THE TABLES OF THE LAW; &
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

IKELEY

RARY

ERSITY or
LirORHIA

Ex Lib rid

R. Magee Smythej>

THE TABLES OF THE LAW ; &
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI

Five hundred and ten copies printed ;
type distributed. No, 3 //

THE TABLES OF THE LAW; &
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

THE SHAKESPEARE HEAD PRESS
STRATFORD-UPON-AVON MCMXIV

THE TABLES OF THE LAW

974

THE TABLES OF THE LAW

^ Will you permit me, Aherne,' I said, 'to ask you
a question, which I have wanted to ask you for
years, and have not asked because we have grown
nearly strangers ? Why did you refuse the ber-
retta, and almost at the last moment ? When you
and I lived together, you cared neither for wine,
women, nor money, and had thoughts for nothing
but theology and mysticism.' I had watched through
dinner for a moment to put my question, and ven-
tured now, because he had thrown off a little of the
reserve and indifference which, ever since his last
return from Italy, had taken the place of our once
close friendship. He had just questioned me, too,
about certain private and almost sacred things, and
my frankness had earned, I thought, a like frank-
ness from him.

When I began to speak he was lifting to his lips
a glass of that old wine which he could choose so
well and valued so little ; and while I spoke, he set

B

2 THE TABLES OF THE LAW

it slowly and meditatively upon the table and held
it there, its deep red light dyeing his long delicate
fingers. The impression of his face and form, as
they were then, is still vivid with me, and is insepar-
able from another and fanciful impression: the
impression of a man holding a flame in his naked
hand. He was to me, at that moment, the supreme
type of our race, which, when it has risen above,
or is sunken below, the formalisms of half-educa-
tion and the rationalisms of conventional affirmation
and denial, turns away, unless my hopes for the
world and for the Church have made me blind,
from practicable desires and intuitions towards
desires so unbounded that no human vessel can
contain them, intuitions so immaterial that their
sudden and far-off fire leaves heavy darkness about
hand and foot. He had the nature, which is half
monk, half soldier of fortune, and must needs turn
action into dreaming, and dreaming into action ;
and for such there is no order, no finality, no con-
tentment in this world. When he and I had been
students in Paris, we had belonged to a little group
which devoted itself to speculations about alchemy
and mysticism. More orthodox in most of his
beliefs than Michael Robartes, he had surpassed

THE TABLES OF THE LAW 3

him in a fanciful hatred of all life, and this hatred
had found expression in the curious paradox — half
borrowed from some fanatical monk, half invented
by himself — that the beautiful arts were sent into
the world to overthrow nations, and finally life
herself, by sowing everywhere unlimited desires,
like torches thrown into a burning city. This idea
was not at the time, I believe, more than a paradox,
a plume of the pride of youth ; and it was only
after his return to Ireland that he endured the
fermentation of belief which is coming upon our
people with the reawakening of their imaginative
life.

Presently he stood up, saying : ^ Come, and I
will show you, for you at any rate will understand,'
and taking candles from the table, he lit the way
into the long paved passage that led to his private
chapel. We passed between the portraits of the
Jesuits and priests — some of no little fame — his
family had given to the Church ; and engravings
and photographs of pictures that had especially
moved him ; and the few paintings his small for-
tune, eked out by an almost penurious abstinence
from the things most men desire, had enabled him
to buy in his travels. The pictures that I knew

4 THE TABLES OF THE LAW

best, for they had hung there longest, whether
reproductions or originals, were of the Sienese
School, which he had studied for a long time,
claiming that it alone of the schools of the world
pictured not the world but what is revealed to
saints in their dreams and visions. The Sienese
alone among Italians, he would say, could not or
would not represent the pride of life, the pleasure
in swift movement or sustaining strength, or
voluptuous flesh. They were so little interested
in these things that there often seemed to be no
human body at all under the robe of the saint, but
they could represent by a bowed head, or uplifted
face, man's reverence before Eternity as no others
could, and they were at their happiest when man-
kind had dwindled to a little group silhouetted
upon a golden abyss, as if they saw the world
habitually from far off. When I had praised some
school that had dipped deeper into life, he would
profess to discover a more intense emotion than life
knew in those dark outlines. ^Put even Francesca,
who felt the supernatural as deeply,' he would say,
'beside the work of Siena, and one finds a faint
impurity in his awe, a touch of ghostly terror, where
love and humbleness had best been all.' He had

