The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal: Book IX: IV. The Kabalistic Academies

IV

THE KABALISTIC ACADEMIES

We have now dealt with the testimony of the chief witness to the perpetuity and perfection of the Great Experiment, and if it be necessary--as it is at times and seasons--to conceal or re-express things in an artificial and evasive language, I do not know of a more convincing substituted terminology than that of transmutation by alchemy as a high analogy of God's work in the soul. Other analogies there are, but for the most part unrealised, as, for example, the sublime clause of the Apostle's Creed: "Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi sæculi," which, as it stands, is a testimony to the prospect and not the attainment. The motives which lead to the adoption of artificial language and the circumstances which may help to justify it belong to the term of our inquiry, of which

corpus materiale of the Kabalah, a final receptacle of the dèbris and drift of all the old theogonies, theosophies and occult knowledge of many places and periods, or that learning there how the Daughter of the Voice was withdrawn from the sanctuary of Israel, they told in another tongue how, after the departure of the Graal, the dwelling of King Fisherman "began to fall," though the chapel thereto belonging never "wasted nor decayed." The voices say one thing, but they do not speak in concert. We know only and realise that Israel is waiting by the waters of Babylon, and it has come to pass that, though we draw from far other places, we are also beside her, remembering, perhaps more dimly and yet with deeper yearning, the glory that once was in Zion.

Of such was the mind of Kabalism, its appanage, its baggage and its quest.