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Rosa Alchemica

W. B. Yeats

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Title: Rosa Alchemica

Author: W. B. Yeats

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ROSA ALCHEMICA

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W.B. YEATS

O blessed and happy he, who knowing the mysteries of the gods,

sanctifies his life, and purifies his soul, celebrating orgies in the

mountains with holy purifications.--_Euripides._

ROSA ALCHEMICA. I

It is now more than ten years since I met, for the last time, Michael

Robartes, and for the first time and the last time his friends and

fellow students; and witnessed his and their tragic end, and endured

those strange experiences, which have changed me so that my writings

have grown less popular and less intelligible, and driven me almost

to the verge of taking the habit of St. Dominic. I had just published

Rosa Alchemica, a little work on the Alchemists, somewhat in the

manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and had received many letters from

believers in the arcane sciences, upbraiding what they called my

timidity, for they could not believe so evident sympathy but the

sympathy of the artist, which is half pity, for everything which has

moved men's hearts in any age. I had discovered, early in my

researches, that their doctrine was no merely chemical phantasy, but

a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements and to man

himself; and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals

merely as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some

divine and imperishable substance; and this enabled me to make my

little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into

art, and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly of

essences.

I was sitting dreaming of what I had written, in my house in one of

the old parts of Dublin; a house my ancestors had made almost famous

through their part in the politics of the city and their friendships

with the famous men of their generations; and was feeling an unwonted

happiness at having at last accomplished a long-cherished design, and

made my rooms an expression of this favourite doctrine. The

portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and

tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the

doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty

and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the

rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and

precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the

grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a

Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I

pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had

mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various

beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour

with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where

every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and

of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory

of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue

grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human

passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered

about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every

pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart,

individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the

ads:

triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the

firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for

which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my

world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their

own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other

moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except

the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this

thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow. All

those forms: that Madonna with her brooding purity, those rapturous

faces singing in the morning light, those bronze divinities with

their passionless dignity, those wild shapes rushing from despair to

despair, belonged to a divine world wherein I had no part; and every

experience, however profound, every perception, however exquisite,

would bring me the bitter dream of a limitless energy I could never

know, and even in my most perfect moment I would be two selves, the

one watching with heavy eyes the other's moment of content. I had

heaped about me the gold born in the crucibles of others; but the

supreme dream of the alchemist, the transmutation of the weary heart

into a weariless spirit, was as far from me as, I doubted not, it had

been from him also. I turned to my last purchase, a set of alchemical

apparatus which, the dealer in the Rue le Peletier had assured me,

once belonged to Raymond Lully, and as I joined the _alembic_ to

the _athanor_ and laid the _lavacrum maris_ at their side,

I understood the alchemical doctrine, that all beings, divided from

the great deep where spirits wander, one and yet a multitude, are

weary; and sympathized, in the pride of my connoisseurship, with the

consuming thirst for destruction which made the alchemist veil under

his symbols of lions and dragons, of eagles and ravens, of dew and of

nitre, a search for an essence which would dissolve all mortal

things. I repeated to myself the ninth key of Basilius Valentinus, in

which he compares the fire of the last day to the fire of the

alchemist, and the world to the alchemist's furnace, and would have

us know that all must be dissolved before the divine substance,

material gold or immaterial ecstasy, awake. I had dissolved indeed

the mortal world and lived amid immortal essences, but had obtained

no miraculous ecstasy. As I thought of these things, I drew aside the

curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my

troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky

were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour

continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies

into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my

mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of

letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate

spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many

dreams.

My reverie was broken by a loud knocking at the door, and I wondered

the more at this because I had no visitors, and had bid my servants

do all things silently, lest they broke the dream of my inner life.

Feeling a little curious, I resolved to go to the door myself, and,

taking one of the silver candlesticks from the mantlepiece, began to

descend the stairs. The servants appeared to be out, for though the

sound poured through every corner and crevice of the house there was

no stir in the lower rooms. I remembered that because my needs were

so few, my part in life so little, they had begun to come and go as

they would, often leaving me alone for hours. The emptiness and

silence of a world from which I had driven everything but dreams

suddenly overwhelmed me, and I shuddered as I drew the bolt. I found

before me Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose

wild red hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough

clothes, made him look now, just as they used to do fifteen years

before, something between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. He had

recently come to Ireland, he said, and wished to see me on a matter

of importance: indeed, the only matter of importance for him and for

me. His voice brought up before me our student years in Paris, and

remembering the magnetic power ne had once possessed over me, a

little fear mingled with much annoyance at this irrelevant intrusion,

as I led the way up the wide staircase, where Swift had passed joking

and railing, and Curran telling stories and quoting Greek, in simpler

days, before men's minds, subtilized and complicated by the romantic

movement in art and literature, began to tremble on the verge of some

unimagined revelation. I felt that my hand shook, and saw that the

light of the candle wavered and quivered more than it need have upon

the Maenads on the old French panels, making them look like the first

beings slowly shaping in the formless and void darkness. When the

door had closed, and the peacock curtain, glimmering like many-

coloured flame, fell between us and the world, I felt, in a way I

could not understand, that some singular and unexpected thing was

about to happen. I went over to the mantlepiece, and finding that a

little chainless bronze censer, set, upon the outside, with pieces of

painted china by Orazio Fontana, which I had filled with antique

amulets, had fallen upon its side and poured out its contents, I

began to gather the amulets into the bowl, partly to collect my

thoughts and partly with that habitual reverence which seemed to me

the due of things so long connected with secret hopes and fears. 'I

see,' said Michael Robartes, 'that you are still fond of incense, and

I can show you an incense more precious than any you have ever seen,'

and as he spoke he took the censer out of my hand and put the amulets

in a little heap between the _athanor_ and the _alembic_. I

sat down, and he sat down at the side of the fire, and sat there for

awhile looking into the fire, and holding the censer in his hand. 'I

have come to ask you something,' he said, 'and the incense will fill

the room, and our thoughts, with its sweet odour while we are

talking. I got it from an old man in Syria, who said it was made from

flowers, of one kind with the flowers that laid their heavy purple

petals upon the hands and upon the hair and upon the feet of Christ

in the Garden of Gethsemane, and folded Him in their heavy breath,

until he cried against the cross and his destiny.' He shook some dust

into the censer out of a small silk bag, and set the censer upon the

floor and lit the dust which sent up a blue stream of smoke, that

spread out over the ceiling, and flowed downwards again until it was

like Milton's banyan tree. It filled me, as incense often does, with

a faint sleepiness, so that I started when he said, 'I have come to

ask you that question which I asked you in Paris, and which you left

Paris rather than answer.'

He had turned his eyes towards me, and I saw them glitter in the

firelight, and through the incense, as I replied: 'You mean, will I

become an initiate of your Order of the Alchemical Rose? I would not

consent in Paris, when I was full of unsatisfied desire, and now that

I have at last fashioned my life according to my desire, am I likely

to consent?'

'You have changed greatly since then,' he answered. 'I have read your

books, and now I see you among all these images, and I understand you

better than you do yourself, for I have been with many and many

dreamers at the same cross-ways. You have shut away the world and

gathered the gods about you, and if you do not throw yourself at

their feet, you will be always full of lassitude, and of wavering

purpose, for a man must forget he is miserable in the bustle and

noise of the multitude in this world and in time; or seek a mystical

union with the multitude who govern this world and time.' And then he

murmured something I could not hear, and as though to someone I could

not see.

For a moment the room appeared to darken, as it used to do when he

was about to perform some singular experiment, and in the darkness

the peacocks upon the doors seemed to glow with a more intense

colour. I cast off the illusion, which was, I believe, merely caused

by memory, and by the twilight of incense, for I would not

acknowledge that he could overcome my now mature intellect; and I

said: 'Even if I grant that I need a spiritual belief and some form

of worship, why should I go to Eleusis and not to Calvary?' He leaned

forward and began speaking with a slightly rhythmical intonation, and

as he spoke I had to struggle again with the shadow, as of some older

night than the night of the sun, which began to dim the light of the

candles and to blot out the little gleams upon the corner of picture-

frames and on the bronze divinities, and to turn the blue of the

incense to a heavy purple; while it left the peacocks to glimmer and

glow as though each separate colour were a living spirit. I had

fallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard him

speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes with

only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in

imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he

meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of

Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of

the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing

away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the

world and could not find them; and under the power of all those

countless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies

in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under the

power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won

everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and

fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many

think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them

again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in

soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay

in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking

humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips.'

He had stood up and begun to walk to and fro, and had become in my

waking dream a shuttle weaving an immense purple web whose folds had

begun to fill the room. The room seemed to have become inexplicably

silent, as though all but the web and the weaving were at an end in

the world. 'They have come to us; they have come to us,' the voice

began again; 'all that have ever been in your reverie, all that you

have met with in books. There is Lear, his head still wet with the

thunder-storm, and he laughs because you thought yourself an

existence who are but a shadow, and him a shadow who is an eternal

god; and there is Beatrice, with her lips half parted in a smile, as

though all the stars were about to pass away in a sigh of love; and

there is the mother of the God of humility who cast so great a spell

over men that they have tried to unpeople their hearts that he might

reign alone, but she holds in her hand the rose whose every petal is

a god; and there, O swiftly she comes! is Aphrodite under a twilight

falling from the wings of numberless sparrows, and about her feet are

the grey and white doves.' In the midst of my dream I saw him hold

out his left arm and pass his right hand over it as though he stroked

the wings of doves. I made a violent effort which seemed almost to

tear me in two, and said with forced determination: 'You would sweep

me away into an indefinite world which fills me with terror; and yet

a man is a great man just in so far as he can make his mind reflect

everything with indifferent precision like a mirror.' I seemed to be

perfectly master of myself, and went on, but more rapidly: 'I command

you to leave me at once, for your ideas and phantasies are but the

illusions that creep like maggots into civilizations when they begin

to decline, and into minds when they begin to decay.' I had grown

suddenly angry, and seizing the _alembic_ from the table, was

about to rise and strike him with it, when the peacocks on the door

behind him appeared to grow immense; and then the _alembic_ fell

from my fingers and I was drowned in a tide of green and blue and

bronze feathers, and as I struggled hopelessly I heard a distant

voice saying: 'Our master Avicenna has written that all life proceeds

out of corruption.' The glittering feathers had now covered me

completely, and I knew that I had struggled for hundreds of years,

and was conquered at last. I was sinking into the depth when the

green and blue and bronze that seemed to fill the world became a sea

of flame and swept me away, and as I was swirled along I heard a

voice over my head cry, 'The mirror is broken in two pieces,' and

another voice answer, 'The mirror is broken in four pieces,' and a

more distant voice cry with an exultant cry, 'The mirror is broken

into numberless pieces'; and then a multitude of pale hands were

reaching towards me, and strange gentle faces bending above me, and

half wailing and half caressing voices uttering words that were

forgotten the moment they were spoken. I was being lifted out of the

tide of flame, and felt my memories, my hopes, my thoughts, my will,

everything I held to be myself, melting away; then I seemed to rise

through numberless companies of beings who were, I understood, in

some way more certain than thought, each wrapped in his eternal

moment, in the perfect lifting of an arm, in a little circlet of

rhythmical words, in dreaming with dim eyes and half-closed eyelids.

And then I passed beyond these forms, which were so beautiful they

had almost ceased to be, and, having endured strange moods,

melancholy, as it seemed, with the weight of many worlds, I passed

into that Death which is Beauty herself, and into that Loneliness

which all the multitudes desire without ceasing. All things that had

ever lived seemed to come and dwell in my heart, and I in theirs; and

I had never again known mortality or tears, had I not suddenly fallen

from the certainty of vision into the uncertainty of dream, and

become a drop of molten gold falling with immense rapidity, through a

night elaborate with stars, and all about me a melancholy exultant

wailing. I fell and fell and fell, and then the wailing was but the

wailing of the wind in the chimney, and I awoke to find myself

leaning upon the table and supporting my head with my hands. I saw

the _alembic_ swaying from side to side in the distant corner it

had rolled to, and Michael Robartes watching me and waiting. 'I will

go wherever you will,' I said, 'and do whatever you bid me, for I

have been with eternal things.' 'I knew,' he replied, 'you must need

answer as you have answered, when I heard the storm begin. You must

come to a great distance, for we were commanded to build our temple

between the pure multitude by the waves and the impure multitude of

men.'

III

I did not speak as we drove through the deserted streets, for my mind

was curiously empty of familiar thoughts and experiences; it seemed

to have been plucked out of the definite world and cast naked upon a

shoreless sea. There were moments when the vision appeared on the

point of returning, and I would half-remember, with an ecstasy of joy

or sorrow, crimes and heroisms, fortunes and misfortunes; or begin to

contemplate, with a sudden leaping of the heart, hopes and terrors,

desires and ambitions, alien to my orderly and careful life; and then

I would awake shuddering at the thought that some great imponderable

being had swept through my mind. It was indeed days before this

feeling passed perfectly away, and even now, when I have sought

refuge in the only definite faith, I feel a great tolerance for those

people with incoherent personalities, who gather in the chapels and

meeting-places of certain obscure sects, because I also have felt

fixed habits and principles dissolving before a power, which was

_hysterica passio_ or sheer madness, if you will, but was so

powerful in its melancholy exultation that I tremble lest it wake

again and drive me from my new-found peace.

When we came in the grey light to the great half-empty terminus, it

seemed to me I was so changed that I was no more, as man is, a moment

shuddering at eternity, but eternity weeping and laughing over a

moment; and when we had started and Michael Robartes had fallen

asleep, as he soon did, his sleeping face, in which there was no sign

of all that had so shaken me and that now kept me wakeful, was to my

excited mind more like a mask than a face. The fancy possessed me

that the man behind it had dissolved away like salt in water, and

that it laughed and sighed, appealed and denounced at the bidding of

beings greater or less than man. 'This is not Michael Robartes at

all: Michael Robartes is dead; dead for ten, for twenty years

perhaps,' I kept repeating to myself. I fell at last into a feverish

sleep, waking up from time to time when we rushed past some little

town, its slated roofs shining with wet, or still lake gleaming in

the cold morning light. I had been too pre-occupied to ask where we

were going, or to notice what tickets Michael Robartes had taken, but

I knew now from the direction of the sun that we were going westward;

and presently I knew also, by the way in which the trees had grown

into the semblance of tattered beggars flying with bent heads towards

the east, that we were approaching the western coast. Then

immediately I saw the sea between the low hills upon the left, its

dull grey broken into white patches and lines.

When we left the train we had still, I found, some way to go, and set

out, buttoning our coats about us, for the wind was bitter and

violent. Michael Robartes was silent, seeming anxious to leave me to

my thoughts; and as we walked between the sea and the rocky side of a

great promontory, I realized with a new perfection what a shock had

been given to all my habits of thought and of feelings, if indeed

some mysterious change had not taken place in the substance of my

mind, for the grey waves, plumed with scudding foam, had grown part

of a teeming, fantastic inner life; and when Michael Robartes pointed

to a square ancient-looking house, with a much smaller and newer

building under its lee, set out on the very end of a dilapidated and

almost deserted pier, and said it was the Temple of the Alchemical

Rose, I was possessed with the phantasy that the sea, which kept

covering it with showers of white foam, was claiming it as part of

some indefinite and passionate life, which had begun to war upon our

orderly and careful days, and was about to plunge the world into a

night as obscure as that which followed the downfall of the classical

world. One part of my mind mocked this phantastic terror, but the

other, the part that still lay half plunged in vision, listened to

the clash of unknown armies, and shuddered at unimaginable

fanaticisms, that hung in those grey leaping waves.

