•
Just as in magic men manipulated the harmonics of the divine to produce disturbances of harmonics in what we call fascination; or disturbances of the divine correspondences to weave a net of circumstantial evidence, to “pull strings” as we sense it, playing with influences; so men cast spells. Poets cast images. And in this Lawrence’s magic of casting the room or dream in Bid Me to Live, is located as a drawing: “You made it all up, Elsa’s work-bag on the floor, the cups and saucers, the branch out of the window, when I thought you were writing. You were writing or you were painting rather, a branch out of the window, with the window-frame one side and the folds of the blue curtain the other. You drew the fanlight over the door, downstairs.”
•
This is evil; “Old English yfel,” the O.E.D. tells us: “usually referred to the root of up, over.” Where in the orders of the universe the services of craft or art become masterful in craft, crafty as artful; and the ease is dis-eased or mal-eased, we may pose as the Dreamer of our own dream or another’s; man, beast, angel, god may pose as the creator of Creation and appear to have power over things.
•
Helen struggles with the true state of what is, as often we do in dreams, in terms of her own art in letters: In her magic exchange (involvement with) Achilles, she traffics also in a magic claim (power) over Achilles:
I said, “there is mystery in this place,
I am instructed, I know the script,
the shape of this bird is a letter,
they call it the hieroglyph;
•
(Writing on the Wall)
Freud, as H.D. tells us in Tribute to Freud, had viewed just this writing on the wall as “dangerous.” “We can read my writing,” she tells us (she is speaking of the writing that appeared on a wall to her in a vision, but it is also her own writing):
“We can read my writing, the fact that there was writing, in two ways or in more than two ways. We can read or translate it as a suppressed desire for forbidden ‘signs and wonders,’ breaking bounds, a suppressed desire to be a Prophetess, to be important anyway, megalomania they call it—a hidden desire to ‘found a new religion’ which the Professor ferreted out in the later Moses picture. Or this writing-on-the-wall is merely an extension of the artistic mind, a picture or an illustrated poem, taken out of the actual dream or day-dream content and projected from within (though apparently from outside), really a high-powered idea, simply over-stressed, over-thought, you might say, an echo of an idea, a reflection of a reflection, a ‘freak’ thought that had got out of hand, gone too far, a ‘dangerous symptom.’ ”
•
So Helen tries to confess the truth about letters.
I said, I was instructed in the writ,
but I had only heard of it,
when our priests decried
papyrus fragments,
travelers brought back,
as crude, primeval lettering—
what saves her, what saves H.D. is the “Do not despair” that whatever the art, it is “as if God made the picture”; by magic, by violation calling forth violence we try to read:
no, I was not instructed, but I “read” the script,
I read the writing when he seized my throat,
•
And in Helen we learn that not only she, but other inhabitants of the Dream, have a magic and seem to dream each others’ dreams. To communicate at all, creature to creature, creation must be used as meaning; interpretation itself is a power over things. “I can not ‘read’ the hare, the chick, the bee,” H.D.-Helena must confess for her own salvation. Here “the Sun,
hidden behind the sun of our visible day.”
is the Dreamer, Creator-Uncreated. “The invisible attunement is superior to the visible,” Heraklitus tells us.
•
The dream may be the veil of Cytheraea, and the veil the fabric of Maya, and the Dreamer-Creator Brahma. For wherever in Western thought this dream in which we are dreamed appears as the world, we feel the Hindu influence.
In the years following The War Trilogy the theosophical and esoteric elements which had begun to operate in her poetics there increase. We are not on the wrong track to follow from Greece and Egypt to India.
you may ask forever, you may penetrate
every shrine, an initiate,
and remain unenlightened at last.
she tells us:
How does the Message reach me?
do thoughts fly like the word
of the goddess? a whisper—
she asks.
(my own thought or the thought of another?)
•
So in “Palinode”—Proteus, “the legendary King of Egypt, reveals the future, the mystery or the legend.” His is the enactment; “Nameless-of-many-Names he decrees”. He is “Sun behind the sun of day”, we learn in “Eidolon” 1:3, Formalhaut. Is it formal-haut, highest-Form? Is it the star Formalhaut, the month of Pisces—Christos? Helen hears “a voice to lure, a voice to proclaim,
the script was a snare.”
II
Helen In Egypt is a dream-fiction; it belongs not to the orthodox Freudian interpretation of the dream where the content speaks for the subconscious or the collective conscious; but the Dream of Helen-in-Egypt is the Dream of Alice-in-Wonderland, of consciousness that admits other consciousness. It is the situation, as James pictured it in 1901: “as an interaction between slumbering faculties in the automatist’s mind and a cosmic environment of other consciousness of some sort which is able to work upon them.” Formalhaut or Farmalhaut is the Red King.
•
Lewis Carroll is playing games of the psyche, we sense in Alice. Yes,
The dream-child moving through a land
Of wonders wild and new,
In friendly chat with bird or beast—
And half believe it true.
