I find in my diary of magical events for 1899 that I awoke at 3 A.M. out
of a nightmare, and imagined one symbol to prevent its recurrence, and
imagined another, a simple geometrical form, which calls up dreams of
luxuriant vegetable life, that I might have pleasant dreams. I imagined it
faintly, being very sleepy, and went to sleep. I had confused dreams which
seemed to have no relation with the symbol. I awoke about eight, having
for the time forgotten both nightmare and symbol. Presently I dozed off
again and began half to dream and half to see, as one does between sleep
and waking, enormous flowers and grapes. I awoke and recognized that what
I had dreamed or seen was the kind of thing appropriate to the symbol
before I remembered having used it. I find another record, though made
some time after the event, of having imagined over the head of a person,
who was a little of a seer, a combined symbol of elemental air and
elemental water. This person, who did not know what symbol I was using,
saw a pigeon flying with a lobster in his bill. I find that on December
13, 1898, I used a certain star-shaped symbol with a seeress, getting her
to look at it intently before she began seeing. She saw a rough stone
house, and in the middle of the house the skull of a horse. I find that I
had used the same symbol a few days before with a seer, and that he had
seen a rough stone house, and in the middle of the house something under a
cloth marked with the Hammer of Thor. He had lifted the cloth and
discovered a skeleton of gold with teeth of diamonds, and eyes of some
unknown dim precious stones. I had made a note to this last vision,
pointing out that we had been using a Solar symbol a little earlier. Solar
symbols often call up visions of gold and precious stones. I do not give
these examples to prove my arguments, but to illustrate them. I know that
my examples will awaken in all who have not met the like, or who are not
on other grounds inclined towards my arguments, a most natural
incredulity. It was long before I myself would admit an inherent power in
symbols, for it long seemed to me that one could account for everything by
the power of one imagination over another, telepathy as it is called with
that separation of knowledge and life, of word and emotion, which is the
sterility of scientific speech. The symbol seemed powerful, I thought,
merely because we thought it powerful, and we would do just as well
without it. In those days I used symbols made with some ingenuity instead
of merely imagining them. I used to give them to the person I was
experimenting with, and tell him to hold them to his forehead without
looking at them; and sometimes I made a mistake. I learned from these
mistakes that if I did not myself imagine the symbol, in which case he
would have a mixed vision, it was the symbol I gave by mistake that
produced the vision. Then I met with a seer who could say to me, 'I have a
vision of a square pond, but I can see your thought, and you expect me to
see an oblong pond,' or, 'The symbol you are imagining has made me see a
woman holding a crystal, but it was a moonlight sea I should have seen.' I
discovered that the symbol hardly ever failed to call up its typical
scene, its typical event, its typical person, but that I could practically
never call up, no matter how vividly I imagined it, the particular scene,
the particular event, the particular person I had in my own mind, and that
when I could, the two visions rose side by side.
I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers whether
they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half unconsciously
by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist. At first I
tried to distinguish between symbols and symbols, between what I called
inherent symbols and arbitrary symbols, but the distinction has come to
mean little or nothing. Whether their power has arisen out of themselves,
or whether it has an arbitrary origin, matters little, for they act, as I
believe, because the great memory associates them with certain events and
moods and persons. Whatever the passions of man have gathered about,
becomes a symbol in the great memory, and in the hands of him who has the
secret, it is a worker of wonders, a caller-up of angels or of devils. The
symbols are of all kinds, for everything in heaven or earth has its
association, momentous or trivial, in the great memory, and one never
knows what forgotten events may have plunged it, like the toadstool and
the ragweed, into the great passions. Knowledgeable men and women in
Ireland sometimes distinguish between the simples that work cures by some
medical property in the herb, and those that do their work by magic. Such
magical simples as the husk of the flax, water out of the fork of an
elm-tree, do their work, as I think, by awaking in the depths of the mind
where it mingles with the great mind, and is enlarged by the great memory,
some curative energy, some hypnotic command. They are not what we call
faith cures, for they have been much used and successfully, the traditions
of all lands affirm, over children and over animals, and to me they seem
the only medicine that could have been committed safely to ancient hands.
To pluck the wrong leaf would have been to go uncured, but, if one had
eaten it, one might have been poisoned.