shall even come to impress its perfect image on the Astral Light; more even than this, when we fall into dreams or ecstasy, we shall see ourselves as ecstatics and somnambulists would see us and as we must appear undoubtedly in the eyes of animals. Let it happen in such cases that reason be extinguished, that persistent dreams change into madness, and we shall be turned into beasts like Nebuchadnezzar. This explains those stories of were-wolves, some of which have been legally established. The facts were beyond dispute, but the witnesses were not less hallucinated than the were-wolves themselves.[60] Cases of coincidence and correspondence in the dream-state are neither rare nor extraordinary. Persons in the state of magnetic ecstasy can see and talk to one another from opposite ends of the earth. We ourselves may meet someone for the first time and he or she will seem to be an old acquaintance because we have encountered frequently in dream. Life is full of these curious occurrences and as regards the transformation of human beings into animals, the evidences are on every side. How many aged courtesans and gluttonous females, reduced almost to idiocy after threading all sewers of existence, are nothing but old she-cats egregiously enamoured of their tom. Pythagoras believed above all things in the soul’s immortality and in the perpetuity of life. The endless succession of summer and winter, day and night, sleeping and waking, illustrated amply for him the phenomenon of death. For him also the particular immortality of human souls consisted in persistence of memory. He is said to have been conscious of his previous incarnations and if the report is true, it was something suggested by his reminiscences, for such a man as he could have been neither impostor nor fool.[61] It is probable that he came upon former memories in his dreams, while simple speculation and hypothesis have been constructed as positive affirmation on his part. However this may be, his thought was great, for the real life of our individuality consists in memory alone. Those waters of Lethe pictured by the ancients were the true philosophical type of death. The Bible appears to impart a divine sanction to this idea when it is said in the Book of Psalms that “the just shall be in everlasting remembrance.”[62] CHAPTER VII THE HOLY KABALAH Let us now have recourse to the origin of true science by recurring to the Holy Kabalah, or tradition of the children of Seth, taken from Chaldea by Abraham, communicated by Joseph to the Egyptian priesthood, ingarnered by Moses, concealed by symbols in the Bible, revealed by the Saviour to St. John, and embodied in its fulness in hieratic images, analogous to those of all antiquity, in the Apocalypse of this Apostle.