—we’re only, of Helen too, half to believe it true. “From a Fairy to a Child” Dodgson wrote sending his work:
Lady dear, if Fairies may
For a moment lay aside
Cunning tricks and elfish play,
’Tis at happy Christmas tide.
•
It is not only for the Star, the Dreamer of the Dream, that Helen seeks to read the script—but she searches too for the Child: the Euphorion of the poem.
O Child, must it be forever,
that your father destroys you,
that you may find your father?
•
It is along another line tho that I want to trace the relation between the work of Lewis Carroll and the work of H.D. [quote H.D. from “Writing on the Wall” page 80] For they have, we find, a common element in the fairyland-dreamland lore of the nineteenth century, that makes it seem so childish or childlike to grown up minds,
1. Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant), The History of Magic. quote: pg 141 from “The Romans . . . were great observers of dreams”—1888
2. Esoteric Buddhism
3. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I. pg 279, I 309–10, I pg 691
4. Lewis Carroll 1893. Preface to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. pg 463–464
5. George MacDonald 1895. Lilith
•
Sept. 11 The dream or trance is the summons of God where
God’s plan is other than the priests disclose;
I did not know why
(in dream or in trance)
God had summoned me hither
until I saw the dim outline
grown clearer,
We are concerned in Helen in Egypt with the operations of the dream
“Zeus be my witness,” I said,
“it was he, Amen dreamed of all this
phantasmagoria of Troy,
it was dream and a phantasy”;
Dante’s vision and the dreams of the Vita Nuova give background to the tradition of phantasy we follow here: the revelation at nine years old, childhood being the locus and the child the secret person then
the power of the poet being that of an alta fantasia; the world in the Dream being the Divine World or Other world of the Dead in one—the testimony is Orphic and Shamanistic.
•
But it is more directly to certain dream workers of the nineteenth century—to Lewis Carroll, to George MacDonald, and to theosophical fantasts. Here the dream in its movement resembles more closely the associations of Helen-in-Egypt. H.D. has no actual reference to Dante. Pound and Eliot may have, in their so authoritative Danteism, turned her aside, as she seems everywhere to have sought routes to experience outside the recommended charts. [She would, we surmise, have followed, had she read Dante, the alternate readings, to search out the curious heresy or more than Christian possibility in the imagination of Amor and Beatrice.]
It is to the heterodoxy of Alice-in-Wonderland (or Alice’s Adventures Underground) and of Phantastes then that we would turn. Not because H.D. read here and was “influenced”—but because, in the light of certain nineteenth century works, we may see Helen in Egypt with special emphases.
•
In the syncretic teachings of Éliphas Lévi, the revelations of Catholic Christianity, poetic testimony and magic tradition have a common ground in the Astral Light. “There is a composite agent,” Lévi writes in his History of Magic,
a natural and divine agent, at once corporeal and spiritual, an universal plastic mediator, a common receptacle for vibrations of movement and images of form, a fluid and a force which may be called, in a sense at least, the imagination of Nature. By the mediation of this force every nervous apparatus is in secret communication together; hence come sympathy and antipathy, hence dreams, hence the phenomena of second sight and extra natural vision.
A particular phenomenon occurs when the brain is congested or over-charged by Astral Light; sight is turned inward, instead of outward; light falls on the external and real world, while fantastic brilliance shines on the world of dreams; even the physical eyes experience with a slight quivering and turn up inside the lids. The soul then perceives by means of images the reflection of its impressions and thoughts.
But this light in which we now see “the source of all apparitions, all extraordinary visions and all the intuitive phenomena peculiar to madness or ecstasy,” where “it may be understood in a day to come that seeing is actually speaking and that the consciousness of the light is a twilight of eternal life in being,” is, Lévi insists, “the word of God Himself,” the “Fiat Lux.”; for “the soul enamoured with the pageantry of universal beauty, and fixing its attention on that luminous script of the endless book which is called things manifest, seems to cry on its own part, as God at the dawn of the first day, the sublime and creative words: Fiat Lux.”
•
Carried over into the schools of “Esoteric Buddhism,” where theories of evolutionism after Darwin and of the ultimate wisdom of the Vedanta were added to the syncretic essay, the Astral world appears as the Kama-Loca. A. P. Sinnett, in 1884, pictured this astral realm, not as Lévi had—as the ground of high revelation—but as a lower soul ground contrasted with man’s spiritual reality.
“The individual consciousness, it is argued, cannot be in two places at once,” Sinnett writes in Esoteric Buddhism. “But first of all, to a certain extent, it can. As may be perceived presently, it is a mistake to speak of consciousness, as we understand the feeling in life, attaching to the astral shell or remnant; but nevertheless a certain spurious semblance may be reawakened in that shell, without having any connections with the real consciousness all the while gaining in strength and vitality in the spiritual sphere.” “The consciousness even of the lower principles during life is a very different thing from the vaporous fleeting and uncertain consciousness, which continues to inhere in them when that which really is the life, the overshadowing of them, or vitalization of them by the infusion of the spirit, has ceased as far as they are concerned.”
