THE CABALA

THE CABALA



  ITS Origin.-—The Cabala is the summary of the labours of the sects of Judaism, and is occupied in the mystical interpretation of the Scriptures^ and in metaphysical speculations concerning the Deity and the worlds visible and invisible. The Jews say that it was communicated to Moses by God Himself. Now, although it is not at all improbable that Moses did leave to his successors some secret doctrines yet the fantastic doctrines of the Cabala concerning angels and demons are purely Chaldean ; at Babylon the Jews ingrafted on Monotheism the doctrine of the Two Principles. Daniel, the pontiff of the Magi and prophet of the Jews, may be considered as the chieffounder of the Cabala, which was conceived at Babylon, and received as the forbidden fruit of the strange woman.

  Its Progress.—The ancient Jews, indeed, had some idea of angels, but did not ascribe to them any particular functions, though to each patriarch they assigned a special familiar spirit. The Alexandrian School made many additions to that foreign importation ; Philo supplemented Daniel. The speculative portion of the Cabala, whose foundation consists in the doctrine of Emanation, was developed in that School ; the philosophical systems of Pythagoras and Plato were combined with Oriental philosophy, and from these proceeded Gnosticism and Neo-platonism.

   Bate of Cabala. — The first documentary promulgation of the Cabala may roughly be stated to have taken place within the century before and half a century after our era. The greater culture of the Jewish people, the supreme tyranny of the letter of the law and rabbinical minuteness, furthered the spread of occult theology, whose chief text-books are the " Sepher-yetzirah," or Book of the Creation, probably by Akiba, and the " Zehar," the Book of Light, by Simon-ben- Joachai, the St. Thomas of the Cabala, whose work contains the sum of that obscure and strange system.

  The Booh of the Creation. — In this work Adam considers the mystery of the universe. In his monologue he declares the forces and powers of reason, which attempts to discover the bond which unites in a common principle all the elements of things ; and in this investigation he adopts a method different from the Mosaic. He does not descend from God to the creation, but, studying the universe, seeking the unity in variety and multiplicity, the law in the phenomenon, he ascends from the creation to God—a prolific method, but which leads the Cabalists to seek fantastic analogies between superior and inferior powers, between heaven and earth, between the things and the signs of thought. Hence arose all the arts of divination and conjuration, and the most absurd superstitions. According to cabalistic conception, the universe, which to Pythagoras is a symbol of the mysterious virtues of numbers, is only a marvellous page on which all existing things were written by the supreme artificer with the first ten numbers and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The ten abstract numbers are the general forms of things, the "^ supreme categories of ideas." Thus, number one represents the spirit of the living God, the universal generative power ; number two is the breath of the animating spirit; three is the aqueous, and four the igneous principle. The imprint of the letters on the universe is indestructible, and is the only character that can enable us to discover the Supreme Cause, to recompose the name of God, the Logos, written on the face of the world. Nor are all the letters of equal virtue; three, called the mothers hare the precedence, and refer to the triads found in various physical and mental orders; seven others are called double, because from them arise the things constantly opposed to one another ; the remaining twelve are called simple, and refer to twelve attributes of man.

   Different Kinds of Cabala.— It is of two kinds, theoretical and practical. The latter is engaged in the construction of talismans and amulets, and is therefore' totally unworthy of our notice. The theoretical is divided into the literal and dogmatic. The dogmatic is the summary of the metaphysical doctrines taught by the Cabalistic doctors. The literal is a mystical mode of explaining sacred things by a peculiar use of the letters of words. This literal Cabala is again subdivided into three branches, the first considering words according to the numerical value of the letters composing them. This branch is called Gematria, and for an example of it the reader is referred to Mithras (29,) the name of the sun, whose letters make up the number 365, the number of days during which the sun performs his course. The second branch is called Notaricon, and is a mode of constructing one word out of the initials or finals of many. Thus, of the sentence in Deut. xxx. 12, " "Who shall go up for us to heaven?" in Hebrew noiawn dV nVp' 'o, the initial letters of each word are taken to form the wordj nV'O, "circumcision." The third mode ia called Temura, or permutation of letters, such as is familiarly known as an anagram.

  Visions of ezekiel. — Cabalistic terms and inventions, not destitute of poetic ideas, lent themselves to the requirements of the mystics, sectaries, and alchymists. It suffices to consider that portion of the system whose object is the study of the visions of Ezekiel, to form an idea of the fantastic and mythological wealth of the Cabala. In the visions of Ezekiel God is seated on a throne, surrounded with strange winged figures — the man, the buU, the lion, and the eagle, four zodiacal signs, like "the glory which he saw by the river of Chebar,^' that is, among the Chaldeans, famous for their astronomical knowledge. The rabbis call the visions the description of the celestial car, and discover therein profound mysteries. Maimonides reduced those visions to the astronomical ideas of his time ; the Cabala surrounded them with its innumerable hosts of angels. Besides the angels that preside over the stars, elements, virtues, vices, passions, the lower world is peopled by genii of both sexes, holding a position between angels and men — the elemental spirits of the Rosicrucians. The good angels are under the command of Metatron, also called Sar Happanim, the angel of the Divine countenance. The evil angels are subject to Samuel, or Satan, the angel of death. Besides the Indian metempsycliosis the Cabalists admit another, which they call " impregnation," consisting in a union of several souls in one body, which takes place when any soul needs the assistance of others to attain to the beatific vision.

  The Creation out of Nothing.—The primitive Being is called the Ancient of Days, the ancient Ring of Light, incomprehensible, infinite, eternal, a closed eye. Before he manifested himself all things were in him, and he was called The Nothing, the Zero-world (9) . Before the creation of the world the primitive light of God, Nothing, filled all, so that there was no void; but when the Supreme Being determined to manifest His perfections. He withdrew into Himself, and let go forth the first emanation, a ray of light, which is the cause and beginning of all that exists, and combines the generative and conceptive forces. He commenced by forming an imperceptible point, the point-world ; then with that thought He constructed a holy and mysterious form, and finally covered it with a rich vestment — the universe. From the generative and conceptive forces issued forth the first-born of God, the universal form, the creator, preserver, and animating principle of the world, Adam Kadmon, called the macrocosm ; whilst man, born out of and living in it, and comprising, in fact, what the typical or celestial man comprises potentially, is called the microcosm. But before the Busoph or Infinite revealed Himself in that form of the primitiye man, other emanations, other worlds, had succeeded each other, which were called " sparks," which grew fainter the more distant they were from the centre of emanation. Around Adam Kadmon were formed the countless circles of posterior emanations, which are not beings having a life of their own, but attributes of God, vessels of omnipotence, types of creation. The ten emanations from Adam Kadmon are called Sephiroth, the " powers " of Philo, and the " aeons " of the Gnostics.

   Diffusion of Cabalistic Ideas.— Cabalistic ideas spread far and wide. In the middle ages we meet with them in a great number of strange practices and ceremonies. I will here merely allude to one, because it explains a sign stiU in use in many parts of the Continent. The double triangle (18) was regarded by the Jews as a cabalistic figure, to which they attributed the power of averting fire. Hence the German Jews in the middle ages placed it over the entrances of all their workshops and factories. Its use was afterwards restricted to breweries. Now it is the sign of beerhouses ; whilst the pine branch, which is the ancient thyrsus, announces the sale of wine.

  Without specifying how much the philosophic systems of Spinoza and Schelling are indebted to them, and without speaking of the Hebrew sects still existing—which ipay be considered as the sequels of the Cabalistic school, and which include that of the " New Saints," founded by Israel, called the Thaumaturgist, in Podolia, in 1740, and that of the " Zohariti," the Illuminated, founded by Jacob Franck, who attempted, by a kind of philosophical syncretism, to reconcile the ancient and the modern revelation,—^we meet with Cabalistic ideas in the most lasting superstitions, in the Schools, Academies, and Masonic Lodges. The rituals of the Mystics, Freemasons, Illuminati, and Carbonari, abound with them, as I shall successively point out.



THE GNOSTICS



  CHARACTER of Gnosticism.—The leading ideas of Platonism are also found in the tenets of the Gnostics, and they continued, during the second and third centuries, the schools that raised a barrier between recondite philosophy and vulgar superstition. Under this aspect Gnosticism is the most universal heresy, the mother of many posterior heresies, even of Arianism, and reappears among the alchymists, mystics, and modern transcendentalists.

  Doctrines —The Gnostics assumed an infinite, invisible Being, an abyss of darkness, who, imable to remain inactive, diffused himself in emanations, decreasing in perfection the further they were removed from the centre that produced them. They had their grand triad, whose personifications, Matter, the Demiurgus, and the Saviour, comprised and represented the history of mankind and of the world. The superior emanations, partakers of the attributes of the Divine essence, are the " aeons," distributed in classes, according to symbolical numbers. Their union forms the "pleroma," or the fulness of intelligence. The last and most imperfect emanation of the pleroma, according to one of the two grand divisions of Gnosticism, is the Demiurgus, a balance of light and darkness, of strength and weakness, who, without the concurrence of the unknown Father, produces this world, there imprisoning the souls, for he is the primary evil, opposed to the primary good. He encumbers the souls with matter, from which they are redeemed by Christ, one of the sublime powers of the pleroma, the Divine thought, intelligence, the spirit. For humanity is destined to raise itself again from the material to the spiritual life ; to free itself from nature, and to govern it, and to live again in immortal beauty.

  According to the other party of the Gnostics, the Demiurgus was the representative and organ of the highest God, who was placed by the Divine will especially over the Jewish people, as their Jehovah. Men are divided into three classes : the terrestrial men, of the earth earthy, tied and bound by matter; the spiritual men, the Pneumatikoi, who attain to the Divine light ; the Psychikoi, who only rise up to the Demiurgus. The Jews, subject to Jehovah, were Psychikoi j the Pagans were Terrestrial men ; the true Christians or Gnostics, Pneumatikoi.

   Development of Gnosticism.—Simon Magus ; Menander, his successor ; Cerinthus, the apostle of the Millennium, and some others who lived in the first century, are looked upon as the founders of Gnosticism, which soon divided into as many sects as there arose apostles. This may be called the obscure period of Gnosticism. But at the beginning of the second century the sect of Basilides of Alexandria arose, and with it various centres of Gnosticism in Egypt, Syria, Eome, Spain, &c. Basilides assumed 365 aeons or cycles of creation, which were expressed by the word ahraxas, whose letters, according to their numerical value in Greek, produce the number 365. By "abraxas" was meant, in its deeper sense, the Supreme God; but the reader will at once detect the astronomical bearing, and remember the words Mithras and Belenus, which also severally represent that number, and the Supreme God, viz. the sun. Valentinus also is a famous Gnostic, whose fundamental doctrine is that all men shall be restored to their primeval state of perfection ; that matter, the refuge of evil, shall be consumed by fire, which is also the doctrine of Zoroaster, and that the spirits in perfect maturity shall ascend into the pleroma, there to enjoy all the delights of a perfect union with their companions. Prom the Valentinians sprang the Ophites, calling themselves so after the serpent that by tempting Eve brought into the world the blessings of knowledge ; and the Cainites, who maintained that Cain had been the first Gnostic in opposition to the blind, unreasoning faith of Abel, and therefore persecuted by the Demiurgus, Jehovah. The Antitacts (opponents to the* law), like the Ishmaelites at a later period, taught their adepts hatred against all positive religions and laws. The Adamites looked upon marriage as the fruit of sin ; they called their lascivious initiation " paradise ; " held all indulgence in carnal delights lawful, and advocated the abolition of dress. The Pepuzians varied their initiations with the apparition of phantasms, among whom was a woman crowned with the sun and twelve stars, and having the moon under her feet—the Isis of Egypt and the Ceres of Greece. They found in the Apocalypse all their initiatory terminology. A Gnostic stone, represented in the work of Chifflet, shows seven stars of equal size with a larger one above ; these probably mean the seven planets and the sun. There are, moreover, figured on it a pair of compasses, a square, and other geometrical emblems. Thus all religious initiations are ever reducible to astronomy and natural phenomena.

   Spirit of Gnosticism.—The widely opposite ideas of polytheism, pantheism, monotheism, the philosophical systems of Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, together with the mysticism and demonology that after the Jewish captivity created the Cabala — all these went towards forming Gnosticism. And the aristocracy of mind, powerful and numerous as none had ever been before, that arose in the first centuries of our era, even when adopting the new faith, could not but loathe the thought of sharing it completely with the crowd of freed and unfreed slaves around them—-with the low and poor in spirit! The exclpsiveness of Gnosticism was undoubtedly, next to the attractiveness of its dogmas, one of the chief reasons of its rapid propagation and its lasting influence on modern religious systems.



SONS OF THE WIDOW


103. ORIGIN of Religion of Love.—A Persian slavE, whose powerful ' imagination brought forth a desolating doctrine, but extraordinary by originality of invention and variety of episodes, three centuries after the appearance of Christ, and when Orientalism was on the point of disappearing from the West, founded a theogony and instituted a ' sect which revived Eastern influence in Europe, and by means of the Crusades spread schism and revolt throughout the Catholic world. The action of this rebellious disciple of Zoroaster, of this restorer of the ancient faith of the Magi, mixed with Christian forms and Gnostic symbols, had an extension and duration which, though called in doubt by the past, modern criticism discovers in the intrinsic philosopliy of a great part of the sects formed in the bosom of Catholicism. At the head of this gigantic movement of intelligence and conscience, which devoted itself to the most singular superstitions in order to shake off the yoke of Rome, are Gnosticism and Manichseism, Oriental sects, the last and glorious advance of a theogony, which, seeing the rule of so large a portion of the earth pass away from itself, undertook to recover it with mysteries and the evocation of poetic phantoms.

   Manes.—Manes, redeemed from slavery bya rich Persian widow, whence he was called the " son of the widow," and his disciples " sons of the widow," of prepossessing aspect, learned in the Alexandrian philosophy, initiated into the Mithraic mysteries, traversed the regions of India, touched on the confines of China, studied the evangelical doctrines, and so lived in the midst of many religious systems, deriving light from all, and satisfied by none. He was born at a propitious moment, and his temperament fitted him for arduous and fantastic undertakings and schemes.  Possessing great penetration and an inflexible will, he comprehended the expansive force of Christianity, and resolved to profit thereby, masking Gnostic and Cabalistic ideas under Christian names and rites. In order to establish this Christian revelation, he called himself the Paraclete announced by Christ to His disciples, attributing to timself, in the Gnostic manner, a great superiority over the Apostles, rejecting the Old Testament, and allowing to the sages of the pagans a philosophy superior to Judaism,.

   Manichceism.—The dismal conceptions of a dualism, pure and simple, the eternity and absolute evil of matter, the non-resurrection of the body, the perpetuity of the principle of evil,—these preside over the compound that took its name from him, and confound Mithras with Christ, the Gospel with the Zend-Avesta, Magism with Judaism. The Unknown Father, the Infinite Being, of Zoroaster, is entirely rejected by Manes, who divides the universe into two dominions, that of light, and that of darkness, irreconcilable, whereof one is superior to the other ; but, great difference, the first, instead of conquering the latter into goodness, reduces it to impotence, conquers, but does not subdue or convince it. The God of light has innumerable legions of combatants (aeons), at whose head are twelve superior angels, corresponding with the twelve signs of the zodiac. Satanic matter is surrounded by a similar host, which, having been captivated by the charms of the light, endeavours to conquer it ; wherefore the head of the celestial kingdom, in order to obviate this danger, infuses life into a new power, and appoints it to watch the frontiers of heaven. That power is called the " Mother of Life," and is the soul of the world. The " Divine," the primitive thought of the Supreme Ens, the heavenly " Sophia" of the Gnostics. As a direct emanation of the Eternal it is too pure to unite with matter, but a son is born unto it, the first man, who initiates the great struggle with the demons. When the strength of the man fails him, the " Living Spirit " comes to his assistance, and, having led him back to the kingdom of hght, raises above the world that part of the celestial soul not contaminated by contact with the demons—a perfectly pure soul, the Redeemer, the Christ, who attracts to Himself and frees from matter the light and soul of the first man. In these abstruse doctrines lies concealed the Mithraic worship of the sun. The followers of Manes were divided into " Elect " and " Listeners ;" the former had to renounce every corporeal enjoyment, everything that can darken the celestial light in us ; the second were less vigorously treated. Both might attain immortality by means of purification iu an ample lake placed in the moon (the baptism of celestial water), and sanctification in the solar fire (the baptism of celestial fire) , where reside the Redeemer and the blessed spirits.

  life of Manes.—The career of Manes was chequered and stormy, a foreshadowing of the tempests that were to arise against his sect. After having enjoyed the unstable favour of the Court, and acquired the fame of a great physician, he found himself unable to save the life of one of the sons of the prince. He was consequently exiled, and roved through Turkestan, Hindustan, and the Chinese empire. He dwelt for one year in a cave, living on herbs, during which time his followers, having received no news from him, said that he had ascended to heaven, and were believed, not only by the " Listeners," but by the people. The new prince recalled him to court, showered honours on him, erected a sumptuous palace for him, and consulted him on all state affairs. But the successor of this second prince made him pay dearly for this short happiness, for he put him to a cruel death.

  Progress of Manichceism.—The government of the sect already existing with degrees, initiatory rites, signs and pass-words, was continued by astute chiefs, who more and more attracted to themselves the Christians by the use of orthodox language, making them beUeve that their object was to recall Christianity to its first purity. But the sect was odious to the Church of Rome, because it had issued from rival Persia ; and so for two hundred years it was banished from the empire, and the Theodosian Codex is full of laws against it. Towards the end of the fourth century it spread in Africa and Spain. It had peace and flourished under the mother of the Emperor Anastasius (491-518) ; but Justin renewed the persecution. Changing its name, seat, and figurative language, it spread in Bulgaria, Lombardy (Patarini) , France (Cathari, Albigenseg, &c.), miited witli the Saracens and openly made war upon the Emperor, and its followers perished by 'thousands in battle and at .the stake ; and from its secular trunk sprang the so-called heresies of the Hussites and Wyckliffites, which opened the way for Protestantism. In those gloomy middle ages, in fact, arose those countless legions of sectaries, bound by a common pact, whose existence only then becomes manifest when the sinister light of the burning pile flashes through the darkness in which they conceal  themselves. The Freemasons undoubtedly, through the Templars, inherited no small portion of their ritual from them ; they were very numerous in all the courts, and even in the dome of St. Peter, and baptized in blood with new denominations and ordinances.

   Doctrines,—The sacred language of Manichseism was most glowing, and founded on that concert of voices and ideas, called in Pythagoreanz phraseology the " harmony of the spheres," which established a connection between the mystic degrees and the figured spheres by means of conventional terms and images ; and it is known that the Albigenses and Patarini recognized each other by signs. A Provencal Patarino, who had fled to Italy in 1240, everywhere met with a friendly reception, -revealing himself to the brethren by means of conventional phrases. He everywhere found the sect admirably organized, with churches, bishops, and apostles of the most active propaganda, who overran France, Germany, and England. The Manichaean language, moreover, was ascetic, and loving, and Christian ; but the neophyte, after having once entered the sect, was carried beyond, and gradually alienated from the Papal Church. The mysteries had two chief objects in view—that of leading the neophyte, by first insensibly changing his former opinions and dispositions, and then of gradually instructing him in the conventional language, which, being complicated and varied, required much study and much time. But not all were admitted to the highest degrees. Those that turned hack, or could not renounce former ideas, remained always in the Church, and were not introduced into the sanctuary. These were simple Christians and sincere listeners, who, out of zeal for reform, often encountered death, as, for instance, the canons of Orleans, who were condemned to the stake by King Robert in 1022. But those who did not turn back were initiated into all those things which it was important should be known to the most faithful members of the sect. The destruction of Rome, and the establishment of the heavenly Jerusalem spoken of in the Apocalypse, were the chief objects aimed at.

  Spread of Religion of Love.—The religion of love did not end with the massacre of the Alhigenses, nor were its last echoes the songs of the troubadours ; for we meet with it in a German sect which in 1550 pretended to receive a supernatural light from the Holy Spirit. In Holland, also, a sect of Christians arose in 1580, called the " Family of Love," which spread to England, where it publishedmany books, and flourished about the time of Cromwell, and seems to have had some connection with the Puritans.



THE GAY SCIENCE



TRANSITION from Ancient to Modern Initiations. — An order of facts now, claims our attention which in a certain manner signalizes the transition from ancient to modern initiations. An extraordinary phenomenon in social conditions becomes apparent, so strikingly different from what we meet with in antiquity as to present itself as a new starting point, Hitherto we have seen the secret organizing itself in the higher social classes, so as to deprive the multitude of truths whose revelation could not have taken place without injury and danger to the hierarchy. At the base we find polytheism, superstition ; at the summit deism, rationalism, the most abstract philosophy. Truly those peoples were to be pitied, who, slaves of ignorance and corruption. ereoted vdth their own hands the prisons of truth and the temples of imposture who adored idols and idolized form, superficiality, and appearance.

