AE in the Irish Theosophist Part 15

Out of her cave came the ancient Lilith; Lilith the wise; Lilith the enchantress. There ran a little path outside her dwelling; it wound away among the mountains and glittering peaks, and before the door, one of the Wise Ones walked to and fro. Out of her cave came Lilith, scornful of his solitude, exultant in her wisdom, flaunting her s.h.i.+ning and magical beauty.

"Still alone, star gazer! Is thy wisdom of no avail? Thou hast yet to learn that I am more powerful knowing the ways of error than you who know the ways of truth."

The Wise One heeded her not, but walked to and fro. His eyes were turned to the distant peaks, the abode of his brothers. The starlight fell about him; a sweet air came down the mountain path, fluttering his white robe; he did not cease from his steady musing.

Like a mist rising between rocks wavered Lilith in her cave.

Violet, with silvery gleams her raiment; her face was dim; over her head rayed a shadowy diadem, the something a man imagines over the head of his beloved---looking closer at her face he would have seen that this was the crown he reached out to, that the eyes burnt with his own longing, that the lips were parted to yield to the secret wishes of his heart.

"Tell me, for I would know, why do you wait so long? I, here in my cave between the valley and the height blind the eyes of all who would pa.s.s. Those who by chance go forth to you come back to me again, and but one in ten thousand pa.s.ses on. My delusions are sweeter to them than truth. I offer every soul its own shadow; I pay them their own price. I have grown rich, though the simple shepards of old gave me birth. Men have made me; the mortals have made me immortal. I rose up like a vapour from their first dreams, and every sigh since then and every laugh remains with me. I am made up of hopes and fears. The subtle princes lay out their plans of conquest in my cave, and there the hero dreams, and there the lovers of all time write in flame their history. I am wise, holding all experience, to tempt, to blind, to terrify. None shall pa.s.s by.

Why, therefore, dost thou wait?"

The Wise One looked at her and she shrank back a little, and a little her silver and violet faded, but out of her cave her voice still sounded:

"The stars and the starry crown are not yours alone to offer, and every promise you make, I make also. I offer the good and the bad indifferently. The lover, the poet, the mystic, and all who would drink of the first Fountain, I delude with my mirage. I was the Beatrice who led Dante upward: the gloom was in me, and the glory was mine also, and he went not out of my cave. The stars and the s.h.i.+ning of heaven were delusions of the infinite I wove about him.

I captured his soul with the shadow of s.p.a.ce; a nutsh.e.l.l would have contained the film. I smote on the dim heart-chords the manifold music of being. G.o.d is sweeter in the human than the human in G.o.d: therefore he rested in me."

She paused a little, and then went on.

"There is that fantastic fellow who slipped by me--could your wisdom not keep him? He returned to me full of anguish, and I wound my arms round him like a fair melancholy, and now his sadness is as sweet to him as hope was before his fall. Listen to his song."

She paused again. A voice came up from the depths chanting a sad knowledge--

"What of all the will to do?

It has vanished long ago, For a dream shaft pierced it through From the unknown Archer's bow.

What of all the soul to think?

Some one offered it a cup Filled with a diviner drink, And the flame has burned it up.

What of all the hope to climb?

Only in the self we grope To the misty end of time; Truth has put an end to hope.

What of all the heart to love?

Sadder than for will or soul, No light lured it on above; Love has found itself the whole."

"Is it not pitiful? I pity only those who pity themselves. Yet he is mine more surely than ever. This is the end of human wisdom.

How shall he now escape? What shall draw him up?"

"His will shall awaken," said the Wise One. "I do not sorrow over him, for long is the darkness before the spirit is born. He learns in your caves not to see, not to hear, not to think, for very anguish flying your delusions."

"Sorrow is a great bond," Lilith said.

"It is a bond to the object of sorrow. He weeps what thou can never give him, a life never breathed in thee. He shall come forth, and thou shalt not see him at the time of pa.s.sing. When desire dies, will awakens, the swift, the invisible. He shall go forth, and one by one the dwellers in your caves will awaken and pa.s.s onwards; this small old path will be trodden by generation after generation.

You, too, oh, s.h.i.+ning Lilith, will follow, not as mistress, but as hand-maiden."

"I shall weave spells," Lilith cried. "They shall never pa.s.s me.

With the sweetest poison I will drug them. They will rest drowsily and content as of old. Were they not giants long ago, mighty men and heroes? I overcame them with young enchantment. Will they pa.s.s by feeble and longing for bygone joys, for the sins of their proud exultant youth, while I have grown into a myriad wisdom?"

The Wise One walked to and fro as before, and there was silence, and I thought I saw that with steady will he pierced the tumultuous gloom of the cave, and a heart was touched here and there in its blindness. And I thought I saw that Sad Singer become filled with a new longing to be, and that the delusions of good and evil fell from him, and that he came at last to the knees of the Wise One to learn the supreme truth. In the misty midnight I hear these three voices, the Sad Singer, the Enchantress Lilith, and the Wise One. From the Sad Singer I learned that thought of itself leads nowhere, but blows the perfume from every flower, and cuts the flower from every tree, and hews down every tree from the valley, and in the end goes to and fro in waste places gnawing itself in a last hunger. I learned from Lilith that we weave our own enchantment, and bind ourselves with out own imagination; to think of the true as beyond us, or to love the symbol of being, is to darken the path to wisdom, and to debar us from eternal beauty.

