and cause them to preach universal concord among men—peace between sovereigns, reason among priests, and goodness among the princes of this world. In fine, as a last and supreme madness, he neglected the benefits of this world and the favour of the great, lived always humbly and in poverty, possessed nothing but his knowledge and his books, and desired nothing but truth and justice. May God give peace to the soul of poor William Postel. He was so mild and so good that his ecclesiastical superiors took pity upon him and, thinking probably, as was said later on of La Fontaine, that he was more silly than wicked, they were contented with shutting him up in his convent for the rest of his days. Postel was grateful for the quiet thus ensured toward the close of life, and he died peaceably, retracting everything that his superiors required. The man of universal concord could not be an anarchist; he was before all things the sincerest of catholics and humblest of Christians. The works of Postel will be rediscovered one of these days and will be read with wonder. [Illustration: THE SEVEN PLANETS AND THEIR GENII] Let us pass to another maniac who was called Theophrastus Aureolus Bombast and was known in the World of Magic under the famous name of Paracelsus. There is no need to recapitulate what has been said concerning this master in our _Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic_, but something may be added on the occult medicine restored by Paracelsus. This truly universal medicine is based upon a spacious theory of light, called by adepts fluid or potable gold. Light, that creative agent, the vibrations of which are the movement and life of all things; light, latent in the universal ether, radiating about absorbing centres, which, being saturated thereby, project movement and life in their turn, so forming creative currents; light, astralised in the stars, animalised in animals, humanised in human beings; light, which vegetates in plants, glistens in metals, produces all forms of Nature and equilibrates all by the laws of universal sympathy—this is that light which exhibits the phenomena of magnetism, divined by Paracelsus, which tinctures the blood, being released from the air as it is inhaled and discharged by the hermetic bellows of the lungs. The blood then becomes a true elixir of life, wherein ruby and magnetic globules of vital light float in a slightly gilded fluid. These globules are actual seeds, ready to assume all forms of that world whereof the human body is an abridgment. They can become rarefied and coagulated, so renewing the humours which circulate in the nerves and in the flesh encompassing the bones. They radiate outside, or rather, in rarefying, they are drawn by the currents of light and circulate in the astral body—that interior and luminous body which is dilated by the imagination of ecstatics, so that their blood sometimes colours objects at a distance when these have been penetrated and identified with the astral body.