Section One
Vnto the very points and prickes, here are to be
found great misteries. Quod sit Castellum in quo Fratres degunt? Quinam Quod tanto impendio absconditur, etiam solummodo demonstrare, destruereest. Preface to the Third EditionThe words 'Third Edition' to a work of this character, which, it will readily be confessed, prefers claims to being quite sui generis, excite mixed feelings on the part of its Authors. The present edition has been carefully revised, at the same time that it has been largely extended. It comprises, now, Two VOLUMES. The addition of new engravings--singularly suggestive, prepared with great care, presenting very antique and authentic claims--speaks for value. The Authors can refer with pride to the numerous letters which reach them, if pride, or even particular gratification (according to ordinary ideas), could actuate in the statement of the fact. This is a serious treatise upon the 'Rosicrucians'. Letters expressing great interest, some anonymous, some with names, addressed from all parts--from Germany, France, Spain,' the West Indies; from India, Italy, and Denmark, and from remote corners in our own country--these have multiplied since the work was first published. America has displayed unbounded curiosity. To all these communications, with a few exceptions, no answers have been (nor could be) returned. The volumes themselves must be read with attention, or nothing is effected. The book must be its own interpreter, if interpretation is sought. But interpretation does not apply in, this instance. With one word we shall conclude. The Authors of The Rosicrucians would quietly warn (for to do more would imply a greater attention than is due) against all attempts in books, or in print or otherwise, to subscribe with 'letters' or any addition (or affectation), signifying a supposed personal connexion with the real 'Rosicrucians'. These haughty Philosophers forbade disclosure--this, of either their real doctrines of intentions, or of their personality. We may most truly say, that in this work--as it now stands, care being taken to keep all reserves--will be found the best account of this illustrious and mysterious Fraternity. LONDON Preface to the Second EditionThe Authors of this important Book--such must obviously be the fact of any work speaking with authority in regard of that extraordinary Brotherhood the 'Rosicrucians'--feel assured that it will only be necessary to penetrate but to the extent of two or three pages therein, to secure vivid curiosity and attention. The Producers--particularly in the instance of this much enlarged Second Edition--are particularly desirous that no one shall identify them with, or consider them as maintaining personally, the strangely abstruse, and, in some instances, the startlingly singular ideas of these Princes among the Mystics. We are--and desire etc) be viewed as--the Historians only of this renowned Body; of whom it may most truly be asserted that no one can boast of having ever--really and in fact--seen or known in any age any supposed (or suspected) 'Member' in the flesh. It is sufficient honour to offer as the medium only, or the Intermediaries to the reading-world--of this Illustrious Membership; whose renown has filled, and whose mystical doctrines (assumed or supposed) have puzzled the ages:--in the intenser degree, still, in the present time; as the inquisitive reception of the Authors' First Edition of The Rosicrucians abundantly proved. Dr. Ginsburg says of the Cabala, or Kabbalah (regarding the mysteries of which the Rosicrucians claimed to be the only true exponents), that it is a system of religious philosophy, or more properly of theosophy, which has not only exercised, for hundreds of years, an extraordinary influence on the mental development of so shrewd a people as the Jews, but has captivated the minds of some of the greatest thinkers of Christendom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 'It--and all that refers to it'--therefore claims the greatest attention of both the philosopher and the theologian. 'The thinkers of the past days, after restlessly searching for a scientific system which should disclose to them the "deepest depths" of the Divine Nature, and approve to the understanding the real tie which binds all things together, found the craving of their mind SATISFIED by this Theosophy.' [1] We say enough in reference to the august possessors of this knowledge when we remind the reader that among those who knew how to wield (and to adapt) the stupendous acquisition to which they were supposed to have at last penetrated, were Raymond Lully, the celebrated scholastic, metaphysician, and chemist (died 1315); John Reuchlin, the renowned scholar and reviver of oriental literature in Europe (born 14J5, died 1522); John Picus di Mirandola, the famous philosopher and classical scholar (1463-1494); Cornelius Henry Agrippa, the distinguished philosopher, divine, and physician (1486-1535); John Baptist von Helmont, a remarkable chemist and physician (1577-1644); Dr. Henry More (1614-1687), and lastly and chiefly (in regard of whom this whole Book is but the translation and exposition of his highly-prized and very scarce works), our own countryman the famous physician and philosopher (1574-1637). HARGRAVE-JENNINGS. Preface to the First EditionThis book, which now leaves our hands, concentrates in a small compass -the results of very considerable labour, and the diligent study of very many books in languages living and dead. it purports to be a history (for the first time treated seriously in English) of the famous Order of the 'rose-cross', or of the 'rosicrucians'. No student of the occult philosophy need, however, fear that we shall not most carefully keep guard--standing sentry (so to speak) not only over this, which is, by far, the pre-eminent, but also over those other recondite systems which are connected with the illustrious Rosicrucians. An accomplished author of our own period has remarked that 'he who deals in the secrets of magic, or in the secrets of the human mind, is too often looked upon with jealous eyes by the world, which is no great conjuror.' How is it that, after centuries of doubt or denial--how happens it, in face of the reason that can make nothing of it, the common sense that rejects, and the science which can demonstrate it as impossible, the supernatural still has such vital hold in the human--not to say in the modern--mind? How happens it that the most terrible fear is the fear of the invisible?--this, too, when we are on all hands assured that the visible alone is that which we have to dread! The ordinary reason exhorts us to dismiss our fears. That thing 'magic', that superstition 'miracle', is now banished wholly from the beliefs of this clear-seeing, educated age. 'miracle', we are told, never had a place in the world--only in men’s delusions. It is nothing more than a fancy. It never was anything more than a superstition arising from ignorance. What is fear? It is a shrinking from possible harm, either to the body, or to that thing which we denominate the mind that is in us. The body shrinks with instinctive nervous alarm, like the sensitive leaf, when its easy, comfortable exercise or sensations are disturbed. Our book, inasmuch as it deals--or professes to deal--seriously with strange things and with deep mysteries, needs the means of interpretation in the full attention of the reader: otherwise, little will be made, or can come, of it. It is, in brief, a history of the alchemical philosophers, written with a serious explanatory purpose, and for the first time impartially stated since the days of James. the First and Charles the First. This is really what the book pretends to be--and nothing more. It should be mentioned that the peculiar views and deductions to be found herein were hinted at as demonstrable for the first time by the same Author in the year 1858, when a work entitled Curious Things of the Outside World was produced. Let it be understood, however, that the Author distinctly excepts against being in any manner identified with all the opinions religious or otherwise, which are to be found in this book. Some of them are, indeed, most extraordinary; but, in order to do full justice to the speculations of the Hermetic Brethren, he has put forward their ideas with as much of their original- force as he was able; and, in some parts of his book, he believes he has urged them with such apparent warmth, that they, will very likely seem to have been his own most urgent convictions. As far as he can. succeed in being so considered, the Author wishes to be regarded simply as the Historian of, the Rosicrucians, or as an Essayist on their strange, mysterious beliefs. Whether he will succeed in engaging the attention of modern readers to a consideration of this time-honoured philosophy remains to be seen; but this he is assured of, that the admiration of all students and reflective minds will be excited by the unrivalled powers of thinking of the Rosicrucians. The application, proper or otherwise, of these powers is a matter altogether beside the present inquiry. The Author has chiefly chosen for exposition the Latin writings of the great English Rosicrucian, Robert Flood, or Fludd (Robertus de Fluctibus), who lived in the times of James the First and Charles the First. Our final remarks shall be those of a very famous Brother of the 'r.c.', writing under the date of 1653: 'i will now cloze up', saith he, 'with the doxology of a most excellent, renowned philocryphus: Soli Deo Laus et Potentia! LONDON, January 20th, 1870 PART I CRITICS OF THE ROSICRUCIANS CRITICIZED SINGULAR ADVENTURE IN STAFFORDSHIRE EVER-BURNING LAMPS INSUFFICIENCY OF WORLDLY OBJECTS THE HERMETIC PHILOSOPHERS AN HISTORICAL ADVENTURE THE HERMETIC BRETHREN MYTHIC HISTORY OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS SACRED FIRE FIRE-THEOSOPHY OF THE PERSIANS IDEAS OF THE ROSICRUCIANS AS TO THE CHARACTER OF FIRE MONUMENTS RAISED TO FIRE-WORSHIP IN ALL COUNTRIES DRUIDICAL STONES AND THEIR WORSHIP INQUIRY AS TO THE POSSIBILITY OF MIRACLE CAN EVIDENCE BE DEPENDED UPON? EXAMINATION OF HUME'S REASONING FOOTSTEPS OF THE ROSICRUCIANS AMIDST ARCHITECTURAL OBJECTS THE ROUND TOWERS OF IRELAND PRISMATIC INVESTITURE OF THE MICROCOSM CABALISTIC INTERPRETATIONS BY THE GNOSTICS MYSTIC CHRISTIAN FIGURES AND TALISMANS THE 'ROSY CROSS' IN INDIAN, EGYPTIAN, GREEK, ROMAN, AND MEDIAEVAL MONUMENTS MYTH OF THE SCORPION, OR THE SNAKE, IN ITS MANY DISGUISES OMINOUS CHARACTER OF THE COLOUR 'WHITE' TO ENGLISH ROYALTY THE BELIEFS OF THE ROSICRUCIANS-MEANING OF LIGHTS AND OF COMMEMORATIVE FLAMBEAUX IN ALL WORSHIP THE GREAT PYRAMID PART II HISTORY OF THE TOWER OR STEEPLE PRESENCE OF THE ROSICRUCIANS IN HEATHEN AND CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE THE ROSICRUCIANS AMIDST ANCIENT MYSTERIES. THEIR TRACES DISCOVERABLE IN THE ORDERS OF KNIGHTHOOD ROSICRUCIANISM IN STRANGE SYMBOLS CONNEXION BETWEEN THE TEMPLARS AND GNOSTICISM STRANGE SPECULATIONS OF THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS ROSICRUCIAN ORIGIN OF THE ORDER OF THE GARTER. DEDUCTIONS, AND PROOFS, FROM HISTORICAL AUTHORITIES ROSICRUCIAN SUPPOSED MEANS OF MAGIC THROUGH SIGNS, SIGILS, AND FIGURES ASTRO-THEOSOPHICAL (EXTRA-NATURAL) SYSTEM OF THE ROSICRUCIANS--THE ALCHEMIC MAGISTERIUM OR 'STONE' ROSICRUCIAN 'CELESTIAL' AND 'TERRESTRIAL' (MEANS OF INTERCOMMUNICATION) THE PRE-ADAMITES. PROFOUND CABALISTIC OR ROSICRUCIAN SPECULATIONS THE ADAPTED ROSICRUCIAN CONTEMPLATION. INTRUSION OF SIN. RUINS OF THE OLD WORLDS INDIAN MYSTERIOUS ADORATION OF FORMS. THE UNITY OF THE MYTHOLOGIES FOUND IN THE BHUDDISTIC AND MOHAMMEDAN TEMPLES DOCTRINE AND RATIONALE. THE EMBODIED 'CHILDREN OF THE ELEMENTS', BOTH OF HEATHEN AND OF CHRISTIAN PERIODS ROBERT FLOOD (ROBERTUS DE FLUCTIBUS), THE ENGLISH ROSICRUCIAN NOTICES OF ANCIENT AUTHORITIES MYSTERIES OF THE ANCIENTS: THE ARK OF NOAH CABALISTIC ILLUSTRATIONS. THE SAN-GRËALE, GRËAL, OR HOLY GRËALE THE ROUND TABLE IS THE RATIONALE OR APOTHEOSIS OF THE MOST NOBLE THE ORDER OF THE GARTER REMARKS UPON TWO CURIOUS BOOKS REMARKS RELATING TO THE GREAT MYSTIC, ROBERT DE FLUCTIBUS ALCHEMY. THE POWER OF PRODUCING GOLD AND SILVER, THROUGH ARTIFICIAL MEANS. DOCTRINE OF THE ROSICRUCIANS THE OUTLINE OF THE CABALA, OR KABBALAH. ITS MYSTIC INDICATIONS. THE PURPOSE OF THE GREAT ARCHITECT OF THE UNIVERSE IN THE SENSIBLE AND SPIRITUAL WORLDS (NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL), AND THE CHARACTER OF THEIR RECIPROCITY, AND DOUBLE WORKING CABALISTIC PROFUNDITES THE ROSICRUCIANSPART ICHAPTER THE FIRSTCRITICS OF THE ROSICRUCIANS CRITICIZEDThat modern science, spite of its assumptions and of its intolerant dogmatism, is much at fault--nay, to a great extent a very vain thing--is a conclusion that often presents itself to the minds of thinking persons. Thus thoughtful people, who choose to separate themselves from the crowd, and who do not altogether give in with such edifying submission to the indoctrination of the scientific classes--notwithstanding that these latter have the support generally of that which, by a wide term, is called the 'press' in this country--quietly decline reliance on modern science. They see that there are numerous shortcomings of teachers in medicine, which fails frequently, though always with its answer--in theology, which chooses rather that men should sleep, though not the right sleep, than consider waking--nay, in all the branches of human knowledge; the fashion in regard to which is to disparage the ancient schools of thought by exposing what are called their errors by the light of modern assumed infallible discovery. It never once occurs to these eager, conceited professors that they themselves may possibly have learned wrongly, that the old knowledge they decry is underrated because they do not understand it, and that, entirely because the light of the modern world is so brilliant in them, so dark to them, as eclipsed in this novel artificial light, is the older and better and truer sunshine nearer to the ancients: because time itself was newer to the old peoples of the world, and because the circumstances of the first making of time were more understood in the then first divine disclosure, granting that time ever had a beginning, as man’s reason insists it must.Shelley, the poet, who, if he had not been so great as a poet, would have been perhaps equally eminent as a metaphysician, that is, when age and experience had ripened and corrected his original brilliant crudities of thought--used to declare that most men--at least, most thinking men--spend the latter half of their lives in unlearning the mistakes of the preceding half. This he declares to have been the fact in his own experience--which was, even for this test, a very brief one; .for Shelley was only twenty-nine when his lamentable death occurred. The early departure of three brilliant poetic spirits of our fathers' period, at the same time that it is very melancholy, is worthy of deep remark. Shelley was, as we have said, twenty-nine; Byron was only thirty-six; John Keats--in some respects the most poetically intense and abstract of the three--was only twenty-four. And in these short several lifetimes, measuring so few years, these distinguished persons had achieved that which resulted in the enrolment of their names in a nation's catalogue in a grand branch of human attainment. They live in lasting records, they grow in honour, and their names do not fade, as is the case with those reputations which have been unduly magnified, but which give way to time. Perhaps the lot of some contemporaneous accepted important, not to say great, reputations will be diminution and disappearance. Time is not only an avenger, but a very judicious corrector. We are so convinced of the irresistible dominancy, all the world over, of opinions, and of the dicta relative to this or that merit, or this or that truth, propounded, by people with names and of influence in our good, readily believing England, and of the power of supposed authority in matters of taste and literary acceptance, that we desire to warn querists against the statements about the fraternity--for it is not a body--of the Rosicrucians appearing in all the published accounts, whether of this country or abroad. We have examined all these supposed notices and explanations of who the Rosicrucians were in biographical works, in encyclopædias and histories, and we find them all prejudiced and misrepresenting, really telling no truth, and only displaying a deplorable amount of mischievous ignorance. They are, besides, in the main copied from each other--which is notably the case with the early encyclopædias. Old Fuller, who has some notices of Robert Flood, a famous English member of the order of Rosicrucians, fully admits his ignorance of whom the brotherhood comprised, and of their constitution or purpose. All generally received accounts, therefore, are wrong, principally for three reasons: first, through ignorance; secondly, through prejudice; thirdly, as instigated by distrust, dislike, and envy--for in criticism it is a dogma that the subject must be always under the critic, never that, by a chance, the subject may be above the critic--that is, above the critic's grasp and comprehension. But suppose the criticized choose to except to the ability of the critic in any way to judge of him? From this obstinacy and conceit arise such underrating and false comment as is implied in the following which is extracted from The Encyclopædia Britannica--which account is copied again into several other encyclopædias, and repeated into smaller works with. pertinacious, with even malicious fidelity 'In fine, the Rosicrucians, and all their fanatical descendants, agree in proposing the most crude and incomprehensible notions and ideas in the most obscure, quaint, and unusual expressions.'--Encyclopædia Britannica: article 'Rosicrucians'. During the age of James the First, Charles the First, even during the Protectorate, and again in the time of Charles the Second, the singular doctrines of the Rosicrucians attracted a large amount of attention, and excited much keen controversy. Sundry replies or 'apologies' appeared on the part of the Rosicrucians. Among them was a most able work published in Latin by Dr. Robert Flood, at Leyden, in 1616. It was a small, closely printed, very learned octavo, entitled Apologia Compendiaria Fraternitatis de Rosea Cruce, etc., and abounds in knowledge. It is an exceedingly rare work; but there is a copy in the British Museum. All this long period was marked by considerable speculation regarding these Rosicrucians. Pope’s Rape of the Lock is founded upon some of their fanciful cabalistic ideas. The Spectator contains notices of the mystic society; and, to prove. the public curiosity concerning the Rosicrucians, and a strange incident, the particulars of which we are going to supply from the best sources now for the first time, we may state that there is included, in one number of Addison’s elegant series of papers called The Spectator, a resumption of a notice, and some after-comment, upon the supposed discovery of the burial-place in England of one of these mighty men the Rosicrucians. The story is to the following. purport, as nearly as it can be gathered. We have written much more fully of it from other means; for The Spectator's account is very full of errors, and was evidently gained afar off, and merely from hearsay, as it were. It is, besides, poor and ineffective, gathered from no authority, and produced with no dramatic force; for the life and the beliefs of the Rosicrucians were very dramatic, at the same time that the latter were very true, although generally disbelieved.
DelphicE (With the significant point in the centre) CHAPTER THE SECONDSINGULAR ADVENTURE IN STAFFORDSHIREDr. Plot, who was a very well-known and reliable man, and a painstaking antiquary and writer of natural history, in his History of Staffordshire, published by him in the time of Charles the Second, relates the following strange story:That a countryman was employed, at the close of a certain dull summer’s day, in digging a trench in a field in a valley, round which the country rose into sombre, silent woods, vocal only with the quaint cries of the infrequent magpies. It was some little time after the sun had sunk, and the countryman was just about giving over his labour for the day. Dr. Plot says that, in one or two of the last languid strokes of his pick, the rustic came upon something stony and hard, which struck a spark, clearly visible in the increasing gloom. At this surprise he resumed his labour, and, curiously enough, found a large, flat stone in the centre of the field. This field was far away from any of the farms or 'cotes', as they were called in those days, with which the now almost twilight country was sparingly dotted. In a short time he cleared the stone free of the grass and weeds which had grown over it; and it proved to be a large, oblong slab, with an immense iron ring fixed at one end in a socket. For half-an-hour the countryman essayed to stir this stone in vain. At last he bethought himself of some yards of rope which he had lying near amongst his tools; and these he converted, being an ingenious, inquisitive, inventive man, into a tackle--by means of which, and by passing the sling round a bent tree in a line with the axis of the stone, he contrived, in the last of the light, and with much expenditure of toil, to raise it. And then, greatly to his surprise, he saw a large, deep, hollow place, buried in darkness, which, when his eyes grew accustomed a little to it, he discovered was the top-story to a stone staircase, seemingly of extraordinary depth, for he saw nothing below. The country fellow had not the slightest idea of where this could lead to; but being a man, though a rustic and a clown, of courage, and most probably urged by his idea that the staircase led to some secret repository where treasure lay buried, he descended the first few steps cautiously, and tried to peer in vain down into the darkness. This seemed impenetrable; but there was some object at a vast, cold distance below. Looking up to the fresh air and seeing the star Venus--the evening star--shining suddenly like a planet, in encouraging, unexpected brilliancy, although the sky had still some beautiful placid sunset light in it, the puzzled man left the upper ground, and descended silently a fair, though a somewhat broken staircase. Here, at an angle, as near as he could judge, of a hundred feet underground, he came upon a square landing-place, with a niche in the wall; and then he saw a further long staircase, descending at right angles to the first staircase, and still going down into deep, cold darkness. The man cast a glance upward, as if questioning the small segment of light from the upper world which shot down, whether he should continue his search or desist and return. All was stillest of the still about him; but he saw no reason particularly to fear. So; imagining that he would in some way soon penetrate the mystery, and feeling in the darkness by his hands upon the wall, and by his toes to make sure first on each step, he resolutely descended; and he .deliberately counted two hundred and twenty steps. He felt no difficulty in his breathing, except a certain sort of aromatic smell of distant incense, that he thought Egyptian, coming up now and then from below, as if from another, though a subterranean, world. 'Possibly', thought he--for he had heard of them--'the world of the mining gnomes: and I am breaking in upon their secrets, which is forbidden for man'. The rustic, though courageous, was superstitious. But, notwithstanding some fits of fear, the countryman went on, and at a much lower angle he met a wall in his face; but, making a turn to the right, with singular credit to his nerves, the explorer went down again. And now he saw at a vast distance below, at the foot of a deeper staircase of stone, a steady though a pale light. This was shining up as if from a star, or coming from the centre of the earth. Cheered by this light, though absolutely astounded, nay, frightened, at thus discovering light, whether natural or artificial, in the deep bowels of the earth, the man again descended, meeting a thin, humid trail of light, as it looked, mounting up the centre line of the shining though mouldering old stairs, which apparently had not been pressed by a foot for very many ages. He thought now, although it was probably only the wind in some hidden recess, or creeping down some gallery, that he heard a murmur overhead, as. if of the uncertain rumble of horses and of heavy waggons or lumbering wains. Next moment, all subsided into total stillness; but the distant light seemed to flicker, as if in recognition or answer to the strange sound. Half-a-dozen times he paused, and turned as if he would remount--almost flee for his life upward,. as he thought; for this might be the secret haunt of robbers, or the dreadful abode of evil spirits. What if, in a few moments, he should -come upon some scene to affright, or alight in the midst of desperate ruffians; or be caught by murderers! He listened eagerly. He now almost bitterly repented his descent. Still the light streamed at a distance; but still there was no sound to interpret the meaning of the light, or to display the character of this mysterious place, in which the countryman found himself entangled hopelessly like a knight of romance in an enchanted world. The discoverer by his time stood still with fear. But at last, summoning courage, and recommending himself devoutly to God, he determined to complete his discovery. Above, he had been working in no strange place; the field he well knew, the woods were very familiar to him, and his own hamlet and his wife and family were only a few miles distant. He now hastily, and more in fear than through courage, noisily with his feet descended the remainder of the stairs; and the light grew brighter and brighter as he approached, until at last, at another turn, he came upon a square chamber, built up of large hewn ancient stones. He stopped, silent and awe-struck. Here was a flagged pavement and a somewhat lofty roof, gathering up into a centre, in the groins of which was a rose, carved exquisitely in some dark stone or in marble. But what was this poor man’s fright when, making another sudden turn, from between the jambs, and from under the large archivolt of a Gothic, stone portal, light streamed out over him with inexpressible brilliancy, shining over everything, and lighting up the place with brilliant radiance, like an intense golden sunset. He started back. Then his limbs shook and bent under him as he gazed with terror at the figure of a than, whose face: was hidden, as he sat in a studious attitude in a stone chair, reading in a great book, with his elbow testing on a table like a rectangular altar, in the light of a large, ancient iron lamp, suspended by a thick chain to the middle of the roof. A cry of alarm, which he could not suppress, escaped from the scared discoverer, who involuntarily advanced one pace, beside himself with terror. He was now within the illuminated chamber. As his foot fell on the stone, the figure started bolt upright from his seated position, as if in. awful astonishment. He erected his hooded head, and showed himself as if in anger about to question the intruder. Doubtful if what he saw were a reality, or whether he was not in some terrific dream, the countryman advanced, without being aware of what he was doing, another audacious step. The hooded man now thrust out a long arm, as if in warning; and in a moment the discoverer perceived that this hand was armed with an iron baton, and that he pointed it as if tremendously to forbid further approach. Now, however, the poor man, not being in a condition either to reason or to restrain himself, with a cry, and in a passion of fear, took a third fatal step; and as his foot descended on the groaning stone, which seemed to give way for a moment under him, the dreadful man, or image, raised his arm high like a machine, and with his truncheon struck a prodigious blow upon the lamp, shattering it into a thousand pieces, and leaving the place in utter darkness. This was the end of this terrifying adventure. There was total silence now, far and near. Only a long, low roll of thunder, or a noise similar to thunder, seemed to begin from a distance, and then to move with snatches, as if making turns; and it then rumbled sullenly to sleep, as if through unknown, inaccessible passages. What these were--if any passages--nobody ever found out. It was only suspected that this hidden place referred in some way to the Rosicrucians, and that the mysterious people of that famous order had there concealed some of their scientific secrets. The place in Staffordshire became afterwards famed as the sepulchre of one of the brotherhood, whom, for want of a more distinct recognition or name, the people chose to call 'Rosicrucius', in general reference to his order; and from the circumstance of the lamp, and its sudden extinguishment by the figure that started up, it was supposed that some Rosicrucian had determined to inform posterity that he had penetrated to the secret of the making of the ever-burning lamps of the ancients--though, at the moment that he displayed his knowledge, he took effectual means that no one should reap any advantage from it. The Spectator, in No. 379, for Thursday, May 15th, 1712, under the signature of 'X', which is understood to be that of Budgell, has the following account of that which is chosen there to be designated 'Rosicrucius’s Sepulchre': Rosicrucius, say his disciples, made use of this method to show the world that he had re-invented the ever-burning lamps of the ancients, though he was resolved no one should reap any advantage from the discovery'. We have chosen the above story as the introduction to our curious history. Christian Rosencreutz died in 1484. To account for Rosicrucianism not having been heard of until 1604, it has been asserted that this supposed first founder of Rosicrucianism bound his disciples not to reveal any of his doctrines until a period of one hundred and twenty years after his death. The ancient Romans are said to have preserved lights in their sepulchres many ages by the oiliness of gold (here steps in the art of the Rosicrucians), resolved by hermetic methods into a liquid substance; and it is reported that at the dissolution of monasteries, in the time of Henry the Eighth, there was a lamp found that had then burned in a tomb from about three hundred years after Christ--nearly twelve hundred years. Two of these subterranean lamps are to be seen in the Museum of Rarities at Leyden, in Holland. One of these lamps, in the Papacy of Paul the Third, was found in the Tomb of Tullia (so named), Cicero's daughter, which had been shut up fifteen hundred and fifty years (Second edition of N. Bailey's Φιλόλογος, 1731).
