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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Rosa Alchemica, by W. B. Yeats
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Rosa Alchemica
+
+Author: W. B. Yeats
+
+
+Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5794]
+This file was first posted on September 1, 2002
+Last Updated: July 3, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROSA ALCHEMICA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ROSA ALCHEMICA
+
+
+By W.B. Yeats
+
+
+
+O blessed and happy he, who knowing the mysteries of the gods,
+sanctifies his life, and purifies his soul, celebrating orgies in the
+mountains with holy purifications.--_Euripides._
+
+
+
+
+ROSA ALCHEMICA.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+It is now more than ten years since I met, for the last time, Michael
+Robartes, and for the first time and the last time his friends and
+fellow students; and witnessed his and their tragic end, and endured
+those strange experiences, which have changed me so that my writings
+have grown less popular and less intelligible, and driven me almost
+to the verge of taking the habit of St. Dominic. I had just published
+Rosa Alchemica, a little work on the Alchemists, somewhat in the
+manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and had received many letters from
+believers in the arcane sciences, upbraiding what they called my
+timidity, for they could not believe so evident sympathy but the
+sympathy of the artist, which is half pity, for everything which has
+moved men's hearts in any age. I had discovered, early in my
+researches, that their doctrine was no merely chemical phantasy, but
+a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements and to man
+himself; and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals
+merely as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some
+divine and imperishable substance; and this enabled me to make my
+little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into
+art, and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly of
+essences.
+
+I was sitting dreaming of what I had written, in my house in one of
+the old parts of Dublin; a house my ancestors had made almost famous
+through their part in the politics of the city and their friendships
+with the famous men of their generations; and was feeling an unwonted
+happiness at having at last accomplished a long-cherished design, and
+made my rooms an expression of this favourite doctrine. The
+portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and
+tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the
+doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty
+and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the
+rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and
+precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the
+grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a
+Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I
+pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had
+mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various
+beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour
+with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where
+every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and
+of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory
+of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue
+grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human
+passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered
+about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every
+pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart,
+individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the
+triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the
+firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for
+which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my
+world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their
+own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other
+moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except
+the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this
+thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow. All
+those forms: that Madonna with her brooding purity, those rapturous
+faces singing in the morning light, those bronze divinities with
+their passionless dignity, those wild shapes rushing from despair to
+despair, belonged to a divine world wherein I had no part; and every
+experience, however profound, every perception, however exquisite,
+would bring me the bitter dream of a limitless energy I could never
+know, and even in my most perfect moment I would be two selves, the
+one watching with heavy eyes the other's moment of content. I had
+heaped about me the gold born in the crucibles of others; but the
+supreme dream of the alchemist, the transmutation of the weary heart
+into a weariless spirit, was as far from me as, I doubted not, it had
+been from him also. I turned to my last purchase, a set of alchemical
+apparatus which, the dealer in the Rue le Peletier had assured me,
+once belonged to Raymond Lully, and as I joined the _alembic_ to
+the _athanor_ and laid the _lavacrum maris_ at their side,
+I understood the alchemical doctrine, that all beings, divided from
+the great deep where spirits wander, one and yet a multitude, are
+weary; and sympathized, in the pride of my connoisseurship, with the
+consuming thirst for destruction which made the alchemist veil under
+his symbols of lions and dragons, of eagles and ravens, of dew and of
+nitre, a search for an essence which would dissolve all mortal
+things. I repeated to myself the ninth key of Basilius Valentinus, in
+which he compares the fire of the last day to the fire of the
+alchemist, and the world to the alchemist's furnace, and would have
+us know that all must be dissolved before the divine substance,
+material gold or immaterial ecstasy, awake. I had dissolved indeed
+the mortal world and lived amid immortal essences, but had obtained
+no miraculous ecstasy. As I thought of these things, I drew aside the
+curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my
+troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky
+were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour
+continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies
+into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my
+mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of
+letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate
+spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many
+dreams.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+My reverie was broken by a loud knocking at the door, and I wondered
+the more at this because I had no visitors, and had bid my servants
+do all things silently, lest they broke the dream of my inner life.
+Feeling a little curious, I resolved to go to the door myself, and,
+taking one of the silver candlesticks from the mantlepiece, began to
+descend the stairs. The servants appeared to be out, for though the
+sound poured through every corner and crevice of the house there was
+no stir in the lower rooms. I remembered that because my needs were
+so few, my part in life so little, they had begun to come and go as
+they would, often leaving me alone for hours. The emptiness and
+silence of a world from which I had driven everything but dreams
+suddenly overwhelmed me, and I shuddered as I drew the bolt. I found
+before me Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose
+wild red hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough
+clothes, made him look now, just as they used to do fifteen years
+before, something between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. He had
+recently come to Ireland, he said, and wished to see me on a matter
+of importance: indeed, the only matter of importance for him and for
+me. His voice brought up before me our student years in Paris, and
+remembering the magnetic power he had once possessed over me, a
+little fear mingled with much annoyance at this irrelevant intrusion,
+as I led the way up the wide staircase, where Swift had passed joking
+and railing, and Curran telling stories and quoting Greek, in simpler
+days, before men's minds, subtilized and complicated by the romantic
+movement in art and literature, began to tremble on the verge of some
+unimagined revelation. I felt that my hand shook, and saw that the
+light of the candle wavered and quivered more than it need have upon
+the Maenads on the old French panels, making them look like the first
+beings slowly shaping in the formless and void darkness. When the
+door had closed, and the peacock curtain, glimmering like many-coloured
+flame, fell between us and the world, I felt, in a way I
+could not understand, that some singular and unexpected thing was
+about to happen. I went over to the mantlepiece, and finding that a
+little chainless bronze censer, set, upon the outside, with pieces of
+painted china by Orazio Fontana, which I had filled with antique
+amulets, had fallen upon its side and poured out its contents, I
+began to gather the amulets into the bowl, partly to collect my
+thoughts and partly with that habitual reverence which seemed to me
+the due of things so long connected with secret hopes and fears. 'I
+see,' said Michael Robartes, 'that you are still fond of incense, and
+I can show you an incense more precious than any you have ever seen,'
+and as he spoke he took the censer out of my hand and put the amulets
+in a little heap between the _athanor_ and the _alembic_. I
+sat down, and he sat down at the side of the fire, and sat there for
+awhile looking into the fire, and holding the censer in his hand. 'I
+have come to ask you something,' he said, 'and the incense will fill
+the room, and our thoughts, with its sweet odour while we are
+talking. I got it from an old man in Syria, who said it was made from
+flowers, of one kind with the flowers that laid their heavy purple
+petals upon the hands and upon the hair and upon the feet of Christ
+in the Garden of Gethsemane, and folded Him in their heavy breath,
+until He cried against the cross and his destiny.' He shook some dust
+into the censer out of a small silk bag, and set the censer upon the
+floor and lit the dust which sent up a blue stream of smoke, that
+spread out over the ceiling, and flowed downwards again until it was
+like Milton's banyan tree. It filled me, as incense often does, with
+a faint sleepiness, so that I started when he said, 'I have come to
+ask you that question which I asked you in Paris, and which you left
+Paris rather than answer.'
+
+He had turned his eyes towards me, and I saw them glitter in the
+firelight, and through the incense, as I replied: 'You mean, will I
+become an initiate of your Order of the Alchemical Rose? I would not
+consent in Paris, when I was full of unsatisfied desire, and now that
+I have at last fashioned my life according to my desire, am I likely
+to consent?'
+
+'You have changed greatly since then,' he answered. 'I have read your
+books, and now I see you among all these images, and I understand you
+better than you do yourself, for I have been with many and many
+dreamers at the same cross-ways. You have shut away the world and
+gathered the gods about you, and if you do not throw yourself at
+their feet, you will be always full of lassitude, and of wavering
+purpose, for a man must forget he is miserable in the bustle and
+noise of the multitude in this world and in time; or seek a mystical
+union with the multitude who govern this world and time.' And then he
+murmured something I could not hear, and as though to someone I could
+not see.
