The Way of Power, L. Adams Beck [beach books txt] 📗

into what we call magic or rise into the true psychic. Some of his legends are true but not on this plane of consciousness. Others shadow truth in parable.

This is seen on a much higher step of the ladder also. Take as an example the half or wholly animal gods of ancient Egypt. Why does Anubis, one of the gods of the dead, wear the mask of the jackal? Why was the Bull worshiped as Apis? Why does the deified beauty of Hathor bear the full-circle moon poised between the horns of a cow?

We are told by scholars that the Bull received worship as representing virility and reproductive power, and though it is difficult to trace the presentation in all instances this may be granted as representing the material point of view which the average mentality of mankind, incapable of penetrating beyond the surface, would naturally accept. It found even cruder and more obvious illustration. But still the Bull persists in India as the inseparable companion of the god who, seated on the loneliest Himalayan peaks, is known as the Great Ascetic, and to those who realized and realize that animals are like ourselves phenomena or manifestations of the highest Thought of the universe that explanation never did nor can cover all the ground.

There is a mystic bond between ourselves and them which nothing can break, causing an agony of revolt in the spirit most highly developed in psychics at the thought of any cruelty to them. It is realized that in this we are torturing not only ourselves, for all life is one immutably, but something deeper even than that, to our inevitable and well-nigh eternal loss. Take the lines of Blake, that prince among mystics. (I write in a foreign country and without the book but the quotation is not far astray.)

“A robin-redbreast in a cage,

Sets all heaven in a rage.

A horse misused upon the road

Calls to heaven for human blood.

A dog starved at his master’s gate

Predicts the ruin of the State.

Each outcry of the hunted hare

A fibre from the brain doth tear.”

And so it continues through its litany of cruelties and their punishments. I remember when this revelation broke on me in its final fulness. I was walking along a country lane in England and a despairing hunted hare broke through the hedge to my feet with the pack of beagles upon it. I could do nothing and there they tore it to bloody rags under the enthusiastic eyes of the Master (a woman) and the crowd. For a moment like Blake I saw them as devils who find their joy in the sight of agony. That passed and it became possible to remember the callousness produced by ignorance which the Buddha describes as the very mother of sin. And my thoughts traveled on to what in writing of vivisection Professor William James describes as “the helpless dog shrieking before his executioners,” in regretting that when suffering such torments the dog cannot have the satisfaction of understanding that his tortures may alleviate the sufferings of the human race which inflicts them. There are not many men who even when properly instructed would complacently submit to be dissected alive or infected with abominable diseases to serve that end, but even that side of the question is scarcely as important as the effect on the men who do these things and the nations which permit it. In the deepest reasons of the true occult such things are crimes and their so-called justification a plea of cowardly convenience or selfishness. And be it remembered that if such pleas are accepted they stretch further and to frightful ultimates. If it be said that manliness of a country must be fostered by these sports and its diseases cured by knowledge so attained, I reply that truer manliness may be learned by wise austerities of self-government, and rather than so cure diseases it is better to prevent them by adopting a simple and healthy way of living which also excludes the slaughter of animals for our food. Those who have cast aside the antiquated superstition of its necessity know the true gain to body and mind and still further and more profoundly to national prosperity in other ways. The wise and great Sir Thomas More in the reign of Henry VIII pointed out how far more costly and wasteful is pastoralism than agriculture: how little employment the first gives in comparison with the second and how pastoralism depopulates a countryside, whilst agriculture fills it with labor. “The sheep,” he says, “do eat up the men.”

As for the relation of food to psychic progress, the world-wide experience of the great faiths demonstrates this, as I have before pointed out.

To return: Note, in the high civilization of ancient Greece, how each divine being is attended by and partly manifested through some animal which becomes as it were a part of the divine effluence. Athene, the goddess of wisdom, must have her owl—wise to see in the dark that blinds others; Zeus his eagle soaring against the sunlight that dazzles lesser creatures, Hera her peacock, many-faceted in color as a jewel. In India the wise god, the Lord of Obstacles, wears the elephant’s head with his kindliness of strength. By Vishnu, the Preserver, sits Garuda, his man-bird: Saraswati, the Divine Learning, rides her peacock. Passing on to China and Japan, amongst others one sees the Divine Compassion (Kwan-Yin in China, Kwannon in Japan) bearing the sacred fish. And this recalls the Christian symbol of the Fish connected with the Greek initials of the Christ. Our Scriptures teem with sacred animals, from the Four Beasts of Revelation full of eyes within and without “who rest not day and night crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’” before the Throne, to the terrible image of the scapegoat driven out to die in the desert accursed and bearing the sins of the people—evolving later to that of the Lamb on whom it is declared are “laid the iniquities of us all.”

