Sâr Joséphin Péladan. A sculpture by Zacharie Astruc

in the collections of the Musée des Beaux-arts de Lyon.

*

In today’s sharing, from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA, we journey further among quotations & excerpts from the works of Joséphin Péladan, here excerpted from the 1898-1900 ‘La Terre du Sphinx’ (Land of the Sphinx), published by Editions Ernest Flammarion in Paris. English translation from the original French by Via-HYGEIA.

They are the four ‘dialogue avec un double‘ (dialog with a double) to which we have added a prolog and an epilog. These dialogs are strikingly revealing of Péladan’s state of mind at the time. It is set after the closing of the ‘affaire des deux roses‘ and all of its noise, division and hurt, which led him into a sort of self-imposed purgatory. If it wouldn’t have been for his wife Christiana Taylor, he wouldn’t have made the cathartic trips that followed this turbulent period.

These trip were the turning of a chapter in the book of his life; they deeply moved him and gave him an impressive amount of renewed inspiration and some of his best works were born after his return to Paris in semi-isolation until his premature death in 1918.

Here is a quote from a letter to Gabriel Boissy who rallied him during this last period:

‘You came at the time when, repairing the damage of an untimely publicity, the Work was closing itself, as much as it had been exaggeratedly opened. I know my sin and I do not despise it. I couldn’t love my epoch, in turn, it overwhelmed my zeal with its rejection. I have loved the past too much, its pumps and its works. With an archaic phraseology, supremely unpleasant, in the land of the universal suffrage and secularism, I have literally sinned using a dead language. My words were rebuffed, and the good I wished did not happen. I, only, was vanquished; the doctrine remains everlastingly red and would only bear a delay of expansion. The wish remains; if I cannot find the modern form of Truth, I will help those who have been called to its discovery, by the very lesson of my adventure. Among those who have inherited my labors with an experience that I lacked, you have been designated.’

In his 1952 foreword to Dr. Edouard Betholet’s second volume of ‘La Pensée et les Secrets du Sâr Joséphin Péladan‘, Emile Dantinne writes:

‘Dr. Bertholet writes about ‘Land of the Sphinx‘ as a ‘remarkable book we can open, read and re-read always with new benefits.’ To speak the truth, those blessed pages Péladan brings back from his trip to Egypt, the dialog with the Sphinx, the following dialogs with temple doubles alongside his excursions, are pure jewels of esotericism. Also, his comments upon the magical art of healing by the ancient Egyptians are the true mark of a clairvoyant and experienced practitioner. It is a pity, that no publishers have thought of re-publishing this admirable ‘Land of the Sphinx‘ and its companion, ‘Land of Christ‘.‘

Via-HYGEIA-Bibliotherapy can announce a forth-coming sampler (number IV), in which we will publish the part about ‘healing in ancient Egypt‘ with an extensive commentary by Dr. Bertholet.

**

Prolog

The Sphinx does not disappoint: statue or monument, work of art or symbol, pentacle or master-piece, in whatever series we place it, it has no match and nothing has out-classed it; nothing has out-limited its concept and its making.

The head-wear looks like bat wings; the Ureus is missing, so does the nose, the eyes are eroded and the chin that has survived makes the forehead receding, by contrast: from profile it seems Nubian; up front,  the eye arch and the sublime smile of the lips are beaming and the whole is so subtle! Neither Saint John, nor Saint Ann, nor the Jocund, have a mouth more indefinite, that this five thousand years old and fifty-three meters high colossus.

The Sphinx must have been born of the river Nile: his shape does not recall the contemporary winged bull of the Euphrates; it has engendered the Phenico-Judaic Kherub and the Greek Kimera. The Baron Vivant Denon, one of the first ‘modern’ to have described it, admired the perfection of the work, its dimensions, and he insisted upon the soft and tranquil serenity that permeates this guardian of the Mysteries; zodiacally, unites the signs of the Virgin to that of the Lion. When in doubt about the exact ‘translation’ of this marvelous figure, we ought to see, either the archangel of the Mysteries, or ‘the man of desire’, aspiring to immortal becoming: in the succession of languages, it has always meant the unfathomable. If I dared attribute a form to the shapeless God, I would like to see a ‘them out of Him’, one of the Oelohim from the Holy Spirit.

The Egyptian statues, scribes, pharaohs or priests, do not reach the level of the making of this colossus: in the monumental art, because it is more than a statue-one with the bed-rock it lays upon: it represents the ‘esthetic point’ Da Vinci was seeking, and, also it synthetizes the  most ancient, the deepest, and maybe the truest of the thoughts of our world.

The Hebrews, let it be the artists or just the cultivated ones, should have ask Aaron to make a Sphinx and not an Apis; I grant you that Humanity, in the measure of Charity, appears differently expressed in this beautiful face of  concentrated light, than in the conception of the terrible Jehovah.

The Sphinx was not taken as a symbol by any major religion. I wonder why?

The Kherubs of the Arch the Covenant, accessory figures marking angles, are perhaps the sons of the bull with human faces? Who would tell us the degree of kinship between the Assyrian Bull and the Egyptian Sphinx, parallel symbols, one active, the other passive, of Eternal Gnosis.

*

First Dialog with A Double

(with the Sphinx in Gizeh)

-In front of You, who am I?

-Sacrilege!

-Did I lie?

-You told the truth to whom cannot hear it; and a misunderstood truth poisons the souls!

-Have I labored empty works?

-You wanted eternal works, vainly! You have compromised the Gods, by attesting them!

-I was hoping a better welcoming!

-Yes, the blessing of the Sphinx, you craved after it!

-Am I such a nothingness?

-Why would I answer the void, and why would you bother about who you are?

-Because to understand is to be the thing that is understood.

*How to represent the voiceless and lipless laugh of the immobile monster?*

-Sphinx, I did not know I was coming to be chastised.

-One chastises only who is conscient and you know your desire; but instead of living it in your heart, you yearned to reflect your vision in the eyes of other people, to better intoxicate yourself.

-Am I then a reprobate?

-Yes, for the time being: Your epoch rebuked you; no formula, no miracle would be true enough coming from you.

-And yet, I gave testimony to it…

-And for that, Eternity will be merciful with you.

-At least, judge me, O ancient witness.

-Your judgement is embodied in your desire.

-It was a luminous one.

-But you confined it inside you.

-How to labor without incarnating?

-You are such a Sophist! You wanted to chisel yourself into the Light.

-The conscious human being, does he not become Osiris?

-Do you even know what Osiris is?

-Serial perfection, nothing more!

-Have you even sought after it?

-No, I must confess: I wanted to shed light, to warm-up…

-You have found simpler to create in others these very virtues you could not develop in you. You wanted to raise geniuses and saints, without learning what was missing in you, so to become both. You have made a dream of pride within the Good, nothing but a dream! Like someone who teaches about Heaven and points at it, but does not bother feeling it. You made yourself a shepherd rather than becoming a good sheep. You wanted to be a master by your mere laziness to become a disciple. Within your desire, you have usurped; you look alike those fellah who, without any orders or mandate from the pharaoh, delegate themselves to collect taxes and to fulfil any other requisition order.

-You deny my charity, O Sphinx, the charity of my intention?

-Was your will not shattered?

-Is it victory heralding justice?

-Does boldness become Law?

-Maybe, Sphinx: there is a proportion between what we dare and what we can.

-You have exceeded that proportion!

-Will you ever precise me my fault?

-You wanted to resurrect abolished forms and they vanished, hastening your demise.

-I was lost in my piety.

-You call piety, your helplessness. Do you think that a soul is eager to resurrect into an eviscerated mummy? You have put divine interests into dead vases.

-I swore by you, O Sphinx.

-Without knowing my name, you invoked me?

-Tradition guided me.

-Really? It would have taught you that one must reveal the mystery every time one speak of it; this is the election, the genius!

-But, if you deem me inferior, why bother talking to me?

-Are you dreaming being praised by the Sphinx?

-No, but your words unsettle me.

-You said, I believe, that the Saint John painting in the Louvre museum was the masterpiece of the representation of a thinking face. Remember, this face; does it not make its contemplator doubt?

-Yes, it denies as much as it confirms.

-And me, its symbolic ancestor, I would be different?

-How would you know a painting in the Louvre museum?

-I can only answer you by reflecting your thoughts.

-Your blame was not in my thoughts.

-Because you were yearning after my approval, you were doubting; and doubt is the spiritual form of sin.

-You would therefore be incarnating sin?

-What is sin? An acted doubt; a false equation between conscience and instinct.

-Sphinx, I’d rather you give me an enigma.

-Explain me, then, your presence before me?

-To be instructed.

-No, to increase you. You came to be honored by a truth, like any mortal would be collecting a title!

-Is Truth not the supreme honor?

-It is, within each of us, different. When the sun hits a polished metal, it blinds; glass lets it go through and coal absorbs it.

-If you, the Sphinx,  mock me, then I shouldn’t be cast out by my epoch; because what it likes is exactly what you despise.

-What feeling corresponds to the void?

-Do you therefore deem our epoch doomed?

-Epochs and individuals make their fate. The Speech of Man is powerful upon Man: in truth, for the atheist, there is no God, no heaven.

-Could you explain, O Sphinx?

-Don’t ever think about the Absolute but to worship it: you do not have any other power than your thought; it alone is your limit; you conquer what you conceive and you take away into your death what you have kept of your conquests.

-At the time of my death, what you are, Sphinx, what would it be for me? In the perspective of my destiny?

-What the fragment is to the statue: an essential part.

-You are comforting me now?

-No, you are now listening under a different spiritual angle.

-But, my fault! Sphinx, what about my fault?!

-Why am I  the Sphinx, and not not just a sphinx? Is it because of my greatness?

-No, but because of your divine expression.

-Therefore, you are guilty because you haven’t found the truly divine expression of your aim.

-I have loved Beauty.

-Yes, but you have organized painting exhibitions. You were eager to revive symbols; even to animate me and you have shown others but images. The irony of the secondary causes warned you…

-I did what I could.

-This is really the answer of a fellah! Who tries more that he can handle, sins; et even more because he tries in a higher level.

-Would the fear of being bold cancel zeal?

-If you would have been taught well, you wouldn’t be, now, the antinomy in everything.

-But it is in everything!

-Yes, I am a thing for the eye, and yet, I speak and you hear me. The words of a statue, I grant you, it is an antinomy; and my form, my human head, my virgin breast, and my body of a lion: Antinomies!

-You think, you foster and you can.

-No, I can nothing, but I keep a will.

-You are the formidable seal affixed upon mystery.

-I am even the gnostic cameo: Who explains me, explains himself. I am the immobile dog of the Absolute.

-In this quality, do you bark against me?

-You, always you ! I salute the abstract particle that you incarnate, the rest…

-Can I separate my thought from the rest of my person?

-You must: My own person is of stone, while my thought is reaching higher than the sun.

-Again, an antinomy!

-There is only one: Relativity. You are embarrassing yourself, like the others, with insignificant  concordances, You the Host-God worshiper! The explanation is always included in the higher term of the problem. Is Man able to receive in his body and truth his creator? No, of course. Now, turn the question. Can God give himself in body and truth to His creature? And the questions finds its resolution just by asking it; because the idea of Man brings the idea of indignity, and the idea of God, the limitlessness of any concept. It is allowed to explain God only to make Him loved by weakened beings: but a Magus who would dream about Him, is but a fool, because God is to be worshiped and not conceived.

-But the very form of the worship is it not already a conception?

-And this very form, who determines it, if not the creator?

-Yes, the pharaoh was the vicar of the Gods and the fellah their slaves.

-If hierarchy wouldn’t have suffocated justice, i wouldn’t be bothered all the time and covered by sand: and you would have learned in the granite temple some things much different than what I can only here suggest you.

-Your epoch has more excuses than mine; Jesus did not come yet.

-Is Jesus God?

-Of course, He is God, Sphinx!

-And do you believe that God is deprived of his qualities by acting within time? Do you believe that we can pin on Jesus a date in the calendar? Finally, do you believe that the grace of the calvary flows upon the world only for nineteen centuries? You are stupid, if you do; exactly like this monk who threw a stone at me, because he thought I was an idol; he believed he would gain Heaven by destroying me. Man despises what crushes him, and it was not my mass that he was angry at, by my very thought that was irritating him.

But, I can recall for you a memory: I did give shelter to the Child-God and his mother, and at that time, I was truly the center of the visible and invisible creation-and the whole desert was full of angels and their songs was moving the fresh air with their eternal choruses. This Hope you can read in my tired eyes, this Promise that you discover uttered by my broken mouth, the very Affirmation that is my whole being, it is the Child-God who slept between my legs: and much after, angels still come to kiss the very place He was resting: I too was baptized; witness of the Promise, I have then seen its fulfillment. Do not seek any other Gnosis than Christ Himself, the Absolute. All miracles are to be done in His name.

-Your piety rejoices me without surprising me, Sphinx. Tell me how did the order of the Temple disappear? As it was born in the admirable shadow of the Cross.

-It has disappeared because it did not renew itself in front of new circumstances: it died of its power that had changed its nature and consequently brought its removal upon itself.

There are people who imitate my headwear and place my image in their meetings; all I can say is that they are silly and thick selfish beings that play with mystery but truly only desire vanity and wealth.

-Aren’t all the people invoking Free-Masons?

-No, there are others, the pleasure seekers of the spirit and the spiritual party-goers: they only desire the sensation of the mysteries and mystery cannot grant it.

-The future, O Sphinx!

-The future is called becoming!

-What would it be?

