“I want to become a member of the Theosophical Society,” Moira told her.
“What do you believe?”
“What does the Society believe?”
“Each member believes what speaks from the soul. We need not all believe the same thing.”
“I have read the works of H.P. Blavatsky.”
Mrs. Besant smiled skeptically. “All of them? There are more than twenty volumes.”
“I have read Isis Unveiled, Studies in Occultism, and The Secret Doctrine.”
“H.P.B. gave me this ring.” She showed it to Moira. An emerald, not large but of exceptional radiance, was set in a silver snake that wound round her finger to take its own tail in its mouth; its eyes were human eyes with lashes and lids. She tilted a lampshade and held the gem up to the light. A flash of green flared in Moira’s eyes, far stronger than she might have expected from a mere reflection. Mrs. Besant withdrew her hand and straightened the lampshade.
“The father of our thought, in modern times, is Swedenborg. He is the greatest sage to live among humanity since Jesus of Nazareth. He was trained as a scientist and engineer. After many years of study, he discovered what he called Cosrespondences, which are the higher and invisible analogues of visible things. His writing also contains accounts of visits to the realms of departed spirits and angels. It was the reading of Swedenborg that set H.P.B. on the path to her own Astral awakening. She was a great teacher and guiding spirit. She wrote many books, and she was the founder of the Theosophical Society. She had many followers; some were believers, some were charlatans, some only curious. I myself was a journalist in those days. I knew of Theosophy, but its meaning penetrated my soul only when I was given The Secret Doctrine to review. I sought out H.P.B. and introduced myself to her, and from that day I became her spiritual daughter. I left my work as a journalist, and since then I have devoted myself to Theosophy. Shortly before H.P.B left her body, she passed along her ring to me, and I became the President of the Society.”
“I have so many questions. What is evil? Is it just caused by bad thoughts, as Madame Blavatsky says?”
“You haven’t quite understood. Evil is not the result of negative thought, but rather of thought itself, which, being cognitive and containing design and purpose, is part of the physical world.”
“What is the Astral Body? Is it the same as the soul?”
“You say you have read these books.”
“Yes, but I don’t understand them.”
“The Astral Body is not the same as the soul. It is the true Self, the essential being, the What Is, as H.P.B. called it. It is the model for the physical body, which is connected to it by a Silver Cord. We know now that the Astral Body can take part in events going on at a great distance, and, returning, impress on the physical brain what it has experienced. Swedenborg went to Heaven and came back to tell us what he saw there.”
“Is Theosophy a religion?”
“No. There is nothing supernatural in these things we have discovered, any more than your ordinary thought is supernatural, even though it is not accessible to a fish.”
“What is life?”
“All the universe is pulsing with life. Amoeba in a microscope have consciousness. Even a stone thinks. Life is simply the fons vitae that penetrates everything, animating higher and lower beings to a greater or lesser degree.”
“What is death?”
“There is no death, only change. Through change, we raise ourselves to successively higher levels of existence.”
“Must we die to raise ourselves higher?”
“No. In this lifetime, through study, thought and meditation we may elevate ourselves to the Astral Plane where clairvoyance and clairaudience become possible.”
Moira told her about her True Visions, starting with the imaginary pageants of her childhood, and going on to an account of how she had seen this house in Avenue Road before she knew that it existed. “I saw the very smoke coming from the chimney.”
Mrs. Besant gazed at her curiously. “Until a few years ago we had fires in the chimney. Now it has been blocked off and the house is heated with gas.”
Moira described the train wreck she had seen in her Vision the day before she read about it in the newspaper.
Mrs. Besant called out, “Mr. Blaise, come and hear this.”
The old gentleman in the salt-and-pepper suit entered the room and stood without a word at the edge of the carpet. He had shadowy eye-sockets and a penetrating but slightly distracted glance. “Mr. Blaise is my metaphysician,” Mrs. Besant explained with a smile. “He rules on all matters too mysterious for the rest of us.”
Moira repeated her stories, adding a few details that she had not thought of the first time.
Mr. Blaise said, “I can see her Astral Body. It glows through her skin.”
“So can I,” said Mrs. Besant.
When Moira left the house she was a member of the Theosophical Society. She and Mrs. Besant met frequently in the remaining months of the War, and she regularly attended meetings in the house in Avenue Road.
Mrs. Besant told her, “H.P.B was my Astral mother, and I her daughter. But you are my sister.”
After that they called each other by their first names, Annie and Moira. When the War ended Moira returned to America. There she founded, not a branch of the Theosophical Society as Annie wanted her to do, but the Guild of Love, which was her own creation, financed by her own wealth, which had grown enormously during the War. She lived in hotels, occasionally staying for a few days in the house of a friend or a disciple. The Guild became her whole life; she devoted herself to it heart and soul and thought of little else, although she was also an advocate of International Peace and often spoke on behalf of the League of Nations.
In the years after the War she acquired a small band of converts. With these she traveled over America and Europe, holding her séances in churches, public buildings, and rented halls. Although she had plenty of money of her own and had no need to ask for donations from her audiences, she accepted their gifts as tokens of their devotion. In only a short time she transformed herself from Mrs. Pockock, a wealthy American widow, to Moira, the charismatic leader of a group as closely knit as it was mysterious. In a shop in Covent Garden she found her scent, Camélia noir, a Belgian potpourri of fermented garden petals. She wore it the rest of her life, ordering it to be shipped to her wherever she was in the world. She had her Trump made by a London instrument maker and tuned to her exact specifications. With Aunt Madge Foxthorn, one of her earliest converts, she designed the gown covered with M’s that she wore in the séances. Aunt Madge Foxthorn helped her to dress, since the gown fastened up the back, and handed her the Trump inconspicuously at the right moment so that it seemed to form out of the darkness. It was Cereste Legrand, the former Belgian circus manager, who made the black tin box that glowed with the jade letters of her name, and supervised the lighting and other effects in the halls where she spoke. She won converts with ease, transmitting to everyone she met a sense of inner peace and a love devoid of sensual grossness. Her smile was as mysterious and vital as that of the woman in the painting in the Louvre. Gioconda; the soft word rang in her thoughts. As time went on her body became even slighter and more fragile. Her golden hair acquired a faint green tinge, visible only in certain lights.
Before she recruited her first follower, she decided in her mind that everyone in the Guild, men and women, would be called by their first and last names. This rule was enforced rigorously; she herself was the only exception. Woe betide any journalist or other person who addressed her as Mrs. Pockock; he was quickly put in his place by Aunt Madge Foxthorn.
Not everyone that Moira converted in the séances, of course, became a member of her inner circle. She built up her elite band of followers gradually, one person at a time. She acquired a Vestal here and a Vestal there, and most of the Frieze in England. She took on Romer Goult because she felt, with a touch of humor, that she ought to have a metaphysician to solve difficult ques
tions, as Annie had Mr. Blaise. Through her power of clairvoyance she was able to look into the heart of each person and see his secret: that Joshua Main was fond of the bottle, that Eliza Burney had a sickness of the soul that sickened every part of her body, that Joan Esterel sought a mother who would at the same time be a sister and a lover, and that Romer Goult hungered for the secret of the universe which he had not found in his studies. She admitted Joshua Main into the Guild because of his stories, which she knew to be true, of how many children he had engendered; because she already had her plans for Gioconda. She made him take a solemn pledge of temperance before she admitted him. Her True Visions told her that he often broke this when he was out of her presence, but what the inner eye saw the outer eye could discreetly ignore.
Whenever she was in London she called at the house in Avenue Road, sometimes to attend one of Annie’s own meetings, sometimes merely to take a cup of Indian tea in the study and talk with her about the world of the occult. These visits always ended in the same way; Annie drew her aside, embraced her with a kiss, called her Blessed Moira, and turned away without a farewell. It seemed to her that she and Annie were locked in a strange kind of marriage, a spiritual wedlock. The love of man for woman had failed them, and this was its substitute—not merely its substitute but something far finer and higher, a union of spirits, of inner souls, in which their outer bodies met only rarely. The others in the house seemed to regard her oddly, with respect, yet as though with a hidden curiosity. They never spoke her name. When she was admitted to the house, the brown youth disappeared and Moira could hear him telling Annie in another part of the house, “She is here.”
