CHAPTER XVII

LOVE LOOKS BEYOND DEATH

The forces of the psyche, the lower or animal self, lacking intelligence and reasoning power, must await the impingement upon themselves of the higher-pitched vibrations of the Erotic divinity before they can be linked to rational purposes. The Prince Charming comes down to marry the sleeping beauty, the Princess to be. He is called Charming because, as ordinary romantic love itself attests, his superior spirito-intellectual power very literally, yet figuratively too, does enchant and transform the very soul of the awakened lady. His power to wave his magic wand of beautiful allurement over her and captivate her is indeed that of a charmer. To charm is to bring under a magic spell and thenceforth to control the action of the subject. This is precisely what the spiritual soul does or is to do in its gradual gaining of ascendancy. Its exalted kingship is won by virtue of its bringing the multitudinous animal tendencies under its sway through the power mind exerts over all energies below it in rank. Paul's statement that the lower self becomes transformed into the likeness of the higher is the scriptural prototype of the fairy-tale magic as well as of the integrating power of true light and understanding in psychoanalysis today.

The psyche can not become fecund and produce the Christ-child as her son without the coming of the bridegroom who will impregnate her physical potencies with his contribution of the seed of a divine nature. Nor can he, on his side, become productively Father without union with her mothering agencies. The great mythical fables of the King of the Gods, Jupiter or Zeus, carrying off beautiful maidens on a honeymoon impulse is just the dramatic representation of the cardinal principles of the spirit-matter relation. The

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Christ personages or dramatizations were always the progeny of God's mind or Logos, the Holy Spirit of the Christian theology, as male parent, descending from above, and of an earthly maiden, the virgin of the world. The sons of God are our incarnating divine souls; the women, the virgins of the allegory, are the human bodies. The bride is the matter of body, pining as she waits for the coming of her Lord.

John Addington Symonds in his lucid work already quoted, The Renaissance in Italy, pauses to take account of this ascription of gender to divinities, to abstract qualities and to the elements of consciousness. He ends by qualifying it as overdrawn poetic, mystical and in a word silly affectation of classical pedantry. That so generally astute a student as Symonds proves himself to have been in his fine analyses of cultural trends should fall into this blunder along with practically the rest of the scholarly company, is dispiriting. This attribution of gender or sex to the characters in the myths and in the Olympian and other pantheons is indeed the most expressive and revealing descriptive methodology practicable. The predication of male or female nature to energies, qualities, attributes in the personae of the cosmic dramas was the most direct and plausible manner of certifying at one stroke their generative or male function or their passive female and mothering function. It is, as already stressed, the blind spot before the eye of the modern mind which prevents it from seeing the reality of sex as operative on the higher levels of mental and spiritual consciousness. This is the myopia that shuts out the positive veritude of the phenomena esoterically concealed under ancient allegory and that allows such a capable mind as Symonds' to cast his slur and slight into his judgment of the masterly dramatic genius of primordial wisdom. Time and again it is the clue of sex that opens out the tangled web of abstrusity and mystery inwrought in the great classical myths. It is not by accident or by the play of infantile simplicity of early mind, or by "primitive" fancy, that such languages as Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, even to German, French and Spanish, give gender

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to every common noun. Symonds should have penetrated and analyzed that profound usage before he decried the sound rationality behind the gender of the Gods and their powers. Sex in proper physical manifestation belongs only to the flesh. But the mental conception of sex as the eternal interaction between positive and negative life pervades all thought. Even numbers were given sex by the Pythagoreans. The odd numbers were masculine, the even feminine. The number one was of no sex, the eternal androgyne.

The visible material universe is the feminine, for it is the womb in which all birthing takes place. The body must likewise be feminine, since it is the mother of whatever spiritual entification takes place within it. In the Greek the body was soma, which was identical in incarnational philosophy with the tomb, sema. And in English womb and tomb are, in the same way cognate. The tomb of the body, in which the soul went to its captivity and death, was at the same time the womb of its renewal and resurrection, as the soil is to seed. Soil is both tomb of death and womb of new birth for the plant.