  Spirit of Ancient Secret Societies. —The secret societies of antiquity were theological, and theology frequently inculcated superstition ; but in the deepest recesses of the sanctuary there was a place where it would laugh at itself and the deluded people, and draw to itself the intelligences that rebelled agaiast the servitude of fear, by initiating them into the only "creed worthy of a free man. To that theology, therefore, otherwise very learned and not cruel, and that promoted art and science, much may be forgiven, attributing perhaps not to base calculation, but to sincere conviction and thoughtful prudence, the dissimulation with which it concealed the treasures of truth and knowledge, that formed its power, glory, and, in a certain manner, its privilege.

   Spirit of Modern Societies. — In modern times the high religious and political spheres have no secrets, for they have no privilege of knowledge, nor initiations which confer on those higher in knowledge the right to sit on the seat of the mighty.

  Cause and Progress of Heresy.—But the pyramid was overthrown ; the lofty summit fell, and the ample massive base became visible, and no one, without being guilty of an anachronism and preparing for himself bitter disappointments, can seek the truth where there is but a delusive show of truth. Whoever persists in making any mendacious, height the object of his ambition, removes his eyes from the horizon which, lit up by the dawn, casts light around his feet, while his head is yet in darkness. Henceforth secret societies are popular and religious, not in the sense of the constituted and official church, but of a rebellious and sectarian church ; and since at a period when the authority of the church is paramount, and religion circulates through an the veins of the state, no change can be effected without heresy, so this must necessarily be the first aspect of political and intellectual revolt. This heresy makes use of the denial and rejection of official dogmas in order to overthrow the hated clerocracy, and to open for itself a road to civil freedom.

  Efforts and Influence of Heretics. — The Papacy was necessarily the first cradle of the new conspirators, and from the heresies arose the sects, of which none was more extensive and active than the Albigenses. This great fact of opposition and reaction has no parallel in antiquity, where the very schools of philosophy adopted the forms of the mysteries ; and it is a fact which imparts an immense momentum to modern history, and surrounds with lustre popular movements and personalities. This great energy proceeded from heretical and sectarian schools, and struggled in the dark to conquer in the light. The sect of the Albigenses, the offspring of Manichseism, fructified in its turn the germs of the Templars and Eosicrucians, and of all those associations that continued the struggle and fought against ecclesiastical and civil oppression.

  The Albigenses. —It is to be noticed that the object of the Albigenses in so far differed from that of all posterior sects, that its blows were intended for Papal Rome alone ; and wholly Papal was the revenge taken through the civil arm, and with priestly rage. The Albigenses were the 'Ghibeliines of France, and combined with all who were opposed to Rome, especially with Frederick II. and the Arragonese, in maintaining the rights of kings against the pretensions of the Papal See. Their doctrines had a special influence on the University of Bologna, wholly imperial ; Dante was imperialistic, tainted with that doctrine, and therefore hated by the Guelphs.

  Tenets of Albigenses.—Toulouse was the Rome of that church which had its pastors, bishops, provincial and general councils, like the official church, and assembled under its banners the dissenters of a great portion of Europe, all meditating the ruin of Rome and the restoration of the kingdom of Jerusalem. The rising in Provence gathered strength from the circumstances in which it took place. The Crusaders had revived eastern Manicheism, placing Europe in immediate contact with sophisticated Greece, and Mahomedan and Pantheistic Asia. The east, moreover, contributed Aristotle and his Arab commentators, to which must be added the subtleties of the cabala and the materialism of ideas. Philosophy, republicanism, and industry assailed the Holy See. Various isolated rebellions had revealed the general spirit, and wholesale slaughter had not repressed it ; the rationalism of the Waldensea connected itself with the German mysticism of the Ehine and the Netherlands, where the operatives rose against the counts and the bishops. Every apostle that preached pure morality, the religion of the spirit, the restoration ofthe primitive church, found followers ; the century of Saint Louis is the century of unbelief in the Church of Eome, and the Impossibilia of Sigero foreshadowed those of Strauss.

