A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (39 page)

6. The Lipika circumscribe the triangle, the first one, the cube, and the second one, and the pentacle within the egg. Iris the ring called "Pass Not" for those who ascend and descend. Also for those who during the kalpa are progressing towards the great day "Be with us." Thus were formed the Rupa and the Arupa: from one light, seven lights; from each of the seven, seven times seven lights: the wheels watch the ring.

Stanza VI

1. By the power of the mother of mercy and knowledge, Kwan-Yin, the "triple" of Kwan-Shai-Yin, residing in Kwan-Yin-Tien, Fohat, the breath of the progeny, the son of the sons, having called forth, from the lower abyss, the elusive form of Sien-Tchnag and the seven elements:

2. The swift and radiant one produces the seven Laya centres, against which none will prevail to the great day "Be with us," and seats the universe on these eternal foundations surrounding Tsien-Tchan with the elementary germs.

3. Of the seven: first one manifested, six concealed, two manifested, five concealed, three manifested, four concealed; four produced, three hidden, four and one Tsan revealed; two and one half concealed, six to be manifested, one laid aside. Lastly, seven smalls wheels revolving, one giving birth to the other.

4. He builds them in the likness of older wheels, placing them on imperishable centres. How does Fohat build them? He collects fiery dust. He makes balls of fire, runs through them and round them, infusing life therein, then sets them into motion; some one way, some the other way. They are cold, he makes them hot. They are dry, he makes them moist. They shine: he fans and cools them. Thus acts Fohat from one twilight to the other, during seven eternities.

5. At the fourth the sons are told to create their images. One third refuses, Two obey. The curse is pronounced: they will be born on the fourth, suffer and cause suffering: this is the first war.

6. The older wheels rotated downwards and upwards. The mother's spawn filled the whole. There were battles fought between the creators and the destroyers, and the battles fought for space; the seed appearing and re-appearing continuously.

7. Make they calculations, Lanoo, if thou wouldst learn the correct age of thy small wheel. Is fourth spoke our mother; reach the fourth fruit of the fourth path of knowledge that leads to Nirvanna, and thou shalt comprehend, for thou shalt see.

Stanza VII

1. Behold the beginning of sentient formless life. First the divine, the one from the mother-spirit; then the -spiral, the three from the one, the four from the one, and the five from which the three, the five, and the seven. These are the three-fold, the four-fold downward; the "mind born" sons of the first lord, the shining seven. It is they who are thou, me, him oh Lanoo. They who watch over thee, and thy mother earth.

2. The one ray multiplies the other rays; life precedes form, and life survives the last atom of form. Through the countless rays proceeds the life-ray, the one, like a thread through many jewels.

3. When the one becomes two, then the threefold appears and the three are one; and it is our thread, oh Lanoo, the heart of the man-plant called Saptasarma.

4. It is the root that never dies; the three-tongued flame of the four wicks. The wicks are the sparks, that draw from the three-tongued flame shot out by the seven: their flame, the beams and sparks of one moon reflected in the running waves of all the rivers of earth.

5. The spark hangs from the flame by the finest thread of Fohat. It journeys through the seven worlds of Maya.

It stops in the first and is a metal, and a stone; it passes into the second and behold: a plant; the plant whirls through seven changes and becomes a sacred animal. From the combined attributes of these, Manu, the thinker, is formed. Who forms him? The seven lives and the one life. Who completes him? The five-fold Lha. And who perfects the last body, Fish, sin and soma ...

6. From the first-born, the thread between the silent watcher and the shadow becomes more strong and radiant with every change. The morning sunlight has changed into noonday glory.

7. This is they present wheel, said the flame to the spark, thou art myself, my image and my shadow. I have clothed myself in thee and thou art my Vahan to the day "be with us," when thou shalt re-become myself and others, thyself and me. Then the builders, having donned their first clothing, descend on radiant earth and reign over men who are themselves.

From The writings of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin

THE COUNSEL OF THE EXILE

Man has been set amidst the darkness of created things only to demonstrate by his individual light the existence of their Supreme Agent, to convince all who misconstrue it.