THE TABLES OF THE LAW 5

often told me of his hope that by filling his mind
with those holy pictures he would help himself to
attain at last to vision and ecstasy, and of his dis-
appointment at never getting more than dreams of
a curious and broken beauty. But of late he had
added pictures of a different kind, French symbol-
istic pictures which he had bought for a few
pounds from little-known painters, English and
French pictures of the School of the English Pre-
Raphaelites; and now he stood for a moment and
said, ^ I have changed my taste. I am fascinated
a little against my will by these faces, where I find
the pallor of souls trembling between the excite-
ment of the flesh and the excitement of the spirit,
and by landscapes that are created by heightening
the obscurity and disorder of nature. These land-
scapes do not stir the imagination to the energies
of sanctity but as to orgaic dancing and prophetic
frenzy.' I saw with some resentment new images
where the old ones had often made that long gray,
dim, empty, echoing passage become to my eyes a
vestibule of Eternity.

Almost every detail of the chapel, which we
entered by a narrow Gothic door, whose threshold
had been worn smooth by the secret worshippers

6 THE TABLES OF THE LAW

of the penal times, was vivid in my memory ; for
it was in this chapel that I had first, and when but
a boy, been moved by the mediaevalism which is
now, I think, the governing influence in my life.
The only thing that seemed new was a square
bronze box which stood upon the altar before the
six unlighted candles and the ebony crucifix, and
was like those made in ancient times of more
precious substances to hold the sacred books.
Aherne made me sit down on an oak bench, and
having bowed very low before the crucifix, took
the bronze box from the altar, and sat down beside
me with the box upon his knees.

^You will perhaps have forgotten,' he said,
^most of what you have read about Joachim of
Flora, for he is little more than a name to even
the well read. He was an abbot in Cortale in
the twelfth century, and is best known for his
prophecy, in a book called Expositio in Apocalypsln^
that the Kingdom of the Father was passed, the
Kingdom of the Son passing, the Kingdom of the
Spirit yet to come. The Kingdom of the Spirit
was to be a complete triumph of the Spirit, the
spintualts intelligentia he called it, over the dead
letter. He had many followers among the more

THE TABLES OF THE LAW 7

extreme Franciscans, and these were accused of
possessing a secret book of his called the Liber
Inducens in Evangelium Mternum, Again and again
groups of visionaries were accused of possessing
this terrible book. In which the freedom of the
Renaissance lay hidden, until at last Pope Alexan-
der IV. had It found and cast Into the flames.
I have here the greatest treasure the world con-
tains. 1 have a copy of that book ; and see what
great artists have made the robes In which It Is
wrapped. The greater portion of the book Itself
Is Illuminated In the Byzantine style, which so
few care for to-day, but which moves me because
these tall, emaciated angels and saints seem to
have less relation to the world about us than to
an abstract pattern of flowing lines that suggest
an Imagination absorbed In the contemplation of
Eternity. Even If you do not care for so formal
an art, you cannot help seeing that work where
there Is so much gold, and of that purple colour
which has gold dissolved In It, was valued at a
great price In Its day. But It was only at the
Renaissance the labour was spent upon It which
has made It the priceless thing It Is. The wooden
boards of the cover show by the astrological

8 THE TABLES OF THE LAW

allegories painted upon them, as by the style of
painting itself, some craftsman of the school of
Francesco Cossi of Ferrara, but the gold clasps
and hinges are known to be the work of Benvenuto
Cellini, who made likewise the bronze box and
covered it with gods and demons, whose eyes are
closed, to signify an absorption in the inner light.'

I took the book in my hands and began turning
over the gilded, many-coloured pages, holding it
close to the candle to discover the texture of the
paper.

^ Where did you get this amazing book ? ' I said.
'If genuine, and I cannot judge by this light, you
have discovered one of the most precious things
in the world.'

'It is certainly genuine,' he replied. 'When the
original was destroyed, one copy alone remained,
and was in the hands of a lute-player of Florence,
and from him it passed to his son, and so from
generation to generation until it came to the lute-
player who was father to Benvenuto Cellini, and
from Benvenuto Cellini to that Cardinal of Ferrara
who released him from prison, and from him to a
natural son, so from generation to generation, the
story of its wandering passing on with it, until it

THE TABLES OF THE LAW 9

came into the possession of the family of Aretino,
and to Giulio Aretino, an artist and worker in
metals, and student of the kabalistic heresies of
Pico della Mirandola. He spent many nights with
me at Rome, discussing philosophy ; and at last I
won his confidence so perfectly that he showed me
this, his greatest treasure ; and, finding how much
I valued it, and feeling that he himself was growing
old and beyond the help of its teaching, he sold
it to me for no great sum, considering its great
preciousness.'

' What is the doctrine ? ' I said. ^ Some mediaeval
straw-splitting about the nature of the Trinity,
which is only useful to-day to show how many
things are unimportant to us, which once shook
the world ? '

^I could never make you understand,' he said,
with a sigh, 'that nothing is unimportant in belief,
but even you will admit that this book goes to
the heart. Do you see the tables on which the
commandments were written in Latin ?' I looked
to the end of the room, opposite to the altar, and
saw that the two marble tablets were gone, and that
two large empty tablets of ivory, like large copies
of the little tablets we set over our desks, had
c

lo THE TABLES OF THE LAW

taken their place. 'It has swept the command-
ments of the Father away/ he went on, 'and
displaced the commandments of the Son by the
commandments of the Holy Spirit. The first book
is called Fractura 'Tabularum. In the first chapter
it mentions the names of the great artists who
made them graven things and the likeness of many
things, and adored them and served them ; and the
second the names of the great wits who took the
name of the Lord their God in vain ; and that long
third chapter, set with the emblems of sanctified
faces, and having wings upon its borders, is the
praise of breakers of the seventh day and wasters
of the six days, who yet lived comely and pleasant
days. Those two chapters tell of men and women
who railed upon their parents, remembering that
their god was older than the god of their parents ;
and that which has the sword of Michael for an
emblem commends the kings that wrought secret
murder and so won for their people a peace that
was amore somnoque gravata et vestibus versicoloribus^
heavy with love and sleep and many-coloured
raiment ; and that with the pale star at the closing
has the lives of the noble youths who loved the wives
of others and were transformed into memories.

THE TABLES OF THE LAW 1 1

which have transformed many poorer hearts into
sweet flames ; and that with the winged head is
the history of the robbers who lived upon the sea
or in the desert, lives which it compares to the
twittering of the string of a bow, nervi stridentis
ins tar ; and those two last, that are fire and gold,
are devoted to the satirists who bore false witness
against their neighbours and yet illustrated eternal
wrath, and to those that have coveted more than
other men the house of God, and all things that are
His, which no man has seen and handled, except
in madness and in dreams.

'The second book is called Lex Secreta, and
describes the true inspiration of action, the only
Eternal Evangel ; and ends with a vision, which
he saw among the mountains of La Sila, of his
disciples sitting throned in the blue deep of the
air, and laughing aloud, with a laughter that was
like the rustling of the wings of Time : Ctrlis in
c^ruleis ridentes sedehant discipuli mei super tbronos :
talis erat risus^ qualis temporis pennati susurrus'

'I know little of Joachim of Flora,' I said,
'except that Dante set him in Paradise among the
great doctors. If he held a heresy so singular, I
cannot understand how no rumours of it came to

12 THE TABLES OF THE LAW

the ears of Dante ; and Dante made no peace with
the enemies of the Church.'

'Joachim of Flora acknowledged openly the
authority of the Church, and even asked that all
his published writings, and those to be published
by his desire after his death, should be submitted
to the censorship of the Pope» He considered
that those whose work was to live and not to reveal
were children and that the Pope was their Father ;
but he taught in secret that certain others, and in
always increasing numbers, were elected, not to
live, but to reveal that hidden substance of God
which is colour and music and softness and a sweet
odour ; and that these have no father but the Holy
Spirit. Just as poets and painters and musicians
labour at their works, building them with lawless
and lawful things alike, so long as they embody
the beauty that is beyond the grave, these children
of the Holy Spirit labour at their moments with
eyes upon the shining substance on which Time
has heaped the refuse of creation ; for the world
only exists to be a tale in the ears of coming
generations ; and terror and content, birth and
death, love and hatred, and the fruit of the Tree,
are but instruments for that supreme art which is

THE TABLES OF THE LAW 13

to win us from life and gather us into eternity like
doves into their dove-cots.

