The Magic of the Middle Ages Part 2

III.

THE MAGIC OF THE LEARNED.

We find ourselves in a dismal labyrinth of narrow, winding streets, now and then issuing into some open s.p.a.ce before a guild-hall or a church. The objects which meet our gaze in this strange city do not solicit pause or reflection; for we have seen essentially the same type of homes and humanity in many another city which we have wandered through in our search for the stone of wisdom. We therefore continue on our way. The buildings of the university are said to be in the neighborhood, and we turn the corner to the right, and again to the left, until we come upon it. The lecture-hour approaches. Professors draped in stiff mantles and wearing the scholastic cap on their supremely wise foreheads, wend their way to the temples of knowledge at the portals of which flocks of students wait.

We recognize their various and familiar types: the new-matriculated look as usual, their cheeks still retaining the glow of early youth, their hearts still humble, perhaps still held captive by the sweet delusion that the walls by which they wait are the propylaea to all the secrets of earth and heaven. Just as readily recognized are the parchment-worms, destined one day to s.h.i.+ne as lights in the Church and in the domain of science, whether they now toil themselves pale and melancholic over their _catenae_, their _summae_ and _sententiae_, or bear with unfeigned self-satisfaction the precious weight of _terms_ which lifts them so conspicuously above the ignorant ma.s.s of mortals. And among the throng of the first named still fresh with youth, and these already dried pedants, we find also the far-famed third cla.s.s of students, adventurers a.s.sembled from all quarters under the protection of university-privileges,--those gentlemen with bearded cheek, and faces swelled by drinking and scarred by combat, with terribly long and broad swords dangling at their side,--the heroes of that never ending Iliad which the apprentices of learning and the guilds enact nightly in the darkness of the lanes, who may yet turn out some day the most pious of conventical priors, the gravest doctors and the very severest burgomasters in Christendom, unless before that time they meet their fate upon the gallows, or on the field of battle, or as _scholares vagantes_ in the ditch or by the roadside.

Shall we enter and listen to some of these lectures which are about to be delivered? Our letter of academic members.h.i.+p will open the doors to us, if we desire. To the left in the vaulted hall the professor of medicine has commenced his lecture. With astonis.h.i.+ng subtlety and penetration he discusses the highly important question, before propounded by Petrus de Abano, but not as yet fully solved,--"_an caput sit factum propter cerebrum vel oculos_" (whether the head was formed for the sake of the brain or the eyes). To the right the professor of theology leads us into one of the dim mysteries of the Church by ventilating the question what Peter would have done with the bread and wine, had he distributed the elements while the body of Christ in unchanged reality was yet hanging on the cross.[28] A little farther on in this mouldy vault we find the workshop of philosophy, where a master in the art of abstract reasoning deduces the distinction between _universalia ante rem_ and _universalia in re_. In yonder furthest room a jurisconsult expounds a pa.s.sage in the pandects.--Or perhaps you would rather not choose at all? You smile sadly.

Alas! like myself you have good reason for complaining with Faust:--

I have, alas! Philosophy, Med'cine, and Jurisprudence too, And to my cost Theology, With ardent labor studied through.

And here I stand, with all my lore, Poor fool, no wiser than before.

and if you add like him,

Hence have I now applied myself to magic,

we shall bring back to our minds the object of our burning desires, the hope which cheers us that finally the veil will be torn from the face of the Isis-image, and that we shall behold the unspeakable face to face, even though her looks burn us to ashes. Let us turn our back upon this tragi-comic seat of learning, where, as everywhere else, h.o.a.ry-headed fools are teaching young chicken-heads to admire nonsense, and young eagle-souls to despair of knowledge. It is not far hence direct--as direct as the winding lanes permit--to that great magician who has taken up his abode in this city. At the feet of that master let us seat ourselves. We shall there slake our burning thirst with at least a few drops of that knowledge which through by-gone ages has been flowing in a subterranean channel, though from the same sources as the streams of Paradise. And if we are disappointed there,--well, then _you_, if you so choose, can quench your longing for truth in the whirlpool of pleasure and adventure. _I_ shall go into a monastery, seek the narrowest of its cells, watch, pray, scourge forth my blood in streams; or I shall go to India, sit down upon the ground and stare at the tip of my nose,--stare at it and never cease, year out and year in, until all consciousness is extinguished. Agreed, then, is it not?....

We are arrived in the very loneliest quarter of the town, and the most dreary limits of the quarter, where old crumbling houses group themselves in inextricable confusion along the city wall, and from their gable windows fix their vacant, hypochondriacal looks upon the open fields beyond. A tower, crowning the wall of the fort upon this side, now serves the great scientist as an observatory and dwelling, given him by the burgomaster and the council of the city. He was for a long time private physician to the Queen of France, but has now retired to this lonely place from the pleasures, the distinctions, and the dangers of life at court, in order to devote himself quietly to research and study. He has a protector in the prince-archbishop resident in the city; and as the professor of theology has certified at the request of this same prince-bishop to his strict orthodoxy, the city authorities thought to persuade him to receive the honorable and lucrative position of town-astrologer, not heeding the a.s.sertion of the monks that he was a wizard, and that his black spaniel was in reality none other than the devil himself.

A magician never suffers himself to be interrupted in his labors, whether engaged in contemplating the nature of spirits, in watching the heavens, or in the elaboration of the _quinta essentia_, the final essence, with his crucibles. Oh! what world-wide hopes, what solemn emotions, what inexpressible tension of soul must accompany these investigations! Gold, which rules the world, here falls from the tree of knowledge as a fruit over-ripe into the bosom of the master. And what is gold with all the power it possesses, and all the enjoyment it commands, compared with the ability to control heaven and earth and the spirits of h.e.l.l, compared with the capacity to summon by the means of l.u.s.trations, seals, characters and exorcisms the angels hovering in the higher spheres, or tame to obedience the demons which fill the immensity of s.p.a.ce? And what again is this power compared with the pure celestial knowledge to which magic delivers the key? a knowledge as much transcending the wisdom of angels as the son's place in his father's house is superior to a servant's!

Perchance the magician at this very moment is deeply absorbed in some investigation, and within a hair's breadth of the revelation of some new and dazzling truth. Let us consider before we venture to ask admittance.

Let us pause a moment before this iron-bound door, and recover our breath.

Ye men of science in this nineteenth century, how miserable you would be had you not once for all determined to limit your hopes to a minimum! To die when you have gleaned and contributed but a single straw to the harvest of science, is the fate to which you subject yourselves. The one among you who has brought to notice a hitherto unknown snail or flower, deems himself not to have lived in vain. To have discovered a formula under which a group of phenomena can be arranged, is already a triumph.

This resignation which makes each one among you, even the greatest, only an insignificant detail-worker upon the immense labor whose completion you contemplate at an infinite remove, and the very outlines of which you ignore,--this resignation is sublime, though supremely painful to the aspiring soul. The individual laborer for his part abstains from all hope of seeing the whole truth, and works for his generation and futurity. Even the philosopher who undertakes to explain the framework of the macrocosm, does not see in his system a final solution of the "problem of cosmical explanation," but only a link in the long chain of development. He foresees the fall of his theories, satisfied, perhaps, if the traces of his error keep his successor on a straighter path. It is the race and not the individual which works in your work; which continues it when you have grown weary and been forgotten. It is a collective activity like that of ants and bees. But the magician stands alone! To be sure he receives what the past may offer,--but only to enclose himself with this treasure, and improve it by the immense wealth of his own mind. He believes in this immensity. He believes that the powers of all the generations are stored up in the bosom of the individual, and he hopes to accomplish alone what you faint-heartedly leave to the mult.i.tude of incalculable centuries!

We knocked upon the door ponderous with its bolts of iron. It opened as by an unseen hand. No servant interposed either welcome or remonstrance as we mounted the dark spiral stairs. Unannounced we entered the hall of the great magician. Along the arched ceiling of the rooms whose green lead-fastened window panes admitted but a scanty light, floated a fragrant vapor from the cell in the extreme background, where we could see the magician himself clad in a snow-white mantle reaching to his feet, and standing solemnly beside an incense-altar. Upon his head he wore a diadem on which was engraved the unspeakable name, _Tetragrammaton_, and in his hand he held a metallic plate which, as we soon learned, was made of electrum and signed with the signatures of coming centuries.

We paused and stammered a word of excuse for the interruption we had caused him. A smile of satisfaction broke upon his face when he had momentarily surveyed us, and he bade us welcome.

"You are the very persons whose arrival I have been expecting, and whom it has cost me much trouble to summon," he said. "You are the spirits of the nineteenth century, conjured to appear before a man of the fifteenth. You are called from the ante-chambers where the souls of the unborn await their entrance upon earth. But the images of the century to which your future mortal life belongs dwell in the depths of your consciousness.

These images you shall show me. It is for this that I have summoned you, for I wish to cast a glance into the future."

I was seized with a strange, almost horrid feeling. I now remembered that I and my companions had transported ourselves, by the use of means which stirs up the entire reproductive forces of the imagination, from the actual nineteenth century, back to the long-past fifteenth, that we might see it live before our eyes, not in dissevered traits as a past age is wont to be preserved in books, but in the completeness of its own multi-formity. Who was right, the magician or myself? Which was the one only seemingly living, he or I? At what hour did the hand on the clock of time point at that moment? Granted that time is absolutely nothing but a conceptual form without independent reality; as long as I live in time I believe in its ordered course, and do not wish to see its golden thread entangled. I did not wish that the spirit which I had summoned should be my master and degrade me to a product of his own imagination. I summoned courage and exclaimed:--

"We have wandered through many cities, great magician, to find you. We finally stand in this your sanctuary. We see these gloomy Gothic arches over our heads; we see your venerable figure before us; we behold these folios and strange instruments which surround you; we look out through these windows and behold on one side towers and house-tops, on the other fields, meadows and the huts of serfs, and yonder in the distance the castle of a knight who is suspected of night-attacks upon the trains of the merchants as they approach the city. All these things stand real and present before our eyes: but, nevertheless, great magician, it is all, yourself included, a product of _our_ magic, of the power of our own imagination, not of _your_ magic. It is in order to make some acquaintance with the latter that we are come. It is not we who are to answer your questions, but you ours."

The magician smiled. He persisted in his view, and I in mine. The contested question could not be decided, and it was laid aside. But along with my consciousness of belonging to a period of critical activity, my doubts had awakened--my vivid hope a moment ago of finding in magic the key of all secrets, was fast fading away.

I looked around in this home of the magician. On his writing-desk lay a parchment on which he had commenced to write down the horoscope of the following year. Beside the desk was a celestial globe with figures painted in various colors. In a window looking towards the south hung an astrolabe, to whose alidade a long telescope (of course without lenses) was attached. The book-case contained a not inconsiderable number of folios: Versio Vulgata, some volumes of the fathers, Virgil, Dionysius Areopagita, Ptolemy, the hymns of Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus, Jamblichus, Pliny's Natural History, a large number of works partly in Arabic upon astrology and alchemy, also a few Hebrew ma.n.u.scripts, and so on. These and other such things were to be found in his observatory, which was also his studio and sleeping-room. Next to the observatory was the alchemical laboratory with a strangely appointed oven filled with singular instruments reminding me again of Faust's complaint:--

=Ihr Instrumente freilich spottet mein, Mit Rad und Kammen, Walz und Bugel.

Ich stand am Thor, ihr solltet Schlussel sein; Zwar euer Bart ist kraus, doch hebt Ihr nicht die Riegel.=

While we lingered here our host informed us that for the present he had suspended his experiments in alchemy. He hoped to find his _quinta essentia_ by a shorter process than the combination of substances and distillation, which had exhausted already so many investigators and led so few to success. He acknowledged that he had himself advanced no farther in the art of the adepts than the extraction from "philosophic earth" mixed with "philosophic water" of just so much, and no more, gold than he had employed at the beginning of the experiment.[29] In spite of this, however, he worked daily before his oven, melting and purifying such metals as he needed for his planet-medallions, amulets and magical rings, and above all in preparing that effective alloy which is called electrum.

From his laboratory our host conducted us into two other apartments with arched ceilings, forming a sort of museum of most extraordinary curiosities,--skeletons and dried limbs of various animals: fishes, birds, lizards, frogs, snakes, etc.; herbs and differently colored stones; whole and broken swords; nails extracted from coffins and gallows; flasks containing I know not what,--all arranged in groups under the signs of the different planets. We beheld before us the wonderful and rich apparatus of practical magic arranged according to rules of which we were entirely ignorant,--rules which we had vainly sought in all the treatises of modern times upon the occult sciences of the Middle Ages, rules which might perhaps contain the simple principles underlying their confusion.

Evening was drawing on. The sun was sinking behind the western hills. It was beginning to grow dark among the arches where the great magician had imprisoned himself among dead and withered relics,--fragments broken from the great and living world without. We returned to his observatory. He opened a window and contemplated with dreamy glances the stars which were kindling one after another in the heavens. The twilight is a favorable time for conversation of the kind for which we had been preparing ourselves. We were soon settled in comfortable, roomy arm-chairs and discoursing earnestly,--we, the man of the fifteenth century, and the unborn souls of the nineteenth, whom he had summoned that he might look into the future, and who now used him to look back into the past. He spoke to us of his science....

"My knowledge is not of myself. Far, far away behind these hills, behind the snowy summits of the Alps, behind the mountains of the 'farthest-dwelling Garamantes,' on nameless heights which disappear among the clouds, the temple of truth was built long ago over the fountain from which life flows. That this temple is demolished we well know; only the first human pair has wandered through its sacred halls. But he who desires, who yearns and has patience, can sit down by the margin of the stream of Time and grasp and draw ash.o.r.e some of the cedar-beams from the ruined temple drifting upon the billows, and from the form of the fragments may determine the structure of the whole. All wisdom has its roots in the past, and the farther we penetrate antiquity, the richer the remains we find of a highest human wisdom. What is Albertus Magnus with his profound knowledge in comparison with the angelic wisdom of Dionysius Areopagita, and what is the latter compared with that of the prophet who denounced his woes over Nineveh and Babylon? And yet these divinely commissioned men would gladly have been taught by the seventy elders who were allowed with Moses to approach the mountain where G.o.d chose to reveal himself, there receiving the mystic knowledge of the Cabala. On Sinai, however, G.o.d's secret was veiled in clouds, lightnings and terror; Moses himself was permitted to see him only 'from behind'--did not obtain a morning-knowledge (a knowledge _a priori_, an a.n.a.logy-seeking pupil of Sch.e.l.ling would have called it), but an evening-knowledge (knowledge _a posteriori_, he would have added). The morning-knowledge was shown only to the man of the dawn of time and was extinguished at the first sin. From that time every successive generation has deteriorated from its predecessor:

"'_Aetas parentum, pejor avis, tulit Nos nequiores, mox daturos Progeniem vitiosiorem_,'

and with the darkness of sin reason is plunged into constantly blacker depths. The individual seeker after truth may gain enlightenment, but for himself alone, not for humanity. Therefore a magician confines the wisdom he acquires to his own bosom, or imparts it to a single pupil, or buries it under obscure expressions which he commits to parchment; but he neither can nor will impart it without reserve to humanity whose path appears to lead downward into a constantly deeper night.

"Even the theologians speak of the pristine wisdom,--the theologians with whom we, who practice the occult science, agree far more than the simple and suspicious among them think. What remained, in the time of Noah, of pristine wisdom was saved with him in the ark. His first-born obtained as his portion the fairest wisdom. Prophecy, the Cabala, and the Gospel belong to the sons of Shem, the Jews. But even Ham and j.a.phet were not left dest.i.tute. It was the priest of the sons of Ham that guarded the secrets of Isis,--secrets before which even we Christians must bow in the dust; for the Old Testament does not hesitate to exalt the wisdom of the Egyptians and recognize Moses as a pupil from their school. Hermes Trismegistus was an Egyptian, and we magicians who know that he trans.m.u.ted whatever he chose into gold and precious stones, are not astonished when the apostle Paul speaks of the treasures of Egypt, or at what travellers relate of its pyramids and other giant works, or when Pliny estimates the number of its cities at twenty thousand, or when Marcellinus is amazed at the immense treasures which Cambyses carried away from it, for all this was a creation of the art of Hermes Trismegistus.[30] Even the portion of the children of j.a.phet was not insignificant. It was divided between the treasury of Zoroaster and that of the Eleusinian mysteries. Some coins of this treasure fell into the hands of Plato and Aristotle and have from them come into the possession of Porphyrius, Jamblichus, and the theosophists and scholastics. It is this diffused illumination--that of the Bible (its inner, secret meaning) the Cabala and fragments of Egyptian, Persian and Grecian wisdom--which are collected and united in the magic of learning. These are the ancestors of my science. Has it not a pedigree more n.o.ble than that of any royal family?

"I heard you mention something about the necessity for a science of investigation without presupposition. Would you then really presume to be the judge of all that past generations have thought, believed and transmitted as a sacred inheritance to those that follow? Do you not shrink before the idea that human hunger for truth must have been satisfied from Adam to our own days by nothing but illusions? that you are the children and children's children of mere idiots who have fixed their hopes, their faith, and their convictions on baseless falsehoods? Put your G.o.dless plan of investigation to the test! Do it openly, and the theologians will burn you! Do it in secret, and you will finally crave the stake as a liberator from the terrible void such a science would leave in your own soul! No, the magician believes just as devoutly as the theologian. Only in the mellow twilight of faith can he undertake those operations whose success is a confirmation of the truth of his faith. Or do you require stronger corroboration of the genuineness of his tenets than what I find when I read in these stars which wander silently past my window, the fates of men, and see these fates accomplished; when, with the potency of magical means, I summon angels, and demons, and the souls of dead and unborn men to reveal themselves before my eyes, and they appear?

"I confess that our science, if it is looked at only on the surface, resembles a variegated carpet with artfully interwoven threads; but as only a limited number of manipulations is required to produce the most remarkable texture, so it is also but a few simple thoughts which support all the doctrines and products of magic.

"That the universe is a triple harmony, as the G.o.dhead is a Trinity, you are aware. We live in the elemental world; over our head the celestial s.p.a.ce, with its various spheres, revolves; and above this, finally, G.o.d is enthroned in the purely spiritual world of ideas. The unhappy scientists of your century have in their narrow prejudice separated these worlds from one another (but by crowding together the celestial and the elementary).

Your so-called students of nature investigate only the elementary world, and your so-called philosophers only the ideal; but the former with all their delving in the various forms of matter, never reach the realm of the spiritual, but are rather led to disavow its existence; and the latter can never from the dim world of ideas summon up the concrete wealth of nature.

