Section 12

OF THE HERMETICS
is not to be a perfect man. He passed the ultimate of the human in his prime, but rises toward the acme of the angelic from bis valley of dry bones. The Ideal once captured, we seek another, and reach per- fection again in that when found. Excuse this digression ; we return to the Illum- inati.
If this mysterious body of men in Bel- gium, or Thibet, are lauded as supernat- ural, we must assert, that we in all our search for data, have found no evidence which transcends law, as we understand it; and up to date, we repudiate them. If, on the contrary-, these bands of brothers have left behind effects that are destined to endure, because of tkeir grasp upon and understanding of Law, we admit their worthiness of the title, on account of their great wisdon, and power to impart the same. That a certain amount of oc- cult lore has been preserved, somewhere, prudently parcelled out on occasion, is in- disputable. ( By occult lore, we mean that
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not generally known.) To have occult lore at one's command, to have discovered laws and facts beyond the ken of humanity at large, and to give out as one sees fit, is to be a sort of Japanese Mikado of ancient times, upon whose face man dared not look, who, nevertheless, through his shrewd and too powerful Shogun dispensed wisdom and justice ad libitum.
That there have been such men, that there are such men, the data demonstrate. Is there a flawless gem? In the sense that it answers the demand of the eye, yes; under the microscope, no. But we seldom extend our vision with a brass tube; our eyes are adapted to the world, and the world to them. In this sense, there is much that is perfect. Our lUum- inati, whether visible or concealed, create and perpetuate by that tremendous soul energy, whose constituent is fire. Should you catch the eye of one enlightened, or stand dazed before the work of him, he would so heat and inflame you, that your
OF THE HERMETICS 193
dreaming soul must needs wake. Like the great gourmand, Sirius, who swallows the stars, he in his greed, would devour every other luminary, and become to you an insatiate sun, covering all heaven.
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ALONE.
Utterly, without a friend. On foreign soil, in the shade of a ruin; you discourse to yourself, no one understands you, for you speak in a strange tongue; you frighten people with your tears, and living things shrink from you. How you came here is a mystery; whither you are going, you know not ; for once in your life you stand isolate; the trees shrink from you, and the sun draws its veil ; even the air smoth- ers you — nothing is yours. This is not hell, nor an ice palace of frozen self, but that terrible nostalgia whose clutch is worse than death. And yet you came here by slow degrees, leaving one thing loved after another ; the last face smiled on you long ago, then the last flower; now
OF THE HBRMETICS
you find yourself in a strange place, utterly strange ; your heart has gone out of you, you no longer hear it beat. You sit down upon a stone, 'tis hard ; it resents you ; even the clothes that you wear seem peculiar; and your unfamiliar hands wring each other.
What are you? Who are you? How have you lost yourself? You pull up memories, as from a fathomless well — ■ strange faces look in your eyes and escape you, after dropping tears, one after another, all dropping tears. Vou draw on the future, and see visions of dead worlds, and a bottomless deep, and a mountain where you sit, solitary. You can no more think, you are too sad; you touch nothing with brain or heart. If only something, a grain of sand, a speck of dust, something, would come to you; if the wind would but blow it at you. Alas! unseen hands scoop the very earth beneath your feet, as if your mother were digging your grave; and the wind struggles to tear off your garments and your mantling hair. Nature would de-
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molish and annihilate you in herself, or roll the spinning earth from beneath you, leaving you bodiless, a naked soul, palpita- ting in space. Is it your fault? You im- agine so; you have wandered away. Yon know that you were a long time getting^ here, that you might have gone back; but now you are lost, the old world has van- ished, the new is a tomb. You put your arms longingly around the ruined column, it gives no response; you lean your cheek against it, it kisses the ivy, but not you; and then, your tears all shed, you pray, and implore Death to strike you, lest you take your own life; but he, even he despises you as too cheap a victim. How awake, how alive you are in your own company! The terrible realization oi self is upon you; the potential energies of a new world are waking while those of the old are falling asleep.
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Man who dares to wander in realms not trod by his ancestors, who explores in- tellectual and moral jungles, who strays away from home, far, far, till he loses the
OF THE HERMETICS
road back, must pass tirough that awful hour, when on the edge of the old, and the brink of the unexplored , naked, desolate, he finds himself alone. Not a soul would come with him, not one loved him enough to fol- low; and he {it was his own fault) has no choice but to advance. It might have been curiosity, it does not matter; whatever it was, it has beckoned him, and he has fol- lowed. To be sure, he has done with the past; he knows it now; he has worn it out; and yet it was dear; his ancestors' thoughts, his mother's lectures, his father's homilies, all have been bom and bred in him.
