building of the palace. This consisted of eight divisions, each made
of a different quality; while the whole was built in a star-shaped
form; so that each division with its sub-divisions was connected
directly with the central chamber occupied by the king. But what was
most curious about it was, that in each division some special invisible
genii or spirit seemed to preside; for in each a peculiar influence
differing from the rest could be felt by anyone whose nerves were not
made of cast-iron or who was not a blockhead.
Thus the hall of the mushrooms on the north side breathed an air of
luxury and enjoyment; while the room to the left of it was pervaded
by a spirit of anxiety and dissatisfaction, and was visited only by
those who by force of habit had become attracted to it, and who, so
to say, found satisfaction only in being always dissatisfied; chronic
grumblers, misanthropes, people discontented with themselves and with
everything. On the other hand, there were two rooms to the east, in
which nobody could remain without being overcome by a feeling of awe,
reverence, generosity, sublimity, and a deep religious sentiment. They
were visited by the brightest of the gnomes, and served as places for
contemplation. These rooms seemed to be empty, but they were not empty;
because, while they were bare of all objects, they were filled with an
overwhelming abundance of that spirit which is the creator or producer
of forms.
[Illustration: THE PALACE OF THE KING.]
The south-eastern portion of the palace contained the sleeping
apartments of the royal family, and whoever entered there would sink
into a state of torpor and forgetfulness; but the hall next to that,
lying directly towards the south, inspired its inhabitants with a deep
melancholy easily turned into anger. Another division towards the west
was called the chamber of cunning, and used on certain occasions for
the purpose of concocting schemes of revenge and intrigue. It was
very seldom used at the time of my arrival, but became a favourite
meeting-room later on. As to the hall upon the north side, which
was dedicated to all sorts of sensual enjoyment, it was the most
attractive, but also the most dangerous of them all, and I am bound by
promise not to divulge any of its mysteries.
All these rooms were free of access to every gnome of good standing;
but the division in the centre, where the king resided, was open
only to those who gained admission there. It was always guarded by a
selected number of female soldiers, corresponding to our Amazons, and
it was said that female soldiers were always chosen in preference,
because they were more faithful and reliable than the males among the
gnomes.
At the entrance of the king’s chamber there were statues of gigantic
size, reminding me of the ones at the British Museum which were brought
there from Easter Island. They represented that prehistoric race of
beings which the gnomes used to call “_Man_,” or “_Homo divinus_,”
and of which they claimed that it existed no more upon the planet
earth, having emigrated to other spheres, and abandoned their country
to hobgoblins, devils, and spooks. I must confess that in our country
I never met with any human beings of such a superhuman aspect as was
represented here. There were images of men and women of such noble mien
and so awe-inspiring, that they looked much more like gods than like
specimens of the genus _homo bipex_, and a resemblance to them can be
found only among the statuary of the ancient Greeks. Here the king in
person resided, and nobody dared to approach him without his consent,
and without being admitted by the Amazons; but the apartments of the
princess were next to those of the king, and as I spent a great deal of
time in her company, I also came very frequently in contact with her
father the king.
The most remarkable thing among the gnomes was that they could not
distinguish falsehood from truth. They were incapable of saying
anything else than what they themselves thought and believed, and they
could not conceive of the possibility of telling a lie. This state of
affairs was sometimes somewhat annoying, for it is not always agreeable
to hear some one state his opinion about you right to your face; but
on the other hand it was advantageous in many respects. For instance,
whenever I wanted to enter the chamber of the king, all I had to do was
to tell the Amazons that the king wanted to see me; and I believe if
anyone had told the treasurer of the kingdom that he was entitled to
take the treasure away, the guardian would have delivered it up without
hesitation. This, however, was only at the time of my arrival, and
before an attempt of civilising the gnomes was made. Time passed away
rapidly, and I do not know how long I remained at the palace enjoying
the hospitality of the queen and the company of the princess; but each
day I learned more to admire Adalga’s character; the simplicity of her
way of thinking, and the purity of her affection. It is true that her
want of modern education, her inability to hide her true sentiments,
and her inexperience in the habits of modern civilisation--especially
in what refers to conventionalities--sometimes created a feeling of
dissatisfaction in my mind. She did not know how to pretend sentiments
which she did not experience; she knew nothing about logical quibbles
and tergiversation, nor of the many sweet little lies that make life
supportable among mankind. It never occurred to her to say anything
just for the sake of using a little flattery or tickling one’s vanity,
or for the purpose of teasing; and of all such things which are much
admired among people of culture she knew nothing. This I regretted,
but I could not keep myself from admiring her naturalness and
sincerity. We passed a great deal of our time in the hall at the north
end, and the princess asked me a thousand questions in regard to the
constitution, customs and habits of the human kingdom, the manners
of its inhabitants, their object of living and occupation, and the
immortality of their souls.
