This passage is from the section Arcana of Adar or Persistence from Joséphin Péladan’s book Comment on devient Mage. Péladan was a devout Catholic as well as a Hermetist. Yet he recognizes that the Catholic faith makes sense only if it is the Primordial Tradition. All truth must be incorporated in it. The idea of a monument to the greatest thinkers of the past brings to mind the Great Being of August Comte, even if he never quite grasped the full significance of his discovery.

Note: Adar is the Chaldean name for Saturn.

The correspondence between marriage and magic, is the union of the initiate with the tradition contained in the chefs-d’oeuvre of Roman Catholicism, and the care of combining all the scattered morsels of truth and those belonging to religions that have disappeared.

The virtue of the initiate is formed from equanimity; the beatitude given to the peacemakers applies to him.

The highest work of mercy consists in making, in one’s thought, a sepulchre to sublime thoughts; gathering the beautiful ideas lost in ancient books and, I say it especially to the Roman congregations, lifting up into their understanding a cenotaphe to Plato, rethinking the sublime thoughts of Confucius or of Zarathustra, will always be the highest of pieties as well as the rarest.