"You see it won't do to play with the world spirits of Evil.
I used to know a rich bachelor who had a mania for the occult sciences. He was president of a theosophic society and he even wrote a little book on the esoteric doctrine, in the Isis series. Well, he could not, like the Péladan and Papus tribe, be content with knowing nothing, so he went to Scotland, where Diabolism is rampant. There he got in touch with the man who, if you stake him, will initiate you into the Satanic arcana. My friend made the experiment. Did he see him whom Bulwer Lytton in Zanoni calls 'the dweller of the threshold'? I don't know, but certain it is that he fainted from horror and returned to France exhausted, half dead."
"Evidently all is not rosy in that line of work," said Durtal. "But it is only spirits of Evil that can be evoked?"
"Do you suppose that the Angels, who, of earth, obey only the saints, would ever consent to take orders from the first comer?"
"But there must be an intermediate order of angels, who are neither celestial nor infernal, who, for instance, commit the well-known asininities in the spiritist séances."
"A priest told me one day that the neuter larvæ inhabit an invisible, neutral territory, something like a little island, which is beseiged on all sides by the good and evil spirits. The larvæ cannot long hold out and are soon forced into one or the other camp. Now, because it is these larvæ they evoke, the occultists, who cannot, of course, draw down the angels, always get the ones who have joined the party of Evil, so unconsciously and probably involuntarily the spiritist is always diabolizing."
"Yes, and if one admits the disgusting idea that an imbecile medium can bring back the dead, one must, in reason, recognize the stamp of Satan on these practises."
"However viewed, Spiritism is an abomination."
"So you don't believe in theurgy, white magic?"
"It's a joke. Only a Rosicrucian who wants to hide his more repulsive essays at black magic ever hints at such a