C. Those who are conscious rather of the Divine as a Tran-

scendent Life immanent in the world and the self, and of a strange spiritual seed within them by whose development man, moving to higher levels of character and consciousness, attains his end, will see the mystic life as involving inward change rather than outgoing search. Regeneration is their watchword, and they will choose symbols of growth or transmutation: saying with St. Catherine of Genoa, “my Being is God, not by simple participation, but by a true transformation of my Being.” =
These three groups of mystics, then, stand for three kinds ot temperament ; and we may fairly take as their characteristic forms of symbolic expression the Mystic Quest, the Marriage of the Soul and the “Great Work” of the Spiritual Alchemists,
* Vita e Dottrina, p. 36.
154 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
I
The pilgrimage idea, the outgoing quest, appears in mysti- cal literature under two rather different aspects. One is the search for the “ Hidden Treasure which desires to be found.” Such is the “quest of the Grail” when regarded in its mystic aspect as an allegory of the adventures of the soul. The other is the long, hard journey towards a known and definite goal or state. Such is Dante’s “Divine Comedy”; which is, in one of its aspects, a faithful and detailed description of the Mystic Way. The goal of such a quest—the Empyrean of Dante, the Beatific Vision or fulfilment of love—is often called Jerusalem by the Christian Mystics; naturally enough, since that city was for the mediaeval mind the supreme end of pilgrimage. By Jerusalem they mean not only the celestial country, Heaven: but also the spiritual life, which is “itself a _ heaven.” “Just as a true pilgrim going towards Jerusalem,” says Hilton, “leaveth behind him house and land, wife and children, and maketh himself poor and bare from all things that he hath, that he may go lightly without letting. Right so, if thou wilt be a spiritual pilgrim, thou shalt strip thyself naked of all that thou hast ... then shalt thou resolve in thy heart fully and wholly that thou wilt be at Jerusalem, and at no other place but there.” “Jerusalem,” he says in this same chapter, “is as much as to say a sight of peace; and betokeneth contempla- tion in perfect love of God.”2
Under this image of a pilgrimage—an image as concrete and practical, as remote from the romantic and picturesque, for the mediaeval writers who used it, as a symbolism of hotel and ' railway train would be to us—the mystics contrived to summarize and suggest much of the life history of the ascend- ing soul; the developing spiritual consciousness. The neces- sary freedom and detachment of the traveller, his departure from his normal life and interests, the difficulties, enemies, and hardships encountered on the road ; the length of the journey _ the variety of the country, the dark night which overtakes him, the glimpses of destination far away—all these are seen more
This image seems first to have been elaborated by St. Augustine, from whom it was borrowed by Hugh of St. Victor, and most of the mediaeval mystics, 2 The Scale of Perfection,’’ bk. ii. pt. ii. cap. iii.
MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM 155
and more as we advance in knowledge to constitute a trans- parent allegory of the incidents of man’s progress from the unreal to the real. Bunyan was but the last and least mystical of a long series of minds which grasped this fact.
The Traveller, says the Sufi ’Aziz bin Mahommed Nafasi, in whose book, “ The Remotest Aim,” the pilgrimage-symbolism is developed in great detail, is the Perceptive or Intuitive Sense of Man. The goal to which he journeys is Knowledge of God. This mysterious traveller towards the only country of the soul may be known of other men by his detachment, charity, humility, and patience. These primary virtues, however— belonging to ethical rather than to spiritual life—are not enough to bring his quest to a successful termination. They make him, say the Siifis, “ perfect in knowledge of his goal but deficient in the power of reaching it.” Though he has fraternal love for his fellow-pilgrims, detachment from wayside allure- ments, tireless perseverance on the road, he is still encumbered and weakened by unnecessary luggage. The second stage of his journey, therefore, is initiated like that of Christian by a casting off of his burden: a total self-renouncement, the attain- ment of a Franciscan poverty of spirit whereby he becomes “Perfectly Free.”
Having got rid of all impediments to the spiritual quest, he must now acquire or develop in their stead the characteristic mys- tical qualities, or Three Aids of the Pilgrim ; which are called in this system Attraction, Devotion, and Elevation. Attraction is ‘consciousness of the mutual desire existing between man’s spirit and the Divine Spirit : of the link of love which knits up reality and draws all things to their home in God. This is the universal law on which all mysticism is based. It is St. Augustine’s “Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts can find no rest outside of Thee.” This “natural magnetism,” then, once he is aware of it, will draw the pilgrim irresistibly along the road from the Many to the One. His second aid, Devotion, says the “ Remotest Aim” in a phrase of great depth and beauty, is “the prosecution of the journey ¢o God and zx God.” It embraces, in fact, the whole contemplative life. It
* So too Ruysbroeck says that ‘‘ the just man goes towards God by inward love in perpetual activity and z# God in virtue of his fruitive affection in eternal rest ” (‘‘ L’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,” 1. ii. cap. Ixxiii.),
156 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
is the next degree of spiritual consciousness after the blind yielding to the attraction of the Real, and the setting in. order of man’s relation to his source.
The Traveller’s journey ¢o God is complete when he attains knowledge of Him—“ Illumination,” in the language of European mystics. The point at which this is attained is called the Tavern, or resting-place upon the road, where he is fed with the Divine Mysteries. There are also “Wine Shops” upon the way, where the weary pilgrim is cheered and refreshed by a draught of the wine of Divine Love Only when the journey fo God is completed begins the “ Journey zw God ”—that which the Christian mystics call the Unitive Way— and this, since it is the essence of Eternal Life, can have no end. Elevation, the pilgrim’s third aid, is the exalted or ecstatic form of consciousness peculiar to the contemplative, and which allows the traveller to see the spiritual city towards which he goes.?
The Sufi poet ’Attar, in his mystical poem, “The Colloquy of the Birds,” has described the stages of this same spiritual pilgrimage with greater psychological insight, as the journey through “Seven Valleys.” The lapwing, having been asked by other birds what is the length of the road which leads to the hidden Palace of the King, replies that there are Seven Valleys through which every traveller must pass: but since none who attain the End ever come back to describe their adventures, no one knows the length of the way.
(1) The first valley, says the lapwing, is the Valley of the Quest. It is long and toilsome: and there the traveller must strip himself of all earthly things, becoming poor, bare, and desolate: and so stay till the Supernal Light casts a ray on his desolation. It is, in fact, Dante’s Purgatorio, the Christian Way of Purgation: the period of self-stripping and purification which no mystic system omits.
(2) When the ray of Supernal Light has touched the pilgrim he enters the limitless Valley of Love: begins, that is to say, the mystic life. It is Dante’s “ Earthly Paradise,” or, in the tradi- tional system of the mystics, the onset of illumination.
* I need not remind the reader o. the fact that this symbolism, perverted to the purposes of his sceptical philosophy, runs through the whole of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
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MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM 157
(3) Hence he passes to the Valley of Knowledge or En- lightenment—the contemplative state—where each finds in ‘communion with Truth the place that belongs to him. No ‘Dante student will fail to see here a striking parallel with those planetary heavens where each soul partakes of the Divine, “not ‘supremely in the absolute sense,” as St. Bonaventura has it, but “supremely in respect of Azmself.”’ The mystery of Being is ‘now revealed to the traveller. He sees Nature’s secret, and God in all things: It is the height of illumination. (4) The next stage is the Valley of Detachment, of utter absorption in Divine Love—the Stellar Heaven of the Saints— where Duty is seen to be all in all. This leads to— (5) The Valley of the Unity, where the naked Godhead is the one object of contemplation. This is the stage of ecstasy, or the Beatific Vision: Dante’s condition.in the last canto of the “Paradiso.” It is transient, however, and leads to— (6) The Valley of Amazement; where the Vision, far trans- cending the pilgrim’s receptive power, appears to be taken from him and he is plunged in darkness and bewilderment. This is the state which Dionysius the Areopagite, and after him many “mediaeval mystics, called the Divine Dark, and described as the truest and closest of all our apprehensions of the Godhead. It is the Cloud of Unknowing: “dark from excessive bright.” The final stage is— (7) The Valley of Annihilation of Self: the supreme degree of union or theopathetic state, in which the self is utterly merged “like a fish in the sea” in the ocean of Divine Love. Through all these metaphors of pilgrimage to a goal—ofa road followed, distance overpassed, fatigue endured—there runs the definite idea that the travelling self in undertaking the journey is fulfilling a destiny, a law of the transcendental life ; obeying an imperative need. The chosen Knights are destined or called to the quest of the Grail. “All men are cad/ed to their
origin,” says Rulman Merswin, and the fishes which he sees in his Vision of Nine Rocks are impelled to struggle as it were “against nature” uphill from pool to pool towards their source.?
: t ’Attar’s allegory of the Valleys will be found epitomised in Mr. W. S. Lilly’s
excellent account of the Siifi poets, in ‘“‘ Many Mansions,” p. 130; and in a fuller
| form in ‘*The Porch” Series, No. 8. 2 Jundt, ‘‘ Rulman Merswin,” p. 27.
158 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
All mystical thinkers agree in declaring that there is a mutual attraction between the Spark of the Soul, the free divine germ in man, and the Fount from which it came forth. “We long for the Absolute,” says Royce, “only in so far as in us the Absolute also longs, and seeks, through our very temporal striving, the peace that is nowhere in Time, but only, and yet Absolutely, in Eternity.” So, many centuries before the birth of American philosophy, Hilton put the same truth of ex-
perience in lovelier words. “ He it is that desireth in thee, and ©
He it is that is desired. He is all and He doth all if thou couldst see Him.’’2 The homeward journey of man’s spirit, then, is due to the
push of a divine life within answering to the pull of a divine
life without.3 It is the going of like to like, the fulfilment of
a Cosmic necessity: and the mystics, in undertaking it, are — humanity’s pioneers on the only road to rest. Hence that attraction which the Moslem mystic discerned as the traveller’s ©
necessary aid, is a fundamental doctrine of all mysticism: and
as a consequence, the symbolism of mutual desire is here inex-_
tricably mingled with that of pilgrimage. The spiritual pilgrim
goes because he is called ; because he wants to go, must go, if © he is to find rest and peace. “God meeds man,” says Eckhart. — It is Love calling to love: and the journey, though in one sense
a hard pilgrimage, up and out, by the terraced mount and the
ten heavens to God, in another is the inevitable rush of the
roving comet, caught at last, to the Central Sun. “My weight is my love,” said St. Augustine Like gravitation, it inevitably compels, for good or evil, every spirit to its own place. Ac- cording to another range of symbols, that love flings open a door, in order that the Larger Life may rush in, and it and the soul be “one thing.”
* Royce, ‘‘ The World and the Individual,” vol. ii. p. 386. 2 «¢The Scale of Perfection,” bk. ii, pt. ii. cap. v.
3 Compare Reécéjac (‘‘Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique,” p. 252).
‘¢ According to mysticism, morality leads the soul to the frontiers of the Absolute and even gives it an impulsion to enter, but this is not enough. This movement of pure Freedom cannot succeed unless there is an equivalent movement within the Absolute itself.”
