Chapter III: Subtle. Your lapis philosophicus?

_Face._ ’Tis a stone,
And not a stone; a spirit, a soul, and a body;
Which if you do dissolve, it is dissolved;
If you coagulate, it is coagulated;
If you make it to fly, it flieth.

THE ALCHEMIST.

ATHERTON. We are to call on Willoughby to-night, I believe, to conduct us to Jacob Behmen—or Boehme, more correctly.

WILLOUGHBY. I shall scarcely bring you so far this evening. I have to trouble you with some preliminary paragraphs on the theosophic mysticism which arose with the Reformation, some remarks on the theurgic superstitions of that period, and a word or two about Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus. A very formidable preamble,—yet necessary, I assure you.

And herewith, Willoughby, after solacing himself with a goodly bunch of grapes, began to read his essay.

ON THE THEOSOPHY OF JACOB BEHMEN.

§ 1. _Mysticism and Science._

I have to trace the advance of mysticism into a new world. Prior to
the Reformation the mystic sought escape in God from all that was
not God. After that epoch he is found seeking at the hands of his
Maker a supernatural acquaintance with all that He has made. Once
his highest knowledge was that surpassing ignorance which swoons in
the glory of the Infinite. Now he claims a familiarity passing that
of common mortals with the mysteries of sea and land, of stars and
elements. Escaping that monastic dualism which abandoned the world
to Satan, mysticism will now dispute the empire of the prince of
this world. Inspired from above, and haply not unaided by angelic
ministries, the master of the hidden wisdom will devoutly elicit the
benign potencies of the universe, and repel the malevolent. No
longer a mere contemplatist—gazing up at the heights of the divine
nature, or down into the depth of the human—the mystic of the new
age will sweep, with all-piercing vision, the whole horizon of
things visible. The theosophist covets holiness still, but knowledge
scarcely less. Virtue (as aforetime) may be regarded by such mystics
too much as the means to an end. But the end is no longer the same.
With the theopathetic mysticism the exercise of the Christian graces
and the discipline of fiery spiritual purgations were the road to a
superhuman elevation—a vision and repose anticipating heaven. With
the theosophic, Faith and Charity and Hope were the conditions of
the higher knowledge. For never to the proud, the greedy, the
impure, would heaven vouchsafe the keys of mystery and hazardous
prerogative in the unseen world. To the contemplative mystic the
three heavenly sisters brought a cloud of glory; for the theosophist
they unclasped nature’s ‘infinite book of secrecy;’ in the hand of
the theurgist they placed an enchanter’s wand.

The sphere of mysticism was not thus extended by any expansive force
of its own. The spirit of a new and healthier age had ventured to
depreciate the morbid seclusion of the cloister. Men began to feel
that it was at once more manly and more divine to enquire and to
know than to gaze and dream. After the servitude of the schools and
the collapse of the cloister, the ambition of the intellect would
acknowledge no limit, would accept of no repose. The highest
aspirations of religion and the most daring enterprise of science
were alike mystical. They coalesced in theosophy. Changes such as
these were wrought by a power from without. Mysticism was awakened
from its feverish dream by the spirit of the time—as Milton’s Eve by
Adam from her troubled morning sleep—and invited to go forth and see
‘nature paint her colours.’

As the revival of letters spread over Europe the taste for
antiquity, and natural science began to claim its share in the
freedom won for theology, the pretensions of the Cabbala, of Hermes,
of the Neo-Platonist theurgy, became identified with the cause of
progress.

That ancient doctrine, familiar to the school of Plotinus, according
to which the world was a huge animal—a living organism united in all
its parts by secret sympathies,—received some fresh development in
the fancy of every adept. The student of white magic believed, with
Iamblichus, in the divine power inherent in certain words of
invocation, whereby the aspirant might hold intercourse with powers
of the upper realm. With the modern, as with the ancient
Neo-Platonists, religion bore an indispensable part in all such
attempts. Proclus required of the theurgist an ascetic purity.
Campanella demands a _fides intrinseca_,—that devout simplicity of
heart which should qualify the candidate at once to commune with
holy spirits and to baffle the delusive arts of the malign.[209]

But the theosophists of Germany were not, like the Alexandrians,
slavish worshippers of the past. They did not resort to theurgy in
order to prop a falling faith. They did not wield that instrument to
prolong, by the spasmodic action of superstitious practice, the life
of an expiring philosophy. Those formulæ of incantation, those
‘symbola’ and ‘synthemata,’ which were everything with Iamblichus,
were with many of them only a bye-work, and by others utterly
abjured. They believed devoutly in the genuineness of the Cabbala.
They were persuaded that beneath all the floods of change this oral
tradition had perpetuated its life unharmed from the days of Moses
downward,—even as Jewish fable taught them that the cedars alone, of
all trees, had continued to spread the strength of their
invulnerable arms below the waters of the deluge. They rejoiced in
the hidden lore of that book as in a treasure rich with the germs of
all philosophy. They maintained that from its marvellous leaves man
might learn the angelic heraldry of the skies, the mysteries of the
divine nature, the means of converse with the potentates of
heaven.[210] But such reverence, so far from oppressing, seemed
rather to enfranchise and excite their imagination. In the tradition
before which they bowed, the majesty of age and the charm of youth
had met together. Hierocles brought to them Pythagoras out of an
immemorial past; and there was no novelty more welcome in that
restless wonder-loving present. Thus the theosophists could oppose
age to age, and reverently impugn the venerable. Antiquity, in the
name of Aristotle, so long absolute, had imposed a shameful bondage.
Antiquity, in the name of Plato, newly disinterred, imparted a
glorious privilege. The chains of the past were being filed away by
instruments which the past had furnished. Ancient prescription
became itself the plea for change when one half of its demands was
repudiated in honour of the other.

This theosophy was a strange mixture of the Hellenic, the Oriental,
and the Christian styles of thought. I shall assume as its emblem
the church of St. John, at Rhodes, which, full of statues of saints
and tombs of knights, broken, or rounded into mounds of sullied snow
by the hand of time, is surmounted by a crescent, and echoes to the
voice of the muezzin, while sheltering beneath its porch the altar
of a Grecian God. But our incongruous theosophic structure, ever
open and ever changing, enlarged its precincts continually. A
succession of eccentric votaries enriched it ceaselessly with quaint
devices, fresh flowers of fancy, new characters in mystical mosaic,
and intricate arabesques of impenetrable significance.

Plotinus, indifferent to the material universe, had been content to
inherit and transmit the doctrine of the world’s vitality. That
notion now became the nucleus of a complex system of sympathies and
antipathies. It suggested remedies for every disease, whether of
mind or body. It prompted a thousand fantastic appliances and
symbols. But at the same time it rendered the enquirer more keenly
observant of natural phenomena. Extolling Trismegistus to the skies,
and flinging his Galen into the fire, Paracelsus declared the world
his book.[211] The leaves of that volume were continents and
seas—provinces, its paragraphs—the plants, the stones, the living
things of every clime, its illuminated letters.

In the dawn of science hovered a meteor, which at once lured onward
and led astray the seekers after truth,—it was the hope of special
illumination. They hastened to generalize on a medley of crude
fancies and of partial facts. For generalization was with them a
sudden impulse, not a slow result. It was an exalted act prompted by
a Divine light that flashed on intuition from without, or radiated
from the wondrous depths of the microcosm within. Hence (as with
bees in dahlias) their industry was their intoxication. It is of the
essence of mysticism to confound an internal creation or process
with some external manifestation. Often did the theosophist rejoice
in the thought that nature, like the rock in the desert, had been
made to answer to his compelling rod,—that a divinely-given stream
welled forth to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. As we look back
upon his labours we can perceive that the impulse was by no means a
wonder, and often anything but a blessing. It was in reality but as
the rush of the water into the half-sunk shaft of his research,
flooding the region of his first incautious efforts, and sooner or
later arresting his progress in every channel he might open. In
fact, the field of scientific enquiry, which had withered under the
schoolman, was inundated by the mystic,—so facile and so copious
seemed the knowledge realized by heaven-born intuition. It was
reserved for induction to develop by a skilful irrigation that
wonder-teeming soil. No steady advance was possible when any
hap-hazard notion might be virtually invested with the sanction of
inspiration.

The admixture of light and darkness during that twilight period
reached precisely the degree of shadow most favourable to the
vigorous pursuit of natural science by supernatural means.

It is true that the belief in witchcraft everywhere prevalent did,
ever and anon, throw people and rulers alike into paroxysms of fear
and fury. But an accomplished student of occult art was no longer in
much danger of being burnt alive as a fair forfeit to Satan. The
astrologer, the alchemist, the adept in natural magic, were in
universal demand. Emperors and nobles, like Rudolph and Wallenstein,
kept each his star-gazer in a turret chamber, surrounded by
astrolabes and alembics, by ghastly preparations and mysterious
instruments, and listened, with ill-concealed anxiety, as the
zodiac-zoned and silver-bearded counsellor, bent with study and
bleared with smoke, announced, in oracular jargon, the junction of
the planets or his progress toward projection. The real perils of
such pretenders now arose from the very confidence they had
inspired. Such was the thirst for gold and the faith in alchemy,
that no man supposed to possess the secret was secure from
imprisonment and torture to compel its surrender. Setonius was
broken on the wheel because the cruel avarice of the great could not
wring out of him that golden process which had no existence. The few
enquirers whose aim was of a nobler order were mortified to find
their science so ill appreciated. They saw themselves valued only as
casters of horoscopes and makers of cunning toys. Often, with a
bitter irony, they assumed the airs of the charlatan for their daily
bread. Impostors knavish as Sir Arthur Wardour’s Dousterswivel,
deceived and deceiving like Leicester’s Alasco, swarmed at the petty
court of every landgrave and elector.

Theurgic mysticism was practically admitted even within the Lutheran
Church, while the more speculative or devotional mysticism of
Sebastian Frank, Schwenkfeld, and Weigel, was everywhere proscribed.
Lutheran doctors, believers in the Cabbala, which Reuchlin had
vindicated against the monks, were persuaded that theurgic art could
draw the angels down to mortals. Had not the heaven-sent power of
the Cabbala wrought the marvels of Old Testament history? Had not
the power of certain mystic words procured for Hebrew saints the
privilege of converse with angelic natures? Had not the Almighty
placed all terrestrial things under the viceregency of the starry
influences? Had He not united all things, animate and inanimate, by
a subtle network of sympathies, and was not man the leading chord in
this system of harmony—the central heart of this circulating
magnetic force? Thus much assumed, a devout man, wise in the laws of
the three kinds of vincula between the upper and lower worlds, might
be permitted to attract to himself on earth those bright
intelligences who were to be his fellows in heaven. Theurgy rested,
therefore, on the knowledge of the _intellectual vinculum_ (the
divine potency inherent in certain words), the _astral_ (the
favourable conjunction of the planets), and the _elementary_ (the
sympathy of creatures). In the use of these was, of course, involved
the usual hocus-pocus of magical performance—talismans, magic
lights, incense, doves’ blood, swallows’ feathers, _et hoc genus
omne_.[212]

Footnote 209:

Horst’s _Zauberbibliothek_, vol. iii. p. 21.

Footnote 210:

Agrippa’s _Vanity of Arts and Sciences_, chap. 47.

Footnote 211:

See M. B. Lessing, _Paracelsus, sein Leben und Denken_, p. 60.

Footnote 212:

The third and fourth volumes of Horst’s _Zauberbibliothek_ contain a
very full account of all these vincula. The vincula of the
Intellectual World are principally formulas of invocation; secret
names of God, of celestial principalities and spirits; Hebrew, Arabic,
and barbarous words; magical figures, signs, diagrams, and circles.
Those of the Elementary World consist in the sympathetic influence of
certain animals and plants, such as the mole, the white otter, the
white dove, the mandrake; of stones and metals, ointments and
suffumigations. Those of the Astral or Celestial World depend on the
aspects and dispositions of the heavenly bodies, which, under the sway
of planetary spirits, infuse their influences into terrestrial
objects. This is the astrological department of theurgy. Meinhold’s
_Sidonia_ contains a truthful exhibition of this form of theurgic
mysticism, as it obtained in Protestant Germany. See Paracelsus, _De
Spiritibus Planetarum_, passim. (Ed. Dorn., 1584.)