternal egg which resembles the vague reveries of that age which follows upon childhood. The placenta, which is the exterior and the real body of the foetus, feels germinating in itself something unknown, which already tends to break it and escape. The child then enters more distinctly into the life of dreams. Its brain, acting as a mirror of that of its mother, reproduces with so much force her imaginations, that it communicates their form to its own limbs. Its mother is for it at that time what God is for us, a Providence unknown and invisible, to which it aspires to the point of identifying itself with everything that she admires. It holds to her, it lives by her, although it does not see her, and would not even know how to understand her. If it was able to philosophize, it would perhaps deny the personal existence and intelligence of that mother which is for it as yet only a fatal prison and an apparatus of preservation. Little by little, however, this servitude annoys it; it twists itself, it suffers, it feels that its life is about to end. Then comes an hour of anguish and convulsion; its bonds break; it feels that it is about to fall into the gulf of the unknown. It is accomplished; it falls, it is crushed with pain, a strange cold seizes it, it breathes a last sigh which turns into a first cry; it is dead to embryonic life, it is born to human life!
During embryonic life it seemed to it that the placenta was its body, and it was in fact its special embryonic body, a body useless for another life, a body which had to be thrown off as an unclean thing at the moment of birth.
The body of our human life is like a second envelope, useless for the third life, and for that reason we throw it aside at the moment of our second birth.
Human life compared to heavenly life is veritably an embryo. When our evil passions kill us, Nature miscarries, and we are born before our time for eternity, which exposes us to that terrible dissolution which St. John calls the second death.
According to the constant tradition of ecstatics, the abortions of human life remain swimming in the terrestrial atmosphere which they are unable to surmount, and which little by little absorbs them and drowns them. They have human form, but always lopped and imperfect; one lacks a hand, another an arm, this one is nothing but a torso, and that is a pale rolling head. They have been prevented from rising to heaven by a wound received during human life, a moral wound which has caused a physical deformity, and through this wound, little by little, all of their existence leaks away.
Soon their moral soul will be naked, and in order to hide its shame by making itself at all costs a new veil, it will be obliged to drag itself into the outer darkness, and pass slowly through the dead sea, the slumbering waters of ancient chaos. These wounded souls are the larvae of the second formation of the embryo; they nourish their airy bodies with a vapour of shed blood, and they fear the point of the sword. Frequently they attach themselves to vicious men and live upon their lives, as the embryo lives in its mother's womb. In these circumstances, they are able to take the most horrible forms to represent the frenzied desires of those who nourish them, and it is these which appear under the figures of demons to the wretched operators of the nameless works of black magic.
These larvae fear the light, above all the light of the mind. A flash of intelligence is sufficient to destroy them as by a thunderbolt, and hurl them into that Dead Sea which one must not confuse with the sea in Palestine so-called. All that we reveal in this place belongs to the tradition of seers, and can only stand before science in the name of that exceptional philosophy, which Paracelsus called the philosophy of sagacity, philosophia sagax.
Last updated on the 21.June.00