-I cannot teach you the mechanics of the cosmos: each creature is a world. It is anarchy if the organism rules; it is perverted if the soul bogs the mind. Each civilization forms a part of the cosmos. You can calculate after its past course what has of its virtuality left to incarnate, before it reaches its due rest. Take a river-people-what are then a delta and the sea? But why do you concern yourself with so many things? You are for me like an obscure priest thriving to discover the supreme duties of the pontificate, forgetting that understanding comes with the mission, and you…you weren’t mandated for any.

-The Rose+Cross, O Sphinx, have I desecrated it, the mystical flower?

-What is a temple?

-The place where human desire is accumulated to ask for Grace to descend.

-Good; and what are the proper people for such a place?

-Those who have a passion for the divine.

-And what is the sign of passion?

-Unity of desire, O Sphinx.

-And how does it manifest?

-By an application of all activity.

-You just gave me the description of the common priesthood, and by that you may get a glimpse of your fault. The cross designate the virtue of the saint

-And the Rose the creation of the genius. Closer to the Rose than the Cross. I wanted to go from one to the other: Ad Crucem per Rosam.

-Do you believe that the magical mottos are: to know, to want, to dare and to be silent? There is only one that sums them: To know how to obey.

-Those who give orders to others are usually unable to obey themselves, O Sphinx!

-I told you: To know how to obey, to submit the means to the aim, the details to the frame. And when an epoch is envious and stupidly equalitarian, hide your ambition. There are times when the Good conspires; it is a masked will. But you, you have deployed the banner of triumph, at the time of recruiting men. The noblest intoxicated themselves, for a time, with the mirage that was produced: after the intoxication faded, they saw the needed effort and they stopped believing in you-and when leaving-in themselves. The Church taught you to work through humility, but you mistook others for demons, thus operating through pride. You have disobeyed tradition, and the faithful showed you that a leader’s fault spreads upon all of his followers.

-Is the idea not holy, if conceived again?

-It is the salvation of the world.

-Would I see it blooming again, O Sphinx?

-Blooming no, germinating yes!

-By a new master?

-By the person who, at the heart of the Church, accepting its daily chores, and at the bosom of a democratic society, by bearing its customs, would be a free spirit with outdated forms, a hierarchical will but with a flexible rule, and under the double mask of orthodoxy and progress, will do the negative works of those two formulas, one inert, the other insane.

Truth has to be the fashion of the time in which it manifests, and your repulsion to wear it with the democratic costume made the people shout at her, as a shameless one and a lost soul from the carnival. If you want to convince, do not astonish. Seem to be following your flock; if you want to be heard, let others speak. Truth by itself is a scandal, alike a naked beauty.

You ought not to invoke Justice against the Laws, the ideal against the arts, charity against customs; we ought to justify the Laws, idealize the artworks, make the customs more altruistic, through acts of legislation, creation and by living through the example of virtue.

To preach is vain: Do. Don’t say: ‘Such a thing should be like this’, but do it. Don’t say: ‘Art must escape reality’, but make art idealistic.

-I hear you, O Sphinx.

-Then you are Osiris.

-Osiris is God.

-He who executes the will of the pharaoh is he pharaoh?

-No, he acts, according to the granted delegation.

-By doing God’s will, we come closer to His heart, is similar to the person come closer to the pharaoh while serving him.

-But, even though we are the number one in his court, we do not become the pharaoh.

-Do you know where the future stops?

-A the extreme parabola of the origin.

-The origin of what is immortal. O neophyte.

-I dare not listen!

-I see, you are shocked.

-Why did you take the image of the king, as an image of God?

-Like we took the Nile river as an image for Providence.

-But the Nile is benevolent, while the pharaoh…

-It is but a form of authority.

-Then, what should be the attitude of the initiate in front of authority, O Sphinx?

-Charity.

-Charity, is to love God above all; and authority is often in conflict with such a love.

-Love ignores all, but its object.

-But, Sphinx, the citizen…?

-As a confidence, such a word coming from you sounds out of place!

-What about homeland?

-Oh, you are starting to divagate, neophyte! Do not start to irritate me with you continuous rambling!

-Sphinx, a last word: This saying from the Master is troubling me: ‘One must give back to Cesar what is his, and to God his own.’ Would you explain to me?

-What do we owe to God?

-To God, everything!

-The rest, then, is Cesar’s.

*A smile, fulgurating like a lightning, transmitting the proud conscience of Initiation, a smile that came from the origin of mankind and stretches up to the remote civilizations of the future; a smile strong like science, subtle like art; a smile in which the nine choruses of the angels move, a smile that was testing me-not being a citizen-was the answer and literally the teaching that the Sphinx was leaving me.*

-What do we owe to Cesar?

-Nothing.

I had the premonition of this, now there is no doubt: Cesar is nothing. There was the instruction I have received. I will transmit it, in turn, because God is everything and our Lord Jesus-Christ is God.

*

Second Dialog with A Double

(in a Temple in Abydos)

I, pilgrim coming from the West, wonder if Osiris is a figure of Christ; but, what then is a God that ceases its divinity?

-You are baffled that a God of life becomes a God of death; as if death was something else that just the horizon, scaring the weak soul like a wall, but comfort the strong, like the true door through which we exit from contingency.

-I do not comprehend that a God, who having desired to die, does not resurrect from his own will, and needs the magic of Isis, Horus and Anubis in order to be brought back to his original condition.

-You got yourself deceived by names: was not Jesus put into the tomb, and after descending into the limbos, did he not open the gates of Eternity? Try to find what is in common between your truth and other truths: they will complete each others.

-I do not understand the coffin that Seth offers to Osiris, and in which he lays down willingly into.

-That coffin, its incarnation.

-A bad figure.

-Do you think that the infernal pyre is a better one? The ‘Campo-Santo hell’ is it a more abstract painting than those  in the temple here in Abydos? These angels and these demons that are fighting for souls, Egypt named them, and the Church swallowed them afterwards in one lump: there is no difference!

-I grant you that, but why does the pharaoh have a personal chapel among those of the Gods?

-We took animals to represent the Gods; Man, with his strength and order, a natural regulator, was necessary to stand as a mediator between Heaven & Earth. We have deified power in order to direct it. Pharaoh is a wonderful puppet that we have animated for the best interests of the people and the Ideal.

-The West had its very Christian kings at the mercy of the clergymen, and that time was not the time of charity!

-In the West, the clergy was the first lobby to court the king and not its hidden master. We were the head, the brain of the head; pharaoh was the heart; a heart that came from his function, not from his mother!

-Does function have an intrinsic virtue?

-As a true public service person, an entity appears, not the man.

-Formalism would then be necessary for the State?

-It is the body of the idea, what is visible!

-And when nothing distinguishes power from obedience?

-Then, there is no power nor obedience…

-Democracy?

-See the short span of life of Greece. It died for having been deaf to the thought of Eleusis; Egypt lasted by the virtue of Abydos.

– Where is expressed the thought of Abydos?