•
What Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 with its “cunning tricks and elfish play” and then in Through the Looking Glass in 1872 where “though the shadow of a sigh / May tremble through the story. . . . ”:
it shall not touch with breath of bale,
The pleasance of our fairy-tale.
What in these works of Carroll had shown in the operation of the story-book—the pluralistic universe where Alice, Red King, and Kitten too share in the identity of the Dream—now in the “childish” deliberations of theosophy shows again.
•
“Language cannot render all the facets of the many-sided idea intelligible at once any more than a plain drawing can show all sides of a solid object at once,” Sinnett writes: “And at the first glance different drawings of the same object from different points of view may seem so unlike as to be unrecognizable as the same; but none the less, by the time they are put together in the mind, will their diversities be seen to harmonize. So with these subtle attributes of the invisible principles of man—no treatise can do more than discuss their different aspects separately. The various views suggested must mingle in the reader’s mind before the complete conception corresponds to the realities of Nature.” Sinnett and his mentor Madame Blavatsky presented an effort absurd in its dogma but admirable in its sense of the play of man’s realities; the letting things mingle in the mind was the creative genius of theosophy. Éliphas Lévi had taught that Dante had triumphed over hell by inverting its dogma: “thanks to the pagan genius of Virgil, Dante emerges from that gulf above the door of which he had read the sentence of despair; he escapes by standing on his head, which means by reversing dogma.” And Blavatsky in turn would play Humpty-Dumpty with the official orthodoxies of Church of England and Science of England alike. She labored the absurd, as Carroll played with it. Blavatsky questioned every establishment in the light of every heterodox dogma. Carroll, George MacDonald’s son tells us, “the shy, learned mathematician who hated inaccuracy, loved to question the very multiplication-table’s veracity.”
Blavatsky delighted in correcting unverifiable spiritualization-tables. “The Earth was in her first Pûpa,” she writes in The Secret Doctrine: “the essence of which is the kâshic Principle . . . that which is now known as, and very erroneously termed, Astral Light.” Lévi should have added, she tells us, that the Lux “is the body of those Spirits themselves, and their very essence”—here she is speaking of the Elohim. “Our physical light is the manifestation on our plane.”
•
In the teachings of theosophy this Astral Light was dreamland; but it was also fairyland or Wonderland. Outside whatever formed reality was an unseen lower and higher real, or (so that the Astral Light was thought of as the primal Egg of Leda from which Helen or the Moon, regent of dreams, was born) a globe or shell. “Our planet (like all we see)”—so the theosophical teaching went—“is adapted to the peculiar state of its human stock, that state which enables us to see with our naked eye the sidereal bodies which are coessential with our terrene plane and substance, just as their respective inhabitants, the Sorraus, Marhaus and others, can perceive our little world.” The Earth belonged to a “Chain” or “String”; it was a note in a scale of planets. But if one could change the scale, that was the constant theme of theosophy, if one saw a “terrene” Mars in the String of Terra, in the String of Mars other planets, another earthly reality could appear. “If he,” Sinnett is told in Esoteric Buddhism: “would perceive even the dim silhouette of one of such ‘planets’ on the higher planes, he has to first throw off even the thin clouds of astral matter that stand between him and the next plane.”
•
The prospect delighted Carroll, where in his “Preface” to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded in 1893 we find him posing his humor in theosophical terms:
It may interest some of my Readers to know the theory on which this story is constructed. It is an
attempt to show what might possibly happen, supposing that Fairies really existed; and that they were sometimes visible to us, and we to them; and that they were sometimes able to assume human form; and supposing, also, that human beings might sometimes become conscious of what goes on in the Fairy-world—by actual transference of their immaterial essence, such as we meet with in ‘Esoteric Buddhism’.
I have supposed a Human being to be capable of various psychical states, with varying degrees of consciousness, as follows:
(a) the ordinary state, with no consciousness of the presence of Fairies;
(b) the “eerie” state, in which, while conscious of actual surroundings, he is also conscious of the presence of Fairies;
(c) a form of trance, in which, while unconscious of actual surroundings, and apparently asleep, he (i.e. his immaterial essence) migrates to other scenes, in the actual world, or in Fairyland, and is conscious of the presence of Fairies.
I have also supposed a Fairy to be capable of migrating from Fairyland into the actual world, and of assuming, at pleasure, a Human form; and also to be capable of various psychical states, viz.
(a) the ordinary state, with no consciousness of the presence of Human beings;
(b) a sort of “eerie” state, in which he is conscious, if in the actual world, of the presence of actual Human beings; if in Fairyland, of the presence of the immaterial essences of Human beings.
The H.D. Book Page 67