We had gone but a few paces along the pier when we came upon an old

man, who was evidently a watchman, for he sat in an overset barrel,

close to a place where masons had been lately working upon a break in

the pier, and had in front of him a fire such as one sees slung under

tinkers' carts. I saw that he was also a voteen, as the peasants say,

for there was a rosary hanging from a nail on the rim of the barrel,

and I saw I shuddered, and I did not know why I shuddered. We had

passed him a few yards when I heard him cry in Gaelic, 'Idolaters,

idolaters, go down to Hell with your witches and your devils; go down

to Hell that the herrings may come again into the bay'; and for some

moments I could hear him half screaming and half muttering behind us.

'Are you not afraid,' I said, 'that these wild fishing people may do

some desperate thing against you?'

'I and mine,' he answered, 'are long past human hurt or help, being

incorporate with immortal spirits, and when we die it shall be the

consummation of the supreme work. A time will come for these people

also, and they will sacrifice a mullet to Artemis, or some other fish

to some new divinity, unless indeed their own divinities, the Dagda,

with his overflowing cauldron, Lug, with his spear dipped in poppy-

juice lest it rush forth hot for battle. Aengus, with the three birds

on his shoulder, Bodb and his red swineherd, and all the heroic

children of Dana, set up once more their temples of grey stone. Their

reign has never ceased, but only waned in power a little, for the

Sidhe still pass in every wind, and dance and play at hurley, and

fight their sudden battles in every hollow and on every hill; but

they cannot build their temples again till there have been martyrdoms

and victories, and perhaps even that long-foretold battle in the

Valley of the Black Pig.'

Keeping close to the wall that went about the pier on the seaward

side, to escape the driving foam and the wind, which threatened every

moment to lift us off our feet, we made our way in silence to the

door of the square building. Michael Robartes opened it with a key,

on which I saw the rust of many salt winds, and led me along a bare

passage and up an uncarpeted stair to a little room surrounded with

bookshelves. A meal would be brought, but only of fruit, for I must

submit to a tempered fast before the ceremony, he explained, and with

it a book on the doctrine and method of the Order, over which I was

to spend what remained of the winter daylight. He then left me,

promising to return an hour before the ceremony. I began searching

among the bookshelves, and found one of the most exhaustive

alchemical libraries I have ever seen. There were the works of

Morienus, who hid his immortal body under a shirt of hair-cloth; of

Avicenna, who was a drunkard and yet controlled numberless legions of

spirits; of Alfarabi, who put so many spirits into his lute that he

could make men laugh, or weep, or fall in deadly trance as he would;

of Lully, who transformed himself into the likeness of a red cock; of

Flamel, who with his wife Parnella achieved the elixir many hundreds

of years ago, and is fabled to live still in Arabia among the

Dervishes; and of many of less fame. There were very few mystics but

alchemical mystics, and because, I had little doubt, of the devotion

to one god of the greater number and of the limited sense of beauty,

which Robartes would hold an inevitable consequence; but I did notice

a complete set of facsimiles of the prophetical writings of William

Blake, and probably because of the multitudes that thronged his

illumination and were 'like the gay fishes on the wave when the moon

sucks up the dew.' I noted also many poets and prose writers of every

age, but only those who were a little weary of life, as indeed the

greatest have been everywhere, and who cast their imagination to us,

as a something they needed no longer now that they were going up in

their fiery chariots.

Presently I heard a tap at the door, and a woman came in and laid a

little fruit upon the table. I judged that she had once been

handsome, but her cheeks were hollowed by what I would have held, had

I seen her anywhere else, an excitement of the flesh and a thirst for

pleasure, instead of which it doubtless was an excitement of the

imagination and a thirst for beauty. I asked her some question

concerning the ceremony, but getting no answer except a shake of the

head, saw that I must await initiation in silence. When I had eaten,

she came again, and having laid a curiously wrought bronze box on the

table, lighted the candles, and took away the plates and the

remnants. So soon as I was alone, I turned to the box, and found that

the peacocks of Hera spread out their tails over the sides and lid,

against a background, on which were wrought great stars, as though to

affirm that the heavens were a part of their glory. In the box was a

book bound in vellum, and having upon the vellum and in very delicate

colours, and in gold, the alchemical rose with many spears thrusting

against it, but in vain, as was shown by the shattered points of

those nearest to the petals. The book was written upon vellum, and in

beautiful clear letters, interspersed with symbolical pictures and

illuminations, after the manner of the Splendor Soils.