The Unknown holds something undoubt- edly rich, splendid. He is well aware that the Great pass through the wilderness — it is the portal to a kingdom. But in spite of it all, he is alone.
We offer him no consolation; the Inevit- able justifies itself. Yet, somehow as the moon comes up and turns him to marble, at that look in his eyes, half desperation, half despair, we are undone, and sadly turn our steps another way.
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YOU.
You say to yourself that the day must arrive when you can fold your hands and be happy; your work finished, everything com- plete, you will sit down and enjoy the result. You are running a race, and when the goal is reached, you will rest in a sort of trance ecstacy, till time shall end. You under- stand life to be a probation, or rather a pre- paration for SITTING STILL. A prolonged idleness seems to you, in your present com- prehension of things, to be the ultimate of living — an aim worthy the struggle, a re- sult worth the price.
Perhaps you are young; if so, you have doubtless set apart a certain number of years for this, and another for that; you have planned every step of your way to nowhere
OF THE HERMETICS
witli the ingenuity and anxiety of one seek- ing the magnetic pole; you will work the best part of your life for nothing, as ar- dently as though the gold of an Ophir were awaiting you, or a trip to Mars. Hoping for at least the allotted three score years and ten as your term of life, you expect to ex- haust fifty of them in labor, and twenty in sitting down. You are constantly telling your friends that you are getting ready for something, that you expect the time will come when you can take life easy, that you are progressing where you can see your way ahead, etc. If your friend really pinned you to your statement, and demanded your mean- ing, you would be unable to answer; you have a vague idea that you are going to school, and that the vacation is a certainty in the far future. In fact that word, Future, acts upon you like magic; no other sets your blood bounding in the same way. If a thing is far off, it takes on the enchantment of dis- tance. You carry a spyglass in your pocket, and spend long hours looking at it. It is like a speck of a boat out at sea, very much
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akin to a cloud, which you expect to sail on nevertheless. Your life is all a great by and by, vague and hazy, but so overcharged with bliss that your energy is constantly sapped in the anxiety of waiting for it. You wonder sometimes why other people, old folks, are not enjo3dng what you feel certain that you will. They have reached the age of realization, their time of work has passed, they have wealth and leisure, and alas, senility. You console yourself that it is not the fault of the method, the idea, but of them. You talk with one, an old man; he will tell you that his reward is in heaven, that on the other side every kind of bliss awaits him, that he is lying upon the door- step of the temple, which he will enter to-morrow, where there is rapture eternal; that in heaven there is no night, but a splendor of sun, and golden streets past understanding; that he has but to die to arrive at it all; he is "only waiting."
And this is the refrain that you sing also; waiting/ waiting/ for what? To-morrow, which will be another to-day; perchance
OF THE HERMETICS 201
better, perchance worse, but another to-day. Some one, which will be another entity,, perhaps better, perhaps worse, than the one with which you fraternize now, but another entity. A new country which will have its mountains and vales, its lakes and streams but slightly diflferent from your native land. A new heaven with a similar sun to that which captured your gaze this morning, and a new earth, with an ocean and dry land not far diflferent from that upon which you travel now. Or if you have rounded your three score years and ten, and found your road to have been the. dead level of repetition, you delude yourself with the idea that "There is no road without some turn- ing," and expect at the sharp comer of death to wake up in a flood tide of glory, bom into heaven full grown.
You undoubtedly discover that there is still to your dreaming eyes a Future which veils itself, and allures you with the promise of a more distant portal and paradise, yet farther oflF and harder to reach. So you go on chasing the Future, which somehow you
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can never catch. If perchance you lay- hands on her, she slips through your fingers like an eel; she well knows that possession spoils the charm, that her hold on you lies in illusive, slippery attributes; she entices you through the val- ley and appears again far away on tlie mountain top; she throws you a kiss from the edge of the precipice, and peeps out later from behind a far-away forest tree. She never does more than to throw kisses; her lips touch no man's, they are sacred. You are dying for love of her, dying by inches, and she knows it. She watches you as you fade, her eyes radiant with happiness. " One more victim," she says, "one more." She is the Queen of a heaven peopled with beings, ever restless with insatiate passion for her- self — the Isis-veiled future. There is no calm in this place, no peace. Her's are the only satisfied eyes; all others are filled with longing, longing for her.