“I know, love of my heart!” she used to say, “that if I could only
become fully identified with you, we would both be as one immortal
being, and it is only the dark aspect of your nature which prevents
this unification and identity.”
“But why, dearest one!” I asked, “can you not become immortal without
this unification that would destroy your identity? Have you not within
yourself all the elements necessary for that purpose?”
“Alas, no!” answered the princess. “These elements are within us, but
they are capable of development only in the constitution of man, and
therefore we strive to become human just as you strive to become gods.
But the race of real human beings has disappeared, and only a spurious
imitation is left. These are the ghosts and hobgoblins with whom
intercourse is forbidden, and we are now doomed to be left for ages
without any prospect of real progress, until a race of real men appears
again upon the earth.”
I answered her questions as well as I could, assuring her that there
were still a great many honest and noble-minded people among what she
called hobgoblins and ghosts, and that they would be glad to contract
marriages with gnomes and sylphs, if they knew that they could thereby
be useful to them. I said that there were among us millions of people
who did not know that they were immortal, but that thousands of
clergymen were engaged in the occupation of making them believe it. I
also said that new systems of ethics, morals, and philosophy were being
invented almost every day, and that the world of humanity would soon
become very much improved.
“Oh, I wish I were a man!” exclaimed Adalga.
“This will be impossible in your present incarnation,” I said. “But I
will do all I can to develop in you a human mind and teach you all that
men know.”
“Oh, do please!” cried the princess, embracing me in the exuberance of
her joy.
“First of all,” I said, “you must learn the rules of logic, syntax
and induction, illation, postulation, assumption and inference. You
must learn to doubt everything you see and feel, and deny all you
hear. Never believe anything unless you already know all the whys
and wherefores, and never take anything for granted unless it comes
from an authority which you believe to be respectable, and which is
recognised as such by the crowd. Deny everything that you do not
understand, consider everybody a liar until he has irrefutably proved
his veracity; never let anybody get the advantage of you by showing
yourself to him such as you are, and never do anything without getting
a personal profit.”
I stopped, because I saw that these maxims were all gibberish to the
princess, and that she did not understand what I said; but I resolved
to try my best to instruct her, and to bring intellectual culture among
the gnomes.
During these happy days, and while waiting for the return of the three
imbeciles, I highly enjoyed the novelty of my situation. My liberty was
not restricted, and I had ample opportunity for studying the character
and the habits of the gnomes, in which occupation I was liberally
aided by the princess. Arm in arm we wandered or floated through
the villages, visited the mines and observed the gnomes at their
labour, and I was astonished at the untold amount of treasures in the
Untersberg, the existence of which is little suspected.
The gnomes on the whole were at that time an unsophisticated lot;
because, owing to their simple nature, a gnome could only think one
thought at a time. They were therefore not given to reasoning and
argumentation, and lived fully contented. In fact, they were rather
deficient in intellectuality, but in spite of that, or perhaps on
account of it, they had a great deal of spiritual power. Falsehood,
lying, hypocrisy, scheming, and wilful deception were unknown to them,
and as stated above, they always meant what they said, and took it for
granted that everyone except a hobgoblin or spook meant what his words
implied; nor would it have been possible for a gnome to tell a wilful
lie without experiencing therefrom immediately a detrimental effect
upon his constitution; for as it was the light of truth that made them
luminous, the telling of a falsehood, or even the thinking of one,
would have immediately diminished the amount of his or her luminosity,
which would have at once become visible to the rest; or it might have
extinguished their light for ever. Thus they were, by the necessity of
their nature, always open and sincere, and followed their impulses for
good or evil without being guided by the reasoning intellect. Whatever
was done by them was done in good faith, even if it was foolish; there
never was any malicious intent.
Being capable of perceiving the truth directly and without reasoning,
by the power of pure reason or instinct, they could solve the most
difficult mathematical problems by merely looking at the final result,
and nearly every one of them could thus have made a fortune among us by
giving exhibitions of his power as a mathematical phenomenon, without
the least knowledge of mathematics; but they could not even make
the smallest calculation or draw any inferences from given factors.
They knew what they knew because they perceived it, and there was no
guessing about what they saw.
I found them to be exceedingly impressible by my thoughts and emotions.
I often amused myself with the lower orders of gnomes by making them
act out what I thought. When I, for instance, imagined myself to be
afraid of them, they would become immediately afraid of me and run
away. When I became angry at them, they became angry at me, even if
I said not a word nor showed it by my manners. I think that if I had
secretly determined to kill a gnome, he would have unknowingly followed
the impulse and killed me. This made me think of the story of Burkhart
of Tollenstein, and that perhaps many suicides may be thus due to the
ire aroused in those semi-intelligent forces of nature which we find
objectified in the kingdom of gnomes.
