Things near & far
chapter here, a sentence there; but let him avoid all deep and
systematic study of Crollius and of Vaughan, the brother of the
Silurist, and of all their tribe. For if you go too far you will be
disenchanted. Open Robert Fludd, otherwise Robertus de Fluctibus,
and find the sentence: _Transmutemini, transmutemini de lapidibus
mortuis in lapides philosophicos vivos_--Be ye changed, be ye changed
from dead stones into living and life-giving stones. This is a
great word indeed, exalted and exultant; but beware of mastering
Fludd’s system--if confusion can be called a system--of muddled
alchemy, physical science, metaphysics and mysticism. Get Knorr von
Rosenroth’s “Kabbala Denudata,” vellum, in quarto, and find out a
little about the Sephiroth: about Kether, the Crown; Tiphereth,
Beauty; Gedulah, Mercy; Geburah, Justice or Severity. Really, you
will discover very curious things, and the more easily, if instead
of Knorr von Rosenroth, you choose A. E. Waite’s “Doctrine and
Literature of the Kabalah.” It is odd, for example, to discover that
the side of Mercy is the masculine side, that Justice or Severity
is feminine; and that all will go amiss till these two are united
in Benignity. Again, it is interesting from another point of view
to discover that three of the Sephiroth are called the Kingdom, the
Victory and the Glory. Is there any connection between these and the
ancient liturgical response to the Pater Noster: “For Thine is the
Kingdom, the Power and the Glory”? And then that matter of Lilith and
Samael and the Shells or Cortices, the husks of spirits from a ruined
world that brought about the Fall of Man; the strange mystery of
that place “which is called Zion and Jerusalem”--duly here comparing
Böhme on the Recovery of Paradise when innocent man and maid are
joined in love--all this is a wonderful and fascinating region of
thought. And beautiful indeed is the saying of one of the Fathers
of Kabbalism: that when the lost Letters of Tetragrammaton, the
Divine Name, are found there shall be mercy on every side. And here,
perhaps, but not certainly, light may be thrown on certain obscure
matters of Freemasonry. Dip then, and read and wander in the Kabbala;
but do not become a Kabbalist. For if you do, you will end by
transliterating your name and the names of your friends into Hebrew
letters and finding out all sorts of marvellous things, till at last
you back Winners--which turn out to be Losers--on purely Kabbalistic
principles.
And here, by the way, I may remark that I have long meditated writing
an article called “The Aryan Kabbala,” keeping the requirements of
occult magazines strictly in view. It would make a pretty article. I
should begin by a brief note on the Hebrew Kabbala, explaining how
the Sephiroth tell in a kind of magic shorthand the whole history and
mystery of man and all the worlds from their source to their end.
The Tree of Life--as the Sephiroth arranged in a certain scheme are
called--is, in fact, I would point out, at once an account of how
all things came into being and a map and an analysis of all things
as they now are. As an occult friend once said to me by my hearth in
Gray’s Inn: “The Tree of Life can be applied to that poker.” The Tree
of Life, then, is a key to the secret generation and being of all
souls and all heavens; it will also analyse for you the little flower
growing in a cranny of the wall.
Well; this made clear, I would go on to say: “But what if there be a
Kabbala and a Tree of Life of the Aryans as well as of the Semites?
What if it tells all the hidden secrets of our beginning and our
journey and our ending? What if its august symbols are known to all
of us, in every-day and common use amongst us, remaining all the
while as undiscerned as the most sacred and mystic hieroglyphics?
What if the office boy and the grocer handle every day the signs
which tell The Secret of Secrets?”
And then, after all due amplifications and ponderous circumnavigations
it would all come out. The Aryan Kabbala is, in fact, the Decad; the
ten first numbers. They embody an age-old tradition dating from the
time when the ancestors of the Greek and the Welshman, the Persian
and the Teuton were all one people. They contained the secret mystery
religion of this primitive race, they sank by degrees from their
first august significance to become instruments of common use and
commercial convenience, just as vestments became clothes. The proof
is easy enough. Take the first number of the Decad: one in English,
ἕν (in the neuter) in Greek, unus in Latin, un (pronounced “een”) in
Welsh, ein in German. And then compare another series of words in
these languages: wine, οἶνος, vinum, gwin, wein. Then: two, δύο, duo,
dau, zwei; and compare with: water, ὕδωρ, udus, wy (and dwr) wasser.
I drop the other terms, or Sephiroth, of the Decad--in Mrs. Boffin’s
presence--and come to the last two numerals: nine, ἐννέα, novem, naw,
neun, compared with new, νέος, novus, newydd, neu. Then finally ten,
δέκα, decem, deg, zehn: compare with deck (bedeck) δόξα, decor, teg,
schön.
The conclusion, I hope, is evident: we (and all things) proceed from
Unity, which is wine, decline to Duality (or a weakened, fallen
nature), which is water. Then, after passing through many changes,
adventures, transformations, transmutations--undescribed for the
reason given--we are renovated, made New--“I will make all things
new”--in the last number but one of the Decad, and, in the final
term, which is Ten, are reunified in Beauty and Glory.
There! It seems to me wonderfully plausible, and I really think I
should have written the article and sent it to some suitable quarter.
It is all nonsense, of course, but ... does that matter?
* * * * *
Well, all that business of the Aryan Kabbala is an absurd digression,
but it illustrates well enough the frame of mind likely to be
induced by the study of a good many of the books in the Catherine
Street garret. Take the interlude and add to it the rich odours of
the frowsy, neglected room stuffed with confusions of old books and
pamphlets, add to it the old, delightful, picturesque London that
was undisturbed in those days. Holywell Street and Wych Street were
all in their glory in 1885, a glory compounded of sixteenth-century
gables, bawdy books and matters congruous therewith, parchment
Elzevirs, dark courts and archways, hidden taverns, and ancient
slumminess. There were no great, blatant Australia Houses or Colonial
Edifices of any kind about the Strand in those times: instead, we
had the beauty and the green lawns of Clement’s Inn and the solemn
square of New Inn, and Clare Market communicating tortuously
with Great Queen Street by the most evil-smelling by-ways that I
have ever experienced--and something of jollity in the air that
seems to me to have vanished utterly. Take all these elements and
things; and you have me as I worked high up in the vanished house in
Catherine Street, preparing the Catalogue that was to be called: “The
Literature of Occultism and Archæology”--when the gas lamps in the
Strand shone with a brighter light than the arc lamps of to-day.
_Chapter II_
Such was the scene of my life in the summer of the year 1885. By my
odd jobs; a little “reading,” a little compiling and a good deal of
catalogue making, I just managed to live, earning perhaps as much
as a pound a week, one week with another. I do not remember exactly
the precise terms on which I worked, but I know that I had a good
deal of time on my hands. Part of this time I spent in trying to
learn shorthand. I can’t think why, for at this period of my life I
had no newspaper or secretarial employment in view. I am inclined to
think that trying to learn shorthand had become a mechanical habit
with me. Then, I resumed my old mooning walks out of London, going
westward usually or always, sometimes Acton way and sometimes through
Brentford--that curious, dirty, and most fascinating place--to
Osterley Park, where in those days you could walk and wander anywhere
you pleased, so long, I suppose, as you did not glue your nose to the
windows of that mansion. And then I fell to writing again.
Now here is a mystery. It is held, and very properly, that people
should keep their mouths shut unless they have something to say;
similarly that a man has no business to write unless he has something
in his heart which, he feels, cries out to be expressed. But here
was I not knowing in the least what I wanted to say, but resolved,
even at the cost of much pain and misery, to say it; that is, to
write it. There are, of course, people who are said to talk for
talking’s sake; and so, I suppose, I was suffering from the analogous
vice of writing for writing’s sake, otherwise known as the _cacoethes
scribendi_. I fancy a volume of Hazlitt had fallen into my hands;
it had strayed, very likely, into the Catherine Street library, and
at first I began to try to write essays, more or less in imitation
of this inimitable author. I need scarcely say that I made sad work
of it; and happily, no scrap of manuscript survives. And then I
fell on Rabelais and on Balzac’s “Contes Drolatiques,” and wondered
and admired hugely and studied both deeply in my long night watches
under the gas-jet in the little room in Clarendon Road. I would dine
sumptuously on half a loaf of dry bread, green tea made as I liked
it, without milk or sugar, with plenty of tobacco by way of dessert;
and then to my books and to my wonder. It was not a bad life on the
whole, sweetened as it was by the enthusiasm for letters; but the
loneliness was an oppression and sometimes a horror. Weeks passed
without any human converse beyond brief business dialogue; still,
since then I have known far worse days. Poverty and loneliness;
these are doubtless evils hard to bear; but they are light indeed;
nay, they have their dignity, and the gas-jet of Clarendon Road is
not altogether without a halo--when I weigh all this and set it in
the balances beside the intolerable degradation of the service of
Carmelite House. I often thought in those latter and most hideous
days that my case was somewhat that of a man who had been captured
by a malignant tribe of anthropoid apes or Yahoos and was by them
tormented and unspeakably degraded; and there was this additional
shame and horror: that my degradation and misery were witnessed by
rational creatures like myself. I remember how in my last year in
the employment of “The Evening News,” I was out on some idiotic
errand which led me up Wellington Street, past York Street, where
George Redway, the publisher of “The Anatomy of Tobacco” and of “The
Literature of Occultism and Archæology,” had his place of business.
In a line, pretty well, with York Street I could see that new street
which runs over the site of old Vizetelly’s office where the famous
fusty garret was. The streets--Wellington Street, Bow Street, York
Street--are not much changed in the last forty years, and the gap
formed by the new street made me see myself a cloudy young man
of twenty-two up in the air labouring amongst the dusty ancient
books; all this and all the recollections of the days of dry bread,
tea, tobacco and the hopeless but not dishonourable endeavour of
literature; all this contrasted with the shameful circumstances of my
life as a weary old man of fifty-eight, a man who had known struggles
and sorrows and losses; all this, I say, overwhelmed me suddenly. It
was almost more than I could endure.
But we go too fast. We are still in the days of the cloudy young man,
who is clear that fine literature is an infinitely noble thing, but
is not clear upon any other subject whatever. I had my queer books
in the mornings and my long lonely walks in the afternoons, and my