cally as the Devil, Serpent, Dragon, or " Adversary," typified through all time; the world terrestrial being the ashes of the fire celestial.

The torches borne at funerals are not alone for light: they have their mystic meaning. They mingle largely, as do candles on altars, in all solemn celebrations. The employment of light in all religious rites, and in celebration in the general sense, has an overpoweringly great meaning. Festival, also, claims flame as its secret signal and its password to the propitious Invisible. Lights and flambeaux and torches carried in the hand were ever the joyous accompaniment of weddings. The torch of Hymen is a proverbial expression. The ever-burning lamps of the ancients; the steady, silent tomb-lights (burning on for ages), from time to time discovered among the mouldering monuments of the past in the hypogea, or sepulchral caves, and buildings broken in upon by men in later day; the bonfires of the moderns; the fires on the tops of hills; the mass of lamps disposed about sanctuaries, whether encircling the most sacred point of the mosque of the Prophet, the graded and cumulative Grand Altar in St. Peter's, or the saint-thrones in the churches of the Eternal City, or elsewhere, wherever magnificence riseth into expansion, and intensifieth and overpowereth in the sublimity which shall be felt; the multitudinous grouped lamps in the Sacred Stable-the Place of the Holy Nativity, meanest and yet highest-at Bethlehem ; the steady, constant lights ever burning in mystic, blazing attestation in Jerusalem, before the tomb of the Redeemer; the chapelle ardente in the funeral observances of the ubiquitous Catholic Church; the congregated tapers about the bed of the dead-the flames in mysterious grandeur (and in royal awe), placed as in waiting, so brilliant and striking, and yet so terrible, a court, and surrounding the stately catafalque; the very word falcated, as bladed, sworded, or scimitared (as with the guard of waved or sickle-like flames); the lowly, single candle at the bedside of the povertyattenuated dead-thus by the single votive light only allied (yet in unutterably mystic and godlike bond) as with the

SNAKE, SERPENT, AND DRAGON.

III

greatest of the earth; the watch-lights everywhere, and in whatever country; the crosses (spiry memorials, or monoliths) which rose as from out the earth, in imitation of the watching candle, at whatever point rested at night, in her solemn journey to her last home, the body of Queen Eleanor, as told in the English annals (which flamememorials, so raised by the pious King Edward in the spiry, flame-imitating stone, are all, we believe, obliterate or put out of things, but the well-known, magnificent, restored cross at Waltham);-all these, to the keen, philosophic eye, stand as the best proofs of the diffusion of this strange Fire-Dogma: mythed as equally, also, in that "dark veiled Cotytto,"

"She to whom the flame

Of midnight torches burns."

"She," this blackest of concealment in the mysteries, Isis, Io, Ashtaroth, or Astarte, or Cybele, or Proserpine; "he," this Baal, Bel, "Baalim," Foh, Brahm, or Bhudd; "it,"-for the Myth is no personality, but sexless,-Snake, Serpent, Dragon, or Earliest at all of Locomotion, under whatever "Letter of the Alphabet ;"-all these symbols, shapes, or names, stand confessed in that first, absolutely primal, deified element, Fire, which the world, in all religions, has worshipped, is worshipping, and will worship to the end of time, unconsciously; we even in the Christian religion, and in our modern day, still doing it-unwitting the meaning of the mysterious symbols which pass daily before our eyes : all which point, as we before have said, to Spirit-Light as the Soul of the World,-otherwise, to the inexpressible mystery of the Holy Ghost.

Little is it suspected what is the myth conveyed in the Fackeltanz and Fackelzug of Berlin, of which so much. was heard, as a curious observance, at the time of the marriage of the Princess Royal of England with the Prince Frederick William of Prussia. This is the Teutonic perpetuation of the "Bacchic gloryings," of the Saturnian rout and flame-brandishing, of the earliest and last rite.