' I shall go away in a little while and travel into
many lands, that I may know all accidents and
destinies, and when I return will write my secret
law upon those ivory tablets, just as poets and
romance writers have written the principles of their
art in prefaces ; and when I know what principle
of life, discoverable at first by imagination and
instinct, I am to express, I will gather my pupils
that they may discover their law in the study of
my law, as poets and painters discover their own
art of expression by the study of some Master. I
know nothing certain as yet but this — I am to
become completely alive, that is, completely pas-
sionate, for beauty is only another name for perfect
passion. I shall create a world where the whole
lives of men shall be articulated and simplified as if
seventy years were but one moment, or as they were
the leaping of a fish or the opening of a flower.'

He was pacing up and down, and I listened to the
fervour of his words and watched the excitement
of his gestures with not a little concern. I had been
accustomed to welcome the most singular specula-
tions, and had always found them as harmless as

14 THE TABLES OF THE LAW

the Persian cat who half closes her meditative eyes
and stretches out her long claws before my fire.
But now I would battle in the interests of orthodoxy,
even of the commonplace : and yet could find
nothing better to say than : ^ It is not necessary
to judge everyone by the law, for we have also
Christ's commandment of love.'

He turned and said, looking at me with shining
eyes : ^ Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen
of this city by hating his neighbour as himself.'

^At any rate, you cannot deny that to teach
so dangerous a doctrine is to accept a terrible
responsibility.'

'Leonardo da Vinci,' he replied, 'has this noble
sentence: "The hope and desire of returning home
to one's former state is like the moth's desire for
the light ; and the man who with constant longing
awaits each new month and new year, deeming
that the things he longs for are ever too late in
coming, does not perceive that he is longing for
his own destruction." How, then, can the pathway
which will lead us into the heart of God be other
than dangerous ? why should you, who are no
materialist, cherish the continuity and order of the
world as those do who have only the world ? You

THE TABLES OF THE LAW 15

do not value the writers who will express nothing
unless their reason understands how it will make
what is called the right more easy ; why, then, will
you deny a like freedom to the supreme art, the
art which is the foundation of all arts ? Yes, I
shall send out of this chapel saints, lovers, rebels
and prophets : souls who will surround themselves
with peace, as with a nest made with grass ; and
others over whom I shall weep. The dust shall
fall for many years over this little box ; and then I
shall open it ; and the tumults, which are, perhaps,
the flames of the last day, shall come from under
the lid;

I did not reason with him that night, because
his excitement was great and I feared to make him
angry ; and when I called at his house a few days
later, he was gone and his house was locked up and
empty. I have deeply regretted my failure both
to combat his heresy and to test the genuineness
of his strange book. Since my conversion I have
indeed done penance for an error which I was only
able to measure after some years.

1 6 THE TABLES OF THE LAW

II

I was walking along one of the Dublin quays,
on the side nearest the river, about ten years after
our conversation, stopping from time to time to
turn over the books upon an old bookstall, and
thinking, curiously enough, of the terrible destiny
of Michael Robartes, and his brotherhood ; when
I saw a tall and bent man walking slowly along
the other side of the quay. 1 recognized, with a
start, in a lifeless mask with dim eyes, the once
resolute and delicate face of Owen Aherne. I
crossed the quay quickly, but had not gone many
yards before he turned away, as though he had
seen me, and hurried down a side street; I followed,
but only to lose him among the intricate streets on
the north side of the river. During the next few
weeks I inquired of everybody who had once known
him, but he had made himself known to nobody ;
and I knocked, without result, at the door of his
old house ; and had nearly persuaded myself that
I was mistaken, when I saw him again in a narrow
street behind the Four Courts, and followed him
to the door of his house.

