The Count of Gabalis

and would rather have suffered death by fire than
desecrated his holiness by revealing it to
an unworthy prince, an ambitious man, or
one lacking in self-restraint original: "Unenthaltsamen," meaning someone who lacks moderation or chastity. For these
three types of people have always been banished from the
community of the Sages. Fortunately,
I am no prince, I have little ambition, and
as will be seen in what follows, I am even
somewhat more chaste than a Sage requires.
He found my spirit to be teachable,
penetrating, and not easily shaken;
I lacked only a certain melancholy melancholy: in the humoral theory of the time, a melancholic temperament (associated with Saturn) was considered a prerequisite for deep philosophical and occult study to force all
those who wish to reproach the Count
of Gabalis for concealing nothing from me
to confess that I was indeed capable enough to
be introduced to the hidden sciences.
Certainly, without melancholy one can
make no great progress in them; but the
little I did possess did not deter him
in the least. "You have," he told me a
hundred times, "Saturn in the angle, in its
house, and in retrograde original: "im Winkel, im Hause und Rückgang." These are specific astrological positions: "in the angle" refers to one of the four cardinal points of a chart, and "retrograde" refers to the planet's apparent backward motion, often suggesting a delayed or internalizing influence;
you cannot help but one day become
as melancholic as a Sage must be;
for the wisest of all men, as we
know from the Kabbalah Kabbalah: a school of thought in Jewish mysticism; here used in its "Christian Cabala" form popular among early modern occultists, had, just like you, Jupi-