The Angel of Lust

by Maurice Magre

  Logically, if the pleasure of eating is not prohibited, there is no reason for that of sensuality to be. But one cannot assimilate those two orders of physical pleasure. They are, in the normal human being, as indispensable to life as one another, but while one only draws from nourishment a bodily habitude coming from a harmonious digestion, one can obtain marvelous possibilities of sensuality if it is practiced with a person one loves. It can even be a road to perfection—except that the road in question is unknown. The laws that specify how spiritual elevation can be achieved by the community of desire and its mutual satisfaction have not yet been written by any master. I have never even heard that there has been any oral information on that subject. A prudery as old as the world has stopped by its virtuous silence the flight that humankind might have been able to take by means of the portal of the flesh and sexual intercourse.

  But we do not know whether the Rosicrucian symbol of the rose might contain implicitly the indication of the secret of amour that remains to be found.

  The person who arrives at the supreme knowledge by means of magnified intelligence can only love beings and things whose inner workings he has penetrated, whose movements he can see, the passions of which he understands as if they were his own. The person who succeeds in reaching the sensible estate of perfect love by the emotive impulse of the heart will see the barriers of ignorance fall and will conquer knowledge by the gift of themselves to the person they love. For the two roads join at a certain height, and are only one thereafter.

  The symbol is just and eternal and there is no need of any other for thousands of human evolutions. Everyone can weigh himself in his measure and find a provisional touchstone of good and evil by referring to the rose and the cross. Now, that is the question mark that looms up in so many consciences without them admitting it. What is good and what is evil? Am I right to accomplish an action that seems good from my point of view and bad from the viewpoint of others? Certainly, the rose and the cross cannot serve as a key to all enigmas, for there are too many doors in the shadows of the soul. The anguishing question, posed at least once for everyone, a thousand times for some, of knowing whether the most important thing is one’s own development or helping others, whether it is better to sacrifice oneself or to impel oneself forward by study, is unresolved. But the two ever-present images provide a basis for a person who is sincere with himself.

  Every time that one identifies oneself, via love, either with the ensemble of the universe known as God, with a landscape, with a human being or any other being, even a dog, one is on the path of the rose, protected by it an enriched by its substance. Every time one escapes ignorance, that one learns a fact or a law, that one permits the mind to go a little further in the knowledge of what exists, one is making progress toward the supra-terrestrial and supra-celestial place where the cross extends its four spiritual branches.

  That is the message that Christian Rosenkreutz came to bring the men of the Occident. It is a message that might seem very humble to the skeptics of our race, who are convinced that they possess all knowledge and place a higher priority on hatred than love. But it was brought very humbly by a messenger who put his glory into hiding his name and who, having traveled for more than a hundred years to transmit his humble verity, left no other trace of his passage than the design of the flower open in the middle of the cross.

  Notes

  1 The 1758 Dictionnaire historique, géographique, critique, théologique, moral et portative de la Bible asserts, in its entry on Priapus, that this Hebrew term, found in the scriptures, refers to that god; the same paragraph refers to Priapus’ function as a scarecrow. Magre appears to have been the only subsequent writer to have made use of these dubious data.

  2 Posthumius Albinus was consul in 186 B.C. when the Senate took action to suppress popular Bacchic cults, probably for political reasons, although Livy asserts, in justifying the suppression, that cult members had perpetrated horrible crimes.

  3 Maacha, the daughter of Absalom and wife of Rehomboam, mentioned in I Kings 1-14 and also in passages in Chronicles, is actually said there to be the grandmother of Asa of Judah.

  4 Domitia Lepida (c 5 B.C.-54 A.D.), probably married Marcus Valerius Messalla Barbatus in 15 A.D. or thereabouts; their daughter, the future Empress Valeria Messalina, would have been born a few years thereafter, but the exact date is unknown.

  5 The temple of Volupia, the goddess of pleasure—also known as Volupta—on the Via Nova, where sacrifices were offered to the protective goddess Angerona, is mentioned by several classical authors, including Pliny the Elder and Macrobius, but without further explanation.

  6 Author’s note: “These details are reported by Suetonius.” Suetonius was one of the “historians” who did everything possible, for political reasons, to blacken Claudius’ reputation some time after his death, including inventing all the scurrilous myths that made Messalina’s name notorious, and for which there is no contemporary evidence at all, so this description is highly unreliable.

  7 The Christian apologists Justin Martyr and Irenaeus both record that Simon Magus performed magical acts in Rome during the reign of Claudius, and was honored in consequence with a statue on an island in the Tiber whose inscription declared him to be a god. It was the same two authors who laid the foundations of the story of his companion Helen.