Moira savored every particle of her new life. In spite of the fragility and weakness of her body, she was keenly aware of the world about her, as though she had been living before half numbed and only aware of a small part of what her senses detected. Now, as she walked in a park, every leaf, tendril, and foliage became alive and filled her soul with a sense of oneness, of the beating heart of nature that pulsed in her and in every creature however humble, down to the merest amoeba. There was no Moira, no world, only the great universal sensitivity that was aware of itself in its awareness of all that was. She herself became the fragrance of cut grass, the buzz of cicadas, the chill of ice, and the pungence of the rotted log. Even death and corruption she knew as sensory poems, the tingling of the universe against her soul. To every natural form, flowers and trees, insects, even the stones on the path, she gave a moral life. She would take infinite pains to shepherd a fly out of the house without harming it.
As for her clairvoyant powers, she thought about them as little as she did about the beating of her heart or the revolution of the planets over her head. As long as she fasted, the True Visions came to her with an erratic constancy, sometimes several in only a few days, sometimes none for a long time. She felt faint as they came on, and often found herself lying on the ground after they had passed, not crumpled like a body that had fallen, but like a sleeper awakening from a refreshing dream. Sometimes she didn’t understand whether the things that she saw were happening somewhere else in the world at this moment, or came from the past, or the future. Some she remembered as though they were photographs printed on her soul. The great fish soaring over the lake. The image of her own death, a filmy body dissolving in the altitude of space. Others she saw only once, and probably at the time they were happening: a satyr pursuing a nymph through the woods, a brown-skinned girl pulling fish from the sea in a plunging boat, a set of circus animals wandering through the streets of a city, a burning forest where the fire crept from tree to tree underground through their roots. Sometimes when she was asleep she arose from the bed in her Astral Body and traveled over the world, attached to her physical body only by the Silver Cord; if this thin thread broke, she knew, she could never return. On one of these nocturnal voyages she beheld the most important sight of her lifetime, but one she was to tell the others about only later, in the secrecy of her faery castle in the sky. She knew then the meaning of the word the voice had cried out over the lake in Germany. Gioconda! It told her that she herself was the woman in the picture in Paris, and that her smile was the certainty of a future bliss.
With her Vision sharp in her mind, Moira was now able to take colored pencils and draw a picture of the heart-shaped globe with the dimple at the top and a point at the bottom which later appeared on the banner she flew from her dirigible. For the present, she hid the sketch away and told no one about it. Now that she knew where Gioconda was, she ran over in her own mind the various transportation devices that might take her there along with the small band of the Guild. All of them were within the means of her purse, but some were more suitable and some less. For a long while she couldn’t make up her mind. Then one autumn day, sitting at dusk at the window of her hotel room in an American city, she felt light-headed and faint. She remained motionless in the chair, and after a moment she saw the fish rising from the lake and floating away over the clouds. When she awoke from her trance the matter was settled. She made inquiries, telegrams went back and forth, and finally she and Aunt Madge Foxthorn went to Germany to make the arrangements for building the dirigible. All was quickly settled; she even engaged a captain for the League of Nations. This was what she had decided in her mind to call the airship; she had in mind not only this great organization which was the last hope of mankind for peace, but the analogy to her own band of followers, drawn from many nations and dedicated to love and brotherhood.
When she returned to America, she announced the plans for the voyage to Gioconda to her followers, without at this point being specific about the means of transportation. Then she dispatched most of them to the far corners of the earth, to keep them occupied and give them a feeling they were contributing something to the dream, and to get them out of the way while she and Aunt Madge Foxthorn, with a good deal of help from Cereste Legrand, did the practical work of the planning. Finally the magic day arrived; the Guild collected at Mainz, the League of Nations floated down to the earth at Frankfurt, and the immense machine and its crew stood ready at her bidding. The die is cast, she told herself. But it was not really a die that was to be cast. The things that were to happen in the coming time were certain in her mind, as certain as the clarity of the Visions that sprang into the arch of her brow.