+
+For a moment the room appeared to darken, as it used to do when he
+was about to perform some singular experiment, and in the darkness
+the peacocks upon the doors seemed to glow with a more intense
+colour. I cast off the illusion, which was, I believe, merely caused
+by memory, and by the twilight of incense, for I would not
+acknowledge that he could overcome my now mature intellect; and I
+said: 'Even if I grant that I need a spiritual belief and some form
+of worship, why should I go to Eleusis and not to Calvary?' He leaned
+forward and began speaking with a slightly rhythmical intonation, and
+as he spoke I had to struggle again with the shadow, as of some older
+night than the night of the sun, which began to dim the light of the
+candles and to blot out the little gleams upon the corner of
+picture-frames and on the bronze divinities, and to turn the blue of the
+incense to a heavy purple; while it left the peacocks to glimmer and
+glow as though each separate colour were a living spirit. I had
+fallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard him
+speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes with
+only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in
+imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he
+meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of
+Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of
+the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing
+away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the
+world and could not find them; and under the power of all those
+countless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies
+in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under the
+power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won
+everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and
+fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many
+think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them
+again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in
+soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay
+in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking
+humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips.'
+
+He had stood up and begun to walk to and fro, and had become in my
+waking dream a shuttle weaving an immense purple web whose folds had
+begun to fill the room. The room seemed to have become inexplicably
+silent, as though all but the web and the weaving were at an end in
+the world. 'They have come to us; they have come to us,' the voice
+began again; 'all that have ever been in your reverie, all that you
+have met with in books. There is Lear, his head still wet with the
+thunder-storm, and he laughs because you thought yourself an
+existence who are but a shadow, and him a shadow who is an eternal
+god; and there is Beatrice, with her lips half parted in a smile, as
+though all the stars were about to pass away in a sigh of love; and
+there is the mother of the God of humility who cast so great a spell
+over men that they have tried to unpeople their hearts that he might
+reign alone, but she holds in her hand the rose whose every petal is
+a god; and there, O swiftly she comes! is Aphrodite under a twilight
+falling from the wings of numberless sparrows, and about her feet are
+the grey and white doves.' In the midst of my dream I saw him hold
+out his left arm and pass his right hand over it as though he stroked
+the wings of doves. I made a violent effort which seemed almost to
+tear me in two, and said with forced determination: 'You would sweep
+me away into an indefinite world which fills me with terror; and yet
+a man is a great man just in so far as he can make his mind reflect
+everything with indifferent precision like a mirror.' I seemed to be
+perfectly master of myself, and went on, but more rapidly: 'I command
+you to leave me at once, for your ideas and phantasies are but the
+illusions that creep like maggots into civilizations when they begin
+to decline, and into minds when they begin to decay.' I had grown
+suddenly angry, and seizing the _alembic_ from the table, was
+about to rise and strike him with it, when the peacocks on the door
+behind him appeared to grow immense; and then the _alembic_ fell
+from my fingers and I was drowned in a tide of green and blue and
+bronze feathers, and as I struggled hopelessly I heard a distant
+voice saying: 'Our master Avicenna has written that all life proceeds
+out of corruption.' The glittering feathers had now covered me
+completely, and I knew that I had struggled for hundreds of years,
+and was conquered at last. I was sinking into the depth when the
+green and blue and bronze that seemed to fill the world became a sea
+of flame and swept me away, and as I was swirled along I heard a
+voice over my head cry, 'The mirror is broken in two pieces,' and
+another voice answer, 'The mirror is broken in four pieces,' and a
+more distant voice cry with an exultant cry, 'The mirror is broken
+into numberless pieces'; and then a multitude of pale hands were
+reaching towards me, and strange gentle faces bending above me, and
+half wailing and half caressing voices uttering words that were
+forgotten the moment they were spoken. I was being lifted out of the
+tide of flame, and felt my memories, my hopes, my thoughts, my will,
+everything I held to be myself, melting away; then I seemed to rise
+through numberless companies of beings who were, I understood, in
+some way more certain than thought, each wrapped in his eternal
+moment, in the perfect lifting of an arm, in a little circlet of
+rhythmical words, in dreaming with dim eyes and half-closed eyelids.
+And then I passed beyond these forms, which were so beautiful they
+had almost ceased to be, and, having endured strange moods,
+melancholy, as it seemed, with the weight of many worlds, I passed
+into that Death which is Beauty herself, and into that Loneliness
+which all the multitudes desire without ceasing. All things that had
+ever lived seemed to come and dwell in my heart, and I in theirs; and
+I had never again known mortality or tears, had I not suddenly fallen
+from the certainty of vision into the uncertainty of dream, and
+become a drop of molten gold falling with immense rapidity, through a
+night elaborate with stars, and all about me a melancholy exultant
+wailing. I fell and fell and fell, and then the wailing was but the
+wailing of the wind in the chimney, and I awoke to find myself
+leaning upon the table and supporting my head with my hands. I saw
+the _alembic_ swaying from side to side in the distant corner it
+had rolled to, and Michael Robartes watching me and waiting. 'I will
+go wherever you will,' I said, 'and do whatever you bid me, for I
+have been with eternal things.' 'I knew,' he replied, 'you must need
+answer as you have answered, when I heard the storm begin. You must
+come to a great distance, for we were commanded to build our temple
+between the pure multitude by the waves and the impure multitude of
+men.'
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+I did not speak as we drove through the deserted streets, for my mind
+was curiously empty of familiar thoughts and experiences; it seemed
+to have been plucked out of the definite world and cast naked upon a
+shoreless sea. There were moments when the vision appeared on the
+point of returning, and I would half-remember, with an ecstasy of joy
+or sorrow, crimes and heroisms, fortunes and misfortunes; or begin to
+contemplate, with a sudden leaping of the heart, hopes and terrors,
+desires and ambitions, alien to my orderly and careful life; and then
+I would awake shuddering at the thought that some great imponderable
+being had swept through my mind. It was indeed days before this
+feeling passed perfectly away, and even now, when I have sought
+refuge in the only definite faith, I feel a great tolerance for those
+people with incoherent personalities, who gather in the chapels and
+meeting-places of certain obscure sects, because I also have felt
+fixed habits and principles dissolving before a power, which was
+_hysterica passio_ or sheer madness, if you will, but was so
+powerful in its melancholy exultation that I tremble lest it wake
+again and drive me from my new-found peace.
+
+When we came in the grey light to the great half-empty terminus, it
+seemed to me I was so changed that I was no more, as man is, a moment
+shuddering at eternity, but eternity weeping and laughing over a
+moment; and when we had started and Michael Robartes had fallen
+asleep, as he soon did, his sleeping face, in which there was no sign
+of all that had so shaken me and that now kept me wakeful, was to my
+excited mind more like a mask than a face. The fancy possessed me
+that the man behind it had dissolved away like salt in water, and
+that it laughed and sighed, appealed and denounced at the bidding of
+beings greater or less than man. 'This is not Michael Robartes at
+all: Michael Robartes is dead; dead for ten, for twenty years
+perhaps,' I kept repeating to myself. I fell at last into a feverish
+sleep, waking up from time to time when we rushed past some little
+town, its slated roofs shining with wet, or still lake gleaming in
+the cold morning light. I had been too pre-occupied to ask where we
+were going, or to notice what tickets Michael Robartes had taken, but
+I knew now from the direction of the sun that we were going westward;
+and presently I knew also, by the way in which the trees had grown
+into the semblance of tattered beggars flying with bent heads towards
+the east, that we were approaching the western coast. Then
+immediately I saw the sea between the low hills upon the left, its
+dull grey broken into white patches and lines.
+
+When we left the train we had still, I found, some way to go, and set
+out, buttoning our coats about us, for the wind was bitter and
+violent. Michael Robartes was silent, seeming anxious to leave me to
+my thoughts; and as we walked between the sea and the rocky side of a
+great promontory, I realized with a new perfection what a shock had
+been given to all my habits of thought and of feelings, if indeed
+some mysterious change had not taken place in the substance of my
+mind, for the grey waves, plumed with scudding foam, had grown part
+of a teeming, fantastic inner life; and when Michael Robartes pointed
+to a square ancient-looking house, with a much smaller and newer
+building under its lee, set out on the very end of a dilapidated and
+almost deserted pier, and said it was the Temple of the Alchemical
+Rose, I was possessed with the phantasy that the sea, which kept
+covering it with showers of white foam, was claiming it as part of
+some indefinite and passionate life, which had begun to war upon our
+orderly and careful days, and was about to plunge the world into a
+night as obscure as that which followed the downfall of the classical
+world. One part of my mind mocked this phantastic terror, but the
+other, the part that still lay half plunged in vision, listened to
+the clash of unknown armies, and shuddered at unimaginable
+fanaticisms, that hung in those grey leaping waves.
