Symbols ana a

t be four scaqcs
of poujor
m he first "Materia” that we encounter with which the
ordinary ego has the most immediate rapport is mental energies. Once they have been freed from the condi­tions of the body (and specifically from the brain), these energies acquire a "pen­etrating’⁴⁷² and ubiquitous virtue: they can communicate directly with other minds, bridging die spatial separation between individuals. But this ability commonly referred to as ''reading minds” is not the only faculty acquired. There is also the power to arouse, in other beings, specific thoughts, visions, and plans of action (mental commands).¹ The experience itself of a particular thought, moreover, can vary, and shows that our usual consciousness derives not so much from thought as from the repercussions of deeper energies. Such surges of energy at this point are picked up directly and isolated by the brain, which acts as a "transformer.” It is in this state that the supernormal psychic abilities we have mentioned are manifested.
And the same can be said, analogously, for the deeper stratum of the human entity that is the seat of the emotions, passions, and sentiments. Nonhuman influences are at work behind the subjective forms of the stirrings of the soul and senses. The various feelings of the human emotional spectrum result from different primordial energies, of which the types of the animal world are often considered

their avenues of sensitivity, k seems then, that what appears in man in the form of a particular passion or emotion is the same that is manifested in Nature by a specific species of animal. The twelve animals of the zodiac refer to this; and the "marriages with sacred animals” mentioned in certain traditions must be under­stood as the union with energies acting through the world of human affectivity, as general, invisible, nonhuman causes of the forms of it,^{473 474}
This is the point at which we also acquire the virtual faculty of "projecting” to other beings not only ideas and images, but emotions and affective states in general, even "charging” objects and places^ with specific emotive states, This provides a supernatural authority over the animal kingdom as well, as recorded in the lives of many saints and ascetics.
And all this is an effect of the separation, purification, and stripping of every­thing that is manifested in the double aspect of thought and feeling in the common man. But now let us go on to the third "level”: to the plane of the vital forces corresponding to the sign ^ of the "lunar Mercury” (vegetative soul). After the "separation” has taken place (that which occurs in the "Whiteness” with the conse­quent transmutarion of the Lead into bright Silver), there follows a control over a "form” or "subtle body” that can be detached from the physical body. Tie re upon it becomes possible to project one’s own "double” which, as a regenerated conscious­ness, has the power to transport itself instantaneously to any given point in space, resulting thereby in a corresponding apparition.
This "form,” being sustained solely by the mind, can assume whatever shape the mind imagines and imposes. Hence not only bilocation, but also the ability, that the Orient attributes to the yogis, to appear simultaneously in several different forms apart from chose which (up to this stage) the unity of a single physical body lying in abeyance maintains. If in many popular traditions or among primitive people there are witch doctors said to have the power to manifest themselves and act in the forms of animals, while remaining elsewhere and lying in their human body, there is reason to think there are other phenomena substantially like these. But in the greater part of these cases (if they are authentic), they are not the deliberate acts of the Higher Soul. Such phenomena are the result rather of a dark promiscuity on the part of the sorcerer with one of the occult forces of animality, which erupting in him, dominates the "double” to whom is transmitted the figure of the type that corresponds in the visible animal kingdom ("werewolves,” "leopard-men,” etc.): dissociated projections

in which are dramatized the tatemic rapports mentioned in footnote 2.
That which is dissociated, in any case, is that which in the subtle forces of man corresponds to the vegetable kingdom; and as affectivity in itself opens the way to extrasensory knowledge of the "sacred animals,” so the "extraction” of this group of subtle forces opens the way to the extrasensory consciousness of the vegetable essences, a consciousness distinguished by a corresponding "power. ” The phenomena of desiccation or the. abnormally rapid growth, well known in the Orient, of plants and herbs are also mentioned in the hermetico-alchemical texts.^{475 476} As for the strictly human application of the "Medicine,” the acquisition of the "White Stone” confers on the soul the capacity to act on disturbances or ailments of the body not merely in a functional way, but also organically.-’ An intuitive knowledge of those natural remedies can also be acquired which, according to the circumstances, can act on the sick body. This is the method followed, for instance, by Paracelsus, for whom the basis of true medicine [the knowledge of signatures] was essentially alchemy.


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Finally, when dissociation, purification and reconstitution vest the same cohe­sive telluric structure in the body—apart from the possibility of transporting into the invisible everything that makes up visible man, (invisibility, death without leaving a body—"raising the whole body to heaven by Assumption,’’ "the body raising itself, by its own power, to the region of Brahma,” etc.)—and apart from the possibility of magically dissolving the body in one given place in order to recompose it and cause it to appear intact in another, and not just in its double (in that case there occurs in the human body what today we must admit under other conditions, that is, mediumistic conditions, which take place in the metaphysical and "psychic" phenomenon of the "apport”)⁴⁷⁷—beyond all that, is the not inconsid­erable power to act on substances and on the laws of external mlnerality, on the occult forces active in them, that henceforth the initiate has activated within his own magically enlivened organism.
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