VI
Jacob Wrestles with God
I cannot relate in brief all that I learned from the singular musician Pistorius about Abraxas. The most important result of his teaching was that I made a further step forward on the road to self-realization. I was then about eighteen years old. I was a young man rather out of the ordinary, precocious in a hundred things, in a hundred other things backward and helpless. When from time to time I used to compare myself with others, I was often proud and conceited, but just as frequently I felt depressed and humiliated. I had often looked upon myself as a genius, often as half mad. I could not share the pleasures and life of the fellows of my age, and often I heaped reproaches on myself and was consumed with cares, thinking I was hopelessly cut off from them, and that life was closed to me.
Pistorius, himself full-grown and an eccentric, taught me to preserve my courage and my self-esteem. In constantly finding some value in my words, in my dreams, in the play of my imagination and in my ideas, in taking them seriously and discussing them, he set me an example.
“You have told me,” he said, “that you like music because it is not moral. Well, all right. But you should be no moralist yourself! You should not compare yourself with others. If nature had created you to be a bat, you ought not to want to make yourself into an ostrich. You often consider yourself as singular, you reproach yourself with going ways different from most people. You must get out of that habit. Look in the fire, look at the clouds, and as soon as you have presentiments, and the voices of your soul begin to speak, yield to them and don’t first ask what the opinion of your master or your father would be, or whether they would be pleasing to some god or other. One spoils oneself that way. In doing that one treads the common road, becomes a fossil. Sinclair, my dear fellow, the name of our god is Abraxas. He is God and he is Satan; he has the light and the dark world in him. Abraxas has no objection to urge against any of your ideas or against any of your dreams. Never forget that. But he deserts you if you ever become blameless and normal. He deserts you and seeks out another pot in order to cook his ideas therein.”
Of all my dreams, that dark love-dream recurred most frequently. Often, often have I dreamed of it; often I stepped under the crest with the bird on it into our house, and wished to draw my mother to me, but instead of her I found I was embracing the tall, manly, half-motherly woman, of whom I was afraid, and yet to whom I was drawn by a most ardent desire. And I could never relate this dream to my friend. I kept it back, although I had opened my heart to him on everything else. It was my secret, my retreat, my refuge.
When I was depressed, I used to beg Pistorius to play me the Passacaglia of old Buxtehude. I sat in the dark church in the evening, engrossed in this singularly intimate music, which seemed to be hearkening to itself, as if entirely self-absorbed. Each time it did me good and made me more ready to follow the promptings of my inward self.
Sometimes we stayed awhile in the church after the strains of the organ had died away. We sat and watched the feeble light shine through the high lancet window; the light seemed to lose itself in the body of the church.
“It sounds funny,” said Pistorius, “that I once did theology and almost became a parson. But it was only an error in form that I committed. To be a priest, that is my vocation and my aim. Only I was too easily satisfied, and gave myself to the service of Jehovah before ever I knew Abraxas. Ah, every religion is beautiful! Religion is soul. It is all one whether you take communion as a Christian or whether you make a pilgrimage to Mecca.”
“Then really you might have been a clergyman,” I suggested.
“No, Sinclair, no. I should have had to have lied in that case. Our religion is so practised, as if it were none. It is carried on as if it were a work of the understanding. A Catholic I could well be, if need were, but a Protestant clergyman—no! There are two kinds of genuine believers—I know such—who hold gladly to the literal interpretation. I could not say to them that for me Christ was not a mere person, but a hero, a myth, a wonderful shadow-picture, in which mankind sees itself painted on the wall of eternity. And what should I find to say to the other sort, those who go to church to hear wise words, to fulfill a duty, in order to leave nothing undone, etc.? Convert them, you think, perhaps? But that is not at all my idea. The priest does not wish to convert. He only wants to live among the believers, among those of his own kind, so that through him they may find expression for that feeling out of which we make our gods.”
He broke off. Then he continued: “Our new faith, for which we have now chosen the name of Abraxas, is beautiful, my friend. It is the best we have. But it is still a nestling. Its wings have not yet grown. Alas, a lonely religion, that is not yet the true one. It must become an affair of many, it must have cult and orgy, feasts and mysteries. …”
He was sunk in reflection.
“Can one not celebrate mysteries alone, or in a very small circle?” I asked hesitatingly.
“Yes, one can,” he nodded. “I have been celebrating them for a long time past. I have celebrated cults for which I
