Incoherence and abuse are the only messages of table-turning; they are echos of the low-life deeps of thought, absurd and anarchic dreams, words which the scum of the people make use of to express defiance. There is a book by Baron de Guldenstubbé,[217] who pretends to conduct a correspondence with the other world. He has had answers, and such answers—obscene sketches, despairing hieroglyphics and the following Greek signature, [Greek: pneuma thanatos], which may be translated “spirit of death.” Such is the last word of the phenomenal revelations according to American doctrine; such is doctrine itself in separation from sacerdotal authority and in the attempt to establish it independently of hierarchic control. The reality and importance of the phenomena, the good faith of those who believe them, are in no sense denied; but we must warn all who are concerned against the dangers to which they are liable if they do not prefer the spirit of wisdom, communicated divinely and hierarchically to the Church, before all these disorderly and obscure messages, in which the fluidic soul of the earth reflects automatically the mirage of intelligence and the dreams of slumbering reason.
BOOK V
THE ADEPTS AND THE PRIESTHOOD
ה—HE
CHAPTER I
PRIESTS AND POPES ACCUSED OF MAGIC
We have explained that owing to the profanations and impieties of Gnostics the Church proscribed Magic. The condemnation of the Knights Templar completed the rupture, and from this time forward, compelled to seek concealment and plan revenge in the shadows, Magic ostracised the Church in turn. More prudent than those arch-heretics who opposed altar to altar in public day, and thus entailed denunciation and the headsman’s axe on themselves, the adepts dissimulated their resentment as well as their doctrines. They bound themselves together by dreadful oaths and, realising the importance of first securing a favourable view at the tribunal of public opinion, they turned back on their accusers and judges the sinister rumours by which they were pursued themselves and denounced the priesthood to the people as a school of Black Magic.
So long as his convictions and beliefs are not rooted in the irremovable foundation of reason, man ardently and indifferently desires both truth and falsehood; on either side he finds that there are cruel reactions. Who shall put an end to this warfare? Only the spirit of Him who has said: “Render not evil for evil, but overcome evil by good.”
The Catholic priesthood has been charged with the spirit of persecution, though its mission is that of the good Samaritan, for which reason it superseded the unpitying Levites who continued their way without extending compassion to him who had fallen among thieves. It is in the exercise of humanity that priests prove their Divine consecration. Hence it is a supreme injustice to cast upon sacerdotalism at large the crimes or certain men who are unfortunately sealed with the priesthood. For a man, as such, it is always possible to be wicked; but a true priest is, on the contrary, always charitable. Now, the false adepts did not look at the question from this standpoint;[218] for them the Christian priesthood was made void and was hence an usurping power since the proscription of the Gnostics. What, said they, is a hierarchy whose degrees are no longer regulated by conscience? The same ignorance of the Mysteries and the same blind faith drive into the same fanaticism or the same hypocrisy the prime leaders and lowest ministers of the sanctuary. The blind are leaders of the blind. The supremacy between equals is no longer anything but the result of intrigue and chance. The pastors consecrate the sacred elements with a gross and disordered faith; they are jugglers in bread and eaters of human flesh; they are no longer thaumaturgists but sorcerers. Such was the sectarian verdict. To support the calumny they invented fables, affirming for example that the popes had been given over to the spirit of darkness ever since the tenth century. The learned Gerbert, who was crowned as Sylvester II, made confession—as it is said—to this effect on his death-bed. Honorius III, being he who confirmed the Order of St. Dominic and preached the Crusades, was himself an abominable necromancer, author of a Grimoire which still bears his name and is reserved exclusively to priests. The same false adepts paraded and commented on this Grimoire, seeking in such manner to turn against the Holy See the most terrible of all popular prejudices at that period—the mortal hatred of those who, wrongly or rightly, passed publicly for sorcerers.
Some malevolent or credulous historians have favoured these lying inventions. Thus Platina, a scandalous chronicler of the papacy, reproduces from Martinus Polonus the calumnies against Sylvester II. According to this fable, Gerbert, who was proficient in mathematical science and the Kabalah, performed an evocation of the devil and required his assistance to attain the pontificate. The fulfilment of his ambition was not only promised by the demon but it was affirmed further that he should not die except at Jerusalem, to which place it will be understood readily that the magician determined inwardly that he would never go. He became pope as promised, but on a certain day, when he was saying Mass in a church at Rome, he felt seriously ill and remembering suddenly that the chapel wherein he was officiating was dedicated to the Holy Cross of Jerusalem, he realised what had come to pass. He caused a bed to be put up in the chapel and, summoning his cardinals, confessed publicly that he had engaged in commerce with demons. He ordained further that his dead body should be placed upon a chariot of green wood and should be drawn by two virgin horses, one black and the other white; that they should be started on their course but neither led nor driven; and that his remains should be interred wherever a halt was made. The chariot proceeded in this manner across Rome and stopped in front of the Lateran. Loud cries and groans were heard for a few moments, after which there was silence and the burial took place. So ends a legend the proper place of which is in the hawker’s chap-books.
