Cause Principle Unity

A general account of bonding
bound can be truly bound; even if there were no hell, the thought and
imagination of hell without a basis in truth would still really produce a true
hell, for fantasy has its own type of truth. It can truly act, and can truly
and most powerfully entangle in it that which can be bound, and thus the
torments of hell are as eternal as the eternity of thought and faith. As long
as the soul, even when stripped of the body, retains these same characteristics,
it maintains its unhappy state for ages, and perhaps even more so
because of its pleasures and drinking and lack of self-control. The common
philosophers did not understand this, and they most stupidly used this
teaching to condemn the most ignorant of people. We will not make a big
issue of this, except to say the following: when we were children and inexperienced,
we were flooded with the arguments of these philosophers, just
as much as the old and the experienced, themselves, had been flooded with
the same arguments. Nevertheless, we forgive these elders for these views,
just as much as we think that we should be forgiven, since we were just
children.
On cupid’s bond and on bonds in general
We have claimed in our treatise De naturali magia 7 that all bonds are either
reduced to the bond of love, depend on the bond of love or are based on the
bond of love. An examination of our thirty topics of discussion will easily
show that love is the foundation of all feelings, for he who loves nothing has
no reason to fear, to hope, to praise, to be proud, to dare, to condemn, to
accuse, to excuse, to be humble, to be competitive, to be angered or to be
affected in other ways of this sort. Hence, in this section, which we have
entitled ‘On Cupid’s Bond’, we have the opportunity to deal with a topic
which is very familiar and with considerations and speculations which
range very widely. This examination should not be considered to be far
removed from public affairs just because it is more important and more
wonderful than the field of public affairs.
1. The definition of a bond. According to the Pythagoreans and the
Platonists, the bond of beauty is said to be a brightness, a beam of light and
a certain motion, or at least its shadow and image and trace. It has spread
out first into the mind, which it adorns with the order of things; second
into the soul, which it brings to completion with the sequence of things;
7 See On Magic, ‘On the Analogy of Spirits’, #2.
165