All things should speak, since the spirit and the voice of God should fill all, and yet is all mute about us.

It is a sign of the glory of our humanity, as it is an instance of the signal wisdom of Providence, that all such proofs adduced from the external order are thus deceptive in their last analysis ... The entire universe, notwithstanding all the splendours which it displays before our eyes, can never of itself manifest the truly divine treasures.

There is not a man in possession of his true self for whom the temporal universe is not a great allegory or fable which must give place to a grand morality.

At the first glance which man directs upon himself, he will perceive without difficulty that there must be a science or an evident law for his own nature, since there is one for all beings, though it is not universally in all, and since even in the midst of our weakness, our ignorance, and humiliation we are employed only in the search after truth and light. Albeit, therefore, the efforts which man makes daily to attain the end of his researches are so rarely successful, it must not be considered on this account that the end is imaginary, but only that man is deceived as to the road which leads thereto, and is hence in the greatest of privations, since he does not even know the way in which he should walk. The overwhelming misfortune of man is not that he is ignorant of the existence of truth, but that he misconstrues its nature. What errors and what sufferings would have been spared us if, far from seeking truth in the phenomena of material nature, we had resolved to descend into ourselves, and had sought to explain material things by man, and not man by material things; if, fortified by courage and patience, we had preserved in the calm of our imagination the discovery of the light which we desire all of us with so much ardour.

Man is the sole being in the natural order who is not compelled to pursue the same road invariably.

The function of man differs from that of other physical beings, for it is the reparation of the disorders in the universe. Man possesses innumerable vestiges of the faculties resident

in that Agent which produced him; he is the sign or visible expression of the Divinity.

The saintly race of man, engendered from the fount of wonder and the fount of desire and intelligence, was established in the region of temporal immensity like a brilliant star for the diffusion of heavenly light.

I must not conceal that this crass envelope is the actual penalty to which the crime of man has made him subject in the temporal region. Thereby begin and thereby are perpetuated the trials without which he cannot recover his former correspondence with the light.

When God has recourse to such visible signs as the universe to communicate his thought, it is to employ them in favour of beings separated from him. Had all beings remained in his unity, they would not have needed this means to draw towards him. The universe is therefore a sign of God's love for corrupted creatures separated voluntarily from the First Cause and submitted to the laws of justice in the womb of the visible universe. God operates unceasingly to remove the separation so contrary to their felicity.

The wisdom and bounty of the Divine Being are manifested by the birth of man into terrestrial life. He is thus placed in a position to soothe by his labour and striving a part of the evils which the first crime has caused on the earth.

It is perhaps this wrong connection of ideas (that the earth is a mere point in the universe) which has led men to the still falser notion that they are not worthy of the Creator's regard. They have believed themselves to be obeying the dictates of humility when they have denied that the earth and all that the universe contains exists only on man's account, on the ground that the admission of such an idea would be only conceit. But they have not been afraid of the laziness and cowardice which are the inevitable results of this affected modesty. The present day avoidance of the belief that we are the highest in the universe is the reason that we have not the courage to work in order to justify that title, that the duties springing from it seem too laborious, and that we would rather abdicate our position and our rights than realise them in all their consequences. Where is the pilot that will guide us between these hidden reefs of conceit and false humility?

If there be anything deplorable in our existence, it is to know that we ourselves bar the approach of Divinity; it is to be physically aware that the Divinity is ever moving around us, striving to enter our hearts and thus raise us from the dead, to enliven us by the fire of the Spirit. The least ray of the Divine Word suffices to operate this prodigy within us, substituting virtues and characterised faculties in place of the tenebrous state which is peculiar to the region we inhabit. Yet it is the ray of this Word which we drive zealously away as though. it were death.

The learned describe nature; the wise explain it.

Had we the courage to make voluntarily the sincere and continual sacrifice of our entire being, the ordeals, oppositions and evils which we undergo during life would not be sent us; hence we should always be superior to our sacrifices, like the Repairer, instead of being almost invariably inferior to them.