The first chapter described how six students, of Celtic descent, gave

themselves separately to the study of alchemy, and solved, one the

mystery of the Pelican, another the mystery of the green Dragon,

another the mystery of the Eagle, another that of Salt and Mercury.

What seemed a succession of accidents, but was, the book declared,

the contrivance of preternatural powers, brought them together in the

garden of an inn in the South of France, and while they talked

together the thought came to them that alchemy was the gradual

distillation of the contents of the soul, until they were ready to

put off the mortal and put on the immortal. An owl passed, rustling

among the vine-leaves overhead, and then an old woman came, leaning

upon a stick, and, sitting close to them, took up the thought where

they had dropped it. Having expounded the whole principle of

spiritual alchemy, and bid them found the Order of the Alchemical

Rose, she passed from among them, and when they would have followed

she was nowhere to be seen. They formed themselves into an Order,

holding their goods and making their researches in common, and, as

they became perfect in the alchemical doctrine, apparitions came and

went among them, and taught them more and more marvellous mysteries.

The book then went on to expound so much of these as the neophyte was

permitted to know, dealing at the outset and at considerable length

with the independent reality of our thoughts, which was, it declared,

the doctrine from which all true doctrines rose. If you imagine, it

said, the semblance of a living being, it is at once possessed by a

wandering soul, and goes hither and thither working good or evil,

until the moment of its death has come; and gave many examples,

received, it said, from many gods. Eros had taught them how to

fashion forms in which a divine soul could dwell, and whisper what

they would into sleeping minds; and Ate forms from which demonic

beings could pour madness, or unquiet dreams, into sleeping blood;

and Hermes, that if you powerfully imagined a hound at your bedside

it would keep watch there until you woke, and drive away all but the

mightiest demons, but that if your imagination was weakly, the hound

would be weakly also, and the demons prevail, and the hound soon die;

and Aphrodite, that if you made, by a strong imagining, a dove

crowned with silver and had it flutter over your head, its soft

cooing would make sweet dreams of immortal love gather and brood over

mortal sleep; and all divinities alike had revealed with many

warnings and lamentations that all minds are continually giving birth

to such beings, and sending them forth to work health or disease, joy

or madness. If you would give forms to the evil powers, it went on,

you were to make them ugly, thrusting out a lip, with the thirsts of

life, or breaking the proportions of a body with the burdens of life;

but the divine powers would only appear in beautiful shapes, which

are but, as it were, shapes trembling out of existence, folding up

into a timeless ecstasy, drifting with half-shut eyes, into a sleepy

stillness. The bodiless souls who descended into these forms were

what men called the moods; and worked all great changes in the world;

for just as the magician or the artist could call them when he would,

so they could call out of the mind of the magician or the artist, or

if they were demons, out of the mind of the mad or the ignoble, what

shape they would, and through its voice and its gestures pour

themselves out upon the world. In this way all great events were

accomplished; a mood, a divinity, or a demon, first descending like a

faint sigh into men's minds and then changing their thoughts and

their actions until hair that was yellow had grown black, or hair

that was black had grown yellow, and empires moved their border, as

though they were but drifts of leaves. The rest of the book contained

symbols of form, and sound, and colour, and their attribution to

divinities and demons, so that the initiate might fashion a shape for

any divinity or any demon, and be as powerful as Avicenna among those

who live under the roots of tears and of laughter.

A couple of hours after Sunset Michael Robartes returned and told me

that I would have to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique dance,

