OPEN SECRET SOCIETIES.
1865.
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I.
Inscribed upon the banners of the grandest Secret Societies recorded in history, as at once their motto and their vindication, we read the great words, Love, Truth, Justice. Love, when the Society has professed to discipline its members in fraternity, expanding and attuning their hearts to its cosmic laws, and thus gradually preparing an Age of Gold for the iron-bound earth. Truth, when the Society has professed to cherish for secure development some priceless germ of doctrine, too weak and tender as yet to bear the rough storms of the open air. The truth may be purely scientific, without any direct relation to the existing polity; in which case it is fostered in secret because the vulgar mind cannot comprehend it, and its cultivators fear persecution as professors of the black art. Or it may be religious, having a direct relation to the existing polity; in which case its votaries are secretly undermining a superstition or spiritual tyranny as yet too strong to be openly attacked. Justice, when the end of the Society is political or social, in immediate relation to active life; in which case its adherents are secretly undermining some temporal tyranny whose conquest it would as yet be hopeless to attempt by open assault. These appear to be the very best ends which Secret Societies have ever acknowledged or professed as justifying and demanding their institution. Of such as have sprung from meaner or lighter motives, and have intentionally worked for selfish or fantastic or obstructive purposes, it is not here necessary to speak.
Judging them à priori, by deduction from their own first principles without induction of historical facts and fancies, my opinion is that even the best of such Secret Societies, formed and carried on for these best objects, always must have been and always must be failures; that at the best the results cannot pay the expense of the elaborate machinery, that the business must be carried on at a heavy and continually-increasing ratio of loss. But I have had no experience in any such Society, and I am well aware that deductions from first principles are often in reality as foolishly wrong as they appear logically right; the reader will therefore please to bear in mind that my statements state mere inferences, and are liable to be dispersed to the four w4nds by statements of facts from some member of a noble brotherhood. It would be tiresome to begin nearly every sentence with "I should judge," or some similar phrase; let it, then, be understood once for all that the following are mere fancy portraits, and may be very vile caricatures of the originals.
A Secret Society must come into being with a glow of enthusiasm and a vigorous activity; but the enthusiasm becomes a narrow fanaticism or dies out altogether, the activity degenerates into busybodyism or sets into an unprogressive routine like that of a squirrel in its cage. The spirit of fraternity either discovers that it cannot harmonise the little world of the Society, and gradually perishes of atrophy, or in its hunger grasps at husks and straw in the absence of grain; or it narrows into the exclusiveness of a clique or coterie, cherishing rather a pharisaical contempt than a yearning love for the mass of uninitiate mankind.
If the object of the Society be the hidden conservation and secret culture of some truth, it probably appears, in the course of a not long time, that instead of the truth expanding the intellects of its votaries to its breadth and greatness, they are contracting it to the measure of their own narrow littleness. The first warm intoxication is soon followed by a very cold sobriety, if not by shuddering nausea. And the truth adopted and professed by the Society will be even narrower than the intellect of almost any one of its members; for all will assent only to some proposition shorn of everything very offensive to one or the other; hence the result is a maimed, mutilated, semi-vital compromise; it will not soar with the birds, it will not walk with the beasts, so it flits about bat-like in the dusk lower air. For a meeting is always less wise than a man. The branches lopped off from their tree of knowledge will be precisely the most vigorous individual offshoots. Thus the sublime and fruitful doctrine withers into an abstract formula, the sacred watchwords become jargon and cant; the conservation which was enterprised in the spirit of progress is continued in the spirit of obstructiveness. In the meantime the outward air has become milder, the temperature of the human zone has ameliorated; and while this tree of knowledge has been cut and trimmed lest it should shatter the glass walls of its conservatory, and has languished in the lack of natural warmth and light, not all the similar germs left to the rough nursing of open nature have perished; some have thriven, deep-rooted and strong-boughed from their warfare with tempests, and contrast in their robust integral majesty with this sickly mutilated dwarf. It remains then for the Society simply to enfranchise its members by abolishing itself, or (the course it will probably pursue for many years) to take refuge in pretence and deceit, asserting peculiar and mysterious virtues for its specimen, which is only uncommon by stunted deformity, and claiming for it heavenly powers in the absence of earthly fruits.
