BOOK THREE

The Book of the Divine Mother

Canto One

The Pursuit of the Unknowable

ALL IS too little that the world can give:

Its power and knowledge are the gifts of Time

Although of One these forms of greatness are

Although more near to us than nearness' self,

Hidden by its own works, it seemed far-off,

The Presence was lost by which all things have charm,

The world lived on made empty of its Cause,

The labour to know seemed a vain strife of Mind;

The effort to rule seemed a vain pride of Will;

All power retired into the Omnipotent.

A silence settled on his striving heart;

He turned to the Ineffable's timeless call.

A wide compelling ecstasy and peace

Approached and faded from his soul's pursuit

Near, it retreated; far, it called him still.

Its absence left the greatest actions dull,

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But when the uplifting Deity withdrew,

The order of the immemorial planes,

Were turned to props for an impermanent scene.

Impalpable, yet filling all that is,

And took and lost a thousand shapes and names.

Or was a subtle kernel in the soul:

A mystic closeness shut it sweetly in:

And seemed sometimes his own colossal shade.

Across a neutral all-supporting Void

Allured towards some recondite Supreme,

Aspiring and half-sinking and upborne,

Always a signless vague Immensity

Condemning finite things to nothingness,

Then to the ascent there came a mighty term.

A line where every hope and search must cease

A zero formed pregnant with boundless change.

And human mind must abdicate in Light

He stood compelled to a tremendous choice.

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Must now be left behind or else transform

Alone and fronting an intangible Force

His spirit faced the adventure of the Inane.

A fruitful world-wide Ignorance foundered here;

And ineffective paused the actor Will.

The structures Nescience builds collapsing failed,

Fainted in luminous insufficiency.

Transcending every perishable support

The separate self must melt or be reborn

All glory of outline, sweetness of harmony,

Expunged from Being's silence nude, austere,

The Demiurges lost their names and forms,

Passed, taken and abolished one by one.

And at the unimaginable end

Appeared the far-seen Godhead of the whole,

Omnipotent, a lonely seer of Time,

Attracted by the unfathomable regard

To rise again from that invisible sea.

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Nothing remained the cosmic Mind conceives.

A hue and imposition on the Void,

Before its ending into Nothing's deeps.

Seemed myths projected from the Unknowable;

But what That was, no thought nor sight could tell.

A tenuous ghost of something that had been,

Before it sinks into a bourneless sea, —

Its bare feeling of the ocean whence it came.

An Everlastingness cut off from Time;

Silent rejected from it world and soul.

Answered at last to his soul's passionate search:

Keeping the mystery none would ever pierce,

Facing him with its dumb tremendous calm.

There was no act, no movement in its Vast:

The world's effort ceased convicted of ignorance

There was no mind there with its need to know,

All person perished in its namelessness.

Only itself was real to itself.

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A pure existence safe from thought and mood,

It dwelt aloof in its bare infinite,

A Being formless, featureless and mute

Aware for ever in its motionless depths,

The One by whom all live, who lives by none,

Guarded by the veils of the Unmanifest,

Abode supreme, immutably the same,

Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone.

END OF CANTO ONE

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