Things near & far Chapter 3: Part 3

for a moment? Katy promised me a lock of her beautiful golden hair, and I am _sure_ I felt it float down on my hand.” The lights are turned up. A strand of yellow hair is, sure enough, reposing on the lady’s hand. It had evidently been treated with spiritual peroxide, made, no doubt, of Ethers, like the ghostly whiskey and sodas in “Raymond.” Then the room is darkened and the Medium takes up the tale. “This spirit’s name is Milton. Henry--no, John Milton, the author of the ‘Faery Queen.’ He says that he is very happy. He spends most of his time with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Shakespeare has confessed to him that all his plays were written by Bacon. The evidence will be found in a brass box under the Tube station at Liverpool Street. Pope often has tea with him. He says they don’t use alcohol there.” There is a sudden crash. “Avast!” comes with a roar through the trumpet. _John King_ has returned, bringing with him an _American Indian_ who speaks in the idiom of a Nigger Minstrel practising in the East End of London and will call the Medium his “Midi.” Whereupon Katy puts a beautiful warm arm round the neck of a gentleman sitter and the gramophone plays “Abide with me.” All repeat the Lord’s Prayer, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle expresses his intense gratification. Well; it may be so. But I hope it isn’t, and I shall never believe that it is so. Well; there I laboured in the Catherine Street garret amidst all this, and much more than this. Down below were the publishing offices of old Mr. Vizetelly, who was issuing English translations of Zola at the time, and was at last sent to gaol for publishing an English version of “La Terre,” an obscene book that every judicious Bishop of Central France should put in the hands of newly ordained priests--if it is to be accepted that the physician ought to have some knowledge of the constitutions of his patients and of the diseases from which they are suffering. It was a sumptuous and rich garret--a street now passes over the site of the house--filled with that mysterious odour that used to prevail in oldish London houses that were not too carefully swept and washed and polished, and there day after day I worked, reading and annotating, and all alone. Now and then in the older books I came across striking sentences. There was Oswaldus Crollius, for example--I suppose his real name was Osvald Kroll--who is quoted by one of the characters in “The Great God Pan.” “In every grain of wheat,” says Oswaldus, “there lies hidden the soul of a Star.” A wonderful saying; a declaration, I suppose, that all matter is one, manifested under many forms; and, so far as I can gather, modern science is rapidly coming round to the view of this obscure speculator of the seventeenth century; and, in fact, to the doctrine of the alchemists. But I would advise any curious person who desires to investigate this singular chamber of the human mind to beware of over-thoroughness. Let him dip lightly from the vellum quarto into the leather duodecimo, glancing at a chapter here, a sentence there; but let him avoid all deep and systematic study of Crollius and of Vaughan, the brother of the Silurist, and of all their tribe. For if you go too far you will be disenchanted. Open Robert Fludd, otherwise Robertus de Fluctibus, and find the sentence: _Transmutemini, transmutemini de lapidibus mortuis in lapides philosophicos vivos_--Be ye changed, be ye changed from dead stones into living and life-giving stones. This is a great word indeed, exalted and exultant; but beware of mastering Fludd’s system--if confusion can be called a system--of muddled alchemy, physical science, metaphysics and mysticism. Get Knorr von Rosenroth’s “Kabbala Denudata,” vellum, in quarto, and find out a little about the Sephiroth: about Kether, the Crown; Tiphereth, Beauty; Gedulah, Mercy; Geburah, Justice or Severity. Really, you will discover very curious things, and the more easily, if instead of Knorr von Rosenroth, you choose A. E. Waite’s “Doctrine and Literature of the Kabalah.” It is odd, for example, to discover that the side of Mercy is the masculine side, that Justice or Severity is feminine; and that all will go amiss till these two are united in Benignity. Again, it is interesting from another point of view to discover that three of the Sephiroth are called the Kingdom, the Victory and the Glory. Is there any connection between these and the ancient liturgical response to the Pater Noster: “For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory”? And then that matter of Lilith and Samael and the Shells or Cortices, the husks of spirits from a ruined world that brought about the Fall of Man; the strange mystery of that place “which is called Zion and Jerusalem”--duly here comparing Böhme on the Recovery of Paradise when innocent man and maid are joined in love--all this is a wonderful and fascinating region of thought. And beautiful indeed is the saying of one of the Fathers of Kabbalism: that when the lost Letters of Tetragrammaton, the Divine Name, are found there shall be mercy on every side. And here, perhaps, but