-In a work you have celebrated long time ago:

‘When our brother from the river Nile wished that the most remote future would inherit their beautiful wisdom; in order to preserve throughout the ages, the divine names and the twenty-two numbers, they did not  transmit it to their successors, nor to the scribes, nor to the devotees. These ‘Knowers of Man’ knew too well  that the only constant in the world is its indignity: and these very pure spirits, very clairvoyants did not dare to lay upon the rarest and short-lived virtues. On the contrary, they chose for their transmission, the worst of them, being perfectly clear that they would travel along the rivers of evil the banks of the future. They gave the sacred name of God to anger and the twenty-two numbers to laziness. From the river Nile to the snows of Hyperborea, across the seas and the mountains, the craft man, the farmer hasten his horse, screaming the name of the Tetragramaton. Travel along the camps and the country side Inns, found in the hands of thief and prostitutes: there you will find the game of Thoth, the divine fire of the twenty-two arcana.’ (A Via-Hygeia note: This quote comes from Péladan 1895 tragedy in four parts, ‘Babylon’.)

After my memory had reminded me of the speech of the Arch-magus Nakhonta, I realized that this remembrance was summing up the whole answers from the double.

The place I was standing became sentimental and soft again, inspiring me only melancholy. I felt that the oracle went back into its silence, and, resigned, i rode back on my donkey to the Belianeh station, fourteen kilometers away, under the full moon.

*

Third Dialog With A Double

(in a Temple in Thebes)

-Plato came to Thebes; What was he taught?

-What he could understand.

-If an intelligence seemed limitless it is surely his.

-Temperament is a limit, habit also.

-Yes, but it has also limited the priest, am I right?

-Any priest is limited by his rite.

-The secular person, then would he be the inspired one?

-Yes, if he would have had the discipline of the priest.

-Why is it that to some priests some horns are growing?

(A Via-Hygeia note: this may be a hint to some of the clerics, Peladan was in contact with, such as  Abbé Lacuria and Abbé Alta)

-Because some mother-ideas are eager to incarnate.

-What is a person for the idea?

-Only similar to a lens for the light.

-Is the idea scattered, like a fluid?

-No, but divided due to insufficient mirrors.

-The idea uses more than one person?

-Calculate how much faith had of martyrs, and for instance, Ammonius Saccas composed the ritual of the mass, and he is not even recognized by the Christian Church!

-Is it Justice?

-Justice has a seat in the Amenti!

(A Via-Hygeia note: The underworld in the Egyptian religion)

-Those Gods that die and then are reborn, would they then belong to this movement of the Ideal?

-If you believe in the power of an analogy, you admit it.

-Yes, the Emerald Tablet!

-Tradition says it originates in Egypt.

-This would be the Saint John’s Gospel of the river Nile.

-Yes, it is the magical creed.

-Say its words aloud, so that the reliefs of the walls may be animated for a short moment.

-What is above…

-Osiris.

-Is what is below…

-Man.

-And what is below…

-Creation.

-Is like what is above…

-The creator.

-What is Unity? God but also what came out of Him, Creation: and what is the achievement of the created if it is not its ascension towards the un-created? Man, therefore is a candidate for divinity, an Osiris.

-What, do you say that creation is like the creator?

-Shadow is like the form; the echo like the spoken word, the reflect like the light.

-But shadow does not become light, the echo doesn’t become speech, the reflect doesn’t become light, never.

-But one expresses the other, and for instance, if you know the time of the day, you can determine the height of a pylon just by looking at its shadow. Therefore, likewise, for the upper world, your thoughts are the shadows of the mother-ideas. What you conceive is; otherwise, you would be God; and what you would conceive would be: because God cannot think without creating.

Imagine the noblest ideas and they will be materializing in you; now think about lower matters, and immediately the terrestrial larvae-attentive to your call-rush towards you so to possess you. If you could see the spiritual state of Man, you would be split between pride and fright; if only, you could suddenly comprehend his importance as the mediator between the spiritual realm and the instinctive realm.

At this very moment, some evil spoors are lurking around you. You are suggested the idea of a carnal encounter with a Egyptian woman that would torment your beautiful day of study with much playful frustration; also you are invited to acquire a mummy and, as a magus you will love to invoke its will; or, finally, you are suggested to detach from the monument you now are standing some reliefs heads to bring back as souvenirs…That’s for the inferior realm.

Above you, threads-luminous like rays coming from the Virgin-are swaying, intoxicated with love, like splattered fragments of the ideal, true pollen of the infinite. They await a rising thought, a more lively conception to allow them to approach and respond to your mental and to slide into your double and enrich the circulation of the ideal inside of you. The saint or the genius is a person who casts away the larvae from below and welcomes the divine scents from above.

-This is such a mystery!

-The true mystery is the relationship between all that is created and the creator; everything must be accomplished: and suffering is the archer, the redeemer of the celestial tax; and within this collected tax, the sadness of a noble desire, the disappointments of impotence are accounted for; but, only you see the end work. The study of art should have taught you through the increasing filiation of the works, that the successor is always the son of somebody, and that one abandoned project can finds its destiny in a project to come. The modern person cannot fathom the dedication and the countless efforts the ancients spent transmitting us their centuries old legacy.

You yearned after a Renaissance and you complain to have only  worked at it? To succeed? What does this word mean, as we are contemplating the key at this very moment as we are speaking? Success is Eternity. It doesn’t care about that the feeling of a few men may last for a few years!

Faith only gives immediate results: extasy. What is an artist? He is an ecstatic who is eager to show his extasy to the crowd; and you are surprised that this very crowd is not very attentive to such elevated phenomenon, and after having met it, it is feeling even more alienated.

-Whoever you are, advise me.

-You did not chose between reality and what we call dreams; they separate you from reality and your need to stay connected with reality makes your dreams heavier. You cannot love your epoch but you want it to love you back; your effort is to incarnate it, but you await its recognition! You are neither from your epoch, nor from above, even though you keep invoking Time & Heaven.

-What to do, then?

-Chose: Pentaour wasn’t a hierophant, and none of the existing hierophants of his time would have written his poem.

(A Via-Hygeia note: The character Pentaour appears in Péladan’s novel, “Le Vice Suprême” (1884). In the book, Pentaour serves as a symbolic figure embodying the conflict between materialism and spirituality, which are central themes in Péladan’s work.)

-Is Art not able to rise as high as a thought?

-No, because art has a double also that feeds of moral emanations: and your art, being retrospective, cannot rise due to a lack of nutritional elements.

-I would feed myself with the past I invoke.

-Yes, but do not boast presenting to the present epoch dead forms.

-Absolute forms.

-We ought to never talk about the absolute, as it is unconceivable, unspeakable and shapeless: therefore, there are no conception without a form.

-I sense God, without attributes, God without symbols.

-Yes, you feel God, like you feel me, nameless, in your mind.

-You name is Tradition.

-You call me so, but if I would reveal to somebody else your secrets, I would only be but the superior unconscious. No, I am something else.

-What are you?

-The ephemeral creation, born from your desire and from fluidic molecules: You have coagulated and vivified the larva of a priest that will dissolve in a while, after you have ceased to activate it.

