Slippery elm

“ There looms up before you—like a bare mountain in its majesty—the great elemental world-fact, the death-grapple of the will with circumstance. You may build yourself any philosophy or any creed you please, but you will never get away from the world-fact—the death-grapple of the soul with circumstance. Æschylus has one creed, and Milton has another, and Shelley has a third; but always it is the death-grapple. Chaos, evil—circumstance—lies about you, binds you; and you grip it—you close with it—all your days you toil with it, you shape it into systems, you make it live and laugh and sing. ”

“ It found heaven filled with a horde of gods, monstrous, impure, and horrible, gigantic embodiments of brute force and lust, or at best cold abstractions of cosmical principles, whom men could fear, but not love, honour, or revere. It found man in a world dark and unhomelike, bowing down in abject worship to beasts and birds, and stocks and stones, trembling with craven cowardice before the elements and forces of Nature, enslaved in a degrading bondage of physical superstition, fetishism, and polytheism. ”

“ Many herbs, leaves, barks, seeds, roots, berries and flowers are bought in very large quantities, it being the custom of the larger houses to merely place an order with the collector for all he can collect, without restriction. For example, the barks used from the sassafras roots, from the wild cherry tree, white pine tree, elm tree, tansy herb, jimson weed, etc., run into the hundreds of thousand pounds annually, forming very often the basis of many remedies you buy from your druggist. ”

“ The instant we ascribe to an image or a shell real power to act, we make of it an inspired being in itself, and all the sophistry in the world as to its being a means of faith, or a symbol, or causing a higher power to act on the suppliant, is rubbish. ”

“ If you would give forms to the evil powers, it went on, you were to make them ugly, thrusting out a lip, with the thirsts of life, or breaking the proportions of a body with the burdens of life; but the divine powers would only appear in beautiful shapes, which are but, as it were, shapes trembling out of existence, folding up into a timeless ecstasy, drifting with half-shut eyes, into a sleepy stillness. ”

“ Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse.”
“How much the splitting or tearing off of the slip had to do with magic we learn from a piece of Slavonic folk-lore. It is unlucky to use for a beam a branch or a tree broken by the wind. The devil, or storm-spirit, claims it as his own, and, were it used, the evil spirit would haunt the house. It is a broken branch the witches choose; a sliver’d slip the woodman will have none of.” ”

“ The body's shattered by master-powers of eld,
And fallen the frame with its enfeebled powers,
Thought hobbles, tongue wanders, and the mind gives way;
All fails, all's lacking at the selfsame time. ”

“ By means of insinuating snares they entrap mankind in the meshes of their magic. They secure possession of his soul and body by leading him into sin, or bringing him into contact with tabooed things, or by overcoming his divine protector with sympathetic magic.... [Pg 214] These adversaries of humanity thus expel a man's god, or genius, or occupy his body. These rituals of atonement have as their primary object the ejection of the demons and the restoration of the divine protector. Many of the prayers end with the petition, 'Into the kind hands of his god and goddess restore him'. ”

“ To begin at the beginning, consider what made those most noble spirits among all creatures fall into the abyss of ruin; and take heed lest in like manner you also fall after them. All your forethought, all your care will be needed to save you from this danger. Think how many temptations urge your mind to perilous and soaring flights. They make you dream of nobleness and forget your frailty; they choke your faculties with fumes of self-esteem, until you think of nothing else; they lead you to wax so proud and confident in your own strength that at length you hate your Creator. ”

“ Those words of child wisdom sowed in Adam the seed of a terrible revolt. Revolt—yea, revolt against this horrible need to hide—this fear and dread of punishment that always and forever so bitterly mocked his manhood! If he could find the strength to rise to the heights of Genie’s wisdom—divine philosophy of a child!—he would no longer hate his shadowed wandering steps down the naked shingles and hidden trails of the lonely desert. ”

“ Wayward human nature will rebel against mental sloth. We must act, suffer, or enjoy; or the worst of all torments is ours—such restless agony as old poets figured as befalling a living soul imprisoned in the bark of a tree. ”

“ Had I failed in my attempt to reveal the crime, had the Domina but suspected that the mystery was none to me, my ruin was inevitable. Angels who watch unceasingly over those who deserve their favour, have enabled me to escape detection: I am now at liberty to relate a Tale, whose circumstances will freeze every honest soul with horror. Mine is the task to rend the veil from Hypocrisy, and show misguided Parents to what dangers the Woman is exposed, who falls under the sway of a monastic Tyrant. ”

“ The mob had broken down the walls of tradition to batten in the orchard of forbidden knowledge. The inaccessible goddess whom the Professor had served in his youth now offered her charms in the market-place. And yet it was not the same goddess after all, but a pseudo-science masquerading in the garb of the real divinity. ”

“ So all religions are degenerate in which one chooses as a libido symbol the unconcealed sexual act, and therefore also a religion must degenerate, in which gold, this object of inordinate desire, is used as a symbol.
What impels the seeker, that is, the man who actually deserves the name, in masonry and in alchemy, is clearly manifested as a certain dissatisfaction. The seeker is not satisfied with what he actually learns in the degrees, he expects more, wants to have more exhaustive information, wants to know when the “real” will be finally shown. ”

“ For when from Elysium is absent the lyre, No joy can the banquet of nectar inspire. He is blessed by the gods, with an intellect clear, That mirrors the world as it glides; He has seen all that ever has taken place here, And all that the future still hides. He sat in the god's secret councils of old And heard the command for each thing to unfold. He opens in splendor, with gladness and mirth, That life which was hid from our eyes; Adorns as a temple the dwelling of earth, That the Muse has bestowed as his prize, No roof is so humble, no hut is so low, But he with divinities bids it o'erflow. ”