4 Aug. Cont., bk. xiii. cap.9. ‘‘ All those who love,” says Ruysbroeck, feel this attraction ; more or less according to the degree of their love.”” (‘* De Calculo sive de Perfectione filiorum Dei.” Quoted by Maeterlinck, introduction to ‘‘ L’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,” p. lvi.)
:
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MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM 159
Here, then, we run through the whole gamut of symbolic expression; through Transcendence, Desire, and Immanence. All are seen to point to one consummation, diversely and allusively expressed: the imperative need of union between man’s separated spirit and the Real, his remaking in the interests of transcendent life, his establishment in that Kingdom which is both “ near and far.”
“In the book of Hidden Things it is written,” says Eckhart, “‘I stand at the door and knock and wait’ thou needst not seek Him here or there: He is no farther off than the door of the heart. There He stands and waits and waits until He finds thee ready to open and let Him in. Thou needst not call Him from a distance; to wait until thou openest is harder for Him than for thee. He needs thee a thousand times more than thou canst need Him. Thy opening and Hts entering are but one moment.”* “God,” he says in another place, “can as little do without us, as we without Him.”2 Our attainment of the Absolute is not a one-sided ambition, but a mutual necessity. “ For our natural Will,” says Lady Julian, “is to have God, and the Good will of God is to have us; and we may never cease from longing till we have Him in fullness of joy.” 3
So, in the beautiful poem or ritual called the “Hymn of Jesus,” contained in the apocryphal ‘“ Acts of John” and dating from primitive Christian times, the Logos, or Eternal Christ, is thus represented as matching with His own transcendent self-giving desire every need of the soul who stands with Him in the mystical circle of initiation.4
The Soul says :-—
***T would be saved.’” Christ replies :—
*** And I would save.” Amen.” The Dialogue continues :—
*©¢¥ would be loosed.’ ‘And I would loose.’ Amen.
* Meister Eckhart, Pred. iii. 2 Jbid., Pred. xiii.
3 “ Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. vi.
4 The Greek and English text will be found in the ‘*‘ Apocrypha Anecdota”’ of Dr. M. R. James, series 2 (Cambridge, 1897), pp. 1-25. I follow his ranslation. It will be seen that I have adopted the hypothesis of Mr. G. R. S. Mead as to the dramatic nature of this poem. See his *‘ Echoes from the Gnosis,’ 1896.
a ——
160 AN INTRODUCTION TO: MYSTICISM
‘I would be pierced.’
‘And I would pierce.’ Amen.
‘I would be born.’
‘And I would bear.’ Amen.
‘I would eat.’
‘And I would be eaten.’ Amen. *I would hear.’
‘And I would be heard.’ Amen.’
a * * * ©
***T am a Lamp to thee who beholdest Me, I am a Mirror to thee who perceivest Me, I am a Door to thee, who knockest at Me, I am a Way to thee a wayfarer.’”’
The same fundamental idea of the mutual quest of the Soul and the Absolute is expressed in the terms of another symbolism by the great Mahommedan mystic :—
‘No lover ever seeks union with his beloved, But his beloved is also seeking union with him. But the lover’s love makes his body lean While the beloved’s love makes her fair and lusty. When in ¢hzs heart the lightning spark of love arises, Be sure this love is reciprocated in ¢hat heart. When the love of God arises in thy heart, Without doubt God also feels love for thee.” !
The mystic vision, then, is of a spiritual universe held tight within the bonds of love:? and of the free and restless human soul, having within it the spark of divine desire, the “tendency to the Absolute,” only finding satisfaction and true life when united with this Life of God. Then, in Patmore’s lovely image, “the babe is at its mother’s breast,” “the lover has returned to the beloved.” 3
Whatever their outward sense, the mystic symbols one and all express aspects of this “secret of the world,” this primal
t Jalalu ’d Din (Wisdom of the East Series), p. 77. ? So Dante—
‘*Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna legato con amore in un volume cio che per Il’universo si squaderna.”’ (Par. xxxiii. 85.)
8 “The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,”’ ‘‘ Aurea Dicta,’’ ccxxviii.
MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM 161
verity. But whereas such great visionary schemes as those of "Attar and of Dante show it in its Cosmic form, in many other symbols—particularly those which we meet in the writings of the ecstatic saints—the personal subjective note, the conscious- ness of an individual relation between that one self and the Supernal Self, overpowers all such general applications. Then philosophy and formal allegory must step aside : the sacramental language of exalted emotion, of profoundly felt experience, takes its place. The phases of mutual love, of wooing and combat, awe and delight—the fevers of desire, the ecstasy of surrender—are drawn upon. “All this lovely dalliance of private conference,” in Hilton’s words,t is made to contribute something to the description of the great and secret drama of the soul.
To such symbolic transcripts of intimate experience belongs one amazing episode of the spiritual life-history which, because it has been given immortal expression by the greatest mystical poet of modern times, is familiar to thousands of readers who know little or nothing of the more normal adventures incidental to man’s attainment of the Absolute. In “The Hound of Heaven” Francis Thompson described with an almost terrible power, not the self’s quest of adored Reality, but Reality’s quest of the unwilling self. He shows to us the remorseless, tireless seeking and following of the soul by the Divine Life to which it will not surrender: the inexorable onward sweep of “ this tremendous Lover,’ hunting the separated spirit, “strange piteous futile thing” that flees Him “down the nights and down the days.” This idea of the love-chase, of the spirit rushing in terror from the overpowering presence of God, but followed, sought, conquered in the end, is common to all the mediaeval mystics: it is the obverse of their general doctrine of the necessary fusion of human and divine life, “escape from the flame of separation.”
“T chased thee, for in this was my pleasure,” says the voice of Love to Mechthild of Magdeburg; “I captured thee, for this
‘was my desire; I bound thee, and I rejoice in thy bonds; I ‘have wounded thee, that thou mayst be united to me. If I ‘gave thee blows, it was that I might be possessed of thee.”?
* «The Scale of Perfection,” bk. iii. cap. xv. 2 «‘ Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit,”’ pt. i. cap. iii.
162 AN. INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
So in the beautiful Middle English poem of “ Quia amore langueo,’— **T am true love that fals was nevere, Mi sistyr, mannis soule, I loved hir thuss Bicause we wolde in no wise discevere I lefte my Kyngdom glorious. I purveyde for hir a paleis precious; She fleyth, I folowe, I soughte hir so. I suftride this peyne piteous Quia amore langueo.” *
Meister Eckhart has the same idea of the inexorable Following Love, impossible to escape, expressed under less personal images. “Earth,” he says, “cannot escape the sky; let it flee up or down, the sky flows into it, and makes it fruitful whether it will or no. So God does to man. He who will escape Him only runs to His bosom ; for all corners are open to Him.” 2
All mystics have very strongly this sense of a mysterious spiritual life—a Reality—without, seeking man and compelling him to Its will. It is not for him, they think, to say that he will or will not aspire to the transcendental world.3 Hence - sometimes this inversion of man’s long quest of God. The self resists the pull of spiritual gravitation, flees from the touch of Eternity ; and the Eternal seeks it, tracks it ruthlessly down, The Following Love, the mystics say, is a fact of experience, not a poetic idea. “ Those strong feet that follow, follow after,” once set upon the chase, are bound to win. Man, once conscious” of Reality, cannot evade it. For a time his separated spirit, his disordered loves, may wilfully frustrate the scheme of things: but he must be conquered in the end. Then the mystic process unfolds itself inexorably : Love triumphs: the “ purpose of the worlds” fulfills itself in the individual life, |
II
It was natural and inevitable that the imagery of human love and marriage should have seemed to the mystic the best of
* * Quia amore langueo,” an anonymous fifteenth-century poem. Printed from the Lambeth MS. by the E.E.T.S., 1866-67.
2 Pred. Ixxxviii.
3 So we are told of St. Francis of Assisi, that in his youth he ‘‘ ¢ried to flee God's hand.”” Thomas of Celano, Legenda Prima, cap. ii.
MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM 163
all images of his own “ fulfilment of life”; his soul’s surrender, first to the call, finally to the embrace of Perfect Love. It lay ready to his hand: it was understocd of all men: and, more- over, it most certainly does offer, upon lower levels, a strangely exact parallel to the sequence of states in which man’s spiritual consciousness unfolds itself, and which form the consummation _ of the mystic life.
It has been said that the constant use of such imagery by Christian mystics of the mediaeval period is traceable to the popularity of the Song of Solomon. I think that the truth lies rather in the opposite statement: namely, that the mystic loved the Song of Solomon because he there saw reflected, as in a mirror, the most secret experiences of his soul. The sense of a desire that was insatiable, of a personal fellowship so real, inward, and intense that it could only be compared with the closest link of human love, of an intercourse that was no mere spiritual self-indulgence, but was rooted in the primal duties and necessities of life--more, those deepest, most intimate secrets of communion, those self-giving ecstasies which all mystics know, but of which we, who are not mystics, may not speak—all these he found symbolized and suggested, their unendurable glories veiled in a merciful mist, in the poetry which man has invented to honour that august passion in which the merely human draws nearest to the divine.
The great saints who adopted and elaborated this symbo- lism, applying it to their pure and ardent passion for the Absolute, were destitute of the prurient imagination which their modern commentators too often possess. They were essen- tially pure of heart; and when they “saw God” they were so far from confusing that unearthly vision with the products of morbid sexuality, that the dangerous nature of the imagery which they employed did not occur to them. They knew by experience the unique nature of spiritual love: and no one can know anything about it in any other way.
Thus for St. Bernard, throughout his deeply mystical sermons on the Song of Songs, the Divine Word is the Bridegroom, the human soul is the Bride: but how different is the effect pro- duced by his use of these symbols from that with which he has been charged by hostile critics! In the place of that “sensuous imagery ” which is so often and so earnestly deplored by those
164 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
who have hardly a nodding acquaintance with the writings of the saints, we find images which indeed have once been sensuous; but which are here anointed and ordained to a holy office, carried up, transmuted, and endowed with a radiant purity, an intense and spiritual life.