Secret Societies whose aim is direct action, as the overthrow of political tyranny, are likely to fail yet more conspicuously. The energy and skill which should be employed in pressing onward are mainly absorbed in the endless work of keeping the complex machine and its intricate gear in order. If the Society be swayed by a council, it will go to wreck by internal incoherences; and, at any rate, with the utmost possible harmony, a council of war never equals the inspired daring of a general. If it be wielded by one man, it may hold together and prove a most formidable engine; but will probably prove yet more formidable to the enemies than to the friends of the tyranny it was constructed to overthrow. Every member in the moment of suffering initiation abdicates his personal freedom, loses the very essence of his manhood, is no longer a living will, but the blind and dumb slave of some other unknown will, and must exist thenceforth under a despotism far more absolute than the worst which can grow up publicly to oppress mankind. And the secresy in which all the members are involved intensifies and raises to higher powers the evil of mutual distrust, which is the deepest foundation of all tyrannies in the world. Try to conceive the state of a member in social converse, when the subject of talk is the Government or the Society as rumour with its thousand tongues describes it. The man who speaks most loudly against the Government may be a brother member, may be a spy of the Government; the man who speaks most loudly against the Society may be a member in the confidence of some of the chiefs, if not of the Chief, and may be a genuine supporter of the Government. The man who communicates some sign of fraternity and wishes to converse intimately on the Society, may be a real devoted member, may be one who without taking on the vows of initiation has discovered this sign, may be a Government spy who has been charged to get initiated in order to thoroughly betray, may be a double Judas who sells Government secrets to the Chief, and Society secrets to the Government. As a double Judas, he may be at bottom more the friend of the Chief than of the Government, or more the friend of the Government than of the Chief: he may have the connivance of the Chief in denouncing unimportant members and mysteries to the Government; he may have the connivance of the Government in revealing unimportant or quasi-important State secrets to the Society; and except the Chief himself no member can be sure that his own sacrifice may not be considered expedient in the interests of the Society. There are thus wheels within wheels whirling and intervolving to make the soundest head dizzy. Where all move in darkness you cannot discern whether your companions wear a single or a sevenfold veil. All the members must breathe that frenzying atmosphere of preternatural suspicion, which was the miasma of the Reign of Terror: I suspect, thou suspectest, he suspects; we, you, and they suspect, and are suspected; and we suspect that we are suspected, and are suspected that we suspect. Why should not the Chief himself be a super-subtle minion of the State? How can the Chief himself know whether large numbers of the affiliated are or are not subtle minions of the State? Why should not the Chief himself, even if sincere, have ends beyond ends in view which the mass of the Society have no knowledge of, and can but set their brains whirling by guessing at? Why—as the Society is a state within the State—may there not be a society within the Society, ready to overthrow it in the moment it overthrows the State? And after all, should the Society succeed and become the ruling power, what a tenfold more terrible tryanny would this unknown phantom Chief exercise than any known Czar, Sultan, Emperor, King, Oligarchy, Timocracy, or Ochlocracy.
Thus it appears to me that the best Secret Societies (earnest and not sportive in their ends) must inherently be bad. They are based on the erroneous assumption that the thoughts and sentiments of mankind, that human nature, can be improved by machinery; that the Spirit of the Ages, the Zeitgeist, can be hurried forward by cunningly devised wheels and pistons. The wind that bloweth where it listeth wall work windmills well-planted to catch its breath, the stream flowing ever unhasting, unresting, wall work watermills well-placed to meet its current; but mill-sails cannot direct the wind, nor mill-wheels engender rivers.
In contrast to such Chinese ingenuities, so clever and so futile, there always have been and always will be in the world countless genuine Secret Societies of the most open, while of the most hidden, character. Continuous and unadulterate these have flowed, separate streams through the Sea of Time, from an antiquity which makes all nobilities and castes unreverend; holding in solution secrets and mysteries so august, so ineffable, that those of Illuminati and Rosicrucians, and even the Eleusinian and the Orphean and the Osirean, are jejune and puerile compared with them.
Their members are affiliated for life and death in the instant of being born; without ceremonies of initiation, without sponsorial oaths of fidelity. Their bond of union is a natural affinity, quite mysterious in its principles and elements, precise and assured in its results as the combination and proportions of oxygen and hydrogen in water, or oxygen and nitrogen in air. No spy or traitor, no unworthy or uncongenial brother, can obtain entrance among them, any more than a hemlock or a lily can be adopted into the family of the roses, any more than an ape or a tiger can pass as one of a herd of elephants. Their esoteric doctrines are the most spontaneous and independent thoughts of each and every of their members; their secret watchwords are the most free and public expressions of their members; their mysterious signals are telegraphed in the most careless gestures which all eyes may see. The watchwords and symbols change from generation to generation, the supreme secrets are immutable from the beginning to the end of Time. Exactly what they cherish and adore as the inmost mystery of their being, their whole being ever strives to utter most clearly abroad to the senses and hearts and intellects of the whole world; thus the mystery still inviolate must for ever be inviolable, for there can be no new or better means of expression and interpretation: only the initiated ever truly hear and read it, to all others it is sound without meaning and letters without significance. They are without machinery to regulate and propagate themselves; yet the rank of each brother is fixed with more than heraldic precision, and no one who should be of the confraternity ever fails to be gathered into it; and it endures aggregating throughout the centuries and the millenniums, while creeds and systems collecting millions of money and scattering thousands of missionaries languish and die away. They have not consciously signs of fraternity; yet a brother shall recognise a brother immediately by a glance, a gesture, a casual word, and the two shall be straightway as if they had been intimate from childhood. They have no set councils or lodges: yet the experience of the senators is their shield, and the daring of the young members their sword; and they are thus, though dispersed throughout all the countries and cycles, ever ready in battle-array to repel or to assault. They are of all characters and professions; and each human being, while belonging supremely to one, belongs in lower degrees to many of them, for every point in the circle of his nature touches a point in the circle of some other nature.
In the noblest of these confraternities, very rarely in the lifetime of any one member does he come into personal contact with another of the same rank, almost never into personal contact with more than two or three others of the same rank; yet their spirit of fraternity is perfect, and with the dead of his brotherhood each may hold frequent and solemn communion. These rare meetings of the living seldom occur in the bustling streets and busy marts; but in places and times of extreme seclusion and tranquillity, or extreme agitation and strife. In the stillness of the library, the oratory, the studio; in the tumult and terror of the battle, the plague, the revolution, the shipwreck; brothers meet unforebodingly by twos and threes. The still meetings are their eucharistic love-feasts, the others are their Thermopylæ banquets: and the rapture of the agony in these transcends the rapture of the joy in those. In the moment of their coming together the whole past life of the one is revealed to the other; infinite mutual love and reverence consecrate their meeting and their parting. From drinking together the glorious wine of communion, they go their ways to live yet more nobly or to die more grandly, rejoicing in the death as in the life.
But it must be admitted that these loftiest of the Open Secret Societies, which exist everywhere and endure with the æon of our race, are parodied and counterfeited and traduced by ingenious Societies of the artificial kind, and that many simple people confuse the parody with the original, the artificial with the natural. I shall have to speak of the respective parodies in speaking of a few of the originals; for one must come to the concrete in order to be plain and intelligible. In the concrete, however, I care only to describe somewhat in detail a few of the best and most generally distinguished. It is bad work dwelling on the bad; and it would be endless work trying to mention all the orders, genera, species, sub-species, and so on, through an infinitude of divisions and subdivisions.
II.
