CHAPTER IX.
O sola, mica, rama lamahi,
Volase, cala, maja, mira, salame,
Viemisa molasola, Rama, Afasala.
Mirahel, Zorabeli, Assaja!
Citation for all Spirits, from the Black Raven.
A strict regard for historical accuracy compels me to state that the following conversation took place in the drawing-room, and not in the library. By such an arrangement, that bright feminine presence was secured which, according to Gower, deprived mysticism itself of half its obscurity.
‘Did Jacob Behmen frighten you away?’ asked Willoughby of Mrs. Atherton, somewhat remorsefully. ‘I think Atherton and Gower will bear me out in saying that it was not easy to render the worthy shoemaker entertaining.’
Mrs. Atherton. Mr. Gower was telling us just before you came in, that he found him, from your account, a much more imaginative personage than he had supposed—quite a poetical philosopher.
Gower. Behmen holds a poet’s doctrine, surely, when he represents all nature as struggling towards an ideal,—striving to bring forth now, as it once did—ere Lucifer had fallen,—longing and labouring, in fellowship with our human aspiration.
Willoughby. Such a notion must tend to remove from the mind that painful sense we sometimes have of the indifference of nature to our thoughts and doings.
Atherton. To remove that feeling from the imagination, at least.
Willoughby. And that is enough; for only in imagination can it have existence. Man is so much greater than nature.
Gower. It does, indeed, make all the difference to poets and artists, whether they read sympathy or apathy in the face of creation. Think of the various forms and agencies of nature—of the swart Cyclopean forces under the earth—of the deftly-woven threadwork of the tissues—of vapour-pageantries, and cloud-cupolas, and fairy curls of smoke—of the changeful polity of the seasons, advancing and disgracing frost or sunshine—of the waves lashing at the land, and the land growing into the waves,—of all these ministries as working, like thoughtful man, toward a divine standard; as rejoicing, in their measure, through every descending range of being, under the restoring hand of the Divine Artificer, and panting to recover the order and the beauty of the Paradise which shines above,—of the Eden which once blossomed here below. Think of the earth, resigning herself each winter to her space of sleep, saying inwardly, ‘I have wrought another year to bring the offspring of my breast nearer to the heavenly pattern hidden in my heart. I rest, another circuit nearer to the final consummation.’ Then there is that upper Paradise—substantial, yet ethereal,—as full of beauty, for finer senses, as earth’s fairest spots for more gross, without aught that is hurtful or discordant. Fill up Behmen’s outline. Picture the heavenly hills and valleys, whispering one to another in odorous airs,—a converse only broken sweetly, from time to time, by the floating tones of some distant angel-psalm, as the quiet of a lake by a gliding swan. There run rivers of life—the jubilant souls of the meditative glens through which they wend. There are what seem birds, gorgeous as sunset clouds, and less earthly,—animal forms, graceful as the antelope, leaping among crags more lustrous than diamond,—creatures mightier than leviathan; and mild-eyed as the dove couching among immortal flowers, or bathing in the crystal sea. The very dust is dazzling and priceless, intersown with the sapphire, the sardonyx, the emerald of heaven; and all the ground and pavement of that world branching with veins as of gold and silver, an arborescent glory, instinct with mysterious life.
Willoughby. Thank you, Gower.
Gower. Thank you, Willoughby. You are my informant. I never read a line of Behmen on my own account, and, what is more, never will.
Kate. Helen and I want you very much to tell us something about the Rosicrucians.
Atherton. You have read Zanoni——
Kate. And we are all the more curious in consequence. How much of such a story may I think true?
Atherton. As an ideal portraiture of that ambition which seeks lordship within the marches of the unseen world, I think Zanoni perfect.
Mrs. Atherton. The Rosicrucians pretended, did they not, that they could prolong life indefinitely,—laid claim to all sorts of wonderful power and knowledge? Have you not once or twice met with a person, or heard of one, who would certainly have been suspected of being a Rosicrucian by superstitious people? I mean, without any pretence on his part, merely from a singular appearance, or a mysterious manner, or uncommon cleverness.
Atherton. Oh, yes; such men would keep up the Rosicrucian tradition bravely among the common folk.
Willoughby. And among great folk, too, if they took the pains.
Mrs. Atherton. I was thinking of Colonel Napier’s description of George Borrow, which we were reading the other day. He pictures him youthful in figure, yet with snow-white hair; inscrutable, therefore, as to age, as the Wandering Jew; he has deep-black mesmeric eyes, terrible to dogs and Portuguese; he is silent about himself to the most tantalizing height of mystery, no man knowing his whence or whither; he is master of information astoundingly various, speaks with fluency English, French, German, Spanish, Greek, Hindee, Moultanee, the gipsy tongue, and more beside, for aught I know. So equipped, within and without, he might have set up for a Zanoni almost anywhere, and succeeded to admiration.
Atherton. How small the charlatans look beside such a specimen of true manhood. But where shall we find the distance wider between the ideal and the actual than in this very province of supernatural pretension? What a gulf between the high personage our romance imagines and that roving, dare-devil buccaneer of science, or that shuffling quacksalver which our matter-of-fact research discovers. Don’t you agree with me, Willoughby?
Willoughby. Altogether. Only compare the two sets of figures—what we fancy, and what we find. On the one side you picture to yourself a man Platonically elevated above the grossness and entanglement of human passions, disdaining earth, dauntlessly out-staring the baleful eyes of that nameless horror—the Dweller on the Threshold; commanding the prescience and the power of mightiest spirits; and visited, like Shelley’s Witch of Atlas, as he reads the scrolls of some Saturnian Archimage, by universal Pan, who comes with homage ‘out of his everlasting lair,’—
‘Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant.’
This is the theurgist, as imagination paints him. Now turn, on the other side, to the actual gallery of theosophic and theurgic worthies, as history reveals them. Baptista Porta dwells in a house which is the triumph of legerdemain,—the palace of Puck, the most intricate nest of traps, surprises, optical delusions, grotesque transformations,—throwing host and guests into paroxysms of laughter or of fear. You see Cornelius Agrippa, in threadbare bravery, with his heart upon his sleeve, and every expression by turns upon his brow, save that of the Platonic serenity. Paracelsus swears worse than my uncle Toby’s comrades in Flanders, and raves about his Homunculus. But from such men we cannot withhold sympathy, respect, even a certain admiration. In that eighteenth century, behold that grand magnet for all the loose and dupable social particles in every class and country—the soi-disant Count Cagliostro, with his Seraphina, his Egyptian Lodge, his elixirs and red powder, his magical caraffes, his phosphorous glories, his Pentagon and Columbs, his Seven Planetary Spirits, his Helios, Mene, Tetragrammaton. In that age of professed Illuminism, in the times of Voltaire and Diderot, when universal Aufklärung was to banish every mediæval phantasm, you see Father Gassner, with his miraculous cures, followed by crowds through Swabia and Bavaria;—Mesmer attracting Paris and Vienna to his darkened rooms and hidden music, to be awe-stricken by the cataleptic horrors there achieved;—the Count St. Germain declaring himself three hundred years old, and professing the occult science of diamond-manufacturing Brahmins;—the coffee-house keeper, Schröpfer, deluding Leipsic and Frankfort with his pretended theurgic art;—and St. Maurice, swindling the sceptical wits and roués who flutter in the drawing-rooms of Mesdames Du Maine and De Tencin, pretending to open converse for them with sylphs and Salamanders, invoking the genius Alaël, and finally subsiding into the Bastille. Such are some among the actual caricatures of the artistic conception embodied in the character of Zanoni.
Atherton. Truly a bad symptom of the general disease, when men grow unable to see that the highest dignity lies close at hand.
Willoughby. As though man could never exhibit magnanimity unless in some thrilling dramatic ‘situation.’
Gower. Or could not believe in the unseen world save by help of necromancers, miracle-mongers, and clairvoyantes.
