The H.D. Book (88 page)

“He commanded me many times that I should seek to behold this most youthful angel: wherefore in my childhood often did I go seeking her . . . ”

the power of the poet being that of an
alta fantasia;
the world in the Dream being the Divine World or Other world of the Dead in one—the testimony is Orphic and Shamanistic.

•

But it is more directly to certain dream workers of the nineteenth century—to Lewis Carroll, to George MacDonald, and to theosophical fantasts. Here the dream in its movement resembles more closely the associations of Helen-in-Egypt. H.D. has no actual reference to Dante. Pound and Eliot may have, in their so authoritative Danteism, turned her aside, as she seems everywhere to have sought routes to experience outside the recommended charts. [She would, we surmise, have followed, had she read Dante, the alternate readings, to search out the curious heresy or more than Christian possibility in the imagination of Amor and Beatrice.]

It is to the heterodoxy of
Alice-in-Wonderland
(or
Alice’s Adventures Underground
) and of
Phantastes
then that we would turn. Not because H.D. read here and was “influenced”—but because, in the light of certain nineteenth century works, we may see
Helen in Egypt
with special emphases.

•

In the syncretic teachings of Éliphas Lévi, the revelations of Catholic Christianity, poetic testimony and magic tradition have a common ground in the Astral Light. “There is a composite agent,” Lévi writes in his
History of Magic,

a natural and divine agent, at once corporeal and spiritual, an universal plastic mediator, a common receptacle for vibrations of movement and images of form, a fluid and a force which may be called, in a sense at least, the imagination of Nature. By the mediation of this force every nervous apparatus is in secret communication together; hence come sympathy and antipathy, hence dreams, hence the phenomena of second sight and extra natural vision.

A particular phenomenon occurs when the brain is congested or over-charged by Astral Light; sight is turned inward, instead of outward; light falls on the external and real world, while fantastic brilliance shines on the world of dreams; even the physical eyes experience with a slight quivering and turn up inside the lids. The soul then perceives by means of images the reflection of its impressions and thoughts.

But this light in which we now see “the source of all apparitions, all extraordinary visions and all the intuitive phenomena peculiar to madness or ecstasy,” where “it may be understood in a day to come that seeing is actually speaking and that the consciousness of the light is a twilight of eternal life in being,” is, Lévi insists, “the word of God Himself,” the “
Fiat Lux.
”; for “the soul enamoured with the pageantry of universal beauty, and fixing its attention on that luminous script of the endless book which is called things manifest, seems to cry on its own part, as God at the dawn of the first day, the sublime and creative words:
Fiat Lux.
”

•

Carried over into the schools of “Esoteric Buddhism,” where theories of evolutionism after Darwin and of the ultimate wisdom of the Vedanta were added to the syncretic essay, the Astral world appears as the Kama-Loca. A. P. Sinnett, in 1884, pictured this astral realm, not as Lévi had—as the ground of high revelation—but as a lower
soul
ground contrasted with man’s spiritual reality.

“The individual consciousness, it is argued, cannot be in two places
at once,” Sinnett writes in
Esoteric Buddhism.
“But first of all, to a certain extent, it can. As may be perceived presently, it is a mistake to speak of consciousness, as we understand the feeling in life, attaching to the astral shell or remnant; but nevertheless a certain spurious semblance may be reawakened in that shell, without having any connections with the real consciousness all the while gaining in strength and vitality in the spiritual sphere.” “The consciousness even of the lower principles
during life
is a very different thing from the vaporous fleeting and uncertain consciousness, which continues to inhere in them when that which really is the life, the overshadowing of them, or vitalization of them by the infusion of the spirit, has ceased as far as they are concerned.”

•

What
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
in 1865 with its “
cunning tricks and elfish play
” and then in
Through the Looking Glass
in 1872 where “though the shadow of a sigh / May tremble through the story. . . . ”:

it shall not touch with breath of bale,
The pleasance of our fairy-tale.

What in these works of Carroll had shown in the operation of the story-book—the pluralistic universe where Alice, Red King, and Kitten too share in the identity of the Dream—now in the “childish” deliberations of theosophy shows again.