“ speaks these words? It is the Bride. Who is the Bride? It is the Soul thirsting for God. . . . She who asks this is held by . the bond of love to him from whom she asks it. Of all the sentiments of nature, this of love is the most excellent, espe- cially when it is rendered back to Him who is the principle and fountain of it—that is, God. Nor are there found any expres- sions equally sweet to signify the mutual affection between the Word of God and the soul, as those of Bridegroom and of Bride; inasmuch as between individuals who stand in such relation to each other all things are in common, and they possess nothing separate or divided. They have one inheritance, one dwelling- place, one table, and they are in fact one flesh. If, then, mutual love is especially befitting to a bride and bridegroom, it is not unfitting that the name of Bride is given to a soul which loves.” =
To women mystics of the Catholic Church, familiar with the antique and poetic metaphor which called every cloistered nun the Bride of Christ, that crisis in their spiritual history in which they definitely vowed themselves to the service of Transcendent Reality seemed, naturally enough, the veritable betrothal of the soul. Often, in a dynamic vision, they saw as in a picture the binding vows exchanged between their spirits and their God.? That further progress on the mystic way which brought with it a sharp and permanent consciousness of union with the Divine Will, the constant sustaining presence of a Divine . Companion, became, by an extension of the original simile, — Spiritual Marriage. The elements of duty, constancy, irre- © vocableness, and loving obedience involved in the mediaeval conception of the marriage tie, made it an apt image of a spiritual state in which humility, intimacy, and love were the dominant characteristics. There is really no need to seek a pathological explanation of these simple facts. Moreover, the
t St. Bernard, ‘‘ Cantica Canticorum,’’ Sermon vii. * Vide infra, pt. il. cap. v,
MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM 165
descriptions of spiritual marriage which the great mystics have left are singularly free from physical imagery. ‘AII that I can say of it, and all that I understand of it,” says St. Teresa, “is that the soul, or rather the Spirit of the Soul [the divine spark, or part], becomes one thing with God. That He may show how ‘much He loves us, God, Who is also spirit, has desired to show to certain souls how far this love can go: and this, that we may be excited to praise His generosity. Despite His infinite Majesty, He condescends to unite Himself so closely to a feeble creature, that, like those whom the sacrament of marriage has united in an irrevocable bond, He would never again be separated from her. After the spiritual betrothal it is not thus: more than once the lovers separate. In the spiritual marriage, on the contrary, the soul dwells always with God, in that centre which I have described.” !
The great Richard of St. Victor, in one of his most splendid mystical treatises,2 has given us perhaps the most daring and detailed application of the symbolism of marriage to the adventures of the spirit of man. He divides the “steep stairway of love,” by which the contemplative ascends to union with the Absolute, into four stages. These he calls the betrothal, the marriage, the wedlock, and the fruitfulness of the soul.3 In the betrothal, he says, the soul “thirsts for the Beloved”; that is to say, it longs to experience the delights of Reality. “The Spirit comes to the Soul, and seems sweeter than honey.” It is conversion, the awakening to mystical truth ; the kindling of the passion for the Absolute. “Then the Soul, with pertinacity demands more”: and because of her burning desire she attains to pure contemplation, and so passes to the second degree of love. In this she is “led in bridal” by the Beloved. Ascend- ing “above herself” in contemplation, she “sees the Sun of Righteousness.” She is now confirmed in the mystic life; the irrevocable marriage vows are made between her spirit and her God. At this point she can “see the Beloved,” but “cannot yet
* « FB] Castillo Interior,” Moradas Sétimas, cap. ii. ‘De Quatuor Gradibus Violentae Uharitatis ” (Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. cxcvi. col. 1207). 3 ‘* Tn primo gradu fit desponsatio, in secundo nuptiae, in tertio copula, in quarto puerperiuin. . . . De quarto dicitur, Concepimus, et quasi parturivimus et peperimus spiritum ”’ (Isa. xviii. 26). (Od. c¢¢., 1216, D.) -
166 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
come in to Him,” says Richard. This degree, as we shall see later, answers more or less to that which other mystics call the Illuminative Way: but any attempt to press these poetic symbols into a cast-iron series, and establish exact parallels, is foredoomed to failure, and will merely succeed in robbing them of their fragrance and suggestive power. In Richard’s “ third stage,” however, that of union, or wedlock, it is clear that the soul enters upon the “ Unitive Way.” She has passed the stages of ecstatic and significant events, and is initiated into the Life. She is “deified,” “passes utterly zzfo God, and is glorified in Him”: is transfigured, he says, by immediate con- tact with the Divine Substance, into an utterly different quality of being. “Thus,” says St. John of the Cross, “the soul, when it shall have driven away from itself all that is contrary to the divine will, becomes transformed in God by love.” !
“The Soul,” says Richard again, “is utterly concentrated on the One.” She is “caught up to the divine light.” The expres- sion of the personal passion, the intimate relation, here rises to its height. But this is not enough. Where most mystical diagrams leave off, Richard of St. Victor’s “Steep stairway of Love” goes on: with the result that this is almost the only symbolic system bequeathed to us by the great contemplatives in which all the implications contained in the idea of the spiritual marriage have been worked out to their term. He saw clearly that the union of the soul with its Source could not be a barren ecstasy. That was to mistake a means for an end ; and to frustrate the whole intention of life, which is, on all levels, fruitful and creative. Therefore he says that in the fourth degree, the Bride who has been so greatly honoured, caught up to such unspeakable delight, sinks her own will and “is humiliated below herself.” She accepts the pains and duties in the place of the raptures of love; and becomes a source, a “parent” of fresh spiritual life. The Spomsa Dez develops into the Mater Divine gratie. That imperative need of life, to push on, to create, to spread, is here seen operating in the spiritual sphere. This forms that rare and final stage in the evolution of the great mystics, in which they return to the world which they forsook; and there live, as it were, as centres of transcendental energy, the creators of spiritual
* * Subida del Monte Carmelo,” I. ii. cap. v.
MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM 167
families, the partners and fellow-labourers with the Divine Life.t
III
We come now to the symbols which have been adopted by those mystics in whom temperamental consciousness of their own imperfection, and of the unutterable perfection of the Absolute Life to which they aspired, has overpowered all other aspects of man’s quest of reality. The “seek, and ye shall find” of the pilgrim, the “by Love shall He be gotten and holden” of the bride, can never seem an adequate description of experience to minds of this type. They are intent on the inexorable truth which must be accepted in some form by both these classes: the crucial fact that “we behold that which we are,” or, in other words, that “only the Real can know Reality.” Hence the state of the inward man, the “unreal- ness” of him when judged by any transcendental standard, is their centre of interest. His remaking or regeneration appears to them as the primal necessity, if he is ever to obtain rights of citizenship in the “ country of the soul.”
We have seen that this idea of the New Birth, the remaking or transmutation of the self, clothed in many different symbols, runs through the whole of mysticism and much of theology. It is the mystic’s subjective reading of those necessary psycho- logical changes which he observes taking place within himself as his spiritual consciousness grows. His hard work of renunciation, of detachment from the things which that con- sciousness points out as illusory or impure, his purifications and trials, all form part of it. If that which is whole or perfect is to come, then that which is in part must be done away: “for in what measure we put off the creature, in the same measure are we able to put on the Creator: neither more nor less.” 2
Of all the symbolic systems in which this truth has been enshrined none is so complete, so picturesque, and now so little understood as that of the “ Hermetic Philosophers ” or Spiritual Alchemists. This fact would itself be sufficient to justify us in examining some of the chief features of their symbolism,
* Vide infra, pt. ii. caps. i. and x. 2 *¢ Theologia Germanica,”’ cap. i.
168 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
There is a further excuse for this apparently eccentric pro- ceeding, however, in the fact that the language of alchemy’ was largely—though not always accurately and consistently—used by the great mystic Jacob Boehme, and after him by his English disciple, William Law. Without, then, some knowledge of the terms which they employed, but seldom explained, the writings of this important school can hardly be understood.
I do not propose in this place to enter upon a long and detailed discussion of the alchemic symbols and their applica- tion to the mystic life. These symbols are full of an often deliberate obscurity, which makes their exact interpretation a controversial matter at the best. Moreover, the various authors of the Hermetic writings do not always use them in the same sense, and whilst many of these writings are undoubtedly mys- tical, others clearly deal with the physical quest of gold: nor have we any sure standard by which to divide class from class.
The elements from which the spiritual alchemists built up their amazing allegories of the mystic life are, however, easily grasped: and these elements, together with the significance generally attributed to them, are as much as those who are not specialists can hope to unravel from this very tangled skein. First, there are the metals, of course the obvious materials of physical alchemy. These are usually called by the names of their presiding planets: thus in Hermetic language Luna means silver, Sol gold, &c. Then there is the Vessel, or Athanor, in which the transmutation of base metal to gold took place: an object whose exact nature is veiled in much mystery. The Fire and various solvents and waters, peculiar to the different alchemistic recipes, complete the apparatus neces- sary to the “Great Work.”
The process of this work, sometimes described in chemical, and sometimes in astrological terms, is more often than not veiled in a strange heraldic and zoological symbolism dealing with Lions, Dragons, Eagles, Vultures, Ravens and Doves: which, delightful in its picturesqueness, is unequalled in its power of confusing the anxious and unwary enquirer. It is also the subject of innumerable and deliberate allegories, which were
©
supposed to convey its secrets to the elect, whilst most certainly |
concealing them from the crowd. Hence it is that the author of “A Short Enquiry concerning the Hermetic Art” speaks for
MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM 169
all investigators of this subject when he describes the“ Her- metic science” as a“ great Labyrinth, in which are abundance of enquirers rambling to this day, many of them undiscerned by one another.” Like him, I too “have taken several Turns in it myself, wherein one shall meet with very few; for ’tis so large, and almost every one taking a different Path, that they seldom meet. But finding it a very melancholy place, I resolved to get out of it, and rather content myself to walk in the little garden before the entrance, where many things, though not all, were orderly to be seen. Choosing rather to stay there, and con- template on the Metaphor set up, than venture again into the wilderness.” *
Coming, then, to the “Contemplation of the Metaphor set up, ’—by far the most judicious course for modern students of the Hermetic art—we observe first that the prime object of alchemy was held to be the production of the Philosopher’s Stone; that perfect and incorrupt substance, or “ noble Tincture,” never found upon our imperfect earth in its natural state, which could purge all baser metals of their dross, and turn them to pure gold. The quest of the Stone, in fact, was but one aspect of man’s everlasting quest of perfection, his hunger for the Absolute; and hence an appropriate symbol of the mystic life. But this quest was not conducted in some far off tran- scendental kingdom. It was prosecuted in the Here and Now, amongst the ordinary things of natural life.
Gold, the Crowned King, or Sol, as it is called in the planetary symbolism of the alchemists, was their standard of perfection, the “Perfect Metal.” Towards it, as the Christian towards sanctity, their wills were set. It had for them a value not sordid but ideal. Nature, they thought, is always trying to make gold, this incorruptible and perfect thing ; and the other metals are merely the results of the frustration of her original design. Nor is this aiming at perfection and achieving of imperfection limited to the physical world. Quod superius, sicut quod infertus. Upon the spiritual plane also they held that the Divine Idea is always aiming at “ Spiritual Gold ”— divine humanity, the New Man, citizen of the transcendental world—and “natural man” as we ordinarily know him is a lower metal, silver at best, a departure from the “plan”; who
t «* A Short Enquiry Concerning the Hermetic Art,’’ p. 29.
170 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
yet bears within himself, if we could find it, the spark or seed of absolute perfection: the “tincture ” which makes gold. “The smattering I have of the Philosopher’s Stone,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “(which is something more than the perfect exaltation of gold) hath taught me a great deal of divinity, and instructed my belief how that immortal spirit and incorruptible substance of my soul may lie obscure, and sleep awhile within this house of flesh.” This “incorruptible substance” is man’s goldness, his perfect principle: for “the highest mineral virtue resides in Man,” says Albertus Magnus, “and Gold may be found every where.” 2 Hence the prosecution of a spiritual chemistry is a proper part of the true Hermetic science.
