We do not understand properly the harmonies of being, which follow an ordered sequence, as the illustrious maniac Fourier well said. The spirit acts upon spirits by means of the Word; matter receives the imprints of spirit and communicates therewith by means of a perfect organism. Harmony in forms is related to harmony in ideas, and the light is the common mediator. Light is spirit and life; it is the synthesis of colours, the accord of shadows, the harmony of forms; and its vibrations are living mathematics. But darkness and its phantastic illusions, the phosphorescent errors of slumber and words spoken in delirium—all these create nothing, realise nothing and in a word do not exist. Such things belong to the limbus of life, are vapours of astral intoxication and delusions of tired eyes. To follow these will o’ the wisps is to walk in a blind alley; to believe in their revelations is to worship death: such is Nature’s testimony. Incoherence and abuse are the only messages of table-turning; they are echos of the low-life deeps of thought, absurd and anarchic dreams, words which the scum of the people make use of to express defiance. There is a book by Baron de Guldenstubbé,[217] who pretends to conduct a correspondence with the other world. He has had answers, and such answers—obscene sketches, despairing hieroglyphics and the following Greek signature, [Greek: pneuma thanatos], which may be translated “spirit of death.” Such is the last word of the phenomenal revelations according to American doctrine; such is doctrine itself in separation from sacerdotal authority and in the attempt to establish it independently of hierarchic control. The reality and importance of the phenomena, the good faith of those who believe them, are in no sense denied; but we must warn all who are concerned against the dangers to which they are liable if they do not prefer the spirit of wisdom, communicated divinely and hierarchically to the Church, before all these disorderly and obscure messages, in which the fluidic soul of the earth reflects automatically the mirage of intelligence and the dreams of slumbering reason. BOOK V THE ADEPTS AND THE PRIESTHOOD ה—HE CHAPTER I PRIESTS AND POPES ACCUSED OF MAGIC