Canto Eight

The World of Falsehood, the Mother of Evil

and the Sons of Darkness

THEN could he see the hidden heart of Night:

Revealed the endless terrible Inane.

A Nature that denied the eternal Truth

Hoped to abolish God and reign alone.

Unhelped it would create its own bleak world.

Its deaf ears heard the untruth its dumb lips spoke;

Its mindless sentience quivered with fierce conceits;

Evil and pain begot a monstrous soul.

Great Titan beings and demoniac powers,

Vast minds and lives without a spirit within:

Leaders of the cosmic ignorance and unrest

Embodied the dark Ideas of the Abyss.

Dim forms were born in the unthinking Void

In whose black folds Being imagined Hell.

Identified their sight with its blind stare:

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A violent, fierce and formidable world,

Coiled like a larva in the obscurity

It was the gate of a false Infinite,

An immense negation of spiritual things.

Turned now into their own dark contraries:

That yet was a zero parent of the worlds;

Produced a universe from its lethal sleep;

Coiled back to itself and God's eternal joy

Still dolorously nailed upon a cross

Where birth was a pang and death an agony,

Thought sat, a priestess of Perversity,

Reading by opposite signs the eternal script,

In darkling aisles with evil eyes for lamps

In strange infernal dim basilicas

The ominous profound Initiate

There suffering was Nature's daily food

And torture was the formula of delight,

There Good, a faithless gardener of God,

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And, careful of the outward word and act,

All high things served their nether opposite:

Heaven's face became a mask and snare of Hell.

In an enormous action's writhen core

Sitting on Death who swallows all things born.

Her dreadful trident in her shadowy hand

When nothing was save Matter without soul

Then Life first touched the insensible Abyss;

Her pallid beam smote the unfathomed Night

In all things she sought their slumbering mystic truth,

She groped in his deeps for an invisible Law,

And strove to find a way for spirit to be.

A seed was in that nether matrix cast,

A cell of an insentient infinite.

In Nature's titan embryo, Ignorance.

Something that sprang from the stark Inconscient's sleep

Lifted its ominous head against the stars;

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A nameless Power, a shadowy Will arose

In the inconceivable Purpose none can gauge

The boundless Nescience of the unconscious depths

A seeking Mind replaced the seeing Soul:

The Spirit's bliss was changed to cosmic pain.

A mighty opposition conquered Space.

It pressed its fierce hegemony on the earth;

Of the architecture of her fate's design,

And bound to struggle and dread vicissitudes

Implanting error in the stuff of things

It baffled the sure touch of life's hid sense,

Deformed the insect's instinct and the brute's,

A shadow fell across the simple Ray:

That burns unwitnessed in the altar crypt

Companioning the Godhead of the shrine.

Who mimes the eternal Mother's mighty shape

With a grey distorted silhouette in the Night.

She forced on life a slow and faltering pace;

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Is laid on the mystic evolution's curve:

The Gods see not and man is impotent;

She forces back to the beast the human fall.

She feels the One grow in the heart of Time

Alarmed for her rule and full of fear and rage

Casting its ray from the spirit's lonely tent,

And in the cradle slay the divine Child.

Her touch is a fascination and a death;

Even Good she makes a hook to drag to Hell.

Often the pilgrim on the Eternal's road

Or in devious byways wandering alone,

Falls overpowered by her lion leap,

Intoxicated by a burning breath

Once a companion of the sacred Fire,

An Adversary governs heart and brain,

The self of life yields up its instruments

That aggrandise earth-nature and disframe:

His subtle defeatist murmur slays the faith

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A lying inspiration fell and dark

A silence falls upon the spirit's heights,

Empty and cold is the chamber of the Bride;

No longer burns the white spiritual ray

Then by the Angel of the Vigil Tower

A flame that sang in Heaven sinks quenched and mute;

This is the tragedy of the inner death

And only a mind and body live to die.

For terrible agencies the Spirit allows

And there are subtle and enormous Powers

Offspring of the gulfs, agents of the shadowy Force,

Aping to the thought the shining Friend and Guide,

They veil the occult uplifting Harmonist.

The doors of God they have locked with keys of creed

Along all Nature's lines they have set their posts

Wherever the Gods act, they intervene.

Masked are its beats from the supernal Bliss,

Block the fine entries of celestial Fire.

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Turn into defeats the victories of Truth,

And load the dice of Doom with wizard lies;

In scorn of the dwindling chances of the Gods

And crown themselves the iron Lords of Time.

The artificers of Nature's fall and pain

In the clay temple of terrestrial life.

