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Title: Michael Robartes and the dancer
Author: W. B. Yeats
Release date: February 18, 2024 [eBook #72987]
Language: English
Original publication: Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1920
Credits: Christopher Hapka. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER ***
MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER
By William Butler Yeats
THE CUALA PRESS
CHURCHTOWN
DUNDRUM
MCMXX
CONTENTS
Preface
Michael Robartes and the Dancer
Solomon and the Witch
An Image from a Past Life
Under Saturn
Easter, 1916
Sixteen Dead Men
The Rose Tree
On a Political Prisoner
The Leaders of the Crowd
Towards Break of Day
Demon and Beast
The Second Coming
A Prayer for My Daughter
A Meditation in Time of War
To Be Carved on a Stone at Ballylee
Notes
PREFACE
A few of these poems may be difficult to understand, perhaps more
difficult than I know. Goethe has said that the poet needs all
philosophy, but that he must keep it out of his work. After the first
few poems I came into possession of Michael Robartes’ exposition of
the _Speculum Angelorum et Hominum_ of Geraldus, and in the
excitement of arranging and editing could no more keep out philosophy
than could Goethe himself at certain periods of his life. I have
tried to make understanding easy by a couple of notes, which are
at anyrate much shorter than those Dante wrote on certain of his
odes in the _Convito_, but I may not have succeeded. It is hard
for a writer, who has spent much labour upon his style, to remember
that thought, which seems to him natural and logical like that style,
may be unintelligible to others. The first excitement over, and the
thought changed into settled conviction, his interest in simple, that
is to say in normal emotion, is always I think increased; he is no
longer looking for candlestick and matches but at the objects in the
room.
I have given no account of Robartes himself, nor of his discovery
of the explanation of Geraldus’ diagrams and pictures in the
traditional knowledge of a certain obscure Arab tribe, for I
hope that my selection from the great mass of his letters and
table talk, which I owe to his friend John Aherne, may be published
before, or at any rate but soon after this little book, which,
like all hand-printed books will take a long time for the setting
up and printing off and for the drying of the pages.
W. B. Yeats.
MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER
HE
Opinion is not worth a rush;
In this altar-piece the knight,
Who grips his long spear so to push
That dragon through the fading light,
Loved the lady; and it’s plain
The half-dead dragon was her thought,
That every morning rose again
And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.
Could the impossible come to pass
She would have time to turn her eyes,
Her lover thought, upon the glass
And on the instant would grow wise.
SHE
You mean they argued.
HE
Put it so;
But bear in mind your lover’s wage
Is what your looking-glass can show,
And that he will turn green with rage
At all that is not pictured there.
SHE
May I not put myself to college?
HE
Go pluck Athena by the hair;
For what mere book can grant a knowledge
With an impassioned gravity
Appropriate to that beating breast,
That vigorous thigh, that dreaming eye?
And may the devil take the rest.
SHE
And must no beautiful woman be
Learned like a man?
HE
Paul Veronese
And all his sacred company
Imagined bodies all their days
By the lagoon you love so much,
For proud, soft, ceremonious proof
That all must come to sight and touch;
While Michael Angelo’s Sistine roof
His ‘Morning’ and his ‘Night’ disclose
How sinew that has been pulled tight,
Or it may be loosened in repose,
Can rule by supernatural right
Yet be but sinew.
SHE
I have heard said
There is great danger in the body.
HE
Did God in portioning wine and bread
Give man His thought or His mere body?
SHE
My wretched dragon is perplexed.
HE
I have principles to prove me right.
It follows from this Latin text
That blest souls are not composite.
And that all beautiful women may
Live in uncomposite blessedness,
And lead us to the like--if they
Will banish every thought, unless
The lineaments that please their view
When the long looking-glass is full,
Even from the foot-sole think it too.
SHE
They say such different things at school.
SOLOMON AND THE WITCH
And thus declared that Arab lady:
“Last night, where under the wild moon
On grassy mattress I had laid me,
Within my arms great Solomon,
I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue
Not his, not mine.”
And he that knew
All sounds by bird or angel sung
Answered: “A crested cockerel crew
Upon a blossoming apple bough
Three hundred years before the Fall,
And never crew again till now,
And would not now but that he thought,
Chance being at one with Choice at last.
All that the brigand apple brought
And this foul world were dead at last.
He that crowed out eternity
Thought to have crowed it in again.
A lover with a spider’s eye
Will find out some appropriate pain,
Aye, though all passion’s in the glance,
For every nerve: lover tests lover
With cruelties of Choice and Chance;
And when at last that murder’s over
Maybe the bride-bed brings despair
For each an imagined image brings
And finds a real image there;
Yet the world ends when these two things,
Though several, are a single light,
When oil and wick are burned in one;
Therefore a blessed moon last night
Gave Sheba to her Solomon.”
“Yet the world stays:”
“If that be so,
Your cockerel found us in the wrong
Although he thought it worth a crow.
Maybe an image is too strong
Or maybe is not strong enough.”
“The night has fallen; not a sound
In the forbidden sacred grove
Unless a petal hit the ground,
Nor any human sight within it
But the crushed grass where we have lain;
And the moon is wilder every minute.
Oh, Solomon! let us try again.”
AN IMAGE FROM A PAST LIFE
HE
Never until this night have I been stirred.
The elaborate star-light has thrown reflections
On the dark stream,
Till all the eddies gleam;
And thereupon there comes that scream
From terrified, invisible beast or bird:
Image of poignant recollection.
SHE
An image of my heart that is smitten through
Out of all likelihood, or reason.
And when at last,
Youth’s bitterness being past,
I had thought that all my days were cast
Amid most lovely places; smitten as though
It had not learned its lesson.
HE
Why have you laid your hands upon my eyes?
What can have suddenly alarmed you
Whereon ’twere best
My eyes should never rest?
What is there but the slowly fading west,
The river imaging the flashing skies,
All that to this moment charmed you?
SHE
A sweetheart from another life floats there
As though she had been forced to linger
From vague distress
Or arrogant loveliness.
Merely to loosen out a tress
Among the starry eddies of her hair
Upon the paleness of a finger.
HE
But why should you grow suddenly afraid
And start--I at your shoulder--
Imagining
That any night could bring
An image up, or anything
Even to eyes that beauty had driven mad,
But images to make me fonder.
SHE
Now she has thrown her arms above her head;
Whether she threw them up to flout me,
Or but to find,
Now that no fingers bind,
That her hair streams upon the wind,
I do not know, that know I am afraid
Of the hovering thing night brought me.
UNDER SATURN
Do not because this day I have grown saturnine
Imagine that some lost love, unassailable
Being a portion of my youth, can make me pine
And so forget the comfort that no words can tell
Your coming brought; though I acknowledge I have gone
On a fantastic ride, my horses flanks were spurred
By childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen,
And of a Middleton, whose name you never heard,
And of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he died
Before my time, seem like a vivid memory.
You heard that labouring man
who had served my people. He said
Upon the open road, near to the Sligo quay--
No, no, not said, but cried it out--“You have come again
And surely after twenty years it was time to come.”
I am thinking of a child’s vow sworn in vain
Never to leave that valley his fathers called their home.
November, 1919.
EASTER, 1916
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse.
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it
Where long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call.
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name.
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn.
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
September 25th, 1916.
SIXTEEN DEAD MEN
O but we talked at large before
The sixteen men were shot,
But who can talk of give and take,
What should be and what not?
While those dead men are loitering there
To stir the boiling pot.
You say that we should still the land
Till Germany’s overcome;
But who is there to argue that
Now Pearse is deaf and dumb?
And is their logic to outweigh
MacDonagh’s bony thumb?
How could you dream they’d listen
That have an ear alone
For those new comrades they have found
Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone,
Or meddle with our give and take
That converse bone to bone.
THE ROSE TREE
“O words are lightly spoken”
Said Pearse to Connolly,
“Maybe a breath of politic words
Has withered our Rose Tree;
Or maybe but a wind that blows
Across the bitter sea.”
“It needs to be but watered,”
James Connolly replied,
“To make the green come out again
And spread on every side,
And shake the blossom from the bud
To be the garden’s pride.”
“But where can we draw water”
Said Pearse to Connolly,
“When all the wells are parched away?
O plain as plain can be
There’s nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree.”
ON A POLITICAL PRISONER
She that but little patience knew,
From childhood on, had now so much
A grey gull lost its fear and flew
Down to her cell and there alit,
And there endured her fingers touch
And from her fingers ate its bit.
Did she in touching that lone wing
Recall the years before her mind
Became a bitter, an abstract thing,
Her thought some popular enmity:
Blind and leader of the blind
Drinking the foul ditch where they lie?