CHAPTER THE THIRDEVER-BURNING LAMPSIn the Papacy of Paul the Third, in the Appian Way, where abundance of the chief heathens of old were laid, a sepulchre was opened, where was found the entire body of a fair virgin swimming in a wonderful juice, which kept it from putrefaction so well, that the face seemed no way impaired, but lively and very beautiful. Her hair was yellow, tied up artificially, and kept together with a golden circlet or band. Under her feet burnt lamps, the light of which was extinguished at the opening of the sepulchre. By some inscriptions found about the tomb it appeared that she must have lain there fifteen hundred years. Who she was was never known, although many concluded her to be 'Tulliola', the daughter of Cicero. This discovery has been reported from various hands.Cedrenus makes mention of a lamp, which, together with an image of Christ, was found at Edessa in the reign of Justinian the Emperor. It was set over a certain gate there, and elaborately enclosed and shut out from the air. This lamp, as appeared from the date attached to it, was lighted soon after Christ was crucified. It was found burning--as in fact it had done for five hundred years--by the soldiers of Cosroes, king of Persia; by whom, at this strange discovery and plunder, the oil was taken out and cast into the fire. As it is reported, this wild act occasioned such a plague as brought death upon numbers of the forces of Cosroes, sufficiently punished for their sacrilegious mischief. At the demolition of our monasteries here in England, there was found in the monument which was supposed to be that of Constantius Chlorus, father to the great Constantine, a burning lamp, which was thought to have continued burning there ever since his burial, which was about three hundred years after Christ. The ancient Romans are said to have been able to maintain lights in their sepulchres for an indefinite time, by an essence or oil obtained from liquid gold; which was an achievement assumed to have been only known to the Rosicrucians, who boasted this among some other of their stupendous arts. Baptista Porta, in his treatise on Natural Magic, relates that about the year 1550, in the island of Nesis, in the Bay of Naples, a marble sepulchre of a certain Roman was discovered; upon the opening of which a burning lamp, affording a powerful illumination, was discovered. The light of this lamp paled on the admission of the air, and it was speedily extinguished. It appeared from undoubted tokens in the mode of inscription that this wonderful lamp had been placed in its present receptacle before the advent of the Saviour. Those who saw the lamp declared that the effulgence was of the most dazzling character; that the light did not flicker or change, but burnt marvellously steadily. A most celebrated lamp, called that of Pallas, the son of Evander, who, as Virgil relates, was killed by Turnus (the account will be found in the tenth book of Virgil's Æneid), is that reported as discovered not far from Rome, as far forward in time as the year 1401. It is related that a countryman was digging in the neighbourhood, and that delving deeper than usual, he came upon a stone sepulchre, wherein there was discovered the body of a man of extraordinary size, as perfect and natural as if recently interred. Above the head of the deceased there was found a lamp, burning with the supposed fabulous perpetual fire. Neither wind nor water, nor any other superinduced means, could extinguish it; but the flame was mastered eventually by the lamp being bored at bottom and broken by the astonished investigators of this consummate light. The man enclosed in this monument had a large wound in the breast. That this was the body of Pallas was evident from the inscription on the tomb, which was as follows: Pallas, Evander’s son, whom Turnus’ spearA very remarkable lamp was discovered about the year 1500 near Ateste, a town belonging to Padua, in Italy, by a rustic who in his explorations in a field came upon an urn containing another urn, in which last was deposited one of these much-doubted miraculous lamps. The aliment of this strange lamp appeared to be a very exquisite crystal liquor, by the ever-during powers of which the lamp must have continued to shine for upwards of fifteen hundred years. And unless this lamp had been so suddenly exposed to the action of the air, it is supposed that it might have continued to burn for any time. This lamp, endowed with such unbelievable powers, was discovered to be the workmanship of an unknown contriver named Maximus Olibius, who must have possessed the profoundest skill in chemical art. On the greater urn some lines were inscribed in Latin, recording the perpetuation of this wonderful secret of the preparation and the starting of these (almost) immortal flames. St. Austin mentions a lamp that was found in a temple dedicated to Venus, which,, notwithstanding that it was exposed to the open weather, could never be consumed or extinguished. Ludovicus Vives, his commentator, in a supplementary mention of ever-burning lamps, cites an instance of another similar lamp which was discovered a little before his time, and which was considered to have been burning for a thousand and fifty years. It is supposed that the perpetuity of the flame of these wonderful lamps was owing to the consummate tenacity of the unctuous matter with which the light was maintained; and that the balance was so exquisitely perfect between the feeding material and the strength of the flame, and so proportioned -for everlasting provision and expenditure, that, like the radical moisture and natural heat in animals, neither of them could ever unduly prevail. Licetus, who has advanced this opinion, observes that in order to effectually prevent interference with this balance, the ancients hid these lamps in caverns or in enclosed monuments. Hence it happened that on opening these tombs and secret places, the admission of fresh air to the lamps destroyed the fine equilibrium and stopped the life (as it were) of the lamp, similarly as a blow or a shock stops a watch, in jarring the matchless mechanism.
CHAPTER THE FOURTHINSUFFICIENCY OF WORLDLY OBJECTSIt is a constant and very plausible charge offered by the general world against the possession of the power of gold-making as claimed by the alchemists, who were the practical branch of the Rosicrucians, that if such supposed power were in their hands, they would infallibly use it, and that quickly enough; for the acquisition of riches and power, say they, is the desire of all men. But this idea proceeds from an ignorance of the character and inclinations of real philosophers, and results from an inveterate prejudice relative to them. Before we judge of these, let us acquire a knowledge of the natural inclinations of very deeply learned men. Philosophers, when they have attained to much knowledge, which wearies them of merely mundane matters, hold that the ordering of men, the following of them about by subservient people, and the continual glitter about them of the fine things of this world, are, after all, but of mean and melancholy account, because life is so brief, and this accidental pre-eminence is very transitory. Splendour, show, and bowing little delight the raised and abstract mind. That circuit of comfort formed by the owning of money and riches is circumscribed by the possessor's own ken. What is outside of this sight may just as well be enjoyed by any other person as by the owner, since all is the thinking of it; only granting that a man has sufficient for his daily wants, letting the 'morrow, indeed, take thought for itself'. One dinner a day, one bed for each night, in the alternations of sun and darkness, one of everything that is agreeable to (or is desirable for) man, is sufficient for any one man. A man’s troubles are increased by the multiplication even of his enjoyments, because he is then beset with anxiety as to their repetition or maintenance. Reduction of things to attend to, and not multiplication, is his policy, because thinking of it is all that can affect him about anything in this world.By the time that the deep, philosophical chemist has penetrated to the control and conversion of the ultimate elements, so as to have in his view the secret operations of Nature, and to have caught Nature, as it were: preparing her presentments and arranging her disguises behind the scenes, he is no more to be amused with vain book-physics. After his spying into the subtle processes of Nature, he cannot be contented with the ordinary toys of men; for are not worldly possessions, honour, rank, money, even wives and numerous or any children, but toys in a certain sense? Where sink they in importance to him when the great unknown sets in which awaits every man? He who can work as Nature works, causing the sunshine, so to speak, to light fire up independently in itself, and to breed and propagate precious things upon the atmosphere in which it burns, causing the growing supernatural soul to work amidst the seeds of gold, and to purge the material, devilish mass until the excrement is expelled, and it springs in health into condensating, solid splendour, a produce again to be sown, to fructify into fresh harvests--the alchemist, or prince of chemists, who can do this, laughs at the hoards of kings. By the time that the artist is thus so much more than man, is he the less desirous of the gratifying things to the ordinary man. Grandeur fades to him before such high intellectual grandeur. He is nearer to the angels, and the world has sunk infinitely below. His is the sky, and the bright shapes of the clouds of the sky: which he is going to convert, perhaps, into prisms, showering solid triumphs. He can well leave to common man his acres of mud, and the turbid pools spotted over them like the shining, showy discs of a snake. Man, under these enlightened philosophical circumstances, will only value the unseen kingdoms--glimpses of the immortal glories of which and of their Rosicrucian inhabitants he has obtained in his magic reveries. What can the longest ordinary man’s life give to such a gifted thinker? Man’s senses and their gratification, as long as the inlets and avenues of perception remain--world’s music, so long as the strings cling tight, for the air of imagination to play upon them--appetites, with downward eyes to find their satisfaction--man’s mortality, with an exit into the shadows or into the grave while the sun is up: the longest life can but give him repetition to satiety of these things--repetitions until he seems almost to tire of the common sun. Of which he grows weary, as well as of his waste or extent of knowledge. To some minds, this world does not present such extraordinary attractions. The very possession of the heights of knowledge induces rather stay up there, amidst the stars, thane descent. Every man almost has felt the sublime exaltation of a great height, when he has achieved the top of a high hill, and looks out and over the landscape for miles and miles. How very little the world looks under him! He is obliged to descend, because he has his home under there. But he quits the upper regions with reluctance, although it is somewhat frightening (as though he were going to be flown away with) to stay so, high up. You become giddy by looking up at the stars, which then seem to be so much nearer as to be attainable. Limited as it is, life itself--very brief, very empty, very much disposed to repeat dull things, gathering up from about you in a strange sensation sometimes, in folds like a dream, or flowing on like a sleep-inducing river to the sea, carrying faces seen and snatched away, and obliterating voices which change into echoes--life, at its very best, ought to be the stoicism of the spectator, who feels that he has come here somehow, though for what purpose he knows not; and he is rather amused as at a comedy in life, than engaged in it as in a business. Even perpetual youth, and life prolonged, with pleasures infinite--even the fancied ever-during life--would, to the deeply thinking man who had risen; as it were, over life, and to that strangely gifted being who has in himself the power of self-perpetuation (like the Wandering Jew), seem vain. Man can be conceived as tiring of the sun--tiring of consciousness even. What an expression is that, 'forgotten by Death'! The only being through whom the scythe of the great destroyer passes scatheless! That life, as a phantom, which is the only conceivable terrible doom of the 'Wanderer' (if such a magical being ever existed); whom as a locomotive symbol, to be perpetuated through the ages, the earth, at the command of the Saviour, refused to hide, and of whom a legend--soon hushed in again--now and then rises to the popular whisper and to the popular distrust! We only adduce these remarks to show that, in, the face of the spectator of the great ultimate, mysterious man, children are no necessity, but an anxiety, estates are a burden, 'business' is the oft-told purposeless tale to the wearying ear: He who can be the spectator of the ages has no particulars in ordinary life. He has nothing which can interest him. He can have no precise and consolidated likings or affections or admirations, or even aversions, because the world is as a toy-shop to him--its small mechanism is an artificial show, of which (given the knowledge of the wheels) he can predicate as to-the movements safely--completely. To return for a moment to the idea of the 'Wandering Jew', which some have supposed to be derived from the claim of the Rosicrucians to the possession of a secret means of renewing youth, and to the escape of some notion of it from out their writings. Even supposing that this strange tale was true, nothing can be imagined more melancholy than the state of this lone traveller, moving with his awful secret through the world, and seeing the successive generations, like leaves, perishing from about him. He counts the years like the traveller of a long summer day, to whom the evening will never come, though he sees his temporary companions, at the different hours of the day, depart appropriately and disappearing to their several homes by the wayside. To him the childhood of his companions seems to turn to old age in an hour. He remembers the far-off ancestors of his contemporaries. Fashions fleet, but your unsuspected youth is accommodated to all. Yours is, indeed, the persecution of the day-life, which will not let you fall to sleep and cease to see the vanity of everything. Your friends of any period disappear. The assurance of the emptiness of all things is the stone as into which your heart is turned. Grey hairs (and the old face) have nothing with you, though you see them appearing upon all others. Familiar objects disappear from about you, and you and the sun seem the only things that survive as old friends. Indeed, it may be doubtful whether, to this supposed man of the ages, the generations would not seem to be produced as a purposeless efflux out of the ground by the sun, like flowers or plants; so as mere matter of mould would all flesh appear, with a phenomenon only going with it in the article of the figure's uprightness as man; it having so strangely set its face against the stars, unlike the creatures doomed to move horizontally. We make these observations to show that, notwithstanding the opinions of the world to the contrary, there may have been men who have possessed these gifts--that is, the power of making gold and of perpetuating their lives--and yet that the exercise of these powers was forborne; and also that their secrets of production have most carefully been kept, lest less wise men should (to speak in figure) have 'rushed in where they feared to tread', and have abused where the philosophers even would not use--despising wealth, which they could not enjoy, and declining a perpetuated life, which would only add to their weariness--life being only a repetition of the same suns, already found too unmeaning and too long. For it is a mistake to suppose that this life is so equally enjoyable by all. There is a sublime sorrow of the ages, as of the lone ocean. There is the languishment for the ever-lost original home in this tearful mortal state. The philosophers knew that possession blunted desire, and that rich men may be poor men. A remarkable answer was made by a man who, to all appearance, possessed superabundantly the advantages of life--wealth, honour, wife, children, 'troops of friends', even health, by day: but in his night he lived another life, for in it was presented another picture, and that unfailingly uncomfortable, even to this good man--exchanging joy for horror. 'My friend', replied he to an inquirer, 'never congratulate a man upon his happiness until you become aware how he sleeps. Dreams are as that baleful country into which I pass. every night of my life; and what can be said to a man who dreams constantly (and believes it) that he is with the devil'? There was no answering this, for every person leads two lives, altogether independent of each other--the days and the nights both full of life, though the night, with the dreams, may be of an opposite order. The world’s circumstances may afford you solace and gratification--even happiness--in the day; but you may be very miserable, notwithstanding, if it happen that you have persecution in your dreams. Here the world’s advantages are of no use to you, for you are delivered over helpless, night after night, in your sleep--and you must have sleep--to the dominion of Other Powers, whom all your guards cannot keep out, for their inlet is quite of another kind than the ordinary life’s access. We advise you, then, to beware of this dark door; the other will perhaps take care of itself, letting in no ugly things upon you: but the former may let in unpleasant things upon you in full grasp with your hands bound.
CHAPTER THE FIFTHTHE HERMETIC PHILOSOPHERSThere was among the sages a writer, Artephius, whose productions are very famous among the Hermetic Philosophers, insomuch that the noble Olaus Borrichius, an excellent writer and a most candid critic, recommends these books to the attentive perusal of those who would acquire knowledge of this sublime highest philosophy. He is said to have invented a cabalistic magnet which possessed the extraordinary property of secretly attracting the aura, or mysterious spirit of human efflorescence and prosperous bodily growth, out of young men; and these benign and healthful springs of life he gathered up, and applied by his magic art to himself--by inspiration, transudation, or otherwise--so that he concentred in his own body, waning in age, the accumulated rejuvenescence of many young people: the individual owners of which new fresh life suffered and were consumed in proportion to the extent in which he preyed vitally upon them, and some of them were exhausted by this enchanter and died. This was because their fresh young vitality had been unconsciously drawn out of them in his baneful, devouring society, which was unsuspected because it afforded a glamour delightful. Now this seems absurd; but it is not so absurd as we suppose when considered sympathetically.Sacred history affords considerable authority to this kind of opinion. We all are acquainted with the history of King David, to whom, when he grew old and stricken in years, Abishag, the Shunammite, was brought to recover him--a damsel described as 'very fair'; and we are told that she 'lay in his bosom', and that thereby he 'gat heat'--which means vital heat, but that the king 'knew her not'. This latter clause in 1 Kings i. 4, all the larger critics, including those who speak in the commentaries of Munster, Grotius, Vossius, and others, interpret in the same way. The seraglios of the Mohammedans have more of this less lustful meaning, probably, than is commonly supposed. The ancient physicians appear to have been thoroughly -acquainted with the advantages of the companionship, without irregular indulgence, of the young to the old in the renewal of their vital powers. The elixir of life was also prepared by other and less criminal means than those singular ones hinted above. It was produced out of the secret chemical laboratories of Nature by some adepts. The famous chemist, Robert Boyle, mentions a preparation in his works, of which Dr. Le Fevre gave him an account in the presence of a famous physician and of another learned man. An intimate friend of the physician, as Boyle relates, had given, out of curiosity, a small quantity of this medicated wine or preparation to an old female domestic; and this, being agreeable to the taste, had been partaken of for ten or twelve days by the woman, who was near seventy years of age, but whom the doctor did not inform what the liquor was, nor what advantage he was expecting that it might effect. A great change did indeed occur with this old woman; for she acquired much greater activity, a sort of youthful bloom came to her countenance, her face was becoming much more smooth and agreeable; and beyond this, as a still more decided step backward to her youthful period, certain purgationes came upon her again with sufficiently severe indications to frighten her very much as to their meaning; so that the doctor, greatly surprised at his success, was compelled to forego his further experiments, and to suppress all mention of this miraculous new cordial, for fear of alarming people with incomprehensible novelties--in regard to which they are very tenacious, having prejudices inveterate. But with respect to centenarians, some persons have been mentioned as having survived for hundreds of years, moving as occasion demanded from country to country; when the time arrived that, in the natural course of things, they should die, or be expected to die, merely changing their names, and reappearing in another place as new persons--they having long survived all who knew them, and thus being safe from the risk of discovery. The. Rosicrucians always most jealously guarded these secrets, speaking in enigmas and parables for the most part; and they adopted as their motto the advice of one of their number, one of the Gnostics of the early Christian period: 'Learn to know all, but keep thyself unknown'. Further, it is not generally known that the true Rosicrucians bound themselves to obligations of comparative poverty but absolute chastity in the world, with certain dispensations and remissions that fully answered their purpose; for .they were not necessarily solitary people: on the contrary, they were frequently gregarious, and mixed freely with all classes, though privately admitting no law but their own. Their notions of poverty, or comparative poverty, were different from those that usually prevail. They felt that neither monarchs nor the wealth of monarchs could endow or aggrandize those who already esteemed themselves the superiors of all men; and therefore, though declining riches, they were voluntary in the renunciation of them. They held to chastity, because, entertaining some very peculiar notions about the real position in creation of the female sex, the Enlightened or Illuminated Brothers held the monastic or celibate state to be infinitely that more consonant with the intentions of Providence, since in everything possible to man’s frail nature they sought to trample on the pollutions and the great degradation of this his state in flesh. They trusted the great lines of Nature, not in the whole, but in part, as they believed Nature was in certain senses not true and a betrayer, and that she was not wholly the benevolent power to endow, as accorded with the prevailing deceived notion. We wish not to discuss more particularly than thus the extremely refined and abstruse protesting views of these fantastic religionists, who ignored Nature. We have drawn to ourselves a certain frontier of reticence, up to which margin we may freely comment; and the limit is quite extended enough for the present popular purpose, though we absolutely refuse to overpass it with too distinct explanation, or to enlarge further on the strange persuasions of the Rosicrucians. There is related, upon excellent authority, to have happened an extraordinary incident at Venice, that made a very great stir among the talkers in that ancient place, and which we will here supply at length, as due to so mysterious and amusing an episode. Every one who has visited Venice in these days, and still more those of the old-fashioned time who have put their experience of it on record, are aware that freedom and ease among persons who make a good appearance prevail there to an extent that; in this reserved and suspicious country, is difficult to realize. This doubt of respectability until conviction disarms has a certain constrained and unamiable effect on our English manners, though it occasionally secures us from imposition, at the expense perhaps of our accessibility. A stranger who arrived in Venice one summer, towards the end of the seventeenth century, and who took up his residence in one of the best sections of the city, by the considerable figure which, he made, and through his own manners, which were polished, composed, and elegant, was admitted into the best company--this though he came with no introductions, nor did anybody exactly know who or what he was. His figure was exceedingly elegant and well-proportioned, his face oval and long, his forehead ample and pale, and the intellectual faculties were surprisingly brought out, and in distinguished prominence. His hair was long, dark, and flowing; his smile inexpressibly fascinating, yet sad; and the deep light of his eyes seemed laden, to the attention sometimes of those noting him, with the sentiments and experience of all the historic periods. But his conversation, when he chose to converse, and his, attainments and knowledge, were marvellous; though he seemed always striving to keep himself back, and to avoid saying too much, yet not with an ostentatious reticence. He went by the name of Signor Gualdi and was looked upon as a plain private gentleman, of moderate independent estate. He was an interesting character; in short, one to make an observer speculate concerning him. This gentleman remained at Venice for some. months, and was known by the name of 'The Sober Signior' among the common people, on account of the regularity of his life, the composed simplicity of, his manners, and the quietness of his costume; for he always wore dark clothes, and these of a plain, unpretending style. Three things were remarked of him during his stay at Venice. The first was, that he had a small collection of fine pictures, which he readily showed to everybody that desired it; the next, that he seemed perfectly versed in all arts and sciences, and spoke always with such minute correctness as to particulars as astonished, nay, silenced, all who heard him, because he seemed to have been present at the occurrences which he related, making the most unexpected correction in small facts sometimes. And it was, in the third place, observed that he never wrote or received any letter, never desired any credit, but always paid for everything in ready money, and made no use of bankers, bills of exchange, or letters of credit. However, he always seemed to have enough, and he lived respectably, though with no attempt at splendour or show. Signor Gualdi met, shortly after his arrival at Venice, one day, at the coffee-house which he was in the habit of frequenting, a Venetian nobleman of sociable manners, who was very fond of art, and this pair used to engage in sundry discussions; and they had many conversations concerning the various objects and pursuits which were interesting to both of them. Acquaintance ripened into friendly esteem; and the nobleman invited Signor Gualdi to his private house, whereat--for he was a widower--Signor Gualdi first met the nobleman's daughter, a very beautiful young maiden of eighteen, of much grace and intelligence, and of great accomplishments. The nobleman's daughter was just introduced at her father's house from a convent, or pension, where she had been educated by the nuns. This young lady, in short, from constantly being in his society, and listening to his interesting narratives, gradually fell in love with the mysterious stranger, much for the reasons of Desdemona; though Signor Gualdi was no swarthy Moor, but only a well-educated gentleman--a thinker rather than the desirer to be a doer. At times, indeed, his countenance seemed to grow splendid and magical in expression; and he boasted certainly wondrous discourse; and a strange and weird fascination would grow up about him, as it were, when he became more than usually pleased, communicative, and animated. Altogether, when you were set thinking about him, he seemed a puzzling person, and of rare gifts; though when mixing only with the crowd you would scarcely distinguish him from the crowd; nor would you observe him, unless there was something romantically .akin to him in you excited by his talk. And now for a few remarks on the imputed character of these Rosicrucians. And in regard to them, however their existence is disbelieved, the matters of fact we meet with, sprinkled, but very sparingly, in the history of these hermetic people, are so astonishing, and at the same time are preferred with such confidence, that if we disbelieve--which it is impossible to avoid, and that from the preposterous and unearthly nature of their pretensions--we cannot escape the conviction that, if there is not foundation for it, their impudence and egotism is most audacious. They speak of all mankind as infinitely beneath them; their pride is beyond idea, although they are most humble and quiet in exterior. They glory in poverty, and declare that it is the state ordered for them; and this though they boast universal riches. They decline all human affections, or submit to them as advisable escapes only--appearance of loving obligations, which are assumed for convenient acceptance, or for passing in a world which is composed of them, or of their supposal. They mingle most gracefully in the society of women, with hearts wholly incapable of softness in this direction; while they criticize them with pity or contempt in their own minds as altogether another order of beings from men, They are most simple and deferential in their exterior; and yet the self-value which fills their hearts ceases its self-glorying expansion only with the boundless skies. Up to a certain point, they are the sincerest people in the world; but rock is soft to their impenetrability afterwards. In comparison with the hermetic adepts, monarchs are poor, and their greatest accumulations are contemptible. By the side of the sages, the most learned are mere dolts and blockheads. They make no movement towards fame, because they abnegate and disdain it. If they become famous, it is in spite of themselves: they seek no honours, because there can be no gratification in honours to such people. Their greatest wish is to steal unnoticed and unchallenged through the world, and to amuse themselves with the world because they are in it, and because they find it about them. Thus, towards mankind they are negative; towards everything else, positive; self-contained, self-illuminated, self-everything; but always prepared (nay, enjoined) to do good, wherever possible or safe. To this immeasurable exaltation of themselves, what standard of measure, or what appreciation, can you apply? Ordinary estimates fail in the idea of it. Either the state of these occult philosophers is the height of sublimity, or it is the height of absurdity. Not being competent to understand them or their claims, the world insists that these are futile. The result entirely depends upon their being fact or fancy in the ideas of the hermetic philosophers. The puzzling part of the investigation is, that the treatises of these profound writers abound in the most acute discourse upon difficult subjects, and contain splendid p. 32 passages and truths upon all subjects--upon the nature of metals, upon medical science, upon the unsupposed properties of simples, upon theological and ontological speculation, and upon science and objects of thought generally--upon all these matters they enlarge to the reader stupendously--when the proper attention is directed to them.
CHAPTER THE SIXTHAN HISTORICAL ADVENTUREBut to return to Signor Gualdi, from whom we have notwithstanding made no impertinent digression, since he was eventually suspected to be one of the strange people, or Rosicrucians, or Ever-Livers of whom we are treating. This was from mysterious circumstances which occurred afterwards in relation to him, and which are in print.The Venetian nobleman was now on a footing of sufficient intimacy with Signor Gualdi to say to him one evening, at his own house, that he understood that he had a fine collection of pictures, and that, if agreeable, he would pay him a visit some day for the purpose of viewing them. The nobleman's daughter who was present, and who was pensively looking down upon the table, more than half in love with the stranger as she had become, thinking deeply of something that the Signor had just said, raised her eyes eagerly at this expression of wish by her father and, as accorded with her feelings, she appeared, though she spoke not, to be greatly desirous to make one of the party to see the pictures. It was natural that she should secretly rejoice at this opportunity of becoming more intimately acquainted with the domestic life, of one whom she had grown to regard with feelings of such powerful interest. She felt that the mere fact of being his guest, and under the roof which was his; would seem to bring her nearer to him; and, as common with lovers, it appeared to her that their being thus together would, in feeling at least, appear to identify both. Signor Gualdi was very polite, and readily invited the nobleman to his house, and also extended the invitation to the young lady, should she feel disposed to accompany her father, since he divined from the expression of her face that she was wishful to that effect. The day for the visit was then named, and the Signor took his departure with the expressions of friendship on all sides which usually ended their pleasant meetings. It followed from this arrangement, that on the day appointed the father and daughter went to Signor Gualdi’s house. They were received by the Signor with warm kindness, and were shown over his rooms with every mark of friendliness and distinction. The nobleman viewed Signor Gualdi’s pictures with great attention; and when he had completed his tour of the gallery, he expressed his satisfaction by telling the Signor that he had never seen a finer collection, considering the number of pieces. They were now in Signor Gualdi’s own chamber--the last of his set of rooms; and they were just on the point of turning to go out and bidding adieu, and Gualdi was courteously removing the tapestry from before the door to widen the egress, when the nobleman, who had paused to allow him thus to clear the way, by chance cast his eyes upwards over the door, where there hung a picture with the curtain accidentally left un-drawn, evidently of the stranger himself. The Venetian looked upon it with doubt, and after a while his face fell; but it soon cleared, as if with relief. The gaze of the daughter was also now riveted upon the picture, which was very like Gualdi; but she regarded it with a look of tenderness and a blush. The Venetian looked from the picture to Gualdi, and back again from Gualdi to the picture. It was some time before he spoke; and when, he did; his voice sounded strangely. 'That picture was intended for you, sir', said he at last, hesitating, to Signor Gualdi. A slight cold change passed over the eyes of the stranger; but he only made reply by a low bow. 'You look a moderately young man--to be candid with you, sir, I should say about forty-five or thereabouts; and yet I know, by certain means of which I will not now further speak, that this picture is by the hand of Titian, who has been dead nearly a couple of hundred years. How is this possible'? he added, with a polite, grave smile. 'It is not easy', said Signor Gualdi quietly, 'to know all things that are possible or not possible, for very frequently mistakes are made concerning such; but there is certainly nothing strange in my being like a portrait painted by Titian.' The nobleman easily perceived by his manner, and by a momentary cloud upon his brow, that the stranger felt offence. The daughter clung to her father's arm, secretly afraid that this little unexpected demur might pass into coolness, and end with a consummation of estrangement, which she feared excessively; she dreaded nervously the rupture of their intimacy with the stranger; and, contradictory as it may seem, she wanted to withdraw, even without the demur she dreaded being cleared up into renewed pleasant confidence. However, this little temporary misunderstanding was soon put an end to by Signor Gualdi himself, who in a moment or two resumed his ordinary manner; and he saw the father and daughter downstairs, and forth to the entrance of his house, with his usual composed politeness, though the nobleman could not help some feeling of restraint, and his daughter experienced a considerable amount of mortification; and she could not look at Signor Gualdi, or rather, when she did, she dwelt on his face too much. This little occurrence remained as a puzzle in the mind of the nobleman. His daughter felt lonely and dissatisfied afterwards, eager for the restoration of the same friendly feeling with Signor Gualdi, and revolving in her mind, with the ingenuity of love, numberless schemes to achieve it. The Venetian betook himself in the evening to the usual coffeehouse; and he could not forbear speaking of the incident among the group of people collected there. Their curiosity was roused, and one or two, resolved to satisfy themselves by looking at the picture attentively the next morning. But to obtain an opportunity to see the picture on this next morning, it was necessary to see the Signor Gualdi somewhere, and to have the invitation of so reserved a man to his lodgings for the purpose. The only likely place to meet with him was at the coffee-house; and thither' the gentlemen went at the usual time, hoping, as it was the Signor's habit to present himself, that he would do so. But he did not come; nor had he been heard of from the time of the visit of the nobleman the day before to the Signor's house--which absence, for the first time almost that he had been in Venice, surprised everybody. But as they did not meet with him at the coffee-house, as they thought was sure, one of the persons who had the oftenest conversed with the Signor, and therefore was the freer in his acquaintance, undertook to go to his lodgings and inquire after him, which he did; but he was, answered by the owner of the house, who came to the street-door to respond to the questioner, that the Signor had gone, having quitted Venice that morning, early, and that he had locked up his pictures with certain orders, and had taken the key of his rooms with him. This affair made a great noise at the time in Venice; and an account of it found its way into most of the newspapers of the year in which it occurred. In these newspapers and elsewhere, an outline of the foregoing particulars may be seen. The account of the Signor Gualdi will also be met with in Les Mémoires Historiques for the year 1687, tome i. p. 365. The chief particulars of our own narrative are extracted from an old book in our collection treating of well-attested relations of the sages, and of life protracted by their art for several centuries: Hermippus Redivivus; or, the Sage's Triumph over Old Age and the Grave. London, Second Edition, much enlarged. Printed for J. Nourse, at The Lamb, against Catherine Street in the Strand, in, the year 1749. And thus much for the history of Signor Gualdi, who was suspected to be a Rosicrucian. We shall have further interesting notices of these unaccountable people as we proceed.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTHTHE HERMETIC BRETHRENThe following passages occur in a letter published by some anonymous members of the R.C., and are adduced in a translation from the Latin by one of the most famous men of the order, who addressed from the University of Oxford about the period of Oliver Cromwell; to which university the great English Rosicrucian, Robertus de Fluctibus (Robert Flood), also belonged, in the time of James the First and Charles the First. We have made repeated visits to the church where Robert Flood lies buried.'Every man naturally desires superiority. Men wish for treasures and to seem great in the eyes of the world. God, indeed, created all things to the end that man might give Him thanks; But there is no individual thinks of his proper duties; he secretly desires to spend his days idly, and would enjoy riches and pleasures without any previous labour or danger. When we' (professors of abstruse sciences) 'speak, men either revile or contemn, they either envy or laugh. When we discourse of gold, they assume that we would assuredly produce it if we could, because. they judge us by themselves; and when we debate of it, and enlarge upon it, they imagine we shall finish by teaching them how to make gold by art, or furnish them with it already made. And wherefore or why should we teach them the way to these mighty possessions? Shall it be to the end that men may live pompously in the eyes of the world; swagger and make wars; be violent when they are contradicted; turn usurers, gluttons, and drunkards; abandon themselves to lust? Now, all these things deface and defile man, and the holy temple of man’s body, and are plainly against the ordinances of God. For this dream of the world, as also the body or vehicle through which it is made manifest, the Lord intended to be pure. And it was not purposed, in the divine arrangement, that men should grow again down to the earth. It is for other purposes that the stars, in their attraction, have raised man on his feet, instead of abandoning him to the "all fours" that were the imperfect tentatives of nature until life, through the supernatural impulse, rose above its original condemned level--base and relegate. 'We of the secret knowledge do wrap ourselves in mystery, to avoid the objurgation and importunity or violence of those who conceive that we cannot be philosophers unless we put our knowledge to some ordinary worldly use. There is scarcely one who thinks about us who does not believe that our society has no existence; because, as he truly declares, he never met any of us. And he concludes that there is no such brotherhood because, in his vanity, we seek not- him to be our fellow. We do not come, as he assuredly expects, to that conspicuous stage upon which, like himself, as he desires the gaze of the vulgar, every fool may enter; winning wonder, if the man’s appetite be that empty way; and, when he has obtained it, crying out "Lo, this is also vanity!"' Dr. Edmund Dickenson, physician to King Charles the Second, a professed seeker of the hermetic knowledge, produced a book entitled, De Quinta Essentia Philosophorum: which was printed at Oxford in 1686, and a second time in 1705. There was a third edition of it printed in Germany in 1721. In correspondence with a French adept, the latter explains the reasons why the Brothers of the Rosy Cross concealed themselves. As to the universal medicine, Elixir Vitæ, or potable form of the preternatural menstruum, he positively asserts that it is in the hands of the 'Illuminated', but that, by the time they discover it, they have ceased to desire its uses, being far above them; and as to life for centuries, being wishful for other things, they decline availing themselves of it. He adds, that the adepts are obliged to conceal themselves for the sake of safety, because they would be abandoned in the consolations of the intercourse of this world (if they were not, indeed, exposed to worse risks), supposing that their gifts were proven to the conviction of the bystanders as more than human; when they would become simply intolerable and abhorrent. Thus, there are excellent reasons for their conduct; they proceed with the utmost caution, and instead of making a display of their powers, as vainglory is the least distinguishing characteristic of these great men, they studiously evade the idea that they possess any extraordinary. or separate knowledge. They live simply as mere spectators in the world, and they desire to make no disciples, converts, nor confidants. They submit to the obligations of life, and to relationships--enjoying the fellowship of none, admiring none, following none, but themselves. They obey all codes, are excellent citizens, and only preserve silence in regard to their own private convictions, giving the world the benefit of their acquirements up to a certain point: seeking only sympathy at some angles of, their multiform character, but shutting out curiosity wholly where they do not wish its imperative eyes. This is the reason that the Rosicrucians passed through the world mostly unnoticed, and that people generally disbelieve that there ever were such persons; or believe that, if there were, their pretensions are an imposition. It is easy to discredit things which we do not understand--in fact, nature compels us to reject all propositions which do not consist with our reason. The true artist is supposed to avoid all suspicion, even on the part of those nearest to him. And granting the possibility, of the Rosicrucian means of the renewal of life, and supposing also that it was the desire of the hermetic philosopher, it would not be difficult for him so to order his arrangements as that he should seem to die in one place (to keep up the character of the natural manner of his life), by withdrawing himself, to reappear in another place as a new person at the time that seemed most convenient to him for the purpose. For everything, and every difficult thing, is easy to those with money; nor will, the world inquire with too resolute a curiosity, if you have coolness and address, and if you have the art of accounting for things. The man of this order also is solus, and without wife or children to embarrass him in the private disposition of his affairs, or to follow him too closely into his by-corners. Thus it will be seen that philosophers may live in the world, and have all these gifts, and yet be never heard of--or, if heard of, only as they themselves wish or suggest. As an instance of the unexpected risks which a member of this order may run if he turns his attention to the practical side of his studies, spite of all his precautions, we may cite the accident which happened to a famous Englishman, who disguised himself under the name of Eugenius Philalethes, but whose real name is said to be Thomas Vaughan. He tells us of himself, that going to a goldsmith to sell twelve hundred marks’ worth of gold, the man told him, at first sight, that it never came out of the mines, but was the production of art, as it was not of the standard of any known kingdom: which proved so sudden a dilemma to the offerer of the gold, that he withdrew immediately, leaving it behind him. It naturally follows from this, that it is not only necessary to have gold, but that the gold shall be marketable or acceptable gold, as otherwise it is utterly useless for the purposes of conversion into money in this world. Thomas Vaughan, who was a scholar of Oxford, and was vehemently attacked in his lifetime, and who certainly was a Rosicrucian adept if there ever was one, led a wandering life, and fell often into great perplexities and dangers from the mere suspicion that he possessed extraordinary secrets. He was born, as we learn from his writings, about the year 1612, which makes him a contemporary of the great English Rosicrucian, Robert Flood; and what is the strangest part of his history, as we find remarked by a writer in 1749, is, that he is 'believed by those of his fraternity' (so the author adds) 'to be living even now; and a person of great credit at Nuremberg, in Germany, affirms that he conversed with him a year or two ago. Nay, it is further asserted' (continues the author) 'that this very individual is the president of the Illuminated in Europe, and that he sits as such in all their annual meetings'. Thomas Vaughan, according to the report of the philosopher Robert Boyle, and of others who knew him, was a man of remarkable piety, and of unstained morals. He has written and edited several invaluable works upon the secrets of the philosophers, some of which are in our possession; among others: Introitus Apertus ad occlusum Regis Palatium; Lumen de Lumine; Magia Adamica; Anima Magica Abscondita, and other learned books; advancing very peculiar theories concerning the seen and the unseen. These books were disbelieved at the time, and remain discredited, principally because they treat of eccentric and seemingly impossible things. It is, however, certain that we go but a very little way out of the usual learned track before we encounter puzzling matters, which may well set us investigating our knowledge, and looking with some suspicion upon its grounds, spite of all the pompous claims of modern philosophers, who are continually, on account of their conceitedness, making sad mistakes; and breaking down with their plausible systems. 'Progress and enlightenment are prerogatives to which no generation in particular can lay a special claim', says a modern writer, speaking of railways and their invention. 'Intelligence like that of the Stephensons is born again and again, at lengthened intervals; and it is only these giants in wisdom who know how to carry on to perfection the knowledge which centuries have been piling up before them. But the age in which such men are cast, is often unequal to appreciate the genius which seeks to elevate its aspiration. Thus it was in 1820 that Mr. William Brougham proposed to consign George Stephenson to Bedlam, for being the greatest benefactor of his time. But now that we have adopted somewhat fully his rejected ideas of steam-locomotion and high rates of speed, which were with so much difficulty forced upon us, we complacently call ourselves "enlightened"; and doubtless we are tolerably safe in doing so, considering that the Stephensons, and similar scientific visionaries, no longer live to contradict us.' We might add, that the Rosicrucians hold their critics in light esteem--indeed in very light esteem. If such is the disbelief of science of everyday use, what chance of credit has the abstruser knowledge, and those assertions of power which contradict, our most ordinary ideas of possibility? Common sense will answer, None at all. And yet all human conclusions and resolutions upon points which have been considered beyond the possibility of contradiction have been sometimes at fault. The most politic course is not too vigorously to take our stand upon any supposed fixed point of truth, but simply to admit that our knowledge is limited, that absolute truth is alone in the knowledge of God, and that no more truth is vouchsafed to man than he knows how to utilize: most of his uses, even of his little quantum of truth, being perverted. He must await other states for greater light, and to become a higher creature--should that be his happy destiny. As to certainty in this world, there is none--nor can there be any. Whether there is anything outside of man is uncertain. Hume has pointed out that there is no sequence between one and two. Other philosophers have ingeniously detected that our senses are all one, or all none. Man is the picture painted upon external matter, and external matter is the individuality that surveys the picture. In the world of physics, colours are tones in other senses, and tones are colours; sevenfold in either case, as the planetary powers and influences are septenary--which, in the ideas of the Rosicrucians, produce both.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTHMYTHIC HISTORY OF THE FLEUR-DE-LISThe maypole is a phallos. The ribbons depending from the discus, or ring, through which the maypole pierces, should be of the seven prismatic colours--those of the rainbow (or Règne-beau). According to the Gnostics and their Remains, Ancient and Modern, a work by the Rev. C. W. King, M.A., published in 1864, Horapollo has preserved a talisman, or Gnostic gem, in yellow jasper, which presents the engraved figure of a 'Cynocephalus, crowned, with bâton erect, adoring the first appearance of the new moon'.The phallic worship prevailed, at one time, all over India. It constitutes, as Mr. Sellon asserts, to this day one of the chief, if not the leading, dogma of the Hindoo religion. Incontestable evidence could be adduced to prove this--however strange and impossible it seems--the key of all worship the world over; and highest in esteem in the most highly civilized nations. Though it has degenerated into gross and sensual superstition, it was originally intended as the worship of the creative principle in Nature. Innumerable curious particulars lie scattered up and down, in all countries of the world, relating to this worship; mad as it seems--bad as, in its grossness, it is. It is only in modern times that sensuality, and not sublimity, has been actively associated with this worship, however. There was a time when the rites connected with it were grand and solemn enough. The general diffusion of these notions regarding the Phalli and the Ioni, and of the sacred mystic suggestions implied in both, as well as the inflections in design of these unlikely, repulsive figures for serious worship, prove that there was something very extraordinary, and quite beyond belief to the moderns in the origin of them. The religion of the Phallos (and of its twin emblem) is to be traced all over the East. It appears to be the earliest worship practised by man. It prevailed not only amongst the Hindoos, Assyrians, Babylonians, Mexicans, Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans in ancient times, but it still forms an integral part of the worship of India, Thibet, China, Siam, Japan, and Africa. We cannot, therefore, afford, to ignore this grand scheme of ritual, when we discover it to be a religion so widely spread, and reappearing so unexpectedly, not only in the countries with which we are contemporaneously acquainted, but also in those old countries of which we in reality know very little, or nothing at all; for all history reads doubtfully, being written for popular purposes. In the Temple-Herren of Nicolai there is an account of a Gnostic gem, or talisman, which represents a 'Cynocephalus', with a lunar disc on his head, standing in the act of adoration, with sceptrum displayed, before a column engraved with letters, and supporting a triangle. This latter architectural figure is, in fact, an obelisk. All the Egyptian obelisks were Phalli. The triangle symbolizes one of the Pillars of Hermes (Hercules). The Cynocephalus was sacred to him. The Pillars of Hermes have been Judaised into Solomon's 'Jachin and Boaz'. So says Herz, in regard to 'Masonic Insignia'. We will explain fully, later in our book, of these interesting sexual images, set up for adoration so strangely and from the meaning of which we foolishly but determinedly avert. We now propose to deduce a very original and a very elaborate genealogy, or descent, of the famous arms of France, the Fleurs-de-Lis, 'Lucifera', Lisses, Luces, 'Lucies', Bees, Scarabs, Scara-bees, or Imperial 'Bees' of Charlemagne, and of Napoleon the First and Napoleon the Third, from a very extraordinary and (we will, in the fullest assurance, add) the most unexpected point of view. The real beginning of these inexpressibly sublime arms (or this 'badge'), although in itself, and apart from its purpose, it is the most refined, but mysteriously grand, in the world, contradictory as it may seem, is also the most ignoble. It has been the crux of the antiquaries and of the heralds for centuries! We would rather be excused the mentioning of the peculiar item which has thus been held up to the highest honour (heraldically) throughout the world. It will be sufficient to say that mystically, in its theological Gnostic allusion, it is the grandest device and most stupendous hint that armory ever saw; and those who are qualified to apprehend our hidden meaning will perhaps read correctly and perceive our end by the time that they have terminated this strange section of our history of Rosicrucianism--for to it it refers particularly. Scarabæi, Lucifera ('Light-bringers'), Luce, Fleur-de-Lis, Lily, Lucia, Lucy, Lux, Lu( + )x. The Luce is the old-fashioned name for the 'pike' or jack--a fish famous for the profuse generation of a certain insect, as some fishermen know full well. This once (incredible as it may seem) formed an object of worship, for the sake of the inexpressibly sublime things which it symbolized. Although so mean in itself, and although so far off, this implied the beginning of all sublunary things. The bees of Charlemagne, the bees of the Empire in France, are 'scarabs', or figures of the same affinity as the Bourbon 'lilies'. They deduce from a common ancestor. Now, the colour heraldic on which they are always emblazoned is azure, or blue--which is the colour of the sea, which is salt. In an anagram it may be expressed as 'C'. Following on this allusion, we may say that 'Ventre-saint-gris!' is a very ancient French barbarous expletive, or oath. Literally (which, in the occult sense, is always obscurely), it is the 'Sacred blue (or grey) womb'--which is absurd. Now, the reference and the meaning of this we will confidently commit to the penetration of those among our readers who can felicitously privately surmise it; and also the apparently circuitous deductions, which are yet to come, to be made by us. Blue is the colour of the 'Virgin Maria'. Maria, Mary, mare, mar, mara, means the 'bitterness' or the 'saltness' of the sea. Blue is expressive of the Hellenic, Isidian, Ionian, Yonian (Yoni-Indian) Watery, Female, and Moonlike Principle in the universal theogony. It runs through all the mythologies. The 'Lady-Bird' or 'Lady-Cow' (there is no resemblance between a bird and a cow, it may be remarked, en passant, except in this strangely occult, almost ridiculous, affinity), and the rustic rhyme among the children concerning it, may be here remembered: Lady-Bird, Lady-Bird, fly away home!Such may be heard in all parts of England when a lady-bird is seen by the children. Myths are inextricably embodied--like specks and straws and flies in amber--amidst the sayings and rhymes of the common people in all countries; and they are there preserved for very many generations, reappearing to recognition after the lapse sometimes of centuries. Now, how do we explain and re-render the above rude couplet? The 'Lady-Bird' is the 'Virgin Maria', Isis, the 'Mother and Producer of Nature'; the 'House' is the 'Ecliptic'--it is figuratively 'on fire', or 'of fire', in the path of the sun; and the 'children at home' are the 'months' produced in the house of the sun, or the solar year, or the 'signs of the Zodiac'--which were originally 'ten', and not twelve' [2] , each sign answering to one of the letters of the primeval alphabet, which were in number 'ten'. Thus, re-read, the lines run: Lady-Bird, Lady-Bird (Columba, or Dove), fly away home!The name of the flying insect called in England 'Lady-Bird' is Bête-à-Dieu in French, which means 'God-creature' or 'God’s creature'. The Napoleonic green is the mythic, magic green of Venus. The Emerald is the Smaragdus, or Smaragd. The name of the insect Barnabee, Barnbee, 'Burning Fire-Fly', whose house is of fire, whose children are ten, is Red Chafer, Rother-Kaefer, Sonnen-Kaefer, Unser-Frauen Kohlein, in German; it is 'Sun-Chafer', 'Our Lady's Little Cow', Isis, or Io, or C--ow, in English. The children Tenne (Tin, or Tien, is fire in some languages) are the earliest 'Ten Signs' in the Zodiacal Heavens --each 'Sign' with its Ten Decans, or Decumens, or 'Leaders of Hosts'. They are also astronomically called 'Stalls', or 'Stables'. We may here refer to Porphyry, Horapollo, and Chifflet's Gnostic Gems. The Speckled Beetle was flung into hot water to avert storms (Pliny, Nat. Hist., lib. xxxvii, ch. x). The antiquary Pignorius has a beetle 'crowned with the sun and encircled with the serpent'. Amongst the Gnostic illustrations published by Abraham Gorlæus is that of a talisman of the more abstruse Gnostics--an onyx carved with a 'beetle which threatens to gnaw at a thunderbolt'. See Notes and Queries: 'Bee Mythology'. The 'Lilies' are said not to have appeared in the French arms until the time of Philip Augustus. See Montfauçon's Monumens de la Monarchie Française, Paris, 1729. Also Jean-Jacques Chifflet, Anastasis de Childeric, 1655. See also Notes and Queries, 1856, London, 2d Series, for some learned papers on the 'Fleur-de-lis'. In the early armorial bearings of the Frankish kings, the 'lilies' are represented as 'insects', seméed (seeded), or spotted, on the blue field. These are, in their origin, the scarabæi of the Orientals; they were dignified by the Egyptians as the emblems of the 'Enlightened'. If the reader examines carefully the sculpture in the British Museum representing the Mithraic Sacrifice of the Bull, with its mystic accompaniments (No. 14, Grand Central Saloon), he will perceive the scarabæus, or crab, playing a peculiar part in the particulars of the grand rite so strangely typified, and also so remotely. The motto placed under the 'lilies', which are the arms of France, runs as follows: 'Lilia non laborant, neque nent'. This is also (as all know) the legend, or motto, accompanying the royal order of knighthood denominated that of the 'Saint-Esprit' in France. We are immediately now recalled to those exceedingly obscure, but very significant, words of our Saviour, which have always seemed very erroneously interpreted, on account of their obvious contradictions: 'Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin' [3] Now, in regard to this part of the text, what does the judicious speculator think of the following Rosicrucian gloss, or explanation? Lilia non laborant (like bees); neque nent, 'neither do they spin' (like spiders). Now of the 'lisses', as we shall elect to call, them. They toil not like 'bees' (scarabæi); neither do they spin like 'spiders' (arachnidæ). To be wise is to be enlightened. Lux is the Logos by whom all things were made; and the Logos is Rasit--R.s.t.: ′ρ.′σ.′τ = 600; and Lux makes Lucis; then LX, ξ′ς = 666. Again, L = 50, ו v = 6, ש s = 300, י i = 10, ש s = 300 = 666. The Fleur-de-lis is the Lotus (water-rose), the flower sacred to the Lux, or the Sul, or the Sun. The 'Auriflamme' (the flame of fire, or fire of gold) was the earliest standard of France. It was afterwards called Oriflamme. It was the sacred flag of France, and its colour was red--the heraldic, or 'Rosicrucian red, signifying gold. The three 'Lotuses', or 'Lisses', were the coat of arms--emblems of the Trimurti, the three persons of the triple generative power, or of the Sun, or 'Lux'. שלה, sle, 'Shilo', is probably שיל, sil =360, or χ = 600, λ = 50 = 10, ו = 6 = 666. This is Silo, or Selo. 'I have no doubt it was the invocation in the Psalms called "Selah", שלה(ס)'. Thus asserts the learned and judicious Godfrey Higgins. 'The Holie Church of Rome herself doth compare the incomprehensible generation of the Sonne of God from His Father, together with His birth out of the pure and undefiled Virgine Marie, unto the Bees--which were in verie deede a great blasphemie, if the bees were not of so great valour and virtue' (value and dignity).--'Beehive of the Romish Church': Hone's Ancient Mysteries Described, p. 283. In the second edition of Nineveh and its Palaces, by Bonomi (London, Ingram, 1853), p. 138, the headdress of the divinity Ilus is an egg-shaped cap terminating at the top in a fleur-de-lis; at p. 149, the Dagon of Scripture has the same; at p. 201, fig. 98, the same ornament appears; at p. 202, fig. 99, a bearded figure has the usual 'fleur-de-lis'. In the same page, the tiaras of two bearded figures are surmounted with fleurs-de-lis. At p. 322, fig. 211, the Assyrian helmet is surmounted with a fleur-de-lis; at p. 334, fig. 217, the head-dress of the figure in the Assyrian standard has a fleur-de-lis; at p. 340, fig. 245, the bronze resembles a fleur-de-lis; at p. 350, fig. 254, an Egyptian example of the god Nilus, as on the thrones of Pharaoh-Necho, exhibits the fleur-de-lis. Vert, or green, and azure, or blue (feminine tinctures), are the colours on which respectively the golden 'bees', or the silver 'lisses', are emblazoned. The Egyptian Scarabæi are frequently cut in stone, generally in green-coloured basalt, or verdantique. Some have hieroglyphics on them, which are more rare; others are quite plain. In the tombs of Thebes, Belzoni found scarabæi with human heads. There is hardly any symbolical figure which recurs so often in Egyptian sculpture or painting as the scarabæus, or beetle, and perhaps scarcely any one which it is so difficult to explain. He is often represented with a ball between his forelegs, which some take for a symbol of the world, or the sun. He may be an emblem of fertility. The 'crab' on the Denderah Zodiac is by some supposed to be a 'beetle' (Egyptian Antiquities). It is for some of the preceding reasons that one of the mystic names of Lucifer, or the Devil, is the 'Lord of Flies', for which strange appellation all antiquaries, and other learned decipherers, have found it impossible to account. Of the figure of the Fleur-de-Luce, Fleur-de-Lis, or Flower-de-Luce (Lus, Luz, Loose), the following may be remarked. On its sublime, abstract side, it is the symbol of the mighty self-producing, self-begetting Generative Power deified in many myths. We may make a question, in the lower sense, in this regard, of the word 'loose', namely, wanton, and the word 'Lech', or 'leche', and 'lecher', etc. Consider, also, in the solemn and terrible sense, the name Crom-Lech, or 'crown', or 'arched entry', or 'gate', of death. The Druidical stones were generally called cromlechs when placed in groups of two [4] with a coping or capstone over, similarly to the form of the Greek letter pi (Π, π), which was imitated from that temple of stones which we call a cromlech: Cromlechs were the altars of the Druids, and were so called from a Hebrew word signifying 'to bow'. There is a Druidic temple at Toulouse, in France, exhibiting many of these curious Druidical stones. There is a large, flat stone, ten feet long, six feet wide, one foot thick, at St. David’s, Pembrokeshire. It is called in Cymric 'Lêch Lagar, the speaking stone'. We may speculate upon the word 'Lich, Lych, Lech' in this connexion, and the terms 'Lich-gate', or 'Lech-gate', as also the name of 'Lich-field'. There is a porch or gateway, mostly at the entrance of old-fashioned churchyards, which is called the 'Lyke-Porch', or 'Litch-Porch'. Lüg, or Lük, is a word in the Danish signifying the same as Lyk in the Dutch, and Leiche, in the German. Thus comes the word 'Lich-gate'. Lich in the Anglo-Saxon means a 'dead body'. See Notes and Queries, vol. ii. p. 4. The 'Lich-gates' were as a sort of triumphal arches (Propylæa) placed before the church, as the outwork called the 'Propylon', or 'Propylæum', was advanced before the Egyptian and the Grecian temples. They are found, in the form of separate arches, before the gates even of Chinese cities, and they are there generally called 'triumphal arches'. Propylæa is a name of Hecate, Dis, Chronos, or the Π, to which sinister deity the Propylon or Propylæum (as also, properly, the Lych-gate) is dedicated. Hence its ominous import, Pro, or 'before', the Pylon or passage. Every Egyptian temple has its Propylon. The Pyramid also in Nubia has one. We refer to the ground plans of the Temples of Denderah, Upper Egypt; the Temple of Luxor, Thebes; the Temple of Edfou, Upper Egypt; the Temple of Carnac (or Karnak), Thebes. Colonel (afterwards General) Vallancey, in the fourth volume, p. 80, of his General Works, cited in the Celtic Druids, p. 223 (a valuable book by Godfrey Higgins), says: 'In Cornwall they call it' (i.e. the rocking-stone) 'the Logan-Stone. Borlase, in his History of Cornish Antiquities, declares that he does not understand the meaning of this term Logan, as applied to the Druidical stones. 'Had Dr. Borlase been acquainted with the Irish MSS', significantly, adds Colonel Vallancey, 'he would have found that the Druidical oracular stone called Loghan, which yet retains its name in Cornwall, is the Irish Logh-oun, or stone into which the Druids pretended that the Logh, or divine essence, descended when they consulted it as an oracle.' Logh in Celtic is the same as Logos in the Greek'; both terms mean the Logos ('Word') or the Holy Ghost. Sanchoniathon, the Phœnician, says that Ouranus contrived, in Bœtulia, 'stones that moved as having life'. Stukeley's Abury, p. 97, may be here referred to for further proofs of the mystic origin of these stones, and also the Celtic Druids of Godfrey Higgins, in contradiction to those who would infer that these 'poised stones' simply mark burial-places, or foolish conclusions of shallow and incompetent antiquaries. The Basilidans were called by the orthodox Docetæ, or Illusionists. The Deity of the Gnostics was called 'Abraxas' in Latin, and 'Abrasax' in Greek. Their last state, or condition for rescued sensitive entities, as they termed souls, was the 'Pleroma', or 'Fullness of Light'. This agrees precisely with the doctrines of the Buddhists or Bhuddists. The regulating, presiding genius was the Pantheus. The Pythagorean record quoted by Porphyry (Vit. Pythag.) states that the 'numerals of Pythagoras were hieroglyphical symbols by means whereof he explained ideas concerning the nature of things'. That these symbols were ten in number, the ten original signs of the zodiac, and the ten letters of the primeval, alphabet, appears from Aristotle (Met. vii. 7). 'Some philosophers hold', he says, 'that ideas and numbers are of the same nature, and amount to ten in all.' See The Gnostics and their Remains, p. 229. But to return to the arms of France, which are the 'Fleurs-de-lis', and to the small representative creature (sublime enough, as the farthest-off symbol which they are imagined in their greatness to indicate). A Bible presented to Charles the Second, A.D. 869, has a miniature of this monarch and his court. His throne is terminated with three flowers of the form of 'fleurs-de-lis sans pied'. On his head is a crown 'fermée à fleurons d’or, relevez et recourbez d’une manière singulière'. Another miniature in the Book of Prayers shows him on a throne surmounted by a sort of 'fleurs-de-lis sans pied'. His crown is of 'fleurs comme de lis', and the robe is fastened with a rose, 'd’où sortent trois pistils en forme de fleurs-de-lis'. His sceptre terminates in a fleur-de-lis.--Notes and Queries. Sylvanus Morgan, an old-fashioned herald abounding in suggestive disclosures, has the following: 'Sir William Wise having lent to the king, Henry VIII, his signet to seal a letter, who having powdered' (seméed, or spotted) 'eremites' (they were emmets--ants) 'engray’d in the seale, the king paused and lookit thereat, considering'. We may here query whether the field of the coat of arms of Sir William Wise was not 'ermine'; for several of the families of Wise bear this fur, and it is not unlikely that he did so also. '"Why, how now, Wise!" quoth the king. "What! hast thou lice here?" "An’, if it like your majestie", quoth Sir William, "a louse is a rich coat;" for by giving the louse I part arms with the French king, in that he giveth the flour-de-lice." Whereat the king heartily laugh’d, to hear how prettily so byting a taunt (namely, proceeding froth a prince) was so suddenly turned to so pleasaunte a conceit.'--Stanihurst's History of Ireland, in Holinshed's Chron. Nares thinks that Shakespeare, who is known to have been a reader of Holinshed, took his conceit of the 'white lowses which do become an old coat well', in The Merry Wives of Windsor, from this anecdote. See Heraldic Anomalies, vol. i. p. 204; also Lower's Curiosities of Heraldry, p. 82 (1845). It may here be mentioned, that the mark signifying the royal property (as it is used in France), similarly to the token, or symbol, or 'brand', denoting the royal domain, the property, or the sign upon royal chattels (the 'broad arrow'), as used in England, is the 'Lis', or the 'Fleur-de-Lis'. The mark by which criminals are 'branded' in France is called the 'Lis--Fleur-de-lis'. The English 'broad-arrow', the mark or sign of the royal property, is variously depicted, similarly to the following marks:
These are the Three Nails of the Passion. In figs. 1 and 2 they are unmistakably so, with the points downwards. Figs. 3 and 4 have the significant horizontal mark which, in the first centuries of Christianity, stood for the Second (with feminine meanings) Person of the Trinity; but the points of the spikes (spicæ, or thorns) are gathered upwards in the centre. In fig. 5 there are still the three nails; but a suggestive similarity to be 'remarked in this figure is a disposition resembling the crux-ansata--an incessant symbol, always reappearing in Egyptian sculptures and hieroglyphics. There is also a likeness to the mysterious letter 'Tau'. The whole first chapter of Genesis is' said to be contained in this latter-emblem--this magnificent, all-including 'Tau'. Three bent spikes, or nails, are unmistakably the
same symbol that Belus often holds in his extended hand on the Babylonian cylinders, afterwards discovered by the Jewish cabalists in the points of the letter 'Shin', and by the mediæval mystics in the 'Three Nails of the Cross'.--The Gnostics and their Remains, Ancient and Mediæval, p. 208. This figure, which is clearly a nail, has also characteristics, which will use remarked in its upper portion, which suggest a likeness to the obelisk, pin, spike, upright or phallus. The Hebrew letter 'Shin', or 'Sin', counts for 300 in the Hebraic numeration. Each spica, or spike, may be taken to signify 100, or ten tens. We have strong hints here of the origin of the decimal system, which reigns through the universal laws of computation as a natural substratum, basis, or principle. This powerful symbol, also, is full of secret important meanings. It will be remarked as the symbol or figure assigned in the formal zodiacs of all countries, whether original zodiacs, or whether produced in figure-imitations by recognizing tradition. The marks or symbols of the zodiacal signs, 'Virgo-Scorpio', are closely similar to each other, with certain differences, which we recommend to the judicious consideration of close and experienced observers. Fig. 8 is the symbol, or hook, of Saturn, the colour
Fig. 8, 9 The Templar Banner: the famous 'Beauséant' of whom, in the heraldic configuration, is sab., sable, or black, divided, party per pale, with the opening light of the first crescent moon of the post-diluvian world [5] Fig. 9 is the same grandly mystic banner, denominated Beauséant ('Beau-Séant'), revealing a whole occult theosophy to the initiate, which the leaders of the Templars undoubtedly were. The difference between these two figures, fig. 8 and fig. 9, is, that the 'fly' of the ensign marked fig. 9 is bifurcated (or cloven) in the 'lighted' part. We subjoin the representation of the wondrous banner of the 'Poor soldiers of the Temple as depicted abundantly 'on the spandrels of the arches of the Temple Church, London. Von Hammer's Mystery of Baphomet Revealed contains much suggestive matter relative to these mysterious
Figs. 10 and 11 supposed dreadful Templars. The Parisian 'Templiers' assert that there is a connexion between the recent Niskhi letter and the 'Cufic' characters, and that the origin of the secrets of the order of the Temple is contemporary with the prevalence of the latter alphabet. We here refer to the work entitled Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum; seu, Fratres Militiæ Templi, qua Gnostici et quidem Ophiani, apostasiæ, idololatriæ, et quidem impuritatis convicti per ipsa eorum monumenta, published in the Mines’ de l’Orient, vol. vi. This treatise is illustrated with numerous admirably executed copper-plates of magical statuettes, architectural ornaments, mystical inscriptions, vases, and coins. Amidst these there is a bearded, yet female, figure, 'Mete' (magna, or maxima), whom Von Hammer, following Theodosius and others, makes the same as the 'Sophia' of the Ophites. Some particulars to these subjects are contained in The Gnostics and their Remains, Ancient and Mediæval; although there is an evident betraying of total ignorance on the part of the author, throughout his book, as to the purpose, meaning, and reality of the, whole of these remote and mysterious subjects to which he is, however, blindly constantly referring, without the merit of even feeling his way. It is well known that the preservation of Gnostic symbols by Freemasons was, and remains so to this day, exceedingly sedulous. We will terminate this part of our long dissertation, which commenced with the explanation of the descent, or the genealogy, or the generation of the famous 'fleurs-de-lis' of France--the noblest and sublimest symbol, in its occult or mysterious meaning, which the 'monarch sun' ever saw displayed to it, inexpressibly mean and repellant as the 'Lis' seems: we will finish, we say, thus far, by commenting in a very original and unexpected, but strictly corroborative, manner upon some words of Shakespeare which have hitherto been passed wholly without remark or explanation. We may premise by recalling that the luce is a pike (pic), or Jack: Jac, Iacc (B and I are complementary in this mythic sense), Bacc, Bacche, Bacchus. Shakespeare's well-known lampoon, or satirical ballad, upon the name of 'Lucy' may be cited as illustrative proof on this side of the subject: Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it.The Zodiacal sign for February is the 'fishes'. Now, the observances of St. Valentine's Day, which point to courtship and to sexual love, or to loving invitation, bear direct reference to the 'fishes', in a certain sense. The arms of the Lucys--as they are at present to be seen, and where we not long since saw them, beautifully restored upon the great entrance-gates of Charlecote Hall, or Place, near Stratford-upon-Avon--are 'three luces or pikes, hauriant, argent'. 'The dozen white luces' are observed upon with intense family pride by Shallow (Lucy), in The Merry Wives of Windsor: ‘Shallow. It is an old coat. ‘Evans. The dozen white louses do become an old coat well’. The significant part of the passage follows to this effect, though deeply hidden in the sly art of our knowing, but reticent, Shakespeare: 'I agrees well passant' (we would here read passim, 'everywhere', which makes clear sense). 'It is a familiar beast to Man, and signifies--love' (the generative act).--Merry Wives of Windsor, act i. sc. 1. We commend the above history of the 'Fleur-de-Lis' to the thoughtful attention of our reader, because he will find under it the whole explanation of the arms of France. And yet, although the above is all-essentially 'feminine', this is the country that imported amidst its Frankish or Saxon progenitors (Clodio, the 'long-haired', to the example, who first passed the Rhine and brought his female 'ultramarine' to supersede and replace, in blazon, the martial, manly 'carmine' or 'gules' of the Gauls)--this is the country that adopted and maintains 'la Loi Salique'.
