THE WORSHIP OF LYONE, SUPREME GODDESS.
The worship of the goddess began with the appearance on a revolving
stage between the nearest worshippers and the base of the throne
itself of a veritable forest of trees about one hundred feet in width.
There were trees like magnolias, oaks, elms and others splendid in
foliage, and amid these there was an undergrowth of beds of the most
brilliant flowers.
It was the work of the magicians and sorcerers!
There were thickets of camellias and rhododendrons, amid which bloomed
flowers like scarlet geraniums, primroses, violets and poppies. What
appeared to be apple, peach, cherry and hawthorn trees, all in full
bloom, tossed their white and pink foam of flowers.
They were real trees and flowers, made to exist for a time by the
sorcery of the masters of spirit power. They had never before known
the outer air. The priests of Harikar had made them, and would
dissipate them as living bodies are dissipated by death.
A sacred opera was chanted by the priests of invention, art, and
spirituality, on their terraces of silver above the trees and flowers.
As the music continued, groups of singers would at times sweep forth
on wings and float in wheeling circles around the throne. Their
delightful choruses swelling upward were like draughts of rich wine,
keen and intoxicating. The priests and spiritual powers marching
beneath filled the vast building with broad recitatives, full of
vividly descriptive passages and finely contrasted measures, until the
soul seemed melted in a sea of bliss.
The throne was bathed and caressed by a blue vapor of incense, while
from the great dome above, filled with figures formed of enamelled
glass, there streamed lights of all mysterious colors, that
illuminated its gleaming sides and lit up the amphitheatre with
ineffable effects.
A warm, rosy beam, falling perpendicularly, enveloped the goddess like
a robe of transparent tissue. She sat, a living statue, the joy of
every heart, the embodiment of a hopeless love that kept the
worshipper in a fever of delicious unrest. Wherever the eye wandered,
it always came back to the goddess; whatever the soul thought, its
last thought was of her.
Amid a tempest of music and the thundering song of two hundred
thousand voices repeating a litany of love, the throne itself began to
revolve upon the silver cone that supported it. A fresh rapture took
possession of the multitude.
In the soul of the goddess what must have been the joy of being
surrounded by such an ocean of adoring love?
As I mused on the scene, I thought of the Coliseum at Rome raised to
the glory of barbaric force, of empire founded on the blood of its
victims, and, being such, has necessarily passed away, becoming a heap
of ruins.
Here, thought I, is a temple founded on a nobler idea, the glory of
the human soul, its ingenuity, art, and spiritual forces.
Many in the outer world would say it was an idolatrous attempt on the
part of the creature to usurp the throne of its Creator. Yet it was
strangely like the religion of such people themselves. There, as here,
I thought, is the same worship of gold, the same dependence on the
material products of man's invention, the same worship of art, the
same idolatry of each other's souls between the sexes. There is this
difference, however: in the outer world men pretend that they worship
something else other than such objects; here they have the honesty to
say what they do actually worship.
Apart from the idea of attempting to realize a friendship that can
only exist in a realm that knows neither interest, fortune, time,
ambition, temper, nor sensual love, their idolatry had one splendid
truth to unfold, viz., the necessity of a soul for an arid and
mechanical civilization. "Every intellect shall enfold a soul" was
their motto, and there was this sanity in their creed that sentiment
was the breath of its life. Science abhors sentiment; it is the cold
investigation of that which once thrilled with the passion of life.
While the singing continued, a band of neophytes of occult force
performed marvellous feats of magic, led by the Grand Sorcerer,
Charka, chief of the magicians of Harikar. The people sat enraptured
as miracle after miracle was performed. At the waving of fans by the
adepts, plants issued from the hands of every god of gold, clothing
the throne in one endless wreath of brilliant crimson blossoms and
green foliage. The fans again waved and that crimson mass of flowers
turned to a pale green, while again the green foliage changed to a
vermilion color. The throne appeared like one enormous Bougainvillea
glabra, whose leaves are flowers.
Again the fans were waved and the flowers changed to bloom all
snowy-white, while the foliage became blue.
The adepts disappeared at a given signal and thereupon entered another
band of beautiful girl adepts, who seated themselves, each body in a
crouched mass with flowing drapery, around the base of the throne.