The art of the alchemist, whether spiritual or physical, consists in completing the work of perfection, bringing forth and making dominant, as it were, the “latent goldness” which “lies obscure” in metal or man. The ideal adept of alchemy was therefore an “auxiliary of the Eternal Goodness.” By his search for the “Noble Tincture” which should restore an imperfect world, he became a partner in the business of creation, assisting the Cosmic Plan.
The proper art of the Spiritual Alchemist, with whom alone we are here concerned, was the production of the spiritual and only valid tincture or Philosopher’s Stone, the mystic seed of transcendental life which should invade, tinge, and wholly transmute the imperfect self into spiritual gold. That this was no fancy of seventeenth-century allegorists, but an idea familiar to many of the oldest writers upon alchemy—whose quest was truly a spiritual search into the deepest secrets of the
soul—is proved by the words which bring to an end the first |
part of the antique “ Golden Treatise upon the Making of the Stone,” sometimes attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. “ This,
O Son,” says that remarkable tract, “is the Concealed Stone of
Many Colours ; which is born and brought forth in one colour ; — know this and conceal it . . . it leads from darkness into light,
* © Religio Medici,” pt. i.
2 “(A Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery,” p. 143. This rare and —
curious study of spiritual alchemy was the anonymous work of the late Mrs. Atwood, who attempted to suppress it soon after publication under the impression—common
amongst mystics of a certain type—that she had revealed matters which might not — be spoken of. In the same way Coventry Patmore destroyed his masterpiece,
‘*Sponsa Dei.”
Se ee
MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM 171
from this desert wilderness to a secure habitation, and from poverty and straits to a free and ample fortune.” ?
Man, then, was for the alchemists “the true laboratory of the Hermetic art”; which concealed in an entanglement otf vague and contradictory symbols the life-process of his ascen- sion to that perfect state in which he was able to meet God. This state must not be confused with a merely moral purity, but must be understood as involving utter transmutation into a“new form.” It naturally followed from this that the in- dwelling Christ, the “ Corner Stone,” the Sun of Righteousness, became, for many of the Christian alchemists, identified with the Lapis Philosophorum and with Sol: and was regarded both as the image and as the earnest of this “great work.” His spirit was the “noble tincture” which “can bring that which is lowest in the death to its highest ornament or glory,” 2 trans- mutes the natural to the supernatural, operates the “ New Birth.” “This,” says Boehme, “is the noble precious Stone (Lapzs Phelo- sophorum), the Philosopher’s Stone, which the Magi (or wise men) find which tzmctureth nature, and generateth a new son in the old. He who findeth that, esteemeth more highly of it than of this (outward) world. For the Son is many thousand times greater than the Father.” Again, “If you take the sfzrvit of the tincture, then indeed you go on a way in which many have found Sol; but they have followed on the way to the heart of Sol, where the spirit of the heavenly tincture hath laid hold on ¢hem, and brought them into the liberty, into the Majesty, where they have Known the Noble Stone, Lapis Philosophorum, the Philosopher’s Stone, and have stood amazed at man’s blindness, and seen _ his labouring in vain. Would you fain find the Noble Stone? Behold we will show it you plain enough, if you be a Magus, and worthy, else you shall remain blind still: therefore fall to work thus: for it hath no more but three numbers. First tell from one till you come to the Cross, which is ten (X).... and there lieth the Stone without any great painstaking, for it is pure and not defiled with any earthly nature.”
“In this stone there lieth hidden, whatsoever God and the
* Quoted in ‘fA Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery,” p. 107. The whole of the “Golden Treatise ” will be found set out in this work. ? Jacob Boehme, ‘‘ The Threefold Life of Man,” cap. iv. § 23.
172 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
Eternity, also heaven, the stars and elements contain and are able to do. There never was from eternity anything better or more precious than this, and it is offered by God and bestowed upon man; every one may have it... it is in a simple form, and hath the power of the whole Deity in it.”!
Boehme, however, is here using alchemic symbols, according to his custom, in a loose and artistic manner; for the true Hermetic Philosopher’s Stone is not something which can be found but something which must be made. The alchemists, whether their search be for a physical or a spiritual “ tincture,” say always that this tincture is the product of the furnace and Athanor: and further that it is composed of “three num- bers” or elements, which they call Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury. These, when found, and forced into the proper combination, form the “ Azoth” or “Philosopher’s Egg ”—the stuff or First Matter of the Great Work. Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury, how- ever, must not be understood in too literal a sense.
“You need not look for our metallic seed among the elements,” says Basil the Monk, “it need not be sought so far back. If you can only rectify the Mercury, Sulphur, and Salt (understand those of the sages) until the metallic spirit and body are inseparably joined together by means of the metallic soul, you thereby firmly rivet the chain of love and prepare the palace for the Coronation.” 2
Of these three ingredients, the important one is the spiritual principle, the unseizable Mercury ; which is far from being the metal which we ordinarily know by that name. The Mercury which the alchemists sought—often in strange places—is a hidden and powerful substance. They call it “ Mercury of the Wise”; and he who can discover it, they say, is on the way towards success. The reader in search of mystical wisdom already begins to be bewildered ; but if he persevere in this labyrinth of symbolism, he presently discovers—as Basil the Monk indeed hints—that the Sulphur and the Salt, or “ metallic soul and body” of the spiritual chemistry, represent something analogous to the body and mind of man—Sulphur his earthly
* Boehme, ‘The Threefold Life of Man,” cap. vi. § 98; cap. x. §§ 3, 4; and cap. xill. § I.
2 «The Golden Tripod of the Monk Basilius Valentinus ’’ (The Hermetic Museum, vol. i. p. 319).
MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM 173
nature, seasoned with intellectual salt. The Mercury is Spirit in its most mystic sense, the Synteresis or holy Dweller in the Inner- most, the immanent spark or Divine Principle of his life. Only the “ wise,’ the mystically awakened, can know this Mercury, the agent of man’s transmutation: and until it has been discovered, brought out of the hiddenness; nothing can be done. “ This Mercury or Snowy Splendour, is a Celestial Body drawn from the beams of the Sun and the Moon. It is the only Agent in - the world for this art.”* It is the divine-human “spark of the soul,” the bridge between Gold and Silver, God and Man.
The Three Principles being enclosed in the vessel, or Athanor, which is man himself, and subjected to a gentle fire —the /ucendium Amoris—the process of the Great Work, the mystic transmutation of natural into spiritual man, can begin. This work, like the ingredients which compose it, has “three numbers”: and the first matter, in the course of its transmu- tation, assumes three successive colours: the Black, the White, and the Red. These three colours are strictly analogous to the three traditional stages of the Mystic Way: Purgation, [llumin- ation, Union.
The alchemists call the first stage, or Blackness, Putre- faction. In it the three principles which compose the “whole man ” of body, soul and spirit, are “ sublimated ” till they appear as a black powder full of corruption, and the imperfect body is “dissolved and purified by subtle Mercury”; as man is purified by the darkness, misery, and despair which follows the emergence of his spiritual consciousness. As psychic uproar and disorder seems part of the process of mental growth, so “ Solve et coagula” —break down that you may build up—is the watchword of the spiritual alchemist. The “ black beast,” the passional element, _ of the lower nature must emerge and be dealt with before any- : thing further can be done. ‘“ There is a black beast in our forest,” says the highly allegorical “ Book of Lambspring,” “his name is Putrefaction, his blackness is called the Head of the Raven ; when it is cut off, Whiteness appears.”2 This White- ness, the state of Luna, or Silver, the “chaste and immaculate Queen,” is the equivalent of the IJluminative Way: the highest point which the mystic can attain short of union with the
t *¢ A Short Enquiry Concerning the Hermetic Art,” p. 17. 2 “The Hermetic Museum,” vol. i. p. 272.
174 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
Absolute. This White Stone is pure, and precious; but in it the Great Work of man’s spiritual evolution has not yet reached its term. That term is the attainment of the Red, the colour of Perfection or alchemic gold; a process sometimes called the “Marriage of Luna and Sol”—the fusion of the human and divine spirit. Under this image is concealed the final secret of the mystic life : that ineffable union of finite and infinite—that loving reception of the inflowing vitality of God—from which comes forth the Magnum Opus: deified or spiritual man.
“ This,” says the author of “A Suggestive Enquiry,” “is the union supersentient, the nuptials sublime, Wenzzs et Universz. .. . Lo! behold I will open to thee a mystery, cries the Adept, the bridegroom crowneth the bride of the north [ze she who comes out of the cold and darkness of the lower nature]. In the
darkness of the north, out of the crucifixion of the cerebral life, —
when the sensual dominant is occultated in the Divine Fiat, and subdued, there arises a Light wonderfully about the summit, which wisely returned and multiplied according to the Divine Blessing, is made substantial in life.” *
I have said, that side by side with the metallic and planetary language of the alchemists, runs a strange heraldic symbolism in which they take refuge when they fear—generally without reason—that they are telling their secrets too plainly to an unregenerate world. Many of these heraldic emblems are used in an utterly irresponsible manner; and whilst doubtless con- veying a meaning to the individual alchemist and the disciples for whom he wrote, are, and must ever be, unintelligible to other men. But others are of a more general application ; and appear so frequently in seventeenth-century literature, whether mystical or non-mystical, that some discussion of them may well be ~ of use.
Perhaps the quaintest and most celebrated of all these allegories is that which describes the quest of the Philosopher’s Stone as the “hunting of the Green Lion.”2 The Green Lion, though few would divine it, is the First Matter of the Great Work: hence, in spiritual alchemy, natural man in his whole-
* «¢ A Suggestive Enquiry,” p. 354.
2 See ‘A Short Enquiry,” p.17, and ‘‘ A Suggestive Enquiry,” pp. 297 ef seq. where the rhymed Alchemic tract called ‘‘ Hunting the Greene Lyon” is printed in full.
MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM 175
ness—Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury in their crude state. He is called green because, seen from the transcendent standpoint, he is still unripe, his latent powers undeveloped ; and a Lion, because of his strength, fierceness, and virility. Here the common opinion that a pious effeminacy, a diluted and amiable spirituality, is the proper raw material of the mystic life, is emphatically contradicted. It is not by the education of the lamb, but by the hunting and taming of the wild intractable - lion, instinct with vitality, full of ardour and courage, exhibiting heroic qualities on the sensual plane, that the Great Work is achieved. The lives of the saints enforce the same law.
‘*Our lyon wanting maturitie Is called greene for his unripeness trust me: And yet full quickly he can run, And soon can overtake the Sun.’’!
