Page:The Great Book of Magical Art, Hindu Magic and East Indian Occultism.djvu/503

 PUBAUMRUM 485

from books is not an Arcanum;* a secret that might be communicated intellectually from one person to another, is not a divine or spiritual mystery. A cow can give birth to nothing else but a calf; a monkey cannot produce a man; neither can he who has not himself been reborn in the spirit produce or endow things with spiritual power. Man must himself be and realise that which he desires to produce.

The first Arcanum is the Mercurius Vivus; the second the Prima Materia; the third is the Lapis Philosophorum, and the fourth the Tinc- tura. These remedies are rather of an occult than of a material character.

If the mind or imagination could create a disease, surely the same will, acting within the soul of man, can cure all diseases; but only that will which is active in man, not that which is outside of him, can act within his organization, and before a man becomes able to send his will within the soul of another person his own will must become godlike and free. A "hypnotist" literally controls the will of a patient and acts upon his imagination, but the magic power of the true Adept is the power of the spirit acting through him. Such powers do not belong to that which is mortal in man, but to that which is divine, and therefore those who wish to graduate in the "esoteric" works of the writer, and follow his example will have to become regenerated in the spirit of the soul.

♦An Arcanum is incorporeal and indestructible of eternal life, superhuman and beyond disease. In the human soul is the Arcanum Dei and the Arcanum Nature; the Arcanum is the virtue of a thing in its highest potency; the Arcanum Ho minis is that power of man which is eternal in him.