In the tale recounted below, a devout community of otherworld monks shame their human neighbors with their Lenten piety. The editor notes: “The story of the monastery beneath the lake and of Caenchomrac’s sojourn therein appears to be of local origin and, in its present form, is the work of a writer who was acquainted with the monastic tradition represented by the annals. It is more or less paralleled by many accounts of sunken churches, castles, and cities and of visits made by mortals to the subaqueous world in medieval romance and in modern folk-lore.” He appends a large and interesting bibliography.1

There was a distinguished bishop in Clonmacnoise, whose name was Cáin Comrac (though at first he had been called Mochta). He was a “son of virginity,” a true heir of God, and he had made two pilgrimages to Clonmacnoise. So great was the honour and affection shown him there that he had won this favour from God: no member of his community would ever die either of hunger or of painful sickness, and each year he foretold to every­one who among them would die in the last quarter of that same year.

Yet that very honour at Clon­macnoise weighed on him; so he went off to the lonely island of Inis Eandaimh in Lough Ree to do penance apart from the round of rule, Mass, and communal prayer.

A devout handful of monks stayed with him on the island. They would row to the mainland of Teffia to collect alms and first-fruits, for the men of Teffia were bound to him by a heavy tribute: one hundred piglets, one hundred calves, one hundred lambs, a loaf from every hearth, and a small silver coin (screapall) from every farm-steading.
No travelling company was allowed to exceed nine persons unless it paid an extra screapall; and Cáin Comrac laid down the rule in these verses:

“I beg it of my King:
let the men of Teffia reach their land;
may they wound no one,
and let no one wound them.

“Hear me plainly—no lying word—
if you will heed me,
your company shall be nine.

“Though great hosts stand in your path and strike you with dread, if you keep to my counsel you will go home safe.

“Nine men of Teffia’s land
against a hundred thousand warriors—
my ordering shall protect them;
they will pass unharmed through every host.

“No victorious war-band,
no mighty army of the world,
will plunder them,
so long as they remain in my service—
and my service is service of God.”

For a time the traffic ran back and forth between Clonmacnoise and Inis Eandaimh on those terms. One day, while the saint was on the island, the monks went off. Eógan and Eicertach, two sons of Áedacán of Uí Maine, helped carry the bishop’s packs as far as Sliabh Liatroma. There the clan Fannáin were out hunting in the mountain; they killed a litter of young pigs that belonged to the clerics, brought one piglet to them, and spitted it beside the fire. When the party dispersed about the island to chant the psalms, Cáin Comrac was left alone to watch the roasting.

It was not long till he saw a gigantic man striding toward him, rising from the very bottom of the lake. They exchanged blessings. “Good is the watch you keep,” the stranger said, “over the pig upon the spit, while the others chant their psalms without you.”

“And what is that to you?” asked Cáin Comrac.

“It concerns me much,” the stranger replied. “There is a monastery of ours beneath this lake; it offends the Creator no more that men should dwell under water than in other places. The novices of the monastery caused mischief, and for penance they were turned into pigs; they are the very pigs that were killed to-day on Sliabh Liatroma. That pig on the spit is one of them, and I am his father in the flesh. Here in my hand is his Psalter; I give it to you. It will afterwards be called Saltair na Muice, ‘The Pig’s Psalter’, and may it be treasured long in Clonmacnoise.

“As for the piglet, give it to Eógan — let it count in place of a full-grown boar” — and Cáin Comrac granted him leave to carry it away for burial. “But, cleric,” the great man added, “will you not come and visit the monastery that lies beneath this lake?”

“I will,” said Cáin Comrac. Down they went together, entered the hidden monastery, and the bishop stayed a while among the underwater monks. Next morning he returned to his own house, laden with the spiritual riches of the lake; thenceforward he often visited the brethren below and never abandoned them so long as he lived.

Every Thursday the clerics of Lough Ree came to Inis Eandaimh for Cáin Comrac to bless oil for them; he celebrated the Hours and Mass, blessed the oil, and preached. A feast followed, as was the custom after the liturgy.

Cáin Comrac withdrew, taking with him most of the Lenten fare, and later re-entered the refectory where they were dining. He found the tables heaped with fat meats, which they were freely eating in mid-Lent; he began to clear the dishes away in honour of the fast. A mighty wrath seized him; such radiance of divine fire shone from his face that the clerics could not endure his look. They fled in trembling before the holiness of the man.

Cáin Comrac left them—and was never seen again. No one knows whether he went beneath the lake for good, to serve God in the hidden monastery, or whether angels bore his soul straight to heaven.

