No More Learning

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.


VIII

I have now described that belief in magic which has set me all but
unwilling among those lean and fierce minds who are at war with their
time, who cannot accept the days as they pass, simply and gladly; and
I look at what I have written with some alarm, for I have told more
of the ancient secret than many among my fellow-students think it
right to tell. I have come to believe so many strange things because
of experience, that I see little reason to doubt the truth of many
things that are beyond my experience; and it may be that there are
beings who watch over that ancient secret, as all tradition affirms,
and resent, and perhaps avenge, too fluent speech. They say in the
Aran Islands that if you speak overmuch of the things of Faery your
tongue becomes like a stone, and it seems to me, though doubtless
naturalistic reason would call it Auto-suggestion or the like, that I
have often felt my tongue become just so heavy and clumsy. More than
once, too, as I wrote this very essay I have become uneasy, and have
torn up some paragraph, not for any literary reason, but because some
incident or some symbol that would perhaps have meant nothing to the
reader, seemed, I know not why, to belong to hidden things.