ALCHEMY AND ASTROLOGY 253 



or to drive them away when they were not wanted ; 

 and whenever he wanted another spirit to appear he 

 wrote some other characters on the inside of that bell. 

 He refused to tell me the secret of these words and 

 characters, but I meditated about it, and found it out 

 myself." 



" You need not be surprised to hear that such things 

 are possible, because everything is possible, if it is con- 

 sistent with natural laws. One man may call another 

 man by his name, and order him to do certain things, 

 and if the latter respects the former, or is awed by his 

 superiority, he will obey his order without being forced 

 to do so with a weapon or stick. On invisible beings 

 the will of man has still more effect, and an inferior 

 being can be made to obey the will of a superior one 

 by the force of the mere thought of a word, because the 

 lower is subject to the higher, and the inferior to the 

 superior, and what else is the will but a power hidden 

 in the thought (mind) of man, and becoming active 

 through his imagination.^ But the thought of man is 

 as potent to impress a spirit as the spoken word is to 

 impress the mind of a man, for spirits have no physical 

 ears to hear physical sounds, and the voice is only needed 

 for those who cannot hear in the spirit." * 



" If the astral element in man can be sent into another 

 man by the power of his Olympic spirit, such an astral 

 element may also be embedded in metals and leave its 

 influence in them, and thereby the metal can be raised 

 into a higher state than the one into which it was put 

 by Nature."* 



* The power that man may silently exercise over animals is well known. 

 ' It does not require the sound of our voice to bring the image of some 



object before our imagination, and if we see the image of a thing in our 

 mind, and realise its presence, it actually exists for us, and thus a spirit 

 may be brought into a form by the power of imagination. 



• This remark throws some light on alchemical processes, and goes to 

 show that it is not the "magnetism" of the planets alone, but ako the 

 soul -essence of the operator, that ia to be bound, and the two connected 

 together in the metal by the process described below. 



