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.h1
Occultists & Mystics of All Ages
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<xxl><B>OCCULTISTS & MYSTICS OF ALL AGES</B></xxl>

<l><B>BY</B></l>
<xxl><B>RALPH SHIRLEY</B></xxl>

<l><B>AUTHOR OF “THE NEW GOD, AND OTHER ESSAYS,” “A SHORT LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN,” ETC.</B></l>

<l><B><i>WITH FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS</i></B></l>


LONDON
WILLIAM RIDER & SON, LIMITED
8 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. 4
1920
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<i>First Published Autumn 1920.</i>
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.h2
CONTENTS
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#1. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA:chap1# ...     1

#2. PLOTINUS:chap2# ...      31

#3. MICHAEL SCOTT:chap3# ...      54

#4. PARACELSUS:chap4# ...      76

#5. EMANUEL SWEDENBORG:chap5# ...      91

#6. COUNT CAGLIOSTRO:chap6# ...      120

#7. ANNA KINGSFORD:chap7# ...      145
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ILLUSTRATIONS
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#PARACELSUS:fig1# ...      78

#EMANUEL SWEDENBORG:fig2# ...      92

#COUNT CAGLIOSTRO:fig3# ...      122

#ANNA KINGSFORD:fig4# ...      146
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.h2 id=chap1
<abbr=one>I</abbr> | APOLLONIUS OF TYANA
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The difficulty of treating of such a subject as the
life and activities of the Philosopher of Tyana lies
in the fact that the story of Apollonius’s career
has been overlaid with legends of the miraculous on
the one hand, and distorted by religious prejudices
on the other; while the only authoritative account
of this great religious reformer is marred by the
glaring deficiencies of the writer for the task which
he had in hand, and his inability to appreciate the
life-work of the subject of his biography. Indeed
he fills many pages with literary padding of the
worst kind, while he fails to give us over and over
again the very facts which it is of value and importance
for us to know. Philostratus, the author
of this life, was one of the literary coterie that
gathered round the presiding genius of the Empress
Julia Domna, the wife of Septimus Severus and
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mother of Caracalla. Julia Domna was a generous
patroness of art and literature, and her husband
Severus was devoted to the study of occult science.
Gibbon, in his usual sceptical vein, observes that
“he was passionately addicted to the vain studies
of magic and divination, deeply versed in the interpretation
of dreams and omens, and perfectly
acquainted with the science of judicial astrology.”
The Empress, who was a daughter of the Priest of
the Sun at Emesa in Syria, was an enthusiastic
bibliophile and had collected, among her other
literary treasures, the note-books of Damis, the
companion and fellow traveller of Apollonius.
These note-books or tablets contained the records
of his journeys and other details concerning the
life of Apollonius, who was as great a hero to Damis
as ever Johnson was to Boswell. If these notes
were as full of detail as Philostratus asserts, one can
only regret that the biographer did not turn them
to more useful account. Damis was a native of
Ninus or Nineveh, and Philostratus speaks somewhat
contemptuously of his defective Greek style.
But it is probable that with all their grammatical
errors the note-books of Damis would have given
us a truer portrait of the great philosopher than
the more finished phrases and elaborate oratorical
devices of Philostratus. The biographer had also
access to a book written by Maximus of Ægæ, containing
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a record of Apollonius’s doings at that place.
It requires an acute critic to gauge how much of
Philostratus’s narrative is literary embellishment
and interpolated matter, and how much is actually
derived from the original records. Even the Gospels
of the Evangelists hardly present a more difficult
task to the critic anxious to discriminate between
the original and the glosses with which it is overlaid.

The other difficulty from which the record of
Apollonius’s life and teachings has suffered is due
to the religious disputes which arose through the
rapid growth of Christianity and its conflict with the
previously existing religions of the Roman world.
We may argue legitimately enough that the power
of working miracles is no proof of the truth of the
doctrines expounded by any religious teacher. But
the fact remains that in proselytising for Christianity
the fullest use was made of the miracles
recorded as accomplished by Jesus in the Gospels,
in support of the contention in favour of the Divine
origin of their worker, and of his work. Illogical
though this argument may appear to the philosophic
mind, it is not surprising that it should have
carried great weight, and indeed it must be admitted
that it does so even at the present day. What
more natural, then, than that one of the disputants
on the other side should have produced a polemical
pamphlet in which he attempted to show that such
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an argument was a two-edged weapon, and that
in fact it was possible to produce better evidence
in favour of the miracles attributed to the pagan
philosopher Apollonius than for those of Jesus of
Nazareth, and to argue that, this being the case,
even assuming the authenticity of the Gospel
narrative, there was no more justification for regarding
the Jewish prophet as a God than the
Tyanian philosopher? Such a criticism of the
claims of the Christians was in fact written by
Hierocles, a philosopher of some note and successively
governor of Palmyra, Bithynia, and Alexandria,
about the first decade of the fourth century
<abbr rend=spell><sc>A.D.</sc></abbr>, under the title of <i>Philalethes</i>, or <i>The Truth-lover</i>.

This pamphlet was not long in provoking a
rejoinder from a leading light of the Christian
community. The reply, the author of which was
Eusebius, Bishop of Cæsarea, is still extant, though
Hierocles’s contribution to the controversy was
destroyed, like much other evidence hostile to
Christianity, by the ecclesiastical authorities, when
the new religion finally became triumphant. Eusebius
was able to show that Philostratus was not a
reliable authority, and that his judgment, where the
credibility of a narrative was in question, was
clearly at fault. Though the criticisms of Eusebius
might have been applied with equal force to much
of the Gospel record, it is plain that his retort to
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Hierocles did not lack point, the veracity of Philostratus
being obviously not above suspicion, and
some of his narratives urgently calling for evidential
corroboration, indeed, in certain cases, being mere
legend or romance. This applies in especial to the
account given of Apollonius’s journey to India, which
is interspersed with numerous fantastic stories which
appear to be derived by Philostratus from other
sources and interpolated in an unscrupulous manner,
with the idea, presumably, of giving local colour.
There are, however, numerous records given which
are clearly taken direct from the narrative of
Damis, and the general accuracy of which there
appears to be no adequate reason to call in question.
One of these offers a parallel to the various accounts
of the raising of the dead to life given in the Gospel
story, as, for instance, the recalling to life of the son
of the widow of Nain; the raising from the dead
of Jairus’s daughter, and last but not least, the case
of Martha and Mary’s brother Lazarus, which, owing
to the circumstances surrounding it, has caught hold
of the popular imagination to a greater extent than
either of the others. The record of the incident referred
to is given in Philostratus’s life[#] as follows:—

.pm letter-start
Here, too, is a miracle which Apollonius worked: A girl
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had died just in the hour of her marriage, and the bridegroom
was following her bier lamenting, as was natural,
his marriage left unfulfilled, and the whole of Rome was
mourning with him, for the maiden belonged to a consular
family. Apollonius then witnessing their grief, said:
“Put down the bier, for I will stay the tears that you are
shedding for this maiden.” And withal he asked what was
her name. The crowd accordingly thought that he was
about to deliver such an oration as is commonly delivered
as much to grace the funeral as to stir up lamentation;
but he did nothing of the kind, but merely touching her
and whispering in secret some spell over her, at once woke
up the maiden from her seeming death; and the girl
spoke out loud, and returned to her father’s house, just as
Alcestis did when she was brought back to life by Hercules.
And the relations of the maiden wanted to present him
with the sum of 150,000 sesterces, but he said that he
would freely present the money to the young lady by way
of dowry. Now, whether he detected some spark of life
in her, which those who were nursing her had not noticed—for
it is said that although it was raining at the time,
a vapour went up from her face—or whether life was
really extinct, and he restored it by the warmth of his
touch, is a mysterious problem which neither I myself nor
those who were present could decide.
.pm letter-end

The record of this incident is presumably taken
direct from the notes of Damis, and is not, I think,
to be too lightly set aside. Apollonius does not
appear to have made any claim to supernatural
power in the matter, nor need he be necessarily
credited with anything beyond an intuitive capacity
for divining the fact that life had not finally departed.
Nor indeed are we bound to assume
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anything more than this intuitive capacity as
regards the two first-mentioned miracles in the
Gospel records—those of the son of the widow of
Nain and Jairus’s daughter. The raising of
Lazarus may be held to stand in a different category,
but it is noteworthy as regards this, that only
one Evangelist records the incident and that his
Gospel is the latest in date of the four. This has
naturally not escaped the attention of the critics,
as it is almost incredible that neither Matthew,
Mark, nor Luke should have alluded to so sensational
an incident if they had any knowledge of its
occurrence. On the other hand, so dramatic an
event could hardly have failed to excite the greatest
commotion at the time, and must, one would naturally
have supposed, inevitably have reached the
ears of those who were writing biographies of the
performer of the miracle. The incident, in short,
is hardly one that could be placed even on the same
evidential plane as the raising of the consul’s
daughter at Rome by Apollonius.

The problem as to whether life is, or is not,
extinct in any specific instance has over and over
again proved too difficult of solution for even
the ablest of modern doctors, and in cases of
trance, opinions of the medical profession can be
freely cited that there is no apparent difference
to be detected between the living and the dead.
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Numerous tests have been applied and failed in
cases where the patient has eventually regained
consciousness, and it is legitimate to suppose that
a certain clairvoyant power is in some cases alone
capable of determining the possibility of the spirit
returning to reoccupy its mortal tenement. According
to occult theory, if the chord or magnetic link
that unites the astral with the physical body has not
been definitely severed, it is still possible for life to be
restored. What more probable than that one gifted
with abnormal psychical powers, such as either Jesus
or Apollonius, might diagnose the presence of this
connecting link, which was invisible to all around?

Eusebius argues that the stories told of Apollonius’s
psychic powers detract from his credit as
a philosopher. Such powers, he argues, only
appertain to a divine being, and therefore while
they may be justly credited in the case of Jesus
they must be dismissed in that of Apollonius.
Such arguments will hardly appeal to the unbiased
critic of the present day. We must recognise,
however, that it was Philostratus’s methods of
embellishing his narrative with fantastic oriental
and other legends which gave a loophole for the
attack of Eusebius. There was, indeed, a sufficiently
serious sequel to this early passage of arms.
The discussion as to whether or not Apollonius’s
miracles were entitled to be set in juxtaposition to
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those of the Prophet of Nazareth, proved in the
end to be a veritable red-herring drawn across the
track of the whole story of Apollonius’s life and
labours. Though there is no recorded reference
of Apollonius to Jesus or his teachings, he is made
to appear in the light of subsequent controversies
as the false prophet <i>par excellence</i>, and worker of
pseudo-miracles, sent by the devil, according to one
ingenious commentator, to destroy the work of the
Saviour by an attempt to imitate his miracles,
and thus to disprove their unique character. When
the printing press came into vogue and classical
literature was widely disseminated by this means,
Aldus hesitated to print the text of Philostratus’s
<i>Life of Apollonius</i>, and only did so finally with the
text of Eusebius’s treatise added as an appendix,
so that, as he phrased it, “the antidote might
accompany the poison.” Later on, ingenious Continental
commentators advanced the theory that
the life of Apollonius was a myth, and that it had
for its object the defence of classical philosophy as
opposed to Christianity. This theory is as ingenious
as it is unconvincing, and even the authority
of its defenders, Baur and Zeller, has failed to
secure it a serious hearing at the present day. It is
obvious that the supposed antagonism between
Jesus and Apollonius never really existed at all,
and though probably they were born within twenty
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years of each other, there is no evidence to show
that there was any connection of any kind between
their respective lives and activities.

The tradition which credits Apollonius with
being a worker of miracles and magician is widespread,
but there is comparatively little that is
narrated of him by Philostratus which is incredible,
if assumed to have been performed by a man who
had led a life such as that of the Sage of Tyana,
and who was gifted with such psychic powers as
we are familiar with at the present day. We shall
probably be right in regarding most of these narratives
of psychic incidents as taken direct from
the tablets of Damis, and therefore in the main
authentic, even if the details are not in every case
exact. A few instances will serve to illustrate the
point of what I have said.

After Apollonius’s visit to Athens, in which he
was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, he took
ship for Egypt, stopping at Rhodes on the way.
Arriving at Alexandria he found that his reputation
had preceded him, and was met everywhere with
reverence and respect. He took advantage of the
friendly popular feeling towards him to intervene
in a case of miscarriage of justice. A robbery had
recently taken place in the town, and twelve men
had been condemned in connection with it. An
innocent victim of the general sentence was revealed
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psychically to Apollonius. He thereupon called
the procession to a halt as they were being led to
execution, and instructed the guard to place the
innocent man last of the twelve. The delay thus
secured gave time for a horseman to ride up with a
reprieve for the man in question, whose innocence
had been established subsequently to the trial.
It is not difficult to attribute such a case as this to
psychic powers, but, on the other hand, it is quite
open to us to assume that Apollonius had learned
something by normal means as to the doubt
hanging over the condemned man’s implication in
the crime.

Never, perhaps, has any possessor of noted
psychic powers enjoyed the friendship or the hostility
of so many great Emperors as did Apollonius.
Vespasian and Titus were both intimate in their
friendship, and sought the advice of the sage of
Tyana on various notable occasions. It was, it
appears, during this same visit to Alexandria that
Vespasian arrived at the great Egyptian seaport and
requested an interview with the sage. Vespasian
explained to him his schemes, for he was already
then aiming at the supreme power. Apollonius
encouraged him, and to his great surprise informed
him that it was his destiny to rebuild the temple of
Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome. As a matter of
fact the temple had just been burned down, but
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the news did not reach Egypt till some time later.
What we call nowadays a telepathic wave had
conveyed the incident to the knowledge of the seer.
A similar instance of Apollonius’s telepathic powers
is narrated in connection with the death of Domitian.
Apollonius had previously been arrested by this
Emperor on the ridiculous charge of sacrificing an
Arcadian boy, in order, apparently, to discover
the prospects of the succession of Nerva to the
Empire. He was acquitted by the monster who
was Nero’s rival in cruelty without Nero’s artistic
talents, to the great surprise of all his friends. The
story is that he vanished mysteriously from the
court. We may, however, I think, without hesitation
attribute this incident to Philostratus’s love
of the dramatic, especially as it seems clear that he
had already been acquitted and that there was no
apparent reason why he should not walk out as a free
man like any ordinary mortal in similar circumstances.
What strikes the dispassionate reader as
really remarkable is the fact that though Apollonius
was twice arrested, once by Nero and again by
Domitian, and though the philosophers of the day,
being supposed to be hostile to the tyrants, met
almost invariably with short shrift, the sage of
Tyana was in each case acquitted and left the
court, as we say to-day, “without a stain on his
character.” Why, if the Emperors had him arrested,
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knowing doubtless the value of the charges against
him, did they not take steps to ensure his condemnation?
The fact seems to be, without doubt, that
they regarded him with fear. Whether this fear was
due merely to his reputation as a worker of wonders,
or to his actual psychic power exercised at their
expense in the courts of justice, is an open question,
and clearly admits of two opinions.

His own observations on this subject, as quoted
by Philostratus, seem, however, to justify our
accepting by preference the latter of the two views.
Speaking to his friends about his intention to take
ship for Rome in order to meet openly any charge
that might be made against him rather than to lie
low in some distant corner of the Empire as his
disciples were anxious that he should do, he
observed that he would not consider a man a coward
because he had disappeared out of dread of Nero,
but would hail as a philosopher any one who rose
superior to such a fear. And he added, “Let not
any one think it foolish so to venture along a path
which many philosophers are fleeing from, for in
the first place I do not esteem any human agency
so formidable that a wise man can ever be terrified
by it, and in the second place I would not urge upon
you the pursuit of bravery unless it were attended
with danger.” After dwelling upon the ferocity
and brutality of Nero, contrasting him with savage
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animals who could sometimes be tamed, and
mollified by coaxing and flattery, whereas Nero
was only roused to greater cruelty than before by
those who stroked him, he continued in the following
remarkable strain:

.pm letter-start
If, however, any one is disposed to dread Nero for these
reasons, and is led abruptly to forsake philosophy, conceiving
that it is not safe for him to thwart his evil temper,
let him know that the quality of inspiring fear really
belongs to those who are devoted to temperance and
wisdom, because they are sure of Divine succour. But
let him snap his fingers at the threats of the proud and
insolent, as he would at those of drunken men, for we
regard these surely as daft and senseless, but not as
formidable.
.pm letter-end

We are accustomed to refer to Apollonius as a
philosopher. While we are perfectly correct in so
doing, it is well to observe what the term philosophy
connotes when employed by the Tyanian sage. It
is not obviously a question merely of adopting
a creed or view of life or a certain set of philosophical
opinions, but implies in the fullest measure the life
led in accordance with these opinions and inspired
by the courage with which the knowledge of their
truth endows the man who professes them. The
keynote, indeed, to the whole of Apollonius’s life
lies in the fact that his so-called philosophy was an
active and inspiring force which dominated his whole
conduct.
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I have alluded to the evidence of Apollonius’s
telepathic powers in connection with the death of
Domitian. His passage of arms with this tyrant may
have afforded the requisite psychic link. In any
case the Tyanian was made aware of Domitian’s
assassination under sufficiently dramatic circumstances.
He had returned to Ionia after a stay of
two years in Greece, and was at the moment speaking
at Ephesus. In the midst of his discourse he
seemed to lose the current of his words, and the
audience noticed a troubled expression passing over
his features. Suddenly breaking off any further
attempt to continue his speech, he stepped forward
three or four paces on the platform from which he
was addressing the assembly, and cried out in loud
tones, “Strike the tyrant! Strike!” The audience
were naturally amazed at this sudden outburst,
but soon coming to himself, Apollonius explained to
them that Domitian had been slain at that hour,
and that a vision from the gods had been granted to
him at the moment of what actually took place.
News arrived in due course confirming his statement.
This story is narrated by Dion Cassius as
well as by Philostratus.

Beyond these records there are several others of
a sufficiently startling character, which it is not
easy to take too literally. There is, for instance,
the narrative of the rescue of a young Athenian
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from the clutches of a vampire. The youth,
according to the story, mistook the vampire for a
normal living woman, and being infatuated with
her, was on the point of marrying her until Apollonius
dispelled the illusion. Probably this was
one of the many romances that had collected
round the name of Apollonius between his death
and the time of Philostratus, though there may
possibly have been some small grain of truth at
the bottom of it. Another story which may have
had some basis in fact, has been so embroidered
upon as to render it quite incredible in the form in
which it is presented by the biographer. This
relates to the supposed interview of Apollonius
with the ghost of Achilles, which was held to haunt
the tomb of the Grecian hero. The reputation of
Apollonius was so great and his supposed power as
a worker of miracles had obtained so widespread
a currency by the second century of our era that
all sorts of miraculous happenings were readily
credited by the ignorant public when ascribed to
the Tyanian sage. Philostratus appears to have
made use of certain of these floating stories.

That the name of Apollonius was regarded with
the greatest veneration during the centuries following
his death is abundantly evident. Caracalla
(Roman Emperor 211-216 <abbr rend=spell><sc>A.D.</sc></abbr>) honoured his
memory with a chapel or monument (<i>heroum</i>).
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Alexander Severus (Emperor 225-235 <abbr rend=spell><sc>A.D.</sc></abbr>) placed
his statue in his <i>lararium</i> along with those of Christ,
Abraham, and Orpheus. Aurelius is stated to have
vowed a temple to the sage of Tyana, of whom he
had seen a vision. Vopiscus at the end of the third
century speaks of him as “a sage of the most widespread
renown and authority, an ancient philosopher
and a true friend of the gods.” “He it was,”
says Vopiscus, “who gave life to the dead. He
it was who did and said so many things beyond the
power of men.” In the work entitled <lang=la><i>Quaestiones
et Responsiones ad Orthodoxos</i></lang>, attributed (though
apparently in error) to Justin Martyr, occurs among
other of these “questions” the following: “If
God is the maker and master of creation how do
the <i>telesmata</i> of Apollonius have power in the orders
of that creation? For as we see, they check the
fury of the waves and the power of the winds, and
the inroads of vermin and attacks of wild beasts.”
These <i>telesmata</i> or talismans were articles that had
been, or were supposed to have been, consecrated or
magnetised, with some religious ceremony, by
Apollonius.[#]

We see, then, that around the name of this
philosopher gathered, as time went on, a mass of
more or less incredible miraculous tradition. And,
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as happens too often in such cases, the real work of
this great religious reformer was lost sight of amid
this accumulation of legend that impressed the
popular eye, which was too dull to appreciate or
understand the deeper significance of the life-work
and esoteric teaching of the sage. Orthodox religion
in the Roman Empire had indeed at this time
fallen into very much the same sort of discredit as
orthodox Christianity has among ourselves to-day.
Two definite attempts were made to resuscitate
these old religions of Greece and Rome by reviving
the understanding of the essential spiritual truths
which they enshrined; the first by Apollonius of
Tyana, who was above all else a reformer of the
ancient Greek religion from within, and the other,
an abortive one three hundred years later, by
Julian the so-called Apostate. These classical
faiths were, however, too much overlaid with
mythological stories of an unedifying character ever
again to recover their ascendancy over the popular
imagination, and the ascetic life and esoteric interpretation
which appealed to the isolated religious
communities which Apollonius visited in his extensive
travels throughout the countries bordering
the Mediterranean, and as far east as Persia and
India, could not in their very nature make a popular
appeal to the average man. We see now that the
triumph of Christianity was due to the universality
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of its appeal, and that however uncertain the issue
of the struggle of the contending faiths appeared
at the time, that issue was never really in doubt.
The ascetic philosopher worked for the little public
to whom the life of self-denial and esoteric truth
are all in all, and to whom the world and the pursuits
of the ordinary citizen take a place of minor
importance. The “friend of publicans and sinners,”
“who was in all things tempted like as we are,”
was able to “draw all men unto him” by a compelling
force such as the austere discipline and
profound philosophy of Apollonius could never
command. Jesus of Nazareth, in short, triumphed—and
there is a profound significance in this fact—because
mankind in the realisation of his true
humanity forgot that he was accounted a God. The
life of Apollonius was so far removed from anything
the average man could comprehend that the world
lost sight of the wisdom and deep spirituality of
his teaching, in amazement at a worker of miracles
so far beyond human ken that he came to be
reckoned even a manifestation of Deity.

We are not, however, justified in supposing that
it was primarily to his miracle-working powers that
Apollonius owed his reputation among his contemporaries.
It was rather as the wise man who
had more knowledge and experience of the world
than those around him, whose judgment was sounder
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and more unbiased by personal considerations than
other men’s, and whose high spirituality kept him
aloof from all considerations of private gain or
private interest, that Apollonius was regarded by
the men of his own day. Later tradition which
invested him with all kinds of miraculous achievements
served to dim the halo round a great name.
The foremost men of his time in thought and
action, the Emperors Vespasian, Titus, and many
others, did not come to consult Apollonius because
he was some master magician. We do not in effect
ask advice of a man in our hour of need because he
can do the vanishing trick in a court of law, or pull
rabbits out of his hat when there are no rabbits
to pull, or do any of the marvellous performances
which strike the vulgar with amazement. We seek
rather the advice of one whose judgment is saner
and whose knowledge of the world is greater than
that of his fellows. It was for this reason that the
wisest of the Roman Emperors came to consult
Apollonius by preference with regard to the great
task with which they were entrusted, when they
had all the highest intellects in the Roman Empire
from which to choose.

The account of Titus’s first meeting with the
Tyanian sage is of some interest, and not without
its humorous side. Apollonius, who was already
acquainted with his father, sent greetings to Titus,
// File: 029.png
.pn +1
after the suppression of the Jewish insurrection,
saying in characteristic manner, “Whereas you
have refused to be proclaimed for success in war
and for shedding the blood of your enemies, I myself
assign to you the crown of temperance and moderation
because you thoroughly understand what deeds
really merit a crown.” Titus thoroughly appreciated
the compliment, and was not to be outdone
by the other’s courtesy. “On my own behalf,”
he replied, “I thank you no less than on behalf of
my father, and I will not forget your kindness.
For although I have captured Jerusalem, you have
captured me.”

After Titus had been appointed to share his
father’s responsibilities in the government of the
Empire he did not forget Apollonius, and when he
was in Tarsus wrote to the sage begging him to
come and see him.

