Underworld

“ She calls upon the gods of the underworld, the silent throng from the dark world of spirits, the tormented shades, all to come to her present aid. She recounts her miraculous powers over nature which she has used aforetime, and which are still in her grasp. ”

“ Time and space do not avail, or I could tell story after story of such lives, for in the underworld they are numerous enough. Who can wonder that some of them "are made bitter by misfortune"? Who can wonder that others "are driven to wrong"? Who can be surprised that "many drift into lives of hopeless uselessness"? Surely our friend knew what she was talking about, in the underworld though she be. She sees that there are deeps below the depths, that she herself is in. ”

“ For the underworld was itself regarded as including, besides places of horror, brighter regions, into which, either through the direct favour of the gods or in accordance with a judgment pronounced upon the dead, the souls of the pure and righteous are received. As a result of the division which thus occurred, and of the antithesis in which these images of the beyond came to stand, pain and torment were added to the impressions of horror and hopelessness which the original conceptions of the underworld aroused. ”

“ Here we are burrowing in this beastly world that isn't a world, with its inky ocean hidden in some abominable blackness below, and outside that torrid day and that death stillness of night. And all those things that are chasing us now, beastly men of leather—insect men, that come out of a nightmare! After all, they're right! What business have we here, smashing them and disturbing their world? For all we know the whole planet is up and after us already. ”

“ Which out of her teeming womb at last brought forth
Creatures that loved and sinned, laughed, wept and prayed,
Died, and returned to the unknown Power that made them; [19]
Earth, and that tale of men, the kings of thought,
Who strove to read her secret in the rocks,
And turned, amid wild calumny and wrong,
The lucid sword-like search-beams of the mind
On the dark passion that through uncounted æons
Crept, fought, and climbed to the celestial gates,
Three gates in one, one heavenly gate in three,
Whose golden names are Beauty, Goodness, Truth. ”

“ Through many a dark and dreary vale They passed, and many a region dolorous, O'er many a frozen, many a fiery alp, Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death— A universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good ”

“ Forty thousand souls arising amid smoke and blackened clouds of flying stones and upheaving earth, with outstretched arms, and faces strained with horror, emerging suddenly from their old bodies into their spirit-forms—looking awestruck into each other’s faces ”

“ Those hide-and-seek, half-glimpsed, eerie phantasies that are hidden deep in every man’s subconscious mind were in the ascendancy to-night. They had been implanted in the germ-plasm a thousand thousand generations gone, they were a dim and mystic heritage from the childhood days of the race, the fear and the dreads and horrors of those dark forests of countless thousands of years ago, and they still lie like a shadow over the fear-cursed minds of some of the more savage peoples. ”

“ This weird region of fantasy and shadow, where the light is lurid and ghastly, and the fierce alternations of heat and cold are terrible, is haunted also, by correspondence with the evil shades of its inhabitants, by innumerable species of birds and beasts of prey and myriads of hideous and venomous reptiles, which represent outwardly in form and character the evil lusts and cruelties of the heart which is utterly alienated from God and for ever divorced from heaven. ”

“ And so, on and on through endless transformations he passed, and he saw how the first world of dark elements crept in upon the world of beauty, clothing it around with grossness and veiling its fires; and the dark spirits entered by subtle ways into the spheres of the spirits of light, and became as a mist over memory and a chain upon speed; the earth groaned with the anguish. ”

“ There is some mysterious, miraculous, supernatural, invisible agency, called, I believe, the Holy Ghost, that enters and changes the heart of man, and this mysterious agency is like the wind, under the control, apparently, of no one, coming and going when and whither it listeth. It is this illogical and absurd view of regeneration that I have attacked. ”

“ Their authors looking within, on their own passions, and without, on the natural scenery around them, conscious of order and disorder, love and hate, virtue and crime, beholding phenomena of beauty and horror, sun and stars, night and tempest, winter and summer, icebergs and volcanoes, placid moonlight and blinding mist, assisting friends and battling foes, personified everything as a demon or a divinity. ”

“ It flung near blazing monsters like the Sun, that also were lost in the black, blind spaces so that their conflagrations were sparks flecking the universal slumber. Upon this twirling ball was life. Everywhere she looked, was life. One spot of earth was a city of creation, one drop of water was a multitudinous welter. ”

“ What if the botched worlds have continued to develop in the everlasting dark, outside the range of your knowledge, spawning who knows what abnormalities and horrors, like mutant monsters confined in caves? ”

“ Beings of sorcery, demons and monsters of the under-world fled forth. Creatures turned fierce, becoming beasts of prey, wherefore others turned timid, becoming their quarry; wretchedness and hunger abounded, black magic, war, and contention entered when fear did into the hearts of men and the creatures. Yea, fear was everywhere among them, wherefore, everywhere the people, hugging in dread their precious possessions, became wanderers they, living on the seeds of grasses, eaters of dead and slain things! ”

“ I repeat that the interior of the globe is inhabited. By what kind of beings I am not prepared to say. They may be monsters; they may be pigmies, or both; but that is a question I hope to be able to answer at some future day. Ladies and gentlemen, as the Creator has adapted a race of beings to exist on the surface of the earth, I fearlessly assert that He may have adapted a race to exist in the interior. ”

“ Now out of this inner spiritual universe—a double universe of light and darkness—this temporal, visible, more or less material, world has come forth, as an outer sheath of an inner world, and, like its Mother, it, too, is a double world of good and evil. ”

