"rslcm10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yeats William Butler)

what men called the moods; and worked all great changes in the world;
for just as the magician or the artist could call them when he would,
so they could call out of the mind of the magician or the artist, or
if they were demons, out of the mind of the mad or the ignoble, what
shape they would, and through its voice and its gestures pour
themselves out upon the world. In this way all great events were
accomplished; a mood, a divinity, or a demon, first descending like a
faint sigh into men's minds and then changing their thoughts and
their actions until hair that was yellow had grown black, or hair
that was black had grown yellow, and empires moved their border, as
though they were but drifts of leaves. The rest of the book contained
symbols of form, and sound, and colour, and their attribution to
divinities and demons, so that the initiate might fashion a shape for
any divinity or any demon, and be as powerful as Avicenna among those
who live under the roots of tears and of laughter.




IV


A couple of hours after Sunset Michael Robartes returned and told me
that I would have to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique dance,
because before my initiation could be perfected I had to join three
times in a magical dance, for rhythm was the wheel of Eternity, on
which alone the transient and accidental could be broken, and the
spirit set free. I found that the steps, which were simple enough,
resembled certain antique Greek dances, and having been a good dancer
in my youth and the master of many curious Gaelic steps, I soon had
them in my memory. He then robed me and himself in a costume which
suggested by its shape both Greece and Egypt, but by its crimson
colour a more passionate life than theirs; and having put into my
hands a little chainless censer of bronze, wrought into the likeness
of a rose, by some modern craftsman, he told me to open a small door
opposite to the door by which I had entered. I put my hand to the
handle, but the moment I did so the fumes of the incense, helped
perhaps by his mysterious glamour, made me fall again into a dream,
in which I seemed to be a mask, lying on the counter of a little
Eastern shop. Many persons, with eyes so bright and still that I knew
them for more than human, came in and tried me on their faces, but at
last flung me into a corner with a little laughter; but all this
passed in a moment, for when I awoke my hand was still upon the
handle. I opened the door, and found myself in a marvellous passage,
along whose sides were many divinities wrought in a mosaic, not less
beautiful than the mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less
severe beauty; the predominant colour of each divinity, which was
surely a symbolic colour, being repeated in the lamps that hung from
the ceiling, a curiously-scented lamp before every divinity. I passed
on, marvelling exceedingly how these enthusiasts could have created