In front of the reredos in the mystic rite

Intones his solemn hymn the mitred priest

Attributing to them the awful Name

And summons the unseen communion's act,

All the fierce bale with which the world is racked

And poured to them like sacramental wine.

Opponents of the Highest they have come

To serve by enmity the cosmic scheme.

Against the sword of Flame, the luminous Eye,

Calm and secure in sunless privacy:

Armoured, protected by their lethal masks,

The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan

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All who would raise the fallen world must come

For even the radiant children of the gods

None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.

This too the traveller of the worlds must dare.

A warrior in the dateless duel's strife,

Challenging the darkness with his luminous soul.

He came into a fierce and dolorous realm

Ignorant like men born blind who know not light,

Virtue was to their eyes a face of sin

A dire administration's penal code

Decreeing universal joylessness

And torture into a daily festival.

Laughter and pleasure were banned as deadly sins:

A dull heart's silent apathy as peace:

Death came but neither respite gave nor end;

Ever he deeper probed that kingdom of pain;

Of agony followed by worse agony,

Glad of one's own and others' calamity.

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The body a field of torment, a massed unease;

This was the law of things none dreamed to change:

Rejected happiness like a cloying sweet;

Only by suffering life grew colourful;

If one could cease to be, all would be well;

A fury of jealousy burning the gnawed heart,

The whisper that lures to the pit and treachery's stroke

To watch the drama of infelicity,

And sorrow's tragic gaze into the night

Were the ingredients in Time's heavy cup

Of such fierce stuff was made up life's long hell:

In which the soul was caught, quivering and rapt;

In a fell chapel of iniquity

Kneeling one must cross hard-hearted stony courts,

Each stone was a keen edge of ruthless force

The dry gnarled trees stood up like dying men

And from each window peered an ominous priest

Uprooted cities, blasted human homes,

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"Our enemies are fallen, are fallen," they sang,

How great we are, how merciful art Thou."

And Him command whom all their acts opposed,

And make him an accomplice of their crimes.

But ruthless strength and iron moods had sway,

This took the figure of a darkened God

Who held in thrall a miserable world,

Adored the feet that trampled them into mire.

Sorrow with hatred for its lonely joy,

A bitter rictus curled the suffering mouth;

Hate was the black archangel of that realm;

Burning the soul with its malignant rays,

These passions even objects seemed to exude, --

That answered with the wickedness it received, --

Hurt without hands and strangely, suddenly slew,

Or they made themselves a fateful prison wall

Counted by the tollings of an ominous bell.

All things were conscious there and all perverse.

Even into its deepest pit and darkest core,

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Its ancient privileged right and absolute force:

In Hell he sought the root and cause of Hell.

He listened to clamours of its crowded pain,

Above was a chill deaf eternity.

He heard the goblin Voice that guides to slay,

And traversed the ambush of the opponent Snake.

Companionless he roamed through desolate ways

And Death's black eagles scream to the precipice,

Baying across the veldts of Destiny,

Fought shadowy combats in mute eyeless depths,

And bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal.

Captured and trailed in Falsehood's lethal net

Or cast in the grim morass of swallowing doubt,

He drank her poison draughts till none was left.

The ordeal he suffered of evil's absolute reign,

Incapable of motion or of force,

Pinned to the black inertia of our base

His being ventured into mindless Void,

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In atomic parcellings of the Infinite

He felt the curious small futility

Or, stifled in the Inconscient's hollow dusk,

Of the enormous and unmeaning deeps

There in the stark identity lost by mind

And a mute wisdom in the unknowing Night.

Where darkness peers from her mattress, grey and nude,

Where Being slept unconscious of its thoughts

There waiting its hour the future lay unknown,

There in the slumber of the cosmic Will

A light was with him, an invisible hand

Till it became a quivering ecstasy,

He saw in Night the Eternal's shadowy veil,

In destruction felt creation's hasty pace,

And hell as a short cut to heaven's gates.

And in the Inconscient's magic printing-house

And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.

Nature expunged her stiff mechanical code

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Annulled were the tables of the law of Pain,

The skilful Penman's unseen finger wrote

Earth's forms were made his divine documents,

Inconscience chased from the world's voiceless breast;

Arousing consciousness in things inert,

The diamond script of the Imperishable,

A paean-song of the free Infinite

And traced on the awake exultant cells

The lyric of the love that waits through Time

And the message of the superconscient Fire.

The infernal Gleam died and could slay no more.

Hell split across its huge abrupt facade

As if a magic building were undone,

Night opened and vanished like a gulf of dream.

In which she had filled the place of absent God,

Healed were all things that Time's torn heart had made

Division ceased to be, for God was there.

Matter and spirit mingled and were one.

END OF CANTO EIGHT

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