Kitabı oku: «Tablets», sayfa 7

III
GENESIS

"Had man withstood the trial, his descendants would have been born one from another in the same way that Adam – i. e., mankind – was, namely, in the image of God; for that which proceeds from the Eternal has eternal manner of birth." – Behmen.

GENESIS

i. – vestiges

Boehme, the subtilest thinker on Genesis since Moses, conceives that nature fell from its original oneness by fault of Lucifer before man rose physically from its ruins; and moreover, that his present existence, being the struggle to recover from nature's lapse, is embarrassed with double difficulties by defection from rectitude on his part. We think it needs no Lucifer other than mankind collectively conspiring, to account for nature's mishaps, or man's, since, assuming man to be nature's ancestor, and nature man's ruins rather, himself were the impediment he seeks to remove; nature being the child of his choices, corresponding in large – or macrocosmically – to his intents. Eldest of creatures, the progenitor of all below him, personally one and imperishable in essence, if debased forms appear in nature, these are consequent on man's degeneracy prior to their genesis. And it is only as he lapses out of his integrity, by debasing his essence, that he impairs his original likeness, and drags it into the prone shapes of the animal kingdom – these being the effigies and vestiges of his individualized and shattered personality. Behold these upstarts of his loins, everywhere the mimics jeering at him saucily, or gaily parodying their fallen lord.

 
"Most happy he who hath fit place assigned
To his beasts, and disafforested his mind;
Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and every beast,
And is not ape himself to all the rest."
 

It is man alone who conceives and brings forth the beast in him that swerves and dies. Perversion of will by mis-choice precipitates him into serpentine form, duplicated in sex,

 
"Parts of that Part which once was all."
 

'Tis but one and the same soul in him, entertaining a dialogue with himself, that is symbolized in the Serpent, Adam, and the woman; nor needs there fabulous "Paradises Lost or Regained," for setting in relief this serpent symbol of temptation, this Lord or Lucifer in our spiritual Eden:

 
"First state of human kind,
Which one remains while man doth find
Joy in his partner's company;
When two, alas! adulterate joined,
The serpent made the three."
 

ii. – serpent symbol

Better is he who is above temptation, than he who, being tempted, overcomes, since the latter but suppresses the evil inclination stirring in his breast which the former has not. Whoever is tempted has so far sinned as to entertain the tempting lust within, betraying his lapse from singleness or holiness. The virtuous choose, are virtuous by choice; the holy, being one, deliberate not – their volitions answering spontaneously to their desires. It is the cleft personality, or other within, which seduces the Will, and is the Adversary and Deuce we become individually, and impersonate in the Snake.

 
Chaste love's a maid,
Though shapen as a man.
 

But one were an Œdipus to expound this serpent mythology; whereby is symbolized the mysteries of genesis, and of The One rejoining man's parted personality, and thus recreating mankind. Coeval with flesh, the symbol appears wherever traces of civilization exist; a remnant of it in the ancient Phallus worship having come to us disguised in our Mayday dance. Nor was it confined to carnal knowledge merely. The serpent symbolized divine wisdom, also; and it was under this acceptation that it became associated with those "traditionary teachers of mankind whose genial wisdom entitled them to divine honors." An early Christian sect, called Ophites, worshipped it as the personation of natural knowledge. So the injunction, "Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves," becomes the more significant when we learn that seraph in the original means a serpent; cherub, a dove. And these again symbolize facts in osteological science as connected with the latest theories of the vertebrated cranium,¹¹ which view Nature as ophiomorphous – a series of spines, crowned, winged, webbed, finned, footed in structure – set erect, prone, trailing, as charged with life in higher potency or lower; man, holding the sceptre of dominion as he maintains his inborn rectitude, or losing his prerogative as lapsed from his integrity – hereby debasing his form and parcelling his gifts away in the prone shapes distributed throughout nature's kingdoms. Or, again as aspiring for lost supremacy, he uplift and crown his fallen form with forehead, countenance, speech, – thus liberating the genius from the slime of its prone periods, and restoring it to rectitude, religion, science, fellowship, the ideal arts.

 
"Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man."
 

iii. – embryons

"The form is in the archetype before it appears in the work, in the divine mind before it exists in the creature."

As the male impregnates the female, so mind charges matter with form and fecundity; the spermatic world being life in transmission and body in embryo; the egg a genesis and seminary of forms, the kingdoms of animated nature sleeping coiled in its yolk, and awaiting the quickening magnetism that ushers them into light. Herein the human embryon unfolds in series the lineaments of all forms in the living hierarchy, to be fixed at last in its microcosm, unreeling therefrom its faculties into filamental organs, spinning so minutely the threads, "that were it physically possible to dissolve away all other members of the body, there would still remain the full and perfect figure of a man. And it is this perfect cerebro-spinal axis, this statue-like tissue of filaments, that, physically speaking, is the man."¹² The mind contains him spiritually, and reveals him physically to himself and his kind. Every creature assists in its own formation, souls being essentially creative and craving form.