Atherton. The ancient saying abides true,—He that ruleth his own spirit is greater than he that taketh a city,—greater than even he who should carry the cloud-capital of the whole world of spirits, pull down its meteor-flag, and make all the weird garrison his thralls. I think, if I were a preacher, I should some day take up the phase of man’s mental history we have now reviewed as a practical exposition of Christ’s words—‘Nevertheless, in this rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rather that your names are written in heaven.’
Kate. I should like to know, after all, precisely who and what these Rosicrucians were. When did they make their first appearance?
Willoughby. They were originally neither more nor less than the ‘Mrs. Harris’ of a Lutheran pastor.
Mrs. Atherton. Mr. Willoughby!
Atherton. Fact, Lily. Willoughby never said anything truer.
Willoughby. Allow me to tell you the story.—About the year 1610, there appeared anonymously a little book, which excited great sensation throughout Germany. It was entitled, The Discovery of the Brotherhood of the Honourable Order of the Rosy Cross, and dedicated to all the scholars and magnates of Europe.[[256]]
It commenced with an imaginary dialogue between the Seven Sages of Greece, and other worthies of antiquity, on the best method of accomplishing a general reform in those evil times. The suggestion of Seneca is adopted, as most feasible, namely, a secret confederacy of wise philanthropists, who shall labour everywhere in unison for this desirable end. The book then announces the actual existence of such an association. One Christian Rosenkreuz, whose travels in the East had enriched him with the highest treasures of occult lore, is said to have communicated his wisdom, under a vow of secresy, to eight disciples, for whom he erected a mysterious dwelling-place called The Temple of the Holy Ghost. It is stated further, that this long-hidden edifice had been at last discovered, and within it the body of Rosenkreuz, untouched by corruption, though, since his death, one hundred and twenty years had passed away. The surviving disciples of the institute call on the learned and devout, who desire to co-operate in their projects of reform, to advertise their names. They themselves indicate neither name nor place of rendezvous. They describe themselves as true Protestants. They expressly assert that they contemplate no political movement in hostility to the reigning powers. Their sole aim is the diminution of the fearful sum of human suffering, the spread of education, the advancement of learning, science, universal enlightenment, and love. Traditions and manuscripts in their possession have given them the power of gold-making, with other potent secrets; but by their wealth they set little store. They have arcana, in comparison with which the secret of the alchemist is a trifle. But all is subordinate, with them, to their one high purpose of benefiting their fellows both in body and soul.
Mrs. Atherton. No wonder the book made some noise.
Willoughby. I could give you conclusive reasons, if it would not tire you to hear them, for the belief that this far-famed book was written by a young Lutheran divine named Valentine Andreä. He was one of the very few who understood the age, and had the heart to try and mend it. You see him, when his college days are over, starting on his travels—his old mother giving him her tearful ‘God bless you,’ as she puts into his hand all the treasure of her poverty,—a rusty old coin, and twelve kreuzer. From the cottage-door her gaze follows with many a prayer the good son, whose beloved form lessens along the country road. Years after, he comes back, bringing with him the same old coin, and with it several hundred gulden. He has seen the world, toiling, with quick observant eye and brave kindly heart, through south and western Germany, among the Alps, through Italy and France. He has been sometimes in clover as a travelling tutor, sometimes he has slept and fared hard, under vine-hedges, in noisy, dirty little inns, among carriers, packmen, and travelling apprentices. The candidate becomes pastor, and proves himself wise in men as well as books. A philanthropist by nature, he is not one of those dreamers who hate all that will not aid their one pet scheme, and cant about a general brotherhood which exempts them from particular charity. Wherever the church, the school, the institute of charity have fallen into ruin or disorder by stress of war, by fraud, or selfish neglect, there the indefatigable Andreä appears to restore them. He devises new plans of benevolence,—appealing, persuading, rebuking. He endures the petulence of disturbed indolence, the persecution of exposed abuse; bearing with, and winning over, all sorts of hopeless crabbed people, thrusting men’s hands into their pockets, they know not how. He is an arch bore in the eyes of miserly burgomasters and slumberous brother clergy—a very patron-saint for the needy and distressed, the orphan and the widow. To this robust practical benevolence was added a genial humour, not uncommon in minds of strength like his, and a certain trenchant skill in satirical delineation which renders some of his writings among the most serviceable to the historian of those times.
Gower. Oh, how I love that man!
Willoughby. Well, this Andreä writes the Discovery of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, a jeu-d’esprit with a serious purpose, just as an experiment to see whether something cannot be done by combined effort to remedy the defect and abuses—social, educational, and religious, so lamented by all good men. He thought there were many Andreäs scattered throughout Europe—how powerful would be their united systematic action!
Kate. But why mix up with his proposal all this idle fabling about Rosenkreuz and his fraternity?
Willoughby. But for that spice of romance, this notion of his could never have done more than chip the shell or sprawl helpless in the nest. The promise of supernatural powers awakened universal attention—fledged, and gave it strength to fly through Europe.
Mrs. Atherton. But the hoax could not last long, and would, after all, encourage those idle superstitions which were among the most mischievous of the errors he was trying to put down.
Willoughby. So indeed it proved. But his expectation was otherwise. He hoped that the few nobler minds whom he desired to organize would see through the veil of fiction in which he had invested his proposal; that he might communicate personally with some such, if they should appear; or that his book might lead them to form among themselves a practical philanthropic confederacy, answering to the serious purpose he had embodied in his fiction. Let the empty charlatan and the ignoble gold-seeker be fooled to the top of their bent, their blank disappointment would be an excellent jest; only let some few, to whom humanity was more dear than bullion, be stimulated to a new enterprise.
Gower. The scheme was certain, at any rate, to procure him some amusement.
Willoughby. Many a laugh, you may be sure, he enjoyed in his parsonage with his few friends who were in the secret, when they found their fable everywhere swallowed greedily as unquestionable fact. On all sides they heard of search instituted to discover the Temple of the Holy Ghost. Printed letters appear continually, addressed to the imaginary brotherhood, giving generally the initials of the candidate, where the invisibles might hear of him, stating his motives and qualifications for entrance into their number, and sometimes furnishing samples of his cabbalistic acquirements. Still, no answer. Not a trace of the Temple. Profound darkness and silence, after the brilliant flash which had awakened so many hopes. Soon the mirth grew serious. Andreä saw with concern that shrewd heads of the wrong sort began to scent his artifice, while quacks reaped a rogue’s harvest from it. The reality was ridiculed as fiction, and the fiction hailed as reality. Society was full of the rotten combustible matter which his spark had kindled into a conflagration he could not hope to stay. A cloud of books and pamphlets issued from the press, for and against the fraternity, whose actual house lay beneath the Doctor’s hat of Valentine Andreä. Medical practitioners of the old school, who denounced the spagiric method, and to whom the name of Paracelsus was an abomination, ridiculed the Rosicrucian secrets, and scoffed at their offer of gratuitous cures. Orthodox divines, like Libavius, swinging a heavy club, cruelly demolished the little book,—which, of a truth, was not fit to sustain rough handling. They called down fire from heaven on its unknown authors, and declared that their rosa should be rota—their rose, the wheel. Meanwhile a number of enthusiasts became volunteer expositors of the principle and aim of this undiscoverable brotherhood. Andreä saw his scheme look as ridiculous in the hands of its credulous friends as it seemed odious in those of its enemies. A swarm of impostors pretended to belong to the Fraternity, and found a readier sale than ever for their nostrums. Andreä dared not reveal himself. All he could do was to write book after book to expose the folly of those whom his handiwork had so befooled, and still to labour on, by pen and speech, in earnest aid of that reform which his unhappy stratagem had less helped than hindered.
Mrs. Atherton. And was no society ever actually formed?
