is not dead, and he will come again upon earth before the last day. CHAPTER V SOME FAMOUS SORCERERS AND MAGICIANS Amidst a great multiplicity of commentaries and studies on the work of Dante, no one, that we are aware, has signalised its characteristic in chief. The masterpiece of the glorious Ghibelline is a declaration of war against the papacy by a daring revelation of mysteries. The epic of Dante is Johannite and Gnostic; it is a bold application of Kabalistic figures and numbers to Christian dogmas, and is further a secret negation of the absolute element therein; his visit to the supernatural worlds takes place like an initiation into the Mysteries of Eleusis and Thebes. He is guided and protected by Virgil amidst the circles of the new Tartarus, as if the tender and melancholy prophet of the destinies of the son of Pollio were, in the eyes of the Florentine poet, the illegitimate yet true father of the Christian epic. Thanks to the pagan genius of Virgil, Dante emerges from that gulf above the door of which he had read the sentence of despair; he escapes by standing on his head, which means by reversing dogma. So does he ascend to the light, using the demon himself, like a monstrous ladder; by the force of terror he emerges from terror, from the horrible by the power of horror. He seems to testify that hell is without egress for those only who cannot go back on themselves; he takes the devil against the grain, if I may use so familiar an expression, and attains emancipation by audacity.[258] This is truly protestantism surpassed, and the poet of Rome’s enemies has already divined Faust ascending to heaven on the head of the defeated Mephistopheles. Observe also that the hell of Dante is but a negative purgatory, by which is meant that his purgatory seems to take form in his hell, as if in a mould; it is like the lid or stopper of the gulf, and it will be understood that the Florentine titan in scaling Paradise meant to kick purgatory into hell.[259] His heaven is composed of a series of Kabalistic circles divided by a cross, like the pantacle of Ezekiel; in the centre of this cross a rose blossoms, thus for the first time manifesting publicly and almost explaining categorically the symbol of the Rosicrucians. We say for the first time because William of Lorris, who died in 1260, five years before the birth of Dante, did not complete the _Romance of the Rose_, his mantle falling upon Clopinel some fifty years later. It will be discovered with a certain astonishment that the _Romance of the Rose_ and the _Divine Comedy_ are two opposite forms of a single work—initiation by independence of spirit, satire on all contemporary institutions and an allegorical formula of the grand secrets of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross.