PRIESTESSES.
Nirvana is the consummate gift of Harikar, the one everlasting sweetness!
During the intonation of the ritual, the twin-souls put into practice the manifestations of those endearments prayed for, and which they certainly seemed to possess.
Throughout the entire congregation, priest and priestess, enfolded in each other's arms, swayed caressingly together and rapturously kissed each other. The fondest sighs were heard amid the recitations, and the faces of lover and beloved were flushed the color of rosy flame. A tempest of restrained passion shook the entire congregation.
What wonder, that, ruled by such a faith, each twin-soul splendidly apparelled, in such an edifice, should grow rich and strange, bold and delicate, and exhibit the intemperance of emotion excited by sensations so multiplied and extreme? I then saw a new meaning in the grandeur and efflorescence of the sculptures of the temple. I saw in the profuse decorations, in the arabesques so fantastically entangled and unrolled, a manifestation of the delicate sensibility that created them.
Not only were real or natural objects idealized in art, but also conventional art, or the record of what nature suggests, as well as how she appears, to the soul of the artist. And what must have been the infinite wealth of suggestion to such souls as these to account for such mouldings and traceries on wall and roof, and such wealth of color in attire, reflected and duplicated in the jewelled windows of the dome. Here were souls fitted by nature and art to fuse and create the suggestions of nature into shapes of eternal beauty. These flamboyant shapes and mystical colors presuppose the strange illuminations that had pierced tender and extravagant hearts.