Martinus Polonus, on the faith of whom Platina repeats such reveries, had borrowed them on his own part (a) from a certain Galfridus and (b) from Gervaise, a maker of chronicles, whom Naudé terms “the greatest forger of fables and the most notorious liar that ever took pen in hand.” From sources of similar value the protestants have derived a scandalous and obviously apocryphal story concerning a pretended Pope Joan, who was also a sorceress, as we have all heard: indeed she is one to whom books on Black Magic are still attributed. We have glanced at a memoir of this female pope by a protestant historian and have taken note of two very curious engravings contained therein. They are assumed to be portraits of the heroine but are in reality ancient Tarots, representing Isis crowned with a tiara. It is well known that the hieroglyphic figure on the second Tarot card is still called the female pope, being a woman wearing a tiara on which are the points of the crescent moon, or the horns of Isis. One example in the protestant book is even more remarkable; the hair of the figure is long and scanty; there is a solar cross on the breast; she is seated between the two pillars of Hercules: and behind her flows the ocean, with lotus-flowers blooming on the surface of the water. The second portrait represents the same divinity, with attributes of the sovereign priesthood and holding her son Horus in her arms. As Kabalistic documents, the two pictures are of singular value, but they are little to the purpose of those who are concerned with Pope Joan.
To dispose of the accusation of sorcery in respect of Gerbert, supposing that it could be taken seriously, it would be enough to mention that he was the most learned man of his century and having been preceptor of two sovereigns, he owed his election to the gratitude of one of his august pupils. He had extraordinary proficiency in mathematics, and his knowledge of physics may have exceeded that of his epoch; in a word, he was a man of universal erudition and great ability, as the letters which he left bear witness, though he was not a denouncer of kings like the terrible Hildebrand. He chose to instruct princes rather than excommunicate them, and enjoying the favour of two French kings and three emperors, he had no need, as Naudé has judiciously pointed out, to sell himself to the devil for the archbishoprics of Rheims and Ravenna, or for the papacy in succession to these. It is true that he attained the successive positions, to some extent in spite of his merit; it was an age when able politicians were taken for possessed people and those who were learned for enchanters. Gerbert was not only a great mathematician, as we have said, and a distinguished astronomer, but he excelled also in mechanics, and—according to William of Malmesbury—he erected at Rheims such wonderful hydraulic machines that the water itself executed symphonies and played most enchanting airs. Moreover, according to Ditmare, he adorned the town of Magdebourg with a clock which registered all the motions of heaven and the times when the stars rose and set. Finally, by the evidence of Naudé,[219] whom we cite once again with pleasure, he made “that test of brass which was devised so ingeniously that the before-mentioned William of Malmesbury was himself deceived thereby and referred it to Magic. Further, Onuphrius states that he saw in the Farnese library a learned book on geometry composed by this same Gerbert; and for myself I estimate that, without adjudicating on the opinion expressed by Erfordiensis and some others, who regard him as the maker of timepieces and of arithmetic as these exist now among us, all these evidences are sufficiently valid to warrant the conclusion that those who had never heard of cube, parallelogram, dodecahedron, almicantar, valsagora, almagrippa, cathalzem and other names, familiar enough in these days to such as understand mathematics, conceived that they were those of the spirits invoked by Gerbert and that such a multitude of things so rare could not emanate from a single personality in the absence of extraordinary advantages, from the possession of which it followed therefore that he must have been a magician.”
To indicate the lengths of impertinence and bad faith reached by makers of chronicles, it remains to say that Platina[220]—that maliciously naïve echo of all Roman pasquinades—affirms that the tomb of Sylvester II itself turned sorcerer, weeping prophetically at the approaching downfall of each pope and that the reprobate bones of Gerbert shook and rattled together when one of them was about to die. An epitaph engraved on the tomb lends colour to these wonders—so adds unblushingly the librarian of Sixtus IV. Such are the proofs which pass among historians as sufficient to certify the existence of a curious historical document. Platina was librarian of the Vatican; he wrote his history of the popes by order of Sixtus IV; he wrote also at Rome, where nothing could be easier than to verify the truth or falsehood of such an assertion, which notwithstanding the pretended epitaph never existed outside the imagination of the authors from whom Platina borrowed with incredible lack of caution[221]—a circumstance which moves justly the indignation of honest Naudé, whose further remarks shall follow: “It is a pure imposture and manifest falsehood, both in respect of the experience—being the pretended prodigies at the tomb of Sylvester II—the same having never been witnessed by anyone—and of the alleged inscription on the tomb, that inscription—as it exists really—having been composed by Sergius IV and so far from supporting the supposed magical fables, is, on the contrary, one of the most excellent testimonies that could be desired to the good life and integrity of Sylvester. It is truly a shameful thing that so many catholics should be abettors of a slander concerning which Marianus Scotus, Glaber, Ditmare, Helgandus, Lambert and Herman Contract, who were his contemporaries, make no mention.”