+
+We had gone but a few paces along the pier when we came upon an old
+man, who was evidently a watchman, for he sat in an overset barrel,
+close to a place where masons had been lately working upon a break in
+the pier, and had in front of him a fire such as one sees slung under
+tinkers' carts. I saw that he was also a voteen, as the peasants say,
+for there was a rosary hanging from a nail on the rim of the barrel,
+and I saw I shuddered, and I did not know why I shuddered. We had
+passed him a few yards when I heard him cry in Gaelic, 'Idolaters,
+idolaters, go down to Hell with your witches and your devils; go down
+to Hell that the herrings may come again into the bay'; and for some
+moments I could hear him half screaming and half muttering behind us.
+'Are you not afraid,' I said, 'that these wild fishing people may do
+some desperate thing against you?'
+
+'I and mine,' he answered, 'are long past human hurt or help, being
+incorporate with immortal spirits, and when we die it shall be the
+consummation of the supreme work. A time will come for these people
+also, and they will sacrifice a mullet to Artemis, or some other fish
+to some new divinity, unless indeed their own divinities, the Dagda,
+with his overflowing cauldron, Lug, with his spear dipped in
+poppy-juice lest it rush forth hot for battle. Aengus, with the three
+birds on his shoulder, Bodb and his red swineherd, and all the heroic
+children of Dana, set up once more their temples of grey stone. Their
+reign has never ceased, but only waned in power a little, for the Sidhe
+still pass in every wind, and dance and play at hurley, and fight their
+sudden battles in every hollow and on every hill; but they cannot build
+their temples again till there have been martyrdoms and victories, and
+perhaps even that long-foretold battle in the Valley of the Black Pig.'
+
+Keeping close to the wall that went about the pier on the seaward
+side, to escape the driving foam and the wind, which threatened every
+moment to lift us off our feet, we made our way in silence to the
+door of the square building. Michael Robartes opened it with a key,
+on which I saw the rust of many salt winds, and led me along a bare
+passage and up an uncarpeted stair to a little room surrounded with
+bookshelves. A meal would be brought, but only of fruit, for I must
+submit to a tempered fast before the ceremony, he explained, and with
+it a book on the doctrine and method of the Order, over which I was
+to spend what remained of the winter daylight. He then left me,
+promising to return an hour before the ceremony. I began searching
+among the bookshelves, and found one of the most exhaustive
+alchemical libraries I have ever seen. There were the works of
+Morienus, who hid his immortal body under a shirt of hair-cloth; of
+Avicenna, who was a drunkard and yet controlled numberless legions of
+spirits; of Alfarabi, who put so many spirits into his lute that he
+could make men laugh, or weep, or fall in deadly trance as he would;
+of Lully, who transformed himself into the likeness of a red cock; of
+Flamel, who with his wife Parnella achieved the elixir many hundreds
+of years ago, and is fabled to live still in Arabia among the
+Dervishes; and of many of less fame. There were very few mystics but
+alchemical mystics, and because, I had little doubt, of the devotion
+to one god of the greater number and of the limited sense of beauty,
+which Robartes would hold an inevitable consequence; but I did notice
+a complete set of facsimiles of the prophetical writings of William
+Blake, and probably because of the multitudes that thronged his
+illumination and were 'like the gay fishes on the wave when the moon
+sucks up the dew.' I noted also many poets and prose writers of every
+age, but only those who were a little weary of life, as indeed the
+greatest have been everywhere, and who cast their imagination to us,
+as a something they needed no longer now that they were going up in
+their fiery chariots.
+
+Presently I heard a tap at the door, and a woman came in and laid a
+little fruit upon the table. I judged that she had once been
+handsome, but her cheeks were hollowed by what I would have held, had
+I seen her anywhere else, an excitement of the flesh and a thirst for
+pleasure, instead of which it doubtless was an excitement of the
+imagination and a thirst for beauty. I asked her some question
+concerning the ceremony, but getting no answer except a shake of the
+head, saw that I must await initiation in silence. When I had eaten,
+she came again, and having laid a curiously wrought bronze box on the
+table, lighted the candles, and took away the plates and the
+remnants. So soon as I was alone, I turned to the box, and found that
+the peacocks of Hera spread out their tails over the sides and lid,
+against a background, on which were wrought great stars, as though to
+affirm that the heavens were a part of their glory. In the box was a
+book bound in vellum, and having upon the vellum and in very delicate
+colours, and in gold, the alchemical rose with many spears thrusting
+against it, but in vain, as was shown by the shattered points of
+those nearest to the petals. The book was written upon vellum, and in
+beautiful clear letters, interspersed with symbolical pictures and
+illuminations, after the manner of the _Splendor Solis_.
+
+The first chapter described how six students, of Celtic descent, gave
+themselves separately to the study of alchemy, and solved, one the
+mystery of the Pelican, another the mystery of the green Dragon,
+another the mystery of the Eagle, another that of Salt and Mercury.
+What seemed a succession of accidents, but was, the book declared,
+the contrivance of preternatural powers, brought them together in the
+garden of an inn in the South of France, and while they talked
+together the thought came to them that alchemy was the gradual
+distillation of the contents of the soul, until they were ready to
+put off the mortal and put on the immortal. An owl passed, rustling
+among the vine-leaves overhead, and then an old woman came, leaning
+upon a stick, and, sitting close to them, took up the thought where
+they had dropped it. Having expounded the whole principle of
+spiritual alchemy, and bid them found the Order of the Alchemical
+Rose, she passed from among them, and when they would have followed
+she was nowhere to be seen. They formed themselves into an Order,
+holding their goods and making their researches in common, and, as
+they became perfect in the alchemical doctrine, apparitions came and
+went among them, and taught them more and more marvellous mysteries.
+The book then went on to expound so much of these as the neophyte was
+permitted to know, dealing at the outset and at considerable length
+with the independent reality of our thoughts, which was, it declared,
+the doctrine from which all true doctrines rose. If you imagine, it
+said, the semblance of a living being, it is at once possessed by a
+wandering soul, and goes hither and thither working good or evil,
+until the moment of its death has come; and gave many examples,
+received, it said, from many gods. Eros had taught them how to
+fashion forms in which a divine soul could dwell, and whisper what
+they would into sleeping minds; and Ate, forms from which demonic
+beings could pour madness, or unquiet dreams, into sleeping blood;
+and Hermes, that if you powerfully imagined a hound at your bedside
+it would keep watch there until you woke, and drive away all but the
+mightiest demons, but that if your imagination was weakly, the hound
+would be weakly also, and the demons prevail, and the hound soon die;
+and Aphrodite, that if you made, by a strong imagining, a dove
+crowned with silver and had it flutter over your head, its soft
+cooing would make sweet dreams of immortal love gather and brood over
+mortal sleep; and all divinities alike had revealed with many
+warnings and lamentations that all minds are continually giving birth
+to such beings, and sending them forth to work health or disease, joy
+or madness. If you would give forms to the evil powers, it went on,
+you were to make them ugly, thrusting out a lip, with the thirsts of
+life, or breaking the proportions of a body with the burdens of life;
+but the divine powers would only appear in beautiful shapes, which
+are but, as it were, shapes trembling out of existence, folding up
+into a timeless ecstasy, drifting with half-shut eyes, into a sleepy
+stillness. The bodiless souls who descended into these forms were
+what men called the moods; and worked all great changes in the world;
+for just as the magician or the artist could call them when he would,
+so they could call out of the mind of the magician or the artist, or
+if they were demons, out of the mind of the mad or the ignoble, what
+shape they would, and through its voice and its gestures pour
+themselves out upon the world. In this way all great events were
+accomplished; a mood, a divinity, or a demon, first descending like a
+faint sigh into men's minds and then changing their thoughts and
+their actions until hair that was yellow had grown black, or hair
+that was black had grown yellow, and empires moved their border, as
+though they were but drifts of leaves. The rest of the book contained
+symbols of form, and sound, and colour, and their attribution to
+divinities and demons, so that the initiate might fashion a shape for
+any divinity or any demon, and be as powerful as Avicenna among those
+who live under the roots of tears and of laughter.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+A couple of hours after Sunset Michael Robartes returned and told me
+that I would have to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique dance,
+because before my initiation could be perfected I had to join three
+times in a magical dance, for rhythm was the wheel of Eternity, on
+which alone the transient and accidental could be broken, and the
+spirit set free. I found that the steps, which were simple enough,
+resembled certain antique Greek dances, and having been a good dancer
+in my youth and the master of many curious Gaelic steps, I soon had
+them in my memory. He then robed me and himself in a costume which
+suggested by its shape both Greece and Egypt, but by its crimson
+colour a more passionate life than theirs; and having put into my
+hands a little chainless censer of bronze, wrought into the likeness
+of a rose, by some modern craftsman, he told me to open a small door
+opposite to the door by which I had entered. I put my hand to the
+handle, but the moment I did so the fumes of the incense, helped
+perhaps by his mysterious glamour, made me fall again into a dream,
+in which I seemed to be a mask, lying on the counter of a little
+Eastern shop. Many persons, with eyes so bright and still that I knew
+them for more than human, came in and tried me on their faces, but at
+last flung me into a corner with a little laughter; but all this
+passed in a moment, for when I awoke my hand was still upon the
+handle. I opened the door, and found myself in a marvellous passage,
+along whose sides were many divinities wrought in a mosaic, not less
+beautiful than the mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less
+severe beauty; the predominant colour of each divinity, which was
+surely a symbolic colour, being repeated in the lamps that hung from
+the ceiling, a curiously-scented lamp before every divinity. I passed
+on, marvelling exceedingly how these enthusiasts could have created
+all this beauty in so remote a place, and half persuaded to believe
+in a material alchemy, by the sight of so much hidden wealth; the
+censer filling the air, as I passed, with smoke of ever-changing
+colour.
+
+I stopped before a door, on whose bronze panels were wrought great
+waves in whose shadow were faint suggestions of terrible faces. Those
+beyond it seemed to have heard our steps, for a voice cried: 'Is the
+work of the Incorruptible Fire at an end?' and immediately Michael
+Robartes answered: 'The perfect gold has come from the
+_athanor_.' The door swung open, and we were in a great circular
+room, and among men and women who were dancing slowly in crimson
+robes. Upon the ceiling was an immense rose wrought in mosaic; and
+about the walls, also in mosaic, was a battle of gods and angels, the
+gods glimmering like rubies and sapphires, and the angels of the one
+greyness, because, as Michael Robartes whispered, they had renounced
+their divinity, and turned from the unfolding of their separate
+hearts, out of love for a God of humility and sorrow. Pillars
+supported the roof and made a kind of circular cloister, each pillar
+being a column of confused shapes, divinities, it seemed, of the
+wind, who rose as in a whirling dance of more than human vehemence,
+and playing upon pipes and cymbals; and from among these shapes were
+thrust out hands, and in these hands were censers. I was bid place my
+censer also in a hand and take my place and dance, and as I turned
+from the pillars towards the dancers, I saw that the floor was of a
+green stone, and that a pale Christ on a pale cross was wrought in
+the midst. I asked Robartes the meaning of this, and was told that
+they desired 'To trouble His unity with their multitudinous feet.'
+The dance wound in and out, tracing upon the floor the shapes of
+petals that copied the petals in the rose overhead, and to the sound
+of hidden instruments which were perhaps of an antique pattern, for I
+have never heard the like; and every moment the dance was more
+passionate, until all the winds of the world seemed to have awakened
+under our feet. After a little I had grown weary, and stood under a
+pillar watching the coming and going of those flame-like figures;
+until gradually I sank into a half-dream, from which I was awakened
+by seeing the petals of the great rose, which had no longer the look
+of mosaic, falling slowly through the incense-heavy air, and, as
+they fell, shaping into the likeness of living beings of an
+extraordinary beauty. Still faint and cloud-like, they began to
+dance, and as they danced took a more and more definite shape, so
+that I was able to distinguish beautiful Grecian faces and august
+Egyptian faces, and now and again to name a divinity by the staff in
+his hand or by a bird fluttering over his head; and soon every mortal
+foot danced by the white foot of an immortal; and in the troubled
+eyes that looked into untroubled shadowy eyes, I saw the brightness
+of uttermost desire as though they had found at length, after
+unreckonable wandering, the lost love of their youth. Sometimes, but
+only for a moment, I saw a faint solitary figure with a Rosa veiled
+face, and carrying a faint torch, flit among the dancers, but like a
+dream within a dream, like a shadow of a shadow, and I knew by an
+understanding born from a deeper fountain than thought, that it was
+Eros himself, and that his face was veiled because no man or woman
+from the beginning of the world has ever known what love is, or
+looked into his eyes, for Eros alone of divinities is altogether a
+spirit, and hides in passions not of his essence if he would commune
+with a mortal heart. So that if a man love nobly he knows love
+through infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending sympathy; and if
+ignobly through vehement jealousy, sudden hatred, and unappeasable
+desire; but unveiled love he never knows. While I thought these
+things, a voice cried to me from the crimson figures: 'Into the
+dance! there is none that can be spared out of the dance; into the
+dance! into the dance! that the gods may make them bodies out of the
+substance of our hearts'; and before I could answer, a mysterious
+wave of passion, that seemed like the soul of the dance moving within
+our souls, Alchemica took hold of me, and I was swept, neither
+consenting nor refusing, into the midst. I was dancing with an immortal
+august woman, who had black lilies in her hair, and her dreamy gesture
+seemed laden with a wisdom more profound than the darkness that is
+between star and star, and with a love like the love that breathed upon
+the waters; and as we danced on and on, the incense drifted over us
+and round us, covering us away as in the heart of the world, and ages
+seemed to pass, and tempests to awake and perish in the folds of our
+robes and in her heavy hair.
+
+Suddenly I remembered that her eyelids had never quivered, and that
+her lilies had not dropped a black petal, or shaken from their
+places, and understood with a great horror that I danced with one who
+was more or less than human, and who was drinking up my soul as an ox
+drinks up a wayside pool; and I fell, and darkness passed over me.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+I awoke suddenly as though something had awakened me, and saw that I
+was lying on a roughly painted floor, and that on the ceiling, which
+was at no great distance, was a roughly painted rose, and about me on
+the walls half-finished paintings. The pillars and the censers had
+gone; and near me a score of sleepers lay wrapped in disordered
+robes, their upturned faces looking to my imagination like hollow
+masks; and a chill dawn was shining down upon them from a long window
+I had not noticed before; and outside the sea roared. I saw Michael
+Robartes lying at a little distance and beside him an overset bowl of
+wrought bronze which looked as though it had once held incense. As I
+sat thus, I heard a sudden tumult of angry men and women's voices mix
+with the roaring of the sea; and leaping to my feet, I went quickly
+to Michael Robartes, and tried to shake him out of his sleep. I then
+seized him by the shoulder and tried to lift him, but he fell
+backwards, and sighed faintly; and the voices became louder and
+angrier; and there was a sound of heavy blows upon the door, which
+opened on to the pier. Suddenly I heard a sound of rending wood, and
+I knew it had begun to give, and I ran to the door of the room. I
+pushed it open and came out upon a passage whose bare boards
+clattered under my feet, and found in the passage another door which
+led into an empty kitchen; and as I passed through the door I heard
+two crashes in quick succession, and knew by the sudden noise of feet
+and the shouts that the door which opened on to the pier had fallen
+inwards. I ran from the kitchen and out into a small yard, and from
+this down some steps which descended the seaward and sloping side of
+the pier, and from the steps clambered along the water's edge, with
+the angry voices ringing in my ears. This part of the pier had been
+but lately refaced with blocks of granite, so that it was almost
+clear of seaweed; but when I came to the old part, I found it so
+slippery with green weed that I had to climb up on to the roadway. I
+looked towards the Temple of the Alchemical Rose, where the fishermen
+and the women were still shouting, but somewhat more faintly, and saw
+that there was no one about the door or upon the pier; but as I
+looked, a little crowd hurried out of the door and began gathering
+large stones from where they were heaped up in readiness for the next
+time a storm shattered the pier, when they would be laid under blocks
+of granite. While I stood watching the crowd, an old man, who was, I
+think, the voteen, pointed to me, and screamed out something, and the
+crowd whitened, for all the faces had turned towards me. I ran, and
+it was well for me that pullers of the oar are poorer men with their
+feet than with their arms and their bodies; and yet while I ran I
+scarcely heard the following feet or the angry voices, for many
+voices of exultation and lamentation, which were forgotten as a dream
+is forgotten the moment they were heard, seemed to be ringing in the
+air over my head.
+
+There are moments even now when I seem to hear those voices of
+exultation and lamentation, and when the indefinite world, which has
+but half lost its mastery over my heart and my intellect, seems about
+to claim a perfect mastery; but I carry the rosary about my neck, and
+when I hear, or seem to hear them, I press it to my heart and say:
+'He whose name is Legion is at our doors deceiving our intellects
+with subtlety and flattering our hearts with beauty, and we have no
+trust but in Thee'; and then the war that rages within me at other
+times is still, and I am at peace.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Rosa Alchemica, by W. B. Yeats
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