CHAPTER XIII.

ROSICRUCIAN PROFUNDITIES.
Ir is an assertion of the occult philosophers that the meaning and purpose of life is altogether mistaken, That is—that it is necessarily—in the “necessity of things”—mistaken. That, inasmuch as he /ives, man is incapacitated for pronouncing upon the nature of his life ; being it—itsel/f. He being a “liver” is “it”—(ie., “life, itself’) These positions are obvious, when thus stated. Philosophy and common sense take it for granted that life needs consciousness, or some form in which the consciousness may reside, in order that the liver may “live.” Abstract philosophy asserts that the liver (living) unlives (in the true sense) for the very purpose of living. In other words, it is concluded that, as man is the “ thing seen,” the individual cannot ever go out of himself, “to see himself.” The “judged at the bar” cannot cease his character to become another character, and to change places with his judge, and become the judge on the bench. The individual cannot go out of “himself” to become “ something other than himself” and to judge of what he is, himself.
Now all this, obviously, cannot be in common sense, or in any sense. And, in this manner, this philosophy is applied in the Hermetic sense. The alchemists contended that it is possible (by art) to obtain out of the boundless, holy, unappropriated eternal youth of Nature, a where- withal by means of which to “ wreak’?—to usea strange
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word. ‘Thus there could be miraculous renewal possible even out of the existent powers of Nature.
No one knows the purposes of God, nor can any one limit the powers of God. No one can apply the word “impossible” to the powers of God Almighty; for the word “ possible” only applies to man’s (false) notions of things, which apprehension only springs from his senses ; which culminate, in the sum and perfection of all his senses, in his reason ; and his senses do not make reason, for they rather make wnreason. Farther, we will state the case still more strongly (if more curiously) when we say that it is the real fact, in the one sense (the abstract sense) that men only “die,” because they do not “live any longer ;” because that ‘ which lives in them” cannot any longer maintain itself in them. It is not the man, but the thing that is im the man, that dies. Thus men really (and only) die by the very means by which they live—that is, by the natural nutriment or the means of destruction (however slow) by which they live. Very naturally fire should cease to burn itself out, in the con- sumption and decomposition and using up of the fuel by which the fire (the life in the world of elements) is pro- duced and maintained. The natural nutriment is the indefinitely-delayed corrosion, the slow means of destruc- tion. Digestion is destroying agitation, in the body, of its kind; which, in time, wears out the solids, and brings on decrepitude. All the phenomena of this—as it were— eating away or natural nutrition, is as the flameless fire which feeds upon the solids, and at last consumes. man. The true art to live is to eat as little as possible, to maintain the body in its balance of health. And as to decease, man dies daily in his bodily secretions, and
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therefore corruptions. In the abstract sense, he is always dying, because digestion is natural corruption, and corruption is digestion, or disintegration, or dissolution, as we have before said. This gift of death in life is the NATURAL result of mortality—is the only condition by means of which we live. Food is as fuel, which, in its working up, and in its elaboration, just as truly destroys, just as flame destroys, only in a non-inflammable manner. The Hermetical philosophers held that it is possible to arrest, in magic art, the supernatural secret seeds (opera- tive though invisible) of new life in the next world, off this world, which was certainly not all spirit. They held to a peculiar opinion that particular life is only an arrest out of the broad flow of general life; the quicker, the slower, in its effervescence of fructification (as growing plants) as it became the more quickly purged of the thicker matter, and as the divine motived spark set itself forward the speedier and surer, as the freer out of its coagulation, choke, or devil-like and impeding hindrances. We know how short the minutest microscope goes of reality. Man’s registers and instruments fail him above and below. Thus his science only commands a part— and a very limited part—of the real. A continual asser- tion of the Rosicrucians is, that the philosopher’s fire is to be found in everything; that the germen of the Japis philosophorum abides in everything. But that the elimi- nation of this unknown, inside matter, or ensouled mag- netism, or spirit of Nature, or means of endowment, in possibility of renewable life (in the interior of all life, motived and spiritual) is their own affair, and that the secret of attaining to it rests solely and wholly in their hands; from which reason the fraternity considered, in