I laid my hand on his arm ; he turned quite

THE TABLES OF THE LAW 17

without surprise ; and indeed it is possible that to
him, whose inner life had soaked up the outer life,
a parting of years was a parting from forenoon to
afternoon. He stood holding the door half open,
as though he would keep me from entering ; and
would perhaps have parted from me without further
words had I not said : ^ Owen Aherne, you trusted
me once, will you not trust me again, and tell me
what has come of the ideas we discussed in this
house ten years ago ? — but perhaps you have
already forgotten them/

^You have a right to hear,' he said, 'for since
I have told you the ideas, 1 should tell you the
extreme danger they contain, or rather the bound-
less wickedness they contain ; but when you have
heard this we must part, and part for ever, because
I am lost, and must be hidden ! '

I followed him through the paved passage, and
saw that its corners were choked, and the pictures
gray, with dust and cobwebs ; and that the dust
and cobwebs which covered the ruby and sapphire
of the saints on the window had made it very dim.
He pointed to where the ivory tablets glimmered
faintly in the dimness, and I saw that they were
covered with small writing, and went up to them

1 8 THE TABLES OF THE LAW

and began to read the writing. It was in Latin,
and was an elaborate casuistry, illustrated with
many examples, but whether from his own life or
from the lives of others I do not know. I had
read but a few sentences when I imagined that a
faint perfume had begun to fill the room, and
turning round asked Owen Aherne if he were
lighting the incense.

^No,' he replied, and pointed where the thurible
lay rusty and empty on one of the benches ; as he
spoke the faint perfume seemed to vanish, and I
was persuaded I had imagined it.

^Has the philosophy of the Liber Inducens in
Evangelium JEternum made you very unhappy ? ' I
said.

'At first I was full of happiness,' he replied,
'for I felt a divine ecstasy, an immortal fire in
every passion, in every hope, in every desire, in
every dream ; and I saw, in the shadows under
leaves, in the hollow waters, in the eyes of men
and women, its image, as in a mirror ; and it was
as though I was about to touch the Heart of God.
Then all changed and I was full of misery, and I
said to myself that I was caught in the glittering
folds of an enormous serpent, and was falling with

THE TABLES OF THE LAW 19

him through a fathomless abyss, and that hence-
forth the glittering folds were my world ; and in
my misery it was revealed to me that man can
only come to that Heart through the sense of
separation from it which we call sin, and I under-
stood that I could not sin, because I had discovered
the law of my being, and could only express or fail
to express my being, and I understood that God
has made a simple and an arbitrary law that we may
sin and repent ! '

He had sat down on one of the wooden benches
and now became silent, his bowed head and hanging
arms and listless body having more of dejection
than any image I have met with in life or in any
art. I went and stood leaning against the altar,
and watched him, not knowing what I should say ;
and I noticed his black closely-buttoned coat, his
short hair, and shaven head, which preserved a
memory of his priestly ambition, and understood
how Catholicism had seized him in the midst of
the vertigo he called philosophy ; and I noticed his
lightless eyes and his earth-coloured complexion,
and understood how she had failed to do more
than hold him on the margin: and 1 was full of an
anguish of pity.

20 THE TABLES OF THE LAW

^It may be/ he went on, ^that the angels whose
hearts are shadows of the Divine Heart, and whose
bodies are made of the Divine Intellect, may come
to where their longing is always by a thirst for the
divine ecstasy, the immortal fire, that is in passion,
in hope, in desire, in dreams ; but we whose hearts
perish every moment, and whose bodies melt away
like a sigh, must bow and obey ! '

I went nearer to him and said: ^Prayer and
repentance will make you like other men.'

'No, no,' he said, 'I am not among those for
whom Christ died, and this is why I must be hidden.
I have a leprosy that even eternity cannot cure. I
have seen the whole, and how can 1 come again to
believe that a part is the whole ? I have lost my
soul because I have looked out of the eyes of the
angels.'

Suddenly I saw, or imagined that 1 saw, the
room darken, and faint figures robed in purple,
and lifting faint torches with arms that gleamed
like silver, bending, above Owen Aherne ; and I
saw, or imagined that I saw, drops, as of burning
gum, fall from the torches, and a heavy purple
smoke, as of incense, come pouring from the flames
and sweeping about us. Owen Aherne, more happy