“ Silence, turning to him, but undisturbed by the interruption, “a lecture on the nature and history of magic, but can only say that an Elemental is the active force behind the elements,—whether earth, air, water, or fire,—it is impersonal in its essential nature, but can be focused, personified, ensouled, so to say, by those who know how—by magicians, if you will—for certain purposes of their own, much in the same way that steam and electricity can be harnessed by the practical man of this century. ”

“ He considered how quickly odd, erratic ideas could spill out onto all regions of the brain like paint from leaking tubes, mix grotesquely, amalgamate in beings, and spread their diminutive warped presence in insurrections begetting hegemonies of the mind. With this recent association and its disconnection pressing so fully onto his mind he could not stay here, the venue and embodiment of their activity together. It made his head ache worse than his buttocks, arm, and clavicle. ”

“ Some years ago, the history of one of our young students, as known to us and many others, diverged into a dark channel of its own, whereby the unwise young man reversed our metaphysical method of healing, and subverted his mental power apparently for the purposes of tyranny peculiar to the individual. A stolid moral sense, great want of spiritual sentiment, restless ambition, and envy, embedded in the soil of this student's nature, metaphysics brought to the surface, and he refused to give them up, choosing darkness rather than light. ”

“ But this confidence in the stability of nature is bred only by the experience which comes of wide observation and long tradition; and the savage, with his narrow sphere of observation and his short-lived tradition, lacks the very elements of that experience which alone could set his mind at rest in face of the ever-changing and often menacing aspects of nature. ”

“ There rose before him a sort of welter of gray slime and darkness in which were things visible, things white and vivid, yet vague, broken and unfinished, because his mind refused to join or finish them; things that were faceless and deformed, like white bodies that tumble and toss in the twilight of evil dreams. ”

“ I knew that all I met was part of myself and that what I could not comprehend was related by affinity to some yet unrealised forces in my being.
We have within us the Lamp of the World; and Nature, the genie, is Slave of the Lamp, and must fashion life about us as we fashion it within ourselves.
What we are alone has power. ”

“ Therefore in this allegory of Eden, the serpent is said to be more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made; because, of all cunning arts, of all sophistry and sophistical reasoning, of all promises that are sweet to the ear and destructive to the soul, those employed by the sensual nature and by sensuous men are the most sweet, cunning and sophistical, yet false and soul destroying. The serpent of the soul—the sensuous principle—is the most false and subtle of all the beasts of the field, of all the affections of the mind. ”

“ Carrying the delusion to its height, I fear that the enthusiast entered upon ground still more shadowy and benighted;—the old secrets of the alchymist, and perhaps even of those arcana yet more gloomy and less rational, were subjected to their serious contemplation; and night after night, they delivered themselves wholly up to that fearful and charmed fascination which the desire and effort to overleap our mortal boundaries produce even in the hardest and best regulated minds. ”

“ He now looked clearly upon a hundred thousand true idealists. Their offenses were wiped out. Counterfeit and false though the garish joys of these spangled temples were, he perceived that deep under the gilt surface they offered saving and apposite balm and satisfaction to the restless human heart. ”

“ In writing of Magic, I have indicated the origin of the notion of force; and if my view is justifiable, it appears that those celebrated abstractions “force” and “matter,” form and substance, spirit and body, may be traced to the savage mind. That savages are incapable of general and abstract ideas we have seen to be an illusion. They are necessary to economy in the organisation of the mind. When a tribe bases its grammatical gender on the distinction of Animate and Inanimate, has it in no sense corresponding ideas? ”

“ And the power of rule that has been extolled as a magical effect of the Philosopher's Stone lies in the harmonizing of the individual will with that of the world or with God's will. In the new birth—so remarks Jane Leade casually—we acquire a magic power; this occurs “through faith, that is, through the harmony of our will with the divine will. For faith puts the world in our power, inasmuch as the harmony of our will with the divine has the result of making everything ours or obedient to us. ”

“ Then, together with his body, those fierce spirits became so broken, that he, who formerly considered nothing less worthy of a king than to devote his mind to religion, suddenly became a slave to every form of superstition, important and trifling, and filled the people's minds also with religious scruples. ”

“ To slay intolerance, the arch-enemy and arch-destroyer of the sweetest human affections and the most sacred social ties, he would slay creed,—stabbing her secretly, whilst wearing the disguise of a Christian. ”

“ Know thyself, and God will supply the The armor of divinity. wisdom and the occasion for a victory over evil. Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you. The cement of a higher humanity will unite all interests in the one Divinity.
Through trope and metaphor, the Revelator — immortal scribe of Spirit, and of a true idealism — furnishes Reflector of glory. the mirror in which mortal mind may see its own image. In significant figures he depicts the thoughts which he beholds in mortal mind. Thus he rebukes the conceit of sin, and foreshadows its doom. ”

“ Besides that sensual deification of nature, which was the predominant principle in the mythology and popular religion of the ancients, there was another and capital error—magic, which was a dark and abusive application—an illicit perversion of the high powers of nature, when these were really understood, and the mind, penetrating through her sensible and external veil, had caught her true spirit and internal life. ”

“ Along with the view of the world as pervaded by spiritual forces, savage man has a different, and probably still older, conception in which we may detect a germ of the modern notion of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency. The germ of which I speak is involved in that sympathetic magic, as it may be called, which plays a large part in most systems of superstition. ”

“ The more enervating the superstition, the more exacting and tyrannous its priesthood, the more it will do our work, if we help it to do its own. If it permit us to enslave the body, we will permit it to enslave the soul.”
And so may be inaugurated a period of that organised anarchy of which the poet says:
It is not life, but death, when nothing stirs. ”