When long ago I saw her ride
Under Ben Bulban to the meet,
The beauty of her country-side
With all youth’s lonely wildness stirred,
She seemed to have grown clean and sweet
Like any rock-bred, sea-borne bird:
Sea-borne, or balanced on the air
When first it sprang out of the nest
Upon some lofty rock to stare
Upon the cloudy canopy,
While under its storm-beaten breast
Cried out the hollows of the sea.
THE LEADERS OF THE CROWD
They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose phantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.
TOWARDS BREAK OF DAY
Was it the double of my dream
The woman that by me lay
Dreamed, or did we halve a dream
Under the first cold gleam of day?
I thought “there is a waterfall
Upon Ben Bulban side,
That all my childhood counted dear;
Were I to travel far and wide
I could not find a thing so dear.”
My memories had magnified
So many times childish delight.
I would have touched it like a child
But knew my finger could but have touched
Cold stone and water. I grew wild
Even accusing heaven because
It had set down among its laws:
Nothing that we love over-much
Is ponderable to our touch.
I dreamed towards break of day,
The cold blown spray in my nostril.
But she that beside me lay
Had watched in bitterer sleep
The marvellous stag of Arthur,
That lofty white stag, leap
From mountain steep to steep.
DEMON AND BEAST
For certain minutes at the least
That crafty demon and that loud beast
That plague me day and night
Ran out of my sight;
Though I had long pernned in the gyre,
Between my hatred and desire,
I saw my freedom won
And all laugh in the sun.
The glittering eyes in a death’s head
Of old Luke Wadding’s portrait said
Welcome, and the Ormonds all
Nodded upon the wall,
And even Stafford smiled as though
It made him happier to know
I understood his plan;
Now that the loud beast ran
There was no portrait in the Gallery
But beckoned to sweet company,
For all men’s thoughts grew clear
Being dear as mine are dear.
But soon a tear-drop started up
For aimless joy had made me stop
Beside the little lake
To watch a white gull take
A bit of bread thrown up into the air;
Now gyring down and pernning there
He splashed where an absurd
Portly green-pated bird
Shook off the water from his back;
Being no more demoniac
A stupid happy creature
Could rouse my whole nature.
Yet I am certain as can be
That every natural victory
Belongs to beast or demon,
That never yet had freeman
Right mastery of natural things,
And that mere growing old, that brings
Chilled blood, this sweetness brought;
Yet have no dearer thought
Than that I may find out a way
To make it linger half a day.
O what a sweetness strayed
Through barren Thebaid,
Or by the Mareotic sea
When that exultant Anthony
And twice a thousand more
Starved upon the shore
And withered to a bag of bones:
What had the Caesars but their thrones?
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER
Once more the storm is howling and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s Wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.
I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right and never find a friend.
Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.
It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.
In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
Oh, may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.
My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.
An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?
Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting.
And that its own sweet will is heaven’s will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.
And may her bride-groom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn.
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
June, 1919.
A MEDITATION IN TIME OF WAR
For one throb of the Artery,
While on that old grey stone I sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate
Mankind inanimate phantasy.
TO BE CARVED ON A STONE AT BALLYLEE
I, the poet William Yeats,
With old mill boards and sea-green slates,
And smithy work from the Gort forge,
Restored this tower for my wife George;
And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again.
NOTES
AN IMAGE FROM A PAST LIFE
Robartes writes to Aherne under the date May 12th, 1917. “I
found among the Judwalis much biographical detail, probably
legendary, about Kusta-ben-Luki. He saw occasionally during
sleep a woman’s face and later on found in a Persian painting
a face resembling, though not identical with the dream-face,
which was he considered that of a woman loved in another life.
Presently he met & loved a beautiful woman whose face also
resembled, without being identical, that of his dream. Later
on he made a long journey to purchase the painting which was,
he said, the better likeness, and found on his return that his
mistress had left him in a fit of jealousy.” In a dialogue and
in letters, Robartes gives a classification and analysis of
dreams which explain the survival of this story among the followers
of Kusta-ben-Luki. They distinguished between the memory of concrete
images and the abstract memory, and affirm that no concrete
dream-image is ever from our memory. This is not only true they
say of dreams, but of those visions seen between sleeping and waking.
This doctrine at first found me incredulous, for I thought it
contradicted by my experience and by all I have read, not however
a very great amount, in books of psychology and of psycho-analysis.
Did I not frequently dream of some friend, or relation, or that I
was at school? I found, however, when I studied my dreams, as I was
directed in a dialogue, that the image seen was never really that of
friend, or relation, or my old school, though it might very closely
resemble it. A substitution had taken place, often a very strange one,
though I forgot this if I did not notice it at once on waking. The
name of some friend, or the conceptions “my father” and “at school,”
are a part of the abstract memory and therefore of the dream life,
but the image of my father, or my friend, or my old school, being a
part of the personal concrete memory appeared neither in sleep nor
in visions between sleep and waking. I found sometimes that my father,
or my friend, had been represented in sleep by a stool or a chair, and
I concluded that it was the entire absence of my personal concrete
memory that enabled me to accept such images without surprise. Was it
not perhaps this very absence that constituted sleep? Would I perhaps
awake if a single concrete image from my memory came before me? Even
these images--stool, chair, etc. were never any particular stool,
chair, etc. that I had known. Were these images, however, from the
buried memory? had they floated up from the subconscious? had I
seen them perhaps a long time ago and forgotten having done so?
Even if that were so, the exclusion of the conscious memory was
a new, perhaps important truth; but Robartes denied their source
even in the subconscious. It seems a corroboration that though I
often see between sleep and waking elaborate landscape, I have
never seen one that seemed a possible representation of any place
I have ever lived near from childhood up. Robartes traces these
substitute images to different sources. Those that come in sleep
are (1) from the state immediately preceding our birth; (2) from
the _Spiritus Mundi_--that is to say, from a general store-house
of images which have ceased to be a property of any personality or
spirit. Those that come between sleeping and waking are, he says,
re-shaped by what he calls the “automatic faculty” which can create
pattern, balance, etc. from the impressions made upon the senses,
not of ourselves, but of others bound to us by certain emotional
links though perhaps entire strangers, and preserved in a kind of
impersonal mirror, often simply called the “record,” which takes
much the same place in his system the lower strata of the astral
light does among the disciples of Elephas Levi. This does not
exhaust the contents of dreams for we have to account also for
certain sentences, for certain ideas which are not concrete images
and yet do not arise from our personal memory, but at the moment
I have merely to account for certain images that affect passion
or affection. Robartes writes to Aherne in a letter dated May 15th,
1917: “No lover, no husband has ever met in dreams the true image
of wife or mistress. She who has perhaps filled his whole life with
joy or disquiet cannot enter there. Her image can fill every moment
of his waking life but only its counterfeit comes to him in sleep;
and he who classifies these counterfeits will find that just in so
far as they become concrete, sensuous, they are distinct individuals;
never types but individuals. They are the forms of those whom he has
loved in some past earthly life, chosen from _Spiritus Mundi_ by the
subconscious will, and through them, for they are not always hollow
shades, the dead at whiles outface a living rival.” They are the
forms of Over Shadowers as they are called. All violent passion
has to be expiated or atoned, by one in life, by one in the state
between life and life, because, as the Judwalis believe, there is
always deceit or cruelty; but it is only in sleep that we can see
these forms of those who as spirits may influence all our waking
thought. Souls that are once linked by emotion never cease till
the last drop of that emotion is exhausted--call it desire, hate
or what you will--to affect one another, remaining always as it
were in contact. Those whose past passions are unatoned seldom
love living man or woman but only those loved long ago, of whom
the living man or woman is but a brief symbol forgotten when some
phase of some atonement is finished; but because in general the
form does not pass into the memory, it is the moral being of the
dead that is symbolised. Under certain circumstances, which are
precisely described, the form indirectly, and not necessarily from
dreams, enters the living memory; the subconscious will, as in
Kusta-ben-Luki in the story, selects among pictures, or other
ideal representations, some form that resembles what was once
the physical body of the Over Shadower, and this ideal form
becomes to the living man an obsession, continually perplexing
and frustrating natural instinct. It is therefore only after
full atonement or expiation, perhaps after many lives, that a
natural deep satisfying love becomes possible, and this love,
in all subjective natures, must precede the Beatific Vision.
When I wrote An Image from a Past Life, I had merely begun my
study of the various papers upon the subject, but I do not think
I misstated Robartes’ thought in permitting the woman and not the
man to see the Over Shadower or Ideal Form, whichever it was. No
mind’s contents are necessarily shut off from another, and in
moments of excitement images pass from one mind to another with
extraordinary ease, perhaps most easily from that portion of the
mind which for the time being is outside consciousness. I use the
word “pass” because it is familiar, not because I believe any
movement in space to be necessary. The second mind sees what the
first has already seen, that is all.
