Devil's Tor

by David Lindsay

  But Ingrid conceived that if the tones were souls, and they were being born into life, then neither could they be so born for themselves, nor yet for the purpose of the creation of another world—another senseless work of art, expressive merely of a pre-existent reality: but perhaps they should be born for the ennoblement by sorrow of that great spectral Womb out of which, one by one, they marvellously issued. … So both end and beginning of this theme-progress must be in that Mother... for Whom, certainly, time could have no meaning. …

  To Saltfleet, however, it occurred that he might be dead already. He found these experiences not to consort very well with what he had hitherto known of life. …

  When, immediately, the most confounding leap of all for his senses began, and this very soul of music promised to forsake ear for eye, so destructive of the fabric of his human notions was the violence that, whether he were in death or only in its foretaste and resemblance, no longer might he suppose his state one for the exercise even of fundamental judgements. Reposings, or their quick series, were for the eye, actions were for the ear; from the gases and fluids of the atmosphere no living entity could be constructed: these things he knew, or had thought to know. But now the hereditary structure of his mind was declared by a new and last fact to be on wrong principles, and everything was to tumble about him. … For, from having beheld the translation of those bright sparks of the joined flints into stars of the sky, and then imaginably heard the same stars give forth a metaphysical music, now he was still to be marched along the road of impossibility by the return to vision... yet how different a category of vision from that elementary spectacle of stars! ...

  Nevertheless because she was a woman, Ingrid was the more greatly overcome. For her mental ways remaining always womanly, she was less than Saltfleet astounded by this latest eccentricity of heavenly changing for them both, yet in her depths could be moved by the underlying spiritual significance to a degree and in a manner that he might not share. Hardly of herself, little of the world's women, was she reminded; only it was as if never before in all her days had she stood even outside the door of such a new conception of womanhood as now was distressing her spirit from that mystic ambiguity in the sky. …

  All the great continent of cloud had rolled by; the stars, that should have been behind, were gone as well. The music was receding. It was withdrawing into the galactic phosphorescence occupying the heaven before them: and during the process was losing its clarity that was instead of volume. The new conformation was as much more wonderful than the dying harmonies, as they at their height had been than the blazing spheres that had given them birth. A true passage it was. While the music departed, so its diminution fed that increasing awful glow. …

  Perhaps they swept not its length with their uneasy eyes at all, perhaps neither had their ears ever heard—still were hearing—right sounds; but a sensitiveness in their two souls sought an organ, and found it not. Just as the vanishing had seemed more and other than music to them, this appeared unlike shape—unlike even light. It filled not all the sky, or must have been figureless; its light was measured, or they must have dropped their gaze: yet the black of the sky was but the negation of this strange holding shine, that stopped not at pupil and retina, but went in and in. …

  The music quite ceased, when there ensued a stillness as of a world of graves. Far from conveying the cessation of life, it brought the assurance of the presence of life undissipated by acts of will and death.

  Indeed, they saw Her not... but knew that She was there, as if high before them; and lived. …

  But it was revealed to Ingrid that without the dark solidity of earth, so fearful a seeming adumbration could not have been... that She behind it was born of this created world, as a mother is born of her child. It was her swift new insight, that was confusing all her nature.

  Before the child, no mother: before the mother, no woman. For only by virtue of motherhood were women essentially other than men. Accordingly, not till the world, or the first of the worlds, was made, had its Maker likewise become made, as Mother. …

  And Ingrid's soul, ever gazing up from its dungeon of night towards what should be a lowest rung of the ladder of heaven, went on to apply that the love of father for child, of youth for maiden, of wife for husband, of friend for friend, of saint for wretch, was of the richness of life indeed: but that the love of a mother for that isolated existence which had struggled within her was mystical... that its mystery lay in this—that she who knew such love was now of the very substance and essence of the All-Mother. …

  There was a trinity: anguish, sacrifice, love. The ancient Ghost, living alone before the creation of the worlds, could not have possessed it; but with the coming into being of the first world, of necessity the Mother too had come into being: and that trinity was Her nature. And it had been, though incomprehensibly, better than the old nature of the solitary Ghost. …

  Meanwhile Saltfleet, quelled as never yet in his life he had been by this strangeness seeming to possess the sky, still persevered in boldness, if not to seize it with his understanding, at least to find a means of living with it during the time he must. He knew that his sight presumed insolently. This that he saw as he had never seen other things, was neither as he saw it, nor so much as towards its true being: but rather was as an uncouth sign standing to his grossness for something else. Yet he felt too that he was surely in the presence of the same extraordinary sluice of invisible new life which lately—he knew not days, or hours—had chosen the abbreviated human mortal form for its disguise.

  He remembered it had increased him: therefore this token should be auspicious. … Nevertheless, for increase to come as from a supernatural female ministry, certainly there must be a common bond between sex and sex, deriving from a date earlier than both, whether the date were terrestrial or celestial—earlier than the branching of the sexes. For supposing spirit itself to have been the undivided root, then in males it had just as much hardened, as in females softened. Perhaps, original spirit was without defences, as scorning to defend itself. The later male hardness represented that tough armour against fate that had been slowly forged through the ages. … Feeling this, he also scorned his manhood, that stood for defence. …

  Such a bond between the sexes... he conceived that the primal Sublime, dwelling alone—before the issuing forth of Time, Space, worlds, angels, infernals, men and women—could still to this hour be so dwelling—still alone... while a female Demiurge, being detached from that Sublime to serve as fount and living principle of all creation, should present the archetype of animal maternity. … Whereby were explainable the two great instincts of mankind, that forever had been and must be at variance: on the one hand, the automatic gregarious life of the herd, speaking eloquently of kinship in a common Mother; on the other, the sporadic appearance among men of such stern recluses and austere visionaries as had ever been dubbed mad by the cheerful mob; they should be from that Ancient, dwelling alone. …

  Yet no man could reach that Ancient except through the Demiurge, since She it was who created both bodies and souls: apart from Her, even souls had no existence. Accordingly, through and by Her was conceded the possibility of attaining to the Ancient. And because it was the highest of Her states, from the beginning She had willed this attainment. For this one purpose—namely, to carry created souls past and out of creation, as far as to the very throne of the Ancient—must the infinite flaming suns, and tortured worlds, and savage, horrible evil wills of the universes have been conceived within Her awful matrix. …

  And with the continued stultifying of his indomitable eyes by that vast interception of the sky that not even named itself, Saltfleet was inly conscious of the last disappearance of a conviction of all his intelligent years, the roots of which, interwoven in his brain with a thousand alien beliefs and habits, had grown even inconspicuous. The conviction was that the world's creation was from a God, not male indeed, but more properly to be associated with the male pronoun. Suddenly this was seeming a
s unreal to him as the flatness of the earth's surface, or the movement of the sun round the planet, or the impendence of hell-fire for sinners.

  All the great elements of the world—the universal and all-powerful incentive of love, the enormous fact and cult of beauty, the endless production of children to supply the wastage by death, the seasonal mating of free animals and annual rebirth of vegetation, the orbits of planets and comets, the doubtless curved paths of the stars, the tides not only of the sea, the purely instinctive existences of all creatures save the moral among humans, and even of them... everything of this was so peculiarly of the female stamp—emotional, blind, repetitive—that it was as if he found himself in a house whose every room contained women's clothes, needlework, flowers, stuffs, silken draperies, fragile furniture, infants' toys and garments; and were asked and required to consent that the residence had been equipped for his own use by a man. …

  But the indubitable male side—the wars, political cruelties and bloody hubbubs, the trade helotisings and plottings for self, self, and again self, the private lusts, appetites, buffooneries, vulgarities... evidently no character of any Creator, unless a Devil, could be represented by these: but if they were more than the accidental necessary incrustation of the metal in the melting-pot, then perhaps their function should be the secondary one of disgusting souls with life, in conjunction with the principal fundamental evils of disease, insecurity, need, bereavement, frustration of instincts, and death; thus serving to bring them before that remote throne of the Ancient. Because a man was rootless, he was first free-moving, then competitive, then hard, merciless, and military: while because a woman was rooted in the Demiurge, she was first sedentary, then attractive, then soft, pacific, and compassionate. But though such a divergence of destinies was to render women practically the inferior creature, men were still for women, not women for men. The roots of women were for a purpose. The sedentariness was to procure ease for child-production. The production was in order that of the souls produced, some might return soon, some late, to the Ancient. … It was a mighty mystery. …

  Well had the Prophet said that the created universe was no joke. Its Conceiver had not disunited from the Ancient by joke, or by accident. The Weaver into the world of the passions and emotions, the instincts of creatures and the ascending instinct of all life—that Weaver had woven from the knowledge.

  And very positive it was that this frightful pain-journey, for one planet alone, from floating specks of colloid jelly to the visited and crucified ones, with all its infinity of slaughter, dispossession, insult, degradation, enforcement, denial, physical and mental torture of a terrific range, could not be fiend-invented. The savagery was too thorough not to have meaning. It was from the Ancient, dwelling alone before the Demiurge.

  The soul could be no such simple, spotless entity, able to be kept clean and ripe for heaven by a few years of blameless living, as the holy innocents of all ages had presumed: but it must be a terrible piece of wrought work, needing for the fusing and re-fusing of its constituents the totality of these piled-up agonies. Of no other stuff than the Ancient were the worlds made. That Ancient was both torturer and tortured. Then how could there not be an original Necessity, more crushing than the combined weight of all the rushing spheres of all the universes? ...

