ROSA ALCHEMICA

BY

W. B. YEATS

 O blessed and happy he, who knowing the mysteries of the gods, sanctifies his life, and purifies his soul, celebrating orgies in themountains with holy purifications. --_Euripides. _

 ROSA ALCHEMICA. I

It is now more than ten years since I met, for the last time, MichaelRobartes, and for the first time and the last time his friends andfellow students; and witnessed his and their tragic end, and enduredthose strange experiences, which have changed me so that my writingshave grown less popular and less intelligible, and driven me almostto the verge of taking the habit of St. Dominic. I had just publishedRosa Alchemica, a little work on the Alchemists, somewhat in themanner of Sir Thomas Browne, and had received many letters frombelievers in the arcane sciences, upbraiding what they called mytimidity, for they could not believe so evident sympathy but thesympathy of the artist, which is half pity, for everything which hasmoved men's hearts in any age. I had discovered, early in myresearches, that their doctrine was no merely chemical phantasy, buta philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements and to manhimself; and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metalsmerely as part of an universal transmutation of all things into somedivine and imperishable substance; and this enabled me to make mylittle book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life intoart, and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly ofessences. 

I was sitting dreaming of what I had written, in my house in one ofthe old parts of Dublin; a house my ancestors had made almost famousthrough their part in the politics of the city and their friendshipswith the famous men of their generations; and was feeling an unwontedhappiness at having at last accomplished a long-cherished design, andmade my rooms an expression of this favourite doctrine. Theportraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; andtapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over thedoors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beautyand peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on therose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate andprecise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at thegrey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all aChristian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when Ipondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I hadmortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in variousbeauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labourwith many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, whereevery book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, andof a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the gloryof the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the bluegrey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of humanpassions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gatheredabout me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced everypleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in thetriumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in thefirelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, forwhich symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of myworld, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as theirown; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many othermoments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness exceptthe bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed thisthought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow. Allthose forms: that Madonna with her brooding purity, those rapturousfaces singing in the morning light, those bronze divinities withtheir passionless dignity, those wild shapes rushing from despair todespair, belonged to a divine world wherein I had no part; and everyexperience, however profound, every perception, however exquisite, would bring me the bitter dream of a limitless energy I could neverknow, and even in my most perfect moment I would be two selves, theone watching with heavy eyes the other's moment of content. I hadheaped about me the gold born in the crucibles of others; but thesupreme dream of the alchemist, the transmutation of the weary heartinto a weariless spirit, was as far from me as, I doubted not, it hadbeen from him also. I turned to my last purchase, a set of alchemicalapparatus which, the dealer in the Rue le Peletier had assured me, once belonged to Raymond Lully, and as I joined the _alembic_ tothe _athanor_ and laid the _lavacrum maris_ at their side, I understood the alchemical doctrine, that all beings, divided fromthe great deep where spirits wander, one and yet a multitude, areweary; and sympathized, in the pride of my connoisseurship, with theconsuming thirst for destruction which made the alchemist veil underhis symbols of lions and dragons, of eagles and ravens, of dew and ofnitre, a search for an essence which would dissolve all mortalthings. I repeated to myself the ninth key of Basilius Valentinus, inwhich he compares the fire of the last day to the fire of thealchemist, and the world to the alchemist's furnace, and would haveus know that all must be dissolved before the divine substance, material gold or immaterial ecstasy, awake. I had dissolved indeedthe mortal world and lived amid immortal essences, but had obtainedno miraculous ecstasy. As I thought of these things, I drew aside thecurtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to mytroubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the skywere the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labourcontinually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodiesinto souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour mymortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men ofletters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaboratespiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so manydreams. 

