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Fifty-One
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After associating the hermetic Philosophers with the Rosicrucians, Salmon says of the latter: "We have been told that they can spiritualize their bodies, transport themselves in an instant to distant places, make themselves invisible whenever they wish and do other things that seem impossible.^1,1
The abbot Langlet du Fresnoy in the History of Hermetic Philosophy, relates that according to the Rosicrucians "the meditations of their primeval founders surpass by far all that has ever been known since the creation of the world: that they are destined to accomplish the general reestablishment of the universe. They are subject neither to hunger, nor to thirst, nor to age nor to any other infliction of nature. They know by revelation those who are worthy of being admitted into their society. They live in all times as if they had existed from the beginning of the world, or as if they must remain in it until the end of time. They are able to press into their service and control the most powerful spirits and demons. ”^{513 514}
And Cagliostro says: "I belong neither to any century nor to any particular place; my spiritual being lives its eternal existence outside time and space. When I immerse myself in thought I go back through the Ages. When I extend my spirit to a world existing far from anything you perceive, 1 can change myself into whatever I wish. Participating consciously in absolute being, I regulate my action according to my surroundings. My country is wherever I happen to set foot at the moment... I am that which is . . , free and master of life. There are beings who no longer possess guardian angels; I am one of those.”⁵¹⁵
Association with the Rosicrucians, those enigmatic personages whose custom was to appear in the world as ordinary beings, hiding their true being and their real mission, must serve again here as a warning to those who, on the basis of the extraordinary possibilities attributed to the hermetic Art, seek in past epochs or even the present, some tangible and convincing manifestation of it to remove their suspicion that the whole thing is nothing more than the mere fantasy of exalted imagination.
Those who adopt this attitude will find few confirmations and little proof. They are proceeding from a dramatic, theatrical concept of the magus or initiate: as if the adept is preoccupied, above all else, with "exhibiting,” or manifesting—in forms that will astonish, amaze, or terrify—everything within the power of heaven and earth so that all eyes will converge On him.
On the contrary, if there is anything radically opposed to the style of a true initiate, it is precisely such behavior. By definition, the initiate is an occult being and his path is neither visible nor penetrable. He is elusive, not to be pigeonholed. He arrives from the direction contrary to that towards which all gazes are lixed and takes the most natural seeming vehicle for Ills supernatural action. He may be an intimate friend, companion, or lover; he may be sure of possessing all your heart and confidence. But he will always be something different, other than what he lets be known. We will perceive this "other” only when we haw penetrated his domain. And then perhaps we will have the feeling of having been walking on the edge of an abyss.
Men desire that what they are be known, that what they do be acknowledged, and that we be pleased by the quality of their performance. In the words of Agrippa, we have learned how different the law is that governs the magus and the hermetist. They judge all exhibitionism and personality to be puerile. There is no adept. He does not exist. He does not speak. They but seek to net the wind, who are diverted by such things. The hermetist has reached a state that categorically avoids all reaction to human judgment. He has stopped taking an interest in what others may think of him, or say about him, just or unjust, good Or bad. He knows only that certain things must happen: he provides the precise means and conditions for them and that is all. He does not pretend the action is his own. He is pure instrumentality "Self-affirmation’’ is a mania he does not recognize. And the farther he advances, the more deeply his center sinks into a superindividual and superpersonal range, like one of the great forces of Nature, while those on whom he acts will have the impresson of being free.
Of the hermetic quality itself, since their texts are as if they have been written only for themselves, we have to rely for the most part on what the alchemists say of themselves and their works. And once a certain attitude is assumed one can always find a way to convince oneself that the hermetic texts lack all inner meaning and have been reduced to an incomprehensible jargon in the service of superstition, chimeras, and muddles; just as, with a similar attitude, we can always convince ourselves that nothing in history shows us “positively'’ that we can completely prove that persons of such extraordinary possibilities have ever existed. Actually in the very fact of the miserable human existence led by so many alchemists we can see an ironic argument for the opposite contention. A hermetist would guard himself from dissuading anyone who thought him to be an ordinary person; this is precisely what helps to make the mask behind which the tradition is hidden still more impenetrable.
As for what might astonish some people—instead of furnishing sufficiently documented cases of actual metallic transmutations as proof, true accounts from a not so distant past^{516 517} that indicate some "phenomenon" regardless of the hermetic commandment to disdain the vulgar magic associated with such and such a particular result, to let things happen outwardly according to "nature and author­ity” and to be directed, instead, to "know oneself and to dominate the nameless triad”'’’—instead of focusing on all this, it might be useful to consider how many "random” and unpredictable elements are the germs of sometimes great revolution­ary changes in life and history. It might also be useful to consider how much there is in the natural order of phenomena, beyond the laws that explain the how, but never the why of their happening. All that constitutes an empty space, which might not be so empty after alJ^b Behind the scenes of the consciousness of men