And, say the old men of Ireland, from that day on the elders of the Gaels would never again taste flesh in Lent.

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First published in The Candle of Vision, 1918.

We experience the romance and delight of voyaging upon uncharted seas when the imagination is released from the foolish notion that the images seen in reverie and dream are merely the images of memory refashioned; and in tracking to their originals the forms seen in vision we discover for them a varied ancestry, as that some come from the minds of others, and of some we cannot surmise another origin than that they are portions of the memory of Earth which is accessible to us. We soon grow to think our memory but a portion of that eternal memory and that we in our lives are gathering an innumerable experience for a mightier being than our own. The more vividly we see with the inner eye the more swiftly do we come to this conviction. Those who see vaguely are satisfied with vague explanations which those who see vividly at once reject as inadequate. How are we to explain what has happened to many, and oftentimes to myself, that when we sit amid ancient ruins or in old houses they renew their life for us?

I waited for a friend inside a ruined chapel and while there a phantasm of its ancient uses came vividly before me. In front of the altar I saw a little crowd kneeling, most prominent a woman in a red robe, all pious and emotionally intent. A man stood behind these leaning by the wall as if too proud to kneel. An old man in ecclesiastical robes, abbot or bishop, stood, a crozier in one hand, while the other was uplifted in blessing or in emphasis of his words. Behind the cleric a boy carried a vessel, and the lad’s face was vain with self-importance. I saw all this suddenly as if I was contemporary and was elder in the world by many centuries. I could surmise the emotional abandon of the red-robed lady, the proud indifference of the man who stood with his head but slightly bent, the vanity of the young boy as servitor in the ceremony, just as in a church to-day we feel the varied mood of those present.

Anything may cause such pictures to rise in vivid illumination before us, a sentence in a book, a word, or contact with some object. I have brooded over the grassy mounds which are all that remain of the duns in which our Gaelic ancestors lived, and they builded themselves up again for me so that I looked on what seemed an earlier civilisation, saw the people, noted their dresses, the colours of natural wool, saffron or blue, how rough like our own homespuns they were; even such details were visible as that the men cut meat at table with knives and passed it to the lips with their fingers.

This is not, I am convinced, what people call imagination, an interior creation in response to a natural curiosity about past ages. It is an act of vision, a perception of images already existing breathed on some ethereal medium which in no way differs from the medium which holds for us our memories; and the reperception of an image in memory which is personal to us in no way differs as a psychical act from the perception of images in the memory of Earth. The same power of seeing is turned upon things of the same character and substance.

It is not only rocks and ruins which infect us with such visions. A word in a book when one is sensitive may do this also. I sought in a classical dictionary for informa- tion about some myth. What else on the page my eye caught I could not say, but something there made two thousand years to vanish. I was looking at the garden of a house in some ancient city. From the house into the garden fluttered two girls, one in purple and the other in a green robe, and they, in a dance of excitement, ran to the garden wall and looked beyond it to the right. There a street rose high to a hill where there was a pillared building. I could see through blinding sunlight a crowd swaying down the street drawing nigh the house, and the two girls were as excited as girls might be to-day if king or queen were entering their city.

This instant uprising of images following a glance at a page cannot be explained as the refashioning of the pictures of memory. The time which elapsed after the page was closed and the apparition in the brain was a quarter of a minute or less. One can only surmise that pictures so vividly coloured, so full of motion and sparkle as are moving pictures in the theatres were not an instantaneous creation by some magical artist within us, but were evoked out of a vaster memory than the personal, that the Grecian names my eye had caught had the power of symbols which evoke their affinities, and the picture of the excited girls and the shining procession was in some fashion, I know not how, connected with what I had read.

We cannot pass by the uprising of these images with some vague phrase about suggestion or imagination and shirk further inquiry. If with the physical eye twenty-five years ago a man had seen a winged aeroplane amid the clouds it had roused him to a tumult of speculation and inquiry. But if the same picture had been seen in the mind it would speedily have been buried as mere fancy. There would have been no speculation, though what appears within us might well be deemed more important than what appears without us. Every tint, tone, shape, light or shade in an interior image must have intelligible cause as the wires, planes, engines and propellers of the aeroplane have. We must infer, when the image is clear and precise, an original of which this is the reflection.