not certainly, light may be thrown on certain obscure matters of Freemasonry. Dip then, and read and wander in the Kabbala; but do not become a Kabbalist. For if you do, you will end by transliterating your name and the names of your friends into Hebrew letters and finding out all sorts of marvellous things, till at last you back Winners--which turn out to be Losers--on purely Kabbalistic principles. And here, by the way, I may remark that I have long meditated writing an article called “The Aryan Kabbala,” keeping the requirements of occult magazines strictly in view. It would make a pretty article. I should begin by a brief note on the Hebrew Kabbala, explaining how the Sephiroth tell in a kind of magic shorthand the whole history and mystery of man and all the worlds from their source to their end. The Tree of Life--as the Sephiroth arranged in a certain scheme are called--is, in fact, I would point out, at once an account of how all things came into being and a map and an analysis of all things as they now are. As an occult friend once said to me by my hearth in Gray’s Inn: “The Tree of Life can be applied to that poker.” The Tree of Life, then, is a key to the secret generation and being of all souls and all heavens; it will also analyse for you the little flower growing in a cranny of the wall. Well; this made clear, I would go on to say: “But what if there be a Kabbala and a Tree of Life of the Aryans as well as of the Semites? What if it tells all the hidden secrets of our beginning and our journey and our ending? What if its august symbols are known to all of us, in every-day and common use amongst us, remaining all the while as undiscerned as the most sacred and mystic hieroglyphics? What if the office boy and the grocer handle every day the signs which tell The Secret of Secrets?” And then, after all due amplifications and ponderous circumnavigations it would all come out. The Aryan Kabbala is, in fact, the Decad; the ten first numbers. They embody an age-old tradition dating from the time when the ancestors of the Greek and the Welshman, the Persian and the Teuton were all one people. They contained the secret mystery religion of this primitive race, they sank by degrees from their first august significance to become instruments of common use and commercial convenience, just as vestments became clothes. The proof is easy enough. Take the first number of the Decad: one in English, ἕν (in the neuter) in Greek, unus in Latin, un (pronounced “een”) in Welsh, ein in German. And then compare another series of words in these languages: wine, οἶνος, vinum, gwin, wein. Then: two, δύο, duo, dau, zwei; and compare with: water, ὕδωρ, udus, wy (and dwr) wasser. I drop the other terms, or Sephiroth, of the Decad--in Mrs. Boffin’s presence--and come to the last two numerals: nine, ἐννέα, novem, naw, neun, compared with new, νέος, novus, newydd, neu. Then finally ten, δέκα, decem, deg, zehn: compare with deck (bedeck) δόξα, decor, teg, schön. The conclusion, I hope, is evident: we (and all things) proceed from Unity, which is wine, decline to Duality (or a weakened, fallen nature), which is water. Then, after passing through many changes, adventures, transformations, transmutations--undescribed for the reason given--we are renovated, made New--“I will make all things new”--in the last number but one of the Decad, and, in the final term, which is Ten, are reunified in Beauty and Glory. There! It seems to me wonderfully plausible, and I really think I should have written the article and sent it to some suitable quarter. It is all nonsense, of course, but ... does that matter? * * * * * Well, all that business of the Aryan Kabbala is an absurd digression, but it illustrates well enough the frame of mind likely to be induced by the study of a good many of the books in the Catherine Street garret. Take the interlude and add to it the rich odours of the frowsy, neglected room stuffed with confusions of old books and pamphlets, add to it the old, delightful, picturesque London that was undisturbed in those days. Holywell Street and Wych Street were all in their glory in 1885, a glory compounded of sixteenth-century gables, bawdy books and matters congruous therewith, parchment Elzevirs, dark courts and archways, hidden taverns, and ancient slumminess. There were no great, blatant Australia Houses or Colonial Edifices of any kind about the Strand in those times: instead, we had the beauty and the green lawns of Clement’s Inn and the solemn square of New Inn, and Clare Market communicating tortuously with Great Queen Street by the most evil-smelling by-ways that I have ever experienced--and something of jollity in the air that seems to me to have vanished utterly. Take all these elements and things; and you have me as I worked high up in the vanished house in Catherine Street, preparing the Catalogue that was to be called: “The Literature of Occultism and Archæology”--when the gas lamps in the Strand shone with a brighter light than the arc lamps of to-day. _Chapter II_ Such was the scene of my life in the summer of the year 1885. By my odd jobs; a little “reading,” a little compiling and a good deal of catalogue