because before my initiation could be perfected I had to join three

times in a magical dance, for rhythm was the wheel of Eternity, on

which alone the transient and accidental could be broken, and the

spirit set free. I found that the steps, which were simple enough,

resembled certain antique Greek dances, and having been a good dancer

in my youth and the master of many curious Gaelic steps, I soon had

them in my memory. He then robed me and himself in a costume which

suggested by its shape both Greece and Egypt, but by its crimson

colour a more passionate life than theirs; and having put into my

hands a little chainless censer of bronze, wrought into the likeness

of a rose, by some modern craftsman, he told me to open a small door

opposite to the door by which I had entered. I put my hand to the

handle, but the moment I did so the fumes of the incense, helped

perhaps by his mysterious glamour, made me fall again into a dream,

in which I seemed to be a mask, lying on the counter of a little

Eastern shop. Many persons, with eyes so bright and still that I knew

them for more than human, came in and tried me on their faces, but at

last flung me into a corner with a little laughter; but all this

passed in a moment, for when I awoke my hand was still upon the

handle. I opened the door, and found myself in a marvellous passage,

along whose sides were many divinities wrought in a mosaic, not less

beautiful than the mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less

severe beauty; the predominant colour of each divinity, which was

surely a symbolic colour, being repeated in the lamps that hung from

the ceiling, a curiously-scented lamp before every divinity. I passed

on, marvelling exceedingly how these enthusiasts could have created

all this beauty in so remote a place, and half persuaded to believe

in a material alchemy, by the sight of so much hidden wealth; the

censer filling the air, as I passed, with smoke of ever-changing

colour.

I stopped before a door, on whose bronze panels were wrought great

waves in whose shadow were faint suggestions of terrible faces. Those

beyond it seemed to have heard our steps, for a voice cried: 'Is the

work of the Incorruptible Fire at an end?' and immediately Michael

Robartes answered: 'The perfect gold has come from the

_atbanor_.' The door swung open, and we were in a great circular

room, and among men and women who were dancing slowly in crimson

robes. Upon the ceiling was an immense rose wrought in mosaic; and

about the walls, also in mosaic, was a battle of gods and angels, the

gods glimmering like rubies and sapphires, and the angels of the one

greyness, because, as Michael Robartes whispered, they had renounced

their divinity, and turned from the unfolding of their separate

hearts, out of love for a God of humility and sorrow. Pillars

supported the roof and made a kind of circular cloister, each pillar

being a column of confused shapes, divinities, it seemed, of the

wind, who rose as in a whirling dance of more than human vehemence,

and playing upon pipes and cymbals; and from among these shapes were

thrust out hands, and in these hands were censers. I was bid place my

censer also in a hand and take my place and dance, and as I turned

from the pillars towards the dancers, I saw that the floor was of a

green stone, and that a pale Christ on a pale cross was wrought in

the midst. I asked Robartes the meaning of this, and was told that

they desired 'To trouble His unity with their multitudinous feet.'

The dance wound in and out, tracing upon the floor the shapes of

petals that copied the petals in the rose overhead, and to the sound

of hidden instruments which were perhaps of an antique pattern, for I

have never heard the like; and every moment the dance was more

passionate, until all the winds of the world seemed to have awakened

under our feet. After a little I had grown weary, and stood under a

pillar watching the coming and going of those flame-like figures;

until gradually I sank into a half-dream, from which I was awakened

by seeing the petals of the great rose, which had no longer the look

of mosaic, falling slowly through the incense-heavy air, and, as

they fell, shaping into the likeness of living beings of an

extraordinary beauty. Still faint and cloud-like, they began to

dance, and as they danced took a more and more definite shape, so

that I was able to distinguish beautiful Grecian faces and august

Egyptian faces, and now and again to name a divinity by the staff in

his hand or by a bird fluttering over his head; and soon every mortal

foot danced by the white foot of an immortal; and in the troubled

eyes that looked into untroubled shadowy eyes, I saw the brightness

of uttermost desire as though they had found at length, after

unreckonable wandering, the lost love of their youth. Sometimes, but

only for a moment, I saw a faint solitary figure with a Rosa veiled

face, and carrying a faint torch, flit among the dancers, but like a

dream within a dream, like a shadow of a shadow, and I knew by an

understanding born from a deeper fountain than thought, that it was

Eros himself, and that his face was veiled because no man or woman

from the beginning of the world has ever known what love is, or

looked into his eyes, for Eros alone of divinities is altogether a

spirit, and hides in passions not of his essence if he would commune

with a mortal heart. So that if a man love nobly he knows love

through infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending sympathy; and if