  8 Apion (c20 B.C.-c48 A.D.), who taught rhetoric in Rome, did indeed have this reputation. The earliest version of the story of Androcles and the Lion is found in one of his works,

  9 The alleged career of the ancient Roman poisoner Locusta was detailed—long after her supposed death—by Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, but the later accounts probably copied the first. Her name became legendary in nineteenth-century France because Alexandre Dumas used it as the nickname for the poisoner featured in Le Comte de Monte Cristo. Typically, Magre’s characterization is greatly embellished.

  10 The term ephialtes was used by the Greek physician Galen to describe nightmares, imagined as caused by an incubus lying on top of a sleeper.

  11 Author’s note: “Juvenal, Tacitus and Josephus are unanimous in claiming that it was almost every evening that Messalina took the place in a brothel of a whore named Lysisca. It stands to reason that the entire city of Rome would have headed for a place where the Empress could be had for a few sesterces. It is more plausible, as Cassius Dio says, that she only went there once, on the occasion of which he speaks.”

  12 Author’s note: “Tacitus says that is was Cectius Velens who climbed he tree; others name Theogonius. It does not matter.”

  13 This character is based on Alfonso Carrillo de Acuña (1410-1482), who was appointed as Archbishop of Toledo in 1446. He was one of the main instigators of a bloody civil war in Castile in the 1460s. The details of the character’s later life given in the story are all fictitious.

  14 This character is based on Abu l’Hasan Ali, who was the Sultan of Granada from 1464-82 and again from 1483-85. He refused to pay tribute to the realm of Castile in 1477 and invaded the city of Zahara in 1481, which sparked a war against Isabella I of Castile. The latter events are juxtaposed in the story, and chronological liberties are taken with a number of other datable events, but the principal action appears to take place in 1481-82.

  15 Abiathar Crescas, a Jewish physician and astrologer who became the chief astrologer of King John of Aragon, who reigned from 1458-79. He became famous for restoring the king’s eyesight by means of a pioneering cataract operation. Aboulfedia is fictitious, and is not to be confused with the fourteenth-century Arab historian Abulfeda.

  16 Astronomical telescopes were unknown in Europe until the seventeenth century, but Magre consistently places them in remoter periods of history in his historical novels, and seems to have believed that they were employed in the Orient in antiquity.

  17 The legendary Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus was reputed to contain the secret of the transmutation of primal matter, and was regarded by European alchemists as the foundation-stone
of their art. The extant text, which is brief and gnomic, dates from the eighth century or thereabouts and was translated into Latin in the twelfth century. Its subsequent translators included Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus and Isaac Newton.

  18 Rabbi Aben Ezra, whose full name was Abraham Ben Meir ibn Ezra (1089-1167) was one of the most distinguished Jewish philosophers of his era. He was forced into exile from Spain by persecution of the Jews. His prolific writings included numerous astrological tracts. The “Alferan” whose work he is alleged here to have translated is mentioned by that name in the Encyclopédie as an Arab astronomer; his name is usually rendered Al-Farghani or Alfraganus, and he lived in the ninth century. Translations of his textbook of elementary astronomy became a standard reference book during the Renaissance.

  19 The physician Arnaldus de Villa Nova (c1240-1311), called Arnaud de Villeneuve in many French sources, translated many medical texts from Arabic. Following his death he acquired the reputation of hang been an alchemist, and several well-known alchemical texts were falsely attributed to him, including the one cited here.

  20 Al-Mutanabbi (915-965) and Abu Nuwas (756-814) were two of the greatest Arabic poets.

  21 I have left this term as it appears in the original rather than transcribing it as djinn (the plural of djinni), because the text uses the term djinn at one point in another context and the idiosyncratic variant employed by the princess is clearly deliberate.

  22 The historical Sultan known to the Spanish as El Zagal [the valiant] (Abu’Abd Allah Muhammad al-Zaghali, 1444-1494), was not the Emir of Malaga in 1482, although he did become Emir of Granada briefly in 1485.

  23 Wallada bint al-Mustakfi (1001-1091), daughter of Muhammad III of Cordoba, who was assassinated in 1026 and replaced by the caliph known in the Occident as Almanzor; it was not by virtue of her father’s permission, therefore, that she refused to wear the hijab.