The ring of light, glory, nimbus, aureole, or circle of rays, about the heads of sacred persons; the hand (magnetic and mesmeric) upon sceptres; the open hand borne in the standards of the Romans; the dragon crest of Maximin, of Honorius, and of the Barbarian Leaders; the Dragon of China and of Japan; the Dragon of Wales; the mythic Dragon trampled by St. George; the "crowned serpent" of the Royal House of Milan; the cairns, as we have already affirmed, and the Runic Monuments; the Round Towers of Ireland (regarding which there hath been so much, and so diverse and vain speculation); the memorial piles, and the slender (on seashore and upland) towers left by the Vikinghs, or Sea-Kings, in their adventurous and predatory voyages; the legends of the Norsemen or the Normans; the vestiges so recently, in the discovery of the forward-of the-old-time ages, exposed to the light of criticism, in the time-out-ofmind antique and quaint cities of the extinct peoples and of the forgotten religions in Central America: the sun or fire-worship of the Peruvians, and their vestal or virginguardians of the fire; the priestly fire-rites of the Mexicans, quenched by Cortez in the native blood, and the context of their strange, apparently incoherently wild, belief; the inscriptions of amulets, on rings and on talismans; the singular, dark, and, in many respects, uncouth arcana of the Bohemians, Zingari, Gitanos, or Gipsies; the teaching of the Talmud; the hints of the Cabala: also that little-supposed thing, even, meant in the British golden collar of “S.S.," which is worn as a relic of the oldest day (in perpetuation of a mythos long ago buried-spark-like-and forgotten in the dust of ages) by some of our officials, courtly and otherwise, and which belongs to no known order of knighthood, but only to the very highest order of knighthood, the Magian, or to Magic;—all these point, as in the diverging radii of the greatest of historical light-suns, to the central, intolerable ring of brilliancy, or the phenomenon-the original God's revelation, eldest of all creeds, survivor, almost, of Time-of the Sacred Spirit, or Ghostly Flame, -the baptism of Fire of the Apostles!

In this apparently strange-nay, to some minds, alarming-classification, and throwing under one head, of symbols diametrically opposed, as holy and unholy, benign and sinister, care must be taken to notice that the types of the "Snake " or the "Dragon" stand for the occult "WorldFire," by which we mean the "light of the human reason," or "manifestation " in the general sense, as opposed to the spiritual light, or unbodied light; into which, as the reverse, -although the same, the former transcends. Thus, shadow is the only possible means of demonstrating light. It is not reflected upon that we must have means whereby to be lifted. After all, we deal only with glyphs, to express inexpressible things. Horns mean spirit - manifestation ; Radius signifies the glorying absorption (into the incomprehensible) of that manifestation. Both signify the same : from any given point, the One Spirit working downwards, and also transcending upwards. From any given point, in height, that the intellect is able to achieve, the same Spirit downwards intensifies into Manifestation; upwards, dissipates into God! In other words, before any knowledge of God can be formed at all, it must have a shape. God is an abstraction; Man is an entity.

Black sculptured Obelisk. (British Museum.)

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH.

INQUIRY AS TO THE POSSIBILITY OF MIRACLE.

HE definition of a miracle has been exposed to numerous erroneous views. Inquirers know not what a miracle is. It is wrong to assume that

nature and human nature are alike invariably, and that you can interpret the one by the other. There may be in reality great divergence between the two, though both start from the common point-individuality. A miracle is not a violation of the laws of nature (because nature is not everything), but a something independent of all laws,— that is, as we know laws. The mistake that is so commonly made is the interpreting-or rather the perceiving, or the becoming aware-of-that thing we denominate a miracle. through the operation of the human senses, which in reality have nothing whatever to do with a miracle, because they cannot know it. If nature, as we understand it, or law, as we understand it, be universal, then, as nothing can be possible to us which contradicts either the one or the other (both being the same),-nature being law, and law being nature,―miracle must be impossible, and there never was, nor could there ever be, such a thing as a miracle. But a miracle works outwardly from us at once, and not by a human path-moves away from the world (that is, man's