Willoughby. I believe not; nothing, at least, answering in any way to Andreä’s design. Confederacies of pretenders appear to have been organized in various places; but Descartes says he sought in vain for a Rosicrucian lodge in Germany. The name Rosicrucian became by degrees a generic term, embracing every species of occult pretension,—arcana, elixirs, the philosopher’s stone, theurgic ritual, symbols, initiations. In general usage the term is associated more especially with that branch of the secret art which has to do with the creatures of the elements.
Atherton. And from this deposit of current mystical tradition sprang, in great measure, the Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism of the eighteenth century,—that golden age of secret societies. Then flourished associations of every imaginable kind, suited to every taste. The gourmand might be sure of a good dinner in one; the alchemist might hope to catch his secret in a second; the place-hunter might strengthen his interest in the brotherhood of a third; and, in all, the curious and the credulous might be fleeced to their hearts’ content. Some lodges belonged to Protestant societies, others were the implements of the Jesuits. Some were aristocratic, like the Strict Observance; others democratic, seeking in vain to escape an Argus-eyed police. Some—like the Illuminati under Weishaupt, Knigge, and Von Zwackh, numbering (among many knaves) not a few names of rank, probity, and learning—were the professed enemies of mysticism and superstition. Others existed only for the profitable juggle of incantations and fortune-telling. The lodges contended with each other and among themselves; divided and subdivided; modified and remodified their constitutions; blended and dispersed; till, at last, we almost cease to hear of them. The best perished at the hands of the Jesuits, the worst at the hands of the police.
Willoughby. At Vienna, the Rosicrucians and Freemasons were at one time so much the rage that a modification of the mason’s apron became a fashionable part of female dress, and chatelaines were made of miniature hammers, circles, and plumblines.
Kate. Very pretty, some of them, I dare say.
Atherton. Do you remember, Gower, that large old house we saw at Vienna, called the Stift?
Gower. Perfectly, and the Stift-gasse, too, leading to it, for there I got wet through.
Atherton. That building is the relic of a charity founded by a professed Rosicrucian. He took the name of Chaos (after their fashion)—every brother changing his name for some such title as Sol, Aureus, Mercurius, and so on, according to his taste. He came to Vienna in the seventeenth century, and somehow, whether by his alchemy or not I cannot say, acquired both fortune and nobility. Ferdinand III. made him Hofkammerath, and prefixed a Von to the Chaos. This good man founded an institution for orphans, who were once educated in that house, since converted into a military academy, and bearing still, in its name and neighbourhood, traces of the original endowment.
Mrs. Atherton. Andreä would have taken some comfort could he but have seen at least that practical fruit of his Rosicrucian whim. How his heart would have rejoiced to hear the hum of the orphan school-room, and to see their smoking platters!
Kate. My curiosity is not yet satisfied. I should like to know something more about those most poetical beings, the creatures of the elements,—Sylph, Undine, and Co.
Atherton. On this subject, Kate, I am happy to be able to satisfy you. I can conduct you at once to the fountain-head. I will read you the process enjoined in the Comte de Gabalis for attaining to converse with some of these fanciful creations. (Taking down a little book.) Here is the passage.[[257]] (Reads.)
‘If we wish to recover our empire over the salamanders, we must purify and exalt the element of fire we have within us, and restore the tone of this chord which desuetude has so relaxed. We have only to concentrate the fire of the world, by concave mirrors, in a globe of glass. This is the process all the ancients have religiously kept secret; it was revealed by the divine Theophrastus. In such a globe is formed a solar powder, and this, self-purified from the admixture of other elements, and prepared according to the rules of art, acquires, in a very short time, a sovereign virtue for the exaltation of the fire within us, and renders us, so to speak, of an igneous nature. Henceforth the inhabitants of the fiery sphere become our inferiors. Delighted to find our reciprocal harmony restored, and to see us drawing near to them, they feel for us all the friendship they have for their own species, all the respect they owe to the image and vicegerent of their Creator, and pay us every attention that can be prompted by the desire of obtaining at our hands that immortality which does not naturally belong to them. The salamanders, however, as they are more subtile than the creatures of the other elements, live a very long time, and are therefore less urgent in seeking from the sage that affection which endows them with immortality....
