My God! nothing but thine upbearing arms at that moment kept me from eternal annihilation. In stony horror I sat dumb.
After the Angel of Destiny took back his book and shut it with the echo of doom, I know not what time elapsed while I dwelt in that unfathomable abyss of despair. I saw Eternity, like a chariot out of which I had fallen, roll out of sight upon the bowed and smoking clouds to leave me, a creature of perdition, in an inanity of space and out of the successions of duration. Familiar faces were around me, yet the thought of obtaining relief from them never crossed my mind. They were powerless to help a sufferer of the immortal pangs.
If, as I sat at the table, a cauldron of boiling lead had been brought in and set beside me, I would have leaped into it with exultant haste, to divert my mind from spiritual to physical sufferings. Through a period which the hashish-eater alone can know, I sat speechlessly beside my friend.
Suddenly upon the opposite wall appeared a cross, and Christ the Merciful was nailed thereon. I sprang from my seat; I rushed toward him; I embraced his knees; I looked intensely into his face in voiceless entreaty. That sad face sweetly smiled upon me, and I saw that my unspoken prayer was granted. Through my soul, as through a porous film, swept a wind of balm, and left it clean. The voice that had attended me through all past journeyings, now changed from stern upbraiding to unimaginable love, spoke gently, “By the breath of the Spirit thine iniquities are borne utterly away.” To colossal agonies peace as great succeeded, and, thus sustained, I returned to my room.
Yet all my sufferings had not yet been fulfilled. The moment that I reached home I threw myself down upon my bed. Hardly had I touched it when, from all sides, devouring flame rolled upward and girt me in with a hemisphere of fire. Shrieking, I leaped up and ran to my friends, who cared for me till the wrathful hallucination was overpast.
At this day it seems to me almost incredible that I ever survived that experience at all. Yet, inexplicable as it may be, when I awoke the next morning, I was as free from all traces of suffering as if I had been, all the evening previous, cradled in a mother’s arms.
XI
The Book of Symbols
Of all experiences in the hashish state, my indoctrination into spiritual facts through means of symbols was the most wonderful to myself. In other visions I have reveled in more delicious beauty, and suffered horrors even more terrible; but in this I was lifted entirely out of the world of hitherto conceivable being, and invested with the power of beholding forms and modes of existence which, on earth, are impossible to be expressed, for the reason that no material emblems exist which even faintly foreshadow them.
Among men we communicate entirely by symbols. Upon any thought which has not its symbol in the Outer, “untransferable” is stamped indelibly. A certain relation between two thoughts is beheld by one human mind. How shall the man inform his neighbor of this relation? There is no meatus for it through any of the labyrinths of material sense; it can not be seen, heard, felt, smelt, or tasted. What is to be done?
A flock of cranes are assembling from the four quarters of heaven to hold their aerial council on some tall crag above him. Into our thinker’s mind flashes a bright idea. Those birds shall mediate for his relation a passage into his brother’s understanding. The cranes (grues) are coming together (con), and in this visible symbol he embodies his invisible relation, and the name henceforth that passes for it among men is “congruous.”
Yet there is one condition beyond the mere discovery of an apt symbol which is necessary before that symbol can be circulated as the banknote which bases its security on the intangible coin within the spiritual treasury. That coin must be universally felt to exist, or the bill will be good for nothing. In the present instance, the idea of the relation expressed by “congruous” must already have been perceived by the communicatee, or the communicator will be unable to express himself intelligibly. Rather should we say, the idea of the possibility of this relation must exist before the former can perceive it; for, if he recognizes such a possibility, then, by virtue of this very capacity, he will immediately actualize the possible, and on the communication of the symbol perceive the idea of “congruity,” though it be for the first time.
The question now arises, What state of mind lies back of, and conditions the capacity to recognize, through symbols, the mental phenomena of another? Plainly this: the two who are in communication must be situated so nearly upon the same plane of thought that they behold the same truths and are affected by the same emotions. In proportion as this condition is violated will two men be unappreciating of each other’s inner states.
Now in hashish it is utterly violated. In the hashish-eater a virtual change of worlds has taken place, through the preternatural scope and activity of all his faculties. Truth has not become expanded, but his vision has grown telescopic; that which others see only as the dim nebula, or