-Can I not incorporate it in my double?

-The emanation of a dead thing, or even, of a dead loved one, is it healthy? What comes back, ought to be only an apparition! Beware of the Past: It has killed Emperor Julian and many others, Fabre d’Olivet also, who you admire. The exaltation you seek is not magic; rather, you’d better invoke the smile of the Sphinx and the smile of the Ramses of Sakkarah; They see, but remain calm.

-If human nature needs vivacity and passion, is it not better to set ourselves ablaze in the heights, for the heights’ sake?

-There, fire is more vivid there : it consumes. The fate of a moth burning itself into a torch is not an enviable fate, even though if it would be a celestial one.

To do in an extraordinary manner ordinary tasks, to live in an angelical manner human hours, to think with serenity throughout passions and to walk into the mystery in a rational manner: such is the true initiation.

The yogi and the fakir are not role models: their passivity, after overcoming the storm of their ascesis, they hardly go beyond a few physical laws; alike the trickster, they only embody but a few light, just enough to astonish.

Your Christ didn’t even charm the same beasts Orpheus did, and his saints were greater thaumaturges than Him: where do you see the mark of the divinity?

-In the rigorous limitation, which He knew how to hold within it.

-Good! So, if your master gave you the incarnated example of remaining a man, what would gives you the right, as a simple human being, to outline in you a dubious divinity? By being better in the same feeling, by being a role model in the same action, here is the difference between a magus and a common man.

-But what if Good moves me only when I am at the level of passion?  Would fever then be necessary to launch my thought?

-If you bring only the weaknesses and the cowardice of your nature, what kind of servant would the mysteries do with you?

-Hotheads never established anything!

-You mirror me a common trope of wisdom…

-Wisdom cannot bear definitions, otherwise it is not wisdom. Do not lock up your tastes within the walls of rules, and don’t follow your inclinations.

-Words of the Past, you are discourage me! And if I do not have self-love, therefore I am worthless.

-Praise yourself for who you truly are: a vanquished will; but do not think that you haven’t fought well. You would say to an obelisk: ‘I, myself, will raise you up!’, you would be more rational than with your wishes, and the obelisk, inert matter, would have better obeyed you than all the people your work was directed at. They did not want to negate themselves in following your affirmation of the Truth. What did you ask them, but to renounce themselves for ideas as alien to their brain, than the Pschent is to their forehead?!

(A Via-Hygeia note: the Pschent was the double crown worn by the rulers of ancient Egypt)

-What should I have done?

-To succeed first. Success is the sanction of the animalized man, when he decides to move upon numbers and their mass. Tear the titles of the beautiful book of Humanity and say to someone: ‘Look, this is stupid’, or ‘this is great, read and decide for yourself.’ He will reject what you will show him, because admiration is an outlay of personality he is unable to handle, being devoid of any. The weak man needs religious and social assurances before he could even think: and this hesitation proves his despair. The vessel that takes the soul through the western mountains, millions of people saw it: the Egyptian mystics saw Typhon and Osiris, like in your Middle-Age people saw the devil and Jesus: because the sideral atmosphere, wisely worked, produced the figures of faith. Art can participate to this prestige, at the condition to embody its epoch.

-Then, there would be no greatness to incarnate!

-Then, why burden your future with the weight of an impossible duty? Own yourself before the Great Judge; it was enough for many…

-I would then dim charity in my spirit, to appease it?

-No, dim only the impatience that is eager to be heard to when it speaks; celebrate the mysteries of the Idea & Form. Is it necessary for the Christian mass to have an actual audience to be celebrated? The more the priest isolates himself from the audience, the more he is celebrating.

-Yes, i grant you that; but my thought is getting tired; falcon of the invisible, i will release you, so you can soar away with your wings. Who are you?

-You created me, and you ask for my name?!

-I desired you, and it was an nameless desire.

-Do you think a name is a word?

-A name is a form of life.

-Good, What kind of life-form is without a form?

-The spirit.

-Is it then the Spirit of Karnak that speaks to you?

(A Via-Hygeia note: The Karnak temple complex is part of the monumental city of Thebes)

-Yes, it fluidic collective.

-The double of the doubles?

-I feel you are getting away.

-It is because you are tired, and not holding me anymore.

-It is true, do you have anything to suggest?

-You aspiration has weakened. I am losing contact with you.

-Should I regret it?

-Only regret your mistake.

-It was perhaps a mistake to have summoned you.

-No, it was a bold move.

-And when would a bold move be legitimate?

-When it succeeds.

-Finally, who are you?

-A mere reflect of who you are, blended with another reflect mirroring what you sought in invoking me.

-Would I penetrate the thought of the river Nile?

-You do not have the material time to travel the courses of the centuries?

-Leave me at least a souvenir, a formula, an amulet.

-Everything is in everything, nothing in nothing.

-I know that.

-Faust knew too; but he forgot. I can only remind you of a truth and not break it anew.

-Let’s get back to Faust: what did he forget?

-His heart, coming from his mother. It is not your intelligence that has invoked me, but your love. God cannot be understood, so he wants to be loved: Love alone rises from the Earth towards Heaven, and from Heaven towards Earth having received the strength of superior and inferior things.

*

Fourth and Last Dialog With A Double

(in the Granite Temple in Gizeh)

We say ‘a wake of intellectual work’, and ‘a day of physical labor’; is it not a confusing instinct that the great activity of the mind happens when all external activities of life cease? Love, studies, desire the night; and the more subtle the matter is, the more shadow and silence will play their perfect para-nymph role.

The other time, between the legs of the Sphinx, against the pink granite stele of King Thotmes, I was moved, without fear. Here I am like locked up in temple without roofs and on which the moon was shining. The walls are gleaming, almost oily were impressing me with a solemn thrill. I stand in the center of the Tau, and having signed myself with three preventive signs of the cross against wandering larvae, I raised my spirit towards what I can name, in the uncertainty of the answer and of the quality of the possible respondent.

I felt myself bold and i feared being disappointed; but soon, an mental assurance flowed upon me, and in a low voice, I was starting an incantation to bend my attention and help the fluid of the place, analog to my mind, to materialize.

(Péladan)-If a pure fluidity has resisted to the unceasing transformation of all things of being; if a molecule of those who erected here a space for their thoughts, sublime larvae, still lurks, fly of the invisible, along those gleaming walls; if some particle of what was, maybe still is: I, pious and with a pure intention, i call for the lessons of the old masters for me to take away once being told; or for marvelous gift, to be for ever sealed in my mind, or for a delegation of speech, that I will formulate according to the rite of the vivification of the Word. The pure wings of desire must take a great leap to reach its object, if it has ceased to exist in the human series. As Christianity has a great wealth of excellent manifestations, purifying and emulating: May Egypt manifests itself in such a way!

-The elected being do not answer questions, but prayers.

-I would pray, then.

-No, you can only pray the living God, and not the dead Gods.