II

My reverie was broken by a loud knocking at the door, and I wonderedthe more at this because I had no visitors, and had bid my servantsdo all things silently, lest they broke the dream of my inner life. Feeling a little curious, I resolved to go to the door myself, and, taking one of the silver candlesticks from the mantlepiece, began todescend the stairs. The servants appeared to be out, for though thesound poured through every corner and crevice of the house there wasno stir in the lower rooms. I remembered that because my needs wereso few, my part in life so little, they had begun to come and go asthey would, often leaving me alone for hours. The emptiness andsilence of a world from which I had driven everything but dreamssuddenly overwhelmed me, and I shuddered as I drew the bolt. I foundbefore me Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whosewild red hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and roughclothes, made him look now, just as they used to do fifteen yearsbefore, something between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. He hadrecently come to Ireland, he said, and wished to see me on a matterof importance: indeed, the only matter of importance for him and forme. His voice brought up before me our student years in Paris, andremembering the magnetic power ne had once possessed over me, alittle fear mingled with much annoyance at this irrelevant intrusion, as I led the way up the wide staircase, where Swift had passed jokingand railing, and Curran telling stories and quoting Greek, in simplerdays, before men's minds, subtilized and complicated by the romanticmovement in art and literature, began to tremble on the verge of someunimagined revelation. I felt that my hand shook, and saw that thelight of the candle wavered and quivered more than it need have uponthe Maenads on the old French panels, making them look like the firstbeings slowly shaping in the formless and void darkness. When thedoor had closed, and the peacock curtain, glimmering like many-coloured flame, fell between us and the world, I felt, in a way Icould not understand, that some singular and unexpected thing wasabout to happen. I went over to the mantlepiece, and finding that alittle chainless bronze censer, set, upon the outside, with pieces ofpainted china by Orazio Fontana, which I had filled with antiqueamulets, had fallen upon its side and poured out its contents, Ibegan to gather the amulets into the bowl, partly to collect mythoughts and partly with that habitual reverence which seemed to methe due of things so long connected with secret hopes and fears. 'Isee, ' said Michael Robartes, 'that you are still fond of incense, andI can show you an incense more precious than any you have ever seen, 'and as he spoke he took the censer out of my hand and put the amuletsin a little heap between the _athanor_ and the _alembic_. Isat down, and he sat down at the side of the fire, and sat there forawhile looking into the fire, and holding the censer in his hand. 'Ihave come to ask you something, ' he said, 'and the incense will fillthe room, and our thoughts, with its sweet odour while we aretalking. I got it from an old man in Syria, who said it was made fromflowers, of one kind with the flowers that laid their heavy purplepetals upon the hands and upon the hair and upon the feet of Christin the Garden of Gethsemane, and folded Him in their heavy breath, until he cried against the cross and his destiny. ' He shook some dustinto the censer out of a small silk bag, and set the censer upon thefloor and lit the dust which sent up a blue stream of smoke, thatspread out over the ceiling, and flowed downwards again until it waslike Milton's banyan tree. It filled me, as incense often does, witha faint sleepiness, so that I started when he said, 'I have come toask you that question which I asked you in Paris, and which you leftParis rather than answer. '

He had turned his eyes towards me, and I saw them glitter in thefirelight, and through the incense, as I replied: 'You mean, will Ibecome an initiate of your Order of the Alchemical Rose? I would notconsent in Paris, when I was full of unsatisfied desire, and now thatI have at last fashioned my life according to my desire, am I likelyto consent?'

'You have changed greatly since then, ' he answered. 'I have read yourbooks, and now I see you among all these images, and I understand youbetter than you do yourself, for I have been with many and manydreamers at the same cross-ways. You have shut away the world andgathered the gods about you, and if you do not throw yourself attheir feet, you will be always full of lassitude, and of waveringpurpose, for a man must forget he is miserable in the bustle andnoise of the multitude in this world and in time; or seek a mysticalunion with the multitude who govern this world and time. ' And then hemurmured something I could not hear, and as though to someone I couldnot see. 

For a moment the room appeared to darken, as it used to do when hewas about to perform some singular experiment, and in the darknessthe peacocks upon the doors seemed to glow with a more intensecolour. I cast off the illusion, which was, I believe, merely causedby memory, and by the twilight of incense, for I would notacknowledge that he could overcome my now mature intellect; and Isaid: 'Even if I grant that I need a spiritual belief and some formof worship, why should I go to Eleusis and not to Calvary?' He leanedforward and began speaking with a slightly rhythmical intonation, andas he spoke I had to struggle again with the shadow, as of some oldernight than the night of the sun, which began to dim the light of thecandles and to blot out the little gleams upon the corner of picture-frames and on the bronze divinities, and to turn the blue of theincense to a heavy purple; while it left the peacocks to glimmer andglow as though each separate colour were a living spirit. I hadfallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard himspeaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes withonly one god, ' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives inimagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does hemeet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power ofRoland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet ofthe body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishingaway, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down theworld and could not find them; and under the power of all thosecountless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodiesin the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under thepower of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have woneverything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds andfishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The manythink humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake themagain; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and insoft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we layin deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmakinghumanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips. '

He had stood up and begun to walk to and fro, and had become in mywaking dream a shuttle weaving an immense purple web whose folds hadbegun to fill the room. The room seemed to have become inexplicablysilent, as though all but the web and the weaving were at an end inthe world. 'They have come to us; they have come to us, ' the voicebegan again; 'all that have ever been in your reverie, all that youhave met with in books. There is Lear, his head still wet with thethunder-storm, and he laughs because you thought yourself anexistence who are but a shadow, and him a shadow who is an eternalgod; and there is Beatrice, with her lips half parted in a smile, asthough all the stars were about to pass away in a sigh of love; andthere is the mother of the God of humility who cast so great a spellover men that they have tried to unpeople their hearts that he mightreign alone, but she holds in her hand the rose whose every petal isa god; and there, O swiftly she comes! is Aphrodite under a twilightfalling from the wings of numberless sparrows, and about her feet arethe grey and white doves. ' In the midst of my dream I saw him holdout his left arm and pass his right hand over it as though he strokedthe wings of doves. I made a violent effort which seemed almost totear me in two, and said with forced determination: 'You would sweepme away into an indefinite world which fills me with terror; and yeta man is a great man just in so far as he can make his mind reflecteverything with indifferent precision like a mirror. ' I seemed to beperfectly master of myself, and went on, but more rapidly: 'I commandyou to leave me at once, for your ideas and phantasies are but theillusions that creep like maggots into civilizations when they beginto decline, and into minds when they begin to decay. ' I had grownsuddenly angry, and seizing the _alembic_ from the table, wasabout to rise and strike him with it, when the peacocks on the doorbehind him appeared to grow immense; and then the _alembic_ fellfrom my fingers and I was drowned in a tide of green and blue andbronze feathers, and as I struggled hopelessly I heard a distantvoice saying: 'Our master Avicenna has written that all life proceedsout of corruption. ' The glittering feathers had now covered mecompletely, and I knew that I had struggled for hundreds of years, and was conquered at last. I was sinking into the depth when thegreen and blue and bronze that seemed to fill the world became a seaof flame and swept me away, and as I was swirled along I heard avoice over my head cry, 'The mirror is broken in two pieces, ' andanother voice answer, 'The mirror is broken in four pieces, ' and amore distant voice cry with an exultant cry, 'The mirror is brokeninto numberless pieces'; and then a multitude of pale hands werereaching towards me, and strange gentle faces bending above me, andhalf wailing and half caressing voices uttering words that wereforgotten the moment they were spoken. I was being lifted out of thetide of flame, and felt my memories, my hopes, my thoughts, my will, everything I held to be myself, melting away; then I seemed to risethrough numberless companies of beings who were, I understood, insome way more certain than thought, each wrapped in his eternalmoment, in the perfect lifting of an arm, in a little circlet ofrhythmical words, in dreaming with dim eyes and half-closed eyelids. And then I passed beyond these forms, which were so beautiful theyhad almost ceased to be, and, having endured strange moods, melancholy, as it seemed, with the weight of many worlds, I passedinto that Death which is Beauty herself, and into that Lonelinesswhich all the multitudes desire without ceasing. All things that hadever lived seemed to come and dwell in my heart, and I in theirs; andI had never again known mortality or tears, had I not suddenly fallenfrom the certainty of vision into the uncertainty of dream, andbecome a drop of molten gold falling with immense rapidity, through anight elaborate with stars, and all about me a melancholy exultantwailing. I fell and fell and fell, and then the wailing was but thewailing of the wind in the chimney, and I awoke to find myselfleaning upon the table and supporting my head with my hands. I sawthe _alembic_ swaying from side to side in the distant corner ithad rolled to, and Michael Robartes watching me and waiting. 'I willgo wherever you will, ' I said, 'and do whatever you bid me, for Ihave been with eternal things. ' 'I knew, ' he replied, 'you must needanswer as you have answered, when I heard the storm begin. You mustcome to a great distance, for we were commanded to build our templebetween the pure multitude by the waves and the impure multitude ofmen. '

III

I did not speak as we drove through the deserted streets, for my mindwas curiously empty of familiar thoughts and experiences; it seemedto have been plucked out of the definite world and cast naked upon ashoreless sea. There were moments when the vision appeared on thepoint of returning, and I would half-remember, with an ecstasy of joyor sorrow, crimes and heroisms, fortunes and misfortunes; or begin tocontemplate, with a sudden leaping of the heart, hopes and terrors, desires and ambitions, alien to my orderly and careful life; and thenI would awake shuddering at the thought that some great imponderablebeing had swept through my mind. It was indeed days before thisfeeling passed perfectly away, and even now, when I have soughtrefuge in the only definite faith, I feel a great tolerance for thosepeople with incoherent personalities, who gather in the chapels andmeeting-places of certain obscure sects, because I also have feltfixed habits and principles dissolving before a power, which was_hysterica passio_ or sheer madness, if you will, but was sopowerful in its melancholy exultation that I tremble lest it wakeagain and drive me from my new-found peace. 

When we came in the grey light to the great half-empty terminus, itseemed to me I was so changed that I was no more, as man is, a momentshuddering at eternity, but eternity weeping and laughing over amoment; and when we had started and Michael Robartes had fallenasleep, as he soon did, his sleeping face, in which there was no signof all that had so shaken me and that now kept me wakeful, was to myexcited mind more like a mask than a face. The fancy possessed methat the man behind it had dissolved away like salt in water, andthat it laughed and sighed, appealed and denounced at the bidding ofbeings greater or less than man. 'This is not Michael Robartes atall: Michael Robartes is dead; dead for ten, for twenty yearsperhaps, ' I kept repeating to myself. I fell at last into a feverishsleep, waking up from time to time when we rushed past some littletown, its slated roofs shining with wet, or still lake gleaming inthe cold morning light. I had been too pre-occupied to ask where wewere going, or to notice what tickets Michael Robartes had taken, butI knew now from the direction of the sun that we were going westward;and presently I knew also, by the way in which the trees had growninto the semblance of tattered beggars flying with bent heads towardsthe east, that we were approaching the western coast. Thenimmediately I saw the sea between the low hills upon the left, itsdull grey broken into white patches and lines. 

When we left the train we had still, I found, some way to go, and setout, buttoning our coats about us, for the wind was bitter andviolent. Michael Robartes was silent, seeming anxious to leave me tomy thoughts; and as we walked between the sea and the rocky side of agreat promontory, I realized with a new perfection what a shock hadbeen given to all my habits of thought and of feelings, if indeedsome mysterious change had not taken place in the substance of mymind, for the grey waves, plumed with scudding foam, had grown partof a teeming, fantastic inner life; and when Michael Robartes pointedto a square ancient-looking house, with a much smaller and newerbuilding under its lee, set out on the very end of a dilapidated andalmost deserted pier, and said it was the Temple of the AlchemicalRose, I was possessed with the phantasy that the sea, which keptcovering it with showers of white foam, was claiming it as part ofsome indefinite and passionate life, which had begun to war upon ourorderly and careful days, and was about to plunge the world into anight as obscure as that which followed the downfall of the classicalworld. One part of my mind mocked this phantastic terror, but theother, the part that still lay half plunged in vision, listened tothe clash of unknown armies, and shuddered at unimaginablefanaticisms, that hung in those grey leaping waves. 

We had gone but a few paces along the pier when we came upon an oldman, who was evidently a watchman, for he sat in an overset barrel, close to a place where masons had been lately working upon a break inthe pier, and had in front of him a fire such as one sees slung undertinkers' carts. I saw that he was also a voteen, as the peasants say, for there was a rosary hanging from a nail on the rim of the barrel, and I saw I shuddered, and I did not know why I shuddered. We hadpassed him a few yards when I heard him cry in Gaelic, 'Idolaters, idolaters, go down to Hell with your witches and your devils; go downto Hell that the herrings may come again into the bay'; and for somemoments I could hear him half screaming and half muttering behind us. 'Are you not afraid, ' I said, 'that these wild fishing people may dosome desperate thing against you?'

'I and mine, ' he answered, 'are long past human hurt or help, beingincorporate with immortal spirits, and when we die it shall be theconsummation of the supreme work. A time will come for these peoplealso, and they will sacrifice a mullet to Artemis, or some other fishto some new divinity, unless indeed their own divinities, the Dagda, with his overflowing cauldron, Lug, with his spear dipped in poppy-juice lest it rush forth hot for battle. Aengus, with the three birdson his shoulder, Bodb and his red swineherd, and all the heroicchildren of Dana, set up once more their temples of grey stone. Theirreign has never ceased, but only waned in power a little, for theSidhe still pass in every wind, and dance and play at hurley, andfight their sudden battles in every hollow and on every hill; butthey cannot build their temples again till there have been martyrdomsand victories, and perhaps even that long-foretold battle in theValley of the Black Pig. '

Keeping close to the wall that went about the pier on the seawardside, to escape the driving foam and the wind, which threatened everymoment to lift us off our feet, we made our way in silence to thedoor of the square building. Michael Robartes opened it with a key, on which I saw the rust of many salt winds, and led me along a barepassage and up an uncarpeted stair to a little room surrounded withbookshelves. A meal would be brought, but only of fruit, for I mustsubmit to a tempered fast before the ceremony, he explained, and withit a book on the doctrine and method of the Order, over which I wasto spend what remained of the winter daylight. He then left me, promising to return an hour before the ceremony. I began searchingamong the bookshelves, and found one of the most exhaustivealchemical libraries I have ever seen. There were the works ofMorienus, who hid his immortal body under a shirt of hair-cloth; ofAvicenna, who was a drunkard and yet controlled numberless legions ofspirits; of Alfarabi, who put so many spirits into his lute that hecould make men laugh, or weep, or fall in deadly trance as he would;of Lully, who transformed himself into the likeness of a red cock; ofFlamel, who with his wife Parnella achieved the elixir many hundredsof years ago, and is fabled to live still in Arabia among theDervishes; and of many of less fame. There were very few mystics butalchemical mystics, and because, I had little doubt, of the devotionto one god of the greater number and of the limited sense of beauty, which Robartes would hold an inevitable consequence; but I did noticea complete set of facsimiles of the prophetical writings of WilliamBlake, and probably because of the multitudes that thronged hisillumination and were 'like the gay fishes on the wave when the moonsucks up the dew. ' I noted also many poets and prose writers of everyage, but only those who were a little weary of life, as indeed thegreatest have been everywhere, and who cast their imagination to us, as a something they needed no longer now that they were going up intheir fiery chariots. 

Presently I heard a tap at the door, and a woman came in and laid alittle fruit upon the table. I judged that she had once beenhandsome, but her cheeks were hollowed by what I would have held, hadI seen her anywhere else, an excitement of the flesh and a thirst forpleasure, instead of which it doubtless was an excitement of theimagination and a thirst for beauty. I asked her some questionconcerning the ceremony, but getting no answer except a shake of thehead, saw that I must await initiation in silence. When I had eaten, she came again, and having laid a curiously wrought bronze box on thetable, lighted the candles, and took away the plates and theremnants. So soon as I was alone, I turned to the box, and found thatthe peacocks of Hera spread out their tails over the sides and lid, against a background, on which were wrought great stars, as though toaffirm that the heavens were a part of their glory. In the box was abook bound in vellum, and having upon the vellum and in very delicatecolours, and in gold, the alchemical rose with many spears thrustingagainst it, but in vain, as was shown by the shattered points ofthose nearest to the petals. The book was written upon vellum, and inbeautiful clear letters, interspersed with symbolical pictures andilluminations, after the manner of the Splendor Soils. 