THE TABLES OF THE LAW 21

than I who have been half initiated into the Order
of the Alchemical Rose, and protected perhaps by
his great piety, had sunk again into dejection and
listlessness, and saw none of these things ; but my
knees shook under me, for the purple-robed figures
were less faint every moment, and now I could
hear the hissing of the gum in the torches. They
did not appear to see me, for their eyes were upon
Owen Aherne ; and now and again I could hear
them sigh as though with sorrow for his sorrow,
and presently I heard words which 1 could not
understand except that they were words of sorrow,
and sweet as though immortal was talking to im-
mortal. Then one of them waved her torch, and
all the torches waved, and for a moment it was
as though some great bird made of flames had
fluttered its plumage, and a voice cried as from
far up in the air : ' He has charged even his angels
with folly, and they also bow and obey ; but let
your heart mingle with our hearts, which are
wrought of divine ecstasy, and your body with
our bodies, which are wrought of divine intellect.'
And at that cry I understood that the Order of
the Alchemical Rose was not of this earth, and
that it was still seeking over this earth for what-

22 THE TABLES OF THE LAW

ever souls It could gather within Its glittering net ;
and when all the faces turned towards me, and I
saw the mild eyes and the unshaken eyelids, I was
full of terror, and thought they were about to fling
their torches upon me, so that all 1 held dear, all
that bound me to spiritual and social order, would
be burnt up, and my soul left naked and shivering
among the winds that blow from beyond this world
and from beyond the stars ; and then a faint voice
cried, ^ Why do you fly from our torches that were
made out of the trees under which Christ wept In
the Garden of Gethsemane ? Why do you fly from
our torches that were made out of sweet wood, after
It had perished from the world and come to us who
made It of old times with our breath ? '

It was not until the door of the house had closed
behind my flight, and the noise of the street was
breaking on my ears, that I came back to myself
and to a little of my courage ; and 1 have never
dared to pass the house of Owen Aherne from
that day, even though I believe him to have been
driven Into some distant country by the spirits
whose name Is legion, and whose throne Is In the
indefinite abyss, and whom he obeys and cannot
see.

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI

I WAS sitting reading late into the night a little
after my last meeting with Aherne, when I heard
a light knocking on my front door. I found upon
the doorstep three very old men with stout sticks
in their hands, who said they had been told I should
be up and about, and that they were to tell me
important things. I brought them into my study,
and when the peacock curtains had closed behind
us, I set their chairs for them close to the fire, for
I saw that the frost was on their great-coats of
frieze and upon the long beards that flowed almost
to their waists. They took ofi^ their great-coats,
and leaned over the fire warming their hands, and
I saw that their clothes had much of the country
of our time, but a little also, as it seemed to me, of
the town life of a more courtly time. When they
had warmed themselves — and they warmed them-
selves, I thought, less because of the cold of the
night than because of a pleasure in warmth for the
sake of warmth — they turned towards me, so that
the light of the lamp fell full upon their weather-

76685

26 THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI

beaten faces, and told the story I am about to tell.
Now one talked and now another, and they often
interrupted one another, with a desire like that of
countrymen, when they tell a story, to leave no
detail untold. When they had finished they made
me take notes of whatever conversation they had
quoted, so that I might have the exact words, and
got up to go. When I asked them where they
were going, and what they were doing, and by what
names I should call them, they would tell me
nothing, except that they had been commanded to
travel over Ireland continually, and upon foot and
at night, that they might live close to the stones
and the trees and at the hours when the immortals
are awake.

I have let some years go by before writing out
this story, for I am always in dread of the illusions
which come of that inquietude of the veil of the
Temple, which M. Mallarme considers a character-
istic of our times ; and only write it now because
I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous
idea which does not become less dangerous when
written out in sincere and careful English.

The three old men were three brothers, who had
lived in one of the western islands from their early

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 27

manhood, and had cared all their lives for nothing
except for those classical writers and old Gaelic
writers who expounded an heroic and simple life ;
night after night in winter, Gaelic story-tellers
would chant old poems to them over the poteen ;
and night after night in summer, when the Gaelic
story-tellers were at work in the fields or away at
the fishing, they would read to one another Virgil
and Homer, for they would not enjoy in solitude,
but as the ancients enjoyed. At last a man, who
told them he was Michael Robartes, came to them
in a fishing boat, like St. Brandan drawn by some
vision and called by some voice ; and spoke of the
coming again of the gods and the ancient things ;
and their hearts, which had never endured the
body and pressure of our time, but only of distant
times, found nothing unlikely in anything he told
them, but accepted all simply and were happy.
Years passed, and one day, when the oldest of the
old men, who travelled in his youth and thought
sometimes of other lands, looked out on the grey
waters, on which the people see the dim outline of
the Islands of the Young — the Happy Islands
where the Gaelic heroes live the lives of Homer's
Phaeacians — a voice came out of the air over the