-I call upon the ancient thinkers, who did not leave their doctrines behind for the world to keep.

-If they had judged worthless to leave behind their doctrines, do you believe they will come and hand them over to you? And, you know, perhaps they did leave those doctrines-visible though-but veiled in mystery, when they had to abdicate their vital influence before the rising hegemonic power that ceased them all. You have enough truths, and more than you need, to actually foster the evolution of a new humanity: Chose and do, even though…a simple notion!

-To do, the soul needs to be touched, and this is exactly the impulse I seek.

-You seek prestige!

-Yes.

-If you would obtain it, you would not see it. Prestige exists only for the ingenuous, and you would pierce it with any profit. You wish an illumination of the mind , as vivid as a heart set ablaze, and this, not being according to the norm, is called a vain desire.

-Saint Thomas of Aquino said that all of his writing was but a straw, compared to these moments, when allowed by Grace, the thought is fire.

-His grace was warming his genius.

-My intention is pure. Are they so many and sublime, those who come here, vagrants of the truth, beggar of the alms of light, so that I am, in this manner, despised?

-We push you back because we love you.

-Who loves me?

-Those who would have loved you nine thousand years ago.

-So, I was answered at the time my worthless questioning was going no-where and when it was vindicating my piety?

-At this moment your piety is misleading you. ‘The temple without symbols is also the temple without speech. Here, it was not a place of teaching, but a place of awakening, simply.

-Then, may I be awaken!

-Anger is closing on you already: your thought is asking for weapons, and not notions; and if our bronze weapons are worthless nowadays, you still want that our religious tools must adapt to the needs of your epoch?

-There are still matter.

-No, none.

-There are eternal identities.

-All are eternal.

-Then, give me an identical key, I will find its usage.

-The key is full of rust, and the lock has been changed; the key is a museum piece, the lock is alive, a fairy & Proteus at the same time. You can’t even talk to a Muslim about God, and you want that the tradition of the river Nile serves you to face your contemporaries?

-But, ‘my masters’-because this is how I feel you and how it is suitable for me to address you-your science was increased by your election: and you must be mystery’s favorites, and as much it is granted to Man, ‘the masters of God’s secret.’

-Yes, the intelligence that strived throughout life to conceive the proud mystery, receives after its purification, a crown of sublime thoughts; but, even though we would be eager to manifest them to you, no language exists for an elect like us to be fathomed by your intelligence.

-May you try, O my masters! May your benevolence bends over my stretched supplication!

-We agree! Then, strive! You know that the fluids are only states of movements and that dense matter is but an apparent stillness of vibration. The faculties of the soul are but the diverse operations of love: thought is but crystalized love. The phenomena of intellection, in our sphere, is identical to what you would call enthusiasm or even passion; if you are able to extract from it sin, disorder and depression. Celestial life is neither peace-as the hush-hush of life would make you believe-nor the reward once given-like a good servant. Also not the still beatitude of India that rejects personality to conceive happiness.

Paradise is an essence-the word surprises you but I cannot find another one-composed of all of the harmonics. We do not see God, because seeing needs bodies, but, even though, there is an analog perception; we do not hear music, but a spell of the sort is happening. The flowers are plants and could not exist without soil; but the impression of perfume is one of our delights. Spiritual Reality-how shall I put it-as life inters eternity, the phenomenon are collective- in all of the sphere-and at the same time individualized for each of the elects. The same breeze that blossoms the soul of the simple person, stimulates the mind of someone else, widens the heart of a third, and reveals to the next one an unheard arcane.

Life, in you, becomes your works, for others, ambition, vice or flower-pot-life: therefore eternity which is life also, embodies in each elect his very own character. Those who lived their whole life praying, devoting themselves to others, laboring,  live an eternity much more active, than anyone else who has just trodden upon Earth.

And I arrive at what moved me to answer you; because you have spoken there a great secret in asking, not our ancient wisdom of when we were alive in Earth, but for the one, that above, was the rewards of our terrestrial labors. If  you would even know what noble and ineffable career God in His infinite benevolence opens to the good will of his creature! No formulas can express it!

Not only every divine thought we had are granted to us eternally-that is illuminated, expanded-but also-and this try to remember it and tell others-the person who has expanded his heart, prepared his brain, will never cease to palpitate in an ascending manner and to understand, in a progression so formidable  that even though you would conceive that point of election, it would veil for you the idea you have here on Earth of God.

My dear son, imagine that your will has become for ever harmonious, and creates instantaneously all of its conceptions and by using which manner? Imagine, again, a thought; as soon as it is formulated in your mind than a temple rises-the temple of your idea-a divine music is heard, it is the harmony of your idea that celestial bards using unheard modes play upon the lyre the ideal chord of your concept; and finally your thought goes fast as a lightning carry an increase of joy to all of the elects of your sort, and this lightning is reflected back with their praise.

The joys of Paradise, how to conceive them? United in one being, the creative faculty, the most vivid sensitivity, makes of extasy, of thought, devotion, glory, virtues and worlds one single thing; then after this evocation, could you have a very approximative understanding of this unity called delectation, if it could be called using a terrestrial name and be soiled. Therefore, the most important thing to teach and to believe, what we have taught and believed over everything else, and that has earned us a sublime election, it is the dogma of the future life, of the immortality of the soul.

And you, who study and examine doctrines, ask them about this very point, and boldly catalog them upon their answers.

It is less important to know that God is one, than to know that we will see Him, one day, all mighty and merciful, and that the soul, the day after death of its physical manifestation, receives alike the worker at the end of the day, the right price for his labor.

Faith is the magic; who kills faith commits a crime similar to wanting to extinguish the sun. Therefore, nothing exist but through the concept; and the person who does not believe into eternity, factually will not find it. To negate, in the field of the ideas, it to renounce: how many, in the frightening limbos of purgatory, pay for a voiced negation, an empty speech that produced doubt that fell upon other people!

-Masters, you are truly masters. I would dare a question and I would beg for a formula: What is the ideal way to conceive Good? And how to draw on celestial help when we are in the midst of the worst circumstances? May your wisdom crystalizes in one commandment!

-Here the formula you desire: Seek the infinite in everything and to place it-in the measure of your conception. We ought to do perfectly everything we strive for, because if  labor is vain, idealistically, the perfection we put in gives it its moral value. Through this training, consciousness is being purified, it is being sensibilized; and what is an elect, if not a man very sensitive to good? To in-finitize the finite (A Via-Hygeia note: in French, ‘infinir le fini’), O disciple, here is the arcane!

-Yes, masters, but the will that is attached to any labor is the will of a saint. There are the good people that only match great deeds.