The Green Lion, then, in his strength and wholeness is the only creature potentially able to attain Perfection. It needs the adoption and purification of all the wealth and resources of man’s nature, not merely the encouragement of his transcen- dental tastes, if he is to overtake it and achieve the Great Work. The Kingdom of Heaven is taken by violence, not by amiable aspiration. “The Green Lion,” says one alchemist, “is the priest by whom Sol and Luna are wed.” .In other words, the raw stuff of indomitable human nature is the means by which man is to attain union with the Absolute.
The duty of the alchemist, then, the transmuting process, is described as the hunting of the Green Lion through the forest of the sensual world. He, like the Hound of Heaven, is on a love chase down the nights and down the days.
When the lion is caught, when Destiny overtakes it, as the preliminary to the necessary taming process, its head must be cut off. This is called by the alchemists “the head of the Raven,” the Crow, or the Vulture, “for its blackness.” It represents the fierce and corrupt life of the passions: and its removal is that “death of the lower nature” which is the object of all asceticism—ze. Purgation. The lion, the whole man, Humanity in its strength, is as it were “slain to the world,”
* OP. ctt.
176 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
and then resuscitated; but in a very different shape. By its passage through this mystic death or the “putrefaction of the Three Principles” the “colour of unripeness” is taken away. Its taming completed, it receives wings, wherewith it may fly up to Sol, the Perfect or Divine; and is transmuted, say the alchemists, into the Red Dragon. This is of course to us a hopelessly grotesque image: but to the Hermetic philosophers, whose sense of wonder was yet uncorrupt, it was the deeply mystical emblem of a new, strange, and transcendental life, | powerful alike in earth and in heaven. As the angel to the man, so was the dragon to the world of beasts: a creature of splendour and terror, a super-brute, veritably existent if seldom seen. We may perhaps realize something of the significance of this symbol for the alchemic writers, if we remember how sacred a meaning it has for the Chinese: to whom it is the traditional emblem of free spiritual life, as the tiger represents the life of the material plane in its intensest form. Since it is from China that the practice of alchemy is supposed to have reached the European world, it may yet be found that the Red Dragon is one of the most antique and significant symbols of the Her- metic Art.
For the Spiritual Chemistry, then, the Red Dragon repre- sents Deified Man ; whose emergence must always seem like the birth of some monstrous and amazing creature when seen from the standpoint of the merely natural world. With his coming forth, the business of the alchemist, in so far as he be a mystic, is done. Man has transcended his lower nature, has received wings wherewith to live on higher levels of reality. The Tincture, the latent goldness, has been found and made dominant, the Wagnum Opus achieved. That the true and inward business of that Work, when stripped of its many emblematic veils, was indeed the reordering of spiritual rather than material elements, is an opinion which rests on a more solid foundation than personal interpretations of old allegories and alchemic tracts. The Norwich physician—himself deeply read in the Hermetic science—has declared to us his own certainty concerning it in few but lovely words. In them is contained the true mystery of man’s eternal and interior quest of the Stone: its reconciliation with that other, outgoing quest of “the Hidden Treasure that desires to be found,”
MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM 177
“Do but extract from the corpulency of bodies, or resolve things beyond their First Matter, and you discover the habita- tion of Angels : which, if I call it the ubiquitary and omni- present Essence of God, I hope I shall not offend Divinity.” !
* Sir Thomas Browne, ‘‘ Religio Medici,” pt. i.
CHAPTER) Vil MYSTICISM AND MAGIC
Persistence of occultism—It accompanies mystical activity—is often confused with it—It is a serious philosophy—lIts claim stated and criticized—Its limits—It does not attain the Absolute—It influences all religion and some science—It is based on psychological laws—Its aim is to enlarge man’s universe—Its method is enhance- ment of the will—Modern magic—‘‘ New” Thought—The doctrines. of.Magic—
Eliphas Lévi—Hermes Trismegistus—Three occult dogmas—(1) The Astral Light—_
antiquity of this idea—The Cosmic memory—-The ‘‘ universal agent ’’—(2) The Power of the Will—Occult education—a re-making of character—Magic ceremonies agents of will-enhancement—addressed to the subconscious mind—Value of liturgies—Symbols—they are (a) instruments of self-suggestion (4) autoscopes— (3) The Doctrine of Analogy—Its breadth of application—in mysticism—in art—
Abnormal power of the trained will over the body—in religion—in producing
transcendental consciousness—Mental healing purely magical—Attitude of occultism
to suffering—The pure theory of magic—its defects—its influence on character—
Magic and religion—Occult elements in Christianity—Ceremonial religion largely magical—This is necessarily so—The inner and the outer church—The Church of
Mysticism and Church of Magic
—or, in ecclesiastical language, the heresies—into which men have been led by a feeble, a deformed, or an arrogant |
lf seems hardly necessary to examine in detail the mistakes
mystical sense. The number of such mistakes is countless; their wildness almost inconceivable to those who have not been forced to study them. Too often it has happened that the loud voices and strange declarations of their apostles have drowned the quieter accents of the orthodox. |
It would seem as though the moment of puberty were far more critical in the spiritual than it is in the physical life: the ordinary dangers of adolescence being intensified when they appear upon the higher levels of consciousness. Man, becom- ing aware of a new power and new desires within him, abruptly subjected to the influx of new life, is dazzled and pleased by
every brilliant and fantastic guess, every invitation, which is 178 ‘
Sy
(
Recah
See Us
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MYSTICISM AND MAGIC 179
offered to him. In the condition of psychic disorder which is characteristic of his movement to new states, he is unusually at the mercy of the suggestions and impressions which he receives. Hence in every period of mystical activity we find an outbreak of occultism, illuminism, or other perverted spiritu- ality. In the youth of the Christian Church, side by side with the great Neoplatonists, we have the arrogant and disorderly transcendentalism of the Gnostics: their attempted fusion of the ideals of mysticism and magic. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance there is the spurious mysticism of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the occult propaganda of Paracelsus, the Rosicrucians, the Christian Kabalists ; and the innumerable pantheistic, Manichean, mystery-making, and Quietist heresies _ which made war upon Catholic tradition. Usually owing their existence to the undisciplined will and imagination of some individual adventurer, these died with the death of his influence, and only the specialist in strange faiths now cares to trouble their graves,
But it is otherwise with the root idea whence these perverse activities most usually develop. This cannot be so easily dis- missed, nor is it in our interest so to treat it; for, as Reality is best defined by means of negatives, so the right doctrine is often more easily understood after a consideration of the wrong. In the case of mysticism, which deals largely with the unutter- able, and where language at once exact and affirmative is particularly hard to find, such a course is almost certain to help us. Leaving therefore the specifically mystical error of Quietism until we come to the detailed discussion of the states of orison, we will consider some of those other super-normal activities of the self which we have already agreed to classify as magic :? and learn through them more of the hidden forces which she has at her command, the dangerous liberty which she enjoys in their regard.
The word “ magic” is now out of fashion, though its spirit was never more widely diffused than at the present time. Thanks to the gradual debasement of the verbal currency, it suggests to the ordinary reader the art practised by Mr. _Maskelyne. The shelf which is devoted to its literature at the London Library contains many useful works on sleight-of-
* Supra, p. 84.
180 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
hand and parlour tricks. It has dragged with it in its fall the terrific verb “to conjure,” which, forgetting that it once com- pelled the spirits of men and angels, is now content to produce rabbits from top-hats. This circumstance would have little more than philological importance, were it not that the true adepts of modern occultism—annoyed, one supposes, by this abuse of their ancient title—tend more and more to arrogate to - their tenets and practices the name of “ Mystical Science.” _ Vaughan, in his rather supercilious survey of the mystics, long ago classed all forms of white magic, alchemy, and occult philosophy as “theurgic mysticism,’? and, on the other side of the shield, the occultists display an increasing eagerness to claim the mystics as masters in their school.2 Even the “three-fold way” of mysticism has been adopted by them, and relabelled “ Probation, Enlightenment, Initiation.” 3
In our search for the characteristics of mysticism we have already marked the boundary which separates it from magic: and tried to define the true nature and intention of occult philosophy. Now, I think, we may usefully ask of magic in its turn what it can tell us of the transcendental powers and consciousness of man. We saw that it represented the instinctive human “desire to know more” applied to supra- sensible things. For good or ill this desire and the occult sciences and magic arts which express it, have haunted — humanity from the earliest times. No student of man dare ~ neglect their investigation, however distasteful to his intelli- gence their superficial absurdities may be. :
The starting-point of all magic and of all magical religion— — the best and purest of occult activities—is, as in mysticism, man’s inextinguishable conviction that there are other planes of being than those which his senses report to him; and its © proceedings represent the intellectual and individualistic results of this conviction—his craving for the hidden knowledge. It is, in the eyes of those who practise it, a soyen de parvenir: not the performance of illicit tricks, but a serious and philo-
* R. A. Vaughan, ‘‘ Hours with the Mystics,” vol. i. bk. i. ch. v.
? In a list published by Papus from the archives of the Martinists, we find such diverse names as Averroes, St. Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, and Sweden- borg, given as followers of the occult tradition !
3 See R. Steiner, ‘‘ The Way of Initiation,” p. 111. 4 Supra, loc. cit.
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sophic attempt to solve the riddle of the world. Its result, according to one of the best modern writers upon occult philo- sophy, “ comprises an actual, positive, and realizable knowledge concerning the worlds which we denominate invisible, because they transcend the imperfect and rudimentary faculties of a partially developed humanity, and concerning the latent poten- tialities which constitute, by the fact of their latency—the interior man. In more strictly philosophical language, the Hermetic science is a method of transcending the phenomenal world and attaining to the reality which is behind phenomena.” !
Though certain parts of this enormous claim seem able to justify themselves in experience, the whole of it cannot be admitted. The last phrase in particular is identical with the promise which we have seen to be characteristic of mysticism. It presents magic as a pathway to reality. We may as well say at once that this promise is not fulfilled; for the apparent transcending of phenomena does not necessarily entail the attainment of the Absolute. Such an attainment must, as its first condition, meet and satisfy upon the plane of reality each activity of the self: Love, Will, and Thought. Magic at its best only satisfies two of these claimants ; and this by extend- ing rather than escaping the boundaries of the phenomenal world. At its worst, it satishes none. It stands for that form of transcendentalism which does abnormal things, but does not lead anywhere: and we are likely to fall victims to some kind of magic the moment that the declaration “I want to know” ousts the declaration “I want to be” from the chief place in our consciousness. The true “science of ultimates” must be a science of pure Being, for reasons which the reader is now , in a position to discover for himself: but magic is merely a system whereby the self tries to assuage its transcendental curiosity by an extension of the activities of the will beyond their usual limits, obtaining by this means experimental know- ledge of planes of existence usually—but inaccurately—regarded as “supernatural.”
It will, no doubt, be felt by those who are not occultists that even this modified claim needs justification. Few recognize that the whole business of the true magician is not with vulgar marvels, but with transcendental matters: fewer still that this
* A. E. Waite, ‘‘ The Occult Sciences,” p. 1.