•

“Language cannot render all the facets of the many-sided idea intelligible at once any more than a plain drawing can show all sides of a solid object at once,” Sinnett writes: “And at the first glance different drawings of the same object from different points of view may seem so unlike as to be unrecognizable as the same; but none the less, by the time they are put together in the mind, will their diversities be seen to harmonize. So with these subtle attributes of the invisible principles of man—no treatise can do more than discuss their different aspects separately. The various views suggested must mingle in the reader’s mind before the complete conception corresponds to the realities of Nature.” Sinnett and his mentor Madame Blavatsky presented an effort absurd
in its dogma but admirable in its sense of the play of man’s realities; the letting things mingle in the mind was the creative genius of theosophy. Éliphas Lévi had taught that Dante had triumphed over hell by inverting its dogma: “thanks to the pagan genius of Virgil, Dante emerges from that gulf above the door of which he had read the sentence of despair; he escapes by standing on his head, which means by reversing dogma.” And Blavatsky in turn would play Humpty-Dumpty with the official orthodoxies of Church of England and Science of England alike. She labored the absurd, as Carroll played with it. Blavatsky questioned every establishment in the light of every heterodox dogma. Carroll, George MacDonald’s son tells us, “the shy, learned mathematician who hated inaccuracy, loved to question the very multiplication-table’s veracity.”

Blavatsky delighted in correcting unverifiable spiritualization-tables. “The Earth was in her first Pûpa,” she writes in
The Secret Doctrine:
“the essence of which is the Âkâshic Principle . . . that which is now known as, and very erroneously termed, Astral Light.” Lévi should have added, she tells us, that the
Lux
“is the body of those Spirits themselves, and their very essence”—here she is speaking of the Elohim. “Our physical light is the manifestation on our plane.”

•

In the teachings of theosophy this Astral Light was dreamland; but it was also fairyland or Wonderland. Outside whatever formed reality was an unseen lower and higher real, or (so that the Astral Light was thought of as the primal Egg of Leda from which Helen or the Moon, regent of dreams, was born) a globe or shell. “Our planet (like all we see)”—so the theosophical teaching went—“is adapted to the peculiar state of its human stock, that state which enables us to see with our naked eye the sidereal bodies which are coessential with our terrene plane and substance, just as their respective inhabitants, the Sorraus, Marhaus and others, can perceive our little world.” The Earth belonged to a “Chain” or “String”; it was a note in a scale of planets. But if one could change the scale, that was the constant theme of theosophy, if one saw a “terrene” Mars in the String of Terra, in the String of Mars other planets, another earthly reality could appear. “If he,” Sinnett is told in
Esoteric Buddhism:
“would perceive even the dim silhouette of one of
such ‘planets’ on the higher planes, he has to first throw off even the thin clouds of astral matter that stand between him and the next plane.”

•

The prospect delighted Carroll, where in his “Preface” to
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
in 1893 we find him posing his humor in theosophical terms:

It may interest some of my Readers to know the
theory
on which this story is constructed. It is an attempt to show what might
possibly
happen, supposing that Fairies really existed; and that they were sometimes visible to us, and we to them; and that they were sometimes able to assume human form; and supposing, also, that human beings might sometimes become conscious of what goes on in the Fairy-world—by actual transference of their immaterial essence, such as we meet with in ‘Esoteric Buddhism’.

I have supposed a Human being to be capable of various psychical states, with varying degrees of consciousness, as follows:

(a) the ordinary state, with no consciousness of the presence of Fairies;

(b) the “eerie” state, in which, while conscious of actual surroundings, he is
also
conscious of the presence of Fairies;

(c) a form of trance, in which, while unconscious of actual surroundings, and apparently asleep, he (i.e. his immaterial essence) migrates to other scenes, in the actual world, or in Fairyland, and is conscious of the presence of Fairies.

I have also supposed a Fairy to be capable of migrating from Fairyland into the actual world, and of assuming, at pleasure, a Human form; and also to be capable of various psychical states, viz.

