Zanoni — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

initiation! Of thine own free will didst thou make Mejnour thy master, and his lore thy study! ” “But whence came the irresistible desires of that wild and unholy knowledge? I knew them not till thine evil eye fell upon me, and I was drawn into the magic atmosphere of thy being! ” “Thou errest!—the desires were in thee; and, whether in one direction or the other, would have forced their way! Man! thou askest me the enigma of thy fate and my own! Look round all being, is there not mystery everywhere? Can thine eye trace the ripening of the grain beneath the earth? In the moral and the physical world alike, lie dark portents, far more wondrous than the powers thou wouldst ascribe to me! ” “Dost thou disown those powers; dost thou confess thyself an impostor? — or wilt thou dare to tell me that thou art indeed sold to the Evil One,—a magician whose familiar has haunted me night and day? ” “It matters not what I am,” returned Zanoni; “it matters only whether I can aid thee to exorcise thy dismal phantom, and return once more to the wholesome air of this common life. Something, however, will I tell thee, not to vindicate myself, but the Heaven and the Nature that thy doubts malign.” Zanoni paused a moment, and resumed with a slight smile, — “In thy younger days thou hast doubtless read with delight the great Christian poet, whose muse, like the morning it celebrated, came to earth, ‘ crowned with flowers culled in Paradise.’! No spirit was more imbued with the knightly superstitions of the time; 1 “T’aurea testa

Di rose colte in Paradiso infiora.” Tasso, Ger. Lib, iv. 1.

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and surely the Poet of Jerusalem hath sufficiently, to satisfy even the Inquisitor he consulted, execrated all the practitioners of the unlawful spells invoked, —

‘Per isforzar Cocito o Flegetonte.’ !

But in his sorrows and his wrongs, in the prison of his madhouse, know you not that Tasso himself found his solace, his escape, in the recognition of a holy and spiritual Theurgia,— of a magic that could summon the Angel, or the Good Genius, not the Fiend? And do you not remember how he, deeply versed as he was for his age, in the mysteries of the nobler Platonism, which hints at the secrets of all the starry brotherhoods, from the Chaldean to the later Rosicrucian, discriminates in his lovely verse, between the black art of Ismeno and the glorious lore of the Enchanter who counsels and guides upon their errand the champions of the Holy Land? Ais, not the charms wrought by the aid of the Stygian Rebels,” but the perception of the secret powers of the fountain and the herb, —the Arcana of the unknown nature and the various motions of the stars. His, the holy haunts of Lebanon and Carmel, — beneath his feet he saw the clouds, the snows, the hues of Iris, the generations of the rains and dews. Did the Christian Hermit who converted that Enchanter (no fabulous being, but the type of all spirit that would aspire through Nature up to God) command him to lay aside these sublime studies, ‘ Le solite arte e l’ uso mio’? No! but to cherish and direct them to worthy ends.

1 To constrain Cocytus or Phlegethon. 2 See this remarkable passage, which does indeed not unfaithfully represent the doctrine of the Pythagorean and the Platonist, in Tasso, cant. xiv. stanzas xli. to xlvii. (Ger. Lib.) ‘They are beau tifully translated by Wiffen.

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And in this grand conception of the poet lies the secret of the true Theurgia, which startles your ignorance in a more learned day with puerile apprehensions, and the nightmares of a sick man’s dreams. Again Zanoni paused, and again resumed: — “In ages far remote, — of a civilization far different from that which now merges the individual in the state, — there existed men of ardent minds, and an intense desire of knowledge.

In the mighty and solemn kingdoms in which they dwelt, there were no turbulent and earthly channels to work off the fever of their minds. Set in the antique mould of castes through which no intellect could pierce, no valor could force its way, the thirst for wisdom alone reigned in the hearts of those who received its study as a heritage from sire to son.

Hence, even in your imperfect records of the progress of human knowledge, you find that, in the earliest ages, Philosophy descended not to the business and homes of men.

It dwelt amidst the wonders of the loftier creation; it sought to analyze the formation of matter, — the essentials of the prevailing soul; to read the mysteries of the starry orbs; to dive into those depths of Nature in which Zoroaster is said by the schoolmen first to have discovered the arts which your ignorance classes under the name of magic.

In such an age, then, arose some men, who, amidst the vanities and delusions of their class, imagined that they detected gleams of a brighter and steadier lore. They fancied an affinity existing among all the works of Nature, and that in the lowliest lay the secret attraction that might conduct them upward to the loftiest.1 Centuries passed, and lives