Section 6

92 SOME PHILOSOPHY
fined to hoofs and claws. Like that of Good his coat is " many-colored."
We have told you to practice. We have spoken emphatically, and you ask with reason—" On what ? " On the Devil. He is the best muscle developer known. He can put you through a regular course. He will teach you to aim a straight blow and hit between the eyes. To be sure you will be knocked down over and over again, but get up. To lie and groan is to give him a chance. You must be quick, as quick as he is. You will grow as strong as a Greek athlete, and be ready for the ring on all occasions. He does you a good turn in giv ing you the chance. In time you will glory in your own strength as a young man does. In fact the Devil is mightily afraid of the Philosopher, he prefers the nervous man, one who loses his head
Philosophy is the " bete noire" of the Arch Fiend. He fears naught else than that. There is a smile on the Sage's lip that makes his majesty shrivel. There is a steadiness in the wise man's eye that galls
OF THE HER ME TICS 93
even the Devil. He is sarcastic, but the Philosopher is more so — and when the fire fights fire, you know the outcome.
So then we accept him, as we do the other side of heaven, for the inner implies the outer — The height the depth.
94 SOME PHILOSOPHY
THE PAIRvS.
One's illusions vanish one after another ; what today we deem real tomorrow will be a dream. We are building day after day upon the shifting sand, and the tide comes up and washes the shining bits away. Hopes fondly cherished break like bubbles or drown our hearts in tears.
By and by our eyes will be dry, no tears will come, and we will stare dimly and straight ahead into vacancy, to see nothing, not even an illusion. Then upon all men we will smile a ghastly smile, hoping for, believing in, wanting nothing. At this point we reverse and look in. Something appears, some one, and that appearance, that one makes the illusion plain. This appear-
OF THE HERMETICS 95
ance which looks into our eyes is the Real, the everlasting mate of the Unreal.
Had you not dreamed — Had you not suf fered — Had you not sobbed on your pillow at night alone — alone — Had you not longed and longed when the stars came out — Had you not begged the grass-blades to speak to you, and the leaves to whisper to you — Had you not looked on the back of your friend whose eyes were turned elsewhere — Had the sky not rained on you, and the sea sought to clutch you — Had the mirage not come nor the dim island faded, the Real would have failed.
Mortal man goes on and on, plodding and plodding ; he eats, he drinks, he sleeps, alas! he does not dream. His wife makes his bed and his bread. The beasts in his yard are his kin. He dies. No castle ever faded out of his sky. No bird with fire-tinted wing flew over his head ; and the Real — iheface he has failed to see.
When you have drank the wine down to the dregs — When the golden bowl breaks — When love flies off to the moon — When
96 SOME PHILOSOPHY
the blood congeals and will not flow, and Beauty flaunts her hair in your face, look in.
The bank must need follow the fickle river, the inconstant river, but on the bank the water-rushes grow. Ah ! the meander ing stream. Ah ! the constant shore and the water-rushes. When drowning in the cruel river, forget not the shore and the faithful reeds. Wet and dripping you seek refuge deep within the rushes — deep within the rushes.
Drenched in the fog of illusion you rush inland and look into a pair of faithful eyes. I have brushed the cob- webs from mine forever, the spider's web, and now I see straight to the heart of a star. But to my friend I am a mystery. Now and again he hates me, and yet he loves me too. He turns here and there for something better ; he tries to go ; he lies to himself, but he comes back.
Look well to the opposites. The Pairs are faithful. The dream, the illusion, is the other half of the Real. It shimmers like the light on the sea — It goes and comes like
OF THE HERMETICS 97
the moon — It lives and dies like ripe corn, but the arc of heaven which Iris bears in her hands, overshadows her never. Iris still brings news from heaven and tells the tale of Zeus.
98 SOME PHILOSOPHY
ADONAI.
To invoke Adonai is to call upon that in your universe of consciousness which is akin to the ecstasy of love, by no means a physical, but a purely spiritual emotion. You call out of yourself, into your conscious ness, the charm and holy glamour of being. You throw yourself, by an effort of will, into a state where soul is manifested in its beauty, as the flowers display the sex-charm of plants. You call up from the depths of soul its melody, for soul in its most gracious form is music, the singing as it were of the bird to its mate.
To invoke Adonai is to enter the world of variety where habit is abandoned, drudgery forgotten, and conventionality is no more. All things common are hid from view. It is the world of form, of sound, of languor, and of dream. It is the world of haze and
OF THE HERMETICS 99
splendor — the illumined — the shadowy. Here time ceases, the past melts away, the future is unforeshadowed.