Analogies, illustrations only, many will say. But no. A symbol is neither; it is a deeply felt unity seen from quite another angle than that of the material. Felt, not stated in logical terms, but known none the less by the deep undying knowledge which makes us a living part of the universe.

Leaving the subject of the recognition of the divine consciousness in animals let us consider our daily relation with them. Note how when man is exiled by sin or misfortune from his fellow men he is never alone whilst life is with him. Animal companionship is truly the highest form of this, but man’s sanity and something greater in him can live on the presence of a growing plant whilst the companionship of a mouse, a rat, even a spider, can supply him with food for courage and cheerfulness, and solitude ceases to be solitude—for it is peopled with all the mysterious promises and fulfilments of eternal life.

And taking the more highly evolved forms of psychic life—such as the elephant, horse, cat, dog—what does not humanity owe to recognition of the unity between ourselves and them? What has not intercourse done for them also? It is a marvelous mutual reaction. India, never failing in courage of statement, proclaimed the unity between us and took as a part of her teaching the evolution of soul as well as body from those lowlier forms of life, asserting that man sums up in himself all living experience and could not be man were it otherwise. Such also is the view of Plato—greatest of the Greeks. If this is the explanation of some of the instincts and strange wisdoms latent in our psychology it explains much that is obscure otherwise and lights up many dark and profound sympathies which we take as chance and meaningless until we consider them deeply. This is very apparent to all who have acquainted themselves with folk-lore in all nations. Here we have talk of the occult powers of animals whether manifested in anger or protection. All the fairy-tales of the modern world that are worth while are founded on this folk-lore—it is alive and lovable in such stories as those of Grimm, Hans Andersen; it is absent in the modern mechanically invented fairy-tale written by those who no longer know and take refuge in a kind of artificial prettiness and glib flippancy of invention. I am sometimes inclined to think the latest of the Masters was George Macdonald. He knew. Read his “Phantastes,” “The Golden Key,” “The Carasoyn,” “At the Back of the North Wind,” and you will understand that of all deep realizations in the world the understanding of animals is what we have most closely at hand for invaluable psychological advance. Cardinal Newman (I think in the Apologia) remarks that we know less of these lives lived about us than we do of the archangels. They concern us infinitely more at present, and the true understanding of them is a direct gateway into the higher forms of psychology.

I have seen a dog (who in other hands might have been “shrieking before his executioners”) lead a man or a woman straight into realization of Unity by the power of love (the great Unifier) and the knowledge it invariably brings with it. Such a result I have indicated in a short, profoundly true story, “The Openers of the Gate,” and I know that this is a subject worthy of closest observation and experiment. Not even the divinity of a child can open the Gate more surely than the other when it comes with the needed moment and to the person who is ready.

Furthermore, those who have gained foothold in this little-charted country are aware that some obscure physical stimulus which makes for health of mind and body comes from the companionship of animals—especially the domesticated ones, but not necessarily these. The horse, dog, and cat occur at once to the mind with their different powers of stimulating and soothing by their mere presence. They can unfold in a man traits hidden even from his own inmost knowledge of himself. They can make revelation to him in the great mystery of instinct, which is one of their forms of the subconscious, and they can communicate with those who understand this in a way impossible of any analysis in words, but intimate and near and possibly prefiguring some means of understanding much closer than speech.

Among themselves their means of communication are most interesting. I have observed closely and with sympathy and understanding and am convinced that they have more than one means of this. One, I believe, corresponds with our telepathy and it is used also as an understanding between people who have reached a certain stage of psychic evolution and the subconscious of the animals they love and who love them. Another, also a good deal used between themselves, is contact. Expression and sound they use as we do but in a lesser degree, having quite other means. This mystic intercommunion may be touched too in the volleying of great winds or breathing breezes in trees, in the giant glee of waterfalls thundering down stark precipices, or in the rejoicing of the jubilant abyss of ocean. He that hath ears, let him hear! And hearing can be developed. And so on the psychic side also. We are discarding the belief that our ancestors were in all things more gullible or more mendacious than ourselves. They felt, they believed, and because they did so they set down intuition and belief as a record. We have dismissed both as ignorance and credulity at best; They held that in animal life, even in plant life, the psychic sense abides (though they did not call it that) in varying degree. They felt, if they did not say it, that these little servants of the Law also are of “the dateless brood