No More Learning

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 bad 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 call 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.


IV

A couple of hours after sunset Michael Robartes returned and told me
that I would have to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique dance,
because before my initiation could be perfected I had to join three
times in a magical dance, for rhythm was the wheel of Eternity, on
which alone the transient and accidental could be broken, and the
spirit set free. I found that the steps, which were simple enough,
resembled certain antique Greek dances, and having been a good dancer
in my youth and the master of many curious Gaelic steps, I soon had
them in my memory. He then robed me and himself in a costume which
suggested by its shape both Greece and Egypt, but by its crimson colour
a more passionate life than theirs; and having put into my hands a
little chainless censer of bronze, wrought into the likeness of a rose,
by some modern craftsman, he told me to open a small door opposite
to the door by which I had entered. I put my hand to the handle,
but the moment I did so the fumes of the incense, helped perhaps by
his mysterious glamour, made me fall again into a dream, in which I
seemed to be a mask, lying on the counter of a little Eastern shop.
Many persons, with eyes so bright and still that I knew them for more
than human, came in and tried me on their faces, but at last flung
me into a corner with a little laughter; but all this passed in a
moment, for when I awoke my hand was still upon the handle. I opened
the door, and found myself in a marvellous passage, along whose sides
were many divinities wrought in a mosaic, not less beautiful than the
mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less severe beauty;
the predominant colour of each divinity, which was surely a symbolic
colour, being repeated in the lamps that hung from the ceiling, a
curiously-scented lamp before every divinity. I passed on, marvelling
exceedingly how these enthusiasts could have created all this beauty in
so remote a place, and half persuaded to believe in a material alchemy,
by the sight of so much hidden wealth; the censer filling the air, as I
passed, with smoke of ever-changing colour.

I stopped before a door, on whose bronze panels were wrought great
waves in whose shadow were faint suggestions of terrible faces. Those
beyond it seemed to have heard our steps, for a voice cried: 'Is the
work of the Incorruptible Fire at an end? ' and immediately Michael
Robartes answered: 'The perfect gold has come from the _athanor_.
' The
door swung open, and we were in a great circular room, and among men
and women who were dancing slowly in crimson robes. Upon the ceiling
was an immense rose wrought in mosaic; and about the walls, also in
mosaic, was a battle of gods and angels, the gods glimmering like
rubies and sapphires, and the angels of the one greyness, because, as
Michael Robartes whispered, they had renounced their divinity, and
turned from the unfolding of their separate hearts, out of love for a
God of humility and sorrow. Pillars supported the roof and made a kind
of circular cloister, each pillar being a column of confused shapes,
divinities, it seemed, of the wind, who rose as in a whirling dance
of more than human vehemence, and playing upon pipes and cymbals; and
from among these shapes were thrust out hands, and in these hands were
censers. I was bid place my censer also in a hand and take my place
and dance, and as I turned from the pillars towards the dancers, I
saw that the floor was of a green stone, and that a pale Christ on a
pale cross was wrought in the midst. I asked Robartes the meaning of
this, and was told that they desired 'To trouble His unity with their
multitudinous feet. ' The dance wound in and out, tracing upon the floor
the shapes of petals that copied the petals in the rose overhead, and
to the sound of hidden instruments which were perhaps of an antique
pattern, for I have never heard the like; and every moment the dance
was more passionate, until all the winds of the world seemed to have
awakened under our feet. After a little I had grown weary, and stood
under a pillar watching the coming and going of those flame-like
figures; until gradually I sank into a half-dream, from which I was
awakened by seeing the petals of the great rose, which had no longer
the look of mosaic, falling slowly through the incense-heavy air,
and, as they fell, shaping into the likeness of living beings of an
extraordinary beauty. Still faint and cloud-like, they began to dance,
and as they danced took a more and more definite shape, so that I was
able to distinguish beautiful Grecian faces and august Egyptian faces,
and now and again to name a divinity by the staff in his hand or by a
bird fluttering over his head; and soon every mortal foot danced by the
white foot of an immortal; and in the troubled eyes that looked into
untroubled shadowy eyes, I saw the brightness of uttermost desire as
though they had found at length, after unreckonable wandering, the lost
love of their youth. Sometimes, but only for a moment, I saw a faint
solitary figure with a veiled face, and carrying a faint torch, flit
among the dancers, but like a dream within a dream, like a shadow of
a shadow, and I knew by an understanding born from a deeper fountain
than thought, that it was Eros himself, and that his face was veiled
because no man or woman from the beginning of the world has ever known
what love is, or looked into his eyes, for Eros alone of divinities
is altogether a spirit, and hides in passions not of his essence if he
would commune with a mortal heart. So that if a man love nobly he knows
love through infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending sympathy; and
if ignobly through vehement jealousy, sudden hatred, and unappeasable
desire; but unveiled love he never knows. While I thought these things,
a voice cried to me from the crimson figures: 'Into the dance! there
is none that can be spared out of the dance; into the dance! into the
dance! that the gods may make them bodies out of the substance of our
hearts'; and before I could answer, a mysterious wave of passion, that
seemed like the soul of the dance moving within our souls, took hold of
me, and I was swept, neither consenting nor refusing, into the midst. I
was dancing with an immortal august woman, who had black lilies in her
hair, and her dreamy gesture seemed laden with a wisdom more profound
than the darkness that is between star and star, and with a love like
the love that breathed upon the waters; and as we danced on and on,
the incense drifted over us and round us, covering us away as in the
heart of the world, and ages seemed to pass, and tempests to awake and
perish in the folds of our robes and in her heavy hair.

Suddenly I remembered that her eyelids had never quivered, and that her
lilies had not dropped a black petal, or shaken from their places, and
understood with a great horror that I danced with one who was more or
less than human, and who was drinking up my soul as an ox drinks up a
wayside pool; and I fell, and darkness passed over me.