IN the history of science the collector of specimens preceded the zoologist and followed the exponents of natural theology and magic.  He had ceased to study animals in the spirit of the authors of the Bestiaries, for whom the ant was incarnate industry, the panther an emblem, surprisingly enough, of Christ, the polecat a shocking example of uninhibited lasciviousness.  But, except in a rudimentary way, he was not yet a physiologist, ecologist, or student of animal behaviour.  His primary concern was to make a census, to catch, kill, stuff, and describe as many kinds of beasts as he could lay his hands on.

      Like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins.  In relation to the fauna of these regions we are not yet zoologists, we are mere naturalists and collectors of specimens.  The fact is unfortunate; but we have to accept it, we have to make the best of it.  However lowly, the work of the collector must be done, before we can proceed to the higher scientific tasks of classification, analysis, experiment, and theory making.

      Like the giraffe and the duck-billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable.  Nevertheless they exist, they are facts of observation; and as such, they cannot be ignored by anyone who is honestly trying to understand the world in which he lives.

      It is difficult, it is all but impossible, to speak of mental events except in similes drawn from the more familiar universe of material things.  If I have made use of geographical and zoological metaphors, it is not wantonly, out of a mere addiction to picturesque language.  It is because such metaphors express very forcibly the essential otherness of the mind's far continents, the complete autonomy and self-sufficiency of their inhabitants.  A man consists of what I may call an Old World of personal consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of New Worlds - the not too distant Virginias and Carolinas of the personal subconscious and the vegetative soul; the Far West of the collective unconscious, with its flora of symbols, its tribes of aboriginal archetypes; and, across another, vaster ocean, at the antipodes of everyday consciousness, the world of Visionary Experience.

      If you go to New South Wales, you will see marsupials hopping about the countryside.  And if you go to the antipodes of the self-conscious mind, you will encounter all sorts of creatures at least as odd as kangaroos.  You do not invent these creatures any more than you invent marsupials.  They have their own lives in complete independence.  A man cannot control them.  All he can do is to go to the mental equivalent of Australia and look around him.

      Some people never consciously discover their antipodes.  Others make an occasional landing.  Yet others (but they are few) find it easy to go and come as they please.  For the naturalist of the mind, the collector of psychological specimens, the primary need is some safe, easy, and reliable method of transporting himself and others from the Old World to the New, from the continent of familiar cows and horses to the continent of the wallaby and the platypus.

      Two such methods exist.  Neither of them is perfect; but both are sufficiently reliable, sufficiently easy, and sufficiently safe to justify their employment by those who know what they are doing.  In the first case the soul is transported to its far-off destination by the aid of a chemical - either mescalin or lysergic acid [diethylamide, or LSD].  In the second case, the vehicle is psychological in nature, and the passage to the mind's antipodes is accompanied by hypnosis.  The two vehicles carry the consciousness to the same region; but the drug has the longer range and takes its passengers further into the terra incognita. [See Appendix I.]

 

How and why does hypnosis produce its observed effects?  We do not know.  For our present purposes, however, we do not have to know.  All that is necessary, in this context, is to record the fact that some hypnotic subjects are transported, in the trance state, to a region in the mind's antipodes, where they find the equivalent of marsupials - strange psychological creatures leading an autonomous existence according to the law of their own being.

      About the physiological effects of mescalin we know a little.  Probably (for we are not yet certain) it interferes with the enzyme system that regulates cerebral functioning.  By doing so it lowers the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for focusing mind on the problems of life on the surface of our planet.  This lowering of what may be called the biological efficiency of the brain seems to permit the entry into consciousness of certain classes of mental events, which are normally excluded, because they possess no survival value.  Similar intrusions of biologically useless, but aesthetically and sometimes spiritually valuable, material may occur as the result of illness of fatigue; or they may be induced by fasting, or a period of confinement in a place of darkness and complete silence. [See Appendix II.]

      A person under the influence of mescalin or lysergic acid [diethylamide] will stop seeing visions when given a large dose of nicotinic acid.  This helps to explain the effectiveness of fasting as an inducer of visionary experience.  By reducing the amount of available sugar, fasting lowers the brain's biological efficiency and so makes possible the entry into consciousness of material possessing no survival value.  Moreover, by causing a vitamin deficiency, it removes from the blood that known inhibitor of visions, nicotinic acid.  Another inhibitor of visionary experience is ordinary, everyday, perceptual experience.  Experimental psychologists have found that, if you confine a man to a 'restricted environment', where there is no light, no sound, nothing to smell, and, if you put him in a tepid bath with only one almost imperceptible thing to touch, the victim will very soon start 'seeing things', 'hearing things', and having strange bodily sensations.

      Milarepa, in his Himalayan cavern, and the anchorites of the Thebaid followed essentially the same procedure and got essentially the same results.  A thousand pictures of the Temptations of St Anthony bear witness to the effectiveness of restricted diet and restricted environment.  Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation.  If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is because they long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing.  Empirically and from the reports of other ascetics, they know that fasting and a restricted environment will transport them where they long to go.  Their self-inflicted punishment may be the door to paradise.  (It may also - and this is a point which will be discussed in a later paragraph - be a door into the infernal regions.)

      From the point of view of an inhabitant of the Old World, marsupials are exceedingly odd.  But oddity is not the same as randomness.  Kangaroos and wallabies may lack verisimilitude; but their improbability repeats itself and obeys recognizable laws.  The same is true of the psychological creatures inhabiting the remoter regions of our minds.  The experiences encountered under the influence of mescalin or deep hypnosis are certainly strange; but they are strange with a certain regularity, strange according to a pattern.

 

What are the common features which the pattern imposes upon our visionary experiences?  First and most important is the experience of light.  Everything seen by those who visit the mind's antipodes is brilliantly illuminated and seems to shine from within.  All colours are intensified to a pitch far beyond anything seen in the normal state, and at the same time the mind's capacity for recognizing fine distinction of tone and hue is notably heightened.

      In this respect there is a marked difference between these visionary experiences and ordinary dreams.  Most dreams are without colour, or else are only partially or feebly coloured.  On the other hand, the visions met with under the influence of mescalin or hypnosis are always intensely and, one might say, preternaturally brilliant in colour.  Professor Calvin Hall, who has collected records of many thousands of dreams, tells us that about two-thirds of all dreams are in black and white.  'Only one dream in three is coloured, or has some colour in it.'  A few people dream entirely in colour; a few never experience colour in their dreams; the majority sometimes dream in colour, but more often do not.

      'We have come to the conclusion,' writes Dr Hall, 'that colour in dreams yields no information about the personality of the dreamer.'  I agree with this conclusion.  Colour in dreams and visions tells us no more about the personality of the beholder than does colour in the external world.  A garden in July is perceived as brightly coloured.  The perception tells us something about sunshine, flowers, and butterflies, but little or nothing about our own selves.  In the same way the fact that we see brilliant colours in our visions and in some of our dreams tells us something about the fauna of the mind's antipodes, but nothing whatever about the personality who inhabits what I have called the Old World of the mind.

      Most dreams are concerned with the dreamer's private wishes and instinctive urges, and with the conflicts which arise when these wishes and urges are thwarted by a disapproving conscience or a fear of public opinion.  The story of these drives and conflicts is told in terms of dramatic symbols, and in most dreams the symbols are uncoloured.  Why should this be the case?  The answer, I presume, is that, to be effective, symbols do not require to be coloured.  The letters in which we write about roses need not be red, and we can describe the rainbow by means of ink marks on white paper.  Textbooks are illustrated by line engravings and half-tone plates; and these uncoloured images and diagrams effectively convey information.

      What is good enough for the waking consciousness is evidently good enough for the personal subconscious, which finds it possible to express its meanings through uncoloured symbols.  Colour turns out to be a kind of touchstone of reality.  That which is given is coloured; that which our symbol-creating intellect and fancy put together is uncoloured.  Thus the external world is perceived as coloured.  Dreams, which are not given but fabricated by the personal subconscious, are generally in black and white.  (It is worth remarking that, in most people's experience, the most brightly coloured dreams are those of landscapes, in which there is no drama, no symbolic reference to conflict, merely the presentation to consciousness of a given, non-human fact.)

      The images of the archetypal world are symbolic; but since we, as individuals, do not fabricate them, but find them 'out there' in the collective unconscious, they exhibit some at least of the characteristics of given reality and are coloured.  The non-symbolic inhabitants of the mind's antipodes exist in their own right, and like the given facts of the external world are coloured.  Indeed, they are far more intensely coloured than external data.  This may be explained, at least in part, by the fact that our perceptions of the external world are habitually clouded by the verbal notions in terms of which we do our thinking.  We are for ever attempting to convert things into signs for the most intelligible abstractions of our own invention.  But in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.

      At the antipodes of the mind, we are more or less completely free of language, outside the system of conceptual thought.  Consequently our perception of visionary objects possesses all the freshness, all the naked intensity, of experiences which have never been verbalized, never assimilated to lifeless abstractions.  Their colour (that hallmark of givenness) shines forth with a brilliance which seems to us preternatural, because it is in fact entirely natural - entirely natural in the sense of being entirely unsophisticated by language or the scientific, philosophical, and utilitarian notions, by means of which we ordinarily re-create the given world in our own drearily human image.

     

In his Candle of Vision, the Irish poet A.E. (George Russell) has analysed his visionary experiences with remarkable acuity.  'When I meditate,' he writes, 'I feel in the thoughts and images that throng about me the reflections of personality; but there are also windows in the soul, through which can be seen images created not by human but by the divine imagination.'

      Our linguistic habits lead us into error.  For example, we are apt to say, 'I imagine', when what we should have said is, 'The curtain was lifted that I might see'.  Spontaneous or induced, visions are never our personal property.  Memories belonging to the ordinary self have no place in them.  The things seen are wholly unfamiliar.  'There is no reference or resemblance', in Sir William Herschel's phrase, 'to any objects recently seen or even thought of.'  When faces appear, they are never the faces of friends or acquaintances.  We are out of the Old World, and exploring the antipodes.

      For most of us most of the time, the world of everyday experience seems rather dim and drab.  But for a few people often, and for a fair number occasionally, some of the brightness of visionary experience spills over, as it were, into common seeing, and the everyday universe is transfigured.  Though still recognizably itself, the Old World takes on the quality of the mind's antipodes.  Here is an entirely characteristic description of this transfiguration of the everyday world.

      'I was sitting on the seashore, half listening to a friend arguing violently about something which merely bored me.  Unconsciously to myself, I looked at a film of sand I had picked up on my hand, when I suddenly saw the exquisite beauty of every little grain of it; instead of being dull, I saw that each particle was made up on a perfect geometrical pattern, with sharp angles, from each of which a brilliant shaft of light was reflected, while each tiny crystal shone like a rainbow.... The rays crossed and recrossed, making exquisite patterns of such beauty that they left me breathless.... Then, suddenly, my consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital beauty.  For a second or two the whole world appeared as a blaze of glory.  When it died down, it left me with something I have never forgotten and which constantly reminds me of the beauty locked up in every minute speck of material around us.'

      Similarly, George Russell writes of seeing the world illumined by 'an intolerable lustre of light'; of finding himself looking at 'landscapes as lovely as a lost Eden'; of beholding a world where the 'colours were brighter and purer, and yet made a softer harmony'.  Again, 'the winds were sparkling and diamond clear, and yet full of colour as an opal, as they glittered through the valley, and I knew the Golden Age was all about me, and it was we who had been blind to it, but that it had never passed away from the world.'

      Many similar descriptions are to be found in the poets and in the literature of religious mysticism.  One thinks, for example, of Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of immortality in Early Childhood; of certain lyrics by George Herbert and Henry Vaughan; of Traherne's Centuries of Meditations; of the passage in his autobiography, where Father Surin describes the miraculous transformation of an enclosed convent garden into a fragment of heaven.

      Preternatural light and colour are common to all visionary experiences.  And along with light and colour there goes, in every case, a recognition of heightened significance.  The self-luminous objects which we see in the mind's antipodes possess a meaning, and this meaning is, in some sort, as intense as their colour.  Significance here is identical with being; for, at the mind's antipodes, objects do not stand for anything but themselves.  The images which appear in the nearer reaches of the collective subconscious have meaning in relation to the basic facts of human experience; but here, at the limits of the visionary world, we are confronted by facts which, like the facts of external nature, are independent of man, both individually and collectively, and exist in their own right.  And their meaning consists precisely in this, that they are intensely themselves and, being intensely themselves, are manifestations of the essential givenness, the non-human otherness of the universe.

 

Light, colour, and significance do not exist in isolation.  They modify, or are manifested by, objects.  Are there any special classes of objects common to most visionary experiences?  The answer is: Yes, there are.  Under mescalin and hypnosis, as well as in spontaneous visions, certain classes of perceptual experiences turn up again and again.

      The typical mescalin or lysergic acid [diethylamide] experience begins with perceptions of coloured, moving, living geometrical forms.  In time, pure geometry becomes concrete, and the visionary perceives not patterns but patterned things, such as carpets, carvings, mosaics.  These give place to vast and complicated buildings, in the midst of landscapes, which change continuously, passing from richness to more intensely coloured richness, from grandeur to deepening grandeur.  Heroic figures, of the kind that Blake called 'The Seraphim', may make their appearance, alone or in multitudes.  Fabulous animals move across the scene.  Everything is novel and amazing.  Almost never does the visionary see anything that reminds him of his own past.  he is not remembering scenes, persons, or objects, and he is not inventing them; he is looking on at a new creation.

      The raw material for this creation is provided by the visual experiences of ordinary life; but the moulding of this material into forms is the work of someone who is most certainly not the self, who originally had the experiences, or who later recalled and reflected upon them.  They are (to quote the words used by Dr J.R. Smythies in a recent paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry) 'the work of a highly differentiated mental compartment, without any apparent connection, emotional or volitional, with the aims, interests, or feelings of the person concerned'.

      Here, in quotation or condensed paraphrase, is Weir Mitchell's account of the visionary world to which he was transported by peyote, the cactus which is the natural source of mescalin.

      At his entry into that world he saw a host of 'star points' and what looked like 'fragments of stained glass'.  Then came 'delicate floating films of colour'.  These were displaced by an 'abrupt rush of colourless points of white light', sweeping across the field of vision.  Next there were zigzag lines of very bright colours, which somehow turned into swelling clouds of still more brilliant hues.  Buildings now made their appearance, and then landscapes.  There was a Gothic tower of elaborate design with worn statues in the doorways or on stone brackets.  'As I gazed, every projecting angle, cornice and even the faces of the stones at their joinings were by degrees covered or hung with  clusters of what seemed to be huge precious stones, but uncut stones, some being more like masses of transparent fruit.... All seemed to possess an interior light'.  The Gothic tower gave place to a mountain, a cliff of inconceivable height, a colossal birdclaw carved in stone and projecting over the abyss, an endless unfurling of coloured draperies, and an efflorescence of more precious stones.  Finally there was a view of green and purple waves breaking on a beach 'with myriads of lights of the same tint as the waves'.

      Every mescalin experience, every vision arising under hypnosis, is unique; but all recognizably belong to the same species.  The landscapes, the architectures, the clustering gems, the brilliant and intricate patterns - these, in their atmosphere of preternatural light, preternatural colour, and preternatural significance, are the stuff of which the mind's antipodes are made.  Why this should be so, we have no idea.  It is a brute fact of experience which, whether we like it or not, we have to accept - just as we have to accept the fact of kangaroos.

 

From these facts of visionary experience let us now pass to the accounts preserved in all the cultural traditions, of Other Worlds - the worlds inhabited by the gods, by the spirits of the dead, by man in his primal state of innocence.

      Reading these accounts, we are immediately struck by the close similarity between induced or spontaneous visionary experience and the heavens and fairylands of folklore and religion.  Preternatural light, preternatural intensity of colouring, preternatural significance - these are characteristic of all the Other Worlds and Golden Ages.  And in virtually every case this preternaturally significant light shines on, or shines out of, a landscape of such surpassing beauty that words cannot express it.

      Thus in the Greco-Roman tradition we find the lovely Garden of the Hesperides, the Elysian Plain, and the fair Island of Leuke, to which Achilles was transported.  Memnon went to another luminous island, somewhere in the East.  Odysseus and Penelope travelled in the opposite direction and enjoyed their immortality with Circe in Italy.  Still further to the West were the Islands of the Blest, first mentioned by Hesiod and so firmly believed in that, as late as the first century B.C., Sertorius planned to send a squadron from Spain to discover them.

      Magically lovely islands reappear in the folklore of the Celts and, at the opposite side of the world, in that of the Japanese.  And between Avalon in the extreme West and Horaisan in the Far East, there is the land of Uttarakuru, the Other World of the Hindus.  'The land,' we read in the Ramayana, 'is watered by lakes with golden lotuses.  There are rivers by thousands, full of leaves of the colour of sapphire and lapis lazuli; and the lakes, resplendent like the morning sun, are adorned by golden beds of red lotus.  The country all around is covered by jewels and precious stones, with gay beds of blue lotus, golden-petalled.  Instead of sand, pearls, gems, and gold form the banks of the rivers, which are overhung with trees of fire-bright gold.  These trees perpetually bear flowers and fruit, give forth a sweet fragrance and abound with birds.'

      Uttarakuru, we see, resembles the landscapes of the mescalin experience in being rich with precious stones.  And this characteristic is common to virtually all the Other Worlds of religious tradition.  Every paradise abounds in gems, or at least in gem-like objects resembling, as Weir Mitchell puts it, 'transparent fruit'.  Here, for example, is Ezekiel's version of the Garden of Eden.  'Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God.  Every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald and the carbuncle, and gold.... Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth ... thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.'  The Buddhist paradises are adorned with similar 'stones of fire'.  Thus, the Western Paradise of the Pure Land Sect is walled with silver, gold, and beryl; has lakes with jewelled banks and a profusion of glowing lotuses, within which the Bodhisattvas sit enthroned.

      In describing their Other Worlds, the Celts and Teutons speak very little of precious stones, but have much to say of another and, for them, equally wonderful substance - glass.  The Welsh had a blessed land called Ynisvitrin, the Isle of Glass; and one of the names of the Germanic kingdom of the dead was Glasberg.  One is reminded of the Sea of Glass in the Apocalypse.

 

Most paradises are adorned with buildings, and, like the trees, the waters, the hills and fields, these buildings are bright with gems.  We are all familiar with the New Jerusalem.  'And the building of the wall of it was of jasper, and the city was of pure gold, like unto clear glass.  And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones.'

      Similar descriptions are to be found in the eschatological literature of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.  Heaven is always a place of gems.  Why should this be the case?  Those who think of all human activities in terms of a social and economic frame of reference will give some such answer as this: Gems are very rare on earth.  Few people possess them.  To compensate themselves for these facts, the spokesmen for the poverty-stricken majority have filled their imaginary heavens with precious stones.  This 'pie in the sky' hypothesis contains, no doubt, some element of truth; but it fails to explain why precious stones should have come to be regarded as precious in the first place.

      Men have spent enormous amounts of time, energy, and money on the finding, mining, and cutting of coloured pebbles.  Why?  The utilitarian can offer no explanation for such fantastic behaviour.  But as soon as we take into account the facts of visionary experience, everything becomes clear.  In vision, men perceive a profusion of what Ezekiel calls 'stones of fire', of what Weir Mitchell describes as 'transparent fruit'.  These things are self-luminous, exhibit a preternatural brilliance of colour and possess a preternatural significance.  The material objects which most nearly resemble these sources of visionary illumination are gem-stones.  To acquire such a stone is to acquire something whose preciousness is guaranteed by the fact that it exists in the Other World.

      Hence man's otherwise inexplicable passion for gems and hence his attribution to precious stones of therapeutic and magical virtue.  The causal chain, I am convinced, begins in the psychological Other World of visionary experience, descends to earth, and mounts again to the theological Other World of heaven.  In this context the words of Socrates, in the Phaedo, take on a new significance.  There exists, he tells us, an ideal world above and beyond the world of matter.  'In this other earth the colours are much purer and much more brilliant than they are down here.... The very mountains, the very stones have a richer gloss, a lovelier transparency and intensity of hue.  The precious stones of this lower world, our highly prized carnelians, jaspers, emeralds, and all the rest, are but the tiny fragments of these stones above.  In the other earth there is no stone but is precious and exceeds in beauty every gem of ours.'

      In other words, precious stones are precious because they bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary.  'The view of that world,' says Plato, 'is a vision of blessed beholders'; for to see things 'as they are in themselves' is bliss unalloyed and inexpressible.

      Among people who have no knowledge of precious stones or of glass, heaven is adorned not with minerals, but flowers.  Preternaturally brilliant flowers bloom in most of the Other Worlds described by primitive eschatologists, and even in the begemmed and glassy paradises of the more advanced religions they have their place.  One remembers the lotus of Hindu and Buddhist tradition, the roses and lilies of the West.

      'God first planted a garden.'  The statement expresses a deep psychological truth.  Horticulture has its source - or at any rate one of its sources - in the Other World of the mind's antipodes.  When worshippers offer flowers at the altar, they are returning to the gods things which they know, or (if they are not visionaries) obscurely feel, to be indigenous of heaven.

      And this return to the source is not merely symbolical; it is also a matter of immediate experience.  For the traffic between our Old World and its antipodes, between Here and Beyond, travels along a two-way street.  Gems, for example, come from the soul's visionary heaven; but they also lead the soul back to that heaven.  Contemplating them, men find themselves (as the phrase goes) transported - carried away towards that Other Earth of the Platonic dialogue, the magical place where every pebble is a precious stone.  And the same effects may be produced by artifacts of glass and metal, by tapers burning in the dark, by brilliantly coloured images and ornaments, by flowers, shells, and feathers, by landscapes seen, as Shelley from the Euganean Hills saw Venice, in the transfiguring light of dawn or sunset.

      Indeed, we may risk a generalization and say that whatever, in nature or in a work of art, resembles one of those intensely significant, inwardly glowing objects encountered at the mind's antipodes, is capable of inducing, if only in a partial and attenuated form, the visionary experience.  At this point a hypnotist will remind us that, if he can be induced to stare intently at a shiny object, a patient may go into trance; and that if he goes into trance, or if he goes only into reverie, he may very well see visions within and a transfigured world without.

      But how, precisely, and why does the view of a shiny object induce a trance or a state of reverie?  Is it, as the Victorians maintained, a simple matter of eye strain resulting in general nervous exhaustion?  Or shall we explain the phenomenon in purely psychological terms - as concentration pushed to the point of mono-ideism and leading to dissociation?

      But there is a third possibility.  Shiny objects may remind our unconscious of what it enjoys at the mind's antipodes, and these obscure intimations of life in the Other World are so fascinating that we pay less attention to this world and so become capable of experiencing consciously something of that which, unconsciously, is always with us.

     

We see then that there are in nature certain scenes, certain classes of objects, certain materials, possessed of the power to transport the beholder's mind in the direction of its antipodes, out of the everyday Here and towards the Other World of Vision.  Similarly, in the realm of art, we find certain works, even certain classes of works, in which the same transporting power is manifest.  These vision-inducing works may be executed in vision-inducing materials, such as glass, metal, gems, or gem-like pigments.  In other cases their power is due to the fact that they render, in some peculiarly expressive way, some transporting scene or object.

      The best vision-inducing art is produced by men and women who have themselves had the visionary experience; but it is also possible for any reasonably good artist, simply by following an approved recipe, to create works which shall have at least some transporting power.

