It is now many years since I
have convinced myself, convinced myself a sceptic remember, that the old
iron-bound theory is utterly and entirely false. Perhaps this confession
will not wound you so sharply as it would have done twenty years ago;
for I think you cannot have failed to notice that for some time
hypotheses have been advanced by men of pure science which are nothing
less than transcendental, and I suspect that most modern chemists and
biologists of repute would not hesitate to subscribe the _dictum_ of the
old Schoolman, _Omnia exeunt in mysterium_, which means, I take it, that
every branch of human knowledge if traced up to its source and final
principles vanishes into mystery. I need not trouble you now with a
detailed account of the painful steps which led me to my conclusions; a
few simple experiments suggested a doubt as to my then standpoint, and a
train of thought that rose from circumstances comparatively trifling
brought me far. My old conception of the universe has been swept away,
and I stand in a world that seems as strange and awful to me as the
endless waves of the ocean seen for the first time, shining, from a Peak
in Darien. Now I know that the walls of sense that seemed so
impenetrable, that seemed to loom up above the heavens and to be founded
below the depths, and to shut us in forevermore, are no such everlasting
impassable barriers as we fancied, but thinnest and most airy veils that
melt away before the seeker, and dissolve as the early mist of the
morning about the brooks. I know that you never adopted the extreme
materialistic position: you did not go about trying to prove a universal
negative, for your logical sense withheld you from that crowning
absurdity; yet I am sure that you will find all that I am saying strange
and repellent to your habits of thought. Yet, Haberden, what I tell you
is the truth, nay, to adopt our common language, the sole and scientific
truth, verified by experience; and the universe is verily more splendid
and more awful than we used to dream. The whole universe, my friend, is
a tremendous sacrament; a mystic, ineffable force and energy, veiled by
an outward form of matter; and man, and the sun and the other stars, and
the flower of the grass, and the crystal in the test-tube, are each and
every one as spiritual, as material, and subject to an inner working. "You will perhaps wonder, Haberden, whence all this tends; but I think a
little thought will make it clear. You will understand that from such a
standpoint the whole view of things is changed, and what we thought
incredible and absurd may be possible enough. In short, we must look at
legend and belief with other eyes, and be prepared to accept tales that
had become mere fables. Indeed, this is no such great demand. After all,
modern science will concede as much, in a hypocritical manner. You must
not, it is true, believe in witchcraft, but you may credit hypnotism;
ghosts are out of date, but there is a good deal to be said for the
theory of telepathy. Give a superstition a Greek name, and believe in
it, should almost be a proverb. "So much for my personal explanation. You sent me, Haberden, a phial,
stoppered and sealed, containing a small quantity of a flaky white
powder, obtained from a chemist who has been dispensing it to one of
your patients. I am not surprised to hear that this powder refused to
yield any results to your analysis. It is a substance which was known to
a few many hundred years ago, but which I never expected to have
submitted to me from the shop of a modern apothecary. There seems no
reason to doubt the truth of the man's tale; he no doubt got, as he
says, the rather uncommon salt you prescribed from the wholesale
chemist's; and it has probably remained on his shelf for twenty years,
or perhaps longer. Here what we call chance and coincidence begins to
work; during all these years the salt in the bottle was exposed to
certain recurring variations of temperature, variations probably ranging
from 40° to 80°. And, as it happens, such changes, recurring year after
year at irregular intervals, and with varying degrees of intensity and
duration, have constituted a process, and a process so complicated and
so delicate, that I question whether modern scientific apparatus
directed with the utmost precision could produce the same result. The
white powder you sent me is something very different from the drug you
prescribed; it is the powder from which the wine of the Sabbath, the
_Vinum Sabbati_ was prepared. No doubt you have read of the Witches'
Sabbath, and have laughed at the tales which terrified our ancestors;
the black cats, and the broomsticks, and dooms pronounced against some
old woman's cow. Since I have known the truth I have often reflected
that it is on the whole a happy thing that such burlesque as this is
believed, for it serves to conceal much that it is better should not be
known generally. However, if you care to read the appendix to Payne
Knight's monograph, you will find that the true Sabbath was something
very different, though the writer has very nicely refrained from
printing all he knew. The secrets of the true Sabbath were the secrets
of remote times surviving into the Middle Ages, secrets of an evil
science which existed long before Aryan man entered Europe. Men and
women, seduced from their homes on specious pretences, were met by
beings well qualified to assume, as they did assume, the part of devils,
and taken by their guides to some, desolate and lonely place, known to
the initiate by long tradition and unknown to all else. Perhaps it was a
cave in some bare and wind-swept hill; perhaps some inmost recess of a
great forest, and there the Sabbath was held. There, in the blackest
hour of night, the _Vinum Sabbati_ was prepared, and this evil graal was
poured forth and offered to the neophytes, and they partook of an
infernal sacrament; _sumentes calicem principis inferorum,_ as an old
author well expresses it. And suddenly, each one that had drunk found
himself attended by a companion, a shape of glamour and unearthly
allurement, beckoning him apart to share in joys more exquisite, more
piercing than the thrill of any dream, to the consummation of the
marriage of the Sabbath. It is hard to write of such things as these,
and chiefly because that shape that allured with loveliness was no
hallucination, but, awful as it is to express, the man himself. By the
power of that Sabbath wine, a few grains of white powder thrown into a
glass of water, the house of life was riven asunder, and the human
trinity dissolved, and the worm which never dies, that which lies
sleeping within us all, was made tangible and an external thing, and
clothed with a garment of flesh. And then in the hour of midnight, the
primal fall was repeated and represented, and the awful thing veiled in
the mythos of the Tree in the Garden was done anew. Such was the
_nuptiæ Sabbati_.