Whence or when were the originals of the pictures we see in dream or reverie? There must be originals; and, if we are forced to dismiss as unthinkable any process by which the pictures of our personal memory could unconsciously be reshaped into new pictures which appear in themselves authentic copies of originals, which move, have light, colour, form, shade such as nature would bestow, then we are led to believe that memory is an attribute of all living creatures and of Earth also, the greatest living creature we know, and that she carries with her, and it is accessible to us, all her long history, cities far gone behind time, empires which are dust, or are buried with sunken continents beneath the waters. The beauty for which men perished is still shining; Helen is there in her Troy, and Deirdre wears the beauty which blasted the Red Branch. No ancient lore has perished. Earth retains for herself and her children what her children might in passion have destroyed, and it is still in the realm of the Ever Living to be seen by the mystic adventurer.

We argue that this memory must be universal, for there is nowhere we go where Earth does not breathe fragments from her ancient story to the meditative spirit. These memories gild the desert air where once the proud and golden races had been and had passed away, and they haunt the rocks and mountains where the Druids evoked their skiey and subterrene deities. The laws by which this history is made accessible to us seem to be the same as those which make our own learning swift to our service. When we begin thought or discussion on some subject we soon find ourselves thronged with memories ready for use. Everything in us related by affinity to the central thought seems to be mobilised; and in meditation those alien pictures we see, not the pictures of memory, but strange scenes, cities, beings and happenings, are, if we study them, all found to be in some relation to our mood.

If our will is powerful enough and if by concentration and aspiration we have made the gloom in the brain to glow, we can evoke out of the memory of earth images of whatsoever we desire. These earth memories come to us in various ways. When we are passive, and the ethereal medium which is the keeper of such images, not broken up by thought, is like clear glass or calm water, then there is often a glowing of colour and form upon it, and there is what may be a reflection from some earth memory connected with the place we move in or it may be we have direct vision of that memory.

Meditation again evokes images and pictures which are akin to its subject and our mood and serve in illustration of it. Once, when I was considering the play of arcane forces in the body, a book appeared before me, a coloured symbol on each page. I saw the book was magical, for while I looked on one of these the symbol vanished from the page, and the outline of a human body appeared, and then there came an interior revelation of that, and there was a shining of forces and a flashing of fires, rose, gold, azure and silver along the spinal column, and these flowed up into the brain where they struck upon a little ball that was like white sunfire for brilliancy, and they flashed out of that again in a pulsation as of wings on each side of the head; and then the page darkened, and the changing series closed with the Caduceus of Mercury and contained only a symbol once more.

Such pictures come without conscious effort of will, but are clearly evoked by it. Lastly, but more rarely with me, because the electric intensity of will required was hard to attain, I was able at times to evoke deliberately out of the memory of nature pictures of persons or things long past in time, but of which I desired knowledge.

I regret now, while I was young and my energies yet uncoiled, that I did not practise this art of evocation more in regard to matters where knowledge might be regarded as of spiritual value; but I was like a child who discovers a whole set of fresh toys, and plays with one after the other, and I was interested in all that came to me, and was too often content to be the servant of my vision and not its master. It was an excitement of spirit for one born in a little country town in Ireland to find the circle of being widened so that life seemed to dilate into a paradise of beautiful memories, and to reach to past ages and to mix with the eternal consciousness of Earth, and when we come on what is new we pause to contemplate it, and do not hurry to the end of our journey.

The instances of earth memories given here are trivial in themselves, and they are chosen, not because they are in any way wonderful, but rather because they are like things many people see, and so they may more readily follow my argument. The fact that Earth holds such memories is itself important, for once we discover this imperishable tablet, we are led to speculate whether in the future a training in seership might not lead to a revolution in human knowledge. It is a world where we may easily get lost, and spend hours in futile vision with no more gain than if one looked for long hours at the dust. For those to whom in their spiritual evolution these apparitions arise I would say : try to become the master of your vision, and seek for and evoke the greatest of earth memories, not those things which only satisfy curiosity, but those which uplift and inspire, and give us a vision of our own greatness; and the noblest of all Earth’s memories is the august ritual of the ancient mysteries, where the mortal, amid scenes of unimaginable grandeur, was disrobed of his mortality and made of the company of the gods.

First published in The English Review, June 1919.

After Hawthorne come the books of the sea. In Dana and Herman Melville the human relationship is no longer the chief interest. The sea enters as the great protagonist.

The sea is a cosmic element, and the relation between the sea and the human psyche is impersonal and elemental. The sea that we dream of, the sea that fills us with hate or with bliss, is a primal influence upon us beyond the personal range.

We need to find some terms to express such elemental connections as between the ocean and the human soul. We need to put off our per­sonality, even our individuality, and enter the region of the elements.

There certainly does exist a subtle and complex sympathy, corres­pondence, between the plasm of the human body, which is identical with the primary human psyche, and the material elements outside. The primary human psyche is a complex plasm, which quivers, sense­ conscious, in contact with the circumambient cosmos. Our plasmic psyche is radio-active, connecting with all things, and having first­ knowledge of all things.

The religious systems of the pagan world did what Christianity has never tried to do: they gave the true correspondence between the material cosmos and the human soul. The ancient cosmic theories were exact, and apparently perfect. In them science and religion were in accord.

When we postulate a beginning, we only do so to fix a starting-point for our thought. There never was a beginning, and there never will be an end of the universe. The creative mystery, which is life itself, always was and always will be. It unfolds itself in pure living creatures.

Following the obsolete language, we repeat that in the beginning was the creative reality, living and substantial, although apparently void and dark. The living cosmos divided itself, and there was Heaven and Earth: by which we mean, not the sky and the terrestrial globe, for the Earth was still void and dark; but an inexplicable first duality, a divi­sion in the cosmos. Between the two great valves of the primordial universe, moved “the Spirit of God,” one unbroken and indivisible heart of creative being. So that, as two great wings that are spread, the living cosmos stretched out the first Heaven and the first Earth, terms of the inexplicable primordial duality.

Then the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. As no “waters” are yet created, we may perhaps take the mystic “Earth” to be the same as the Waters. The mystic Earth is the cosmic Waters, and the mystic Heaven the dark cosmic Fire. The Spirit of God, moving between the two great cosmic principles, the mysterious universal dark Waters and the invisible, unnameable cosmic Fire, brought forth the first created apparition, Light. From the darkness of primordial fire, and the darkness of primordial waters, light is born, through the intermediacy of creative presence.

Surely this is true, scientifically, of the birth of light.

After this, the waters are divided by the firmament. If we conceive of the first division in Chaos, so-called, as being perpendicular, the inexplicable division into the first duality, then this next division, when the line of the firmament is drawn, we can consider as horizontal: thus we have the ⊕, the elements of the Rosy Cross, and the first enclosed appearance of that tremendous symbol, which has dominated our era, the Cross itself.

The universe at the end of the Second Day of Creation is, therefore, as the Rosy Cross, a fourfold division. The mystic Heaven, the cosmic dark Fire is not spoken of. But the firmament of light divides the waters of the unfathomable heights from the unfathomable deeps of the other half of chaos, the still unformed earth. These strange unfathomable waters breathe back and forth, as the earliest Greek philosophers say, from one realm to the other.

Central within the fourfold division is the creative reality itself, like the body of a four-winged bird. It has thrown forth from itself two great wings of opposite Waters, two great wings of opposite Fire. Then the universal motion begins, the cosmos begins to revolve, the eternal flight is launched.

Changing the metaphors and attending to the material universe only, we may say that sun and space are now born. Those waters and that dark fire which are drawn together in the creative spell impinge into one centre in the sun; those waters and that fire which flee asunder in the creative spell form space.

So that we have a fourfold division in the cosmos, and a fourfold travelling. We have the waters under the firmament and the waters above the firmament: we have the fire to the left hand and the fire to the right hand of the firmament; and we have each travelling back and forth across the firmament. Which means, scientifically, that invisible waters steal towards the sun, right up to feed the sun, whilst new waters are shed away from the sun, into space; whilst invisible dark fire rolls its waves to the sun, and new fire floods out into space. The sun is the great mystery-centre where the invisible fires and the invisible waters roll together, brought together in the magnificence of the creative spell of opposition, to wrestle and consummate in the formation of the orb of light. Night, on the other hand, is Space presented to our consciousness, that space or infinite which is the travelling asunder of the primordial elements, and which we recognize in the living darkness.

So the ancient cosmology, always so perfect theoretically, becomes, by the help of our scientific knowledge, physically, actually perfect. The great fourfold division, the establishment of the Cross, which has so thrilled the soul of man from ages far back before Christianity, far back in pagan America as well as in the Old World, becomes real to our reason as well as to our instinct.

Cosmology, however, considers only the creation of the material universe, and according to the scientific idea life itself is but a product of reactions in the material universe. This is palpably wrong.

When we repeat that on the First Day of Creation God made Heaven and Earth we do not suggest that God disappeared between the two great valves of the cosmos once these were created. Yet this is the modern, scientific attitude. Science supposes that once the first forces was in existence, and the first motion set up, the universe produced itself automatically, throwing off life as a by-product, at a certain stage.

It is such an idea which has brought about the materialization and emptiness of life. When God made Heaven and Earth, that is, in the beginning when the unthinkable living cosmos divided itself, God did not disappear. If we try to conceive of God, in this instance, we must conceive some homogeneous rare living plasm, a living self-conscious ether, which filled the universe. The living ether divided itself as an egg-cell divides. There is a mysterious duality, life divides itself, and yet life is indivisible. When life divides itself, there is no division in life. It is a new life-state, a new being which appears. So it is when an egg divides. There is no split in life. Only a new life-stage is created. This is the eternal oneness and magnificence of life, that it moves creatively on in progressive being, each state of being whole, integral, complete.

But as life moves on in creative singleness, its substance divides and subdivides into multiplicity. When the egg divides itself, a new stage of creation is reached, a new oneness of living being; but there appears also a new differentiation in inanimate substance. From the new life-being a new motion takes place: the inanimate reacts in its pure polarity, and a third stage of creation is reached. Life has now achieved a third state of being, a third creative singleness appears in the universe; and at the same time, inanimate substance has re-divided and brought forth from itself a new creation in the material world.

So creation goes on. At each new impulse from the creative body, All comes together with All: that is, the one half of the cosmos comes together with the other half, with a dual result. First issues the new oneness, the new singleness, the new life-state, the new being, the new individual; and secondly, from the locked opposition of inanimate dual matter, another singleness is born, another creation takes place, new matter, a new chemical element appears. Dual all the time is the creative activity: first comes forth the living apparition of new being, the perfect and indescribable singleness; and this embodies the single beauty of a new substance, gold or chlorine or sulphur. So it has been since time began. The gems of being were created simultaneously with the gems of matter, the latter inherent in the former.

Every new thing is born from the consummation of the two halves of the universe, the two great halves being the cosmic waters and the cosmic fire of the First Day. In procreation, the two germs of the male and female epitomize the two cosmic principles, as these are held within the life-spell. In the sun and the material waters the two principles exist as independent elements. Life-plasm mysteriously corresponds with inanimate matter. But life-plasm, in that it lives, is itself identical with being, inseparable from the singleness of a living being, the indivisible oneness.

Life can never be produced or made. Life is an unbroken oneness, indivisible. The mystery of creation is that new and indivisible being appears forever within the oneness of life.

In the cosmic theories of the creation of the world it has been customary for science to treat of life as a product of the material universe, whilst religion treats of the material universe as having been deliberately created by some will or idea, some sheer abstraction. Surely the universe has arisen from some universal living self-conscious plasm, plasm which has no origin and no end, but is life eternal and identical, bringing forth the infinite creatures of being and existence, living creatures embodying inanimate substance. There is no utterly immaterial existence, no spirit. The distinction is between living plasm and inanimate matter. Inanimate matter is released from the dead body of the world’s creatures. It is the static residue of the living conscious plasm, like feathers of birds.

When the living cosmos divided itself, on the First Day, then the living plasm became twofold, twofold supporting a new state of singleness, new being; at the same time, the twofold living plasm contained the finite duality of the two unliving, material cosmic elements. In the transmutation of the plasm, in the interval of death, the inanimate elements are liberated into separate existence. The inanimate material universe is born through death from the living universe, to co-exist with it for ever.

We know that in its essence the living plasm is twofold. In the same way the dynamic elements of material existence are dual, the fire and the water. These two cosmic elements are pure mutual opposites, and on their opposition the material universal is established. The attraction of the two, mutually opposite, sets up the revolution of the universe and forms the blazing heart of the sun. The sun is formed by the impinging of the cosmic water upon the cosmic fire, in the stress of opposition. This causes the central blaze of the universe.

In the same way, mid-way, the lesser worlds are formed; as the two universal elements become entangled, swirling on their way to the great central conjunction. The core of the worlds and stars is a blaze of the two elements as they rage interlocked into consummation. And from the fiery and moist consummation of the two elements all the material substances are finally born, perfected.

This goes on however, mechanically now, according to fixed, physical laws. The plasm of life, the state of living potentiality exists still central, as the body of a bird between the wings, and spontaneously brings forth the living forms we know. Ultimately, or primarily, the creative plasm has no laws. But as it takes form and multiple wonderful being, it keeps up a perfect law-abiding relationship with that other half of itself, the material inanimate universe. And the first and greatest law of creation is that all creation, even life itself, exists within the strange and incalculable balance of the two elements. In the living creature, fire and water must exquisitely balance, commingle, and consummate, this in continued mysterious process.

So we must look for life midway between fire and water. For where fire is purest, this is a sign that life has withdrawn itself, and is withheld. And the same with water. For by pure water we do not mean that bright liquid rain or dew or fountain stream. Water in its purest is water most abstracted from fire, as fire in its purest must be abstracted from water. And so, water becomes more essential as we progress through the rare crystals of snow and ice, on to that infinitely suspended invisible element which travels between us and the sun, inscrutable water such as life can know nothing of, for where it is, all life has long ceased to be. This is the true cosmic element. Our material water, as our fire, is still a mixture of fire and water.

It may be argued that water is proved to be a chemical compound, composed of two gases, hydrogen and oxygen. But is it not more true that hydrogen and oxygen are the first naked products of the two parent-elements, water and fire. In all our efforts to decompose water we do but introduce fire into the water, in some naked form or other, and this introduction of naked fire into naked water produces hydrogen and oxygen, given the proper conditions of chemical procreation. Hydrogen and oxygen are the first fruits of fire and water. This is the alchemistic air. But from the conjunction of fire and water within the living plasm arose the first matter, the Prima Materia of a living body, which, in its dead state, is the alchemistic Earth.

Thus, at the end of what is called the Second Day of Creation, the alchemistic Four Elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water have come into existence: the Air and the Earth born from the conjunction of Fire and Water within the creative plasm. Air is a final product. Earth is the incalculable and indefinable residuum of the living plasm. All other substance is born by the mechanical consummation of fire and water within this Earth. So no doubt it is the fire and water of the swirling universe, acting upon that Earth or dead plasm which results at the end of each life-phase, that has brought the solid globes into being, invested them with rock and metal.

The birth of the chemical elements from the grain of Earth, through the consummation of fire and water, is as magical, as incalculable as the birth of men. For from the material consummation may come forth a superb and enduring element, such as gold or platinum, or such strange, unstable elements as sulphur or phosphorus, phosphorus, a sheer apparition of water, and sulphur a netted flame. In phosphorus the water principle is so barely held that at a touch the mystic union will break, whilst sulphur only waits to depart into fire. Bring these two unstable elements together, and a slight friction will cause them to burst spontaneously asunder, fire leaping out; or the phosphorus will pass off in watery smoke. The natives of Zoruba, in West Africa, having the shattered fragments of a great pagan culture in their memory, call sulphur the dung of thunder: the fire-dung, undigested excrement of the fierce consummation between the upper waters and the invisible fire.

The cosmic elements, however, have a two-fold direction. When they move together, in the mystic attraction of mutual unknowing, then, in some host, some grain of Earth, or some grain of living plasm, they embrace and unite and the fountain of creation springs up, a new substance, or a new life-form. But there is also the great centrifugal motion, when the two flee asunder into space, into infinitude.

This fourfold activity is the root-activity of the universe. We have first the mystic dualism of pure otherness, that which science will not admit, and which Christianity has called “the impious doctrine of the two principles.” This dualism extends through everything, even through the soul or self or being of any living creature. The self or soul is single, unique, and undivided, the gem of gems, the flower of flowers, the fulfilment of the universe. Yet within the self, which is single, the principle of dualism reigns. And then, consequent upon this principle of dual otherness, comes the scientific dualism of polarity.

So we have in creation the two life-elements coming together within the living plasm, coming together softly and sweetly, the kiss of angels within the glimmering place. Then newly created life, new being arises. There comes a time, however, when the two life-elements go asunder, after the being has perfected itself. Then there is the seething and struggling of inscrutable life-disintegration. The individual form disappears, but the being remains implicit within the intangible life-plasm.

Parallel to this, in the material universe we have the productive coming-together of water and fire, to make the sun of light, the rainbow, and the perfect elements of Matter. Or we have the slow activity in disintegration, when substances resolve back towards the universal Prima Materia, primal inanimate ether.

Thus all creation depends upon the fourfold activity. And on this root of four is all law and understanding established. Following the perception of these supreme truths, the Pythagoreans made their philosophy, asserting that all is number, and seeking to search out the mystery of the roots of three, four, five, seven, stable throughout all the universe, in a chain of developing phenomena. But our science of mathematics still waits for its fulfilment, its union with life itself. For the truths of mathematics are only the skeleton fabric of the living universe.