The definition of sex here must accommodate a scope of meaning not commonly associated with it. It is sex, but non-physical or non-physiological. It is sex dialectically considered, yet none the less sex. It is still the mutual reciprocity of opposites, but now on the mental plane. It is sex in the sense in which the sun is masculine and the moon feminine, or day masculine and night feminine, or rivers and winds masculine and trees feminine, or right masculine and left feminine. Such sex is determined by the nature or functionism of a thing, whether it is self-procreative or passive and receptive to outside influence.

It would in the ultimate demand a genius rather divine than human, of tongue or pen, to put into words the glamorous charm that the two poles of sex exercise upon each other. The passion of love is in its purest and strongest form the living manifestation of the divine nature in the human being. What lesser or different type of magnetic pull it may exert at lower levels than the human,

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or what more divinely sweet allurement it may dispense over consciousness at more exalted levels is left for the speculative imagination to conjure out. It is a presumption that each grade of life and consciousness feels and experiences it in degree and quality exactly apportioned to its status and capacity. But at whatever level or degree it is found in the gamut, its manifestation there is for the creature experiencing it the supreme impelling force in the life movement.

To give some semi-realistic view of the nature of sex attraction one is forced to resort to such terms as magnetic and electric. There will be little violence done to truth if sex is asserted to be in all forms of its exhibition exactly like the chemical reaction between elements that have affinities for each other. As two chemicals instantly unite by the law of their atomic constitution, so the two poles of being coalesce by a similar compulsion. A force almost as palpable as the pull of a magnet on iron filings emanates from the opposite sides and lays a grip on its contrary poles. As matter, which shows itself subject to the law of polarity, is found in the analysis to be of the nature of an electric force, and not solid substance at all, likewise the mutual attraction between spirit and matter must be conceived and defined in terms that describe electricity. And love between the sexes is as tangible or at least as conceivably a physical force as is electricity. It can manifest itself in things as empirical as hunger and homesickness. It can be so strong in its pressure upon the organism that its exuberant flow in free expression, or its thwarting and repression, may produce complete happiness, on the one hand, or produce death, on the other.

Indeed love is intimately bound in with the issues of life and death. This is so well seen in the procreational processes of many varieties of insects, such as bees, wasps and certain species of aphids, wherein the act of reproduction, especially on the male parental side, is immediately followed by death for the generator. Edward Carpenter has beautifully set forth the aspects of this involvement in his book, The Drama of Love and Death. So strong and invincible,

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so unrelenting in its grip is the power of love that sometimes to die in the overt expression of the passion is felt preferable to living without it. Suicides motivated by thwarted love duly attest this tragic and melancholy power. It is almost as if life said to its children: Love and procreate--or die! For it actually does say to some species: Love and procreate--and die! From which consideration it is pretty crisply to be seen by even the dim and limited mentality of man that the death of the organism is of comparative insignificance in the larger ongoing of the stream of life. And as life ostensibly uses the experience undergone by its living units in and for the work of instruction of those units, the continuous unfoldment of organic life in evolution presupposes the continuity of the consciousness which has had the experience, since it is illogical to assume that education can accrue to beings vicariously. Logic indicates that there must be a nucleus of consciousness which can garner up and accumulate, assimilate and digest, the experiential deposits of continuing existence.

By a marvelous alchemy of consciousness, as yet only dimly limned by the human mind, yet in a way quite understandable in the light of ordinary experience, wherein much activity, itself for gotten in detail, results in a digest of rational conception, a deposit of wisdom, much as hundreds of tons of crude coal can be distilled into an ounce of imperishable radium, the enduring Ego, the peregrinating young god, undergoes the myriad touches of actual life and distills from the mass the gleaming pearls of everlasting realization and permanent wisdom. Such an understanding was the ground philosophy of all sapient antiquity, of that genius that produced the world scriptures, immemorially revered as sacred.

Life comes into existence, affirm these venerated texts, bearing the fruits of former existences. The soul is what it is now by virtue of what it--and not something other than itself--has learned and come to be. Modern biological science has not yet enlarged its view

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of truth to embrace this matured science of the ancients. It relies on heredity, transmission, shunning the postulation of forces and entities that do not lie open to physical view. This is the great gap of failure that inheres in modern scientific effort to produce a philosophy that meets the questions propounded by observed phenomena. The great missing segment in the arc of knowledge is the initial principium that life endlessly oscillates between the two conditions of embodied existence (on a planet) and disembodied existence in a suspended state, and carries the gains from one cycle of expression over into the next, and aggregates them for all eternity.

In the simplest approach to dialectic it can be asked how life can carry forward its own products and resultants, if both the consciousness that engendered them and the organism in which it functioned do not continue to exist. Obviously the organism does not continue. It is scattered to dust, as Ecclesiastes states. The perpetuation of the nucleus of consciousness therefore is the only possible assumption on which retention of gains accruing from experience can be grounded. Intelligent religion in olden time postulated the existence in man's make-up of "spiritual" bodies, six of them in all in Egyptian philosophy, along with the physical, the more atomically sublimated one or ones of them being composed of the imperishable radiant element of the sunlight. In these the unit of divine consciousness could subsist when the coarser material bodies disintegrated, and thus preserve its ripened fruits. Life has some provision for enabling the consciousness that has harvested wisdom from life to hold it in perpetuity. Otherwise the value of the labors and sufferings of every soul in every cycle would be cast to the winds, especially since modern biological science is by no means agreed as to the possibility of the transmission of offspring of acquired parental characteristics. Evolution could not be equated with experience or be seen as the result of it.

The love that has matched its values against death itself bespeaks a momentous revelation that mankind has been too slow to catch,--that the attraction and union of sex forces is the supreme means

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to life's prime objective, and therefore is to be rated as near the summit in the man-made categories of sanctities. The verdict of all peoples of high culture when at their most exalted pitch of refined appreciations has been to this effect.

But so high a thing becomes subject to a possible degradation correspondingly low, when handled by gross ignorance and crudity. It is contorted out of beauty by immoderation or unnatural perversion. A cultured minority alone carries the banner of sexual purity, while the immature and crass majority drags down the lovely image of sex so deeply into the mire of lower carnal propensities that it is smeared with the murk and muck of foulness. Genuine love has always had to fight its way up through this miasmatic atmosphere of alleged natural baseness to reach the heights where it can breathe the pure air and bask in the brighter sunshine of uncontaminated mental wholesomeness and sweetness. Pure religion and undefiled, high literature, elevated philosophy, beautiful poetry have ever voiced the praise and acclaimed the sanctity of love and romance. Only less clean hands have besmirched the grand passion with the imputations of mortal turpitude.

The mutual attraction of the two poles of sex is the hidden theme of much mythology, and is both the burden and the gist of the ancient depiction of theological truth. We see it first in the Greek fable of Narcissus, the youth who, bending over a clear spring, saw his image reflected in the water, fell in love with it and in his ardor to woo it, fell into the pool and was drowned. Like the Prodigal Son allegory in the New Testament this is a construction that adumbrates the sublimest significance for a grasp of both Greek philosophy and racial genesis. The apologue depicts the "fall"--more properly the "descent," since it was deliberate and a normal evolutionary procedure--of the units of divine mind, the sons of God, into bodily incarnation.

But the feature of the allegorization that fairly shouts its cardinal import to our dull comprehension is Narcissus' becoming enamored of his own image in the water below him. In ancient usage water

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is the universal and unfailing symbol of matter and the earthly life, since the body which soul inhabits on earth is itself seven-eighths water in composition. Greek philosophy of the great Orphic-Platonic school--the source of all Greek wisdom--says in one place that "it is necessary that the soul should place a likeness of herself in matter," so as to become more conversant with herself through seeing her image reflected in the mirroring surface below. This is quite in line with the discernment already made herein, that spirit must objectify itself to itself, if it would become conscious of its own nature and being. But the moment that the sons of God project their creative forces outward and "downward" and stamp their image upon plastic substance, there is set up the attraction of polarity between spirit and matter, and the higher is filled with a love and yearning for union with the lower self. Hence he "inclines downward," as the Greeks phrase it, and by the force of the desire is drawn down to embrace matter and unite his energies with those of body. He thus becomes the soul in and of these bodies.

The "drowning" refers to the pretty complete submergence of his entire conscious life, for the initial period at least, beneath the waves and tides of animal sense and passion that flood in upon it from its close affinity with the animal body. Chapters in the Book of the Dead caution the soul against being "drowned" in the waters of the underworld. Many passages in the Old Testament Psalms have the soul crying out that the waves have come upon it and the water-floods have overwhelmed it.

It is most desirable that thought should face the implications of the allegory, which intimates the strength of the lure of matter for spirit. It is to be noted that this seduction is strong enough to draw spirit down out of its home of alleged bliss in celestial paradise into the domain and under the bondage of matter, a condition which is dramatized in all religions as the land of dreary exile, desert barrenness and lonely wandering; a place of miry clay, a swamp, a marsh, a reedy sea (the proper translation now of the "Red Sea"), a region of murky gloom and perpetual darkness; in

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short a dreadful dungeon or prison house, or cave, where the soul is confined as in a veritable tomb of death.

This is the allegorist's attempt to paint the power of the flesh over the soul, even when in high heaven the pull of the polarity reaches clear up from earth and entices downward from the empyrean the very sons of God to seek marriage with the daughters of the earth, namely, the fleshly bodies of the highest natural evolution. For these bodes are, collectively, the Virgin Mother, that is, organic matter never before wedded to spiritual monads, so far unfruitful and unproductive, not ever impregnated with the seeds of divine mind to become the mothers of divine birth, and so represented as "barren" in their "old age," their long cycles of evolution from primal atom up to organic body. Only "late in time" are they destined to bring forth, in the developed brain of highest man, the Christ consciousness and so become the virgin mother of the gods. This is the first great act in the cosmic flirtation, the first step in the anthropogenetic cycle of the wooing of spirit and matter, the first great romantic knight-errantry of the Prince of the Royal Lineage, Son of the Eternal King, shining in the brightness of his Father's glory, radiant son of the morning, sallying forth from the heavenly castle to marry the fairest daughter of the physical creation, and produce through that union the new heavens and new earth of the Father's eternal kingdom. Nothing less than such a majestic epic of the soul's descent is the meaning of the fable of Narcissus and others of like import.

Matching it in our Bible is a drama of the New Testament, all the singular beauty of which has faded out of sight by the historization of allegory. It is the incident of the dance before Herod, of the daughter of Herod's brother, Philip's wife, Herodias, as the result of which the divine forerunner, John the Baptist, lost his head. This beautiful bit of cosmic dramatism, like so many others, has been turned by ignorant incomprehension of its esoteric subtlety into a mere historical intrigue, as which it stands stripped bare of all its intrinsic majesty and instructiveness.

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A dance, to begin with, is a movement, the motif, genius and essence of which is rhythm. It is a physical movement according to measure and interval. It is motion in structural form and figure and symmetry and balance. Hence it is a perfect representation of the movement of stellar spheres, of the sweep and circling of physical worlds in their stately order, of the swirling of electrons in the atom, of the gyrations of galaxies round the great fixed poles of central stability, where on his throne sits the King.

What, then, would be the significance of a female dancing before the King? Whole volumes of splendid enlightenment in the tomes of antiquity have been missed because interpretation has not been guided by the ground fact of ancient symbolic language, that the goddesses and the feminine characters generally typified matter, the physical side of creation. With this one clear clue the drama becomes elucidated in resplendent beauty. A woman dancing before the King! What else could it dramatize but the dance of the physical universe, the sweeping and swinging of the planets in all the grace and precision of perfect rhythm before the eyes of the Supreme Generator of it all, figuratively seated above on his throne?

Religions of old invariably used the figure of the King to typify the divine rulership of mind. Watching the rhythmic sweep of his physical creation before his entranced gaze, the King Mind is captivated, till at last he is overcome with desire to rush down and embrace that lovely form of matter and swing along through the cycles in its arms. In this we have the dramatic type of the powerful lure exercised upon the spiritual part by the material half of the creation. It is the Lorelei, the Circe, the siren call to masculine spirit. If the enchantment and witchery of maidenhood over the mind of the male is a natural, legitimate and beautiful thing, then by the same token the lure of matter for spirit--the essential condition of all generation of new life--is similarly accredited and sanctified as lovely, salutary and beneficent. There is no possibility of invalidating the force and relevance of the analogue. If the lower is not ignoble, the upper is established in a tenfold surer sacrosanctity. If

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there is a natural propriety and rightness in the reverence paid by knighthood gallantry to womanhood on the concrete plane of personality in all ages, then the ancient theological ascription of honor and reverence to matter as the mother of spirit is summarily vindicated.

And in the same breath the ideologies that have cast a philosophical odium and obloquy, slight and stigma of evil character upon matter as inferior and degrading, are proven erroneous and impertinent. For woman is the type of matter, the eternal Isis, the mother of life. What the vast massive human sense honors as a thing of nobility can not be made ignoble. The deference of men to womanhood belies by its very implication the philosophical derogation of matter. If there is in masculine nature an instinctive recognition of the inviolable dignity and genuine sanctity of woman and her function of motherhood, and this impulse manifests spontaneously with invariable constancy over the whole area of evolving life, assuredly the high position of the material and maternal side of the cosmic emanation must be held as vindicated. The mistaken disposition on the part of most religionism in history to berate and belittle, to brand and defame matter, to load it with theological odium, has by a series of subtle repercussions on minds so indoctrinated wrought insidious distortion in the lives of millions. For every false attitude of the mind must sooner or later develop a corresponding inharmony in the outer life. All ideal formulations eventually work out and down into a concrete expression on the physical plane. A theory, an impulse, an obsession will in the end come to overt outlet in an act, or in a bodily condition. If activity in the physical world is the long shadow of the reality of the formations in the noumenal world, projected upon the outer screen of the phenomenal world, man's natural inclination to adore woman is the incontestable seal of the queenly status of matter in the philosophical kingdom.

The whole cast of theology is basically formulated upon the incarnation and its involvements. It is built upon the pivotal thesis

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that spiritual beings humbled themselves under the rulership of matter and physical embodiment for the sake of carrying life ahead to new expansion of its potentialities. Here at once is the cosmic counterpart and analogue of the male's self-limitation of his freedom and the restriction of his activities in marriage. And both are a standing irrefutable dramatization of the homage of spirit before the throne of queenly matter. Angels of bright luster have indeed come down out of heaven to adore the Virgin. They have not despised, but exalted the Virgin's womb. They have not deemed it unseemly to seek newness of life through the enabling offices of matter. They have not failed to regard the lowly estate of their handmaiden, nor hesitated to come under the law of her domain.

Plato's conception that each segment of the polarity is drawn toward its opposite by the force of an instinct or hunger for fulfillment of its own lack, being itself only half of the plenary whole, is as true an account of the mutual attraction as can be given. It is an involuntary, almost subconscious sweep of urgent inclination, welling out from deep within and becoming conscious and voluntary after a time. There is a more or less clearly acknowledged desire for what each lacks and is in the possession of the other. To come into the presence of the personal living embodiment and beautiful manifestation of these desirable elements is to fall into love of them and their possessor. Their power of charm is close to overwhelming. Emerson has so well portrayed the almost luminous aura that mystical apperceptions create and fling about the person of the loved object. A radiance enshrines it, and body, voice and movement fill the adoring heart with such subtle delight that reason is thrust into abeyance and desire rules the soul. It is the cosmic first far-off call to the two halves of a divine unity to come to the epithalamium. It is life bidding its children live and create. It is an imperious injunction to them to complete their being. It is, as it were, the coming together of the dry wood and the flame. If the divine fire is to be rekindled on new fuel, the two must wed and conjoin their powers.

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The dance of the maiden before the King has been analyzed for its esoteric meaning. The dance has consistently held a place of favor in human regard, albeit the ground rationale of that favor has hardly yet been expounded. It is perennially attractive and fascinating because it simulates in miniature the universal movement of life as activated by the mutual interplay between the two opposite forces of soul and sense. It is the most perfect dramatization possible to the human mind and body of the cosmic impulse and the universal movement it generates. The movement or the sight of it engenders psychologically the reflex awareness or feeling of that primal and pervasive impulse which thrills within the framework of the cosmos and in which all creatural life participates in degree. It tends to sweep the spectator or the participant into the tide of the creative stream itself.

Rhythm is the law of the movement of life. Its appeal to our sensibilities is due to something far deeper and more elementary than has ever been suspected. Its spell and charm over us springs from the psychological power of a rudimentary memory. From aeons of conscious experience there has become lodged within us the so-called unconscious of the race mind. Our souls, which are units of consciousness that have been for ages rolling through cycles of alternate embodiment and release, have felt the impact of the rhythmic beats of the alternating arcs of the cycles until they have become insensibly attuned to the measure. The tempo of the rhythm has inwrought itself indelibly into the texture of inmost consciousness, through the sensible repetition of the impacts. Our souls have themselves caught the contagion of the rhythm, and they immediately respond to any typal representation of the form of that rhythm by a spontaneous resurgence of the innate afflatus which it liberates. The soul has caught the habit of the swing of the measure, as of a melody, and it is ever stirred to intimations of deepest reality by the incidence of any form of the movement upon the outer sense.

The Greek philosophers asserted that life and consciousness swing alternately out from an interior center of immovability and same-

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ness into a circle or cycle of movement toward endless difference and back again to source. And they thence assert that this grand cosmic and aeonial rhythm is symbolized and endlessly imitated by the larger and smaller cycles of outgoing and return undergone by each unit of living selfhood. All creatures in the scale of being answer to the thrill and throb of life's universal pulse. All life movement is inescapably set and timed to the one pervading and omnipresent pulsation, the beat of the heart of God. And if the consciousness of the individual unit in minor octaves in the gamut has no formal knowledge of the cosmic systematism, there are numberless smaller cycles of ebb and flow to keep it continually reminded of the eternal harmonies.

In a word, if life's larger notes in the music of the spheres are to be prolonged for our ear, so that we may catch their crescendo and diminuendo, we have an infinitude of eighths and sixteenths whose observable striking can keep us sensible of the dance. There is endless counterpoint in the hymn of advancing life. The vast cycles are composed of and interfused with multitudinous minor rounds, so that seven smaller wheels must turn seven times to turn a larger one once, and seven of its revolutions complete a still grander sweep. Undoubtedly this is the sense behind the crumbling of the walls of Jericho by the repetition of the priests' blasts on the ram's horn once a day for seven days and seven times on the seventh day, accompanied by their sevenfold circling of the walls on the march.

Is it asking too much of human intelligence to understand that a soul, a node of consciousness equipped to retain the subliminal memory of all its experiences in going through numberless repetition of cycles of life and death, should retain the feeling and automatic memory thus indelibly interwoven into the context of its sensibilities, so as to be immediately responsive to the thrill of a rhythmic beat? The dance has always played its part in festival gaiety, in ritual, in religious ceremonial as well as in the time-measure of all poetry and music, and this for the all-sufficient reason

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that these forms not only dramatize, but themselves in miniature reproduce the actual movement of life which has ingrained into consciousness the susceptibility to rhythm. And as the run of beats or notes in each cycle moves toward a climactic denouement in the last and highest note in the octave, the continued incidence of a rhythm inevitably carries with it the intimate suggestion of a heightening pleasure moving toward a consummative stroke. The stupendous philosophical involvements of this aspect of the phenomenon will be examined in their proper connection.