The first chapter described how six students, of Celtic descent, gavethemselves separately to the study of alchemy, and solved, one themystery of the Pelican, another the mystery of the green Dragon, another the mystery of the Eagle, another that of Salt and Mercury. What seemed a succession of accidents, but was, the book declared, the contrivance of preternatural powers, brought them together in thegarden of an inn in the South of France, and while they talkedtogether the thought came to them that alchemy was the gradualdistillation of the contents of the soul, until they were ready toput off the mortal and put on the immortal. An owl passed, rustlingamong the vine-leaves overhead, and then an old woman came, leaningupon a stick, and, sitting close to them, took up the thought wherethey had dropped it. Having expounded the whole principle ofspiritual alchemy, and bid them found the Order of the AlchemicalRose, she passed from among them, and when they would have followedshe was nowhere to be seen. They formed themselves into an Order, holding their goods and making their researches in common, and, asthey became perfect in the alchemical doctrine, apparitions came andwent among them, and taught them more and more marvellous mysteries. The book then went on to expound so much of these as the neophyte waspermitted to know, dealing at the outset and at considerable lengthwith the independent reality of our thoughts, which was, it declared, the doctrine from which all true doctrines rose. If you imagine, itsaid, the semblance of a living being, it is at once possessed by awandering soul, and goes hither and thither working good or evil, until the moment of its death has come; and gave many examples, received, it said, from many gods. Eros had taught them how tofashion forms in which a divine soul could dwell, and whisper whatthey would into sleeping minds; and Ate forms from which demonicbeings could pour madness, or unquiet dreams, into sleeping blood;and Hermes, that if you powerfully imagined a hound at your bedsideit would keep watch there until you woke, and drive away all but themightiest demons, but that if your imagination was weakly, the houndwould be weakly also, and the demons prevail, and the hound soon die;and Aphrodite, that if you made, by a strong imagining, a dovecrowned with silver and had it flutter over your head, its softcooing would make sweet dreams of immortal love gather and brood overmortal sleep; and all divinities alike had revealed with manywarnings and lamentations that all minds are continually giving birthto such beings, and sending them forth to work health or disease, joyor madness. If you would give forms to the evil powers, it went on, you were to make them ugly, thrusting out a lip, with the thirsts oflife, or breaking the proportions of a body with the burdens of life;but the divine powers would only appear in beautiful shapes, whichare but, as it were, shapes trembling out of existence, folding upinto a timeless ecstasy, drifting with half-shut eyes, into a sleepystillness. The bodiless souls who descended into these forms werewhat men called the moods; and worked all great changes in the world;for just as the magician or the artist could call them when he would, so they could call out of the mind of the magician or the artist, orif they were demons, out of the mind of the mad or the ignoble, whatshape they would, and through its voice and its gestures pourthemselves out upon the world. In this way all great events wereaccomplished; a mood, a divinity, or a demon, first descending like afaint sigh into men's minds and then changing their thoughts andtheir actions until hair that was yellow had grown black, or hairthat was black had grown yellow, and empires moved their border, asthough they were but drifts of leaves. The rest of the book containedsymbols of form, and sound, and colour, and their attribution todivinities and demons, so that the initiate might fashion a shape forany divinity or any demon, and be as powerful as Avicenna among thosewho live under the roots of tears and of laughter. 

IV

A couple of hours after Sunset Michael Robartes returned and told methat I would have to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique dance, because before my initiation could be perfected I had to join threetimes in a magical dance, for rhythm was the wheel of Eternity, onwhich alone the transient and accidental could be broken, and thespirit set free. I found that the steps, which were simple enough, resembled certain antique Greek dances, and having been a good dancerin my youth and the master of many curious Gaelic steps, I soon hadthem in my memory. He then robed me and himself in a costume whichsuggested by its shape both Greece and Egypt, but by its crimsoncolour a more passionate life than theirs; and having put into myhands a little chainless censer of bronze, wrought into the likenessof a rose, by some modern craftsman, he told me to open a small dooropposite to the door by which I had entered. I put my hand to thehandle, but the moment I did so the fumes of the incense, helpedperhaps by his mysterious glamour, made me fall again into a dream, in which I seemed to be a mask, lying on the counter of a littleEastern shop. Many persons, with eyes so bright and still that I knewthem for more than human, came in and tried me on their faces, but atlast flung me into a corner with a little laughter; but all thispassed in a moment, for when I awoke my hand was still upon thehandle. I opened the door, and found myself in a marvellous passage, along whose sides were many divinities wrought in a mosaic, not lessbeautiful than the mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a lesssevere beauty; the predominant colour of each divinity, which wassurely a symbolic colour, being repeated in the lamps that hung fromthe ceiling, a curiously-scented lamp before every divinity. I passedon, marvelling exceedingly how these enthusiasts could have createdall this beauty in so remote a place, and half persuaded to believein a material alchemy, by the sight of so much hidden wealth; thecenser filling the air, as I passed, with smoke of ever-changingcolour. 

I stopped before a door, on whose bronze panels were wrought greatwaves in whose shadow were faint suggestions of terrible faces. Thosebeyond it seemed to have heard our steps, for a voice cried: 'Is thework of the Incorruptible Fire at an end?' and immediately MichaelRobartes answered: 'The perfect gold has come from the_atbanor_. ' The door swung open, and we were in a great circularroom, and among men and women who were dancing slowly in crimsonrobes. Upon the ceiling was an immense rose wrought in mosaic; andabout the walls, also in mosaic, was a battle of gods and angels, thegods glimmering like rubies and sapphires, and the angels of the onegreyness, because, as Michael Robartes whispered, they had renouncedtheir divinity, and turned from the unfolding of their separatehearts, out of love for a God of humility and sorrow. Pillarssupported the roof and made a kind of circular cloister, each pillarbeing a column of confused shapes, divinities, it seemed, of thewind, who rose as in a whirling dance of more than human vehemence, and playing upon pipes and cymbals; and from among these shapes werethrust out hands, and in these hands were censers. I was bid place mycenser also in a hand and take my place and dance, and as I turnedfrom the pillars towards the dancers, I saw that the floor was of agreen stone, and that a pale Christ on a pale cross was wrought inthe midst. I asked Robartes the meaning of this, and was told thatthey desired 'To trouble His unity with their multitudinous feet. 'The dance wound in and out, tracing upon the floor the shapes ofpetals that copied the petals in the rose overhead, and to the soundof hidden instruments which were perhaps of an antique pattern, for Ihave never heard the like; and every moment the dance was morepassionate, until all the winds of the world seemed to have awakenedunder our feet. After a little I had grown weary, and stood under apillar watching the coming and going of those flame-like figures;until gradually I sank into a half-dream, from which I was awakenedby seeing the petals of the great rose, which had no longer the lookof mosaic, falling slowly through the incense-heavy air, and, asthey fell, shaping into the likeness of living beings of anextraordinary beauty. Still faint and cloud-like, they began todance, and as they danced took a more and more definite shape, sothat I was able to distinguish beautiful Grecian faces and augustEgyptian faces, and now and again to name a divinity by the staff inhis hand or by a bird fluttering over his head; and soon every mortalfoot danced by the white foot of an immortal; and in the troubledeyes that looked into untroubled shadowy eyes, I saw the brightnessof uttermost desire as though they had found at length, afterunreckonable wandering, the lost love of their youth. Sometimes, butonly for a moment, I saw a faint solitary figure with a Rosa veiledface, and carrying a faint torch, flit among the dancers, but like adream within a dream, like a shadow of a shadow, and I knew by anunderstanding born from a deeper fountain than thought, that it wasEros himself, and that his face was veiled because no man or womanfrom the beginning of the world has ever known what love is, orlooked into his eyes, for Eros alone of divinities is altogether aspirit, and hides in passions not of his essence if he would communewith a mortal heart. So that if a man love nobly he knows lovethrough infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending sympathy; and ifignobly through vehement jealousy, sudden hatred, and unappeasabledesire; but unveiled love he never knows. While I thought thesethings, a voice cried to me from the crimson figures: 'Into thedance! there is none that can be spared out of the dance; into thedance! into the dance! that the gods may make them bodies out of thesubstance of our hearts'; and before I could answer, a mysteriouswave of passion, that seemed like the soul of the dance moving withinour souls, took Alchemica. Hold of me, and I was swept, neitherconsenting nor refusing, into the midst. I was dancing with an immortalaugust woman, who had black lilies in her hair, and her dreamy gestureseemed laden with a wisdom more profound than the darkness that isbetween star and star, and with a love like the love that breathed uponthe waters; and as we danced on and on, the incense drifted over usand round us, covering us away as in the heart of the world, and agesseemed to pass, and tempests to awake and perish in the folds of ourrobes and in her heavy hair. 

