The Novel of the White Powder | Page 8

conclusions; a few simple experiments suggested a doubt as to my
then standpoint, and a train of thought that rose from circumstances
comparatively trifling brought me far; my old conception of the
universe has been swept away, and I stand in a world that seems as
strange and awful to me as the endless waves of the ocean seen for the
first time, shining, from a peak in Darien. Now I know that the walls of
sense that seemed so impenetrable, that seemed to loom up above the
heavens and to be founded below the depths, and to shut us in for
evermore, are no such everlasting impassable barriers as we fancied,
but thinnest and most airy veils that melt away before the seeker, and
dissolve as the early mist of the morning about the brooks. I know that
you never adopted the extreme materialistic position; you did not go
about trying to prove a universal negative, for your logical sense
withheld you from that crowning absurdity; but I am sure that you will
find all that I am saying strange and repellent to your habits of thought.
Yet, Haberden, what I tell you is the truth, nay, to adopt our common
language, the sole and scientific truth, verified by experience; and the
universe is verily more splendid and more awful than we used to dream.
The whole universe, my friend, is a tremendous sacrament; a mystic,
ineffable force and energy, veiled by an outward form of matter; and
man, and the sun and the other stars, and the flower of the grass, and
the crystal in the test-tube, are each and every one as spiritual, as
material, and subject to an inner working.
"You will perhaps wonder, Haberden, whence all this tends; but I think
a little thought will make it clear. You will understand that from such a
standpoint the whole view of things is changed, and what we thought
incredible and absurd may be possible enough. In short, we must look
at legend and belief with other eyes, and be prepared to accept tales that

had become mere fables. Indeed this is no such great demand. After all,
modern science will concede as much, in a hypocritical manner; you
must not, it is true, believe in witchcraft, but you may credit hypnotism;
ghosts are out of date, but there is a good deal to be said for the theory
of telepathy.
Give superstition a Greek name, and believe in it, should almost be a
proverb.
"So much for my personal explanation. You sent me, Haberden, a phial,
stoppered and sealed, containing a small quantity of flaky white
powder, obtained from a chemist who has been dispensing it to one of
your patients. I am not surprised to hear that this powder refused to
yield any results to your analysis. It is a substance which was known to
a few many hundred years ago, but which I never expected to have
submitted to me from the shop of a modern apothecary.
There seems no reason to doubt the truth of the man's tale; he no doubt
got, as he says, the rather uncommon salt you prescribed from the
wholesale chemist's, and it has probably remained on his shelf for
twenty years, or perhaps longer. Here what we call chance and
coincidence begin to work; during all these years the salt in the bottle
was exposed to certain recurring variations of temperature, variations
probably ranging from 40¡ to 80¡. And, as it happens, such changes,
recurring year after year at irregular intervals, and with varying degrees
of intensity and duration, have constituted a process, and a process so
complicated and so delicate, that I question whether modern scientific
apparatus directed with the utmost precision could produce the same
result.
The white powder you sent me is something very different from the
drug you prescribed; it is the powder from which the wine of the
Sabbath, the Vinum Sabbati, was prepared. No doubt you have read of
the Witches' Sabbath, and have laughed at the tales which terrified our
ancestors; the black cats, and the broomsticks, and dooms pronounced
against some old woman's cow.
Since I have known the truth I have often reflected that it is on the

whole a happy thing that such burlesque as this is believed, for it serves
to conceal much that it is better should not be known generally.
However, if you care to read the appendix to Payne Knight's
monograph, you will find that the true Sabbath was something very
different, though the writer has very nicely refrained from printing all
he knew. The secrets of the true Sabbath were the secrets of remote
times surviving into the Middle Ages, secrets of an evil science which
existed long before Aryan man entered Europe. Men and