a
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comparison to them, the wisest of ordinary mankind as dolts and blockheads, and esteemed all the riches of the world, and all the accumulations of kings, as below con- tempt, in the face of the Rosicrucians’ possible power to convert solidity itself into gold (which of course takes in everything), and to institute dealings, to their advantage, with all the worlds of the invisibles. To such men as these what could worldly riches be? On the contrary, instead of desiring worldly honours and advantages, or wishing to be even known, they ignored all human association, as sympathetic to them, and they fled from the eyes of men in their character of philosophers; but they mixed with the world familiarly in their appearance of ordinary per- sons, enjoying the world, and using it as a sort of play, or extravagant or brutal masquerade wherewith, to amuse. In fact, after all, and notwithstanding the wondering whispers and accounts about them, there is only the sus- picion of the existence of these strange beings as real men; for no man in the old time, any more than in the period nearer to the present, or in the present times, can boast that he has ever been face to face, or that he has ever been in real visible converse with a Rosicrucian, or with one of these transcendently illustrious philosophers, in regard of whom it has been hazarded as a supposition that they must have been of “the council of God,” in the same sense as Saint John the Divine, or Elias, or Enoch, or the Transfigured ; such being the only method of explaining their supposed—their apparently prepos- terous pretensions. In their superlative majesty of supe- riority to it, and in their weariness and disgust of every- thing human, they even declined unbounded lenyth of life in this world, rejecting with all possible joy the infinite
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prolongation possible of life down here in this mortal state, which (it was said of them) already lay in their
hands by the means of their famous elixir, or their magic ~ methods of rejuvenescence ; also their command of beauty, or of riches, and of all supernatural. gifts—so surely in their hands, but refused and ignored because of their interpenetration of persuasion of the vanity of all life in comparison with the never-ending, always-beginning pros- tration, in the sense of infinite humility, before God, the Almighty. In their souls they were always prostrate before the Throne of the Almighty Creator, in whose service alone lay the immortal rapture.
The secrets of these Sublime Brothers, the true mem- bers of the “R. C.,” are no more to be divulged, than they can be supposed accessible to even the most super- eminent among the ordinary children of men. Indeed, the best safeguard of the mysteries is the perfect im- possibility of their ever being rendered intelligible, or, if intelligible, of their ever being believed possible. *‘ Outside,” and “Inside,” when they contradict each other, can assuredly never become identical, except in supernatural possession, or in that state which men under- stand by that unaccounting, and unaccountable, word— the inflow of the Holy Ghost. It is a miracle (which must always be divine; because a miracle, otherwise than divine, is, of course, an impossibility) wherein, in the mind of the subject momentarily realised to it, conviction tramples triumphantly up the impossibilities into the pos- sible! And therein, time becomes “no time’—space becomes “ no space.” |
It is the hermetic theory that the shadows, lost from this side, are not wholly gone—that the loss is not en-
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tirely passed out of the magic rings, or folds, or invest- ments of “ this world’s” nature, which, in reality, begins to renew when it seems to cease; but that it is recover- able in the magic art of the adepts, or Rosicrucians ; and that its objects can be “ got back,” in the exercise of the magic, and of the adequate practice of the true Alchemists; intent upon their object, and taken up out of the lower world, to work in the higher.
