‘You are about to learn (says the Count to the author) how to command all nature: God alone will be your master; the philosophers alone your equals. The highest intelligences will be ambitious to obey your desire; the demons will not dare to approach the place where you are; your voice will make them tremble in the depths of the abyss, and all the invisible populace of the four elements will deem themselves happy to minister to your pleasures.... Have you the courage and the ambition to serve God alone, and to be lord over all that is not God? Have you understood what it is to be a man? Are you not weary of serving as a slave,—you, who were born for dominion?‘—(p. 27.)
[258]. Comte de Gabalis, p. 185. See the story of Noah’s calamity, and the salamander Oromasis, p. 140.
[259]. See Colin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, Art. Cabale. Horst furnishes a number of such words, Zauberbibliothek, vol. III. xvi. 2.
[260]. Horst inserts in his Zauberbibliothek the whole of a once famous cabbalistic treatise, entitled Semiphoras et Shemhamphoras Salomonis Regis, a medley of astrological and theurgic doctrine and prescription. The word Shemhamphorash is not the real word of power, but an expression or conventional representative of it. The Rabbis dispute whether the genuine word consisted of twelve, two-and-forty, or two-and seventy-letters. Their Gematria or cabbalistic arithmetic, endeavours partially to reconstruct it. They are agreed that the prayers of Israel avail now so little because this word is lost, and they know not ‘the name of the Lord.’ But a couple of its real letters, inscribed by a potent cabbalist on a tablet, and thrown into the sea, raised the storm which destroyed the fleet of Charles V. in 1542. Write it on the person of a prince (a ticklish business, surely), and you are sure of his abiding favour. Eisenmenger gives a full account of all the legends connected therewith, Entdecktes Judenthum, vol. i. pp. 157, 424, 581, &c. (Ed. 1711).
The rationale of its virtue, if we may so call it, affords a characteristic illustration of the cabbalistic principle. The Divine Being was supposed to have commenced the work of creation by concentrating on certain points the primal universal Light. Within the region of these was the appointed place of our world. Out of the remaining luminous points, or foci, he constructed certain letters—a heavenly alphabet. These characters he again combined into certain creative words, whose secret potency produced the forms of the material world. The word Shemhamphorash contains the sum of these celestial letters, with all their inherent virtue, in its mightiest combination.—Horst, Zauberbibliothek, vol. iv. p. 131.
[261]. See Das transcendentale magie und magische Heilarten im Talmud, von Dr. G. Brecher, p. 52. Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, ii. pp. 445, &c.
The Tractat Berachoth says the devils delight to be about the Rabbis, as a wife desireth her husband, and a thirsty land longeth after water,—because their persons are so agreeable. Not so, rejoins Eisenmenger, but because both hate the gospel and love the works of darkness.—(p. 447.)
[262]. See Horst’s Zauberbibliothek, vol. i. pp. 314-327.
[263]. Alban Butler, July 31.
[264]. Ribadeneira, Flos Sanctorum, Appendix, p. 35 (Ed. 1659).