The first Wm Rider & Son book (1902) is a boisterous and poetic picaresque of mystic lovers who meet in the strangest guises:
In his pink infancy Flaxius the Neophyte, a high magic priest sorcerer, met a girl he recognized as a magia, who said, “Who knows what the Gods know? They do not even know what they know themselves.” She was of the beautiful Fylgia who flit over the ocean after the heroes they protect, as they, the fairy race, are protected by Thana, dancing in lucent rings for Diana, chaste goddess of the moon. To live as her divine twin ray destines him for immortality, that in seeing ex nihilo through her magic wand, he may see his own mastery of matter: “To live on earth or in heaven, amid ghosts or gods, would in the end be all one and the same; you would note it all with curious observation, and the same unchanged in every age,” she said. “My destiny! What can one do with such a man?” She wove the eternal law of the Aesir, ruled by Silvani, fauns, dusii, the Fata and satyrs, the mystic magian and her undying one (“an aspirant for immortality”) as they share their Gospel of the Distaff through Romany, first cousin to Hindi, who came from the North, to learn, these twins, of those ancient people, whose vast civilizations have been dematerialized. A flask of Rhenish, some Rosicrucian cookery and the calling of the singers of the Mahabarata and Kalidasa brought the Rosengarten, the airs of Loki and Svanttowit, Teuston, Vith, Busteric, Chrodo, Swackenhammer, Irminsul, Hela, Hellwolf, Zernebock (who the Saxon witches adopted as their black god Cerneboh). For it turns out all material is haunted by the fairies, as in streams by the Naiades, who have by natural affinity a passionate love for poetry, and all that is rare and beautiful, wild or strange, be it in what form it may, singing sweet ritournelles of violets over grey and ancient graves. And they are distorted by the material world as well, to turn chance into mischief, become lemur or lamia, nixey, Flibbertigibbet, implet, browny, ouphe, pigwiggin, duergar, faunus, fire-maid, ganders of Mother Goose the goblin. “In this life even the spirits mimic man,” said Countess von Hoya, in her lecture on Emperor Titus. “By Freia – I mean the Holy Virgin!” said Aeolfric Adelwit, grandson of Ulf the Dane, with one eye closed, the sign by which the initiated of all grades recognize one another, and one generally used by Mahatmas and others in the Karma business—as it was by the augurs of yore—when true believers were present. Flaxius imagined himself mounted on the best steed in Northumbria, and remembered he had grappled once with mighty Solomon, and cast him from his throne, and then in turn was fettered heavily and made to work on the great temple of Jerusalem. The full golden Syrian moon shone o’er Florence, the romantic and occult city, charmingly haunted, as he asked his twin: “Tell me truly, and swear by thy great ancestress Diana, the mother of the Spirits of the Night, and her sister-daughter Herodias, and her Nine Cats, by the Moon and her eternal shadow Endamone, and the word which Bergoia whispered into the ear of the Ox, what is it that makes a man? Is it his soul or his body?” ”Master of the old Etruscan hidden lore! It is his soul,” his Lombard bride replied. “And is it not the perfume of the rose its soul, that which breathes its life, in which it speaks to fairies or to men? Is not the voice in song or sweetened words the perfume of the spirit ever true?” So Flaxius, court factotum, reported to know everything from the works of Moloch the Pismirist up to those of God, was called to Caesar: ”Salve adepte! For mastering the lore of the Etruscan, as I read by the Concordia,” by which he meant he knew how to harvest electricity at will from the air. So surprised at the end of this he was to meet his bride in Hades, but she replied: “Dear one, thou hast too much modesty to declare thyself fit for heaven, and too much pride to allow thou wert fit for the lower regions. Therefore didst thou elect to remain on earth to study and master its problems as thoroughly as it was in thee to do so maintaining that of the few magians who like thyself had mastered immortality, too few prepared themselves, as they should do by studying the rudiments.” But, “ah,” she added, “eternity is long. Be thankful that thou wilt depart as soon as thou shalt have learned the mystery, for verily with thy love and knowledge of the beautiful in art it had also gone hard with thee.” “Yes,” replied Flaxius, “it is generally lost sight of in church histories that those who make the best martyrs are also best martyring others. All the great ones saw hell and raised it after their particular style to earth, and no one interfered … to thy realm and to thy mystic spouse!” He rose his creaming Jacqueline can, or goblet, arrectic auribus, graving every word which he heard on the tablet of his soul, even as Alba seated on a Greek tabouret at a little distance was doing on a leaf of ivory with her stylus [tho, he notes, the witches of Tuscany know her as Bellaria, the spirit of the pen, to be invoked by all who write]. “Now this is hell,” his Holy Crow replied, “and if thou wouldst know what the word really means, a place where everyone entering is supplied with the world he desires, with corresponding scenes and companions – he himself unconsciously drawing them all from memory and imagination. But note – for it is an important point—that they believe it all to be real, and in a certain sense it is so, for they have given to them the power, which science will some day give to man on earth, of perfect synthesis by volition – that is of drawing out the elements of will from the prima materia or materializing unseen elements, or conceptions.” “I understand,” said Flaxius, “Gods in a small way. Demiurges. Make things!” “They think so,” laughed his Pluto, “All here believe that what they saw on earth or see here is real. What is real is unchangeable and eternal. Who lives in Evolution, as all do on earth or in matter, lives in the Transient. It is when they realize by mere satiety the unreality of things that their punishment comes – that of despair.” “Oh, there is nothing here so wonderful as thou art.” Now be she fairy or sorceress or ghost-devil or a peeress, a woman is always a woman, and the Lady Adelinde, a fairy Amal-Alruna ancestress, infused her very best sorcery – the kind formerly conserved for kings—and invited Flaxius to rest himself beside her on the throne. For every soul is damned as soon as it is clogged and stops working, like a bee that wished itself into eternal honey. Adelinde cried on, to have finally found the man who could resist her spell and conquer her, thus ending the spell. “Now I know thee, Flaxius, Elijah, Helios, the sun” she cried, “Cicisti, thou hast conquered! The last link of the chain which has bound me for centuries to earth is broken. And even in the hour in which we meet, beloved master, and in the instant of our love, because it is our love, and I am conquered, I leave thee for the better life beyond! But Ah! To have remained with thee, I would have gladly endured this ghostly existence, which has become a torment. All this is ended. The peasant benighted will no longer see strange lights flickering over the ancient ruin, the enchantment has departed, and the spell of golden glory and glamour will no longer shine at midnight in these halls, the wanderer will no longer behold the elfin array, nor be enchanted by their queen. Sound for the last time my fairy music – We shall meet again soon, O Master, in a better life – such as thou hast chosen – a purer, more idealized existence.” “Now,” he said after a pause, “if I wished to preach a new faith to mankind, Adelinde has given me the text. He who has mastered this in every sense lives in a fairy-land while here on earth, yet they are few who ever master it, the religion where we worship the Creative Force in one another.” In the future hypnotists will entertain the masses, much the way, he concluded, Egyptian Chaldean and Etruscan priests did before it lingered in broken fragments among witches and sorcerers. The Fairy Albinia was beside him again. “None ever yet beheld a perfect rose, yet seeing many roses, we infer what a true rose may be,” he philosophized. “And so the form takes the place of truth, yet still a form is indispensable.” “In forms we live,” replied Flaxius slowly, “Therefore the Egyptians typified the Holy Ghost, or the all-pervading Spirit of Life, as a serpent which annually casts its skin and is renewed in brighter hues.” “And man must have a form to worship or incarnate the Power which he adores.” “Ay, and it is to that I shall come, as the Hebrews worshipped God in a fixed law, incarnate in a Book.” “All men who love live in a fairy-land, and all who will may aye remain in it, if they will make their love the law of life, believing truly that they are divine.” “So have I loved thee, O my golden one, since the old days of the Etruscan age, so shall I love thee through eternity; while different, we were yet ever one in truth, and ever nearing as the time went on. I know that heaven is in love and thee.” Then the spirit of the dream of olden time came over them and hid them from sight, and when it vanished both of them were gone.
From the Poet Tree records: Cupid to Psyche