You ask, uls Adonai a spirit, a Being? " We answer, there is a Being, there are Beings who revel in this Paradise, who hear these sounds and see these sights — Beings who dwell forever in a dim glory softened by a veil such as fell over Isis — Beings whose sight is clouded by tears of rapture, more entranced than those who smile — Beings who hear voices echoing back and forth along the spaces of Heaven — Beings who see tender colors when their eyes are closed, and one of them the Mystics call Adonai.
Life that throes and throes till each throb sings — Life born out of continence till every nerve is thrilling with its own identity, is the spell which Adonai weaves upon him self till he twines his form in rainbows and flashes light from his deep eyes, even as the sun throws flame.
Adonis kissed too much by Venus drags his wings — Adonis free soars upward.
loo SOME PHILOSOPHY
" Can we " you ask, " Can we as Mystics invoke Adonai ? " We answer, unless you do, you are doomed to see, to face and struggle with the common place. Crude ugliness will strike you hour after hour hard blows — The soul of things will be hid, and only the half of every story will be told — Your nostrils will be greeted by bad smells — Your eyes with ugly sights — Your ears will hear revolting sounds — The barren wash-day grayness of the world will stare you in the face — Your friends will unveil all their petty faults, the very pimples on their foreheads will stand out — The great beyond in them will be boxed up in illshaped skulls — Their tongues will say rough things and lap coarse food — Ordin ary, all ordinary.
You have no power to* discern what they have brought to you, what they yet will bring — You measure but the size of their shoes, and count the spots ou their clothes — You have no gift for looking back nor seeing far ahead — You are marching in the ranks where grease and oil besmirch the
OF THE HERMETICS 101
hands of artisans — You smell of lumber, of fresh fish and blood — You toil till sweat soaks through your clothes, and gazing up you think it rains.
Your mother is a woman who breeds and nurses young — Your father is a man who gjoats and drinks — Your brothers kill live things, and laugh — Your sisters stuff rag dolls — Your wife courts your stomach — And gnats and insects suck your blood. You have no heaven nor hell. You serve the common place.
But lo ! how this doth change when you besiege the pearly gates of your own heart, and to the half truth add the other half. Does he come in the sunlight of morning or the sunlight of evening — It matters not. Does he look down from the zenith or up from the depths — What difference? Does he appear without or within — Who cares ? He is Adonai the Beautiful ! With him you get the full meaning — the illumination — the glory. When you see him, your feet scorn the earth — When you hear him, you answer back.
102 SOME PHILOSOPHY
Venus adores and yet fears him, for he scatters light as he moves, and the flashes heat and thrill you. His countenance beams even though veiled, and his eyes pierce and transfix you. All things seen through the mist of him are beautiful. Beside each leaf on the tree is another like silver, which the sun turns to gold.
To invoke Adonai is not always to bring him. Oft times he is taken by force like the kingdom of heaven. If he will not come by your wooing, plunge down in yourself and drag him out of the depths, for he may be asleep.
Beware of the common place. Better look into heaven one moment and down into hell the next, than to set your house in strict order, starch up your linen, and eat for the palate.
Beware of the common place — That mood where you yawn and stretch, and hunt out your aches and pains as old people do, who gloat over sores and decay. Beware of scavengers, buzzards and flies.
OF THE HER ME TICS 103
MAGIC.
You may follow Christianity to the yawn ing grave, you may suck the breast of Buddhism dry, and yet miss Magic — an Aphrodite poising on the foam of the sea.
The magician can subtract glamour from the heart of things ; he can manipu late combinations — he can balance on foam. Out of himself comes a magnetism which envelops and transforms environment. As love turns hell into heaven, so the magician plays at his art.
Nature covers the woman's skeleton with voluptuous curves of flesh — She spreads a pond of slime with water-lilies — She bids exquisite ferns to peep from ghastly crevices — She paints the sky at the brink of the desert — sometimes — when the mood is on
104 SOME PHILOSOPHY
her — sometimes. She touches up the vul ture in the empyrean, till he has the majesty of a heaven sent messenger — She glitters in the purity of the gull till he rivals a white- throated angel — On winter she breathes, and brings hot splendor out of snow and fire out of ice.
Magic never goes naked — She is as real as the soul of woman, but she drapes herself as did Isis. Her eyes look at you through the veil of her hair — her limbs gleam but from the meshes of a net — She has the art of the spider ; she catches and holds, but unlike it she never devours you.
Her food is the pollen of flowers, her drink is the dew on their breasts.