 
"The creature ever delights in the image of the Creator;
And the soul of man will in a manner clasp God to herself;
Having nothing mortal, she is wholly inebriated of God;
For she glories in the harmony under which the human body exists."
 

Throughout the domain of spirit desire creates substance wherein all creatures seek conjunction, lodging and nurture. Nor is there anything in nature save desire holding substances together, all things being dissolvable and recombinable in this spiritual menstruum.

 
"'Tis the blossom whence there blows
Everything that lives and grows;
It doth make the heavens to move
And the sun to burn in love:
The strong to weak it seeks to yoke,
And makes the ivy climb the oak,
Under whose shadows lions wild,
Softened thereby grow tame and mild.
It all medicine doth appease,
It burns the fishes in the seas,
Not all the skill its wounds can stanch,
Not all the sea its thirst can quench:
It did make the bloody spear
Once a leafy coat to wear,
While in his leaves there shrouded lay
Sweet birds for love that sing and play;
And of all the joyful flame,
Bud and blossom this we name."
 

iv. – temperament

Temperament is a fate, oftentimes, from whose jurisdiction its victims hardly escape, but do its bidding herein, be it murder or martyrdom. Virtues and crimes are mixed in one's cup of nativity, with the lesser or larger margin of choice. Unless of chaste extraction, his regeneration shall be wrought with difficulty through the struggling kingdom of evil into the peaceful realm of good. Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry, from fountains whence rose Adam the first and his Eve. The oldest and most persistent of forces, if once ennobled by virtue and refined by culture, it resists base mixtures long, preserving its purity and power for generations. All gifts descend in the torrent; all are mingled in the ecstasy, as purity or passion prevail; genius being the fruit of chaste conjunctions, brute force of adulterous – the virgin complexions or the mixed.¹³

 
"Our generation moulds our state,
Its virtues, vices, fix our fate;
Nor otherwise experience proves,
The unseen hands make all the moves,
If some are great, and some are small,
Some climb to good, some from good fortune fall, —
Not figures these of speech, – forefathers sway us all.
 
 
Me from the womb the midnight muse did take,
She clothed me, nourished, and mine head
With her own hands she fashioned;
She did a cov'nant with me make,
And circumcised my tender soul, and thus she spake:
'Thou of my church shalt be,
Hate and renounce (said she)
Wealth, honour, pleasure, all the world for me.
Thou neither great at court, nor in the war,
Nor at th' exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling bar,
Content thyself with the small barren praise,
That neglected verse does raise.'
 
 
She spake, and all my years to come
Took their determined doom:
Their several ways of life, let others choose,
Their several pleasures let them use,
But I was born for love and for a muse.
 
 
With fate what boots it to contend?
Such I began, such am, and so shall end:
The star that did my being frame
Was but a lambent flame;
Some light indeed it did dispense,
But less of heat and influence.
 
 
No matter, poet, let proud fortune see
That thou canst her despise no less than she does thee;
Why grieve thyself or blush to be
As all the inspired tuneful seers,
And all thy great forefathers were from Shakspeare to thy peers."
 

Yet, biassed by temperament as we may be, whether for good or for evil, such measure of freedom is ours, nevertheless, as enables us to free ourselves from its tendencies and temptations. In the breast of each is a liberating angel, at whose touch, when we will it persistently, the doors of our dungeon fly open and loose their prisoner.

IV
METAMORPHOSES

"Generation is not a creation of life, but a production of things to sense, and making them manifest. Neither is change death, but a hiding of that which was." – Hermes Trismegistus.

METAMORPHOSES

i. – sleep

Life is a current of spiritual forces. In perpetual tides, the stream traverses its vessels to vary its pulsations and perspectives of things, receding from forehead and face into cerebellum and spine, to be replenished night by night from these springs of vigor. The Genius trims our lamps while we sleep. It plumbs us by day and levels us by night. Here recumbent as at nature's navel, her energies flood the spirits with puissance, restoring tone and tension for the coming day's occupations. Then what varying scenes rise to fancy's eye, while the mind lapses out of the globe of thought, the house of the senses, into the palaces of memory through the gate of dreams! Under the sway of occult forces we partake of preternatural insights, having access to sources of information unopened to us in our wakeful hours. Vast systems of sympathies, antedating and extending beyond our mundane experiences, absorb us within their sphere, relating us to other worlds of life and light; as if stirred by the nocturnal impulse we climbed the empyrean, still crediting the superstition of our affinities with the starry orbs —

 
"Eternal fathers of whate'er exists below."
 

Or, pursuing our peregrinations, we plunge suddenly into the abyss of origins, transformed for the moment into slumbering umbilici, skirting the shores of our nativity; or, ascending spine-wise, traverse the hierarchy of gifts. How we grope strangely! Seeking the One amidst the many, we lose ourselves in finding the One we lost. We enter bodies of our bodies, souls of our soul, successively; each organ our prisoner, we in turn the prisoner of each, till by chance the bewildered occupant recover the key to the wards of his apartments, and forth issues into the haunts of his consciousness, the world of natural things. For never is the sleep so profound, the dream so distracting, as to obliterate all sense of the personality, – despite these vagaries of the night, these opiates of the senses, memory sometime dispels the oblivious slumber, and recovers for the mind recollections of its descent and destiny. Some reliques of the ancient consciousness survive, recalling our previous history and experiences.¹⁴

ii. – reminiscence

"Heaven's exile straying from the orb of light."

And but for our surface and distracted lives, – lived here for the most part in the senses, – we should have never lost the consciousness of our descent into mortality, nor have questioned our resurrection and longevity. But as in descending, all drink of oblivion – some more, some less – it happens that while all are conscious of life, by defect of memory, our recollections are various concerning it; those discerning most vividly who have drank least of oblivion, they more easily recalling the memory of their past existence. Ancients of days, we hardly are persuaded to believe that our souls are no older than our bodies, and to date our nativity from our family registers, as if time and space could chronicle the periods of the immortal mind by its advent into the flesh and decease out of it.

 
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
Nor yet in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home."
 

None of us remember when we did not remember, when memory was nought, and ourselves were unborn. Memory is the premise of our sensations, it dates our immortality. Nestling ever in the twilight of our earliest recollections, it cradles our nativity, canopies our hopes, and bears us babes, out of our bodies as into them; opening vistas alike into our past and coming existence. The thread of our experiences, it cannot be severed by any accidents of our mortality; time and space, earliest found and last to leave us, fading and falling away as we pass into recollections which these can neither date nor confine – the smiles that welcomed, the tears that dismiss us, being of no age, nor place nor time.

 
"O love! thou makest all things even
In earth and heaven:
Finding thy way through prison bars
Up to the stars:
Or true to the Almighty plan
That out of dust created man,
Thou lookest in a grave, to see
Thine immortality."
 

iii. – immortality

If immortality inhere in objects known by us, these surely are persons; the ties of kindred being the liveliest, most abiding of any; our faith in the impossibility of being sundered forever, remaining unshaken to the last, and surviving all changes that our bodies may undergo.

 
"Deep love, the godlike in us, still believes
Its objects are immortal as itself."
 

'Tis not our bodies that contain us but our souls. None beholds with bodily eyes the apparition of his person, sees and survives the ghost he provokes. The perturbed spirits alone linger about the tombs – dead before they die, dead burying their dead – comfortless because these are bereft of bodies, flesh being all of them they ever knew.¹⁵

Moreover, the insatiableness of our desires asserts our personal imperishableness. Yearning for full satisfactions while balked of these perpetually, we still prosecute our search for them, our faith in their attainment remaining unshaken under every disappointment. Our hope is eternal as ourselves – a never ending, still beginning quest of our divinity. Infinite in essence, we crave it in potence. The boundlessness and elasticity of the mind, its power of self-recovery, uprise from temporary obstructions self-imposed, or from temperament, are assurances made doubly sure of our soul's infinitude and longevity. So the lives of empires, of men of genius and sanctity, are grand illustrations of its heroic strife for the largest freedom, the widest sway, – of instincts striving within, which these pent confines of time and space can neither subjugate nor appease.

 
"Take this, my child," the father said,
"This globe I give thy mind for bread;"
Eager we seize the proffered store,
The bait devour – then ask for more.
 

"Everything aspires to its own perfection and is restless till it attain it, as the trembling needle till it find its beloved north. And the knowledge of this is innate as is the desire, else the last had been a torment and needless importunity. Nature shoots not at rovers. Even inanimate things, while ignorant of their perfection, are carried towards it by a blind impulse. But that which conducts them knows. The next order of beings have some sight of it, and man most perfectly till he touch the apple." Our delights suckle us life long, our desires being memories of past satisfactions, and we here but sip pleasures once tasted to satiety. The more exquisite our enjoyments, the more transient; the more eagerly sought, the more elusive. We cannot come out of our paradise, nor stay in it contentedly, the gates of bliss closing on opening.

 
"E'en as the amorous needle joys to bend
To her magnetic friend,
Or as the greedy lover's eyeballs fly
At his fair mistress' eye,
Eager we kindle life's illumined stuff,
Can tire, nor tease, nor kindle it enough."
 

Still heaven is, our hearts affirm against every disappointment; and whether behind or before us, as memory or as hope, 'tis to be ours, – our port and resting place sometime in the stream of ages.

 
"All before us lies the way;
Give the past unto the wind;
All before us is the day,
Night and darkness are behind.
 
 
Eden with its angels bold,
Love and flowers and coolest sea,
Is less an ancient story told
Than a glowing prophecy.
 
 
In the spirit's perfect air,
In the passions tame and kind,
Innocence from selfish care,
The real Eden we shall find.
 
 
When the soul to sin hath died,
True and beautiful and sound,
Then all earth is sanctified,
Upsprings paradise around.
 
 
From the spirit-land, afar
All disturbing force shall flee;
Stir, nor toil, nor hope shall mar
Its immortal unity."