CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT 
 FUND GIVEN IN 189I BY 
 
 HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 6035.U87C2 1918 
 
 The candle of vision, 
 
 3 1924 013 218 957 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
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THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 LOHDON • BOMBAY ■ CALCUTTA * MADRAS 
 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK - BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 DALLAS • ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 OF CANADA, LIMITED 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE 
 
 CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 BY 
 
 A. E. ^^.^ ■ 
 
 **The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord," — Proverbs. 
 " When his candle shined upon my head and by his light 
 I walked through darkness." — Job. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 1931 
 
COPYIHGHT 
 
 Fzrsi Edition October igiS 
 
 Reprinted November jgiS, January, April and August 1919 
 
 1920, 1928, 1931 
 
 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 
 BY K. & K. CLARK, LIMITED, EDINBURGH 
 
JAMES STEPHENS 
 
 BEST OF COMPANIONS 
 
PREFACE 
 
 When I am in my room looking upon the 
 walls I have painted I see there reflections of 
 the personal life, but when I look through 
 the windows I see a living nature and land- 
 scapes not painted by hands. So, too, when 
 I meditate 1 feel in the images and thoughts 
 which throng about me the reflections of 
 personality, but there are also windows in 
 the soul through which can be seen images 
 created not by human but by the divine 
 imagination. I have tried according to my 
 capacity to report about the divine order 
 and to discriminate between that which was 
 self-begotten fantasy and that which came 
 
 from a higher sphere. These retrospects and 
 vii 
 
viii THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 meditations are the eiForts of an artist and 
 
 poet to relate his own vision to the vision 
 
 of the seers and writers of the sacred books, 
 
 and to discover what element of truth lay 
 
 in those imaginations. 
 
 A. E. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Retrospect 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 The Earth Breath 
 
 
 
 
 lO 
 
 The Slave of the Lamp. 
 
 
 
 
 '5 
 
 Meditation 
 
 
 
 
 19 
 
 The Many-Coloured Land 
 
 
 
 
 • 27 
 
 Analytic . 
 
 
 
 
 • 38 
 
 The Mingling of Natures 
 
 
 
 
 . 48 
 
 ^The Memory of Earth . 
 
 
 
 
 . 56 
 
 Imagination 
 
 
 
 
 . 66 
 
 Dreams .... 
 
 
 
 
 • 77 
 
 The Architecture of Dream 
 
 
 
 
 . 89 
 
 Have Imaginations Body ? 
 
 
 
 
 102 
 
 Intuition 
 
 
 
 
 112 
 
 The Language of the Gods . 
 
 
 
 
 IZO 
 
 ^I^NCiENT Intuitions . 
 
 
 
 
 128 
 
 Power . . . . . 
 
 
 
 
 137 
 
 The Memory of the Spirit . 
 
 
 
 
 143 
 
 Celtic Cosmogony . 
 
 
 
 
 153 
 
 The Celtic Imagination . 
 
 
 
 
 162 
 
 Earth . . , . . 
 
 
 
 
 170 
 
 IX 
 
RETROSPECT 
 
 I HAD travelled all day and was tired, but I 
 could not rest by the hearth in the cottage on 
 the hill. My heart was beating with too great 
 an excitement. After my year in the city I 
 felt like a child who wickedly stays from 
 home through a long day, and who returns 
 frightened and penitent at nightfall, wondering 
 whether it will be received with forgiveness 
 by its mother. Would the Mother of us all 
 receive me again as one of her children ? 
 Would the winds with wandering voices be as 
 before the evangelists of her love ? Or would 
 I feel like an outcast amid the mountains, the 
 dark valleys and the shining lakes ? I knew 
 if benediction came how it would come. I 
 would sit among the rocks with shut eyes, 
 waiting humbly as one waits in the ante- 
 chambers of the mighty, and if the invisible 
 ones chose me as companion they would begin 
 with a soft breathing of their intimacies, 
 
2 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 creeping on me with shadowy affection like 
 children who steal nigh to the bowed head 
 and suddenly whisper fondness in the ear 
 before it has even heard a footfall. So I stole 
 out of the cottage and over the dark ridges 
 to the place of rocks, and sat down, and let 
 the coolness of the night chill and still the 
 fiery dust in the brain. I waited trembling 
 for the faintest touch, the shyest breathing of 
 the Everlasting within my soul, the sign of 
 reception and forgiveness. I knew it would 
 come. I could not so desire what was not 
 my own, and what is our own we cannot lose. 
 Desire is hidden identity. The darkness drew 
 me heavenward. From the hill the plains 
 beneath slipped away grown vast and vague, 
 remote and still. I seemed alone with 
 immensity, and there came at last that melting 
 of the divine darkness into the life within me 
 for which I prayed. Yes, I still belonged, 
 however humbly, to the heavenly household. 
 I was not outcast. Still, though by a thread 
 fine as that by which a spider hangs from 
 the rafters, my being was suspended from the 
 habitations of eternity. I longed to throw 
 my arms about the hills, to meet with kisses 
 the lips of the seraph wind. I felt the gaiety 
 of childhood springing up through weariness 
 
RETROSPECT 3 
 
 and age, for to come into contact with that 
 which is eternally young is to have that child- 
 hood of the spirit it must attain ere it can be 
 moulded by the Magician of the Beautiful and 
 enter the House of Many Mansions. 
 
 I had not always this intimacy with nature. 
 I never felt a light in childhood which faded 
 in manhood into the common light of day, 
 nor do I believe that childhood is any nearer 
 than age to this being. If it were so what 
 would the spirit have to hope for after youth 
 was gone ? I was not conscious in my boy- 
 hood of any heaven lying about me. I lived 
 in the city, and the hills from which aid was 
 to come to me were only a far flush of blue 
 on the horizon. Yet I was drawn to them, 
 and as years passed and legs grew longer I 
 came nearer and nearer until at last one day 
 I found myself on the green hillside. I came 
 to play with other boys, but years were yet 
 to pass before the familiar places grew strange 
 once more and the mountains dense with fiery 
 forms and awful as Sinai. 
 
 While the child is still in its mother's 
 arms it is nourished by her, yet it does not 
 know it is a mother which feeds it. It knows 
 later in whose bosom it has lain. As the 
 mother nourishes the body so the Mighty 
 
4 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 Mother nourishes the soul. Yet there are 
 but few who pay reverence where reverence 
 is due, and that is because this benign deity- 
 is like a mother who indulges the fancies of 
 her children. With some she imparts life to 
 their own thoughts. Others she endows with 
 the vision of her own heart. Even of these 
 last some love in silence, being afraid to speak 
 of the majesty which smiled on them, and 
 others deceived think with pride : " This 
 vision is my own." 
 
 I was like these last for a long time. I 
 was aged about sixteen or seventeen years, 
 when I, the slackest and least ideal of boys, 
 with my life already made dark by those 
 desires of body and heart with which we so 
 soon learn to taint our youth, became aware 
 of a mysterious life quickening within ray 
 life. Looking back I know not of anything 
 in friendship, anything I had read, to call this 
 forth. It was, I thought, self-begotten. I 
 began to be astonished with myself, for, 
 walking along country roads. Intense and 
 passionate imaginations of another world, of 
 an interior nature began to overpower me. 
 They were like strangers who suddenly enter 
 a house, who brush aside the doorkeeper, 
 and who will not be denied. Soon I knew 
 
RETROSPECT 5 
 
 they were the rightful owners and heirs of 
 the house of the body, and the doorkeeper 
 was only one who was for a time in charge, 
 who had neglected his duty, and who had 
 pretended to ownership. The boy who 
 existed before was an alien. He hid himself 
 when the pilgrim of eternity took up his abode 
 in the dwelling. Yet, whenever the true 
 owner was absent, the sly creature reappeared 
 and boasted himself as master once more. 
 
 That being from a distant country who 
 took possession of the house began to speak 
 in a language difficult to translate. I was 
 tormented by limitations of understanding. 
 Somewhere about me I knew there were 
 comrades who were speaking to me, but I 
 could not know what they said. As I walked 
 in the evening down the lanes scented by 
 the honeysuckle my senses were expectant of 
 some unveiling about to take place, I felt that 
 beings were looking in upon me out of the 
 true home of man. They seemed to be saying 
 to each other of us, " Soon they will awaken ; 
 soon they will come to us again," and for a 
 moment I almost seemed to mix with their 
 eternity. The tinted air glowed before me 
 with intelligible significance like a face, a voice. 
 The visible world became like a tapestry 
 
6 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 blown and stirred by winds behind it. If it 
 would but raise for an instant I knew I would 
 be in Paradise. Every form on that tapestry 
 appeared to be the work of gods. Every 
 flower was a word, a thought. The grass was 
 speech ; the trees were speech ; the waters 
 were speech ; the winds were speech. They 
 were the Army of the Voice marching on to 
 conquest and dominion over the spirit ; and 
 I listened with my whole being, and then these 
 apparitions would fade away and I would be 
 the mean and miserable boy once more. So 
 might one have felt who had been servant of 
 the prophet, and had seen him go up in the 
 fiery chariot, and the world had no more light 
 or certitude in it with that passing. I knew 
 these visitations for what they were and named 
 them truly in my fantasy, for writing then in 
 the first verses of mine which still seem to 
 me to be poetry, I said of the earth that we 
 and all things were her dreams : 
 
 She is rapt in dreams divine. 
 As her clouds of beauty pass 
 On our glowing hearts they shine. 
 Mirrored there as in a glass. 
 
 Earth, whose dreams are we and they. 
 With her deep heart's gladness fills 
 All our human lips can say 
 Or the dawn-fired singer trills. 
 
RETROSPECT 7 
 
 Yet such is human nature that I still felt 
 vanity as if this vision was mine, and I acted 
 like one who comes across the treasure-house 
 of a king, and spends the treasure as if it 
 were his own. We may indeed have a 
 personal wisdom, but spiritual vision is not 
 to speak of as ours any more than we can 
 say at the rising of the sun : " This glory is 
 mine." By the sudden uprising of such 
 vanities in the midst of vision I was often 
 outcast, and found myself in an instant like 
 those warriors of Irish legend, who had come 
 upon a lordly house and feasted there and 
 slept, and when they woke they were on the 
 barren hillside, and the Faed Fia was drawn 
 about that lordly house. Yet though the 
 imagination apprehended truly that this beauty 
 was not mine, and hailed it by its heavenly 
 name, for some years my heart was proud, 
 for as the beauty sank into memory it seemed 
 to become a personal possession, and I said 
 " I imagined this " when I should humbly 
 have said, "The curtain was a little lifted 
 that I might see." But the day was to come 
 when I could not deny the Mighty Mother 
 the reverence due, when I was indeed to 
 know by what being I had been nourished, 
 and to be made sweet and mad as a lover 
 
8 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 with the consciousness of her intermingling 
 spirit. 
 
 The sages of old found that at the close 
 of intense meditation their being was drawn 
 into union with that which they contemplated. 
 AU desire tends to bring about unity with 
 the object adored, and this is no less true of 
 spiritual and elemental than of bodily desire ; 
 and I, with my imagination more and more 
 drawn to adore an ideal nature, was tending 
 to that vital contact in which what at first 
 was apprehended in fantasy would become 
 the most real of all things. When that 
 certitude came I felt as Dante might have 
 felt after conceiving of Beatrice close at his side 
 and in the Happy World, if, after believing 
 it a dream, half hoping that it might here- 
 after be a reality, that beloved face before 
 his imagination grew suddenly intense, vivid 
 and splendidly shining, and he knew beyond 
 all doubt that her spirit was truly in that 
 form, and had descended to dwell in it, and 
 would be with him for evermore. So did I 
 feel one warm summer day lying idly on the 
 hillside, not then thinking of anything but 
 the sunlight, and how sweet it was to drowse 
 there, when, suddenly, I felt a fiery heart 
 throb, and knew it was personal and intimate, 
 
RETROSPECT 9 
 
 and started with every sense dilated and 
 intent, and turned inwards, and I heard first a 
 music as of bells going away, away into that 
 wondrous underland whither, as legend re- 
 lates, the Danaan gods withdrew ; and then 
 the heart of the hills was opened to me, and 
 I knew there was no hill for those who 
 were there, and they were unconscious of the 
 ponderous mountain piled above the palaces 
 of light, and the winds were sparkling and 
 diamond clear, yet full of colour as an opal, 
 as they glittered through the valley, and I 
 knew the Golden Age was all about me, and 
 it was we who had been blind to it but that 
 It had never passed away from the world 
 
THE EARTH BREATH 
 
 After that awakening earth began more and 
 more to bewitch me, and to lure me to her 
 heart with honied entreaty. I could not 
 escape from it even in that busy office where 
 I sat during week-days with little heaps of 
 paper mounting up before me moment by 
 frenzied moment. An interval of inactivity 
 and I would be aware of that sweet eternal 
 presence overshadowing me. I was an exile 
 from living nature but she yet visited me. 
 Her ambassadors were visions that made me 
 part of themselves. Through the hot foetid 
 air of the gaslit room I could see the 
 feverish faces, the quick people flitting about, 
 and hear the voices ; and then room, faces 
 and voices would be gone, and I would be 
 living in the Mother's being in some pure, 
 remote, elemental region of hers. Instead of 
 the dingy office there would be a sky of 
 rarest amethyst ; a snow - cold bloom of 
 
THE EARTH BREATH ii 
 
 cloud ; high up in the divine wilderness, 
 solitary, a star ; all rapt, breathless and still ; 
 rapt the seraph princes of wind and wave 
 and fire, for it was the hour when the King, 
 an invisible presence, moved through His 
 dominions and Nature knew and was hushed 
 at the presence of her Lord. Once, suddenly, 
 I found myself on some remote plain or steppe, 
 and heard unearthly chimes pealing passion- 
 ately from I know not what far steeples. 
 The earth-breath streamed from the furrows 
 to the glowing heavens. Overhead the birds 
 flew round and round crying their incompre- 
 hensible cries, as if they were maddened, and 
 knew not where to nestle, and had dreams 
 of some more enraptured rest in a diviner 
 home. I could see a ploughman lifting him- 
 self from his obscure toil and stand with lit 
 eyes as if he too had been fire-smitten and 
 was caught into heaven as I was, and knew 
 for that moment he was a god. And then 
 I would lapse out of vision and ecstasy, and 
 hear the voices, and see again through the 
 quivering of the hot air the feverish faces, 
 and seem to myself to be cast out of the 
 spirit. I could hardly bear after thinking of 
 these things, for I felt I was trapped in some 
 obscure hell. You, too, trapped with me, 
 
12 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 dear kindly people, who never said a harsh 
 word to the forgetful boy. You, too, I 
 knew, had your revelations. I remember 
 one day how that clerk with wrinkled face, 
 blinking eyes and grizzly beard, who never 
 seemed, apart from his work, to have in- 
 terests other than his pipe and paper, sur- 
 prised me by telling me that the previous 
 midnight he waked in his sleep, and some 
 self of him was striding to and fro in the 
 moonlight in an avenue mighty with gigantic 
 images ; and that dream self he had surprised 
 had seemed to himself unearthly in wisdom 
 and power. What had he done to be so 
 high in one sphere and so petty in another ? 
 Others I could tell of, too, who had their 
 moment of awe when the spirit made its 
 ancient claim on them. But none were so 
 happy or so unhappy as I was. I was happy 
 at times because the divine world which had 
 meant nothing to my childhood was becoming 
 a reality to manhood : and I knew it was 
 not a dream, for comrades in vision soon 
 came to me, they who could see as I saw, 
 and hear as 1 heard, and there were some 
 who had gone deeper into that being than I 
 have ever travelled. I was more miserable 
 than my work-a-day companions, because the 
 
THE EARTH BREATH 13 
 
 very intensity of vision made the recoil more 
 unendurable. It was an agony of darkness 
 and oblivion, wherein I seemed like those 
 who in nightmare are buried in caverns so 
 deep beneath the roots of the world that 
 there is no hope of escape, for the way out is 
 unknown, and the way to them is forgotten 
 by those who walk in light. In those black 
 hours the universe, a gigantic presence, 
 seemed at war with me. I was condemned, 
 I thought, to be this speck of minute life 
 because of some sin committed in remote 
 ages, I and those with me. We were all lost 
 children of the stars. Everything that sug- 
 gested our high original being, a shaft of 
 glory from the far fire in the heavens spear- 
 ing the gloom of the office, the blue twilight 
 deepening through the panes until it was 
 rich with starry dust, the sunny clouds career- 
 ing high over the city, these things would 
 stir pangs of paintul remembrance and my 
 eyes would suddenly grow blind and wet. 
 Sometimes, too, I would rebel and plot in 
 my obscurity, and remember moments when 
 the will in me seemed to be a titanic power, 
 and my spirit would brood upon ways of 
 escape and ascent to its native regions, as 
 those fallen angels in Milton's tremendous 
 
14 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 narrative rose up from torture, and conspired 
 to tear the throne from Him. And then all 
 that would appear to me to be futile as a 
 speck of dust trying to stay itself against the 
 typhoon, and the last door would close upon 
 me and leave me more hopeless than before. 
 
THE SLAVE OF THE LAMP 
 
 Because I was a creature of many imaginings 
 and of rapid alternations of mood out of 
 all that there came to me assurance of a 
 truth, of all truths most inspiring to one in 
 despair in the Iron Age and lost amid the 
 undergrowths of being. I became aware of 
 a swift echo or response to my own moijds 
 in circumstance which had seemed hitherto 
 immutable in its indifference. I found every 
 intense imagination, every new adventure of 
 the intellect endowed with magnetic power to 
 attract to it its own kin. "Will and desire 
 were as the enchanter's wand of fable, and 
 they drew to themselves their own affinities. 
 Around a pure atom of crystal all the atoms 
 of the element in solution gather, and in like 
 manner one person after another emerged out 
 of the mass, betraying their close affinity to 
 my moods as they were engendered. I met 
 these people seemingly by accident along 
 15 
 
1 6 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 country roads, or I entered into conversation 
 with strangers and found they were intimates 
 of the spirit. I could prophesy from the 
 uprising of new moods in myself that I, 
 without search, would soon meet people of a 
 certain character, and so I met them. Even 
 inanimate things were under the sway of these 
 affinities. They yielded up to me what they 
 had specially for my eyes. I have glanced in 
 passing at a book left open by some one in a 
 library, and the words first seen thrilled me, 
 for they confirmed a knowledge lately attained 
 in vision. At another time a book taken 
 down idly from a shelf opened at a sentence 
 quoted from a Upanishad, scriptures then to 
 me unknown, and this sent my heart flying 
 eastwards because it was the answer to a 
 spiritual problem I had been brooding over 
 an hour before. It was hardly a week after 
 my first awakening that I began, to meet those 
 who were to be my lifelong comrades on the 
 quest, and who were, like myself, in_aJboy- 
 hood troubled Jby. the spirit. I had just 
 attempted to write in verse when I met a boy 
 whose voice was soon to be the most beautiful 
 voice in Irish literature. I sought none of 
 these out because I had heard of them and 
 surmised a kinship. The concurrence of our 
 
THE SLAVE OF THE LAMP 17 
 
 person alities jeemedmysteriousandcontrolled 
 by some law of spiritual gravitation, like that 
 which in the chemistry of nature makes one 
 molecule fly to another. I remember the 
 exultation with which I realised about life 
 that, as Heraclitus has said, it was in a flux, 
 and that in all its flowings there was meaning 
 and law ; that I could not lose what was my 
 own ; 1 need not seek, for what was my own 
 would come to me ; if any passed it was 
 because they were no longer mine. One 
 buried in a dungeon for many years could 
 not have hailed sunshine, the sweet-smelling 
 earth, and the long hidden infinitude of the 
 skies more joyously than I the melting of that 
 which had seemed immutable. It is those who 
 live and grow swiftly, and who continually com- 
 pare what is without with what is within, who 
 have this certainty. Those who do not change 
 see no change and recognise no law. He who 
 has followed even in secrecy many lights of the 
 spirit can see one by one the answering torches 
 gleam. When I was made certain about this 
 I accepted what befell with resignation. I 
 knew that all I met was part of myself and 
 that what I could not comprehend was related 
 by affinity to some yet unrealised forces in 
 my being. "We have within us the Lamp of 
 
1 8 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 the World ; and Nature, the genie, is Slave of 
 the Lamp, and must fashion life about us as 
 we fashion it within ourselves. What we are 
 alone has power. ^"We may give up the out- 
 ward personal struggle and ambition, and if 
 we leave all to the Law all that is rightly ours 
 will be paid. I Man becomes truly the Super- 
 man when he has this proud consciousness. 
 No matter where he may be, in what seeming 
 obscurity, he is still the King, stiU master of 
 his fate, and circumstance reels about him or 
 is still as he, in the solitude^of his spirit, is 
 mighty or is humble. We are indeed most 
 miserable when we dream we have no power 
 over circumstance, and I account it the 
 highest wisdom to know this of the living 
 universe that there is no destiny in it other 
 than that we make for ourselves. How the 
 spirit is kindled, how it feels its power, when, 
 outwardly quiet, it can see the coming and 
 going of life, as it dilates within itself or 
 is still ! Then do we move in miracle and 
 wonder. Then does the universe appear to 
 us as it did to the Indian sage who said that 
 to him who was perfect in meditation all rivers 
 were sacred as the Ganges and all speech 
 was holy. 
 
MEDITATION 
 
 There is no personal virtue in me other than 
 this that I followed a path all may travel but 
 on which few do journey. It is a path within 
 ourselves where the feet first falter in shadow 
 and darkness but which is later made gay by 
 heavenly light. As one who has travelled a 
 little on that way and who has had some far- 
 off vision of the Many-Coloured Land, if I 
 tell what I know, and how I came to see most 
 clearly, I may give hope to those who would 
 fain believe in that world the seers spake of, 
 but who cannot understand the language 
 written by those who had seen that beauty of 
 old, or who may have thought the ancient 
 scriptures but a record of extravagant desires. 
 None need special gifts or genius. Gifts ! 
 There are no gifts. For all that is ours we 
 have paid the price. There is nothing we 
 aspire to for which we cannot barter some 
 spiritual merchandise of our own. Genius I 
 19 
 
20 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 There is no stinting of this by the Keeper of 
 the Treasure House. It^is not bestowed but 
 is won. Yon man of heavy soul might if he 
 willed play on the lyre of Apollo, that drunkard 
 be god-intoxicated. Powers are not bestowed 
 by caprice on any. The formulae the chemist 
 illustrates, making exposition before his 
 students, are not more certainly verifiable 
 than the formulae of that alchemy by which 
 what is gross in us may be transmuted into 
 ethereal fires. Our religions make promises 
 to be fulfilled beyond the grave because they 
 have no knowledge now to be put to the test, 
 but the ancients spake of a divine vision to 
 be attained while we are yet in the body. 
 The religion which does not cry out : " I am 
 to-day verifiable as that water wets or that fire 
 burns. Test me that ye can become as gods." 
 Mistrust it. Its messengers are prophets of 
 the darkness. As we sink deeper into the 
 Iron Age we are met by the mighty devils of 
 state and empire lurking in the abyss, claiming 
 the soul for their own, moulding it to their 
 image, to be verily their own creature and not 
 heaven's. * We need a power in ourselves 
 that can confront these mighty powers. > 
 Though I am blind I have had moments of 
 sight. Though I have sinned I have been on 
 
MEDITATION 21 
 
 the path. Though I am feeble I have seen 
 the way to power. I sought out ways to 
 make more securely my own those magical 
 lights that dawned and faded within me. I 
 wished to evoke them at will and be master 
 of my vision, and I was taught to do this 
 which is as old as human life. Day after 
 day, at times where none might interfere, and 
 where none through love or other cause were 
 allowed to interfere, I set myself to attain 
 mastery over the will. I would choose some 
 mental object, an abstraction of form, and 
 strive to hold my mind fixed on it in un- 
 wavering concentration, so that not for a 
 moment, not for an instant, would the con- 
 centration slacken. It is an exercise this, a 
 training for higher adventures of the soul. 
 It is no light labour. The ploughman's, 
 cleaving the furrows, is easier by far. Five 
 minutes of this eifort will at —first- leave us 
 trembling as at the close of a laborious day. 
 It is then we realise how little of life has 
 been our own, and how much a response to 
 sensation, a drifting on the tide of desire. 
 The rumour of revolt, the spirit would 
 escape its thraldom, runs through the body. 
 Empires do not send legions so swiftly to 
 frustrate revolt as all that is mortal in us 
 
22 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 hurries along nerve, artery, and every high- 
 way of the body to beset the soul. The 
 beautiful face of one we love, more alluring 
 than life, glows before us to enchant us from 
 our task. Old sins, enmities, vanities and 
 desires beleaguer and beseech us. If^ we do 
 not heed themjhjsn they change,^ they ^s^^ 
 be with us, t^eyop en u p vistas of all we and^ 
 they will dp, when this_jiew power we strive 
 for is attained. If we are tempted down that 
 vista we find with shame after an hour of 
 vain musing that we were lured away, had 
 deserted our task and forgotten that stern 
 fixity of the will we set out to achieve. Let 
 us persevere In our daily ritual and the 
 turmoil increases ; our whole being becomes 
 vitalised, the bad as well as the good. The 
 heat of this fervent concentration acts like 
 fire under a pot, and everything in our being 
 boils up madly. We learn our own hitherto 
 unknown character. We did not know we 
 could feel such, fierce desires, never imagined 
 such passionate enmities as now awaken. 
 We have created in ourselves a centre of 
 power and grow real to ourselves. It is 
 dangerous, too, for we have flung ourselves 
 into the eternal conflict between spirit and 
 matter, and find ourselves where the battle is 
 
MEDITATION 23 
 
 hottest, where the foemen are locked in a 
 death struggle. We are in grips with mightier 
 powers than we had before conceived of. 
 What man is there who thinks he has self- 
 control .'' He stands in the shallow waters, 
 nor has gone into the great deep, nor been 
 tossed at the mercy of the waves. Let him 
 rouse the arcane powers in himself, and he 
 will feel like one who has let loose the 
 avalanche. None would live through that 
 turmoil if the will were the only power in 
 ourselves we could invoke, for the will is 
 neither good nor bad but is power only, and 
 it vitalises good or bad indifFerendy. If that 
 were all our labour would bring us, not 
 closer to divine being, but only to a dilation 
 of the personality. But the ancients who 
 taught us to gain this intensity taught it but 
 as preliminary to a meditation which would 
 not waver and would be full of power. The 
 meditation they urged on us has been ex- 
 plained as " the inexpressible yearning of the 
 inner man to go out into the infinite." But 
 that Infinite we would enter is living. It is 
 the ultimate being of us. Meditation is a 
 fiery brooding on that majestical Self We 
 imagine ourselves into Its vastness. We con- 
 ceive ourselves as mirroring Its infinitudes, 
 
24 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 as moving in all things, as living in all beings, 
 in earth, water, air, fire, aether. We try to 
 know as It knows, to live as It lives, to be 
 compassionate as It is compassionate. We 
 equal ourselves to It that we may understand 
 It and become It. We do not kneel to It as 
 slaves, but as Children of the King we lift 
 ourselves up to that Glory, and affirm to our- 
 selves that we are what we imagine. " What 
 a man thinks, that he is : that is the old 
 secret," said the wise. We have imagined 
 ourselves into this pitiful dream of life. By 
 imagination and will we re-enter true being, 
 becoming that we conceive of. On that path 
 of fiery brooding I entered. At first all was 
 stupor. I felt as one who steps out of day 
 into the colourless night of a cavern, and 
 that was because I had suddenly reversed the 
 habitual motions of life. We live normally 
 seeing through the eyes, hearing through the 
 ears, stirred by the senses, moved by bodily 
 powers, and receiving only such spiritual 
 knowledge as may pass through a momentary 
 purity of our being. On the mystic path we 
 create our own light, and at first we struggle 
 blind and baffled, seeing nothing, hearing 
 nothing, unable to think, unable to imagine. 
 We seem deserted by dream, vision or in- 
 
MEDITATION 25 
 
 spiration, and our meditation barren alto- 
 gether. But let us persist through weeks or 
 months, and sooner or later that stupor dis- 
 appears. Our faculties readjust themselves, 
 and do the work we will them to do. 
 Never did they do their work so well. The 
 dark caverns of the brain begin to grow 
 luminous. "We are creating our own light. 
 By heat of will and aspiration we are trans- 
 muting what is gross in the subtle sethers 
 through which the mind works. As the 
 dark bar of metal begins to glow, at 
 first redly, and then at white heat, or as ice 
 melts and is alternately fluid, vapour, gas, 
 and at last a radiant energy, so do these 
 aethers become purified and alchemically 
 changed into luminous essences, and they 
 make a new vesture for the soul, and link us 
 to mid-world or heavenward where they too 
 have their true home. How quick the mind 
 is now ! How vivid is the imagination ! 
 We are lifted above the tumult of the body. 
 The heat of the blood disappears below us. 
 We draw nigher to ourselves. The heart 
 longs for the hour of meditation and hurries 
 to it ; and, when it comes, we rise within our- 
 selves as a diver too long under seas rises 
 to breathe the air, to see the light. We have 
 
26 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 invoked the God and we are answered ac- 
 cording to old promise. As our aspiration 
 so is our inspiration. We imagine It as Love 
 and what a love enfolds us. We conceive of 
 It as Might and we take power from that 
 Majesty. We dream of It as Beauty and 
 the Magician of the Beautiful appears every- 
 where at Its miraculous art, and the multi- 
 tudinous lovely creatures of Its thought are 
 busy moulding nature and life in their image, 
 and all are hurrying, hurrying to the Golden 
 World. This vision brings its own proof to 
 the spirit, but words cannot declare or explain 
 it. We must go back to lower levels and 
 turn to that which has form from that which 
 is bodiless. 
 
THE MANY-COLOURED LAND 
 
 I HAVE always been curious about the 
 psychology of my own vision as desirous of 
 imparting it, and I wish in this book to relate 
 the efforts of an artist and poet to discover 
 what truth lay in his own imaginations. I 
 have brooded longer over the nature of 
 imagination than I have lingered over the 
 canvas where I tried to rebuild my vision. 
 Spiritual moods are difficult to express and 
 cannot be argued over, but the workings of 
 imagination may well be spoken of, and need 
 precise and minute investigation. I surmise 
 from my reading of the psychologists who 
 treat of this that they themselves were without 
 this faculty and spoke of it as blind men who 
 would fain draw although without vision. 
 We are overcome when we read Prometheus 
 Unbound, but who, as he reads, flings off 
 the enchantment to ponder in what state was 
 the soul of Shelley in that ecstasy of swift 
 27 
 
28 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 creation. Who has questioned the artist to 
 whom the forms of his thought are vivid as 
 the forms of nature ? Artist and poet have 
 rarely been curious about the processes of their 
 own minds. Yet it is reasonable to assume 
 that the highest ecstasy and vision are 
 conditioned by law and attainable by all, and 
 this might be argued as of more importance 
 even than the message of the seers. I attribute 
 to that unwavering meditation and fiery con- 
 centration of will a growing luminousness in 
 my brain as if I had unsealed in the body a 
 fountain of interior light. Normally we close 
 our eyes on a cloudy gloom through which 
 vague forms struggle sometimes into definite- 
 ness. But the luminous quality gradually 
 became normal in me, and at times in medita- 
 tion there broke in on me an almost intolerable 
 lustre of light, pure and shining faces, dazzling 
 processions of figures, most ancient, ancient 
 places and peoples, and landscapes lovely as 
 the lost Eden. These appeared at first to 
 have no more relation to myself than images 
 from a street without one sees reflected in a 
 glass ; but at times meditation prolonged 
 itself into spheres which were radiant with 
 actuality. Once, drawn by some inner impulse 
 to meditate at an unusual hour, I found quick 
 
THE MANY-COLOURED LAND 29 
 
 oblivion of the body. The blood and heat of 
 the brain ebbed from me as an island fades in 
 the mists behind a swift vessel fleeting into 
 light. The ways were open within. I rose 
 through myself and suddenly felt as if I had 
 awakened from dream. Where was I ? In 
 what city .-• Here were hills crowned with 
 glittering temples, and the ways, so far as I 
 could see, were thronged with most beautiful 
 people, swaying as if shaken by some ecstasy 
 running through all as if the Dark Hidden 
 Father was breathing rapturous life within 
 His children. Did I wear to them an aspect 
 like their own ? Was I visible to them as a 
 new-comer in their land of lovely light ? I 
 could not know, but those nigh me flowed 
 towards me with outstretched hands. I saw 
 eyes with a beautiful flame of love in them 
 looking into mine. But I could stay no 
 longer for something below drew me down 
 and I was again an exile from light. 
 
 There came through meditation a more 
 powerful orientation of my being as if to a 
 hidden sun, and my thoughts turned more 
 and more to the spiritual life of Earth. All 
 the needles of being pointed to it. I felt 
 instinctively that all I saw in vision was part of 
 the life of Earth which is a court where there 
 
30 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 are many starry palaces. There the Planetary 
 Spirit was King, and that Spirit manifesting 
 through the substance of Earth, the Mighty 
 Mother, was, I felt, the being I groped after 
 as God. The love I had for nature as 
 garment of that deity grew deeper. That 
 which was my own came to me as it comes to 
 all men. That which claimed me drew me to 
 itself I had my days and nights of freedom. 
 How often did I start in the sunshine of a 
 Sabbath morning, setting my face to the hills, 
 feeling somewhat uncertain as a lover who 
 draws nigh to a beauty he adores, who some- 
 times will yield everything to him and 
 sometimes is silent and will only endure his 
 presence. I did not know what would happen 
 to me, but I was always expectant, and walked 
 up to the mountains as to the throne of God. 
 Step by step there fell from me the passions 
 and fears of the week-day, until, as I reached 
 the hillside and lay on the grassy slope with 
 shut eyes, I was bare of all but desire for the 
 Eternal. I was once more the child close to 
 the Mother. She rewarded me by lifting for 
 me a little the veil which hides her true face. 
 To those high souls who know their kinship 
 the veil is lifted, her face is revealed, and 
 her face is like a bride's. Petty as was my 
 
THE MANY-COLOURED LAND 31 
 
 everyday life, with the fears and timidities 
 which abnormal sensitiveness begets, in those 
 moments of vision I understood instinctively 
 the high mood they must keep who would 
 walk with the highest ; and who with that 
 divine face glimmering before him could do 
 aught but adore ! 
 
 There is an instinct which stills the lips 
 which would speak of mysteries whose day 
 for revelation has not drawn nigh. The litde 
 I know of these I shall not speak of. It is 
 always lawful to speak of that higher wisdom 
 which relates our spiritual being to that 
 multitudinous unity which is God and Nature 
 and Man. The only justification for speech 
 from me, rather than from others whose 
 knowledge is more profound, is that the 
 matching of words to thoughts is an art I 
 have practised more. What I say may convey 
 more of truth, as the skilled artist, painting 
 a scene which he views for the first time, 
 may yet suggest more beauty and enchantment 
 than the habitual dweller, unskilled in art, 
 who may yet know the valley he loves so 
 intimately that he could walk blindfold from 
 end to end. 
 
 I do not wish to write a book of wonders, 
 but rather to bring thought back to that Being 
 
32 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 whom the ancient seers worshipped as Deity. 
 I believe that most of what was said of God 
 was in reality said of that Spirit whose body 
 is Earth. I must in some fashion indicate 
 the nature of the visions which led me to 
 believe with Plato that the earth is not at all 
 what the geographers suppose it to be, and 
 that we live like frogs at the bottom of a 
 marsh knowing nothing of that Many-Coloured 
 Earth which is superior to this we know, yet 
 related to it as soul to body. On that Many- 
 Coloured Earth, he tells us, live a divine folk, 
 and there are temples wherein the gods do 
 truly dwell, and I wish to convey, so far as 
 words may, how some apparitions of that 
 ancient beauty came to me in wood or on 
 hillside or by the shores of the western 
 sea. 
 
 Sometimes lying on the hillside with the 
 eyes of the body shut as in sleep I could see 
 valleys and hiUs, lustrous as a jewel, where 
 all was self-shining, the colours brighter and 
 purer, yet making a softer harmony together 
 than the colours of the world 1 know. The 
 winds sparkled as they blew hither and thither, 
 yet far distances were clear through that 
 glowing air. What was far oflr was precise 
 as what was near, and the will to see hurried 
 
THE MANY-COLOURED LAND 33 
 
 me to what I desired. There, too, in that 
 land I saw fountains as of luminous mist 
 jetting from some hidden heart of power, and 
 shining folk who passed into those fountains 
 inhaled them and drew life from the magical 
 air. They were, I believe, those who in the 
 ancient world gave birth to legends of nymph 
 and dryad. Their perfectness was like the 
 perfectness of a flower, a beauty which had 
 never, it seemed, been broken by act of the 
 individualised will which with us makes 
 possible a choice between good and evil, and 
 the marring of the mould of natural beauty. 
 More beautiful than we they yet seemed 
 less than human, and I surmised I had more 
 thoughts in a moment than they through 
 many of their days. Sometimes I wondered 
 had they individualised life at all, for they 
 moved as if in some orchestration of their 
 being. If one looked up, all looked up. If 
 one moved to breathe the magical airs from 
 the fountains, many bent in rhythm, I 
 wondered were their thoughts all another's, 
 one who lived within them, guardian or 
 oversoul to their tribe ? 
 
 Like these were my first visions of super- 
 nature, not spiritual nor of any high import, 
 not in any way so high as those transcendental 
 
 D 
 
34 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 moments of awe, when almost without vision 
 the Divine Darkness seemed to breathe with- 
 in the spirit. But I was curious about these 
 forms, and often lured away by them from 
 the highest meditation ; for I was dazzled 
 like a child who escapes from a dark alley in 
 one of our cities of great sorrow where its 
 life has been spent, and who comes for the 
 first time upon some rich garden beyond the 
 city where the air is weighted with scent 
 of lilac or rose, and the eyes are made gay 
 with colour. Such a beauty begins to glow 
 on us as we journey towards Deity, even 
 as earth grows brighter as we journey from 
 the gloomy pole to lands of the sun ; 
 and I would cry out to our humanity, 
 sinking deeper into the Iron Age, that 
 the Golden World is all about us and that 
 beauty is open to all, and none are shut 
 out from it who will turn to it and seek 
 for it. 
 
 As the will grew more intense, the longing 
 for the ancestral self more passionate, there 
 came glimpses of more rapturous life in the 
 being of Earth. Once I lay on the sand 
 dunes by the western sea. The air seemed 
 filled with melody. The motion of the wind 
 made a continuous musical vibration. Now 
 
THE MANY-COLOURED LAND 35 
 
 and then the silvery sound of bells broke on 
 my ear. I saw nothing for a time. Then 
 there was an intensity of light before my 
 eyes like the flashing of sunlight through a 
 crystal. It widened like the opening of a 
 gate and I saw the light was streaming from 
 the heart of a glowing figure. Its body was 
 pervaded with light as if sunfire rather than 
 blood ran through its limbs. Light streams 
 flowed from it. It moved over me along 
 the winds, carrying a harp, and there was a 
 circling of golden hair that swept across the 
 strings. Birds flew about it, and over the 
 brows was a fiery plumage as of wings of 
 outspread flame. On the face was an ecstasy 
 of beauty and immortal youth. There were 
 others, a lordly folk, and they passed by on 
 the wind as if they knew me not or the earth 
 I lived on. When I came back to myself 
 my own world seemed grey and devoid of 
 light though the summer sun was hot upon 
 the sands. 
 
 One other vision I will tell because it bears 
 on things the ancients taught us, and on 
 what I have to write in later pages. Where 
 I saw this I will not say. There was a hall 
 vaster than any cathedral, with pillars that 
 seemed built out of living and trembling 
 
36 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 opal, or from some starry substances which 
 shone with every colour, the colours of eve 
 and dawn. A golden air glowed in this 
 place, and high between the pillars were 
 thrones which faded, glow by glow, to the 
 end of the vast hall. On them sat the Divine 
 Kings. They were fire-crested. I saw the 
 crest of the dragon on one, and there was 
 another plumed with brilliant fires that jetted 
 forth like feathers of flame. They sat shining 
 and starlike, mute as statues, more colossal 
 than Egyptian images of their gods, and at 
 the end of the hall was a higher throne on 
 which sat one greater than the rest. A light 
 like the sun glowed behind him. Below on 
 the floor of the hall lay a dark figure as if in 
 trance, and two of the Divine Kings made 
 motions with their hands about it over head 
 and body. I saw where their hands waved 
 how sparkles of fire like the flashing of jewels 
 broke out. There rose out of that dark 
 body a figure as tall, as glorious, as shining 
 as those seated on the thrones. As he woke 
 to the hall he became aware of his divine kin, 
 and he lifted up his hands in greeting. He 
 had returned from his pilgrimage through 
 darkness, but now an initiate, a master in 
 the heavenly guild. While he gazed on 
 
THE MANY-COLOURED LAND 37 
 
 them the tall golden figures from their 
 thrones leaped up, they too with hands up- 
 lifted in greeting, and they passed from me 
 and faded swiftly in the great glory behind 
 the throne. 
 
ANALYTIC 
 
 Before I may write more of that supernature 
 which rises, a tower of heaven, above the 
 depths where we move, I know I must try to 
 solve some of the doubts and perplexities 
 which come to most who hear of things they 
 have not heard or seen for their own part. 
 They will say, " You are an artist and have 
 painted such things. "We know you have 
 imagination which creates images vividly. 
 You are a poet, and it is the art of your tribe 
 to gild for us the thoughts you have, the 
 emotions you feel, so that what moods are 
 common with us you attire richly till they 
 walk like kings. But what certainty have you 
 that it is not all fancy, and the visions you 
 speak of were not born in the cloudy hollows 
 of your brain, and are not glorified memories 
 of things you have first seen with the sensual 
 eye, and which were afterwards refashioned 
 in memory } What certitude have you that 
 38 
 
ANALYTIC 39 
 
 these things you speak of are in any way 
 related to a real world invisible to our eyes ? " 
 To solve these doubts I must not fall back on 
 authority, or appeal for trust. It will avail 
 nothing to say that others have seen such 
 things and have with me looked upon them, 
 we speaking of them together as people who 
 see the same scene, who refer as they speak 
 to rocks, waters and trees, knowing these are 
 a common vision. It would be true if I said 
 this, but it would avail me nothing in my 
 desire that you should go hopefully on the 
 way I would have you journey. On that path, 
 as an ancient scripture says, to whatsoever 
 place one would travel that place one's own 
 self becomes, and I must try first to uproot 
 false ideas about memory, imagination and 
 vision so that by pure reason people may be 
 led out of error and be able to distinguish 
 between that which arises in themselves and 
 that which comes otherwise and which we 
 surmise is a visitor from a far country. I 
 too in boyhood had the idea so commonly 
 held that the pictures of imagination are old 
 memories refashioned. I first doubted this 
 as a child when, lying on my bed, there came 
 a sudden illumination of my brain, and pictures 
 moved before my inner eyes like the coloured 
 
40 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 moving pictures we see in the theatre. I saw, 
 I remember, a sunlit hillside which seemed 
 close to me. There were huge grey boulders 
 strewn about. Beyond this hill-slope I could 
 see far distant mountains, pale blue through 
 the sparkling air. While I looked, giants in 
 brazen armour clambered swiftly up the hill- 
 side, swinging clubs which had spiked balls of 
 brass held by a chain at the end. They 
 glittered in the sun as they ran up and past 
 me. Motion, light, shadow, colour were 
 perfect as things seen passing before the 
 physical eyes. Then the illumination in my 
 brain ceased, the picture vanished, and I was 
 startled, for I had seen no hillside like that, 
 no distant mountains, no giants in brazen 
 armour in picture or theatre, and I began a 
 speculation which soon ended because child- 
 hood keeps no prolonged meditation. I may 
 take this as a type of vision common to most 
 people. Either when they sit in darkness, 
 or with closed eyes, or as they drift into sleep 
 or awaken from sleep, they pass through 
 strange cities, float in the air, roam through 
 woods, have adventures with people who are 
 not the people they meet every day. There 
 is nothing uncommon about such visions. 
 It is in the interpretation of them that error 
 
ANALYTIC 41 
 
 arises. People pass them by too easily saying, 
 " It is imagination," as if imagination were 
 as easily explained as a problem in Euclid, 
 and was not a mystery, and as if every moving 
 picture in the brain did not need such minute 
 investigation as Darwin gave to earthworms. 
 I was asked to believe that giants, armour, 
 hillside and sunny distance so appeared in my 
 brain because I had seen men who might be 
 enlarged to giants, pictures of armour with 
 which they could be clothed by fancy, brass 
 with which the armour could be coloured. 
 Any rocks might be multiplied and enlarged 
 from memory by imagination to form a hillside, 
 and any sky of sunny blue would make my 
 distance. How plausible for a second ! How 
 unthinkable after a momentary consideration ! 
 I know I could hardly, if you gave me a 
 hundred thousand pictures of heads, by cutting 
 them up and pasting them together, make a 
 fresh face which would appear authentic in 
 its tints and shadows, and it would be a work 
 of infinite labour. But these faces of vision 
 are not still. They move. They have life 
 and expression. The sunlight casts authentic 
 moving shadows on the ground. What is 
 it combines with such miraculous skill the 
 things seen, taking a tint here, a fragment of 
 
42 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 form there, which uses the colours and forms 
 of memory as a palette to paint such master- 
 pieces ? It has been said, " Every man is a 
 Shakespeare in his dreams." The dreamer of 
 landscape is more than a Turner, because he 
 makes his trees to bend before the wind and 
 his clouds to fleet across the sky. The waking 
 brain does not do this. It is unconscious of 
 creation. To say we refashion memories is 
 to surmise in the subconscious nature a 
 marvellous artist, to whom all that we have 
 ever seen with the physical eyes is present at 
 once, and as clay in the hands of a divine 
 potter, and it is such swift creation too that 
 it rivals the works of the Lord. Well, I am 
 not one of those who deny that the Kingdom 
 of Heaven is within us or that the King is 
 also in His Heaven. We need not deny that 
 and yet hold that vision comes otherwise. 
 Nor can be it denied that vision is often so 
 radiant and precise, for experience affirms that 
 it is, and hundreds of artists, and indeed 
 people who are not artists at all, will tell you 
 how clearly they see in their dreams. But 
 for those who hold that visions such as I and 
 many others have had are only the refashioning 
 of memory, and there is nothing mysterious 
 about them, I say try to think out tint by 
 
ANALYTIC 43 
 
 tint, form by form, how these could be 
 recombined, and, for whatever marvel I would 
 have you believe, you will have substituted 
 something just as marvellous but not so 
 credible. Not that it is incredible to think 
 that the spirit in man is Creator, for all the 
 prophets and seers of the world have told us 
 that, but the common psychological explana- 
 tion is not acceptable, because we know that 
 forms can appear in the brain which were 
 transferred by will from one person to another. 
 When we know that, when we know this 
 inner eye can see the form in another's mind, 
 we must regard it as indicating an immense 
 possibility of vision on that plane. We then 
 ask ourselves concerning all these strange 
 cities and landscapes of dream, all these impish 
 faces which flout at us when we are drowsy, 
 all these visions living and moving in our 
 minds, whether they too came, not by way of 
 the physical senses transformed in memory, 
 but came like the image thought transferred, 
 or by obscure ways reflected from spheres 
 above us, from the lives of others and the 
 visions of others. If we brood on this we 
 will come to think the old explanation is un- 
 tenable and will address ourselves with wonder 
 and hope to the exploration of this strange 
 
44 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 country within ourselves, and will try to find 
 out its limits, and whether from image or 
 vision long pondered over we may not reach 
 to their original being. 
 
 I think few of our psychologists have had 
 imagination themselves. They have busy 
 brains, and, as an Eastern proverb says, " The 
 broken water surface reflects only broken 
 images." They see too feebly to make what 
 they see a wonder to themselves. They 
 discuss the mode of imagination as people 
 might discuss art, who had never seen paint- 
 ing or sculpture. One writer talks about 
 light being a vibration, and the vibration 
 affecting the eye and passing along the nerves 
 until it is stored up in the brain cells. The 
 vibration is, it appears, stayed or fixed there. 
 Yet I know that every movement of mine, 
 the words I speak, the circulation of my 
 blood, cause every molecule in my body to 
 vibrate. How is this vibration in the cells 
 unaffected.'' It must remain unaffected in 
 their hypothesis, for I can recall the original 
 scene, can discuss it, can after years re- 
 summon it again and find the image clear 
 as at first. I refer to it in thought and it 
 remains unchanged. The physical explana- 
 tion of memory itself breaks down even as 
 
ANALYTIC 45 
 
 the material explanation of imagination breaks 
 down. Can an unchanging vibration be re- 
 tained when the substance which holds the 
 vibration is itself subject to continual move- 
 ment ? The moment we close our eyes and 
 are alone with our thoughts and the pictures 
 of dream, we are alone with mystery and 
 miracle. Or are we alone ? Are we secure 
 there from intrusion? Are we not nearer 
 the thronged highways of existence where 
 gods, demons, men and goblins all are 
 psychical visitors. I will not speak here of 
 high things because I am trying to argue 
 with people who see no wonder in anything, 
 and dismiss aU high things with a silly 
 phrase as fancy or imagination or hallucina- 
 tion. But I know from questioning many 
 people that it is common with them 
 before they sleep to see faces, while their 
 eyes are closed, and they are, as they think, 
 alone. These faces are sometimes the faces 
 of imps who frown at them, put out their 
 tongues at them, grin or gibber. Sometimes 
 not a face but a figure, or figures, will be 
 seen which, like the faces, seem endowed with 
 life. To call this imagination or fancy is 
 to explain nothing because the explanation is 
 not explained. The more one concentrates 
 
46 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 on these most trivial mental apparitions, the 
 more certain do we feel they have a life of 
 their own, and that our brain is as fuU of 
 living creatures as our body is thronged with 
 tiny cells, each a life, or as the blood may 
 swarm with bacteria. I draw attention to 
 the mystery in obvious and common things, 
 and ask that they be explained and not 
 slurred over as if no explanation were neces- 
 sary. I ask the doubters of my vision to 
 penetrate a little into the mystery of their 
 own thoughts and dreams before they cry out 
 against me, who for many years travelled far 
 and came upon lovely and inhabited regions 
 to which I would also lead them. I know 
 that my brain is a court where many living 
 creatures throng, and I am never alone in it. 
 You, too, can know that if you heighten the 
 imagination and intensify the will. The 
 darkness in you will begin to glow, and you 
 wiU see clearly, and you will know that what 
 you thought was but a mosaic of memories 
 is rather the froth of a gigantic ocean of life, 
 breaking on the shores of matter, casting up 
 its own flotsam to mingle with the life of the 
 shores it breaks on. If you will light your 
 lamp you can gaze far over that ocean and 
 even embark on it. Sitting in your chair 
 
ANALYTIC 47 
 
 you can travel farther than ever Columbus 
 travelled and to lordlier worlds than his eyes 
 had rested on. Are you not tired of sur- 
 faces ? Come with me and we will bathe in 
 the Fountains of Youth. I can point you 
 the way to El Dorado. 
 
THE MINGLING OF NATURES 
 
 To move a single step we must have power. 
 To see we must be exalted. Not to be lost 
 in vision we must learn the geography of the 
 spirit and the many mansions in the being of 
 the Father. If we concentrate we shall have 
 power. If we meditate we shall lift ourselves 
 above the dark environment of the brain. 
 The inner shall become richer and more 
 magical to us than the outer which has held 
 us so long. How may I allure to this 
 meditation those who see only by the light 
 of day ; who, when their eyes are shut, are 
 as cave-dwellers living in a blackness beneath 
 the hills ? The cave of the body can be lit 
 up. If we explore it we shall there find 
 lights by which the lights of day are made 
 dim. I perhaps to build on had some litde 
 gift of imagination I brought with me into 
 the world, but I know others who had no 
 natural vision who acquired this, and by 
 48 
 
THE MINGLING OF NATURES 49 
 
 sustained meditation and by focussing the 
 will to a burning-point, were raised above 
 the narrow life of the body. Being an 
 artist and a lover of visible beauty, I was 
 often tempted from the highest meditation 
 to contemplate, not divine being, but the 
 mirage of forms. Yet because I was so 
 bewitched and was curious about all I saw, 
 I was made certain that the images which 
 populate the brain have not always been there, 
 nor are refashioned from things seen. I 
 know that with the pictures of memory 
 mingle pictures which come to us, sometimes 
 from the minds of others, sometimes are 
 glimpses of distant countries, sometimes 
 are reflections of happenings in regions in- 
 visible to the outer eyes ; and as meditation 
 grows more exalted, the forms traceable to 
 memory tend to disappear and we have access 
 to a memory greater than our own, the 
 treasure-house of august memories in the in- 
 numerable being of Earth. When minute 
 analysis is made of images in the brain, those 
 foolish fables about memory and imagination 
 no longer affect those who begin this quest, 
 and we see how many streams are tributary 
 to our life. All I have said may be proved 
 by any as curious about things of the mind 
 
 £ 
 
50 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 as I was, if they will but light the candle on 
 their forehead and examine the denizens in 
 the brain. They will find that their sphere 
 is populous with the innermost thoughts of 
 others, and will more and more be led by 
 wonder and awe to believe that we and all 
 things swim in an aether of deity, and that 
 the least motion of our minds is incompre- 
 hensible except in memory of this : " In 
 Him we live and move and have our being." 
 Analysis of the simplest mental apparition 
 will lead us often to stay ourselves on that 
 thought. Once in an idle interval in my 
 work I sat with my face pressed in my hands, 
 and in that dimness pictures began flickering 
 in my brain. I saw a little dark shop, the 
 counter before me, and behind it an old man 
 fumbling with some papers, a man so old 
 that his motions had lost swiftness and pre- 
 cision. Deeper in the store was a girl, red- 
 haired, with grey watchful eyes fixed on the 
 old man. I saw that to enter the shop one 
 must take two steps downwards from a 
 cobbled pavement without. I questioned 
 a young man, my office companion, who 
 then was writing a letter, and I found that 
 what I had seen was his father's shop. 
 All my imaginations — the old man, his 
 
THE MINGLING OF NATURES 51 
 
 yeUow-white beard, his fumbling movements, 
 the watchful girl, her colour, the steps, the 
 cobbled pavement — were not imaginations of 
 mine in any true sense, for while I was in a 
 vacant mood my companion had been think- 
 ing of his home, and his brain was populous 
 with quickened memories, and they invaded 
 'my own mind, and when I made question I 
 found their origin. But how many thousand 
 times are we invaded by such images and 
 there is no speculation over them ? Possibly 
 I might have made use of such things in my 
 art. I might have made a tale about the old 
 man and girl. But if I had done so, if other 
 characters had appeared in my tale who 
 seemed just as living, where would they have 
 come from ? Would I have again been 
 drawing upon the reservoir of my companion's 
 memories ? The vision of the girl and old 
 man may in reality have been but a little 
 part of the images with which my brain was 
 flooded. Did I then see all, or might not 
 other images in the same series emerge at 
 some later time and the connection be lost ? 
 If I had written a tale and had imagined an 
 inner room, an old mother, an absent son, 
 a family trouble, might I not all the while be 
 still adventuring in another's life ? While 
 
52 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 we think we are Imagining a character we 
 may, so marvellous are the hidden ways, be 
 really interpreting a being actually existing, 
 brought into psychic contact with us by some 
 affinity of sentiment or soul. 
 
 I brooded once upon a friend not then 
 knowing where he was, and soon I seemed 
 to myself to be walking in the night. Nigh 
 me was the Sphinx, and, more remote, a dim 
 pyramid. Months later my friend came to 
 Ireland. I found he had been in Egypt at 
 the time I had thought of him. He could 
 not recollect the precise day, but had while 
 there spent a night beside the great monu- 
 ments. I did not see him in vision, but I 
 seemed to be walking there in the night. 
 Why did the angle of vision change as with 
 one moving about ? Did I see through his 
 eyes ? Or did I see, as in the other incident, 
 images reflected from his sphere to my own ? 
 Where does this vision end ? What are its 
 limitations ? Would we, fully come to our- 
 selves, be like those beings in the Apocalypse 
 full of eyes within and without ? Would 
 we, in the fulness of power, act through 
 many men and speak through many voices ? 
 Were Shakespeare and the great masters 
 unconscious_^iagij^ blind visionaries, feeling 
 
THE MINGLING OF NATURES 53 
 
 and comprehending a life they could not see, 
 or who, if they saw, thought it was their 
 own creation. "We must ask ourselves these 
 questions, for, when our lamp is lit, we find 
 the house of our being has many chambers 
 and creatures live there who come and go, 
 and we must ask whether they have the 
 right to be in our house ; and there are 
 corridors there leading into the hearts of 
 others, and windows which open into eternity, 
 and we hardly can tell where our own being 
 ends and another begins, or if there is any 
 end to our being. If we brood with love 
 upon this myriad unity, following the 
 meditation ordained by Buddha for the 
 brothers of his order, to let our minds 
 pervade the whole wide world with heart of 
 love, we come more and more to permeate, 
 or to be pervaded by the lives of others. 
 We are haunted by unknown comrades in 
 many moods, whose naked souls pass through 
 ours, and reveal themselves to us in an un- 
 forgettable instant, and we know them as we 
 hardly know those who are the daily comrades 
 of our heart, who, however intimate, are 
 hidden from us by the husk of the body. 
 As the inner life grows richer we beget more 
 of these affinities. We wonder what relation 
 
54 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 with them is rightly ours. Do we affect 
 them by a sympathy unknown to them as 
 they move us by a revelation more intimate 
 than could be uttered by words ? We^dis- 
 cover in ourselves^ a new sense. By touch 
 witlTthe soul we understand. We realise 
 how profound was that ancient wisdom 
 which told us when we were perfected in 
 concentration we could gain full compre- 
 hension of anything we wished by intent 
 brooding. I never attained that perfectness 
 of concentration, but I saw the possibilities 
 in moments of electric intensity of will when 
 I summoned out of the past a knowledge I 
 desired. How is this knowledge possible ? 
 Is there a centre within us through which all 
 the threads of the universe are drawn, a 
 spiritual atom which mirrors the spiritual 
 infinitudes even as the eye is a mirror of 
 the external heavens ? There is not a pin 
 point in visible space which does not contain 
 a microcosm of heaven and earth. We 
 know that, for nowhere do we move where 
 the eye does not receive its vision of infinity. 
 Is it only in the visible world, this condensa- 
 tion of the infinite in the atomic, and not 
 also in the soul and again in the spirit ? 
 What would the soul in its perfection mirror ? 
 
THE MINGLING OF NATURES 55 
 
 Would it reflect within itself the myriad life 
 of humanity ? Would the spirit mirror the 
 heavens, and the imaginations of the Divine 
 Mind well up within it in mystic and trans- 
 cendental ideations ? Or do they already 
 mirror each their own world, and is all know- 
 ledge already within us, and is our need 
 but for wisdom to create the links between 
 portions of a single being, dramatically 
 sundered by illusion as the soul is in dream ? 
 Is not the gathering of the will and the fiery 
 brooding to this end, and are the glimpses 
 we get of supernature caused but by the 
 momentary uplifting of an eye, by which, 
 when it is fuUy awakened, we dead shall be 
 raised ? 
 
THE MEMORY OF EARTH 
 
 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^jnemory^ 
 but a portion of that eternal memory and 
 that we In our lives are gathering an innumer- 
 aBle" experience for a mightier being than -Pur 
 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. 
 56 
 
THE MEMORY OF EARTH 57 
 
 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 ? 1 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 
 
58 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 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 isj itst, ^ am con - 
 vinced, what people call irnaginaJhgn, an 
 iriterior"creation in j^^£onse to_ a natural 
 cmiosTfy" about past ages^. It is an act of 
 vision, a perception of images alrejidj_exisHng 
 breathed ^on som^JthereaXinediuia^ in 
 no way differs froixL the^medium which holds 
 for us our memories^; and the reperception 
 of ari Tmage 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 sub- 
 stance. 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 
 
THE MEMORY OF EARTH 59 
 
 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 sway- 
 ing 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 pagecannot 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 lessi. 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 instan- 
 taneous 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 
 
6o THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 of the excited girls and the shining procession 
 was in some fashion, I know not how, con- 
 nected 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 pro- 
 pellers 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 
 
THE MEMORY OF EARTH 6i 
 
 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 ac- 
 cessible 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 shinine ; Helen is there m 
 her Troy, and Deirdre wears the beauty which 
 blasted the Red Branch. No ancient lore 
 has perished. Earthjretains for herself and 
 her children what her children might in 
 passion~Kave destroyed, and it is still in the 
 realm of the" Ever Living to be seen by 
 the mystic adventurer. We argue that this 
 memory rnust be universal, for there is no- 
 where 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 
 
62 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 those which make our own learning swift to 
 our service. When we begin thought or 
 discussion on some subject we soon find our- 
 selves 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^avejnade 
 the gloom inthe brain to glow, we can evoke 
 out of the memory of earth images of what- 
 soever 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. Medita- 
 tion 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 
 
THE MEMORY OF EARTH 63 
 
 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 
 effbrt 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 
 
64 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 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 
 
THE MEMORY OF EARTH 65 
 
 dust. For those to whom in their spiritual 
 evolution these apparitions arise I would 
 say : try to become the master of your 
 vision, and ^eek Jfor and eygke 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. , 
 
IMAGINATION 
 
 In all I have related hitherto imagination was 
 not present but only vision. These are too 
 often referred to as identical, and in what I 
 have written I have tried to make clear the 
 distinction. If beyond my window I see 
 amid the manifolded hiUs a river winding 
 ablaze with light, nobody speaks of what is 
 seen as a thing imagined, and if I look out 
 of a window of the soul and see more marvels 
 of shining and shadow, neither is this an 
 act of imagination, which is indeed a higher 
 thing than vision, and a much rarer thing, 
 for in the act of imagination that which is 
 hidden in being, as the Son in the bosom of 
 the Father, is made manifest and a trans- 
 figuration takes place like that we imagine 
 in the Spirit when it willed, "Let there be 
 light." Imagination is not a vision of some- 
 thing which already exists, and which in 
 itself must be unchanged by the act of seeing, 
 
 66 
 
IMAGINATION 67 
 
 but by imagination what exists in latency or 
 essence is out-realised and is given a form in 
 thought, and we can contemplate with fuU 
 consciousness that which hitherto had been 
 unrevealed, or only intuitionally surmised. 
 In imagination there is a revelation of the 
 self to the self, and a definite change in being, 
 as there is in a vapour when a spark ignites 
 it and it becomes an inflammation in the air. 
 Here images appear in consciousness which 
 we may refer definitely to an internal creator, 
 with power to use or remould pre-existing 
 forms, and endow them with life, motion 
 and voice. We infer this because dream and 
 vision sometimes assume a symbolic character 
 and a significance which is personal to us. 
 They tell us plainly, " For you only we 
 exist," and we cannot conceive of what is 
 seen as being a reflection of life in any sphere. 
 In exploring the ancestry of the symbolic 
 vision we draw nigh to that clouded majesty 
 we divine in the depths of our being, and 
 which is heard normally in intuition and 
 conscience, but which now reveals character 
 in its manifestation as the artist in his work. 
 I had a gay adventure when I was a boy at 
 the beginning of my mental travelling, when 
 I met, not a lion, but a symbolic vision in 
 
68 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 the path. I had read somewhere of one 
 whose dreams made a continuous story from 
 night to night, and I was excited at this and 
 wondered whether I too could not build up 
 life for myself in a fairyland of my own 
 creation, and be the lord of this in dream, 
 and offset the petty circumstance of daily life 
 with the beauty of a realm in which I would 
 be king. I bent myself to this, walking 
 about the country roads at night in the dark- 
 ness, building up in fantasy the country of 
 sleep. I remember some of my gorgeous 
 fancies. My dream-world was self-shining. 
 Light was born in everything there at dawn, 
 and faded into a coloured gloom at eve, and 
 if I walked across my lawns in darkness the 
 grasses stirred by my feet would waken to 
 vivid colour and glimmer behind me in a 
 trail of green fire ; or if a bird was disturbed 
 at night in my shadowy woods it became a 
 winged jewel of blue, rose, gold and white, 
 and the leaves tipped by its wings would 
 blaze in flakes of emerald flame, and there 
 were flocks of wild birds that my shouts 
 would call forth to light with glittering 
 plumage the monstrous dusk of the heavens. 
 Many other fancies I had which I now forget, 
 and some of them were intuitions about the 
 
IMAGINATION 69 
 
 Many-Coloured Land. After I had con- 
 ceived this world, one night in a fury of 
 effort I willed that it should be my habita- 
 tion in dream. But of all my dreams I 
 remember only two. In the first I saw a 
 mass of pale clouds, and on them was 
 perched a little ape clutching at the misty 
 substance with its fingers and trying to 
 fashion it to some form. It looked from 
 its work every now and then at some- 
 thing beyond and below the clouds, and I 
 came closer in my dream and saw that 
 what the ape was watching was our earth 
 which spun below in space, and it was trying 
 to model a sphere of mist in mimicry of that 
 which spun past it. While I was intent, this 
 grotesque sculptor turned suddenly, looking 
 at me with an extraordinary grimace which 
 said clearly as words could say, "That is 
 what you are trying to do," and then I was 
 whirled away again and I was the tiniest 
 figure in vast mid-air, and before me was a 
 gigantic gate which seemed lofty as the skies, 
 and a shadowy figure filled the doorway and 
 barred my passage. That is all I can re- 
 member, and I am forced by dreams like this 
 to conclude there is a creator of such dreams 
 within us, for I cannot suppose that anywhere 
 
70 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 in space or time a little ape sat on a cloud 
 and tried to fashion it into planetary form. 
 The creator of that vision was transcendent 
 to the waking self and to the self which 
 experienced the dream, for neither self took 
 conscious part in the creation. The creator 
 of that vision was seer into my consciousness 
 in waking and in sleep, for what of the vision 
 I remember was half a scorn of my effort and 
 half a warning that my ambition was against 
 natural law. The creator of that vision could 
 combine forms and endow them with motion 
 and life for the vision was intellectual and 
 penetrated me with its meaning. Is it ir- 
 rational to assume so much, or that the 
 vision indicated a peculiar character in its 
 creator, and that the ironic mood was not 
 alien to it nor even humour ? I am rather 
 thankful to surmise this of a self which waves 
 away so many of our dreams and joys, and 
 which seems in some moods to be remote 
 from the normal and terrible as the angel 
 with the flaming sword pointing every way 
 to guard the Tree of Life. In this dream 
 some self of me, higher in the tower of our 
 being which reaches up to the heavens, made 
 objective manifestations of its thought ; but 
 there were moments when it seemed itself to 
 
IMAGINATION 71 
 
 descend, wrapping its memories of heaven 
 about it like a cloth, and to enter the body, 
 and I knew it as more truly myself than that 
 which began in my mother's womb, and that 
 it was antecedent to anything which had body 
 in the world. Here I must return to those 
 imaginations I had walking about the country 
 roads as a boy, and select from these, as I 
 have done from vision, things upon which 
 the reason may be brought to bear. It is 
 more difficult, for when there is divine 
 visitation the mortal is made dark and blind 
 with glory and, in its fiery fusion with the 
 spirit, reason is abased or bewildered or 
 spreads too feeble a net to capture Leviathan, 
 for often we cannot after translate to ourselves 
 in memory what the spirit said, though every 
 faculty is eager to gather what is left after 
 the visitation even as the rabble in eastern 
 legend scramble to pick up the gold showered 
 in the passing of the king. By the time I 
 was seventeen or eighteen my brain began to 
 flicker with vivid images. I tried to paint 
 these, and began with much enthusiasm a 
 series of pictures which were to illustrate the 
 history of man from his birth in the Divine 
 Mind where he glimmered first in the dark- 
 ness of chaos in vague and monstrous forms 
 
72 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 growing ever nigher to the human, to men 
 beasts and men birds, until at last the most 
 perfect form, the divine idea of man, was 
 born in space. I traced its descent into 
 matter, its conflict with the elements, and 
 finally the series ended in a pessimistic fancy 
 where one of our descendants millions of 
 years hence, a minute philosopher, a creature 
 less than three inches in height, sat on one 
 of our gigantic skulls and watched the skies 
 ruining back into their original chaos and 
 the stars falling from their thrones on the 
 height. Most of these pictures were only 
 the fancies of a boy, but in considering one 
 of the series I began to feel myself in alliance 
 with a deeper consciousness, and that was 
 when I was trying to imagine the apparition 
 in the Divine Mind of the idea of the 
 Heavenly Man. Something ancient and 
 eternal seemed to breathe through my fancies. 
 I was blinded then by intensity of feeling to 
 the demerits of the picture, but I was excited 
 in an extraordinary way over what I had 
 done, and I lay awake long into the night 
 brooding over it. I asked myself what 
 legend I would write under the picture. 
 Something beyond reason held me, and I felt 
 like one who is in a dark room and hears the 
 
IMAGINATION 73 
 
 breathing of another creature, and himself 
 waits breathless for its utterance, and I 
 struggled to understand what wished to be 
 said, and at last, while I was preternaturally 
 dilated and intent, something whispered to 
 me, " Call it the Birth of Aeon." The word 
 " Aeon " thrilled me, for it seemed to evoke 
 by association of ideas, moods and memories 
 most ancient, out of some ancestral life where 
 they lay hidden ; and I think it was the 
 following day that, still meditative and cling- 
 ing to the word as a lover clings to the name 
 of the beloved, a myth incarnated in me, the 
 story of an Aeon, one of the first starry 
 emanations of Deity, one pre-eminent in the 
 highest heavens, so nigh to Deity and so 
 high in pride that he would be not less than 
 a god himself and would endure no dominion 
 over him save the law of his own will. This 
 Aeon of my imagination revolted against 
 heaven and left its courts, descending into 
 the depths where it mirrored itself in chaos, 
 weaving out of the wild elements a mansion 
 for its spirit. That mansion was our earth 
 and that Aeon was the God of our world. 
 This myth incarnated in me as a boy walking 
 along the country roads in Armagh. I re- 
 turned to Dublin after a fortnight and it was 
 
74 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 a day or two after that I went into the Library 
 at Leinster House and asked for an art 
 journal. I stood by a table while the attend- 
 ant searched for the volume. There was a 
 book lying open there. My eye rested on it. 
 It was a dictionary of religions, I think, for 
 the first word my eye caught was " Aeon " 
 and it was explained as a word used by the 
 Gnostics to designate the first created beings. 
 I trembled through my body. At that time 
 I knew nothing of mystical literature and 
 indeed litde of any literature except such tales 
 as a boy reads, and the imaginations which 
 had begun to overwhelm me were to me 
 then nothing but mere imaginations, and were 
 personal and unrelated in my mind with any 
 conception of truth, or idea that the imagina- 
 tion could lay hold of truth. I trembled 
 because I was certain I had never heard the 
 word before, and there rushed into my mind 
 the thought of pre-existence and that this 
 was memory of the past. I went away 
 hurriedly that I might think by myself, but 
 my thoughts drove me back again soon, and 
 I asked the librarian who were the Gnostics 
 and if there was a book which gave an account 
 of their ideas. He referred me to a volume of 
 Neander's Church History, and there, in the 
 
IMAGINATION 75 
 
 section dealing with the Sabaeans, I found 
 the myth of the proud Aeon who mirrored 
 himself in chaos and became the lord of our 
 world. I believed then, and still believe, that 
 the immortal in us has memory of all its 
 wisdom, or, as Keats puts it in one of his 
 letters, there is an ancestral wisdom in man 
 and we can if we wish drink that old wine 
 of heaven. This memory of the spirit is the 
 real basis of imagination, and when it speaks 
 to us we feel truly inspired and a mightier 
 creature than ourselves speaks through us. 
 I remember how pure, holy and beautiful 
 these imaginations seemed, how they came 
 like crystal water sweeping aside the muddy 
 current of my life, and the astonishment I 
 felt, I who was almost inarticulate, to find 
 sentences which seemed noble and full of 
 melody sounding in my brain as if another 
 and greater than I had spoken them ; and 
 how strange it was also a little later to write 
 without effort verse, which some people still 
 think has beauty, while I could hardly, 
 because my reason had then no mastery over 
 the materials of thought, pen a prose sentence 
 intelligently. I am convinced that all poetry 
 is, as Emerson said, first written in the 
 heavens, that is, it is conceived by a self 
 
76 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 deeper than appears In normal life, and when 
 it speaks to us or tells us its ancient story we 
 taste of eternity and drink the Soma juice, 
 the elixir of immortality. 
 
DREAMS 
 
 I HAD discovered through such dreams as 
 that of the satirical ape that there is One 
 who is vigilant through the sleep of the 
 body, and I was led by other dreams to 
 assume that in the heart of sleep there is 
 an intellectual being moving in a world of 
 its own and using transcendental energies. 
 Most of the dreams we remember are 
 chaotic, and these seem often to be deter- 
 mined in character by the accident which 
 brings about our waking. Chaotic as these 
 are, they are full of wonder and miracle, for 
 in the space of a second, almost before a 
 voice has reached the ear of the sleeper 
 or a hand has touched him, some magical 
 engineer has flung a bridge of wild incident 
 over which the spirit races from deep own- 
 being unto outward being. Never when 
 awake could we pack into a second of vivid 
 imagination the myriad incidents that the 
 
 77 
 
78 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 artificer of dream can create to bring us 
 from the being we remember not back to 
 the dream of life. This magical swiftness of 
 creation in dream has been noted by many, 
 and those who have had experience of even 
 the most nightmare happenings before wak- 
 ing must be led to surmise that within that 
 blankness we call sleep there is a conscious- 
 ness in unsleeping vigilance, and this being, 
 which is unsleeping while the body sleeps, 
 excites us to a curiosity as wild as ever 
 led adventurer across uncharted seas. The 
 ancient seers made earth world, mid-world 
 and heaven world synonyms for three states 
 of consciousness, waking, dreaming and 
 deep sleep. But the dream state of the 
 soul moving in the mid-world of which they 
 spoke is an intellectual state, and its character 
 is not easily to be guessed from that chaos 
 of fancies we ordinarily remember and call 
 our dreams ; and which I think are not true 
 dreams at all but rather a transitional state 
 on the borderland, like to the froth on the 
 ocean fringes, where there are buifetings of 
 air, churnings of sand, water and weed, 
 while beyond is the pure deep. I had but 
 slight experience of that loftier life in dream 
 which to others I know was truer life than 
 
DREAMS 79 
 
 waking. But none can speak truly of the 
 dreams or imaginations of others, but only 
 of what themselves have known. In in- 
 tensest meditation I think we encroach on 
 that state which to the waking brain is 
 veiled by sleep and is normally a blank, for 
 in the highest dreams of which I retained 
 memory I was on a plane of being identical 
 with that reached in the apex of meditation 
 and had perceptions of a similar order of 
 things. The black curtain of unconscious- 
 ness which drapes the chambers of the brain 
 in sleep, once, for an instant, was magically 
 lifted for me, and I had a glimpse of the 
 high adventures of the unsleeping soul. I 
 found myself floating on the luminous night 
 in a body lighter than air and charged with 
 power, buoyed up above a mountainous 
 region. Beneath me was a wrinkled dusk 
 like the crater of some huge volcano. There 
 were others with me, people with airy glitter- 
 ing bodies, all, like myself, intent on a being 
 mightier than our own. A breath of power 
 poured upward from below as from a 
 fountain, or as if from here some sidereal 
 river flowed out to the country of the stars. 
 We hovered over the fountain from which 
 came that invisible breath filling us with 
 
8o THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 delight and power. While we hung intent 
 there came the apparition of a vast and 
 glowing orb of light like the radiance about 
 a god, and of those glittering ones some 
 flung themselves into that sphere of light, 
 and were absorbed in it : and it faded away, 
 ebbing from us as if it had been a living 
 galleon come to the hither side of being but 
 for a moment, to carry with it those who 
 might go to the heaven world to be partakers 
 of the divine nature and live in their parent 
 Flame. I could not cross with that Charon, 
 and I remembered no more, for the curtain 
 of darkness which was magically lifted was 
 again dropped over the chambers of the 
 brain. But when I woke I was murmur- 
 ing to myself, as if in interpretation, 
 the words of the Apostle, "We all with 
 open face beholding as in a glass the glory 
 of the Lord are changed unto the same 
 image from glory to glory," and I knew 
 there were many at that mystery who would 
 wake up again outcasts of Heaven, and the 
 God of this world would obliterate memory 
 so that they would never know they had 
 kept tryst with the Kabiri. 
 
 Once before, not in dream but in medita- 
 tion, there had broken in upon me such a 
 
DREAMS 8 I 
 
 light from the secret places ; and I saw 
 through earth as through a transparency to 
 one of those centres of power, "fountains 
 out of Hecate" as they are called in the 
 Chaldaic oracles, and which are in the being 
 of earth, even as in ourselves there are fiery 
 centres undiscovered by the anatomist where 
 thought is born or the will leaps up in flame. 
 And then, and in the dream 1 have just told, 
 and in that other vision of the heavenly city 
 where I found myself among the shining 
 ones, there seemed to be little of personal 
 fantasy as there was in the dream of the 
 ape, but I seemed to myself to be moving 
 in a real nature which others also have 
 moved in, and which was perhaps the sphere 
 known also to that spiritual geographer who 
 assured Socrates of a many-coloured earth 
 above this with temples wherein the gods 
 do truly dwell. I do not wish now to urge 
 this but only to draw the deductions any 
 psychologist analysing dream might draw 
 from dreams not mystical in character. I 
 may liken myself in my perception of that 
 dream to a man in a dark hall so utterly 
 lightless, so soundless, that nothing reaches 
 him ; and then the door is suddenly flung 
 open, and he sees a crowd hurrying by, and 
 
 o 
 
82 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 then the door is closed and he is again in 
 darkness. Such a man seeing through the 
 door a procession of people in the streets 
 knows they had a life before they came nigh 
 the door and after they passed the door ; 
 and he is not foolish if he speculates on this 
 and how they gathered and for what purpose. 
 So I am justified, I think, in assuming that 
 there was some psychic action in priority to 
 my moment of consciousness. I must seek 
 intellectual causes for events which have 
 logical structure and coherency : I cannot 
 assume that that sudden consciousness of 
 being in the air was absolutely the beginning 
 of that episode any more than I can imagine 
 a flower suddenly appearing without plant or 
 root or prior growth ; nor can I think that 
 blind motions of the brain, in blank un- 
 consciousness of what they tend to, suddenly 
 flame into a consciousness instinct with wild 
 beauty. To assume that would be a freak 
 in reasoning. I might with as much wisdom 
 assume that if in the darkness I took my 
 little son's box of alphabetical bricks, and 
 scattered them about blindly, when the light 
 was turned on I might find that the letters 
 composed a noble sentence. I can reason- 
 ably take either of two possibilities, one 
 
DREAMS 83 
 
 being that the dream was self-created fantasy- 
 only, and the other that it was the mirroring 
 in the brain of an experience of soul in a 
 real sphere of being. But whether we 
 assume one or other we postulate an un- 
 sleeping consciousness within ourselves while 
 the brain is asleep : and that unsleeping 
 creature was either the creator of the dream 
 or the actor in a real event. Who is that 
 unsleeping creature ? Is it the same being 
 who daily inhabits the brain ? Does it rise 
 up when the body sinks on the couch ? Has 
 it a dual life as we have when waking, when 
 half our consciousness is of an external 
 nature and half of subjective emotions and 
 thoughts ? Are part of our dreams internal 
 fantasy and part perceptions of an external 
 sphere of being ? If I assume that the soul 
 was an actor in a real event which was 
 mirrored in the brain, why did I remember 
 only one moment of the adventure ? To 
 see any being means that we are on the 
 same plane. I see you who are physical 
 because I also have bodily life. If I see an 
 elemental being or a heavenly being it means 
 that some part of me is on the same plane 
 of being or substance. Had I by medita- 
 tion and concentration evolved in myself 
 
84 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 some element akin to that breathed upward 
 from the mystic fountain, and when the soul 
 inhaled this fiery essence a rapport began 
 between free soul and slumbering body, the 
 circuit was complete, and sleeping and un- 
 sleeping being became one ? On that hypo- 
 thesis there were journeyings of the soul 
 before and after the moment remembered, 
 but the action in priority and in succession I 
 could not remember because there was as 
 yet no kinship in the brain to the mood of 
 the unsleeping soul or to the deed it did. 
 If the soul is an actor in deep sleep, seeing, 
 hearing and moving in a world of real 
 energies, then we are justified in assuming a 
 psychic body within the physical, for to see, 
 to hear, to move are functions of an organism 
 however ethereal. Is it the shining of the 
 Psyche we perceive within ourselves when 
 through aspiration the body becomes filled 
 with interior light and consciousness is 
 steeped in a brilliancy of many colours while 
 the eyes are closed ? Are we then like the 
 half-evolved dragon-fly who catches with the 
 first cracking of its sheath a glimpse of its 
 own gorgeous plumage ^ Was it this body 
 the prophet spoke of when he said, " Thou 
 hast been in Eden the Garden of God : 
 
DREAMS 85 
 
 every precious stone was thy covering . . . 
 thou wast upon the holy mountain of God : 
 thou hast walked up and down amid the 
 stones of fire ? " And was this spiritual life 
 lost to man because his heart was lifted up 
 because of his beauty, and wisdom was cor- 
 rupted by reason of its own brightness ? 
 
 If we brood over the alternative that the 
 dream was self - begotten fantasy, no less 
 must we make obeisance to the dreamer of 
 dreams. Who is this who flashes on the 
 inner eye landscapes as living as those we 
 see in nature ? The winds blow cool upon 
 the body in dream : the dew is on the 
 grass : the clouds fleet over the sky : we 
 float in air and see all things from an angle 
 of vision of which on waking we have no 
 experience : we move in unknown cities and 
 hurry on secret missions. It matters not 
 whether our dream is a grotesque, the same 
 marvellous faculty of swift creation is in it. 
 "We are astonished at nightmare happenings 
 no less than at the lordliest vision, for we 
 divine in the creation of both the same 
 magical power. I cannot but think the gnat 
 to be as marvellous as the Bird of Paradise, 
 and these twain no less marvellous than 
 the seraphim. The Master of Life is in all. 
 
86 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 and 1 am as excited with wonder at the 
 creative genius shown in the wildest dream 
 as in the most exalted vision. Not by any 
 power I understand are these images created : 
 but the power which creates them is, I surmise, 
 a mightier self of ours, and yet our slave for 
 purposes of its own. I feel its presence in 
 all I do, think or imagine. It waits on my 
 will. It is in the instant and marvellous 
 marshalling of memories when I speak or 
 write. Out of the myriad chambers of the 
 soul where they lie in latency, an hundred or 
 a thousand memories rise up, words, deeds, 
 happenings, trivial or mighty, the material 
 for thought or speech waiting in due order 
 for use. They sink back silently and are 
 again ready : at the least desire of the will 
 they fly up to consciousness more swiftly 
 than iron filings to the magnet. If I am 
 wakened suddenly I surmise again that it is 
 that enchanter who builds miraculously a 
 bridge of incident to carry me from deep being 
 to outward being. When thought or imagina- 
 tion is present in me, ideas or images appear 
 on the surface of consciousness, and though 
 I call them my thoughts, my imaginations, 
 they are already formed when I become aware 
 of them. The Indian sage Sankara says by 
 
DREAMS 87 
 
 reason of the presence of the highest Self in 
 us, the mind in us is moved as if moved by 
 another than ourselves. Upon its presence 
 depend all motions of body and soul. Could 
 I embrace even the outer infinitude with the 
 eye of the body, if it did not preside over 
 the sense of sight, infinitude interpreting infini- 
 tude .'' It seems to wait on us as indifferently 
 and as swiftly when the will in us is evil as 
 when it is good. It will conjure up for us 
 images of animalism and lust at the call of 
 desire. It might speak of itself as the Lord 
 spoke of Himself to the prophet : " From 
 me spring forth good and evil." But if we 
 evoke it for evil it answers with fading 
 power, and we soon are unable to evoke it 
 for good, for the evil we have called forth 
 works for our feebleness and extinction. Or 
 is there another and evil genie, a dark effigy 
 of the higher also waiting on us as slave of 
 our desires.'' I do not know. Was it of 
 the higher it was said, "Ask, and ye shall 
 receive. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, 
 and it shall be opened to you " ? Can 
 we by searching find out its ways ? Can 
 we come to an identity of ourselves with 
 it ? Again I do not know, but the more I 
 ponder over this unsleeping being, the more 
 
88 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 do I feel astonished as Aladdin with lamp 
 or ring, who had but to touch the talisman 
 and a legion of genii were ready to work his 
 will, to build up for him marvellous palaces 
 in the twinkling of an eye, and to ransack for 
 him the treasure-houses of eternity. 
 
THE ARCHITECTURE OF DREAM 
 
 I HAVE failed in my purpose if I have not 
 made it clear that in the actual architecture 
 of dream and vision there is a mystery which 
 is not explained by speaking of suppressed 
 desire or sex or any of those springs which 
 modern psychologists surmise are released 
 in dream. A mood may attract its affinities 
 but it does not create what it attracts, 
 and between anger and a definite vision of 
 conflict there is a gulf as mysterious as 
 there was between Aladdin's desire and the 
 building of his marvellous palace. I desire 
 a house, but desire does not build it. I 
 design a house, but every line is drawn 
 with full consciousness, and when I give the 
 plan to the builder every brick is placed 
 with full consciousness by the masons. No 
 coherent architecture in city or dream arises 
 magically by some unreason which translates 
 bodiless desire into organic form. However 
 
 &9 
 
90 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 swift the succession may be, in that second 
 of time between desire and its visionary 
 embodiment or fulfilment there must be 
 space for intellectual labour, the construc- 
 tion of forms or the choice of forms, and 
 the endowing of them with motion. A 
 second to my brain is too brief a fragment 
 of time for more than sight, but I must 
 believe that to a more intense consciousness, 
 which is co-worker with mine, that second 
 may suffice for a glimpse into some pleroma 
 of form for the selection of these and the 
 unrolling of a vast pageantry. Something 
 there is, a creature within me, behind whose 
 swiftness I falter a hopeless laggard, for it 
 may be a traveller through the Archaeus and 
 back again with the merchandise of its travel 
 before my pulse has beaten twice. As an 
 artist who has laboured slowly at the creation 
 of pictures I assert that the forms of dream 
 or vision if self-created require a conscious 
 artist to arrange them, a magician to endow 
 them with life, and that the process is 
 intellectual, that is, it is conscious on some 
 plane of being, though that self which sits 
 in the gate of the body does not know what 
 powers or dignitaries meet in the inner 
 palace chambers of the soul. When we have 
 
ARCHITECTURE OF DREAM 91 
 
 dreams of flying and see all things from an 
 angle of vision of which we never could 
 have experience in waking, we know that 
 to speak of the moving pictures of dream 
 as memories or unconscious recombinations 
 of things seen when waking, is to speak 
 without subtlety or intellectual comprehen- 
 sion. I criticise the figures I see in dream 
 or vision exactly as I would the figures in 
 a painting. Even if I see a figure in dream 
 I have seen when waking, if the figure acts 
 in a manner differing from its action when 
 seen with the physical eye, if it now walks 
 when it then sat, or looks down where before 
 it looked up, and if these motions in dream 
 appear authentic so that face and form have 
 the proper light and shade and the anatomies 
 are undistorted, that dream change in the 
 figure of memory is itself a most perplexing 
 thing. We must suppose that memory 
 as memory is as fixed in its way as a 
 sun -picture is fixed or as the attitude 
 of a statue is fixed. If it fades it should 
 be by loss of precision and not into other 
 equally precise but different forms and 
 gestures. Now we could not without cracks 
 or distorting of anatomies or complete re- 
 modelling change the pose of a statue even 
 
92 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 if it was modelled in some easily malleable 
 substance ; and the plastic change from 
 stillness to motion in a figure, which we 
 presume to be a memory, is wonderful 
 when we think of it, as wonderful as if the 
 little Tanagra in clay upon my shelf should 
 change from its cast solidity and walk up 
 and down before me. For myself I think 
 man is a protean being, within whose unity 
 there is diversity, and there are creatures in 
 the soul which can inform the images of 
 our memory, or the eternal memory, aye, 
 and speak through them to us in dream, 
 so that we hear their voices, and it is with 
 us in our minute microcosmic fashion even 
 as it was said of the universe that it is a 
 soliloquy of Deity wherein Ain-Soph talks 
 to Ain-Soph. 
 
 We can make such general speculations 
 about all pictures moving before the inner 
 eye, and it is always worth while investigating 
 the anatomy of vision and to be intent on 
 what appears to us, for if we have intentness 
 we have memory. A mental picture which 
 at first had yielded nothing to us may be 
 followed by others which indicate a relation 
 to the earliest in the series so that they seem 
 like pages read at different times from the 
 
ARCHITECTURE OF DREAM 93 
 
 same book. When I was young I haunted 
 the mountains much, finding in the high air 
 vision became richer and more luminous. 1 
 have there watched for hours shining land- 
 scape and figures in endless procession, trying 
 to discover in these some significance other 
 than mere beauty. Once on the hillside I 
 seemed to slip from to-day into some remote 
 yesterday of earth. There was the same 
 valley below me, but now it was deepening 
 into evening and the skies were towering up 
 through one blue heaven to another. There 
 was a battle in the valley and men reeled 
 darkly hither and thither. I remember one 
 warrior about whom the battle was thickest, 
 for a silver star flickered above his helmet 
 through the dusk. But this I soon forgot 
 for I was impelled to look upwards, and there 
 above me was an airship glittering with light 
 It halted above the valley while a man, grey- 
 bearded, very majestic, his robes all starred 
 and jewelled, bent over and looked down 
 upon the battle. The pause was but for an 
 instant, and then the lights flashed more 
 brilliantly, some luminous mist was jetted 
 upon the air from many tubes below the boat, 
 and it soared and passed beyond the mountain, 
 and it was followed by another and yet others. 
 
94 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 all glittering with lights, and they climbed 
 the air over the hill and were soon lost amid 
 the other lights of heaven. It must be a 
 quarter of a century ago since I saw this vision 
 which I remember clearly because I painted 
 the ship, and it must, I think, be about five 
 or six years after that a second vision in the 
 same series startled me. I was again on the 
 high places, and this time the apparition in 
 the mystical air was so close that if I could 
 have stretched out a hand from this world to 
 that I could have clutched the aerial voyager 
 as it swept by me. A young man was steer- 
 ing the boat, his black hair blown back from 
 his brows, his face pale and resolute, his head 
 bent, his eyes intent on his wheel : and beside 
 him sat a woman, a rose-coloured shawl 
 speckled with golden threads drawn over her 
 head, around her shoulders, across her bosom 
 and folded arms. Her face was proud as a 
 queen's, and I long remembered that face for 
 its pride, stillness and beauty. I thought at 
 the moment it was some image in the eternal 
 memory of a civilisation more remote than 
 Atlantis and I cried out in my heart in a 
 passion of regret for romance passed away 
 from the world, not knowing that the world's 
 great age was again returning and that soon 
 
ARCHITECTURE OF DREAM 95 
 
 we were to swim once more beneath the epic 
 skies. After that at different times and 
 places I saw other such aerial wanderers, and 
 this I noted, that all such visions had a 
 character in keeping with each other, that 
 they were never mixed up with modernity, 
 that they had the peculiarities by which we 
 recognise civilisations as distinct from each 
 other, Chinese from Greek or Egyptian from 
 Hindu. They were the stuff out of which 
 romance is made, and if I had been a story- 
 teller like our great Standish O'Grady I might 
 have made without questioning a wonder 
 tale of the air, legendary or futurist, but I 
 have always had as much of the philosophic 
 as the artistic interest in what people call 
 imagination, and I have thought that many 
 artists and poets gave to art or romance what 
 would have had an equal if not a greater 
 interest as psychology. I began to ask myself 
 where in the three times or in what realm of 
 space these ships were launched. Was it 
 ages ago in some actual workshop in an 
 extinct civilisation, and were these but images 
 in the eternal memory ? Or were they 
 launched by my own spirit from some magical 
 arsenal of being, and, if so, with what intent ? 
 Or were they images of things yet to be in 
 
96 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 the world, begotten in that eternal mind 
 where past, present and future coexist, and 
 from which they stray into the imagination 
 of scientist, engineer or poet to be out-realised 
 in discovery, mechanism or song ? I find it 
 impossible to decide. Sometimes I even 
 speculate on a world interpenetrating ours 
 where another sun is glowing, and other stars 
 are shining over other woods, mountains, 
 rivers and another race of beings. And I 
 know not why it should not be so. We are 
 forced into such speculations when we become 
 certain that no power in us of which we are 
 conscious is concerned in the creation of such 
 visionary forms. If these ships were launched 
 so marvellously upon the visionary air by 
 some transcendent artisan of the spirit they 
 must have been built for some purpose and 
 for what ? I was not an engineer intent on 
 aerial flight, but this is, I think, notable that at 
 the moment of vision I seemed to myself to 
 understand the mechanism of these airships, 
 and I felt, if I could have stepped out of this 
 century into that visionary barque, I could 
 have taken the wheel and steered it con- 
 fidently on to its destiny. 1 knew that the 
 closing of a tube at one side of the bow would 
 force the ship to steer in that direction. 
 
ARCHITECTURE OF DREAM 97 
 
 because the force jetted from the parallel tube 
 on the other side, no longer balanced by an 
 equal emission of power, operated to bring 
 about the change. There is an interest in 
 speculating about this impression of know- 
 ledge for it might indicate some complicity 
 of the subconscious mind with the vision 
 which startled the eye. That knowledge 
 may have been poured on the one while 
 seeing was granted to the other. If the 
 vision was imagination, that is if the airship 
 was launched from my own spirit, I must 
 have been in council with the architect, 
 perhaps in deep sleep. If I suppose it was 
 imagination I am justified in trying by every 
 means to reach with full consciousness to the 
 arsenal where such wonders are wrought. I 
 cannot be content to accept it as imagination 
 and not try to meet the architect. As for these 
 visions of airships and for many others I have 
 been unable to place them even speculatively 
 In any world or any century, and It must be 
 so with the Imaginations of many other people. 
 But I think that when we begin speculation 
 about these things it Is the beginning of our 
 wakening from the dream of life. 
 
 I have suggested that images of things to 
 be may come into our sphere out of a being 
 
 H 
 
98 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 where time does not exist. I have had my- 
 self no definite proof as yet that any vision 
 I saw was prophetic, and only one which 
 suggested itself as such to me, and this was 
 so remarkable that I put it on record, because 
 if it was prophetic its significance may be- 
 come apparent later on. I was meditating 
 about twenty-one years ago in a little room, 
 and my meditation was suddenly broken by 
 a series of pictures which flashed before me 
 with the swiftness of moving pictures in a 
 theatre. They had no relation I could dis- 
 cover to the subject of my meditation, and 
 were interpolated into it then perhaps, be- 
 cause in a tense state of concentration when 
 the brain becomes luminous it is easier to 
 bring to consciousness what has to be brought. 
 I was at the time much more interested in 
 the politics of eternity than in the politics of 
 my own country, and would not have missed 
 an hour of my passionate meditation on the 
 spirit to have witnessed the most dramatic 
 spectacle in any of our national movements. 
 In this meditation I was brought to a wooded 
 valley beyond which was a mountain, and 
 between heaven and earth over the valley 
 was a vast figure aureoled with light, and 
 it descended from that circle of light and 
 
ARCHITECTURE OF DREAM 99 
 
 assumed human shape, and stood before me 
 and looked at me. The face of this figure 
 was broad and noble in type, beardless and 
 dark-haired. It was in its breadth akin to 
 the face of the young Napoleon, and I would 
 refer both to a common archetype. This 
 being looked at me and vanished, and was 
 instantly replaced by another vision, and this 
 second vision was of a woman with a blue 
 cloak around her shoulders, who came into a 
 room and lifted a young child upon her lap, 
 and from all Ireland rays of light converged 
 on that child. Then this disappeared and 
 was on the instant followed by another 
 picture in the series ; and here I was brought 
 from Ireland to look on the coronation throne 
 at Westminster, and there sat on it a figure 
 of empire which grew weary and let fall 
 the sceptre from its fingers, and itself then 
 drooped and fell and disappeared from the 
 famous seat. And after that in swift suc- 
 cession came another scene, and a gigantic 
 figure, wild and distraught, beating a drum, 
 stalked up and down, and wherever its feet 
 fell there were sparks and the swirling of 
 flame and black smoke upward as from burn- 
 ing cities. It was like the Red Swineherd of 
 legend which beat men into an insane frenzy ; 
 
loo THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 and when that distraught figure vanished I 
 saw the whole of Ireland lit up from mountain 
 to sea, spreading its rays to the heavens as in 
 the vision which Brigid the seeress saw and 
 told to Patrick. All I could make of that 
 sequence was that some child of destiny, 
 around whom the future of Ireland was to 
 pivot, was born then or to be born, and that 
 it was to be an avatar was symbolised by the 
 descent of the first figure from the sky, and 
 that before that high destiny was to be ac- 
 complished the power of empire was to be 
 weakened, and there was to be one more 
 tragic episode in Irish history. Whether this 
 is truth or fantasy time alone can tell. No 
 drums that have since beaten in this land 
 seem to me to be mad enough to be foretold 
 of in that wild drumming. What can I say 
 of such a vision but that it impressed me 
 to forgetfulness of analysis, for what it said 
 was more important than any philosophy of 
 its manner. I have tried to reason over it 
 with myself, as I would with a sequence of 
 another character, to deduce from a sequence 
 better than could be done from a single 
 vision, valid reasons for believing that there 
 must be a conscious intellect somewhere 
 behind the sequence. But I cannot reason 
 
ARCHITECTURE OF DREAM loi 
 
 over it. I only know that I look every- 
 where in the face of youth, in the aspect of 
 every new notability, hoping before I die to 
 recognise the broad -browed avatar of my 
 vision. 
 
HAVE IMAGINATIONS BODY ? 
 
 In the literature of science I read of marvel- 
 lously delicate instruments devised to make 
 clear to the intellect the mode of operation 
 of forces invisible to the eye, how Alpha 
 rays, Gamma rays, or the vibrations in metal 
 or plant are measured, and I sigh for some 
 device to aid the intellect in solving difficult 
 problems of psychology. I ask myself how 
 may I ascertain with a precision of knowledge 
 which would convince others whether the 
 figures of vision, imagination or dream are 
 two or three dimensional. The figures cast 
 on the screen in a theatre are on the flat, but 
 have all the illusion of motion, distance, 
 shadow, light and form. The figures of 
 human memory I am content to accept as 
 being in two dimensions. They are im- 
 printed by waves of light on the retina, and 
 cast upon some screen in the brain. But I 
 am forced by my own experience and that of 
 
HAVE IMAGINATIONS BODY ? 103 
 
 others to believe that nature has a memory, 
 and that it is accessible to us. But this 
 memory cannot be recorded as ours through 
 bodily organs of sight or hearing, nor can 
 imagination make clear to me how any 
 medium could exist in nature which would 
 reflect upon itself as a mirror reflects, or as 
 human vision reflects, an impression in- 
 telligible to us of what is passing. If there 
 were such a medium, acting as a mirror to 
 nature or life, and retaining the impression, 
 it must be universal as the supposed aether of 
 the scientist ; and how could impressions on 
 this medium intelligible to us be focussed as 
 the vibrations of light are through the needle- 
 point of the eye to record a single view-point ? 
 In our visions of the memory of nature we 
 see undistorted figures. If we could imagine 
 the whole body to be sensitive to light, as is 
 that single point in the brain on which the 
 optic nerves converge, what kind of vision 
 would we have ? The earth under foot, 
 objects right, left, above and below, would 
 all clamour in various monstrous shapes for 
 attention. The feet would see from one 
 angle, the hands from another, back and 
 front would confuse us ; so I cannot imagine 
 the recording power in nature as reflecting 
 
I04 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 like a mirror, and retaining and recording 
 the impressions. But we have another mode 
 of memory in ourselves which might suggest 
 the mode of memory in nature, that by 
 which our subjective life is recorded. Mood, 
 thought, passion, ecstasy, aU are preserved 
 for us, can be summoned up and re-created. 
 How is this memory maintained ? Are we 
 continuously casting oiF by way of emana- 
 tion an image of ourselves instant by 
 instant, infinitesimally delicate but yet com- 
 plete ? Is every motion of mind and body 
 preserved so that a complete facsimile, an 
 effigy in three dimensions, exists of every 
 moment in our being. Is the memory of 
 nature like that ? Is it by a continuous 
 emanation of itself it preserves for itself 
 its own history ? Does this hypothesis lay 
 too heavy a burden on the substance of the 
 universe as we know it ? I do not like to 
 use arguments the validity of which I am 
 not myself able to establish. But I might 
 recall that an eminent thinker in science, 
 Balfour Stewart, supposed of the aether that 
 there was a continual transference of energy 
 to it from the visible universe, and that this 
 stored-up energy might form the basis of 
 an immortal memory for man and nature. 
 
HAVE IMAGINATIONS BODY ? 105 
 
 The conception did not lay too heavy a 
 burden on matter as he imagined it. But 
 what is matter ? Is it not pregnant every 
 atom of it with the infinite ? Even in 
 visible nature does not every minutest point 
 of space reflect as a microcosm the macrocosm 
 of earth and heaven ? This minute point 
 of space occupied by my eye as I stand on 
 the mountain has poured into it endless 
 vistas of manifolded mountains, vales, woods, 
 cities, glittering seas, clouds and an infinite 
 blueness. Wherever I move, whether by 
 rays or waves of light, from the farthest 
 star to the nearest leaf with its complexity 
 of vein and tint, there comes to that pin- 
 point of space, the eye, a multitudinous 
 vision. If every pin-point of external space 
 is dense yet not blind with immensity, what 
 more miracle of subtlety, of ethereal delicacy, 
 could be affirmed of matter and be denied 
 because it strains belief? In that acorn 
 which lies at my feet there is a tiny cell 
 which has in it a memory of the oak from 
 the beginning of earth, and a power coiled 
 in it which can beget from itself the full 
 majestic being of the oak. From that tiny 
 fountain by some miracle can spring another 
 cell, and cell after cell will be born, will go 
 
io6 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 on dividing, begetting, building up from 
 each other unnumbered myriads of cells, 
 all controlled by some mysterious power 
 latent in the first, so that in an hundred 
 years they wiU, obeying the plan of the 
 tiny architect, have built up " the green- 
 robed senators of mighty woods," There 
 is nothing incredible in the assumption that 
 every cell in the body is wrapped about 
 with myriad memories. He who attributes 
 least mystery to matter is furthest from 
 truth, and he nighest who conjectures the 
 Absolute to be present in fullness of being 
 in the atom. If I am reproached for the 
 supposition that the soul of earth preserves 
 memory of itself by casting off instant by 
 instant enduring images of its multitudinous 
 life, I am only saying of nature in its fullness 
 what visible nature is doing in its own 
 fashion without cessation. What problem 
 of mind, vision, imagination or dream do 
 I solve by this hypothesis ? I have been 
 perplexed as an artist by the obedience of 
 the figures of imagination to suggestion 
 from myself. Let me illustrate my per- 
 plexity. I imagine a group of white-robed 
 Arabs standing on a sandy hillock and they 
 seem of such a noble dignity that I desire 
 
HAVE IMAGINATIONS BODY ? 107 
 
 to paint them. With a restlessness akin 
 to that which makes a portrait - painter 
 arrange and rearrange his sitter, until he 
 gets the pose which satisfies him, I say to 
 myself, " I wish they would raise their arms 
 above their heads," and at the suggestion 
 all the figures in my vision raise their hands 
 as if in salutation of the dawn. I see other 
 figures in imagination which attract me as 
 compositions. There may be a figure sitting 
 down and I think it would compose better 
 if it was turned in another direction, and 
 that figure will obey my suggestion, not 
 always, but at times it will ; and again and 
 again when I who paint almost entirely from 
 what is called imagination, and who never 
 use models, watch a figure in my vision it 
 will change its motions as I will it. Now 
 this is to me amazing. The invention and 
 actual drawing of the intricate pattern of 
 light and shade involved by the lifting of 
 the hands of my imaginary Arabs would be 
 considerable. My brain does not by any 
 swift action foresee in detail the pictorial 
 consequences involved by the lifting of arms, 
 but yet by a single wish, a simple mental 
 suggestion, the intricate changes are made 
 in the figures of imagination as they would 
 
io8 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 be if real Arabs stood before me and raised 
 their hands at my call. If I ask a crowd 
 of people to whom I speak to change their 
 position so that they may the better hear 
 me I am not astonished at the infinite com- 
 plexity of the change I bring about, because 
 I realise that the will In each one has mastery 
 over the form by some miracle, and the 
 message runs along nerve and muscle, and 
 the simple wish brings about the complex 
 change. But how do I lay hold of the 
 figures in dream or imagination .' By what 
 miracle does the simple wish bring about 
 the complex changes .'' It may now be seen 
 why I asked for some means by which I 
 might ascertain whether the forms in dream 
 or imagination are two or three dimensional. 
 If they are on the flat, if they are human 
 memories merely, vibrations of stored-up 
 sunlight fixed in some way in the brain as 
 a photograph is fixed, the alteration of these 
 by a simple wish involves incredibilities. I 
 find Freud, referring to a dream he had, 
 saying carelessly that it was made up by a 
 combination of memories, but yet the archi- 
 tecture of the dream seemed to be coherent 
 and not a patchwork. It had motion of its 
 own. Wonderful, indeed, that the wonder 
 
HAVE IMAGINATIONS BODY ? 109 
 
 of what was written about so easily was not 
 
 seen ! How could we imagine even the 
 
 mightiest conscious artistic intelligence, with 
 
 seership into all the memories of a life, taking 
 
 the vibrations which constituted this hand, 
 
 and adjusting them to the vibrations which 
 
 made that other arm, or even taking the 
 
 vibrations which registered a complete figure 
 
 and amending these so that the figure moved 
 
 with different gestures from the first gestures 
 
 recorded as memory ? If such a picture 
 
 was made up even from life-size images it 
 
 would be a patchwork and the patches would 
 
 show everywhere. But the dream figure or 
 
 the figure of imagination will walk about 
 
 with authentic motions and undistorted 
 
 anatomies. Does not the effort to imagine 
 
 such recombinations even by the mightiest 
 
 conscious intellect involve incredibilities .'' 
 
 At least it is so with the artist who watches 
 
 form with a critical eye. How much greater 
 
 the incredibility if we suppose there was no 
 
 conscious artist, but that all this authentic 
 
 imagery of imagination or dream came 
 
 together without an intelligence to guide it .'' 
 
 But how do we better matters if we assume 
 
 that the figures in dream or imagination are 
 
 three dimensional, and that they have actual 
 
no THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 body and organisation however ethereal, 
 delicate or subtle ? If they are shadows 
 or effigies emanated from living organisms, 
 and are complete in their phantasmal nature 
 within and without it is possible to imagine 
 life laying hold of them. It is conceivable 
 that the will may direct their motions even 
 as at a word of command soldiers will turn 
 and march. That is why I suggest that the 
 memory of nature may be by way of emana- 
 tion or shadow of life and form, and why 
 when we see such images they are not the 
 monstrous complexities they would be if 
 they were reflections on some universal 
 aether spread everywhere taking colour from 
 everything at every possible angle and 
 remaining two dimensional. The hypothesis 
 that everything in nature, every living 
 being, is a continuous fountain of phantasmal 
 effigies of itself would explain the way in 
 which ruins build up their antique life to 
 the eye of the seer, so that he sees the 
 people of a thousand years ago in their 
 cities which are now desolate, and the dark- 
 skinned merchants unrolling their bales in 
 the market, and this is why they appear as 
 some one has said, " thinking the thought and 
 performing the deed." If we have access to 
 
HAVE IMAGINATIONS BODY? iii 
 
 such memories, and if they have organism 
 within as well as without, can we not imagine 
 will or desire of ours constraining them ? 
 Can we not imagine such forms swept into 
 the vortex of a dreaming soul swayed by the 
 sea of passion in which they exist and acting 
 according to suggestion ? And if we suppose 
 that a deeper being of ours has wider vision 
 than the waking consciousness, and can use 
 the memories, not only of this plane of 
 being, but of the forms peculiar to mid-world 
 and heaven-world, this might help to solve 
 some of the perplexities aroused in those 
 who are intent and vigilant observers of 
 their own dreams and imaginations. Con- 
 tinually in my analysis of the figures I see 
 I am forced to follow them beyond the 
 transitory life I know and to speculate upon 
 the being of the Ever Living. I think there 
 is no half-way house between the spiritual 
 and the material where the intellect can 
 dwell ; and if we find we have our being in 
 a universal life we must alter our values, 
 change all our ideas until they depend upon 
 and are in harmony with that sole cause of 
 all that is. 
 
INTUITION 
 
 That sense of a divinity ever present in 
 act or thought my words do not communi- 
 cate. The ecstatic, half - articulate, with 
 broken words, can make us feel the kingdom 
 of heaven is within him. I choose words 
 with reverence but speak from recollection, 
 and one day does not utter to another its 
 own wisdom. Our highest moments in life 
 are often those of which we hold thereafter 
 the vaguest memories. We may have a 
 momentary illumination yet retain almost as 
 little of its reality as ocean keeps the track 
 of a great vessel which went over its waters. 
 I remember incidents rather than moods, 
 vision more than ecstasy. How can I now, 
 passed away from myself and long at other 
 labours, speak of what I felt in those years 
 when thought was turned to the spirit, and 
 no duty had as yet constrained me to equal 
 outward effort ? I came to feel akin to 
 
INTUITION 113 
 
 those ancestors of the Aryan in remote 
 spiritual dawns when Earth first extended 
 its consciousness into humanity. In that 
 primal ecstasy and golden age was born that 
 grand spiritual tradition which still remains 
 embodied in Veda and Upanishad, in Persian 
 and Egyptian myth, and which trails glimmer- 
 ing with colour and romance over our own 
 Celtic legends. I had but a faint glow of that 
 which to the ancestors was full light. I 
 could not enter that Radiance they entered 
 yet Earth seemed to me bathed in an aether 
 of Deity. I felt at times as one raised from 
 the dead, made virginal and pure, who 
 renews exquisite intimacies with the divine 
 companions, with Earth, Water, Air and 
 Fire. To breathe was to inhale magical 
 elixirs. To touch Earth was to feel the 
 influx of power as with one who had touched 
 the mantle of the Lord. Thought, from 
 whatever it set out, for ever led to the 
 heavenly city. But these feelings are in- 
 communicable. We have no words to ex- 
 press a thousand distinctions clear to the 
 spiritual sense. If I tell of my exaltation 
 to another, who has not felt this himself, 
 it is explicable to that person as the joy 
 in perfect health, and he translates into 
 
114 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 lower terms what is the speech of the gods 
 to men. 
 
 I began writing desirous to picture things 
 definitely to the intellect and to speak only 
 of that over which there could be reason and 
 argument, but I have often been indefinite as 
 when I said in an earlier chapter that earth 
 seemed an utterance of gods, " Every flower 
 was a thought. The trees were speech. The 
 grass was speech. The winds were speech. 
 The waters were speech." But what does 
 that convey ? Many feel ecstasy at the sight 
 of beautiful natural objects, and it might be 
 said it does not interpret emotion precisely to 
 make a facile reference to a divine world. I 
 believe of nature that it is a manifestation of 
 Deity, and that, because we are partakers in 
 the divine nature, all we see has affinity with 
 us ; and though now we are as children who 
 look upon letters before they have learned to 
 read, to the illuminated spirit its own being 
 is clearly manifested in the universe even as 
 I recognise my thought in the words I write. 
 Everything in nature has intellectual signifi- 
 cance, and relation as utterance to the Thought 
 out of which the universe was born, and we, 
 whose minds were made in its image, who 
 are the microcosm of the macrocosm, have in 
 
INTUITION 115 
 
 ourselves the key to unlock the meaning of 
 that utterance. Because of these affinities 
 the spirit swiftly by intuition can interpret 
 nature to itself even as our humanity in- 
 stinctively comprehends the character betrayed 
 by the curve of lips or the mood which lurks 
 within haunting eyes. We react in number- 
 less ways to that myriad nature about us and 
 within us, but we retain for ourselves the 
 secret of our response, and for lack of words 
 speak to others of these things only in gener- 
 alities. I desire to be precise, and having 
 searched memory for some instance of that 
 divine speech made Intelligible to myself 
 which I could translate into words which 
 might make it intelligible to others, I re- 
 collected something which may at least be 
 understood if not accepted. It was the 
 alphabet of the language of the gods. 
 
 This was a definite exercise of intuition 
 undertaken in order to evolve intellectual 
 order out of a chaos of impressions and to 
 discover the innate affinities of sound with 
 idea, element, force, colour and form. I 
 found as the inner being developed it used a 
 symbolism of its own. Sounds, forms and 
 colours, which had an established significance 
 in the complicated artifice of our external 
 
ii6 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 intercourse with each other, took on new 
 meanings in the spirit as if it spoke a language 
 of its own and wished to impart it to the 
 infant Psyche. If these new meanings did 
 not gradually reveal an intellectual character, 
 to pursue this meditation, to encourage the 
 association of new ideas with old symbols 
 would be to encourage madness. Indeed the 
 partial uprising of such ideas, the fact that a 
 person associates a vowel with a certain colour 
 or a colour with a definite emotion is regarded 
 by some as indicating incomplete sanity. I 
 tried to light the candle on my forehead to 
 peer into every darkness in the belief that 
 the external universe of nature had no more 
 exquisite architecture than the internal uni- 
 verse of being, and that the light could 
 only reveal some lordlier chambers of the 
 soul, and whatever speech the inhabitant 
 used must be fitting for its own sphere, so 
 I became a pupil of the spirit and tried as 
 a child to learn the alphabet at the knees 
 of the gods. 
 
 I was led first to brood upon the elements 
 of human speech by that whisper of the word 
 "Aeon " out of the darkness, for among the 
 many thoughts I had at the time came the 
 thought that speech may originally have been 
 
INTUITION 117 
 
 intuitive. I discarded the idea with regard 
 to that word, but the general speculation 
 remained with me, and I recurred to it again 
 and again, and began brooding upon the 
 significance of separate letters, and had related 
 many letters to abstractions or elements, when 
 once again, seemingly by chance, I took down 
 a book from a shelf. It was a volume of 
 the Upanishads, and it opened at a page 
 where my eye caught this : " From that Self 
 came the air, from air fire, from fire water, 
 from water earth." I quote from a distant 
 memory but the words are, 1 think, close 
 enough. What excited me was that 1 had 
 already discovered what I thought were the 
 sound equivalents for the self, motion, fire, 
 water and earth ; and the order of the cosmic 
 evolution of the elements suggested in the 
 passage quoted led me to consider whether 
 there was any intellectual sequence in the 
 human sound equivalents of elements and 
 ideas. I then began to rearrange the roots 
 of speech in their natural order from throat 
 sounds, through dental to labials, from A 
 which begins to be recognisable in the throat 
 to M in the utterance of which the lips 
 are closed. An intellectual sequence of ideas 
 became apparent. This encouraged me to 
 
ii8 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 try and complete the correspondences arrived 
 at Intuitively. I was never able to do this. 
 Several sounds failed, however I brooded 
 upon them, to suggest their intellectual 
 affinities, and I can only detail my partial 
 discoveries and indicate where harmonies may 
 be found between my own intuitions about 
 language and the roots of speech and in what 
 primitive literature are intuitions akin to my 
 own. 
 
 In trying to arrive at the affinities of sound 
 with thought I took letter after letter, brooding 
 upon them, murmuring them again and again, 
 and watching intensely every sensation in 
 consciousness, every colour, form or idea 
 which seemed evoked by the utterance. No 
 doubt the sanity of the boy who walked about 
 the roads at night more than thirty years 
 ago murmuring letters to himself with the 
 reverence of a mystic murmuring the Ineffable 
 Name might have been questioned by any 
 one who knew that he was trying to put him- 
 self in the place of his Aryan ancestors, and 
 to find as they might have found the original 
 names for earth, air, water, fire, the forces and 
 elements of the nature which was all about 
 them. Even as in the myth in Genesis beings 
 were named by the earliest man, so I invited 
 
INTUITION 119 
 
 the Heavenly Man to renew for me that first 
 speech, and to name the elements as they 
 were by those who looked up at the sky, and 
 cried out the name of the fire in the sky 
 from a God-given intuition. 
 
THE LANGUAGE OF THE GODS 
 
 If I interpreted rightly that dweller in the 
 mind, the true roots of human speech are 
 vowels and consonants, each with affinity to 
 idea, force, colour and form, the veriest 
 abstractions of these, but by their union into 
 words expressing more complex notions, as 
 atoms and molecules by their union form 
 the compounds of the chemist. It is diffi- 
 cult to discover single words of abstract sig- 
 nificance to represent adequately the ideas 
 associated with these rudiments of speech. 
 Every root is charged with significance, being 
 the symbol of a force which is itself the 
 fountain of many energies, even as primordial 
 being when manifested rolls itself out into 
 numberless forms, states of energy and con- 
 sciousness. The roots of human speech are 
 the sound correspondences of powers which 
 in their combination and interaction make up 
 the universe. The mind of man is made in 
 
 t20 
 
LANGUAGE OF THE GODS 121 
 
 the image of Deity, and the elements of speech 
 are related to the powers in his mind and 
 through it to the being of the Oversoul. 
 
 These true roots of language are few, 
 alphabet and roots being identical. The first 
 root is A, the sound symbol for the self 
 in man and Deity in the cosmos. Its form 
 equivalent is the circle Q. The second root 
 is R, representing motion. Its colour corre- 
 spondence is red, and its form symbol is the 
 line I- 
 
 Motion engenders heat, and the third 
 root following the order from throat sounds 
 to labials is H, the sound correspondence of 
 Heat. Its symbol is the triangle A, and it 
 has aflBnity with the colour orange. 
 
 Motion and heat are the begetters of Fire, 
 the sound equivalent of which is the root L, 
 which in form is symbolised by lines radiating 
 from a point as in this figure ^. L is fire, 
 light or radiation, and it is followed in the 
 series of roots by Y which symbolises the 
 reaction in nature against that radiation of 
 energy. It is the sound equivalent of bind- 
 ing, concentration or condensation. Matter 
 in the cosmos is obeying the law of gravita- 
 tion and gathering into fire-mists preliminary 
 to its knotting into suns and planets. The 
 
122 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 colour affinity is yellow. In man it is will 
 which focuses energy and concentrates it to 
 a burning-point for the accomplishing of 
 desire. Its form symbol is '^ representing 
 a vortex or spiral movement inward, opposing 
 in this the expansion or radiation implied in 
 the root L. 
 
 The root which follows Y is W, the 
 sound symbol of liquidity or water. Its 
 form is semilunar, o, and I think its colour 
 is green. 
 
 We have now descended to earth and 
 with this descent comes dualism, and hence- 
 forth all the roots have companion roots. 
 Primordial substance has lost its ethereal 
 character and has settled into a solid or 
 static condition. The two roots which ex- 
 press this are G and K ; G is the symbol of 
 earth, as K is of mineral, rock, crystal or 
 hardness of any kind. I could discover 
 with no certainty any colour affinities for 
 either of these roots, and about the forms I 
 am also uncertain though I was moved to 
 relate G with the square n and K with the 
 square crossed by a diagonal <]>. 
 
 The twin roots next in the series are S 
 and Z, and I can find no better words to 
 indicate the significance of the first than 
 
LANGUAGE OF THE GODS 123 
 
 impregnation, inbreathing or insouling. We 
 have reached in evolution the stage when 
 the one life breaks into myriads of lives, 
 which on earth finds its correspondence in 
 the genesis of the cell. Z represents the 
 multiplication, division or begetting of 
 organism from organism. It is the out- 
 breathing or bringing to birth of the seed 
 which is sown. The form symbol of S is, I 
 think, O, and of Z ©. I discovered no 
 colour affinities for either. 
 
 The duality of roots succeeding this is 
 TH and SH. The first is the sound equi- 
 valent of growth, expansion or swelling, 
 and its twin root represents that state where 
 the limit of growth in a particular form is 
 reached and a scattering or dissolution of 
 its elements takes place. In the vegetable 
 world we might find an illustration in the 
 growth and decay of a plant. 
 
 After these twain come the duality of T 
 and D. I found great difficulty in discover- 
 ing words to express the abstractions related 
 to these. Yet in meditating on them with 
 reference to the T, I was continually haunted 
 by the idea of individual action, movement 
 or initiative, and I believe it refers to that 
 state when life divorced from its old interior 
 
124 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 unity with the source of life, and, confined in 
 a form, begins in its imagination of itself to 
 be an ego, is in a state of outgoing, acts and 
 looks outward, touches and tastes ; while D 
 represents the reverse side of that, its reac- 
 tion or absorption inward to silence, sleep, 
 immobility, abeyance. The form symbol 
 T is + and Q vaguely suggested itself to 
 me as the symbol of D. 
 
 There is a parallelism between T and TH 
 as there is between D and SH, T represent- 
 ing movement of the thing by itself while 
 TH represents growth or expansion merely, 
 while D represents the more subjective 
 sinking of a thing into abeyance of its 
 powers as SH represents the external resolv- 
 ing of an organism into its elements. 
 
 For the dualism of roots J and TCH my 
 intuition failed utterly to discover correla- 
 tions, and when I had placed the roots in 
 their correct sequence and endeavoured by 
 intellect and reason to arrive at the logical 
 significance these two might have in the 
 series of sounds, I could never satisfy myself 
 that I had come nigh to any true affinity, 
 so I pass these by. 
 
 The roots which follow are V and F, of 
 which the first refers to life in water, to all 
 
LANGUAGE OF THE GODS 125 
 
 that swims, while F is related to what lives 
 in air and flies. I am doubtful about the 
 form symbols, but colour affinities began 
 here again, and blue suggested itself to me 
 as the correspondence, while the twin roots 
 which come after them, P and B, are related 
 to indigo, the dark blue. 
 
 Life has now reached the human stage, 
 is divided into sexes, and P is the sound 
 symbol for life masculine or paternity, while 
 B represents feminine life or maternity. 
 
 The series closes with N and M. The 
 first of these represents continuance of being, 
 immortality if you will, while the last root, 
 in the utterance of which the lips are closed, 
 has the sense of finality, it is the close, 
 limit, measure, end or death of things. 
 Their colour affinities are with violet. In 
 all there are twenty-one consonants which 
 with the vowels make up the divine roots 
 of speech. 
 
 The vowels are the sound symbols of 
 consciousness in seven moods or states, while 
 the consonants represent states of matter and 
 modes of energy. 
 
 I despair of any attempt to differentiate 
 from each other the seven states of con- 
 sciousness represented by the vowels. How 
 
126 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 shall I make clear the diiFerence between 
 A where consciousness in man or cosmos 
 begins manifestation, utterance or limita- 
 tion of itself, and 00 where consciousness 
 is returning into itself, breaking from the 
 limitation of form and becoming limitless 
 once more ; or E when it has become 
 passional, or I where it has become egoistic, 
 actively intellectual or reasoning, or O where 
 it has become intuitional. Our psychology 
 gives me no names for these states, but the 
 vowel root always represents consciousness, 
 and, in its union with the consonant root, 
 modifies or defines its significance, doing 
 that again as it precedes or follows it. I 
 once held more completely than I do now 
 an interior apprehension of the significance 
 of all, and I might perhaps, if I had con- 
 centrated more intently, have completed 
 more fully the correspondences with idea, 
 colour and form. But life attracts us in 
 too many ways, and when I was young 
 and most sensitive and intuitional I did 
 not realise the importance of what I was 
 attempting to do. 
 
 This so far as I know is the only con- 
 sidered effort made by any one to ascertain 
 the value of intuition as a faculty by using 
 
LANGUAGE OF THE GODS 127 
 
 it in reference to matters where the intellect 
 was useless but where the results attained 
 by intuition could be judged by the reason. 
 Intuition is a faculty of which many speak 
 with veneration, but it seems rarely to be 
 evoked consciously, and, if it is witness to 
 a knower in man, it surely needs testing 
 and use like any other faculty. I have 
 exercised intuition with respect to many 
 other matters and with inward conviction 
 of the certainty of truth arrived at in this 
 way, but they were matters relating to con- 
 sciousness and were not by their nature 
 easily subject to ratification by the reason. 
 These intuitions in respect of language are 
 to some extent capable of being reasoned 
 or argued over, and I submit them for con- 
 sideration by others whose study of the 
 literature, learning and language of the 
 ancients may give them special authority. 
 
ANCIENT INTUITIONS 
 
 Even where I had a certitude that my 
 attribution of element, form or colour to 
 a root was right I have never thought this 
 exhausted the range of its affinities in our 
 manifold being. I went but a little way 
 within myself, but felt that greater powers 
 awaited discovery within us, powers whose 
 shadowy skirts flicker on the surface of 
 consciousness but with motion so impalpable 
 that we leave them nameless. The root I 
 relate to light may have correspondence also 
 with another power which is to the dark 
 divinity of being what light is to the visible 
 world. I have never thought that the 
 languages spoken by men had all their 
 origin in one intuitional speech. There 
 may have been many beginnings in that 
 undiscoverable antiquity. But I believe 
 that one, or perhaps several, among the 
 early races, more spiritual than the rest, 
 128 
 
ANCIENT INTUITIONS 129 
 
 was prompted by intuition, while others 
 may have developed speech in any of the 
 ways suggested by biologists and scholars. 
 The genius of some races leads them to 
 seek for light within as the genius of others 
 leads them to go outward. I imagine a 
 group of the ancestors lit up from within, 
 endowed with the primal blessings of youth 
 and ecstasy, the strings of their being not 
 frayed as ours are, nor their God-endowed 
 faculties abused, still exquisitely sensitive, 
 feeling those kinships and affinities with the 
 elements which are revealed in the sacred 
 literature of the Aryan, and naming these 
 affinities from an impulse springing up within. 
 I can imagine the spirit struggling outwards 
 making of element, colour, form or sound a 
 mirror, on which, outside itself, it would 
 find symbols of all that was pent within itself, 
 and so gradually becoming self-conscious in 
 the material nature in which it was embodied, 
 but which was still effigy or shadow of a 
 divine original. I can imagine them looking 
 up at the fire in the sky, and calling out " El " 
 if it was the light they adored, or if they 
 rejoiced in the heat and light together they 
 would name it " Hel." Or if they saw death, 
 and felt it as the stillness or ending of motion 
 
 K 
 
I30 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 or breath, they would say " Mor." Or if 
 the fire acting on the water made it boil, 
 they would instinctively combine the sound 
 equivalents of water and fire, and " Wal " 
 would be the symbol. If the fire of life was 
 kindled in the body to generate its kind, the 
 sound symbol would be " Lub." When the 
 axe was used to cut, its hardness would 
 prompt the use of the hard or metallic affinity 
 in sound, and " Ak " would be to cut or 
 pierce. One extension of meaning after 
 another would rapidly increase the wealth of 
 significance, and recombinations of roots the 
 power of expression. The root " M " with 
 its sense of finality would suggest " Mi " to 
 diminish, and as to measure a thing is to go 
 to its ends, " Ma " would also mean to measure, 
 and as to think a thing is to measure it, 
 " Ma " would also come to be associated 
 with thinking. I had nearly all my corre- 
 spondences vividly in mind before I inquired 
 of friends more learned than myself what 
 were the reputed origins of human speech, 
 and in what books I could find whatever 
 knowledge there was, and then I came upon 
 the Aryan roots ; and there I thought and 
 still think are to be found many evidences in 
 corroboration of my intuitions. There are 
 
ANCIENT INTUITIONS 131 
 
 pitfalls for one who has no pretensions to 
 scholarship in tracking words to their origins, 
 and it is a labour for the future in conjunc- 
 tion with one more learned than myself to 
 elucidate these intuitions in regard to the 
 roots, and to go more fully into the psycho- 
 logy which led to rapid extension of mean- 
 ings until words were created, which at first 
 sight seem to have no relation to the root 
 values. I still believe I can see in the Aryan 
 roots an intelligence struggling outward 
 from itself to recognise its own affinities in 
 sound. But I wish here only to give indica- 
 tions and directions of approach to that 
 Divine Mind whose signature is upon us 
 in everything, and whose whole majesty is 
 present in the least thing in nature. I have 
 written enough to enable those who are 
 curious to exercise their intuitions or 
 analytic faculty in conjunction with their 
 scholarship, to test the worth of my in- 
 tuitions. Intuition must be used in these 
 correspondences, for the art of using them is 
 not altogether discoverable by the intellect. 
 I hope also that my partial illumination will 
 be completed, corrected or verified by others. 
 A second line of investigation I suggest is 
 the study of some harmony of primitive 
 
132 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 alphabets, such as that compiled by Forster, 
 and, after arranging the letters in their 
 natural order from throat sounds to labials, 
 to see if there is not much to lead us to 
 suppose that there was an original alphabet, 
 where the form equivalents of sound pro- 
 ceeded in an orderly way from the circle 
 through the line, the triangle and the other 
 forms I have indicated. Perhaps the true 
 correspondences were retained as an esoteric 
 secret by the wisest, because there may have 
 been in them the key to mysteries only to be 
 entrusted to those many times tested before 
 the secret of the use of power was disclosed. 
 And again I would suggest a study of that 
 science of divine correspondences which is 
 embodied in mystical Indian literature. The 
 correspondences of form, colour or force 
 with letters given there are not always in 
 agreement with my own. Sometimes as in 
 the Bagavadgita where Krishna, the Self of 
 the Manifested Universe, says, " I am the A 
 among letters," I find agreement. In other 
 works like the Shivagama there is partial 
 agreement as where it says, " Meditate upon 
 the fire force with R as its symbol, as being 
 triangular and red." The colour and the 
 letter are here in harmony with my own in- 
 
ANCIENT INTUITIONS 133 
 
 tuitions, but the form is not, and I am more 
 inclined to believe my own intuition to be 
 true because I find in so many of the primitive 
 alphabets the form symbol of R is the line 
 coming out of a circle. The water force is 
 given in the same book a semilunar form 
 as correspondence, but its sound symbol is 
 given as V and not W. The earth force is 
 given as quadrangular in form as I imagine 
 it, but the colour is yellow. I have not 
 investigated the consonants in their attribu- 
 tion to the nervous system given in such 
 books. I have no doubt that in a remoter 
 antiquity the roots of language were regarded 
 as sacred, and when chanted every letter was 
 supposed to stir into motion or evoke some 
 subtle force in the body. Tone and word 
 combined we know will thrill the nervous 
 system, and this is specially so with lovers of 
 music and persons whose virgin sensitiveness 
 of feeling has never been blunted by excess. 
 A word chanted or sung will start the wild 
 fires leaping in the body, like hounds which 
 hear their master calling them by name, and to 
 those whose aspiration heavenward has purified 
 their being there comes at last a moment when 
 at the calling of the Ineffable Name the Holy 
 Breath rises as a flame and the shadow man 
 
134 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 goes forth to become one with the ancestral 
 self. 
 
 What is obvious in that ancient literature 
 is the belief in a complete circle of correspond- 
 ences between every root sound in the human 
 voice and elements, forms and colours, and 
 that the alphabet was sacred in character. 
 Intuitions which modern psychologists regard 
 as evidence of decadence are found present in 
 the literature of antiquity. The attributions 
 sometimes are the same as mine ; sometimes 
 they differ, but they suggest the same theory 
 of a harmony of microcosm with macrocosm, 
 and it is carried out so that every centre in 
 the body is named by the name of a divine 
 power. It is only by a spiritual science we 
 can recover identity, renew and make conscious 
 these affinities. Life had other labours for 
 me from which I could not escape, and I had 
 not for long the leisure in which to reknit 
 the ties between myself and the ancestral 
 being. But while I still had leisure I ex- 
 perienced those meltings of the external into 
 intelligible meanings. The form of a flower 
 long brooded upon would translate itself into 
 energies, and these would resolve themselves 
 finally into states of consciousness, intelligible 
 to me while I experienced them, but too 
 
ANCIENT INTUITIONS 135 
 
 remote from the normal for words to tell 
 their story. I may have strayed for a moment 
 Into that Garden of the Divine Mind where, 
 as it is said in Genesis, " He made every 
 flower before it was in the field and every 
 herb before it grew." My failure to find 
 words to express what I experienced made 
 me concentrate more intensely upon the 
 relation of form and colour to consciousness 
 in the hope that analysis might make in- 
 tellectual exposition possible. I do not wish 
 to linger too long on the analysis I made. 
 The message of nature is more important than 
 the symbols used to convey it, and, in de- 
 tailing these correspondences, I feel rather as 
 one who reading Shelley's " Hymn of Pan " 
 ignored all that ecstasy and spoke merely of 
 spelling or verse structure. But why do I 
 say that .'' The works of the Magician of the 
 Beautiful are not like ours and in the least 
 fragment His artistry is no less present than 
 in the stars. We may enter the infinite 
 through the minute no less than through 
 contemplation of the vast. I thought in that 
 early ecstasy of mine when I found how near 
 to us was the King in His Beauty that I could 
 learn to read that marvellous writing on the 
 screen of Nature and teach it to others ; and, 
 
136 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 as a child first learns its letters with difficulty, 
 but after a time leaps to the understanding 
 of their combination, and later, without care 
 for letters or words, follows out the thought 
 alone ; so I thought the letters of the divine 
 utterance might be taught and the spirit in 
 man would leap by intuition to the thought 
 of the Spirit making that utterance. For 
 all that vast ambition I have not even a 
 complete alphabet to show, much less one 
 single illustration of how to read the letters 
 of nature in their myriad intricacies of form, 
 colour and sound in the world we live in. 
 But I believe that vision has been attained by 
 the seers, and we shall all at some time attain 
 it, and, as is said in the Divine Shepherd of 
 Hermes, it shall meet us everywhere, plain 
 and easy, walking or resting, waking or 
 sleeping, " for there is nothing which is not 
 the image of God," 
 
POWER 
 
 I HAVE spoken of a training of the will, but 
 have not indicated the spring of power in our 
 being, nor dilated on those moments when 
 we feel a Titanic energy lurks within us ready 
 to our summons as the familiar spirit to the 
 call of the enchanter. If we have not power 
 we a re no thing and must remain outcasts of 
 the Heavens- We must be perfect as the 
 FatHer is perfect. If in the being of the 
 Ancient of Days there is power, as there is 
 wisdom and beauty, we must liken ourselves 
 to that being, partake, as our nature will 
 permit, of its power, or we can never enter jt. 
 The Kingdom is taken by violence. The 
 easier life _ becomes jn our civilisations^, the 
 remoter we are from nature, the more does 
 power ebb away from most of us. It ebbs 
 away for all but those who never relax the 
 will but sustain it hour by hour. We even 
 grow to dread the powerful person because 
 137 
 
138 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 we feel how phantasmal before power are 
 beauty and wisdom, and indeed there is no 
 true beauty or wisdom which is not allied 
 with strength. For one who cultivates will 
 in himself there are thousands who cultivate 
 the intellect or follow after beauty, and that 
 is because the intellect can walk easily on the 
 level places, while at first every exercise of 
 the will is laborious as the lift is to the climber 
 of a precipice. Few are those who c ome to 
 that fullness of pbwer where the wiU hecome^s 
 a FoufitairTwtthm "ffiem perpetually springing 
 up self-fed, and who feel like the mountain 
 lovers who know that it is easier to tread on 
 the hilltops than to walk on the low and level 
 roads. Because in our ordered Jife__pQwer 
 is continually ebbing away from us, nature, 
 which abhors a vacuum in our being, is 
 perpetually breaking up our civilisations ^y 
 wars or internal conflicts, so that stripped of 
 our ease, in batde, through struggle and 
 sacrifice, we may grow into power again ; 
 and this must continue uiitiLjE£-tread— die 
 rjjyal road, and cukivate_gower in our being 
 as we cukiyate_^eautyorintellect. Those 
 who have in themselves the highest power, 
 who are miracle-workers, the Buddhas and 
 the_ Christs, are also the teachejs. gX. peace, 
 
POWER 139 
 
 and they- may well be so having thgnj^glYes 
 attamedT mastery of the Fire. 
 
 Tt Is because it is so laborious to cultivate 
 the will we find in literature endless analysis 
 of passion and thought, but rarely do we 
 find one writing as if he felt the powers 
 leaping up in his body as the thronged 
 thoughts leap up in the brain. I was never 
 able to recognise that harmony of powers 
 spoken of by the ancients as inhabiting the 
 house of the body, lurking in nerve-centre 
 or plexus, or distinguish their functions, but 
 I began to feel, after long efforts at con- 
 centration and mastery of the will, the begin- 
 ning of an awakening of the fires, and at 
 times there came partial perception of the 
 relation of these forces to centres in the 
 psychic body. I could feel them in myself; 
 and sometimes see them, or the vibration or 
 light of them, about others who were seekers 
 with myself for this knowledge ; so that the 
 body of a powerful person would appear to 
 be throwing out light in radiation from head 
 or heart, or plumes of fire would rise above 
 the head jetting from fountains within, 
 apparitions like wings of fire, plumes or 
 feathers of fliame, or dragon-like crests, many- 
 coloured. Once at the apex of intensest 
 
I40 THE CANDLE OE VISION 
 
 meditation I awoke that fire in myself of 
 which the ancients have written, and it ran 
 up like lightning along the spinal cord, and 
 my body rocked with the power of it, and I 
 seemed to myself to be standing in a fountain 
 of flame, and there were fiery pulsations as 
 of wings about my head, and a musical sound 
 not unlike the clashing of cymbals with 
 every pulsation ; and if I had remembered 
 the ancient wisdom I might have opened 
 that eye which searches infinitude. But I 
 remembered only, in a half terror of the 
 power I had awakened, the J^3.n ger^_of mis- 
 direcHon" of the enej-gy, for such was the 
 sensationoF'power that I seemed to myself 
 to have opened the seal of a cosmic fountain, 
 so I remained contemplative and was not the 
 resolute guider of the fire. And indeed this 
 rousing of the fire is full of peril ; and woe 
 to him who awakens it before he^ has purified 
 his being into selfles saesjs, for it will turn 
 do wnward and vitalise hi s darker _passions 
 and awaken strange frenzies and inextinguish- 
 able desiresr'~The turning earthward of that 
 heaven-born power is the sin against the 
 Holy Breath, for that fire which leaps upon 
 us in the ecstasy of contemplation of Deity 
 is the Holy Breath, the power which can 
 
POWER 141 
 
 carry us from Earth to Heaven. It is 
 normally known to man only in procreation, 
 but its higher and mightier uses are unknown 
 to him. Even though in our scriptures it 
 is said of it that it gives to this man vision 
 or the discerning of spirits, and to that 
 poetry or eloquence, and to another healing 
 and magical powers, it remains for most a 
 myth of the theologians, and is not mentioned 
 by any of our psychologists though it is the 
 fountain out of which is born all other 
 powers in the body and Is the sustamer of 
 aU our faculties. Normally I found this 
 power in myself, not leaping up Titanically 
 as if it would storm the heavens, but a steady 
 light in the brain, "the candle upon the 
 forehead," and it was revealed in ecstasy of 
 thought or power in speech, and in a con- 
 tinuous welling up from within myself of 
 intellectual energy, vision or imagination. 
 ' It is the afflatus of the poet or musician. 
 As an ancient scripture says of it, "The 
 Illuminator is the inspirer of the poet, the 
 jeweller, the chiseller and all who work in 
 the arts." It is the Promethean fire, and 
 only by mastery of this power will man be 
 able to ascend to the ancestral Paradise. 
 Again and again I would warn all who read 
 
142 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 of the danger of awakening it, and again and 
 again I would say that without this power 
 we are as nothing. We shall never scale the 
 Heavens, and religions, be they ever so holy, 
 will never open the gates to us, unless_we 
 are able mightily to open them for ourselves 
 ana"enter""as~Ehe' strong spirit who^^nnot 
 be denied. This power might cry of itself 
 to us : 
 
 My kinsmen are they, beauty, wisdom, love ; 
 But without me are none may dare to climb 
 To the Ancestral Light that glows above 
 Its mirrored lights in Time. 
 
 King have I been and foe in ages past. 
 None may escape me. I am foe until 
 There shall be for the spirit forged at last 
 The high unshakable will. 
 
 Fear, I will rend you. Love, I make you strong. 
 Wed with my might the beautiful and wise. 
 We shall go forth at last, a Titan throng, 
 To storm His Paradise. 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 Hy Brazil, Ildathach, the lands of Im- 
 mortal Youth which flush with magic the 
 dreams of childhood, for most sink soon 
 below far horizons and do not again arise. 
 For around childhood gather the wizards of 
 the darkness and they baptize it and change 
 its imagination of itself as in the Arabian 
 tales of enchantment men were changed by 
 sorcerers who cried, " Be thou beast or bird." 
 So by the black art of education is the 
 imagination of life about itself changed, and 
 one will think he is a worm in the sight of 
 Heaven, he who is but a god in exile, and 
 another of the Children of the King will 
 believe that he is the offspring of animals. 
 What palaces they were born in, what 
 dominions they are rightly heir to, are con- 
 cealed from them as in the fairy tale the 
 stolen prince lives obscurely among the 
 swineherds. Yet at times men do not 
 143 
 
144 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 remember, in dream and in the deeps of 
 sleep, they still wear sceptre and diadem and 
 partake of the banquet of the gods. The 
 gods are still living. They are our brothers. 
 They await us. They beckon us to come 
 up to them and sit upon equal thrones. To 
 those who cry out against romance I would 
 say, You yourself are romance. You are the 
 lost prince herding obscurely among the 
 swine. The romance of your spirit is the 
 most marvellous of stories. Your wanderings 
 have been greater than those of Ulysses. 
 You have been Bird of Paradise and free of 
 immensity, and you have been outcast and 
 wingless, huddled under the rocks and 
 despairing of the Heavens. If you will but 
 awaken the inner sight, Hy Brazil, Ildathach, 
 all the lands of Immortal Youth will build 
 themselves up anew for you no longer as 
 fantasy but in vivid actuality. Earth will 
 become magical and sweet as ever. You 
 will be drunken with beauty. You may see 
 the fiery eyes of the Cyclops wandering over 
 the mountains and hear the Bell Branch 
 shaken, the sound that summons the spirit 
 home. From long pondering I have come 
 to believe in the eternity of the spirit and 
 that it is an inhabitant of many spheres, for 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE SPIRIT 145 
 
 I know not how otherwise I can interpret to 
 myself the myriad images that as memories 
 or imaginations cling to it, following it into 
 the body as birds follow the leader in the 
 migratory flock. Looking back on that 
 other life which began to dominate this there 
 are a thousand things I cannot understand 
 except I believe that for myself and for all of 
 us there has been an eternity of being and 
 that many spheres are open to us. If these 
 images are not earth-born, from what land, 
 Elfland, Heaven-world or God-world, do 
 they come .'' I have chosen but a few images 
 out of many to explain why I think our 
 dreams and visions come often in all com- 
 pleteness into our sphere out of other spheres 
 of being and are not built up from memories 
 of earth. Looking back upon that other 
 life through the vistas of memory I see 
 breaking in upon the images of this world 
 forms of I know not what antiquity. I walk 
 out of strange cities steeped in the jewel 
 glow and gloom of evening, or sail in 
 galleys over the silvery waves of the antique 
 ocean. I reside in tents, or in palace chambers, 
 go abroad in chariots, meditate in cyclopean 
 buildings, am worshipper of the Earth gods 
 upon the mountains, lie tranced in Egyptian 
 
146 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 crypts, or brush with naked body through 
 the long sunlit grasses of the prairies. End- 
 lessly the procession of varying forms goes 
 back into remote yesterdays of the world. 
 How do these self-conceptions spring up ? 
 How are they clothed with the state of 
 ancient civilisations .'' If when I perceived 
 them they were the newest things in the 
 world, and the images were minted that 
 instant by the imagination, out of what 
 treasury of design came the fitting scenery, 
 the always varied buildings, garments and 
 setting of wood, plain or mountain ? Are 
 they not rather, I ask myself, memories of 
 the spirit incarnated many times ? And if so, 
 again I ask myself is it only on earth there 
 has been this long ancestry of self.? For 
 there is another self in me which seemed to 
 know not the world but revealed itself to 
 the listening bodily life in cosmic myths, in 
 remote legends of the Children of Darkness 
 and the Children of Light, and of the revolt 
 against heaven. And another self seemed to 
 bring with it vision or memory of elemental 
 beings, the shining creatures of water and 
 wood, or who break out in opalescent colour 
 from the rocks or hold their court beneath 
 the ponderous hills. And there was another 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE SPIRIT 147 
 
 self which was akin to the gloomy world of 
 the shades, but recoiled shuddering from 
 them. And there was yet another self which 
 sought out after wisdom, and aU these other 
 selves and their wisdom and memories were 
 but tributary to it. The gates of sleep too 
 were often thronged with fleeting presences 
 as I sank into unconsciousness, or was out- 
 cast from that innermost being when waking, 
 and I saw but for an instant back into the 
 profundity, and at times it appeared to the 
 imagination as the gate of Eden : 
 
 With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. 
 
 Out of what sphere came that being taller 
 and mightier than human, whose body seemed 
 wrought out of flame and whose eyes had 
 the stillness of an immortal, and who seemed 
 to gaze at me out of eternity as I waked 
 in the night. It was so lofty and above 
 humanity that I seemed to myself to be less 
 than an insect, though something in me 
 cried out to it in brotherhood, and I knew 
 not whether I had fallen from its height, or 
 was a lost comrade lagging far behind in 
 time who should have been equal and com- 
 panion but was too feeble to rise to such 
 majesty. I know that I have not been alone 
 
148 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 in such imaginations for there are few whose 
 intent will has tried to scale the Heavens 
 who have not been met by messages from 
 the gods who are the fountains of this 
 shadowy beauty, and who are, I think, our- 
 selves beyond this mirage of time and space 
 by which we are enchanted. I have spoken 
 to others, seekers like myself upon this 
 quest, and recognise identity of vision and 
 experience. But I have not been able to 
 devote to every mental image the thought 
 which might make its meaning or origin 
 intelligible. We cannot do that for the 
 forms we see move continuously in visible 
 nature, for we pass them by thinking intensely 
 but of a few of them. But our psychology 
 must take account of every experience of the 
 soul. I have not found in latter-day philo- 
 sophical writers the explanation of my own 
 experiences, and I think that is because there 
 has been an over-development of intellect 
 and few have cultivated vision, and without 
 that we have not got the first data for fruit- 
 ful speculation. We rarely find philosophical 
 writers referring to vision of their own, 
 yet we take them as guides on our mental 
 travelling, though in this world we all would 
 prefer to have knowledge of earth and 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE SPIRIT 149 
 
 heaven through the eyes of a child rather 
 than to know them only through the musings 
 of one who was blind, even though his 
 intellect was mighty as Kant's. 
 
 It is only when I turn to the literature of 
 vision and intuition, to the sacred books and 
 to half sacred tradition, to the poets and seers, 
 that I find a grandiose conception of nature 
 in which every spiritual experience is provided 
 for. I have not entered the paradises they 
 entered but what little I know finds its place 
 in the universe of their vision. Whether 
 they are Syrian, Greek, Egyptian or Hindu, 
 the writers of the sacred books seem to me as 
 men who had all gazed upon the same august 
 vision and reported of the same divinity. 
 Even in our own Gaelic wonder tales I often 
 find a vision which is, I think, authentic, and 
 we can, I believe, learn from these voyages to 
 the Heaven-world more of the geography of 
 the spirit and the many mansions in the being 
 of the Father than we can from the greatest 
 of our sightless philosophers. The Earth- 
 world, Mid-world, Heaven- world and God- 
 world spoken of in the Indian scriptures are 
 worlds our Gaelic ancestors had also know- 
 ledge of. When Cormac enters the Heaven- 
 world and is told by those who inhabit it, 
 
150 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 " Whenever we imagine the fields to be sown 
 they are sown. Whenever we imagine the 
 fields to be reaped they are reaped," he saw 
 the same world as the seer who wrote in 
 the marvellous Upanishad : " There are no 
 chariots there or roads for chariots. The 
 soul makes for itself chariots and roads for 
 chariots. There are no joys or rejoicings 
 there. The soul makes for itself joys and 
 rejoicings. For the spirit of man is creator." 
 The visionaries of the future will finally justify 
 the visionaries of the past. I do not feel that 
 my knowledge is great enough to do this, nor 
 have I been able to steal from a life made 
 busy by other labours enough time or enough 
 thought even to use in the best way the little 
 I know. I would like to vindicate my pre- 
 decessors in Ireland and correlate my own 
 vision and the vision of my friends with 
 the vision of those who went before us, for I 
 think when we discard the past and its vision 
 we are like men who, half-way up a mountain, 
 decide foolishly to attempt the ascent from 
 another side of the hiU and so continually 
 lose the height which was gained. Our Gaelic 
 ancestors had the gift of seership, and I had 
 thought at one time to reconstruct from the 
 ancient literature the vision of the universe 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE SPIRIT 151 
 
 they had, a labour which might be done by 
 any who had vision of his own and who was 
 versed in the comparative study of the religions 
 of the past, and so make intelligible to those 
 who live here to-day the thought of their 
 forefathers, and enable them to begin anew 
 the meditation towards divine things so often 
 broken up in our unhappy history. All 
 literature tends to produce a sacred book by 
 an evolution of thought of the highest minds 
 building one upon another. A literature 
 so continually imaginative, visionary and 
 beautiful as the Gaelic would, I do not doubt, 
 have culminated in some magnificent ex- 
 pression of the spirit if life had not been 
 drawn from central depths to surfaces by 
 continuous invasions. I think that meditation 
 is beginning anew, and the powers which 
 were present to the ancestors are establishing 
 again their dominion over the spirit. To 
 some there come startling flashes of vision, 
 and others feel a hand of power touching 
 them thrust out from a hidden world. 
 Whether they know it or not they are the 
 servants of gods who speak or act through 
 them and make them the messengers of their 
 will. I have written down some of my own 
 thoughts and experiences that others may be 
 
152 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 encouraged to believe that by imagination 
 they can lay hold of truth ; and as something 
 must be written about the geography of the 
 spirit by way of guidance to those who rise 
 within themselves in meditation I will try 
 briefly to reconstruct the Celtic vision of 
 Heaven and Earth as I believe it was known 
 to the Druids and bardic seers. Let no 
 one who requires authority read what I have 
 written for I will give none. If the spirit of 
 the reader does not bear witness to truth he 
 will not be convinced even though a Whitley 
 Stokes rose up to verify the written word. 
 Let it be accepted by others as a romantic 
 invention or attribution of divine powers to 
 certain names to make more coherent the 
 confusion of Celtic myth. 
 
CELTIC COSMOGONY 
 
 In the beginning was the boundless Lir, an 
 infinite depth, an invisible divinity, neither 
 dark nor light, in whom were all things past 
 and to be. There at the close of a divine 
 day, time being ended, and the Nuts of 
 Knowledge harvested, the gods partake of the 
 Feast of Age and drink from a secret fountain. 
 Their being there is neither life nor death 
 nor sleep nor dream, but all are wondrously 
 wrought together. They lie in the bosom of 
 Lir, cradled in the same peace, those who 
 hereafter shall meet in love or war in hate. 
 The Great Father and the Mother of the 
 Gods mingle together and Heaven and Earth 
 are lost, being one in the Infinite Lir. 
 
 Of Lir but little may be affirmed, and 
 nothing can be revealed. In trance alone the 
 seer might divine beyond his ultimate vision 
 this being. It is a breath with many voices 
 which cannot speak in one tone, but utters 
 IS3 
 
154 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 itself through multitudes. It is beyond the 
 gods and if they were to reveal it, it could 
 only be through their own departure and a 
 return to the primeval silences. But in this 
 is the root of existence from which springs 
 the sacred Hazel whose branches are the 
 gods : and as the mystic night trembles into 
 dawn, its leaves and its blossoms and its 
 starry fruit burgeon simultaneously and are 
 shed over the waters of space. An image of 
 futurity has arisen in the divine imagination : 
 and Sinan, who is also Dana, the Great 
 Mother and Spirit of Nature, grows thirsty 
 to receive its imprint on her bosom, and to 
 bear again her offspring of stars and starry 
 beings. Then the first fountain is opened 
 and seven streams issue like seven fiery 
 whirlwinds, and Sinan is carried away and 
 mingled with the torrent, and when the force 
 of the torrent is broken, Sinan also meets 
 death. 
 
 What other names Connla's Well and 
 the Sacred Hazel have in Celtic tradition 
 may be discovered later, but here, without 
 reference to names, which only bewilder 
 until their significance is made known, it 
 is better to explain with less of symbol this 
 Celtic Cosmogenesis. 
 
CELTIC COSMOGONY 155 
 
 We have first of all Lir, an infinite being, 
 neither spirit nor energy nor substance, but 
 rather the spiritual form of these, in which 
 all the divine powers, raised above them- 
 selves, exist in a mystic union or trance. 
 This is the night of the gods from which 
 Mananan first awakens, the most spiritual 
 divinity known to the ancient Gael, being 
 the Gaelic equivalent of that Spirit which 
 breathed on the face of the waters. He is 
 the root of existence from which springs the 
 Sacred Hazel, the symbol of life ramifying 
 everywhere : and the forms of this life are 
 conceived first by Mananan, the divine 
 imagination. It throws itself into seven 
 forms or divinities, the branches of the 
 Hazel ; and these again break out end- 
 lessly into leaves and blossoms and fruit, 
 into myriads of divine beings, the arche- 
 types and ancestral begetters of those 
 spirits who are the Children of Lir. All 
 these are first in the Divine Darkness and 
 are unrevealed, and Mananan Is still the 
 unuttered Word, and is in that state the 
 Chaldaic oracle of Proclus saith of the 
 Divine Mind : " It had not yet gone forth, 
 but abode in the Paternal Depth, and in 
 the adytum of god - nourished Silence." 
 
156 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 But Mananan, while one in essence with 
 the Paternal Lir, is yet, as the divine 
 imagination, a separate being to whom, 
 thus brooding, Lir seems apart, or covered 
 over with a veil, and this aspect of Lir, a 
 mirage which begins to cover over true 
 being, is Dana, the Hibernian Mother of 
 the Gods, or Sinan in the antique Dinn- 
 shenchus, deity first viewed externally, and 
 therefore seeming to partake of the nature 
 of substance, and, as the primal form of 
 matter, the Spirit of Nature. Mananan 
 alone of all the gods exists in the inner side 
 of this spirit, and therefore it is called his 
 mantle, which, flung over man or god, 
 wraps them from the gaze of embodied 
 beings. His mantle, the Faed Fia, has 
 many equivalents in other mythologies. It 
 is the Aether within which Zeus runs 
 invisibly, and the Akasa through which 
 Brahm sings his eternal utterance of joy. 
 The mantle of Mananan, the Aether, the 
 Akasa, were all associated with Sound as 
 a creative power, for to the mystic imagina- 
 tion of the past the world was upsung into 
 being ; and what other thought inspired the 
 apostle who wrote, " In the beginning was 
 the Word " ? 
 
CELTIC COSMOGONY 157 
 
 Out of the Divine Darkness Mananan 
 has arisen, a brooding twilight before dawn, 
 in which the cloud images of the gods are 
 thronging. But there is still in Lir an 
 immense deep of being, an emotional life 
 too vast, too spiritual, too remote to speak 
 of, for the words we use to-day cannot tell 
 its story. It is the love yet unbreathed, 
 and yet not love, but rather a hidden 
 unutterable tenderness, or joy, or the 
 potency of these, which awakens as the 
 image of the divine imagination is reflected 
 in the being of the Mother, and then it 
 rushes forth to embrace it. The Fountain 
 beneath the Hazel has broken. Creation 
 is astir. The Many are proceeding from 
 the One. An energy or love or eternal 
 desire has gone forth which seeks through 
 a myriad forms of illusion for the infinite 
 being it has left. It is Angus the Young, 
 an eternal joy becoming love, a love changing 
 into desire, and leading on to earthly passion 
 and forgetfulness of its own divinity. The 
 eternal joy becomes love when it has first 
 merged itself in form and images of a divine 
 beauty dance before it and lure it afar. 
 This is the first manifested world, the 
 Tirnanoge or World of Immortal Youth. 
 
158 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 The love is changed into desire as it is 
 drawn deeper into nature, and this desire 
 builds up the Mid-world or World of the 
 Waters. And, lastly, as it lays hold of the 
 earthly symbol of its desire it becomes on 
 Earth that passion which is spiritual death. 
 In another sense Angus may be described 
 as the passing into activity of a power 
 latent in Lir, working through the divine 
 imagination, impressing its ideations on 
 nature in its spiritual state, and thereby 
 causing its myriad transformations. It is 
 the fountain in which every energy has 
 its birth, from the power which lays the 
 foundations of the world, down through 
 love and every form of desire to chemical 
 affinity, just as Mananan is the root of all 
 conscious life, from the imperial being of 
 the gods down to the consciousness in the 
 ant or amoeba. So is Dana also the basis 
 of every material form from the imperish- 
 able body of the immortals to the transitory 
 husk of the gnat. As this divinity emerges 
 from its primordial state of ecstatic tender- 
 ness or joy in Lir, its divided rays, incarnate 
 in form, enter upon a threefold life of 
 spiritual love, of desire, and the dark shadow 
 of love ; and these three states have for 
 
CELTIC COSMOGONY 159 
 
 themselves three worlds into which they 
 have transformed the primal nature of 
 Dana : a World of Immortal Youth : a 
 Mid-world where everything changes with 
 desire : and which is called from its fluctua- 
 tions the World of the Waters : and lastly, 
 the Earth-world where matter has assumed 
 that solid form when it appears inanimate 
 or dead. The force of the fountain which 
 whirled Sinan away has been spent and 
 Sinan has met death. 
 
 The conception of Angus as an all- 
 pervading divinity who first connects being 
 with non- being seems removed by many 
 aeons of thought from that beautiful golden- 
 haired youth who plays on the tympan 
 surrounded by singing birds. But the 
 golden-haired Angus of the bards has a 
 relation to the earlier Eros, for in the 
 mysteries of the Druids all the gods sent 
 bright witnesses of their boundless being, 
 who sat enthroned in the palaces of the 
 Sidhe, and pointed the way to the Land of 
 Promise to the man who dared become more 
 than man. 
 
 But what in reality is Angus and what is 
 Dana, and how can they be made real to us ? 
 They will not be gained by much reading of 
 
i6o THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 the legendary tales, for they are already 
 with us. A child sits on the grass and the 
 sunlight falls about it. It is lulled by the 
 soft colour. It grows dreamy, a dreaminess 
 fiUed with a vague excitement. It feels a 
 pleasure, a keen magnetic joy at the touch 
 of earth : or it lays its head in a silent 
 tenderness nigh a mother or sister, its mood 
 impelling it to grow nearer to something it 
 loves. That tenderness in the big dreamy 
 heart of childhood is Angus, and the mother- 
 love it divines is Dana ; and the form which 
 these all-pervading divinities take in the 
 heart of the child and the mother, on the 
 one side desire, on the other a profound 
 tenderness or pity, are nearest of all the 
 moods of earth to the first Love and the 
 Mighty Mother, and through them the 
 divine may be vaguely understood. If the 
 desire remains pure, through innocence, or 
 by reason of wisdom, it becomes in the 
 grown being a constant preoccupation with 
 spiritual things, or in words I have quoted 
 before where it is better said, " The Inexpres- 
 sible yearning of the inner man to go out 
 into the infinite." 
 
 Of Dana, the Hibernian Mother of the 
 gods, I have already said she is the first 
 
CELTIC COSMOGONY i6i 
 
 spiritual form of matter, and therefore 
 Beauty. As every being emerges out of 
 her womb clothed with form, she is the 
 Mighty Mother, and as mother of all she is 
 that divine compassion which exists beyond 
 and is the final arbiter of the justice of 
 the gods. Her heart will be in ours when 
 ours forgive. 
 
 M 
 
THE CELTIC IMAGINATION 
 
 Other names might be used in this Celtic 
 cosmogenesis and the Dagda stand for Lir, 
 Boan for Dana, Fintan for Mananan, and 
 others again might be interchangeable with 
 these. Even as the generations follow one 
 another in time, each looking upon the same 
 unchanging nature as the ancestors but naming 
 it by other names, so in antiquity races were 
 invaded by others who came with a cosmogony 
 the same in all essentials, but for differences 
 of language and name, as that of the people 
 invaded. After centuries there comes a 
 blending of cultures and a subsidence into 
 legend, bringing about a bewildering mosaic 
 of mythology. The unity of primeval vision 
 is broken up in the prism of literature. 
 Deities grow in number in the popular 
 imagination and coexist there, who in truth, 
 if their spiritual ancestry was known, were 
 but varying names for one divine being. 
 162 
 
THE CELTIC IMAGINATION 163 
 
 There are several mythologies In Irish legend 
 the figures of which are made contemporary 
 with each other by the later poets, and while 
 it might be of interest to scholars to dis- 
 entangle these and relate each deity to its 
 proper cycle, only the vision of the universe 
 which underlay them all is of real importance. 
 That spiritual Overworld our Gaelic ancestors 
 beheld was in essentials the same as the Over- 
 world revealed in the sacred books ; and in 
 the wonder tales of the Gael we find a great 
 secular corroboration of sacred literature and 
 of half-sacred philosophy such as Plato utters 
 through the lips of Socrates. Earth, Mid- 
 world, Heaven-world and the great deep of 
 deity they knew as they are expounded in the 
 Upanishads. We can discern the same vision 
 in the Apostle whose beginning of things was 
 in the fulness of being out of which arose the 
 Christos or divine imagination, in which, as 
 it went forth on its cyclic labours, life or the 
 Holy Breath was born, or became in it, and 
 these again shine and work in the darkness 
 of earth. And when St. Paul speaks of a 
 third heaven we divine he had risen to the 
 world of the Christos and was there initiated 
 into mysteries of which it was not lawful to 
 speak. In the sacred books there is a pro- 
 
1 64 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 founder life than there is in secular literature 
 where there is vision indeed, but in the sacred 
 books there is the being. The mind in 
 retrospect, meditation and aspiration needs 
 guidance ; and this spiritual architecture of 
 Earth-world, with Mid-world, Heaven-world 
 and God-world rising above it, made my 
 own vision so far as it went intelligible to me, 
 for my disconnected glimpses of supernature 
 seemed to find a place in that architecture of 
 the heavens. In earlier pages 1 described my 
 first visions of other planes, and the beings 
 there, how some were shining and how others 
 were a lordlier folk lit up from within as if a 
 sun was hidden in the heart ; and in my 
 retrospect of vision I find all I saw falling 
 into two categories which I think correspond 
 to the Mid-wo rld and World of Immortal 
 Youth qfthe^ancestors. My vision into the 
 highest of these spheres was rare, and only 
 once did consciousness for a moment follow 
 vision and I seemed myself to be in the world 
 I contemplated. At other times I was like 
 one who cannot enter the gardens of a palace, 
 but who gazes distantly through gates on 
 their beauty, and sees people of a higher order 
 than himself moving in a world enchanting 
 to his eyes. I did see in some sphere inter- 
 
THE CELTIC IMAGINATION 165 
 
 penetrated with this beings in an ecstasy of 
 radiance, colour and sound, lovers who seemed 
 enraptured with their happiness, as they tell 
 in old story of lovers on the plains of Moy 
 Mell, and to me they seemed like some who 
 had lived in Earth in ancient days and who 
 now were in the happy world. And I saw, 
 without being able to explain to myself their 
 relation to that exalted humanity, beings such 
 as the ancient poets described, a divine folk 
 who I think never were human but were 
 those spoken of as the Sidhe. I did not see 
 enough to enable me to speak with any 
 certainty about their life, and I do not know 
 that it would serve any useful purpose to 
 detail visions which remain bewildering to 
 myself. Into the lowest of these two spheres 
 I saw with more frequency, but was able to 
 understand but little of what I saw. I will 
 tell one or two visions out of many. I was 
 drawn to meditate beside a deep pool amid 
 woods. It was a place charged with psychic 
 life, and was regarded with some awe by the 
 people who lived near. As I gazed into the 
 dark waters consciousness seemed to sink 
 beneath them and I found myself in another 
 world. It was more luminous than this, 
 and I found one there who seemed like an 
 
1 66 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 elemental king. He was seated on a throne, 
 and I saw that a lustrous air rose up as from 
 a fountain beneath the seat and his breathing 
 of it gave him power. The figure was of a 
 brilliant blue and gold opalescence, and the 
 breast, as with many of the higher beings, was 
 shining, and a golden light seemed to pervade 
 the whole body and to shine through its 
 silvery blueness. The tribe he ruled were 
 smaller than himself, and these I saw de- 
 scending on the right of the throne, their 
 shining dimmed to a kind of greyness, and 
 each one as it came before the throne bent 
 forward and pressed its lips upon the heart of 
 the king, and in an instant at the touch it 
 became flushed with life and it shot up plumed 
 and radiant, and there was a continuous 
 descent on one side of grey elementals and 
 on the other side a continuous ascent of 
 radiant figures, and I know not what it meant. 
 And at another time I saw one of these lesser 
 beings flying as a messenger out of the heart 
 of one greater, and I saw a return to the 
 heart and the vanishing of the lesser in the 
 greater, and I know not what it meant. 
 And at another time I was astonished, for I 
 saw rising out of deep water seven shining 
 and silvery figures, and three on one side and 
 
THE CELTIC IMAGINATION 167 
 
 three on another side and one beneath, they 
 held uplifted hands on the hilt of a gigantic 
 sword of quivering flame, and they waved 
 that mighty sword in air and sank again 
 beneath the waters. And after that seven 
 others rose up and they held a great spear, and 
 it they pointed skywards and sank below ; and 
 after that arose two carrying a cauldron, and, 
 when they had vanished, one solitary figure 
 arose and it held in its hands a great and 
 glittering stone ; and why these beautiful 
 beings should bring forth the four precious 
 symbols of the Tuatha de Danaan I do not 
 know, for that Mid-world, as Usheen travel- 
 ling to Tirnanoge saw, is full of strange and 
 beautiful forms appearing and vanishing ever 
 about the mystic adventurer, and there are to 
 be seen many beings such as the bards told 
 of : beings riding like Lir or Mananan upon 
 winged steeds, or surrounded like Angus Oge 
 with many-coloured birds, and why these 
 images of beauty and mystery should be 
 there I do not know, but they entered into 
 the imagination of poets in the past and have 
 entered into the imagination of others who 
 are still living. I can only surmise that they 
 were given the names of Mananan, Angus, 
 Dana or Lir because they were mouthpieces 
 
1 68 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 of the bodiless deities and perhaps sitting on 
 high thrones represented these at the Druidic 
 mysteries, and when the mortal came to be 
 made immortal they spoke to him each out 
 of their peculiar wisdom. In myself as in 
 others I know they awakened ecstasy. To 
 one who lay on the mound which is called 
 the Brugh on the Boyne a form like that the 
 bards speak of Angus appeared, and it cried : 
 " Can you not see me ? Can you not hear 
 me? I come from the Land of Immortal 
 Youth." And I, though I could not be certain 
 of speech, found the wild words flying up to 
 my brain interpreting my own vision of the 
 god, and it seemed to be crying to me : " Oh, 
 see our sun is dawning for us, ever dawning, 
 with ever youthful and triumphant voices. 
 Your sun is but a smoky shadow : ours the 
 ruddy and eternal glow. Your fire is far 
 away, but ours within our hearts is ever living 
 and through wood and wave is ever dawning 
 on adoring eyes. My birds from purple 
 fiery plumage shed the light of lights. Their 
 kisses wake the love that never dies and leads 
 through death to me. My love shall be in 
 thine when love is sacrifice." I do not 
 believe that either to myself or my friend 
 were such words spoken, but the whole being 
 
THE CELTIC IMAGINATION 169 
 
 is lifted up in vision and overmastered, and 
 the words that came flying upward in con- 
 sciousness perhaps represent our sudden har- 
 mony with a life which is beyond ourselves, 
 we in our words interpreting the life of the 
 spirit. Some interpret the spirit with sadness 
 and some with joy, but in this country I think 
 it will always cry out its wild and wondrous 
 story of immortal youth and will lead its 
 votaries to a heaven where they will be 
 drunken with beauty. What is all this .'' 
 Poetry or fantasy ? It has visited thousands 
 in all ages and lands, and from such visions 
 have come all that is most beautiful in poetry 
 or art. These forms inhabited Shelley's 
 luminous cloudland, and they were the models 
 in the Pheidian heart, and they have been 
 with artist, poet and musician since the 
 beginning of the world, and they will be with 
 us until we grow into their beauty and learn 
 from them how to fulfil human destiny, 
 accomplishing our labour which is to make 
 this world into the likeness of the Kingdom 
 of Light. 
 
EARTH 
 
 I THINK of earth as the floor of a cathedral 
 where altar and Presence are everywhere. 
 This reverence came to me as a boy listening 
 to the voice of birds one coloured evening in 
 summer, when suddenly birds and trees and 
 grass and tinted air and myself seemed but 
 one mood or companionship, and I felt a 
 certitude that the same spirit was in all. A 
 little breaking of the barriers and being would 
 mingle with being. Whitman writes of the 
 earth that it is rude and incomprehensible at 
 first. " But I swear to you," he cries, " that 
 there are divine things well hidden." Yet 
 they are not so concealed that the lover may 
 not discover them, and to the lover nature 
 reveals herself like a shy maiden who is 
 slowly drawn to one who adores her at a 
 distance, and who is first acknowledged by a 
 lifting of the veil, a long-remembered glance, 
 a glimmering smile, and at last comes speech 
 170 
 
EARTH 171 
 
 and the mingling of life with life. So the 
 lover of Earth obtains his reward, and little 
 by little the veil is lifted of an inexhaustible 
 beauty and majesty. It may be he will be 
 tranced in some spiritual communion, or will 
 find his being overflowing into the being of 
 the elements, or become aware that they are 
 breathing their life into his own. Or Earth 
 may become on an instant all faery to him, 
 and earth and air resound with the music of 
 its invisible people. Or the trees and rocks 
 may waver before his eyes and become 
 transparent, revealing what creatures were 
 hidden from him by the curtain, and he will 
 know as the ancients did of dryad and hama- 
 dryad, of genii of wood and mountain. Or 
 earth may suddenly blaze about him with 
 supernatural light in some lonely spot amid 
 the hills, and he will find he stands as the 
 prophet in a place that is holy ground, and 
 he may breathe the intoxicating exhalations 
 as did the sibyls of old. Or his love may 
 hurry him away in dream to share in deeper 
 mysteries, and he may see the palace chambers 
 of nature where the wise ones dwell in secret, 
 looking out over the nations, breathing power 
 into this man's heart or that man's brain, 
 on any who appear to their vision to wear 
 
172 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 the colour of truth. So gradually the earth 
 lover realises the golden world is all about 
 him in imperishable beauty, and he may pass 
 from the vision to the profounder beauty of 
 being, and know an eternal love is within 
 and around him, pressing upon him and sus- 
 taining with infinite tenderness his body, his 
 soul and his spirit. 
 
 I have obscured the vision of that being 
 by dilating too much on what was curious, 
 but I desired to draw others to this meditation, 
 if by reasoning it were possible to free the 
 intellect from its own fetters, so that the 
 imagination might go forth, as Blake says, 
 " in uncurbed glory." So I stayed the vision 
 which might have been art, or the ecstasy 
 which might have been poetry, and asked of 
 them rather to lead me back to the ancestral 
 fountain from which they issued. I think 
 by this meditation we can renew for ourselves 
 the magic and beauty of Earth, and understand 
 the meaning of things in the sacred books 
 which had grown dim. We have so passed 
 away from vital contact with divine powers 
 that they have become for most names for 
 the veriest abstractions, and those who read 
 do not know that the Mighty Mother is that 
 Earth on which they tread and whose holy 
 
EARTH 173 
 
 substance they call common clay ; or that the 
 Paraclete is the strength of our being, the 
 power which binds atom to atom and Earth 
 to Heaven : or that the Christos is the 
 Magician of the Beautiful and that it is not 
 only the Architect of the God-world but is 
 that in us which sees beauty, creates beauty, 
 and it is verily wisdom in us and is our 
 deepest self ; or that the Father is the fountain 
 of substance and power and wisdom, and that 
 we could not lift an eyelash but that we have 
 our being in Him. When we turn from 
 books to living nature we begin to understand 
 the ancient wisdom, and it is no longer an 
 abstraction, for the Great Spirit whose home 
 is in the vast becomes for us a moving 
 glamour in the heavens, a dropping tenderness 
 at twilight, a visionary light in the hills, a 
 voice in the heart, the Earth underfoot be- 
 comes sacred, and the air we breathe is like 
 wine poured out for us by some heavenly 
 cupbearer. 
 
 As we grow intimate with earth we realise 
 what sweet and august things await humanity 
 when it goes back to that forgotten mother. 
 Who would be ambitious, who would wish 
 to fling a name like Caesar's in the air, if he 
 saw what thrones and majesties awaited the 
 
174 THE CANDLE OF VISION 
 
 heavenly adventurer ? Who would hate if 
 he could see beneath the husk of the body 
 the spirit which is obscured and imprisoned 
 there, and how it was brother to his own 
 spirit and all were children of the King ? 
 Who would weary of nature or think it a 
 solitude once the veil had been lifted for him, 
 once he had seen that great glory ? Would 
 they not long all of them for the coming of 
 that divine hour in the twilights of time, 
 when out of rock, mountain, water, tree, bird, 
 beast or man the seraph spirits of all that live 
 shall emerge realising their kinship, and all 
 together, fierce things made gentle, and timid 
 things made bold, and small made great, shall 
 return to the Father Being and be made one 
 in Its infinitudes. 
 
 When we attain this vision nature_j?ill 
 melt*TnagicalIy Tjefore our^eyes, and_ powers 
 t^^^^m^drea3ful,„lthings_JtW_.J£emed 
 abhorrent^ in^hgr, will reveal themselves as 
 brothers and ,^Uies. Until then she i s 
 H5™oved^_by_ourj:onflicts ji^^ 
 he r cea aelessdabouj^. 
 
 No sign is made while empires pass. 
 The flowers and stars are still His care, 
 The constellations hid in grass, 
 The golden miracles in air. 
 
EARTH 175 
 
 Life in an instant will be rent 
 
 When death is glittering, blind and wild, 
 
 The Heavenly Brooding is intent 
 
 To that last instant on Its child. 
 
 It breathes the glow in brain and heart. 
 
 Life is made magical. Until 
 
 Body and spirit are apart 
 
 The Everlasting works Its will. 
 
 In that wild orchid that your feet 
 In their next falling shall destroy. 
 Minute and passionate and sweet. 
 The Mighty Master holds His joy. 
 
 Though the crushed jewels droop and fade 
 The Artist's labours will not cease, 
 And from the ruins shall be made 
 Some yet more lovely masterpiece. 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed in Great Britain hy R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.