Silence

The fifteenth card of the Tarot contains an important warning to all those who take magic seriously: it teaches them the magical Arcanum of the generation of demons, and of the power that the latter have over those who have engendered them.

We who have had experience of the demon or egregore in question above, and of the demon engendered by a collective will infatuated by national ambitions and making use of an imagination drawn from the province of biology – the national-socialist demon or egregore – know from first-hand experience what terrible power resides in our will and imagination, and what responsibility it entails for those who unleash it into the world!

How true it is that he who ‘sows the wind, shall reap the whirlwind’ (Hosea ix, 7)…and what a whirlwind!

We know that the ‘great pests’ of our time are the egregores of ‘ideological superstructures’, which have cost humanity more life and suffering than the great epidemics of the Middle Ages.

And having this knowledge, is it not time that we said to ourselves: let us be silent. Let us make our arbitrary will and imagination silent; let us impose on them the discipline of silence. Is this not one of the four traditional rules of Hermeticism: to dare, to will, to know, to be silent? To be silent is more than to keep things secret; it is more even than to guard oneself from profaning the holy things to which a respectful silence is owed. To be silent is, above all, the great magical commandment of not engendering demons through our arbitrary will and imagination; it is the task of silencing the arbitrary will and imagination.

Meditations on the Tarot, Letter XV, The Devil