Rosa Alchemica | Page 9

smoke of
ever-changing colour.
I stopped before a door, on whose bronze panels were wrought great waves in whose
shadow were faint suggestions of terrible faces. Those beyond it seemed to have heard
our steps, for a voice cried: 'Is the work of the Incorruptible Fire at an end?' and
immediately Michael Robartes answered: 'The perfect gold has come from the atbanor.'
The door swung open, and we were in a great circular room, and among men and women
who were dancing slowly in crimson robes. Upon the ceiling was an immense rose
wrought in mosaic; and about the walls, also in mosaic, was a battle of gods and angels,
the gods glimmering like rubies and sapphires, and the angels of the one greyness,
because, as Michael Robartes whispered, they had renounced their divinity, and turned
from the unfolding of their separate hearts, out of love for a God of humility and sorrow.
Pillars supported the roof and made a kind of circular cloister, each pillar being a column
of confused shapes, divinities, it seemed, of the wind, who rose as in a whirling dance of
more than human vehemence, and playing upon pipes and cymbals; and from among
these shapes were thrust out hands, and in these hands were censers. I was bid place my
censer also in a hand and take my place and dance, and as I turned from the pillars
towards the dancers, I saw that the floor was of a green stone, and that a pale Christ on a
pale cross was wrought in the midst. I asked Robartes the meaning of this, and was told
that they desired 'To trouble His unity with their multitudinous feet.' The dance wound in
and out, tracing upon the floor the shapes of petals that copied the petals in the rose
overhead, and to the sound of hidden instruments which were perhaps of an antique
pattern, for I have never heard the like; and every moment the dance was more passionate,
until all the winds of the world seemed to have awakened under our feet. After a little I
had grown weary, and stood under a pillar watching the coming and going of those
flame-like figures; until gradually I sank into a half-dream, from which I was awakened
by seeing the petals of the great rose, which had no longer the look of mosaic, falling
slowly through the incense-heavy air, and, as they fell, shaping into the likeness of living
beings of an extraordinary beauty. Still faint and cloud-like, they began to dance, and as
they danced took a more and more definite shape, so that I was able to distinguish
beautiful Grecian faces and august Egyptian faces, and now and again to name a divinity
by the staff in his hand or by a bird fluttering over his head; and soon every mortal foot
danced by the white foot of an immortal; and in the troubled eyes that looked into
untroubled shadowy eyes, I saw the brightness of uttermost desire as though they had
found at length, after unreckonable wandering, the lost love of their youth. Sometimes,
but only for a moment, I saw a faint solitary figure with a Rosa veiled face, and carrying
a faint torch, flit among the dancers, but like a dream within a dream, like a shadow of a
shadow, and I knew by an understanding born from a deeper fountain than thought, that it
was Eros himself, and that his face was veiled because no man or woman from the
beginning of the world has ever known what love is, or looked into his eyes, for Eros
alone of divinities is altogether a spirit, and hides in passions not of his essence if he
would commune with a mortal heart. So that if a man love nobly he knows love through

infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending sympathy; and if ignobly through vehement
jealousy, sudden hatred, and unappeasable desire; but unveiled love he never knows.
While I thought these things, a voice cried to me from the crimson figures: 'Into the dance!
there is none that can be spared out of the dance; into the dance! into the dance! that the
gods may make them bodies out of the substance of our hearts'; and before I could
answer, a mysterious wave of passion, that seemed like the soul of the dance moving
within our souls, took Alchemica. hold of me, and I was swept, neither consenting nor
refusing, into the midst. I was dancing with an immortal august woman, who had black
lilies in her hair, and her dreamy gesture seemed laden with a wisdom more profound
than the darkness that is between star and star, and with a love like the love that breathed
upon the waters; and as we danced on