-The great deeds you speak of are easy, my son, because greatness is a strength that lifts us up: The small ones, on the other hand, truly are the proof of election. There are thousand of possible choices you can make, but once chosen one, you ought to give it all, application and faculty. The true devout will sweep the temple with the same zeal than when he would decorate it with frescos; and truth, to be always rightly served, needs brothers attached to towers worthy of their bishop and bell-ringers able to preach. Do you think that all the geniuses have worked for the common good? No, but do you think that God would leave those faculties wasted and that they were useless because the world has ignored them? No, with the nobodies, the misunderstood and the defeated, God made up his governors. Happy is the person whose virtue casted him away from the Capitol, or his ideality, deprived of success: that person can count on the votes of the celestial realm, which is eternal.

There are two types of beings: those who are conscious of eternity, and the others, lost in this world, stuck in its contingency; and those will never the crimson dawn of the infinite.

-Masters, what benevolent words must we utter to our modern world, not the most sublime, but the most efficient one?

-Charity, is the word of the ancient enigma. Who gives enriches himself; who obeys expands in dignity; who suffers will be given bliss, and who dies will be reborn. God, Himself, rewards the sacrifices, and he rewards in himself, that is, in eternity. Never consider time & place, as they are realities with unceasing mutations; do not be of your epoch, but ‘of the time of all times’.

-Magic, masters; where does your science hide it?

-In the relationship between the finite and the infinite and not elsewhere. Keep yourself from forcing the Norms into apparent obedience: you may as well block the river Nile with you two little hands! Do not modify but yourself and leave the physical causality operate its regular marvels. The great work is not in the athanor, but in the alchemy: the great grimoire is the book of natural correspondences; and the spell-book that binds the good spirits, is nothing but a simple and fair prayer. Men need plenty of images to support their weak conceptions and endless commentaries to even get but a taste of truth. What is needed become fair, for the sake of it. the greatest utterance, is the one that brings good.

-Masters, may you talk more…

-You mind will itself chisel the ideological scarab we have delivered to you, especially, if in imitating us, you take for a master the person who has gone beyond dogmas and sits on the very seat of election. After this confirmation of your own Christian habit, what do you want further more from the Past?

-Masters, your benediction.

And I kneeled before the invisible, and what came down upon me, was neither a fluid nor a contact, but this mysterious vivification seen so many times described on the walls of temples!

*

Epilog

(Farewell to the Sphinx)

The sea, more even than distance, is a barrier; we leave Rome or Venice, with the certitude that we will come back to them; but Egypt, the eve of my departure, seemed to make me an insisting farewell: I regret to have seen too little, or to have not retained enough, and unhappy about myself and of fate, I would like to stay, because I do not expect to come back.

I have dedicated my last evening wake, by the river Nile, to the Sphinx, this pharaoh of mystery, last survivor of the time of secrets and genius; and the night being quite advanced, I walked towards the colossus, with the fervor and emotion of the person who will leave behind a bit of his heart, and many of his dreams.

I had the impression that he recognized me. (and at the time when book burnings are rarer, it only take three doctors to have you locked up in the Charenton lunatic asylum with the preceding sentence! But I have still written it down because I have lived it and the smile of intelligence that the admirable monster is no less incredible than modern progress, the world of microbes, secular catechism, the removal of ovaries, immortal principles, legality, cremation of the dead and other crazy things more widespread than my own insanity!).

Yes, insanity is often but a difference between an individual and the crowd; and which fool would think that the crowd would acknowledge it is insane to salute the reason of the individual, even if it was Aristotle?

Wisdom, is the steering of the greater number; to say this otherwise would be to calumniate human kind, and even though a collective, it is not short of the vanity of a fool.

Perhaps the title of fool, is also a kind of protection: human wickedness only bother to despise, and her despise can be used as a decoration to a memory; but a memory implies people to be attentive to their past. Will there be memories in the future?

-Are you seeking which level of reverence to address me?

-Yes, Sphinx; i would like to receive your teaching, because, here is the thing: I came, I saw and I did not understand a thing.

-What would you like to understand?

-The secret doctrine!

-Others bring back home scarabs and discover tombs; but for you this is not enough, you want the secrets of Egypt?

-Yes.

-You want to know how the mares of Nectanebo were rendered pregnant just by the neighing of the stallion of Memphis?

No!

-Or, how Darchur’s cat was strangling at distance his chicken?

No!

-Or, the composition of the aphrodisiac perfumes sold at the temple of Edfu? Or, how the goddesses were milking the pharaoh, when adopting them?

-Sphinx, you are making fun of me! Why?

-Close to here, lays the tomb of Prince Khaemweset, son of Isitnotfrit and of Ramses.

-Is he the master-of-the-works who established the great funeral dormitory of the Apis, and had constructed the Serapeum built?

-Yes, it is him. He had been a good soldier at the siege of Ascalon and for that was rewarded by being nominated great hierophant of Ptah, and bothered himself after only with hieratical matters.

-I saw his statue: he looks kind and charming. Did he not leave behind the reputation of being a magus?

-Yes, do you know his adventure? I will tell it to you-this will be the lesson you came for: Khaemweset knew that a sorcerer who died long time ago had been embalmed with a copy of the book of Thoth. He violated the tomb and found, as said, the seventy-eight arcana of the Tarot-he already had, as an initiate. But, his audacity did not get away from this unruly act: the sorcerer, when he was alive, had great credit with the courtesans; and for the price of his services as master speller and perfumer, he had promised to many to come as doubles to guard his tomb and to scare away any desecrator who would be bold enough to come there. But, you may ignore that a double without fail keeps the promises of the living human being. Khaemweset, therefore, was at the mercy of sexual Eumenides, succubus, that were endangering his very life. Good for him that he remembered he was a magus, otherwise he would have died.

-This story is quaint: those prostitutes guarding the tomb of a sorcerer, make a curious picture; but what lesson should I take away from this?

-Who speaks with the Sphinx ought to be subtle. He who asks death the secret of life,  always provokes forces he ignores and are immediately opposing. Khaemweset is the classical type of the searching blind-man.

-Noble blindness!

-All mistakes are bad: Only qualify a thing by its essence. A truth is neither beautiful nor fertile, nor useful: a truth is true, simply. And a mistake is neither grand nor happy, but a truth gone wrong. You want to play the magician; leave first, the adjective ‘passionate’. In art, use the wide range of Sanskrit; in magic, define, never qualify.

-How to express the strangeness of the Egyptian morality, for instance?

-And where do you dig your awareness of this strangeness of the Egyptian morality?

-Do I have to quote Qaqumni and Phtahotpu?

-I’d rather you quote the quatrains of Pibrac! Common morality asks for common enunciation.

-And individual morality, can it be talked about, without highlighting crimes?

-Why would you distract morality from religion? It is its consequence. When medicine was using, as a remedy, the milk of a woman who gave birth to a baby boy, the faeces of a lion and the brain of a turtle, it was not pharmacy which was in charge, medicine. Therefore, for customs, you ought to not seek the philosophical notion of an individual, but the beliefs of his epoch: In the land of the river Nile, temples are ruling.

-In in the temples, who was ruling?

-The worthy ones.

-Who were they?

-Do you want their names that are written nowhere-to sound like you just invented them-or you rather want their designations? They were the elected beings, meaning that they were making the light possible; instead of the excesses that makes you mind go wild!