28 THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI

waters and told him of the death of Michael
Robartes. They were still mourning when the
next oldest of the old men fell asleep while reading
out the Fifth Eclogue of Virgil, and a strange voice
spoke through him, and bid them set out for Paris,
where a woman lay dying, who would reveal to
them the secret names of the gods, which can be
perfectly spoken only when the mind is steeped
in certain colours and certain sounds and certain
odours ; but at whose perfect speaking the im-
mortals cease to be cries and shadows, and walk
and talk with one like men and women.

They left their island, at first much troubled at
all they saw in the world, and came to Paris, and
there the youngest met a person in a dream, who
told him they were to wander about at hazard
until those who had been guiding their footsteps
had brought them to a street and a house, whose
likeness was shown him in the dream. They
wandered hither and thither for many days, but
one morning they came into some narrow and
shabby streets, on the south of the Seine, where
women with pale faces and untidy hair looked at
them out of the windows ; and just as they were
about to turn back because Wisdom could not

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 29

have alighted in so foolish a neighbourhood, they
came to the street and the house of the dream.
The oldest of the old men, who still remembered
some of the modern languages he had known in
his youth, went up to the door and knocked, but
when he had knocked, the next in age to him said
it was not a good house, and could not be the
house they were looking for, and urged him to
ask for some one they knew was not there and
go away. The door was opened by an old over-
dressed woman, who said, 'O, you are her three
kinsmen from Ireland. She has been expecting you
all day.' The old men looked at one another and
followed her upstairs, passing doors from which
pale and untidy women thrust out their heads,
and into a room where a beautiful woman lay
asleep in a bed, with another woman sitting by her.

The old woman said : ^ Yes they have come at
last ; now she will be able to die in peace,' and
went out.

^ We have been deceived by devils,' said one of
the old men, ^for the immortals would not speak
through a woman like this.'

^Yes,' said another, ^we have been deceived by
devils, and we must go away quickly.'

30 THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI

^ Yes/ said the third, ^we have been deceived by
devils, but let us kneel down for a little, for we
are by the deathbed of one that has been beautiful/
They knelt down, and the woman who sat by the
bed, and seemed to be overcome with fear and awe,
lowered her head. They watched for a little the
face upon the pillow and wondered at its look, as
of unquenchable desire, and at the porcelain-like
refinement of the vessel in which so malevolent a
flame had burned.

Suddenly the second oldest of them crowed like
a cock, and until the room seemed to shake with the
crowing. The woman in the bed still slept on in
her death-like sleep, but the woman who sat by
her head crossed herself and grew pale, and the
youngest of the old men cried out : 'A devil has
gone into him, and we must begone or it will go
into us also.' Before they could rise from their
knees a resonant chanting voice came from the lips
that had crowed and said : ' I am not a devil, but
I am Hermes the Shepherd of the Dead, and I
run upon the errands of the gods, and you have
heard my sign, that has been my sign from the old
days. Bow down before her from whose lips the
secret names of the immortals, and of the things

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 3 1

near their hearts, are about to come, that the im-
mortals may come again into the world. Bow
down, and understand that when they are about
to overthrow the things that are to-day and bring
the things that were yesterday, they have no one
to help them, but one whom the things that are
to-day have cast out. Bow down and very low,
for they have chosen for their priestess this woman
in whose heart all follies have gathered, and in
whose body all desires have awaked ; this woman
who has been driven out of Time, and has lain
upon the bosom of Eternity. After you have
bowed down the old things shall be again, and
another Argo shall carry heroes over sea, and
another Achilles beleaguer another Troy.'