There is the Open Secret Society of the Heroes. Their mystery has been published in books, in songs, in world-famous deeds of life and death, to all men of all nations and languages; yet only the heroic brotherhood really comprehend it, and are fully possessed by its inspiration. Other men may have transient glimpses of its meaning, and may thrill with its divine enthusiasm in rare moments; but soon the great door shuts, and they are cowering again in the darkness and the cold; nor can they even truly remember these rare moments in other hours and days, though they remember well enough the words of the chant or the details of the action with which the inspiration happened to be connected. But one of the brotherhood understands and feels always. The mystery which he understands so thoroughly and feels so triumphantly is simply this: That in the whole range of the universe, from highest heaven to deepest hell, there is no thing or circumstance, creature or being, dreadful to a man; that out of himself there is nothing which a man need fear; that no nature can be born into a realm unconquerable by that nature; and, moreover, that the most dazzling lightning of ecstasy leaps from the blackest storm of danger. But neither he who writes nor he who reads is any nearer to the heart of the mystery through this interpretation: if he is of the brotherhood his pulse beat in unison with the throbs of this heart before; if he is not of the brotherhood his pulse will never beat in unison with these throbs, save at intervals and for moments similar to those in which the hands of a clock that does not go accurately may agree with the hands of another which is keeping true time.
The ingenious parodies of this natural Society of the Heroes are the armies of the nations, those elaborate artificial organisations or aggregations whose spirit and tradition are popularly supposed to be heroism. Yet any one who is acquainted with an army or with portions of an army has learned that genuine heroes are nearly as rare in the military as in any other trade. The battle blood-drunkenness and Schwärmerei of congregated thousands by no means imply true heroism. I have known pretty well some of the men who rode and rode well in the Balaclava Light Cavalry Charge; some brave fellows, and some good fellows not specially brave; but I do not remember a hero amongst them.[1] How many soldiers cringe to their officers, how many sneak and spy to get promotion, how many would swear falsely to any extent to escape a punishment, how few in the smallest matter dare act against the ordinary opinion of their comrades. And perhaps as a rule the officers are even less heroic than the men. A few of the brotherhood are in the army, a number not so small in the navy; the others are scattered through all trades and professions, are of all ages and of both sexes; you shall find them not in camps nor in men-of-war, but in garrets and lighthouses, in huts and cottages, in hospitals and schools, in wild forests and sober manses. And they abound rather among the poor and ignorant who wrestle naked with the fierce myrmidons of destiny, than among the rich and learned who fight within golden armour and shoot scientific missiles from afar.
There is the Open Secret Society of the Saints. In how many books, in how many lovely lives, have their mysteries
been published! yet how dark and unintelligible is their simplest vernacular to the learned as to the ignorant, to the learned even more than to the ignorant, who are not of the Society! These are they who know, and live up to the knowledge, that love is the one supreme duty and good, that love is wisdom and purity and valour and peace, and that its infinite sorrow is infinitely better than the world's richest joy.
The solemn artificial burlesques of this Open Secret Society are the Churches, the caricatures of its mysteries are the theologies, the parodies of its sacred watchwords and symbols are the creeds and the rituals and the ceremonies. These Churches have been elaborated and organised by man as patent reservoirs and cisterns (with a parson-tap for nearly every street) of the Waters of Life; and, behold, these waters scarcely flow into them at all, but turn away and make for themselves truly secret and mysterious channels; and stream in pure perennial rills through the souls of humble men and women whom the great chartered companies (strictly limited) for the exploitation of religion despise and perhaps detest; through the souls of poor servants and bondsmen who can barely read or read not at all, of barbarians and idolaters who never heard of the Atonement or the Trinity, of heresiarchs and infidels who never enter kirk or chapel or mosque or cathedral or temple, and whom all the sects furiously revile and persecute and condemn to the abomination of desolation.
Do not be surprised or disappointed if you find very few of this holy sisterhood and brotherhood in the hierarchy of canonised saints, of pontiffs and patriarchs, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, brahmans, imans, lamas; very few of them in the great universities and colleges among the learned divines and subtle theologians, very few of them in monasteries and nunneries, very few of them among the priests and the presbyters, scarcely any of them in the most devout circles of the "religious world." Sometimes when one, being full of scorn and indignation, seeks relief in riant mockery of this Established State Church of ours, this clever church which manages so well to serve at once both God and Mammon, this spiritual church whose real Trinity is an abstract God the Creator, and a fictitious Christ the Redeemer, and a very substantial Holy Ghost of Bumbleism the Conservator; sometimes then a keen pang pierces one's breast, and the gloom of past time is filled with reproachful eyes as the gloom of night with pale stars. Full of sad reproach, and of love whose sweetness is the worst gall and wormwood of reproach, they gaze down upon him, these eyes of holy bliss and sorrow, these faces worn with suffering and fasting and self-renunciation, yet shining with ineffable beatitude; the eyes and the lineaments of true brothers and sisters of this Sacred Order, who being Christians were yet also indeed Saints. And in every pale regard one reads the sad question: Did I, O my friend, live and die thus and thus that you should laugh and fleer? And at first one is smitten with shame and remorse, but when he has reflected a little he replies humbly: Belovèd and pure and beautiful souls, these whom I was mocking are not of you, though indeed they assume your name; they are of the fraternities of those who in your lifetimes mocked and hated and persecuted and killed you; they have caught up your solemn passwords because these are now passwords to wealth and worldly honour, which for you were passwords to the prison and the scaffold and the stake; they have clothed themselves with your sheep's clothing because wolves have long been extinct in our England, and sheep browse securely in the fattest pastures by the sweetest rivers; but they hate with a bitter hatred and fear all who are possessed by the spirit which possessed you; they are behind their age as you were in the forefront of yours; they desecrate your holy mysteries, they stereotype your rapturous prayers into jargon and cant; for your eucharistic wine they have publican's gin-and-water, and your eucharistic bread they butter on both sides and flavour with slander at tea. Even I, poor heathen and cynic, am nearer to you, ye holy ones, than are ninety-nine in a hundred of these.
There is the Open Secret Society of the Philosophers. Many of them have endeavoured to utter their mystery, and their writings are in all languages; but none save the initiated can read them. These are they who know that the world is but a poor expression of thought, that action is but a rude hieroglyph of soul; that silent and pure and eternal, above the fleeting noisy world with its agitation of action and passion, rests the sphere of intellect, the realm of ideas. These are they of whom Emerson has written worthily: "But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age. When, at long intervals, we turn over their abstruse pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few, these great spiritual lords, who have walked in the world—these of the old religion—dwelling in a worship which makes the sanctities of Christianity look parvenues and popular; for 'persuasion is in soul, but necessity is in intellect.' This band of grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Synesius, and the rest, have somewhat so vast in their logic, so primary in their thinking, that it seems antecedent to all the ordinary distinctions of rhetoric and literature, and to be at once poetry and music and dancing and astronomy and mathematics. I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams the soul lays the foundations of nature. The truth and grandeur of their thought is proved by its scope and applicability, for it commands the entire schedule and inventory of things for its illustrations. But what marks its elevation, and has even a comic look to us, is the innocent serenity with which these babe-like Jupiters sit in their clouds, and from age to age prattle to each other and to no contemporary. Well assured that their speech is intelligible, and the most natural thing in the world, they add thesis to thesis, without a moment's heed of the universal astonishment of the human race below, who do not comprehend their plainest argument; nor do they ever relent so much as to insert a popular or explaining sentence; nor testify the least displeasure or petulance at the dulness of their amazed auditory."
Very ponderous burlesques of this Open Secret Society are exhibited in the universities and colleges and schools. Professors build up complicated systems with the lumber they have gathered into their uninhabited upper storeys, and these systems pass for philosophy. Other erudite professors are salaried to expound Plato and the rest; brilliant and acute scholars win reputation by writing brilliantly about ideas, archetypes, dialectics, realism, nominalism, and so forth; but where among the professors and the scholars are the Platonists? Some quiet modest man, who has never read a work on metaphysics and knows nothing of the systems, shall meet with a golden sentence of Plato or Spinoza, Bacon or Berkeley, Fichte or Schelling, and at once feel: This is what I have known so long, yet could never thus express. But he has expressed it in his life, which is utterance far superior to the most eloquent rhetoric.
III.
