The two of them must have been holding a similar conversation, for I heard the Chaplain say, “I would be afraid to let a child drift along like a ship without a rudder. I think it would be certain to run aground.”
“As if most people don’t run aground!” exclaimed the Baron heatedly. “Has someone not run aground, looked at from the higher standpoint of life itself, who, after a youth spent pining behind school windows, becomes, let’s say, a lawyer, marries in order to bequeath his bitter lot to his children, then becomes sick and dies? Do you believe it was for that that his soul created the complicated mechanism we call the human body?”
“Where would we end up if everyone thought as you do?” objected the Chaplain.
“In the most blessed, the most beautiful state the human race can attain! Each one of us would grow in a different way, no one would be like anyone else, everyone would be a crystal, would think and feel in different colours and images, would love and hate differently, as the spirit within wants us to. It must have been Satan himself, the enemy of all colourful diversity, who thought up the slogan that all men are equal.”
“So you do believe in the Devil, Baron? You usually deny it.”
“I believe in the Devil in the same way as I believe in the deadly power of the north wind. But who can point to the place in the universe where cold originates? That is where the Devil must have his throne. Cold spends all its time pursuing warmth, for it wants to become warm itself. The Devil must come to God, icy death to the fire of life; that is the origin of all journeying. They say there is an absolute zero temperature? No one has ever found it yet, and no one ever will, no more than they can ever find absolute magnetic north. Even if you lengthen a bar magnet, or break it in two, the north pole will always be opposite the south pole, in the one case the portion separating the point where the two appear will be longer, in the other shorter, but the two poles will never meet, for that would mean the bar would be a ring and the magnet would no longer be a bar magnet. You may seek the source of either pole in the finite world, but you will always end up on a journey into infinity. Look at the picture on the wall, Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. There you can see what I was saying about magnets, as well as about education through the soul, transferred to human beings. The mission of the soul of each of the disciples is indicated symbolically by the position of his hands and fingers. In each one of them the right hand is active, whether it is leaning on the table, the edge of which is divided into sixteen parts, which could indicate the sixteen letters of the ancient Roman alphabet, or joined with the left hand. It is Judas Iscariot alone whose left hand is active, his right hand is closed! John the Evangelist – of whom Jesus said he might tarry till He came, so that a saying went abroad among the disciples that he would not die – has his hands clasped together, which signifies that he is a magnet which is no longer a magnet, he is a ring in eternity, he is no longer journeying.
These finger positions are strange things, they conceal the deepest mysteries of religion. You find them on old statues of gods in the East, but they also reappear in the paintings of almost all the masters of the Middle Ages.
A legend has been handed down in our family that our ancestor, the lamp-bearer Christopher Jöcher, came from the East, bringing with him the secret of using finger gestures to call up the shades of the dead and bend them to his will for all sorts of purposes.
A document which I possess reveals he was a member of an ancient order which in one place calls itself Shi Kiai, that is ‘The Dissolution of the Corpse’, and in another Kieu Kiai, ‘The Dissolution of the Swords’.
This document tells of things which will sound very strange to your ears. With the help of the art of making the hands and fingers spiritually alive, some members of the order disappeared from the grave along with their corpse, and others transformed themselves in the earth into swords.
Do you not see in that, Father, a striking parallel with the Resurrection of Christ? Especially if you relate it to the mysterious hand gestures in pictures and statues from the Middle Ages and Oriental antiquity?”
I heard the Chaplain becoming restless, walking up and down the room with hurried steps. Then he stopped and spoke in urgent tones:
“All this, my dear Baron, sounds too much like Freemasonry for me, as a Catholic priest, to accept without contradiction. What you call the deadly north wind is, for me, Freemasonry and everything connected with it. I know well – we have spoken about it often enough – that all great painters and artists were united by a common bond, which they called the Guild, and that they declared this unity beyond frontiers by attaching to the figures in their pictures secret signs, usually in the position of the fingers or gestures of the hands, or through the attitude of faces in the clouds, or sometimes through their choice of colours. Often enough the Church, before commissioning pictures of saints, made them solemnly swear to desist from this practice, but they kept on finding ways of circumventing their oath. People hold it against the Church that she says, if not for everyone to hear, that art comes from the Devil. Is that so incomprehensible for a strict Catholic? When it is well known that artists possessed and preserved a mystery that was clearly directed against the Church?
I know of a letter from a great painter of the past to a Spanish friend in which he openly admits the existence of the secret league.”
“I know that letter too”, the Baron broke in. “In it the painter says – more or less, I cannot remember his exact words – ‘Go to such and such a person, a man by the name of X, and go down on thy knees and beg him to give me just one hint of how to proceed further with this mystery. I do not want to remain merely a painter to the end of my life.’ And what does that tell us, my dear Chaplain? Nothing more than that the famous artist, however far he had been initiated into the externals, was in reality only a blind man. There is no doubt in my mind that he belonged to the Guild and that he was a Freemason, which, for me, is as much as to say: he was a mere labourer in the brickyard who was only involved in work on the exterior of the building. You are quite correct when you say that all the architects, painters, sculptors, goldsmiths and engravers of those days were Freemasons. But – and this is the crucial point – they were only acquainted with the external rituals and only understood them in an ethical sense; they were merely tools of that invisible power, which you, as a Catholic, mistakenly think of as the ‘Master of the Left Hand’. Tools they were, nothing else, and their sole purpose was to preserve certain mysteries in symbolic form for posterity, until the time shall be ripe. They always came to a halt part of the way along the path, for they kept on hoping that human lips would give them the key that would open the door. They never suspected that it lies in the execution of their art itself; they never understood that art conceals a deeper meaning than merely producing pictures or creating literature, namely to develop within the artist a kind of hypersensitivity of perception and sensation, of which the first expression is called a ‘right sense of art’. Even an artist alive today, insofar as his profession has opened his senses to the influences of that power, will be able to bring those symbols back to life in his works. There is no need at all for him to learn of them from the lips of a living person, nor to have been received into one or other of the Lodges. On the contrary, there are ‘invisible lips’ that speak a thousand times more clearly than the tongues of men. What is true art other than scooping up a portion of this eternal abundance?
It is true that there are people who may justifiably bear the title of ‘artist’, and yet are possessed by a dark force which you, from your standpoint, can certainly designate as the ‘Devil’. Their creations resemble the Christians’ conception of the Devil’s infernal kingdom, down to the last jot and tittle; their works give off the icy breath of the frozen north, which from earliest antiquity has been seen as the home of the demons that hate mankind. The means of expression their art uses are pestilence, death, madness, murder, blood, despair and depravity.
How can we explain this kind of artis
tic temperament? I will tell you. An artist is a person in whose mind the spiritual, occult side of man has achieved dominance over the material side. That can come about in two ways: on the one hand there are those, let us call them the ‘satanic ones’, whose brain is beginning to degenerate through excess, through syphilis, through inherited or acquired vices; as a consequence it weighs lighter, so to speak, in the scales, with the result that the spiritual side is automatically made ‘heavier and manifest in the world of appearances’. It is only because the other side has become lighter that the pan of the scales with the occult faculties sinks, and not because it has become heavier itself. In such cases the works of art are suffused with a putrid odour. It is as if the spirit were wearing a garment which shone with the phosphorescence of decay.
In the other artists – I like to call them the ‘anointed ones’ – the spirit has, like St. George, attained mastery over the animal. In them, the pan with the spirit sinks into the world of appearances thanks to its own weight. In such cases the spirit wears the golden garment of the sun.
In both kinds of artist, however, the balance of the scales has been tilted in favour of the occult, whilst in the average person it is the animal alone that has weight; both the ‘satanic’ artist and the ‘anointed’ artist are moved by the wind from the invisible realm of eternal abundance, the former by the north wind, the latter by the breath of dawn. The average person, on the other hand, is as unyielding as a solid block of wood.
What is that power that uses the great artists as an instrument to preserve the symbolic rites of magic for those that come after?
I tell you, it is the same power that once created the Church. It builds two living columns at the same time, the one white and the other black; two living columns, which will hate each other until they realise that they both support the same triumphal arch.
Remember the place in the Gospels where St. John says, ‘And there are many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.’ Now, Father, how can you explain that, according to your belief, it was the will of God that the Bible came down to us, but not those ‘other things’? Have they been ‘lost’, just as a boy ‘loses’ his pocket-knife?
I tell you, those ‘other things’ are still alive, they have always been alive, and will live on, even if all the lips to tell them, and all the ears to hear them, should die. The spirit will keep whispering them into life, and it will create more and more artists, with minds that vibrate when it wills it, and more and more hands, that will write as it commands. Those are the things that St. John knew of and knows of, the mysteries that were with ‘Christ’, and which he included when he made his instrument, Jesus, say, ‘Before Adam was, I am’.
I tell you – whether you cross yourself or not – the Church began with Peter, but will only be completed by John. What does that mean? Try reading the Gospels as if they were a prophecy of what will become of the Church. Perhaps if you look at them from that point of view you will see what it means that Peter denied Christ thrice and was angry when Jesus said of John, ‘I will that he tarry till I come.’ For your comfort, I will add that though I believe the Church will die – I can see it coming – it will rise from the dead, and it will be as it should be. Nothing, nor any person, not even Jesus Christ, has risen from the dead without dying first.
I know you too well as an honest man who takes his duty very seriously for me to harbour the least doubt that you have often asked yourself how it is that among the clergy, even among the Popes, there could be criminals, men unworthy of their position, unworthy to bear the name of monk? I know, too, that if anyone were to ask you for an explanation of such facts, you would say, ‘It is only the office that is free of sin, and not the man who holds the office.’ Do not think, my dear friend, that I am one of those who would mock such an explanation, or who think themselves too clever to be taken in by what they see as a piece of glib hypocrisy. My conception of a priest’s mission is too deep for that.
I know well, perhaps even better than you do, just how many Catholic priests there are whose hearts are filled with fearful doubt. ‘Can it really be the Christian religion’, they ask, ‘that is called to redeem mankind? Do not all the signs of the times indicate that the Church is decayed. Will the millennium really come? It is true that Christianity is growing like a huge tree, but where are the fruits? Day by day the number of those that call themselves Christians is increasing, but fewer and fewer are worthy of it!’
Where do these doubts come from, I ask you? From weakness of faith? No. They come from the subconscious recognition that there are too few among the priests whose sense of mission is fiery enough for them to seek the path of sanctification, as the Yogis and Sadhus do in India. There are too few to take heaven by force. Believe me, there are more paths to the resurrection than the Church dreams of. But a lukewarm hope of ‘grace’ is not one of them! How many are there among your fellow priests who can say of themselves, ‘As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God’?
They are all secretly hoping for the fulfilment of the apocryphal prophecy, which says that fifty-two popes will appear, each one bearing a hidden Latin name, which alludes to his work on earth; the last one will be called ‘flos florum’, that is the ‘flower of flowers’, and it is under his sway that the millennium will dawn.
I will make you a prophecy – I, who am more of a heathen than a Catholic – that he will be called John and will be a mirror-image of John the Evangelist; from John the Baptist, the patron saint of the Freemasons, who preserve the mysteries of baptism with water without knowing them themselves, he will be given power over the lower world.
Thus will two pillars come to bear a triumphal arch!
But if, today, you were to write a book and say, ‘To lead mankind we need neither a soldier nor a diplomat, neither a professor nor a … blockhead, but a priest and no one else’, its publication would be greeted with a scream of rage. And if you were to go on to write, ‘The Church is only one half of a sword that has been broken in twain, and its measures will only be half measures until Christ’s representative is at the same time the Vicar of Solomon, the head of the Order’, the book will be burnt on a bonfire.
Of course, the truth could not be burnt or crushed. It is becoming more and more manifest, like the inscription over the altar in our St. Mary’s Church, where the painted board they put there to cover it up keeps on falling off.
I can tell from your expression that you object to the idea that there might be a sacred mystery belonging to the opponents of the Church that the Catholic Church knows nothing of. Yet that is the case, though with the crucial restriction that those who guard it can make no use of it, their community is the other half of the ‘broken sword’ and cannot comprehend its meaning. Truly, it would be more than grotesque to imagine that the respectable gentlemen who founded the Gotha Life Insurance Company should possess a magic arcanum for the overcoming of death.”
There was a long pause. The two old gentlemen seemed to be lost in thought. Then I heard the clink of glasses, and after a while the Chaplain said, “Where on earth do you get all this strange knowledge from?”
The Baron was silent.
“Or do you not like talking about it?”
The Baron avoided a direct answer, “Hmm. It depends. Some of it is connected with my life, some just came to me and some I … er … inherited.”
“That one can inherit knowledge is new to me. However, people still tell the oddest stories about your late father.”
“What, for example?” said the Baron, a smile on his face. “I would be very interested to hear.”
“Well, people say he was … he was …”
“A fool!” said the Baron genially.
“Not exactly a fool. Oh no, not at all. But an eccentric of the first order. He is supposed – so people say, but you mustn’t imagine I believe this kind of talk
– he is supposed to have invented a machine to inculcate a belief in miracles in … well … in hounds.”
“Ha ha ha!” the Baron burst out laughing. He laughed so loud and so long and so heartily that I, in my bed in the next room, found it infectious and had to clench my teeth on my handkerchief so as not to betray to them that I was listening.
“I knew it was all nonsense”, the Chaplain apologised.
“Oh!” – the Baron was still gasping for breath – “oh, not at all. It’s quite correct. Ha ha! Just a moment please, I must get this laughter out of my system. That’s better. You see, my father was a character such as you don’t seem to find any more nowadays. He had an immense store of knowledge, and if there was anything the human mind was capable of thinking up, he thought it up. One day he gave me a long look, snapped shut the fat tome he had been reading, threw it to the ground (since that day he never looked into another book) and said to me, ‘Bartholomew, my lad, I have now realised that everything is nonsense. The brain is the most superfluous gland we humans possess. We should have it removed, like our tonsils. I have determined to start a new life from today.’
The very next morning he moved into a small castle we owned at that time in the country, and spent the rest of his days there. It was only shortly before his death that he returned home, to die here, peacefully, on the floor below.
Whenever I went to visit him in the castle, he would show me something new. Once it was an enormous, intricate spider’s web on the inside of a window-pane, that he looked after as if it were the apple of his eye. ‘You see, my son,’ he explained, ‘in the evening I set a bright light here, behind the web, in order to attract the insects outside. Swarms of them come whizzing along, but they can’t get caught in the web because the window is in between. The spider, who naturally has no idea what glass is – where would it find something like that in the natural world? – cannot understand what is happening, and is probably shaking its head in disbelief. But the fact is that every day it weaves a finer and finer web – without that having any effect on the problem whatsoever! In this way I want to cure the beast of its unhesitating trust in the omnipotence of understanding. Later on, when, through reincarnation, it has become a human being, it will thank me for such far-sighted education, for it will have a subconscious hoard of experience, which can be of great value to it. It is clear to me that when I was a spider, I lacked such an educator, otherwise I would have thrown away my books when I was a child.’
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