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Title: Occultists & mystics of all ages
Author: Ralph Shirley
Release date: October 22, 2025 [eBook #77108]
Language: English
Original publication: London: William Rider & Son, 1920
Credits: Mairi, David King, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OCCULTISTS & MYSTICS OF ALL AGES ***
Occultists & Mystics of All Ages
OCCULTISTS & MYSTICS OF ALL AGES
BY
RALPH SHIRLEY
AUTHOR OF “THE NEW GOD, AND OTHER ESSAYS,” “A SHORT LIFE OF ABRAHAM
LINCOLN,” ETC.
_WITH FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS_
LONDON
WILLIAM RIDER & SON, LIMITED
8 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. 4
1920
_First Published Autumn 1920._
CONTENTS
1. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA ... 1
2. PLOTINUS ... 31
3. MICHAEL SCOTT ... 54
4. PARACELSUS ... 76
5. EMANUEL SWEDENBORG ... 91
6. COUNT CAGLIOSTRO ... 120
7. ANNA KINGSFORD ... 145
ILLUSTRATIONS
PARACELSUS ... 78
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG ... 92
COUNT CAGLIOSTRO ... 122
ANNA KINGSFORD ... 146
I
APOLLONIUS OF TYANA
The difficulty of treating of such a subject as the life and activities
of the Philosopher of Tyana lies in the fact that the story of
Apollonius’s career has been overlaid with legends of the miraculous on
the one hand, and distorted by religious prejudices on the other; while
the only authoritative account of this great religious reformer is
marred by the glaring deficiencies of the writer for the task which he
had in hand, and his inability to appreciate the life-work of the
subject of his biography. Indeed he fills many pages with literary
padding of the worst kind, while he fails to give us over and over again
the very facts which it is of value and importance for us to know.
Philostratus, the author of this life, was one of the literary coterie
that gathered round the presiding genius of the Empress Julia Domna, the
wife of Septimus Severus and mother of Caracalla. Julia Domna was a
generous patroness of art and literature, and her husband Severus was
devoted to the study of occult science. Gibbon, in his usual sceptical
vein, observes that “he was passionately addicted to the vain studies of
magic and divination, deeply versed in the interpretation of dreams and
omens, and perfectly acquainted with the science of judicial astrology.”
The Empress, who was a daughter of the Priest of the Sun at Emesa in
Syria, was an enthusiastic bibliophile and had collected, among her
other literary treasures, the note-books of Damis, the companion and
fellow traveller of Apollonius. These note-books or tablets contained
the records of his journeys and other details concerning the life of
Apollonius, who was as great a hero to Damis as ever Johnson was to
Boswell. If these notes were as full of detail as Philostratus asserts,
one can only regret that the biographer did not turn them to more useful
account. Damis was a native of Ninus or Nineveh, and Philostratus speaks
somewhat contemptuously of his defective Greek style. But it is probable
that with all their grammatical errors the note-books of Damis would
have given us a truer portrait of the great philosopher than the more
finished phrases and elaborate oratorical devices of Philostratus. The
biographer had also access to a book written by Maximus of Ægæ,
containing a record of Apollonius’s doings at that place. It requires an
acute critic to gauge how much of Philostratus’s narrative is literary
embellishment and interpolated matter, and how much is actually derived
from the original records. Even the Gospels of the Evangelists hardly
present a more difficult task to the critic anxious to discriminate
between the original and the glosses with which it is overlaid.
The other difficulty from which the record of Apollonius’s life and
teachings has suffered is due to the religious disputes which arose
through the rapid growth of Christianity and its conflict with the
previously existing religions of the Roman world. We may argue
legitimately enough that the power of working miracles is no proof of
the truth of the doctrines expounded by any religious teacher. But the
fact remains that in proselytising for Christianity the fullest use was
made of the miracles recorded as accomplished by Jesus in the Gospels,
in support of the contention in favour of the Divine origin of their
worker, and of his work. Illogical though this argument may appear to
the philosophic mind, it is not surprising that it should have carried
great weight, and indeed it must be admitted that it does so even at the
present day. What more natural, then, than that one of the disputants on
the other side should have produced a polemical pamphlet in which he
attempted to show that such an argument was a two-edged weapon, and that
in fact it was possible to produce better evidence in favour of the
miracles attributed to the pagan philosopher Apollonius than for those
of Jesus of Nazareth, and to argue that, this being the case, even
assuming the authenticity of the Gospel narrative, there was no more
justification for regarding the Jewish prophet as a God than the Tyanian
philosopher? Such a criticism of the claims of the Christians was in
fact written by Hierocles, a philosopher of some note and successively
governor of Palmyra, Bithynia, and Alexandria, about the first decade of
the fourth century A.D., under the title of _Philalethes_, or _The
Truth-lover_.
This pamphlet was not long in provoking a rejoinder from a leading light
of the Christian community. The reply, the author of which was Eusebius,
Bishop of Cæsarea, is still extant, though Hierocles’s contribution to
the controversy was destroyed, like much other evidence hostile to
Christianity, by the ecclesiastical authorities, when the new religion
finally became triumphant. Eusebius was able to show that Philostratus
was not a reliable authority, and that his judgment, where the
credibility of a narrative was in question, was clearly at fault. Though
the criticisms of Eusebius might have been applied with equal force to
much of the Gospel record, it is plain that his retort to Hierocles did
not lack point, the veracity of Philostratus being obviously not above
suspicion, and some of his narratives urgently calling for evidential
corroboration, indeed, in certain cases, being mere legend or romance.
This applies in especial to the account given of Apollonius’s journey to
India, which is interspersed with numerous fantastic stories which
appear to be derived by Philostratus from other sources and interpolated
in an unscrupulous manner, with the idea, presumably, of giving local
colour. There are, however, numerous records given which are clearly
taken direct from the narrative of Damis, and the general accuracy of
which there appears to be no adequate reason to call in question. One of
these offers a parallel to the various accounts of the raising of the
dead to life given in the Gospel story, as, for instance, the recalling
to life of the son of the widow of Nain; the raising from the dead of
Jairus’s daughter, and last but not least, the case of Martha and Mary’s
brother Lazarus, which, owing to the circumstances surrounding it, has
caught hold of the popular imagination to a greater extent than either
of the others. The record of the incident referred to is given in
Philostratus’s life[1] as follows:—
Here, too, is a miracle which Apollonius worked: A girl had died
just in the hour of her marriage, and the bridegroom was following
her bier lamenting, as was natural, his marriage left unfulfilled,
and the whole of Rome was mourning with him, for the maiden belonged
to a consular family. Apollonius then witnessing their grief, said:
“Put down the bier, for I will stay the tears that you are shedding
for this maiden.” And withal he asked what was her name. The crowd
accordingly thought that he was about to deliver such an oration as
is commonly delivered as much to grace the funeral as to stir up
lamentation; but he did nothing of the kind, but merely touching her
and whispering in secret some spell over her, at once woke up the
maiden from her seeming death; and the girl spoke out loud, and
returned to her father’s house, just as Alcestis did when she was
brought back to life by Hercules. And the relations of the maiden
wanted to present him with the sum of 150,000 sesterces, but he said
that he would freely present the money to the young lady by way of
dowry. Now, whether he detected some spark of life in her, which
those who were nursing her had not noticed—for it is said that
although it was raining at the time, a vapour went up from her
face—or whether life was really extinct, and he restored it by the
warmth of his touch, is a mysterious problem which neither I myself
nor those who were present could decide.
The record of this incident is presumably taken direct from the notes of
Damis, and is not, I think, to be too lightly set aside. Apollonius does
not appear to have made any claim to supernatural power in the matter,
nor need he be necessarily credited with anything beyond an intuitive
capacity for divining the fact that life had not finally departed. Nor
indeed are we bound to assume anything more than this intuitive capacity
as regards the two first-mentioned miracles in the Gospel records—those
of the son of the widow of Nain and Jairus’s daughter. The raising of
Lazarus may be held to stand in a different category, but it is
noteworthy as regards this, that only one Evangelist records the
incident and that his Gospel is the latest in date of the four. This has
naturally not escaped the attention of the critics, as it is almost
incredible that neither Matthew, Mark, nor Luke should have alluded to
so sensational an incident if they had any knowledge of its occurrence.
On the other hand, so dramatic an event could hardly have failed to
excite the greatest commotion at the time, and must, one would naturally
have supposed, inevitably have reached the ears of those who were
writing biographies of the performer of the miracle. The incident, in
short, is hardly one that could be placed even on the same evidential
plane as the raising of the consul’s daughter at Rome by Apollonius.
The problem as to whether life is, or is not, extinct in any specific
instance has over and over again proved too difficult of solution for
even the ablest of modern doctors, and in cases of trance, opinions of
the medical profession can be freely cited that there is no apparent
difference to be detected between the living and the dead. Numerous
tests have been applied and failed in cases where the patient has
eventually regained consciousness, and it is legitimate to suppose that
a certain clairvoyant power is in some cases alone capable of
determining the possibility of the spirit returning to reoccupy its
mortal tenement. According to occult theory, if the chord or magnetic
link that unites the astral with the physical body has not been
definitely severed, it is still possible for life to be restored. What
more probable than that one gifted with abnormal psychical powers, such
as either Jesus or Apollonius, might diagnose the presence of this
connecting link, which was invisible to all around?
Eusebius argues that the stories told of Apollonius’s psychic powers
detract from his credit as a philosopher. Such powers, he argues, only
appertain to a divine being, and therefore while they may be justly
credited in the case of Jesus they must be dismissed in that of
Apollonius. Such arguments will hardly appeal to the unbiased critic of
the present day. We must recognise, however, that it was Philostratus’s
methods of embellishing his narrative with fantastic oriental and other
legends which gave a loophole for the attack of Eusebius. There was,
indeed, a sufficiently serious sequel to this early passage of arms. The
discussion as to whether or not Apollonius’s miracles were entitled to
be set in juxtaposition to those of the Prophet of Nazareth, proved in
the end to be a veritable red-herring drawn across the track of the
whole story of Apollonius’s life and labours. Though there is no
recorded reference of Apollonius to Jesus or his teachings, he is made
to appear in the light of subsequent controversies as the false prophet
_par excellence_, and worker of pseudo-miracles, sent by the devil,
according to one ingenious commentator, to destroy the work of the
Saviour by an attempt to imitate his miracles, and thus to disprove
their unique character. When the printing press came into vogue and
classical literature was widely disseminated by this means, Aldus
hesitated to print the text of Philostratus’s _Life of Apollonius_, and
only did so finally with the text of Eusebius’s treatise added as an
appendix, so that, as he phrased it, “the antidote might accompany the
poison.” Later on, ingenious Continental commentators advanced the
theory that the life of Apollonius was a myth, and that it had for its
object the defence of classical philosophy as opposed to Christianity.
This theory is as ingenious as it is unconvincing, and even the
authority of its defenders, Baur and Zeller, has failed to secure it a
serious hearing at the present day. It is obvious that the supposed
antagonism between Jesus and Apollonius never really existed at all, and
though probably they were born within twenty years of each other, there
is no evidence to show that there was any connection of any kind between
their respective lives and activities.
The tradition which credits Apollonius with being a worker of miracles
and magician is widespread, but there is comparatively little that is
narrated of him by Philostratus which is incredible, if assumed to have
been performed by a man who had led a life such as that of the Sage of
Tyana, and who was gifted with such psychic powers as we are familiar
with at the present day. We shall probably be right in regarding most of
these narratives of psychic incidents as taken direct from the tablets
of Damis, and therefore in the main authentic, even if the details are
not in every case exact. A few instances will serve to illustrate the
point of what I have said.
After Apollonius’s visit to Athens, in which he was initiated into the
Eleusinian Mysteries, he took ship for Egypt, stopping at Rhodes on the
way. Arriving at Alexandria he found that his reputation had preceded
him, and was met everywhere with reverence and respect. He took
advantage of the friendly popular feeling towards him to intervene in a
case of miscarriage of justice. A robbery had recently taken place in
the town, and twelve men had been condemned in connection with it. An
innocent victim of the general sentence was revealed psychically to
Apollonius. He thereupon called the procession to a halt as they were
being led to execution, and instructed the guard to place the innocent
man last of the twelve. The delay thus secured gave time for a horseman
to ride up with a reprieve for the man in question, whose innocence had
been established subsequently to the trial. It is not difficult to
attribute such a case as this to psychic powers, but, on the other hand,
it is quite open to us to assume that Apollonius had learned something
by normal means as to the doubt hanging over the condemned man’s
implication in the crime.
Never, perhaps, has any possessor of noted psychic powers enjoyed the
friendship or the hostility of so many great Emperors as did Apollonius.
Vespasian and Titus were both intimate in their friendship, and sought
the advice of the sage of Tyana on various notable occasions. It was, it
appears, during this same visit to Alexandria that Vespasian arrived at
the great Egyptian seaport and requested an interview with the sage.
Vespasian explained to him his schemes, for he was already then aiming
at the supreme power. Apollonius encouraged him, and to his great
surprise informed him that it was his destiny to rebuild the temple of
Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome. As a matter of fact the temple had just
been burned down, but the news did not reach Egypt till some time later.
What we call nowadays a telepathic wave had conveyed the incident to the
knowledge of the seer. A similar instance of Apollonius’s telepathic
powers is narrated in connection with the death of Domitian. Apollonius
had previously been arrested by this Emperor on the ridiculous charge of
sacrificing an Arcadian boy, in order, apparently, to discover the
prospects of the succession of Nerva to the Empire. He was acquitted by
the monster who was Nero’s rival in cruelty without Nero’s artistic
talents, to the great surprise of all his friends. The story is that he
vanished mysteriously from the court. We may, however, I think, without
hesitation attribute this incident to Philostratus’s love of the
dramatic, especially as it seems clear that he had already been
acquitted and that there was no apparent reason why he should not walk
out as a free man like any ordinary mortal in similar circumstances.
What strikes the dispassionate reader as really remarkable is the fact
that though Apollonius was twice arrested, once by Nero and again by
Domitian, and though the philosophers of the day, being supposed to be
hostile to the tyrants, met almost invariably with short shrift, the
sage of Tyana was in each case acquitted and left the court, as we say
to-day, “without a stain on his character.” Why, if the Emperors had him
arrested, knowing doubtless the value of the charges against him, did
they not take steps to ensure his condemnation? The fact seems to be,
without doubt, that they regarded him with fear. Whether this fear was
due merely to his reputation as a worker of wonders, or to his actual
psychic power exercised at their expense in the courts of justice, is an
open question, and clearly admits of two opinions.
His own observations on this subject, as quoted by Philostratus, seem,
however, to justify our accepting by preference the latter of the two
views. Speaking to his friends about his intention to take ship for Rome
in order to meet openly any charge that might be made against him rather
than to lie low in some distant corner of the Empire as his disciples
were anxious that he should do, he observed that he would not consider a
man a coward because he had disappeared out of dread of Nero, but would
hail as a philosopher any one who rose superior to such a fear. And he
added, “Let not any one think it foolish so to venture along a path
which many philosophers are fleeing from, for in the first place I do
not esteem any human agency so formidable that a wise man can ever be
terrified by it, and in the second place I would not urge upon you the
pursuit of bravery unless it were attended with danger.” After dwelling
upon the ferocity and brutality of Nero, contrasting him with savage
animals who could sometimes be tamed, and mollified by coaxing and
flattery, whereas Nero was only roused to greater cruelty than before by
those who stroked him, he continued in the following remarkable strain:
If, however, any one is disposed to dread Nero for these reasons,
and is led abruptly to forsake philosophy, conceiving that it is not
safe for him to thwart his evil temper, let him know that the
quality of inspiring fear really belongs to those who are devoted to
temperance and wisdom, because they are sure of Divine succour. But
let him snap his fingers at the threats of the proud and insolent,
as he would at those of drunken men, for we regard these surely as
daft and senseless, but not as formidable.
We are accustomed to refer to Apollonius as a philosopher. While we are
perfectly correct in so doing, it is well to observe what the term
philosophy connotes when employed by the Tyanian sage. It is not
obviously a question merely of adopting a creed or view of life or a
certain set of philosophical opinions, but implies in the fullest
measure the life led in accordance with these opinions and inspired by
the courage with which the knowledge of their truth endows the man who
professes them. The keynote, indeed, to the whole of Apollonius’s life
lies in the fact that his so-called philosophy was an active and
inspiring force which dominated his whole conduct.
I have alluded to the evidence of Apollonius’s telepathic powers in
connection with the death of Domitian. His passage of arms with this
tyrant may have afforded the requisite psychic link. In any case the
Tyanian was made aware of Domitian’s assassination under sufficiently
dramatic circumstances. He had returned to Ionia after a stay of two
years in Greece, and was at the moment speaking at Ephesus. In the midst
of his discourse he seemed to lose the current of his words, and the
audience noticed a troubled expression passing over his features.
Suddenly breaking off any further attempt to continue his speech, he
stepped forward three or four paces on the platform from which he was
addressing the assembly, and cried out in loud tones, “Strike the
tyrant! Strike!” The audience were naturally amazed at this sudden
outburst, but soon coming to himself, Apollonius explained to them that
Domitian had been slain at that hour, and that a vision from the gods
had been granted to him at the moment of what actually took place. News
arrived in due course confirming his statement. This story is narrated
by Dion Cassius as well as by Philostratus.
Beyond these records there are several others of a sufficiently
startling character, which it is not easy to take too literally. There
is, for instance, the narrative of the rescue of a young Athenian from
the clutches of a vampire. The youth, according to the story, mistook
the vampire for a normal living woman, and being infatuated with her,
was on the point of marrying her until Apollonius dispelled the
illusion. Probably this was one of the many romances that had collected
round the name of Apollonius between his death and the time of
Philostratus, though there may possibly have been some small grain of
truth at the bottom of it. Another story which may have had some basis
in fact, has been so embroidered upon as to render it quite incredible
in the form in which it is presented by the biographer. This relates to
the supposed interview of Apollonius with the ghost of Achilles, which
was held to haunt the tomb of the Grecian hero. The reputation of
Apollonius was so great and his supposed power as a worker of miracles
had obtained so widespread a currency by the second century of our era
that all sorts of miraculous happenings were readily credited by the
ignorant public when ascribed to the Tyanian sage. Philostratus appears
to have made use of certain of these floating stories.
That the name of Apollonius was regarded with the greatest veneration
during the centuries following his death is abundantly evident.
Caracalla (Roman Emperor 211-216 A.D.) honoured his memory with a chapel
or monument (_heroum_). Alexander Severus (Emperor 225-235 A.D.) placed
his statue in his _lararium_ along with those of Christ, Abraham, and
Orpheus. Aurelius is stated to have vowed a temple to the sage of Tyana,
of whom he had seen a vision. Vopiscus at the end of the third century
speaks of him as “a sage of the most widespread renown and authority, an
ancient philosopher and a true friend of the gods.” “He it was,” says
Vopiscus, “who gave life to the dead. He it was who did and said so many
things beyond the power of men.” In the work entitled _Quaestiones et
Responsiones ad Orthodoxos_, attributed (though apparently in error) to
Justin Martyr, occurs among other of these “questions” the following:
“If God is the maker and master of creation how do the _telesmata_ of
Apollonius have power in the orders of that creation? For as we see,
they check the fury of the waves and the power of the winds, and the
inroads of vermin and attacks of wild beasts.” These _telesmata_ or
talismans were articles that had been, or were supposed to have been,
consecrated or magnetised, with some religious ceremony, by
Apollonius.[2]
We see, then, that around the name of this philosopher gathered, as time
went on, a mass of more or less incredible miraculous tradition. And, as
happens too often in such cases, the real work of this great religious
reformer was lost sight of amid this accumulation of legend that
impressed the popular eye, which was too dull to appreciate or
understand the deeper significance of the life-work and esoteric
teaching of the sage. Orthodox religion in the Roman Empire had indeed
at this time fallen into very much the same sort of discredit as
orthodox Christianity has among ourselves to-day. Two definite attempts
were made to resuscitate these old religions of Greece and Rome by
reviving the understanding of the essential spiritual truths which they
enshrined; the first by Apollonius of Tyana, who was above all else a
reformer of the ancient Greek religion from within, and the other, an
abortive one three hundred years later, by Julian the so-called
Apostate. These classical faiths were, however, too much overlaid with
mythological stories of an unedifying character ever again to recover
their ascendancy over the popular imagination, and the ascetic life and
esoteric interpretation which appealed to the isolated religious
communities which Apollonius visited in his extensive travels throughout
the countries bordering the Mediterranean, and as far east as Persia and
India, could not in their very nature make a popular appeal to the
average man. We see now that the triumph of Christianity was due to the
universality of its appeal, and that however uncertain the issue of the
struggle of the contending faiths appeared at the time, that issue was
never really in doubt. The ascetic philosopher worked for the little
public to whom the life of self-denial and esoteric truth are all in
all, and to whom the world and the pursuits of the ordinary citizen take
a place of minor importance. The “friend of publicans and sinners,” “who
was in all things tempted like as we are,” was able to “draw all men
unto him” by a compelling force such as the austere discipline and
profound philosophy of Apollonius could never command. Jesus of
Nazareth, in short, triumphed—and there is a profound significance in
this fact—because mankind in the realisation of his true humanity forgot
that he was accounted a God. The life of Apollonius was so far removed
from anything the average man could comprehend that the world lost sight
of the wisdom and deep spirituality of his teaching, in amazement at a
worker of miracles so far beyond human ken that he came to be reckoned
even a manifestation of Deity.
We are not, however, justified in supposing that it was primarily to his
miracle-working powers that Apollonius owed his reputation among his
contemporaries. It was rather as the wise man who had more knowledge and
experience of the world than those around him, whose judgment was
sounder and more unbiased by personal considerations than other men’s,
and whose high spirituality kept him aloof from all considerations of
private gain or private interest, that Apollonius was regarded by the
men of his own day. Later tradition which invested him with all kinds of
miraculous achievements served to dim the halo round a great name. The
foremost men of his time in thought and action, the Emperors Vespasian,
Titus, and many others, did not come to consult Apollonius because he
was some master magician. We do not in effect ask advice of a man in our
hour of need because he can do the vanishing trick in a court of law, or
pull rabbits out of his hat when there are no rabbits to pull, or do any
of the marvellous performances which strike the vulgar with amazement.
We seek rather the advice of one whose judgment is saner and whose
knowledge of the world is greater than that of his fellows. It was for
this reason that the wisest of the Roman Emperors came to consult
Apollonius by preference with regard to the great task with which they
were entrusted, when they had all the highest intellects in the Roman
Empire from which to choose.
The account of Titus’s first meeting with the Tyanian sage is of some
interest, and not without its humorous side. Apollonius, who was already
acquainted with his father, sent greetings to Titus, after the
suppression of the Jewish insurrection, saying in characteristic manner,
“Whereas you have refused to be proclaimed for success in war and for
shedding the blood of your enemies, I myself assign to you the crown of
temperance and moderation because you thoroughly understand what deeds
really merit a crown.” Titus thoroughly appreciated the compliment, and
was not to be outdone by the other’s courtesy. “On my own behalf,” he
replied, “I thank you no less than on behalf of my father, and I will
not forget your kindness. For although I have captured Jerusalem, you
have captured me.”
After Titus had been appointed to share his father’s responsibilities in
the government of the Empire he did not forget Apollonius, and when he
was in Tarsus wrote to the sage begging him to come and see him.
When he had arrived [says the narrative], Titus embraced him,
saying, “My father has told me by letter everything in respect of
which he consulted you; and lo! here is his letter, in which you are
described as his benefactor and the being to whom we owe all that we
are. Now though I am only just thirty years of age, I am held worthy
of the same privileges to which my father only attained at the age
of sixty. I am called to the throne to rule, perhaps before I have
learnt myself to obey, and I therefore dread lest I am undertaking a
task beyond my powers.” Thereupon Apollonius, after stroking his
neck, said (for he had as stout a neck as any athlete in training),
“And who will force so sturdy a bull-neck as yours under the yoke?”
“He that from my youth up reared me as a calf,” answered Titus,
meaning his own father, and implying that he could only be
controlled by the latter, who had accustomed him from childhood to
obey himself. “I am delighted then,” said Apollonius, “in the first
place, to see you prepared to subordinate yourself to your father,
whom without being his natural children so many are delighted to
obey, and next to see you rendering to his court homage in which
others will associate yourself. When youth and age are paired in
authority, is there any lyre or any flute that will produce so sweet
a harmony and so nicely blended? For the qualities of old age will
be associated with those of youth, with the result that old age will
gain in strength and youth in discipline.”
The records of Apollonius’s pithy sayings are very numerous and give a
better insight into the man’s character than the startling achievements
with which he is so commonly credited. Once, when staying at Smyrna, he
complimented the inhabitants on their zeal for letters and philosophy
and their numerous activities, urging them to take pride rather in
themselves than in the beauty of their city, for “although they had the
most beautiful of cities under the sun, and although they had a friendly
sea at their doors, nevertheless it was more pleasing for the city to be
crowned with men than with porticoes and pictures, or even with gold in
excess of what they needed.” “For,” he said, “public edifices remain
where they are and are nowhere seen except in that particular part of
the earth where they exist, but good men are conspicuous everywhere and
everywhere talked about, and so they can magnify the city the more to
which they belong in proportion to the numbers in which they are able to
visit any part of the earth.” And again, when visiting the monument to
Leonidas, the hero of Thermopylæ, he was enthusiastic in admiration for
the Greek leader, and on coming to the mound where the Lacedemonians
were said to have been overwhelmed by the arrows which the enemy rained
upon them, he heard his companions discussing with one another which was
the loftiest peak in Hellas, the topic being suggested, apparently, by
the sight of Mount Oeta which rose before their eyes. Accordingly
ascending the mound, he said, “I consider this the loftiest of all, for
those who fell here in defence of freedom raised it to a level with Oeta
and carried it to a height surpassing many mountains like Olympus.” On
another occasion when, on arriving at Athens, and meeting with an
enthusiastic reception at the hands of the people, he proposed to be
initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, the hierophant showed jealousy
of Apollonius’s great reputation, which he felt put his own into the
shade, and was reluctant, accordingly, to admit so formidable a rival.
He therefore made the excuse that Apollonius was a wizard and had
dabbled in impure rites, and that he could not in consequence consent to
initiate him. Apollonius, however, was fully equal to the occasion, and
retorted, “You have not yet mentioned the chief head of my offending,
which is that knowing as I do more about the initiatory rite than you do
yourself, I have nevertheless come for initiation to you as if you were
wiser than I am.” The attitude of the crowd was so hostile to the
hierophant, on discovering his rejection of their honoured guest, that
he found it advisable to change his tone. But Apollonius preferred to
postpone his initiation till a later occasion, and, it is said, foretold
the name of the successor who was destined to initiate him four years
after.
Of many men who have led a deeply spiritual life and sacrificed
everything for the sake of the pursuit of a spiritual ideal, it is
recorded that they were wild and profligate in youth. Such was the case
with St Francis of Assisi, and Apollonius’s contemporary, the zealous
Saul of Tarsus, led a changed life from the moment of his conversion.
Indeed it has been said, referring doubtless to such instances, that
“the greater the sinner the greater the saint.” This saying, however, is
by no means applicable to Apollonius. From his earliest days his choice
was made clear. He came of a family which was at once wealthy and
well-connected, and in addition to this he was endowed by nature with
exceptional abilities and a remarkable memory, while the beauty of his
person excited universal admiration. Every temptation, therefore, which
fortune could offer, might, one would have thought, have led him to
choose the path of worldly success. From the age of fourteen, however,
he abandoned all idea of the pursuit of pleasure and devoted himself to
discovering among the numerous Greek philosophies of the day some school
of thought which would enable him to live up to his own ideals. Finally
he adopted the system of Pythagoras, but was not content to receive it
in the sense of accepting its doctrines and not living the life, after
the manner of his teacher, Euxenus. Accordingly when Euxenus asked him
how he would begin his new mode of life, he replied, “As doctors purge
their patients.” “Hence” (says G. R. S. Mead, in his Biography), “he
refused to touch anything that had animal life in it, on the ground that
it densified the mind and rendered it impure. He considered that the
only pure form of food was what the earth produced, fruits and
vegetables. He also abstained from wine, for, though it was made from
fruit, it rendered turbid the ether in the soul, and destroyed the
composure of the mind.” In addition to this, he went barefoot, let his
hair grow long, and wore nothing but linen.
On the death of his father, when he was twenty years of age, he
inherited a considerable fortune, which was left to him to share with
his elder brother, a dissolute young man of three-and-twenty. When his
brother had run through his share of the patrimony, he endeavoured
(successfully as it appears) to rescue him from his vicious life, and
made over to him half his own share of the inheritance. Having
distributed the major part of the remainder among his relatives, he
merely retained for himself a bare pittance.
Before starting on his missionary activities—he was probably by far the
greatest traveller of his time—he took the vow of silence for five
years. After this, he travelled from place to place making the
acquaintance of temple priests and heads of the religious communities,
endeavouring always to bring back the public cults to the purity of
their ancient traditions and to suggest improvements in the practices of
the private brotherhoods, the most important part of his work being
devoted to those who were followers of the inner life. _Public_
instruction in ethics and practical life he never gave until after the
middle of the day, “for,” he said, “those who live the inner life should
on day’s dawning enter the presence of the gods, spending the time till
midday in giving and receiving instructions in holy things.” His Indian
expedition, from which his friends and disciples endeavoured to dissuade
him, he undertook, as he stated, on the advice of his inner monitor,
starting his perilous undertaking entirely alone, and so continuing
until he made the acquaintance of Damis at Nineveh.
There is some doubt as to the date of Apollonius’s birth, but an
allusion by Philostratus makes it appear that he was quite a young man
at the time of his Indian expedition, and as he apparently did not
commence his five years’ vow of silence till after he came of age, we
must assume that he was somewhere between twenty-six and thirty at the
commencement of this undertaking. Treadwell dates the Indian travels as
from 41 to 54 A.D. If this is approximately accurate we may assign his
birth-date to the second decade of the first century of the Christian
era. Assuming this to be the case, he was presumably over eighty years
old at the time of his death, which occurred about 98 A.D. Damis had
been his almost inseparable companion from the time when he first met
him at Nineveh. It seems to have been a case of something akin to “love
at first sight,” for the Assyrian was seized at once with an enthusiasm
for the nobility of Apollonius’s character, which was blent with a
natural and even dog-like affection. At the last, however, his companion
was not with him, and there is some mystery as to the exact place and
occasion of his death. He sent Damis away when the expected time
approached, on the pretext of entrusting him with a confidential letter
to the Emperor Nerva, so that it may be said of him, as it was of Moses,
“No man knoweth his burial place unto this day.”
Apollonius had never reason to regret his Indian travels. He became
deeply imbued with the metaphysical ideas of the Brahmins, and was in
the habit ever after of extolling their spiritual philosophy as the
fountain-head of all the profounder truths of Western religion. As to
Damis’s record of Apollonius’s sojourn with the Indian Philosophers, we
have only Philostratus’s garbled account to guide us, and the quotation
of Apollonius’s cryptic observation, “I saw men dwelling on the earth
and yet not on it; defended on all sides, without any defence; and yet
possessed of nothing but what all possessed.” It may be well to quote
the interpretation of this saying given by Mr Mead. “They were on the
earth but not of the earth, for their minds were set on things above.
They were protected by their innate spiritual power, of which we have so
many instances in Indian literature. And yet they possessed nothing but
what all men possess if they would but develop the spiritual part of
their being.” There are a good many references in the conversations with
Apollonius to the belief in Reincarnation, which was of course an
essential tenet of Pythagorean philosophy, and he himself averred that
in his previous life he was a man of no consequence, to wit, a ship’s
pilot. A letter ascribed to him, whether rightly or wrongly, has some
interesting observations on this subject.
“Why has this false notion,” he asks, “of birth and death” (_i.e._,
that they are real and not illusory in character)—“why has this
false notion remained so long without being refuted? Some think that
what has happened through them they have themselves brought about.
They are ignorant that the individual is brought to birth _through_
parents, not _by_ parents. Just as a thing produced through the
earth is not produced from it. The change which comes to the
individual is nothing that is caused by his visible surroundings,
but rather a change in the one thing which is in every man.”
The portrait of Apollonius which has been handed down through many
generations has become blurred and disfigured beyond recognition, and it
seemed therefore well to give, even if in but a brief outline, such a
sketch as might convey a juster idea of the philosopher whose friendship
the greatest men of his day considered it their highest honour to enjoy,
the man who chose the path of sanctity at a time of life when others
choose “the primrose path of dalliance,” who chose Wisdom for her own
sake and Truth for the sake of Truth.
The world holds no record of a long life lived more nobly, of a more
undaunted courage in confronting the tyrant, of a more unflinching
tenacity of purpose, of a more single-minded devotion to a high ideal.
His boyhood’s choice, the inspiration of his manhood, the beacon-light
of his latest years—to follow in the footsteps of that Form, so austere
in the simplicity of her loveliness, “whose ways are ways of
pleasantness and all whose paths are peace.”[3]
Footnote 1:
_Philostratus_, Book IV, chapter xlv. I am indebted to Dr Conybeare’s
translation, published by Messrs Heinemann, for this and some other
quotations. The book is a very useful one, the Greek and English being
given side by side.
Footnote 2:
I am indebted to G. R. S. Mead’s work, _Apollonius of Tyana, The
Philosopher-Reformer of the First Century A.D._ (London: T. P. S.),
for these particulars.
Footnote 3:
“Happy is the man that findeth wisdom. Length of days is in her right
hand and in her left hand riches and honour. Her ways are ways of
pleasantness and all her paths are peace” (Prov. iii. 13, 16, 17).
II
PLOTINUS
The problem of the origin of the universe is one with which every
religion in a certain sense claims to deal; but it is a problem only of
the most recondite sphere of metaphysics, while religions generally, in
order to ensure their success, make appeal to popular sympathy and
endeavour to bring down the truths which they enshrine to the
intellectual level of the masses of mankind. To put abstruse truths into
simple language is an impossibility. They can, however, be conveyed by a
species of symbolism, or presented in an allegorical form which will be
interpreted in one sense by the vulgar and in another by the philosopher
or the religious initiate. The communication of these hidden truths has
been represented in the case of most religions as a definite revelation
from a higher plane; but whatever claim is made as to their origin, they
are at least put before the rank and file of the faithful as dogmas to
be accepted unhesitatingly as a vital element of the orthodox religion
of the time or country. Such dogmas in their crude form, it is needless
to say, have never made appeal to the high philosophical intelligence of
the day. Under the autocratic regime of persecuting Christianity during
the Middle Ages of Europe, Christian dogma was indeed accepted nominally
by great intellects, but it was accepted under duress and with a
reservation, and subject to such interpretations of its inner meaning as
might commend themselves to the mental standpoint of their professor.
The men of highest intellect were compelled to express the faith that
was in them in the most guarded language, and if they failed to do so
they were only too liable to share the fate of Galileo, or—worse
still—of Giordano Bruno. The sole exception to this rule is to be found
in Oriental countries, such as India, where religion, whether Brahmin or
Buddhist, has assumed a less dogmatic form, and has found it possible
accordingly to assimilate and identify itself with philosophical
speculations of the profoundest and most abstruse character, without any
sense of incongruity or doing violence to its own specific tenets. It is
true that Mohammedanism appears to contradict this, but it must be
remembered that the religion of Mohammed was in the nature of a foreign
importation and not indigenous to Indian soil.
Thus it came about that the philosophers of early Greece and Rome were
almost invariably avowed sceptics as regards the popular religious
beliefs of their time, though in spite of this, with the sole exception
of Socrates, they were allowed to preach their doctrines openly in the
market place without let or hindrance. Thus, too, the triumph of
Christianity brought it eventually into open antagonism with philosophic
thought. In this case, however, the dogmatic and intolerant character of
the creed suffered no rival schools of opinion, and accordingly, within
200 years of the date at which it was established by Constantine as the
recognised religion of the Roman Empire, the Athenian schools of
philosophy were forcibly suppressed by Justinian.[4] For some two and a
half centuries before this latter date Neoplatonism in one form or
another had dominated the intellectual world of philosophy. It had
superseded the materialistic philosophies of earlier Rome and Greece,
and even before the time of Constantine, the Stoic and Epicurean schools
of thought had already ceased to appeal to the inquiring spirit of the
time. When, after a thousand years of intervening barbarism, under the
influence of the Renaissance movement, men began to turn their attention
once more to classic scholarship and classic philosophy, it was to
Plato, mainly as interpreted by his successor and follower, Plotinus,
that the leading spirits of the day turned in search of a solution of
those problems of life which were once more pressing for interpretation,
after the intellectual death in life of the Dark Ages, following the
break-up of the Roman Empire. Christianity, indeed, had its
metaphysics—for every religion is bound, in a sense, to explain its
Divinity to its devotees—but they were the bastard metaphysics of the
Athanasian Creed, the expression of a political compromise drawn up to
satisfy the warring sects of Christendom. Far different was the effort
of Plotinus, who sought not only to solve the riddle of the sphinx, but
to express in language intelligible to his hearers the solution of the
profoundest mysteries of the universe. How far he succeeded in doing so
is yet in dispute to the present day. At least the basis of his
philosophy still remains as an attempted approximation to the truth
which forms the groundwork for the efforts of every new seeker after
spiritual enlightenment.
At the date of the birth of Plotinus, Alexandria was the intellectual
capital of the world. There met East and West, in spite of Mr Rudyard
Kipling’s dictum to the contrary. There the philosophical and
intellectual speculations of the entire civilised world enjoyed a common
forum where the most diverse views found a ready audience. There Philo
interpreted Judaism in terms of current Greek thought. There Gnostics
and Christians contended for the supremacy of their various religious
doctrines. There, among others, Ammonius Saccas lectured on his
philosophical interpretation of the universal life, first from a
standpoint akin to that of the new Christian religion, which was already
obtaining so many converts, and later from an independent platform of
his own. To him, after listening to many different philosophers, in
whose views he found neither satisfaction nor illumination, came the
most illustrious of his pupils, Plotinus. Plotinus was at this time
about twenty-eight (he was born probably at Lycopolis in Egypt, in the
year 205 or 206 A.D.), and he continued to remain at Alexandria and to
elaborate his theories under the auspices of his master, Ammonius, for
some eleven years. At the expiration of this period the similarity of
the philosophy of Ammonius to that taught by the Brahmins of India, and
doubtless also the interest in these Oriental conceptions which had been
stimulated by the travels of Apollonius of Tyana, led to a decision on
the part of Plotinus to emulate the Tyanian sage and himself embark on a
similar mission. The expedition of the Emperor Gordian against the
Persians appeared to supply a favourable opportunity for carrying out
this project. This expedition was, however, destined to disaster, and
Gordian met with an untimely end. Plotinus himself barely escaped with
his life, but eventually reached Antioch in safety. Our philosopher did
not remain long in the Syrian capital, but at the earliest opportunity
sailed for Rome, where the remainder of his life was spent in lecturing
and in philosophic study and discussion.
It was not until he had lived in Rome for ten years that, at the urgent
request of his followers, he commenced writing what subsequently became
known as _The Enneads of Plotinus_. Twenty-one of these books were
completed when, at the age of fifty-nine, he first met Porphyry, who is
our principal source of information with regard to his manner of life
and the main facts of his career. To Porphyry was eventually allotted
the task of editing his writings, which he divided into six volumes of
nine books each, the number of books in each volume being thus used to
give a name to his whole system of philosophy (Enneads, Greek ἐννεα,
nine).
That his treatises were in urgent need of a competent editor is apparent
from the observations which Porphyry makes with regard to his methods of
composition. He was in the habit of writing down his thoughts just as
they occurred to him, and “could not (says his biographer) by any means
endure to review twice what he had written, nor even to read his own
composition,” mainly on account of his defective eyesight. Nor, indeed,
was he by any means a perfect master of the Greek language, in which his
lectures were delivered and his books written. Porphyry in fact
observes, let us hope with some exaggeration, that he “neither formed
the letters with accuracy, nor exactly distinguished the syllables, nor
bestowed any diligent attention on the orthography, but neglecting all
these as trifles, he was alone attentive to the intellection of his
wonderful mind, and, to the admiration of all his disciples, persevered
in this custom to the end of his life.”
One is, indeed, not a little impressed how entirely, in the later days
of the Roman Empire, “captive Greece led captive her conquerors.” Greek
philosophy and Greek ideas had, in truth, permeated the whole civilised
world. Not only was this the case, but when the Western or Roman Empire
fell eventually into decrepitude and ruin, its Eastern partner, though
threatened and harassed by barbarian foes on all its borders, continued
to survive the extinction of the erstwhile mistress of the world by
something like a thousand years. Alexandria was, however, destined to
destruction by an Arab invasion long ere this, and never recovered from
its sack by the Mohammedan Amru in A.D. 640. The survival of the Eastern
Empire was doubtless due in great part to the superior vitality of the
Greek race; but it does not admit of doubt that it would have fallen a
victim to the Moslem invader at least 500 years before the date of its
final doom, had it not been for Constantine’s choice of an Eastern
capital and the almost impregnable position enjoyed by the imperial
city. It is open to conjecture that had the British Government of the
present day been better acquainted with the history of Constantinople
and the many sieges which it had successfully sustained, they would have
thought twice, and indeed thrice, before launching without adequate
preparation, the ill-fated expedition to the Dardanelles.
The dialectical disquisitions of Plotinus were delivered in Greek, and
his whole trend of thought was essentially Greek in character. One is
inclined to ask oneself indeed whether the Latin language would have
been capable of expressing the subtleties of his philosophical
speculation. In this connection the similarity of his ideas to those
enunciated in the great Vedantic system of Indian philosophy must not
blind us to the fact that his method of treating his subject, and the
closely reasoned arguments which he adduces in the defence of his scheme
of the universe, are purely and entirely Greek. This appears to me to be
the real truth in relation to a much disputed point, as to what Plotinus
owed to Indian thought on the one hand, and to Greek culture and Greek
philosophy on the other.
When Milton appealed to the Divine Muse to enable him to “soar above the
Aonian Mount” and achieve “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,” he
was in truth taking on a small order compared with the tremendous task
which Plotinus set himself in his attempted solution of the riddle of
the universe. To say that his exposition of his system lends itself to
criticism in more than one vital point is merely to state that he was
human. Whoever attempts to go behind phenomena and postulate a First
Cause, whether we denominate that Cause The One, like Plotinus, or The
Good, like Plato, or The Absolute, like Herbert Spencer, is manifestly
passing into realms of thought with which the human mind is incompetent
to deal. It stands to reason, indeed, that the finite mind cannot
comprehend the infinite, and logic, therefore, inevitably fails us. But
there is in truth another side to this most recondite problem. Though
logic cannot fathom it, and though the finite cannot comprehend the
infinite, yet the infinite spirit may contact infinity. In other words,
the infinite in man, that is, the divine spark, which is part and parcel
of infinity, may realise the infinite within itself, not, indeed, by any
logical process, but by the immediate experience implicit in spiritual
union. Hence the possibility of that form of mystical ecstasy which has
been denominated Cosmic Consciousness, and which it is narrated that
Plotinus experienced no less than four times during the six years,
262-268, when Porphyry was his companion in Rome. The effect of these
experiences on Plotinus is very evident in his philosophy. They led to
his emphasising the unity of all creation, and its oneness with the
Divine, and the natural corollary of this, the illusory nature of
separate individuality. Hence that which causes individuality, the
principle of limitation inherent in matter, appears to him itself also
of an illusory nature, that is, essentially incapable of acquiring or
participating in real existence. From this negative character of matter
arise, according to Plotinus, the imperfections of the material
universe, and its inability to conform to the ideal or intelligible
order.
At the basis of the system of Plotinus there is postulated then an ideal
universe which constitutes an archetype or pattern of the phenomenal
order which our senses apprehend. Plotinus assumes three root principles
which he denominates the Three Divine Hypostases, and which have been
since designated the Alexandrian Trinity, though it would be a mistake
to confuse this triad with the Trinity of the Christian Creed. The First
Divine Hypostasis is the Prime Source of Being, denominated, as already
stated, the One or the Good. This corresponds to the Absolute of the
Spencerian philosophy, and Plotinus tells us that it transcends all
known attributes—so much so, in fact, that even existence itself cannot
be predicated of it. Every being, according to the Plotinian system,
tends to produce an image of itself. Hence we have the Second and Third
of these Divine Principles, emanating in their turn from the First. The
Second Divine Hypostasis our philosopher designates the Intelligible
Universe or Universal Intelligence. This is the sphere of Absolute
Reality or Essence, and constitutes a manifestation of the creative
power of the One. The Third Divine Hypostasis is the Universal Soul, and
this again is the image of the Second; but it differs from its principal
in the fact that life in its sphere is no longer inert or motionless,
but revolves about and within the Universal Intelligence. By way of
explanation, Plotinus offers the parallel of one circle enclosed within
another and larger but concentric circle which revolves about it, the
common centre of both being represented by the One or First Hypostasis,
the motionless inner circle by the Universal Intelligence, and the
revolving outer circle by the Universal Soul; though it is recognised
that this form of symbolism can be pressed too far, as the expressions
“external” and “internal” in this connection have no real validity.
Matter, as already stated, is regarded as possessing no definite
attributes of its own; but it is capable of receiving a semblance of
life by reflecting the forms derived by the Universal Soul from the
Second Divine Principle or Intelligible Universe. Matter, then, serves
as a mirror upon which the Universal Soul projects the images or
reflections of its creations, and thus gives rise to the phenomena of
the sensible universe. This universe, which we are accustomed to term
the Phenomenal World, holds an intermediate position between Reality and
Negation owing to its participation in matter, which Plotinus identifies
with Evil as being the negation of the Spiritual or Real. The existence
of the Universal Soul is an eternal contemplation of the One as revealed
in the sphere of Intelligence or Beauty (the Second Divine Hypostasis)
and is itself an indivisible noncorporeal essence, possessing
omnipresent consciousness. While, then, one part of the Universal Soul
inhabits the sphere of Intelligence, its inferior part has relation with
the Sensible World, or Material Universe. The Universal Soul by this
relation with the Material Universe gives birth to the phenomena of
Nature in all their varied manifestation. But whereas the object of
contemplation of the Universal Soul is the One as revealed in terms of
Beauty or the Intelligible Order, the object of the contemplation of
Nature is Nature itself. Nature, in short, contemplates the forms of its
own creation, and hence arise the imperfections of its manifestation.
“The character of the material universe [following Dr Whitby,[5] in his
summary of the doctrine of Plotinus] is thus due to the irradiation of
matter or chaos by the complex unity of forms or reasons (_logoi_)
derived by the Universal Soul from its contemplation of the sphere of
essential reality and Absolute Perfection. By reason of the inability of
matter to participate fully in the real qualities of existence, it
follows that the perfection of the material universe is inferior to that
of the Universal Soul, and still more so to that of the Intelligible
Universe.” In writing “on the nature and origin of evil,” our
philosopher observes, “Whatever is deficient of good in a small degree
is not yet evil, since it is capable from its nature of becoming
perfect. But whatever is perfectly destitute of good, and such is
matter, is evil in reality, possessing no portion of good. For, indeed,
matter does not, properly speaking, possess being, by means of which it
might be invested with good. But the attribute of being is only
equivocally affirmed of matter.”
The association of matter with the soul arises from the voluntary
determination of the individual consciousness towards the material
plane. But it must not be supposed that this commingling of the soul and
matter results in any actual union between the two in the same sense as
in the chemical world hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water. For
matter, as explained above, is in the nature of a mirror which the
divine light of the soul illuminates but which is incapable of receiving
into itself that light by which it is illuminated. “But [observes
Plotinus][6] matter obscures by its sordid mixture and renders feeble
the light which emanates from the soul and, by opposing the waters of
generation, it occasions the soul’s entrance into the rapid stream, and
by this means renders her light, which is in itself vigorous and pure,
polluted and feeble, like the faint glimmerings from a watch tower
beheld in a storm. For if matter were never present, the soul would
never approach to generation; and this is the lapse of the soul, thus to
descend into matter and become debilitated and impure, inasmuch as
matter prohibits many of the soul’s powers from their natural
activities, comprehending and as it were contracting the place which the
soul contains, in her dark embrace.” Matter thus is the cause of the
evil inherent in the material world, as without this the soul would have
for ever remained “permanent and pure.”
Matter, in itself, possesses no form, being unable to sustain order or
measure. The soul, however, by its union with matter, imposes form upon
it, this form being the result of the combination of the limitation
inherent in matter, in union with the archetypal idea of which the soul
is the expression. We have, then, a conception of the universe, of which
the One represents Infinity, and matter, the opposite pole, or zero.
Owing, however, to the fact that no attributes or qualities can be
predicated of the One, and that this is, in a negative sense, also the
case with matter, which is the privation of being, we arrive at a
certain confusion, the attempts of our philosopher to explain matter
leading to phrases which are equally applicable to Infinity or the One.
The two extremes of Absolute Being and Non-Being appear, in short, to
meet, and a resulting bewilderment arises in the mind, which one is
rather inclined to gather, was not entirely absent from the thought of
Plotinus himself. It may be suggested, tentatively, that this _impasse_
arises rather from the failure of Plotinus to describe the One in more
positive terms, than in his defective description of the negative
qualities of matter. The fact that the One of Plotinus is conceived of
as such that no language is able to express it, does not, in reality,
justify the philosopher in describing it in terms of negation, however
much positive statements may fall short of portraying the Absolute
Reality. Of matter itself, however, we ought perhaps to predicate a
relative though inferior reality; even while we admit that the presence
of spirit is in inverse proportion to the density of matter.
In the view of Plotinus the universe is a single vast conscious organism
of which all the parts are similarly endowed with consciousness. He
attributes a species of divinity to the Sun and the stars, and appears
to accept the theory of planetary spirits. Thus also Origen observes:
“As our body while consisting of human members is yet held together by
one soul, so the universe is to be thought of as an immense living being
which is held together by one soul, the power of the logos, God.”
According to Plotinus it is truer to state that the body is in the soul
than that the soul is in the body, inasmuch as the soul is transcendent
as well as immanent in the corporeal form. Thus, when a particular body
acquires life the soul which is destined to animate it does not in
reality descend into it and become identified with it, but rather the
body comes within the sphere of its influence, thus attaining to the
world of life. This explanation is, it seems to me, helpful in enabling
us to understand the gradual process by which the individual
consciousness becomes _en rapport_ with the immature bodies of
childhood. Following out the same theory we can understand the doctrine
of early Gnostic sects, that Jesus of Nazareth was overshadowed by the
Christ, and also we may believe, if we will, that the guardian angels of
the little children who, as Jesus asserted, “do always behold the face
of My Father which is in Heaven” are indeed their own higher spiritual
selves, attracted on the one hand to those physical bodies of which they
are the prospective tenants, and on the other looking regretfully back
to their pre-natal home in the spiritual world.
Like the Deity, the soul is in the nature of a trinity, the occult
axiom, “As above, so below” being implicit in Plotinus’s philosophy.
Thus man consists, firstly, of the animal, or sensual soul, which is
closely united with the body; secondly, of the logical, or reasoning
soul; and thirdly, of that individualised portion of the divine essence
whose proper habitation is the Intelligible Universe, of which it in its
origin forms a part. The return of the soul to the One is accomplished
by means of a gradual process of purification, which eventually, after
an immeasurable period of time, releases the soul from its inclination
towards the plane of sensibility; _i.e._ its attraction to the material
world. The philosophy of Plotinus thus included the doctrine of
metempsychosis, as regards the affirmation of the truth of which he is
very emphatic. For he declares that “The gods bestow on each the destiny
which appertains to him, and which harmonises with his antecedents in
his successive existences. Every one who is not aware of this is grossly
ignorant of divine matters.” He would even appear to admit that at times
fallen human souls are imprisoned in the bodies of animals, but speaks
less confidently on this head.
The conceptions of Plotinus explain many of those psychical phenomena
which have so much puzzled our modern scientists, and offer a solution
for the much-debated problems involved in the phenomena of telepathy,
magic, and planetary influence. “The sensitivity of nature [writes Dr
Whitby, summarising this side of Plotinus’s philosophy] is manifested as
a vital nexus in virtue of which every minutest and remotest particle of
the universe is intimately correlated and symbolically united to the
rest. The universe as a whole, although thus endowed with a potential
sensitivity, may nevertheless be considered as impassive, because the
soul which animates and pervades it has no need of sensations for its
own enlightenment and does not, in fact, regard them. Nevertheless, and
for the simple reason that nature is a living organism, sympathetic
throughout, individual parts of the universe have a quasi-sensitivity,
and respond to impressions from without. When, for example, the stars,
in answer to human invocations, confer benefits upon men, they do so,
not by a voluntary action, but because their natural or unreasoning
psychical faculties are unconsciously affected. Similarly demons may be
charmed by spells or prayers acting upon the unreasoning part of their
nature.” For, according to Plotinus, the universe is a vast chain, of
which every being is a link.
Plotinus, like every one else who has attempted to solve the Riddle of
the Sphinx, is up against the basic facts of existence. Boldly and
perseveringly as we may attempt to face the problem, the Sphinx sits and
smiles with the smile that will not come off, well knowing that however
near we may seem to be to the solution of the mystery, the problem will
still baffle us, and remain unsolved to the end. We may postulate a
Deity who is all Perfection, but, if we do so, it rests with us to
explain how it is that evil is present in the universe, if this Deity is
in reality, as Plotinus and other philosophers have taught us, the All.
We may postulate matter as inherently evil in nature, in opposition to
the Good, but if so, whence comes that which is not included in the All?
If matter is the mere privation of good, whence come its apparently very
positive qualities? If the All is complete and perfect in itself, what
need for the manifested universe? What need for the striving after a
higher perfection, which gives the lie to the Absolute Perfection
predicated of the One? Matthew Arnold has adopted the hypothesis of a
“Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness”; but in this
hypothesis he first abandons the conception of the unity of the All and
subsequently throws over the idea of divine perfection. For his Deity
is, after all, only striving after a perfection which he has not yet
reached.
The dualistic conception offers in truth fewer difficulties to the
ordinary mind. It is more in accordance with the obvious facts of
existence, which are brought under our notice every day of our lives.
Deceptive and illusory though the conception may be, we still appear to
be confronted by the existence of a gigantic struggle between good and
evil in which the two combatants are more nearly matched than we care to
admit. We like to shut our eyes to this and postulate a Deity of
infinite power and infinite beneficence, but, while we do so, we are for
ever admitting into our intellectual sphere certain conceptions that run
counter to this theory, and in order to acquit our Deity of
responsibility for the evil which we see ever around us, we make of the
Devil a scapegoat who, in practice, bears on his shoulders the sins of
the whole world; or alternatively we accept a conception of God and the
Devil which runs on parallel lines with that of Dickens’ Spenlow and
Jawkins. If behind Good and Evil, the two forces which are everlastingly
struggling for the mastery, we have, as Plotinus and other of the wisest
philosophers assure us, some principle of Unity from which both alike
flow, are we justified in postulating of that Unity Absolute Perfection
and Absolute Power? Or are we not nearer the mark in describing it in
the Nietzschean phrase as “beyond good and evil,” as possessed of
attributes and qualities which finite brains are incapable of
apprehending? Are we not indeed darkening counsel by attributing to this
Unknown a perfection which, after all, the entire gamut of existence
suggests to us has never yet been reached through all the æons even
though we may be approaching nearer to it every day and every hour?
The creation of the universe, if we are to accept the system of
Plotinus, did not actually take place in time. He argues this point out
with much subtlety and ingenuity in his essay “on Providence,” rejecting
the hypothesis of “a certain foresight and discursive consideration on
the part of Deity, deliberating in what condition the world should be
especially formed, and by what means it may be constituted as far as
possible for the best”; and accepting in place of it the assumption that
the universe always had a being, and that it was “formed according to
intellect, and intellect not preceding _in time_ but prior[7]; because
the world is its offspring, and because intellect is the cause and the
world its image, perpetually subsisting in the same manner and flowing
from this as its source.” In other words, being faced with the
alternative of assuming a definite date at which life began, or
postulating existence from all eternity, he accepts the latter as
presenting the lesser difficulty of the two; but in order to do so, he
finds himself involved in the necessity of admitting a sequence of cause
and effect which the finite mind is quite unable to dissociate from the
conception of time. Failing this, his whole theory of the three Divine
Hypostases falls to the ground. If we adopt the alternative which
Plotinus rejected, we are plunged into still greater embarrassment; for
if creation began in time, why did the All or the One wait through all
the æons of eternity[8] for its commencement? And how, indeed, did time
itself evolve from eternity, in view of the fact that the two ideas have
no apparent relation to each other? The philosopher may
plunge into eternity where recorded time
Seems but a point, and the reluctant mind
Flags wearily in its unending flight
Till it sink dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless.[9]
He may do this, indeed, but after all he will not have solved the Riddle
of the Sphinx.
Footnote 4:
Constantine became sole Emperor in 323 A.D. The Athenian schools of
philosophy were suppressed by Justinian in 529 A.D.
Footnote 5:
To whose book, _The Wisdom of Plotinus_ (Rider, 3s. 6d. net) I must
acknowledge my indebtedness.
Footnote 6:
Plotinus on _The Nature and Origin of Evil_ (Taylor’s Translation).
Footnote 7:
_I.e._, prior in the sense that cause precedes effect.
Footnote 8:
The Indian conception of the inbreathing and outbreathing of Brahma
may help us here, but it does not entirely get over the difficulty.
Footnote 9:
Shelley, “Prometheus Unbound.”
III
MICHAEL SCOT
The name of Michael Scot is principally familiar to English readers
through Sir Walter Scott’s _Lay of the Last Minstrel_. Shakespeare’s
_Tempest_ and Scott’s _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ are probably the two,
best-known works among English classics which breathe throughout the
weird and fascinating atmosphere of mediæval magic. Prospero is a
magician, and the whole plot of the _Tempest_ is based upon his magical
practices and their consequences. The Lady of Branksome in the _Lay of
the Last Minstrel_ has also learned from her father the “forbidden art.”
Her father was a clerk of fame
Of Bethune’s line of Picardie:
He learned the art that none may name,
In Padua, far beyond the sea.
Men said, he changed his mortal frame
By feat of magic mystery;
For when, in studious mood, he paced
St Andrew’s cloistered hall,
His form no darkening shadow traced
Upon the sunny wall!
And of his skill, as bards avow,
He taught that Ladye fair,
Till to her bidding she could bow
The viewless forms of air.
In order the more effectually to accomplish her purposes, she dispatches
her staunch henchman, William of Deloraine, to Melrose Abbey, where lies
buried the wizard, Michael Scot, and buried with him, the Book of Might,
which contains those potent spells whereby the great wizard had achieved
his world-wide celebrity. “The Monk of St Mary’s Aisle,” now an
ecclesiastical veteran of some hundred summers, had in earlier days
fought the Moslem on the fields of Spain, and had there met and become
an intimate friend of the much dreaded wizard. He had attended him at
his death-bed, and had himself buried him in Melrose Abbey, receiving
injunctions from him in his last hours never to allow the Book of Might
to be disinterred “save at his chief of Branksome’s need.” For Michael
Scot himself was a native of Teviot Dale, though his life had been spent
in Italy, in Spain, and at Palermo in Sicily in attendance at the court
of the Emperor Frederick II., whose fame became in a curious way linked
with his own. The date of Michael Scot’s departure from Sicily for Spain
was approximately 1210 A.D., and coincided with the turning-point of
that long war of centuries which ended in the ejection of the Moorish
conquerors from the Spanish peninsula. 1212 A.D. was the date of the
decisive battle of Las Navas, which resulted in a crushing defeat for
the Moorish forces, and led within fifty years to their retirement from
all parts of Spain with the exception of the province of Granada. Scot
was at this time in Spain pursuing his studies in Alchemy, Astrology,
and the forbidden arts generally, and translating the works of the
learned Arabians, Avicenna, Averroes, and Geber, and rewriting their
paraphrases of Aristotle in the Latin tongue, which was then the
universal medium for the dissemination of all scientific and philosophic
knowledge throughout Europe.
We may imagine the monk of St Mary’s Aisle in his early days fighting
the Moorish hosts in Spain and engaged, perhaps, in the great battle of
Las Navas, which sealed their doom. Here he is represented by the poet
as striking up a firm friendship with the student and philosopher,
Michael Scot, and learning from him the secret of his magical practices.
The monk is represented as telling William of Deloraine:
“In those far climes it was my lot
To meet the wondrous Michael Scot,
A wizard, of such dreaded fame,
That when, in Salamanca’s cave,
Him listed his magic wand to wave,
The bells would ring in Notre Dame!
Some of his skill he taught to me;
And, Warrior, I could say to thee
The words that cleft Eildon hills in three,
And bridled the Tweed with a curb of stone:
But to speak them were a deadly sin;
And for having but thought them my heart within,
A treble penance must be done.”
These achievements, according to the legend, were attributed to Michael
Scot’s “familiar,” to whom he entrusted first one task and then another,
but finding his energies too tireless, and fearing he might engage in
some mischief which would react detrimentally on himself, finally sent
him to spin ropes of sand at the mouth of the Tweed. This operation
being an unending one, is said to be still in progress, and as his
biographer relates, the successive attempts and failures of the spirit
are pointed out as every tide casts up or, receding, uncovers the
ever-shifting sands of Berwick bar. The reference to bridling the Tweed
with a curb of stone, is an allusion to the basaltic dyke which crosses
the bed of the river near Ednam. Michael, according to the tale, enjoyed
that complete mastery of words of power which in the traditions of
ancient magic is so potent a force in the working of wonders. As the
monk records in his conversation with the knight of Branksome:
“The words may not again be said
That he spoke to me, on death-bed laid;
They would rend this Abbaye’s massy nave
And pile it in heaps above his grave.”
The monk was not unnaturally alarmed at the power that this archworker
of spells might have given to the fiends of darkness, and took
precaution to bury him
... On St Michael’s night,
When the bell tolled one, and the moon was bright,
so that the cross of his patron saint reflected by the light of the moon
from the emblazoned window pane might fall on the spot which was chosen
for his grave. Once again on this fateful night the Red Cross was
reflected on the sepulchral stone, and the opportunity which this
offered to take possession of the Book of Might undisturbed by the hosts
of darkness, must be taken without delay. Within the grave was one of
those ever-burning lamps, for the existence of which there seems to be
some historical evidence, and which was to serve in the present instance
as a further protection for the wizard against the fiends of night.
Deloraine’s task achieved “by dint of passing strength” with the aid of
a bar of iron handed him by the monk, the light
Streamed upward to the chancel roof
And through the galleries far aloof.
No earthly flame blazed e’er so bright;
It shone like Heaven’s own blessed light.
Before their eyes the Wizard lay
As if he had not been dead a day,
His hoary beard in silver roll’d,
He seem’d some seventy winters old;
A palmer’s amice wrapp’d him round,
With a wrought Spanish baldric bound,
Like a pilgrim from beyond the sea:
His left hand held his Book of Might;
A silver cross was in his right;
The lamp was placed beside his knee.
High and majestic was his look,
At which the fellest fiends had shook,
And all unruffled was his face;
They trusted his soul had gotten grace.
William of Deloraine hesitated to perform what seemed very like an act
of sacrilege. He was used to battlefields, but panic seized him in this
strange scene, and the monk was eventually compelled to warn him that
delay in such circumstances was dangerous.
“Now speed thee what thou hast to do,
Or, warrior, we may dearly rue;
For those thou may’st not look upon
Are gathering fast round the yawning stone!”
Then Deloraine, in terror, took
From the cold hand the Mighty Book,
With iron clasped and with iron bound:
He thought, as he took it, the dead man frowned;
But the glare of the sepulchral light,
Perchance, had dazzled the warrior’s sight.
How the knight and priest withdrew from the chapel after the tombstone
had been replaced, in the redoubled gloom of the night, “with wavering
steps and with dizzy brain,” imagining the walls of the chapel echoing
with fiendish laughter as they retreated, is recounted dramatically
enough by the bard of the Scottish border. We are, perhaps, more
interested to know what manner of man this Michael Scot was, and how far
these records of his magical powers are based on anything more than
unauthenticated tradition. The facts we possess with regard to Michael
Scot’s career convince us indeed that he was a man of the greatest
erudition and learning, and far in advance of his contemporaries in
these respects. He was a noted mathematician, and not content with
gaining the highest honours in the schools of Paris of that day, he
subsequently pursued his studies at the fountain-head of mathematical
and alchemical research at Toledo in Spain. For it must be remembered
that we owe the basis of our mathematical knowledge primarily to the
Arabs who introduced to Europe not only the Arabic numerals in place of
the cumbrous Roman figures, but also the study of Algebra, itself an
Arabic word. To the Arabs, too, we owe the basis of our Chemistry—a word
that is, of course, synonymous with Alchemy, which again bears the stamp
of its Arabian origin. It is curious indeed to note how far the
civilisation of the Arab was in advance of that of the greater part of
Europe in those days. Five hundred years before Michael Scot took ship
from Sicily for Spain, the Arabs had advanced across the whole of
Northern Africa, conquering Egypt, Tripoli, Algeria, and Morocco in
turn, and finally crossing to Spain and there establishing a separate
kaliphate in the eighth century of the Christian era. The invasion of
Spain by the Arabs introduced into the Iberian peninsula a literary
culture of a kind till then quite unknown. Under the sway of the Moorish
sovereigns the arts and architecture flourished, and science found a
welcome which it met with nowhere else in Christianised Europe.
It was to the Moorish capital that students of the medical art repaired
who desired to master the latest discoveries and most modern methods in
the treatment of the human body. Irrigation with the Moors had become an
applied science, and was employed extensively throughout the Iberian
peninsula with the most advantageous results in enhancing the fertility
of the soil. Nowhere else in Europe did the land yield such rich
harvests, and nowhere else was the science of agriculture so fully
understood. The fertile fields of those days are in many cases replaced
by barren deserts and the towns with teeming populations by ruins and
uninhabited wastes. The ignorant peasantry that has taken the place of
the cultivated sons of Arabia are still in the matter of civilisation
and commercial activity hundreds of years behind the busy and
intelligent population whom in the latter part of the fifteenth century
they finally drove over the seas after subjecting them to the most cruel
persecution for adhering to the faith of their fathers. Three million
Moors are said to have been ejected from Spanish soil at the bidding of
the civil power, instigated by ecclesiastical tyranny. Civilisation has
not yet rallied from the so-called “triumph of the Cross” in Spain. This
ejection of the Moors from the west of Europe coincided, as it happened,
with the advent of the Turk at Constantinople; but here, by a curious
contradiction, the Turk as the champion of Mohammedanism represented not
progress but the triumph of the sword. The case was inverted, but in
each instance it represented the victory of barbarism over civilisation,
whether the Mohammedan made headway in the east or the Christian in the
west. In the east the effete remnant of the Eastern Empire was swept
away before the advancing hosts of Islam. In the west a far more highly
developed and industrial population was wiped out at the bidding of the
myrmidons of the Papal See.
For five hundred years the Moors had ruled all but the northernmost
portion of Spain, and for another 250 they retained the province of
Granada. Countless examples of their ornate and characteristic
semi-oriental architecture remain behind as a record of their artistic
culture, and much also of their language intermingled with that of the
race which they at first conquered and which in the days of their luxury
and decadence reconquered them in turn. But the intellectual life of
Moorish Spain, which was for so long like a beacon light in the darkness
of Mediæval Europe, has passed, never to return. The Inquisition marked
the high-water mark of the reaction of Christian bigotry against the
tolerant and broad-minded intellectuality which had flourished under the
fostering dominion of a race whose glories to-day are but a memory of
the far-distant past.
Scot as a mathematician, alchemist, and astrologer, had this been his
sole life’s work, would have merited no insignificant niche in the
temple of Science; but in addition to this, he exercised, though in an
entirely indirect manner, a marked influence on the history of Europe.
His talents and learning commended him for the position of tutor to
Frederick II., at that time king only of Sicily, but afterwards “Emperor
of the Romans.” Frederick was an orphan, having lost both his parents in
early childhood, and the receptive mind of the ardent boy responded
sympathetically to the instructions of his broad-minded and accomplished
tutor, who was destined subsequently to become his confidant and friend.
Michael Scot’s first efforts as an author had for their aim the
education of his royal pupil. For this purpose he first wrote the _Liber
Introductorius_, and afterwards the _Liber Particularis_ and the
_Physionomia_. The first two of these books dealt with astronomy and
astrology, and the latter with physiognomy and the reading of character
from the physical appearance.
Marriages were arranged early in those days, and Frederick, when a boy
of but fourteen, was united in wedlock, at the Pope’s desire, with
Constance, daughter of the King of Aragon, and widow of the King of
Hungary, who was some ten years his senior. This brought the attendance
of Michael Scot at the court at Palermo, temporarily at least, to an
end, and led to his setting sail, as already narrated, for the coasts of
Spain. It appears that the _Physionomia_ was his parting gift on his
marriage to his illustrious pupil. On his arrival in Spain, Scot betook
himself to the headquarters of the scientific activities of those days,
the renowned city of Toledo. Here, towards the middle of the twelfth
century, a regular school for translations from the Arabic had been
established, and it was work of this kind on which Scot himself
embarked. Here he translated the _Abbreviatio Avicennæ_ with a
dedication to the Emperor Frederick in the following terms: “O!
Frederick, Lord of the World, and Emperor, receive with devotion this
book of Michael Scot, that it may be a grace unto thy head and a chain
about thy neck”—no empty compliment as such phrases generally are, nor
one unappreciated by its distinguished recipient. Here, too, he pursued
his studies in alchemy, chemistry, medicine, and astrology. Alchemy in
those days was a special bone of contention, one school maintaining its
feasibility, and the other denouncing it, after the manner of nineteenth
century scientists, as a mere will-o’-the-wisp. The belief in it which
later on took hold of Mediæval Europe had not yet met with any general
sort of acceptance, though the Arabian school in the main adopted it,
and there seems little doubt that it was held by Michael Scot himself.
One book indeed on this particular subject, _De Alchimia_, is attributed
to his pen. The book is contained in a manuscript in possession of
Corpus Christi College, Oxford. If, however, the main part of the work
is genuine, which is somewhat uncertain, the dedication to Theophilus,
King of the Scots, is certainly not so. We have in this book a curious
formula for turning lead into gold, which runs as follows:
Medibibaz, the Saracen of Africa, used it to change lead into gold
in the following manner:—Take lead and melt it thrice with caustic
(comburenti), red arsenic, sublimate of vitriol, sugar of alum, and
with that red tuchia of India which is found on the shore of the Red
Sea, and let the whole be again and again quenched in the juice of
the Portulaca marina, the wild cucumber, a solution of sal ammoniac,
and the urine of a young badger. Let all these ingredients then,
when well mixed, be set on the fire, with the addition of some
common salt, and well boiled until they be reduced to one-third of
their original bulk, when you must proceed to distil them with care.
Then take the marchasite of gold, prepared talc, roots of coral,
some carcharoot, which is an herb very like the Portulaca marina;
alum of Cumæ, something red and saltish, Roman alum and vitriol, and
let the latter be made red; sugar of alum, Cyprus earth, some of the
red Barbary earth, for that gives a good colour; Cumæan earth of the
red sort, African tuchia, which is a stone of variegated colours and
being melted with copper changeth it into gold; Cumæan salt which is
pure red arsenic, the blood of a ruddy man, red tartar, gumma of
Barbary, which is red and worketh wonders in this art; salt of
Sardinia which is like.... Let all these be beaten together in a
brazen mortar, then sifted finely and made into a paste with the
above water. Dry this paste, and again rub it fine on the marble
slab. Then take the lead you have prepared as directed above, and
melt it together with the powder, adding some red alum, and some
more of the various salts. This alum is found about Aleppo (Alapia),
and in Armenia, and will give your metal a good colour. When you
have so done you shall see the lead changed into the finest gold, as
good as what comes from Arabia. This have I, Michael Scot, often put
to the proof and ever found it to be true.
Whether the statement appearing in the manuscript under his name, that
Michael Scot worked on this recipe, be true or not, one would not envy
the task of the modern chemist who was called upon to compound the
prescription. The basic idea of alchemy which, since the discovery of
radium, is looked upon with some favour by certain advanced scientists,
that all metals are reducible to a single substance, and therefore
theoretically interchangeable, does not seem to find much place in this
curious prescription, which suggests the idea of what we should call
to-day a gold-substitute, rather than the genuine metal itself, in spite
of the fact that we are told that the gold in question would prove “as
good as what comes from Arabia.”
The greatest work of Scot as translator was his reproduction in Latin of
the commentary of Averroes on the _De Anima_ of Aristotle. This book,
which expounded views on theological problems which were the reverse of
orthodox, was long held back from publication by Scot’s patron, the
Emperor Frederick, who hesitated to incur obloquy, and in especial the
hostility of the Pope by reason of its publication. Friction, however,
between the Papal See and the Emperor became so acute in the end that it
appeared useless to attempt to placate papal bigotry further, and the
publication in question was thus finally given to the world.
The study of the writings of Averroes had indeed taken very strong hold
on Scot’s imagination, and if the story may be accepted as authentic, he
even went so far as to attempt to evoke the spirit of the great Arabian,
presumably with a view to securing his assistance in the work which he
had in hand. There is nothing intrinsically improbable in the
supposition that Scott practised or experimented in such methods of
evocation. Averroes had only been dead some twenty years when Scot was
in Spain, and holding the views he did, he may well have thought that
the philosopher’s spirit had not passed so far from the physical plane
that some form of necromantic conjuration of his conscious personality
would be ineffectual. Here, as elsewhere, it seems impossible to draw
the line between record of fact and that fabric of legend and tradition
which has been woven round the story of his life.
A number of the tales told of Scot’s magical achievements reduce
themselves in the light of modern knowledge to the results of highly
developed hypnotic powers. It is familiar knowledge that such
achievements are not unknown in India at the present day. A Florentine
authority gives us one of these anecdotes. Scot’s guests at dinner, we
are told, once asked him to show them a new marvel. The month was
January. Yet in spite of the season he caused vines with fresh shoots
and ripe grapes to appear on the table. The company were bidden each of
them to choose a bunch, but their host warned them not to put forth
their hands till he should give the sign. At the word “Cut!” lo, the
grapes disappeared, and the guests found themselves each with a knife in
the one hand and in the other his neighbour’s sleeve. Another story of a
more or less similar character is told of a feast given by the Emperor
to celebrate his coronation at Rome, which took place on November 22,
1220.
The pages were still on foot with ewers and basins of perfumed water
and embroidered towels, when suddenly Michael Scot appeared with a
companion, both of them dressed in Eastern robes, and offered to
show the guests a marvel. The weather was oppressively warm, so
Frederick asked him to procure them a shower of rain which might
bring coolness. This the magician did accordingly, raising a great
storm, which as suddenly vanished again at their pleasure. Being
required by the Emperor to name his reward, Scot asked leave to
choose one of the company to be the champion of himself and his
friend against certain enemies of theirs. This being freely granted,
their choice fell on Ulfo, a German baron. As it seemed to Ulfo,
they set off at once on their expedition, leaving the coasts of
Sicily in two great galleys, and with a mighty following of armed
men. They sailed through the Gulf of Lyons, and passed by the
Pillars of Hercules, into the unknown and western sea. Here they
found smiling coasts, received a welcome from the strange people,
and joined themselves to the army of the place; Ulfo taking the
supreme command. Two pitched battles and a successful siege formed
the incidents of the campaign. Ulfo killed the hostile king, married
his lovely daughter, and reigned in his stead; Michael and his
companion having left to seek other adventures. Of this marriage
sons and daughters were begotten, and twenty years passed like a
dream ere the magicians returned, and invited their champion to
revisit the Sicilian court. Ulfo went back with them, but what was
his amazement, on entering the palace of Palermo, to find everything
just as it had been at the moment of their departure so long before;
even the pages were still holding rounds with water for the hands of
the Emperor’s guests. This prodigy performed, Michael and the other
withdrew and were seen no more; but Ulfo, it is said, remained ever
inconsolable for the lost land of loveliness, and the joys of wedded
life he had left behind for ever, in a dream not to be repeated.
On Scot’s return to the court of Frederick II., after his sojourn in
Sicily, he added the study and practice of the medical art to his other
activities. Lesley states that he “gained much praise as a philosopher,
astronomer, and physician,” and Dempster speaks of him as “one of the
first physicians for learning.” He appears to have treated cases which
would not yield to the ordinary medical pharmacopœia, and in particular
he specialised in leprosy, gout, and dropsy. Acting apparently under his
advice, Frederick II. instituted various reforms in the practice of
medicine. It was stipulated that the course preliminary to qualification
should consist of three years in arts, and five in medicine and surgery.
Laws were passed forbidding the adulteration of drugs, while physicians
were prohibited from demanding a greater fee than half a _taren_ of gold
per day, and this gave the patient the right to be visited three times
in the course of the twenty-four hours. It was stipulated that the poor
should be attended free of charge. Certain recipes of Michael Scot’s are
still extant, and can be studied in Latin in the British Museum. One of
these bears the name of the _Pillulæ Magistri Michaelis Scoti_. They
seem to be something in the nature of a universal panacea, and perhaps
if the prescription were taken up by some enterprising modern chemist,
they might rival the fame of the celebrated Beecham’s Pills!
It appears that Scot had ambitions in the way of ecclesiastical
preferment; but though the Emperor put himself out to secure his
favourite the position which he coveted, and in fact appealed to the
Pope on his behalf, nothing practical came of these representations.
Probably Scot’s fame was of too dubious a kind to recommend him to the
heads of the orthodox Church, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom
the Pope applied in his interest, does not seem to have responded in any
friendly fashion. Finally, an offer was made to Michael Scot of the
Archbishopric of Cashel in Ireland, but in those days the Irish were
little better than a barbarous race, and they spoke the language of
Erse, which was a sealed book to their prospective bishop. In any case,
though the Chapter had actually elected him to the post, he decided to
decline. He apparently had too much principle to accept the position of
an absentee bishop, and a home among a wild and uncultured race would
hardly have been to the liking of a man who had associated with the most
intellectual minds of Europe. These hopes of ecclesiastical preferment
having fallen through, Frederick, after long delay, decided to take
steps for the publication of the translation of the works of Averroes,
and certain books of Aristotle, with the commentaries thereon of the
Arabian philosophers. He issued an imperial circular announcing the
appearance of these, and sent Michael Scot as his emissary to arrange
for their publication in the principal European centres of learning.
Finally, after visiting Bologna and Paris, Scot made his way to England,
where he appears to have visited Oxford about the year 1230. Tradition
says that he journeyed thence to his native land of Scotland. But
shortly after this we lose sight of him altogether, and though there is
no authoritative evidence with regard to his death, he seems to have
passed away by or before the year 1232. In this year the _Abbreviatio
Avicennæ_ was published at Melfi, in the Latin version which Scot had
translated. Henry of Colonia was selected by Frederick to transcribe the
work from the imperial copy, and Scot’s biographer is probably right in
regarding this work as a wreath laid by his imperial friend on his
grave. The matter would assuredly have been placed in Scot’s own hands
if he were still alive.
Scot is related to have foretold that his death would take place by the
blow of a stone falling on his head, and tradition says that being in
church one day with head uncovered at the sacring of the mass, a stone,
shaken from the tower by the motion of the bell rope, fell upon his
head, mortally wounding him. Presumably this incident occurred in
Scotland; if, that is, there is any truth at all in the story.
Another prediction is also attributed to Michael Scot by the same
chronicler—Pipini. He states that he foretold the manner also of the
Emperor’s death, which he declared would take place “ad portas ferreas”;
that is, “at the iron gates,” and in a town named after Flora.
Frederick, it is said, interpreted this as referring to Florence, which
city he accordingly made a point of avoiding. During his last campaign,
however, in the year 1250, he fell ill at Florentino, in Apulia, where
he slept in a chamber of the castle. His bed, says the story, stood
against a wall recently built to fill up the ancient gateway of the
tower, the iron staples on which the gate had been hung still forming
part of the wall. It is stated that the Emperor, learning these
particulars, and calling to mind Michael Scot’s prediction, exclaimed,
“This is the place where I shall make an end, as it was told me. The
will of God be done, for here I shall die.” A few days later the great
Emperor passed to his rest.
Of Michael Scot’s learning and erudition there can be no question, in
spite of the unfavourable criticisms of Roger Bacon with regard to his
knowledge of languages, which are the less worthy of notice in view of
the fact that Bacon’s own accomplishments in this direction were far
inferior to those of Scot. A fairer criticism of his work would be based
on its lack of originality, and the fact that the greater part of his
literary output was borrowed either from the Arabians or the Greeks. His
talents as a past master of mathematics were never in dispute, and his
researches into the problems presented by astronomy enjoyed a great
vogue in his own day.
While there is no evidence but that of highly-coloured tradition to
suggest that Michael Scot was the adept he is represented as being in
magical spells and incantations, there is nothing in our historical
knowledge of his career which renders the practice of such arts by him
at all incredible, or indeed unlikely. Legend has magnified this portion
of his many-sided activities to the exclusion of that branch of his
labours which might well, one would have thought, have earned for him
more enduring fame. The lovers of the marvellous have thus surrounded
with a mysterious and semi-sinister halo the name of a man whose chief
work in life lay in the paths of philosophy, astronomy, and medical
research. It seems not improbable that the last of these pursuits led
this daring thinker into the investigation and practice of what to-day
we term hypnotism, and its employment to the bewilderment of his
acquaintances in the creation of illusions, the source of which we now
recognise in the power of a master mind to mould by sheer force of will
the plastic imagination and subjective consciousness of his audience.
IV
PARACELSUS
The embattled forces of conservative orthodoxy are so strong that one is
sometimes tempted to wonder how it is that the world ever goes round at
all; how it is that the forward movement of progress succeeds, as it
apparently does, in getting the better of so many retrograde tendencies,
so much prejudice, so strong a clinging to the stereotyped conditions of
the day. After all, the more one thinks about it, the more one becomes
convinced that the whole progress of the world is the work of the very,
very few; that the positive and progressive intellect is the rare
exception, and that if democratic conditions really prevailed (as of
course they never do) all civilisation would go backwards and gradually
revert once more to chaos. What a mockery, after all, Democracy is! And
how hopelessly the modern world is deluded in thinking that anywhere or
at any time Democracy has in reality held sway! As a matter of fact, the
many have never ruled, have never wished to rule; they have merely asked
for some strong man to lead them. Where was ever the flock of sheep that
did not follow the bell-wether? Here and there we meet with a master
mind that—for good or evil—leads the multitude—or, if he does not lead,
at least points the way where others will eventually follow. Side by
side with him we see the multitude either drifting or being led. “Work!”
said Voltaire, that most popular of writers, “work for the little
public!” Voltaire knew, as all great leaders have known, before and
after, that it is the “little public” that ever dominates the situation.
It is the “little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump.” “It is a sight
beloved of the gods,” says the old saying, “to see a good man struggling
against adversity.” But is it not a finer sight still, to see a strong
man battling with the forces of orthodoxy, and refusing to yield his
ground? A man of such a mould was Philip Bombast of Hohenheim, better
known by his assumed name of Paracelsus. Never was there any one to whom
Shelley’s celebrated line
The sun comes out and many reptiles spawn,
was more absolutely appropriate. The hostility and venomous antagonism
of his own profession, with a few notable exceptions, followed and
persecuted him throughout his entire medical career. The boldness and
independence of his medical attitude galled the leaders as well as the
rank and file of the profession. But what was still more galling to them
than his lack of orthodoxy, was the fact that his novel methods, as they
must have appeared to the doctors of that day, were so immeasurably more
successful than their own. Paracelsus, indeed, never gave nor asked for
quarter. John the Baptist denouncing the Pharisees who came to him as “a
generation of vipers” was no bad parallel to Paracelsus’s stinging
invective on the ignorance and tradition-loving proclivities of his own
profession.
[Illustration: Paracelsus (aged 24).]
Many to whom the name of Paracelsus is familiar are accustomed to look
upon him as little more than a singularly successful quack who revived
the traditions of an earlier school of Occultism in defiance of the more
scientific methods of his own time. As a matter of fact, the doctors of
his day were, in the vast majority of cases, merely theorists with
little real practical experience, but with a fair store of book-learning
of a very indifferent kind. It was Paracelsus whose medical knowledge
was derived from experiment and experience, and who had acquired the
greater part of his medical and surgical skill from wide and varied
travelling and visiting more countries and more different nationalities
than any other medical expert of his day, and who had learnt by actual
association with all sorts and conditions of men in different climes,
far more than any book-learning had ever taught him.
The period of Paracelsus’s career coincided with the Reformation of
Luther, and with the wider and more general Renaissance movement. This
latter development had brought back in its train the study of classical
learning and classical ideals which had fallen into discredit about the
period of the first triumph of Christianity and its establishment as a
world-religion. The attitude of the earlier Christians, who looked upon
the Pagan deities as devils, and Greek and Roman classical writers as
apologists for devil-worship, had passed away; and the highest
dignitaries of the Church were now often noted for their classical
erudition and ripe scholarship. With the return of classical ideals came
back also into favour in a number of unexpected quarters the doctrines
of Neoplatonism. When Hypatia perished at Alexandria, orthodox
Christianity set its foot on Plotinus and all his works. The struggle at
the end had been one rather between Christianity and the later Greek
philosophers with their Neoplatonic conceptions than between
Christianity and Pagan Rome. The gods of Rome were dead already. Pan was
dead past resurrecting. The danger that threatened Christianity was the
triumph of such Emperors as Julian the Apostate—Julian, whose master was
Plotinus, and whose religion was Neoplatonism merely dressed in an old
Roman garb. To the thinkers and philosophers of that time the triumph of
Christianity seemed like the victory of exoteric religion over the inner
esoteric truths. Back, now, with all that was best of the scholarship
and art of Greece and Rome, came the mystic doctrines of the Alexandrian
philosophers—back, not in triumph, but daring once more to reassert
themselves in the face of a hostile world that had long even forgotten
their existence. A thousand years separated Hypatia from Cornelius
Agrippa—a thousand years which, in the realm of thought, might well be
characterised as the Dark Ages. Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim was
born at Cologne in 1486. Seven years later, on 10th November 1493, at
Einsiedeln, near Zurich, a son was born to Dr Wilhelm Bombast von
Hohenheim, and was christened Theophrastus, in honour of Theophrastus
Tyrtamos, a Greek physician, philosopher, and follower of Aristotle.
This child was subsequently to be known to fame and held up to obloquy
under the title of Paracelsus.
It was a period in which the world was in labour with great events. Only
a year before Columbus had landed on American soil. In the same year, or
the previous one, passed away a man whose life was destined to create as
great a revolution in the history of the human race as that of Columbus
himself—William Caxton. Returning from a long sojourn in the Netherlands
in or about 1474, Caxton established his printing press in the precincts
of Westminster Abbey, and before his death at least sixty-four books are
known to have been issued from this first English Printing House. Ten
years exactly before Paracelsus’s birth, a third of these great makers
of revolutions had seen the light. On 10th November 1483, Martin Luther
was born at Eisleben in Lower Saxony, and when the subject of these
notes was twenty-four years old, Luther nailed his ninety-five theses
against the Doctrine of Indulgences on the church door at Wittenberg.
Paracelsus, when occasion offered, did not attempt to disguise his
sympathy with this bold reformer, though he took no actual part in the
movement, and he was accused by his enemies of being a medical Luther, a
charge which he took pains to show that he did not in any way resent.
Another noteworthy character in the realm of History and Literature,
Lorenzo de Medici, had passed away a year before our hero’s birth. In
England the Wars of the Roses were over, and Henry VII. was busy
establishing monarchy on a firm basis, the people, worn out by incessant
struggles, being glad to accept the Tudor rule, sympathetic as it always
was to the middle and commercial classes. In Europe there was no
Austrian Emperor, and Italy was still fated, for centuries to come, to
remain a geographical expression. The Holy Roman Empire extended from
the German Ocean and the Baltic Sea on the North to the Adriatic on the
South. Poland and Lithuania extended far along its Eastern border, and
the outmost limit of the realm of the Muscovite was still 500 miles east
of the site where a century later Peter the Great was to found and give
his name to the capital of the Russian Empire. The conquering Turk was
thundering at the gates of Christendom. Ferdinand and Isabella, patrons
of Columbus, reigned at Madrid. Everywhere throughout the civilised
world vast changes were impending, everywhere the horizon was widening,
and men’s minds were being directed into new channels and to fresh
fields of enterprise and of opinion.
There has been much discussion as to what exactly is connoted by the
name “Paracelsus,” and how it came to be first adopted. What seems clear
is that von Hohenheim adopted the name himself, and was not, as some
have held, given it by his admirers. It was a usual practice in those
days to write books under some Latin _nom de plume_, frequently some
adaptation into Latin of the name of the writer. In all probability the
last two syllables of the name, “celsus,” were suggested by “Hohen” (or
“high”), “Hohenheim” being literally translated as “high home.” With
regard to the first two syllables it is noticeable that these were
occasionally employed by Paracelsus in giving name to his medical
treatises. There is thus one treatise called “Paramirum,” and another
“Paragranum.” This word “para” seems to have been used in the sense of
giving the word to which it was prefixed a superlative value. Thus
“Paramirum” would mean “extremely wonderful.” The whole word is
doubtless a polyglot hotchpotch, the first part being Greek and the
second Latin; but mediæval writers had little scruple in adapting the
classical tongues to their own requirements.
To follow the writings of Paracelsus it is necessary to understand his
phraseology, his jargon, as we should call it in the slang of to-day.
Without this he is as incomprehensible as is the dog Latin of a
scientific textbook to one who is not a scientific specialist—or, to
give another example, as the language of Astrology is to one who is not
an Astrologer. Paracelsus held that there were three basic substances
necessary to the existence of all bodies. These he called Sulphur,
Mercury, and Salt. Sulphur corresponds to fire, or rather to the
principle of inflammability; Mercury to water, or fluidity; and Salt to
earth, or solidity. For a full glossary of the terms which he employed,
readers are referred to the volume on _The Life and Philosophy of
Paracelsus_, by the late Dr Franz Hartmann. In this terminology _Azoth_
stands for the creative principle in Nature, or the spiritual vitalising
force; the _Ilech Primum_ is the causative force; _Cherio_, the essence
of the thing, the “fifth principle,” which constitutes what we call its
essential qualities; the _Evestrum_ is man’s astral body, his ethereal
counterpart, that may act to him as guardian angel and warn him of
dangers; the _Elementaries_ are the astral corpses of the dead, and must
not be confused with the _Elementals_, or Nature Spirits—Sylphs,
Salamanders, Undines, and Gnomes; _Magic_ is the conscious employment of
spiritual powers to act on external Nature. Many of these expressions
have been adopted by the Theosophists of the present day and by students
of Occultism.
It is clear, though Paracelsus long antedated Hahnemann, the founder of
Homœopathy, that much of his medical teaching is what we should now call
Homœopathic. Hahnemann, in fact, borrowed extensively from Paracelsus.
Take, for instance, Paracelsus’s teaching with regard to the
quintessence or virtue of each substance. This, he taught, though
infinitesimal in quantity, even in large bodies, had none the less the
power to affect the mass through and through, as a single drop of gall
embitters, or a few grains of saffron colour a large quantity of water.
The application of homœopathic cures by those ignorant of homœopathic
principles has frequently led to mistakes in this connection; as, for
instance, the administration of doses many times in excess of what the
complaint requires, the result being the entire failure of the medicine
to produce the intended effect.
“There are wide differences,” says Paracelsus, striking again a very
homœopathic note, “between what the ancient doctors taught and what
we here teach, and therefore our healing art differs widely from
theirs. For we teach that what heals a man also wounds him, and what
wounded will also heal him. For the nettle can be so changed that it
cannot burn, the flame so that it does not scorch, and the chelidony
so that it does not cicatrize. Thus similars are good in healing,
such and such a salt to such and such a sore. And the things which
heal a wound in Nature heal the same sort of wound in man.”
“Many kinds of rust,” says Paracelsus again, “occur in the minerals; for
each mineral has its own peculiar nature.” This rust is in the form of a
disease, and iron has one disease, while copper has another. In a
similar way a man has a sore and it is healed by treatment. The metal,
too, has a sore, and can be healed by treatment. “Metallic bodies,” says
Paracelsus, long antedating the discoveries of the present day, “are as
liable to death as the others, for their salt is arsenic.” The whole
earth is linked together, and the life that passes through the bodies of
men passes also through the bodies of minerals. Paracelsus had no
patience with those who taught of a panacea that would heal all
diseases. He described them as people who “rode all horses with one
saddle,” through whom more harm than good was effected. He maintained
that a doctor must know the sick and all matters appertaining to their
state “just as a carpenter knows his wood.” He mentions six essential
qualifications for the practical physician.
(1) A doctor (he says) must know how many kinds of tissue there are
in the body, and how each kind stands in relation to the man.
(2) He must know all the bones, such as the ribs and their
coverings, the difference between one and another, their relations
to each other and their articulations.
(3) He must know all the blood-vessels, the nerves, the cartilages
and how they are held together.
(4) He must know the length, number, form, condition, and purpose of
each member of the body, its particular flesh, marrow, and all other
details.
(5) He must know where all emunctoria lie and how they are to be
averted; also what is in every cavity of the body, and everything
about the intestines.
(6) He must with all his might and being seek to understand about
life and death, what the chief organs in man mean, and what each
member can and may suffer.
If we look to Paracelsus as the real founder of Homœopathy, so also must
we regard him as the pioneer of magnetism and magnetic healing. Man, he
maintained, is nourished through the magnetic power which resides in all
Nature and by which each individual being draws its specific nourishment
to itself. He called this magnetic force _Mumia_ in his special
phraseology, and he laid great stress on the healing power which resided
in this _Mumia_. “Just as the power of the lily breaks forth in perfume
which is invisible, so,” he writes, “the invisible body sends forth its
healing influence. Just as in the visible body are wonderful activities
which the senses can perceive, so, too, lie powers in the invisible body
which can work great wonders.” To him the whole universe was one, and
knit together by indissoluble bonds.
“The astral currents created by the imagination of the Macrocosmos,”
he writes, “act upon the Microcosmos, and produce certain states in
the latter, and likewise the astral currents produced by the
imagination and will of man produce certain states in external
Nature; and these currents may reach far, because the power of the
imagination reaches as far as thought can go. The physiological
processes taking place in the body of living beings are caused by
their astral currents, and the physiological and meteorological
processes taking place in the great organism of Nature are caused by
the astral currents of Nature as a whole. The astral currents of
either act upon the other, either consciously or unconsciously; and
if this fact is properly understood it will cease to appear
incredible that the mind of man may produce changes in the universal
mind, which may cause changes in the atmosphere—winds and rains,
storm, hail and lightning—or that evil may be changed into good by
the power of Faith. Heaven is a field into which the imagination of
man throws the seeds.”
Here, in a single paragraph, is the philosophy of Astrology, and the
justification for the efficacy of prayer.
I have said that Paracelsus was the father of Homœopathy, and the father
also of that later school of animal magnetism which was founded in
France in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and the inception
of which is always associated with the name of Mesmer. Unfortunately,
Mesmer had neither the knowledge nor the experience, nor yet the
intuitive faculties of his master, Paracelsus. But, resurrected as it
was under somewhat unfavourable conditions, there is reason to believe
that magnetic healing is destined to play a far greater part in the
future of medical art than it has ever done in the past. Not only was
Paracelsus a pioneer in Homœopathy and animal magnetism, he was also one
of the first, as well as one of the greatest, of all Faith-healers.
“Faith,” he says, “has a great deal more power than the physical body.”
“All magical processes are based upon Faith.” “The power of Faith
overcomes all spirits of Nature, because it is a spiritual power, and
Spirit is higher than Nature.” “Whatever is grown in the realm of Nature
may be changed by the power of Faith.” “Anything we may accomplish which
surpasses Nature is accomplished by Faith, and by Faith diseases may be
cured.” “Imagination,” he says again, “is the cause of many diseases.
Faith is the cure for all.” “If we cannot cure a disease by Faith, it is
because our Faith is too weak. But our Faith is weak on account of our
want of knowledge. If we were conscious of the power of God within
ourselves, we should never fail.” “The power of amulets does not rest so
much in the material of which they are made as in the Faith with which
they are worn.” Paracelsus’s chosen motto was:
Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest—
“Let him not belong to another who has the power to be his own”—who can,
in short, be master of his own soul. Paracelsus declined to follow any
leader, but formed his own conclusions from his own experience. For him
the _Codex Naturæ_ was a system which led straight to exact knowledge,
and he rejected whatever could not be verified by research. He laid the
foundations of a new system, built on evidence rather than on the
outworn traditions of the medicine of his day. This system comprised
within itself at once a practical guide to the medical art and a
spiritual philosophy of life. The fatal error of divorcing the physical
from the spiritual, and treating the physical as a thing apart, which
has rendered abortive so much of the medical research of recent
generations, would undoubtedly have been obviated, had the modern
exponent of the medical art realised that in Paracelsus was to be found
a pioneer who brought the life-giving genius of his intellect to bear on
old truths in their relation to modern problems, rather than a quack and
mountebank who deluded his contemporaries—none so easy a task—into the
idea that he had accomplished marvellous cures where the medical faculty
of his day could show nothing but a record of failures.
V
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG
Of all the men and women whom the world has classed under the general
title of “mystic,” not one certainly occupies so singular a position as
Emanuel Swedenborg. If we decide to accept the world’s verdict—and it
seems difficult to do otherwise—and agree to call Swedenborg a mystic,
we are confronted by the fact that we can find no parallel either to his
personality or to his career, though we search the roll of the mystics
of all the ages. Pascal indeed was, like Swedenborg, a master
mathematician, and a man of wide general learning, but he was a mystic
first and foremost, and his life from an early date was given up to his
calling as a leading light of the Catholic Church. Swedenborg, on the
other hand, was, until the age of fifty, a man of science and a man of
affairs; that is, he was a scientist of the most eminently practical
kind, one whose encyclopædic knowledge was turned always into
utilitarian channels, and for whom knowledge of any kind appeared to
have no meaning outside its practical application. It would be difficult
to instance a single one of the world’s great men whose interests were
so wide, or whose mental activity was so all-absorbing. Outside art
there seemed literally nothing that did not appeal to him as a field for
his indefatigable investigation, and, as regards art, it was presumably
its lack of utilitarian value which led to its neglect by his
essentially practical mentality.
[Illustration: Emanuel Swedenborg.]
Swedenborg started his travels in the first years of early manhood, and
wherever they took him there was nothing which escaped his observant
eye. To whatever part of Europe he went it would seem that he could not
be satisfied without learning all that was to be learnt, without seeing
all that was to be seen. When he establishes himself in London he does
not merely take lodgings because the price is reasonable or because the
cooking is good, or because he thinks he will be comfortable. He writes
from London in 1711: “I turn my lodgings to some use, and change them
often. At first I was at a watchmaker’s, and now I am at a mathematical
instrument maker’s. From them I steal their trades, which some day will
be of use to me.” At Leyden he learnt to grind glass for lenses, so that
he might furnish himself with appliances which he could not afford to
buy. His brother wishes for globes for the university at Upsala. These
proved too expensive, and he was asked to purchase printed maps which
might be mounted in Sweden. The makers would not supply these, so
Swedenborg applied himself to learning engraving, and prepared them
himself. When chafing at enforced inactivity at home he turns his
attention to music, and writes to his brother-in-law that he has been
able several times to take the place of the organist. In travelling on
the Continent he studies the fortifications of the towns, the methods of
constructing fences. He visits and investigates all the manufactories.
He passes critical remarks with regard to the blast furnaces, the
vitriol, arsenic, and sulphur works, the copper and tin manufactories,
the paper mills, and studies also the methods of mining. Not content
with this, he investigates the social conditions of the people,
criticises the situation of affairs in France, the wealth of the Church
and the poverty of the people. “Everywhere,” he says, “the convents,
churches, and monks are the wealthiest and possess most land. The monks
are fat, puffed up, and prosperous. A whole proud army might be formed
of them without their being missed.” Again: “The houses are miserable,
the convents magnificent, the people poor and wretched.” He investigates
the problem of the revenue of the French Government, obtained by the
system of taxation called tithing. “It amounts,” he says, “to some
thirty-two million livres, and Paris, on account of its rents,
contributes nearly two-thirds of the sum.” “I am told,” he says, “that
the ecclesiastical order possesses one-fifth of all the property in the
State, and that the country will be ruined if this goes on much
longer.”[10] He gives the number of convents in France, actually at that
date between fourteen and fifteen thousand; the number of the members of
the religious orders; the number of the abbesses, prioresses, chapters,
etc. He goes to hear the celebrated preachers, among them the King’s
chaplain, who “gesticulates like an actor.” He discusses the adoration
of saints with an abbé. He visits the hospitals and attends the opening
of Parliament. Not content with this, he frequents the opera and the
theatres, and passes opinions upon the most popular pieces and the most
distinguished actors and actresses. In the midst of all this we find him
speculating on the form of the particles of the atmosphere, and writing
an introductory essay to a book which he is planning to prove that “the
soul of wisdom is the knowledge and acknowledgment of the Supreme
Being.” As if this were not enough, he occupies his spare moments in the
study of anatomy, astronomy, magnetism, and hydrostatics.
Surely, since the world began, there was never a more versatile brain!
He has even observations to make on military matters. He goes to see the
Brandenburg soldiers, Frederick the Great’s famous regiment. “The men,”
he says, “are tall and slender and they march erectly. They go through
their drills with the greatest promptness and regularity, but their
manner is a little theatrical. The whole squadron is like a machine
placed there, moving instantaneously at the pleasure of the machinist.”
“If,” he says, “they displayed the same uniformity in battle as in
drill, they would conquer Alexander’s army, and subject a great part of
Europe to Prussia, but——” He leaves it to the reader to fill in the
reason of his doubt.
Others besides Swedenborg have possessed that encyclopædic type of brain
which amasses vast stores of miscellaneous knowledge, but few, if any,
have possessed at the same time Swedenborg’s extraordinary capacity for
utilising the knowledge gained and turning it to practical account. The
idea of learning as an object in itself was indeed entirely alien to
Swedenborg’s type of mentality. All information acquired was merely
regarded as a means towards some practical end. We thus find him
founding universal principles upon the knowledge he has accumulated in
explanation of the laws which govern phenomena. We see him, for example,
deducing his conclusions in the field of geology from a number of
observed facts. He reports on the geological conformation of Sweden, and
concludes from it that the country was at one time swept over by a sea
in a state of great commotion. He notices the fact that the stones on
the mountain sides are worn off and rounded, in support of this. He also
describes the remnants of a wrecked ship excavated far inland, and the
skeleton of a whale which was discovered in West Gothland. “Swedenborg’s
contributions in the field of geology,” says Professor A. G. Nathorst,
“are of such significance and value that they alone would have been
sufficient to have secured him an honoured scientific name.” As a mining
expert he was unequalled. “We should never be able to finish,” says
Professor Schleiden, “if we attempted to enumerate all the improvements
which Swedenborg introduced in the working of the mines in his own
country.” “The metallurgical works of this remarkable man,” says Dr
Percy, “seem to be very imperfectly known, and yet none are in my
judgment more worthy of the attention of those interested in the history
of metallurgy.” The air-tight stove which he describes in his work on
_New Observations and Discoveries Respecting Iron and Fire_, published
in 1721, is stated to be identical in principle with one recently
patented in Washington.[11] Sir Isaac Newton had propounded the
corpuscular theory of light, which was for long universally held.
Swedenborg dissented, stating, in his _Principia_, that “motion diffused
from a given centre through a contiguous medium or volume of particles
of ether produced light.” This theory is the one now adopted. Swedenborg
also notices that light and electricity are produced by the same
efficient cause, thereby supplying the clue to the utilisation of
electricity as a means of lighting. Even where in the field of science
he was looked upon as a dreamer in his own days, his dreams have since
taken practical shape. Among the inventions which he projected was “the
plan of a certain ship which with its men was to go under the surface of
the sea wherever it chooses, and do great damage to the fleet of the
enemy.” He also designed a flying machine, a project which he was very
reluctant to drop. Christopher Polhem, however, threw cold water on
this, saying, with respect to flying by artificial means, “there is
perhaps the same difficulty as in making a _perpetuum mobile_, or gold
by artificial means.”
His philosophy recognises the synthetical as well as the analytical
method as requisite to arrive at true conclusions. “Both,” he says, “are
necessary in reflecting upon and tracing out one and the same thing; for
in order to do so there is required both light, _a priori_, and
experience, _a posteriori_.” “He who is possessed of scientific
knowledge,” he says elsewhere, “and is merely skilled in experiment, had
taken only the first steps in wisdom. For such a person is only
acquainted with what is posterior, and is ignorant of what is prior.
Thus his wisdom does not extend beyond the working of the senses and is
unconnected with reason; whereas, nevertheless, true wisdom embraces
both.”
Unquestionably Swedenborg, as he is known to us from the record of the
first fifty years of his life (if we except the earliest years of his
childhood), was about the last person one would expect to have his name
associated with that Swedenborgian gospel by which eventually it came to
be known to the world at large. He had, as we have seen, earned many
titles to recognition, but assuredly that of a medium of communication
between this world and the world of spirits was not one of them.
Swedenborg’s father was a Swedish Lutheran Bishop with leanings towards
pietism, and a rather broader and more sympathetic outlook than the
majority of his fellow clergy. His name, Swedborg, was subsequently
changed to Swedenborg when the family was ennobled by the Swedish king.
Emanuel was the second son and third child of Bishop Swedborg and his
wife, Anna, of whom we know but little, and who died when Emanuel was
only eight years old. The child was thus surrounded by religious
influences in his early days, and it is said that his father had a
guardian angel with whom he claimed to be able to hold converse on
occasion. Reared under these conditions, he naturally enough evinced
strongly religious tendencies in his childhood. “From my fourth to my
tenth year,” he says, “I was constantly engaged in thought upon God,
salvation, and the spiritual experiences of men. I revealed things at
which my father and mother wondered, saying that angels must be speaking
through me.” Here at least we obtain some suggestion of what he
eventually became, and of which the intervening years between childhood
and middle age seem to afford us little or no hint. The believer in
heredity will point to the psychic temperament of the father as
inherited by the son; but there appears to be no foreshadowing in his
ancestry of that encyclopædic mind with which he was destined to
astonish his contemporaries. His father evidently failed to understand
his precocious son, and the relations between the two were far from
cordial, the son considering that his father was inappreciative and
failed to encourage his intellectual activities, and also blaming him
for meanness in matters of finance. Bishop Swedborg had, however, eight
other children besides Emanuel, and very probably he did not find it
easy to make two ends meet, especially as he was something of an author
himself, and published books at his own expense, which proved far from
remunerative. Probably the father considered that the son ought to
settle down to some regular trade or profession instead of commencing
life by travelling in search of knowledge first to one country and then
to another. Presumably he regarded his precocious offspring as likely to
become a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, and there are doubtless
many other parents who, under similar circumstances, would have thought
the same. In any case the son was able to start off on his travels in
spite of financial embarrassments and many dangers on the way. He was
nearly wrecked when approaching England. Then the ship was boarded by
pirates, and on the top of this was fired into by a British guardship,
being mistaken for the pirate craft. Finally, our youthful hero narrowly
escaped hanging for breaking the quarantine regulations, the plague at
this time being prevalent in Sweden. Under somewhat similar
circumstances the great Julius told the captain of his vessel not to be
afraid, as he was carrying Cæsar. Whether Swedenborg had any such faith
in a Providence watching over his future destiny, we are not told. He
certainly realised his unique powers, but can hardly have suspected the
channel into which they were eventually to be diverted.
The one link between Emanuel and his family was his brother-in-law, Eric
Benzelius, afterwards bishop, and the sister to whom he was married. In
his financial and other troubles he repeatedly appeals to him for
sympathy and practical help, evidently not without response. He also
asks for intercession with his father, to whom he obviously did not care
to appeal direct, having met with too many rebuffs. It is interesting to
note that one of the first objects that met his eyes in London was “the
magnificent St Paul’s Cathedral, finished a few days ago, in all its
parts.” He makes the acquaintance of Flamsteed, the most notable
astronomer in England, who was concerned in the founding of Greenwich
Observatory and seems to have been something of an astrologer as well.
Apparently as the result of this visit, he takes up with enthusiasm the
study of astronomy.
I have made such progress in it [he says], as to have discovered
much which I think will be useful in its study. Although in the
beginning it made my brain ache, yet long speculations are no longer
difficult for me. I examined closely all proportions for finding the
terrestrial longitude, but could not find a single one. I have,
therefore, originated a method by means of the Moon, which is
unerring, and I am certain that it is the best which has yet been
advanced. In a short time I will inform the Royal Society that I
have a proposition to make on this subject, stating my points.... I
have also discovered many new methods for observing the planets, the
Moon, and the stars. That which concerns the Moon and its parallax,
diameter, and inequality I will publish whenever an opportunity
arises.
He longs to go to Oxford, and investigate the Bodleian Library, but
cannot, for want of money. “I wonder,” he says, “my father does not show
greater care for me than to let me live now for more than sixteen months
upon 250 rixdalers (something under £50).” Finally, he returns home and
obtains an appointment as Assessor-extraordinary at the State Department
of the Board of Mines, which was responsible for the supervision of the
great mining industries of Sweden. In this connection he is fortunate in
making the acquaintance of Christopher Polhem, the celebrated engineer,
who recommends him for his talents and readiness of resource. By degrees
he becomes an intimate guest with Polhem’s family, a circumstance which
leads in the end to a tragic love affair. He falls desperately in love
with Polhem’s younger daughter. The father gives his consent; but the
girl, a mere child of thirteen or fourteen, cannot reconcile herself to
the idea. Swedenborg, with great sorrow, relinquishes his claim,
resolving never again to let his thoughts settle upon any woman. Polhem
himself seems to have been almost equally distressed with Swedenborg
over the incident, especially as it led to a breach between himself and
the young man, whom he had come to regard in the light of his own son. A
period of depression follows, which is accentuated by the death of
Charles XII. of Sweden, about the same period, from whose encouragement
and support Emanuel had considerable expectations. The relations between
himself and the King were, indeed, singularly intimate, Charles readily
appreciating the young man’s remarkable talents and mathematical
knowledge. “Every day,” says Swedenborg, in writing on 14th September
1718, “I had some mathematical matters for his Majesty, who deigned to
be pleased with all of them. When the eclipse took place, I took his
Majesty out to see it, and talked much to him about it. This, however,
is a mere beginning.”
In the summer of 1721, Swedenborg started again on his travels, his
object this time being to study the mines and manufactories of other
countries, so that he might be in a position to render greater services
to his own in the office to which he had been appointed. On this
occasion he visited all the mines in Saxony and the Hartz mountains, and
was royally entertained by Duke Ludvic Rudolf of Brunswick-Lüneburg, who
showed him a generosity which he doubtless appreciated after his
father’s parsimony. Meanwhile his pen was by no means idle. He published
a treatise at Amsterdam on Chemistry and Physics; some observations on
Iron and Fire; and a work on the construction of Docks and Dykes; and
later on, at Leipzig, some miscellaneous observations on Geology and
Mineralogy. On his return home he settled down again for a period to his
work at the Board of Mines, in the meantime gathering matter for further
publications which followed in due course. The most important of these
were his _Opera Philosophia Mineralia_, and a treatise on _The
Infinite_. The former work met with a very favourable reception, and
between one publication and another Swedenborg soon won for himself a
European reputation. The Academy of Sciences at St Petersburg nominated
him a corresponding member, while he was one of the first to be elected
for the newly established Royal Academy of Sciences in his own country.
Everything thus seemed to open out for Swedenborg a career of great
scientific and practical utility. He became, however, gradually led by
his philosophical speculations to an investigation of the nature of the
soul and its operation in the body, and the mutual relations of the two.
This study was the subject of two important works, entitled respectively
_The Economy of the Animal Kingdom considered Anatomically and
Philosophically_, and _The Animal Kingdom considered Anatomically,
Physically, and Philosophically_. By the “animal kingdom” must be
understood the kingdom presided over by the soul. In the first of these
books Swedenborg deals with the composition of the blood and its
circulation, with the heart, arteries, and veins, and with the brain and
its cortices. In this book Swedenborg attaches “great importance to the
blood, for, as he says, nothing exists in the body that has not
previously existed in the blood.” He describes it again as “a vital and
most spirituous fluid, which has an immediate connection with the soul.”
In the _Animal Kingdom_ Swedenborg describes in full detail all the
organs of the body and their uses, the object being in the end to track
the soul home and to describe its activities. “For as yet,” he tells us,
“her modes of being and her nature are absolutely unknown.” Naturally he
recognises that this will be regarded by the philosophers of his day as
a vain and useless quest. But he is prepared to meet their objections
with the following pertinent remarks, which, now that the materialistic
hypothesis has been finally discarded by the advance guard of modern
Science, are likely to find a sympathetic echo in scientific as well as
philosophic circles.
Inasmuch [he says] as the soul is the model, the idea, the first
form, the substance, the force, and the principle of her organic
body, and of all its forces and powers, or what amounts to the same
thing, as the organic body is the image and type of its soul
conformed and principled to the whole nature of the soul’s
efficiency, it follows that the one is represented in the other....
Thus by the body we are instructed respecting the soul, by the soul
respecting the body, and by both respecting the truth of the whole.
Emerson describes the _Animal Kingdom_ as “an anatomist’s account of the
human body in the highest style of poetry,” and its object as to “put
science and the soul, long estranged from each other, at one again.” It
was while continuing his pursuit of this apparently visionary aim that
Swedenborg quite unexpectedly found himself, as he believed, in touch
with another than the physical world. In writing of this extraordinary
development in his life history in the Introduction to the _Arcana
Cœlestia_, the first volume of which appeared in 1749, he gives his own
account of his relationship with the spiritual realm in justification of
the remarkably dogmatic statements contained in the book in question.
“It is,” he says, “expedient here to premise that of the Lord’s
divine mercy it has been granted me now for several years to be
constantly and uninterruptedly in company with spirits and angels,
hearing them converse with each other and conversing with them.
Hence it has been permitted me to hear and see things in another
life which are astonishing, and which have never before come to the
knowledge of any man nor entered into his imagination. I have thus
been instructed concerning different kinds of spirits and the state
of souls after death—concerning Hell, or the lamentable state of the
unfaithful—concerning Heaven, or the most happy state of the
faithful—and particularly concerning the doctrine of Faith, which is
acknowledged throughout all Heaven, on which subjects, by the divine
mercy of the Lord, more will be said in the following pages.” With
regard to the extraordinary transformation which these experiences
brought about in his life’s work, he explains to a friend that the
Lord has elected him for this work, and “for revealing the spiritual
meaning of the Sacred Scriptures which he had promised to the
Prophets and in the Book of Revelation.” “My purpose previously,” he
adds, “had been to explore Nature, chemistry, and the sciences of
mining and anatomy.”
The basis of Swedenborg’s teaching which, of course, under the
circumstances he did not claim in any way as original, was that the
Bible must be accepted absolutely as a divinely inspired book, but must
be taken in an allegorical sense. Thus where historical events are
recorded they are not recorded for the sake of history, for the object
of the Scriptures is to treat not of the kingdoms of the earth, but of
the Kingdom of God. In other parts of the Bible, as in Genesis, there is
no truth in the story from the historical point of view. The record is
merely an allegory of the soul.
His doctrine of Correspondences was merely the recognition of this
allegorical relationship of the spiritual and material. The universe,
according to Swedenborg, is symbolical throughout, All material things
are derived from their spiritual archetypes, and are representations of
these. The bodily form represents the spiritual character, for the
spirit forms the body in its own likeness. A man’s acts are thus the
outcome of his inward nature, and there is consequently a similar
correspondence between them and the inward man. The basis of these ideas
is, of course, the ancient occult teaching that the universe is the
macrocosm, and man the microcosm. Thus Swedenborg tells us that as there
is a material sun, moon, and stars, so each of these heavenly bodies has
its mental and spiritual counterpart.
Swedenborg’s doctrine of Degrees appears to follow from his doctrine of
Correspondences. The three degrees of the human mind correspond to the
three kingdoms of Nature: animal, vegetable, and mineral, corresponding
to spirit, soul, and body. “Degrees,” Swedenborg tells us, “are of two
kinds, discrete and continuous.” “All things, from least to greatest, in
both the spiritual and natural worlds, co-exist at once from discrete
and continuous degrees. In respect of discrete degrees there can be no
intercourse between either by continuity.” It follows, therefore, with
regard to the degrees of the human mind, the celestial, spiritual, and
the natural, that they cannot communicate under normal conditions one
with another. Thus, too, men on earth can have no sensible communication
with the spiritual world or see things of that world without a special
opening of the spiritual sight. Elsewhere Swedenborg tells us “to the
intent that anything may be perfect it must be distinguished into three
degrees. The ground and reason of this is because there must be end,
cause, and effect.” Another doctrine of Swedenborg’s was that of
regeneration. In order to be partaker of the higher life, man, he held,
must be born again, but this regeneration was not a special occurrence
of any particular date, but a continuous process. One of the orthodox
doctrines which Swedenborg attacked was that of the Trinity. He denied
that Jesus Christ was merely the Second Person of a Divine Trinity. He
cites St Paul’s statement that “in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the
Godhead bodily,” and maintains that the whole Trinity is centred in his
Person. “In consequence,” he says, “of separating the Divine Trinity
into Three Persons each of which is declared to be God and Lord, a sort
of frenzy has infected the whole system of theology as well as the
Christian Church so called from its Divine Founder.... That a trinity of
gods occupies the minds of Christians, although they deny it from shame,
is very evident from the ingenuity of many who contrive methods to prove
that three are one, and one three, by geometry, arithmetic, and
physics.... Others have trifled with the Divine Trinity as jugglers play
one with another. Their juggling on this subject may be compared to
those sick of a fever who see a single object, such as a man, a table,
or a candle, as three; or three as one.”
The basis of this orthodox Christian teaching with regard to the Trinity
is, of course, the Athanasian Creed, which attempts to explain the
matter by the absurd method of a juxtaposition of contradictions. It is
well to bear in mind, in view of the enormous amount of theological
twaddle that has been talked on this subject, that the Athanasian Creed
was in the nature of a political concordat to meet the exigencies of a
time of acute religious difficulty, and in no sense an exposition of
spiritual truth.
As the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity was false, argued Swedenborg,
and there were no three Persons, as supposed, it was, of course,
impossible for one of them, the Son, to offer Himself as sacrifice to
appease the wrath of another, the Father. The doctrine of the atonement,
therefore, as taught by the Church, had no basis in fact. God needed no
reconciliation to His creatures. It was they who needed to be reconciled
to Him before they could be fitted to appear in His presence. Christ
took upon Himself human nature that He might conquer mankind’s spiritual
enemies which were keeping him in bondage and estranged from his Divine
Source.
One of Swedenborg’s most astounding statements had reference to the Last
Judgment. This was not, maintained Swedenborg, as the orthodox generally
hold, the final consummation of all things. The event was an occurrence
in the spiritual sphere which actually took place in the year 1757! It
appears from this amazing account that in the Intermediate State so many
undesirable and evil spiritual entities had accumulated that they were
threatening the whole world with imminent catastrophe. It may be
remembered, in this connection, that in Swedenborg’s time scepticism was
everywhere rampant, and that religious life had reached its lowest ebb.
This was the case not only on the Continent, but pre-eminently in
England, where the movement headed by John Wesley led to such remarkable
scenes in connection with the great spiritual revival which followed
this period of religious apathy. To avert the catastrophe threatened to
the world according to Swedenborg’s theory, a general judgment was
executed upon the spirits who were in revolt and were imperilling the
divine order. These powers of evil were at that date placed under
restraint, so that an influx of new spiritual forces among men might be
made possible. Swedenborg actually goes so far as to affirm that he
himself was permitted to witness this judgment in fulfilment of the
prophecies made in the Gospels and in the Book of Revelation.
The Swedenborgian teaching which has come in probably for most criticism
is that with regard to Marriage. Swedenborg (thus far as it appears to
me quite rightly) insisted that sex is a spiritual as well as a physical
distinction. He denied the virtues of celibacy and declared that true
chastity resides in the perfect marriage relation. Marriage, according
to Swedenborg, is not a physical relationship till death part the united
pair, but is eternal in its character. “Conjugial love” being the
central and fundamental love of man’s life is also the source of his
fullest joy. The delights of the true conjugial love exceed the delights
of all other loves. All delights that are felt by man proceed from love,
and it follows, therefore, that the principal happiness in the celestial
life must have a similar source, and the highest joy of heaven must
therefore be the spiritual counterpart of the conjugial life of earth.
It does not, of course, necessarily follow from this that earthly
marriages are perpetuated in heaven. If the feelings of the marriage
partners towards one another are concordant and sympathetic, they
continue indeed their married life; but if they are discordant and
antipathetic, they dissolve it. For true conjugial love is the only
possible form of marriage in heaven, and “as their love lasts to
eternity, it follows that the wife becomes more and more a wife and the
husband more and more a husband. The true reason of this is that in a
marriage of truly conjugial love each married partner becomes
continually a more interior man. For that love opens the interiors of
their minds and in the proportion in which these are opened the man
becomes more and more a man.”
Swedenborg has some very beautiful observations with regard to the
rejuvenescence of those who have passed into the higher life. “All who
come into heaven,” he says, “return into their vernal youth, and remain
so to eternity. The more thousands of years they live the more beautiful
and happy is the spring to which they attain.... In a word, to grow old
in heaven is to grow young.... They who live in the chaste life of
marriage are above all others in the order and form of Heaven after
death. Their beauty, therefore, is surpassing, and the flower of their
youth endures for ever.”
What are we to say of this man who propounded this amazing gospel as a
direct message from the highest spheres? What are we to say of his
communications and conversations with the unseen world? Of his _bona
fides_ it is impossible to entertain a doubt. The ordinary hypothesis is
that he suffered from hallucinations. It has been argued on the other
hand, that for a man so sane and so shrewd in the ordinary affairs of
the world, hallucinations of the kind were an impossibility. This,
however, seems going rather too far. Some of the sanest men in the world
have had special points on which they were not mentally sound. Monomania
is a recognised form of mental aberration, and the man who suffers from
it is as sane as his fellows on all matters except one.
This spiritual communion, however, was continuous in the case of
Swedenborg for many years, and during those years occupied either in
itself or in the activities that arose from it the larger portion of his
life. In spite of this absorption, his relations with his fellow men
continued as sane and responsible as those of any of his neighbours.
Would this have been possible, one may ask, in the face of so absorbing
an interest, had this interest merely been founded on a monomania? It
would, I think, be difficult to parallel such a case. If, however, we
decide to take Swedenborg’s relations with the other world at his own
valuation, are we called upon to accept his gospel at his own valuation
on that account? Certainly I think not. Swedenborg’s estimate of the
status of the spiritual beings with whom he communicated, even if we
accept their reality, need not be ours. Recent investigations and
records of innumerable psychic experiences have tended to show what a
miscellaneous crowd of spirits hover around the confines of this
material world. Swedenborg’s mistake has been made by many spiritualists
of the present day, and sometimes with disastrous results. Swedenborg
had not before him the evidence which we now hold to warn him of the
necessity of testing the quality of his spiritual communicants. The
experiences encountered overwhelmed him by their unexpected and
apparently miraculous character, and his naturally sane judgment was at
fault for want of a criterion by which to estimate them.[12] Few of
those who now accept the genuineness of psychical phenomena are prepared
to question Swedenborg’s exceptional mediumistic powers. To allow them
to their fullest extent is by no means to accept the doctrine which was
preached through his mediumship.
Of Swedenborg’s psychic gifts there is indeed plenty of evidence quite
outside the teachings of his celestial visitors. On one occasion he
disclosed to the Queen of Sweden a secret that had existed between her
and her deceased brother, the Crown Prince Augustus William of Prussia,
which was unknown to any living person. On another he described to a
whole company of people at Gothenburg a destructive fire which had
broken out at that very moment in Stockholm. Again on another occasion
he revealed to the widow of Monsieur de Marteville the hiding place of a
missing receipt for money which had been paid by her husband, the Dutch
Ambassador at Stockholm. These incidents are among the best
authenticated of any extant historical records of a psychic character.
The philosopher Kant, among others, made a searching investigation into
the evidence on which they rested, and came away absolutely convinced of
their truth. It is curious to note that John Wesley was not a little
interested in the Swedenborgian propagandism. The great Methodist
preacher was impressed with a strong desire to meet the Swedish seer—a
desire to which, however, he had never given open expression. The Rev.
Samuel Smith, one of Wesley’s preachers, records how, about the end of
February 1772 he was in attendance upon John Wesley, when the latter
received a communication as follows from Swedenborg, who was then in
London, which he read aloud.
GREAT BATH STREET,
GREAT BATH FIELDS.
SIR,—I have been informed in the world of spirits that you have a
strong desire to converse with me. I shall be happy to see you if
you will favour me with a visit. I am, sir, your humble servant,
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG.
Mr Wesley wrote in reply that he was then on the point of starting for a
six months’ journey, but would be pleased to wait on Swedenborg after
his return to London. Swedenborg replied to this, that the visit
proposed by Wesley would be too late, as he, Swedenborg, would enter the
world of spirits on the 29th day of the next month, never more to
return, a prediction which proved perfectly correct.
Other men have written many books. It is Swedenborg’s unique
distinction, if distinction it is, to be the one man in history who has
written a library on his own account. The encyclopædic brain does not,
as a rule, tend to perspicuity in style, and Swedenborg has suffered
from neglect owing to the fact that the fertility of his genius was not
sufficiently associated with the powers of selection and condensation.
To search for the treasures of his knowledge among his published works
is like looking, in the words of the hackneyed proverb, “for needles in
a haystack.” Had he given us far less in volume the world would
doubtless have profited more by the very valuable information contained
in his writings.
There are times when one is inclined to regret (if also to feel
thankfulness) that Swedenborg was side-tracked by his Celestials and
that he did not complete his phenomenal career on the lines which he had
marked out for himself. It is a vain, though a most alluring
speculation, to consider how the destinies of nations might have evolved
if certain incidents in a single life history had eventuated otherwise
than they did. We may conceive of Swedenborg bringing to completion his
schemes for the construction of flying machines and submarines, nearly
two centuries earlier than was decreed by destiny, and ask ourselves, if
we will, what use the great Napoleon might not have made of these
formidable implements of destructive warfare, and how far the map of
Europe, and indeed of the world, might have been changed through their
employment by his formidable genius; or, again, to what extent the
linking up of the New and Old Worlds might have been accelerated by such
developments. Here at least we must admit was a phenomenon—a man who
realised, in a measure undreamed of by his contemporaries, not only in
the physical but also in the spiritual sphere, the stupendous
possibilities of the Coming Time.
Footnote 10:
Church property being free from taxation.
Footnote 11:
See _Life of Emanuel Swedenborg_. By George Trobridge. London:
Frederick Warne & Co. To which book I must acknowledge my great
indebtedness.
Footnote 12:
There are not a few of the communications recorded, notably in the
“Spiritual Diary,” which might be advanced to support the hypothesis
of a disordered brain; and we must not lose sight of the fact that
Swedenborg’s tireless activities taxed his intellectual faculties
beyond the powers of any but the most exceptional human organism.
VI
COUNT CAGLIOSTRO
Who has not heard of Cagliostro? And yet who but a few students have any
real knowledge of that mysterious character, of whom it may be said, as
it was of Melchizedek, that he had “neither beginning of life nor end of
days.” Both, at least, like the king of Salem’s, are wrapped in
uncertainty, and though popular tradition, repeated again and again by
the uncritical historian, has identified Cagliostro’s early life with
that of the Italian scoundrel Joseph Balsamo, the evidence is as near
conclusive as presumptive evidence can well be, that the two had no
connection whatever with one another, beyond having married Italian
wives with the same surname[13]—and that by no means an uncommon one—and
the fact that Balsamo is said to have had an uncle of the name of
Cagliostro. From what we know of Balsamo it may fairly be said that two
people more opposite in character than himself and Count Cagliostro
would be difficult to discover, and the identification of the two would
seem to involve the assumption that Cagliostro had discarded his first
wife and taken a second, a supposition which would render worthless the
argument based on the identity of their surnames.
Cagliostro’s whole career, as far as we know it, shows a character in
which generosity is perpetually being carried to the verge of folly. His
credulity was constantly making him the dupe of designing knaves, in
whose honesty he placed a pathetic faith, and had he ever had the
misfortune to encounter his alter ego, a common rogue of the most
ordinary type, it is safe to predict that he would not have escaped from
his clutches till he had been fleeced of the bulk of his possessions. As
late as the date of his trial in the affair of the Diamond Necklace, no
suggestion of the identity of the two characters was even mooted. The
story owes its origin to the fertile brain of one of the greatest
scoundrels of whom European history holds record, the notorious
blackmailer, Theveneau de Morande.
A short _résumé_ of this arch-villain’s history will probably be
sufficient to dissipate any credence which has ever been placed in a
narrative for which his assertions are our only authority. Theveneau de
Morande was born in 1741, the son of a lawyer, at Arnay-le-Duc, in
Burgundy. As a boy he was arrested for theft in a house of ill-fame.
Subsequently he enlisted, obtained his discharge through his father’s
intervention, found himself once more in prison at For-l’Evêque, and was
then confined in a convent at Armentières, from which he was released
two years after at the age of four-and-twenty. Having shortly after
lampooned one of the members of the government, he was compelled to fly
the country and took refuge in England, where he arrived in a state of
destitution.
[Illustration: Count Cagliostro. From an engraving by Bartolozzi, in the
British Museum.]
Needs must when the devil drives, and, the pinch of poverty sharpening
his wits, he now turned his attention to the black-mailing business, in
the pursuit of which he was soon to evince a quite uncommon aptitude and
adroitness. His talents in this direction were ably seconded by a facile
pen and a command of vituperative language and personal abuse which the
author of the Letters of Junius could scarcely have outdone. His first
effort of importance in this direction was _Le Gazetier Cuirassé, ou
Anecdotes Scandaleuses sur la Cour de France_. Those who would not
purchase immunity by a lump sum down had their characters and private
lives mercilessly torn to pieces in its pages. The book is said to have
brought him £1000. An attempt to blackmail Voltaire was less successful.
The veteran _philosophe_ published the blackmailer’s letter with
comments by his own satiric pen. The blackmailer’s path has indeed its
ups and downs, and once he was fain to accept a horsewhipping and
publish an abject apology, the price extorted by an offended French
nobleman. Madame du Barry, however, Louis XV.’s notorious favourite, was
made of other stuff, and in consequence the _Memoires d’une Femme
Publique_, compared with which _Le Gazetier Cuirassé_ was said to have
been “rosewater,” were never published. Morande accepted the sum of
32,000 livres in solatium for his wounded literary _amour propre_.
Before, however, paying him his price the French Government had
attempted to kidnap the audacious libeller. This was the ancient
substitute for the more prosaic extradition methods of modern times. The
plot, however, failed. With a dexterity worthy of a better cause,
Morande, warned in time, was able to pose in the English press as a
political exile and avenger of public morality. The sympathy of the
susceptible public responded warmly to the unscrupulous appeal, and the
representatives of French authority escaped with difficulty from the
clutches of an infuriated London mob.
It not unfrequently happens with countries that have been at war, that
the signature of the treaty of peace is followed after no long lapse of
time by a formal alliance between the erstwhile foes, there being
obviously two methods of gaining one’s ends, the method of grab and the
method of give and take, and the failure of one suggesting the
advisability of adopting the other. So at least reasoned the French
Government, and the payment of Morande’s price was followed in due
course by his employment on behalf of the said Government in the
capacity of subsidised journalist, and spy. Morande was nothing loth to
come to terms, and eventually blossomed out into the Editor of the
_Courier de l’Europe_. This journal, originally started by Latour under
the ægis of the French Government, was soon read in every corner of the
Continent. This was the weapon which of all others the blackmailer
desired for his purposes. “In it,” says Brisset, “he tore to pieces the
most estimable people, and manufactured, or caused to be manufactured,
articles to ruin any one whom he feared.”
Cagliostro had—all unwittingly—made dire enemies of the French Court
through his acquittal in the trial over the Diamond Necklace affair. To
acquit Cagliostro, who had no more to do with the matter in question
than the man in the moon, appeared from the royal standpoint to be
tantamount to incriminating the Queen, on whom, in fact, suspicion long
and not unnaturally rested. Morande, therefore, received his
instructions from Paris to ruin Cagliostro’s reputation. The means ready
to his hand was the _Courier de l’Europe_. Hence the story of Joseph
Balsamo and his identification with the _soi-disant_ Count Cagliostro.
To say that the authority hardly seems adequate is surely to put it
mildly. And yet Carlyle, and others before and after him, have quietly
accepted the statement of the paid blackmailer as sufficient evidence of
the character and history of his victim!
Who, then, was Cagliostro? The answer to this question must ever remain
among the unsolved problems of history. There is, however, no reason to
dismiss as incredible—even if there is reason to doubt—the account which
he gave of himself on the occasion of the “Diamond Necklace” trial. From
what we know of Cagliostro we may, I think, say that his character was
far too ingenuous for him to have been likely to invent so remarkable a
tale. Everything, however, in his history points to the fact that he was
just the person to take a record of the kind and colour it with the hues
of his own fertile imagination. In any case, the impartial historian,
while dismissing as preposterous the Balsamo fiction is bound to give
some weight—however slight—to the only evidence on the subject we
possess which is not manifestly untrue. Cagliostro, however, himself did
not pretend to have knowledge of his parentage. “I cannot,” he states,
“speak positively as to the place of my nativity, nor as to the parents
who gave me birth. All my inquiries have ended only in giving me some
great notions, it is true, but altogether vague and uncertain,
concerning my family.” The gist, however, of his story was that he spent
his childhood in Arabia, where he was brought up under the name of
Acherat. He had then, he states, four persons attached to his
service—the chief of whom was a certain Althotas, a man between
fifty-five and sixty years of age. This man (whom it has been attempted
to identify with a certain Kölmer, a Jutland merchant, who had travelled
extensively and had the reputation of being a master-magician) informed
Cagliostro that he had been left an orphan when three months old, and
that his parents were Christian and nobly born. All his attempts,
however, to discover the secret of his birth were doomed to
disappointment. The matter was one which was treated as taboo. In his
twelfth year (to follow his own story) he left Medina for Mecca, where
he remained three years, until, wearying of the monotonous round of the
Cherif’s Court, he obtained leave to travel.
One day (he narrates), when I was alone, the prince entered my
apartment; he strained me to his bosom with more than usual
tenderness, bid me never cease to adore the Almighty, and added,
bedewing my cheeks with his tears: “Nature’s unfortunate child,
adieu!”
From this date commenced, according to his own account, Cagliostro’s
travels, first in company with Althotas, for whom he ever expressed the
warmest affection, afterwards with the wife whom he chose for himself in
Italy. For upwards of three years he claims to have travelled through
Egypt, Africa, and Asia, finally reaching the island of Rhodes in the
year 1766, and thence embarking on a French ship bound for Malta. Here
he and his guardian were received with all honour, Pinto, the Grand
Master of the Knights of Malta, giving them apartments in his palace.
It was here (he notes) that I first assumed European dress and with
it the name of Count Cagliostro; nor was it a small matter of
surprise to me to see Althotas appear in a clerical dress with the
insignia of the Order of Malta.
The Grand Master Pinto was apparently acquainted with Cagliostro’s
history. He often spoke to him, he says, of the Cherif, but always
refused to be “drawn” on the subject of his real origin and birth. He
treated him, however, with every consideration and endeavoured to induce
him to “take the cross,” promising him a great career and rapid
preferment if he would consent to do so. Cagliostro’s love of travelling
and of the study of medicine drew him in another direction, and on the
death of his guardian, Althotas, which occurred shortly after, he left
Malta for ever. After visiting Sicily and the Greek Archipelago in
company with the Chevalier d’Aquino he proceeded thence to Naples, where
he took leave of his companion. Provided with a letter of credit on the
banking house of Signor Bellone he left Naples for Rome, where his
destiny awaited him in the shape of Seraphina Feliciani, who shortly
after became his wife, and to whom he showed throughout his married life
a most unfailing devotion.[14] Cagliostro states that he was then (anno
1770) in his twenty-second year, and he appears to have continued to
pursue that nomadic life which was so dear to him, travelling from town
to town on the Continent of Europe till he at length emerges into the
light of day in the city of London, in the month of July 1776, in
furnished apartments in Whitcombe Street, Leicester Fields. London seems
always to have been an unfortunate place for Cagliostro, and here he was
destined, on the first of many occasions, to become the victim of his
own too trustful and generous disposition and to be fleeced of the
greater part of his possessions by a nest of rogues, who took advantage
of a foreigner entirely ignorant of London. Eventually he was rescued
from this gang of knaves by a good Samaritan in the shape of a certain
O’Reilly. Now O’Reilly was a prominent member of the Esperance Lodge of
Freemasons, and here we first find Cagliostro brought into contact with
that celebrated secret society, his connection with which was destined
to play so all-important a part in the subsequent years of his life.
O’Reilly, it appears, was the proprietor of the _King’s Head_, in Gerard
Street, where the Esperance Lodge assembled, and it was only natural
that one so fascinated with the occult as Cagliostro should be readily
persuaded by his benefactor and rescuer to become initiated into the
order of Freemasons. It is not necessary here to follow in detail the
sordid intrigues of which, during his sojourn in England, he was made
the victim. He was, however, glad eventually to escape from the country,
with “no more than £50 and some jewels” in his possession, having lost
in all, through fraud and consequent legal proceedings, some 3000
guineas during his sojourn. Cagliostro’s star, however, had not yet set,
and his all too brief spell of fame and triumph was still in front of
him. Providence, in the shape probably of the emissaries of Freemasonry,
was waiting at Brussels to replenish his purse, and the same Providence,
probably in the same guise, replenished it many times afterwards with no
niggardly hand.
From Brussels to The Hague, from The Hague to Nuremberg, from Nuremberg
to Berlin, from Berlin to Leipzig, we trace the Count’s peregrinations,
gathering fame and founding Egyptian Masonic Lodges as he went. It is
true he met with setbacks and reverses, and the capital of Frederick the
Great would have none of him, but it is clear that, in spite of these,
his credit and reputation as a healer and clairvoyant grew steadily in
volume. It was, in fact, on these two gifts that his fame rested. Though
he claimed to have been taught the secrets of occultism by Althotas, or
to have learned them from the Egyptian priests, there is no evidence[15]
throughout the records of his career of his possessing anything but a
smattering of such abstruse knowledge, and on several occasions, notably
at St Petersburg, there is something more than a suspicion that his
attempt to make good his claim to the name of occultist involved him in
serious humiliation and rebuffs. The tales, however, of his predictions
and their fulfilments were handed on from mouth to mouth, doubtless
losing nothing on the way, while his reputation as a healer and the
stories of the cures which he effected assured a perfect furore of
enthusiasm in every fresh town to which he paid a visit. He took
advantage of this enthusiasm to found fresh Masonic Lodges in all
directions, and, while he consistently refused to receive payment of any
kind for his cures, the shekels of an endless file of initiate converts
poured into the coffers at the headquarters of Egyptian Masonry. Never
was man at once more lavish with money and more indifferent to the
comforts which money brings. “He slept in an armchair,” said Madame
d’Oberkirch contemptuously, “and lived on cheese.” Whatever he spent,
however, he appeared to draw from an inexhaustible widow’s cruise. As in
spite of his refusal to accept fees, he paid his own bills with the
greatest promptitude; the problem whence this continuous stream of gold
flowed excited unbounded curiosity, and many were the fantastic stories
invented to account for it.
Meanwhile, after visiting Mittau, where he was enthusiastically taken up
by Marshal von Medem, the head of the Masonic Lodge at that place, he
passed on to Petersburg, Warsaw, and thence to Strassburg. Here he was
destined to enjoy a great triumph and to win a powerful friend, who was
eventually, through a pure accident, to prove the cause of his undoing.
This was none other than the notorious Cardinal de Rohan. It is hardly
necessary to state that the ecclesiastical dignitary of the eighteenth
century in France was not selected for his high office by reason of his
exemplary life or his Christian virtues. To neither of these did
Cardinal de Rohan make any claim. Yet honours had fallen thick and fast
upon him. He was Bishop of Strassburg, Grand Almoner of France,
Cardinal, Prince of the Empire, Landgrave of Alsace, in addition to
being Abbot of the richest abbey in France, the Abbey of St Waast
Handsune. Of fascinating manner, an aristocrat of the aristocrats, there
was no position in the kingdom to which he did not feel justified in
aspiring. The fact that he enjoyed a reputation for dissipation and
extravagance did not appear calculated to tell against him in such an
age.
Surprising as it may seem, the Cardinal combined with a pleasure-loving
disposition a passion for alchemy and the pursuit of the occult
sciences, and the arrival of Cagliostro at Strassburg naturally enough
excited his interest to no small degree. The Cardinal determined to lose
no time in making the acquaintance of the man about whom and whose
marvellous cures the whole town was already talking almost before he set
foot in its streets. But Cagliostro was inclined to ride the high horse.
“If the Cardinal is ill,” he replied to the great man’s messenger, “let
him come to me and I will cure him. If not, he has no need of me nor I
of him.” In spite of the Count’s stand-offishness, the Cardinal was not
to be denied, and the acquaintance once made soon ripened into the
closest intimacy. Cagliostro was told to consider the palace his own,
and he and his wife resided there on the footing of the most honoured
guests. Marvellous tales are told of the results of his experiments in
the Cardinal’s laboratory, how he manufactured gold and jewels, and
finally showed De Rohan in the crystal the form of the woman whom he had
loved. It is on these stories alone that the reputation of Cagliostro as
an alchemist really rests, and in the absence of further confirmatory
evidence one is inclined to take them with a grain of salt. However this
may be, it is certain that the Cardinal was completely won over, and
Cagliostro took care not to lose caste by assuming airs of humility or
deference. Never, certainly, was there less of a snob than this
marvellous adventurer. “Cagliostro,” says Madame d’Oberkirch, “treated
him and his other distinguished admirers as if they were under the
deepest obligation to him; but he under none whatever to them.” As
usual, our hero was besieged at Strassburg by those who would profit by
his medical knowledge and skill as a healer, for he really appears to
have possessed both, and as usual by obliging his clients he incurred
the inveterate hostility of the medical profession. In all ages of the
world’s history the natural healer has had the doctor as his enemy, and
the prophet, the priest. Orthodoxy has ever closed its ranks against
those who poach on its preserves. Doubtless it is the natural instinct
of self-defence. For Cagliostro, however, it was extremely inconvenient.
The people would throng his doorsteps to be cured and make him heal them
willy-nilly, and the medical profession were equally determined to make
each place in which he practised his medical skill too hot for him.
Others might have been willing to let the dogs bark, but a fatal
sensitiveness to criticism made the Count an all too easy target for
their venom. They drove him from Strassburg as they had driven him from
other places, in spite of the entreaties of De Rohan, who pressed him to
stay and disregard their clamour.
We need not follow Cagliostro from Strassburg to Bordeaux and from
Bordeaux to Lyons, where he added further laurels to his reputation and
founded further Lodges of Egyptian Masonry. He might have remained
indefinitely to all appearance at the latter place if it had not been
for the solicitations of Cardinal de Rohan, who urged him to respond to
the appeals of Parisian Society and visit the gay capital, where he
guaranteed him an enthusiastic reception. He even sent a special
messenger to back his request, and perhaps Cagliostro himself had heard
the capital of cultured Europe a-calling. Anyhow he came, his evil
fate—if not Paris—summoning him. Cagliostro declared that he took the
greatest precaution on arriving there to avoid causing ill-will. However
this may be, he immediately became “the rage” in fashionable circles;
people flocked to him by hundreds to be cured, and the stories of the
miracles which he was supposed to have effected were the talk of every
dinner-party in the capital. Mesmer had already left Paris with a
fortune of 340,000 livres, made by his lucrative practice, in his
pocket. Paris, craving for a new excitement, was ready to receive with
open arms the wonder-worker of whom it was said that no one of all his
patients ever succeeded in making him accept the least mark of
gratitude.[16]
Cagliostro was here surfeited with flattery. Houdin executed his bust.
His statuettes were in every shop window. His portrait was in every
house. Those who claimed to have been cured by him were met with on all
sides. Angels, it is said, and heroes of Biblical story appeared at his
séances. No story was too absurd for Paris to believe about him.
But a train of events in which he had no hand, and a catastrophe for
which he had no responsibility, were destined, while wrecking other
reputations and undermining the throne itself, to bring his career of
triumph to a sudden and tragic close, and eventually to drive him, a
forsaken and persecuted outcast, to his final doom. Cagliostro, as
already stated, had nothing whatever to do with the affair of the
Diamond Necklace. But for all that, he was caught in the web of deceit
that an unscrupulous woman had woven to suit her own purposes.
The Countess de Lamotte-Valois, a descendant of a natural son of Henri
II., and an adventuress of the most reckless type, had found a protector
in the person of the susceptible Cardinal de Rohan. Now the Cardinal was
by no means a _persona grata_ at the Court of Versailles. As a matter of
fact, he was never seen there except at the feast of the Assumption,
when it was his duty as Grand Almoner to celebrate Mass in the Royal
Chapel. The cause of this was the enmity of Queen Marie Antoinette. The
Cardinal had been recalled from the embassy at Vienna at the instance of
her mother, Maria Theresa, and doubtless the mother had communicated to
the daughter a distrust for the brilliant but pleasure-loving Cardinal.
This was a fatal obstacle to De Rohan, whose ambition it was to become
First Minister to the King. The Countess de Lamotte saw her chance in
the thwarted ambitions of her protector, and took care to pose as an
intimate friend of the Queen, a story to which her frequent visits to
Versailles in connection with a petition for the recovery of some family
property which had passed into the possession of the State, lent a
certain appearance of truth. She represented to the Cardinal the
interest the Queen took in him but which matters of policy compelled her
to dissemble. In the sequel, a series of letters—of course forged—passed
between De Rohan and the supposed Queen. The Queen, through the
intermediary of the Countess, borrowed large sums of money of the
Cardinal, which the Cardinal, on his part, being head over ears in debt
in spite of his enormous income, was compelled to borrow of the Jews.
Then, when the Cardinal was becoming suspicious, the Countess arranged a
bogus interview, at which another lady—admittedly remarkably like
her—posed as the Queen, and permitted De Rohan to kiss her hand.
Finally, Madame de Lamotte got in touch with Böhmer, the owner of the
famous necklace. This she represented to the Cardinal that the Queen had
set her heart on obtaining, but could not, at a moment’s notice, find
the ready cash. Would he become security? Needless to say, De Rohan fell
into the trap. The first instalment of the bill fell due, and the
Cardinal, who had not expected to be called on to pay, was unable
offhand to find the money. At this point Böhmer, feeling nervous,
consulted one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, who informed him that
the story of the Queen having bought the necklace was all moonshine. He
then went to the Countess de Lamotte, who had the effrontery to say she
believed he was being victimised, and advised him to go to the Cardinal,
thinking, doubtless, that De Rohan would take the entire responsibility
when the alternative was his ruin. The jeweller, however, instead of
taking her advice, went straight to the King. The King immediately
communicated with the Queen, who was furious, and insisted on having the
Cardinal arrested forthwith. The fat was now in the fire with a
vengeance. The arrest of the Cardinal was followed by that of the
Countess de Lamotte, of Cagliostro and his wife (whom the Countess in
utter recklessness accused of the theft of the necklace), of the
Baroness d’Oliva, who had “played” the Queen, of de Vilette, the forger
of the letters, and various minor actors in this astounding drama.
In the celebrated trial that followed Cagliostro was acquitted, but not
until he had spent nine months in the Bastille. There was, in fact, not
a shadow of evidence against him. His wife was released before the trial
took place. Cagliostro received an ovation from the people of Paris on
the occasion of his release, as well as De Rohan, who was also
acquitted, the popularity of the verdict being due to the hatred with
which the Royal Family were now everywhere regarded. But on the day
after, by a Royal edict, De Rohan was stripped of all his dignities and
exiled to Auvergne, while Cagliostro was ordered to leave France within
three weeks. The Count retired to England, fearful lest worse might
befall him; but even here the relentless malignity of the discredited
Queen, who regarded his acquittal as equivalent to her own condemnation,
followed his footsteps. The unscrupulous De Morande, as we have already
seen, was paid by the Court to ruin his reputation and to identify him
with the thief and gaolbird Joseph Balsamo. London was soon made so hot
for him that he returned once more to the Continent, and made his home
for a short time in Switzerland. Later on he went to Trent, where the
Prince-Bishop, who had a passion for alchemy, made him a welcome guest.
But the Count’s day was over, and misfortune continued to dog his
footsteps. The Emperor Joseph II. would not permit his vassal to harbour
the man who had been mixed up in the Diamond Necklace affair, and the
Bishop was reluctantly obliged to bid him begone. Cagliostro now found
himself driven from pillar to post, his resources were at an end, and
his friends were dead or had deserted him. He turned his steps towards
Italy, and eventually arrived at Rome. Here his presence becoming known
to the papal authorities, he and his wife were arrested as members of
the Masonic Fraternity. In those days, within the Papal States
Freemasonry was a crime punishable by death. After a mock trial the
death-sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life, while his wife was
confined in a penitentiary.
Rumour which wove a web of romance round all his doings, did not leave
him even here, and stories were circulated that he had escaped from his
dungeon and was living in Russia. There appears, however, to be no doubt
that neither Count nor Countess long survived their incarceration, and
when the French soldiers invaded the Papal States in 1797 and the Polish
Legion under General Daubrowski captured the fortress of San Leo, in
which the Count had been confined, the officers who inquired after the
once famous magician, hoping to set him free, were informed that it was
too late, and that he was already dead. The Queen, whose vindictive
spite had ruined these two lives, went to her doom first; but her
instrument, the blackmailer Morande, retired to a quiet corner of France
on his ill-gotten fortune, escaped the furies of the French Revolution,
and ended his life surrounded by an atmosphere of the most unquestioned
respectability.
And what of the man with whom not only his own fate, but the
misrepresentations of history have dealt so hardly? What manner of man
was he for whom even those who denounce him as mountebank might not
unreasonably, one would think, feel a passing sympathy? On two points we
have ample testimony. All those who knew him bore witness to the
marvellous magnetism of his personality and to the fascination and
beauty of his extraordinary eyes. “No two eyes like his were ever seen,”
says the Marquise de Crégny, “and his teeth were superb.” “He was not,
strictly speaking, handsome,” says Madame d’Oberkirch, “but I have never
seen a more remarkable face. His glance was so penetrating that one
might almost be tempted to call it supernatural. I could not describe
the expression of his eyes; it was, so to speak, a mixture of flame and
ice. It attracted and repelled at the same time, and, whilst it inspired
terror, it aroused along with it an irresistible curiosity. I cannot
deny,” she adds, “that Cagliostro possessed an almost demoniacal power.”
Not less noteworthy is the opinion of so hostile a witness as Beugnot,
who confesses, while ridiculing him, that his face, his attire, the
whole man, in fact, impressed him in spite of himself. “If gibberish can
be sublime,” he continues, “Cagliostro was sublime. When he began
speaking on a subject he seemed carried away with it, and spoke
impressively in a ringing, sonorous voice.”
This was the man whose appearance Carlyle caricatured in the following
elegant phraseology:
A most portentous face of scoundrelism; a fat snub abominable face;
dew-lapped, flat-nosed, greasy, full of greediness, sensuality,
ox-like obstinacy; the most perfect quack face produced by the
eighteenth century.
Carlyle, however, who would say anything or write anything in his moods
of irritability, also alluded to the late Cardinal Newman as “not
possessing the intellect of a moderate-sized rabbit”; and the two
statements may fairly be juxtaposed.
Mr W. R. H. Trowbridge, to whose recent book I am greatly indebted for
material for this brief sketch of Cagliostro’s life, well observes that
“there is perhaps no other equally celebrated personality in modern
history whose character is so baffling to the biographer.” History has
condemned him purely on the evidence of his most unscrupulous enemies.
But while dismissing such one-sided portraits, it is no easy matter to
arrive at an unprejudiced valuation of the real man. Of his latest
biographer’s impartiality and candour, as well as his careful research
of authorities, it is impossible to speak too highly. His conclusions
will be all the more widely accepted in view of the fact that he is
himself in no sense an occultist. In spite of a rather long chapter
dealing with “Eighteenth Century Occultism,” we feel instinctively and
at every turn that the subject is one in which he is obviously out of
his depth. Indeed, only on the second page of his biography we come
across the following surprising statement. Speaking of “theosophists,
spiritualists, occultists,” all of whom are unceremoniously lumped
together, he observes:
By these amiable visionaries Cagliostro is regarded as one of the
princes of occultism whose mystical touch has revealed the arcana of
the spiritual world to the initiated, and illumined the path along
which the speculative scientist proceeds on entering the labyrinth
of the supernatural.
Every occultist knows this to be sheer rubbish. Cagliostro has never
been regarded as an authority in any school of occultism. Many, if not
most occultists, have been inclined to believe that he was more than
half a quack. Mr Trowbridge—it is to be said to his credit—has judged
him in the light of the evidence more fairly than they. The truth is
that, Cagliostro with all his good qualities, with all his generosity of
heart, his human sympathy, his nobility—yes, it really was nobility—of
character, was beyond and above all things a poser and a mystery-monger.
He had a magnetic personality, a mediumistic temperament, and almost
certainly some clairvoyant power, though it is noticeable that he
invariably employed a little boy or girl whose assistance was essential
to his predictions. Beyond this, and, I think we must say, more
important than all this, he had an incontestable natural healing gift,
which he aided by no small knowledge of practical medicine. In these
qualifications we have the secret of his success, and also the clue to
his failure. He was excessively vain, and loved to impress the
multitude. He loved, moreover, to impress them by surrounding himself
with an atmosphere of mystery and posing as an occultist, which
(probably) he never was. He has left no body of teaching behind him. He
has left no followers, no disciples. He was merely the comet of a
season, though an exceptionally brilliant one. It would be absurd to
class him in the same category as such master occultists as Cornelius
Agrippa and Paracelsus, or indeed even as Eliphas Levi. He was not cast
in the same mould. He belonged to another and a lower type. But his was
withal a striking as well as a sympathetic personality, a personality
that makes appeal, by a certain glamour heightened by the tragedy of his
inglorious end, to all that is warm, and chivalrous, and romantic in the
human heart.
Footnote 13:
The Christian name of Balsamo’s wife was Lorenza, of Cagliostro’s
Seraphina. But the story is itself of doubtful authenticity.
Footnote 14:
It is perhaps almost superfluous to state that Joseph Balsamo got his
wife locked up in jail, beside compelling her to lead a life of
immorality.
Footnote 15:
Unless indeed we accept the (doubtful) story of his transmuting metals
for De Rohan.
Footnote 16:
Grimm.
VII
ANNA KINGSFORD AND EDWARD MAITLAND
We are all of us familiar with the old proverb that marriages are made
in Heaven, though there are few of us who believe it. It may, however,
well be true that there are certain spiritual marriages or associations
which are made in Heaven in the sense that they have a certain cosmic
foundation in the nature of things and in the relationship of one life
to another. It may also be true that two lives are brought together for
special and important purposes by influences working from another and a
far higher plane. Collaboration is a very commonplace word, but there
was certainly no element of the commonplace in the collaboration of Anna
Kingsford and Edward Maitland. History perhaps contains nothing more
remarkable, and romance nothing more romantic, than this singular
association of two strikingly diverse and original characters of
opposite sexes for a single and supreme purpose. To the two individuals
concerned, the sacrifice of two lives to the ideal which inspired them
seemed but little in view of the momentous character of the objects to
be achieved. The world may not set the same store on the high mission of
Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, may not perhaps value it at the same
price as the two co-workers who gave up their all in pursuit of their
aims. Many may say, as many have said already, that, like Arthur’s
Knights of the Round Table, they were pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp and
not the Holy Grail of their hearts’ desire. But assuming that they
partially misinterpreted the end to be achieved, or, alternatively,
over-estimated their own powers of achieving that end with anything like
the success that so high an ideal demanded, it should still be borne in
mind that those who under-estimate the greatness of their own mission
must inevitably fail to impress others with its value in the scheme of
things, and it is therefore far better to over-estimate your own powers
and the importance of the object aimed at than to underrate either the
one or the other.
[Illustration: Anna Kingsford.]
People are apt to look scoffingly at the man with a mission, but it is
the men and the women with missions who have in fact made the world what
it is to-day. “A crank,” said some wit, “is a little thing that makes
revolutions.” The saying is as true as it was in the times of Jesus
Christ, that God has “chosen the foolish things of the world to confound
the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the things which
are mighty.” If there is one word in our language more misunderstood
than any other, it is the little word “Faith.” We have been told by the
cynical that faith is the capacity for believing that which we know to
be untrue, and the misinterpretation of this term by the orthodox clergy
is responsible for the derision which has been cast upon it. Worst of
all sinners within the fold of the Church has been the evangelical
contingent. “Believe,” they tell us, “all the dry-as-dust dogmas of
orthodox theology, and you will win eternal salvation.” This is not, we
may be sure, the sense in which Jesus used the word. Neither is it the
sense in which, in a magnificently eloquent passage, the word was
employed by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, when he spoke of
those who “through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness,
obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions; quenched the violence of
fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong,
waxed valiant in fight, and turned to flight the armies of the aliens.”
The faith of Jesus and the faith of his apostles and followers is the
faith that implies and includes the power to achieve. It is what we call
in the ordinary language of the day “self-confidence,” but it is not the
confidence in the _lower_ but in the _higher_ self; it is the confidence
which comes of the conscious placing of ourselves _en rapport_ with what
Prentice Mulford called “the Infinite Life” and the “Divine Source.”
This power is the secret of all great achievement. The _faith_ of the
orthodox, on the other hand, corresponds to the _credulity_ of the man
in the street. It is the will-o’-the-wisp that leads fools to sacrifice
the reality for a chimera. It was in condemnation and in ridicule of
such folly as this that Omar Khayyám bade his friends “take the cash and
let the credit go.” It was in the spirit of this true self-confidence
and self-reliance that Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland entered upon
the daring project of their life’s work. It was this spirit of faith
that enabled them to carry it at length to a triumphant
conclusion—successful in spite of those imperfections inevitably
incidental to a work of the kind, achieved under the defective
conditions of present-day humanity.
A great work was certainly seldom, if ever, accomplished under such
curious and such self-contradictory conditions. A man and a woman have
frequently worked together before, and worked effectively and
harmoniously, but they have either been in the relationship of husband
and wife, of avowed lovers, independent of or having deliberately cast
aside other ties, or they have been free to work together as friends
owing to the fact that circumstances have left them unhampered by family
conditions. The peculiarity of the present case is that the relations of
Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland subsisted in spite of the existence
of a husband for whom his wife had a very genuine and warm affection,
and who most undoubtedly reciprocated it to the full—in spite also of
the fact that the husband was fully aware of, and approved of, all that
took place, without seeing anything in it to lessen his esteem for his
wife or compromise their relationship—in spite also of the fact that the
society of the day held up its hands in horror at the scandal and more
than suspected immorality where there was none to suspect—in spite,
finally, of the fact that, joined to the respect and friendly feeling
which Edward Maitland felt for the husband, there was something in his
whole attitude and demeanour towards Anna Kingsford which was more in
the nature of the devotion of a lover to his mistress than anything else
which the ordinary terms of language can express. When Anna Kingsford
passed away to another sphere early indeed in life (she was but
forty-two), but with her life’s work accomplished, the two who joined
hands over her grave and who mourned her most deeply and most sincerely
were the devoted husband who loved her without understanding the most
remarkable side of her character, and the friend who loved and
understood, but, better even than the woman whom he loved, loved the
work of which her presence and being were to him the divine symbol and
seal.
People of the type of Anna Bonus Kingsford are too sensitive and
impressionable ever to be really happy for long. The acuteness of their
feelings exaggerates their own sufferings, and at the same time makes
the consciousness of the sufferings of others an ever present torture
and martyrdom. Mrs Kingsford’s life, indeed, at times when her health,
always far from robust, was below the usual level, became absolutely
unbearable. The thought of bringing a child into the world to share her
own anguish and despair seemed in itself a crime.
I long (she writes, in one of these moods of depression), I long for
a little rest and peace. The world has grown very bitter to me. I
feel as if every one were dead!
Ah, what a life is before me!—a life of incessant struggle,
reproach, and loneliness. I shall never be as other women, happy in
their wifehood and motherhood. Never to my dying day shall I know
the meaning of a home.
And behind me, as I look back on the road by which I have come, all
is storm and darkness. I fought my way through my lonely,
sad-hearted childhood; I fought my way through my girlhood,
misunderstood, and mistrusted always; and now, in my womanhood, I am
fighting still. On every side of me are rebuke and suspicion, and
bitter, abiding sorrow. Pain and suffering of body and of spirit
have hung on my steps all the years of my life. I have had no
respite.
Is there never to be peace? Never to be a time of sunlight that
shall make me glad of my being?
Her spirit was indeed naked and without defence against the arrows of
the world. Endowed with courage far greater than falls to the lot of
most women, with great independence and an utter fearlessness of
conventionality, she had no hesitation in avowing her own profound
belief in her divine mission. To one who, meeting her for the first
time, observed with ill-timed jocularity, “I understand, Mrs Kingsford,
that you are a prophetess,” she retorted with the utmost solemnity, “I
am indeed a prophetess,” and on her interrogator continuing his banter
by inquiring: “But not, I suppose, as great as Isaiah?” “Yes,” she
returned, “greater than Isaiah.” Such mockery, however boldly she faced
it, caused her the most acute pain. There was, indeed, nothing
undignified about her avowal of her claims, nothing that jarred, nothing
of the charlatan in her composition. If she was deceived herself, at
least she never dreamed of deceiving others. She never posed or
attempted to gain a hearing by acting a part which was not natural to
her. She was too genuine, too intense in her convictions, and withal too
natural and too unaffected to be otherwise than always and everywhere
true to herself. She was essentially a child of nature, and in some of
the traits of her character she retained to the end the simplicity and
wayward playfulness which most people say good-bye to when they reach
years of discretion. Animals, of course, always appealed to her
strongest sympathies, and for nine long years she could not bear to be
parted except for occasional very brief periods from her favourite
guinea-pig, Rufus. Nature in its varying moods made the strong appeal
which it always does to people of so emotional a temperament. Once after
recovering from a serious bout of illness she was taken to convalesce at
Dieppe. An incident occurred here very illustrative of her susceptible
nature. Having stayed for some time and being greatly benefited by the
change, she was proceeding in company with Mr Edward Maitland to see her
husband off by the steamer. Says her biographer:
It was a day of days for beauty. While waiting, we sat watching the
gambols of a flock of sea-gulls, whose gleaming white wings, as they
circled round and round against a sky of clearest and tenderest
blue, approaching each other to give loving salute with their bills,
and then darting off only to return and repeat the act, uttering the
while shrill notes of joy and delight, made a spectacle of exquisite
beauty, and one that went to the invalid’s inmost heart, inducing an
estatic sense of the possibilities of happiness in the mere fact of
a natural and healthy existence. Though entranced by the scene no
less than my companion, I did not fail to note the effect upon her,
and the thought arose in my mind, “This is the best remedy of all
she has yet had.”
As we were thus gazing and feeling, a shot was fired from a boat
containing some men and women, which, unperceived by us, had glided
out from behind the opposite pier; and immediately one of the birds
fell into the sea, where it lay fluttering in agony with a broken
wing, while its companions fled away with harsh, discordant cries;
and in one instant the whole bright scene was changed for us from
one of innocence and joy into one of the darkest gloom and misery.
It was a murder done in Eden, followed by the instant eclipse of all
that made it Paradise. Mary was frantic. Her so lately injured
organism gave way under the shock of such a revulsion of feeling.
Her impulse was to throw herself into the sea to succour the wounded
bird, and it was with difficulty that I restrained her; and only
after giving vent to an agony of tears, and pouring on the shooting
party a storm of reproaches, at the imminent risk of being given
into custody as they landed bearing the bird, now dead, as a trophy,
did I succeed in getting her back to the hotel. For the next
twenty-four hours her state was one of raving mania.
No incident could be more characteristic of her temperament or of her
outlook upon life. The charm and beauty and joy of life were all on the
surface and only served to conceal the horror and anguish which lurked
beneath. She felt, with the apostle, that all creation groaneth and
travaileth together, and to her hyper-sensitive spirit life itself was
all too frequently a very hell. One can well understand the ardour with
which a spirit like hers pursued the campaign against vivisection. But
it is rare indeed to find this temperament joined with a courage which
faced the presence of the horrors she so dreaded to go through the
entire medical course and qualify as a doctor at a time when obstacles
innumerable were placed in the way of women candidates for the
profession. It is in connection with this phase of her career that a
story is narrated which has attained for her a somewhat unenviable
notoriety. This is the record of the boast she is stated herself to have
made that she had brought about by her magical powers the death of one
of the most prominent supporters of vivisection in its worst form in the
medical world. The doctor in question was the well-known Professor
Claude Bernard, and the claim that she made will probably be regarded by
the occultist as not wanting foundation in fact. The narrative had
better be given in her biographer’s own words:
It was in mid-February, when, having occasion to visit the _Ecole de
Médecine_, I accompanied her thither. It was afternoon. On reaching
the place we found it shut up, and a notice on the gate apprised us
that the school was closed for the day on account of the obsequies
of Professor Claude Bernard. We had not heard even of his illness. A
cry, or rather a gasp, of astonishment escaped her, and she
exclaimed, “Claude Bernard dead! Claude Bernard dead! Take hold of
me! Help me to a seat or I shall fall. Claude Bernard dead! Claude
Bernard dead!” The only seat available near was on the stony steps
by which we were standing, and I accordingly placed her on these,
seeing that emotion had deprived her of all her powers. Once seated
she buried her face in her hands, and I stood before her awaiting
the result in silence. I knew that such an event could not fail
greatly to move her, but no special reason occurred to me. Presently
she looked up, her face strangely altered by the intensity of her
emotion, and asked me if I remembered what she had told me some
weeks ago about Claude Bernard, and her having been provoked to
launch her maledictions at him. I remembered perfectly. It was in
the latter part of the previous December. Her professor had forced
her into a controversy about vivisection, the immediate occasion
being some experiments by Claude Bernard on animal heat, made by
means of a stove invented by himself, so constructed as to allow of
observations being made on animals while being slowly baked to
death. Her professor had agreed with her as to the unscientific
character and utter uselessness for any medical purpose of such a
method of research. But he was altogether insensible to its moral
aspects, and in answer to her strong expressions of reprobation, had
taken occasion to deliver himself of a tirade against the sentiments
generally of morality and religion, and the folly of allowing
anything so chimerical to stand in the way, not merely of science,
but of any object whatever to which one might be inclined, and
setting up a transcendental standard of right and wrong, or
recognising any limits to self-gratification saving the physical
risks to oneself. Even the feeling which makes a mother weep over
her child’s suffering he sneered at as hysterical, and gloried in
the prospects of the time when science and intellect should be
utterly unrestrained by what people call heart and moral conscience,
and the only recognised rule should be that of the bodily self.