Suddenly I remembered that her eyelids had never quivered, and thather lilies had not dropped a black petal, or shaken from theirplaces, and understood with a great horror that I danced with one whowas more or less than human, and who was drinking up my soul as an oxdrinks up a wayside pool; and I fell, and darkness passed over me. 

I awoke suddenly as though something had awakened me, and saw that Iwas lying on a roughly painted floor, and that on the ceiling, whichwas at no great distance, was a roughly painted rose, and about me onthe walls half-finished paintings. The pillars and the censers hadgone; and near me a score of sleepers lay wrapped in disorderedrobes, their upturned faces looking to my imagination like hollowmasks; and a chill dawn was shining down upon them from a long windowI had not noticed before; and outside the sea roared. I saw MichaelRobartes lying at a little distance and beside him an overset bowl ofwrought bronze which looked as though it had once held incense. As Isat thus, I heard a sudden tumult of angry men and women's voices mixwith the roaring of the sea; and leaping to my feet, I went quicklyto Michael Robartes, and tried to shake him out of his sleep. I thenseized him by the shoulder and tried to lift him, but he fellbackwards, and sighed faintly; and the voices became louder andangrier; and there was a sound of heavy blows upon the door, whichopened on to the pier. Suddenly I heard a sound of rending wood, andI knew it had begun to give, and I ran to the door of the room. Ipushed it open and came out upon a passage whose bare boardsclattered under my feet, and found in the passage another door whichled into an empty kitchen; and as I passed through the door I heardtwo crashes in quick succession, and knew by the sudden noise of feetand the shouts that the door which opened on to the pier had falleninwards. I ran from the kitchen and out into a small yard, and fromthis down some steps which descended the seaward and sloping side ofthe pier, and from the steps clambered along the water's edge, withthe angry voices ringing in my ears. This part of the pier had beenbut lately refaced with blocks of granite, so that it was almostclear of seaweed; but when I came to the old part, I found it soslippery with green weed that I had to climb up on to the roadway. Ilooked towards the Temple of the Alchemical Rose, where the fishermenand the women were still shouting, but somewhat more faintly, and sawthat there was no one about the door or upon the pier; but as Ilooked, a little crowd hurried out of the door and began gatheringlarge stones from where they were heaped up in readiness for the nexttime a storm shattered the pier, when they would be laid under blocksof granite. While I stood watching the crowd, an old man, who was, Ithink, the voteen, pointed to me, and screamed out something, and thecrowd whitened, for all the faces had turned towards me. I ran, andit was well for me that pullers of the oar are poorer men with theirfeet than with their arms and their bodies; and yet while I ran Iscarcely heard the following feet or the angry voices, for manyvoices of exultation and lamentation, which were forgotten as a dreamis forgotten the moment they were heard, seemed to be ringing in theair over my head. 

There are moments even now when I seem to hear those voices ofexultation and lamentation, and when the indefinite world, which hasbut half lost its mastery over my heart and my intellect, seems aboutto claim a perfect mastery; but I carry the rosary about my neck, andwhen I hear, or seem to hear them, I press it to my heart and say:'He whose name is Legion is at our doors deceiving our intellectswith subtlety and flattering our hearts with beauty, and we have notrust but in Thee'; and then the war that rages within me at othertimes is still, and I am at peace.