There was one class of gnomes called _Pigmies_, whose office it was to
direct the currents of vital electricity in the earth to all places
where the roots of the plants that grew upon the surface required it.
This they did while they were in their disembodied state, when each
of them was, so to say, like a magnetic current; but whenever they
assumed corporeal forms they were very small, and perhaps for this
reason they had a dislike against appearing in corporeal bodies, and
did so only for the purpose of taking food, or for some other object
which required material organs. They were composed of some substantial
but bodiless active force, which they could cause to crystallise into
a nucleus of latent energy. In such a condition they were very lazy;
but when liberated they were very active. They were strong, and it was
surprising to see what an amount of active force could be developed
from a comparatively insignificant spark of energy.
Next, there were the _Vulcani_, who were principally occupied with
mineral life, having in their charge the growth and transformation of
metals. Their substance consisted of a certain force for which we have
no name, but which might be called an electro-magnetic fire. By an
exercise of their will they were able to send a current of such vital
electricity into a mineral vein, and cause gold and silver, iron and
copper, to grow; for it is a sign of short-sightedness if one believes
that metals have no life and do not grow, because their growth is not
so rapid and perceptible as that of the plants.
Then there were the _Cubitali_, and the substance of which they were
formed was a kind of explosive force, which means that they could
contract their fluidic bodies and expand them very rapidly, when the
quick expansion caused a kind of explosion with a destructive effect.
Whenever they assumed a form they were about two feet high, well
built, and showing great muscular strength. They were, so to say, the
hard-working class, and their principal occupation was the blasting
of air and the cutting of rocks; and, in spite of their robust
appearance, they had a great deal of artistic talent, as was proved by
the products of their labour that could be seen in the palace of the
king.
Furthermore, there were the _Acthnici_, constituted of “_Acthna_,” an
invisible subterranean fire, who, whenever they manifested themselves
in forms and became visible, appeared like fiery globes and balls
of lightning. They were, on the whole, stupid and dangerous, and it
was said that on more than one occasion some of them had entered
dreamland--as they called our world--and been seen by the spooks and
returned no more; all of which may, perhaps, have been only a fable,
believed only by the children of the gnomes. The _Acthnici_ were said
to create heat and cause upheavings of the earth, and some of our
ancient philosophers believed them to cause explosions in our mines.
However that may be, I never saw them at work, for they were uncouth
fellows, and I loved to avoid their society.
There were also the _Sagani_, and they were the cleverest of all. They
were tall and well-formed, resembling the human shape in stature and
form whenever they assumed a body. They were from three to five feet
high, but they had the power to elongate themselves from the normal
size up to a length of twenty-five feet and more. Their principal
occupation was to construct the astral models of plants after a certain
type for each species, which they did by the power of their imagination
(I have no other suitable word); and here I beg to add in parenthesis
that, according to my observation among the gnomes, every plant, stone,
or tree upon the Untersberg had its “Leffahs,” as it is called by
the gnomes, or astral type within the astral body of that mountain;
each being in some way which I am unable to explain, connected with
the physical part of the corresponding organism; so that the physical
and (to us) visible product was always the exact image and corporeal
representation of its ethereal progenitor and counterpart that is
invisible to us but visible to the gnomes.
All the gnomes could at all times and at their own pleasure live in
their ethereal states without any definite form, comparable to air or
clouds or mists; or they could by an effort of will assume material and
corporeal forms, each one according to his or her innate qualities.
In their ethereal shape they could travel with the velocity of a
thought, and penetrate through the most solid rocks like a current of
electricity passing through a bar of iron; but in their corporeal state
their locomotion was comparatively slow, and the atmospheric air, not
being their own element, caused great obstacles to their locomotion.
For the purpose of passing through air, they had to employ cutting and
blasting and other methods similar to those which we use for tunnelling
rocks.
It is believed by some people that when our bodies are asleep, our
spirits are free to roam consciously through space, and experience
things which we do not remember when we awake, but which appear to us
at best as a dream. Something similar was the case with the gnomes. In
their ethereal states they were individual powers, as distinct from
each other as electricity is distinct from light, or heat from sound,
and as such they were in possession of consciousness and perception of
a spiritual kind, and capable of remembering all they had experienced
while condensed into a corporeal form. But whenever they assumed
corporeal bodies, they had no distinct recollection of what they had
been doing while in a state of dissolution, and this was explained to
me by the fact that while in their ethereal state their brains were
not solidified enough to register and retain the impressions which
they received; but the higher impressions which they received while in
their corporeal forms they remembered also in their ethereal state, and
whenever a gnome entered into the ethereal state he knew all that he
had been doing in the same state before. Moreover, there was a state
in which they lived in a semi-corporeal and semi-ethereal condition,
and this was when they had not fully dissolved their forms, but merely
assumed the shape of a globe of light.