‘It is otherwise with the sylphs, the gnomes, and the nymphs. As they live a shorter time, they have more inducement to court our regard, and it is much easier to become intimate with them. You have only to fill a glass vessel with compressed air, with earth, or with water, close it up, and leave it exposed to the sun’s rays for a month. After that time, effect a scientific separation of the elements, which you will easily accomplish, more especially with earth or water. It is wonderful to see what a charm each of the elements thus purified possesses for attracting nymphs, sylphs, and gnomes. After taking the smallest particle of this preparation every day for a few months, you see in the air the flying commonwealth of the sylphs, the nymphs coming in crowds to the waterside, and the guardians of hidden treasure displaying their stores of wealth. Thus, without magical figures, without ceremonies, without barbarous terms, an absolute power is acquired over all these people of the elements. They require no homage from the philosopher, for they know well that he is their superior.... Thus does man recover his natural empire, and become omnipotent in the region of the elements, without aid of dæmon, without illicit art.’
Of course you have all learnt from Undine that the creatures of the elements are supposed to obtain a soul, and become immortal by alliance with one of our race. There is a double advantage, too, for these happy philosophers may not only raise their nymph or sylphide to a share with them in the happiness of heaven, if they reach it, but if the sage should be so unfortunate as not to be predestined to an immortality of blessedness, his union with one of these beings will operate on himself conversely,—that is, will render his soul mortal, and deliver him from the horrors of the endless second death. So Satan misses his prey in either sphere.
Willoughby. I never knew before that these cabbalists were Calvinists.
Atherton. This touch of Jansenism excites the same astonishment in the author of the Comte de Gabalis. A delightful wag, that Abbé Villars!
The philosophers are described by the Count as the instructors and the saviours of the poor elementary folk, who, but for their assistance in forming liaisons with mortals, would inevitably at last fall into the hands of their enemy, the devil. As soon, he says, as a sylph has learnt from us how to pronounce cabbalistically the potent name Nehmahmihah,[[258]] and to combine it, in due form, with the delicious name Eliael, all the powers of darkness take to flight, and the sylph enjoys, unmolested, the love he seeks!
Willoughby. How universal seems to have been the faith in the magical efficacy of certain words, from the earliest to the latest times, among the more sober as well as the most extravagant theurgists. A long list of them might be drawn up. There is the Indian O-U-M; there are the Ephesian letters; with Demogorgon, ‘dreaded name,’ as Milton reminds us; the barbarous words, too, which the Chaldean oracles and Psellus declare must on no account be Hellenised.
Gower. And the word Agla, I remember, in Colin de Plancy, which, when duly pronounced, facing the east, makes absent persons appear, and discovers lost property.[[259]] I suppose the potency is in proportion to the unintelligibility of the terms.
Atherton. The Comte de Gabalis tells us how the Salamander Oramasis enabled Shem and Japhet to restore the patriarch Noah to his former vigour by instructing them how to pronounce six times alternately, walking backward, the tremendous name Jabamiah.
But the word above every word is the Shemhamphorash of the Talmud.[[260]] The latter rabbins say that Moses was forty days on Mount Sinai, to learn it of the angel Saxael. Solomon achieved his fiend-compelling wonders by its aid. Jesus of Nazareth, they say, stole it from the Temple, and was enabled by its virtue to delude the people. It is now, alas! lost; but could any one rightly and devoutly pronounce it, he would be able to create therewith a world. Even approximate sounds and letters, supplied by rabbinical conjecture, give their possessor power over the spirit-world, from the first-class archangel to the vulgar ghost: he can heal the sick, raise the dead, and destroy his enemies.
Willoughby. It is curious to see some of these theosophists, who cry out so against the letter, becoming its abject bondsmen among the puerilities of the Cabbala. They protest loudly that the mere letter is an empty shell—and then discover stupendous powers lying intrenched within the curves and angles of a Hebrew character.
Atherton. Our seventeenth century mystics, even when most given to romancing, occupied but a mere corner of that land of marvel in which their Jewish contemporaries rejoiced. The Jews, in their dæmonology, leave the most fantastic conceptions of all other times and nations at an immeasurable distance. Their affluence of devils is amazing. Think of it!—Rabbi Huna tells you that every rabbi has a thousand dæmons at his left hand, and ten thousand at his right: the sensation of closeness in a room of Jewish assembly comes from the press of their crowding multitudes: has a rabbi a threadbare gabardine and holes in his shoes, it is from the friction of the swarming devilry that everywhere attends him.[[261]]
Gower. To return to societies—did you ever hear, Willoughby, of the Philadelphian Association?[[262]]
Willoughby. That founded by Pordage, do you mean—the doctor who fought the giant so stoutly one night?
Gower. The same. I picked up a book of his at a stall the other day.
Kate. Who was he? Pray tell us the story of the battle.
Gower. A Royalist clergyman who took to medicine under the Protectorate. The story is simply this.—Pordage, whose veracity even his enemies do not impugn, declares that he woke from sleep one night, and saw before his bed a giant ‘horrible and high,’ with an enormous sword drawn in one hand, and an uprooted tree in the other. The monster evidently means mischief. The Doctor seizes his walking-stick. Round swings the lumbering tree-trunk, up goes the nimble staff——
Atherton. What became of the bedposts?
Gower. Hush, base materialist! The weapons were but the symbols of the conflict, and were symbolically flourished. The real combat was one of spirit against spirit—wholly internal; what would now be called electro-biological. Each antagonist bent against his foe the utmost strength of will and imagination.
Willoughby. Somewhat after the manner of the Astras which the Indian gods hurled at each other—spells of strong volition, which could parch their object with heat, freeze him with cold, lash him with hail, shut him up in immobility, though hundreds of miles away.
Atherton. Surpassing powers those, indeed; not even requiring the present eye and will of the operator to master the imagination of the subject mind.
Kate. And the battle in the bedroom?
Gower. Lasted half an hour; when the giant, finding Dr. Pordage a tough customer, took his departure.
Willoughby. Pordage was a great student and admirer of Behmen; but, unlike his master, an inveterate spirit-seer. I dare say he actually had a dream to the effect you relate.
Gower. But he and the whole Philadelphian Society—a coterie of some twenty ghost-seers—profess to have seen apparitions of angels and devils, in broad daylight, every day, for nearly a month.
Mrs. Atherton. What were they like?
Gower. The chief devils drove in chariots of black cloud, drawn by inferior dæmons in the form of dragons, bears, and lions. The spirits of wicked men were the ugliest of all,—cloven-footed, cats-eared, tusked, crooked-mouthed, bow-legged creatures.
Atherton. Did the Philadelphians profess to see the spirits with the inward or the bodily eye?
Gower. With both. They saw them in whole armies and processions, gliding in through wall or window-pane—saw them as well with the eyes shut as open. For, by means of the sympathy between soul and body, the outer eye, says Pordage, is made to share the vision of the inner. When we cease to use that organ, the internal vision is no less active. I should add that the members were conscious of a most unpleasant smell, and were troubled with a sulphurous taste in the mouth while such appearances lasted.
Willoughby. Mrs. Leade is one of the most conspicuous of their number,—a widow of good family from Norfolk, who forsook the world and retired into her inmost self, holding intercourse with spirits and writing her revelations.
Gower. She, I believe, carried to its practical extreme the Paracelsian doctrine concerning the magical power of faith.
Willoughby. That is her one idea. By union with the divine will, she says, the ancient believers wrought their miracles. Faith has now the same prerogative: the will of the soul, wholly yielded to God, becomes a resistless power, can bind and loose, bless and ban, throughout the universe. Had any considerable number among men a faith so strong, rebellious nature would be subdued by their holy spells, and Paradise restored.
Atherton. Some of the German Romanticists have revived this idea—never, perhaps, wholly dead. Some stir was made for awhile by the theory that the power of miracle was native in man—and haply recoverable.
Willoughby. Such a doctrine is but one among the many retrogressions of the mediæval school.