and their history, where the physical eye and doubt alike dare not stretch, there may he someone. Homer said that the gods often travel through the world in the guise, of strangers and pilgrims and turn the cities of men around, This is not just mythology. There is reason to believe that no historical or social event of any importance, no phenomenon that has followed a determined course of terrestrial events comprising certain "discoveries" or the birth of new ideas, has not had a casual or spontaneous origin, but on the contrary has obeyed an invention, if not an actual plan conceived behind the scenes and realized via paths we can scarcely imagine today, under the sign of the Light, as well as—according to circumstances - under the sign of Darkness.
Now then, whoever, peradventure, comes to accept ideas so meagerly '’posi­tive,'’ it could be said to him that "the Transcendent Man,⁵¹⁸’ created by the hermetic Royal Art, instead of playing with little phenomena to astound the profane—like the sleights-of-hand of the music hall—or making "metaphysical investigations” his objective, he might very well prefer to focus his possibilities On the invisible world. He should not pay any great attention if some shock or rebound from above comes to alter the more or less happy course of his terrestrial existence even if it result in the spectacle of a life that perhaps few would envy. "Ye are not here to struggle with things, but with gods," said Boehme/
Given the nature of this work, we have said enough. For some we need only quote from a master of the Far East: "Just as the fish cannot live outside the gloomy depths, so the common man knows not the weapon of this 'Noble Wisdom.’"⁵¹⁹ For others, for those who despite everything wish to learn more, there is only one way to direct them: to create in themselves the capacity for a vision in which what is beyond their consciousness and thought be made as clear and distinct as objective things are for the eye and for the mind tied to the body.
But it is time now to enter into the adventure and to become one of the links in the royal, golden, occult chain of the tradition of the sons of Hermes: for which, there only remains for us—and thus we come to the end—to repeat these words of the second Rosicrucian manifesto: "Anyone who comes looking for us simply out of curiosity will never find us. But if his will truly and in fact is to inscribe himself in the registry of our fraternity, we, who judge by thought, will fulfill our promises to him. We do not divulge the place of our residence, because thoughts, united to the real will of the reader, are capable of letting us know him, and him us.”⁵²⁰
fnocx

Abraham the Jew, 60, 100 Aeneas, 173 Aesclepius, 183 Aeschylus, 7
Agathodaimon, 21, 67, 158 Agrippa, 9-10, 18, 21, 25, 35, 48-50, 83, 111, 128, 147, 172, 177, 190-93, 195, 204, 206-7, 209-11 Andreac, J. V, 61, 130-31 Apuleius, 88, 105, 110 Aristides, 110
Aristotle, 32, 36, 97, 162, 187, 200 Arnold of Villanova, 103, 118. 136, 148, 166, 172, 200, 203
Artephius, xv, 68-70, 72, 78, 106, 124, 144, 147, 156-57 162, 167, 199, 201, 208
Ashmole, E., 205 Athenagoras, 6 Aymar, 215
Bachofen, J. J., 87 140 Bacon, R., 130, 207 Bacot, J,, 143 Barchusen, j. C, 116 Bardo Thodol, 110, 182
Bernard of Treviso, 4, 18-19, 31, 44. 67 87-88, 103, 113, 116, 124, 144, 147 156, 159, 198, 209 Berthelot, M., 8-9, 16, 81, 162, 179 Bethunar, Marquis of, 215 Bhagavad-Gica, 5, 84, 133 Boehine, J., xvi, 10, 24-26, 31-32, 34-35, 37 44-45, 50, 5l, 53, 59, 68, 70, 75-77 80-82, 85-86, 88-91, 101, 105, 107 125, 127 133-34, 148, 159-60, 162, 165, 176-/8, 185, 216 Bonaventura, Saint, 128 Bonus, Petrus, 176, 200 Book ol Baruch, 7 Book of Enoch, 7, 9 Book of Jubilees, 7 Bornia, P., 87 150 Born, 215
Braccesco. 28, 50, 69, 91, 139, 151, 192. 202 B r ih adar any aka-Upani shad, 25, 88, 127, 153, 164, 185
Buddha, 4, 24, 36, 53-54, 75, 91, 114, 197 Bundabcsh, 3 Burckhardt, T., 136
Cagliostro, 10, 160, 213-14

Calvin, John, 96
Char bo nneau-Lass ay, L., 4, 88
Chymes, 187