The voice ended with a sigh, and immediately
the old man awoke out of sleep, and said : ^ Has
a voice spoken through me, as it did when I fell
asleep over my Virgil, or have I only been asleep ? '

The oldest of them said : 'A voice has spoken
through you. Where has your soul been while
the voice was speaking through you ? '

^I do not know where my soul has been, but I
dreamed I was under the roof of a manger, and
I looked down and I saw an ox and an ass ; and I

32 THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI

saw a red cock perching on the hay-rack ; and a
woman hugging a child ; and three old men, in
armour, studded with rubies, kneeling with their
heads bowed very low in front of the woman and
the child. While I was looking the cock crowed
and a man with wings on his heels swept up through
the air, and as he passed me, cried out : " Foolish
old men, you had once all the wisdom of the stars."
I do not understand my dream or what it would
have us do, but you who have heard the voice out
of the wisdom of my sleep know what we have
to do.'

Then the oldest of the old men told him they
were to take the parchments they had brought
with them out of their pockets and spread them
on the ground. When they had spread them on
the ground, they took out of their pockets their
pens, made of three feathers, which had fallen from
the wing of the old eagle that is believed to have
talked of wisdom with St. Patrick.

^He meant, I think,' said the youngest, as he
put their ink-bottles by the side of the rolls of
parchment, 'that when people are good the world
likes them and takes possession of them, and so
eternity comes through people who are not good

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 33

or who have been forgotten. Perhaps Christianity
was good and the world liked it, so now it is going
away and the immortals are beginning to awake.'

^ What you say has no wisdom/ said the oldest,
^ because if there are many immortals, there cannot
be only one immortal.*

Then the woman in the bed sat up and looked
about her with wild eyes ; and the oldest of the
old men said : ^ Lady, we have come to write down
the secret names,' and at his words a look of great
joy came into her face. Presently she began to
speak slowly, and yet eagerly, as though she knew
she had but a little while to live, and in the Gaelic
of their own country ; and she spoke to them many
secret powerful names, and of the colours, and
odours, and weapons, and instruments of music
and instruments of handicraft belonging to the
owners of those names ; but most about the Sidhe
of Ireland and of their love for the Cauldron, and
the Whetstone, and the Sword, and the Spear.
Then she tossed feebly for a while and moaned,
and when she spoke again it was in so faint a
murmur that the woman who sat by the bed leaned
down to listen, and while she was listening the
spirit went out of the body.

F

34 THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI

Then the oldest of the old men said in French
to the woman who was still bending over the bed :
'There must have been yet one name which she
had not given us, for she murmured a name while
the spirit was going out of the body/ and the
woman said, 'She was but murmuring over the
name of a symbolist painter she was fond of. He
used to go to something he called the Black Mass,
and it was he who taught her to see visions and to
hear voices. She met him for the first time a few
months ago, and we have had no peace from that
day because of her talk about visions and about
voices. Why ! it was only last night that I dreamed
I saw a man with a red beard and red hair, and
dressed in red, standing by my bedside. He held a
rose in one hand, and tore it in pieces with the other
hand, and the petals drifted about the room, and
became beautiful people who began to dance slowly.
When I woke up 1 was all in a heat with terror.'

This is all the old men told me, and when I
think of their speech and of their silence, of their
coming and of their going, I am almost persuaded
that had I gone out of the house after they had
gone out of it, I should have found no footsteps
on the snow. They may, for all I or any man

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 35

can say, have been themselves immortals : im-
mortal demons, come to put an untrue story into
my mind for some purpose I do not understand.
Whatever they were I have turned into a pathway
which will lead me from them and from the Order
of the Alchemical Rose. I no longer live an
elaborate and haughty life, but seek to lose myself
among the prayers and the sorrows of the multi-
tude. I pray best in poor chapels, where the frieze
coats brush by me as I kneel, and when I pray
against the demons I repeat a prayer which was
made 1 know not how many centuries ago to help
some poor Gaelic man or woman who had suffered
with a suffering like mine.

Seacht h-piidreacha fh seacht
Chuir Muire faoi n-a Mac^
Chuir Brigbid faoi n-a brat^
Chuir Dia faoi n-a neart^
Eidir sinn ^san Sluagh Sidhe^
Eidir sinn ^san Sluagh Gaoith,

Seven paters seven times,
Send Mary by her Son,
Send Bridget by her mantle,
Send God by His strength.
Between us and the faery host,
Between us and the demons of the air.

Printed by A. H. Bullen, at the Shakespeare Head Press,
Stratford-upon-A'von.