Only symbolically do the numbers still live for us. In religion we still accept the four Gospel Natures, the four Evangels, with their symbols of man, eagle, lion, and bull, symbols parallel to the Four Elements, and to the Four Activities, and to the Four Natures. And the Cross, the epitome of all this fourfold division, still stirs us to the depths with unaccountable emotions, emotions which go much deeper than personality and the Christ drama.

The ancients said that their cosmic symbols had a sevenfold or a fivefold reference. The simplest symbol, the divided circle, ⦶, stands not only for the first division in the living cosmos and for the two cosmic elements but also within the realms of created life, for the sex mystery; then for the mystery of dual psyche, sensual and spiritual, within the individual being; then for the duality of thought and sensation, and so on, or otherwise, according to varying exposition. Having such a clue, we can begin to find the meanings of the Rosy Cross, the ⊕; and for the ankh, the famous Egyptian symbol, called the symbol of life, the cross or Tau beneath the circle ☥, the soul undivided resting upon division; and for the so-called symbol of Aphrodite, the circle resting upon the complete cross, ♀. These symbols too have their multiple reference, deep and far-reaching, embracing the cosmos and the indivisible soul, as well as the mysteries of function and production. How foolish it is to give these great signs a merely phallic indication!

The sex division is one of the Chinese three sacred mysteries. Vitally, it is a division of pure otherness, pure dualism. It is one of the first mysteries of creation. It is parallel with the mystery of the first division in chaos, and with the dualism of the two cosmic elements. This is not to say that the one sex is identical with fire, the other with water. And yet there is some indefinable connection. Aphrodite born of the waters, and Apollo the sun-god, these give some indication of the sex distinction.

It is obvious, however, that some races, men and women alike, derive from the sun and have the fiery principle predominant in their constitution, whilst some, blonde, blue-eyed, northern, are evidently water-born, born along with the ice-crystals and blue, cold deeps, and yellow, ice-refracted sunshine. Nevertheless, if we must imagine the most perfect clue to the eternal waters, we think of woman, and of man as the most perfect premiss of fire.

Be that as it may, the duality of sex, the mystery of creative otherness, is manifest, and given the sexual polarity, we have the fourfold motion. The corning-together of the sexes may be the soft, delicate union of pure creation, or it may be the tremendous conjunction of opposition, a vivid struggle, as fire struggles with water in the sun. From either of these consummations birth takes place. But in the first case it is the birth of a softly rising and budding soul, wherein the two principles commune in gentle union, so that the soul is harmonious and at one with itself. In the second case it is the birth of a disintegrative soul wherein the two principles wrestle in their eternal opposition: a soul finite, momentaneous, active in the universe as a unit of sundering. The first kind of birth takes place in the youth of an era, in the mystery of accord; the second kind preponderates in the times of disintegration, the crumbling of an era. But at all times beings are born from the two ways, and life is made up of the duality.

The latter way, however, is a way of struggle into separation, isolation, psychic disintegration. It is a continual process of sundering and reduction, each soul becoming more mechanical and apart, reducing the great fabric of co-ordinate human life. In this struggle the sexes act in the polarity of antagonism or mystic opposition, the so-called sensual polarity, bringing tragedy. But the struggle is progressive. And then at last the sexual polarity breaks. The sexes have no more dynamic connection, only a habitual or deliberate connection. The spell is broken. They are not balanced any more even in opposition.

But life depends on duality and polarity. The duality, the polarity now asserts itself within the individual psyche. Here, in the individual, the fourfold creative activity takes place. Man is divided, according to old-fashioned phraseology, into the upper and lower man: that is, the spiritual and sensual being. And this division is physical and actual. The upper body, breast and throat and face, this is the spiritual body; the lower is the sensual.

By spiritual being we mean that state of being where the self excels into the universe, and knows all things by passing into all things. It is that blissful consciousness which glows upon the flowers and trees and sky, so that I am sky and flowers, I, who am myself. It is that movement towards a state of infinitude wherein I experience my living oneness with all things.

By sensual being, on the other hand, we mean that state in which the self is the magnificent centre wherein all life pivots, and lapses, as all space passes into the core of the sun. It is a magnificent central positivity, wherein the being sleeps upon the strength of its own reality, as a wheel sleeps in speed on its positive hub. It is a state portrayed in the great dark statues of the seated lords of Egypt. The self is incontestable and unsurpassable.

Through the gates of the eyes and nose and mouth and ears, through the delicate ports of the fingers, through the great window of the yearning breast, we pass into our oneness with the universe, our great extension of being, towards infinitude. But in the lower part of the body there is darkness and pivotal pride. There in the abdomen the contiguous universe is drunk into the blood, assimilated, as a wheel’s great speed is assimilated into the hub. There the great whirlpool of the dark blood revolves and assimilates all unto itself. Here is the world of living dark waters, where the fire is quenched in watery creation. Here, in the navel flowers the water-born lotus, the soul of the water begotten by one germ of fire. And the lotus is the symbol of our perfected sensual first-being, which rises in blossom from the unfathomable waters.

In the feet we rock like the lotus, rooted in the under-mud of earth. In the knees, in the thighs we sway with the dark motion of the flood, darkly water-conscious, like the thick, strong, swaying stems of the lotus that mindlessly answer the waves. It is in the lower body that we are chiefly blood-conscious.

For we assert that the blood has a perfect but untranslatable consciousness of its own, a consciousness of weight, of rich, down-pouring motion of powerful self-positivity. In the blood we have our strongest self-knowledge, our most powerful dark conscience. The ancients said the heart was the seat of understanding. And so it is: it is the seat of the primal sensual understanding, the seat of the passional self-consciousness.

In the nerves, on the other hand, we pass out and become the universe. But even this is dual. It seems as if from the tremendous sympathetic centres of the breast there ran out a fine, silvery emanation from the self, a fine silvery seeking which finds the universe, and by means of which we become the universe, we have our extended being. On the other hand, it seems as if in the great solar plexus of the abdomen were a dark whirlwind of pristine force, drawing, whirling all the world darkly into itself, not concerned to look out, or to consider beyond itself. It is from this perfect self-centrality that the lotus of the navel is born, according to Oriental symbolism.

But beyond the great centres of breast and bowels, there is a deeper and higher duality. There are the wonderful plexuses of the face, where our being runs forth into space and finds its vastest realization; and there is the great living plexus of the loins, there where deep calls to deep. All the time, there is some great incomprehensible balance between the upper and the lower centres, as when the kiss of the mouth accompanies the passionate embrace of the loins. In the face we live our glad life of seeing, perceiving, we pass in delight to our greater being, when we are one with all things. The face and breast belong to the heavens, the luminous infinite. But in the loins we have our unbreakable root, the root of the lotus. There we have our passionate self-possession, our unshakable and indomitable being. There deep calls unto deep. There in the sexual passion the very blood surges into communion, in the terrible sensual oneing. There all the darkness of the deeps, the primal flood, is perfected, as the two great waves of separated blood surge to consummation, the dark infinitude.

When there is balance in first-being between the breast and belly, the loins and face, then, and only then, when this fourfold consciousness is established within the body, then, and only then, do we come to full consciousness in the mind. For the mind is again the single in creation, perfecting its finite thought and idea as the chemical elements are perfected into finality from the flux. The mind brings forth its gold and its gems, finite beyond duality. So we have the sacred pentagon, with the mind as the conclusive apex.

In the body, however, as in all creative forms, there is the dual polarity as well as the mystic dualism of otherness. The great sympathetic activity of the human system has the opposite pole in the voluntary system. The front part of the body is open and receptive, the great valve to the universe. But the back is sealed, closed. And it is from the ganglia of the spinal system that the will acts in direct compulsion, outwards.

The great plexuses of the breast and face act in the motion of oneing, from these the soul goes forth in the spiritual oneing. Corresponding to this, the thoracic ganglion and the cervical ganglia are the great centres of spiritual compulsion or control or dominion, the great second or negative activity of the spiritual self. From these ganglia go forth the motions and commands which force the external universe into that state which accords with the spiritual will-to-unification, the will for equality. Equality, and religious agreement, and social virtue are enforced as well as found. And it is from the ganglia of the upper body that this compulsion to equality and virtue is enforced.

In the same way, from the lumbar ganglion and from the sacral ganglion acts the great sensual will to dominion. From these centres the soul goes forth haughty and indomitable, seeking for mastery. These are the great centres of activity in soldiers, fighters; as also in the tiger and the cat the power-centre is at the base of the spine, in the sacral ganglion. All the tremendous sense of power and mastery is located in these centres of volition, there where the back is walled and strong, set blank against life. These are the centres of negative polarity of our first-being.

So the division of the psychic body is fourfold. If we are divided horizontally at the diaphragm, we are divided also perpendicularly. The upright division gives us our polarity, our for and against, our mystery of right and left.

Any man who is perfect and fulfilled lives in fourfold activity. He knows the sweet spiritual communion, and he is at the same time a sword to enforce the spiritual level; he knows the tender unspeakable sensual communion, but he is a tiger against anyone who would abate his pride and his liberty.