Page:Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia) (1651).djvu/564

Chapter lxii. Of Consecrations, and their manner. Consecration is a lifting up of experiments, by which a spiritual soul, being drawn by proportion and conformity, is infused into the matter of our works according to the tradition of Magicall art rightly and lawfully prepared, and our work is vivified by the spirit of understanding. The efficacy of consecrations is perfected by two things especially, viz. the vertue of the person himself consecrating, and the vertue of the prayer it self. In the person himself is required holinesse of life, and a power to consecrate; the former, nature and desert perform; the latter is acquired by imitation, and dignification, of which we have spoken elsewhere. Then it is necessary that he that sacrificeth must know this vertue and power in himself, with a firm and undoubted faith. Now what things are required in prayer, are these. There is also a certain power of sanctifying placed in it by God, as if it be so ordained of God for this or that very thing (of which sort we read of many in the holy writ) or instituted to this or that thing, by the vertue of the holy ghost, according to the ordination of the Church, of which sort are many every where extant: or this holiness is in the prayer it selfe, not by vertue of institution, but of the commemoration of sacred things, as of sacred letters, histories, nriracles, works, effects, favours, promises, sacraments and such sacramentall things, which shall seem to cohere with the thing to be consecrated, either properly, or improperly, or analogically. And of these we shall now give some examples, by which a way easily may be laid open to the whole consideration of it. So in the consecrating of water there is this comemoration made, viz. because God placed the firmament in the middle of waters; because in the middle of the earthly paradise he made a holy fountain, from which through four rivers the whole Earth is watered: because he made the waters an instrument of his justice, in the destruction of the Giants, by the generall deluge over the whole earth: and in the destruction of the Army of Pharaoh in the