182 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
business may be prosecuted with honesty and success. The search after hidden things has become synonymous with foolish and disreputable deceits: and the small but faithful company of Thrice-great Hermes is confused with the army of camp- followers which preys upon its ranks,
Most persons who do not specialize in the eccentric sciences are of opinion that in these days the occultist can only be said to exist in either the commercial or the academic sense. The | Bond Street palmist may represent one class; the annotator of improper grzmozres the other. In neither department is the thing supposed to be taken seriously: it is merely the means of obtaining money or of assuaging a rather morbid curiosity.
Such a view is far from being accurate. In magic, whether we choose to regard it as a superstition or a science, we have at any rate the survival of a great and ancient tradition, the true splendour and meaning of whose title should hardly have been lost in a Christian country; for it claims to be the science of those Magi whose quest of the symbolic Blazing Star brought them once, at least, to the cradle of the In- carnate God. Its laws, and the ceremonial rites which express those laws, have come down to us from immemorial antiquity. They enshrine a certain definite knowledge, and a large number of less definite theories, concerning the sensual and supersensual worlds, and concerning powers which man, according to occult thinkers, may develop if he will. Ortho- dox persons should be careful how they condemn the laws of magic: for they unwittingly conform to many of them whenever they go to church. All formal religion is saturated with magic. The art of medicine will never wholly cast it off: many cen- turies ago it gave birth to that which we now call modern science, It seems to possess inextinguishable life. This is not surprising when we perceive how firmly occultism is rooted in psychology: how perfectly it is adapted to certain perennial characteristics of the human mind—its curiosity, its arrogance, its love of mystery.
Magic, in its perfect and uncorrupted form, claims to be a practical, intellectual, highly individualistic science, working towards a declared end: that, namely, of enlarging the sphere on which the will of man can work and obtaining experimental knowledge of planes of being usually regarded as transcen-
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dental. It is the last descendant of a long line of teaching— the whole teaching, in fact, of the mysteries of Egypt and Greece—which aims at initiating man into the secrets of knowledge, and aspires, egoistically, to an understanding of things, “In every man,” says a living occultist, “there are latent faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself knowledge of the higher worlds ...as long as the human race has existed there have always been schools in which those who possessed these higher faculties gave instruction to those who were in search of them. Such are called the occult schools, and the instruction which 1s imparted therein is called esoteric science or the occult teaching.” *
These schools, at least as they exist in the present day, formulate the laws which govern occult phenomena in a manner which seems distressingly prosaic to the romantic inquirer ; borrowing from physics and psychology theories of vibration, attraction, mental suggestion and subconscious activity which can be reapplied for their own purposes.
According to its modern teachers, magic is in essence simply an extension of the theory and practice of volition beyond the usual limits. The will, says the occultist, is king, not only of the House of Life, but of the universe outside the gates of sense. It is the key to “man limitless”; the true “ring of Gyges,” which can control the forces of nature, known and unknown. This aspect of occult philosophy informs much of the cheap American transcendentalism which is so lightly miscalled mystical by its teachers and converts; Menticulture, “New” or “Higher Thought,” and the scriptures of the so- called “ New Consciousness.” The ingenious authors of “ Volo,” “The Will to be Well,” and “ Just How to Wake the Solar Plexus,” the seers who assure their eager disciples that by “Concentration” they may acquire not only health but also that wealth which is “health of circumstance,” are no mystics. They are magicians; and teach, though they know it not, little else but the cardinal doctrines of Hermetic science, omitting only their picturesque ceremonial accompaniments.?
* Steiner, ‘‘ The Way of Initiation,” p. 66.
2 See E. Towne, ‘‘ Joy Philosophy ” (1903) and ‘‘Just How to Wake the Solar Plexus” (1904); R. D. Stocker, ‘New Thought Manual” (1906) and ‘Soul
Culture” (1905); Floyd Wilson, ‘‘ Man Limitless” (1905). But the literature of these sects is enormous.
184 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
These cardinal doctrines, in fact, have varied little since their first appearance early in the world’s history: though, like the doctrines of theology, they have needed re-statement from time totime. In setting them out for the enlightenment of the modern reader, I shall quote largely from the works of Eliphas Lévi; the pseudonym under which Alphonse Louis Constant, probably the sanest and certainly the most readable occult philosopher of the nineteenth century, offered his con- . clusions to the world.
Eliphas Lévi found in the,.old magical tradition, rehandled in the terms of contemporary thought, an adequate theory of the universe and rule of practical life. In his writings, there- fore, we see the Hermetic science under its most favourable aspect—Opus hierarchicum et Catholicum, as he proudly calls it upon the title-page of his great “ Histoire de la Magie.” It is the one object of his later works to exhibit—indeed to exag- gerate—its connection with true mysticism ; to show that it is “Le Clef des Grands Mystéres” which will open the gate of that Secret Garden on which the desire of the soul is ever set. The spectacle which he presents is that of a man of eager desires and natural intuitions, set, is is true, upon the quest of reality; but pursuing that quest by strange and twisted paths. It remains for us to examine with his help the nature of these paths and the prospects which they offer to other way farers.
The tradition of magic, like most other ways ot escape which man has offered to his own soul, originated in the East. It was formulated, developed, and preserved by the religion of Egypt. It made an early appearance in that of Greece. It has its legendary grand master in Hermes Trismegistus, who gave to it its official name of Hermetic Science, and stands towards the magicians in much the same position as Moses occupied in the tradition of the Jews. Fragmentary writings attributed to this personage and contained in the so-called Hermetic books are the primitive scriptures of occultism: and the probably spurious Table of Emerald which is said to have been dis- covered in his tomb, ranks as the magician’s Table of Stone. In Gnosticism, in the superb allegories of the Kabalah, in much of the ceremonial of the Christian Church—fnally, in secret associations which still exist in England, France, and Germany
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—all that is best and truest im the “secret wisdom ” of magical tradition has wandered down the centuries, Its baser offshoots, by which it is unfortunately represented to the crowd, are but too well known and need not be particularized.
Like the world which it professes to interpret, magic has a body and a soul: an outward vesture of words and ceremonies and an inner doctrine. The outward vesture, which is all that the uninitiated are permitted to perceive, is hardly attractive to the judicious eye of common sense. It consists of a series of confusing and often ridiculous symbolic veils: of strange words and numbers, grotesque laws and ritual acts, personifications and mystifications, wrapped one about the other as if the bewilderment of impatient investigators were its one design. The outward vestures of our religious, political, and social systems—which would probably appear equally irrational to a wholly ignorant yet critical observer—offer an instructive parallel to this aspect of occult philosophy.
Stripped of these archaic formule, symbols, mystery-mon- gerings, and other adventitious trappings, magic is found to rest upon three fundamental axioms; none of which can be dismissed as ridiculous by those who listen respectfully to the amazing and ever-shifting hypotheses of fashionable psychology and physics.
(1) The first of these axioms affirms the existence of an imponderable “medium” or “universal agent,” which is de- scribed as beyond the plane of our normal sensual perceptions yet interpenetrating and binding up the material world. This agent, which is not luminous and has nothing to do with the stars, is known to the occultists by the unfortunate name of “ Astral Light”: a term, originally borrowed from the Martinists by Eliphas Lévi, to which the religious rammage-sales of current theosophy have since given a familiarity which treads upon the margin of contempt. To live in conscious communication with the “ Astral Light” is to live upon the “ Astral Plane,” or in the Astral World: to have risen, that is to say, to a new level of consciousness. The education of the occultist is wholly directed towards this end.
This doctrine of the Astral Plane, like most of our other diagrams of the transcendent, possesses not only a respectable ancestry, but also many prosperous relations in the world of
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philosophic thought. Traces of it may even be detected under veils in the more recent speculations of orthodox physics. It is really identical with the “ Archetypal World” or Yesod of the Kabalah—the “ Perfect Land” of old Egyptian religion—in which exist the true or spirit forms of all created things. Perhaps it is connected with the “real world” described by such visionaries as Boehme and Blake. A persistent tradition as to the existence of such a plane of being or of consciousness is found all over the world: in Indian, Greek, Egyptian, Celtic, and Jewish thought. “ Above this visible nature there exists another, unseen and eternal, which, when all things created perish, does not perish,” says the Bhagavad Gita. According to the Kabalists it is “the seat of life and vitality, and the nourishment of all the world.”* Vitalism might accept it as one of those aspects of the universe which can be perceived by a more extended rhythm than that of normal consciousness. Various aspects of it have been identified with the “ Burning Body of the Holy Ghost” of Christian Gnosticism and with the Odic force of the old-fashioned spiritualists,
According to the doctrine of magic the Astral Plane constitutes the “Cosmic Memory,” where the images of all beings and events are preserved, as they are preserved in the memory of man.
‘¢ The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky”—
all are living in the Astral World. There too the concepts of ' future creation are present in their completeness in the Eternal _ Now, before being brought to birth in the material sphere. On this theory prophecy, and also clairvoyance—one of the great objects of occult education—consists in opening the eyes of the mind upon this timeless Astral World: and spiritualists, evoking the phantoms of the dead, merely call them up from the ecesses of universal instead of individual remembrance. The reader who feels his brain to be whirling amidst this medley of solemn statement and unproven fairy tale must remember that at best the dogmatic part of the occult tradition can only
t A. E. Waite, ‘‘ Doctrine and Literature of the Kabalah,”’ p. 48.
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represent the attempt of an extended consciousness to find an explanation of its own experiences.
Further, in its strictly undenominational form, the Astral Light is first cousin to the intangible ether beloved of Sir Oliver Lodge and other transcendental physicists. In it our whole selves—not merely our sentient selves—are bathed; and here again we are reminded of Vitalism, with its unresting River of Life. Hence in occult language the all-penetrating Astral is a “universal agent”: the possible vehicle of hypnotism, telepathy, clairvoyance, and all those supernormal phenomena which science has taken out of the hands of the occultists and re- named metapsychic. This hypothesis also accounts for the confusing fact of an initial similarity of experience in many of the proceedings of mystic and occultist. Both must pass through the plane of consciousness which the concept of the “ Astral” represents, because this plane of perception is the one which lies “next beyond” our normal life. The transcendental faculties, once they are freed, become aware of this world: only, in the case of the mystic, to pass through it as quickly as they can. The occultist, on the contrary, is willing to rest in the “Astral” and develop his perceptions of this aspect of the world. It is the medium in which he works.
From the earliest times, occult philosophy has proclaimed its knowledge of this medium: always describing its existence as a scientific fact, outside the range of our normal senses, but sus- ceptible of verification by the trained powers of the initiate. The possessor of such trained powers, not the wizard or the fortune-teller, is to be regarded as the true magician: and it is the first object of occult education, or initiation, to actualize this supersensual plane of experience, to give the student the power of entering into conscious communion with it, and teach him to impose upon its forces the directive force of his own will, as easily as he imposes that will upon the “material” things of sense.! | (2) This brings us to the second axiom of magic, which also has a curiously modern air: for it postulates simply the limit- less power of the disciplined human will. This dogma has been “taken over” without acknowledgment from occult philosophy
* For a more detailed discussion of this subject the reader is referred to Steiner’s exceedingly curious and interesting little book, ‘‘ The Way of Initiation,”
188 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
to become the trump card of menticulture, “ Christian Science,” and “New Thought.” The preachers of “ Joy Philosophy,” and other dilute forms of mental discipline, are the true priests of transcendental magic in the modern world.!
The first lesson of the would-be magus is self-mastery. “ By means of persevering and gradual athletics,” says Eliphas Lévi, “the powers of the body can be developed to an amazing extent. It is the same with the powers of the soul. Would you govern yourself and others? Learn how to will. How may one learn how to will? This is the first secret of magical initiation ; and it was to make the foundations of this secret thoroughly under- stood that the antique keepers of the mysteries surrounded the approach to the sanctuary with so many terrors and illusions, They did not believe in a will until it had given its proofs; and they were right. Strength cannot prove itself except by con- quest. Idleness and negligence are the enemies of the will ; and this is the reason why all religions have multiplied their practices and made their cults difficult and minute. The more trouble one gives oneself for an idea, the more power one acquires in regard to that idea. ... Hence the power of religions resides entirely in the inflexible will of those who practise them.” 2
In its essence, then, magical initiation is a traditional form of mental discipline, strengthening and focussing the will. By it, some of those powers of apprehension which lie below the threshold of ordinary consciousness are liberated, and enabled to report their discoveries to the active and sentient mind. This discipline, like that of the religious life, consists partly in physical austerities and in a deliberate divorce from the world, partly in the cultivation of will-power: but largely in a yielding of the mind to the influence of suggestions which have been selected and accumulated in the course of ages because of their power over that imagination which Eliphas Lévi calls “ The eye of the soul.” There is nothing supernatural about it. Like the more arduous, more disinterested self-training of the mystic, it is character-building with an object, conducted upon an heroic
* Compare the following: ‘‘ Imagine that all the world and the starry hosts are waiting, alert and with shining eyes, to do your bidding. Imagine that you are to touch the button now, and instantly they will spring to do the rest. The instant you say, ‘‘ [can and I will,” the entire powers of the universe are to be set in motion”’ (E. Towne, ‘‘ Joy Philosophy,” p. 52).
2 “* Rituel de la Haute Magie,” pp. 35, 36.
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scale. In magic the “will to know” is the centre round which the personality is rearranged. As in mysticism, subconscious factors are dragged from the hiddenness to form part of that personality. The uprushes of thought, the abrupt intuitions which reach us from the subliminal region, are developed, ordered, and controlled by rhythms and symbols which have become traditional because the experience of centuries has proved, though it cannot explain, their efficacy.
“The fundamental principle,” says A. E. Waite, speaking of occult evocations, “was in the exercise of a certain occult force resident in the magus and strenuously exerted for the establish- ment of such a correspondence between two planes of nature as would effect his desired end. This exertion was termed the evocation, conjuration, or calling of the spirit, but that which in veality was vaised was the energy of the tnner man ; tremendously developed and exalted by combined will and aspiration, this energy germinated by sheer force a new intellectual faculty of sensible psychological perception. To assist and stimulate this energy into the most powerful possible operation, artificial means were almost invariably used. . . . The synthesis of these methods and processes was called Ceremonial Magic, which in effect was a tremendous forcing-house of the latent faculties of man’s spiritual nature.” ?
This is the psychological explanation of those apparently absurd rituals of preparation, doctrines of signs and numbers, pentacles, charms, angelical names, the “power of the word” and all the rest, which go to make up ceremonial magic. The
’ power of such artifices is known amongst the Indian mystics,
who, recognizing in the Mantra, or occult and rhythmic formula, consciously held and repeated, an invaluable help to the attain-
. ment of the true ecstatic states, are not ashamed to borrow them
from the magicians. So, too, the modern American schools of mental healing and New Thought recommend concentration upon a carefully selected word as the starting-point of efficacious meditation. This fact of the enormous psychical effect of certain verbal combinations, when allowed to dominate the field of consciousness, is the practical reason of that need of a formal liturgy which is felt by nearly every great religion: for religion, on its ceremonial side, is always largely magical. It, too, seeks
* «©The Occult Sciences,” p. 14.
190 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
by artificial means to stimulate latent energies. The true magic “word” or spell is untranslatable; because its power resides only partially in that outward sense which is apprehended by the reason, but chiefly in the rhythm, which is addressed to the subliminal mind. Did the Catholic Church choose to acknow- ledge a law long known to the adepts of magic, she has here an explanation of that instinct which has caused her to cling so strenuously to a Latin liturgy, much of whose amazing and truly magic power would evaporate were it translated into the vulgar tongue. Symbols, religious and other, and symbolic acts which appear meaningless when judged by the intellect alone, perform a similar office. They express the deep-seated instinct of the human mind that it must have a focus on which to con- centrate its volitional powers, if those powers are to be brought to their highest state of efficiency. The nature of the focus matters little: its office matters much. I give a short extract from the “Rituel de la Haute Magie,” which sufficiently exhibits Lévi’s opinion on this subject. Many of its phrases might be fresh from the pen of the newest American psychologist.
«|, . All these figures, and acts analogous to them, all these dispositions of numbers and of characters [ze. sacred words, charms, pentacles, &c.] are, as we have said, but instru- ments for the education of the will, of which they fix and — determine the habits. They serve also to concentrate in action all the powers of the human soul, and to strengthen the creative
power of the imagination. ... A practice, even though it be superstitious and foolish, may be efficacious because it is a realization of the will. ... We laugh at the poor woman who
denies herself a ha’porth of milk in the morning, that she may take a little candle to burn upon the magic triangle in some chapel. But those who laugh are ignorant, and the poor woman does not pay too dearly for the courage and resignation which she thus obtains. The wise pass proudly by shrugging their shoulders. They attack superstition with a clamour which shakes the world: and what happens? The houses which they build fall down, and their debris are re-sold to the providers and purchasers of little candles; who willingly allow it to be said that their power is at an end, since they know that their reign is eternal,” ?
* * Rituel de la Haute Magie,” p. 71.
J
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Magic symbols, therefore, from penny candles to Solomon’s seal, fall, in modern technical language, into two classes. The first contains instruments of self-suggestion, exaltation, and will direction. To this belong all spells, charms, rituals, perfumes : from the magician’s vervain wreath to the “Youth! Health! Strength!” which the student of New Thought repeats when she is brushing her hair in the morning. The second class contains autoscopes : 2.¢., material objects which focus and express the subconscious perceptions of the operator. The dowser’s divining rod, fortune-teller’s cards, and crystal-gazer’s ball, are characteristic examples. Both kinds are rendered necessary rather by the disabilities of the human than by the peculiarities of the superhuman plane: and the great adept, like the great saint, may attain heights at which he can entirely dispense with these “outward and visible signs.” “Ceremonies being, as we have said, artificial methods of creating certain habits of the will, they cease to be necessary when these habits have become fixed.” # This is a point at which the history of magic lights up for us certain peculiarities in the history of mysticism.
These facts, now commonplaces of psychology, have been known and used by students of magic for countless generations. Those who decry the philosophy because of the apparent absurdity of its symbols and ceremonies should remember that the embraces, gestures, grimaces, and other ritual acts by which we all concentrate, liberate, or express love, wrath, or enthusiasm, will ill endure the cold revealing light of a strictly rational inquiry.
(3) To the two dogmas of the “ Astral Light” or universal agent and the “power of the will” there is to be added a third : the doctrine of Analogy, or implicit correspondence between appearance and reality, the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the universe, the seen and the unseen worlds. In this, oc- cultism finds the basis of all its transcendental speculations. Quod supertus sicut quod infertus—the first words of that Emerald Table which was once attributed to Hermes Tris- megistus himself—is an axiom which must be agreeable to all Platonists. It plays an enormous part in the theory of mysticism, which has always assumed that the path of the individual soul towards loving union with the Absolute is
* “ Rituel de la Haute Magie,’’ p. 139.
192 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
strictly analogous with the path on which the universe moves to its consummation in God.
The notion of analogy ultimately determines the religious concepts of every race, and resembles the verities of faith in the breadth of its application: for it embraces alike the appearances of the visible world—which thus become the mirrors of the invisible—the symbols of religion, the tiresome arguments of Butler’s “ Analogy,” the sublime allegories of the Kabalah and the spiritual alchemists, and that childish “doctrine of signa- tures” on which much of mediaeval science was built.
“ Analogy,” says Lévi,! “is the last word of science and the first word of faith ... the sole possible mediator between the visible and the invisible, between the finite and the infinite.” Here Magic clearly defines her own limitations; stepping incautiously from the useful to the universal, and laying down a doctrine which no mystic could accept—which, carried to its logical conclusion, would turn the adventure of the infinite into a guessing game.
“ Analogy,” he says again—and this time, perhaps, with more propriety—‘“is the key of all the secrets of nature: . . . this is why religions seem to be written in the heavens and in all nature : this must be so, for the work of God is the book of God, and in that which he writes one should see the expression of his thought and consequently of his Being, since we conceive of him only as Supreme Thought.”2 Here we have a hint of that idealistic element which is implicit in occultism: as even the wildest heresies retain traces of the truths which they pervert.
The argument by analogy is carried by the occultists to lengths which can hardly be set down in this place. Armed with this torch, they explore the darkest, most terrible mysteries of life: and do not hesitate to cast the grotesque shadows of these mysteries upon the unseen world. The principle of cor- respondence is no doubt a sound one, so long as it works within reasonable limits. It was admitted into the system of the Kabalah, though that astute philosophy was far from giving to it the importance which it assumes in Hermetic science. It has been accepted eagerly by many of the mystics. Boehme and Swedenborg gladly availed themselves of its method in presenting their intuitions to the world. It is implicitly ac-
* * Dogme de la Haute Magie,” p. 361 ¢¢ seg. * Jbid., p. 363.
MYSTICISM AND MAGI
knowledged by thinkers of innumerable other s influence permeates the best periods of literature. Si Browne spoke for more than himself when he said, in known passage of the “ Religio Medici”: “ The severe shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Herm Trismegistus] that this visible world is but a picture invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real subs in that invisible framework.” Such a sense of analogy, ever the “severe schools” may say, is the foundation of every perfect work of art. “Intuitive perception of the hidden analogies of things,” says Hazlitt in “ English Novelists,” “or, as it may be called, his zuzstznct of the tmagination, is perhaps what stamps the character of genius on the productions of art more than any other circumstance.”
The central doctrine of magic may now be summed up thus :—
(1) That a supersensible and real “cosmic medium ” exists, which interpenetrates, influences, and supports the tangible and apparent world, and is amenable to the categories both of philosophy and of physics.
(2) That there is an established analogy and equilibrium between the real and unseen world, and the illusory manifesta- tions which we call the world of sense.
(3) That this analogy may be discerned, and this equilibrium controlled, by the disciplined will of man, which thus becomes master of itself and of fate.
