Then I asked to have some past life of mine revealed, and a new evocation
was made before the tablet full of little squares. I cannot remember so
well who saw this or that detail, for now I was interested in little but
the vision itself. I had come to a conclusion about the method. I knew
that the vision may be in part common to several people.
A man in chain armour passed through a castle door, and the seeress
noticed with surprise the bareness and rudeness of castle rooms. There was
nothing of the magnificence or the pageantry she had expected. The man
came to a large hall and to a little chapel opening out of it, where a
ceremony was taking place. There were six girls dressed in white, who took
from the altar some yellow object--I thought it was gold, for though, like
my acquaintance, I was told not to see, I could not help seeing. Somebody
else thought that it was yellow flowers, and I think the girls, though I
cannot remember clearly, laid it between the man's hands. He went out
after a time, and as he passed through the great hall one of us, I forget
whom, noticed that he passed over two gravestones. Then the vision became
broken, but presently he stood in a monk's habit among men-at-arms in the
middle of a village reading from a parchment. He was calling villagers
about him, and presently he and they and the men-at-arms took ship for
some long voyage. The vision became broken again, and when we could see
clearly they had come to what seemed the Holy Land. They had begun some
kind of sacred labour among palm-trees. The common men among them stood
idle, but the gentlemen carried large stones, bringing them from certain
directions, from the cardinal points I think, with a ceremonious
formality. The evoker of spirits said they must be making some kind of
masonic house. His mind, like the minds of so many students of these
hidden things, was always running on masonry and discovering it in strange
places.
We broke the vision that we might have supper, breaking it with some form
of words which I forget. When supper had ended the seeress cried out that
while we had been eating they had been building, and they had built not a
masonic house but a great stone cross. And now they had all gone away but
the man who had been in chain armour and two monks we had not noticed
before. He was standing against the cross, his feet upon two stone rests
a little above the ground, and his arms spread out. He seemed to stand
there all day, but when night came he went to a little cell, that was
beside two other cells. I think they were like the cells I have seen in
the Aran Islands, but I cannot be certain. Many days seemed to pass, and
all day every day he stood upon the cross, and we never saw anybody there
but him and the two monks. Many years seemed to pass, making the vision
flutter like a drift of leaves before our eyes, and he grew old and
white-haired, and we saw the two monks, old and white-haired, holding him
upon the cross. I asked the evoker of spirits why the man stood there, and
before he had time to answer I saw two people, a man and a woman, rising
like a dream within a dream, before the eyes of the man upon the cross.
The evoker of spirits saw them too, and said that one of them held up his
arms and they were without hands. I thought of the two gravestones the man
in chain mail had passed over in the great hall when he came out of the
chapel, and asked the evoker of spirits if the knight was undergoing a
penance for violence, and while I was asking him, and he was saying that
it might be so but he did not know, the vision, having completed its
circle, vanished.
It had not, so far as I could see, the personal significance of the other
vision, but it was certainly strange and beautiful, though I alone seemed
to see its beauty. Who was it that made the story, if it were but a story?
I did not, and the seeress did not, and the evoker of spirits did not and
could not. It arose in three minds, for I cannot remember my acquaintance
taking any part, and it rose without confusion, and without labour, except
the labour of keeping the mind's eye awake, and more swiftly than any pen
could have written it out. It may be, as Blake said of one of his poems,
that the author was in eternity. In coming years I was to see and hear of
many such visions, and though I was not to be convinced, though half
convinced once or twice, that they were old lives, in an ordinary sense of
the word life, I was to learn that they have almost always some quite
definite relation to dominant moods and moulding events in this life. They
are, perhaps, in most cases, though the vision I have but just described
was not, it seems, among the cases, symbolical histories of these moods
and events, or rather symbolical shadows of the impulses that have made
them, messages as it were out of the ancestral being of the questioner.
At the time these two visions meant little more to me, if I can remember
my feeling at the time, than a proof of the supremacy of imagination, of
the power of many minds to become one, overpowering one another by spoken
words and by unspoken thought till they have become a single intense,
unhesitating energy. One mind was doubtless the master, I thought, but all
the minds gave a little, creating or revealing for a moment what I must
call a supernatural artist.