-How to measure the possible light?

-By people, climate and the historical hour.

– Priestly genius would then only be the appropriation of the truth, at a certain time, at a certain place?

-You say well, but you will always mis-behave, in taking yourself as a human prototype, and in believing that by assimilating every thing that you intake, by the mere virtue of exceptionality. To contain truth, is the opposite of telling the truth: it is about keeping it. Remember this and stop grabbing Isis’ veil. The veil acts upon you better than the bare face; the explained mystery, the occult un-occulted, are they still the mystery and the occult? No.

What is an initiate? Someone who has for mystery something else than the non-initiated: you understand that the fellah does not get it, but for you there are things that will remain un-explained. Your efforts is getting weak in trying to go beyond exotericism. What would be your gain? Let’s compare mystery to the source of the river Nile: most people go only up to Luxor; but you, you journey further-up to Assouan, or even up to Ouadi Halfa. Have you reached the cradle of the river? No.

Mystery, the eternal Apis, must be greeted and used in its flow. Blossom your soul to its contact, try to own it if you have that amount of delusion; but do not wish for it, so to spread it like diamond powder, in the dust of the souls of your contemporaries; there, it would get lost, being for them intrinsically useless, soiled and unnoticed! Do you not have a sacred text that teaches you that life is the only light for humanity? Ah! If you could vivify mystery-One did, and he was not human. And even, if I would deliver to you brilliant formulas, true offerings of the past to the future, from me-faithful keeper-to you-sincere beggar-what would you do with it? A few pages, a few sentences? And for who?

Mystery cannot be spoken, nor taught. It is lived. I defy you to establish in yourself, a hundredth of the truths that you have received; and you still come before me to ask for some more! And with which strength, would you carry them, which silence will you honor them?

-Life is passion. What I know does not move me anymore. I want more forwards! More upwards! So to be moved!

-Illusion! Ambition of the mind and not a desire for the infinite. When the hierophants strived to make Amon-Ra, the unique God, their desire was fair; and do you know why Amon was, in appearance, victorious? Because it was Thebes’ God, and Thebes was the symbol of independence, the victory against the invading Hyksos. It was the God of Egypt, not the abstract God.

-But, Sphinx, must we stop voluntarily in the evolution of one’s thought and to remain stationary, to i don’t know which usual and moderate point?

-The bell capital, the basket capital, the hathoric capital are they similar? You can work an idea and reform it according to your likes; but a column is always crowned by an essential form and spirit upon any kind of theme is submitted by rules, in the mind and in architectonic as well: one among others you ignore.

Yes, it is only at the time of its incarnation that an idea can be conceptualized. A notion must be ‘in the air’ to be activated. Man does not generate his thoughts: he receives them. Due to the virtue of analogy, there is a double current from this world below in direction to the superior sphere and back: one made of the idea & prayer rises like the falcon and goes fetch his ideal life in the heavens; the other one descends alike a great celestial river, coming to fertilize minds & souls. Thoughts can be admirable spree of exaltation that reaches beyond the ordinary norm, or they can the blessed fruits of the descent of Grace. But genius & salvation are the reflection of their times, alike the obelisk reflects the shine of the quarry its stone come from. A truth given to a specific time becomes dogma, temple, virtue and masterpieces to the souls of the genius. But these souls do not choose their truth.

The stain glass of a cathedral is brought alive and shine in all its beauty upon the action of the light; but even though the figures and the colors are fair, the liveliness depends upon the action of the sun: hence, the elected Man is but a stain glass that draws and colors the dispensed truth of the epoch.

-And what is the dispensed truth, at this hour?

-Actual solidarity, not the one resulting from the will.

-Yes, Sphinx, a war in the West would ruin both sides of the belligerents, winners & losers.

-Ethics & virtue are not of any weight anymore, and this is why the modern Man is less religious than his ancestors: the economics doctrine dominates everything, amoral and lethal !

-On this ground, I am truly a nobody.

-More than that, you are a scandalous person: you have agitated banners, people saw your fancy clothes: you thought you could renovate the most beautiful rites and what they saw in them was but a timeless masquerade they were alien to.

What would you gift your epoch? Its negation, solemn, crushing; and would the present time accept its condemnation? No, and you became a subject of ridicule, like a anachronism. Unable to detach yourself from your cherished forms, you rather chose to abort with them, than to succeed in renouncing them. In that you obeyed to your own nature and not to the light.

The idea is eternal, immanent, absolute. Form is transitory, therefore, you wasted your efforts in trying to revive mere mummies. You took your expressions in the windows of museums and you are surprised that your epoch rebuked you; one does make life with relics; one does not vivify ashes, how ever august they may be. Instead of pointing at the past as the harbor of truth, you were to guess the future, to formulate it!

-Formulate it for me, O Sphinx!

-My gaze is fixed to the sun rise; I am not the figure of the setting sun. I express, the best a form can strive to, the very arcane that you have ignored. Ah! You have shown the mountain carved speos, the hypogeum and the Pan flute like images of initiation, like a hierophant of the dead, poet and magus, green and black, a funerary psychopomp!

-You are more severe than the others, O Sphinx!

-I love you more than anybody else, and only I can talk to you this way, due to the prestige you grant me.

-A hierophant of the dead can he come back to life, again?

-No, Osiris, killed by Seth, had ended his rule of vivification: he made the underworld his abode.

-Is it to say that I will not shake the sistrum anymore?

-The sistrum is but a noise!

-Do I not have the prerogative of the panther skin?

-What is your duty?

-To create the form to come, that truth will embody.

-A form of art or of expansion?

-How vague is your speech!

-I can reveal only through your mind, i cannot give birth to you, like Socrates would say. It is up to you to be fertile.

-Those words without light are vain!

-Vain, perhaps; without light, no. They actually shed more light than what you would like.

-One does not lie to the Sphinx.

-But one does lie to oneself!

-What will I take back from Egypt?

-What the Egyptians take away in the Amenti: their judgement.

-That judgement is condemning me.

-Yes, as much as it is possible!

-What to do, then?

-Re-new yourself.

-Yes, the dead travels from Osiris to Horus, and then to Atoum; he later becomes a heron, Bennu.

-Then, become! Magic is the art of metamorphosis.

-Do you believe, Sphinx, that one can renounce oneself so easily?

-Easily is the adverb for laziness.

-You mix laziness and tiredness.

-If you are tired, what did you come before me?

-Tiredness is not exhaustion.

-Rest and dream, then!

-Would I need you for such a meager advice?

-I am but the invisible finger upon the keyboard; if the instrument is out of tune, my words become fake.

-Goodbye then, O Sphinx; if you can do nothing more, goodbye…

-Wait, If I were certain you wouldn’t turn my words into a literary exercise, I’d share something helpful. But, for that you need to swear an oath of secrecy, swear to Mystery!

-I swear silence & secrecy to mystery.

-Very well, then. Listen…

*

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