CHAPTER THE NINTHSACRED FIREThe appearance of God to mortals seems always to have been in brightness and great glory, whether He was angry and in displeasure, or benign and kind. These appearances are often mentioned in Scripture. When God appeared on Mount Sinai, it is said 'The Lord descended upon it in Fire' (Exod. xix. 18). And when Moses repeats the history of this to the children of Israel, he says 'The Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the Fire' (Deut. iv. 12). So it was when the Angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire out of the midst of the bush: 'The bush burned with Fire, and the bush was not consumed' (Exod. iii. 3). The appearances of the Angel of God’s presence, or that Divine Person who represented God; were always in brightness; or, in other words, the Shechinah was always surrounded with glory. This seems to have given occasion to those of old to imagine fire to be what God dwelt in.'Ipse' (Darius) 'solem Mithren, sacrumque et æternum invocans IGNEM, ut illis dignam vetere gloria majoremque monumentis fortitudinem inspirarent.'--Q. Curtius, l. iv. c. 13. Whether it was that any fire preceded from God, and burnt up the oblation in the first sacrifices, as some ingenious men have conjectured, we know not. It is certain that in after ages this was the case. We are sure that a fire from the Lord consumed upon the altar the burnt-offering of Aaron (Lev. ix. 24); and so it did the sacrifice of Gideon, 'both the flesh and the unleavened cakes' (Judg. vi. 21). When David 'built an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt-offerings and peace-offerings, and called upon the Lord, He answered him from heaven by Fire, upon the altar of burnt-offerings' (1 Chron. xxi. 26). The same thing happened at the dedication of Solomon's temple: 'The fire came down from heaven, and consumed the burnt-offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the Lord filled the house' (2 Chron. vii. 1). And much about a hundred years afterwards, when Elijah made that extraordinary sacrifice in proof that Baal was no god, 'The Fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench' (1 Kings xviii. 38). And if we go back long before the times of Moses, as early as Abraham's days, we meet with an instance of the same sort: 'It came to pass that when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp, that passed between these pieces' (Gen. xv. 17). The first appearance of God, then, being in glory--or, which is the same thing, in light or fire--and He showing His acceptance of sacrifices in so many instances, by consuming them with fire, hence it was that the Eastern people, and particularly the Persians, fell into the worship of fire itself, or rather they conceived fire to be the symbol of God’s presence-, and they worshipped God in, or by, fire. From the Assyrians, or Chaldæans, or Persians, this worship was propagated southwards among the Egyptians, and westward among the Greeks; and by them it was brought into Italy. The Greeks were wont to meet together to worship in their Prytaneia, and there they consulted for the public good; and there was a. constant fire kept upon the altar, which was dignified by the name of Vesta, by some. The fire itself was properly Vesta; and so Ovid: Nec te aliud Vestam, quam vivam intelligere flammam.The Prytaneia were the atria of the temples, wherein a fire was kept that was never suffered to go. out. On the change in architectural forms from the pyramidal (or the horizontal) to the obeliscar (or the upright, or vertical), the flames were transferred from the altars, or cubes, to the summits of the typical uprights, or towers; or to the tops of the candles, such as we see them used now in Catholic worship, and which are called 'tapers', from their tapering or pyramidal form, and which, wherever they are seen or raised, are supposed always to indicate the divine presence or influence. This, through the symbolism that there is in the living light, which is the last exalted show of fluent or of inflamed brilliant matter, passing off beyond into the unknown and unseen world of celestial light (or occult fire), to which all the forms of things tend, and in which even idea itself passes from recognition as meaning, and evolves--spiring, as all flame does, to escape and to wing away. Vesta, or the fire, was worshipped in circular temples, which were the images or the miniatures, of the 'temple' of the world, with its dome, or cope, of stars. It was in the atria of the temples, and in the presence of, and before the above-mentioned lights, that the forms of ceremonial worship .were always observed. It is certain that Vesta was worshipped at Troy; and Æneas brought her into Italy manibus vittas, Vestamque potentem,Numa settled an order of Virgin Priestesses, whose business and care it was constantly to maintain the holy fire. And long before Numa's days, we find it not only customary, but honourable, among the Albans to appoint the best-born virgins to be priestesses of Vesta, and to keep up the constant, unextinguished fire. When Virgil speaks (Æneid iv. 200) of Iarbas, in Africa, as building a hundred temples and a hundred altars, he says: vigilemque sacraverat Ignem,that he had 'consecrated a fire that never went out'. And he calls these temples and these lights, or this fire, the 'perpetual watches', or 'watch-lights', or proof of the presence, of the gods. By which expressions he means, that places and things were constantly protected, and solemnized where such lights burned, and that the celestials, or angel-defenders, 'camped', as it were, and were sure to be met with thickly, where these flames upon the altars, and these torches or lights about the temples, invited them and were studiously and incessantly maintained. Thus the custom seems to have been general from the earliest antiquity to maintain a constant fire, as conceiving the gods present there. And this was not only the opinion of the inhabitants in Judæa, but it extended all over Persia, Greece, Italy, Egypt, and most other nations of the world. Porphyry imagined that the 'reason why the most ancient mortals kept up a constant, ever-burning fire in honour of the immortal Gods, was because Fire was most like the Gods. He says that the ancients kept an unextinguished fire in their temples to the Gods, because it was most like them. Fire was not like the Gods, but it was what they appeared in to mortals. And so the true God always appeared in brightness and glory, yet no one would say that brightness was most like the true God, but was most like the Shechinah, in which God appeared. And hence the custom arose of keeping up an unextinguished fire in the ancient temples. Vesta is properly an Oriental word, derived from the Hebrew אש, As--'Fire'. Thence the word Astarte, in the Phœnician dialect. The signification of the term is the same as the πῦρ ἄσβεστον, the ignis æternus, the perpetual fire itself. They that worshipped either Vesta or Vulcan, or the master-power of nature which is known under those names, were properly Fire-worshippers. God, then, being wont to appear in Fire, and being conceived to dwell in Fire, the notion spread universally, and was universally admitted. First, then, it was not at all out of the way to think of engaging in friendship with God by the same means as they contracted friendship with one another. And since they to whom God appeared saw Him appear in Fire, and they acquainted others with such His appearances, He was conceived to dwell in Fire. By degrees, therefore, the world came to be over-curious in the fire that was constantly to be kept up, and in things to be sacrificed; and they proceeded from one step to another, till at length they filled up the measure of their aberration, which was in reality instigated by their zeal, and by their intense desire to mitigate the displeasure of their divinities--for religion was much more intense as a feeling in early days--by passing into dreadful ceremonies in regard to this fire, which they reverenced as the last possible physical form of divinity, not only in its grandeur and power, but also in its purity. It arose from this view that human sacrifices came to be offered to the deities in many parts of the world, particularly in Phœnicia, and in the colonies derived from thence into Africa and other places. In the intensity of their minds, children were sacrificed by their parents, as being the, best and dearest oblation that could be made, and the strongest arguments that nothing ought to. be withheld from God. This was expiation for that sad result, the consequence of the original curse, issuing from the fatal curiosity concerning the bitter fruit of that forbidden 'Tree', whose mortal tasteaccording to Milton. That peculiar natural sense of shame in all its forms lesser and larger, and with all the references inseparably allied to propagation in all its multitudinous cunning (so to speak), wherever the condemned material tissues reach, puzzled the thoughtful ancients as to its meaning. This they considered the convicted 'Adversary', or Lucifer, 'Lord of light'--that is, material Light', 'Eldest Son of the Morning'. Morning, indeed! dawning with its light from behind that forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. What is this shame, urged the philosophers, this reddening, however good and beautiful, and especially the ornament of the young and inexperienced and of children, who are newest from the real, glowing countenance of Deity, with the bloom of the first angelic word scarcely yet fading from off their cherub faces, gradually darkening and hardening in the degradation and iniquity of being here as presences in this world, although the most glorious amidst the forms of flesh? What is this shame, which is the characteristic singly of human creatures? All other creatures are sinless in this respect, and know not the feeling of that--correctly looked at--strange thing which men call 'shame', something which is not right that the sun even should see, and therefore stirring the blood, and, reddening the face, and confusing the speech, and causing man to hang down his head, and to hide himself, as if guilty of something: even as our guilty first parents, having lost the unconsciousness of their child-like, innocent first state--that of sinless virginity--hid themselves and shunned their own light in the umbrage of Paradise, all at once convicted to the certainty that they must hide, because they were exposed, and that they had themselves broken that original intention regarding them. 'Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven'. That is, the innocent children should come up for salvation, who, though suffering under the mortal liability incurred by all flesh in that first sin (and incident in the first fall, which has empoisoned and cursed all nature), are yet free by the nature of their ungrown possibility, and from their unconsciousness of it. They know not the shame of the condition adult, and therefore they bear not the badge of men, and are not of this world really, but of another world. To recur for a moment to the theory of human sacrifices which once largely prevailed. Interwoven inseparably with the forms of architecture from the earliest times, proof of which we see constantly in classical buildings particularly, and in the Italian modifications displayed in the cities of Europe, was the habit of exposing as talismans the members (and particularly the heads) of human sacrifices. This is observable in the innumerable masks (or heads full-faced) placed on the keystones of arches or portals. They are either deified mortals or demigods. Sometimes, but very rarely (because it is, a sinister palladium),the head of Medusa is seen. Exposure of the heads of criminals on town-gates, over bridges, or over arches, follows the same idea, as ranging in the list of protecting, protesting, or appealing Palladia, which are supposed to possess the same objurgating or propitiating power as the wild, winged creatures--children of the air--affixed in penitential, magic brand or exposure on the doors of barns, or on the outside of rustic buildings. All this is ceremonial sacrifice, addressed to the harmful gods, and meant occultly and entreatingly for the eyes of the observant, but invisible, wandering angels, who move through the world--threading unseen the ways of men, and unwitted of by them, and most abundant and most active there where the mother of all of them is in the ascendant with her influences; or when Night is abroad, throned in her cope of stars--letters, from their first judiciary arrangement in the heavens, spelling out continually new astrological combinations. For Astrology. was the mother, as she was the precursor, of Astronomy, and was once a power; into whatever mean roads the exercise of the art of her servants has strayed now, in unworthy and indign divination, and in the base proffer of supposed Gipsy arts--ministration become ridiculous (or made so), which was once mighty and sublime. The pyramidal or triangular form which Fire assumes in its ascent to heaven is in the monolithic typology used to signify the great generative power. We have only to look at Stonehenge, Ellora, the Babel-towers of Central America, the gigantic ruins scattered all over Tartary and India, to see how gloriously they symbolized the majesty of the Supreme. To these uprights, disks, or lithoi, of the old world, including the Bethel, or Jacob's Pillar, or Pillow, raised in the Plain of 'Luz', we will add, as the commemorative or reminding shape of the fire, the Pyramids of Egypt, the Millenarius, Gnomon, Mete-Stone, or Mark, called 'London Stone', all Crosses raised at the junction of four roads, all Market-Crosses, the Round Towers of Ireland, and, in all the changeful aspects of their genealogy, all spires and towers, in their grand hieroglyphic proclamation, all over the world. All these are Phalli, and express a sublime meaning. (♈) Aries, (♉) Taurus, (♊) Gemini, (♋) Cancer, (♌) Leo, (♍) Virgo, are the first six 'Signs'; and they collectively (in their annual succession) form 'the Macrocosmos' of the Cabalists. Then succeeds the 'turning-point', 'balances', or 'nave' (navel), of the astronomical wheel, represented by the sign 'Libra' (♎), which, be it remembered, was added by the imaginative (and therefore practically inventive) Greeks. The foregoing, up to 'Libra', represent the 'ascending signs', or six of the spokes, so to speak, of the annual zodiacal wheel, circling to the zenith or vertex. The last six 'Signs' of the zodiac are called 'descending signs', and they are the sinister, autumnal, or changing, in reverse, monthly spaces, each of thirty degrees, and again comprising six radii of this celestial wheel, or this 'Ezekiel's Wheel'. The turning-point is 'Virgo-Scorpio', which, until separated in the mythical interruption from without at the 'junction-point' between ascent and descent, were the same 'single sign'. The latter half (or left wing of this grand zodiacal 'army', or 'host of heaven', drawn up in battle array, and headed--as, by a figure, we shall choose to say--by the 'Archangel Michael', or the Sun, at the centre, or in the 'champion' or 'conquering point') is called by the Cabalists--and therefore by the Rosicrucians--the abstract 'Microcosmos'--in which 'Microcosm', or 'Little World', in opposition to the 'Macrocosm', or 'Great World', is to be found 'Man', as produced in it from the operations from above, and to be saved in the 'Great Sacrifice' (Crucifixion-Act), the phenomena of the being (Man) taking place 'in the mythic return. of the world'. All this is incomprehensible, except in the strange mysticism of the Gnostics and the Cabalists; and the whole theory requires a key of explanation to render it intelligible; which key is only darkly referred to as possible, but refused absolutely, by these extraordinary men, as not permissible to be disclosed. As they, however, were very fond of diagrams and mystic figures, of which they left many in those rarities (mostly ill-executed, but each wonderfully suggestive) called Gnostic gems ',we will supply a seeming elucidation of this their astrological assumption of 'what was earliest'; for which see the succeeding figure. (♎) Libra (the Balances) leads again off as the 'hinge-point,' introducing the six winter signs, which are: (♎) Libra again, (♏) Scorpio, (♐) Sagittarius, (♑) Capricornus, (♒) Aquarius, and (♓) Pisces.
Fig.12 (A) 'Ezekiel's Wheel' Macrocosmos (ascending) Microcosmos (descending) Turning-point--Libra. (The sign 'Libra' was added by the Greeks.) The first six signs, or ascending signs, are represented
Figs. 13-21 by the celestial perpendicular, or descending ray, as thus: (Fig. 13). The last six signs, or descending signs, are 'represented by the terrestrial ground-line, or horizontal, or 'equatorial' (symbol or sigma), as thus: (Fig. 14). The union of these (at the intersection of these rays) at the junction-point, or middle point, forms the 'Cross', as thus: (Fig 15-19). In figure C, the union of fig. 16 and fig. 17 forms the cross. Fig. 18 is the mundane circle. Fig. 19 is the astronomical cross upon the mundane circle. The union of fig. 18, fig. 17, and fig. 16, in this respective order, gives the crux-ansata, so continual in all the Egyptian sculptures, which mark or sign is also the symbol of the Planet Venus, as below (Fig. 20, 21). Their origin is thus traced clearly to the same original meanings, which reappear under all sorts of disguises, and are varied in innumerable ingenious ways, in all the mythologies--incessantly disclosing, and inviting, and as continually evading and escaping discovery. This abstruse mark particularly abounds in the Egyptian temples, where every object and every figure presents it. Its real meaning is, however, intended to be buried in profound darkness. In regard to the mysteries implied in the Christian Cross, the schismatics contended (1st) 'that Christ, alive upon the cross, humbled Himself, usque ad inferni tremenda tormenta, even unto the dreadful torments of hell'. (Paget's Catech. Latin.) (2nd) 'Endured for a time those torments, qualis reprobi in æternum sensuri sunt, which the reprobates shall everlastingly suffer in hell'. (Pisc. in Luc. xii. 10.) 'Even despaired of God’s mercy, finding God, at this time, Non patrem sed tyrannum, not a Father, but a Tyrant: and overcame despair by despair; death by death; hell by hell; and Satan by Satan' (Ferus in Matth. 27): 'suffered actually all the torments of hell for our redemption, and descended into the heaviest that hell could yield; endured the torments of hell, the second death, abjection from God, and' was made a curse; that is, had the bitter anguish of God’s wrath in his soul and body, which is the fire that shall never be quenched'.--Faith and Doctrine (Thomas Rogers), London, 1629. Jacob Böhmen produces some of these most stringent and dark shades in his profound mysticism--although essentially Christian. It may be here distinctly mentioned that it is a mistake to suppose any of the Egyptian hieroglyphics tell the story of that most profound and most ancient religion. There are various series of hieroglyphics, more or less reserved, but the real beliefs of the Egyptian Priest were never (indeed, they dared not so have been hazarded in sigma, or writing, or hieroglyphic of any kind--being forbidden to be spoken, still more written. Consequently all supposed readings of hieroglyphics are guesswork only--implying earnest and plausible but mistaken effort alone.