From all this it will appear that it is as difficult for a gnome to
penetrate into our world as it is for us to penetrate into theirs, and
even, as it often may happen, a gnome, while in his incorporeal form,
visits mankind, he will not remember anything about it when he returns,
or it will appear to him like a dream, and this may be the reason
that our world has gained the reputation among the gnomes as being a
dreamland, and nothing more. It may be a dreamland to them as theirs is
to us. But they appeared to me to live and exist in their own sphere as
much as we in ours. As to the rest, they were born, ate, drank, slept,
married, and evaporated after death.
Each family and each tribe of gnomes had its own head and leaders,
whom they implicitly obeyed, without even knowing the possibility of
disobedience, because they were not given to arguing, and all were
ruled by Bimbam I. The administration of the kingdom was very simple;
there were no taxes to pay, and everyone had what he wanted, because
nobody wanted more than he had. The king took whatever he needed, and
never more than he cared to have. Custom-house duties, monopolies,
privileges, and corporation nuisances were entirely unknown, and there
was no newspaper to disseminate gossip, cause dissensions, and ruin
characters for the sake of getting up a sensation. There were no shams.
The nobility consisted of gnomes that were truly noble, and not merely
pretended to be so; the doctors actually knew something, and did not
merely make believe that they were in possession of knowledge; the
goodness of the good could be estimated by the amount of light that
radiated from their stars, and their character was indicated by the
colour of the star. Consequently each individual sphere of light slowly
changed when a new emotion or virtue grew in a gnome. Anger made them
red, love blue, intelligence yellow, sensuality green, wisdom violet,
and so forth.
The ladies of the gnomes occupied positions similar to those of our
wives and daughters. The lower classes joined the males in their work;
the higher ones were of a more ornamental character, and protectors of
arts. The world of gnomes, the same as ours, would have been dreary
without female beauty and loveliness. Many of the gnomesses were
exceedingly beautiful and ethereal, others were homely; but all of
them were very amiable, because they acted in a natural manner, made
no attempt of disguising their feelings, and knew of no such thing as
deceit; neither did they disfigure their forms by absurd fashions in
dress.
Love-making and wooing were carried on among the gnomes as it is with
us, only with the exception that the females had the same right as the
males to bestow their affection and to make proposals; neither was
it considered a disgrace for any lady to do so; on the contrary, it
would have been a disgrace for her to pretend to have other sentiments
than she had, and it would have injured her beauty and destroyed her
light. There was, however, no such thing as what is understood among
us as “women’s rights,” for their natural instincts taught them that
not everything that becomes a male also becomes a female; these gnomes
made no attempt to overstep the limits drawn by nature, for this would
have caused them to become degraded and unnatural. On account of
their simple-mindedness immorality was entirely unknown, because true
morality has its basis in the instinctive perception of truth, and
requires no artificially concocted systems and shams. One may be very
moral without even knowing that moral doctrines exist, and another may
know all the moral prescriptions by heart, and be a rascal for all that.
There was one class of females distinguished from the rest. They were
such as, having attained a certain age, were still without children.
They corresponded to what is in our world called “old maids”; but
they were neither old nor ugly. In fact, they were on the whole very
charming, and could sing beautiful songs, as everyone knows who has
lived for a certain time in the vicinity of the Untersberg, and heard
them sing. Their songs are usually of a sad character, and alluring;
they express their loneliness and longing for children. The love for
production exists in all departments of nature, and also among the
gnomes. A gnome having no knowledge of his own, is always happy to
stuff his head with theories belonging to others, and loves them as
if they were his own children. The same is the case with the so-called
“wild women” of the Untersberg. Their love for offspring sometimes
causes them to come out of the Untersberg and appropriate to themselves
children of men, such as they find lost or astray within their realm.
For this reason they are called “wild,” although I wish to gracious
that I would never meet with anything less wild than they. I always
found them very lovely, and I now understand the meaning of those
popular tales which speak of children of peasants that have been
abducted by these spirits, and taken into the Untersberg, where they
lived among the “wild women,” who treated them kindly, and played with
them; and after a certain time sent them back to their parents loaded
with gifts.
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF LUCIFER]
VI.
LUCIFER.
Adalga, like all the rest of the gnomes, was a spirit, in the same
sense as we are spirits ourselves; the term “spirit” implying a
centre of consciousness or intelligence, irrespective as to whether
the form in which that spiritual power or energy dwells is visible
to somebody or everybody or nobody. In this sense the essence of
everything is spirit, and every living form is a dwelling-place or
vehicle for a conscious spiritual energy, be it latent or active, as
it could not otherwise be, if the world, as demonstrated by our best
philosophers, is, with all its seen and unseen forms, nothing else but
a manifestation of All-consciousness, an attribute of the Divine Mind.