THE SECOND COMING
Robartes copied out and gave to Aherne several mathematical diagrams
from the _Speculum_, squares and spheres, cones made up of revolving
gyres intersecting each other at various angles, figures sometimes
of great complexity. His explanation of these, obtained invariably
from the followers of Kusta-ben-Luki, is founded upon a single
fundamental thought. The mind, whether expressed in history or in
the individual life, has a precise movement, which can be quickened
or slackened but cannot be fundamentally altered, and this movement
can be expressed by a mathematical form. A plant or an animal has an
order of developement peculiar to it, a bamboo will not develop
evenly like a willow, nor a willow from joint to joint, and both
have branches, that lessen and grow more light as they rise, and
no characteristic of the soil can alter these things. A poor soil
may indeed check or stop the movement and a rich prolong and
quicken it. Mendel has shown that his sweet-peas bred long and
short, white and pink varieties in certain mathematical proportions,
suggesting a mathematical law governing the transmission of parental
characteristics. To the Judwalis, as interpreted by Michael Robartes,
all living mind has likewise a fundamental mathematical movement,
however adapted in plant, or animal, or man to particular
circumstance; and when you have found this movement and calculated
its relations, you can foretell the entire future of that mind. A
supreme religious act of their faith is to fix the attention on the
mathematical form of this movement until the whole past and future
of humanity, or of an individual man, shall be present to the
intellect as if it were accomplished in a single moment. The
intensity of the Beatific Vision when it comes depends upon the
intensity of this realisation. It is possible in this way, seeing
that death is itself marked upon the mathematical figure, which
passes beyond it, to follow the soul into the highest heaven and
the deepest hell. This doctrine is, they contend, not fatalistic
because the mathematical figure is an expression of the mind’s
desire, and the more rapid the developement of the figure the
greater the freedom of the soul. The figure while the soul is
in the body, or suffering from the consequences of that life,
is frequently drawn as a double cone, the narrow end of each
cone being in the centre of the broad end of the other.
[Illustration: A line drawing of two cones superimposed on
each other, with the tip of each cone in the centre of the
base of the other.]
It has its origin from a straight line which represents, now
time, now emotion, now subjective life, and a plane at right
angles to this line which represents, now space, now intellect,
now objective life; while it is marked out by two gyres which
represent the conflict, as it were, of plane and line, by two
movements, which circle about a centre because a movement outward
on the plane is checked by and in turn checks a movement onward
upon the line; & the circling is always narrowing or spreading,
because one movement or other is always the stronger. In other
words, the human soul is always moving outward into the objective
world or inward into itself; & this movement is double because
the human soul would not be conscious were it not suspended
between contraries, the greater the contrast the more intense the
consciousness. The man, in whom the movement inward is stronger
than the movement outward, the man who sees all reflected within
himself, the subjective man, reaches the narrow end of a gyre at
death, for death is always, they contend, even when it seems the
result of accident, preceded by an intensification of the subjective
life; and has a moment of revelation immediately after death, a
revelation which they describe as his being carried into the presence
of all his dead kindred, a moment whose objectivity is exactly equal
to the subjectivity of death. The objective man on the other hand,
whose gyre moves outward, receives at this moment the revelation,
not of himself seen from within, for that is impossible to objective
man, but of himself as if he were somebody else. This figure is true
also of history, for the end of an age, which always receives the
revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the
coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the
other to that of its greatest contraction. At the present moment
the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth
of Christ which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest
expansion. The revelation which approaches will however take
its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre.
All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous
civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the
continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash,
though in a flash that will not strike only in one place, and will
for a time be constantly repeated, of the civilization that must
slowly take its place. This is too simple a statement, for much
detail is possible. There are certain points of stress on outer and
inner gyre, a division of each, now into ten, now into twenty-eight,
stages or phases. However in the exposition of this detail so far
as it affects the future, Robartes had little help from the Judwalis
either because they cannot grasp events outside their experience,
or because certain studies seem to them unlucky. “‘For a time the
power’ they have said to me,” (writes Robartes) “‘will be with us,
who are as like one another as the grains of sand, but when the
revelation comes it will not come to the poor but to the great and
learned and establish again for two thousand years prince & vizier.
Why should we resist? Have not our wise men marked it upon the sand,
and it is because of these marks, made generation after generation
by the old for the young, that we are named Judwalis.’”
Their name means makers of measures, or as we would say, of diagrams.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
In this plain text version, italics in the text have been replaced
with _underscores_. A description has been added for a line drawing
in the original text. The nested quotation marks near the end of the
Notes have been corrected from the printed text.
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