.pm letter-start
When he had arrived [says the narrative], Titus embraced
him, saying, “My father has told me by letter
everything in respect of which he consulted you; and lo!
here is his letter, in which you are described as his benefactor
and the being to whom we owe all that we are.
Now though I am only just thirty years of age, I am held
worthy of the same privileges to which my father only
attained at the age of sixty. I am called to the throne
to rule, perhaps before I have learnt myself to obey, and
I therefore dread lest I am undertaking a task beyond my
powers.” Thereupon Apollonius, after stroking his neck,
said (for he had as stout a neck as any athlete in training),
// File: 030.png
.pn +1
“And who will force so sturdy a bull-neck as yours under
the yoke?” “He that from my youth up reared me as
a calf,” answered Titus, meaning his own father, and
implying that he could only be controlled by the latter,
who had accustomed him from childhood to obey himself.
“I am delighted then,” said Apollonius, “in the first
place, to see you prepared to subordinate yourself to your
father, whom without being his natural children so many
are delighted to obey, and next to see you rendering to
his court homage in which others will associate yourself.
When youth and age are paired in authority, is there any
lyre or any flute that will produce so sweet a harmony and
so nicely blended? For the qualities of old age will be
associated with those of youth, with the result that old
age will gain in strength and youth in discipline.”
.pm letter-end

The records of Apollonius’s pithy sayings are very
numerous and give a better insight into the man’s
character than the startling achievements with
which he is so commonly credited. Once, when
staying at Smyrna, he complimented the inhabitants
on their zeal for letters and philosophy and their
numerous activities, urging them to take pride
rather in themselves than in the beauty of their
city, for “although they had the most beautiful of
cities under the sun, and although they had a
friendly sea at their doors, nevertheless it was more
pleasing for the city to be crowned with men than
with porticoes and pictures, or even with gold in
excess of what they needed.” “For,” he said,
“public edifices remain where they are and are
nowhere seen except in that particular part of the
// File: 031.png
.pn +1
earth where they exist, but good men are conspicuous
everywhere and everywhere talked about, and so
they can magnify the city the more to which they
belong in proportion to the numbers in which they
are able to visit any part of the earth.” And
again, when visiting the monument to Leonidas,
the hero of Thermopylæ, he was enthusiastic in
admiration for the Greek leader, and on coming to
the mound where the Lacedemonians were said to
have been overwhelmed by the arrows which the
enemy rained upon them, he heard his companions
discussing with one another which was the loftiest
peak in Hellas, the topic being suggested, apparently,
by the sight of Mount Oeta which rose before their
eyes. Accordingly ascending the mound, he said,
“I consider this the loftiest of all, for those who
fell here in defence of freedom raised it to a level
with Oeta and carried it to a height surpassing
many mountains like Olympus.” On another occasion
when, on arriving at Athens, and meeting with
an enthusiastic reception at the hands of the people,
he proposed to be initiated into the Eleusinian
Mysteries, the hierophant showed jealousy of Apollonius’s
great reputation, which he felt put his own
into the shade, and was reluctant, accordingly, to
admit so formidable a rival. He therefore made
the excuse that Apollonius was a wizard and had
dabbled in impure rites, and that he could not in
// File: 032.png
.pn +1
consequence consent to initiate him. Apollonius,
however, was fully equal to the occasion, and
retorted, “You have not yet mentioned the chief
head of my offending, which is that knowing as I do
more about the initiatory rite than you do yourself,
I have nevertheless come for initiation to you as
if you were wiser than I am.” The attitude of the
crowd was so hostile to the hierophant, on discovering
his rejection of their honoured guest, that
he found it advisable to change his tone. But
Apollonius preferred to postpone his initiation till
a later occasion, and, it is said, foretold the name
of the successor who was destined to initiate him
four years after.

Of many men who have led a deeply spiritual life
and sacrificed everything for the sake of the pursuit
of a spiritual ideal, it is recorded that they were wild
and profligate in youth. Such was the case with
St Francis of Assisi, and Apollonius’s contemporary,
the zealous Saul of Tarsus, led a changed life from
the moment of his conversion. Indeed it has been
said, referring doubtless to such instances, that
“the greater the sinner the greater the saint.”
This saying, however, is by no means applicable to
Apollonius. From his earliest days his choice was
made clear. He came of a family which was at
once wealthy and well-connected, and in addition
to this he was endowed by nature with exceptional
// File: 033.png
.pn +1
abilities and a remarkable memory, while the beauty
of his person excited universal admiration. Every
temptation, therefore, which fortune could offer,
might, one would have thought, have led him to
choose the path of worldly success. From the age
of fourteen, however, he abandoned all idea of the
pursuit of pleasure and devoted himself to discovering
among the numerous Greek philosophies
of the day some school of thought which would
enable him to live up to his own ideals. Finally
he adopted the system of Pythagoras, but was not
content to receive it in the sense of accepting its
doctrines and not living the life, after the manner of
his teacher, Euxenus. Accordingly when Euxenus
asked him how he would begin his new mode of
life, he replied, “As doctors purge their patients.”
“Hence” (says <abbr rend=spell>G. R. S.</abbr> Mead, in his Biography),
“he refused to touch anything that had animal
life in it, on the ground that it densified the mind
and rendered it impure. He considered that the
only pure form of food was what the earth produced,
fruits and vegetables. He also abstained from wine,
for, though it was made from fruit, it rendered
turbid the ether in the soul, and destroyed the
composure of the mind.” In addition to this, he
went barefoot, let his hair grow long, and wore
nothing but linen.

On the death of his father, when he was twenty
// File: 034.png
.pn +1
years of age, he inherited a considerable fortune,
which was left to him to share with his elder
brother, a dissolute young man of three-and-twenty.
When his brother had run through his share of the
patrimony, he endeavoured (successfully as it
appears) to rescue him from his vicious life, and
made over to him half his own share of the inheritance.
Having distributed the major part of the
remainder among his relatives, he merely retained
for himself a bare pittance.

Before starting on his missionary activities—he
was probably by far the greatest traveller of his
time—he took the vow of silence for five years.
After this, he travelled from place to place making
the acquaintance of temple priests and heads of the
religious communities, endeavouring always to bring
back the public cults to the purity of their ancient
traditions and to suggest improvements in the
practices of the private brotherhoods, the most
important part of his work being devoted to those
who were followers of the inner life. <i>Public</i> instruction
in ethics and practical life he never gave
until after the middle of the day, “for,” he said,
“those who live the inner life should on day’s
dawning enter the presence of the gods, spending the
time till midday in giving and receiving instructions
in holy things.” His Indian expedition, from which
his friends and disciples endeavoured to dissuade
// File: 035.png
.pn +1
him, he undertook, as he stated, on the advice of
his inner monitor, starting his perilous undertaking
entirely alone, and so continuing until he made
the acquaintance of Damis at Nineveh.

There is some doubt as to the date of Apollonius’s
birth, but an allusion by Philostratus makes it
appear that he was quite a young man at the time
of his Indian expedition, and as he apparently did
not commence his five years’ vow of silence till
after he came of age, we must assume that he was
somewhere between twenty-six and thirty at the
commencement of this undertaking. Treadwell
dates the Indian travels as from 41 to 54 <abbr rend=spell><sc>A.D.</sc></abbr> If
this is approximately accurate we may assign his
birth-date to the second decade of the first century
of the Christian era. Assuming this to be the case,
he was presumably over eighty years old at the
time of his death, which occurred about 98 <abbr rend=spell><sc>A.D.</sc></abbr>
Damis had been his almost inseparable companion
from the time when he first met him at Nineveh.
It seems to have been a case of something akin to
“love at first sight,” for the Assyrian was seized
at once with an enthusiasm for the nobility of
Apollonius’s character, which was blent with a
natural and even dog-like affection. At the last,
however, his companion was not with him, and there
is some mystery as to the exact place and occasion
of his death. He sent Damis away when the expected
// File: 036.png
.pn +1
time approached, on the pretext of entrusting
him with a confidential letter to the Emperor
Nerva, so that it may be said of him, as it was of
Moses, “No man knoweth his burial place unto
this day.”

Apollonius had never reason to regret his Indian
travels. He became deeply imbued with the metaphysical
ideas of the Brahmins, and was in the habit
ever after of extolling their spiritual philosophy as
the fountain-head of all the profounder truths of
Western religion. As to Damis’s record of Apollonius’s
sojourn with the Indian Philosophers, we
have only Philostratus’s garbled account to guide
us, and the quotation of Apollonius’s cryptic
observation, “I saw men dwelling on the earth and
yet not on it; defended on all sides, without any
defence; and yet possessed of nothing but what
all possessed.” It may be well to quote the interpretation
of this saying given by Mr Mead.
“They were on the earth but not of the earth,
for their minds were set on things above. They
were protected by their innate spiritual power, of
which we have so many instances in Indian literature.
And yet they possessed nothing but what all
men possess if they would but develop the
spiritual part of their being.” There are a good
many references in the conversations with Apollonius
to the belief in Reincarnation, which was of
// File: 037.png
.pn +1
course an essential tenet of Pythagorean philosophy,
and he himself averred that in his previous life he
was a man of no consequence, to wit, a ship’s pilot.
A letter ascribed to him, whether rightly or wrongly,
has some interesting observations on this subject.

.pm letter-start
“Why has this false notion,” he asks, “of birth and
death” (<abbr rend=spell><i>i.e.</i></abbr>, that they are real and not illusory in
character)—“why has this false notion remained so long
without being refuted? Some think that what has
happened through them they have themselves brought
about. They are ignorant that the individual is brought
to birth <i>through</i> parents, not <i>by</i> parents. Just as a
thing produced through the earth is not produced from
it. The change which comes to the individual is nothing
that is caused by his visible surroundings, but rather a
change in the one thing which is in every man.”
.pm letter-end

The portrait of Apollonius which has been handed
down through many generations has become blurred
and disfigured beyond recognition, and it seemed
therefore well to give, even if in but a brief outline,
such a sketch as might convey a juster idea of the
philosopher whose friendship the greatest men of his
day considered it their highest honour to enjoy, the
man who chose the path of sanctity at a time of
life when others choose “the primrose path of
dalliance,” who chose Wisdom for her own sake and
Truth for the sake of Truth.

The world holds no record of a long life lived more
nobly, of a more undaunted courage in confronting
// File: 038.png
.pn +1
the tyrant, of a more unflinching tenacity of purpose,
of a more single-minded devotion to a high ideal.
His boyhood’s choice, the inspiration of his manhood,
the beacon-light of his latest years—to follow
in the footsteps of that Form, so austere in the
simplicity of her loveliness, “whose ways are ways
of pleasantness and all whose paths are peace.”[#]

.fn #
<i>Philostratus</i>, Book <abbr=four>IV</abbr>, chapter <abbr='forty-five'>xlv</abbr>. I am indebted to Dr
Conybeare’s translation, published by Messrs Heinemann, for
this and some other quotations. The book is a very useful one,
the Greek and English being given side by side.
.fn-

.fn #
I am indebted to <abbr rend=spell>G. R. S.</abbr> Mead’s work, <i>Apollonius of Tyana,
The Philosopher-Reformer of the First Century <abbr rend=spell>A.D.</abbr></i> (London:
<abbr rend=spell>T. P. S.</abbr>), for these particulars.
.fn-

.fn #
“Happy is the man that findeth wisdom. Length of days
is in her right hand and in her left hand riches and honour. Her
ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace” (<abbr=Proverbs>Prov.</abbr>
<abbr=three>iii.</abbr> 13, 16, 17).
.fn-
// File: 039.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap2
<abbr=two>II</abbr> | PLOTINUS
.sp 2
The problem of the origin of the universe is one
with which every religion in a certain sense claims
to deal; but it is a problem only of the most
recondite sphere of metaphysics, while religions
generally, in order to ensure their success, make
appeal to popular sympathy and endeavour to
bring down the truths which they enshrine to the
intellectual level of the masses of mankind. To
put abstruse truths into simple language is an
impossibility. They can, however, be conveyed
by a species of symbolism, or presented in an
allegorical form which will be interpreted in one
sense by the vulgar and in another by the philosopher
or the religious initiate. The communication
of these hidden truths has been represented in
the case of most religions as a definite revelation
from a higher plane; but whatever claim is made
as to their origin, they are at least put before the
rank and file of the faithful as dogmas to be accepted
unhesitatingly as a vital element of the orthodox
religion of the time or country. Such dogmas in
// File: 040.png
.pn +1
their crude form, it is needless to say, have never
made appeal to the high philosophical intelligence
of the day. Under the autocratic regime of persecuting
Christianity during the Middle Ages of
Europe, Christian dogma was indeed accepted
nominally by great intellects, but it was accepted
under duress and with a reservation, and subject
to such interpretations of its inner meaning as
might commend themselves to the mental standpoint
of their professor. The men of highest
intellect were compelled to express the faith that
was in them in the most guarded language, and if
they failed to do so they were only too liable to
share the fate of Galileo, or—worse still—of Giordano
Bruno. The sole exception to this rule is to be
found in Oriental countries, such as India, where
religion, whether Brahmin or Buddhist, has assumed
a less dogmatic form, and has found it possible
accordingly to assimilate and identify itself with
philosophical speculations of the profoundest and
most abstruse character, without any sense of
incongruity or doing violence to its own specific
tenets. It is true that Mohammedanism appears to
contradict this, but it must be remembered that
the religion of Mohammed was in the nature of a
foreign importation and not indigenous to Indian
soil.

Thus it came about that the philosophers of
// File: 041.png
.pn +1
early Greece and Rome were almost invariably
avowed sceptics as regards the popular religious
beliefs of their time, though in spite of this, with
the sole exception of Socrates, they were allowed to
preach their doctrines openly in the market place
without let or hindrance. Thus, too, the triumph
of Christianity brought it eventually into open
antagonism with philosophic thought. In this case,
however, the dogmatic and intolerant character of
the creed suffered no rival schools of opinion, and
accordingly, within 200 years of the date at which it
was established by Constantine as the recognised
religion of the Roman Empire, the Athenian schools
of philosophy were forcibly suppressed by Justinian.[#]
For some two and a half centuries before this latter
date Neoplatonism in one form or another had dominated
the intellectual world of philosophy. It had
superseded the materialistic philosophies of earlier
Rome and Greece, and even before the time of
Constantine, the Stoic and Epicurean schools of
thought had already ceased to appeal to the inquiring
spirit of the time. When, after a thousand years
of intervening barbarism, under the influence of the
Renaissance movement, men began to turn their
attention once more to classic scholarship and classic
philosophy, it was to Plato, mainly as interpreted
// File: 042.png
.pn +1
by his successor and follower, Plotinus, that the
leading spirits of the day turned in search of a
solution of those problems of life which were once
more pressing for interpretation, after the intellectual
death in life of the Dark Ages, following
the break-up of the Roman Empire. Christianity,
indeed, had its metaphysics—for every religion is
bound, in a sense, to explain its Divinity to its
devotees—but they were the bastard metaphysics
of the Athanasian Creed, the expression of a political
compromise drawn up to satisfy the warring sects
of Christendom. Far different was the effort of
Plotinus, who sought not only to solve the riddle
of the sphinx, but to express in language intelligible
to his hearers the solution of the profoundest
mysteries of the universe. How far he succeeded
in doing so is yet in dispute to the present day.
At least the basis of his philosophy still remains
as an attempted approximation to the truth which
forms the groundwork for the efforts of every new
seeker after spiritual enlightenment.

At the date of the birth of Plotinus, Alexandria
was the intellectual capital of the world. There
met East and West, in spite of Mr Rudyard Kipling’s
dictum to the contrary. There the philosophical
and intellectual speculations of the entire
civilised world enjoyed a common forum where
the most diverse views found a ready audience.
// File: 043.png
.pn +1
There Philo interpreted Judaism in terms of current
Greek thought. There Gnostics and Christians
contended for the supremacy of their various
religious doctrines. There, among others, Ammonius
Saccas lectured on his philosophical interpretation
of the universal life, first from a standpoint
akin to that of the new Christian religion,
which was already obtaining so many converts,
and later from an independent platform of his own.
To him, after listening to many different philosophers,
in whose views he found neither satisfaction
nor illumination, came the most illustrious
of his pupils, Plotinus. Plotinus was at this time
about twenty-eight (he was born probably at
Lycopolis in Egypt, in the year 205 or 206 <abbr rend=spell><sc>A.D.</sc></abbr>),
and he continued to remain at Alexandria and to
elaborate his theories under the auspices of his
master, Ammonius, for some eleven years. At
the expiration of this period the similarity of the
philosophy of Ammonius to that taught by the
Brahmins of India, and doubtless also the interest
in these Oriental conceptions which had been
stimulated by the travels of Apollonius of Tyana,
led to a decision on the part of Plotinus to emulate
the Tyanian sage and himself embark on a similar
mission. The expedition of the Emperor Gordian
against the Persians appeared to supply a favourable
opportunity for carrying out this project. This
// File: 044.png
.pn +1
expedition was, however, destined to disaster, and
Gordian met with an untimely end. Plotinus
himself barely escaped with his life, but eventually
reached Antioch in safety. Our philosopher did
not remain long in the Syrian capital, but at the
earliest opportunity sailed for Rome, where the
remainder of his life was spent in lecturing and in
philosophic study and discussion.

It was not until he had lived in Rome for ten
years that, at the urgent request of his followers,
he commenced writing what subsequently became
known as <i>The Enneads of Plotinus</i>. Twenty-one
of these books were completed when, at the age of
fifty-nine, he first met Porphyry, who is our principal
source of information with regard to his manner
of life and the main facts of his career. To Porphyry
was eventually allotted the task of editing his writings,
which he divided into six volumes of nine
books each, the number of books in each volume
being thus used to give a name to his whole system
of philosophy (Enneads, Greek ἐννεα, nine).

That his treatises were in urgent need of a competent
editor is apparent from the observations
which Porphyry makes with regard to his methods
of composition. He was in the habit of writing
down his thoughts just as they occurred to him,
and “could not (says his biographer) by any means
endure to review twice what he had written, nor
// File: 045.png
.pn +1
even to read his own composition,” mainly on
account of his defective eyesight. Nor, indeed,
was he by any means a perfect master of the Greek
language, in which his lectures were delivered and
his books written. Porphyry in fact observes,
let us hope with some exaggeration, that he “neither
formed the letters with accuracy, nor exactly distinguished
the syllables, nor bestowed any diligent
attention on the orthography, but neglecting all
these as trifles, he was alone attentive to the intellection
of his wonderful mind, and, to the admiration
of all his disciples, persevered in this custom to
the end of his life.”

One is, indeed, not a little impressed how entirely,
in the later days of the Roman Empire, “captive
Greece led captive her conquerors.” Greek philosophy
and Greek ideas had, in truth, permeated
the whole civilised world. Not only was this the
case, but when the Western or Roman Empire fell
eventually into decrepitude and ruin, its Eastern
partner, though threatened and harassed by barbarian
foes on all its borders, continued to survive
the extinction of the erstwhile mistress of the world
by something like a thousand years. Alexandria
was, however, destined to destruction by an Arab
invasion long ere this, and never recovered from
its sack by the Mohammedan Amru in <abbr rend=spell><sc>A.D.</sc></abbr> 640.
The survival of the Eastern Empire was doubtless
// File: 046.png
.pn +1
due in great part to the superior vitality of the
Greek race; but it does not admit of doubt that
it would have fallen a victim to the Moslem invader
at least 500 years before the date of its final doom,
had it not been for Constantine’s choice of an
Eastern capital and the almost impregnable position
enjoyed by the imperial city. It is open to
conjecture that had the British Government of
the present day been better acquainted with the
history of Constantinople and the many sieges which
it had successfully sustained, they would have
thought twice, and indeed thrice, before launching
without adequate preparation, the ill-fated
expedition to the Dardanelles.

The dialectical disquisitions of Plotinus were
delivered in Greek, and his whole trend of thought
was essentially Greek in character. One is inclined
to ask oneself indeed whether the Latin language
would have been capable of expressing the subtleties
of his philosophical speculation. In this connection
the similarity of his ideas to those enunciated in
the great Vedantic system of Indian philosophy
must not blind us to the fact that his method of
treating his subject, and the closely reasoned
arguments which he adduces in the defence of his
scheme of the universe, are purely and entirely
Greek. This appears to me to be the real truth in
relation to a much disputed point, as to what
// File: 047.png
.pn +1
Plotinus owed to Indian thought on the one hand,
and to Greek culture and Greek philosophy on the
other.

When Milton appealed to the Divine Muse to
enable him to “soar above the Aonian Mount”
and achieve “things unattempted yet in prose
or rhyme,” he was in truth taking on a small order
compared with the tremendous task which Plotinus
set himself in his attempted solution of the riddle
of the universe. To say that his exposition of his
system lends itself to criticism in more than one
vital point is merely to state that he was human.
Whoever attempts to go behind phenomena and
postulate a First Cause, whether we denominate
that Cause The One, like Plotinus, or The Good,
like Plato, or The Absolute, like Herbert Spencer,
is manifestly passing into realms of thought with
which the human mind is incompetent to deal.
It stands to reason, indeed, that the finite mind
cannot comprehend the infinite, and logic, therefore,
inevitably fails us. But there is in truth another
side to this most recondite problem. Though logic
cannot fathom it, and though the finite cannot
comprehend the infinite, yet the infinite spirit may
contact infinity. In other words, the infinite in
man, that is, the divine spark, which is part and
parcel of infinity, may realise the infinite within
itself, not, indeed, by any logical process, but by
// File: 048.png
.pn +1
the immediate experience implicit in spiritual
union. Hence the possibility of that form of
mystical ecstasy which has been denominated
Cosmic Consciousness, and which it is narrated
that Plotinus experienced no less than four times
during the six years, 262-268, when Porphyry was
his companion in Rome. The effect of these experiences
on Plotinus is very evident in his philosophy.
They led to his emphasising the unity of
all creation, and its oneness with the Divine, and
the natural corollary of this, the illusory nature of
separate individuality. Hence that which causes
individuality, the principle of limitation inherent
in matter, appears to him itself also of an illusory
nature, that is, essentially incapable of acquiring
or participating in real existence. From this
negative character of matter arise, according to
Plotinus, the imperfections of the material universe,
and its inability to conform to the ideal or intelligible
order.

At the basis of the system of Plotinus there is
postulated then an ideal universe which constitutes
an archetype or pattern of the phenomenal
order which our senses apprehend. Plotinus
assumes three root principles which he denominates
the Three Divine Hypostases, and which have
been since designated the Alexandrian Trinity,
though it would be a mistake to confuse this
// File: 049.png
.pn +1
triad with the Trinity of the Christian Creed. The
First Divine Hypostasis is the Prime Source of
Being, denominated, as already stated, the One
or the Good. This corresponds to the Absolute
of the Spencerian philosophy, and Plotinus tells us
that it transcends all known attributes—so much
so, in fact, that even existence itself cannot be
predicated of it. Every being, according to the
Plotinian system, tends to produce an image of
itself. Hence we have the Second and Third of
these Divine Principles, emanating in their turn
from the First. The Second Divine Hypostasis
our philosopher designates the Intelligible Universe
or Universal Intelligence. This is the sphere of
Absolute Reality or Essence, and constitutes a
manifestation of the creative power of the One.
The Third Divine Hypostasis is the Universal Soul,
and this again is the image of the Second; but it
differs from its principal in the fact that life in its
sphere is no longer inert or motionless, but revolves
about and within the Universal Intelligence. By
way of explanation, Plotinus offers the parallel of
one circle enclosed within another and larger but
concentric circle which revolves about it, the common
centre of both being represented by the One
or First Hypostasis, the motionless inner circle
by the Universal Intelligence, and the revolving
outer circle by the Universal Soul; though it is
// File: 050.png
.pn +1
recognised that this form of symbolism can be
pressed too far, as the expressions “external”
and “internal” in this connection have no real
validity.

Matter, as already stated, is regarded as possessing
no definite attributes of its own; but it is
capable of receiving a semblance of life by reflecting
the forms derived by the Universal Soul from the
Second Divine Principle or Intelligible Universe.
Matter, then, serves as a mirror upon which the
Universal Soul projects the images or reflections of
its creations, and thus gives rise to the phenomena
of the sensible universe. This universe, which
we are accustomed to term the Phenomenal World,
holds an intermediate position between Reality and
Negation owing to its participation in matter,
which Plotinus identifies with Evil as being the
negation of the Spiritual or Real. The existence
of the Universal Soul is an eternal contemplation
of the One as revealed in the sphere of Intelligence
or Beauty (the Second Divine Hypostasis) and is
itself an indivisible noncorporeal essence, possessing
omnipresent consciousness. While, then, one part
of the Universal Soul inhabits the sphere of Intelligence,
its inferior part has relation with the
Sensible World, or Material Universe. The Universal
Soul by this relation with the Material
Universe gives birth to the phenomena of Nature
// File: 051.png
.pn +1
in all their varied manifestation. But whereas
the object of contemplation of the Universal Soul
is the One as revealed in terms of Beauty or
the Intelligible Order, the object of the contemplation
of Nature is Nature itself. Nature,
in short, contemplates the forms of its own
creation, and hence arise the imperfections of its
manifestation.

“The character of the material universe [following
Dr Whitby,[#] in his summary of the doctrine of
Plotinus] is thus due to the irradiation of matter
or chaos by the complex unity of forms or reasons
(<i>logoi</i>) derived by the Universal Soul from its
contemplation of the sphere of essential reality
and Absolute Perfection. By reason of the inability
of matter to participate fully in the real qualities
of existence, it follows that the perfection of the
material universe is inferior to that of the Universal
Soul, and still more so to that of the Intelligible
Universe.” In writing “on the nature and origin
of evil,” our philosopher observes, “Whatever is
deficient of good in a small degree is not yet evil,
since it is capable from its nature of becoming
perfect. But whatever is perfectly destitute of good,
and such is matter, is evil in reality, possessing no
portion of good. For, indeed, matter does not,
// File: 052.png
.pn +1
properly speaking, possess being, by means of
which it might be invested with good. But the
attribute of being is only equivocally affirmed of
matter.”

The association of matter with the soul arises
from the voluntary determination of the individual
consciousness towards the material plane. But it
must not be supposed that this commingling of the
soul and matter results in any actual union between
the two in the same sense as in the chemical
world hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water.
For matter, as explained above, is in the nature of
a mirror which the divine light of the soul illuminates
but which is incapable of receiving into itself
that light by which it is illuminated. “But [observes
Plotinus][#] matter obscures by its sordid mixture
and renders feeble the light which emanates from
the soul and, by opposing the waters of generation,
it occasions the soul’s entrance into the rapid
stream, and by this means renders her light, which
is in itself vigorous and pure, polluted and feeble,
like the faint glimmerings from a watch tower
beheld in a storm. For if matter were never present,
the soul would never approach to generation;
and this is the lapse of the soul, thus to descend
into matter and become debilitated and impure,
// File: 053.png
.pn +1
inasmuch as matter prohibits many of the soul’s
powers from their natural activities, comprehending
and as it were contracting the place which the
soul contains, in her dark embrace.” Matter thus
is the cause of the evil inherent in the material
world, as without this the soul would have for ever
remained “permanent and pure.”

Matter, in itself, possesses no form, being unable
to sustain order or measure. The soul, however,
by its union with matter, imposes form upon it,
this form being the result of the combination of
the limitation inherent in matter, in union with
the archetypal idea of which the soul is the
expression. We have, then, a conception of the
universe, of which the One represents Infinity, and
matter, the opposite pole, or zero. Owing, however,
to the fact that no attributes or qualities can be predicated
of the One, and that this is, in a negative
sense, also the case with matter, which is the privation
of being, we arrive at a certain confusion, the
attempts of our philosopher to explain matter
leading to phrases which are equally applicable to
Infinity or the One. The two extremes of Absolute
Being and Non-Being appear, in short, to meet, and
a resulting bewilderment arises in the mind, which
one is rather inclined to gather, was not entirely
absent from the thought of Plotinus himself. It
may be suggested, tentatively, that this <i>impasse</i>
// File: 054.png
.pn +1
arises rather from the failure of Plotinus to describe
the One in more positive terms, than in his defective
description of the negative qualities of matter.
The fact that the One of Plotinus is conceived of as
such that no language is able to express it, does not,
in reality, justify the philosopher in describing it
in terms of negation, however much positive statements
may fall short of portraying the Absolute
Reality. Of matter itself, however, we ought perhaps
to predicate a relative though inferior reality;
even while we admit that the presence of spirit is
in inverse proportion to the density of matter.

In the view of Plotinus the universe is a single
vast conscious organism of which all the parts are
similarly endowed with consciousness. He attributes
a species of divinity to the Sun and the stars,
and appears to accept the theory of planetary
spirits. Thus also Origen observes: “As our body
while consisting of human members is yet held
together by one soul, so the universe is to be thought
of as an immense living being which is held together
by one soul, the power of the logos, God.”

According to Plotinus it is truer to state that the
body is in the soul than that the soul is in the
body, inasmuch as the soul is transcendent as well
as immanent in the corporeal form. Thus, when a
particular body acquires life the soul which is
destined to animate it does not in reality descend
// File: 055.png
.pn +1
into it and become identified with it, but rather
the body comes within the sphere of its influence,
thus attaining to the world of life. This explanation
is, it seems to me, helpful in enabling us to
understand the gradual process by which the individual
consciousness becomes <lang=fr><i>en rapport</i></lang> with the
immature bodies of childhood. Following out the
same theory we can understand the doctrine of
early Gnostic sects, that Jesus of Nazareth was
overshadowed by the Christ, and also we may
believe, if we will, that the guardian angels of the
little children who, as Jesus asserted, “do always
behold the face of My Father which is in Heaven”
are indeed their own higher spiritual selves,
attracted on the one hand to those physical bodies
of which they are the prospective tenants, and on
the other looking regretfully back to their pre-natal
home in the spiritual world.

Like the Deity, the soul is in the nature of a
trinity, the occult axiom, “As above, so below”
being implicit in Plotinus’s philosophy. Thus man
consists, firstly, of the animal, or sensual soul,
which is closely united with the body; secondly,
of the logical, or reasoning soul; and thirdly, of
that individualised portion of the divine essence
whose proper habitation is the Intelligible Universe,
of which it in its origin forms a part. The return
of the soul to the One is accomplished by means
// File: 056.png
.pn +1
of a gradual process of purification, which eventually,
after an immeasurable period of time, releases the
soul from its inclination towards the plane of sensibility;
<abbr rend=spell><i>i.e.</i></abbr> its attraction to the material world.
The philosophy of Plotinus thus included the doctrine
of metempsychosis, as regards the affirmation
of the truth of which he is very emphatic. For he
declares that “The gods bestow on each the destiny
which appertains to him, and which harmonises
with his antecedents in his successive existences.
Every one who is not aware of this is grossly
ignorant of divine matters.” He would even
appear to admit that at times fallen human souls
are imprisoned in the bodies of animals, but speaks
less confidently on this head.

The conceptions of Plotinus explain many of
those psychical phenomena which have so much
puzzled our modern scientists, and offer a solution
for the much-debated problems involved in the
phenomena of telepathy, magic, and planetary
influence. “The sensitivity of nature [writes Dr
Whitby, summarising this side of Plotinus’s philosophy]
is manifested as a vital nexus in virtue of
which every minutest and remotest particle of the
universe is intimately correlated and symbolically
united to the rest. The universe as a whole, although
thus endowed with a potential sensitivity, may
nevertheless be considered as impassive, because the
// File: 057.png
.pn +1
soul which animates and pervades it has no need of
sensations for its own enlightenment and does not,
in fact, regard them. Nevertheless, and for the
simple reason that nature is a living organism,
sympathetic throughout, individual parts of the
universe have a quasi-sensitivity, and respond to
impressions from without. When, for example, the
stars, in answer to human invocations, confer benefits
upon men, they do so, not by a voluntary action,
but because their natural or unreasoning psychical
faculties are unconsciously affected. Similarly
demons may be charmed by spells or prayers
acting upon the unreasoning part of their nature.”
For, according to Plotinus, the universe is a vast
chain, of which every being is a link.

Plotinus, like every one else who has attempted
to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx, is up against the
basic facts of existence. Boldly and perseveringly
as we may attempt to face the problem, the Sphinx
sits and smiles with the smile that will not come
off, well knowing that however near we may seem
to be to the solution of the mystery, the problem
will still baffle us, and remain unsolved to the end.
We may postulate a Deity who is all Perfection,
but, if we do so, it rests with us to explain how it
is that evil is present in the universe, if this Deity
is in reality, as Plotinus and other philosophers
have taught us, the All. We may postulate matter
// File: 058.png
.pn +1
as inherently evil in nature, in opposition to the
Good, but if so, whence comes that which is not
included in the All? If matter is the mere privation
of good, whence come its apparently very
positive qualities? If the All is complete and
perfect in itself, what need for the manifested
universe? What need for the striving after a
higher perfection, which gives the lie to the Absolute
Perfection predicated of the One? Matthew Arnold
has adopted the hypothesis of a “Power, not ourselves,
which makes for righteousness”; but in
this hypothesis he first abandons the conception of
the unity of the All and subsequently throws over
the idea of divine perfection. For his Deity is,
after all, only striving after a perfection which he
has not yet reached.

The dualistic conception offers in truth fewer
difficulties to the ordinary mind. It is more in
accordance with the obvious facts of existence,
which are brought under our notice every day of
our lives. Deceptive and illusory though the
conception may be, we still appear to be confronted
by the existence of a gigantic struggle between good
and evil in which the two combatants are more
nearly matched than we care to admit. We like
to shut our eyes to this and postulate a Deity of
infinite power and infinite beneficence, but, while
we do so, we are for ever admitting into our intellectual
// File: 059.png
.pn +1
sphere certain conceptions that run counter
to this theory, and in order to acquit our Deity of
responsibility for the evil which we see ever around
us, we make of the Devil a scapegoat who, in
practice, bears on his shoulders the sins of the
whole world; or alternatively we accept a conception
of God and the Devil which runs on parallel
lines with that of Dickens’ Spenlow and Jawkins.
If behind Good and Evil, the two forces which are
everlastingly struggling for the mastery, we have,
as Plotinus and other of the wisest philosophers
assure us, some principle of Unity from which both
alike flow, are we justified in postulating of that
Unity Absolute Perfection and Absolute Power?
Or are we not nearer the mark in describing it in
the Nietzschean phrase as “beyond good and evil,”
as possessed of attributes and qualities which finite
brains are incapable of apprehending? Are we not
indeed darkening counsel by attributing to this
Unknown a perfection which, after all, the entire
gamut of existence suggests to us has never yet been
reached through all the æons even though we may be
approaching nearer to it every day and every hour?

The creation of the universe, if we are to accept
the system of Plotinus, did not actually take place
in time. He argues this point out with much
subtlety and ingenuity in his essay “on Providence,”
rejecting the hypothesis of “a certain foresight
// File: 060.png
.pn +1
and discursive consideration on the part of Deity,
deliberating in what condition the world should be
especially formed, and by what means it may be
constituted as far as possible for the best”; and
accepting in place of it the assumption that the
universe always had a being, and that it was
“formed according to intellect, and intellect not
preceding <i>in time</i> but prior[#]; because the world
is its offspring, and because intellect is the cause
and the world its image, perpetually subsisting in
the same manner and flowing from this as its source.”
In other words, being faced with the alternative of
assuming a definite date at which life began, or
postulating existence from all eternity, he accepts
the latter as presenting the lesser difficulty of the
two; but in order to do so, he finds himself involved
in the necessity of admitting a sequence of
cause and effect which the finite mind is quite unable
to dissociate from the conception of time. Failing
this, his whole theory of the three Divine Hypostases
falls to the ground. If we adopt the alternative
which Plotinus rejected, we are plunged into still
greater embarrassment; for if creation began in
time, why did the All or the One wait through all
the æons of eternity[#] for its commencement? And
// File: 061.png
.pn +1
how, indeed, did time itself evolve from eternity, in
view of the fact that the two ideas have no apparent
relation to each other? The philosopher may

.pm verse-start
plunge into eternity where recorded time
Seems but a point, and the reluctant mind
Flags wearily in its unending flight
Till it sink dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless.[#]
.pm verse-end

He may do this, indeed, but after all he will not
have solved the Riddle of the Sphinx.

.fn #
Constantine became sole Emperor in 323 <abbr rend=spell><sc>A.D.</sc></abbr> The Athenian
schools of philosophy were suppressed by Justinian in 529 <abbr rend=spell><sc>A.D.</sc></abbr>
.fn-

.fn #
To whose book, <i>The Wisdom of Plotinus</i> (Rider, <abbr rend=spell>3s. 6d.</abbr> net) I
must acknowledge my indebtedness.
.fn-

.fn #
Plotinus on <i>The Nature and Origin of Evil</i> (Taylor’s Translation).
.fn-

.fn #
<abbr rend=spell><i>I.e.</i></abbr>, prior in the sense that cause precedes effect.
.fn-

.fn #
The Indian conception of the inbreathing and outbreathing of
Brahma may help us here, but it does not entirely get over the
difficulty.
.fn-

.fn #
Shelley, “Prometheus Unbound.”
.fn-
// File: 062.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap3
<abbr=three>III</abbr> | MICHAEL SCOT
.sp 2
The name of Michael Scot is principally familiar to
English readers through Sir Walter Scott’s <i>Lay of the
Last Minstrel</i>. Shakespeare’s <i>Tempest</i> and Scott’s
<i>Lay of the Last Minstrel</i> are probably the two, best-known
works among English classics which breathe
throughout the weird and fascinating atmosphere
of mediæval magic. Prospero is a magician, and
the whole plot of the <i>Tempest</i> is based upon his
magical practices and their consequences. The
Lady of Branksome in the <i>Lay of the Last Minstrel</i> has
also learned from her father the “forbidden art.”

.pm verse-start
Her father was a clerk of fame
  Of Bethune’s line of Picardie:
He learned the art that none may name,
  In Padua, far beyond the sea.
Men said, he changed his mortal frame
  By feat of magic mystery;
For when, in studious mood, he paced
  <abbr=Saint>St</abbr> Andrew’s cloistered hall,
His form no darkening shadow traced
  Upon the sunny wall!
And of his skill, as bards avow,
  He taught that Ladye fair,
Till to her bidding she could bow
  The viewless forms of air.
.pm verse-end
// File: 063.png
.pn +1

In order the more effectually to accomplish her
purposes, she dispatches her staunch henchman,
William of Deloraine, to Melrose Abbey, where
lies buried the wizard, Michael Scot, and buried
with him, the Book of Might, which contains
those potent spells whereby the great wizard had
achieved his world-wide celebrity. “The Monk of
St Mary’s Aisle,” now an ecclesiastical veteran of
some hundred summers, had in earlier days fought
the Moslem on the fields of Spain, and had there
met and become an intimate friend of the much
dreaded wizard. He had attended him at his death-bed,
and had himself buried him in Melrose Abbey,
receiving injunctions from him in his last hours
never to allow the Book of Might to be disinterred
“save at his chief of Branksome’s need.” For
Michael Scot himself was a native of Teviot Dale,
though his life had been spent in Italy, in Spain,
and at Palermo in Sicily in attendance at the court
of the Emperor Frederick <abbr='the second'>II.</abbr>, whose fame became
in a curious way linked with his own. The date of
Michael Scot’s departure from Sicily for Spain was
approximately 1210 <abbr rend=spell><sc>A.D.</sc></abbr>, and coincided with the
turning-point of that long war of centuries which
ended in the ejection of the Moorish conquerors from
the Spanish peninsula. 1212 <abbr rend=spell><sc>A.D.</sc></abbr> was the date of
the decisive battle of Las Navas, which resulted in a
crushing defeat for the Moorish forces, and led
// File: 064.png
.pn +1
within fifty years to their retirement from all parts
of Spain with the exception of the province of
Granada. Scot was at this time in Spain pursuing
his studies in Alchemy, Astrology, and the forbidden
arts generally, and translating the works
of the learned Arabians, Avicenna, Averroes,
and Geber, and rewriting their paraphrases of
Aristotle in the Latin tongue, which was then the
universal medium for the dissemination of all
scientific and philosophic knowledge throughout
Europe.

We may imagine the monk of <abbr=Saint>St</abbr> Mary’s Aisle in
his early days fighting the Moorish hosts in Spain
and engaged, perhaps, in the great battle of Las
Navas, which sealed their doom. Here he is represented
by the poet as striking up a firm friendship
with the student and philosopher, Michael
Scot, and learning from him the secret of his
magical practices. The monk is represented as
telling William of Deloraine:

.pm verse-start
“In those far climes it was my lot
To meet the wondrous Michael Scot,
  A wizard, of such dreaded fame,
That when, in Salamanca’s cave,
Him listed his magic wand to wave,
  The bells would ring in Notre Dame!
Some of his skill he taught to me;
And, Warrior, I could say to thee
The words that cleft Eildon hills in three,
// File: 065.png
.pn +1
  And bridled the Tweed with a curb of stone:
But to speak them were a deadly sin;
And for having but thought them my heart within,
  A treble penance must be done.”
.pm verse-end

These achievements, according to the legend,
were attributed to Michael Scot’s “familiar,” to
whom he entrusted first one task and then another,
but finding his energies too tireless, and fearing
he might engage in some mischief which would
react detrimentally on himself, finally sent him
to spin ropes of sand at the mouth of the Tweed.
This operation being an unending one, is said to
be still in progress, and as his biographer relates,
the successive attempts and failures of the spirit
are pointed out as every tide casts up or, receding,
uncovers the ever-shifting sands of Berwick bar.
The reference to bridling the Tweed with a
curb of stone, is an allusion to the basaltic dyke
which crosses the bed of the river near Ednam.
Michael, according to the tale, enjoyed that complete
mastery of words of power which in the traditions
of ancient magic is so potent a force in the
working of wonders. As the monk records in his
conversation with the knight of Branksome:

.pm verse-start
“The words may not again be said
That he spoke to me, on death-bed laid;
They would rend this Abbaye’s massy nave
And pile it in heaps above his grave.”
.pm verse-end
// File: 066.png
.pn +1

The monk was not unnaturally alarmed at the
power that this archworker of spells might have
given to the fiends of darkness, and took precaution
to bury him

.pm verse-start
     ... On <abbr=Saint>St</abbr> Michael’s night,
When the bell tolled one, and the moon was bright,
.pm verse-end

so that the cross of his patron saint reflected by the
light of the moon from the emblazoned window pane
might fall on the spot which was chosen for his
grave. Once again on this fateful night the Red
Cross was reflected on the sepulchral stone, and the
opportunity which this offered to take possession
of the Book of Might undisturbed by the hosts of
darkness, must be taken without delay. Within
the grave was one of those ever-burning lamps, for
the existence of which there seems to be some
historical evidence, and which was to serve in the
present instance as a further protection for the
wizard against the fiends of night. Deloraine’s task
achieved “by dint of passing strength” with the
aid of a bar of iron handed him by the monk,
the light

.pm verse-start
Streamed upward to the chancel roof
And through the galleries far aloof.
No earthly flame blazed e’er so bright;
It shone like Heaven’s own blessed light.
Before their eyes the Wizard lay
As if he had not been dead a day,
// File: 067.png
.pn +1
His hoary beard in silver roll’d,
He seem’d some seventy winters old;
A palmer’s amice wrapp’d him round,
With a wrought Spanish baldric bound,
  Like a pilgrim from beyond the sea:
His left hand held his Book of Might;
A silver cross was in his right;
  The lamp was placed beside his knee.
High and majestic was his look,
At which the fellest fiends had shook,
And all unruffled was his face;
They trusted his soul had gotten grace.
.pm verse-end

William of Deloraine hesitated to perform what
seemed very like an act of sacrilege. He was used
to battlefields, but panic seized him in this strange
scene, and the monk was eventually compelled to
warn him that delay in such circumstances was
dangerous.

.pm verse-start
“Now speed thee what thou hast to do,
Or, warrior, we may dearly rue;
For those thou may’st not look upon
Are gathering fast round the yawning stone!”
Then Deloraine, in terror, took
From the cold hand the Mighty Book,
With iron clasped and with iron bound:
He thought, as he took it, the dead man frowned;
But the glare of the sepulchral light,
Perchance, had dazzled the warrior’s sight.
.pm verse-end

How the knight and priest withdrew from the
chapel after the tombstone had been replaced, in
the redoubled gloom of the night, “with wavering
// File: 068.png
.pn +1
steps and with dizzy brain,” imagining the walls
of the chapel echoing with fiendish laughter as they
retreated, is recounted dramatically enough by the
bard of the Scottish border. We are, perhaps,
more interested to know what manner of man this
Michael Scot was, and how far these records of his
magical powers are based on anything more than
unauthenticated tradition. The facts we possess
with regard to Michael Scot’s career convince us
indeed that he was a man of the greatest erudition
and learning, and far in advance of his contemporaries
in these respects. He was a noted
mathematician, and not content with gaining the
highest honours in the schools of Paris of that day,
he subsequently pursued his studies at the fountain-head
of mathematical and alchemical research at
Toledo in Spain. For it must be remembered that
we owe the basis of our mathematical knowledge
primarily to the Arabs who introduced to Europe
not only the Arabic numerals in place of the
cumbrous Roman figures, but also the study of
Algebra, itself an Arabic word. To the Arabs, too,
we owe the basis of our Chemistry—a word that is,
of course, synonymous with Alchemy, which again
bears the stamp of its Arabian origin. It is curious
indeed to note how far the civilisation of the Arab
was in advance of that of the greater part of Europe
in those days. Five hundred years before Michael
// File: 069.png
.pn +1
Scot took ship from Sicily for Spain, the Arabs had
advanced across the whole of Northern Africa,
conquering Egypt, Tripoli, Algeria, and Morocco in
turn, and finally crossing to Spain and there
establishing a separate kaliphate in the eighth
century of the Christian era. The invasion of
Spain by the Arabs introduced into the Iberian
peninsula a literary culture of a kind till then quite
unknown. Under the sway of the Moorish sovereigns
the arts and architecture flourished, and
science found a welcome which it met with nowhere
else in Christianised Europe.

It was to the Moorish capital that students of the
medical art repaired who desired to master the
latest discoveries and most modern methods in
the treatment of the human body. Irrigation with
the Moors had become an applied science, and was
employed extensively throughout the Iberian peninsula
with the most advantageous results in enhancing
the fertility of the soil. Nowhere else in
Europe did the land yield such rich harvests, and
nowhere else was the science of agriculture so fully
understood. The fertile fields of those days are
in many cases replaced by barren deserts and the
towns with teeming populations by ruins and uninhabited
wastes. The ignorant peasantry that has
taken the place of the cultivated sons of Arabia are
still in the matter of civilisation and commercial
// File: 070.png
.pn +1
activity hundreds of years behind the busy and
intelligent population whom in the latter part of
the fifteenth century they finally drove over the
seas after subjecting them to the most cruel persecution
for adhering to the faith of their fathers.
Three million Moors are said to have been ejected
from Spanish soil at the bidding of the civil power,
instigated by ecclesiastical tyranny. Civilisation
has not yet rallied from the so-called “triumph of
the Cross” in Spain. This ejection of the Moors
from the west of Europe coincided, as it happened,
with the advent of the Turk at Constantinople;
but here, by a curious contradiction, the Turk as
the champion of Mohammedanism represented not
progress but the triumph of the sword. The case
was inverted, but in each instance it represented the
victory of barbarism over civilisation, whether the
Mohammedan made headway in the east or the
Christian in the west. In the east the effete
remnant of the Eastern Empire was swept away
before the advancing hosts of Islam. In the west
a far more highly developed and industrial population
was wiped out at the bidding of the myrmidons
of the Papal See.

For five hundred years the Moors had ruled all
but the northernmost portion of Spain, and for
another 250 they retained the province of Granada.
Countless examples of their ornate and characteristic
// File: 071.png
.pn +1
semi-oriental architecture remain behind as
a record of their artistic culture, and much also of
their language intermingled with that of the race
which they at first conquered and which in the days
of their luxury and decadence reconquered them in
turn. But the intellectual life of Moorish Spain,
which was for so long like a beacon light in the darkness
of Mediæval Europe, has passed, never to return.
The Inquisition marked the high-water mark of the
reaction of Christian bigotry against the tolerant and
broad-minded intellectuality which had flourished
under the fostering dominion of a race whose glories
to-day are but a memory of the far-distant past.

Scot as a mathematician, alchemist, and astrologer,
had this been his sole life’s work, would have merited
no insignificant niche in the temple of Science; but
in addition to this, he exercised, though in an
entirely indirect manner, a marked influence on the
history of Europe. His talents and learning commended
him for the position of tutor to Frederick <abbr='the second'>II.</abbr>,
at that time king only of Sicily, but afterwards
“Emperor of the Romans.” Frederick was an
orphan, having lost both his parents in early childhood,
and the receptive mind of the ardent boy responded
sympathetically to the instructions of his
broad-minded and accomplished tutor, who was
destined subsequently to become his confidant and
friend.
// File: 072.png
.pn +1

Michael Scot’s first efforts as an author had for
their aim the education of his royal pupil. For
this purpose he first wrote the <i>Liber Introductorius</i>,
and afterwards the <i>Liber Particularis</i> and the
<i>Physionomia</i>. The first two of these books dealt
with astronomy and astrology, and the latter with
physiognomy and the reading of character from the
physical appearance.

Marriages were arranged early in those days,
and Frederick, when a boy of but fourteen, was
united in wedlock, at the Pope’s desire, with
Constance, daughter of the King of Aragon, and
widow of the King of Hungary, who was some ten
years his senior. This brought the attendance of
Michael Scot at the court at Palermo, temporarily
at least, to an end, and led to his setting sail, as
already narrated, for the coasts of Spain. It appears
that the <i>Physionomia</i> was his parting gift on his
marriage to his illustrious pupil. On his arrival
in Spain, Scot betook himself to the headquarters
of the scientific activities of those days, the renowned
city of Toledo. Here, towards the middle of the
twelfth century, a regular school for translations
from the Arabic had been established, and it was
work of this kind on which Scot himself embarked.
Here he translated the <i>Abbreviatio Avicennæ</i> with a
dedication to the Emperor Frederick in the following
terms: “O! Frederick, Lord of the World,
// File: 073.png
.pn +1
and Emperor, receive with devotion this book of
Michael Scot, that it may be a grace unto thy head
and a chain about thy neck”—no empty compliment
as such phrases generally are, nor one unappreciated
by its distinguished recipient. Here,
too, he pursued his studies in alchemy, chemistry,
medicine, and astrology. Alchemy in those days
was a special bone of contention, one school maintaining
its feasibility, and the other denouncing it,
after the manner of nineteenth century scientists,
as a mere will-o’-the-wisp. The belief in it which
later on took hold of Mediæval Europe had not yet
met with any general sort of acceptance, though
the Arabian school in the main adopted it, and there
seems little doubt that it was held by Michael Scot
himself. One book indeed on this particular subject,
<i>De Alchimia</i>, is attributed to his pen. The
book is contained in a manuscript in possession
of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. If, however,
the main part of the work is genuine, which is
somewhat uncertain, the dedication to Theophilus,
King of the Scots, is certainly not so. We have in
this book a curious formula for turning lead into
gold, which runs as follows:

.pm letter-start
Medibibaz, the Saracen of Africa, used it to change lead
into gold in the following manner:—Take lead and melt
it thrice with caustic (comburenti), red arsenic, sublimate
of vitriol, sugar of alum, and with that red tuchia of India
// File: 074.png
.pn +1
which is found on the shore of the Red Sea, and let the
whole be again and again quenched in the juice of the
Portulaca marina, the wild cucumber, a solution of sal
ammoniac, and the urine of a young badger. Let all
these ingredients then, when well mixed, be set on the fire,
with the addition of some common salt, and well boiled
until they be reduced to one-third of their original bulk,
when you must proceed to distil them with care. Then
take the marchasite of gold, prepared talc, roots of coral,
some carcharoot, which is an herb very like the Portulaca
marina; alum of Cumæ, something red and saltish,
Roman alum and vitriol, and let the latter be made red;
sugar of alum, Cyprus earth, some of the red Barbary
earth, for that gives a good colour; Cumæan earth of
the red sort, African tuchia, which is a stone of variegated
colours and being melted with copper changeth it into
gold; Cumæan salt which is pure red arsenic, the blood
of a ruddy man, red tartar, gumma of Barbary, which is
red and worketh wonders in this art; salt of Sardinia
which is like.... Let all these be beaten together in a
brazen mortar, then sifted finely and made into a paste
with the above water. Dry this paste, and again rub it
fine on the marble slab. Then take the lead you have
prepared as directed above, and melt it together with the
powder, adding some red alum, and some more of the
various salts. This alum is found about Aleppo (Alapia),
and in Armenia, and will give your metal a good colour.
When you have so done you shall see the lead changed
into the finest gold, as good as what comes from Arabia.
This have I, Michael Scot, often put to the proof and ever
found it to be true.
.pm letter-end

Whether the statement appearing in the manuscript
under his name, that Michael Scot worked on
this recipe, be true or not, one would not envy the
// File: 075.png
.pn +1
task of the modern chemist who was called upon to
compound the prescription. The basic idea of
alchemy which, since the discovery of radium, is
looked upon with some favour by certain advanced
scientists, that all metals are reducible to a single
substance, and therefore theoretically interchangeable,
does not seem to find much place in this curious
prescription, which suggests the idea of what we
should call to-day a gold-substitute, rather than the
genuine metal itself, in spite of the fact that we are
told that the gold in question would prove “as good
as what comes from Arabia.”

The greatest work of Scot as translator was his
reproduction in Latin of the commentary of
Averroes on the <i>De Anima</i> of Aristotle. This book,
which expounded views on theological problems
which were the reverse of orthodox, was long held
back from publication by Scot’s patron, the Emperor
Frederick, who hesitated to incur obloquy, and in
especial the hostility of the Pope by reason of its
publication. Friction, however, between the Papal
See and the Emperor became so acute in the end
that it appeared useless to attempt to placate papal
bigotry further, and the publication in question
was thus finally given to the world.

The study of the writings of Averroes had indeed
taken very strong hold on Scot’s imagination, and
if the story may be accepted as authentic, he even
// File: 076.png
.pn +1
went so far as to attempt to evoke the spirit of
the great Arabian, presumably with a view to
securing his assistance in the work which he had
in hand. There is nothing intrinsically improbable
in the supposition that Scott practised or experimented
in such methods of evocation. Averroes
had only been dead some twenty years when Scot
was in Spain, and holding the views he did, he may
well have thought that the philosopher’s spirit had
not passed so far from the physical plane that some
form of necromantic conjuration of his conscious
personality would be ineffectual. Here, as elsewhere,
it seems impossible to draw the line between
record of fact and that fabric of legend and tradition
which has been woven round the story of his life.

A number of the tales told of Scot’s magical
achievements reduce themselves in the light of
modern knowledge to the results of highly developed
hypnotic powers. It is familiar knowledge that
such achievements are not unknown in India at the
present day. A Florentine authority gives us one
of these anecdotes. Scot’s guests at dinner, we are
told, once asked him to show them a new marvel.
The month was January. Yet in spite of the season
he caused vines with fresh shoots and ripe grapes to
appear on the table. The company were bidden
each of them to choose a bunch, but their host
warned them not to put forth their hands till he
// File: 077.png
.pn +1
should give the sign. At the word “Cut!” lo,
the grapes disappeared, and the guests found themselves
each with a knife in the one hand and in the
other his neighbour’s sleeve. Another story of a
more or less similar character is told of a feast
given by the Emperor to celebrate his coronation
at Rome, which took place on November 22, 1220.

.pm letter-start
The pages were still on foot with ewers and basins of
perfumed water and embroidered towels, when suddenly
Michael Scot appeared with a companion, both of them
dressed in Eastern robes, and offered to show the guests
a marvel. The weather was oppressively warm, so
Frederick asked him to procure them a shower of rain
which might bring coolness. This the magician did
accordingly, raising a great storm, which as suddenly
vanished again at their pleasure. Being required by the
Emperor to name his reward, Scot asked leave to choose
one of the company to be the champion of himself and
his friend against certain enemies of theirs. This being
freely granted, their choice fell on Ulfo, a German baron.
As it seemed to Ulfo, they set off at once on their expedition,
leaving the coasts of Sicily in two great galleys,
and with a mighty following of armed men. They sailed
through the Gulf of Lyons, and passed by the Pillars of
Hercules, into the unknown and western sea. Here they
found smiling coasts, received a welcome from the strange
people, and joined themselves to the army of the place;
Ulfo taking the supreme command. Two pitched battles
and a successful siege formed the incidents of the campaign.
Ulfo killed the hostile king, married his lovely
daughter, and reigned in his stead; Michael and his companion
having left to seek other adventures. Of this
marriage sons and daughters were begotten, and twenty
// File: 078.png
.pn +1
years passed like a dream ere the magicians returned,
and invited their champion to revisit the Sicilian court.
Ulfo went back with them, but what was his amazement,
on entering the palace of Palermo, to find everything
just as it had been at the moment of their departure so
long before; even the pages were still holding rounds
with water for the hands of the Emperor’s guests. This
prodigy performed, Michael and the other withdrew and
were seen no more; but Ulfo, it is said, remained ever
inconsolable for the lost land of loveliness, and the joys
of wedded life he had left behind for ever, in a dream not
to be repeated.
.pm letter-end

On Scot’s return to the court of Frederick <abbr='the second'>II.</abbr>,
after his sojourn in Sicily, he added the study and
practice of the medical art to his other activities.
Lesley states that he “gained much praise as a
philosopher, astronomer, and physician,” and Dempster
speaks of him as “one of the first physicians
for learning.” He appears to have treated cases
which would not yield to the ordinary medical
pharmacopœia, and in particular he specialised in
leprosy, gout, and dropsy. Acting apparently
under his advice, Frederick <abbr='the second'>II.</abbr> instituted various
reforms in the practice of medicine. It was stipulated
that the course preliminary to qualification
should consist of three years in arts, and five in
medicine and surgery. Laws were passed forbidding
the adulteration of drugs, while physicians
were prohibited from demanding a greater fee than
half a <i>taren</i> of gold per day, and this gave the patient
// File: 079.png
.pn +1
the right to be visited three times in the course
of the twenty-four hours. It was stipulated that
the poor should be attended free of charge. Certain
recipes of Michael Scot’s are still extant, and can
be studied in Latin in the British Museum. One of
these bears the name of the <i>Pillulæ Magistri
Michaelis Scoti</i>. They seem to be something in
the nature of a universal panacea, and perhaps if
the prescription were taken up by some enterprising
modern chemist, they might rival the fame of the
celebrated Beecham’s Pills!

It appears that Scot had ambitions in the way of
ecclesiastical preferment; but though the Emperor
put himself out to secure his favourite the position
which he coveted, and in fact appealed to the Pope
on his behalf, nothing practical came of these representations.
Probably Scot’s fame was of too
dubious a kind to recommend him to the heads of
the orthodox Church, and the Archbishop of Canterbury,
to whom the Pope applied in his interest, does
not seem to have responded in any friendly fashion.
Finally, an offer was made to Michael Scot of the
Archbishopric of Cashel in Ireland, but in those
days the Irish were little better than a barbarous
race, and they spoke the language of Erse, which
was a sealed book to their prospective bishop. In
any case, though the Chapter had actually elected
him to the post, he decided to decline. He apparently
// File: 080.png
.pn +1
had too much principle to accept the position
of an absentee bishop, and a home among a wild
and uncultured race would hardly have been to the
liking of a man who had associated with the most
intellectual minds of Europe. These hopes of
ecclesiastical preferment having fallen through,
Frederick, after long delay, decided to take steps
for the publication of the translation of the works of
Averroes, and certain books of Aristotle, with the
commentaries thereon of the Arabian philosophers.
He issued an imperial circular announcing the
appearance of these, and sent Michael Scot as his
emissary to arrange for their publication in the
principal European centres of learning. Finally,
after visiting Bologna and Paris, Scot made his way
to England, where he appears to have visited Oxford
about the year 1230. Tradition says that he
journeyed thence to his native land of Scotland.
But shortly after this we lose sight of him altogether,
and though there is no authoritative evidence with
regard to his death, he seems to have passed away
by or before the year 1232. In this year the
<i>Abbreviatio Avicennæ</i> was published at Melfi, in the
Latin version which Scot had translated. Henry
of Colonia was selected by Frederick to transcribe
the work from the imperial copy, and Scot’s
biographer is probably right in regarding this work
as a wreath laid by his imperial friend on his grave.
// File: 081.png
.pn +1
The matter would assuredly have been placed in
Scot’s own hands if he were still alive.

Scot is related to have foretold that his death
would take place by the blow of a stone falling on
his head, and tradition says that being in church
one day with head uncovered at the sacring of
the mass, a stone, shaken from the tower by the
motion of the bell rope, fell upon his head, mortally
wounding him. Presumably this incident occurred
in Scotland; if, that is, there is any truth at all
in the story.

Another prediction is also attributed to Michael
Scot by the same chronicler—Pipini. He states
that he foretold the manner also of the Emperor’s
death, which he declared would take place “ad
portas ferreas”; that is, “at the iron gates,” and
in a town named after Flora. Frederick, it is said,
interpreted this as referring to Florence, which city
he accordingly made a point of avoiding. During
his last campaign, however, in the year 1250, he
fell ill at Florentino, in Apulia, where he slept in
a chamber of the castle. His bed, says the story,
stood against a wall recently built to fill up the
ancient gateway of the tower, the iron staples on
which the gate had been hung still forming part
of the wall. It is stated that the Emperor, learning
these particulars, and calling to mind Michael Scot’s
prediction, exclaimed, “This is the place where I
// File: 082.png
.pn +1
shall make an end, as it was told me. The will of
God be done, for here I shall die.” A few days later
the great Emperor passed to his rest.

Of Michael Scot’s learning and erudition there
can be no question, in spite of the unfavourable
criticisms of Roger Bacon with regard to his knowledge
of languages, which are the less worthy of notice
in view of the fact that Bacon’s own accomplishments
in this direction were far inferior to those of
Scot. A fairer criticism of his work would be based
on its lack of originality, and the fact that the
greater part of his literary output was borrowed
either from the Arabians or the Greeks. His talents
as a past master of mathematics were never in
dispute, and his researches into the problems presented
by astronomy enjoyed a great vogue in his
own day.

While there is no evidence but that of highly-coloured
tradition to suggest that Michael Scot was
the adept he is represented as being in magical
spells and incantations, there is nothing in our
historical knowledge of his career which renders the
practice of such arts by him at all incredible, or
indeed unlikely. Legend has magnified this portion
of his many-sided activities to the exclusion of that
branch of his labours which might well, one would
have thought, have earned for him more enduring
fame. The lovers of the marvellous have thus
// File: 083.png
.pn +1
surrounded with a mysterious and semi-sinister
halo the name of a man whose chief work in life lay
in the paths of philosophy, astronomy, and medical
research. It seems not improbable that the last
of these pursuits led this daring thinker into the
investigation and practice of what to-day we term
hypnotism, and its employment to the bewilderment
of his acquaintances in the creation of illusions,
the source of which we now recognise in the power
of a master mind to mould by sheer force of will
the plastic imagination and subjective consciousness
of his audience.
// File: 084.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap4
<abbr='four'>IV</abbr> | PARACELSUS
.sp 2
The embattled forces of conservative orthodoxy
are so strong that one is sometimes tempted to
wonder how it is that the world ever goes round
at all; how it is that the forward movement of
progress succeeds, as it apparently does, in getting
the better of so many retrograde tendencies, so
much prejudice, so strong a clinging to the stereotyped
conditions of the day. After all, the more
one thinks about it, the more one becomes convinced
that the whole progress of the world is the
work of the very, very few; that the positive and
progressive intellect is the rare exception, and that
if democratic conditions really prevailed (as of
course they never do) all civilisation would go
backwards and gradually revert once more to chaos.
What a mockery, after all, Democracy is! And
how hopelessly the modern world is deluded in
thinking that anywhere or at any time Democracy
has in reality held sway! As a matter of fact, the
many have never ruled, have never wished to rule;
// File: 085.png
.pn +1
they have merely asked for some strong man to
lead them. Where was ever the flock of sheep that
did not follow the bell-wether? Here and there we
meet with a master mind that—for good or evil—leads
the multitude—or, if he does not lead, at
least points the way where others will eventually
follow. Side by side with him we see the multitude
either drifting or being led. “Work!” said
Voltaire, that most popular of writers, “work for
the little public!” Voltaire knew, as all great
leaders have known, before and after, that it is
the “little public” that ever dominates the situation.
It is the “little leaven that leaveneth the
whole lump.” “It is a sight beloved of the gods,”
says the old saying, “to see a good man struggling
against adversity.” But is it not a finer sight still,
to see a strong man battling with the forces of
orthodoxy, and refusing to yield his ground? A
man of such a mould was Philip Bombast of Hohenheim,
better known by his assumed name of Paracelsus.
Never was there any one to whom Shelley’s
celebrated line

.pm verse-start
The sun comes out and many reptiles spawn,
.pm verse-end

was more absolutely appropriate. The hostility
and venomous antagonism of his own profession,
with a few notable exceptions, followed and persecuted
him throughout his entire medical career.
// File: 086.png
.pn +1
The boldness and independence of his medical attitude
galled the leaders as well as the rank and file
of the profession. But what was still more galling
to them than his lack of orthodoxy, was the fact that
his novel methods, as they must have appeared
to the doctors of that day, were so immeasurably
more successful than their own. Paracelsus, indeed,
never gave nor asked for quarter. John the Baptist
denouncing the Pharisees who came to him as “a
generation of vipers” was no bad parallel to Paracelsus’s
stinging invective on the ignorance and
tradition-loving proclivities of his own profession.

.if h
.il fn=fig1.jpg id=fig1 w=60% alt=''
.ca Paracelsus (aged 24).
.if-
.if t
[Illustration: Paracelsus (aged 24).]
.if-

Many to whom the name of Paracelsus is familiar
are accustomed to look upon him as little more than
a singularly successful quack who revived the traditions
of an earlier school of Occultism in defiance of
the more scientific methods of his own time. As a
matter of fact, the doctors of his day were, in the
vast majority of cases, merely theorists with little
real practical experience, but with a fair store of
book-learning of a very indifferent kind. It was
Paracelsus whose medical knowledge was derived
from experiment and experience, and who had
acquired the greater part of his medical and surgical
skill from wide and varied travelling and visiting
more countries and more different nationalities
than any other medical expert of his day, and
who had learnt by actual association with all
// File: 087.png
// File: 088.png
// File: 089.png
.pn +1
sorts and conditions of men in different climes, far
more than any book-learning had ever taught him.

The period of Paracelsus’s career coincided with
the Reformation of Luther, and with the wider and
more general Renaissance movement. This latter
development had brought back in its train the study
of classical learning and classical ideals which had
fallen into discredit about the period of the first
triumph of Christianity and its establishment as a
world-religion. The attitude of the earlier Christians,
who looked upon the Pagan deities as devils,
and Greek and Roman classical writers as apologists
for devil-worship, had passed away; and the
highest dignitaries of the Church were now often
noted for their classical erudition and ripe scholarship.
With the return of classical ideals came back
also into favour in a number of unexpected quarters
the doctrines of Neoplatonism. When Hypatia
perished at Alexandria, orthodox Christianity set its
foot on Plotinus and all his works. The struggle
at the end had been one rather between Christianity
and the later Greek philosophers with their
Neoplatonic conceptions than between Christianity
and Pagan Rome. The gods of Rome were dead
already. Pan was dead past resurrecting. The
danger that threatened Christianity was the
triumph of such Emperors as Julian the Apostate—Julian,
whose master was Plotinus, and whose
// File: 090.png
.pn +1
religion was Neoplatonism merely dressed in an old
Roman garb. To the thinkers and philosophers
of that time the triumph of Christianity seemed
like the victory of exoteric religion over the inner
esoteric truths. Back, now, with all that was best
of the scholarship and art of Greece and Rome,
came the mystic doctrines of the Alexandrian
philosophers—back, not in triumph, but daring
once more to reassert themselves in the face of
a hostile world that had long even forgotten
their existence. A thousand years separated
Hypatia from Cornelius Agrippa—a thousand
years which, in the realm of thought, might well
be characterised as the Dark Ages. Cornelius
Agrippa von Nettesheim was born at Cologne in
1486. Seven years later, on 10th November 1493,
at Einsiedeln, near Zurich, a son was born to Dr
Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim, and was christened
Theophrastus, in honour of Theophrastus
Tyrtamos, a Greek physician, philosopher, and
follower of Aristotle. This child was subsequently
to be known to fame and held up to obloquy under
the title of Paracelsus.

It was a period in which the world was in labour
with great events. Only a year before Columbus
had landed on American soil. In the same year,
or the previous one, passed away a man whose life
was destined to create as great a revolution in the
// File: 091.png
.pn +1
history of the human race as that of Columbus
himself—William Caxton. Returning from a long
sojourn in the Netherlands in or about 1474, Caxton
established his printing press in the precincts of
Westminster Abbey, and before his death at least
sixty-four books are known to have been issued
from this first English Printing House. Ten years
exactly before Paracelsus’s birth, a third of these
great makers of revolutions had seen the light.
On 10th November 1483, Martin Luther was born at
Eisleben in Lower Saxony, and when the subject of
these notes was twenty-four years old, Luther
nailed his ninety-five theses against the Doctrine
of Indulgences on the church door at Wittenberg.
Paracelsus, when occasion offered, did not attempt
to disguise his sympathy with this bold reformer,
though he took no actual part in the movement,
and he was accused by his enemies of being a
medical Luther, a charge which he took pains to
show that he did not in any way resent. Another
noteworthy character in the realm of History and
Literature, Lorenzo de Medici, had passed away a
year before our hero’s birth. In England the Wars
of the Roses were over, and Henry <abbr='the seventh'>VII.</abbr> was busy
establishing monarchy on a firm basis, the people,
worn out by incessant struggles, being glad to
accept the Tudor rule, sympathetic as it always
was to the middle and commercial classes. In
// File: 092.png
.pn +1
Europe there was no Austrian Emperor, and Italy
was still fated, for centuries to come, to remain a
geographical expression. The Holy Roman Empire
extended from the German Ocean and the Baltic Sea
on the North to the Adriatic on the South. Poland
and Lithuania extended far along its Eastern border,
and the outmost limit of the realm of the Muscovite
was still 500 miles east of the site where a century
later Peter the Great was to found and give his
name to the capital of the Russian Empire. The
conquering Turk was thundering at the gates of
Christendom. Ferdinand and Isabella, patrons
of Columbus, reigned at Madrid. Everywhere
throughout the civilised world vast changes were
impending, everywhere the horizon was widening,
and men’s minds were being directed into new
channels and to fresh fields of enterprise and of
opinion.

There has been much discussion as to what
exactly is connoted by the name “Paracelsus,”
and how it came to be first adopted. What seems
clear is that von Hohenheim adopted the name
himself, and was not, as some have held, given it
by his admirers. It was a usual practice in those
days to write books under some Latin <lang=fr><i>nom de plume</i></lang>,
frequently some adaptation into Latin of the name
of the writer. In all probability the last two
syllables of the name, “celsus,” were suggested by
// File: 093.png
.pn +1
“Hohen” (or “high”), “Hohenheim” being
literally translated as “high home.” With regard
to the first two syllables it is noticeable that these
were occasionally employed by Paracelsus in giving
name to his medical treatises. There is thus one
treatise called “Paramirum,” and another “Paragranum.”
This word “para” seems to have been
used in the sense of giving the word to which it was
prefixed a superlative value. Thus “Paramirum”
would mean “extremely wonderful.” The whole
word is doubtless a polyglot hotchpotch, the first
part being Greek and the second Latin; but
mediæval writers had little scruple in adapting the
classical tongues to their own requirements.

To follow the writings of Paracelsus it is necessary
to understand his phraseology, his jargon, as we
should call it in the slang of to-day. Without this
he is as incomprehensible as is the dog Latin of a
scientific textbook to one who is not a scientific
specialist—or, to give another example, as the
language of Astrology is to one who is not an
Astrologer. Paracelsus held that there were three
basic substances necessary to the existence of all
bodies. These he called Sulphur, Mercury, and
Salt. Sulphur corresponds to fire, or rather to the
principle of inflammability; Mercury to water, or
fluidity; and Salt to earth, or solidity. For a full
glossary of the terms which he employed, readers
// File: 094.png
.pn +1
are referred to the volume on <i>The Life and Philosophy
of Paracelsus</i>, by the late Dr Franz Hartmann. In
this terminology <i>Azoth</i> stands for the creative
principle in Nature, or the spiritual vitalising force;
the <i>Ilech Primum</i> is the causative force; <i>Cherio</i>, the
essence of the thing, the “fifth principle,” which
constitutes what we call its essential qualities;
the <i>Evestrum</i> is man’s astral body, his ethereal
counterpart, that may act to him as guardian
angel and warn him of dangers; the <i>Elementaries</i>
are the astral corpses of the dead, and must not
be confused with the <i>Elementals</i>, or Nature Spirits—Sylphs,
Salamanders, Undines, and Gnomes;
<i>Magic</i> is the conscious employment of spiritual
powers to act on external Nature. Many of these
expressions have been adopted by the Theosophists
of the present day and by students of Occultism.

It is clear, though Paracelsus long antedated
Hahnemann, the founder of Homœopathy, that
much of his medical teaching is what we should now
call Homœopathic. Hahnemann, in fact, borrowed
extensively from Paracelsus. Take, for instance,
Paracelsus’s teaching with regard to the quintessence
or virtue of each substance. This, he taught,
though infinitesimal in quantity, even in large
bodies, had none the less the power to affect the
mass through and through, as a single drop of gall
embitters, or a few grains of saffron colour a large
// File: 095.png
.pn +1
quantity of water. The application of homœopathic
cures by those ignorant of homœopathic
principles has frequently led to mistakes in this
connection; as, for instance, the administration
of doses many times in excess of what the complaint
requires, the result being the entire failure
of the medicine to produce the intended effect.

.pm letter-start
“There are wide differences,” says Paracelsus, striking
again a very homœopathic note, “between what the ancient
doctors taught and what we here teach, and therefore our
healing art differs widely from theirs. For we teach that
what heals a man also wounds him, and what wounded
will also heal him. For the nettle can be so changed that it
cannot burn, the flame so that it does not scorch, and the
chelidony so that it does not cicatrize. Thus similars are
good in healing, such and such a salt to such and such a
sore. And the things which heal a wound in Nature heal
the same sort of wound in man.”
.pm letter-end

“Many kinds of rust,” says Paracelsus again,
“occur in the minerals; for each mineral has its
own peculiar nature.” This rust is in the form of a
disease, and iron has one disease, while copper has
another. In a similar way a man has a sore and
it is healed by treatment. The metal, too, has a
sore, and can be healed by treatment. “Metallic
bodies,” says Paracelsus, long antedating the discoveries
of the present day, “are as liable to death
as the others, for their salt is arsenic.” The whole
earth is linked together, and the life that passes
through the bodies of men passes also through the
// File: 096.png
.pn +1
bodies of minerals. Paracelsus had no patience
with those who taught of a panacea that would heal
all diseases. He described them as people who
“rode all horses with one saddle,” through whom
more harm than good was effected. He maintained
that a doctor must know the sick and all matters
appertaining to their state “just as a carpenter
knows his wood.” He mentions six essential
qualifications for the practical physician.

.pm letter-start
(1) A doctor (he says) must know how many kinds of
tissue there are in the body, and how each kind stands
in relation to the man.

(2) He must know all the bones, such as the ribs and
their coverings, the difference between one and another,
their relations to each other and their articulations.

(3) He must know all the blood-vessels, the nerves, the
cartilages and how they are held together.

(4) He must know the length, number, form, condition,
and purpose of each member of the body, its particular
flesh, marrow, and all other details.

(5) He must know where all emunctoria lie and how
they are to be averted; also what is in every cavity of
the body, and everything about the intestines.

(6) He must with all his might and being seek to understand
about life and death, what the chief organs in man
mean, and what each member can and may suffer.
.pm letter-end

If we look to Paracelsus as the real founder of
Homœopathy, so also must we regard him as the
pioneer of magnetism and magnetic healing. Man,
he maintained, is nourished through the magnetic
power which resides in all Nature and by which each
// File: 097.png
.pn +1
individual being draws its specific nourishment to
itself. He called this magnetic force <i>Mumia</i> in his
special phraseology, and he laid great stress on the
healing power which resided in this <i>Mumia</i>. “Just
as the power of the lily breaks forth in perfume
which is invisible, so,” he writes, “the invisible
body sends forth its healing influence. Just as in
the visible body are wonderful activities which the
senses can perceive, so, too, lie powers in the
invisible body which can work great wonders.”
To him the whole universe was one, and knit
together by indissoluble bonds.

.pm letter-start
“The astral currents created by the imagination of
the Macrocosmos,” he writes, “act upon the Microcosmos,
and produce certain states in the latter, and likewise the
astral currents produced by the imagination and will of
man produce certain states in external Nature; and these
currents may reach far, because the power of the imagination
reaches as far as thought can go. The physiological
processes taking place in the body of living beings are
caused by their astral currents, and the physiological and
meteorological processes taking place in the great organism
of Nature are caused by the astral currents of Nature as
a whole. The astral currents of either act upon the other,
either consciously or unconsciously; and if this fact is
properly understood it will cease to appear incredible that
the mind of man may produce changes in the universal
mind, which may cause changes in the atmosphere—winds
and rains, storm, hail and lightning—or that evil
may be changed into good by the power of Faith. Heaven
is a field into which the imagination of man throws the
seeds.”
.pm letter-end
// File: 098.png
.pn +1

Here, in a single paragraph, is the philosophy of
Astrology, and the justification for the efficacy of
prayer.

I have said that Paracelsus was the father of
Homœopathy, and the father also of that later school
of animal magnetism which was founded in France
in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and the
inception of which is always associated with the
name of Mesmer. Unfortunately, Mesmer had
neither the knowledge nor the experience, nor yet
the intuitive faculties of his master, Paracelsus.
But, resurrected as it was under somewhat unfavourable
conditions, there is reason to believe
that magnetic healing is destined to play a far
greater part in the future of medical art than it
has ever done in the past. Not only was Paracelsus
a pioneer in Homœopathy and animal magnetism, he
was also one of the first, as well as one of the greatest,
of all Faith-healers. “Faith,” he says, “has a
great deal more power than the physical body.”
“All magical processes are based upon Faith.”
“The power of Faith overcomes all spirits of
Nature, because it is a spiritual power, and Spirit
is higher than Nature.” “Whatever is grown in
the realm of Nature may be changed by the power
of Faith.” “Anything we may accomplish which
surpasses Nature is accomplished by Faith, and by
Faith diseases may be cured.” “Imagination,” he
// File: 099.png
.pn +1
says again, “is the cause of many diseases. Faith is
the cure for all.” “If we cannot cure a disease by
Faith, it is because our Faith is too weak. But
our Faith is weak on account of our want of knowledge.
If we were conscious of the power of God
within ourselves, we should never fail.” “The
power of amulets does not rest so much in the
material of which they are made as in the Faith
with which they are worn.” Paracelsus’s chosen
motto was:

.pm letter-start
Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest—
.pm letter-end

“Let him not belong to another who has the power
to be his own”—who can, in short, be master of
his own soul. Paracelsus declined to follow any
leader, but formed his own conclusions from his
own experience. For him the <i>Codex Naturæ</i> was
a system which led straight to exact knowledge,
and he rejected whatever could not be verified by
research. He laid the foundations of a new
system, built on evidence rather than on the
outworn traditions of the medicine of his day.
This system comprised within itself at once a
practical guide to the medical art and a spiritual
philosophy of life. The fatal error of divorcing the
physical from the spiritual, and treating the physical
as a thing apart, which has rendered abortive so
much of the medical research of recent generations,
// File: 100.png
.pn +1
would undoubtedly have been obviated, had the
modern exponent of the medical art realised that
in Paracelsus was to be found a pioneer who
brought the life-giving genius of his intellect to
bear on old truths in their relation to modern
problems, rather than a quack and mountebank
who deluded his contemporaries—none so easy
a task—into the idea that he had accomplished
marvellous cures where the medical faculty of his
day could show nothing but a record of failures.
// File: 101.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap5
<abbr=five>V</abbr> | EMANUEL SWEDENBORG
.sp 2
Of all the men and women whom the world has
classed under the general title of “mystic,” not one
certainly occupies so singular a position as Emanuel
Swedenborg. If we decide to accept the world’s
verdict—and it seems difficult to do otherwise—and
agree to call Swedenborg a mystic, we are
confronted by the fact that we can find no parallel
either to his personality or to his career, though we
search the roll of the mystics of all the ages. Pascal
indeed was, like Swedenborg, a master mathematician,
and a man of wide general learning, but
he was a mystic first and foremost, and his life
from an early date was given up to his calling as
a leading light of the Catholic Church. Swedenborg,
on the other hand, was, until the age of fifty,
a man of science and a man of affairs; that is,
he was a scientist of the most eminently practical
kind, one whose encyclopædic knowledge was
turned always into utilitarian channels, and for
whom knowledge of any kind appeared to have no
meaning outside its practical application. It would
// File: 102.png
.pn +1
be difficult to instance a single one of the world’s
great men whose interests were so wide, or whose
mental activity was so all-absorbing. Outside art
there seemed literally nothing that did not appeal to
him as a field for his indefatigable investigation,
and, as regards art, it was presumably its lack of
utilitarian value which led to its neglect by his
essentially practical mentality.

.if h
.il fn=fig2.jpg id=fig2 w=60% alt=''
.ca Emanuel Swedenborg.
.if-
.if t
[Illustration: Emanuel Swedenborg.]
.if-

Swedenborg started his travels in the first years
of early manhood, and wherever they took him
there was nothing which escaped his observant eye.
To whatever part of Europe he went it would seem
that he could not be satisfied without learning
all that was to be learnt, without seeing all that was
to be seen. When he establishes himself in London
he does not merely take lodgings because the price
is reasonable or because the cooking is good, or
because he thinks he will be comfortable. He
writes from London in 1711: “I turn my lodgings
to some use, and change them often. At first I was
at a watchmaker’s, and now I am at a mathematical
instrument maker’s. From them I steal their
trades, which some day will be of use to me.” At
Leyden he learnt to grind glass for lenses, so that
he might furnish himself with appliances which he
could not afford to buy. His brother wishes for
globes for the university at Upsala. These proved
too expensive, and he was asked to purchase printed
// File: 103.png
// File: 104.png
// File: 105.png
.pn +1
maps which might be mounted in Sweden. The
makers would not supply these, so Swedenborg
applied himself to learning engraving, and prepared
them himself. When chafing at enforced inactivity
at home he turns his attention to music, and writes
to his brother-in-law that he has been able several
times to take the place of the organist. In travelling
on the Continent he studies the fortifications
of the towns, the methods of constructing fences.
He visits and investigates all the manufactories.
He passes critical remarks with regard to the blast
furnaces, the vitriol, arsenic, and sulphur works,
the copper and tin manufactories, the paper mills,
and studies also the methods of mining. Not content
with this, he investigates the social conditions
of the people, criticises the situation of affairs in
France, the wealth of the Church and the poverty
of the people. “Everywhere,” he says, “the convents,
churches, and monks are the wealthiest and
possess most land. The monks are fat, puffed up,
and prosperous. A whole proud army might be
formed of them without their being missed.”
Again: “The houses are miserable, the convents
magnificent, the people poor and wretched.” He
investigates the problem of the revenue of the
French Government, obtained by the system of
taxation called tithing. “It amounts,” he says,
“to some thirty-two million livres, and Paris, on
// File: 106.png
.pn +1
account of its rents, contributes nearly two-thirds
of the sum.” “I am told,” he says, “that the
ecclesiastical order possesses one-fifth of all the
property in the State, and that the country will be
ruined if this goes on much longer.”[#] He gives
the number of convents in France, actually at that
date between fourteen and fifteen thousand; the
number of the members of the religious orders;
the number of the abbesses, prioresses, chapters, etc.
He goes to hear the celebrated preachers, among
them the King’s chaplain, who “gesticulates like
an actor.” He discusses the adoration of saints
with an abbé. He visits the hospitals and attends
the opening of Parliament. Not content with this,
he frequents the opera and the theatres, and passes
opinions upon the most popular pieces and the most
distinguished actors and actresses. In the midst
of all this we find him speculating on the form of
the particles of the atmosphere, and writing an
introductory essay to a book which he is planning
to prove that “the soul of wisdom is the knowledge
and acknowledgment of the Supreme Being.” As
if this were not enough, he occupies his spare
moments in the study of anatomy, astronomy,
magnetism, and hydrostatics.

Surely, since the world began, there was never a
more versatile brain! He has even observations to
// File: 107.png
.pn +1
make on military matters. He goes to see the
Brandenburg soldiers, Frederick the Great’s famous
regiment. “The men,” he says, “are tall and
slender and they march erectly. They go through
their drills with the greatest promptness and
regularity, but their manner is a little theatrical.
The whole squadron is like a machine placed there,
moving instantaneously at the pleasure of the
machinist.” “If,” he says, “they displayed the
same uniformity in battle as in drill, they would
conquer Alexander’s army, and subject a great part
of Europe to Prussia, but——” He leaves it to
the reader to fill in the reason of his doubt.

Others besides Swedenborg have possessed that
encyclopædic type of brain which amasses vast
stores of miscellaneous knowledge, but few, if any,
have possessed at the same time Swedenborg’s
extraordinary capacity for utilising the knowledge
gained and turning it to practical account. The idea
of learning as an object in itself was indeed entirely
alien to Swedenborg’s type of mentality. All information
acquired was merely regarded as a means
towards some practical end. We thus find him
founding universal principles upon the knowledge he
has accumulated in explanation of the laws which
govern phenomena. We see him, for example,
deducing his conclusions in the field of geology from
a number of observed facts. He reports on the
// File: 108.png
.pn +1
geological conformation of Sweden, and concludes
from it that the country was at one time swept over
by a sea in a state of great commotion. He notices
the fact that the stones on the mountain sides are
worn off and rounded, in support of this. He
also describes the remnants of a wrecked ship
excavated far inland, and the skeleton of a
whale which was discovered in West Gothland.
“Swedenborg’s contributions in the field of geology,”
says Professor <abbr rend=spell>A. G.</abbr> Nathorst, “are of such significance
and value that they alone would have been
sufficient to have secured him an honoured scientific
name.” As a mining expert he was unequalled.
“We should never be able to finish,” says Professor
Schleiden, “if we attempted to enumerate all the
improvements which Swedenborg introduced in the
working of the mines in his own country.” “The
metallurgical works of this remarkable man,” says
Dr Percy, “seem to be very imperfectly known,
and yet none are in my judgment more worthy of
the attention of those interested in the history of
metallurgy.” The air-tight stove which he describes
in his work on <i>New Observations and Discoveries
Respecting Iron and Fire</i>, published in
1721, is stated to be identical in principle with
one recently patented in Washington.[#] Sir Isaac
// File: 109.png
.pn +1
Newton had propounded the corpuscular theory of
light, which was for long universally held. Swedenborg
dissented, stating, in his <i>Principia</i>, that
“motion diffused from a given centre through a contiguous
medium or volume of particles of ether produced
light.” This theory is the one now adopted.
Swedenborg also notices that light and electricity
are produced by the same efficient cause, thereby
supplying the clue to the utilisation of electricity
as a means of lighting. Even where in the field of
science he was looked upon as a dreamer in his own
days, his dreams have since taken practical shape.
Among the inventions which he projected was
“the plan of a certain ship which with its men was
to go under the surface of the sea wherever it
chooses, and do great damage to the fleet of the
enemy.” He also designed a flying machine, a
project which he was very reluctant to drop.
Christopher Polhem, however, threw cold water on
this, saying, with respect to flying by artificial
means, “there is perhaps the same difficulty as in
making a <i>perpetuum mobile</i>, or gold by artificial
means.”

His philosophy recognises the synthetical as well
as the analytical method as requisite to arrive at
true conclusions. “Both,” he says, “are necessary
in reflecting upon and tracing out one and the same
thing; for in order to do so there is required both
// File: 110.png
.pn +1
light, <i>a priori</i>, and experience, <i>a posteriori</i>.” “He
who is possessed of scientific knowledge,” he says
elsewhere, “and is merely skilled in experiment,
had taken only the first steps in wisdom. For such
a person is only acquainted with what is posterior,
and is ignorant of what is prior. Thus his wisdom
does not extend beyond the working of the senses
and is unconnected with reason; whereas, nevertheless,
true wisdom embraces both.”

Unquestionably Swedenborg, as he is known to
us from the record of the first fifty years of his life
(if we except the earliest years of his childhood),
was about the last person one would expect to
have his name associated with that Swedenborgian
gospel by which eventually it came to be known to
the world at large. He had, as we have seen,
earned many titles to recognition, but assuredly
that of a medium of communication between this
world and the world of spirits was not one of
them.

Swedenborg’s father was a Swedish Lutheran
Bishop with leanings towards pietism, and a rather
broader and more sympathetic outlook than the
majority of his fellow clergy. His name, Swedborg,
was subsequently changed to Swedenborg when the
family was ennobled by the Swedish king. Emanuel
was the second son and third child of Bishop Swedborg
and his wife, Anna, of whom we know but little,
// File: 111.png
.pn +1
and who died when Emanuel was only eight years
old. The child was thus surrounded by religious
influences in his early days, and it is said that his
father had a guardian angel with whom he claimed
to be able to hold converse on occasion. Reared
under these conditions, he naturally enough evinced
strongly religious tendencies in his childhood.
“From my fourth to my tenth year,” he says, “I
was constantly engaged in thought upon God,
salvation, and the spiritual experiences of men. I
revealed things at which my father and mother
wondered, saying that angels must be speaking
through me.” Here at least we obtain some suggestion
of what he eventually became, and of which
the intervening years between childhood and middle
age seem to afford us little or no hint. The believer
in heredity will point to the psychic temperament
of the father as inherited by the son; but there
appears to be no foreshadowing in his ancestry of
that encyclopædic mind with which he was destined
to astonish his contemporaries. His father evidently
failed to understand his precocious son, and
the relations between the two were far from cordial,
the son considering that his father was inappreciative
and failed to encourage his intellectual
activities, and also blaming him for meanness in
matters of finance. Bishop Swedborg had, however,
eight other children besides Emanuel, and very
// File: 112.png
.pn +1
probably he did not find it easy to make two ends
meet, especially as he was something of an author
himself, and published books at his own expense,
which proved far from remunerative. Probably
the father considered that the son ought to settle
down to some regular trade or profession instead
of commencing life by travelling in search of knowledge
first to one country and then to another.
Presumably he regarded his precocious offspring
as likely to become a jack-of-all-trades and master
of none, and there are doubtless many other parents
who, under similar circumstances, would have
thought the same. In any case the son was able to
start off on his travels in spite of financial embarrassments
and many dangers on the way. He was
nearly wrecked when approaching England. Then
the ship was boarded by pirates, and on the top of
this was fired into by a British guardship, being
mistaken for the pirate craft. Finally, our youthful
hero narrowly escaped hanging for breaking the
quarantine regulations, the plague at this time
being prevalent in Sweden. Under somewhat
similar circumstances the great Julius told the
captain of his vessel not to be afraid, as he was
carrying Cæsar. Whether Swedenborg had any
such faith in a Providence watching over his future
destiny, we are not told. He certainly realised his
unique powers, but can hardly have suspected the
// File: 113.png
.pn +1
channel into which they were eventually to be
diverted.

The one link between Emanuel and his family
was his brother-in-law, Eric Benzelius, afterwards
bishop, and the sister to whom he was married.
In his financial and other troubles he repeatedly
appeals to him for sympathy and practical help,
evidently not without response. He also asks for
intercession with his father, to whom he obviously
did not care to appeal direct, having met with too
many rebuffs. It is interesting to note that one
of the first objects that met his eyes in London was
“the magnificent <abbr=Saint>St</abbr> Paul’s Cathedral, finished a few
days ago, in all its parts.” He makes the acquaintance
of Flamsteed, the most notable astronomer in
England, who was concerned in the founding of
Greenwich Observatory and seems to have been
something of an astrologer as well. Apparently
as the result of this visit, he takes up with enthusiasm
the study of astronomy.

.pm letter-start
I have made such progress in it [he says], as to have
discovered much which I think will be useful in its study.
Although in the beginning it made my brain ache, yet
long speculations are no longer difficult for me. I examined
closely all proportions for finding the terrestrial
longitude, but could not find a single one. I have, therefore,
originated a method by means of the Moon, which
is unerring, and I am certain that it is the best which has
yet been advanced. In a short time I will inform the
// File: 114.png
.pn +1
Royal Society that I have a proposition to make on this
subject, stating my points.... I have also discovered
many new methods for observing the planets, the Moon,
and the stars. That which concerns the Moon and its
parallax, diameter, and inequality I will publish whenever
an opportunity arises.
.pm letter-end

He longs to go to Oxford, and investigate the
Bodleian Library, but cannot, for want of money.
“I wonder,” he says, “my father does not show
greater care for me than to let me live now for more
than sixteen months upon 250 rixdalers (something
under £50).” Finally, he returns home and obtains
an appointment as Assessor-extraordinary at the
State Department of the Board of Mines, which was
responsible for the supervision of the great mining
industries of Sweden. In this connection he is
fortunate in making the acquaintance of Christopher
Polhem, the celebrated engineer, who recommends
him for his talents and readiness of resource. By
degrees he becomes an intimate guest with Polhem’s
family, a circumstance which leads in the end to a
tragic love affair. He falls desperately in love with
Polhem’s younger daughter. The father gives his
consent; but the girl, a mere child of thirteen or
fourteen, cannot reconcile herself to the idea.
Swedenborg, with great sorrow, relinquishes his
claim, resolving never again to let his thoughts
settle upon any woman. Polhem himself seems to
have been almost equally distressed with Swedenborg
// File: 115.png
.pn +1
over the incident, especially as it led to a breach
between himself and the young man, whom he had
come to regard in the light of his own son. A
period of depression follows, which is accentuated
by the death of Charles <abbr='the twelfth'>XII.</abbr> of Sweden, about the
same period, from whose encouragement and support
Emanuel had considerable expectations. The
relations between himself and the King were, indeed,
singularly intimate, Charles readily appreciating
the young man’s remarkable talents and mathematical
knowledge. “Every day,” says Swedenborg,
in writing on 14th September 1718, “I had
some mathematical matters for his Majesty, who
deigned to be pleased with all of them. When the
eclipse took place, I took his Majesty out to see it,
and talked much to him about it. This, however,
is a mere beginning.”

In the summer of 1721, Swedenborg started again
on his travels, his object this time being to study
the mines and manufactories of other countries,
so that he might be in a position to render greater
services to his own in the office to which he had
been appointed. On this occasion he visited all the
mines in Saxony and the Hartz mountains, and was
royally entertained by Duke Ludvic Rudolf of
Brunswick-Lüneburg, who showed him a generosity
which he doubtless appreciated after his father’s
parsimony. Meanwhile his pen was by no means
// File: 116.png
.pn +1
idle. He published a treatise at Amsterdam on
Chemistry and Physics; some observations on
Iron and Fire; and a work on the construction of
Docks and Dykes; and later on, at Leipzig, some
miscellaneous observations on Geology and Mineralogy.
On his return home he settled down again
for a period to his work at the Board of Mines, in
the meantime gathering matter for further publications
which followed in due course. The most
important of these were his <i>Opera Philosophia
Mineralia</i>, and a treatise on <i>The Infinite</i>. The
former work met with a very favourable reception,
and between one publication and another Swedenborg
soon won for himself a European reputation.
The Academy of Sciences at <abbr=Saint>St</abbr> Petersburg nominated
him a corresponding member, while he was one of
the first to be elected for the newly established
Royal Academy of Sciences in his own country.

Everything thus seemed to open out for Swedenborg
a career of great scientific and practical utility.
He became, however, gradually led by his philosophical
speculations to an investigation of the
nature of the soul and its operation in the body, and
the mutual relations of the two. This study was
the subject of two important works, entitled respectively
<i>The Economy of the Animal Kingdom
considered Anatomically and Philosophically</i>, and
<i>The Animal Kingdom considered Anatomically,
// File: 117.png
.pn +1
Physically, and Philosophically</i>. By the “animal
kingdom” must be understood the kingdom presided
over by the soul. In the first of these books
Swedenborg deals with the composition of the
blood and its circulation, with the heart, arteries,
and veins, and with the brain and its cortices. In
this book Swedenborg attaches “great importance
to the blood, for, as he says, nothing exists in the
body that has not previously existed in the blood.”
He describes it again as “a vital and most spirituous
fluid, which has an immediate connection with the
soul.” In the <i>Animal Kingdom</i> Swedenborg describes
in full detail all the organs of the body and
their uses, the object being in the end to track the
soul home and to describe its activities. “For as
yet,” he tells us, “her modes of being and her
nature are absolutely unknown.” Naturally he
recognises that this will be regarded by the philosophers
of his day as a vain and useless quest.
But he is prepared to meet their objections with
the following pertinent remarks, which, now that
the materialistic hypothesis has been finally discarded
by the advance guard of modern Science,
are likely to find a sympathetic echo in scientific as
well as philosophic circles.

.pm letter-start
Inasmuch [he says] as the soul is the model, the idea,
the first form, the substance, the force, and the principle
of her organic body, and of all its forces and powers, or
// File: 118.png
.pn +1
what amounts to the same thing, as the organic body is
the image and type of its soul conformed and principled
to the whole nature of the soul’s efficiency, it follows that
the one is represented in the other.... Thus by the body
we are instructed respecting the soul, by the soul respecting
the body, and by both respecting the truth of the
whole.
.pm letter-end

Emerson describes the <i>Animal Kingdom</i> as “an
anatomist’s account of the human body in the
highest style of poetry,” and its object as to “put
science and the soul, long estranged from each other,
at one again.” It was while continuing his pursuit
of this apparently visionary aim that Swedenborg
quite unexpectedly found himself, as he believed,
in touch with another than the physical world.
In writing of this extraordinary development in
his life history in the Introduction to the <i>Arcana
Cœlestia</i>, the first volume of which appeared in
1749, he gives his own account of his relationship
with the spiritual realm in justification of the remarkably
dogmatic statements contained in the
book in question.

“It is,” he says, “expedient here to premise that
of the Lord’s divine mercy it has been granted me
now for several years to be constantly and uninterruptedly
in company with spirits and angels,
hearing them converse with each other and conversing
with them. Hence it has been permitted
me to hear and see things in another life which are
// File: 119.png
.pn +1
astonishing, and which have never before come to
the knowledge of any man nor entered into his
imagination. I have thus been instructed concerning
different kinds of spirits and the state of
souls after death—concerning Hell, or the lamentable
state of the unfaithful—concerning Heaven,
or the most happy state of the faithful—and
particularly concerning the doctrine of Faith,
which is acknowledged throughout all Heaven,
on which subjects, by the divine mercy of the Lord,
more will be said in the following pages.” With
regard to the extraordinary transformation which
these experiences brought about in his life’s work,
he explains to a friend that the Lord has elected
him for this work, and “for revealing the spiritual
meaning of the Sacred Scriptures which he had
promised to the Prophets and in the Book of
Revelation.” “My purpose previously,” he adds,
“had been to explore Nature, chemistry, and the
sciences of mining and anatomy.”

The basis of Swedenborg’s teaching which, of
course, under the circumstances he did not claim
in any way as original, was that the Bible must be
accepted absolutely as a divinely inspired book,
but must be taken in an allegorical sense. Thus
where historical events are recorded they are not
recorded for the sake of history, for the object
of the Scriptures is to treat not of the kingdoms of
// File: 120.png
.pn +1
the earth, but of the Kingdom of God. In other
parts of the Bible, as in Genesis, there is no truth
in the story from the historical point of view. The
record is merely an allegory of the soul.

His doctrine of Correspondences was merely the
recognition of this allegorical relationship of the
spiritual and material. The universe, according to
Swedenborg, is symbolical throughout, All material
things are derived from their spiritual archetypes,
and are representations of these. The bodily form
represents the spiritual character, for the spirit
forms the body in its own likeness. A man’s acts
are thus the outcome of his inward nature, and there
is consequently a similar correspondence between
them and the inward man. The basis of these ideas
is, of course, the ancient occult teaching that the
universe is the macrocosm, and man the microcosm.
Thus Swedenborg tells us that as there is a material
sun, moon, and stars, so each of these heavenly
bodies has its mental and spiritual counterpart.

Swedenborg’s doctrine of Degrees appears to
follow from his doctrine of Correspondences. The
three degrees of the human mind correspond to the
three kingdoms of Nature: animal, vegetable, and
mineral, corresponding to spirit, soul, and body.
“Degrees,” Swedenborg tells us, “are of two kinds,
discrete and continuous.” “All things, from least
to greatest, in both the spiritual and natural worlds,
// File: 121.png
.pn +1
co-exist at once from discrete and continuous
degrees. In respect of discrete degrees there can
be no intercourse between either by continuity.”
It follows, therefore, with regard to the degrees of
the human mind, the celestial, spiritual, and the
natural, that they cannot communicate under
normal conditions one with another. Thus, too,
men on earth can have no sensible communication
with the spiritual world or see things of that world
without a special opening of the spiritual sight.
Elsewhere Swedenborg tells us “to the intent that
anything may be perfect it must be distinguished
into three degrees. The ground and reason of this
is because there must be end, cause, and effect.”
Another doctrine of Swedenborg’s was that of
regeneration. In order to be partaker of the higher
life, man, he held, must be born again, but this
regeneration was not a special occurrence of any
particular date, but a continuous process. One of
the orthodox doctrines which Swedenborg attacked
was that of the Trinity. He denied that Jesus
Christ was merely the Second Person of a Divine
Trinity. He cites <abbr=Saint>St</abbr> Paul’s statement that “in
Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead
bodily,” and maintains that the whole Trinity is
centred in his Person. “In consequence,” he says,
“of separating the Divine Trinity into Three
Persons each of which is declared to be God and
// File: 122.png
.pn +1
Lord, a sort of frenzy has infected the whole
system of theology as well as the Christian Church
so called from its Divine Founder.... That
a trinity of gods occupies the minds of Christians,
although they deny it from shame, is very evident
from the ingenuity of many who contrive methods
to prove that three are one, and one three, by
geometry, arithmetic, and physics.... Others
have trifled with the Divine Trinity as jugglers play
one with another. Their juggling on this subject
may be compared to those sick of a fever who see
a single object, such as a man, a table, or a candle,
as three; or three as one.”

The basis of this orthodox Christian teaching
with regard to the Trinity is, of course, the Athanasian
Creed, which attempts to explain the matter
by the absurd method of a juxtaposition of contradictions.
It is well to bear in mind, in view
of the enormous amount of theological twaddle
that has been talked on this subject, that the
Athanasian Creed was in the nature of a political
concordat to meet the exigencies of a time of acute
religious difficulty, and in no sense an exposition
of spiritual truth.

As the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity was false,
argued Swedenborg, and there were no three
Persons, as supposed, it was, of course, impossible
for one of them, the Son, to offer Himself as sacrifice
// File: 123.png
.pn +1
to appease the wrath of another, the Father. The
doctrine of the atonement, therefore, as taught by
the Church, had no basis in fact. God needed no
reconciliation to His creatures. It was they who
needed to be reconciled to Him before they could
be fitted to appear in His presence. Christ took
upon Himself human nature that He might conquer
mankind’s spiritual enemies which were keeping him
in bondage and estranged from his Divine Source.

One of Swedenborg’s most astounding statements
had reference to the Last Judgment. This was
not, maintained Swedenborg, as the orthodox
generally hold, the final consummation of all
things. The event was an occurrence in the spiritual
sphere which actually took place in the year 1757!
It appears from this amazing account that in the
Intermediate State so many undesirable and evil
spiritual entities had accumulated that they were
threatening the whole world with imminent catastrophe.
It may be remembered, in this connection,
that in Swedenborg’s time scepticism was everywhere
rampant, and that religious life had reached
its lowest ebb. This was the case not only on the
Continent, but pre-eminently in England, where the
movement headed by John Wesley led to such
remarkable scenes in connection with the great
spiritual revival which followed this period of religious
apathy. To avert the catastrophe threatened
// File: 124.png
.pn +1
to the world according to Swedenborg’s theory,
a general judgment was executed upon the spirits
who were in revolt and were imperilling the divine
order. These powers of evil were at that date
placed under restraint, so that an influx of new
spiritual forces among men might be made possible.
Swedenborg actually goes so far as to affirm that he
himself was permitted to witness this judgment in
fulfilment of the prophecies made in the Gospels and
in the Book of Revelation.

The Swedenborgian teaching which has come in
probably for most criticism is that with regard to
Marriage. Swedenborg (thus far as it appears to
me quite rightly) insisted that sex is a spiritual
as well as a physical distinction. He denied the
virtues of celibacy and declared that true chastity
resides in the perfect marriage relation. Marriage,
according to Swedenborg, is not a physical relationship
till death part the united pair, but is
eternal in its character. “Conjugial love” being
the central and fundamental love of man’s life is
also the source of his fullest joy. The delights of
the true conjugial love exceed the delights of all
other loves. All delights that are felt by man
proceed from love, and it follows, therefore, that
the principal happiness in the celestial life must
have a similar source, and the highest joy of heaven
must therefore be the spiritual counterpart of the
// File: 125.png
.pn +1
conjugial life of earth. It does not, of course,
necessarily follow from this that earthly marriages
are perpetuated in heaven. If the feelings of the
marriage partners towards one another are concordant
and sympathetic, they continue indeed
their married life; but if they are discordant and
antipathetic, they dissolve it. For true conjugial
love is the only possible form of marriage in heaven,
and “as their love lasts to eternity, it follows that
the wife becomes more and more a wife and the
husband more and more a husband. The true
reason of this is that in a marriage of truly conjugial
love each married partner becomes continually
a more interior man. For that love opens the
interiors of their minds and in the proportion in
which these are opened the man becomes more and
more a man.”

Swedenborg has some very beautiful observations
with regard to the rejuvenescence of those
who have passed into the higher life. “All who
come into heaven,” he says, “return into their
vernal youth, and remain so to eternity. The more
thousands of years they live the more beautiful
and happy is the spring to which they attain....
In a word, to grow old in heaven is to grow young....
They who live in the chaste life of marriage
are above all others in the order and form of
Heaven after death. Their beauty, therefore, is
// File: 126.png
.pn +1
surpassing, and the flower of their youth endures
for ever.”

What are we to say of this man who propounded
this amazing gospel as a direct message from the
highest spheres? What are we to say of his communications
and conversations with the unseen
world? Of his <i>bona fides</i> it is impossible to entertain
a doubt. The ordinary hypothesis is that he
suffered from hallucinations. It has been argued
on the other hand, that for a man so sane and so
shrewd in the ordinary affairs of the world, hallucinations
of the kind were an impossibility. This,
however, seems going rather too far. Some of the
sanest men in the world have had special points
on which they were not mentally sound. Monomania
is a recognised form of mental aberration,
and the man who suffers from it is as sane as his
fellows on all matters except one.

This spiritual communion, however, was continuous
in the case of Swedenborg for many
years, and during those years occupied either in
itself or in the activities that arose from it the
larger portion of his life. In spite of this absorption,
his relations with his fellow men continued as
sane and responsible as those of any of his neighbours.
Would this have been possible, one may
ask, in the face of so absorbing an interest, had this
interest merely been founded on a monomania?
// File: 127.png
.pn +1
It would, I think, be difficult to parallel such a case.
If, however, we decide to take Swedenborg’s
relations with the other world at his own valuation,
are we called upon to accept his gospel at his own
valuation on that account? Certainly I think not.
Swedenborg’s estimate of the status of the spiritual
beings with whom he communicated, even if we
accept their reality, need not be ours. Recent
investigations and records of innumerable psychic
experiences have tended to show what a miscellaneous
crowd of spirits hover around the confines
of this material world. Swedenborg’s mistake
has been made by many spiritualists of the present
day, and sometimes with disastrous results. Swedenborg
had not before him the evidence which we
now hold to warn him of the necessity of testing
the quality of his spiritual communicants. The
experiences encountered overwhelmed him by their
unexpected and apparently miraculous character,
and his naturally sane judgment was at fault for
want of a criterion by which to estimate them.[#]
Few of those who now accept the genuineness of
psychical phenomena are prepared to question
Swedenborg’s exceptional mediumistic powers. To
// File: 128.png
.pn +1
allow them to their fullest extent is by no means
to accept the doctrine which was preached through
his mediumship.

Of Swedenborg’s psychic gifts there is indeed
plenty of evidence quite outside the teachings of
his celestial visitors. On one occasion he disclosed
to the Queen of Sweden a secret that had existed
between her and her deceased brother, the Crown
Prince Augustus William of Prussia, which was
unknown to any living person. On another he
described to a whole company of people at Gothenburg
a destructive fire which had broken out at
that very moment in Stockholm. Again on another
occasion he revealed to the widow of Monsieur de
Marteville the hiding place of a missing receipt for
money which had been paid by her husband, the
Dutch Ambassador at Stockholm. These incidents
are among the best authenticated of any extant
historical records of a psychic character. The
philosopher Kant, among others, made a searching
investigation into the evidence on which they rested,
and came away absolutely convinced of their truth.
It is curious to note that John Wesley was not
a little interested in the Swedenborgian propagandism.
The great Methodist preacher was impressed
with a strong desire to meet the Swedish
seer—a desire to which, however, he had never
given open expression. The Rev. Samuel Smith,
// File: 129.png
.pn +1
one of Wesley’s preachers, records how, about the
end of February 1772 he was in attendance upon
John Wesley, when the latter received a communication
as follows from Swedenborg, who was then
in London, which he read aloud.

.pm verse-start
<sc>Great Bath Street,
Great Bath Fields.</sc>
.pm verse-end

.pm letter-start
<sc>Sir</sc>,—I have been informed in the world of spirits that
you have a strong desire to converse with me. I shall be
happy to see you if you will favour me with a visit. I am,
sir, your humble servant,

<sc>Emanuel Swedenborg</sc>.
.pm letter-end

Mr Wesley wrote in reply that he was then on the
point of starting for a six months’ journey, but
would be pleased to wait on Swedenborg after his
return to London. Swedenborg replied to this, that
the visit proposed by Wesley would be too late, as
he, Swedenborg, would enter the world of spirits on
the 29th day of the next month, never more to
return, a prediction which proved perfectly correct.

Other men have written many books. It is
Swedenborg’s unique distinction, if distinction it
is, to be the one man in history who has written a
library on his own account. The encyclopædic
brain does not, as a rule, tend to perspicuity in style,
and Swedenborg has suffered from neglect owing to
the fact that the fertility of his genius was not
// File: 130.png
.pn +1
sufficiently associated with the powers of selection
and condensation. To search for the treasures of
his knowledge among his published works is like
looking, in the words of the hackneyed proverb,
“for needles in a haystack.” Had he given us far
less in volume the world would doubtless have
profited more by the very valuable information
contained in his writings.

There are times when one is inclined to regret
(if also to feel thankfulness) that Swedenborg was
side-tracked by his Celestials and that he did not
complete his phenomenal career on the lines which
he had marked out for himself. It is a vain, though
a most alluring speculation, to consider how the
destinies of nations might have evolved if certain
incidents in a single life history had eventuated
otherwise than they did. We may conceive of
Swedenborg bringing to completion his schemes for
the construction of flying machines and submarines,
nearly two centuries earlier than was decreed by
destiny, and ask ourselves, if we will, what use the
great Napoleon might not have made of these
formidable implements of destructive warfare, and
how far the map of Europe, and indeed of the world,
might have been changed through their employment
by his formidable genius; or, again, to what
extent the linking up of the New and Old Worlds
might have been accelerated by such developments.
// File: 131.png
.pn +1
Here at least we must admit was a phenomenon—a
man who realised, in a measure undreamed of
by his contemporaries, not only in the physical
but also in the spiritual sphere, the stupendous
possibilities of the Coming Time.

.fn #
Church property being free from taxation.
.fn-

.fn #
See <i>Life of Emanuel Swedenborg</i>. By George Trobridge.
London: Frederick Warne & Co. To which book I must
acknowledge my great indebtedness.
.fn-

.fn #
There are not a few of the communications recorded, notably
in the “Spiritual Diary,” which might be advanced to support
the hypothesis of a disordered brain; and we must not lose sight
of the fact that Swedenborg’s tireless activities taxed his intellectual
faculties beyond the powers of any but the most exceptional
human organism.
.fn-
// File: 132.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap6
<abbr=six>VI</abbr> | COUNT CAGLIOSTRO
.sp 2
Who has not heard of Cagliostro? And yet who
but a few students have any real knowledge of that
mysterious character, of whom it may be said, as
it was of Melchizedek, that he had “neither beginning
of life nor end of days.” Both, at least,
like the king of Salem’s, are wrapped in uncertainty,
and though popular tradition, repeated again and
again by the uncritical historian, has identified
Cagliostro’s early life with that of the Italian
scoundrel Joseph Balsamo, the evidence is as
near conclusive as presumptive evidence can well
be, that the two had no connection whatever with
one another, beyond having married Italian wives
with the same surname[#]—and that by no means
an uncommon one—and the fact that Balsamo is
said to have had an uncle of the name of Cagliostro.
From what we know of Balsamo it may fairly be
// File: 133.png
.pn +1
said that two people more opposite in character than
himself and Count Cagliostro would be difficult to
discover, and the identification of the two would
seem to involve the assumption that Cagliostro
had discarded his first wife and taken a second,
a supposition which would render worthless the
argument based on the identity of their surnames.

Cagliostro’s whole career, as far as we know it,
shows a character in which generosity is perpetually
being carried to the verge of folly. His credulity
was constantly making him the dupe of designing
knaves, in whose honesty he placed a pathetic
faith, and had he ever had the misfortune to encounter
his alter ego, a common rogue of the most
ordinary type, it is safe to predict that he would
not have escaped from his clutches till he had been
fleeced of the bulk of his possessions. As late as
the date of his trial in the affair of the Diamond
Necklace, no suggestion of the identity of the two
characters was even mooted. The story owes its
origin to the fertile brain of one of the greatest
scoundrels of whom European history holds record,
the notorious blackmailer, Theveneau de Morande.

A short <i>résumé</i> of this arch-villain’s history will
probably be sufficient to dissipate any credence
which has ever been placed in a narrative for which
his assertions are our only authority. Theveneau
de Morande was born in 1741, the son of a lawyer,
// File: 134.png
.pn +1
at Arnay-le-Duc, in Burgundy. As a boy he was
arrested for theft in a house of ill-fame. Subsequently
he enlisted, obtained his discharge through
his father’s intervention, found himself once more
in prison at For-l’Evêque, and was then confined
in a convent at Armentières, from which he was
released two years after at the age of four-and-twenty.
Having shortly after lampooned one of
the members of the government, he was compelled
to fly the country and took refuge in England,
where he arrived in a state of destitution.

.if h
.il fn=fig3.jpg id=fig3 w=60% alt=''
.ca Count Cagliostro. From an engraving by Bartolozzi, in the British Museum.
.if-
.if t
[Illustration: Count Cagliostro. From an engraving by Bartolozzi, in the British Museum.]
.if-

Needs must when the devil drives, and, the pinch
of poverty sharpening his wits, he now turned his
attention to the black-mailing business, in the
pursuit of which he was soon to evince a quite
uncommon aptitude and adroitness. His talents
in this direction were ably seconded by a facile pen
and a command of vituperative language and
personal abuse which the author of the Letters of
Junius could scarcely have outdone. His first
effort of importance in this direction was <i>Le Gazetier
Cuirassé, ou Anecdotes Scandaleuses sur la Cour de
France</i>. Those who would not purchase immunity
by a lump sum down had their characters and
private lives mercilessly torn to pieces in its pages.
The book is said to have brought him £1000. An
attempt to blackmail Voltaire was less successful.
The veteran <i>philosophe</i> published the blackmailer’s
// File: 135.png
// File: 136.png
// File: 137.png
.pn +1
letter with comments by his own satiric pen. The
blackmailer’s path has indeed its ups and downs,
and once he was fain to accept a horsewhipping
and publish an abject apology, the price extorted
by an offended French nobleman. Madame du
Barry, however, Louis <abbr='the fifteenth'>XV.</abbr>’s notorious favourite,
was made of other stuff, and in consequence the
<lang=fr><i>Memoires d’une Femme Publique</i></lang>, compared with
which <lang=fr><i>Le Gazetier Cuirassé</i></lang> was said to have been
“rosewater,” were never published. Morande
accepted the sum of 32,000 livres in solatium for
his wounded literary <lang=fr><i>amour propre</i></lang>. Before, however,
paying him his price the French Government
had attempted to kidnap the audacious libeller.
This was the ancient substitute for the more prosaic
extradition methods of modern times. The plot,
however, failed. With a dexterity worthy of a
better cause, Morande, warned in time, was able
to pose in the English press as a political exile and
avenger of public morality. The sympathy of the
susceptible public responded warmly to the unscrupulous
appeal, and the representatives of
French authority escaped with difficulty from the
clutches of an infuriated London mob.

It not unfrequently happens with countries that
have been at war, that the signature of the treaty
of peace is followed after no long lapse of time by a
formal alliance between the erstwhile foes, there
// File: 138.png
.pn +1
being obviously two methods of gaining one’s ends,
the method of grab and the method of give and
take, and the failure of one suggesting the advisability
of adopting the other. So at least reasoned
the French Government, and the payment of
Morande’s price was followed in due course by his
employment on behalf of the said Government in
the capacity of subsidised journalist, and spy.
Morande was nothing loth to come to terms, and
eventually blossomed out into the Editor of the
<lang=fr><i>Courier de l’Europe</i></lang>. This journal, originally started
by Latour under the ægis of the French Government,
was soon read in every corner of the Continent.
This was the weapon which of all others the blackmailer
desired for his purposes. “In it,” says
Brisset, “he tore to pieces the most estimable
people, and manufactured, or caused to be manufactured,
articles to ruin any one whom he feared.”

Cagliostro had—all unwittingly—made dire
enemies of the French Court through his acquittal
in the trial over the Diamond Necklace affair.
To acquit Cagliostro, who had no more to do with
the matter in question than the man in the moon,
appeared from the royal standpoint to be tantamount
to incriminating the Queen, on whom, in
fact, suspicion long and not unnaturally rested.
Morande, therefore, received his instructions from
Paris to ruin Cagliostro’s reputation. The means
// File: 139.png
.pn +1
ready to his hand was the <lang=fr><i>Courier de l’Europe</i></lang>.
Hence the story of Joseph Balsamo and his identification
with the <lang=fr><i>soi-disant</i></lang> Count Cagliostro. To
say that the authority hardly seems adequate is
surely to put it mildly. And yet Carlyle, and others
before and after him, have quietly accepted the
statement of the paid blackmailer as sufficient
evidence of the character and history of his victim!

Who, then, was Cagliostro? The answer to this
question must ever remain among the unsolved
problems of history. There is, however, no reason
to dismiss as incredible—even if there is reason to
doubt—the account which he gave of himself
on the occasion of the “Diamond Necklace” trial.
From what we know of Cagliostro we may, I think,
say that his character was far too ingenuous for
him to have been likely to invent so remarkable
a tale. Everything, however, in his history points
to the fact that he was just the person to take a
record of the kind and colour it with the hues of his
own fertile imagination. In any case, the impartial
historian, while dismissing as preposterous the Balsamo
fiction is bound to give some weight—however
slight—to the only evidence on the subject we
possess which is not manifestly untrue. Cagliostro,
however, himself did not pretend to have knowledge
of his parentage. “I cannot,” he states, “speak
positively as to the place of my nativity, nor as to
// File: 140.png
.pn +1
the parents who gave me birth. All my inquiries
have ended only in giving me some great notions,
it is true, but altogether vague and uncertain, concerning
my family.” The gist, however, of his
story was that he spent his childhood in Arabia,
where he was brought up under the name of Acherat.
He had then, he states, four persons attached to
his service—the chief of whom was a certain
Althotas, a man between fifty-five and sixty years
of age. This man (whom it has been attempted
to identify with a certain Kölmer, a Jutland
merchant, who had travelled extensively and had
the reputation of being a master-magician) informed
Cagliostro that he had been left an orphan
when three months old, and that his parents were
Christian and nobly born. All his attempts, however,
to discover the secret of his birth were doomed
to disappointment. The matter was one which
was treated as taboo. In his twelfth year (to
follow his own story) he left Medina for Mecca,
where he remained three years, until, wearying of
the monotonous round of the Cherif’s Court, he
obtained leave to travel.

.pm letter-start
One day (he narrates), when I was alone, the prince
entered my apartment; he strained me to his bosom with
more than usual tenderness, bid me never cease to adore
the Almighty, and added, bedewing my cheeks with his
tears: “Nature’s unfortunate child, adieu!”
.pm letter-end

From this date commenced, according to his
// File: 141.png
.pn +1
own account, Cagliostro’s travels, first in company
with Althotas, for whom he ever expressed the
warmest affection, afterwards with the wife whom
he chose for himself in Italy. For upwards of
three years he claims to have travelled through
Egypt, Africa, and Asia, finally reaching the island
of Rhodes in the year 1766, and thence embarking
on a French ship bound for Malta. Here he and his
guardian were received with all honour, Pinto, the
Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, giving them
apartments in his palace.

.pm letter-start
It was here (he notes) that I first assumed European
dress and with it the name of Count Cagliostro; nor was
it a small matter of surprise to me to see Althotas appear
in a clerical dress with the insignia of the Order of Malta.
.pm letter-end

The Grand Master Pinto was apparently acquainted
with Cagliostro’s history. He often spoke
to him, he says, of the Cherif, but always refused to
be “drawn” on the subject of his real origin and
birth. He treated him, however, with every consideration
and endeavoured to induce him to “take
the cross,” promising him a great career and rapid
preferment if he would consent to do so. Cagliostro’s
love of travelling and of the study of medicine
drew him in another direction, and on the death of
his guardian, Althotas, which occurred shortly
after, he left Malta for ever. After visiting Sicily
and the Greek Archipelago in company with the
// File: 142.png
.pn +1
Chevalier d’Aquino he proceeded thence to Naples,
where he took leave of his companion. Provided
with a letter of credit on the banking house of Signor
Bellone he left Naples for Rome, where his destiny
awaited him in the shape of Seraphina Feliciani,
who shortly after became his wife, and to whom he
showed throughout his married life a most unfailing
devotion.[#] Cagliostro states that he was then
(anno 1770) in his twenty-second year, and he
appears to have continued to pursue that nomadic
life which was so dear to him, travelling from town
to town on the Continent of Europe till he at length
emerges into the light of day in the city of London, in
the month of July 1776, in furnished apartments in
Whitcombe Street, Leicester Fields. London seems
always to have been an unfortunate place for
Cagliostro, and here he was destined, on the first
of many occasions, to become the victim of his own
too trustful and generous disposition and to be
fleeced of the greater part of his possessions by a
nest of rogues, who took advantage of a foreigner
entirely ignorant of London. Eventually he was
rescued from this gang of knaves by a good
Samaritan in the shape of a certain O’Reilly.
Now O’Reilly was a prominent member of the
Esperance Lodge of Freemasons, and here we first
// File: 143.png
.pn +1
find Cagliostro brought into contact with that
celebrated secret society, his connection with which
was destined to play so all-important a part in the
subsequent years of his life. O’Reilly, it appears,
was the proprietor of the <i>King’s Head</i>, in Gerard
Street, where the Esperance Lodge assembled, and
it was only natural that one so fascinated with the
occult as Cagliostro should be readily persuaded by
his benefactor and rescuer to become initiated into
the order of Freemasons. It is not necessary here
to follow in detail the sordid intrigues of which,
during his sojourn in England, he was made the
victim. He was, however, glad eventually to
escape from the country, with “no more than £50
and some jewels” in his possession, having lost in
all, through fraud and consequent legal proceedings,
some 3000 guineas during his sojourn. Cagliostro’s
star, however, had not yet set, and his all too brief
spell of fame and triumph was still in front of him.
Providence, in the shape probably of the emissaries
of Freemasonry, was waiting at Brussels to replenish
his purse, and the same Providence, probably
in the same guise, replenished it many times
afterwards with no niggardly hand.

From Brussels to The Hague, from The Hague
to Nuremberg, from Nuremberg to Berlin, from
Berlin to Leipzig, we trace the Count’s peregrinations,
gathering fame and founding Egyptian
// File: 144.png
.pn +1
Masonic Lodges as he went. It is true he met with
setbacks and reverses, and the capital of Frederick
the Great would have none of him, but it is clear
that, in spite of these, his credit and reputation as
a healer and clairvoyant grew steadily in volume.
It was, in fact, on these two gifts that his fame
rested. Though he claimed to have been taught
the secrets of occultism by Althotas, or to have
learned them from the Egyptian priests, there is
no evidence[#] throughout the records of his career
of his possessing anything but a smattering of such
abstruse knowledge, and on several occasions,
notably at <abbr=Saint>St</abbr> Petersburg, there is something more
than a suspicion that his attempt to make good his
claim to the name of occultist involved him in
serious humiliation and rebuffs. The tales, however,
of his predictions and their fulfilments were
handed on from mouth to mouth, doubtless losing
nothing on the way, while his reputation as a healer
and the stories of the cures which he effected assured
a perfect furore of enthusiasm in every fresh town
to which he paid a visit. He took advantage of this
enthusiasm to found fresh Masonic Lodges in all
directions, and, while he consistently refused to
receive payment of any kind for his cures, the
shekels of an endless file of initiate converts poured
// File: 145.png
.pn +1
into the coffers at the headquarters of Egyptian
Masonry. Never was man at once more lavish
with money and more indifferent to the comforts
which money brings. “He slept in an armchair,”
said Madame d’Oberkirch contemptuously, “and
lived on cheese.” Whatever he spent, however,
he appeared to draw from an inexhaustible widow’s
cruise. As in spite of his refusal to accept fees,
he paid his own bills with the greatest promptitude;
the problem whence this continuous stream of gold
flowed excited unbounded curiosity, and many were
the fantastic stories invented to account for it.

Meanwhile, after visiting Mittau, where he was
enthusiastically taken up by Marshal von Medem,
the head of the Masonic Lodge at that place, he
passed on to Petersburg, Warsaw, and thence to
Strassburg. Here he was destined to enjoy a great
triumph and to win a powerful friend, who was
eventually, through a pure accident, to prove the
cause of his undoing. This was none other than the
notorious Cardinal de Rohan. It is hardly necessary
to state that the ecclesiastical dignitary of the
eighteenth century in France was not selected for
his high office by reason of his exemplary life or
his Christian virtues. To neither of these did
Cardinal de Rohan make any claim. Yet honours
had fallen thick and fast upon him. He was Bishop
of Strassburg, Grand Almoner of France, Cardinal,
// File: 146.png
.pn +1
Prince of the Empire, Landgrave of Alsace, in
addition to being Abbot of the richest abbey in
France, the Abbey of <abbr=Saint>St</abbr> Waast Handsune. Of
fascinating manner, an aristocrat of the aristocrats,
there was no position in the kingdom to which he
did not feel justified in aspiring. The fact that
he enjoyed a reputation for dissipation and extravagance
did not appear calculated to tell against
him in such an age.

Surprising as it may seem, the Cardinal combined
with a pleasure-loving disposition a passion for
alchemy and the pursuit of the occult sciences, and
the arrival of Cagliostro at Strassburg naturally
enough excited his interest to no small degree. The
Cardinal determined to lose no time in making the
acquaintance of the man about whom and whose
marvellous cures the whole town was already
talking almost before he set foot in its streets. But
Cagliostro was inclined to ride the high horse.
“If the Cardinal is ill,” he replied to the great
man’s messenger, “let him come to me and I will
cure him. If not, he has no need of me nor I of
him.” In spite of the Count’s stand-offishness, the
Cardinal was not to be denied, and the acquaintance
once made soon ripened into the closest intimacy.
Cagliostro was told to consider the palace his own,
and he and his wife resided there on the footing
of the most honoured guests. Marvellous tales
// File: 147.png
.pn +1
are told of the results of his experiments in the
Cardinal’s laboratory, how he manufactured gold
and jewels, and finally showed De Rohan in the
crystal the form of the woman whom he had loved.
It is on these stories alone that the reputation of
Cagliostro as an alchemist really rests, and in the
absence of further confirmatory evidence one is
inclined to take them with a grain of salt. However
this may be, it is certain that the Cardinal was
completely won over, and Cagliostro took care not
to lose caste by assuming airs of humility or
deference. Never, certainly, was there less of a
snob than this marvellous adventurer. “Cagliostro,”
says Madame d’Oberkirch, “treated him
and his other distinguished admirers as if they were
under the deepest obligation to him; but he under
none whatever to them.” As usual, our hero was
besieged at Strassburg by those who would profit
by his medical knowledge and skill as a healer,
for he really appears to have possessed both, and
as usual by obliging his clients he incurred the
inveterate hostility of the medical profession. In
all ages of the world’s history the natural healer
has had the doctor as his enemy, and the prophet,
the priest. Orthodoxy has ever closed its ranks
against those who poach on its preserves. Doubtless
it is the natural instinct of self-defence. For
Cagliostro, however, it was extremely inconvenient.
// File: 148.png
.pn +1
The people would throng his doorsteps to be cured
and make him heal them willy-nilly, and the
medical profession were equally determined to make
each place in which he practised his medical skill
too hot for him. Others might have been willing
to let the dogs bark, but a fatal sensitiveness to
criticism made the Count an all too easy target for
their venom. They drove him from Strassburg as
they had driven him from other places, in spite of
the entreaties of De Rohan, who pressed him to stay
and disregard their clamour.

We need not follow Cagliostro from Strassburg to
Bordeaux and from Bordeaux to Lyons, where he
added further laurels to his reputation and founded
further Lodges of Egyptian Masonry. He might
have remained indefinitely to all appearance at the
latter place if it had not been for the solicitations
of Cardinal de Rohan, who urged him to respond
to the appeals of Parisian Society and visit the gay
capital, where he guaranteed him an enthusiastic
reception. He even sent a special messenger to
back his request, and perhaps Cagliostro himself
had heard the capital of cultured Europe a-calling.
Anyhow he came, his evil fate—if not Paris—summoning
him. Cagliostro declared that he took
the greatest precaution on arriving there to avoid
causing ill-will. However this may be, he immediately
became “the rage” in fashionable
// File: 149.png
.pn +1
circles; people flocked to him by hundreds to be
cured, and the stories of the miracles which he was
supposed to have effected were the talk of every
dinner-party in the capital. Mesmer had already
left Paris with a fortune of 340,000 livres, made by
his lucrative practice, in his pocket. Paris, craving
for a new excitement, was ready to receive with
open arms the wonder-worker of whom it was
said that no one of all his patients ever succeeded
in making him accept the least mark of
gratitude.[#]

Cagliostro was here surfeited with flattery. Houdin
executed his bust. His statuettes were in every
shop window. His portrait was in every house.
Those who claimed to have been cured by him
were met with on all sides. Angels, it is said,
and heroes of Biblical story appeared at his séances.
No story was too absurd for Paris to believe about
him.

But a train of events in which he had no hand,
and a catastrophe for which he had no responsibility,
were destined, while wrecking other reputations
and undermining the throne itself, to bring his
career of triumph to a sudden and tragic close, and
eventually to drive him, a forsaken and persecuted
outcast, to his final doom. Cagliostro, as already
stated, had nothing whatever to do with the affair
// File: 150.png
.pn +1
of the Diamond Necklace. But for all that, he was
caught in the web of deceit that an unscrupulous
woman had woven to suit her own purposes.

The Countess de Lamotte-Valois, a descendant
of a natural son of Henri <abbr='the second'>II.</abbr>, and an adventuress
of the most reckless type, had found a protector in
the person of the susceptible Cardinal de Rohan.
Now the Cardinal was by no means a <i>persona grata</i>
at the Court of Versailles. As a matter of fact, he
was never seen there except at the feast of the
Assumption, when it was his duty as Grand Almoner
to celebrate Mass in the Royal Chapel. The cause
of this was the enmity of Queen Marie Antoinette.
The Cardinal had been recalled from the embassy
at Vienna at the instance of her mother, Maria
Theresa, and doubtless the mother had communicated
to the daughter a distrust for the brilliant but
pleasure-loving Cardinal. This was a fatal obstacle
to De Rohan, whose ambition it was to become First
Minister to the King. The Countess de Lamotte
saw her chance in the thwarted ambitions of her
protector, and took care to pose as an intimate
friend of the Queen, a story to which her frequent
visits to Versailles in connection with a petition
for the recovery of some family property which had
passed into the possession of the State, lent a
certain appearance of truth. She represented to
the Cardinal the interest the Queen took in him
// File: 151.png
.pn +1
but which matters of policy compelled her to
dissemble. In the sequel, a series of letters—of
course forged—passed between De Rohan and the
supposed Queen. The Queen, through the intermediary
of the Countess, borrowed large sums of
money of the Cardinal, which the Cardinal, on his
part, being head over ears in debt in spite of his
enormous income, was compelled to borrow of the
Jews. Then, when the Cardinal was becoming suspicious,
the Countess arranged a bogus interview,
at which another lady—admittedly remarkably like
her—posed as the Queen, and permitted De Rohan to
kiss her hand. Finally, Madame de Lamotte got in
touch with Böhmer, the owner of the famous
necklace. This she represented to the Cardinal that
the Queen had set her heart on obtaining, but
could not, at a moment’s notice, find the ready
cash. Would he become security? Needless to
say, De Rohan fell into the trap. The first instalment
of the bill fell due, and the Cardinal, who had
not expected to be called on to pay, was unable
offhand to find the money. At this point Böhmer,
feeling nervous, consulted one of the Queen’s
ladies-in-waiting, who informed him that the story
of the Queen having bought the necklace was all
moonshine. He then went to the Countess de
Lamotte, who had the effrontery to say she believed
he was being victimised, and advised him
// File: 152.png
.pn +1
to go to the Cardinal, thinking, doubtless, that De
Rohan would take the entire responsibility when
the alternative was his ruin. The jeweller, however,
instead of taking her advice, went straight to
the King. The King immediately communicated
with the Queen, who was furious, and insisted on
having the Cardinal arrested forthwith. The fat
was now in the fire with a vengeance. The arrest
of the Cardinal was followed by that of the Countess
de Lamotte, of Cagliostro and his wife (whom the
Countess in utter recklessness accused of the theft
of the necklace), of the Baroness d’Oliva, who had
“played” the Queen, of de Vilette, the forger of
the letters, and various minor actors in this astounding
drama.

In the celebrated trial that followed Cagliostro
was acquitted, but not until he had spent nine
months in the Bastille. There was, in fact, not a
shadow of evidence against him. His wife was
released before the trial took place. Cagliostro
received an ovation from the people of Paris on
the occasion of his release, as well as De Rohan,
who was also acquitted, the popularity of the
verdict being due to the hatred with which the
Royal Family were now everywhere regarded.
But on the day after, by a Royal edict, De Rohan
was stripped of all his dignities and exiled to
Auvergne, while Cagliostro was ordered to leave
// File: 153.png
.pn +1
France within three weeks. The Count retired to
England, fearful lest worse might befall him; but
even here the relentless malignity of the discredited
Queen, who regarded his acquittal as equivalent
to her own condemnation, followed his footsteps.
The unscrupulous De Morande, as we have already
seen, was paid by the Court to ruin his reputation
and to identify him with the thief and gaolbird
Joseph Balsamo. London was soon made so hot
for him that he returned once more to the Continent,
and made his home for a short time in Switzerland.
Later on he went to Trent, where the Prince-Bishop,
who had a passion for alchemy, made him
a welcome guest. But the Count’s day was over,
and misfortune continued to dog his footsteps.
The Emperor Joseph <abbr='the second'>II.</abbr> would not permit his
vassal to harbour the man who had been mixed up
in the Diamond Necklace affair, and the Bishop was
reluctantly obliged to bid him begone. Cagliostro
now found himself driven from pillar to post, his
resources were at an end, and his friends were dead
or had deserted him. He turned his steps towards
Italy, and eventually arrived at Rome. Here his
presence becoming known to the papal authorities,
he and his wife were arrested as members of the
Masonic Fraternity. In those days, within the
Papal States Freemasonry was a crime punishable
by death. After a mock trial the death-sentence
// File: 154.png
.pn +1
was commuted to imprisonment for life, while his
wife was confined in a penitentiary.

Rumour which wove a web of romance round
all his doings, did not leave him even here, and
stories were circulated that he had escaped from his
dungeon and was living in Russia. There appears,
however, to be no doubt that neither Count nor
Countess long survived their incarceration, and
when the French soldiers invaded the Papal States
in 1797 and the Polish Legion under General
Daubrowski captured the fortress of San Leo, in
which the Count had been confined, the officers
who inquired after the once famous magician,
hoping to set him free, were informed that it was
too late, and that he was already dead. The Queen,
whose vindictive spite had ruined these two lives,
went to her doom first; but her instrument, the
blackmailer Morande, retired to a quiet corner of
France on his ill-gotten fortune, escaped the furies
of the French Revolution, and ended his life
surrounded by an atmosphere of the most unquestioned
respectability.

And what of the man with whom not only his
own fate, but the misrepresentations of history
have dealt so hardly? What manner of man was
he for whom even those who denounce him as
mountebank might not unreasonably, one would
think, feel a passing sympathy? On two points we
// File: 155.png
.pn +1
have ample testimony. All those who knew him
bore witness to the marvellous magnetism of his
personality and to the fascination and beauty of
his extraordinary eyes. “No two eyes like his
were ever seen,” says the Marquise de Crégny,
“and his teeth were superb.” “He was not,
strictly speaking, handsome,” says Madame d’Oberkirch,
“but I have never seen a more remarkable
face. His glance was so penetrating that one
might almost be tempted to call it supernatural.
I could not describe the expression of his eyes; it
was, so to speak, a mixture of flame and ice. It
attracted and repelled at the same time, and, whilst
it inspired terror, it aroused along with it an irresistible
curiosity. I cannot deny,” she adds, “that
Cagliostro possessed an almost demoniacal power.”
Not less noteworthy is the opinion of so hostile
a witness as Beugnot, who confesses, while ridiculing
him, that his face, his attire, the whole man, in
fact, impressed him in spite of himself. “If
gibberish can be sublime,” he continues, “Cagliostro
was sublime. When he began speaking on a subject
he seemed carried away with it, and spoke impressively
in a ringing, sonorous voice.”

This was the man whose appearance Carlyle
caricatured in the following elegant phraseology:

.pm letter-start
A most portentous face of scoundrelism; a fat snub
abominable face; dew-lapped, flat-nosed, greasy, full of
// File: 156.png
.pn +1
greediness, sensuality, ox-like obstinacy; the most perfect
quack face produced by the eighteenth century.
.pm letter-end

Carlyle, however, who would say anything or
write anything in his moods of irritability, also
alluded to the late Cardinal Newman as “not
possessing the intellect of a moderate-sized rabbit”;
and the two statements may fairly be juxtaposed.

Mr <abbr rend=spell>W. R. H.</abbr> Trowbridge, to whose recent book
I am greatly indebted for material for this brief
sketch of Cagliostro’s life, well observes that “there
is perhaps no other equally celebrated personality
in modern history whose character is so baffling to
the biographer.” History has condemned him
purely on the evidence of his most unscrupulous
enemies. But while dismissing such one-sided portraits,
it is no easy matter to arrive at an unprejudiced
valuation of the real man. Of his latest
biographer’s impartiality and candour, as well as
his careful research of authorities, it is impossible
to speak too highly. His conclusions will be all
the more widely accepted in view of the fact that
he is himself in no sense an occultist. In spite of
a rather long chapter dealing with “Eighteenth
Century Occultism,” we feel instinctively and at
every turn that the subject is one in which he is
obviously out of his depth. Indeed, only on the
second page of his biography we come across the
following surprising statement. Speaking of “theosophists,
// File: 157.png
.pn +1
spiritualists, occultists,” all of whom are
unceremoniously lumped together, he observes:

.pm letter-start
By these amiable visionaries Cagliostro is regarded as
one of the princes of occultism whose mystical touch has
revealed the arcana of the spiritual world to the initiated,
and illumined the path along which the speculative
scientist proceeds on entering the labyrinth of the supernatural.
.pm letter-end

Every occultist knows this to be sheer rubbish.
Cagliostro has never been regarded as an authority
in any school of occultism. Many, if not most
occultists, have been inclined to believe that he
was more than half a quack. Mr Trowbridge—it
is to be said to his credit—has judged him in the
light of the evidence more fairly than they. The
truth is that, Cagliostro with all his good qualities,
with all his generosity of heart, his human sympathy,
his nobility—yes, it really was nobility—of
character, was beyond and above all things a poser
and a mystery-monger. He had a magnetic personality,
a mediumistic temperament, and almost
certainly some clairvoyant power, though it is
noticeable that he invariably employed a little boy
or girl whose assistance was essential to his predictions.
Beyond this, and, I think we must say,
more important than all this, he had an incontestable
natural healing gift, which he aided by no small
knowledge of practical medicine. In these qualifications
// File: 158.png
.pn +1
we have the secret of his success, and also
the clue to his failure. He was excessively vain,
and loved to impress the multitude. He loved,
moreover, to impress them by surrounding himself
with an atmosphere of mystery and posing as an
occultist, which (probably) he never was. He has
left no body of teaching behind him. He has left
no followers, no disciples. He was merely the
comet of a season, though an exceptionally brilliant
one. It would be absurd to class him in the same
category as such master occultists as Cornelius
Agrippa and Paracelsus, or indeed even as Eliphas
Levi. He was not cast in the same mould. He
belonged to another and a lower type. But his was
withal a striking as well as a sympathetic personality,
a personality that makes appeal, by a
certain glamour heightened by the tragedy of his
inglorious end, to all that is warm, and chivalrous,
and romantic in the human heart.

.fn #
The Christian name of Balsamo’s wife was Lorenza, of
Cagliostro’s Seraphina. But the story is itself of doubtful
authenticity.
.fn-

.fn #
It is perhaps almost superfluous to state that Joseph Balsamo
got his wife locked up in jail, beside compelling her to lead a life of
immorality.
.fn-

.fn #
Unless indeed we accept the (doubtful) story of his transmuting
metals for De Rohan.
.fn-

.fn #
Grimm.
.fn-
// File: 159.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2 id=chap7
<abbr=seven>VII</abbr> | ANNA KINGSFORD AND EDWARD MAITLAND
.sp 2
We are all of us familiar with the old proverb that
marriages are made in Heaven, though there are
few of us who believe it. It may, however, well be
true that there are certain spiritual marriages or
associations which are made in Heaven in the sense
that they have a certain cosmic foundation in the
nature of things and in the relationship of one life
to another. It may also be true that two lives are
brought together for special and important purposes
by influences working from another and a far
higher plane. Collaboration is a very commonplace
word, but there was certainly no element of the
commonplace in the collaboration of Anna Kingsford
and Edward Maitland. History perhaps contains
nothing more remarkable, and romance nothing
more romantic, than this singular association of two
strikingly diverse and original characters of opposite
sexes for a single and supreme purpose. To the two
// File: 160.png
.pn +1
individuals concerned, the sacrifice of two lives to
the ideal which inspired them seemed but little
in view of the momentous character of the objects
to be achieved. The world may not set the same
store on the high mission of Anna Kingsford and
Edward Maitland, may not perhaps value it at the
same price as the two co-workers who gave up
their all in pursuit of their aims. Many may say,
as many have said already, that, like Arthur’s
Knights of the Round Table, they were pursuing
a will-o’-the-wisp and not the Holy Grail of their
hearts’ desire. But assuming that they partially
misinterpreted the end to be achieved, or, alternatively,
over-estimated their own powers of achieving
that end with anything like the success that
so high an ideal demanded, it should still be borne
in mind that those who under-estimate the greatness
of their own mission must inevitably fail to
impress others with its value in the scheme of things,
and it is therefore far better to over-estimate your
own powers and the importance of the object aimed
at than to underrate either the one or the other.

.if h
.il fn=fig4.jpg id=fig4 w=60% alt=''
.ca Anna Kingsford.
.if-
.if t
[Illustration: Anna Kingsford.]
.if-

People are apt to look scoffingly at the man with
a mission, but it is the men and the women with
missions who have in fact made the world what it is
to-day. “A crank,” said some wit, “is a little
thing that makes revolutions.” The saying is as
true as it was in the times of Jesus Christ, that God
// File: 161.png
// File: 162.png
// File: 163.png
.pn +1
has “chosen the foolish things of the world to
confound the wise, and the weak things of the world
to confound the things which are mighty.” If
there is one word in our language more misunderstood
than any other, it is the little word “Faith.”
We have been told by the cynical that faith is the
capacity for believing that which we know to be
untrue, and the misinterpretation of this term by
the orthodox clergy is responsible for the derision
which has been cast upon it. Worst of all sinners
within the fold of the Church has been the evangelical
contingent. “Believe,” they tell us, “all
the dry-as-dust dogmas of orthodox theology, and
you will win eternal salvation.” This is not, we
may be sure, the sense in which Jesus used the word.
Neither is it the sense in which, in a magnificently
eloquent passage, the word was employed by the
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, when he
spoke of those who “through faith subdued kingdoms,
wrought righteousness, obtained promises,
stopped the mouths of lions; quenched the violence
of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness
were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, and
turned to flight the armies of the aliens.”

The faith of Jesus and the faith of his apostles
and followers is the faith that implies and includes
the power to achieve. It is what we call in the
ordinary language of the day “self-confidence,”
// File: 164.png
.pn +1
but it is not the confidence in the <i>lower</i> but in the
<i>higher</i> self; it is the confidence which comes of the
conscious placing of ourselves <i>en rapport</i> with what
Prentice Mulford called “the Infinite Life” and
the “Divine Source.” This power is the secret of
all great achievement. The <i>faith</i> of the orthodox,
on the other hand, corresponds to the <i>credulity</i> of
the man in the street. It is the will-o’-the-wisp
that leads fools to sacrifice the reality for a chimera.
It was in condemnation and in ridicule of such folly
as this that Omar Khayyám bade his friends “take
the cash and let the credit go.” It was in the spirit
of this true self-confidence and self-reliance that
Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland entered upon
the daring project of their life’s work. It was this
spirit of faith that enabled them to carry it at length
to a triumphant conclusion—successful in spite of
those imperfections inevitably incidental to a work
of the kind, achieved under the defective conditions
of present-day humanity.

A great work was certainly seldom, if ever,
accomplished under such curious and such self-contradictory
conditions. A man and a woman
have frequently worked together before, and worked
effectively and harmoniously, but they have either
been in the relationship of husband and wife, of
avowed lovers, independent of or having deliberately
cast aside other ties, or they have been free to work
// File: 165.png
.pn +1
together as friends owing to the fact that circumstances
have left them unhampered by family
conditions. The peculiarity of the present case is
that the relations of Anna Kingsford and Edward
Maitland subsisted in spite of the existence of
a husband for whom his wife had a very genuine
and warm affection, and who most undoubtedly
reciprocated it to the full—in spite also of the fact
that the husband was fully aware of, and approved
of, all that took place, without seeing anything in
it to lessen his esteem for his wife or compromise
their relationship—in spite also of the fact that the
society of the day held up its hands in horror at the
scandal and more than suspected immorality where
there was none to suspect—in spite, finally, of the
fact that, joined to the respect and friendly feeling
which Edward Maitland felt for the husband, there
was something in his whole attitude and demeanour
towards Anna Kingsford which was more in the
nature of the devotion of a lover to his mistress
than anything else which the ordinary terms of
language can express. When Anna Kingsford
passed away to another sphere early indeed in life
(she was but forty-two), but with her life’s work
accomplished, the two who joined hands over her
grave and who mourned her most deeply and most
sincerely were the devoted husband who loved her
without understanding the most remarkable side
// File: 166.png
.pn +1
of her character, and the friend who loved and
understood, but, better even than the woman whom
he loved, loved the work of which her presence
and being were to him the divine symbol and seal.

People of the type of Anna Bonus Kingsford are
too sensitive and impressionable ever to be really
happy for long. The acuteness of their feelings
exaggerates their own sufferings, and at the same
time makes the consciousness of the sufferings
of others an ever present torture and martyrdom.
Mrs Kingsford’s life, indeed, at times when her
health, always far from robust, was below the usual
level, became absolutely unbearable. The thought
of bringing a child into the world to share her own
anguish and despair seemed in itself a crime.

.pm letter-start
I long (she writes, in one of these moods of depression),
I long for a little rest and peace. The world has grown
very bitter to me. I feel as if every one were dead!

Ah, what a life is before me!—a life of incessant struggle,
reproach, and loneliness. I shall never be as other women,
happy in their wifehood and motherhood. Never to my
dying day shall I know the meaning of a home.

And behind me, as I look back on the road by which I
have come, all is storm and darkness. I fought my way
through my lonely, sad-hearted childhood; I fought my
way through my girlhood, misunderstood, and mistrusted
always; and now, in my womanhood, I am fighting still.
On every side of me are rebuke and suspicion, and bitter,
abiding sorrow. Pain and suffering of body and of spirit
have hung on my steps all the years of my life. I have had
no respite.
// File: 167.png
.pn +1

Is there never to be peace? Never to be a time of
sunlight that shall make me glad of my being?
.pm letter-end

Her spirit was indeed naked and without defence
against the arrows of the world. Endowed with
courage far greater than falls to the lot of most
women, with great independence and an utter
fearlessness of conventionality, she had no hesitation
in avowing her own profound belief in her
divine mission. To one who, meeting her for the
first time, observed with ill-timed jocularity, “I
understand, Mrs Kingsford, that you are a prophetess,”
she retorted with the utmost solemnity,
“I am indeed a prophetess,” and on her interrogator
continuing his banter by inquiring: “But not, I
suppose, as great as Isaiah?” “Yes,” she returned,
“greater than Isaiah.” Such mockery,
however boldly she faced it, caused her the most
acute pain. There was, indeed, nothing undignified
about her avowal of her claims, nothing that jarred,
nothing of the charlatan in her composition. If she
was deceived herself, at least she never dreamed
of deceiving others. She never posed or attempted
to gain a hearing by acting a part which was not
natural to her. She was too genuine, too intense in
her convictions, and withal too natural and too
unaffected to be otherwise than always and everywhere
true to herself. She was essentially a child
of nature, and in some of the traits of her character
// File: 168.png
.pn +1
she retained to the end the simplicity and wayward
playfulness which most people say good-bye to when
they reach years of discretion. Animals, of course,
always appealed to her strongest sympathies, and
for nine long years she could not bear to be parted
except for occasional very brief periods from her
favourite guinea-pig, Rufus. Nature in its varying
moods made the strong appeal which it always does
to people of so emotional a temperament. Once
after recovering from a serious bout of illness she
was taken to convalesce at Dieppe. An incident
occurred here very illustrative of her susceptible
nature. Having stayed for some time and being
greatly benefited by the change, she was proceeding
in company with Mr Edward Maitland to see her
husband off by the steamer. Says her biographer:

.pm letter-start
It was a day of days for beauty. While waiting, we
sat watching the gambols of a flock of sea-gulls, whose
gleaming white wings, as they circled round and round
against a sky of clearest and tenderest blue, approaching
each other to give loving salute with their bills, and then
darting off only to return and repeat the act, uttering
the while shrill notes of joy and delight, made a spectacle
of exquisite beauty, and one that went to the invalid’s
inmost heart, inducing an estatic sense of the possibilities
of happiness in the mere fact of a natural and healthy
existence. Though entranced by the scene no less than
my companion, I did not fail to note the effect upon her,
and the thought arose in my mind, “This is the best remedy
of all she has yet had.”

As we were thus gazing and feeling, a shot was fired
// File: 169.png
.pn +1
from a boat containing some men and women, which,
unperceived by us, had glided out from behind the opposite
pier; and immediately one of the birds fell into the
sea, where it lay fluttering in agony with a broken wing,
while its companions fled away with harsh, discordant
cries; and in one instant the whole bright scene was
changed for us from one of innocence and joy into one
of the darkest gloom and misery. It was a murder done
in Eden, followed by the instant eclipse of all that made
it Paradise. Mary was frantic. Her so lately injured
organism gave way under the shock of such a revulsion of
feeling. Her impulse was to throw herself into the sea
to succour the wounded bird, and it was with difficulty
that I restrained her; and only after giving vent to an
agony of tears, and pouring on the shooting party a storm
of reproaches, at the imminent risk of being given into
custody as they landed bearing the bird, now dead, as a
trophy, did I succeed in getting her back to the hotel.
For the next twenty-four hours her state was one of
raving mania.
.pm letter-end

No incident could be more characteristic of her
temperament or of her outlook upon life. The charm
and beauty and joy of life were all on the surface and
only served to conceal the horror and anguish which
lurked beneath. She felt, with the apostle, that
all creation groaneth and travaileth together, and
to her hyper-sensitive spirit life itself was all too
frequently a very hell. One can well understand
the ardour with which a spirit like hers pursued
the campaign against vivisection. But it is rare
indeed to find this temperament joined with a
courage which faced the presence of the horrors
// File: 170.png
.pn +1
she so dreaded to go through the entire medical
course and qualify as a doctor at a time when
obstacles innumerable were placed in the way of
women candidates for the profession. It is in
connection with this phase of her career that a story
is narrated which has attained for her a somewhat
unenviable notoriety. This is the record of the
boast she is stated herself to have made that she
had brought about by her magical powers the death
of one of the most prominent supporters of vivisection
in its worst form in the medical world. The
doctor in question was the well-known Professor
Claude Bernard, and the claim that she made will
probably be regarded by the occultist as not wanting
foundation in fact. The narrative had better be
given in her biographer’s own words:

.pm letter-start
It was in mid-February, when, having occasion to visit
the <lang=fr><i>Ecole de Médecine</i></lang>, I accompanied her thither. It was
afternoon. On reaching the place we found it shut up,
and a notice on the gate apprised us that the school was
closed for the day on account of the obsequies of Professor
Claude Bernard. We had not heard even of his illness.
A cry, or rather a gasp, of astonishment escaped her,
and she exclaimed, “Claude Bernard dead! Claude Bernard
dead! Take hold of me! Help me to a seat or I
shall fall. Claude Bernard dead! Claude Bernard dead!”
The only seat available near was on the stony steps by
which we were standing, and I accordingly placed her on
these, seeing that emotion had deprived her of all her
powers. Once seated she buried her face in her hands,
and I stood before her awaiting the result in silence. I
// File: 171.png
.pn +1
knew that such an event could not fail greatly to move
her, but no special reason occurred to me. Presently she
looked up, her face strangely altered by the intensity of
her emotion, and asked me if I remembered what she had
told me some weeks ago about Claude Bernard, and her
having been provoked to launch her maledictions at him.
I remembered perfectly. It was in the latter part of
the previous December. Her professor had forced her
into a controversy about vivisection, the immediate
occasion being some experiments by Claude Bernard
on animal heat, made by means of a stove invented by
himself, so constructed as to allow of observations being
made on animals while being slowly baked to death. Her
professor had agreed with her as to the unscientific
character and utter uselessness for any medical purpose
of such a method of research. But he was altogether
insensible to its moral aspects, and in answer to her strong
expressions of reprobation, had taken occasion to deliver
himself of a tirade against the sentiments generally of
morality and religion, and the folly of allowing anything
so chimerical to stand in the way, not merely of science,
but of any object whatever to which one might be inclined,
and setting up a transcendental standard of right and
wrong, or recognising any limits to self-gratification saving
the physical risks to oneself. Even the feeling which
makes a mother weep over her child’s suffering he sneered
at as hysterical, and gloried in the prospects of the time
when science and intellect should be utterly unrestrained
by what people call heart and moral conscience, and
the only recognised rule should be that of the bodily
self.

Thus speaking, he had worked his pupil into a frenzy
of righteous indignation, and the vision rose before her of
a future when, through the teaching of a materialistic
science, society at large had become wholly demonised,
// File: 172.png
.pn +1
even as already were this man and his kind. And seeing
in Claude Bernard the foremost living representative
and instrument of the fell conspiracy, at once against the
human and the divine, to destroy whom would be to rid
the earth of one of its worst monsters, she no sooner found
herself alone than she rose to her feet, and with passionate
energy invoked the wrath of God upon him, at the same
moment hurling her whole spiritual being at him with all
her might, as if with intent, then and there, to smite him
with destruction. And so completely, it seemed to her,
had she gone out of herself in the effort that her physical
system instantly collapsed, and she fell back powerless
on her sofa, where she lay awhile utterly exhausted and
unable to move. It was thus that, on rejoining her, I
found her, with just sufficient power to recount the experience,
and to ask me my opinion as to the possibility
of injuring a person at a distance by making, as it were, a
spiritual thunderbolt of oneself; for, if such a thing were
possible, and had ever happened, it must, she was convinced,
have happened then.
.pm letter-end

At the moment the discussion on this subject was
dropped, but further evidence was subsequently
sought which it was hoped would confirm or disprove
the idea that Anna Kingsford had been
responsible for the great French doctor’s death.
Eventually, our heroine came across an acquaintance
of the deceased Professor in the person of a
practical student of occult science. It appeared
from his narrative that Claude Bernard was one
of the few members of the profession who also took
an interest in this subject, which had served as a
// File: 173.png
.pn +1
link between them. He informed Mrs Kingsford
that the doctor had described his earliest symptoms
to himself, and had regarded them as somewhat
mysterious. He was engaged, it appears, in
his laboratory in the <lang=fr><i>Collège de France</i></lang>, being at
the time in his usual health, when he felt himself
suddenly struck as if by some poisonous effluvium
which he believed to emanate from the subject of
his experiment. The effect, instead of passing off,
became intensified, and manifested itself in severe
internal inflammation, from which he eventually
died. The doctors pronounced the complaint to be
Bright’s disease. This was the disease which
Claude Bernard had chiefly endeavoured to investigate
by inducing it in animals. The possibility of
such an incident is of course familiar to students
of occultism, and Paracelsus, with others before and
since, have maintained its feasibility. The great
German occultist writes that it is possible that the
spirit without the help of the body may, “through
a fiery will alone, and without a sword, stab and
wound others.” This is purely in accordance with
the general trend of his doctrine, a large part of
which is based on the belief that the will is a most
potent operator in medicine.

Anna Kingsford was, it is well known, one of the
earliest and foremost champions of the movement
for women’s rights, but the line she took in this
// File: 174.png
.pn +1
movement was supremely sane and wise, and was
devoid of all the extravagances which have since
brought certain sides of one of the greatest and most
important movements of the day into well-deserved
contempt. Edward Maitland was in entire sympathy
with her in this matter, and in endorsing one
of her communications to him observes: “I send
you to-day’s <i>Times</i>, with a report of the debate
on the Women’s Suffrage Bill, which will show you
how much you are needed in that movement. For
the debate shows why it does not advance. They
are all on the wrong tack, supporters and opponents
alike. The franchise is claimed in hostility, not
sought in love. The women are demanding it as
a means of defence and offence against man, instead
of as a means of aiding and perfecting man’s work.
They want a level platform with man expressly
in order to fight him on equal terms. And of course
the instinct of the majority of men and women
resents such a view.” “Justice, in fact, as between
men and women, human and animal,” was among
Anna Kingsford’s foremost aims; for, as her
biographer well says: “All injustice was cruelty,
and cruelty was for her the one unpardonable sin.”
“Her love,” he adds in a curiously revealing
passage, “was all for principles, not for persons.
The last thing contemplated by Anna Kingsford
was an aggravation of the existing divisions and
// File: 175.png
.pn +1
antagonisms between the sexes.” “And,” continues
Mr Maitland, “so far from accepting the
doctrine of the superiority of spinsterhood over
wifehood, she regarded it as an assertion of the
superiority of non-experience over experience as a
means of education.” But that which most of all
she reprobated was the disposition which led women
to despise womanhood itself as an inferior condition,
and accordingly to cultivate the masculine at
the expense of the feminine side of their nature.
“It was by magnifying their womanhood and not by
exchanging it for a factitious masculinity that she
would have her sex obtain its proper recognition.”
This recognition no one more ardently desired than
herself. She compares the modern woman to
Andromeda bound to the rock on the seashore,
shackled by the chains of ignorance and a helpless
prey to that terrible monster whose name is ennui.
“When,” she asks, “will Perseus come to deliver
the fair Andromeda, to loosen her fetters and to
set her free?” Much has happened to better the
position of women since this was written, but much
yet remains to be done.

All who knew Anna Kingsford unite in testifying
to the impression conveyed to them by her striking
personality with its originality, freshness, and force,
no less than by her many-sidedness and the strange
contradictions of her character. Her biographer
// File: 176.png
.pn +1
gives the following description of her appearance
at the date when he first met her:

.pm letter-start
Tall, slender, and graceful in form. Fair and exquisite
in complexion. Bright and sunny in expression. The
hair long and golden, but the brows and lashes dark and
the eyes deep set and hazel, and by turns dreamy and
penetrating. The mouth rich, full, and exquisitely formed.
The broad brow prominent and sharply cut. The nose
delicate, slightly curved, and just sufficiently prominent
to give character to the face. And the dress somewhat
fantastic as became her looks. Anna Kingsford seemed at
first more fairy than human and more child than woman.
For though really twenty-seven she appeared scarcely
seventeen, and made expressly to be caressed, petted and
indulged, and by no means to be taken seriously.
.pm letter-end

These impressions as regards her character were
appreciably modified on subsequent acquaintance,
and Mr Maitland observes that “when she warmed
to her favourite themes, her whole being radiant
with a spiritual light, her utterances were those in
turn of a savant, a sage, and a child, each part
suiting her as well as if it were her one and only
character.”

The relationship between the authors of <i>The
Perfect Way</i> and the founders of the Theosophical
Society in the days of its infancy affords matter of
no little interest. The basic idea of the Theosophical
Society, viz. the harmonising of the
esoteric side of all religions, naturally suggested to
the promoters of the movement that in the authors
// File: 177.png
.pn +1
of so remarkable a work, they would find a tower
of strength, and Madame Blavatsky, in particular,
was most anxious to obtain their support and co-operation
for the British section of the Society.
Eventually, after considerable hesitation, Anna
Kingsford responded to the advances made to her,
and accepted the presidency of the British section.
But the arrangement was not one which was
destined to last long. That it was not likely to be
a success might, I think, have been readily enough
foreseen. Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland
were too uncompromising in their point of view—too
positive that the source of their own information
could not be impugned, to accept readily the
<i>bona fides</i> of other and, as they considered, lower
oracles. This, however, was by no means all.
The attitude of Theosophy in its early days towards
Christianity was in the main hostile. To make the
esoteric interpretation of this creed the pivot of
their teaching was the last idea they contemplated.
Madame Blavatsky had attacked Christianity in
<i>Isis Unveiled</i>. Mr Sinnett was equally unsympathetic.
The basis of their actual teaching was
an interpretation of Eastern religions, whereas the
basis of <i>The Perfect Way</i> was an interpretation of
Western. Anna Kingsford was just as unhesitating
in giving her preference to Christianity as the leaders
of Theosophy were in according theirs to Buddhism,
// File: 178.png
.pn +1
Hinduism, and kindred Oriental philosophies. Mrs
Besant’s attitude when she joined the Society
showed similar preferences. Her early experiences
of orthodox Christianity were not such as to bias
her in its favour, and it was not until later days
that she assumed the mantle of the prophet of <i>The
Perfect Way</i>, and openly recognised the importance
of the esoteric side of Christianity to complete the
circle of theosophical teachings. The views with
which Theosophy commenced have in the course
of time been materially modified, and a curious
sidelight is thrown, by a letter of Anna Kingsford’s,
on the question whether the leaders of this
Society had originally adopted the reincarnation
hypothesis, or whether this was in the nature of
a subsequent development. Mrs Kingsford writes
under date 3rd July 1882, to her friend Lady
Caithness, alluding to the reception of <i>The Perfect
Way</i> by the Press:

.pm letter-start
After all this reviewing and fault-finding on the part of
critics having but a third of the knowledge which has been
given to us, there is not a line in <i>The Perfect Way</i> which
I would alter were the book to be reprinted. The very
reviewer—Mr Sinnett—who writes with so much pseudo-authority
in the <i>Theosophist</i>, has, within a year’s time,
completely altered his views on at least one important
subject—I mean Reincarnation. When he came to see us
a year ago in London, he vehemently denied that doctrine,
and asserted, with immense conviction, that I had been
// File: 179.png
.pn +1
altogether deceived in my teaching concerning it. He
read a message from <i>Isis Unveiled</i> to confute me, and
argued long on the subject. He had not then received
any instruction from his Hindu guru about it. Now, he
has been so instructed, and wrote Mr Maitland a long letter
acknowledging the truth of the doctrine which, since
seeing us, he has been taught. But he does not yet know
all the truth concerning it, and so finds fault with our
presentation of that side of it which, as yet, he has not
been taught.
.pm letter-end

Presumably in this matter Mr Sinnett reflected
Madame Blavatsky’s views, and the fact that he
cites <i>Isis Unveiled</i> seems to me to leave little doubt
in the matter. Surely if he had misunderstood her,
<abbr rend=spell>H. P. B.</abbr> would have taken pains to put him right!
I think that the date given will fix approximately
the period at which official Theosophy was openly
converted to the doctrine of Reincarnation. Until
that time, if it was not uniformly denied, at least
there were wide diversities of opinion, and apparently
its opponents mustered more strongly than
its supporters. Eventually Anna Kingsford and
Edward Maitland founded between them the
<i>Hermetic Society</i>. This was not destined to a long
lease of life, mainly owing to the breakdown of
Anna Kingsford’s health. But while Theosophy
showed the greater vitality, in spite of scandals
and discords which might well have shattered it to
its base, the teachings of the authors of <i>The Perfect
Way</i> exercised a profound influence in leavening
// File: 180.png
.pn +1
the mass of Theosophical teaching. Though possessing
no little dogmatism in her own intellectual
organisation, Anna Kingsford had no great liking
for any form of society that taught dogmatically,
her idea being that every one must necessarily find
out the truth for himself and realise it spiritually
from his own individual standpoint. Theosophy
was altogether too dogmatic for her, without
being dogmatic on her own lines. She was readier
to admit the existence of the Mahatmas than to
grant the inspired source of their communications.
In any case she looked upon their teaching as of a
radically lower order than her own, and reflecting
those vices and defects which she and Maitland were
wont to associate with the denizens of the astral
plane. On the subject of communications with such
entities, or with those whom she suspected of belonging
by nature to this region, she was never tired
of inveighing.

.pm letter-start
The secret (she says) of the opposition made in certain
circles to the doctrine set forth in <i>The Perfect Way</i> is not
far to seek. It is to be found in the fact that the book is,
throughout, strenuously opposed to idolatry in all its
forms, including that of the popular “spiritualism” of
the day, which is, in effect, a revival, under a new guise
and with new sanctions, of the ancient cultus known as
Ancestor-worship. <i>The Perfect Way</i>, on the contrary,
insists that truth is accessible only through the illumination,
by the Divine Spirit, of man’s own soul; and that
// File: 181.png
.pn +1
precisely in proportion as the individual declines such
interior illumination, and seeks to extraneous influences,
does he impoverish his own soul and diminish his possibilities
of knowledge. It teaches that “Spirits” or
“Angels,” as their devotees are fond of styling them, are
untrustworthy guides, possessed of no positive divine
element, and reflecting, therefore, rather than instructing,
their interrogators; and that the condition of mind,
namely, passivity, insisted on by these “angels” is one
to be strenuously avoided, the true attitude for obtaining
divine illumination being that of ardent active aspiration,
impelled by a resolute determination to know nothing
but the Highest. Precisely such a state of passivity,
voluntarily induced, and such veneration of and reliance
upon “guides” or “controls,” are referred to by the
Apostle when he says: “But let no man beguile you by
a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels.” And
precisely such exaltation of the personal Jesus, as <i>The
Perfect Way</i> repudiates and its opponents demand, is by
the same Apostle condemned in the words: “Henceforth
know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we
have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth
know we him no more.”
.pm letter-end

Accordingly, as Maitland and Kingsford fell foul
of the Theosophical Society on the one hand, they
fell foul of the Spiritualists on the other. But the
cleavage between Spiritualism and the teaching of
<i>The Perfect Way</i> was far deeper than that between
this teaching and Theosophy. With Theosophy
indeed, in its broadest sense, there was nothing in
Kingsford and Maitland’s teaching that was radically
antagonistic. <i>The Perfect Way</i> might in fact
// File: 182.png
.pn +1
be accepted to-day, with some reservations on
minor points, as a theosophical text-book, and,
looked at from this point of view, it is the fullest,
the most complete, and the most coherent exposition
of Christianity as seen through theosophical
spectacles. Anna Kingsford had indeed herself
been received into the fold of the Roman Catholic
Church, though certainly Roman Catholicism never
had a more rebellious or more independent subject.
On the doctrine of authority she would never have
made concessions, and, without this admission,
one fails to see what status the Roman Church
can be held to occupy. It is indeed a case of Hamlet
without the Prince of Denmark. Her leanings,
however, towards the ancient mother of Christian
churches was, even in its modified form, gall and
wormwood to her partner and collaborator, and in
the end it brought about some very unhappy and
regrettable scenes in connection with her last hours,
and a dispute as to the faith in which she died,
which must have been exceedingly painful to all
concerned.

Perhaps in no single point does Roman Catholicism
present a worse and more undesirable aspect
than in the manner in which its missionaries besiege
the last hours of the passing soul in the effort to
induce its victims, when too weak for resistance, to
say “ditto” to the formulæ which their priests
// File: 183.png
.pn +1
pretend to regard as constituting a password to the
celestial realms. Certainly, in Anna Kingsford’s
case, the admission of a Roman Catholic Sister of
Mercy to tend her in her last illness was productive
of the worst results, troubling her last hours with
an unseemly wrangle that did not cease even after
her body was consigned to its final resting-place.

A sidelight is thrown on Mrs Kingsford’s attitude
towards Roman Catholicism by the record of a
conversation which her biographer cites her as
having had on one occasion with a Roman Catholic
priest. She was calling on a Catholic friend on
the occasion, and speaking as usual in her very
free and self-confident manner with regard to the
religious views which she held. Some remark which
she made elicited from the priest the rebuke,
“Why, my daughter, you have been <i>thinking</i>.
You should never do that. The Church saves us
the trouble and danger of thinking, by telling us
what to <i>believe</i>. We are only called on to believe.
I never think: I dare not. I should go mad if
I were to let myself think.” Anna Kingsford
replied that what she wanted was to understand,
and that it was impossible to do this without thinking.
Believing without understanding was for her
not faith but credulity. “How, except by thinking,”
she asked, “does one learn whether the Church has
the truth?”
// File: 184.png
.pn +1

When the Hermetic Society was founded, <abbr rend=spell>W. T.</abbr>
Stead was editor of the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>, and Mrs
Kingsford wrote for him an account of the new
Society. Stead, with his usual taste for dramatic
headlines, entitled it “The Newest Thing in Religions.”
This was the very last description that
its founders were likely to tolerate. Anna Kingsford
wrote back an indignant letter of repudiation.
“So far,” she says, “from being the newest thing
in religions, or even claiming to be a religion at all,
that at which the Society aims is the recovery of
what is really the oldest thing in religion, so old as
to have become forgotten and lost—namely, its
esoteric and spiritual, and therefore its true signification.”
Elsewhere she writes of <i>The Perfect Way</i>
as not purporting to be a new gospel. “Its
mission,” she says, “is that simply of rehabilitation
and re-interpretation undertaken with the
view, not of superseding Christianity, but of saving
it.” She continues:

.pm letter-start
For, as the deepest and most earnest thinkers of our
day are painfully aware, the Gospel of Christendom, as
it stands in the Four Evangels, does <sc>NOT</sc> suffice, uninterpreted,
to satisfy the needs of the age, and to furnish a
perfect system of thought and rule of life. Christianity—historically
preached and understood—has for eighteen
centuries filled the world with wars, persecutions, and
miseries of all kinds; and in these days it is rapidly
filling it with agnosticism, atheism, and revolt against
// File: 185.png
.pn +1
the very idea of God. <i>The Perfect Way</i> seeks to consolidate
truth in one complete whole, and, by systematising religion,
to demonstrate its Catholicity. It seeks to make peace
between Science and Faith; to marry the Intellect with the
Intuition; to bring together East and West, and to
unite Buddhist philosophy with Christian love, by demonstrating
that the basis of religion is not historical, but
spiritual—not physical, but psychic—not local and temporal,
but universal and eternal. It avers that the true
“Lord Jesus Christ” is no mere historical character,
no mere demi-god, by whose material blood the souls of
men are washed white, but “the hidden man of the heart,”
continually born, crucified, ascending and glorified in the
interior Kingdom of the Christian’s own Spirit. A
scientific age rightly refuses to be any longer put off with
data which are more than dubious, and logic which
morality and philosophy alike reject. A deeper, truer,
more real religion is needed for an epoch of thought, and
for a world familiar with Biblical criticism and revision—a
religion whose foundations no destructive agnosticism
can undermine, and in whose structure no examination,
however searching, shall be able to find flaw or blemish.
It is only by rescuing the Gospel of Christ from the externals
of history, persons, and events, and by vindicating
its essential significance, that Christianity can be saved
from the destruction which inevitably overtakes all idolatrous
creeds. There is not a word in <i>The Perfect Way</i>
at variance with the spirit of the Gospel of the “Lord
Jesus Christ.”
.pm letter-end

Nothing shows the method adopted in their
Gospel of Interpretation by the two authors more
clearly than their teaching with regard to the story
of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man. It is
curious how literally this story has been taken
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through many ages of the Church’s history, in view
of the fact that such a writer as Origen in the early
days of the infant Church observed that: “No one
in his time would be so foolish as to take this allegory
as a description of actual fact.” Kingsford and
Maitland refer the interpretation firstly to the
Church, and secondly to individual man. “The
conscience,” they say, “set over the human reason
as its guide, overseer, and ruler, whether, in the
general, as the Church, or in the particular, as the
individual, falls, when, listening to the suggestions
of the lower nature, she desires, seeks, and at length
defiles herself with, the ambitions and falsehoods
of this present world.” “Ceasing to be a trustworthy
guide she becomes herself serpent and
seducer to the human reason, leading him into
false paths until, if she have her way, she will end
by plunging him into the lowest depths of abject
ignorance, there to be devoured by the brood of
unreason and to be annihilated for ever. For she
is now no longer the true wife, Faith, she has
become the wanton, Superstition.” On the other
hand, “the Church at her best, unfallen, is the glass
to the lamp of Truth, guarding the sacred flame
within and transmitting unimpaired to her children
the light received upon its inner surface.” Hitherto
this fall has been the common fate of all Churches.
“Thus fallen and degraded, the Church becomes a
// File: 187.png
.pn +1
church of this world, greedy of worldly dignities,
emoluments, and dominion, intent on foisting on
the belief of her votaries in the name of authority
fables and worse than fables—a Church jealous of
the letter which killeth, ignorant of, or bitterly at
enmity with, the spirit which giveth life.”

We now come to the interpretation of the Fall as
applied to individual Man. This is allegorically
described as “the lapse of heavenly beings from
their first happy estate and their final redemption
by means of penance done through incarnation in
the flesh.” The authors tell us that this imagined
lapse is a parable designed to veil and preserve a
truth. This truth is the Creative Secret, the projection
of Spirit into matter, the descent of substance
into Maya, or illusion. From a cosmic
standpoint “the Tree of Divination or Knowledge
becomes Motion or the Kalpa—the period of Existence
as distinguished from Being; the Tree of
Life is Rest or the Sabbath, the Nirvâna. Adam is
Manifestation; the Serpent—no longer of the lower,
but of the higher sphere—is the celestial Serpent
or Seraph of Heavenly Counsel.” By the Tree of
Divination of Good and Evil in this interpretation
must be understood that condition by means of
which Spirit projected into appearance becomes
manifested under the veil of Maya, a necessary
condition for the evolution of the individual, but
// File: 188.png
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carrying with it its own inevitable perils. It is
not, say our authors, because matter is in itself
evil that the soul’s descent into it constitutes a
fall. It is because to the soul matter is a forbidden
thing. By quitting her own proper condition and
descending into matter she takes upon herself
matter’s limitations. It is no particular act that
constitutes sin. Sin does not consist in fulfilling
any of the functions of nature. Sin consists in
acting without or against the Spirit, and in not
seeking the divine sanction for everything that is
done. Sin, in fact, is of the soul, and it is due to
the soul’s inclination to the things of sense. To
regard an act as <i>per se</i> sinful is materialism and
idolatry. For in doing so we invest that which is
physical with a spiritual attribute, and this is of
the essence of idolatry.

Adam signifies the manifested personality, or
man, and is only complete when Eve, his soul, is
added to him as helpmeet. When Eve takes of
the fruit and enjoys it, she turns away from her
higher spiritual self to seek for pleasure in the things
of her lower self, and in doing so she draws Adam
down with her till they both become sensual and
debased. The sin which commences in the thought
of the soul, Eve, thus becomes subsequently developed
into action through the energy of the body
or masculine part, Adam. One of the inevitable
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results of the soul’s enslavement to matter is its
liability to extinction. In eating of the fruit Adam
and Eve absorb the seeds of mortality. As Milton
says:

.pm verse-start
They engorged without restraint,
And knew not, eating Death.
.pm verse-end

The soul in her own nature is immortal, but the
lower she sinks into matter the weaker becomes her
vitality. A continuous downward course must
therefore end in the extinction of the individual—not
of course of the Divine Ray, which returns to
the Source whence it came. It is well to bear in
mind that man is a dual being, not masculine or
feminine only, but both. This, of course, applies
equally to man whether manifested in a male or
female body. One side is more predominant in
man and the other in woman, but this does not
imply absence of the other side, but merely its
subordination. The man who has nothing, or next
to nothing, of the woman in him, is no true man,
and the woman who has nothing of the man in her,
is no true woman. Man, whether man or woman,
consists of male and female, Reason and Intuition,
and is therefore essentially twofold. Owing
to the duality of his constitution, every doctrine
relating to man has a dual significance and
application. Thus the sacred books not only present
an historical narrative of events occurring in time,
// File: 190.png
.pn +1
but have a spiritual significance of a permanent
character in regard to which the element of time has
no meaning. In this sense Scripture is a record of
that which is always taking place.

.pm letter-start
Thus, the Spirit of God, which is original Life, is always
moving upon the face of the waters, or heavenly deep,
which is original Substance. And the One, which consists
of these two, is always putting forth alike the Macrocosm
of the universe and the Microcosm of the individual, and
is always making man in the image of God, and placing
him in a garden of innocence and perfection, the garden
of his own unsophisticated nature. And man is always
falling away from that image and quitting that garden
for the wilderness of sin, being tempted by the serpent of
sense, his own lower element. And from this condition
and its consequences he is always being born of a pure
virgin—dying, rising and ascending into heaven.
.pm letter-end

This, in brief, is one of the most essential portions
of the new Gospel of Interpretation. It exemplifies
the method adopted throughout which is that to
which we are accustomed to apply the word
“Hermetic.” It is both Christian and pre-Christian,
for it is the interpretation of the meaning of life,
which was the Key to the ancient Gnostic faiths
which, subsisting before Christianity, became incorporated
in the Christian teaching. New generations
and races of men require the old truths to be
put before them in a new guise. This was so when
Christianity first came to birth, but in the days of
Jesus Christ there were many things which the
// File: 191.png
.pn +1
Prophet of Nazareth had to say to his disciples,
but which, as he told them, they were then too
weak to understand. The mystical interpretation
of Christian truth fell on deaf ears then. Re-stated
and re-interpreted, after a lapse of 1900 years, is it
too much to hope that it may no longer prove “to
the Gentiles foolishness, and to the Jews a rock of
offence”?

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY NEILL AND CO., LTD., EDINBURGH

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