ignobly through vehement jealousy, sudden hatred, and unappeasable

desire; but unveiled love he never knows. While I thought these

things, a voice cried to me from the crimson figures: 'Into the

dance! there is none that can be spared out of the dance; into the

dance! into the dance! that the gods may make them bodies out of the

substance of our hearts'; and before I could answer, a mysterious

wave of passion, that seemed like the soul of the dance moving within

our souls, took Alchemica. hold of me, and I was swept, neither

consenting nor refusing, into the midst. I was dancing with an immortal

august woman, who had black lilies in her hair, and her dreamy gesture

seemed laden with a wisdom more profound than the darkness that is

between star and star, and with a love like the love that breathed upon

the waters; and as we danced on and on, the incense drifted over us

and round us, covering us away as in the heart of the world, and ages

seemed to pass, and tempests to awake and perish in the folds of our

robes and in her heavy hair.

Suddenly I remembered that her eyelids had never quivered, and that

her lilies had not dropped a black petal, or shaken from their

places, and understood with a great horror that I danced with one who

was more or less than human, and who was drinking up my soul as an ox

drinks up a wayside pool; and I fell, and darkness passed over me.

I awoke suddenly as though something had awakened me, and saw that I

was lying on a roughly painted floor, and that on the ceiling, which

was at no great distance, was a roughly painted rose, and about me on

the walls half-finished paintings. The pillars and the censers had

gone; and near me a score of sleepers lay wrapped in disordered

robes, their upturned faces looking to my imagination like hollow

masks; and a chill dawn was shining down upon them from a long window

I had not noticed before; and outside the sea roared. I saw Michael

Robartes lying at a little distance and beside him an overset bowl of

wrought bronze which looked as though it had once held incense. As I

sat thus, I heard a sudden tumult of angry men and women's voices mix

with the roaring of the sea; and leaping to my feet, I went quickly

to Michael Robartes, and tried to shake him out of his sleep. I then

seized him by the shoulder and tried to lift him, but he fell

backwards, and sighed faintly; and the voices became louder and

angrier; and there was a sound of heavy blows upon the door, which

opened on to the pier. Suddenly I heard a sound of rending wood, and

I knew it had begun to give, and I ran to the door of the room. I

pushed it open and came out upon a passage whose bare boards

clattered under my feet, and found in the passage another door which

led into an empty kitchen; and as I passed through the door I heard

two crashes in quick succession, and knew by the sudden noise of feet

and the shouts that the door which opened on to the pier had fallen

inwards. I ran from the kitchen and out into a small yard, and from

this down some steps which descended the seaward and sloping side of

the pier, and from the steps clambered along the water's edge, with

the angry voices ringing in my ears. This part of the pier had been

but lately refaced with blocks of granite, so that it was almost

clear of seaweed; but when I came to the old part, I found it so

slippery with green weed that I had to climb up on to the roadway. I

looked towards the Temple of the Alchemical Rose, where the fishermen

and the women were still shouting, but somewhat more faintly, and saw

that there was no one about the door or upon the pier; but as I

looked, a little crowd hurried out of the door and began gathering

large stones from where they were heaped up in readiness for the next

time a storm shattered the pier, when they would be laid under blocks

of granite. While I stood watching the crowd, an old man, who was, I

think, the voteen, pointed to me, and screamed out something, and the

crowd whitened, for all the faces had turned towards me. I ran, and

it was well for me that pullers of the oar are poorer men with their

feet than with their arms and their bodies; and yet while I ran I

scarcely heard the following feet or the angry voices, for many

voices of exultation and lamentation, which were forgotten as a dream

is forgotten the moment they were heard, seemed to be ringing in the

air over my head.

There are moments even now when I seem to hear those voices of

exultation and lamentation, and when the indefinite world, which has

but half lost its mastery over my heart and my intellect, seems about

to claim a perfect mastery; but I carry the rosary about my neck, and

when I hear, or seem to hear them, I press it to my heart and say:

'He whose name is Legion is at our doors deceiving our intellects

with subtlety and flattering our hearts with beauty, and we have no

trust but in Thee'; and then the war that rages within me at other

times is still, and I am at peace.

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