In vain your students of nature imagine that in physiology, or your philosophers that in anthropology, they shall find the transition from one world to the other. We magicians, on the contrary, study these worlds as a unit. We find them combined by two mighty bonds: those of correspondence and causality. All things in the elementary world have their ant.i.type in the celestial, and all celestial things have their corresponding ideas. These correspondences are strung from above downwards as strings on the harp of the universe, and on that harp the causalities move up and down like the fingers of a player. While your students of nature seek the chains of causality in only one direction, the horizontal, that which runs through things on the same level, that which connects things in one and the same elementary world; we, the students of magic, search with still greater diligence those perpendicular chains of causality which run through and combine corresponding objects in the three worlds. Our manner of investigating this perpendicular series resembles your method of examining the horizontal but slightly, if at all. What unnecessary trouble your induction causes you! You wish to investigate the nature of some manifestation of force, for instance; you a.n.a.lyze it with great painstaking into different factors, you strive to isolate each of these factors and to cause them to act each its own part, to find out what each has contributed to the common expression of force. We meet with no such hindrances. A secret tradition has presented to us our perpendicular lines of causality almost entire, and we are able to fill up the lacunae of this tradition by an investigation which is not impeded with any great difficulties. This investigation relies on the resemblances of things, for this similarity is derived from a correspondence, and causality is interwoven with correspondence. Thus, for instance, we judge from the resemblance between the splendor of gold and that of the sun that gold has its celestial correspondence in that luminary, and sustains to it a causal relation. Another example: the two-horned beetle bears a causal relation to the moon, which at its increase and wane is also two-horned; and if there were any doubt of this intimate relation between them, it must vanish when we learn that the beetle hides its eggs in the earth for the s.p.a.ce of twenty-eight days, or just so long time as is required for the moon to pa.s.s through the Zodiac, but digs them up again on the twenty-ninth, when the moon is in conjunction with the Sun.[31] Do not smile at this method of investigation! Beware of repeating the mistake which 'common sense' is so p.r.o.ne to make in seeing absurdities in truths which happen to be beyond its horizon? Our method is founded on the idea that there is nothing casual in nature. To be sure we accept a divine arbitrament, but by no means a natural fortuity. Not even the slightest similarity between existing objects is a meaningless accident! Not even the slightest stroke in the figures by which we fix our words and thoughts in writing is without deep significance. Every thing in the work of nature and of man has its cause and its effect. We can not make a gesture, nor say a word, without imparting vibrations to the whole universe, upward and downward,--vibrations which may be strong or feeble, perceptible or imperceptible. This principle runs through the whole of our cosmical system, and this thought must be true even for you a.n.a.lyzers.

"Before explaining more fully the magical use of our series of correspondence and causality, I wish to show you a couple of them. I shall choose the simplest, but at the same time the most important. I commence with

THE SCALE OF THE HOLY TETRAD. (Table I.)

_From which is found the Correspondences to the Four Elements._

------------------------------------------------------------------------ G.o.d's name [Hebrew] (Jehovah) in four letters.

------------------------------------------------------------ THE Seraphim, Dominions, Princ.i.p.ali- Saints, The four WORLD Cherubim, Powers, ties, Martyrs, triplicities OF Thrones Empires Archangels, Confessors of the ARCHETYPES Angels celestial AND hierarchy.

BLISS ---------+----------+------------+-----------+-------------- Michael Raphael Gabriel Uriel Four angels, guardians of the four card.

points.

---------+----------+------------+-----------+-------------- Seraph Cherub Tharsis Ariel Angels presiding over the elements.

======================================================================== Aries, Gemini, Cancer, Taurus, The four Leo, Libra, Scorpio, Virgo, triplicities Sagit- Aquarius Pisces Capra of the Zodiac.

THE tarius CELESTIAL ---------+----------+------------+-----------+-------------- WORLD Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Fixed The stars and Sun Venus Mercury Stars, planets as Moon related to the elements.

---------+----------+------------+-----------+-------------- Light Transpar- Activity Firmness Four qualities ency of the celestial elements.

======================================================================== Fire Air Water Earth The four elements.

---------+----------+------------+-----------+-------------- Warmth Humidity Coldness Aridity The four qualities of the elements.

---------+----------+------------+-----------+-------------- Summer Spring Winter Autumn The four seasons.

---------+----------+------------+-----------+-------------- East West North South The four card.

points.

THE ---------+----------+------------+-----------+-------------- ELEMENTARY Animals Herbs Metals Stones Four kinds of mixed bodies.

WORLD ---------+----------+------------+-----------+-------------- Walking Flying Swimming Crawling Four kinds of animals.

---------+----------+------------+-----------+-------------- Germ Flower Leaves Root The parts of the plants as related to the elements.

---------+----------+------------+-----------+-------------- Gold, Copper, Quicksilver Lead, Metals Iron Tin Silver corresponding to the elements.

---------+----------+------------+-----------+-------------- s.h.i.+ning Light and Clear and Heavy and Stones and Trans- Hard Opaque corresponding Burning parent to the elements.

======================================================================== Faith Science Opinion Experience Four principles of MICROCOSMOS judging.

---------+----------+------------+-----------+-------------- Choleric Sanguinic Phlegmatic Melancholic Temperaments.

======================================================================== Samael Azazael Azael Mehazael Princes of the evil spirits raging in the elements.