CHAPTER THE TENTHFIRE-THEOSOPHY OF THE PERSIANSThe Fire-Philosophers, or Philosophi per ignem, were a fanatical sect of philosophers, who appeared towards the close of the sixteenth century. They made a figure in almost all the countries of Europe. They declared that the intimate essences of natural things were only to be known by the trying efforts of fire, directed in a chemical process. The Theosophists also insisted that human reason was a dangerous and deceitful guide; that no real progress could be made in knowledge or in religion by it; and that to all vital--that is, supernatural--purpose it was a vain thing. They taught that divine and supernatural illumination was the only means of arriving at truth. Their name of Paracelsists was derived from Paracelsus, the eminent physician and chemist, who was the chief ornament of this extraordinary sect. In England, Robert Flood, or Fludd, was their great advocate and exponent. Rivier, who wrote in France; Severinus, an author of Denmark; Kunrath, an eminent physician .of Dresden; and Daniel Hoffmann, Professor of Divinity in the University of Helmstadt--have also treated largely on Paracelsus and on his system.Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Paracelsus was born in 1493, at Einsiedeln, a small town of the Canton of Schwitz, distant some leagues from Zurich. Having passed a troubled, migratory, and changeful life, this' great chemist, and very original thinker, died on the 24th of September 1541, in the Hospital of St. Stephen, in the forty-eighth year of his age. His works may be enumerated as follows: 1. The German editions: Basil, 1575, in 8vo; lb. 1, 1589-90, in 10 vols. 4to; and Strasbourg, 1603-18, in 4 vols. folio. 2. The Latin editions: Opera Omnia Medico-chymico-chirurgica, Francfort, 1603, in 10 vols. 4to; and Geneva, 1658,. in 3 vols. folio. 3. The French editions: La Grand Chirurgerie de Paracelse, Lyons, 1593 and 1603, in 4to; and Montbéliard, 1608, in 8vo. See Adelung, Histoire de la Folie Humaine, tom. vii; Biographie Universelle, article 'Paracelse'; and Sprengel, Histoire Pragmatique de la Médecine, tom. iii. 'Akin to the school of the ancient Fire-Believers, and of the magnetists of a later period', says the learned Dr. Ennemoser, in his History of Magic (most ably rendered into English by William Howitt), 'of the same cast as these speculators and searchers into the mysteries of nature, drawing from the same well, are the Theosophists of the sixteenth and seventeenth, centuries. These practised chemistry, by which they asserted that they could explore the profoundest secrets of nature. As they strove, above all earthly knowledge, after the divine, and sought the divine light and fire, through which all men can acquire the true wisdom, they were called the Fire-Philosophers (philosophi per ignem). The most distinguished of these are Theophrastus Paracelsus, Adam von Boden, Oswald Croll; and, later, Valentine Weigel, Robert Flood, or Fludd, Jacob Böhmen, Peter Poiret, etc.' Under this head we may also refer to the Medico-surgical Essays of Hemmann, published at Berlin in 1778; and Pfaff's Astrology. As a great general principle, the Theosophists called the soul a fire, .taken from the eternal ocean of light. In regard to the supernatural--using the word in its widest sense--it may be said that 'all the difficulty in admitting the strange things told us lies in the non-admission of an internal causal world as absolutely real: it is said, in intellectually admitting, because the influence of the arts proves that men’s feelings always have admitted, and do still admit, this reality'. The Platonic philosophy of vision is, that it is the view of objects really existing in interior light, which assume form, not according to arbitrary laws, but according to the state of mind. This interior light, if we understand Plato, unites with exterior light in the eye, and is thus drawn into a sensual or imaginative activity; but when the outward light is separated, it reposes in its own serene atmosphere. It is, then, in this state of interior repose, that the usual class of religions, or what are called inspired visions occur. It is the same light of eternity so frequently alluded to in books that treat of mysterious subjects; the light revealed to Pimander, Zoroaster, and all the sages of the East, as the emanation of the spiritual sun. Böhmen writes of it in his Divine Vision or Contemplation, and Molinos in his Spiritual Guide--whose work is the ground of Quietism: Quietism being the foundation of the religion of the people called Friends or Quakers, as also of the other mystic or meditative sects. We enlarge from a very learned, candid, and instructive book upon the Occult Sciences. Regard Fire, then, with other eyes than with those soulless, incurious ones, with which thou hast looked upon it as the most ordinary thing. Thou hast forgotten what it is--or rather thou hast never known. Chemists are silent about it; or may we not say that it is too loud for them? Therefore shall they speak fearfully of it in whispers. Philosophers talk of it as anatomists discourse of the constituents (or the parts) of the human body--as a piece of mechanism, wondrous though it be. Such the wheels of the clock; say they in their ingenious expounding of the 'whys' and the 'wherefores' (and the mechanics and the mathematics) of this mysterious thing, with a supernatural soul in it, called world. Such is the chain, such are the balances, such the larger and the smaller mechanical forces; such the 'Time-blood', as it were, that is sent circulating through it; such is the striking, with an infinity of bells. It is made for man, this world and it is greatly like him--that is mean, they would add. And they do think it, if they dare add their thinkings. But is this all? Is this the sum of that casketed lamp of the human body--thine own body, thou unthinking world’s machine--thou Man! Or, in the fabric of this clay lamp (lacquered in thy man’s Imperial splendours), burneth there not a Light? Describe that, ye Doctors of Physics! Unwind the starry limbs of that phenomenon, ye heavy-browed doctorial wielders of the scalpel--useful, however, as ye be, in that 'upholstery warehouse' of nature to which bodies and their make be referred by the materialists as the godless origin of everything. Touch at its heart, ye dissectors of fibres and of valves; of sinews and of leaves (hands, perchance); of the vein-work, of the muscles, as bark-integument; of the trunk! Split and pare, as with steel tools and wedge, this portent, this 'Tree' (human though it be), round which ye cluster to examine, about which ye gather, with your 'persuasions' to wind into the innermost secret of Cyclops--one-eyed and savage--break into meaning this portent, Man, on your science-wheels. Note the goings of the Fire, as he creepeth, serpentineth, riseth, slinketh, broadeneth. Note him reddening, glowing, whitening. Tremble at his face, dilating; at the meaning that is growing into it, to you. See that spark from the blacksmith's anvil--struck, as an insect, out of a sky containing a whole cloud of such. Rare locusts, of which Pharaoh and the Cities of the Plain read of old the secret! One, two, three sparks; dozens come: faster and faster the fiery squadrons follow, until, in a short while, a whole possible army of that hungry thing for battle, for food for it--Fire--glances up; but is soon warned in again--lest acres should glow in the growing advance. Think that this thing is bound as in matter-chains. Think that he is outside of all things, and deep in the inside of all things; and that thou and thy world are only the thing between; and that outside and inside are both identical, couldst thou understand the supernatural truths! Reverence Fire (for 'its meaning), and tremble at it; though in the Earth it be chained, and the foot of the Archangel Michael--like upon the Dragon--be upon it! Avert the face from it, as the Magi turned, dreading, and (as the Symbol) before it bowed askance. So much for this great thing--Fire! Observe the multiform shapes of fire; the flame-wreaths, the spires, the stars, the spots, the cascades, and the mighty falls of it; where the roar, when it grows high in Imperial masterdom, is as that of Niagara. Think what it can do, what it is. Watch the trail of sparks, struck, as in that spouting arch, from the metal shoes of the trampling horse. It is as a letter of the great alphabet. The familiar London streets, even, can give thee the Persian's God: though in thy pleasures, and in thy commerce-operations, thou so oft forgettest thine own God. Whence liberated are those sparks? as stars, afar off, of a whole sky of flame; sparks deep down in possibility, though close to us; great in their meaning, though small in their show; as distant single ships of whole fiery fleets; animate children of, in thy human conception, a dreadful, but, in reality, a great world, of which thou knowest nothing. They fall, foodless, on the rejecting, barren, and (on the outside) the coldest stone. But in each stone, flinty and chilly as the outside is, is a heart of fire, to strike at which is to bid gush forth the waters, as it were, of very Fire, like waters of the rock! Truly, out of sparks can be displayed a whole acreage of fireworks. Forests can be conceived of flame--palaces of the fire; grandest things--soul-things--last things--all things! Wonder no longer, then, if, rejected so long as an idolatry, the ancient Persians and their masters the Magi--concluding that they saw 'All' in this supernaturally magnificent element--fell down and worshipped it; making of it the visible representation of the very truest; but yet, in man’s speculation, and in his philosophies--nay, in his commonest reason--impossible God: God being everywhere, and in us, and, indeed, us, in the God-lighted man; and impossible to be contemplated or known outside--being All! Lights and flames, and the torches, as it were, of fire (all fire in this world, the last background on which all things are painted), may be considered as 'lancets' of another world--the last world: circles, enclosed by the thick walls (which, however, by the fire are kept from closing) of this world. As fire waves and brandishes, will the walls of this world wave, and, as it were, undulate from about it. In smoke and disruption, or combustion of matter, we witness a phenomenon of the burning as of the edges of the matter-rings of this world, in which world is fire, like a spot; that dense and hard thing, matter, holding it in. Oxygen, which is the finest of air, and is the means of the quickest burning out, or the supernatural (in this world) exhilaration of animal life, or extenuation of the Solid; and above all, the heightening of the capacity of the Human, as being the quintessence of matter: this oxygen is the thing which feeds fire the most overwhelming. Nor would the specks and spots and stars of fire stop in this dense world-medium, in this tissue or sea of things--could it farther and farther fasten upon and devour the solids: eating, as it were, through them. But as this thick world is a thing the thickest, it presses out, thrusts, or gravitates upon, and stifles, in its too great weight; and conquers not only that liveliest, subtlest, thinnest element of the solids, the finest air, by whatever chemical name--oxygen; azote, azone, or what not--it may be called; which, in fact, is merely the nomenclature of its composition, the naming of the ingredients which make the thing (but not the thing). The denseness of the world not only conquers this, we repeat; but, so to figure it, matter stamps upon, effaces, and treads out fire: which, else, would burn on, back, as in the beginning of things, or into itself--consuming, as in its great revenge of any thing being created other than it, all the. mighty worlds which, in Creation, were permitted out of it. - This is the teaching of the ancient Fire-Philosophers (re-established and restored, to the days of comprehension of them, in the conclusions of the Rosicrucians, or Illuminati, of later times), who claimed to have discovered the Eternal Fire, or to have found out 'God' in the 'Immortal Light'. There are all grades or gradations of the density of matter; but it all coheres by the one law of gravitation. Now, this gravitation is mistaken for a force of itself, when it is nothing but the sympathy, or the taking away of the supposed thing between two other things. It is sympathy (or appetite) seeking its food, or as the closing-together of two like things. It is not because one mass of matter is more ponderable or attracting than another (out of our- senses, and in reality), but. that, they are the same, with different amounts of affection, and that like seeks like, not recognizing or knowing that between. Now, this thing which is, as it were; slipped between, and which we strike into show of itself, or into fire--surprised and driven out of its ambush--is Fire. It is as the letter by which. matter spells itself out--so to speak. Now, matter is only to be finally forced asunder by heat; flame being the bright, subtle something which comes last, and is the expansion, fruit, crown, or glory of heat: it is the vivid and visible soul, essence, and spirit of heat--the last evolvement before rending and before the forcible closing again of all the centre-speeding weights, or desires, of matter. Flame is as the expanding-out (or even exploding) flower to this growing thing, heat: it is as the bubble of it--the fruit (to which before we have likened it), or seed, in the outside Hand upon it. Given the supernatural Flora, heat is as the gorgeous plant, and flame the glorying flower; and as growth is greater out of the greater matrix, or matter of growing, so the thicker the material of fire (as we may roughly figure it, though we hope we shall be understood), so the stronger shall the fire be, and of necessity the fiercer will it be perceived to be--result being according to power. Thus we get more of fire--that is, heat--out of the hard things: there being more of the thing Fire in them. Trituration, mechanical division, multiplication, cutting up, precipitating, or compounding, are states into which the forces outside can place matter, without searching into and securing its bond, and gathering up (into hand off it) its chains, and mastering it. These changes can be wrought in matter, and; as it, were, it can be taken in pieces; and all this dissolution of it may be effected without our getting as at the fire-blood of our subject. But Fire disjoints, as it were, all the hinges of the house--laps out the coherence of it--sets ablaze the dense thing, matter--makes the dark metals run like waters of light--conjures the black devils out of the minerals, and, to our astonishment, shows them much libelled, blinding, angel-white! By Fire we can lay our hand upon the solids, part them, powder them, melt them, fine them, drive them out to more and more delicate and impalpable texture--firing their invisible molecules, or imponderables, into cloud, into mist, into gas: out of touch, into hearing; out of hearing, into seeing; out of seeing into smelling; out of smelling, into nothing--into real NOTHING--not even into the last blue sky. These are the potent operations of Fire--the crucible into which we can cast all the worlds, and find them, in their last evolution, not even smoke. These are physical and scientific facts which there can be no gainsaying--which were seen and found out long ago, ages ago, in the reveries first, and then in the practice of the great Magnetists, and those who were called the Fire-Philosophers, of whom we have spoken before. What is that mysterious and inscrutable operation, the striking fire from flint? Familiar as it is, who remarks it? Where, in that hardest, closest pressing together of matter--where the granulation compresses, shining even in its hardness, into the solidest laminæ of cold, darkest blue, and streaky, core-like, agate-resembling white--lie the seeds of fire, spiritual flame-seeds, to the so stony fruit? In what folds of the flint, in. the block of it--in what invisible recess--speckled and spotted in what tissue--crouch the fire-sparks?-- to issue, in showers, on the stroke of iron--on the so sudden clattering (as of the crowbars of man) on its stony doors: Stone caving the thing Fire, unseen as its sepulchre; Stroke warning the magical thing forth. Whence comes that trail of the fire from the cold bosom of the hard, secret, unexploding flint?--children as from what hard, rocky breast; yet hiding its so sacred, sudden fire-birth! Who--and what science-philosopher--can explain this wondrous darting forth of the hidden something, which he shall try in vain to arrest, but which like a spirit, escapes. him? If we ask what fire is, of the men of science, they are at fault. They will tell us that it is a phenomenon, that their vocabularies can give no further account of it. They will explain to us that all that can be said of it is, that it is a last affection of matter, to the results of which (in the world of man) they can only testify, but of whose coming and of whose going--of the place from which it comes, and the whereabout to which it goeth--they are entirely ignorant--and would give a world to know! The foregoing, however feebly expressed, are the views of the famous Rosicrucians respecting the nature of this supposed familiar, but yet puzzling, thing--Fire. We will proceed to some of their further mystic reveries. They are very singular. But the consideration of these is exceedingly abstract, and difficult. The whole subject is abstruse in the highest degree. In regard to the singular name of the Rosicrucians, it may be here stated that the Chemists, according to their arcana, derive the Dew from the Latin Ros, and in the figure of a cross (+) they trace the three letters which compose the word Lux, Light. Mosheim is positive as to the accuracy of his information. CHAPTER THE ELEVENTHIDEAS OF THE ROSICRUCIANS AS TO THE CHARACTER OF FIRESpark surrenders out of the world, when it disappears to us, in the universal ocean of Invisible Fire. That is its disappearance. It quits us in the supposed light, but to it really darkness--as fire-born, the last level of all--to reappear in the true light, which is to us darkness. This is hard to understand. But, as the real is the direct contrary of the apparent, so that which shows as light to us is darkness in the supernatural; and that which is light to the supernatural is darkness to us: matter being darkness, and soul light. For we know that light is material; and being material, it must be dark. For the Spirit of God is not material, and therefore, not being material, it cannot be light to us, and therefore darkness to God. Just as (until discovered otherwise) the world it is that is at rest, and the sun and the heavenly bodies in daily motion--instead of the very reverse being the fact. This is the belief of the oldest Theosophists, the founders of magical knowledge in the East, and the discoverers of the Gods; also the doctrine of the Fire-Philosophers, and of the Rosicrucians, or Illuminati, who taught that all knowable things (both of the soul and of the body) were evolved out of Fire, and finally resolvable into it: and that Fire was the last and only-to-be-known God: as that all things were capable of being searched down into it, and all things were capable of being thought up into it. Fire, they found--when, as it were, they took this world, solid, to pieces (and also, as metaphysicians, distributed and divided the mind of man, seeking for that invisible God-thing, coherence of ideas)--fire, these thinkers found, in their supernatural light of mind, to be the latent, nameless matter started out of the tissues--certainly out of the body, presumably out of the mind--with groan, disturbance, hard motion, and flash (when forced to sight of it), instantly disappearing, and relapsing, and hiding its Godhead in the closing-violently-again solid matter--as into the forcefully resuming mind. Matter, the agent whose remonstrance at disturbance out of its Rest was, in the winds, murmur, noises, cries, as it were, of air; in the waters, rolling and roaring; in the piled floors of the sky, and their furniture, clouds, circumvolvence, contest, and war, and thunders (defiant to nature, but groans to God), and intolerable lightning-rendings; matter tearing as a garment, to close supernaturally together again as the Solid, fettered and chained--devil-bound--in the Hand upon it, 'To Be!' In this sense, all noise (as the rousing or conjuration of matter by the outside forces) is the agony of its penance. All motion is pain, all activity punishment; and fire is the secret, lowest--that is, foundation-spread--thing, the ultimate of all things, which is disclosed when the clouds of things roll, for an instant, off it--as the blue sky shows, in its fragments, like turquoises, when the canopy of clouds is wind-torn, speck-like, from off it. Fire is that floor over which the coats or layers, or the spun kingdoms of matter, or of the subsidences of the past periods of time (which is built up of objects), are laid: tissues woven over a gulf of it: in one of which last, We Are. To which Fire we only become sensible when we start it by blows or force, in the rending up of atoms, and in the blasting out of them that which holds them, which then, as Secret Spirit, springs compelled to sight, and as instantly flies, except to the immortal eyes, which receive it (in the supernatural) on the other side.The Fire-Philosophers maintained that we transcend everything into Fire, and that we lose it there in the flash; the escape of fire being as the door through which everything disappears to the other side. In their very peculiar speculations, and in this stupendous and supernatural view of the universe, where we think that fire is the exception, and is, as it were, spotted over the world (in reality, to go out when it goes out), they held that the direct contrary was the truth, and that we, and all things, were spotted upon fire: and that we conquer patches only of fire when we put it out, or win torches (as it were) out of the great flame, when we enkindle fire--which is our master in the truth, making itself, in our beliefs (in our human needs), the slave. Thus fire, when it is put out, only goes into the under world, and the matter-flags close over it, like a grave-stone. When we witness Fire, we are as if peeping only through a door into another world. Into this, all the (consumed into microscopical smallness) things of this world, the compressed and concentrate matter-heaps of defunct tides of Being and of Time, are in combustion rushing: kingdoms of the floors of the things passed through--up to this moment held in suspense in the invisible inner worlds. All roars through the hollow. All that is mastered in the operations of this Fire, and that is rushing through the hollow made by it in the partition-world of the Knowable--across, and out on the other side, into the Unknowable--seeks, in the Fire, its last and most perfect evolution into ABSOLUTE NOTHING-- as a bound prisoner urges to his feet, in his chains, and shrieks for freedom when he is smitten. In Fire, we witness a grand phenomenon of the subsidiary (or further, and under, and inner, and multiplied) birth and death, and the supernatural transit of microscopic worlds, passing from the human sense-worlds to other levels and into newer fields. Then it is that the Last Spirit, of which they are composed, is playing before us; and playing, into last extinction, out of its rings of this-side matter; all which matter, in its various stages of thickening, is as the flux of the Supernatural Fire, or inside God. It will appear no wonder now, if the above abstractions be caught by the Thinker, how it was that the early people (and the founders of Fire-Worship) considered that they saw God, standing face to face with Him--that is, with all that, in their innermost possibility of thought, they could find as God--in Fire. Which Fire is not our vulgar, gross fire; neither is it the purest material fire, which has something of the base, bright lights of the world still about it--brightest though they be in the matter which makes them the Lightest to the material sight; but it is an occult, mysterious, or inner--not even magnetic, but a supernatural--Fire: a real, sensible, and the only possible Mind, or God, as containing all things, and as the soul of all things; into whose inexpressibly intense, and all-devouring and divine, though fiery, gulf, all the worlds in succession, like ripe fruit to the ground, and all things, fall--back into whose arms of Immortal Light: on the other side, as again receiving them, all things, thrown off as the smoke off light, again fall! At the shortest, then, the theory of the Magi may be summed up thus. When, as we think, fire is spotted over all the world, as we have said, it is we who make the mistake, necessitated in our man’s nature and we are that which is spotted over it--just as, while we think we move, we are moved; and we conclude the senses are in us, while we are in the senses; everything--out of this world--being the very opposite of that which we take it. The views of these mighty thinkers amounted to the suppression of human reason, and the institution of magic, or god head, as all. It will be seen at once that this knowledge was possible but for -the very few. It is only fit for men when they seek to pass out of the world, and to approach--the nearer according to their natures--God. The hollow world in which that essence of things, called Fire, plays, in its escape, in violent agitation--to us, combustion--is deep down inside of us; that is, deep-sunk inside of the time-stages; of which rings of being (subsidences of spirit) we are, in the flesh--that is, in the human show of things, in the OUTER. It is exceedingly difficult, through language, to make this idea intelligible; but it is the real mystic dogma of the ancient Guebres, or the Fire-Believers, the successors of the Buddhists, or, more properly, Bhuddists. What is explosion? It is the lancing into the layers of worlds, whereinto we force, through turning the edges out and driving through; in surprisal of the reluctant, lazy, and secret nature, exposing the hidden, magically microscopical stores of things, passed inwards out of the accumulated rings of worlds, out of the (within) supernaturally buried wealth, rolled in, of the past, in the procession of Being. What is smoke but the disrupted vapour-world to the started soul-fire? The truth is, say the Fire-Philosophers, in the rousing of fire we suddenly come upon Nature, and start her violently out of her ambush of things, evoking her secretest and immortal face to us. Therefore is this knowledge not to be known generally of man; and it is to be assumed at the safest in the disbelief of it: that disbelief being as the magic casket in which it is locked. The keys are only for the Gods, or for god-like spirits. This is the true view of the religion of the leaders of the ancient Fire-Believers, and of the modern Illuminati. We shall proceed to demonstrate, in the chapters following, other strange things, hitherto wholly unsuspected in the philosophical short-sight of the modern metaphysicians. We imagine that it will be said that it is impossible that any religionists could have seriously entertained such extraordinary doctrines; but, incredible as it may seem, because it requires much preparation to understand them, it is certainly true, that it is only in this manner the ideas of the divinity of fire, which we know once prevailed largely, can be made intelligible--we mean, to the philosopher, who knows how properly to value the ancient thinkers, who were as giants in the earth. We shall shortly show that the monuments raised to this strange faith still remain, and that, surviving from the heathen times, the forms still linger and lurk largely amidst the Christian European institutions--the traces of the idolatry, if not the idolatry itself. Obelisks, spires, minarets, tall towers, upright stones (Menhirs), monumental crosses, and architectural perpendiculars of every description, and, generally speaking, all erections conspicuous for height and slimness, were representatives of the sworded, or of the pyramidal, Fire. They bespoke, wherever found, and in whatever age, the idea of the First Principle, Or the male generative emblem. Having given, as we hope, some new views of the doctrine of Universal Fire, and shown that there has been error in imagining that the Persians and the ancient Fire-Worshippers were idolaters simply of fire, inasmuch as, in bowing down before it, they only regarded Fire as a symbol, or visible sign, or thing placed as standing for the Deity--having, in our preceding chapters, disposed the mind of the reader to consider as a matter of solemnity, and of much greater general significance, this strange fact of Fire-Worship, and endeavoured to show it as a portentous, first, all-embracing as all-genuine principle--we will proceed to exemplify the widespread roots of the Fire-Faith. In fact, we seem to recognize it everywhere. Instead of--in their superstitions--making of fire their God, they obtained Him, that is, all that we can realize of Him; by which we mean, all that the human reason can find of the Last Principle--out of it. Already, in their thoughts, had the Magi exhausted all possible theologies; already had they, in their great wisdom, searched through physics--their power to this end (as not being distracted by world’s objects) being much greater than that of the modern faith-teachers and doctors; already in their reveries, in their. observations (deep within their deep souls) upon the nature of themselves, and of the microcosm of a world in which they found themselves, had the Magi transcended. They had arrived at a new world in their speculations and deductions upon facts, upon all the things behind which (to men) make these facts. Already, in their determined climbing into the heights of thought, had these Titans of mind achieved, past the cosmical, through the shadowy borders of Real and Unreal, into Magic. For, is Magic wholly false? Passing through these mind-worlds, and coming out, as we may figure it, at the other side, penetrating into the secrets of things, they evaporated all Powers, and resolved them finally into the Last Fire. Beyond this, they found nothing; as into this they resolved all things. And then, on the Throne of the Visible, they placed this--in the world, Invisible--Fire: the sense-thing to be worshipped in the senses, as the last thing of them, and the king of them--that is, that which we know as the phenomenon, Burning Fire--the Spiritual Fire being impalpable, as having the visible only for its shadow; the Ghostly Fire not being even to be thought upon; thought being its medium of apprehension when it itself had slipped; the waves of apprehension of it only flowing back when it--being intuition--had vanished. We only know that a thought is in us when the thought is off the object and in us: another thought being, at that simultaneous instant, in the object, to be taken up by us only when the first has gone out of us, and so on; but not before to be taken up by us--that thought being all of us, and a deceptive and unreal thing to pass at all to us through the reason, and there being no resemblance between it and its original: the true thing being 'Inspiration', or 'God in us', excluding all matter or reason, which is only built up of matter. It is most difficult to frame language in regard to these things. Reason can only unmake God; He is only possible in His own development, or in His. seizing of us, and 'in possession'. Thus Paracelsus and his disciples declare that Human Reason become our master, that is, in its perfection--but not used as our servant--transforms, as it were, into the Devil, and exercises his office in leading us away from the throne of Spiritual Light--other, and, in the world, seeming better; in his false and deluding World-Light, or Matter-Light, really showing himself God. This view of the Human Reason, intellectually trusted, transforming into the Angel of Darkness, and effacing God out of the world, is borne out by a thousand texts of Scripture. It is equally in the belief and in the traditions of all nations and of all time, as we shall by and by show. Real Light is God’s shadow, or the soul of matter; the one is the very brighter, as the other is the very blacker. Thus, the worshippers of the Sun, or Light, or Fire, whether in the Old or the New Worlds, worshipped not Sun, or Light, or Fire--otherwise they would have worshipped the Devil, he being all conceivable Light; but rather they adored the Unknown Great God, in the last image that was possible to man of anything--the Fire. And they chose that as His shadow, as the very opposite of that which He really. was; honouring the Master through His Servant; bowing before the manifestation, Eldest of Time, for the Timeless; paying homage to the spirit of the Devil-World, or rather to the Beginning and End, on which was the foot of the ALL, that the ALL, or the LAST, might be worshipped; propitiating the Evil Principle in its finite shows, because (as by that alone a world could be made, whose making is alone Comparison) it was permitted as a means of God, and therefore the operation of God Downwards, as part of Him, though Upwards dissipating as before Him--before Him in whose presence Evil, or Comparison, or Difference, or Time, or Space, or anything, should be Impossible: real God being not to be thought upon. But it was not only in the quickening Spirit of Divinity that these things could be seen. Otherwise than in faith, we can hope that they shall now--in our weak attempts to explain them--be gathered as not contradictory, and merely intellectual, and seen as vital and absolute. They need the elevation of the mind in the sense of 'inspiration', and not the quickening and the sharpening of the Intellect, as seeking wings--devil-pinions--wherewith to sail into the region only of its own laws, where, of course it will not find God. Then step in the mathematics, then the senses, then the reason--then the very perfection of matter-work, or this world’s work, sets in--engines of which the Satanic Powers shall realize the work. The Evil Spirit conjures, as even by holy command, the translucent sky. The Archangelic, clear, child-like rendering-up in intuitive belief--intense in its own sun--is FAITH. Lucifer fills the scope of belief with imitative, dazzling clouds, and built splendours. With these temptations it is sought to dissuade, sought to rival, sought to put out Saints’ sight--sought even to surpass in seeming a further and truer, because a more solid and a more sensible, glory. The apostate, real-born Lucifer is so named as the intensest Spirit of Light, because he is of the things that perish, and of the things that to Mind--because they are all of Matter--have the most of glory! Thus is one of the names of the Devil, the very eldest-born and brightest Star of Light, that of the very morning and beginning of all things--the clearest, brightest, purest, as being soul-like, of Nature; but only of Nature. Real law, or Nature, is the Devil; real Reason is the Devil. Now we shall find, with a little patience, that this transcendental, beyond-limit-or-knowledge ancient belief of the Fire-God is to be laid hand upon--as, in a manner, we shall say--in all the stories and theologies of the ancient world--in all the countries (and they, indeed, are all) where belief has grown--yea, as a thing with the trees and plants, as out of the very ground, in all the continents, and in both worlds. And out of this great fact of its universal diffusion, as a matter of history the most innate and coexistent, shall we not assume this fire-doctrine as being of truth--as a thing really, fundamentally, and vitally true? As in the East, so in the West; as in the old time, so in the new; as in the preadamite and postdiluvian worlds, so in the modern and latter-day world; surviving through the ages, buried in the foundations of empires, locked in the rocks, hoarded in legends, maintained in monuments, preserved in beliefs, suggested in tradition, borne amidst the roads of the multitude in emblems, gathered up--as the recurring, unremarked, supernaturally coruscant, and yet secret, evading, encrusted, and dishonoured jewel--in rites, spoken (to those capable of the comprehension) in the field of hieroglyphics, dimly glowing up to a fitful suspicion of it in the sacred rites of all peoples, figured forth in the religions, symbolized in a hundred ways; attested, prenoted, bodied forth in occult body, as far as body can--in fine, in multitudinous fashions and forms forcibly soliciting the sharpness of sight directed to its discovery, and spelt over a floor as under-placing all things, we recognize, we espy, we descry, and we may, lastly, ADMIT the mysterious sacredness of Fire. For why should we not admit it? Of course, it will not for a moment be supposed that we mean anything like--or in its nature similar to--ordinary fire. We hope that no one will be so absurd as to suppose that this in any manner could be the mysterious and sacred element for which we are contesting. Where we are seeking to transcend, this would be simply sinking back into vulgar reason. While we are seeking to convict and dethrone this world’s reason as the real devil, this would be distinctly deifying common sense. Of common sense, except for common-sense objects, we make no account. We have rather in awed contemplation the divine, ineffable, transcendental SPIRIT--the Immortal fervour--into which the whole World evolves. We have the mystery of the Holy Spirit in view, called by its many names. It is because theologies will contest concerning divers names of the same thing, that we therefore seek, in transcending, but to identify. It is because men will dispute about forms, that we seek philosophically to show that all forms are impossible--that, when we take the human reason into account, all forms of belief are alike. Reason has been the great enemy of religion. Let us see if this world’s reason cannot be mastered: We are now about--in a new light--to-treat of facts, and of various historical monuments. They all bear reference to this universal story of the mystic Fire. We claim to be the first to point out how strikingly--and yet how, at the same time, without any suspicion of it--these emblems and remains, in so many curious and unintelligible forms, of the magic religion are found in the Christian churches.
