PRIEST.
Love is a heated furnace that devours The thickest ice; love is a sweet moist wind That cools the fevered desert with its balm.
There is no rain nor heat, yea, even snow Is warm and rosy to ideal souls That shudder in life's sweetest ecstasies.
If love, that makes ideal life, that dwells In fragrant silences, makes green the grass, And far more tender the diviner flowers, It surely makes both bold and delicate The warm superiority of flesh Of that strange, sacred soul that dwells with mine.
The clear, yet golden whiteness of the form That shines through pale green diaphane, Showing its pliant beauty, is the dress Of that rapt soul that is all tenderness.
Her brow is crowned with wistful daffodils, Making her fair face fairer, and her eyes Are clouded sapphires; yea, her perfect lips (Whereon my soul will dwell for evermore) Clear blood-red rubies! The sweet hand holds Red poppies and blue lotus, and the soft And sulphur blossomed wind flower. If such dress Enshrine a soul as perfect, if the curves That make her form voluptuous describe The splendor of her soul (and this I know), Love has no purer temple, nor more sweet!
The priest had sung alone so far, and now both priest and priestess joined their voices in a marvellous song. Wilder, sweeter and more intense, the violins stormed and wailed pathetic whirlwinds of ecstasy. At times their insufferable moans caught the excited hearts of the audience, and twin-souls in their passion would rise on their wings and, revolving, sweep around the amphitheatre locked in each other's arms.
PRIEST AND PRIESTESS.
Sharper than pain, we love, and the caress, Keener than torment, overmaddens us!
There is no fasting when our feverish lips Meet in the shock that strikes the spirit dumb With swooning raptures! The dilated soul, Intemperate with the enormous moan Of passion, would outleap the strenuous will.
The flesh, transfigured with the crisis, reels, Stretches the chain of duty and would leap To grasp the tempting and forbidden fruit, Were not that virtue is our comrade now.
We lift our eager faces to the sun And feast on life and in each other's souls Luxuriate, confounded with delight.
For us no mouldy cloister waits its prey, Nor cave of darkness, where existence mourns And dies beneath its scourgings. We have made Our grim novitiate with reality.
Have known its agony, for we were born So eminent for rapture, that the pain All men inherit desolated us And spread a living terror in our souls; So that through clouds of everlasting woe Scarce came the gleam of gladness or of love, And earth was pitiless, and brutal souls Who cannot feel there ruled. Oh, the wide world, Degraded by ignoble brutishness, Could yield no tendernesses infinite For we who feed on rapture. Thus it was Our souls on meeting, in the thrilling kiss Were fused in indissoluble embrace; We who were famished, in ideal love Found sustenance and passed from death to life!
The song was perfect. The strange, fresh accents of the singers, so full of love and passion, melted every heart in the temple with their ecstasy. One might hear such measures without thought of lapse of time or of worldly concerns. Ah! if one could hear such melody forevermore!
With a burst of dramatic joy the singing of the last stanza revealed whole worlds of rapture.
Reincarnated in an earthly heaven, Now have we reached Nirvana, now Above us open the wide gulfs of joy, And luminous and glorious round us blow Millions of flowers; while afar there shines The mighty splendor of the exhaustless sea!
We dwell in breathless joys, thrilled through and through With majesty and sweetness; we have grown Athletes of joy in our Agapemone: Eager and breathless, we have found at last The fount of youth, the magical Arjeels; Fruits of organic gold amid the leaves Sparkle, and around our island home Are spread the veritable golden sands Whereon our happy feet tread evermore!
The singers disappeared, and in their places a hundred wondrously-arrayed figures moved in the dance of pure being on the silver pavement. Lithe as leopards, with unclad limbs and feet, priest and priestess danced all the ecstasies of Egyplosis. The dancers were so young, so fresh, so tender, so beautiful, and so innocent, that it was a supreme joy to behold them. Rapture grew universal and lovers cried with hysterical shudderings. The rainbow-colored throng, moving to the music of the golden instruments, flashed upon the pavement like joy taking possession of the world!