Man's head is raised toward heaven, and for this reason he finds nowhere to repose it on earth.

All the impressions which are made on us by Nature are designed to exercise our soul during its term of penitence, to prompt us towards the eternal truths shown beneath a veil, and to lead us to recover what we have lost.

We are all in a widowed state, and our task is to remarry.

As a proof that we are regenerated we must regenerate everything around us.

From Inferno

AUGUST STRINDBERG

I

THE HAND OF THE UNSEEN

It was with feelings of savage glee that I returned homewards from the Gare du Nord where I had parted from my little wife. She was going to our child, who had fallen ill in a distant land. So now I had accomplished the sacrifice of my heart. Her last words, `When shall we meet again?' and my answer, `Soon,' still echoed in my ears as an untruth, a deception that I was unwilling to admit, even to myself, though something in me whispered that we had now parted for ever. Those farewell words that we exchanged in November 1894 were in fact our last, for up to the present time, May 1897, I have never seen my dear wife again.

When I got as far as the Cafe de la Regence I sat down at a table at which I had often sat with my wife, my beautiful wardress, who had spied upon my soul day and night, had guessed my secret thoughts, kept watch over the development of my ideas, observed with jealous resentment the striving of my spirit towards the unknown.

Restored to the world of the free, I became aware of a sudden expansion of my self that elevated me above the petty cares of life in the great city, that scene of intellectual strife, where I had just won a victory - no great thing in itself, but to me of enormous significance, representing as it did the fulfilment of a youthful dream. A play of mine had been performed at a Paris theatre, the dream of all contemporary authors in my country, but one which I alone had realized. But now the theatre was repellent, as is everything that one has attained, and science attracted me: Compelled to choose between love and knowledge, I had made up my mind that I would try to reach the summits of intellectual achievement, but in my willingness to make a sacrifice of my love I forgot the innocent victim of my ambition or my vocation.

Back once more in my miserable student's room in the Latin Quarter, I delved into my trunk and drew forth from their hiding place six crucibles of fine porcelain which I had robbed myself to buy. A pair of tongs and a packet of pure sulphur completed the apparatus of my laboratory. All that remained to be done was to make a fire of furnace heat in the stove, secure the door, and draw down the blinds, for since the execution of Caserio, only three months earlier, it had become dangerous to handle chemical apparatus in Paris.

Night fell, the flames of hell rose from the burning sulphur, but towards morning I had ascertained the presence of carbon in sulphur, previously regarded as an elementary substance. By doing this I believed I had solved the great problem, overthrown the prevailing chemical theories, and won the only immortality accorded to mortals.

But from my hands, roasted by the intense heat, the skin was peeling off in scales, and the pain caused by the mere effort of undressing reminded me of what my victory had cost. Yet, alone in my bed, where the odour of woman still lingered, I was blissful. A feeling of spiritual purity, of masculine virginity, made me regard my past married life as something unclean, and I regretted that there was no one to whom I could render thanks for my deliverance from those degrading fetters, now broken without much fuss. The fact is, that in the course of years, as I came to notice that the unseen Powers left the world to its fate and showed no interest in it, I had become an atheist.

Someone to thank? There was no one, and the ingratitude thus forced upon me weighed me down.

Being jealously anxious about my discovery, I took no steps to make it known. My shyness prevented me from approaching authorities on the subject or the academies. All the same, I continued my experiments, but meanwhile my chapped hands became poisoned, the cracks widened, were filled with coke dust, blood oozed from them, and the agony became intolerable. Everything I touched caused me pain and I was in mind to ascribe my torment to those unknown Powers which, for so many years, had persecuted me and frustrated all my endeavours. Almost mad with pain, I avoided and neglected my fellow men, refused invitations, drove my friends from me. Silence and solitude encompassed me, the stillness of a desert, solemn, terrifying, in which I defiantly challenged the unseen Power to a wrestling match, body against body, soul against soul.