“ But how, if the alien nature contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes, and confounds it? How, again, if not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are introduced within what once he thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself? ”

“ We are deep, deep down in the bowels of the earth, trespassers in the land of the creatures whom "light annoys." Shall we extinguish our torch, and so allow the thick darkness to fall upon us like a pall? ”

“ On you go, from maze to maze, till there is no more recollection of direction or guess at size: you are lost in an underground world of gods that are half devils; you hardly distinguish the silent-footed, gleaming-eyed attendants from the stone figures. ”

“ Then, in expectation of instant death, they listened with an awe too great for expression to the infernal uproar, the crash of falling objects, the groaning and grinding of the swaying house, and above all to the voice of the deep, subterranean power which appeared to be rending the earth. ”

“ Still on we went over the uneven ground, thridding an endless labyrinth of death, oppressed, weighed upon, hustled by inhuman walls, breathing and exhaling the thin black fluid that is the atmosphere of the disembodied. ”

“ Is it not plain to you that in your youth you pursued objects which were shadows? And, were they substantial, you are a score of years beyond them now. What keeps you alive? What can you have left for your ruin of a human frame, for your pillaged temple of a body? ”

“ When the reason, for instance, usurps the whole field and acts in isolation from the imagination and the intuition, it tends to persuade us to deny the very existence of that deepest and most vivid reality of all, the handle of our spear-head, the base of our pyramid, the mysterious entity within us, which we have come, following the traditions of the centuries, to name the "soul." ”

“ I wondered whether I should ever reach the world again, and at times would furtively open my eyes to see if I could discern any feature of the place other than the wind of spiced putrefaction, the topless columns, and the thaumatropically grotesque shadows of abnormal horror. ”

“ But, after all, what can be expected of creatures without souls? One sees, now and seen, stupid human beings, whose eyes have no thoughts in them, and whose souls seem to be sound asleep. Such lumps of dulness might almost as well be gnomes, and slip into the earth and have done with it.
These underground folk had a great horror of our world. ”

“ But now he saw them crouching under the sky, with still the dark, mysterious world of reality inside, but as a world within a world, a sort of side show, whereas before they had been as a world to him within a chaos: a reality, an order, an absolute, within a meaningless confusion. ”

“ To those at the bottom of the social pyramid, however, who stand with their feet upon the earth, Nature is not a curious phenomenon to be looked down at and studied, but a living force to be obeyed. They front grim, naked Life, face to face, and wrestle with it through the darkness ”

“ With its illimitable possibilities for dramatic development and fantastic embellishment with incident and ethical symbolism, this theme has provided countless thousands of story-tellers with the skeleton which they clothed with the living flesh of their stories, representing not merely the earliest theories of astronomy and meteorology, but all the emotional conflicts of daily life, the struggle between light and darkness, heat and cold, right and wrong, justice and injustice, prosperity and adversity, wealth and poverty. ”

“ Out of the vasty space this mighty urging of life creating itself into the vehicles of worlds, creating itself from worlds into more emotional creatures upon the world, gathers into forms, attracts, repels, coheres into shapes, reaches to the mystery of crystals. ”

“ It's seeing people and objects in their weird entirety, in their true and complete shapes, that is so distressing. It introduces me to a world of monsters. Horses, dogs, cats, all of which I loved; people, trees, children; all that I have considered beautiful in life—everything, from a human face to a cathedral—appear to me in a different shape and aspect to all I have known before. ”

“ And it is this grotesque side of life that finds quasi-religious expression in the Carnival processions, with their monsters known and unknown to Nature, with their fanciful hybrids and quaint permutations of the elements of reality. ”

“ Swift and tempestuous, from th’ eternal throne,
With irresistible commission arm’d,
The world, in vain corrected, to destroy, 150
And ease creation of the shocking scene.
Seest thou, Lorenzo! what depends on man?
The fate of Nature; as for man, her birth.
Earth’s actors change earth’s transitory scenes,
And make creation groan with human guilt. ”

“ Here are peoples to whom a written letter is witchcraft and sorcery, and yet who can read the heavens, interpret the writings of the clouds, deserts, and cañons with unerring certainty.... A land it is of witchcraft and sorcery, of horror and dread of ghosts and goblins, of daily propitiations of fates and powers, and princes of darkness and air, at the very thought of whom withering injuries are sure to come. ”

“ Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change.358 But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal. ”

“ And if ancient chronicles were dumb, Countless stones in witness forth would come From the deepest entrails of the earth. But this highly-favored race has gone, Gone forever to the realms of night. We, we live! The moments are our own, And the living judge the right. ”

“ The crystal-world, in symbolic fashion, bare unimpeachable witness to me, through its brilliant unvarying shapes, of life and of the laws of human life, and spake to me with silent yet true and readable speech of the real life of the world of mankind. ”

“ The world is upside down—a world without light, or pointing finger, or affection for special favorites, and therefore bereft of all mysterious and attractive wisdom, a crazy world, a corpse of a world—if this be true! ”

“ The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—— No, they were not inhuman. ”

“ If at one moment life stood before his mental gaze, an illuminated little speck or disc, softly rounded with mysterious sleep, the next moment this mere span shot out into an illimitable plain, whereon he himself stood—a plain covered with forests, parted by seas, studded with cities and huge concourses of men, mapped out into civilizations, over-canopied by stars. ”