There is the Open Secret Society of the Poets. These are they who feel that the universe is one mighty harmony of beauty and joy; and who are continually listening to the rhythms and cadences of this eternal music whose orchestra comprises all things from the shells to the stars, all beings from the worm to man, all sounds from the voice of the little bird to the voice of the great ocean; and who are able partially to reproduce these rhythms and cadences in the language of men. In all these imitative songs of theirs is a latent undertone, in which the whole infinite harmony of the whole lies furled; and the fine ears catch this undertone and convey it to the soul, wherein the furled music unfurls to its primordial infinity, expanding with rapturous pulses and agitating with awful thunders this soul which has been skull-bound, so that it is dissolved and borne away beyond consciousness, and becomes as a living wave in a shoreless ocean. If, however, these their poems be read silently in books, instead of being heard chanted by the human voice, then for the eye which has vision an underlight stirs and quickens among the letters, which grow translucent and throb with life; and this mysterious splendour entering by the eyes into the soul fills it with spheric illumination, and like the mysterious music swells to infinity, consuming with quick fire all the bonds and dungeon-walls of the soul, dazing it out of consciousness and dissolving it in a shoreless ocean of light. I have called these entrancements of beauty and joy, but there is intense sadness in the joy and a supernatural awe in the beauty: "Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?" sings the magnificent poet of the Canticles; and Plato writes in the Phædrus, "He who has been recently initiated, when he sees a godlike countenance, or some bodily form that presents a good imitation of beauty, at first shudders, and some of the old terrors come over him."
The educated, the intelligent, the clever, by thousands, hear these songs sung, and read them in books, and think that they perfectly enjoy and comprehend; and they can discourse very profoundly about metres and diction and canons of art; but they never hear the undertone, and never have vision of the interior illumination, and are never rapt away in the ecstasy: thus the very soul of the poetry must, in truth, ever remain for them a music unheard, a light unseen, a language unknown embodied in their familiar mother-tongue.
Serious parodies of these divine songs abound in every age, and are welcomed by the uninitiate (who are usually what we call persons of liberal culture, for the poor and the ignorant remain grandly indifferent to all such attempts) as the most beautiful utterance of the inmost mysteries of this veritable Secret Society; and the authors thereof win during their lifetime wealth and honour and renown. For many of them can copy with marvellous adroitness the rhythms and rhymes and melodious phrases which are much loved by the true brotherhood, so that not only by others but also by themselves they are believed to be genuine bards. But when one who is initiate hears or reads their productions, he discerns that they are as fair bodies without souls; for the music and the splendour of infinity are not within them, and they are utterly unrelated to eternity.
Many, however, who are not learned and who are quite without profitable talents, shepherd youths and farm maidens, men in great cities who will never get on in the world, rude mountaineers familiar with sounding storms, sailors with the rhythm of the ocean-tides in their blood, can hear this undertone of the cosmic harmony, and see this light transfiguring the world, and enter with these true Poets into the mysterious trance; and are thus, even though they know it not, real members of this high confraternity. For the best interpretation of its mysteries in our language, let me refer the reader to Shelley's Defence of Poetry.
Lastly (for this brief essay), there is the Open Secret Society of the Mystics. These are the very flower and crown of the four already touched upon, Saints of Saints, Heroes of Heroes, Philosophers of Philosophers, Poets of Poets; the identity of the masculine ideal of Hero and Philosopher and the feminine ideal of Poet and Saint. Their mysteries have been published to all the world in the choicest visions and actions, thoughts and strophes, of the choicest members of these other fraternities; yet not only do they remain utterly obscure and illegible to the common world of men, they are dark to all of even those fraternities who have not been initiated to the supreme degree.
This Society has been less parodied than any of the others; firstly, because (as I have heard) its mysteries are so awful that whoever long strives to parody them becomes insane; secondly, because its most common and public passwords and signs are incredibly difficult for the vulgar to distinguish. Its members may be unfolding the profoundest secrets in talking of dogs and cats, pans and kettles; they may be transmitting the most pregnant signals in doing the most ordinary daily work. As George Herbert has written (The Elixir):—
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heaven espy.
....
A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine.
But it is probable that we must go to the East for the purest fountain and the most copious river of the element which bathes the souls of this brotherhood. In Sir William Jones's Dissertation on the Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindus,[2] he translates an ode by a sufi of Bokhara, who assumed the poetical name of Ismat, which is so transcendent an expression of the spirit of this fraternity, that I must cite it in its completeness.
"Yesterday, half-inebriated, I passed by the quarter where the vintners dwell, to seek the daughter of an infidel who sells wine.
"At the end of the street there advanced before me a damsel, with a fairy's cheeks, who, in the manner of a pagan, wore her tresses dishevelled over her shoulders like the sacerdotal thread. I said: 'O thou, to the arch of whose eyebrow the new moon is a slave, what quarter is this, and where is thy mansion?'
"She answered: 'Cast thy rosary on the ground; bind on thy shoulder the thread of paganism; throw stones at the glass of piety; and quaff wine from a full goblet:
"'After that come before me, that I may whisper a word in thine ear; thou wilt accomplish thy journey, if thou listen to my discourse.'
"Abandoning my heart, and rapt in ecstasy, I ran after her, till I came to a place, in which religion and reason forsook me.
"At a distance I beheld a company, all insane and inebriated, who came boiling and roaring with ardour from the wine of love.
"Without cymbals, or lutes, or viols, yet all full of mirth and melody; without wine, or goblet, or flask, yet all incessantly drinking.
"When the cord of restraint slipped from my hand, I desired to ask her one question, but she said: 'Silence!
"'This is no square temple, to the gate of which thou canst arrive precipitately; this is no mosque to which thou canst come with tumult, but without knowledge. This is the banquet-house of infidels, and within it all are intoxicated; all from the dawn of eternity to the day of resurrection, lost in astonishment.
"'Depart then from the cloister, and take the way to the tavern; cast off the cloak of a dervise and wear the robe of a libertine.'
"I obeyed; and, if thou dcsirest the same strain and colour with Ismat, imitate him, and sell this world and the next for one drop of pure wine."
Similar passages, I believe, abound in Hafiz:—
"Stain with wine thy prayer-carpet if the old man of the tavern commands thee: for the traveller is not ignorant of the ways and customs of the inn."
"Build up thy heart with wine; for this ruined world
Is resolved when we are dead to make only bricks of our clay."
And Sir William Jones cites a fine sentence from the Bustan; wherein, characteristically, thorough sameness of the spirit is couched in contradiction of the letter: "Through remembrance of God they shun all mankind; they are so enamoured of the cup-bearer, that they spill the wine from the cup."
In our own poetry sublime expression of some of their subtlest mysteries may be read by who can read in the Epipsychidion of Shelley.
But there are those informed by this spirit who cannot read its letter. For it is to be remarked that every talent and ability, and all scientific and other "useful" knowledge, are apt to be hindrances and veils to the purest manifestations of this mystery in humanity. "He has hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them unto babes."—"Suffer little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven."—"To the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness." A man of great talents and acquirements may have also this celestial genius; but such a one, be sure, employs his talents and acquirements simply as hewers of wood and drawers of water in the menial household service thereof Every one who elevates them to be his ambassadors and ministers in the high and solemn businesses of life does so in destitution of this genius plenipotential.
The loftiest member of this Open Secret Society familiar to us, familiar to us if we can read the story of his actions and his words aright, was a poor carpenter's son who seems to have had no other learning than such knowledge of the sacred books of his people as any frequenter of the synagogues of his people might easily have acquired, who we are told could read (Luke iv. 16, 20), but who perhaps could not write. When the theological scaffolding which has been reared around the image of this man shall have altogether fallen away, and the lineaments can be seen in broad daylight, we shall discover that he reigns over us by the power and prerogative of his divine mysticism.
Such are a few of the loftiest Open Secret Societies, these organisations of Nature so perfect and enduring, so superior to the most subtle organisations elaborated by man. And in all of them, I think, we find that the poor and the mean and the ignorant and the simple have their part no less—nay, have their part even more—than the rich and the great and the learned and the clever. Let us praise the impartiality of our Mother Nature, the most venerable, the ever young, the fountain of true democracy, the generous annunciator of true liberty and equality and fraternity; who bestoweth on all her children alike all things most necessary to true health and wealth, the sunshine, the air, the water, the fruits of the earth; and opens to rich and poor alike the golden doors of enfranchisement and initiation into the mysteries of heroism, purity, wisdom, beauty, and infinite love.
Were I required to draw a practical moral, I should say that all proselytism is useless and absurd. Every human being belongs naturally, organically, unalterably, to a certain species or society; and by no amount of repeating strange formulas, ejaculations, or syllogisms, can he really apostatise from himself so as to become a genuine member of a society to which these are not strange but natural. A penny whistle doesn't become a cathedral organ by being made to whistle the Old Hundredth; a church mouse doesn't grow a lion by straying into a Secular Hall.
- ↑ One of the most miserable humbugs of these years is the humbug of certain popular writers (the two Kingsleys, Tennyson, Tom Brown, Guy Livingstone, together with a solemn swarm of female novelists) anent the Crimean War. It has been a perfect godsend of profitable and blasphemous cant to them. That war was by no means heroic— a mere selfish haggle for the adjustment of the balance of power, badly begun and meanly finished; and five soldiers out of six who took part in it will tell you that they would much rather have pitched into the Turks than the Russians. Yet these pious scribes (for most of them are extra-earnest Christians, notable brawlers for the Gospel of Peace) invoke God and the seven heavens to attest its heroic sanctity.Again, was English manhood really in so rotten a state ten years ago that these people are justified in soaring into ecstasies of admiration because an English army with its officers did not act like a drove of cowards (though in many instances exceedingly like a set of fools) during a rather severe and
longish siege? These bookwrights are as ready to bestow plenary absolution on every soldier who fairly did his duty there, as was Pope Urban on the first crusaders, "What shall I do to be saved?" asks the scamp or debauchee or desperado of a novel; "Go to the Crimea and thou shalt be saved," exclaims the enraptured novelist.
[Since the above was written, the general acclamation and worship of that vilest Blatant Beast, Jingoism, the most dastardly as it is the most vauntful and rapacious and bloodthirsty of big Bullies, have revealed an immeasurably deeper degradation of our English manhood than could have been foreboded sixteen years ago. The Court, the Senate, Pall-Malldom, the majority of the nobles and clergy and middle classes, have vied with the slums, the music halls, the hirelings of the Press, and the cosmopolitan gamblers of the Exchange, in despicable glorification of this hideous Idol, whose front is of brass and the rest of it clay tempered with blood. We have crouched at the feet of the sons of Levi for discipline in English honour and patriotism; our Queen has hailed our fitting Tyrtaeus in a bard of vulgar comic songs. Soldiers successful— or even unsuccessful!—in brutally iniquitous battue-wars against tribes of ill-armed savages, have been bepraised and honoured and dowered as if they were the heroes of another Waterloo. All signs point to a thoroughly disastrous and disgraceful collapse of our whole military system should we find ourselves involved in a European war.—March, 1881.]
- ↑ Asiatic Researches, vol. iii. In the same dissertation, Sir William Jones gives examples of the occult meanings which many zealous admirers insist upon attributing to the most common words in these mystical poems. Thus wine means devotion; idolaters, infidels, and libertines are men of the purest religion; a tavern is a retired oratory; kisses and embraces are the raptures of piety, &c. &c. I do not doubt that orthodox Mussulmans are satisfied with such interpretations; nor would I argue that such interpretations are not in any sense right, for occult or spiritual meanings certainly abound in these poems. But had the poets meant the same kind of religion, devotion, &c., as the orthodox, they would have used the orthodox terms. No serious writer, and especially no poet, casts away venerable words rich in solemn and tender associations, until. he finds that they are altogether inadequate to convey his thought. Had the religion of Ismat been nothing more or higher than the best religion of those around him, would he have spoken with such contempt of the glass of piety, the square temple, the mosque, the cloak of a dervise? would he have celebrated with enthusiasm wine and paganism, the two things most abhorred by the devout among his people? The fact is, that mysticism, being intimate with the soul of the world in its own right, knows that it is beyond the law, proves its prerogative by dignifying the most despised objects (as a Sultan who makes a slave his Vizier), and cannot help now and then riotously shocking the formalists. For mysticism is the identity of the purest faith and the purest scepticism; the extremes not only meet, they intermingle and grow veritably one. There are in Christianity germs of this spirit which few Christians have ever dared to cultivate, and which few of those who have dared have been fit to cultivate: see the Epistle to the Romans, passim. The Anabaptists, Antinomians, &c. &c, made a miserable mess of it.