I did not speak as we drove through the deserted streets, for my mind
was curiously empty of familiar thoughts and experiences; it seemed
to have been plucked out of the definite world and cast naked upon a
shoreless sea. There were moments when the vision appeared on the
point of returning, and I would half-remember, with an ecstasy of joy
or sorrow, crimes and heroisms, fortunes and misfortunes; or begin to
contemplate, with a sudden leaping of the heart, hopes and terrors,
desires and ambitions, alien to my orderly and careful life; and then
I would awake shuddering at the thought that some great imponderable
being had swept through my mind. It was indeed days before this
feeling passed perfectly away, and even now, when I have sought
refuge in the only definite faith, I feel a great tolerance for those
people with incoherent personalities, who gather in the chapels and
meeting-places of certain obscure sects, because I also have felt
fixed habits and principles dissolving before a power, which was
_hysterica passio_ or sheer madness, if you will, but was so
powerful in its melancholy exultation that I tremble lest it wake
again and drive me from my new-found peace.
When we came in the grey light to the great half-empty terminus, it
seemed to me I was so changed that I was no more, as man is, a moment
shuddering at eternity, but eternity weeping and laughing over a
moment; and when we had started and Michael Robartes had fallen
asleep, as he soon did, his sleeping face, in which there was no sign
of all that had so shaken me and that now kept me wakeful, was to my
excited mind more like a mask than a face. The fancy possessed me
that the man behind it had dissolved away like salt in water, and
that it laughed and sighed, appealed and denounced at the bidding of
beings greater or less than man. 'This is not Michael Robartes at
all: Michael Robartes is dead; dead for ten, for twenty years
perhaps,' I kept repeating to myself. I fell at last into a feverish
sleep, waking up from time to time when we rushed past some little
town, its slated roofs shining with wet, or still lake gleaming in
the cold morning light. I had been too pre-occupied to ask where we
were going, or to notice what tickets Michael Robartes had taken, but
I knew now from the direction of the sun that we were going westward;
and presently I knew also, by the way in which the trees had grown
into the semblance of tattered beggars flying with bent heads towards
the east, that we were approaching the western coast. Then
immediately I saw the sea between the low hills upon the left, its
dull grey broken into white patches and lines.
When we left the train we had still, I found, some way to go, and set
out, buttoning our coats about us, for the wind was bitter and
violent. Michael Robartes was silent, seeming anxious to leave me to
my thoughts; and as we walked between the sea and the rocky side of a
great promontory, I realized with a new perfection what a shock had
been given to all my habits of thought and of feelings, if indeed
some mysterious change had not taken place in the substance of my
mind, for the grey waves, plumed with scudding foam, had grown part
of a teeming, fantastic inner life; and when Michael Robartes pointed
to a square ancient-looking house, with a much smaller and newer
building under its lee, set out on the very end of a dilapidated and
almost deserted pier, and said it was the Temple of the Alchemical
Rose, I was possessed with the phantasy that the sea, which kept
covering it with showers of white foam, was claiming it as part of
some indefinite and passionate life, which had begun to war upon our
orderly and careful days, and was about to plunge the world into a
night as obscure as that which followed the downfall of the classical
world. One part of my mind mocked this phantastic terror, but the
other, the part that still lay half plunged in vision, listened to
the clash of unknown armies, and shuddered at unimaginable
fanaticisms, that hung in those grey leaping waves.
We had gone but a few paces along the pier when we came upon an old
man, who was evidently a watchman, for he sat in an overset barrel,
close to a place where masons had been lately working upon a break in
the pier, and had in front of him a fire such as one sees slung under
tinkers' carts. I saw that he was also a voteen, as the peasants say,
for there was a rosary hanging from a nail on the rim of the barrel,
and I saw I shuddered, and I did not know why I shuddered. We had
passed him a few yards when I heard him cry in Gaelic, 'Idolaters,
idolaters, go down to Hell with your witches and your devils; go down
to Hell that the herrings may come again into the bay'; and for some
moments I could hear him half screaming and half muttering behind us.
'Are you not afraid,' I said, 'that these wild fishing people may do
some desperate thing against you?'
'I and mine,' he answered, 'are long past human hurt or help, being
incorporate with immortal spirits, and when we die it shall be the
consummation of the supreme work. A time will come for these people
also, and they will sacrifice a mullet to Artemis, or some other fish
to some new divinity, unless indeed their own divinities, the Dagda,
with his overflowing cauldron, Lug, with his spear dipped in
poppy-juice lest it rush forth hot for battle. Aengus, with the three
birds on his shoulder, Bodb and his red swineherd, and all the heroic
children of Dana, set up once more their temples of grey stone. Their
reign has never ceased, but only waned in power a little, for the Sidhe
still pass in every wind, and dance and play at hurley, and fight their
sudden battles in every hollow and on every hill; but they cannot build
their temples again till there have been martyrdoms and victories, and
perhaps even that long-foretold battle in the Valley of the Black Pig.'