I felt intensely sad for Lyone, who sat like a statue of golden marble, gazing on the abyss of joy beneath. Had the goddess no lover to press her to his heart amid the universal rapture? Alas! the immense dignity of her position and the unalterable laws of Atvatabar alike prevented any single soul from feeding the intense hunger that consumed her.
Accompanying the dancers, the unseen choir in the cloisters began to sing a new opera of love, and the strains of an "Ave, Lyone, bona dea," stole upon the senses like the bewildering sighs of angels, making one ache with delight. A story of romantic love once more sculptured the faces of priest and priestess with angelic beauty, as it rose on wings of song and swept in delightful moans upon the carven stone.
It was a memorable scene, one never to be forgotten! The hieroglyphic walls, carved in high relief with the instruments of empire, the dome with its ten thousand fadeless lights, the terraces of twin-souls radiant with delight, the marvellous dancers, the superb music that seemed to shake the heart of the solid stone that enclosed us, and high over all the supreme goddess in whose honor all this adoration was made, seated in bliss on the throne of the gods--such was the situation at that moment.
It was a monstrous and a splendid joy!
Suddenly a roar of invincible music issued from gigantic tubes that pierced the body of the throne itself with fresh and warlike explosions of melody. I was filled with a maddening delight, until consciousness could hardly bear the strain any longer. I cried aloud, amid a Chimborazo of song, a hundred-cratered Popocatapetl of sweet strains. The audience, enraptured with the climax, became an inferno of passion, laughter tears and felicity!
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE MYSTERY OF EGYPLOSIS.
The palace of the goddess at Egyplosis was a component part of the vast quadrangle known as the supernal palace. The view therefrom embraced the wide inner garden of the entire palace of temples, discovering jungles of shrubs and flowers of all imaginable hues, interspersed with lakes sleeping in their marble basins like enormous jewels. Fountains of solid silver gushed forth a brilliant foam of waters amid the embowering foliage, and there glad priests, in the society of priestesses sweeter than the flowers themselves, dreamed life away in enthusiastic peace. Surrounding all was the high and glorious palace, forming a background, on the design of which imagination and art had been entirely exhausted.
The scene the day following the Ritual of the installation of a twin-soul in the temple of Egyplosis was a boudoir in the palace of the goddess. It was a large apartment, whose walls were hung with panels of rose-colored velvet, embroidered with gray-green silk foliage. In one large tapestry, the hands of loving priestesses had embroidered a scene in the garden of Egyplosis. On a dais, upon a couch of soft red silk upholstery sat Lyone, swathed in draperies of shrimp pink and pale peacock green, embroidered with ivory-white silk.
A large terra-cotta silk rug, whose only ornament was an elaborate border, covered the floor. The goddess wore a belt of aquelium serpents having tulips in their mouths. Heavy terrelium bracelets adorned her wrists, and she wore a diminutive tiara on her head.
I sat on a luxurious seat, the sole guest of the goddess. I was rapidly learning from the divinity the mystery of Egyplosis. I was especially anxious to find out how the jewel of one hundred years of youth could be grafted into the ordinary existence. An idea so splendid seemed to be the germ of earthly immortality. We were discussing the subject of hopeless love, and I asked her if she considered life and love were the same element.
"Life and love are synonymous," she replied. "By love I mean the spiritual, ideal, romantic passion that is hopeless."
"Yes," I replied, "but does not the idea of inaccessibility create a worthless desire, that is, a desire for something that is forbidden or unattainable? The majority of men, I think, will prefer an every-day love with all its risks and imperfections to the shadowy ghost of a hopeless love. The hopeful love does no violence to nature such as is contemplated by the hopeless sentiment."
"You hardly understand me," said she; "the pleasure we aspire to is superior to any physical delight, and is an end in itself. It is romantic love, that blooms like a single flower in the crevices of a volcano. It is the quintessence of existence, the rarest wine of life, the expressed sweetness of difficulty and repression and long-suffering, the choicest holiday of the soul. We are willing to pay the price of hopelessness to taste such nectar. In the every-day world such joy only rarely exists. Interest, indulgence, ambition, fortune, time, temper and marriage destroy it. Youth, captivated by a beautiful face or a winning smile, thinks it has discovered its true counterpart, and so takes possession of the prize. It finds afterward it was mistaken, and all its life thenceforth becomes miserable."
"But," I replied, "if the world at large had discovered that your theory of love was the true one, it would long since have acted on its discovery and put no destroying restraint or obligation on so precious a possession. But the world found that a thousand accidents would infallibly open the eyes of both parties to the fact that they possessed but few qualities in common, or in counterpart, and with such knowledge of good and evil they would infallibly separate. Hence the foundation of society would be torn asunder and the rising generation of helpless children become orphaned of home, the very bulwark of life. Society must have assurances that people do not get married simply as an experiment, but are willing to honorably undertake the mutual sacrifices their act carries with it."
"I have already admitted," said she, "that the joy of spiritual love hardly ever exists in its virgin force in the every-day world. I admit that the necessary regulations of society, although they tend to destroy it, must be enforced. The Atvatabar nation rests on the marriage idea. At one time in our history the people strove for ideal love and overthrew the ordinary marriage yoke without the restraint of reason. Law and order disappeared and social chaos reigned. The land was filled with the wailings of orphans whose parents had deserted them, and men and women formed new associates every day. Unbridled license devastated the country. Our lawgivers re-established the law of marriage as being the only law suitable to mankind. Man in the aggregate had not developed to a state in which the consummation of marriage could be dispensed with. Yet there were many among those who had advocated ideal love worthy of their theory. Although married to each other, they had remained celibates. For these Egyplosis was founded, for the study and practice of what is really a higher development of human nature and in itself an unquestionable good. It is the most powerful element in the production of creative energy of soul and personal beauty. As you will have observed, all our devotees are singularly beautiful in form and feature and possess spirit power to a high degree."
As the goddess spoke a few threads of her bright blue hair had strayed across her face. Her beautiful eyes flashed with a royalty of truth, tenderness, magnetism, and feeling. She was the living illustration of her claims for Egyplosis.
"What you say," I replied, "illustrates that ordinary marriage, with all its limitations and, infelicities, is absolutely necessary for the well-being of society. Marriage is simply the application of reason and morality to blind, passionate nature. The home circle is the origin of nationality, progress, and wealth. Ideal love, wrested from the dragon of difficulty, is, I think, but rarely tasted in so real, so practical an institution. This is the experience of the nations of the outer world, and how much better for man that it is so? A roadway in proportion to its rhythm of undulation becomes useless, hindering travel rather than accelerating it. So also with love. When settled in the calm security of marriage the mind is freed from the romantic extravagance, the torture, the delight of hopeless sentiment. Thus men are free to devote themselves to the more serious purposes of life and achieve wealth and fame for themselves and their families. I am, nevertheless, curious to see how your institution is conducted, for hopeless love seems to me one of the most disquieting things in life.
Its victims, happy and unhappy, resisting passion with regret or yielding with remorse, are ever on the rack of torture. They resemble the devotees of certain idols, who pierce themselves with cruel hooks and swing aloft in honor of their god. It may be pleasure, but not one in a thousand will ever achieve that degree of soul exaltation and physical abnegation to think it so."
"And yet not one in a thousand, not one in a hundred thousand lives in Egyplosis," said the goddess.
"The men who achieve anything," I continued, "good and great in the world, the men who build empires, discover ideas, who both rule and populate nations, are all rewarded by a hopeful love. It is only a hopeless love that sets up its mirage of false and never-to-be-obtained joys. Hence, I ask you the question, What of Egyplosis?"
The goddess smiled at my controversial attitude, "It is the old question," she replied, "of conventionalism _versus_ art, of economic institutions _versus_ nature and life. Just as we endeavor to rescue spontaneous invention and originality from the disease of the tasteless and laborious productions of a mechanical civilization, so we labor to create an earthly home for the soul in a world where superficial necessities will stifle it out of existence. There was a time in the history of Atvatabar when people talked of art and love, both of which did not exist. The octopus of commercial, mechanical and economical life had strangled the soul and all its attributes. Men fought for treaties of commerce, treaties of marriage, deeds of property, and all the while acted in defiance of their obligations.
They cheated each other, lied to each other, deserted each other incessantly. Love had taken wings and fled. Art had lost its language and its cunning. Life was no longer illuminated with splendid ideals.
It was no longer arrayed in the fair and fascinating garments that only the soul can weave. History was no longer glorified by paintings and sculptured reliefs. Religion was no longer symbolized in the solemn magnificence of architecture, or sculptured shrines of gods.
Articles of daily use were made solely to make a profit, and the widespread use of machinery was destroying the art, the soul, the pure life of the people. A paternal government, seeing the tyranny of commercialism and the possible extinction of the soul itself, has wisely, in the spirit of patriarchal hospitality, established the art institution of Gnaphisthasia and the religious institution of Egyplosis, for soul development in harmony with the high destiny of mankind. Harikar, or developed soul, is the natural sequence of the development of the soul and intellect, achieving the supreme virtue of spiritual perfection, or dominion of the passions of the body and the forces of nature. Love was the one great end of our religion, for life is love."
"I value your creed," I continued, "to the fullest extent. I value the idea that every intellect shall enfold a soul. You practise the doctrine that hopeless love is that phase of the passion that contains the most delirious possibilities of joy, yet, allow me to ask, have you never discovered that there may be disappointments for even such guarded emotions as yours? Are your neophytes perfectly happy? We find, in the outer world at least, that no state or condition in life is perfectly pleasurable. Their joys die of their own _ennui_ if for no other cause. We find happiness like a flower; it has its period of bloom and decay. The more intoxicating the beauty the shorter its life. Happiness long continued grows common, fades and dies. Then again the human soul is always in a fever of unrest. It always thinks what is beyond its reach is liberty. As one of our poets has expressed it:
"'Oh, give me liberty!
For even were a paradise itself my prison, Still would I long to leap the crystal walls!'"
As I spoke I saw that the goddess was an eager listener to my words.
Was it possible that she might have an idea that even Egyplosis might indeed be a prison? But, then, her position, her vows, recalled to her the fact that she was love's _religieuse_, an indissoluble part of the temple of love itself.
The goddess replied, that sometimes impatient spirits had entered the palace, but any incorrigible cases of insubordination were either imprisoned in the fortress beneath the palace or were expelled into the outer world. The neophytes entered the temple college while under twenty years of age. Each soul, thereafter mingling freely with five thousand of the opposite sex, chooses in a month its counterpart for life, thus forming a complete circle. The choice must be approved by a council of "Soul Inquisitors" who, before the lifelong union is made, see that both possess all the elements that will produce a high, holy and pure blending of thought, feeling, emotion, joys spiritual and intellectual, whose every breath will be an ecstasy, and at the same time possess reverence for each other and the power of resistance to passion and are able to walk in the pure path.
"Do you not think," I replied, "that the temptation being ever present, the struggle in the soul must in time exhaust and enfeeble the moral powers, producing disastrous consequences?"
Before the goddess could reply, a terrible commotion was heard in the palace garden. The shrieks of a woman mingled with the loud voices of men were heard in furious clamor, and one of the royal guards entered the palace chamber in breathless haste.
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE SIN OF A TWIN-SOUL.