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Updated: May 5, 2025
The peasant visionaries that are, the landlord duelists that were, and the whole hurly-burly of legends Cuchulain fighting the sea for two days until the waves pass over him and he dies, Caolte storming the palace of the gods, Oisin seeking in vain for three hundred years to appease his insatiable heart with all the pleasures of faeryland, these two mystics walking up and down upon the mountains uttering the central dreams of their souls in no less dream-laden sentences, and this mind that finds them so interesting all are a portion of that great Celtic phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, nor any angel revealed.
What if there be spirits around and about, invisible to the common eye, but whom we can submit to our control; and what if this rod be charged with some occult fluid, that runs through all creation, and can be so disciplined as to establish communication wherever life and thought can reach to beings that live and think? So would the mystics of old explain what perplexes me.
The Pharisee becomes a selfish individualist just because he has forgotten this; the Essene, a selfish "mystic" for the same reason; Philo and the Jewish mystics of Alexandria lose in like manner all notion that Jehovah is the lawgiver, and ruler, and archetype of family and of national life.
Take the great doctrinal and experimental Puritans, such as John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Richard Baxter, John Howe, and Jonathan Edwards, and add on to them the greatest and best mystics, such as Jacob Behmen, Thomas A Kempis, Francis Fenelon, Jeremy Taylor, Samuel Rutherford, Robert Leighton, and William Law, and you will have the profoundest, the most complete, the most perfect, and, I will add, the most fascinating and enthralling of spiritual teaching in all the world.
It implies as much, in a way, as the cultivation of the intellect and the sympathies, that we should live chiefly in the spirit, in which alone, as philosophers and mystics have rightly understood, there is safety from the worst miseries and room for the most complete happiness.
It is so with the Laplanders, of whom Tornoeus reports that of those instructed in the magical art 'only a few are capable of it. 'Some, he says, 'are naturally magicians. And this fact is emphatically insisted upon by the mystics of our own middle ages, who state that a man must be born a magician; in other words, that the gift is constitutional, though developed by practice and art.
There were more things in these same mystics than are dreamt of in his philosophy; and he has missed seeing them, because he has put himself rather in the attitude of a judge than of an inquirer. He has not had respect and trust enough for the men and women of whom he writes; and is too much inclined to laugh at them, and treat them de haut en bas.
In every society belief in the supernatural is privileged belief, and there accrue to it all the advantages and disadvantages of privilege.... But mystics and religionists are not silent. On the contrary, they become, having passed through a religious experience, voluble.
On the great, smoke-blackened metal plate over which those mystics passed who had to walk through fire, there lay plenty of charcoal, and yonder hung robes of every description. The next moment she had thrown off her own, in order to blacken her glistening white limbs and her face with soot. Among the sewing materials which the lady Euryale had laid beside the scrolls was a pair of scissors.
And the mystics teach that He still lives in the world, diffused among all the living souls on earth, striving ever to lead them to a recognition of the Real Self the Spirit Within. He is with us ever as an Abiding Spirit, a Comforter, a Helper, an Elder Brother. He is not gone from us! He is here with us now and forever, in Actual Spirit Communion!
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