Rosa Alchemica | Page 8

could dwell, and whisper what they would into sleeping minds;
and Ate forms from which demonic beings could pour madness, or unquiet dreams, into
sleeping blood; and Hermes, that if you powerfully imagined a hound at your bedside it
would keep watch there until you woke, and drive away all but the mightiest demons, but

that if your imagination was weakly, the hound would be weakly also, and the demons
prevail, and the hound soon die; and Aphrodite, that if you made, by a strong imagining,
a dove crowned with silver and had it flutter over your head, its soft cooing would make
sweet dreams of immortal love gather and brood over mortal sleep; and all divinities alike
had revealed with many warnings and lamentations that all minds are continually giving
birth to such beings, and sending them forth to work health or disease, joy or madness. If
you would give forms to the evil powers, it went on, you were to make them ugly,
thrusting out a lip, with the thirsts of life, or breaking the proportions of a body with the
burdens of life; but the divine powers would only appear in beautiful shapes, which are
but, as it were, shapes trembling out of existence, folding up into a timeless ecstasy,
drifting with half-shut eyes, into a sleepy stillness. The bodiless souls who descended into
these forms were what men called the moods; and worked all great changes in the world;
for just as the magician or the artist could call them when he would, so they could call out
of the mind of the magician or the artist, or if they were demons, out of the mind of the
mad or the ignoble, what shape they would, and through its voice and its gestures pour
themselves out upon the world. In this way all great events were accomplished; a mood, a
divinity, or a demon, first descending like a faint sigh into men's minds and then
changing their thoughts and their actions until hair that was yellow had grown black, or
hair that was black had grown yellow, and empires moved their border, as though they
were but drifts of leaves. The rest of the book contained symbols of form, and sound, and
colour, and their attribution to divinities and demons, so that the initiate might fashion a
shape for any divinity or any demon, and be as powerful as Avicenna among those who
live under the roots of tears and of laughter.

IV
A couple of hours after Sunset Michael Robartes returned and told me that I would have
to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique dance, because before my initiation could be
perfected I had to join three times in a magical dance, for rhythm was the wheel of
Eternity, on which alone the transient and accidental could be broken, and the spirit set
free. I found that the steps, which were simple enough, resembled certain antique Greek
dances, and having been a good dancer in my youth and the master of many curious
Gaelic steps, I soon had them in my memory. He then robed me and himself in a costume
which suggested by its shape both Greece and Egypt, but by its crimson colour a more
passionate life than theirs; and having put into my hands a little chainless censer of
bronze, wrought into the likeness of a rose, by some modern craftsman, he told me to
open a small door opposite to the door by which I had entered. I put my hand to the
handle, but the moment I did so the fumes of the incense, helped perhaps by his
mysterious glamour, made me fall again into a dream, in which I seemed to be a mask,
lying on the counter of a little Eastern shop. Many persons, with eyes so bright and still
that I knew them for more than human, came in and tried me on their faces, but at last
flung me into a corner with a little laughter; but all this passed in a moment, for when I
awoke my hand was still upon the handle. I opened the door, and found myself in a
marvellous passage, along whose sides were many divinities wrought in a mosaic, not
less beautiful than the mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less severe beauty;

the predominant colour of each divinity, which was surely a symbolic colour, being
repeated in the lamps that hung from the ceiling, a curiously-scented lamp before every
divinity. I passed on, marvelling exceedingly how these enthusiasts could have created all
this beauty in so remote a place, and half persuaded to believe in a material alchemy, by
the sight of so much hidden wealth; the censer filling the air, as I passed, with