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In short I became the patron saint of the house. The usual subject of my lectures was the exaltation of human nature, and the intercourse of men with superior beings; the infallible Count Gabalis was my oracle.
It will be remembered that Pope was indebted to a hint from Gabalis for his aerial machinery in The Rape of the Lock. p. 406 Iredonozar. p. 407 Harlequin comes out on the Stage.
Then we have a little about the Rosicrucians and the Comte de Gabalis, and the theory of the Rabbis, from whom the Rosicrucians borrowed so much, all told in the same lively manner, all utterly new to ninety-nine readers out of a hundred, all indicating, we are bound to say, a much more extensive reading than appears on the page itself.
The reader need only compare Les Soeurs Maçonnes, pp. 323 to 330, with the "Conjuration of the Four" in the fourth chapter of the Rituel de la Haute Magie. It will be objected that this conjuration is derived by Lévi himself from a source which he does not name, and as a fact part of it is found in the Comte de Gabalis.
I must confess the Count of Gabalis renders it plain, from Writ divine and humane, there are such friendly and intelligent Daemons. Char.
In the very early days of imaginative prophecy, the 'elemental' nature of certain beings was accepted by men accounted wise in their own time, in the long ago discredited assertions of the Count de Gabalis and others of his mystic cult, and I am not entirely sure that there does not exist some ground for their beliefs. Life is many-sided; humanity can only be one facet of the diamond."
Read and hear, for your amusement, ingenious systems, nice questions subtilly agitated, with all the refinements that warm imaginations suggest; but consider them only as exercitations for the mind, and turn always to settle with common sense. I stumbled, the other day, at a bookseller's, upon "Comte Gabalis," in two very little volumes, which I had formerly read.
When materialism is rotten-ripe magic takes root. This phenomenon reappears every hundred years. Not to go further back, look at the decline of the last century. Alongside of the rationalists and atheists you find Saint-Germain, Cagliostro, Saint-Martin, Gabalis, Cazotte, the Rosicrucian societies, the infernal circles, as now. With that, good-bye and good luck."
Their Talmud, their Mischna, their Targums, and other traditions and writings of their Rabbins and Doctors, who were most of them Cabalists, are really more extravagant and absurd, if possible, than all that you have read in Comte de Gabalis; and indeed most of his stuff is taken from them.
I now comprehended how it was that the Count de Gabalis peopled his mystic world with sylphs, beautiful beings whose breath of life was lambent fire, and who sported forever in regions of purest ether and purest light. The Rosicrucian had anticipated the wonder that I had practically realized. How long this worship of my strange divinity went on thus I scarcely know. I lost all note of time.
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