< Violationism: or, Sorcery in Science (continued from page 12-111) >
offered in secluded places living oblations of victims the most innocent he could procure, putting them to deaths of hideous torture in the belief that the results obtained would be favourable to his wishes in proportion to the inhumanity and monstrosity of the means employed. Thus, as Ennemoser observes, '“the sorcerers inverted nature itself, abused the innocent animal world with horrible ingenuity, and trod every human feeling gunder foot. Endeavouring by force to obtain benefits from hell, they had recourse to the most terrible of infernal devices. For, where men know not God, or having known, have turned away from Him to wickedness, they are wont to address themselves in worship to the kingdom of hell, and to the powers of darkness.”
Such, precisely, is the part enacted by the vivisector of today. He is, in fact, a practitioner of black magic, the characteristic cultus of which has been described by a well- known writer on occult subjects as that of vicarious death. “To sacrifice others to oneself, to kill others in order to get life,— this was the great principle of sorcery.” (Eliphas Levi.) The witches of Thessaly practised horrible cruelties; some, like (Canidia, of whom Horace speaks, buried infants alive, leaving their heads above ground, so that they died of hunger; others cut them in pieces and mixed their flesh and blood with the juice of belladonna, black poppies, and herbs, in order to compose ointments deemed to have special properties. The well-known history of Gilles de Laval, Seigneur of Retz and Marshal of Brittany in the fifteenth century, may serve as an illustration of the atrocities perpetrated in secret by professors of sorcery. This man, distinguished for the military services the rendered to Charles VII., and occupying an honoured and brilliant position in the society of the day (as also do most of our modern sorcerers), was yet, like the latter, guilty of the most infamous practices conceivable. More than 200 children of tender years died in torture at the hands of the Marshal and his accomplices, who, on the faith of the doctrines of sorcery, believed that the universal agent of life could, by certain processes conducted under approved conditions, be instantaneously fixed and coagulated in the pellicule of healthy blood. This pellicule, immediately after’ transfusion, was collected and subjected to the action of diverse fermentations, and mingled with salt, sulphur, mercury, and other oloinents.* (Eliphas Levi.)
An almost exact parallel to the modern vivisector in motive, in method, and in character is presented by the portrait thus preserved to us of the mediaeval devil-conjurer. In it we recognise the delusion, whose enunciation in medical language is so unhappily familiar to us, that by means of vicarious sacrifices, divinations in living bodies, and rites consisting of torture scientifically inflicted and prolonged, the secrets of life and of power over nature are obtainable. But the spiritual malady which rages in the soul of the man who can be guilty of the deeds of the vivisector, is in itself sufficient to render him incapable of acquiring the highest and best knowledge. Like the sorcerer, he finds it easier' to propagate and multiply disease than to discover the secret of health. Seeking for the germs of life he invents only new methods of death, and pays with his soul the price of these poor gains. Like the sorcerer, he misunderstands alike the terms and the method of knowledge, and voluntarily sacrifices his humanity in order to acquire the eminence of a fiend. But perhaps the most significant of all points of resemblance between the sorcerer and the vivisector, as contrasted with the Magian, is in the distinctive, and exclusive solicitude for the mere body manifested by the two former. To secure advantages of a physical and material nature merely, to discover some effectual method of self-preservation in the flesh, to increase its pleasures, to assuage its self-induced diseases, to minister to its sensual comforts, no matter at what cost of vicarious pain and misery to innocent men and animals, these are the objects, exclusively, of the mere sorcerer,—of the mere vivisector. His aims are bounded by the earthly and the sensual; he neither cares nor seeks for any knowledge unconnected with these. But the aspiration of the Magian, the adept in true magic, is entirely towards the region of the Divine. Ho seeks primarily health for the soul, knowing that health for the body will follow; therefore he works through and by means of him soul, and his art is truly sympathetic, magnetic, and radical. He holds that the soul is the true person, that her interests are paramount, and that no knowledge of value to man can be bought by the vicarious tears and pain of any creature soever. He remembers above all things, that man is the son of God, and if for a moment the interests of Knowledge and of Love should seem to be at variance, he will say with equal courage and wisdom: “I would rather that I and my beloved should suffer and die in the body than that to buy relief or life for it our souls should be smitten with disease and death.” For the Magian is priest and king as well as physician, but the sorcerer, whose miserable craft, divorced from religion, deals only with the lower nature, that is, with the powers of darkness, clings with passionate despair to the flesh, and, by the very character of his pursuits, makes himself incapable of real science. For, to be an adept in this, it is indispensable to be pure of heart, clear of conscience, and just in action. It is not enough that the aim be noble, it is necessary that the means should be noble likewise. A Divine intention presupposes a Divine method. As it is forbidden to man to enrich himself by theft, or to free himself by murder, so also is it forbidden him to acquire knowledge by unlawful means, to fight oven the battles of humanity with the weapons of hell. It is impossible to serve humanity by the sacrifice of that which alone constitutes humanity—justice and its eternal-principles. Whenever the world has followed the axioms of the vivisector, whenever it has put sword and flame and rack to work in the interests of truth or of progress, it has but reaped a harvest of lies, and started an epidemic of madness and delusion. All the triumphs of civilisation have boon gained by civilised methods: it is the Divine law that so it should be, and whoever affirms the contrary is either an imbecile or a hypocrite. The vivisector’s plea that 1m sins in the interests of humanity is, therefore, the product of a mind incapable of reason, or wilfully concealing its true object with a lie. That, in the majority of cases, the latter explanation is the correct one is proved beyond doubt by the nature of the operations performed, and by not a few incautious admissions on the part of some of the school itself. To multiply pamphlets, “observations,” and “scientific” discussions; to gain notoriety among followers of the cultus, to be distinguished as the inventor of such a “method” or the chronicler of such a series of experiments, and thereby to earn wealth and position, those constitute the ambitions of the average vivisector. And, if he go beyond these, if some vague hope of a “groat discovery” delude and blind his moral nature as it did that of the miserable Seigneur de Retz, we must, in such ease, relegate him to the category of madmen, who, for the poor gains of the body, are willing to assassinate the soul. Madness such as this was rife in those mediaeval times which we are wont to speak of as the “dark ages,” and the following examples, selected for the striking resemblance they present to the “scientific” crimes of the nineteenth century, may, with the instances already given, suffice as specimens of the abominations which the delusions of sorcery are able to suggest.
“The Taigheirm was an infernal magical sacrifice of cats, prevalent until the close of the sixteenth century, and of which the origin lies in the remotest times. Tho rites of the Taiglieim were indispensable to the worship or incantation of the subterranean or diabolic gods. The midnight hour, between Friday and Saturday, was the authentic time for these horrible practices; and the sacrifice was continued four whole days and nights. After the cats had been put into magico-sympathetic (sur-excited) condition by a variety of tortures, one of them was put alive upon a spit, and, amid terrific bowlings, roasted before a slow fire. Tho moment that the howls of one agonized creature ceased in death, another was put on the spit—for a minute of interval must not take place if the operators would control hell —and this sacrifice was continued for four entire days and nights. When the Taiglieim was complete, the operators demanded of the demons the reward of their offering, which reward consisted of various things, such as riches, knowledge, fame, the gift of second sight, Ac.”—Horst’s “Deuteroscopy," and Ennemoser s “History of Magic.” †
Let the following extracts from publications circulated among the vivisectors of to-day be compared with the foregoing, and the reader will himself be enabled to judge of the exactness of the parallel between Tho black art of the past and of the present.
“Dr. Legg’s experiments on cats at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital included a groat variety of tortures. Among others, <... continues on page 12-113 >
* Note.—Those formulae prescribed by the ancient science of alchemy, have reference, of course, to truths of which the terms used are symbols only. But the sorcerer, not being u initiate, understood these terms in their ordinary sence, and acted accordingly.
† Among the practices of Japanese sorcerers in the present century, the following is cited in Mr. Pfoundes’ book “Fu-no Mimi Bukuro”: — “A dog is buried alive, the head only being left above ground, and food is then put almost within its reach, thus exposing it to the cruel fate of Tantalus. When in the greatest agony and near death, its head is chopped oft' and put in a box.”