No More Learning

He then left me, promising to return
an hour before the ceremony. I began searching among the bookshelves,
and found one of the most exhaustive alchemical libraries I have ever
seen. There were the works of Morienus, who hid his immortal body
under a shirt of hair-cloth; of Avicenna, who was a drunkard and yet
controlled numberless legions of spirits; of Alfarabi, who put so many
spirits into his lute that he could make men laugh, or weep, or fall in
deadly trance as he would; of Lully, who transformed himself into the
likeness of a red cock; of Flamel, who with his wife Parnella achieved
the elixir many hundreds of years ago, and is fabled to live still in
Arabia among the Dervishes; and of many of less fame. There were very
few mystics but alchemical mystics, and because, I had little doubt, of
the devotion to one god of the greater number and of the limited sense
of beauty, which Robartes would hold an inevitable consequence; but I
did notice a complete set of facsimiles of the prophetical writings of
William Blake, and probably because of the multitudes that thronged his
illumination and were 'like the gay fishes on the wave when the moon
sucks up the dew. ' I noted also many poets and prose writers of every
age, but only those who were a little weary of life, as indeed the
greatest have been everywhere, and who cast their imagination to us, as
a something they needed no longer now that they were going up in their
fiery chariots.

Presently I heard a tap at the door, and a woman came in and laid a
little fruit upon the table. I judged that she had once been handsome,
but her cheeks were hollowed by what I would have held, had I seen her
anywhere else, an excitement of the flesh and a thirst for pleasure,
instead of which it doubtless was an excitement of the imagination and
a thirst for beauty. I asked her some question concerning the ceremony,
but getting no answer except a shake of the head, saw that I must await
initiation in silence. When I had eaten, she came again, and having
laid a curiously wrought bronze box on the table, lighted the candles,
and took away the plates and the remnants. So soon as I was alone,
I turned to the box, and found that the peacocks of Hera spread out
their tails over the sides and lid, against a background, on which were
wrought great stars, as though to affirm that the heavens were a part
of their glory. In the box was a book bound in vellum, and having upon
the vellum and in very delicate colours, and in gold, the alchemical
rose with many spears thrusting against it, but in vain, as was shown
by the shattered points of those nearest to the petals. The book was
written upon vellum, and in beautiful clear letters, interspersed
with symbolical pictures and illuminations, after the manner of the
_Splendor Solis_.

The first chapter described how six students, of Celtic descent,
gave themselves separately to the study of alchemy, and solved, one
the mystery of the Pelican, another the mystery of the green Dragon,
another the mystery of the Eagle, another that of Salt and Mercury.
What seemed a succession of accidents, but was, the book declared,
the contrivance of preternatural powers, brought them together in the
garden of an inn in the South of France, and while they talked together
the thought came to them that alchemy was the gradual distillation of
the contents of the soul, until they were ready to put off the mortal
and put on the immortal. An owl passed, rustling among the vine-leaves
overhead, and then an old woman came, leaning upon a stick, and,
sitting close to them, took up the thought where they had dropped it.
Having expounded the whole principle of spiritual alchemy, and bid
them found the Order of the Alchemical Rose, she passed from among
them, and when they would have followed was nowhere to be seen. They
formed themselves into an Order, holding their goods and making their
researches in common, and, as they became perfect in the alchemical
doctrine, apparitions came and went among them, and taught them more
and more marvellous mysteries. The book then went on to expound so
much of these as the neophyte was permitted to know, dealing at the
outset and at considerable length with the independent reality of our
thoughts, which was, it declared, the doctrine from which all true
doctrines rose. If you imagine, it said, the semblance of a living
being, it is at once possessed by a wandering soul, and goes hither
and hither working good or evil, until the moment of its death has
come; and gave many examples, received, it said, from many gods. 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.