The Rosicrucians, who explored the wonders of the natural world, and the wonders and mysteries of the super- sensual world—those supposed magicians, who forced, or who rather prayed, down into the very depths of their abasement and humility before the idea of God (and of the rescuing, merciful, and pitying God), rising thus into sainthood, looked upon nature with very different eyes to ordinary philosophers. ‘They were enabled (spiritually) to penetrate to the truth of the original Fall of the Angels, and to trace the “ marks” of the thunder (they needed not, in their sense of humbleness, and “poverty of spirit,” to take warning by them) which had precipitated the over- thrown rebellious Spirits from the heights, and holds, and palaces of Heaven (under the ruling of the Arch Divinity) to the dismal vales, and the earthquake-channelled sides of the mountains, and the fires and darkness of the penal Hell—their prison; the monster, mythic chains of which are grasped in the hands of the watching Saint Michael, the “generalissimo of the armies of Heaven;” whose archangelic personality is figured forth, (for man’s feebler comprehension, unable to rise out of the mathematics of the false nature, which is the parody of the real nature,) — in the blessed Saint George on earth, with his “ Sanguine Cross”—at once the talisman through heaven, and the
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terror through hell, to those who can understand it. That Cross, the cognizance, and the palladium, of this land, sacred from innumerable saints, and warlike, and other holy martyrs, distinguished in the centuries of the British story—is displayed in this our country, in this England of ours! Our country will surely be obliterated, when it effaces the Cross from its emblazonments. Nature is a term of indefinite expansion with these mys- terious Rosicrucians. ‘Their questions are very deep and incomprehensible. Of some of their ideas and theories— we speak of the Gnostics, as well as of the Rosicrucians in this place—there is only a glimpse, like a ray, to be caught now and then. The very highest capacity of mind may be tasked to arrive at the possibility of the comprehension of their religion, and to apprehend the reasonableness of some of their conclusions. Can we blame these explorers into the heights, for their jealous exclusion, when they multiply risks in the path up the mountain of light, and mark the track by mnumerable purposely-placed pitfalls ? Incompetent, audacious seekers earn their defeat in their attempts to follow those who are urging up. ‘The path is most carefully, step by step behind them, obliterated by the true sons of know- ledge, to those improper querists. Dare we question their wisdom, who thus deny and bar the road, and who invoke the clouds to conceal them, and the presented points of the flames as the spears of the angelic rearguard to close in and fence their march upward into the light? The story of Faust, or Doctor Faustus, and the magicians and the sages who are described in the old romances to have pined for the forbidden knowledge—these deter- ments supply abundant warning as to this kind of dan-
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gerous ambition. This straining after the knowledge which Nature has—for the preservation of itself, be it noted—so successfully concealed and buried deep in the mysteries is, in the Miltonic sense, “dust and_ bitter ashes”—the “apples of Sodom,” instead of the apples of the Hesperides—guarded by the Dragon; the Old Serpent, or First Rebel, be it remembered. This class of wise men, or wizards, are those who -are fabled to have “sold their souls”—or the chance, or possibility, of the survival of that which the world calls their soul, out of this world— to the Fiend, the Enemy of Mankind (he is to be found in all theologies, in all ages), for wealth and honours, and long life, and a round of power and an exhaustion of sensual enjoyment, and the indulgence of the human passions for a term—to which the liberal and politic Devil was never found grudging enough to fix a limit: the most insatiate appetites were to be fully satisfied in this respect with worldly enjoyments, in all the fables bear- ing upon this subject :—traflickers of the sort, like Faust and his compeers, bargained for things visible in the world; exchanging white hairs and decrepitude, poverty and disdain, for wealth and unbounded power. They exchanged intoxication of delight for the horrors of despair, new life and new creation for the worn-out old ife and for the old creation, which had been exhausted, and was found only suffused with anguish and despair of all sorts. But the Rosicrucians were champions of know- ledge and of aims of a different stamp, and, despising the vain things of this life, sought for other life than this. They sought no alliance with “ Traitors against Heaven.” They trampled the desirable things of this lower world under foot. They had transcended out of the “ dust and
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ashes” of ordinary life. They were true to their names of the “ Brothers of the Red Cross.” They were glorified with a passion of grief for the accumulating sorrows, first in the inflictions which sprang into the tempest of tears, and at Jast—in the natural and supernatural rigours of the “ Garden of Agony.”
The tortures and the sacrifice of Calvary—the Passion - of the Cross—were, in their glorious blessed magic and triumph, the protest and appeal (how this should be, and be REAL, can only be seen, of course, in the mystical conviction of the initiates). The flowing blood streamed from the crown, or the piercing circlet of the thorns of Hell. The Rose is feminine. Its lustrous carmine petals are guarded with thorns. The Rose is the most beautiful of flowers. The Rose is the Queen of God’s Garden. It is not the Rose, alone, which is the magical idea (or truth). But it is the “ Crucified Rose,” or the Martyred Rose (by the grand mystic Apocalyptic figure), which is the talisman, the standard, the object of adoration of all the Sons of Wisdom, or of the true Rosicrucians.
How this latter assertion should be intelligible, and be REAL, can only be seen, of course mystically, in the con- viction of the genuine members of the R. C.
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