The Atlas полностью

But now I know. More than fresh rain I'd prefer to imbibe the dew of beautiful correspondences which is the true elixir of sorcery. Grease to a mechanic, metaphor to a Muse — such is similitude to a magician. Yes! I will speak to you of the three Spheres, and the cords of sympathy between them — ropes of power, if you will, far more necessary to the continuance of creation than those anonymously identical electrons which represent the mediocrity of mass democracy, oh, my friends! — While browsing in an ancient Coptic tractate, I found these lines: Discern what size the water is, that it is immeasurable and incomprehensible, both its beginning and its end. It supports the earth, it blows in the air, where the gods and angels are. But in him who is exalted above all these there is the fear and the light, and in him are my writings revealed. This place of fear and light is the core of talismanic magic: an empyrean cosmos of crystal, a Sphere in which reside the ideals of all created things, swarming like quartz and diamond bees around the radiant nectar of their First Cause. — Enclosing this realm one finds the Middle Globe of constellations. A seal has been inscribed upon each star's flames to name it forever according to its character, be it Tetra, Zebul, Sabbac, Kadie, Berisay, or any of a billion trillion others — for it is a law that no two stars may have the same name. They have spirits of various colors and luminosities; and they are the agents of the forms in the inner sphere where we began. Their rays broadcast influences down to the outermost Sphere of Material Elements within which we find ourselves incorporated; where all is guided by them in every place from the Zone of Snows, where the sky may sometimes be afternoon-blue and the sun lies orange on the frozen sea, to the tree-choked hollows between hot sugarcane hills: —every leaf is veined in its own language with a name, and that name is the name of its star.

Now you know the secret. Each crystal of sea-ice already sends up an essence to its own pale planet. The blood of a bat, they say, mixed with saffron and other ingredients, then brought to a boil upon a grave, will call out of moldy darkness a quorum of demons. But why trouble yourself? The bat already has a bat-star, and the corpse in the grave its star, too; everything is controlled by those maddening rays! The known antipathy between lignum aloes and frankincense, the astrological rules of ascendants, trines and sextiles — all these phenomena can be derived from the characters of the stars which pull them hither and thither.

Sometimes (I admit) I gaze into the night sky longing to blot away those hateful masters of our destiny. Were I to awake inside my coffin, my consolation would be to find no lethal dimples of light to interrupt the lid — foolish solace, I grant, because the stellar rays can pass with easy malignance through earth and stone any quantity of infinities thick, to link whatever they choose with their significators in that eerie Sphere of Stars. Even in the day of Jupiter one cannot hide the evil; the rite of the burial of scorpions cannot forestall it; the conjuration of vegetable souls cannot delay it. Always those horrible stars! When I see a cliff so tightly bulging with ferns as to resemble an immense palmhead; when I find a land swollen with leafy treetops, fringed with plantations and bananas, tunneled with jungle-walled lava-paved creeks, I grow dizzy in contemplation of the immensity of that hideous Sphere above, for whose tyranny every pebble in the water has been wrought; every fruit ripens in accordance with the commands of its celestial orb; each darkness between leaves corresponds to the space between two stars, the dark and waxy ether of the firmament, the mass of anguish that calls for evil to come.