CHAPTER THE TWELFTHMONUMENTS RAISED TO FIRE-WORSHIP IN ALL COUNTRIESWe think that we shall be able fully in our succeeding chapters to place beyond contradiction an extraordinary discovery. It is, that the whole round of disputed emblems which so puzzle antiquaries, and which are found in all countries, point to the belief in Fire as the First Principle. We seek to show that the Fire-Worship was the very earliest, from the immemorial times--that it was the foundation religion--that the attestation to it is preserved in monuments scattered all over the globe--that the rites and usages of all creeds, down even to our own day, and in everyday use about us, bear reference to it--that problems and puzzles in religion, which cannot be otherwise explained, stand clear and evident when regarded in this new light--that in all the Christian varieties of belief--as truly as in Bhuddism, in Mohammedanism, in Heathenism of all kinds, whether Eastern, or Western, or Northern, or Southern--this 'Mystery of Fire' stands ever general, recurring, and conspicuous--and that in being so, beyond all measure, old, and so, beyond all modern or any idea of it, general--as universal, in fact, as man himself, and the thoughts of man; and, as being that beyond which, in science and in natural philosophy, we cannot further go, it must carry truth with it, however difficult to comprehend, and however unsuspected: that is, as really being the manifestation and Spirit of God, and--to the confounding and annihilation of Atheism--Revelation.Affirmatively we shall now, therefore, offer to the attention of the reader the universal scattering of the Fire-Monuments, taking up at the outset certain positions about them. Narrowly considered, it will be found that all religions transcend up into this spiritual Fire-Floor, on which, to speak metaphysically, the phases of Time were laid. Material Fire, which is the brighter as the matter which constitutes it is the blacker, is the shadow (so to express, or to speak, necessarily with 'words', which have no meaning in the spirit) of the 'Spirit-Light', which invests itself in it as the mask in which alone it can be possible. Thus, material light being the very opposite of God, the Egyptians--who were undoubtedly acquainted with the Fire-Revelation--could not represent God as light. They therefore expressed their Idea of Deity by darkness. Their chief adoration was paid to Darkness. They bodied the Eternal forth under Darkness. In the early times before the Deluge--of which 'phenomenon', as there remains a brighter or fainter tradition of it among all the peoples of the globe, it must be true--Man walked with the Knowledge of Spirit in him. He has derogated, through time, from this primeval, God-informed Type. Knowledge of Good and Evil, or the power of perceiving difference, became his faculty, with his power of propagation, only in his fallen state--that is, his gods only came to him in his fallen state. As one of two things must of necessity be under the other, and as 'one' and 'two' are double in succession--one being, as a matter of course, before the other--and 'positive' or 'particled', existence being in itself denial of 'abstract', or 'imparticled', existence--existence needing something other than itself to find itself--logicians must see at once in this that Comparison is constituted; from out of which difference is built Light and Shadow, or a world, whether the moral world or the real world. The immemorial landmark, in the architectural form, is the upright. We find the earliest record of this in the setting-up of monumental stones. Seth is said to have engraved the wisdom of the Antediluvians upon two pillars--one of brick, the other of stone--which he erected in the 'Siriadic land'--a Terra Incognita to modern antiquaries. This raising of the 'reminding-stone' prevails in all places, and was the act of all time. It is the only independent thing which stands distinct out of the clouds of the past. It would seem universally to refer to the single Supernatural Tradition--all that is heired out of Time. A mysterious Cabalistic volume of high repute, and of the greatest antiquity, is The Book of Light, whose doctrine divides. The first dogma is that of 'Light-Enlightened', or 'Self-Existent', which signifies God, or the Light Spiritual, which is darkness in the world, or Manifestation or Creation. This Light-Enlightened is Inspiration, or blackness to men (God), opposed to knowledge, or brightness to men (the Devil). The second Light is the Enlightening Light, or the Material Light, which is the producer, foundation, and God of this World--proceeding, nevertheless, from God; for He is All. It is in reverence to this second light, and to the Mysterious Identity of both (the third power Three in One)--but only in the necessity of 'being'--all dark-being constituting all bright-being in the Spirit, and Both, and their identity, being One--that these monumental pillars are raised--being really the mark and the signal (warning on, in Time) of supernatural, or magic, knowledge. Stones were set up by the Patriarchs: the Bible records them. In India, the first objects of worship were monoliths. In the two peninsulas of India, in Ceylon, in Persia, in the Holy Land, in Phœnicia, in Sarmathia, in Scythia, everywhere where worship was attempted (and in what place where man exists is it not?), everywhere where worship was practised (and where, out of fears, did not, first, come the gods, and then their propitiation?)--in all the countries, we repeat, as the earliest of man’s work, we recognize this sublime, mysteriously speaking, ever-recurring monolith, marking up the tradition of the supernaturally real, and only real, Fire-dogma. Buried so far down in time, the suspicion assents that there must somehow be truth in the foundation; not fanciful, legendary, philosophical creed-truth, unexplainable (and only to be admitted without question) truth; but truth, however mysterious and awing, yet cogent, and not to be of philosophy (that is, illumination) denied. The death and descent of Balder into the Hell of the Scandinavians may be supposed to be the purgatory of the Human Unit (or the God-illuminate), from the Light (through the God-dark phases of being), back into its native Light. Balder was the Scandinavian Sun-God, and the same as the Egyptian Osiris, the Greek Hercules, Bacchus, and Phœbus, or Apollo, the Indian Crishna, the Persian Mithras, the Aten of the empires of insular Asia; or, even of the Sidonians, the Athyr or Ashtaroth. The presences of all these divinities--indeed, of all Gods--were of the semblance of Fire; and we recognize, as it were, the mark of the foot of them, or of the Impersonated Fire, in the countless uprights, left, as memorials, in the great ebb of the ages (as waves) to nations in the latter divisions of that great roll of periods called Time; yet so totally unguessing of the preternatural mystery--seeming the key of all belief, and the reading of all wonders--which they speak. It is to be noted that all the above religions--all the Creeds of Fire--were exceedingly similar in their nature; that they were all fortified by rites, and fenced around with ceremonies; and that, associated as they were with mysteries and initiations, the disciple was led through the knowledge of them in stages, as his powers augmented and his eyes saw, until, towards the last grades (as he himself grew capable and illuminate), the door was closed upon all after-pressing and unrecognized inquirers, and the Admitted One was himself lost sight of. There was a great wave to the westward of all knowledge, all cultivation of the arts, all tradition, all intellect, all civilization, all religious belief. The world was peopled westwards. There seems some secret, divine impress upon the world’s destinies--and, indeed, ingrain in cosmical matter--in. these matters. All faiths seem to have diverged out, the narrower or the wider, as rays from the great central sun of this tradition of the Fire-Original. It would seem that Noah, who is suspected to be the Fo, Foh, or Fohi, of the Chinese, carried it into the farthest Cathay of the Middle Ages. What is the Chinese Tien, or Earliest Fire? The pagodas of the Chinese (which name, pagoda, was borrowed from the Indian; from which country of India, indeed, probably came into China its worship, and its Bhuddist doctrine of the exhaustion back into the divine light, or unparticled nothingness, of all the stages of Being or of Evil)--the Chinese pagodas, we repeat, are nothing but innumerable gilt and belled fanciful repetitions of the primeval monolith. The fire, or light, is still worshipped in the Chinese temples; it has not been perceived that, in the very form of the Chinese pagodas, the fundamental article of the Chinese religion--transmigration, through stages of being; out into nothingness of this world--has been architecturally emblemed in the diminishing stories, carried upwards, and fining away into the series of unaccountable discs struck through a vertical rod, until all culminates, and--as it were, to speak heraldically of it--the last achievement is blazoned in the gilded ball, which means the final, or Bhuddist, glorifying absorption. Buildings have always telegraphed the insignia of the mythologies; and, in China, the fantastic speaks the sublime. We recognize the same embodied Mythos in all architectural spiring or artistic diminution, whether tapering to the globe or exaltation of the Egyptian Uræus, or the disc, or the Sidonian crescent, or the lunar horns, or the acroterium of the Greek temple, or the pediment of the classic pronaos itself (crowning, how grandly and suggestively, at solemn dawn, or in the 'spirit-lustres' of the dimming, and, still more than dawn, solemn twilight, the top of some mountain, an ancient of the days). Here, besetting us at every turn, meet we the same mythic emblem: again, in the crescent of the Mohammedan fanes, surmounting even the Latin, and therefore the once Christian, St. Sophia. Last, and not least, the countless 'churches' rise, in the Latter-day Dispensation, sublimely to the universal signal, in the glorifying, or top, or crowning Cross: last of the Revelations! In the fire-towers of the Sikhs, in the dome-covered and many-storied spires of the Hindoos, in the vertically turreted and longitudinally massed temples of the Bhudds, of all the classes and of all the sects, in the religious buildings of the Cingalese, in the upright flame-fanes of the Parsees, in the original of the campaniles of the Italians, in the tower of St. Mark at Venice, in the flame-shaped or pyramidal (pyr is the Greek for fire) architecture of the Egyptians (which is the parent of all that is called architecture), we see the recurring symbol. All the minarets that, in the Eastern sunshine, glisten through the Land of the Moslem; indeed, his two-horned crescent, equally with the moon, or disc, or two-pointed globe of the Sidonian Ashtaroth (after whose forbidden worship Solomon, the wisest of mankind, in his defection from the God of his fathers, evilly thirsted); also, the mystic discus, or 'round' of the Egyptians, so continually repeated, and set, as it were, as the forehead-mark upon all the temples of the land. of soothsayers and sorcerers--this Egypt so profound in its philosophies, in its wisdom, in its magic-seeing, and in its religion, raising out of the black Abyss a God to shadow it--all the minarets of the Mohammedan, we say, together with all the other symbols of moon, of disc, of wings, or of horns (equally with the shadowy and preternatural beings in all mythologies and in all theologies, to which these adjuncts or insignia are referred, and which are symbolized by them)--all these monuments, or bodied meanings, testify to the Deification of Fire. What may mean that 'Tower of Babel' and its impious raising, when it sought, even past and over the clouds, to imply a daring sign? What portent was that betrayal of a knowledge not for man--that surmise forbidden save in infinite humility, and in the whispered impartment of the further and seemingly more impossible, and still more greatly mystical, meanings? In utter abnegation of self alone shall the mystery of fire be conceived. Of what was this Tower of Belus, or the Fire, to be the monument? When it soared, as a pharos, on the rock of the traditionary ages, to defy time in its commitment to 'form' of the unpronounceable secret--stage on -stage and story on story, though it climbed the clouds, and on its top should shine the ever-burning fire--first idol of the world, 'dark, save with neglected stars'--what was the Tower of Babel but a gigantic monolith? Perhaps to record and to perpetuate this ground-fire of all; to be worshipped, an idol, in its visible form, when it should be alone taken as the invisible thought: fire to be waited for (spirit-possession), not waited on (idolatry). Therefore was the speech confounded, that the thing should not be; therefore, under the myth of climbing into heaven by the means of it, was the first colossal monolithic temple (in which the early dwellers upon the earth sought to enshrine the Fire) laid prostrate in the thunder of the Great God! And the languages were confounded from that day--speech was made babble--thence its name--that the secret should remain a secret. It was to be only darkly hinted, and to be fitfully disclosed, like a false-showing light, in the theosophic glimmer, amidst the world’s knowledge-lights. It was to reappear, like a spirit, to the 'initiate', in the glimpse of reverie, in the snatches of sight, in the profoundest wisdom, through the studies of the ages. We find, in the religious administration of the ancient world, the most abundant proofs of the secret fire-tradition. Schweigger shows, in his Introduction into Mythology (pp. 132, 228), that the Phœnician Cabiri and the Greek Dioscuri, the Curetes, Corybantes, Telchini, were originally of the same nature, and are only different in trifling particulars. All these symbols represent electric and magnetic phenomena, and that under the 'ancient name of twin-fires, hermaphrodite fire. The Dioscuri is a phrase equivalent to the Sons of Heaven: if, as Herodotus asserts, 'Zeus originally represented the whole circle of heaven'. According to the ancient opinion of Heraclitus, the contest of opposing forces is the origin of new bodies, and the reconcilement of these contending principles is called combustion. This is, according to Montfauçon, sketched in the minutest detail in the engravings of the ancient Phœnician Cabiri. From India into Egypt was imported this spiritual fire-belief. We recognize, again, its never-failing structure-signal. Rightly regarded, the great Pyramids are nothing but the world-enduring architectural attestation, following (in the pyramidal) the well-known leading law of Egypt's templar-piling--moundlike, spiry--of the universal Flame-Faith. Place a light upon the summit, star-like upon the sky, and a prodigious altar the mighty Pyramid then becomes. In this tribute to the world-filling faith, burneth expressed devotion to (radiateth acknowledgment of) the immemorial magic religion. There is little doubt that as token and emblem of fire-worship, as indicative of the adoration of the real, accepted deity, these Pyramids were raised. The idea that they were burial-places of the Egyptian monarchs is untenable, when submitted to the weighing of meanings, and when it comes side by side with this better fire-explanation. Cannot we accept these Pyramids as the vast altars on whose top should burn the flame--flame commemorative, as it were, to all the world? Cannot we see in these piles, literally and really transcendental in origin, the Egyptian reproduction, and a hieroglyphical signalling-on, of special truth, eldest of time? Do we not recognize in the Pyramid the repetition of the first monolith--all the uprights constituting the grand attesting pillar to the supernatural tradition of a Fire-Born World? The ever-recurring globe with wings, so frequent in the sculptures of the Egyptians, witnesses to the Electric Principle. It embodies the transmigration of the Indians, reproduced by Pythagoras. Pythagoras resided for a long period in Egypt, and acquired from the priests the philosophic 'transition'-knowledge, which was afterwards doctrine. The globe, disc, or circle of the Phœnician Astarte, the crescent of Minerva, the horns of the Egyptian Ammon, the deifying of the ox--all have the same meaning. We trace among the Hebrews, the token of the identical mystery in the horns of Moses, distinct in the sublime statue by Michael Angelo in the Vatican; as also in the horns of the Levitical altar: indeed, the use of the 'double hieroglyph' in continual ways. The volutes of the Ionic column, the twin-stars of Castor and Pollux, nay, generally, the employment of the double emblem all the world over, in ancient or in modern times, whether displayed as points, or radii, or wings on the helmets of those barbarian chiefs who made war upon Rome, Attila or Genseric, or broadly shown upon the head-piece of the Frankish Clovis; whether emblemed in the rude and, as it were, savagely mystic horns of the Asiatic idols, or reproduced in the horns of the Runic Hammerer (or Destroyer), or those of the Gothic Mars, or of the modern devil; all this double-spreading from a common point (or this figure of HORNS) speaks the same story. The Colossus of Rhodes was a monolith, in the human form, dedicated to the Sun, or to fire. The Pharos of Alexandria was a fire-monument. Heliopolis, or the City of the Sun, in Lower Egypt (as the name signifies), contained a temple, wherein, combined with all the dark superstitions of the Egyptians, the p. 108 flame-secret was preserved. In most jealous secrecy was the tradition guarded, and the symbol alone was presented to the world. Of the Pyramids, as prodigious Fire-Monuments, we have before spoken. Magnificent as the principal Pyramid still is, it is stated by an ancient historian that it originally formed, at the base, 'a square of eight hundred feet, and that it was eight hundred feet high'. Another informs us that 'three hundred and sixty-six thousand men were employed twenty years in its erection'. Its height is now supposed to be six hundred feet. Have historians and antiquaries carefully weighed the fact (even in the name of the Pyramids), that Pyr, or Pur, in the Greek, means Fire? We would argue that that object, in the Great Pyramid, which Ms been mistaken for a tomb (and which is, moreover, rather fashioned like an altar, smooth and plain, without any carved work), is, in reality, the vase, urn, or depository, of the sacred, ever-burning fire: of the existence of which ever-living, inextinguishable fire, to be found at some period of the world’s history, there is abundant tradition. This view is fortified by the statements of Diodorus, who writes that 'Cheops, or Chemis, who founded the principal Pyramid, and Cephren, or Cephrenus, who built the next to it, were neither buried here, but that they were deposited elsewhere'. Cheops, Cephrenus, and Mycerinus, the mighty builders of these super-gigantic monuments, of which it is said that they look as if intended to resist the, waste of the ages, and, as in a front of supernatural and sublime submission, to await, in the undulation of Time (as in the waves of centuries), the expected revolution of nature, and the new and recommencing series of existence, surely had in view something grander, something still more universally portentous, than sepulture--or even death! Is it at all reasonable to conclude, at a period when knowledge was at the highest, and when the human powers were, in comparison with ours at the present time, prodigious, that all these indomitable, scarcely believable, physical efforts--that such achievements as those of the Egyptians--were devoted to a mistake? that the Myriads of the Nile were fools labouring in the dark, and that all the magic of their great men was forgery? and that we, in despising that which we call their superstition and wasted power, are alone the wise? No! there is much more in these old religions than, probably, in the audacity of modern denial, in the confidence of these superficial-science times, and in the derision of these days without faith, is in the least degree supposed. We do not understand the old time. It is evident from their hieroglyphics that the Egyptians were acquainted with the wonders of magnetism. By means of it (and by the secret powers which lie in the hyper-sensual, 'heaped floors' of it), out of the every-day senses, the Egyptians struck together, as it were, a bridge, across which they paraded into the supernatural; the magic portals receiving them as on the other and armed side of a drawbridge, shaking in its thunders in its raising (or in its lowering), as out of flesh. Athwart this, in trances, swept the adepts, leaving their mortality behind them: all, and their earth-surroundings, to be resumed at their reissue upon the plains of life, when down in their humanity again. In the cities of the ancient world, the Palladium, or Protesting Talisman (invariably set up in the chief square or place), was--there is but little doubt--the reiteration of the very earliest monolith. All the obelisks--each often a single stone, of prodigious weight--all the singular, solitary, wonderful pillars and monuments of Egypt, as of other lands, are, as it were, only tombstones of the Fire! All testify to the great, so darkly hinted secret. In Troy was the image of Pallas, the myth of knowledge, of the world, of manifestation, of the fire-soul. In Athens was Pallas-Athene, or Minerva. In the Greek cities, the form of the deity changed variously to Bacchus, to Hercules, to Phœbus-Apollo; to the tri-formed Minerva, Dian, and Hecate; to the dusky Ceres, or the darker Cybele. In the wilds of Sarmathia, in the wastes of Northern Asia, the luminous rays descended from heaven, and, animating the Lama, or 'Light-Born', spoke the same story. The flames of the Greeks, the towers of the Phœnicians, the emblems of the Pelasgi; the story of Prometheus, and the myth of his stealing the fire from heaven, wherewith to animate the man (or ensoul the visible world); the forges of the Cyclops, and the monuments of Sicily; the mysteries of the Etrurians; the rites of the Carthaginians; the torches borne, in all priestly demonstrative processions, at all times, in all countries; the vestal fires of the Romans; the very word flamen, as indicative of the office of the officiating sacerdote; the hidden fires of the ancient Persians, and of the grimmer (at least in name) Guebres; the whole mystic meaning of flames on altars, of the ever-burning tombs-lights of the earlier peoples, whether in the classic or in the barbarian lands--everything of this kind was intended to signify the deified Fire. Fires are lighted in the funeral ceremonies of the Hindoos and of the Mohammedans, even to this day, though the body be committed whole to earth. Wherefore fire, then? Cremation and urn-burial, or the burning of the dead--practised in all ages--imply a profounder meaning than is generally supposed. They point to the transmigration of Pythagoras, or to the purgatorial reproductions of the Indians, among whom we the earliest find the dogma. The real signification of fire-burial is the commitment of human mortality into the last of all matter, overleaping the intermediate states; or the delivering over of the man-unit into the Flame-Soul, past all intervening spheres or stages of the purgatorial: the absolute doctrine of the Bhudds, taught, even at this day, among the initiate all over the East. Thus we see how classic practice and heathen teaching may be made to reconcile--how even the Gentile and Hebrew, the mythological and the (so-called) Christian, doctrine harmonize in the general faith--founded in magic. That magic is indeed possible is the moral of our book. We have seen that Hercules was the myth of the Electric Principle. His pillars (Calpe and Abyla) are the Dual upon which may be supposed to rest a world. They stood in the days when giants might really be imagined--indeed, they almost look as impressive of it now--the twin prodigious monoliths, similar in purpose to the artificial pyramids. They must have struck the astonished and awed discoverer's gaze, navigating that silent Mediterranean (when men seemed as almost to find themselves alone in the world), as the veritable, colossal, natural pillars on which should burn the double Lights of the forbidden Baal: witness of the ever-perpetuated, ever-perpetuating legend of the fire-making! So to the Phœnician sailors, who, we are told, first descried, and then stemmed royally through, these peaked and jagged and majestic Straits--doorway to the mighty floor of the new blue ocean, still of the more Tyrian crystal depth--rolling, in walls of waves, under the enticing blaze of the cloud-empurpled, all-imperial, western sun, whose court was fire indeed--God’s, not Baal's! --So to these men of Sidon, emblemed with the fire-white horns of the globed Astarte, or Ashtaroth, showed the monster rocks: pillar-portals--fire-topped as the last world-beacon--to close in (as gate) that classic sea, and to warn, as of the terrors of the unknown, new, and second world of farthest waters, which stretched to the limits of possibility. Forsaking, indeed, daringly, were these Iberi their altars, to tempt perils, when they left behind them that mouth of their Mediterranean: that sea upon whose embayed and devious margin were nations the most diverse, yet the mightiest of the earth. The very name of the Iberia which they discovered, and to which they themselves gave title, hints the Cabiri, who carried, doubtless, in their explorations, as equally with their commerce and their arts, their religious usages and their faith, as pyramidically intensifying, until it flashed truth upon the worlds in the grand Fire-Dogma--that faith to which sprung monuments from all the sea-borders at which glittered the beak--itself an imitation flame--of every many-oared, single ship of their adventurous, ocean-dotting fleets--the precursors of the exploring ships of the Vikings. We claim the cauldron of the witches as, in the original, the vase or urn of the fiery transmigration, in which all the things of the world change. We accept the sign of the double-extended fingers (pointed in a fork) or of horns, which throughout Italy, the Greek Islands, Greece, and Turkey, is esteemed as the counter-charm to the Evil Eye, as the occult Magian telegraphic. The horns, or radii of the Merry-Andrew, or Jester, or Motley, and the horns of Satan; indeed, the figure of horns generally even have a strange [6] affinity in the consecrate and religious. The horseshoe, so universally employed as a defensive charm, and used as a sign to warn-off and to consecrate, when--as it so frequently is--displayed at the entrance of stables, outhouses, and farm-buildings in country places, speaks the acknowledgment of the Devil, or Sinister Principle. The rearing aloft, and 'throwing out' as it were, of protesting, and--in a certain fashion--badge-like, magic signs, in the bodies of bats, and wild nocturnal creatures, fixed upon barn doors, we hold to be the perpetuation of the old heathen sacrifice to .the harmful gods, or a sort of devil-propitiation. Again, in this horse-shoe we meet the horse, as indicative of, and connected with, spirit power: of which strange association we shall by and by have more to say. The horse-shoe is the, mystic symbol of the Wizard's Foot, or the sigma, or sign, of the abstract 'Four-footed', the strangely secret, constantly presented, but as constantly evading, magic meaning conveyed in which (a tremendous cabalistic sign) we encounter everywhere. May the original, in the East, of the horse-shoe arch of the Saracens, which is a foundation-form of our Gothic architecture--may the horse-shoe form of all arches and cupolas (which figure is to be met everywhere in Asia)--may these strange, rhomboidal curves carry reference to the ancient mysterious blending of the ideas of the horse and the supernatural and religious? It is an awing thought but Spirits and supernatural embodiments--unperceived by our limited, vulgar senses--may make their daily walk amidst us, invisible, in the ways of the world. It may indeed be that they are sometimes suddenly happened upon, and, as it were, surprised. The world--although so silent--may be noisy with ghostly feet. The Unseen Ministers may every day pass in and out among our ways, and we all the time think that we have the world to ourselves. It is, as it were, to this inside, unsuspected world that these recognitive, deprecatory signs of horseshoes and of charms are addressed; that the harming presences, unprovoked, may pass harmless; that the jealous watch of the Unseen over us may be assuaged in the acknowledgment; that the unrecognized presences amidst us, if met with an unconsciousness for which man cannot be accountable, may not be offended with carelessness in regard of them for which he may be punishable.
CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTHDRUIDICAL STONES AND THEIR WORSHIPThe monolith, talisman, mysterious pillar, or stone memorial, raised in attestation of the fire-tradition, and occupying the principal square or place, Forum, or middle-most or navel-point of the city in ancient times, is the original of our British market-crosses. The cromlech, or bilithon, or trilithon; the single, double, or grouped stones found in remote places--in Cornwall, in Wales, in various counties of England, in by-spots in Scotland, in the Scottish Isles, in the Isle of Man, and in Ireland--all these stones of memorial--older than history--speak the secret faith of the ancient peoples. These stones are also to be found in Brittany, in various parts of France and Spain; nay, throughout Europe, and occurring to recognition, in fact, in all parts of the world--old and new.Stonehenge, with its inner and outer circles of stones, enclosing the central mythic object, or altar; all the Druidic or Celtic remains; stones on the tops of mountains, altar-tables in the valley; the centre measuring, or obelisk, stones, in market-places or centre-spaces in great towns, from which the highways radiated, spaced--in mileage--to distance; that time-honoured relic, 'London Stone', still extant in Cannon Street, London; the Scottish 'sacred stone', with its famous oracular gifts, vulgarly called Jacob's Pillow, transported to England by the dominant Edward the First, and preserved in the seat of the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey; even the placing of upright stones as tombstones, which is generally accepted as a mere means of personal record--for, be it remembered, the ancients placed tablets against their walls by way of funeral register; all follow the same rule. We consider all these as variations of the upright commemorative pillar. The province of Brittany, in France, is thickly studded with stone pillars, and the history and manners of its people teem with interesting, and very curious, traces of the worship of them. In these parts, and elsewhere, they are distinguished by the name of Menhirs and Peulvans. The superstitious veneration of the Irish people for such stones is well known. M. de Fréminville says in his Antiquités du Finisterre, p. 106: 'The Celts worshipped a divinity which united the attributes of Cybele and Venus'. This worship prevailed also in Spain--as, doubtless, throughout Europe--inasmuch as we find the Eleventh and Twelfth Councils of Toledo warning those who offered worship to stones that they were sacrificing to devils. We are taught that the Druidical institution of Britain was Pythagorean, or patriarchal, or Brahminical. The presumed universal knowledge which this order possessed, and the singular customs which they practised, have afforded sufficient analogies and affinities to maintain the occult and remote origin of Druidism. A Welsh antiquary insists that the Druidical system of the Metempsychosis was conveyed to the Brahmins of India by a former emigration from Wales. But, the reverse may have occurred, if we trust the elaborate researches which would demonstrate that the Druids were a scion of the Oriental family. The reader is referred to Toland’s History of the Druids, in his Miscellaneous Works, vol. ii, p. 163; also to a book published in London in 1829, with the title The Celtic Druids; or, An Attempt to show that the Druids were the Priests of Oriental Colonies, who emigrated from India, by Godfrey Higgins. A recent writer confidently intimated that the knowledge of Druidism must be searched for in the Talmudical writings; but another, in return, asserts that the Druids were older than the Jews. Whence and when the British Druids transplanted themselves to this lone world amid the ocean, no historian can write. We can judge of the Druids simply by the sublime monuments which are left of them, surviving, in their majestic loneliness, through the ages of civilization. Unhewn masses or heaps of stones tell alone their story; such are their cairns, and cromlechs, and corneddes, and that wild architecture, whose stones hang on one another, still frowning on the plains of Salisbury. Among the most remarkable ancient remains in Wales (both North and South) are the Druidical stones: poised in the most extraordinary manner--a real engineering problem--the slightest touch will sometimes suffice to set in motion the Logan, or rocking, stones, whether these balanced masses are found in Wales or elsewhere. We think that there is very considerable ground for concluding that all these mounted stones were oracular, or, so to express it, speaking; and that, when sought for divine responses, they were caused first to tremble, then to heave, and finally, like the tables of the modern (so-called) Spiritualists, to tip intelligibly. To no other reason than this could we satisfactorily refer the name under which they are known in Wales: namely, 'bowing-stones'. For the idea that they were denominated 'bowing-stones' because to the people they formed objects of adoration is a supposition infinitely less satisfactory. The reader will perceive that we admit the phenomenon, when the mysterious rapport is effected, of the spontaneous sensitiveness and ultimate sympathetic motion of solid objects. No one who has witnessed the strange, unexplained power which tables, after proper preparation, acquire of supplying intelligent signals--impossible as it may seem to those who have not witnessed and tested these phenomena--but will see that there is great likelihood of these magic stones having been reared and haunted by the people for this special sensitive capacity. This idea would greatly increase the majesty and the wonder of them; in other respects, except for some extraordinary and superstitious use, these mysterious, solitary stones appear objectless. The famous 'Round Table' of King Arthur--in regard to which that mystic hero is understood to have instituted an order of knighthood --may have been a magical consulting-disc, round which he and his peers sat for oracular directions. As it is of large dimensions, it presents a similarity not only to some of the prophesying-stones, but also, in a greater degree, to the movable enchanted drums of the Lapps and Finns, and to the divining-tables of the Shamans of Siberia. There lies an unsuspected purpose, doubtless of a mysterious (very probably of a superstitious and supernatural) character, in this exceedingly ancient memorial of the mythic British and heroic time at Winchester. When spires or steeples were placed on churches, and succeeded the pyramidal tower, or square or round towers, these pointed erections were only the perpetuations of the original monolith. The universal signal was reproduced through the phases of architecture. The supposition that the object of the steeple was to point out the church to the surrounding country explains but half its meaning. At one period of our history, the signal-lights abounded all over the country as numerously as church-spires do in the present days. Exalted on eminences, dotting hills, spiring on cliffs, perched on promontories--from sea inland, and from the interior of the country to broad river-side and to the sea-shore--rising from woods, a universal telegraph, and a picturesque landmark--the tower, in its meaning, spoke the identical, unconscious tradition with the blazing Baal, Bael, or Beltane Fires: those universal votive torches, which are lost sight of in the mists of antiquity, and which were so continual in the Pagan countries, so reiterated through the early ages, and which still remain so frequent in the feudal and monastic periods--these were all connected closely with religion. The stone tower was only, as it were, a 'stationary flame'. The origin of beacons may be traced to the highest antiquity. According to the original Hebrew (which language as the Samaritan, is considered by competent judges as the very oldest), the word 'beacon' may be rendered a mark, monolith, pillar, or upright. At one time the ancient Bale, Bel, or religious fires of Ireland were general all over the country. They have been clearly traced to a devotional origin, and are strictly of the same character as the magic, or Magian, fires of the East. During the political discontents of 1831 and 1832, the custom of lighting these signal-fires was very generally revived amidst the party-distractions in Ireland. In the ancient language of this country, the month of May is yet called 'nic Beal tienne', or the month of Beal (Bel or Baal's) fire. The Beltane festival in the Highlands has been ascribed to a similar origin. Druidical altars are still to be traced on many of the hills in Ireland, where Baal (Bel or Beal) fires were lighted. Through the countries, in the present day, which formed the ancient Scandinavia, and in Germany, particularly in the North, on the first of May, as in celebration of some universal feast or festival, fires are even now lighted on the tops of the hills. How closely this practice accords with the superstitious usages of the Bohemians, or 'Fire-kings,' of Prague, is discoverable at a glance. All these western flames are representative of the early fire, which was as equally the object of worship of the Gubhs, Guebres, or Gaurs of Persia, as it is the admitted natural principle of the Parsees. Parsees, Bohemians, the Gipsies or Zingari, and the Guebres, all unite in a common legendary fire-worship. Beside the ancient market-crosses and wayside Gothic uprights, of which so many picturesque specimens are yet to be found in England, Wales, and Scotland, we may enumerate the splendid funeral-crosses raised by the brave and pious King Edward to the memory of his wife. Holinshed writes: 'In the ninetéenth yeare of King Edward, quéene Elianor, King Edward's wife, died, upon saint Andrew's euen, at Hirdebie, or Herdelie (as some haue), neere to Lincolne. In euerie towne and place where the corpse rested by the waie, the King caused a crosse of cunning workmanship to be erected in remembrance of hir'. Two of the like crosses were set up at London--one at 'Westcheape' (the last but one), 'and the other at Charing', which is now Charing Cross, and where the last cross was placed. The final obsequies were solemnized in the Abbey Church at Westminster, on the Sunday before the day of St. Thomas the Apostle, by the Bishop of Lincoln; and the King gave twelve manors and hamlets to the Monks, to defray the charges of yearly obits, and of gifts to the poor, in lasting commemoration of his beloved consort. Some writers have stated. the number of crosses raised as above at thirteen. These were, Lincoln, Newark, Grantham,, Leicester, Stamford, Geddington, Northampton, Stoney-Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St. Alban’s, Waltham, Westcheape (Cheapside), not far from where a fountain for a long time took the place of another erection, and where the statue of Sir Robert Peel now stands. The last place where the body rested, whence the memorial-cross sprung, and which the famous equestrian statue of King Charles the First now occupies, is the present noisy highway of Charing Cross; and, as then, it opens to the royal old Abbey of Westminster. What a changed street is this capital opening at Charing Cross, Whitehall, and Parliament Street from the days--it almost then seeming a river-bordered country road--when the cross spired at one end, and, the old Abbey closed the views southwards. In regard to the royal and sumptuous obsequies of Queen Eleanor, Fabian, who compiled his Chronicles towards the latter part .of the reign of Henry VII, speaking of her burial-place, has the following remark: 'She hathe II wexe tapers brennynge upon her tombe both daye and nyght. Which so hath contynned syne the day of her buryinge to this present daye'. The beacon-warning, the Fiery Cross of Scotland, the universal use of fires on the tops of mountains, on the seashore, and on the highest turrets of castles, to give the signal of alarm, and to telegraph some information of importance, originated in the first religious flames. Elder to these summoning or notifying lights was the mysterious worship to which fire rose as the, answer. From religion the beacon passed into military use. On certain set occasions, and on special Saints’ Days, and at other times of observance, as the traveller in Ireland well knows, the multitude of fires on the tops of the hills, and in any conspicuous situation, would gladden the eyes of the most devout Parsee. The special subject of illumination, however We may have become accustomed to regard it as the most ordinary expression of triumph, and of mere joyous celebration, has its origin in a much more abstruse and sacred source. In Scotland, particularly, the reverential ideas associated with these mythic fires are strong. Perhaps in no country have the impressions of superstition deeper hold than in enlightened, thoughtful, educated, and (in so many respects) prosaic Scotland; and in regard to these occult and ancient fires, the tradition of them, and the ideas concerning their origin, are preserved as a matter of more than cold speculation. Country legendary accounts and local usages--obtained from we know not whence--all referring to the same myth, all pointing to the same Protean superstition, are traceable, to the present, in all the English counties. Cairns in Scotland; heaps of stones in by-spots in England, especially--solitary or in group--to be found on the tops of hills; the Druidical mounds; the raising of crosses on the Continent, in Germany, amongst the windings of the Alps, in Russia (by the roadside, or at the entrance of villages), in Spain, in Poland, in lonely and secluded spots; probably even the first use of the 'sign-post' at the junction of roads; all these point, in strange, widely radiant suggestion, to the fire-religion. Whence obtained is that word 'sign' as designating the guide, or. direction, post, placed at the intersection of cross-roads? Nay, whence gained we that peculiar idea of the sacredness, or of the 'forbidden', attaching to the spot where four roads meet? It is sacer, as sacred, in the Latin; 'extra-church', or 'heathen', supposedly 'unhallowed', in the modern acceptation. The appellative ob in the word 'obelisk' means occult, secret; or magic. Ob is the biblical name for sorcery. It is also found as a word signifying converse with forbidden spirits; among the negroes on the coast of Africa, from whence--and indicating the practices marked out by it--it was transplanted to the West Indies, where it still exists. It is well known that a character resembling the Runic alphabet was once widely diffused throughout Europe. 'A character, for example, not unlike the hammer of Thor, is to be found in. various Spanish inscriptions, and lurks in many magical books. Sir William Jones', proceeds our author--we quote from the Times of the 2nd of February 1859, in reviewing a work upon Italy by the late Lord Broughton--'has drawn a parallel between the deities of Meru and Olympus; and an enthusiast might perhaps maintain that the vases of Alba Longa were a relic of the times when one religion prevailed in Latium and Hindustan. It is most singular that the Hindoo cross is precisely the hammer of Thor.' All our speculations tend to the same conclusion. One day, it is a discovery of cinerary vases; the next, it is etymological research; yet again, it is ethnological investigation; and, the day after, it is the publication of unsuspected tales from the Norse; but all go to heap up the proofs of our consanguinity with the peoples of History--and of an original general belief, we might add. What meaneth the altar, with its mysterious lights? What mean the candles of the Catholic worship, burning even by day, borne in the sunshine, blazing at noon? What meaneth this visible fire, as an element at Mass, or at service at all? Wherefore is this thing, Light, employed as a primal witness and attestation in all worship? To what end, and expressive of what mysterious meaning--surviving through the changes of the faiths and the renewal of the Churches, and as yet undreamt--burn the solemn lamps in multitude, in their richly worked, their highly wrought, cases of solid gold or of glowing silver, bright-glancing in the mists of incense, and in the swell or fall of sacredly melting or of holily entrancing music? Before spiry shrine and elaborate drop-work tabernacle; in twilight hollow, diapered as into a 'glory of stone', and in sculptured niche; in the serried and starry ranks of the columned wax, or in rows of bossy cressets--intertwine and congregate the perfumed flames as implying the tradition eldest of time! What meaneth, in the Papal architectural piles, wherein the Ghostly Fire is enshrined, symbolic real fire, thus before the High Altar? What speak those constellations of lights? what those 'silvery stars of Annunciation'? What signifieth fire upon the altar? What gather we at all from altars and from sacrifice--the delivering, as through the gate of fire, of the first and the best of this world, whether of the fruits, whether of the flocks, whether of the primal and perfectest of victims, or the rich spoil of the 'world-states'? What mean the human sacrifices of the Heathen; the passing of the children through the fire to Moloch; the devotion of the consummate, the most physically perfect, and most beautiful, to the glowing Nemesis, in that keenest, strangest, yet divinest fire-appetite; the offered plunder, the surrendered lives, of the predatory races? What signifies the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the burning of living people among the Gauls, the Indian fiery immolations? What is intended even by the patriarchal sacrifices? What is the meaning of the burnt offerings, so frequent in the Bible? In short, what read we, and what seem we conclusively to gather, we repeat, in this mystic thing, and hitherto almost meaningless, if not contradictory and silencing institution of sacrifice by fire? What gather we, otherwise than in the explanation of the thing signified, by it? We speak of sacrifice as practised in all ages, enjoined in all holy books, elevated into veneration, as a necessity of the highest and most sacred kind. We, find it in all countries--east, west, north, and south; in the Old equally as in the New World. From whence should this strange and unexplainable rite come, and what should it mean? as, indeed, what should mean the display of bright fire at all in the mysteries, Egyptian, Cabiric, Scandinavian, Eleusinian, Etrurian, Indian, Persian, Primal American, Tartarian, Phœnician, or Celtic, from the earliest of time until this very modern, instant, English day of candles on altars, and of the other kindred religious High-Church lightings?--respecting which there rankleth such scandal, and intensifieth such purposeless babble, such daily dispute! What should all this inveterate ritualistic (as it is absurdly called) controversy, and this ill-understood bandying, be about? Is it that, even at this day, men do not understand anything about the symbols of their religion, and that the things for which they struggle are mere words? really that the principles of their wonderful and supernatural faith are perfectly unknown, and that they reason with the inconclusiveness, but with nothing of the simplicity of children--nothing of the divine light of children? But, we would boldly ask, what should all this wealth of fire-subjects mean, of which men guess so little, and know less? What should this whole principle of fire and of sacrifice be? What should it signify but the rendering over, and the surrender-up, in all abnegation, of the state of man, of the best and most valued 'entities' of this world, past and through the fire, which is the boundary and border and wall between this world and the next?--that last element of all, on which is all--Fire--having most of the light of matter in it, as it hath most of the blackness of matter in it, to make it the fiercer; and both being copy, or shadow, of the Immortal and Ineffable Spirit-Light, of which, strange as it may sound, the sun is the very darkness! because that, and the whole Creation--as being Degree, or even, in its wonders, as Greater or Less--beautiful and godlike as it is to man, is as the shadow of God, and hath nothing of Him; but is instituted as the place of purification, 'being', or punishment: the opposite of God, the enemy of God, and, in its results, apart from the Spirit of God--which rescues supernaturally from it--the denier of God! This world and its shows--nay, Life--stands mystically as the Devil, Serpent, Dragon, or 'Adversary', typified through all time; the world terrestrial being the ashes of the fire celestial. The torches borne at funerals are not alone for light; they have their mystic meaning. They mingle largely, as do candles on altars, in all solemn celebrations. The employment of light in all religious rites, and in celebration in the general sense, has an overpoweringly great meaning. Festival, also, claims flame as its secret signal and its password to the propitious Invisible. Lights and flambeaux and torches carried in the hand were ever the joyous accompaniment of weddings. The torch of Hymen is a proverbial expression. The ever-burning lamps of the ancients; the steady, silent tomb-lights (burning on for ages), from time to time discovered among the mouldering monuments of the past in the hypogea, or sepulchral caves, and buildings broken in upon by men in later day; the bonfires of the moderns; the fires on the tops of hills; the mass of lamps disposed about sanctuaries, whether encircling the most sacred point of the mosque of the Prophet, the graded and cumulative Grand Altar in St Peter's, of the saint-thrones in the churches of the Eternal City, or elsewhere, wherever magnificence riseth into expansion, and intensifieth and overpowereth in the sublimity which shall be felt; the multitudinous grouped lamps in the Sacred Stable--the Place of the Holy Nativity, meanest and yet highest--at Bethlehem; the steady, constant lights ever burning in mystic, blazing attestation in Jerusalem, before the tomb of the Redeemer; the chapelle ardente in the funeral observances of the ubiquitous Catholic Church; the congregated tapers about the bed of the dead--the flames in mysterious grandeur (and in royal awe), placed as in waiting, so brilliant and striking, and yet so terrible, a court, and surrounding the stately catafalque; the very word falcated, as bladed, sworded, or scimitared (as with the guard of waved or sickle-like flames); the lowly, single candle at the bedside of the poverty-attenuated dead--thus by the single votive light only allied (yet in unutterably mystic and godlike bond) as with the greatest of the earth; the watch-lights everywhere, and in whatever country; the crosses (spiry memorials, or monoliths) which rose as from out the earth, in imitation of the watching candle, at whatever point rested at night, in her solemn journey to her last home, the body of Queen Eleanor, as told in the English annals (which flame-memorials, so raised by the pious King Edward in the spiry, flame-imitating stone, are all, we believe, obliterate or put out of things, but the well-known, magnificent, restored cross at Waltham); all these, to the keen, philosophic eye, stand as the best proofs of the diffusion of this strange Fire-Dogma: mythed as equally, also, in that 'dark veiled Cotytto': She to whom the flame'She', this blackest of concealment in the mysteries, Isis, Io, Ashtaroth, or Astarte; or Cybele- or Proserpine; 'he', this Baal, Bel, 'Baalim', Foh, Brahm, or Bhudd; 'it'--for the Myth is no personality, but sexless--Snake, Serpent, Dragon, or Earliest at all of Locomotion, under whatever 'Letter of the Alphabet'--all these symbols, shapes, or names, stand confessed in that first; absolutely primal, deified element, Fire, which the world, in all religions, has worshipped, is worshipping, and will worship to the end of time, unconsciously; we even in the Christian religion, and in our modern day, still doing it--unwitting the meaning of the mysterious symbols which pass daily before our eyes: all which. point, as we before have said, to Spirit-Light as the soul of the World--otherwise, to the inexpressible mystery of the Holy Ghost. Little is it suspected what is the myth conveyed in the Fackeltanz and Fackelzug of Berlin, of which so much was heard, as a curious observance, at the time of the marriage of the Princess Royal of England with the Prince Frederick William of Prussia. This is the Teutonic perpetuation of the 'Bacchic gloryings', of the Saturnian rout and flame-brandishing of the earliest and last rite. The ring of light, glory, nimbus, aureole, or circle of rays, about the heads of sacred persons; the hand (magnetic and mesmeric) upon sceptres; the open hand borne in the standards of the Romans; the dragon crest of Maximin, of Honorius, and of the Barbarian Leaders; the Dragon of China and of Japan; the Dragon of Wales; the mythic Dragon trampled by St. George; the 'crowned serpent' of the Royal House of Milan; the cairns, as we have already affirmed, and the Runic Monuments; the Round Towers of Ireland (regarding which there hath been so much, and so diverse and vain speculation); the memorial piles, and the slender (on seashore and upland) towers left by the Vikinghs, or Sea-Kings, in their adventurous and predatory voyages; the legends of the Norsemen or the Normans; the vestiges so recently, in the discovery of the forward-of-the-old-time ages, exposed to the light of criticism, in the time-out-of-mind antique and quaint cities of the extinct peoples and of the forgotten religions in Central America: the sun or fire-worship of the Peruvians, and their vestal or virgin-guardians of the fire; the priestly fire-rites of the Mexicans, quenched by Cortez in the native blood, and, the context of their strange, apparently incoherently wild, belief; the inscriptions of amulets, on rings and on talismans; the singular, dark, and in many respects, uncouth arcana of the Bohemians, Zingari, Gitanos, or Gipsies; the teaching of the Talmud; the hints of the Cabala: also that little-supposed thing, even, meant in the British golden collar of 'S.S.', which is worn as a relic of the oldest day (in perpetuation of a mythos long ago buried--spark-like--and forgotten in the dust of ages) by some of our officials, courtly and otherwise, and which belongs to no known order of knighthood, but only to the very highest order of knighthood, [7] the Magian, or to Magic; all these point, as in the diverging radii of the greatest of historical light-suns, to the central, intolerable ring of brilliancy, or the phenomenon--the original God’s revelation, eldest of all creeds, survivor, almost, of Time--of the Sacred Spirit, or Ghostly Flame-the baptism of Fire of the Apostles! In this apparently strange--nay, to some minds, alarming--classification, and throwing under one head, of symbols diametrically opposed, as holy and unholy, benign and sinister, care must be taken to notice that the types of the 'Snake' or the 'Dragon' stand for the occult 'World-Fire', by which we mean the 'light of the human reason', or 'manifestation' in the general sense, as opposed to the spiritual light, or unbodied light; into which, as the reverse--although the same--the former transcends. Thus, shadow is the only possible means of demonstrating light. It is not reflected upon that we must have means whereby to be lifted. After all, we deal only with glyphs, to express inexpressible things. Horns mean spirit-manifestation; Radius signifies the glorying absorption (into the incomprehensible) of that manifestation. Both signify the same: from any given point, the One Spirit working downwards, and also transcending upwards. From any given point, in height, that the intellect is able to achieve, the same spirit downwards intensifies into Manifestation; upwards, dissipates into God. In other words, before any knowledge of God can be formed at all, it must have a shape. God is an abstraction; Man is an entity.
CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTHINQUIRY AS TO THE POSSIBILITY OF MIRACLEThe definition of a miracle has been exposed to numerous erroneous views. Inquirers know not what a miracle is. It is wrong to assume that nature and human nature are alike invariably, and that you can, interpret the one by the other. There may be in reality great divergence between the two, though both start from the common point--individuality. A miracle is not a violation of the laws of nature (because nature is not everything), but a something independent of all laws--that is, as we know laws. The mistake that is so commonly made is the interpreting--or rather the perceiving, or the becoming aware of--that thing we denominate a miracle through the operation of the human senses, which in reality have nothing whatever to do with a miracle, because they cannot know it. If nature, as we understand it, or law, as we understand it, be universal, then, as nothing can be possible to us which contradicts either the one or the other (both being the same)--nature being law, and law being nature--miracle must be impossible, and there never was, nor could there ever be, such a thing as a miracle. But a miracle works outwardly from us at once, and not by a human path--moves away from the world (that is, man’s world) as a thing impossible to it, though it may be true none the less, since our nature is not all nature; nor perhaps any nature, but even a philosophical delusion. In the conception of a miracle; however, the thing apprehended revolves to us, and can come to us in no other way, and we seize the idea of it through a machinery--our own judgment--which is a clear, sight compounded of our senses--a synthesis of senses that, in the very act of presenting an impossible idea, destroys it as humanly possible. Miracle can be of no date or time, whether earlier, whether later, if God has not withdrawn from nature; and if He has withdrawn from nature, then nature must have before this fallen to pieces of itself; for God is intelligence--not life only; and matter is not intelligent, though it may be living. It is not seen that during that space--which is a space taken out of time, though independent of it--in which miracle is possible to us, we cease to be men, because time, or rather sensation, is man’s measure; and that when we are men again, and back in ourselves, the miracle is gone, because the conviction of the possibility of a thing and its non-possibility has expelled it. The persuasion of a miracle is intuition, or the operation of God’s Spirit active in us, that drives out nature for the time, which is the opposite of the miracle.No miracle can be justified to men’s minds, because no amount of evidence can sustain it; no number of attestations can affirm that which we cannot in our nature believe. In reality, we believe nothing of which our senses do not convince us--even these not always. In other matters, we only believe because we think we believe; and since the conviction of a miracle has nothing of God except the certain sort of motive of possessed, excluding exaltation, which, with the miracle, fills us, and to which exaltation we can give no name, and which we can only feel as a certain something in us, a certain power and a certain light, conquering and outshining another light, become fainter--it will follow that the conviction of the possibility of a miracle is the same sort of unquestioning assurance that we have of a dream in the dream itself; and that, when the miracle is apprehended in the mind, it just as much ceases to be a miracle when we are in our senses, as a dream ceases to be that which it was, a reality, and becomes that which it is, nonentity, when we awake. But to the questions, what is a dream?--nay, what is waking?--who shall answer? or who can declare whether in that broad outside, where our minds and their powers evaporate or cease, where nature melts away into nothing that we can know as nature, or know as anything else, in regard to dreams and realities, the one may not be the other? The dream may be man’s life to him--as another life other than his own life--and the reality may be the dream (in its various forms), which he rejects as false and confusion simply because it is as an unknown language, of which, out of his dream, he can never have the alphabet, but of which, in the dream, he has the alphabet, and can spell well because that life is natural to him. 'A pretence that every strong and peculiar expression is merely an Eastern hyperbole is a mighty easy way of getting rid of the trouble of deep thought and right apprehension, and has helped to keep the world in ignorance.'--Morsels of Criticism, London, 1800. It is very striking that, in all ages, people have clothed the ideas of their dreams in the same imagery. It may therefore be asked whether that language, which now occupies so low a place in the estimation of men; be not the actual waking language of the higher regions, while we, awake as we fancy ourselves, may be sunk in a 'sleep of many thousand years, or at least, in the echo of their dreams, and only intelligibly catch a few dim words of that language of God, as sleepers do scattered expressions from the loud conversation of those around them'. So says Schubert, in his Symbolism of Dreams. There is every form of the dream-state, from the faintest to the most intense, in which the gravitation of the outside world overwhelms the man-senses, and absorbs the inner unit. In fact, the lightest and faintest form of dream is the very thoughts that we think. A very profound English writer, Thomas de Quincey, has the following: 'In the English rite of Confirmation, by personal choice, and by sacramental oath, each man says, in effect: "Lo! I rebaptize myself; and that which once was sworn on my behalf, now I swear for myself." Even so in dreams, perhaps, under some secret conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to consciousness at the time, but darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, each several child of our mysterious race may complete for himself the aboriginal fall.' As to what is possible or impossible, no man, out of his presumption and of his self-conceit, has any right to speak, nor can he speak; for the nature of his terms with all things outside of him is unknown to him. We know that miracle (if once generally believed in) would terminate the present order of things, which are perfectly right and consistent in their own way. Things that contradict nature are not evoked by reason, but by man in his miracle-worked imagining, in all time; and such exceptions are independent of reason, which elaborates to a centre downwards, but exhales to apparent impossibilty (but to real truth) upwards, that is, truth out of this world. Upwards has nothing of man; for it knows him not. He ceases there; but he is made as downwards, and finds his man’s nature there, lowest of all--his mere bodily nature there perhaps, even to be found originally among the four-footed; for by the raising of him by God alone has Man got upon his feet, and set his face upward to regard the stars--those stars which originally, according to the great 'Hermes Trismegistus' (Thrice-Master), in the astrological sense, raised him from the primeval level; for we refer heaven always to a place over our heads, since there only we can be free of the confinements of matter; but above us or below us is equally the. altitude. May not the sacrificial, sacramental rites--may not those minute acts of priestly offering, as they succeed each other, and deepen in intensity and in meaning--may not those aids of music to enlarge and change and conjure the sense of hearing, and to react on sight (it being notorious that object's change their character really as we look at them when operated upon by beautiful music)--may not those dream-producing, somnolent, enchanting vapours of incense, which seem to loosen from around each of us the walls of the visible, and to charm open the body, and to let out (or to let in) new and unsuspected senses, alight with a new light not of this world, the light of a new spiritual world, in which we can yet see things, and see them as things to be recognized--may not all this be true, and involve impossibilities as only seeming so, but true enough; inasmuch as miracle possibly is true enough? May not all these effects, and may not the place and the persons in the body, and may not the suggestions, labouring to that end, of unseen, unsuspected, holy ministries, such as thronging angels, casting off from about us our swathes and bands of thick mortality in the new, overmastering influence--may not all this be as the bridge across which we pass out from this world gladly into the next, until we meet, as on the other side, Jesus, the Ruler in very deed, but now felt as the Offered, the Crucified, the complete and accepted 'Living Great Sacrifice'? May we not in this 'Eucharist' partake, not once, but again and again, of that--even of that solid-which was our atonement, and of that blood which was poured out as the libation to the 'Great Earth', profaned by 'Sin', partaking of that reddest (but that most transcendently lucent) sacrament, which is to be the new light of a new world? Is not the very name of the intercommunicating High-Priest that of the factor. of this mystic, glorious, spirit-trodden, invisible 'bridge'? Whence do we derive the word Pontifex, or Pontifex Maximus (the Great, or the Highest, Bridge-Maker, or Builder), elicited in direct translation from the two Latin words pons and facio in the earliest pre-Christian theologies, and become 'Pontiff' in the Roman and the Christian sense--'Pontiff' from 'Pontifex'? It is surely this meaning--that of fabricator or maker of the bridge between things sensible and things spiritual, between body and spirit, between this. world and the next world, between the spiritualizing 'thither' and the substantiating 'hither', trans being the transit. The whole word, if not the whole meaning, may be accepted in this Roman Catholic sense of 'transubstantiation', or the making of miracle. Never 'Idolatry'--but 'Idea' recognizing and acknowledging.
CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTHCAN EVIDENCE BE DEPENDED UPON? EXAMINATION OF HUME’S REASONING'Our evidence for the truth of the Christian religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses; because, even in the first authors of our religion, it was no greater. It is evident it must diminish in passing from them to their disciples; nor can any one rest such confidence in their testimony as in the immediate object of his senses.'This is wrong, The testimony of some men is more valid than is the evidence of the senses of some others. All depends upon the power of the mind judging. 'It is a general maxim, that no objects have any discoverable connexion together. All the inferences which we can draw from one to another are founded merely on our experience of their constant and regular conjunction; It is evident that we ought not to make an exception to this maxim in favour of human testimony, whose connexion with any event seems in itself as little necessary as any other.' It may be put to any person who carefully considers Hume’s previous position as to the fixedness of the proofs of the senses, whether this last citation does not upset what he previously affirms. 'The memory is tenacious to a certain degree. Men commonly have an inclination to truth and a principle of probity. They are sensible to shame when detected in a falsehood. These are qualities in human nature.' This is a mistake; for they are not qualities in human nature. They are the qualities of grown men, because they are reflective of the state of the man when he is living in community--not as man. 'Contrariety of evidence, in certain cases, may be derived from several different causes: from the opposition of contrary testimony--from the character or number of the witnesses--from the manner of their delivering their testimony--or from the union of all these circumstances. We entertain a suspicion concerning any matter of fact when the witnesses contradict each other--when they are but few, or of a doubtful character--when they have an interest in what they affirm--when they deliver their testimony with hesitation, or, on the contrary, with too violent asseverations. There are many other particulars of the same kind, which may diminish or destroy the force of any argument derived from human testimony.' Now, we contest these conclusions; and we will endeavour to meet them with a direct overthrowing answer. The recognition of likelihood--not to say of truth--is intuitive, and does not depend on testimony. In fact, sometimes our belief goes in another direction than the testimony, though it be even to matters of fact. Hume resumes with his cool, logical statements: 'The reason why we place any credit in witnesses and historians is not derived from any connexion which we perceive a priori between testimony and reality, but because we are accustomed to find a conformity between them.' Just so! we would add to this 'because we are accustomed to find a conformity between them.' We are now arrived at the grand dictum of cool-headed, self-possessed Hume, who thought that by dint of his logical clearness, and by his definitions, he had exposed the impossibility of that unaccountable thing which men call a miracle, and upon the possibility or the non-possibility of which religion will, be ultimately found to wholly depend, because religion is, entirely opposed to laws of 'must be' and 'must not be'. 'A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature' he declares. Not so, we will rejoin. It is only a violation of the laws of our nature. A very different thing. We have no right to set our nature up as the measure of all nature. This is merely the mind’s assumption; and it is important to expose its real emptiness, because all Hume’s philosophy turns upon this, which he imagines to be a rigid axiom, to which all argument must recur. 'A firm and unalterable experience has established the laws of nature. The proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.' So says Hume. But experience has nothing to do with a miracle, because it is a sense not comprised in the senses, but an unexperienced sensation or perception, exposing the senses as dreams, and overriding their supposed certainty and totality by a new dream, or apparent certainty, contradicting the preceding. If this were not possible, then the senses, or the instantaneous judgment which comes out of their sum--or the thing 'conviction' as we call it--would be the measure of everything past, present, and to come--which we know it is not. Hume, or any. philosopher, is wrong in dogmatizing at all; because he only speaks from his own experience; and individual experience will in no wise assist towards the discovery of real truth. In philosophy, no one has a right to lay down any basis, and to assume it as true. The philosopher must always argue negatively, not affirmatively. The moment he adopts the latter course, he is lost. Hume presupposes all his Treatise on Miracles in this single assumption that nature itself has laws, and not laws only to our faculties. The mighty difference between these two great facts will be at once felt by a thinker; but we will not permit Hume to assume anything where he has no right, and so to turn the flank of his adversary by artfully putting forward unawares and carrying an assumption. Nature is only nature in man’s mina, but not true otherwise, any more than that the universe exists out of the mind--or out of the man, who has in thinking to make it. Take away, therefore, the man in whom the idea of it is, and the universe disappears. We will question Hume, the disbelieving philosopher, as to his right to open his lips, because it is very doubtful if language, which is the power of expression, any more than that which we call consistent thought, is inseparably consistent to man, who is all inconsistence in his beginning, middle, and end--in his coming here and in his going hence from here, out of this strange world; to which he does not seem really to belong, and in which world he seems to have been somehow obtruded, as something not of it--strange as this seems. As to the philosophy of Hume, granting the ground, you have, of course, all the basis for, the constructions raised upon that ground. But suppose we, who argue in opposition to Hume, dispute his ground? Hume, in his Treatise on Miracles, only begs the question; and there is therefore no wonder that, having first secured his position by consent or negligence of the opponent, he may deal from it the shot of what artillery he pleases; and his opponent, having. once allowed the first ground--or the capacity to argue--has unwittingly let in all the ruinous results which follow; these philosophically are indisputable. We would urge that Hume has no capacity to argue in this way, inasmuch as he has taken the 'human 'mind' as the capacity of arguing. Either .reason or miracle must be first removed, because you can admit either; for they are opposites, and cannot camp in the same mind one is idea, the other is no idea--in this world; and as we are in this world, we can only judge as in this world. In another world, Hume the philosopher may himself be an impossibility, and therefore be a miracle, through his own philosophy, and the application of it. Hume is the man of ideas, and is therefore very correct, as a philosopher, if philosophy were possible; but we deny that it is possible in regard to any speculation out of this world. Ideas--that is, philosophical ideas--may be described as the steps of the ladder by which we philosophically descend from God. Emotions are also the steps by which alone we can ascend to Him. Human reason is a possibility, from the line drawn by which either ascent or descent may be made. The things Necessity, or Fate, and Free Will, passing into the mind of man (both may be identical in their nature, though opposite in their operation), dictate from the invisible, but persuade from the visible. Hume asserts that 'a uniform experience amounts to a proof'. It does not do so, any more than 'ninety-nine' are a 'hundred'. He also says that 'there is not to be found in all history any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men to be believed.' Now, we will rejoin to this, that a public miracle is a public impossibility; for the moment it has become public, it has ceased to be a miracle. 'In the case of any particular assumed miracle', he further says, 'there are not a sufficient number of men of such unquestioned good sense, education, and learning as to secure us against all delusion in themselves--of such undoubted integrity as to place them beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others.' Now, to this our answer is, that our own senses deceive us; and why, then, should not the asseverations of others? Hume adduces a number of circumstances which, he insists, 'are requisite to give us a full assurance in the testimony of men'; but nothing can give us this assurance in other men’s testimony that he supposes. We judge of circumstances ourselves, upon our own ideas of the testimony of men--not upon the testimony itself; for we sometimes believe that which the witnesses, with the fullest reliance upon themselves, deny. We judge upon our own silent convictions--that is, upon all abstract points. It is for this reason that assurances even by angels, in Scripture, have not been believed by the persons to whom the message was directly sent. Of course, if the miracle was displayed through the ordinary channels of human comprehension, it was no miracle; for comprehension never has miracle in it. 'The maxim by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings is, that the objects of which we have no experience resemble those of which we have' says Hume. Now, this remark is most true; but we cannot help this persuasion. We conclude inevitably that things unknown should resemble things known, because, whatever may be outside of our nature, we have no means of knowing it, or of discovering anything else that is other than ourselves. We can know nothing, except through our own machinery of sense. As God made outside and inside, God alone works, though we think that we--that is, Nature--work. God (who is Himself miracle) can effect impossibilities, and make two one by annihilating the distinction between them. Hume says that 'where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations.' So we ought, if the world were real; but, as it is not, we ought not. Things unreal cannot make things real. Hume declares that 'if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense. Human testimony, in these circumstances, loses all pretensions to authority. A religionist may be an enthusiast, and imagine he sees what has no reality. He may know his narrative to be false, and yet persevere in it with the best intentions in the world, for the sake of promoting so holy a cause. Even where this delusion has not taken place, vanity, excited by so strong a temptation, operates on him more powerfully than on the rest, of mankind in any other circumstances, and self-interest with equal force. His auditors may not have, and commonly have not, sufficient judgment to canvass his evidence. What judgment they have, they renounce by principle in these sublime and mysterious subjects. If they were ever so willing to employ it, passion and a heated imagination disturb the regularity of its operations. Their credulity increases his impudence, and his impudence overpowers their credulity.' Now, the reverse of all this is more nearly the fact. Ordinary minds have more incredulity than credulity. It is quite a mistake to imagine that credulity is the quality of an ignorant mind; it is rather incredulity that is. 'Eloquence, when at its highest pitch', says Hume, 'leaves little room for reason or reflection.' Now, on the contrary, true eloquence is the embodiment or synthesis of reason and reflection. 'Eloquence', resumes Hume, 'addresses itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding. Happily, this pitch it seldom attains; but what a Tully or a Demosthenes could scarcely effect over a Roman or Athenian audience, every capuchin, every itinerant or stationary teacher, can perform over the generality of mankind, and in a higher degree, by touching such gross and vulgar passions.' All the above is simply superficial assumption. Hume then of 'forged miracles and prophecies'; but there is no proof of any forged miracle or prophecy. He says that 'there is a strong propensity in mankind to the extraordinary and the marvellous. There is no kind of report which rises so easily and spreads so quickly, especially in country places and provincial towns, as those concerning marriages, insomuch that two young persons of equal condition never see each other, twice, but the whole neighbourhood immediately join them together.' This is all nonsense. There is always a reason for these suppositions. Hume then goes on to adduce this same love of inspiring curiosity and delight in wonders as the cause of the belief in miracles. 'Do not', he asks, 'the same passions, and others still stronger, incline the generality of mankind to believe and report, with the greatest vehemence and assurance, all religious miracles?' Now, this is only very poor.; and, besides, it is all assumption of truths where they are not. Hume speaks of supernatural and miraculous relations as having been received from 'ignorant and barbarous ancestors'. But what is ignorance and barbarism?--and what is civilization? He says that they have been 'transmitted with that inviolable sanction and authority which always attend received opinions'. But supernatural and miraculous relations have never been received opinions. They have always been contested, and have made their way against the common sense of mankind, because the common sense of mankind is common sense, and nothing more; and, in reality, common sense goes but a very little way, even in the common transactions of life; for feeling guides us in most matters. 'All belief in the extraordinary', Hume declares, 'proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous, which only receives a check at intervals from sense and learning'. But what are sense and learning both but mere conceits? '"It is strange", a judicious reader is apt to say', remarks Hume, 'upon the perusal of these wonderful histories, "that such prodigious events never happen in our days".' But such events do occur, we would rejoin; though they are never believed, and are always treated as fable, when occurring in their own time. 'It is experience only', says Hume, 'which gives authority to human testimony'. Now, it is not experience only which induces belief, but recognition. It is not ideas, but light. We do not go to the thing in ideas, but the thing comes into us, as it were: for instance, a man never finds that he is awake by experience, but by influx of the thing 'waking'--whatever the act of waking is, or means. 'When two kinds of experience are contrary, we have nothing to do but to subtract the one from the other, and embrace an opinion either on one side or the other, with that assurance which arises from the remainder.' This which follows may be a conclusion in regard to the above. If beliefs were sums, we should, and could, subtract the difference between two amounts of evidence, and accept the product; but we cannot help our beliefs, because they are intuitions, and not statements. Hume towards the close of his strictly hard and logical Treatise on Miracles, brings forward an argument, which to all appearance is very rigid and conclusive, out of this his realistic philosophy--if that were true: 'Suppose that all the historians who treat of England should agree that on the 1st of January 1600 Queen Elizabeth died, that both before and after her death she was seen by her physicians and the whole court, as is usual with persons of her rank, that her successor was acknowledged and proclaimed by the parliament, and that, after being interred a month, she again appeared, resumed the throne, and governed England for three years. I must confess that I should be surprised at the concurrence of so many odd circumstances, but should not have the least inclination to believe so miraculous an event. I should not doubt of her pretended death, and of those other public circumstances that followed it.' Now, in their own sequence, as they occur to us as real facts in the world, so unreal even are true, positive circumstances, that we only believe them by the same means that we believe dreams--that is, by intuition. There is no fact, so to say. Startling as it may appear, I appeal to the consciousness of those who have witnessed death whether the death itself did not seem unreal, and whether it did not remain without belief as' a fact until the negative--that, is 'The dead man is not here'--affirmed it, not through present persuasions, but through unreal incidents, post-dating reappearance. As to the belief in miracles, Hume asserts that the Christian religion cannot be believed by any reasonable person without a miracle. 'Mere reason', he assures us, 'is insufficient to convince us of its veracity; and whoever is moved by faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding.' The theosophic foundation of the Bhuddistic Maya, or Universal Illusion, has been finely alluded to by Sir William Jones, who was deeply imbued with the Oriental mysticism and transcendental religious views. 'The inextricable difficulties', says he, 'attending the vulgar notion of material substances, concerning which we know this only, that we know nothing, induced many of the wisest among the ancients, and some of the most enlightened among the moderns, to believe that the whole creation was rather an energy than a work, by which the Infinite Being, who is present at all times and in all places, exhibits to the minds of His creatures a set of perceptions, like a wonderful picture or piece of music, always varied, yet always uniform; so that all bodies and their qualities exist, indeed, to every wise and useful purpose, but exist only as far as they are perceived--a theory no less pious than sublime, and as different from any principle of atheism as the brightest sunshine differs from the blackest midnight.' CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH.FOOTSTEPS OF THE ROSICRUCIANS AMIDST ARCHITECTURAL OBJECTSThomas Vaughan, of Oxford, a famous Rosicrucian, whom we have before mentioned, and who in the year 1650 published a book upon some of the mysteries of the Rosicrucians, has the following passage. His work is entitled Anthroposophia Theomagica; it has a supplemental treatise, called Anima Magica Abscondita; we quote from pages 26 and 27 of the united volume:'In regard of the Ashes of Vegetables', says Vaughan, 'although their weaker exterior Elements expire by violence of the fire, yet their Earth cannot be destroyed, but is Vitrified. The Fusion and Transparency of this substance is occasioned by the Radicall moysture or Seminal water of the Compound. This water resists the fury of the Fire, and cannot possibly be vanquished. "In hac Aqua (saith the learned Severine), Rosa latet in Hieme." These two principles are never separated; for Nature proceeds not so far in her Dissolutions. When Death hath done her worst, there is an Vnion between these two, and out of them shall God raise us at the last day, and restore us to a spiritual constitution. I do not conceive there shall be a Resurrection of every Species, but rather their Terrestrial parts, together with the element of Water (for there shall be "no more sea"; Revelation), shall be united in one mixture with the Earth, and fixed to a pure Diaphanous substance. This is St. John's Crystall gold, a fundamentall of the New Jerusalem--so called, not in respect of Colour, but constitution. Their Spirits, I suppose, shall be reduced to their first Limbus, a sphere of pure, ethereall fire, like rich Eternal Tapestry spread under the Throne of God.' Coleridge has the following, which bespeaks (and precedes), be it remarked, Professor Huxley's late supposed original speculations. The assertion is that the matrix or formative substance is, at the base, in all productions, 'from mineral to man', the same. 'The germinal powers of the plant transmute the fixed air and the elementary base of water into grass or leaves; and on these the organific principle in the ox or the elephant exercises an alchemy still more stupendous. As the unseen agency weaves its magic eddies, the foliage becomes indifferently the bone and its marrow, the pulpy brain or the solid ivory; and so on through all the departments of nature.'--Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, 6th edn., vol. i. p. 328. See also Herder's Ideen, book v. cap. iii. We think that we have here shown the origin of all Professor Huxley's speculations on this head appearing in his Lectures, and embodied in articles by him and others in scientific journals and elsewhere. In a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, Mr. W. S., Savory made the following remarks: 'There is close relationship between the animal and the vegetable kingdoms. The organic kingdom is connected with both by the process of crystallization, which closely resembles some of the processes of vegetation and of the growth of the lower orders of animal creation.' The 'Philosopher's Stone', in one of its many senses, may be taken to mean the magic mirror, or translucent 'spirit-seeing crystal', in which things impossible to ordinary ideas are disclosed. 'Know', says Synesius, 'that the Quintessence' (five-essence) 'and hidden thing of our "stone" is nothing less than our celestial and glorious soul, drawn by our magistery out of its mine, which engenders itself and brings itself forth.' The term for 'Chrystal', or 'Crystal' in Greek, is the following; which may be divided into twin or half-words in the way subjoined: ΧΡΥΣΤ ΑΛΛΟΣ Crystal is a hard, transparent, colourless 'stone' composed of simple plates, giving fire with steel, not fermenting with acid menstrua, calcining in a strong fire, of a regular angular figure, supposed by some to be 'formed of dew coagulated with nitre'.Amber is a solidified resinous gum, and is commonly full of electricity. It was supposed, in the hands of those gifted correspondingly, to abound with the means of magic. In this respect it resembles the thyrsus or pinecone, which was always carried in processions--Bacchanalian or otherwise--in connexion with the mysteries. We can consider the name of the palace, or fortress or 'royal' house in Grenada, in Spain, in this respect following. The word 'Alhambra' or 'Al-Hambra', means the 'Red'. In Arabia this means the place of eminence, the 'place of places', or the 'Red', in the same acceptation that the sea between Arabia and. Egypt is called the 'Red Sea'. All spirits generally (in connexion with those things supposed to be evil or indifferent especially) are 'laid' in the 'Red Sea', when disposed of by exorcism, or in forceful conjuration. We think that this 'Ham-bra', 'ambra', or 'ambre', is connected with the substance amber, which is sometimes very red, and which amber has always been associated with magical influence, magical formularies, and with spirits. We have seen an ancient crucifix, carved in amber, which was almost of the redness of coral. Amber has always been a substance (or gem, or gum) closely mingling with superstitions, from the most ancient times. For further connected ideas of the word 'amber,' and the substance 'amber' in relation to magic and sorcery, and for the recurrence of the word 'amber' and its varieties in matters referring to the mysteries and the mythology generally of ancient times, the reader will please to refer to other parts of this volume. While excavations were in progress at a mound in Orkney, described by Mr. John Stuart, Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, on July 18th, 1861, numerous lines of 'runes' of various sizes were found on the walls and on the roof of a large vaulted chamber in the earth. When the discoveries were completed, the series of runes exceeded 700 in number; figures of 'dragons and a cross' were also cut on some of the slabs. There are many mounds of various forms and sizes in this part of Orkney, and there is a celebrated circle of Druidical Stones on the narrow peninsula which divides the two lochs of Stennis. Pliny says that the word 'boa', for a snake, comes from 'bovine', because 'young snakes are fed with cow’s milk'. Here we have the unexpected and unexplained connexion of the ideas of 'snake' and 'cow'. The whole subject is replete with mystery, as well as the interchange of the references to the 'Cross' and the 'Dragon' found in the insignia of all faiths, and lurking amongst all religious buildings. On a Phœnician coin, found at Citium or Cyprus, and engraved in Higgins's Celtic Druids, p. 117, may be seen a cross and an animal resembling a hippocampus, both of which, or objects closely similar, appear on ancient sculptured stones in Scotland. The same two things, a cross and a strange-looking animal, half mammal, half fish or reptile, but called by Mr. Hodgson, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a Basilisk; appear together on a Mithraic sculptured slab of the Roman period, found in the North of England. What is more remarkable still, the 'star' and 'crescent', or 'sun' and 'moon', also appear, the whole being enclosed in what has been called the 'Fire-Triangle', or 'Triangle with its Face Upwards'. The Builder, of June 6th, 1863, has some valuable observations on 'Geometrical and other Symbols'. In regard to the word 'Alhambra', we may associate another word appropriated to Druidical Stones in England, Men-Amber. A famous Logan-Stone, commonly called 'Men-Amber', is in the parish of Sethney, near Pendennis, Cornwall. It is 11 feet long, 4 feet deep, and 6 feet wide. From this the following derivatives may be safely made: Men-Amber, Mon-Amber, Mon-Ambra, Mon-Amrha, Mon-Amra (M’Om-Ra, Om-Ra), 'Red Stone', or Magic, or Angelic, or Sacred Stone. This red colour is male--it signifies the Salvator. The following is the recognitory mark or talisman of the Ophidiæ: Φ. The Scarabæus, Bee, Ass, Typhon, Basilisk, Saint-Basil, the town of Basle (Basil, or Bâle), in Switzerland (of this place it may be remarked, that the appropriate cognisance is a 'basilisk' or a 'snake'), the mythic horse, or hippocampus, of Neptune, the lion, winged (or natural), the Pegasus or winged horse, the Python, the Hydra, the Bull (Osiris), the Cow (or Io), are mythological ideas which have each a family connexion. All the above signify an identical myth. This we shall presently show conclusively, and connect them all with the worship of fire. Our readers have no doubt often wondered to see on the table-monuments in Christian cathedrals a creature resembling a dog, or generally like some four-footed animal, trampled by the feet of the recumbent effigy. It is generally a male which is represented as performing this significant efforcement, trampling or piercing with the point of his sword, or the butt of the crosier (in his left hand, be it remembered). This crosier is the ancient pedum, or lituus. At Brent-Pelham, in Hertfordshire, there is a tomb, bearing the name of a knight, Pierce Shonke, built in the wall. He is said to have died A.D. 1086. Under the feet of the figure there is a cross-flourie, and under the cross a serpent (Weever, p. 549). There is an inscription which, translated, means: Nothing of Cadmus nor Saint George, those names of great renown, survives them but their names; But Shonke one serpent kills, t’other defies,See Weever's Ancient Funeral Monuments. He calls the place 'Burnt Pelham', and he says: 'In the wall of this Church lieth a most ancient Monument: A Stone wherein is figured a man, and about him an Eagle, a Lion, and a Bull, having all wings, and a fourth of the shape of an Angell, as if they should represent the four Evangelists: under the feet of the man is a crosse Flourie.' 'The being represented cross-legged is not always a proof of the deceased having had the merit either of having been a crusader, or having made a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. I have seen at Milton, in Yorkshire, two figures of the Sherbornes thus represented, who, I verily believe, could never have had more than a wish to enter the Holy Land.' Pennant writes thus of the Temple, London. Weever points out, in relation to the monument of Sir Pierce or Piers Shonke described above: 'Under the Cross is a Serpent. Sir Piers Shonke is thought to havve been sometime the Lord of an ancient decaied House, well moated, not farre from this place, called "O Piers Shonkes". He flourished Ann. a conquestu, vicesimo primo.'--Weever, p. 549. 'The personation of a dog--their invariable accompaniment, as it is also found amongst the sculptures of Persepolis, and in other places in the East--would
in itself be sufficient to fix the heathen appropriation of these crosses' (the ancient Irish crosses), 'as that animal can have no possible relation to Christianity; whereas, by the Tuath-de-danaans, it was accounted sacred, and its maintenance enjoined by the ordinances of the state, as it is still in the Zend books, which remain after Zoroaster.'--O’Brien’s Round Towers of Ireland, 1834, p. 359. 'I apprehend the word "Sin" came to mean Lion when the Lion was the emblem of the Sun at his summer solstice, when he was in his glory, and the Bull and the "Man" were the signs of the Sun at the Equinoxes, and the Eagle at the winter solstice.'--Anacalypsis, vol. ii. p. 292. Figure 23 is an Egyptian bas-relief, of which the explanation is the following: A is the Egyptian Eve trampling the Dragon (the goddess Neith, or Minerva); B, a Crocodile; C, Gorgon's head; D, Hawk (wisdom); E, feathers (soul). 'The first and strongest conviction which will flash on the mind of every ripe antiquary, whilst surveying the long series of Mexican and Toltecan monuments preserved in these various works, is the similarity which the ancient monuments of New Spain bear to the monumental records of Ancient Egypt. Whilst surveying them, the glance falls with familiar recognition on similar graduated pyramids, on similar marks of the same primeval Ophite worship, on vestiges of the same Triune and Solar Deity, on planispheres and temples, on idols and sculptures, some of rude and some of finished workmanship, often presenting the most striking affinities with the Egyptian.'--Stephens and Catherwood's Incidents of Travel, in Central America.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTHTHE ROUND TOWERS OF IRELANDIt is astonishing how much of the Egyptian and the Indian symbolism of very early ages passed into the usages of Christian times. Thus: the high cup and the hooked staff of the god became the bishop’s mitre and crosier; the term nun is purely Egyptian, and bore its present meaning; the erect oval, symbol of the Female Principle of Nature, became the Vesica Piscis, and a frame for Divine Things; the Crux Ansata, testifying the union of the Male and Female Principle in the most obvious manner, and denoting fecundity and abundance as borne in the god's hand, is transformed, by a simple inversion, into the Orb surmounted by the Cross, and the ensign of royalty. Refer to The Gnostics and their Remains,
Fig. 31 The famous 'Stone of Cabar', Kaaba, Cabir, or Kebir, at Mecca, which is so devoutly kissed by the faithful, is a talisman. It is called the 'Tabernacle' (Taberna, or Shrine) of the Star Venus. 'It is said that the figure of Venus is seen to this day engraved upon it, with a crescent.' The very Caaba itself was at first an idolatrous temple, where the Arabians worshipped 'Al-Uza'--that is, Venus. See Bobovius, Dr. Hyde Parker, and others, for particulars regarding the Arabian and Syrian Venus. She is the 'Uraniæ-corniculatæ sacrum' (Selden, De Venere Syriaca). The 'Ihrâm is a sacred habit, which consists only of two woollen wrappers; one closed about the middle of devotees, to cover', etc., 'and the other thrown over the shoulders.' Refer to observations about Noah, later in our book; Sale's Discourse, p. 121; Pococke's India in Greece, vol. ii. part i. p. 218. The Temple of Venus at Cyprus was the Temple of Venus-Urania. 'No woman entered this temple' (Sale's Koran, chap. vii. p. 119; note, p. 149). Accordingly, Anna Commena and Glycas (in Renald. De Mah.) say that 'the Mahometans do worship Venus'. Several of the Arabian idols were no more than large, rude stones (Sale's Discourse, p. 20; Koran, chap. v. p. 82). The stone at Mecca is black. The crypts, the subterranean churches and chambers, the choirs, and the labyrinths, were all intended to enshrine (as it were) and to conceal the central object of worship, or this sacred 'stone'. The pillar of Sueno, near Forres, in Scotland, is an obelisk. These obelisks were all astrological gnomons, or 'pins', to the imitative stellar mazes, or to the 'fateful charts', in the 'letter-written' skies. The astronomical 'stalls', or 'stables' were the many 'sections' into which the 'hosts' of the starry sky were distributed by the Chaldæans. The Decumens (or tenths), into which the ecliptic was divided, had also another name, which was Ashre, from the Hebrew particle as, or ash, which means 'fiery', or 'FIRE'. The Romans displayed reverence for the ideas connected with these sacred stones. Cambyses, in Egypt, left the obelisks or single magic stones. The Linghams in India were left untouched by the Mohammedan conquerors. The modern Romans have a phallus or lingha in front of almost all their churches. There is an obelisk, altered to suit Christian ideas (and surmounted in most instances in modern times by a cross), in front of every church in Rome. There are few churchyards in England without a phallus or obelisk. On the top is usually now fixed a dial. In, former times, when the obeliscar form was adopted for ornaments of all sorts, it was one of the various kinds of Christian acceptable cross which was placed on the summit. We have the single stone of memorial surviving yet in the Fire-Towers (Round Towers of Ireland). This phallus, upright, or 'pin of stone', is found in every Gilgal or Druidical Circle. It is the boundary-stone or terminus, the parish mark-stone; it stands on every motehill lastly (and chiefly), this stone survives in the stone in the coronation chair at Westminster (of which more hereafter), and also in the famous 'London Stone', or the palladium, in Cannon Street, City of London: which stone is said to be 'London’s fate'--which we hope it is not to be in the unprosperous sense. The letter 'S', among the Gnostics, with its. grimmer or harsher brother (or sister) 'Z', was called the 'reprobate' or 'malignant' letter. Of this portentous sigma (or sign) 'S' (the angular and not serpentine 'S' is the grinding or bass 'S'--the letter 'Z'), Dionysius the Halicarnassian says as follows: that the 'letter S makes a noise more brutal than human. Therefore the ancients used it very sparingly' ('Περἰ συνθες': see, also, sect. 14 p of Origin and Progress of Language, vol. ii. p. 233). Notwithstanding the contentions of opposing antiquaries, and the usually received ideas that the 'Irish Round Towers' were of Christian, and not heathen, origin, the following book, turning up very unexpectedly, seems to settle the question in favour of O’Brien, and of those who urge the incredibly ancient devotion of the Round Towers to a heathen myth--fire-worship, in fact. 'John O’Daly, 9 Anglesea Street, Dublin. Catalogue of Rare and Curious Books, No. 10, October 1855, Item 105: De Antiquitate Turrum Belanorum Pagana Kerriensi, et de Architectura non Campanilis Ecclesiasticæ, T. D. Corcagiensi, Hiberno. Small 4to, old calf, with numerous woodcut engravings of Round Towers interspersed through the text, £10. Lovanii, 1610.' The bookseller adds 'I never saw another copy of this curious old book.' This book--which there is no doubt is genuine--would seem finally to settle the question as to the character of these Irish Round Towers, which are not Christian belfries, as Dr. George Petrie, and others sharing his erroneous beliefs, persistently assure us, but heathen Lithoi, or obelisks, in the sense of all those referred to in other parts of this work. They were raised in the early religions, as the objects of a universal worship. All antiquaries know of what object the phallus stands as the symbolical representation. It needs not to be more particular here. The 'Fleur-de-Lis' is a sacred symbol descending from the Chaldæans, adopted by the Egyptians, who converted it into the deified 'scarab', the emblem of the Moon-god; and it is perpetuated in that mystically magnificent badge of France, the female 'Lily', or 'Lis'. All the proofs of this lie concealed in our Genealogy of the Fleur-de-Lis (and following pages, also post), and the 'Flowers-de-Luce', or the 'Fleurs-de-Lis', passim. It means 'generation', or the vaunt realized of the Turkish Soldan, 'Donec totum impleat orbem'. The 'Prince of Wales’s Feathers', we believe to be, and to mean, the same thing as this sublime 'Fleur-de-Lis'. It resembles the object closely, with certain effectual, ingenious disguises. The origin of the Prince of Wales’s plume is supposed to be the adoption of the king's crest (by Edward the Black Prince, at the battle of Cressy), on the discovery of the slain body of the blind King of Bohemia. Bohemia again!--the land of the 'Fire-worshipping Kings' whose palace, the Radschin, still exists on the heights near Prague. We believe the crest and the motto of the Prince of Wales to have been in use, for our Princes of Wales, at a much earlier period, and that history, in this respect, is perpetuating an error--perhaps an originally intended mistake. We think the following, which appears now for the first time; will prove this fact. Edward the Second, afterwards King of England, was the first Prince of Wales. There is reason to suppose that our valiant Edward the First, a monarch of extraordinary acquirements, was initiated into the knowledge of the abstruse Orientals. An old historian has the following: 'On their giving' (i.e. the assembled Welsh) 'a joyful and surprised assent to the King's demand, whether they would accept a king born really among them, and therefore a true Welshman, he presented to them his new-born son, exclaiming in broken Welsh "Eich dyn!", that. is "This is your man"--which has been corrupted into the present motto to the Prince of Wales's crest, "Ich dien", or "I serve". The meaning of 'I serve' in this view, is, that 'I' suffice, or 'the Lis', or 'the act', suffices (refer to pages and figures post), for all the phenomena of the world.
End Section One End Notes Lady-Cow, Lady-Cow, The 'Lady-Bird', or 'Cow', is the Virgin Mary, the 'Little One' under the 'Stone', or the 'Mystic Human Possibility', is the 'Infant Saviour' born in the mysterious 'Month of the Propitiation', or the mystical Astrological and Astronomical 'Escaped Month' of the Zodiac; and the 'Stone' is the 'Philosopher's Stone'. [3] The full quotation is the following: 'Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon' (here steps in some of the lore of the Masonic order) 'in all his glory was not arrayed' (or exalted, or dignified, as it is more correctly rendered out of the original) 'like one of these' (St. Matt. vi. 28). [4] The whole forming a 'capital', 'chapter', 'chapitre', 'chapel', cancel', or 'chancel'--hence our word, and the sublime judicial office of 'Chancellor', and 'Chancery'. [5] The Shining Star as the Harbinger in the Moon's Embrace. Meaning the Divine Post-diluvian Remission and Reconciliation. Thus the sublime Mahometan mythic device or cognisance--the Crescent of the New Moon (lying on her back), and the Shining Star in this display: [6] Horns generally--whether the horns of the cocu, which need not be those of the 'wittol', or contented, betrayed husband, but generally implying the mysterious ultra-natural scorn, ranging in meaning with the 'attiring' and stigmatizing of Acton turned into the stag, and hunted by his own hounds, for surprising Diana naked. [7] It was also something else--to which we make reference in other parts of our book. |