*
Just before the doors close, the Captain steals into the Albert Hall and takes a seat at the front, near the podium. It is possible that this part of the hall is reserved for the Guild of Love, but he finds an empty seat there and slips into it. He is in full uniform, holding his gilded officer’s cap on his lap. When the lights go dim and the five magic letters in green appear in the gloom, he is at first amused, then faintly moved, then amused at himself for being moved.
After a little delay, the woman he has previously known as astute in business and arrogant with wealth appears in the green light, as though coagulating from the air. He is not quite sure how this is done. A lighting trick of some sort. He swings back and forth between a technical interest in how all this is done and a strange feeling in his bones that there may be more here than meets the eye. Some sort of drug is evidently being pumped into the air in small quantities (he thinks of nitrous oxide, although it smells more like frankincense) to make a mass feeling of queerness, a pseudo-ecstasy come over these perfectly ordinary people seated in the hall. Or perhaps it is some kind of electromagnetic vibration; the effects of x-rays on the mind have not yet been fully studied.
He looks around to see if he can catch sight of some kind of apparatus. He sees nothing but some young ladies in Grecian costume and some muscular young men who seem to be serving as ushers: Near him is the English girl who serves as medical assistant, dappled with freckles like a young antelope, and her lover the American metaphysician. Two seats to his left is a queer creature like a mouse in a children’s book, wearing gold spectacles that have no glass in them as far as he can see. There is no doubt now that he is in the wrong part of the hall,
among Madame’s faithful inner circle of followers. However no one pays any attention to him; no one even turns a head. They are all looking fixedly forward, staring at Moira and hanging on her words. The Captain does the same.
Her arm rises; the meager limb slips from the gown and indicates something off to the north, in the direction of Hampstead. Her fingernails flash emerald; has she painted them? No, it is just glints from the green sign over her head. She is speaking of Atman, of Maya, of the ascending nature of the soul, of the spirit body and the Astral Body. Her womanhood seems to focus in the knot in the belt that curves low on her body, and from there it radiates out through the darkened hall with a power that thrums in the blood. Perhaps they are y-rays, or z-rays, he thinks. He feels erotically stimulated, but not in the usual way. It is not his body that is aroused, but something deeper, a part of his spirit body or his Astral Body (he hasn’t mastered the nomenclature yet) that stirs and stretches upward. And it stretches not toward another person, but toward everything, toward the infinite. A very queer thing, and not unpleasurable, although pleasure is a pitiful word to apply to it. Rather than pleasure, this intimation is a reason for forsaking pleasure. The q-rays permeate his body and turn in the particles of his blood. At the same time the rational and skeptical part of the Captain, his military part, tells him that this is all shadow and moonbeams, a spectacle that she has contrived with the help of her friend the circus manager. And she is only a woman! He has forgotten that for a moment. He makes an attempt, a rather feeble one, to extinguish the pillar of light stretching in his soul by thinking of quiet things, green meadows, walks in the forest, and still ponds. The only effect of this is that Moira is transformed in his vision into a young male figure epiphytically showing forth a Silver Wheel in the gloom of the hall. He also has five glowing letters over his head, but they are different ones: ERWIN.
The Captain snaps his eyes open and sits up straight in his chair. He sees now that Moira has the power to turn large numbers of people mad. He grasps at odd words in the hope of saving himself. Hypnotism. Mesmer. Charcot. Mass suggestion. Animal magnetism. He throws these stones at his hallucination one by one and finally makes it go away. But that something has happened to him, that something has changed, is not to be denied. A little telegraph is clicking away in the neurons of his ear, as though in Morse Code. You are Divine, he decodes. Your inchoate longings come not from the mephitic stench of the pit, as you have been told, but from the finest part of your being. Your erection, which you imagine to be shameful, is but the shadow of the Pillar of Light. And then the signal begins to chatter, as though the telegraph has gone wild. Astral Astral. Love, love. Astral Astral Astral. Love love love love love.
The Carp Castle Page 18