From the Wise One I learned that the truest wisdom is to wait, to work, and to will in secret; those who are voiceless today, tomorrow shall be eloquent, and the earth shall hear them, and her children salute them. Of these three truths the hardest to learn is the silent will. Let us seek for the highest truth.

--February 15, 1894

A Strange Awakening

Chapter I.

That we are living in the Dark Age we all know, yet we do not realise half its darkness. We endure physical and moral suffering; but, fortunately or unfortunately, we are oblivious of the sorrow of all sorrows--the Spiritual Tragedy. Such a rust has come over the pure and ancient spirit of life, that the sceptre and the diadem and the starry sway we held are unremembered; and if anyone speaks of these things he is looked at strangely with blank eyes, or with eyes that suspect madness. I do not know whether to call him great, or pity him, who feels such anguish; for although it is the true agony of the crucifixion, it is only G.o.ds who are so martyred.

With these rare souls memory is not born: life flows on, and they with it go on in dreams: they are lulled by lights, flowers, stars, colours, and sweet odours, and are sheltered awhile from heaven and h.e.l.l; then in some moment the bubble bursts, and the G.o.d awakens and knows himself, and he rises again with giant strength to conquer; or else he succ.u.mbs, and the waves of Lethe, perhaps in mercy, blot out his brief knowledge.

I knew such an one many years ago, and I tell of him because I know of no deeper proof of the existence of a diviner nature than that man's story. Arthur Harvey, as I have heard people describe him, in his early years was gentle, shy, and given to much dreaming.

He was taken from school early, came up from the country to the city, and was put to business. He possessed the apathy and unresisting nature characteristic of so many spiritual people, and which is found notably among the natives of India; so he took his daily confinement at first as a matter of course, though glad enough when it was over, and the keen sweet air blew about him in spring or summer evenings, and the earth looked visionary, steeped in dew and lovely colour, and his soul grew rich with strange memories and psychic sensations. And so day-by-day he might have gone on with the alternation of work and dream, and the soul in its imaginings might never have known of the labours of the mind, each working by habit in its accustomed hour, but for an incident which took place about two years after his going to business.

One morning his manager said: "Harvey, take this letter; deliver it, and wait for an answer." He started up eagerly, glad for the unwonted freedom from his desk. At the door, as he went out, the whole blinding glory of the sunlight was dashed on him. He looked up. Ah! what s.p.a.ces illimitable of l.u.s.trous blue. How far off!

How mighty! He felt suddenly faint, small, mean, and feeble.

His limbs trembled under him: he shrank from the notice of men as he went on his way. Vastness, such as this, breaking in upon the eye that had followed the point of the pen, unnerved him: he felt a bitter self-contempt. What place had he amid these huge energies? The city deafened him as with one shout: the tread of the mult.i.tude; the mob of vehicles; glitter and shadow; rattle, roar, and dust; the black smoke curled in the air; higher up the snowy and brilliant clouds, which the tall winds bore along; all were but the intricate and wondrous workings of a single monstrous personality; a rival in the universe who had absorbed and wrested from him his own divine dower. Out of him; out of him, the power-- the free, the fearless--whirled in play, and drove the suns and stars in their orbits, and sped the earth through light and shadow.

Out of him; out of him; never to be reconquered; never to be regained. The exultant laugh of the day; the flame of summer; the gigantic winds careering over the city; the far-off divine things filled him with unutterable despair. What was he amid it all?

A spark decaying in its socket; a little hot dust clinging together.

He found himself in a small square; he sat down on a bench; his brain burning, his eyes unseeing.

"Oh! my, what's he piping over?" jeered a grotesque voice, and a small figure disappeared, turning somersaults among the bushes.

"Poor young man! Perhaps he is ill. Are you not well, sir?" asked a sympathetic nurse.

He started up, brought to himself, and muttering something unintelligible, continued his journey through the city. The terrible influence departed, and a new change came over him. The laugh of the urchin rankled in his mind: he hated notice: there must be something absurd or out of the common in his appearance to invoke it. He knew suddenly that there was a gulf between him and the people he lived among. They were vivid, actual, suited to their places. How he envied them! Then the whole superficies of his mind became filled with a desire to conceal this difference.

He recalled the various characteristics of those who worked along with him. One knew all topical songs, slang and phrases; another affected a smartness in dress; a third discussed theatres with semi-professional knowledge. Harvey, however, could never have entered the world, or lived in it, if he had first to pa.s.s through the portals of such ideas! He delivered his letter; he was wearied out, and as he returned he noticed neither sky nor sunlight, and the hurrying mult.i.tudes were indifferent and without character.

He pa.s.sed through them; his mind dull like theirs; a mere machine to guide rapid footsteps.

That evening, a clerk named Whittaker, a little his senior in the office, was struck by Harvey's curious and delicate face.

"I say, Harvey," he said, "how do you spend your evenings?"

Harvey flushed a little at the unwonted interest.

"I take long walks," he said.

"Do you read much?"

"A little."