All must be dared in order to achieve all—such was the axiom of enchantments and their associated horrors. The false magicians were banded together by crime and believed that they could intimidate others when they had contrived to terrify themselves. The rites of Black Magic have remained revolting like the impious worships it produced; this was the case indifferently in the association of criminals who conspired against the old civilisations and among the barbaric races. There was always the same passion for darkness; there were the same profanations, the same sanguinary processes. Anarchic Magic is the cultus of death. The sorcerer devotes himself to fatality, abjures reason, renounces the hope of immortality, and then sacrifices children. He forswears marriage and is given over to barren debauch. On such conditions he enjoys the plenitude of his mania, is made drunk with iniquity till he believes that evil is omnipotent and, converting his hallucinations into reality, he thinks that his mastery has power to evoke at pleasure all death and Hades. Barbarian words and signs unknown, or even utterly unmeaning, are the best in Black Magic.[93] Hallucination is insured more readily by ridiculous practices and imbecile evocations than by rites or _formulæ_ which keep intelligence in a waking state. Du Potet says that he has tested the power of certain signs on ecstatics, and those which are published in his occult book, with precaution and mystery, are in analogy, if not absolutely identical, with pretended diabolical signatures found in old editions of the Grand Grimoire.[94] The same causes always produce the same effects, and there is nothing that is new beneath the moon of sorcerers, any more than under the sun of sages. The state of permanent hallucination is death or abdication of consciousness, and one is then surrendered to all the chances comprised by the fatality of dreams. Every remembrance begets its own reflection, every evil desire creates an image, every remorse breeds a nightmare. Life becomes that of an animal, but of a peevish and tormented animal; the sense of morality and of time is alike absent; realities exist no longer; it is a general dance in the whirlpool of insensate forms. Sometimes an hour seems protracted over centuries, and again years may fly with an hour’s swiftness.