  And this representation to himself of the whole of created existence as a sub-infinite groaning mountain-press for the formation of a grandeur obtainable no other way, made so profound an imprint upon Saltfleet's soul that never afterwards in his life could he quietly contemplate at leisure the chance actions of persons, creatures, or things without at the same time being reminded of what actually (in no sense metaphorically) they stood for. Whether it were the slow, glassy breaking of the ocean on a western shore, or the uneasy faces and shuffling steps of a city throng, or the rending of some still-alive bird or smaller beast by a cat having the face of Satan, or the focused glittering of light from polished forks and spoons against white napery, or the clanking of shunted railway trucks distantly heard in bed at dead of night, or the blue smoke rising straight as a spear from the chimney of a Norse wooden house perched on its pine-clothed mountain flank—always now he recognised that the identical invisible operation proceeded in each, to the identical end... to the formation by torture of grandeur... that to the Ancient at last might come that grandeur. …

  He thought no more of being dead. The unseen woman beside him he had forgotten: his own mortal body he had as nearly forgotten as its chains permitted him, while seeming to inhabit it, in conscious meditation of all these things.

  Yet perhaps, unguessed by him, Ingrid had suddenly moved. He turned about, to face sharply the opposite half of night.

  Sky and earth were joined in an impenetrable blackness unrelieved. No longer above his eyes was the Emblem that they, as the last and most ambitious of his senses, had attempted. Now for him it would have been like blindness, but for a single queer hint of light ahead, a little lower than his level; that did not yet, but might, foretoken a slit in the night. … It grew more marked, but he could know neither what it was, nor whether near or distant. …

  When, however, the long, horizontal cleft became ever more vivid, as it were blood welling within a latitudinal wound, then it would have begun to speak of daybreak behind serrated mountains incredibly far off; were it not that its colour was blue.

  He was perplexed by this perpetual blue—the blue of the falling meteor, the blue of the joined flints in Arsinal's hand yet could not be recalling those other cases... he understood not why he was perplexed. And so he made it metaphysical. It might be that blue should symbolise the earliest beginning of an advent. It was the hue of sacredness, freshness, mystery: it was compound of night and day; but night not yet dislodged, day still a land away. … Thus the world, with its red dawns, was false. …

  Almost it was an impossible blue—a blue including phantom elements. He did not imagine but was passive to the impression of a far-distant spectral city, concealed from his emotion by mountain parapets, whose upper indentations alone were distinguishable. Between himself and that city lay an emptiness immeasurable by miles or millions of miles. …

  The spectacle was only quickening his thoughts. He saw, as by playing lightning, that if all—the worlds and souls and agonies—were from the Ancient, then the very thoughts of man must be so also. Beggar, thief, clown, prostitute, in thinking at all, were thinking the living thoughts of the Ancient. … It was of the whole crucifixion, and mattered not. …

  But likewise, the loves of the world—they could be but the self-love of the Ancient. … Wherein the incomparable majesty of the Ancient was declared. For the self-love of persons presented the basest of the world's states: this other self-love of the Ancient was that towards which the deepest and most sacrificing love in creatures dimly reached. Towards it the extraordinary mystic love in creatures for their unseen Maker likewise reached. …

  Accordingly, the Christs had not passed through the worlds to effect peace and holiness among creatures, but had suddenly descended as apparitions without regard to history. For the initiated, such apparitions should be no other than the swift irresistible impulses of that self-love of the Ancient. They preached not reconciliation. After their vanishing, sprang up always hatred, wars, massacres, the stake, the rack, the scourge. …

  He felt reborn.

  Through to his generative force it went. The stamp of these awful truths possessed the quiet violence to pass outwards—inwards—he knew not how... right through his soul as far as his living physical reliquary, whose magic should raise the future. Those of his blood coming after him must no less partake of the penetration. …

  But Ingrid, confronting the same strange vision of blue distant dawning, was as little as he diverted thereby from her fearful ponderings. Only by its agitating incomprehensibility were given a new branching, a lonelier depth, to her so dreaming soul.

  Truly a mother was born of her child: and yet, in the world, the mystic love was too s
carce. Native selfishness in the mother, a temperamental dislike of her child, or of all children... or a warm love made nothing for want of spiritual sympathy—a triviality of character depriving the love itself... or too many children—other passions—other needs and preoccupations... few indeed must be the mystical mothers. Of those women possessing the capacity, some might not marry; some might marry unwisely or unluckily. The children of these should not be rightly theirs: the love must lack something of the mystery.

  So it might even be, that mystic mother-love was but the loveliest ideal, hardly to be attained ever. … Yes! so that each chronicled instance of the achievement had flamed forth like a beacon on earth. For to be the noble mother of heroes was not enough. There the mother had not needed to be born of her first-born: of full stature had she been before his coming. In order that a mother should be born of her child, must be the preliminary dissolution of her soul by its pre-natal pangs... darkness, chaos, sightless passion, the joy and anguish of dreadful presentiment: a black world of stirrings and longings. … So had Mary been born of Christ. …

  Therefore, just as the fewest women possessed flawless beauty, though all women in their persons contained some hint of beauty, so perhaps all mothers might know the distant instinct towards mystical motherhood although but a single one in a planet's history should experience it in its human fullness. …