PART III.
THE MAGIC SPELL.
“In the Kingdom of Dream strange things are seen, And the Fate of’ the Nations are there, I ween.”
From “The Rosie Cross,” an unpublished Poem by
P.B. RANDOLPH
THE regal being was scarcely gone from the chamber ere Hesperina and the Shadow—which had once more become visible, approached the sleeping pair—drew nigh unto the woman and the man; and the Fay gently breathed upon their heads, as if to establish a magnetic rapport between herself and them. She then calmly took her stand, near the bedside, and folded her beautiful arms across her still more beautiful bosom and awaited—the action of the tempter. She had not long to wait, for straightway the Black Presence advanced, and hovered, over the bed—hovered scowlingly over then, glaring down into their souls, as doth the vampire upon the man she would destroy—the spirit of Wrong peering; wistfully at all beautiful, things, and true! Such was the posture of affairs.; and thus they remained: until the Thing had also established some sort of connection with the sleepers. It soon became evident, from their nervous, uneasy movements and postures, that the twain were rapidly crossing the mystic boundaries that divide our own from Dreamland— that they were just entering the misty mid-region—the Shadow, the Thing, the monstrous IT, ruling the hour, and guiding them through the strange realm—’That lieth sublime, out of Space and out of Time. [A quote from the poem Dream-Land by Edgar Allen Poe, his only poem published in 1844.]
The man who says that dreams are figments is a fool. Half of our nightly experiences are, in their subsequent effects upon us, far more real and positive than our daily life of wakefulness. Dreams are, as a general thing, save in rare instances, sneered at by the wise ones of this sapient age. Events, we of Rosicrucia hold, are pre-acted in other spheres of being. Prophetic dreaming is no new thing. Circumstances are constantly occurring in the outer life that have been previewed in Dream-land. Recently, while in Constantinople, I became acquainted with a famous Dongolese negro, near the Grand Mosque of St. Sophia, in one of the narrow streets on the left, as you enter the square from toward the first bridge, and this man had reduced the interpretation of dreams to a science almost; and many a long hour have I rapidly driven the pen, in the work of recording what was translated. to me from Dongolese and Arabic into Turkish and English, from his lips, obtaining in this way not merely the principles upon which his art was founded, but also explicit interpretations of about twenty-nine hundred different dreams. [Dongola was the ancient capital of Nubia in what is now Sudan. The book cover depicted appears on an annual report from the Polish Center for Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw, ]
“Was Tom Clark mistaken? Was it Fancy? Was it Fear? . . .One night he went to a theatre, but left it in a hurry, when the actor, who was playing Macbeth, looked straight into his private box and said:
“‘The times have been that, when the brains were out the man would die—and there an end; But now they rise again, with twenty mortal murders On their crowns, to push us from our seats!’ [Act 3, Scene 4, MacBeth.]