Keeping close to the wall that went about the pier on the seaward
side, to escape the driving foam and the wind, which threatened every
moment to lift us off our feet, we made our way in silence to the
door of the square building. Michael Robartes opened it with a key,
on which I saw the rust of many salt winds, and led me along a bare
passage and up an uncarpeted stair to a little room surrounded with
bookshelves. A meal would be brought, but only of fruit, for I must
submit to a tempered fast before the ceremony, he explained, and with
it a book on the doctrine and method of the Order, over which I was
to spend what remained of the winter daylight. He then left me,
promising to return an hour before the ceremony. I began searching
among the bookshelves, and found one of the most exhaustive
alchemical libraries I have ever seen. There were the works of
Morienus, who hid his immortal body under a shirt of hair-cloth; of
Avicenna, who was a drunkard and yet controlled numberless legions of
spirits; of Alfarabi, who put so many spirits into his lute that he
could make men laugh, or weep, or fall in deadly trance as he would;
of Lully, who transformed himself into the likeness of a red cock; of
Flamel, who with his wife Parnella achieved the elixir many hundreds
of years ago, and is fabled to live still in Arabia among the
Dervishes; and of many of less fame. There were very few mystics but
alchemical mystics, and because, I had little doubt, of the devotion
to one god of the greater number and of the limited sense of beauty,
which Robartes would hold an inevitable consequence; but I did notice
a complete set of facsimiles of the prophetical writings of William
Blake, and probably because of the multitudes that thronged his
illumination and were 'like the gay fishes on the wave when the moon
sucks up the dew.' I noted also many poets and prose writers of every
age, but only those who were a little weary of life, as indeed the
greatest have been everywhere, and who cast their imagination to us,
as a something they needed no longer now that they were going up in
their fiery chariots.
Presently I heard a tap at the door, and a woman came in and laid a
little fruit upon the table. I judged that she had once been
handsome, but her cheeks were hollowed by what I would have held, had
I seen her anywhere else, an excitement of the flesh and a thirst for
pleasure, instead of which it doubtless was an excitement of the
imagination and a thirst for beauty. I asked her some question
concerning the ceremony, but getting no answer except a shake of the
head, saw that I must await initiation in silence. When I had eaten,
she came again, and having laid a curiously wrought bronze box on the
table, lighted the candles, and took away the plates and the
remnants. So soon as I was alone, I turned to the box, and found that
the peacocks of Hera spread out their tails over the sides and lid,
against a background, on which were wrought great stars, as though to
affirm that the heavens were a part of their glory. In the box was a
book bound in vellum, and having upon the vellum and in very delicate
colours, and in gold, the alchemical rose with many spears thrusting
against it, but in vain, as was shown by the shattered points of
those nearest to the petals. The book was written upon vellum, and in
beautiful clear letters, interspersed with symbolical pictures and
illuminations, after the manner of the _Splendor Solis_.
The first chapter described how six students, of Celtic descent, gave
themselves separately to the study of alchemy, and solved, one the
mystery of the Pelican, another the mystery of the green Dragon,
another the mystery of the Eagle, another that of Salt and Mercury.
What seemed a succession of accidents, but was, the book declared,
the contrivance of preternatural powers, brought them together in the
garden of an inn in the South of France, and while they talked
together the thought came to them that alchemy was the gradual
distillation of the contents of the soul, until they were ready to
put off the mortal and put on the immortal. An owl passed, rustling
among the vine-leaves overhead, and then an old woman came, leaning
upon a stick, and, sitting close to them, took up the thought where
they had dropped it. Having expounded the whole principle of
spiritual alchemy, and bid them found the Order of the Alchemical
Rose, she passed from among them, and when they would have followed
she was nowhere to be seen. They formed themselves into an Order,
holding their goods and making their researches in common, and, as
they became perfect in the alchemical doctrine, apparitions came and
went among them, and taught them more and more marvellous mysteries.
The book then went on to expound so much of these as the neophyte was
permitted to know, dealing at the outset and at considerable length
with the independent reality of our thoughts, which was, it declared,
the doctrine from which all true doctrines rose. If you imagine, it
said, the semblance of a living being, it is at once possessed by a
wandering soul, and goes hither and thither working good or evil,
until the moment of its death has come; and gave many examples,
received, it said, from many gods. Eros had taught them how to
fashion forms in which a divine soul could dwell, and whisper what
they would into sleeping minds; and Ate, forms from which demonic
beings could pour madness, or unquiet dreams, into sleeping blood;
and Hermes, that if you powerfully imagined a hound at your bedside
it would keep watch there until you woke, and drive away all but the
mightiest demons, but that if your imagination was weakly, the hound
would be weakly also, and the demons prevail, and the hound soon die;
and Aphrodite, that if you made, by a strong imagining, a dove
crowned with silver and had it flutter over your head, its soft
cooing would make sweet dreams of immortal love gather and brood over
mortal sleep; and all divinities alike had revealed with many
warnings and lamentations that all minds are continually giving birth
to such beings, and sending them forth to work health or disease, joy
or madness. If you would give forms to the evil powers, it went on,
you were to make them ugly, thrusting out a lip, with the thirsts of
life, or breaking the proportions of a body with the burdens of life;
but the divine powers would only appear in beautiful shapes, which
are but, as it were, shapes trembling out of existence, folding up
into a timeless ecstasy, drifting with half-shut eyes, into a sleepy
stillness. The bodiless souls who descended into these forms were
what men called the moods; and worked all great changes in the world;
for just as the magician or the artist could call them when he would,
so they could call out of the mind of the magician or the artist, or
if they were demons, out of the mind of the mad or the ignoble, what
shape they would, and through its voice and its gestures pour
themselves out upon the world. In this way all great events were
accomplished; a mood, a divinity, or a demon, first descending like a
faint sigh into men's minds and then changing their thoughts and
their actions until hair that was yellow had grown black, or hair
that was black had grown yellow, and empires moved their border, as
though they were but drifts of leaves. The rest of the book contained
symbols of form, and sound, and colour, and their attribution to
divinities and demons, so that the initiate might fashion a shape for
any divinity or any demon, and be as powerful as Avicenna among those
who live under the roots of tears and of laughter.