We must now examine in more detail the third of these propositions—that which ascribes abnormal powers to the edu- cated and disciplined will: for this assumption lies at the root of all magical practices, alike of the oldest and the newest schools. “Magical operations,” says Eliphas Lévi, “are the exercise of a power which is natural, but superior to the ordinary powers of nature. They are the result of a science, and of habits, which exalt the human will above its usual limits.” This power of the will is daily gaining recognition in the camps of science, as the chief factor in religion and in therapeutics—the healing of the body and the healing of the soul —for our most advanced theories on these subjects are little more
* “ Rituel de la Haute Magie,” p. 32. 0
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wine of magic in new bottles. The accredited ical theory of religious “experience,” for instance, pon the hypothesis that by self-suggestion, by a te cultivation of the “will-to-believe,’ and similar it is possible to shift the threshold of consciousness,
exhibit those supernormal perceptions which are ly attributed to inspiration and to disease. This is what ceremonial magic professes, in milder and more tWresque language, to do for her initiates: and all such eliberate processes of conversion are, on their psychological side, the results of an involuntary obedience to the laws of. Hermetic science. The ancient occultists owed much of their power, and also of their evil reputation, to the fact that they were psychologists before their time.
Recipes for the alteration and exaltation of personality and for the enhancement of will-power, the artificial production of photisms, automatisms, and ecstasy, with the opening up of the subliminal field which accompanies these phenomena—con- cealed from the profane by a mass of confusing allegories and verbiage—form the backbone of all genuine occult rituals. Their authors were perfectly aware that ceremonial magic has no objective importance, but depends solely on its effect upon the operator’s mind. In order that this effect might be enhanced, it was given an atmosphere of sanctity and mystery ; its rules were strict, its higher rites difficult of attainment. It constituted at once a test of the student’s earnestness and a veil which guarded the sanctuary from the profane. The long and difficult preparations, majestic phrases, and strange ceremonies of an evocation had power, not over the spirit of the dead, but over the consciousness of the living, who was thus caught up from the world of sense to a new plane of perception. For him, not for unknown Powers, were these splendours and _ these arts displayed. The rationale of the evocation of an
angel consists, not in summoning spirits from afar, but in opening the operator’s eyes upon angels who are always there.
“When the spiritual exaltation of the Magus has been accomplished by . . . various ceremonial practices, the spirit is, in magical language, compelled to appear. That is to say, the operator has passed into a condition when it would be as
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impossible for a spirit to remain invisible to him as for an ordinary mortal to conceal itself from our common sight, with- out any intervening shelter, in the blaze of a noonday sun.”! Thus the whole education of the genuine occult student tends to awaken in him a new view and a new attitude. It adjusts the machinery of his cinematogra?h to the registering of new intervals in the stream of things, which passed it by before; and thus introduces new elements into that picture by which ordinary men are content to know and judge the—or rather thety—universe.
“In the end,” says Steiner, with the usual exaggeration of the professional occultist, “it all resolves itself into the fact that man, ordinarily, carries body, soul, and spirit about with him, yet is conscious only of the body, not of the soul and spirit; and that the student attains to a similar consciousness of soul and spirit also.” 2
So much for the principles which govern occult education. Magic therapeutics, or as it is now called, “ mental healing,” is but the application of these principles upon another plane. It results, first, from a view of humanity which sees a difference only of degree between diseases of body and of soul, and can state seriously and in good faith that ‘“‘ moral maladies are more contagious than physical, and there are some triumphs of infatuation and fashion which are comparable to leprosy or cholera.” 3 Secondly, it is worked by that enhancement of will power, that ability to alter and control weaker forms of life, which we have seen to be the reward of the occult discipline. “ All the power of the occult healer lies in his conscious will and all his art consists in producing faith in the patient.” 4
This simple truth was in the possession of the magi at a time when Church and State saw no third course between the burning or beatification of its practitioners. Now, under the polite names of mental hygiene, suggestion, and therapeutics, it is steadily advancing to the front rank of medical shibboleths. Yet it is still the same “magic art” which has been employed for centuries, with varying ritual accompaniments, by the adepts
* A. E. Waite, ‘* The Occult Sciences,” p. 32. 2 “©The Way of Initiation,” p. 142.
3 ‘* Dogme de la Haute Magie,” p. 129,
4 “ Rituel,” p. 312.
196 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
of occult science. The methods of Brother Hilarian Tissot, who is described as curing lunacy and crime by “the unconscious use of the magnetism of Paracelsus,” who attributed his cases “either to disorder of the will or to the perverse influence of external wills,” and would “regard all crimes as acts of madness and treat the wicked as diseased,”’! anticipated the discoveries of Charcot and Janet.
But in spite of the consistent employment by all the great .
adepts of their “occult” or supernormal power in the healing and the prevention of disease, on its philosophic side magic, like Christianity, combines a practical policy of pity for the maimed, halt, and blind, with a creed of suffering and renuncia- tion. Here it joins hands with mysticism and proclaims its belief in pain as the schoolmaster of every spirit which desires to transcend the life of sense. Eliphas Lévi, whilst advising the initiate whose conscious will has reached its full strength to employ his powers in the alleviation of pain and prolongation of life, laughs at the student who seeks in magic a method of escaping suffering or of satisfying his own selfish desires. None, he says, knows better than the true magician that suffering is of the essence of the world plan. Only those who face it truly live. “Alas for the man who will not suffer! He will be crushed by griefs.”2 Again—perhaps his finest utterance— “To learn to suffer and to learn to die; this is the gymnastic of Eternity, the noviciate of immortal life. 3
Here, then, is the pure theory of magic. It is seen at its best in Eliphas Lévi’s works; because he was, in some respects, greater than the system which he preached. Towards the close of his life the defective and limited nature of that system became clear to him, and in his latest writings he makes no secret of
this fact. The chief of these defects is the peculiar temper 4
of mind, the cold intellectual arrogance, the intensely individual point of view which occult studies seem to induce by their conscious quest of exclusive power and knowledge, their implicit neglect of love. At bottom, every student of occultism is striving towards a point at which he may be able to “touch the button ” and rely on the transcendental world “springing to do the rest.” In this hard-earned acquirement of power over the * * Dogme,” p. 134. * “*Fristoire de la Magie,”’ p. 36. 3 Jbid., p. 147.
i
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Many, he terids to forget the One. In Lévi’s words, “ Too deep a study of she mysteries of nature may estrange from God the careless investigator, in whom mental fatigue paralyses the ardours of the heart.”! When he wrote this sentence Lévi stood, as the greater occultists have often done, at the very frontiers of mysticism. The best of the Hermetic philosophers, indeed, are hardly ever without such mystical hankerings, such flashes of illumination ; as if the transcendental powers of man, once roused from sleep, cannot wholly ignore the true end for which they were made.
In Lévi’s case, as is well known, the discord between the occult and mystical ideals was resolved by that return to the Catholic Church which has always amazed and sometimes annoyed his commentators. Characteristically, he “read into” Catholicism much that the orthodox would hardly allow; so that it became for him, as it were, a romantic gloss on the occult tradition. He held that the Christian Church, nursing mother of the mystics, was also the heir of the magi; and that popular piety and popular magic veiled the same ineffable truths.
He had more justification than at first appears probable for this apparently wild and certainly heretical statement. Religion, as we have seen, can never entirely divorce herself from magic: for her rituals and sacraments, whatever explanations of their efficacy may be offered by their official apologists, have, and must have if they are to be successful in their appeal to the mind, a magical character. All persons who are naturally drawn towards the ceremonial aspect of religion, are really devotees of the higher magic: are acknowledging the strange power of subtle rhythms, symbolic words and movements, over the human will. An “impressive service” conforms exactly to _ the description which I have already quoted of a magical rite: it is “a tremendous forcing-house of the latent faculties of man’s spiritual nature.” Sacraments, too, however simple their begin- nings, always tend, as they evolve, to assume upon the phenomenal plane a magical aspect. Those who have observed with understanding, for instance, the Roman rite of baptisin, with its spells and exorcisms, its truly Hermetic employment of salt, anointing chrism and ceremonial lights, must have seen in
* «¢ Flistoire de la Magie,”’ p. 514.
198 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
it a ceremony far nearer to the operations of whit= magic than to the simple lustrations practised by St. John the Baptist.
There are obvious objections to the full working out of this subject in a book which is addressed to readers of all shades of belief; but any student who is interested in this branch of religious psychology may easily discover for himself the numerous and well-marked occult elements in the liturgies of the Christian—or indeed of any other—Church. There are invocative arrangements of the Names of God which appear alike in gvzmotre and in Missal ; sacred numbers, ritual actions, perfumes, purifications, words of power, hold as important a place in religion as in magic. In certain minor observances, and charm-like prayers, we seem to stand on the very border- land between magician and priest.
It is inevitable that this should be so. The business of the Church is to appeal to the whole man, as she finds him living in the world of sense. She would hardly be adequate to this task did she neglect the powerful weapons which the occult tradition has put into her hand. She knows, implicitly, that only under those ecstatic conditions which it is the very object of magic to induce, can normal man open his door upon the Infinite, and let those subconscious powers which are the media of all our spiritual experiences emerge and peep for a moment upon the transcendental world. She, who takes the simplest and most common gifts of nature and transmutes them into heavenly food, takes also every discovery which the self has made concerning its own potentialities, and turns them to her own high ends. Founding her external system on sacraments and symbols, on rhythmic invocations and ceremonial acts of praise, insisting on the power of the pure and self-denying will and the “magic chain” of congregational worship, she does but join hands with those Magi whose gold, frankincense, and myrrh were the first eifts that she received.
But she pays for this. She shares the limitations of the system which her Catholic nature has compelled her to absorb, It is true, of course, that she purges it of all its baser elements -——-its arrogance, its curiosity—true also that she is bound to adopt it because it is the highest common measure which she can apply to the spirituality of that world to which she is sent. But she cannot—and her great teachers have always known
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that she cannot—extract finality from a method which does not really seek after ultimate things. This method may and does teach men goodness, gives them happiness and health. It can even induce in them a certain exaltation in which they become aware, at any rate fora moment, of the existence of a transcen- dental world—a stupendous accomplishment. But it will never of itself make them citizens of that world: give to them the freedom of Reality.
“The work of the Church in the world,” says Patmore, “is not to teach the mysteries of life, so much as to persuade the soul to that arduous degree of purity at which God Himself becomes her teacher. The work of the Church ends when the knowledge of God begins.” ! Thus in spite of persistent efforts to the contrary, there will always be an inner and an outer Church: the inner Church of the mystics who £xow, the outer Church which, operating beneficently it is true, but—roughly speaking—upon the magical plane, only knows about. The New Testament is not without its reminders that this was bound to be the case.?
* “©The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” ‘‘ Knowledge and Science,” xxii. ? See, amongst other passages, Matt. xiii. 11, I Cor. il. 6, and iii. I.
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“ As the Pilgrim passes while the Country permanent remains So Men pass on; but the States remain permanent for ever.” BLAKE, “ Jerusalem.”