(a) the ordinary state, with no consciousness of the presence of Human beings;

(b) a sort of “eerie” state, in which he is conscious, if in the actual world, of the presence of actual Human beings; if in Fairyland, of the presence of the immaterial essences of Human beings.

He proceeds to tabulate passages from the two volumes of
Sylvie and Bruno
where “abnormal states occur.”

•

“And also, in the hope of suggesting, to them and to others,” Carroll had written of his first
Sylvie and Bruno
volume and its child readers: “some thought that may prove, I would fain hope, not wholly out of harmony with the graver cadences of Life.” The effort in theosophy too was to bring into harmony the seeming conflicts that appear between the graver cadences of Life that were orthodox in Christianity and other cadences of Life in other human religions.

•

The eerie voices of the Looking-Glass world do seem out of harmony with orthodox possibilities, but the key to its authenticity (and to the mis-take that parodies of Carroll must make) is that it does belong in its humor, not among trivial farces, but to the graver cadences of the human spirit in its heterodox possibilities. The cult of Childhood, in the work of Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald, as a realm bordering upon Fairyland or Wonderland and likewise upon the Kingdom of Heavens, the Child as revelation of the divine self and the Dream as revelation of the divine World; and in the Romance, the shifting impersonations of a faërie or phantasy mode: these orders reappear in our work by H.D.

Sept. 17

The proposition of Sinnett’s
Esoteric Buddhism:
“The individual consciousness, it is argued, cannot be in two places at once. But first of all, to a certain extent it can,” appealed, in a period when belief in the Christian world was newly challenged by developing sciences of geology and biology, to a childish make-believe in
Sylvie and Bruno,
the belief in the fairy world and the belief in the divine world stand in the same need of a child-like innocence of mind. The graver cadences more and more, like the fun of an open and inventive phantasy, must be carried by the imagination.

For the theosophists Wonderland, fairyland, dreamland are one in the realm of the Astral light. For Carroll, as a churchman, there is on the one side the letting go of the serious imagination where “God has become a myth, and heaven a poetic fancy” so that “the light of life is gone.” More and more the reality of God seems to belong to the
reality of dreams and child-like make-believe. Unless you become like little children, you shall not see the Kingdom of Heaven, took on new meaning. “Heaven” too was an “other” world.

•

So in MacDonald’s
Lilith,
written in 1890, child, dream, sleep, being two places at once—and above all the imagined or fictive real—are keys to its structure.

•

“You see that large tree to your left, about thirty yards away?” [asked the Raven] “It stands on the hearth of your kitchen and grows nearly straight up its chimney. That rose-bush is close to the lady at the piano. If you could but hear the music! Those great long heads of wild hyacinth are inside the piano, among the strings of it, and give that peculiar sweetness to her playing.”

“Pardon me: I forgot your deafness!”

“Two objects,” I said, “cannot exist in the same place at the same time!”

“Can they not? I did not know. I remember how they do teach that to you. It is a great mistake—one of the greatest mistakes ever made! No man of the universe, only a man of the world could have said so.”

•

Sept. 21

Back of
Helen in Egypt,
H.D. tells us, lies Stesichorus of Sicily’s
Palinode
and Euripides’
Helen in Egypt
with the word of a phantom Helen at Troy and of the illusory reason for the War then. But Helen in the play of Euripides is not a magic power, we know nothing there of the real Helen’s complicity in the War. The phantom is a thing of air, cast, not in Helen’s desire but by Hera out of the vanity of Menelaus and Paris. Helen’s hubris is in her deranged matronly propriety: against the memory of Aphrodite’s singing with flute and drums that once had changed the grief of Demeter, and against the passionate orders of the Great Mother Herself; and then, so the chorus accuses Helen, against the abandon, “the whirled course of the wheel in the air.”

The Helen of H.D.’s phantasia takes from this ancient tradition her other Helen, but she is a complice of that wraith at Troy. She was at once in Egypt and at Troy. The scene of Euripides’ play, no more than Egypt before the house of Proteus, no more than King of Egypt, in H.D.’s
Helen in Egypt
has become likewise complex: for Egypt is dreamland and Proteus is the agency we find of the dreamer: