[357] See La France Mystique, vol. i. p. 36 et seq. for a contemporary account of Du Potet and of the periodical magnetic séances which took place au dessus du restaurant des Frères Provençaux, au Perron du Palais-Royal.

[358] According to another account, the Magic Mirror was an ordinary circle of evocation drawn with charcoal. Wandering spirits were supposed to be conjured therein.

[359] His madness is said otherwise to have been partial, or characterised by many lucid intervals. His second work was Religion, and it preached the doctrine of reincarnation, with periodical changes of sex. It described the Deity as an infinite substance in which circulated myriads of soul-entities.

[360] His other works include the Gospel of the People, 1840, to which Éliphas Lévi refers subsequently. For this he was imprisoned. In 1847 he published a Histoire des Montagnards. At the end of 1851 he was compelled to leave France, and seems to have lived in England. Henri Alphonse Esquiros was born in 1814.

[361] Henri Delaage seems to have taken the question of physical beauty rather seriously to heart. In 1850, under the title of Perfectionnement physique de la Race Humaine, he made a collection of processes and methods for acquiring beauty, drawn—as he claimed—from Chaldean Magi and Hermetic Philosophers.

[362] The Église Française was forcibly closed about 1840, but in 1848 an attempt was made to reopen it in a small room. A particular kind of Mass was celebrated in the French language, and it appears that the church had fixed festivals of its own. In doctrinal matters, Abbé Châtel regarded the relation between God and the universe as comparable to that between the soul and body, “but in an infinitely more excellent manner.” Paradise, Purgatory and Hell were alike abolished, and in their place two states were substituted, one of glory and felicity, the other of reparation.

[363] See the appendix to Essai sur le Secte des Illuminés, by the Marquis de Luchet, already quoted.

[364] Joseph Pitton de Tournefort: Relation d’un Voyage du Levant, 1717, 2 vols. It was translated into English and published in 3 vols., 1741.

[365] I wish that it were possible to quote the moving panegyric on Ganneau in a letter addressed by Éliphas Lévi to Alexandre Erdan and printed by him in La France Mystique, vol. ii. p. 184-188. He is described as one of the élite of intelligence, an artist, a poet of original and inexhaustible eloquence. He was sometimes bizarre but never absurd or wearisome. He was, finally, one of those hearts under the inspiration of which the zealous will crucify themselves with joy for the ungrateful. Erdan once saw Ganneau addressing a crowd in the Place de la Concorde, “uplifting his great arms and raising to heaven his beautiful Christ-like head.”

[366] I suppose that this would be a St. Andrew’s cross with the addition of a vertical branch, on which would rest the head of the crucified person.

[367] There was a son of this marriage, and in 1855 M. Alexandre Erdan was inquiring what had become of him.

[368] To suggest that the Zohar exists to propound and interpret a thesis of equilibrium is like saying that the vast text is written about the legend of the Edomite Kings or that it is a violent attack on Christianity, because there is a reference to each of these subjects. The symbolism of the Balance is practically confined to a single tract imbedded in the Zohar.

[369] “God stretched forth His right hand and created the world above, and He stretched forth His left hand and created the world below.... God created the world below on the model of the world above, for the image is found beneath of all that abides on high.”—Zohar, Part II., fol. 20a.

[370] Joseph de Maistre: Soirées de St. Pétersbourg, 1821, p. 308.

[371] For the sake of completeness, I have included this preface, though from some points of view it might have been reasonably omitted altogether.