These priestesses were in a state of catalepsy. The ego, or soul, in
each case had been separated from the body, which floated in a state
of apparent death. They had so developed their will by thinking
enormous thoughts, yearning for spiritual power, that they could
suspend the functions of the body and give all their existence to the
soul. Thus hypnotized, it was stated their souls were floating freely
in the dome above, in blessed converse, and that their reincarnation
would afterward take place.
The organ rolled a blessed monotone, with variations exquisitely
sweet. The light in the dome faded perceptibly by the magical
shadowing of its windows until the rapt audience sat in complete
darkness. A circle of electric lights burned around the goddess on the
top of the throne, illuminating her figure. The lights faintly lit up
the dome, and presently appeared as nude spectres the fifty souls of
the priestesses who crouched beneath.
The organ, re-enforced with the wailing of a hundred violins, produced
a storm of the most delirious music, while the souls flashed with a
strange phosphorescence like a circle of fire. They wheeled with their
arms extended horizontally, each aura lying at an angle of forty-five
degrees with the horizon. Then, with hands clasping each other's feet,
they became a vertical circle like the wheel of fortune, and thus went
round and round. Again, they revolved in a circle faces downward, with
arms and hands stretched in an attitude of worship, forming for the
goddess a wreath of souls. Presently each soul sought its own body
floating beneath. The bodies expanding themselves absorbed each its
own soul. With the returning light of the outer sun the forest beneath
the throne had disappeared and the circular stage was occupied by a
band of sorcerers--each having balls of jelly of various colors
floating before him. At the command of the grand sorcerer the balls
would transform themselves into strange animals resembling cats, dogs,
monkeys, serpents, geese, wolves, and eagles. This was a tableau
representing man's supremacy over inferior life.
A company of twin souls of the greatest beauty and splendor of raiment
took possession of the circular platform beneath the throne and
thereupon danced in rhythmic circles wonderfully entrancing and
involved, chanting, in harmony with the movement of their bodies, the
following hymn to Lyone:
TO LYONE.
I.
Oh goddess, oh deity glorious,
With golden wan face, and the bloom
Of spirit and figure victorious!
Oh jewel that lighteneth gloom,
Men call thee the soul of a lover,
Invested with purest of clay,
A chrysalis, eager to hover
And fly from thy prison away!
II.
A nautilus, blown on the tide-lave;
So naked a pearl and so pure,
Or coral, that sucks from the sea wave
Those marbles that ever endure!
Thus float on the ocean of being,
Or fathom its deep-flowing sea,
That feeling, believing, and seeing
Thy glory, will worshipped be!
III.
With sense of the body made captive,
While that of the soul is complete.
For love of pure being, receptive,
So blessed, extravagant, sweet.
Oh victim, thy joys are Meresa's,
Who died on the bosom Divine.
Her madness of rapture appeases
The hunger of soul that is thine!
IV.
Inflammable impulse of beauty,
The breath of whose ardor is grief;
The God, in fulfilment of duty,
Hath stamped thee in highest relief!
From pots of auriferous metal,
Made pure by the torment of flame,
He pressed thee in fearful begettal,
A coinage too perfect for shame.
V.
He made thee, most splendid, a flower,
A heavy sweet rose, to unfold
Some petals immortal, and shower
Their fragrance on earth frozen cold.
Oh golden-hued rose, in such fashion,
By the love of the world thou art sought
Thus flushed with the triumph of passion
Or pale with the splendor of thought!
VI.
Oh soul, that inhales from the blossom
Delight in the rapture of breath,
A goddess aflame with her passion,
Ere beauty is wedded to death!
Oh virginal soul of the fountain,
Alive with the water of Youth,
All these, on the golden high mountain,
Thou dwellest, the image of Truth!
What followed was an intoxicating medley of dancing, song and magic.
Circles of the fairest girls, arrayed in the most ravishing costumes,
made the brain whirl with their gyrations. The oblation to the dancing
gods wound up the performance, and the chorus of a thousand voices
blended with the triumph of drums and explosions from musical
artillery.
The incomparable girl goddess then rose to her feet and waved the
blessing of Harikar over the multitude. The girdle of gold that clung
to her figure blazed with a thousand jewels. Her tiara sparkled with
enormous diamonds that were blue as sapphires, amber as topazes, green
as emeralds and red as rubies. Accompanied by the wailing of music,
the chant of megaphones, and the song of the enraptured people, she
sank into the heart of the throne, glorious as she rose, herself its
most precious jewel.