The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, _black_ magic. Between the two is placed natural “mediumship;” a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the “spirits” it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross. The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his reason. There was no real danger to him whose mind had become thoroughly spiritualized, and so prepared for every terrific sight. He who fully recognized the power of his immortal spirit, and never doubted for one moment its omnipotent protection, had naught to fear. But woe to the candidate in whom the slightest physical fear--sickly child of matter--made him lose sight and faith in his own invulnerability. He who was not wholly confident of his moral fitness to accept the burden of these tremendous secrets was doomed. The _Talmud_ gives the story of the four Tanaïm, who are made, in allegorical terms, to enter into _the garden of delights_; _i.e._, to be initiated into the occult and final science. “According to the teaching of our holy masters the names of the four who entered the garden of delight, are: Ben Asai, Ben Zoma, Acher, and Rabbi Akiba.... “Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight. “Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason. “Acher made depredations in the plantation” (mixed up the whole and failed). “But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, ‘This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.’” “The learned commentators of the _Talmud_, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the _garden of delight_, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences _for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity_,” says A. Franck, in his _Kabbala_. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. _The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation._