Rosa Alchemica | Page 4

upon the corner of picture- frames and on the bronze divinities, and to turn the
blue of the incense to a heavy purple; while it left the peacocks to glimmer and glow as
though each separate colour were a living spirit. I had fallen into a profound dream-like
reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who
communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in imagination
and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he meet with and talk with, and the
more does he come under the power of Roland, who sounded in the Valley of
Roncesvalles the last trumpet of the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw
them perishing away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the
world and could not find them; and under the power of all those countless divinities who
have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies in the minds of the modern poets and
romance writers, and under the power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance
have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and fishes, the
fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many think humanity made these
divinities, and that it can unmake them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling
harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in
deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is
indeed but the trembling of their lips.'
He had stood up and begun to walk to and fro, and had become in my waking dream a
shuttle weaving an immense purple web whose folds had begun to fill the room. The
room seemed to have become inexplicably silent, as though all but the web and the
weaving were at an end in the world. 'They have come to us; they have come to us,' the
voice began again; 'all that have ever been in your reverie, all that you have met with in
books. There is Lear, his head still wet with the thunder-storm, and he laughs because
you thought yourself an existence who are but a shadow, and him a shadow who is an
eternal god; and there is Beatrice, with her lips half parted in a smile, as though all the
stars were about to pass away in a sigh of love; and there is the mother of the God of
humility who cast so great a spell over men that they have tried to unpeople their hearts
that he might reign alone, but she holds in her hand the rose whose every petal is a god;
and there, O swiftly she comes! is Aphrodite under a twilight falling from the wings of
numberless sparrows, and about her feet are the grey and white doves.' In the midst of my

dream I saw him hold out his left arm and pass his right hand over it as though he stroked
the wings of doves. I made a violent effort which seemed almost to tear me in two, and
said with forced determination: 'You would sweep me away into an indefinite world
which fills me with terror; and yet a man is a great man just in so far as he can make his
mind reflect everything with indifferent precision like a mirror.' I seemed to be perfectly
master of myself, and went on, but more rapidly: 'I command you to leave me at once, for
your ideas and phantasies are but the illusions that creep like maggots into civilizations
when they begin to decline, and into minds when they begin to decay.' I had grown
suddenly angry, and seizing the alembic from the table, was about to rise and strike him
with it, when the peacocks on the door behind him appeared to grow immense; and then
the alembic fell from my fingers and I was drowned in a tide of green and blue and
bronze feathers, and as I struggled hopelessly I heard a distant voice saying: 'Our master
Avicenna has written that all life proceeds out of corruption.' The glittering feathers had
now covered me completely, and I knew that I had struggled for hundreds of years, and
was conquered at last. I was sinking into the depth when the green and blue and bronze
that seemed to fill the world became a sea of flame and swept me away, and as I was
swirled along I heard a voice over my head cry, 'The mirror is broken in two pieces,' and
another voice answer, 'The mirror is broken in four pieces,' and a more distant voice cry
with an exultant cry, 'The