Truth is truth, but she is sometimes non- commital. Whatever she bestows is one aspect of her — not all. Veiled in glamour she gives you her smile, and bewitches, tantalizes, lures, and bewilders. Her form is clear-cut and awful, like the scars on the brow of Olympus, but her smile is myriad and seen through a veil.
Mystery and Magic are some way related.
OF THE HERMETICS 105
The half known transfixes you — its spell pierces you, like the glance of a wise man's eyes. The mystery of the moon is in Magic — The side which you wonder about is the half that charms. If the satellite turned, Love's dream would vanish.
We hear strange rumors of Adepts in Thibet and the fakirs in India. We have read fairy tales about the miracles of Christ, and the wonder working of Mahomet. We are familiar with the account of the birth of Gautama, and the magic of Moses. In the face of it all we would tell you, that this is as the blowing of a soap bubble compared with the mystery of the seed or the passion of the plant.
Nature is a hypnotist and a magician. She arrests the busy man in his round of work, and holds him spell-bound before a growing grass blade — She stops the devotee of science on his road to fame, and bewitches him with the remains of a mastodon — She glitters in the scalpel of the surgeon, and flashes on the edge of the dissecting knife — She rouges the consumptive's cheek, and
io6
SOME PHILOSOPHY
tantalizes Esculapius with microbes — She tempts the diver to risk the jaws of the shark, and turns the ills of the oyster into pearls — She foils the explorer with her North Pole, and entices the aeronaut to a pitiful rivalry with the chick-a-dee.
The poet is her victim par excellence. He sees things through the mist of his own eyes — a trait from nature by the terrible law of heredity. He is eternally hypnotized and walks about in a dream. Nature's spell is on him from birth to death, and he, as her true child, shines by his own light. He is not a planet but a lesser sun, that warms itself at its own fire. He generates heat and radiates it from his eyes and fingers. Cold people sit at his feet, as beggars lie out in the light. The rabble follow him as the poor followed Christ. They touch his skirts and warm their bodies in electric heat. Like the magician of India, he draws an ignorant crowd, who know nothing except that he is warm. Each word of his is a spark, which sets something on fire. He is rich with smiles, that tickle the half-dead nerves, and
OF THE HERMETICS 107
metaphors that shock the heart to renewed life. He moves in a glory like the column of fire, and he casts a shadow like the fallen cloud. He is Ariel captured by Earth. He is a god wedded to woman.
But what of Venus Urania, who makes matches in heaven, and kindles her heart at the shrine of Vesta. What of the love that blends souls rather than bodies, and creates her children in celestial spaces on the down pillows of ether ? What of the splendor of Eden, when the gods walked in the garden, and the serpent lay hid in the glitter of his own skin ? Even yet magic eyes sweep the horizon, where the sky lies softly on the breast of the sea. Even yet, on the altar of Vesta, burn the sacred fires. Even yet, the loves of paradise hold the sun in its place — and the moon.
Would you know the art of Magic? Would you discover the magician in your self and wake him out of sleep ? Retire within, far back, away from things seen by the natural eye ; and the long-lashed lids of a spirit's orbs will unloose — when, lo !
io8 SOME PHILOSOPHY
the land of dream ! the realm of memories stored by the ages in you. But look — still farther back, to the magic region of ice and storm and snow, when the world, like a cold corpse, lay wrapt in her icy shroud — you, you were there. Or into those tropic regions where strange plants grew, watered by mists, heated by a seething immensity of sun— you were there. Or, if your eyes weary with wonder, and the fringed lids drop, listen ! Hark with the ears of a spirit —backward — down the aeons of time. Listen to the crashing of the avalanches of the terrible ice period, when chaos roared as the captain shouts in a storm at sea. Listen to the strange note of a long-lost bird that lived in the days of a terrible sun. Listen to the voice which spoke to you, ere Christ traveled the banks of the Galilee, or Caesar mastered the spirit of Rome. // is speak ing still.
Magic ! ! Away with the fakir fraud, who gives you a lie for a paradox — while truth is truth. Away with the mummery of a false act and a sham occultism — while the Phil-
OF THE HERMETICS 109
osopher's stone exists. Away with the devil's cauldron or the craft of priests — while the great laboratory of nature, manipu lated by the witches of science, is seething with the heat of divine alchemy.
Would you be a magician, stir up the smoldering coals at your own fireside. Begin to burn. Feel your blood hot in your veins. Warm yourself with memories of sun-tinted dreams. Pray— pray — $ray at the shrine of the Sphinx.
u