Inspirational Text Of The Day 7/13/18

The Sybil foretold the future; but the Sorceress makes it. Here is the great, the vital distinction. She evokes, conjures, guides Destiny. She is not like the Cassandra of old, who foresaw the coming doom so clearly, and deplored it and awaited its approach; she creates the future. Greater than Circe, greater than Medea, she holds in her hand the magic wand of natural miracle, she has Nature to aid and abet her like a sister. Foreshadowings of the modern Prometheus are to be seen in her, -- a beginning of industry, above all the sovereign industry that heals and revivifies men. Unlike the Sybil, who seemed ever gazing toward the dayspring, she fixes her eyes on the setting sun; but it is just the sombre orb of the declining luminary that shows long before the dawn (like the glow on the peaks of the High Alps) a dawn anticipatory of the true day. 

         The Priest realises clearly where the danger lies, that an enemy, a menacing rival, is to be
         feared in the High-priestess of Nature he pretends to despise. Of the old gods, she has
         invented new ones. Beside the old Satan of the past, a new Satan is seen burgeoning in her,
         a Satan of the future. (ix-x)

         -   Jules Michelet, Satanism And Witchcraft (1862).
                  Translated by A.R. Allinson, Citadel Press, 1939.