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You are eternally asking, " What is the object of life, my life?" As if life, like
VHERMETICS
beauty, were not its own excuse. Life con- tains within itself its own object, which is to be. The seed holds its own motive, which is the stupendous one of the plant. Flora and fauna live in the now, but man, alas! toils and spins. In E^en he went naked, and under the green boughs looked between branches at the divine blue of the sky, or listened when the Lord walked in the gar- den; but the poor mortal of to-day is racing after the Future, that is supposed to be flying back to her home in paradise, and he, so intent upon her, forgets to listen for the footsteps of the Lord.
You will never get there, never, for the Future will race on like the " Wandering Jew;" she is unceasingly going, and you, poor mortal, will stumble in the way. But should you stroll out some day into an Eden, near by, and sit under trees where the sun- light falls strongly, sifting its splinters between the leaves upon your head, and listen, forgetting to-morrow, ignoring yes- terday, you might perchance hear the soft foot-fall of the Lord. The rosebush catches
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it, and the lily, even the bee and the bird; and you, perhaps you, if you listen, will hear it, faintly but certainly — the fooUfall of the Lord.
" Consider the lilies, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin." But per- ceive the anomaly; some few, imagine that they understand, and fold their hands idly, refusing to work. Alas I these few are more undone and godless than those who chase the chimera of the far-oflf. Mark you, the more you calculate, plan, and arrange for the Future, the wiser you are, but live in the now. Remember that this very calculating, this very mathematical problem of to-morrow, is the evolving that you are to enjoy this moment. To- morrow is nothing to you, except as you hold it with tight clutch on the lap of to- day. This mood of yours, which means this present hour (and we calculate time by states of mind), this mood of yours, is your life, your now, be it heaven or hell, it is yours, you; and though you forestall and trap the Future by a device of the present.
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you are you, only as you grapple with the hour's mood — your environment's mood — for you and your environment are to all intents, one.
Farewell Future! Farewell Past! Wed them To-day, and they will respond to another name.
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NATURE.
What the meaning of this word is, it would be hard to define — the generally understood meaning — for no two writers or thinkers speak of it in exactly the same way, or if they do, the scope for interpreta- tion is so large, that it might admit of almost any rendering. To be sure, the dictionary gives a number of definitions, but to accept some of these would necessi- tate the positing of an anthropomorphic God, superior to and above Law; a Being outside of and opposed to Nature; one forever combating her; for Nature is spoken of as sexed.
If you consult Theology for a definition, you find that Nature (though perhaps it does not so state in plain words) is the
OF THE HBRMBTICS
Devil, or closely related to the arch-fiend. You are warned from the beginning to beware of her machinations. The theolo- gian speaks of the natural man as though he were already in the clutches of a Delilah. The spiritual man, on the contrary, is held up as the divine model; but as he is never either fully pictured or defined as distinct from the natural man, he resolves himself into a sort of vague mirage which one seeks in vain to imitate. Nature, according to theology, endows each new born child with an Incentive to sin — originate sin — and nothing but an escape from her who thus damns him, will avail toward his salvation.
This may sound very well in a sermon, or appear plausible in print. But what does it mean? Our mother, for even the theologian calls her sucli, must necessarily be carrying on continual warfare with the author of our being, called by mankind God, and the originator of even, herself. The man of science, if he be clear-cut and great, ' repudiates this idea, and looks upon Nature
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with love and reverence; he considers it in all things — the nature of a thing is the law of it — he debates very little whether it is good or evil ; it is, and that is sufficient. In watching plant life, he discovers that each individual species is distinctly selfish in its eflfort to be, protecting itself not only with means of defense, but with weapons of de- struction. He furthermore finds that it adapts itself to environment, and changes to some extent its habits to fit new conditions. Its prime idea seems to be that of preserving its individuality as against all odds, having no sympathy nor altruistic tendencies toward plants of a diflferent species, ignoring them altogether unless there can be between them a system of interchange, or service rendered back and forth.
In animal life we observe the same tend- ency. The nature of each organized creature is first and foremost to preserve itself and its offspring; and by itself, it means an entity which in its own nature, is diflferent from every other. Nature would seem to mean the individuality of each living thing, or