   Aims of Alhigenses. — The heresy of the Albigenses made such progress along the shores of the Mediterranean that several countries seemed to separate from Rome, whilst princes and emperors openly favoured it. Not satisfied with already considering impious Rome overthrown, the Albigenses suddenly turned towards the Crusaders, at first looked at with indifference, hoping to make Jerusalem the glorious and powerful rival of Rome, there to establish the seat of the Albigenses, to restore the religion of love in its first home, to found on earth the heavenly Jerusalem,, of which Godfrey of Bouillon was proclaimed king. This was the man who had carried fire and sword into Rome, slain the anti-Offisar Rodolphe, "the king of the priests," and thrust the Pope out of the holycity, deserving thereby, and by the hopes entertained of him, the infinite praises for his piety, purity, and chastity, bestowed on him by the troubadours, who originally appeared in the first quarter of the twelfth century, in the allegorical compositions known by the name of the " Knight of the Swan." It was a project which assigned an important part to the Templars, who perhaps were aware of and sharers in it.

  Religion of the Troubadours.—Troubadours and Albigenses drew closer together in persecution; their friendship increased in the school of sorrow. They sang and fought for one another, and their songs expired on the blazing piles ; wherefore it appears reasonable to consider the troubadours as the organizers of that vast conspiracy directed against the Church of Rome, the champions of a revolt which had not for its guide and object material interests and vulgar ambition, but a rehgion and a polity of love. Here love is considered, not as an affection which all more or less experience and understand, but as an art, a science, acquired by means of the study and practice of sectarian rites and laws ; and the artists under various names appear scattered throughout many parts of Europe. It is difficult, indeed, to determine the boundaries witMn whiclL the Gay Science was diffused. The singers of love are met with as the troubadours of the Langue d'Oc and the Langue d'Oil, the minnesangers and minstrels.

   Difficulty to understand the Troubadours.— The singers of Provence—whose language was by the Popes called the language of heresy—are nearly unintelligible to us, and we know not how to justify the praises bestowed upon their poetry by such men as Dante, Petrarc, Chaucer ; nor dare we, since we do not understand their verses, call their inspiration madness, nor deny them the success they undoubtedly achieved. It appears more easy and natural to think that those free champions of a heresy who were not permitted clearly to express their ideas, preferred the obscure turns of poetry and light forms that concealed their thoughts, as the sumptuous and festive courts of love perhaps concealed the "  Lodges " of the Albigenses from the eyes of the Papal Inquisition. The same was done for political purposes at various periods. Thus we have Gringore's La Chasse du Cerf des Cerfs (a pun designating Pope Julius II., by allusion to the servus servorum) , in which that Pope is held up to ridicule.

   Poetry of Troubadours.—Arnaldo Daniello was obscure even for his contemporaries ; according to the Monk of Montaudon, " no one understands his songs," and yet Dante and Petrarch praise him above every other Provencal poet, calling him the " great Master of Love," perhaps a title of sectarian dignity, and extolling his style, whicli they would not have done had they not been able to decipher his meaning. The effusions of the Troubadours were always addressed to some lady, though they dared not reveal her name; what Hugo de Brunet says applies to all : " If I be asked to whom my songs are addressed, I keep it a secret. I pretend to such a one, but it is nothing of the kind." The mistress invoked, there can be no doubt, like Dantes, Beatrice, was the purified religion of love, personified as the Virgin Sophia.

  Degrees among Troubadours. —There were four degrees, but the " Romance of the Rose " divides them into four and three, producing again the mystic number seven. This poem describes a castle, surrounded with a sevenfold wall, which is covered with emblematical figures, and no one was admitted into the castle that could not explain their mysterious meaning. The troubadours also had their secret signs of recognition, and the "minstrels" are supposed to have been so called because they were the " ministers " of a secret worship.

  Courts of Love.—I have already alluded to these; they probably gave rise to the Lodges of Adoption, the Knights and Wymphs of the Rose &c. {which see) . The decrees pronounced therein with pedantic proceedings, literally interpreted, are frivolous or immoral; and therefore incompatible with the morals and manners of the Albigenses, which were on the whole pure and austere. The .Courts of Lore may therefore have concealed far sterner objects than the decision of questions of mere gallantry ; and it is noticeable that these courts, as well as the race of troubadours, become extinct with the extinction of the Albigenses by the sword of De Montfort and the fagots of the Inquisition.