  24 Perhaps the grammarian Ibn al-Daddan (1101-1174).

  25 Aicha al-Horra, known in Spanish sources as Aixa, is generally thought to have obtained the suffix al-Horra [the honored] because she was supposedly a descendant of the Prophet. Previously married to Abu l’Hasan Ali’s predecessor, his marriage to her was a political matter—her dates are unknown but she was presumably considerably older than the thirty-six suggested in the text—and she was exiled from the Alhambra when the Emir fell in love with Isabelle de Solis. She sided with his rivals in 1482 in order to enthrone her son Boabdil (1460-1533) as Muhammad XII, at first temporarily and then again from 1487—when he refused to intervene in the Siege of Malaga—until Granada fell to the Christians in 1492.

  26 This character is obviously not the great Arabic scholar known in the Occident as Al-Biruni (973-1048) but might be modeled on him.

  27 The alumbrados were Christian mystics who probably first appeared in Spain during the late fifteenth century, although history has little race of them until a later period than the one in which the story is set. They became targets of the Spanish Inquisition, which issued an Edict against them in 1525. Their beliefs appear to have had something in common with the Albigensians of France, who had been ruthlessly suppressed in the early thirteenth century. Magre puts Christian Rosenkreutz in contact with them in the biography summarized in the appendix.

  28 Dhoul-fiqar, or Zulfqar, was the sword with two points that Mohammed gave to Ali during the battle of Uhud, and which became one of the key symbols of Islam.

  29 Santon is a now-obsolete term for a Muslim ascetic, who would nowadays be known as a Marabout.

  30 Abu Bakr (573-634), nicknamed the Truthful, was the first convert to Islam outside Mohammed’s family, and the Prophet’s most trusted advisor.

  31 The full name of the ninth-century Persian historian Mirkond, or Mirkhavend, author of a book whose title translates as The Garden of Purity, is given by more recent sources in various forms including Muhammad Bin Khavendshah

  32 Author’s note: “Almost all those who have studied the Rosicrucians have—at least in my opinion—fixed the birth of Christian Rosenkreutz in the middle of the fourteenth century. Some have even placed it in the fifteenth.” He had, of course, located it in the fifteenth century himself in La Luxure de Grenade.

  Germelshausen, about which the author offers no comment, is a fictitious village featured in a story of that title by Friedrich Gerstäcker, which was once caused to sink into the ground by a curse but reappears once every hundred years. The young protagonist who happens to be there on the day in question falls in love with a girl from the town but is inevitably separated from her forever. Magre might have appropriated the title without knowing what the story was about.

  33 Magre undoubtedly found the account of the exploits of Conrad Tors and one-eyed John in H. C. Lea’s History of the Inquisition, where Lea cites Tors’ invention of the “Luciferan heresy” as a significant step in the gradual expansion of the Dominicans into hunting imaginary Satanist witches as well as real heretics.

  34 Author’s note: “The Fama Fraternitas is an anonymous document that appeared in the seventeenth century. It is a puerile image d’Épinal, which summarizes all that was known in that epoch about the authentic Rosicrucians.” The manifesto in question was first published in 1614 and was followed a year later by the supplementary Confessio Fraternitatis. An incomplete allegorical account of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616) is generally attributed to the theologian Johann Valentin Andreae, who might have written all three. Magre’s account is based on the first two documents but adds his own embellishments, in the interests of inserting Rosenkreutz into his syncretic history of magic and mysticism.

  35 Hulugu Khan’s Mongols sacked Bagdad in February 1258, destroying the great library there and massacring approximately a hundred thousand people, leaving the city depopulated.

  36 Although the dates of the Artephius credited as the author of several alchemical tracts are unknown and he may not have existed at all, his name and works were familiar to Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, a century before the (very premature) existence credited to the Alumbrados here.

  37 Marguerite Porete, the author of the mystical treatise on divine love The Mirror of Simple Souls, was burned at the stake in June 1310, by which time, in terms of this count’s chronology, Rosenkreutz must have been nearly seventy years old

  38 “Jean de Mechlin” is mentioned briefly in the French translation H. C. Lea’s History of the Inquisition, which Magre used as a source. In the original he is called John of Mechlin, and remains extremely obscure. The subsequent reference to “Bloemert” must be to the fourteenth-century mystic active in Brussels, Heilwege Blommaert, also known as Bloemaerdinne.

  39 The reference is to the theologian Jean Tauler (1300-1361), whose sermons were published, but to whom several more esoteric works were apocryphally attributed after his death.

  40 Eirenaeus Philalethes was the signature employed by a seventeenth century author of several treatises on alchemy, nowadays widely believed to have been George Starkey (1628-1665)

  41 The poseur who called himself the Comte de Saint-Germain—as well as several other names—and enjoyed a spectacular but meteoric career in France in the mid-eighteenth century was co-opted by Magre into his tradition of supposed magicians and illuminati, and a fanciful chapter is devoted to him in Magiciens et illuminés.

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