Thus speaking, he had worked his pupil into a frenzy of righteous
indignation, and the vision rose before her of a future when,
through the teaching of a materialistic science, society at large
had become wholly demonised, even as already were this man and his
kind. And seeing in Claude Bernard the foremost living
representative and instrument of the fell conspiracy, at once
against the human and the divine, to destroy whom would be to rid
the earth of one of its worst monsters, she no sooner found herself
alone than she rose to her feet, and with passionate energy invoked
the wrath of God upon him, at the same moment hurling her whole
spiritual being at him with all her might, as if with intent, then
and there, to smite him with destruction. And so completely, it
seemed to her, had she gone out of herself in the effort that her
physical system instantly collapsed, and she fell back powerless on
her sofa, where she lay awhile utterly exhausted and unable to move.
It was thus that, on rejoining her, I found her, with just
sufficient power to recount the experience, and to ask me my opinion
as to the possibility of injuring a person at a distance by making,
as it were, a spiritual thunderbolt of oneself; for, if such a thing
were possible, and had ever happened, it must, she was convinced,
have happened then.
At the moment the discussion on this subject was dropped, but further
evidence was subsequently sought which it was hoped would confirm or
disprove the idea that Anna Kingsford had been responsible for the great
French doctor’s death. Eventually, our heroine came across an
acquaintance of the deceased Professor in the person of a practical
student of occult science. It appeared from his narrative that Claude
Bernard was one of the few members of the profession who also took an
interest in this subject, which had served as a link between them. He
informed Mrs Kingsford that the doctor had described his earliest
symptoms to himself, and had regarded them as somewhat mysterious. He
was engaged, it appears, in his laboratory in the _Collège de France_,
being at the time in his usual health, when he felt himself suddenly
struck as if by some poisonous effluvium which he believed to emanate
from the subject of his experiment. The effect, instead of passing off,
became intensified, and manifested itself in severe internal
inflammation, from which he eventually died. The doctors pronounced the
complaint to be Bright’s disease. This was the disease which Claude
Bernard had chiefly endeavoured to investigate by inducing it in
animals. The possibility of such an incident is of course familiar to
students of occultism, and Paracelsus, with others before and since,
have maintained its feasibility. The great German occultist writes that
it is possible that the spirit without the help of the body may,
“through a fiery will alone, and without a sword, stab and wound
others.” This is purely in accordance with the general trend of his
doctrine, a large part of which is based on the belief that the will is
a most potent operator in medicine.
Anna Kingsford was, it is well known, one of the earliest and foremost
champions of the movement for women’s rights, but the line she took in
this movement was supremely sane and wise, and was devoid of all the
extravagances which have since brought certain sides of one of the
greatest and most important movements of the day into well-deserved
contempt. Edward Maitland was in entire sympathy with her in this
matter, and in endorsing one of her communications to him observes: “I
send you to-day’s _Times_, with a report of the debate on the Women’s
Suffrage Bill, which will show you how much you are needed in that
movement. For the debate shows why it does not advance. They are all on
the wrong tack, supporters and opponents alike. The franchise is claimed
in hostility, not sought in love. The women are demanding it as a means
of defence and offence against man, instead of as a means of aiding and
perfecting man’s work. They want a level platform with man expressly in
order to fight him on equal terms. And of course the instinct of the
majority of men and women resents such a view.” “Justice, in fact, as
between men and women, human and animal,” was among Anna Kingsford’s
foremost aims; for, as her biographer well says: “All injustice was
cruelty, and cruelty was for her the one unpardonable sin.” “Her love,”
he adds in a curiously revealing passage, “was all for principles, not
for persons. The last thing contemplated by Anna Kingsford was an
aggravation of the existing divisions and antagonisms between the
sexes.” “And,” continues Mr Maitland, “so far from accepting the
doctrine of the superiority of spinsterhood over wifehood, she regarded
it as an assertion of the superiority of non-experience over experience
as a means of education.” But that which most of all she reprobated was
the disposition which led women to despise womanhood itself as an
inferior condition, and accordingly to cultivate the masculine at the
expense of the feminine side of their nature. “It was by magnifying
their womanhood and not by exchanging it for a factitious masculinity
that she would have her sex obtain its proper recognition.” This
recognition no one more ardently desired than herself. She compares the
modern woman to Andromeda bound to the rock on the seashore, shackled by
the chains of ignorance and a helpless prey to that terrible monster
whose name is ennui. “When,” she asks, “will Perseus come to deliver the
fair Andromeda, to loosen her fetters and to set her free?” Much has
happened to better the position of women since this was written, but
much yet remains to be done.
All who knew Anna Kingsford unite in testifying to the impression
conveyed to them by her striking personality with its originality,
freshness, and force, no less than by her many-sidedness and the strange
contradictions of her character. Her biographer gives the following
description of her appearance at the date when he first met her:
Tall, slender, and graceful in form. Fair and exquisite in
complexion. Bright and sunny in expression. The hair long and
golden, but the brows and lashes dark and the eyes deep set and
hazel, and by turns dreamy and penetrating. The mouth rich, full,
and exquisitely formed. The broad brow prominent and sharply cut.
The nose delicate, slightly curved, and just sufficiently prominent
to give character to the face. And the dress somewhat fantastic as
became her looks. Anna Kingsford seemed at first more fairy than
human and more child than woman. For though really twenty-seven she
appeared scarcely seventeen, and made expressly to be caressed,
petted and indulged, and by no means to be taken seriously.
These impressions as regards her character were appreciably modified on
subsequent acquaintance, and Mr Maitland observes that “when she warmed
to her favourite themes, her whole being radiant with a spiritual light,
her utterances were those in turn of a savant, a sage, and a child, each
part suiting her as well as if it were her one and only character.”
The relationship between the authors of _The Perfect Way_ and the
founders of the Theosophical Society in the days of its infancy affords
matter of no little interest. The basic idea of the Theosophical
Society, viz. the harmonising of the esoteric side of all religions,
naturally suggested to the promoters of the movement that in the authors
of so remarkable a work, they would find a tower of strength, and Madame
Blavatsky, in particular, was most anxious to obtain their support and
co-operation for the British section of the Society. Eventually, after
considerable hesitation, Anna Kingsford responded to the advances made
to her, and accepted the presidency of the British section. But the
arrangement was not one which was destined to last long. That it was not
likely to be a success might, I think, have been readily enough
foreseen. Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland were too uncompromising in
their point of view—too positive that the source of their own
information could not be impugned, to accept readily the _bona fides_ of
other and, as they considered, lower oracles. This, however, was by no
means all. The attitude of Theosophy in its early days towards
Christianity was in the main hostile. To make the esoteric
interpretation of this creed the pivot of their teaching was the last
idea they contemplated. Madame Blavatsky had attacked Christianity in
_Isis Unveiled_. Mr Sinnett was equally unsympathetic. The basis of
their actual teaching was an interpretation of Eastern religions,
whereas the basis of _The Perfect Way_ was an interpretation of Western.
Anna Kingsford was just as unhesitating in giving her preference to
Christianity as the leaders of Theosophy were in according theirs to
Buddhism, Hinduism, and kindred Oriental philosophies. Mrs Besant’s
attitude when she joined the Society showed similar preferences. Her
early experiences of orthodox Christianity were not such as to bias her
in its favour, and it was not until later days that she assumed the
mantle of the prophet of _The Perfect Way_, and openly recognised the
importance of the esoteric side of Christianity to complete the circle
of theosophical teachings. The views with which Theosophy commenced have
in the course of time been materially modified, and a curious sidelight
is thrown, by a letter of Anna Kingsford’s, on the question whether the
leaders of this Society had originally adopted the reincarnation
hypothesis, or whether this was in the nature of a subsequent
development. Mrs Kingsford writes under date 3rd July 1882, to her
friend Lady Caithness, alluding to the reception of _The Perfect Way_ by
the Press:
After all this reviewing and fault-finding on the part of critics
having but a third of the knowledge which has been given to us,
there is not a line in _The Perfect Way_ which I would alter were
the book to be reprinted. The very reviewer—Mr Sinnett—who writes
with so much pseudo-authority in the _Theosophist_, has, within a
year’s time, completely altered his views on at least one important
subject—I mean Reincarnation. When he came to see us a year ago in
London, he vehemently denied that doctrine, and asserted, with
immense conviction, that I had been altogether deceived in my
teaching concerning it. He read a message from _Isis Unveiled_ to
confute me, and argued long on the subject. He had not then received
any instruction from his Hindu guru about it. Now, he has been so
instructed, and wrote Mr Maitland a long letter acknowledging the
truth of the doctrine which, since seeing us, he has been taught.
But he does not yet know all the truth concerning it, and so finds
fault with our presentation of that side of it which, as yet, he has
not been taught.
Presumably in this matter Mr Sinnett reflected Madame Blavatsky’s views,
and the fact that he cites _Isis Unveiled_ seems to me to leave little
doubt in the matter. Surely if he had misunderstood her, H. P. B. would
have taken pains to put him right! I think that the date given will fix
approximately the period at which official Theosophy was openly
converted to the doctrine of Reincarnation. Until that time, if it was
not uniformly denied, at least there were wide diversities of opinion,
and apparently its opponents mustered more strongly than its supporters.
Eventually Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland founded between them the
_Hermetic Society_. This was not destined to a long lease of life,
mainly owing to the breakdown of Anna Kingsford’s health. But while
Theosophy showed the greater vitality, in spite of scandals and discords
which might well have shattered it to its base, the teachings of the
authors of _The Perfect Way_ exercised a profound influence in leavening
the mass of Theosophical teaching. Though possessing no little dogmatism
in her own intellectual organisation, Anna Kingsford had no great liking
for any form of society that taught dogmatically, her idea being that
every one must necessarily find out the truth for himself and realise it
spiritually from his own individual standpoint. Theosophy was altogether
too dogmatic for her, without being dogmatic on her own lines. She was
readier to admit the existence of the Mahatmas than to grant the
inspired source of their communications. In any case she looked upon
their teaching as of a radically lower order than her own, and
reflecting those vices and defects which she and Maitland were wont to
associate with the denizens of the astral plane. On the subject of
communications with such entities, or with those whom she suspected of
belonging by nature to this region, she was never tired of inveighing.
The secret (she says) of the opposition made in certain circles to
the doctrine set forth in _The Perfect Way_ is not far to seek. It
is to be found in the fact that the book is, throughout, strenuously
opposed to idolatry in all its forms, including that of the popular
“spiritualism” of the day, which is, in effect, a revival, under a
new guise and with new sanctions, of the ancient cultus known as
Ancestor-worship. _The Perfect Way_, on the contrary, insists that
truth is accessible only through the illumination, by the Divine
Spirit, of man’s own soul; and that precisely in proportion as the
individual declines such interior illumination, and seeks to
extraneous influences, does he impoverish his own soul and diminish
his possibilities of knowledge. It teaches that “Spirits” or
“Angels,” as their devotees are fond of styling them, are
untrustworthy guides, possessed of no positive divine element, and
reflecting, therefore, rather than instructing, their interrogators;
and that the condition of mind, namely, passivity, insisted on by
these “angels” is one to be strenuously avoided, the true attitude
for obtaining divine illumination being that of ardent active
aspiration, impelled by a resolute determination to know nothing but
the Highest. Precisely such a state of passivity, voluntarily
induced, and such veneration of and reliance upon “guides” or
“controls,” are referred to by the Apostle when he says: “But let no
man beguile you by a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels.”
And precisely such exaltation of the personal Jesus, as _The Perfect
Way_ repudiates and its opponents demand, is by the same Apostle
condemned in the words: “Henceforth know we no man after the flesh:
yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth
know we him no more.”
Accordingly, as Maitland and Kingsford fell foul of the Theosophical
Society on the one hand, they fell foul of the Spiritualists on the
other. But the cleavage between Spiritualism and the teaching of _The
Perfect Way_ was far deeper than that between this teaching and
Theosophy. With Theosophy indeed, in its broadest sense, there was
nothing in Kingsford and Maitland’s teaching that was radically
antagonistic. _The Perfect Way_ might in fact be accepted to-day, with
some reservations on minor points, as a theosophical text-book, and,
looked at from this point of view, it is the fullest, the most complete,
and the most coherent exposition of Christianity as seen through
theosophical spectacles. Anna Kingsford had indeed herself been received
into the fold of the Roman Catholic Church, though certainly Roman
Catholicism never had a more rebellious or more independent subject. On
the doctrine of authority she would never have made concessions, and,
without this admission, one fails to see what status the Roman Church
can be held to occupy. It is indeed a case of Hamlet without the Prince
of Denmark. Her leanings, however, towards the ancient mother of
Christian churches was, even in its modified form, gall and wormwood to
her partner and collaborator, and in the end it brought about some very
unhappy and regrettable scenes in connection with her last hours, and a
dispute as to the faith in which she died, which must have been
exceedingly painful to all concerned.
Perhaps in no single point does Roman Catholicism present a worse and
more undesirable aspect than in the manner in which its missionaries
besiege the last hours of the passing soul in the effort to induce its
victims, when too weak for resistance, to say “ditto” to the formulæ
which their priests pretend to regard as constituting a password to the
celestial realms. Certainly, in Anna Kingsford’s case, the admission of
a Roman Catholic Sister of Mercy to tend her in her last illness was
productive of the worst results, troubling her last hours with an
unseemly wrangle that did not cease even after her body was consigned to
its final resting-place.
A sidelight is thrown on Mrs Kingsford’s attitude towards Roman
Catholicism by the record of a conversation which her biographer cites
her as having had on one occasion with a Roman Catholic priest. She was
calling on a Catholic friend on the occasion, and speaking as usual in
her very free and self-confident manner with regard to the religious
views which she held. Some remark which she made elicited from the
priest the rebuke, “Why, my daughter, you have been _thinking_. You
should never do that. The Church saves us the trouble and danger of
thinking, by telling us what to _believe_. We are only called on to
believe. I never think: I dare not. I should go mad if I were to let
myself think.” Anna Kingsford replied that what she wanted was to
understand, and that it was impossible to do this without thinking.
Believing without understanding was for her not faith but credulity.
“How, except by thinking,” she asked, “does one learn whether the Church
has the truth?”
When the Hermetic Society was founded, W. T. Stead was editor of the
_Pall Mall Gazette_, and Mrs Kingsford wrote for him an account of the
new Society. Stead, with his usual taste for dramatic headlines,
entitled it “The Newest Thing in Religions.” This was the very last
description that its founders were likely to tolerate. Anna Kingsford
wrote back an indignant letter of repudiation. “So far,” she says, “from
being the newest thing in religions, or even claiming to be a religion
at all, that at which the Society aims is the recovery of what is really
the oldest thing in religion, so old as to have become forgotten and
lost—namely, its esoteric and spiritual, and therefore its true
signification.” Elsewhere she writes of _The Perfect Way_ as not
purporting to be a new gospel. “Its mission,” she says, “is that simply
of rehabilitation and re-interpretation undertaken with the view, not of
superseding Christianity, but of saving it.” She continues:
For, as the deepest and most earnest thinkers of our day are
painfully aware, the Gospel of Christendom, as it stands in the Four
Evangels, does NOT suffice, uninterpreted, to satisfy the needs of
the age, and to furnish a perfect system of thought and rule of
life. Christianity—historically preached and understood—has for
eighteen centuries filled the world with wars, persecutions, and
miseries of all kinds; and in these days it is rapidly filling it
with agnosticism, atheism, and revolt against the very idea of God.
_The Perfect Way_ seeks to consolidate truth in one complete whole,
and, by systematising religion, to demonstrate its Catholicity. It
seeks to make peace between Science and Faith; to marry the
Intellect with the Intuition; to bring together East and West, and
to unite Buddhist philosophy with Christian love, by demonstrating
that the basis of religion is not historical, but spiritual—not
physical, but psychic—not local and temporal, but universal and
eternal. It avers that the true “Lord Jesus Christ” is no mere
historical character, no mere demi-god, by whose material blood the
souls of men are washed white, but “the hidden man of the heart,”
continually born, crucified, ascending and glorified in the interior
Kingdom of the Christian’s own Spirit. A scientific age rightly
refuses to be any longer put off with data which are more than
dubious, and logic which morality and philosophy alike reject. A
deeper, truer, more real religion is needed for an epoch of thought,
and for a world familiar with Biblical criticism and revision—a
religion whose foundations no destructive agnosticism can undermine,
and in whose structure no examination, however searching, shall be
able to find flaw or blemish. It is only by rescuing the Gospel of
Christ from the externals of history, persons, and events, and by
vindicating its essential significance, that Christianity can be
saved from the destruction which inevitably overtakes all idolatrous
creeds. There is not a word in _The Perfect Way_ at variance with
the spirit of the Gospel of the “Lord Jesus Christ.”
Nothing shows the method adopted in their Gospel of Interpretation by
the two authors more clearly than their teaching with regard to the
story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man. It is curious how
literally this story has been taken through many ages of the Church’s
history, in view of the fact that such a writer as Origen in the early
days of the infant Church observed that: “No one in his time would be so
foolish as to take this allegory as a description of actual fact.”
Kingsford and Maitland refer the interpretation firstly to the Church,
and secondly to individual man. “The conscience,” they say, “set over
the human reason as its guide, overseer, and ruler, whether, in the
general, as the Church, or in the particular, as the individual, falls,
when, listening to the suggestions of the lower nature, she desires,
seeks, and at length defiles herself with, the ambitions and falsehoods
of this present world.” “Ceasing to be a trustworthy guide she becomes
herself serpent and seducer to the human reason, leading him into false
paths until, if she have her way, she will end by plunging him into the
lowest depths of abject ignorance, there to be devoured by the brood of
unreason and to be annihilated for ever. For she is now no longer the
true wife, Faith, she has become the wanton, Superstition.” On the other
hand, “the Church at her best, unfallen, is the glass to the lamp of
Truth, guarding the sacred flame within and transmitting unimpaired to
her children the light received upon its inner surface.” Hitherto this
fall has been the common fate of all Churches. “Thus fallen and
degraded, the Church becomes a church of this world, greedy of worldly
dignities, emoluments, and dominion, intent on foisting on the belief of
her votaries in the name of authority fables and worse than fables—a
Church jealous of the letter which killeth, ignorant of, or bitterly at
enmity with, the spirit which giveth life.”
We now come to the interpretation of the Fall as applied to individual
Man. This is allegorically described as “the lapse of heavenly beings
from their first happy estate and their final redemption by means of
penance done through incarnation in the flesh.” The authors tell us that
this imagined lapse is a parable designed to veil and preserve a truth.
This truth is the Creative Secret, the projection of Spirit into matter,
the descent of substance into Maya, or illusion. From a cosmic
standpoint “the Tree of Divination or Knowledge becomes Motion or the
Kalpa—the period of Existence as distinguished from Being; the Tree of
Life is Rest or the Sabbath, the Nirvâna. Adam is Manifestation; the
Serpent—no longer of the lower, but of the higher sphere—is the
celestial Serpent or Seraph of Heavenly Counsel.” By the Tree of
Divination of Good and Evil in this interpretation must be understood
that condition by means of which Spirit projected into appearance
becomes manifested under the veil of Maya, a necessary condition for the
evolution of the individual, but carrying with it its own inevitable
perils. It is not, say our authors, because matter is in itself evil
that the soul’s descent into it constitutes a fall. It is because to the
soul matter is a forbidden thing. By quitting her own proper condition
and descending into matter she takes upon herself matter’s limitations.
It is no particular act that constitutes sin. Sin does not consist in
fulfilling any of the functions of nature. Sin consists in acting
without or against the Spirit, and in not seeking the divine sanction
for everything that is done. Sin, in fact, is of the soul, and it is due
to the soul’s inclination to the things of sense. To regard an act as
_per se_ sinful is materialism and idolatry. For in doing so we invest
that which is physical with a spiritual attribute, and this is of the
essence of idolatry.
Adam signifies the manifested personality, or man, and is only complete
when Eve, his soul, is added to him as helpmeet. When Eve takes of the
fruit and enjoys it, she turns away from her higher spiritual self to
seek for pleasure in the things of her lower self, and in doing so she
draws Adam down with her till they both become sensual and debased. The
sin which commences in the thought of the soul, Eve, thus becomes
subsequently developed into action through the energy of the body or
masculine part, Adam. One of the inevitable results of the soul’s
enslavement to matter is its liability to extinction. In eating of the
fruit Adam and Eve absorb the seeds of mortality. As Milton says:
They engorged without restraint,
And knew not, eating Death.
The soul in her own nature is immortal, but the lower she sinks into
matter the weaker becomes her vitality. A continuous downward course
must therefore end in the extinction of the individual—not of course of
the Divine Ray, which returns to the Source whence it came. It is well
to bear in mind that man is a dual being, not masculine or feminine
only, but both. This, of course, applies equally to man whether
manifested in a male or female body. One side is more predominant in man
and the other in woman, but this does not imply absence of the other
side, but merely its subordination. The man who has nothing, or next to
nothing, of the woman in him, is no true man, and the woman who has
nothing of the man in her, is no true woman. Man, whether man or woman,
consists of male and female, Reason and Intuition, and is therefore
essentially twofold. Owing to the duality of his constitution, every
doctrine relating to man has a dual significance and application. Thus
the sacred books not only present an historical narrative of events
occurring in time, but have a spiritual significance of a permanent
character in regard to which the element of time has no meaning. In this
sense Scripture is a record of that which is always taking place.
Thus, the Spirit of God, which is original Life, is always moving
upon the face of the waters, or heavenly deep, which is original
Substance. And the One, which consists of these two, is always
putting forth alike the Macrocosm of the universe and the Microcosm
of the individual, and is always making man in the image of God, and
placing him in a garden of innocence and perfection, the garden of
his own unsophisticated nature. And man is always falling away from
that image and quitting that garden for the wilderness of sin, being
tempted by the serpent of sense, his own lower element. And from
this condition and its consequences he is always being born of a
pure virgin—dying, rising and ascending into heaven.
This, in brief, is one of the most essential portions of the new Gospel
of Interpretation. It exemplifies the method adopted throughout which is
that to which we are accustomed to apply the word “Hermetic.” It is both
Christian and pre-Christian, for it is the interpretation of the meaning
of life, which was the Key to the ancient Gnostic faiths which,
subsisting before Christianity, became incorporated in the Christian
teaching. New generations and races of men require the old truths to be
put before them in a new guise. This was so when Christianity first came
to birth, but in the days of Jesus Christ there were many things which
the Prophet of Nazareth had to say to his disciples, but which, as he
told them, they were then too weak to understand. The mystical
interpretation of Christian truth fell on deaf ears then. Re-stated and
re-interpreted, after a lapse of 1900 years, is it too much to hope that
it may no longer prove “to the Gentiles foolishness, and to the Jews a
rock of offence”?
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○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the chapters in which they are
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