      Of all the vision-inducing arts that which depends most completely on its raw materials is, of course, the art of the goldsmith and jeweller.  Polished metals and precious stones are so intrinsically transporting that even a Victorian, even an Art Nouveau jewel is a thing of power.  And when to this natural magic of glinting metal and self-luminous stone is added the other magic of noble forms and colours artfully blended, we find ourselves in the presence of a genuine talisman.

      Religious art has always and everywhere made use of these vision-inducing materials.  The shrine of gold, the chryselephantine statue, the jewelled symbol or image, the glittering furniture of the altar - we find these things in contemporary Europe as in ancient Egypt, in India and China as among the Greeks, the Incas, the Aztecs.

      The products of the goldsmith's art are intrinsically numinous.  They have their place at the very heart of every Mystery, in every holy of holies.  This sacred jewellery has always been associated with the light of lamps and candles.  For Ezekiel, a gem was a stone of fire.  Conversely, a flame is a living gem, endowed with all the transporting power that belongs to the precious stone and, to a lesser degree, to polished metal.  This transporting power of flame increases in proportion to the depth and extent of the surrounding darkness.  The most impressively numinous temples are caverns of twilight, in which a few tapers give life to the transporting, other-worldly treasures on the altar.

      Glass is hardly less effective as an inducer of visions than are the natural gems.  In certain respects, indeed, it is more effective, for the simple reason that there is more of it.  Thanks to glass, a whole building - the Sainte-Chapelle, for example, the cathedrals of Chartres and Sens - could be turned into something magical and transporting.  Thanks to glass, Paolo Uccello could design a circular jewel thirteen feet in diameter - his great window of the Resurrection, perhaps the most extraordinary single work of vision-inducing art ever produced.

      For the men of the Middle Ages, it is evident, visionary experience was supremely valuable.  So valuable, indeed, that they were ready to pay for it in hard-earned cash.  In the twelfth century collecting-boxes were placed in the churches for the upkeep and installation of stained-glass windows.  Suger, the Abbot of Saint-Denis, tells us that they were always full.

 

But self-respecting artists cannot be expected to go on doing what their fathers have already done supremely well.  In the fourteenth century colour gave place to grisaille, and windows ceased to be vision-inducing.  When, in the later fifteenth century, colour came into fashion again, the glass painters felt the desire, and found themselves, at the same time, technically equipped, to imitate Renaissance painting in transparency.  The results were often interesting; but they were not transporting.

      Then came the Reformation.  The Protestants disapproved of visionary experience and attributed a magical virtue to the printed word.  In a church with clear windows the worshippers could read their Bibles and prayer books and were not tempted to escape from the sermon into the Other World.  On the Catholic side the men of the Counter-Reformation found themselves in two minds.  They thought visionary experience was a good thing, but they also believed in the supreme value of print.

      In the new churches stained glass was rarely installed, and in many of the older churches it was wholly or partially replaced by clear glass.  The unobscured light permitted the faithful to follow the service in their books, and at the same time to see the vision-inducing works created by the new generations of baroque sculptors and architects.  These transporting works were executed in metal and polished stone.  Wherever the worshipper turned, he found the glint of bronze, the rich radiance of coloured marble, the unearthly whiteness of statuary.

      On the rare occasions when the Counter-Reformation made use of glass, it was as a surrogate for diamonds, not for rubies or sapphires.  Faceted prisms entered religious art in the seventeenth century, and in Catholic churches they dangle to this day from innumerable chandeliers.  (These charming and slightly ridiculous ornaments are among the very few vision-inducing devices permitted in Islam.  Mosques have no images or reliquaries; but in the Near East, at any rate, their austerity is sometimes mitigated by the transporting glitter of rococo crystal.)

      From glass, stained or cut, we pass to marble and the other stones that take a high polish and can be used in mass.  The fascination exercised by such stones may be gauged by the amount of time and trouble spent in obtaining them.  At Baalbek, for example, and, two or three hundred miles further inland, at Palmyra, we find among the ruins columns of pink granite from Aswan.  These great monoliths were quarried in Upper Egypt, were floated in barges down the Nile, were towed across the Mediterranean to Byblos or Tripolis, and from thence were hauled, by oxen, mules, or men, uphill to Homs, and from Homs southward to Baalbek or east, across the desert, to Palmyra.

      What a labour of giants!  And, from the utilitarian point of view, how marvellously pointless!  But in fact, of course, there was a point - a point that existed in a region beyond mere utility.  Polished to a visionary glow, the rosy shafts proclaimed their manifest kinship with the Other World.  At the cost of enormous efforts men had transported these stones from their quarry on the Tropic of Cancer; and now, by way of recompense, the stones were transporting their transporters half-way to the mind's visionary antipodes.

 

The question of utility and of the motives that lie beyond utility arises once more in relation to ceramics.  Few things are more useful, more absolutely indispensable, than pots and plates and jugs.  But at the same time few human beings concern themselves less with utility than do the collectors of porcelain and glazed earthenware.  To say that these people have an appetite for beauty is not a sufficient explanation.  The commonplace ugliness of the surroundings in which find ceramics are so often displayed is proof enough that what their owners crave is not beauty in all its manifestations, but only a special kind of beauty - the beauty of curved reflections, of softly lustrous glazes, of sleek and smooth surfaces.  In a word, the beauty that transports the beholder, because it reminds him, obscurely or explicitly, of the preternatural lights and colours of the Other World.  In the main, the art of the potter has been a secular art - but a secular art which its innumerable devotees have treated with an almost idolatrous reverence.  From time to time, however, this secular art has been placed at the service of religion.  Glazed tiles have found their way into mosques and, here and there, into Christian churches.  From China come shining ceramic images of gods and saints.  In Italy Luca della Robbia created a heaven of blue glaze, for his lustrous white madonnas and Christ children.  Baked clay is cheaper than marble and, suitably treated, almost as transporting.

      Plato and, during a later flowering of religious art, St Thomas Aquinas maintained that pure, bright colours were of the very essence off artistic beauty.  A Matisse, in that case, would be intrinsically superior to a Goya or a Rembrandt.  One has only to translate the philosophers' abstractions into concrete terms to see that this equation of beauty in general with bright, pure colours is absurd.  But though untenable as it stands, the venerable doctrine is not altogether devoid of truth.

      Bright, pure colours are characteristic of the Other World.  Consequently works of art painted in bright, pure colours are capable, in suitable circumstances, of transporting the beholder's mind in the direction of its antipodes.  Bright, pure colours are of the essence not of beauty in general but only of a special kind of beauty, the visionary.  Gothic churches are Greek temples, the statues of the thirteenth century after Christ and of the fifth century before Christ - all were brilliantly coloured.

      For the Greeks and the men of the Middle Ages, this art of the merry-go-round and the waxwork show was evidently transporting.  To us it seems deplorable.  We prefer our Praxiteleses plain, our marble and our limestone au naturel.  Why should our modern taste be so different, in this respect, from that of our ancestors?  The reason, I presume, is that we have become too familiar with bright, pure pigments to be greatly moved by them.  We admire them, of course, when we see them in some grand or subtle composition; but in themselves and as such, they leave us untransported.

 

Sentimental lovers of the past complain of the drabness of our age and contrast it unfavourably with the gay brilliance of earlier times.  In actual fact, of course, there is a far greater profusion of colour in the modern than in the ancient world.  Lapis lazuli and Tyrian purple were costly rarities; the rich velvets and brocades of princely wardrobes, the woven or painted hangings of medieval and early modern houses, were reserved for a privileged minority.

      Even the great ones of the earth possessed very few of these vision-inducing treasures.  As late as the seventeenth century, monarchs owned so little furniture that they had to travel from palace to palace with wagon-loads of plate and bedspreads, of carpets and tapestries.  For the great mass of the people there were only homespun and a few vegetable dyes; and, for interior decoration, there were at best the earth colours, at worst (and in most cases) 'the floor of plaster and the walls of dung'.

      At the antipodes of every mind lay the Other World of preternatural light and preternatural colour, of ideal gems and visionary gold.  But before every pain of eyes was only the dark squalor of the family hovel, the dust or mud of the village street, the dirty whites, the duns and goose-turd greens of ragged clothing.  Hence a passionate, an almost desperate, thirst for bright, pure colours; and hence the overpowering effect produced by such colours whenever, in church or at court, they were displayed.  Today the chemical industry turns out paints, inks, and dyes in endless variety and enormous quantities.  In our modern world there is enough bright colour to guarantee the production of billions of flags and comic strips, millions of stop signs and tail lights, fire engines and Cola containers by the hundred thousand, carpets, wallpapers, and non-representational art by the square mile.

      Familiarity breeds indifference.  We have seen too much pure, bright colours at Woolworth's to find it intrinsically transporting.  And here we may note that, by its amazing capacity to give us too much of the best things, modern technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials.  The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings.  Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, films, [I have substituted 'films' for 'cigarettes' in view of the current ban on and irrelevance of cigarette advertising. - Editor's note.] and toothpaste.

      In London, fifty years ago, electric sky signs were a novelty, and so rare that they shone out of the misty darkness 'like captain jewels in the carcanet'.  Across the Thames, on the old Shot Tower, the gold and ruby letters were magically lovely - une féerie.  Today the fairies are gone.  Neon is everywhere and, being everywhere, has no effect upon us, except perhaps to make us pine nostalgically for primeval night.

      Only in floodlighting do we recapture the unearthly significance which used, in the age of oil and wax, even in the age of gas and the carbon filament, to shine forth from practically any island of brightness in the boundless dark.  Under the searchlights Notre-Dame de Paris and the Roman Forum are visionary objects, having power to transport the beholder's mind towards the Other World. [See Appendix III.]

      Modern technology has had the same devaluating effect on glass and polished metal as it has had on fairy lamps and pure, bright colours.  By John of Patmos and his contemporaries walls of glass were conceivable only in the New Jerusalem.  Today they are a feature of every up-to-date office building and bungalow.  And this glut of glass has been paralleled by a glut of chrome and nickel, of stainless steel and aluminium and a host of alloys old and new.  Metal surfaces wink at us in the bathroom, shine from the kitchen sink, go glittering across country in cars and trains.

      Those rich convex reflections, which so fascinated Rembrandt that he never tired of rendering them in paint, are now the commonplaces of home and street and factory.  The fine point of selfdom pleasure has been blunted.  What was once a needle of visionary delight has now become a piece of disregarded linoleum.

     

I have spoken so far only of vision-inducing materials and their psychological devaluation by modern technology.  It is time now to consider the purely artistic devices, by means of which vision-inducing works have been created.

      Light and colour tend to take on a preternatural quality when seen in the midst of environing darkness.  Fra Angelico's Crucifixion at the Louvre has a black background.  So have the frescoes of the Passion painted by Andrea del Castagno for the nuns of Santa Apollonia at Florence.  Hence the visionary intensity, the strange transporting power of these extraordinary works.  In an entirely different artistic and psychological context the same device was often used by Goya in his etchings.  Those flying men, that horse on a tightrope, the huge and ghastly incarnation of Fear - all of them stand out, as though floodlit, against a background of impenetrable night.

      With the development of chiaroscuro, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, night came out of the background and installed itself within the picture, which became the scene of a kind of Manichean struggle between Light and Darkness.  At the time they were painted these works must have possessed a real transporting power.  To us, who have seen altogether too much of this kind of thing, most of them seem merely theatrical.  But a few still retain their magic.  There is Caravaggio's Entombment, for example; there are a dozen magical paintings by Georges de La Tour; [See Appendix IV.] there are all those visionary Rembrandts where the lights have the intensity and significance of light at the mind's antipodes, where the darks are full of rich potentialities waiting their turn to become actual, to make themselves glowingly present to our consciousness.

      In most cases the ostensible subject-matter of Rembrandt's pictures is taken from real life or the Bible - a boy at his lessons or Bathsheba bathing; a woman wading in a pond or Christ before His judges.  Occasionally, however, these messages from the Other World are transmitted by means of a subject drawn, not from real life or history, but from the realm of archetypal symbols.  There hangs in the Louvre a Méditation du philosophe, whose symbolical subject-matter is nothing more nor less than the human mind, with its teeming darkness, its moments of intellectual and visionary illumination, its mysterious stairways winding downwards and upwards into the unknown.  The meditating philosopher sits there in his island of inner illumination; and at the opposite end of the symbolic chamber, in another, rosier island, an old woman crouches before the hearth.  The firelight touches and transfigures her face, and we see, concretely illustrated, the impossible paradox and supreme truth - that perception is (or at least can be, ought to be) the same as Revelation, that Reality shines out of every appearance, that the One is totally, infinitely present in all particulars.

      Along with the preternatural lights and colours, the gems and the ever-changing patterns, visitors to the mind's antipodes discover a world of sublimely beautiful landscapes, of living architecture, and of heroic figures.  The transporting power of many works of art is attributable to the fact that their creators have painted scenes, persons, and objects which remind the beholder of what, consciously or unconsciously, he knows about the Other World at the back of his mind.

 

Let us begin with the human or, rather, the more than human inhabitants of these far-off regions.  Blake called them the Cherubim.  And in effect that is what, no doubt, they are - the psychological originals of those beings who, in the theology of every religion, serve as intermediaries between man and the Clear Light.  The more than human personages of visionary experience never 'do anything'.  (Similarly the blessed never 'do anything' in heaven.)  They are content merely to exist.

      Under many names and attired in an endless variety of costumes, these heroic figures of man's visionary experience have appeared in the religious art of every culture.  Sometimes they are shown at rest, sometimes in historical or mythological action.  But action, as we have seen, does not come naturally to the inhabitants of the mind's antipodes.  To be busy is the law of our being.  The law of theirs is to do nothing.  When we force these serene strangers to play a part in one of our all too human dramas, we are being false to visionary truth.  That is why the most transporting (though not necessarily the most beautiful) representations of 'the Cherubim' are those which show them as they are in their native habitat - doing nothing in particular.

      And that accounts for the overwhelming, the more than merely aesthetic, impression made upon the beholder by the great masterpieces of religious art.  The sculptured figures of Egyptian gods and god-kings, the Madonnas and Pantocrators of the Byzantine mosaics, the Bodhisattvas and Lohans of China, the seated Buddhas of Khmer, the steles and statues of Copan, the wooden idols of tropical Africa - these have one characteristic in common: a profound stillness.  And it is precisely this which gives them their numinous quality, their power to transport the beholder out of the Old World of his everyday experience, far away, towards the visionary antipodes of the human psyche.

      There is, of course, nothing intrinsically excellent about static art.  Static or dynamic, a bad piece of work is always a bad piece of work.  All I mean to imply is that, other things being equal, a heroic figure at rest has a greater transporting power than one which is shown in action.

      The Cherubim live in Paradise and the New Jerusalem - in other words, among prodigious buildings set in rich, bright gardens with distant prospects of plain and mountain, of rivers and the sea.  This is a matter of immediate experience, a psychological fact which has been recorded in folklore and the religious literature of every age and country.  It has not, however, been recorded in pictorial art.

      Reviewing the succession of human cultures, we find that landscape painting is either non-existent, or rudimentary, or of very recent development.  In Europe, a full-blown art of landscape painting has existed for only four or five centuries, in China for not more than a thousand years, in India, for all practical purposes, never.

      This is a curious fact that demands an explanation.  Why should landscapes have found their way into the visionary literature of a given epoch and a given culture, but not into the painting?  Posed in this way, the question provides its own best answer.  People may be content with the merely verbal expression of this aspect of their visionary experience and feel no need for its translation into pictorial terms.

      That this often happens in the case of individuals is certain.  Blake, for example, saw visionary landscapes, 'articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce' and 'infinitely more perfect and minutely organized than anything seen by the mental eye'.  Here is the description of such a visionary landscape, which Blake gave at one of Mrs Aders' evening parties: 'The other evening, taking a walk, I came to a meadow and at the further corner of it I saw a fold of lambs.  Coming nearer, the ground blushed with flowers, and the wattled cote and its woolly tenants were of an exquisite pastoral beauty.  But I looked again, and it proved to be no living flock, but beautiful sculpture.'

      Rendered in pigments, this vision would look, I suppose, like some impossibly beautiful blending of Constable's freshest oil sketches with an animal painting in the magically realistic style of Zurbarán's haloed lamb now in the San Diego Museum.  But Blake never produced anything remotely resembling such a picture.  He was content to talk and write about his landscape visions, and to concentrate in his painting upon 'the Cherubim'.

      What is true of an individual artist may be true of a whole school.  There are plenty of things which men experience, but do not choose to express; or they may try to express what they have experienced, but in only one of their arts.  In yet other cases they will express themselves in ways having no immediately recognizable affinity to the original experience.  In this last context Dr A.K. Coomaraswamy has some interesting things to say about the mystical art of the Far East - the art where 'denotation and connotation cannot be divided' and 'no distinction is felt between what a thing "is" and what it "signifies"'.

      The supreme example of such mystical art is the Zen-inspired landscape painting, which arose in China during the Sung period and came to new birth in Japan four centuries later.  India and the Near East have no mystical landscape painting; but they have its equivalents - 'Vaisnava painting, poetry, and music in India, where the theme is sexual love; and Sufi poetry and music in Persia [Iran], devoted to praises of intoxication.' [A.K. Coomaraswamy, THE TRANSFORMATION OF NATURE IN ART, p.40.]       

 

'Bed,' as the Italian proverb succinctly puts it, 'is the poor man's opera.'  Analogously, sex is the Hindu's Sung; wine, the Persian's Impressionism.  The reason being, of course, that the experiences of sexual union and intoxication partake of that essential otherness characteristic of all vision, including that of landscapes.

      If, at any time, men have found satisfaction in a certain kind of activity, it is to be presumed that, at periods when this satisfying activity was not manifested, there must have been some kind of equivalent for it.  In the Middle Ages, for example, men were preoccupied in an obsessive, an almost maniacal way with words and symbols.  Everything in nature was instantly recognized as the concrete illustration of some notion formulated in one of the books or legends currently regarded as sacred.

      And yet, at other periods of history men have found a deep satisfaction in recognizing the autonomous otherness of nature, including many aspects of human nature.  The experience of this otherness was expressed in terms of art, religion, or science.  What were the medieval equivalents of Constable and ecology, of bird watching and Eleusis, of microscopy and the rites of Dionysos and the Japanese Haiku?  They were to be found, I suspect, in Saturnalian orgies at one end of the scale and in mystical experience at the other.  Shrovetides, May Days, Carnivals - these permitted a direct experience of the animal otherness underlying personal and social identity.  Infused contemplation revealed the yet other otherness of the divine Not-Self.  And somewhere between the two extremes were the experiences of the visionaries and the vision-inducing arts, by means of which it was sought to recapture and re-create those experiences - the art of the jeweller, of the maker of stained glass, of the weaver of tapestries, of the painter, poet, and musician.

      In spite of a Natural History that was nothing but a set of drearily moralistic symbols, in the teeth of a theology which, instead of regarding words as the signs of things, treated things and events as the signs of biblical or Aristotelian words, our ancestors remained relatively sane.  And they achieved this feat by periodically escaping from the stifling prison of their bumptiously rationalistic philosophy, their anthropomorphic, authoritarian, and non-experimental science, their all too articulate religion, into non-verbal, other than human worlds inhabited by their instincts, by the visionary fauna of their mind's antipodes, and, beyond and yet within all the rest, by the indwelling Spirit.

 

From this wide-ranging but necessary digression, let us return to the particular case from which we set out.  Landscapes, as we have seen, are a regular feature of the visionary experience.  Descriptions of visionary landscapes occur in the ancient literature of folklore and religion; but paintings of landscapes do not make their appearance until comparatively recent times.  To what has been said, by way of explanation about psychological equivalents, I will add a few brief notes on the nature of landscape paintings as a vision-inducing art.

      Let us begin by asking a question.  What landscapes - or, more generally, what representations of natural objects - are most transporting, most intrinsically vision-inducing?  In the light of my own experiences and of what I have heard other people say about their reactions to works of art, I will risk an answer.  Other things being equal (for nothing can make up for lack of talent), the most transporting landscapes are, first, those which represent natural objects a very long way off, and, second, those which represent them at close range.

      Distance lends enchantment to the view; but so does propinquity.  A Sung painting of far-away mountains, clouds, and torrents is transporting; but so are the close-ups of tropical leaves in the Douanier Rousseau's jungles.  When I look at the Sung landscape, I am reminded (or one of my not-I's is reminded) of the crags, the boundless expanses of plain, the luminous skies and seas of the mind's antipodes.  And those disappearances into mist and cloud, those sudden emergences of some strange, intensely definite form, a weathered rock, for example, or an ancient pine tree twisted by years of struggle with the wind - these, too, are transporting.  For they remind me, consciously or unconsciously, of the Other World's essential alienness and unaccountability.

      It is the same with the close-up.  I look at those leaves with their architecture of veins, their stripes and mottlings, I peer into the depths of interlacing greenery, and something in me is reminded of those living patterns, so characteristic of the visionary world, of those endless births and proliferations of geometrical forms that turn into objects, of things that are for ever being transmuted into other things.

      This painted close-up of a jungle is what, on one of its aspects, the Other World is like, and so it transports me, it makes me see with eyes that transfigure a work of art into something else, something beyond art.

      I remember - very vividly, though it took place many years ago - a conversation with Roger Fry.  We were talking about Monet's Water Lilies.  They had no right, Roger Fry kept insisting, to be so shockingly unorganized, so totally without a proper compositional skeleton.  They were all wrong, artistically speaking.  And yet, he had to admit, and yet.... And yet, as I should now say, they were transporting.  An artist of astounding virtuosity had chosen to paint a close-up of natural objects seen in their own context and without reference to merely human notions of what's what, or what ought to be what.  Man, we like to say, is the measure of all things.  For Monet, on this occasion, water lilies were the measure of water lilies; and so he painted them.

      The same non-human point of view must be adopted by any artist who tries to render the distant scene.  How tiny, in the Chinese painting, are the travellers who make their way along the valley!  How fail the bamboo hut on the slope above them!  And all the rest of the vast landscape is emptiness and silence.  This revelation of the wilderness, living its own life according to the laws of its own being, transports the mind towards its antipodes; for primeval Nature bears a strange resemblance to that inner world where no account is taken of our personal wishes or even of the enduring concerns of man in general.

 

Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human.  When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy.  The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life.  At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up - the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic, and subatomic.  Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm's length, looked and sounded like a human being, no trace remains.

      Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover.  In the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of Lawrence's poems and novels) ceases to be himself and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe.

      And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point.  In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely.  Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of 'mere things', when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves.  Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the non-human world of the near-point is rendered in patterns.  These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers - the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus - and are elaborated, with recurrences and variations, into something transporting reminiscent of the living geometries of the Other World.

      Freer and more realistic treatments of Nature at the near-point make their appearance at a relatively recent date - but far earlier than those treatments of the distant scene, to which alone (and mistakenly) we give the name of landscape painting.  Rome, for example, had its close-up landscapes.  The fresco of a garden, which once adorned a room in Livia's villa, is a magnificent example of this form of art.

      For theological reasons, Islam had to be content, for the most part, with 'arabesques' - luxuriant and (as in visions) continually varying patterns, based upon natural objects seen at the near-point.  But even in Islam the genuine close-up landscape was not unknown.  Nothing can exceed in beauty and in vision-inducing power the mosaics of gardens and buildings in the great Omayyad mosque at Damascus.

      In medieval Europe, despite the prevailing mania for turning every datum into a concept, every immediate experience into a mere symbol of something in a book, realistic close-ups of foliage and flowers were fairly common.  We find them carved on the capitals of Gothic pillars, as in the Chapter House of Southwell Minster.  We find them in paintings of the chase - paintings whose subject was that ever-present fact of medieval life, the forest, seen as the hunter or the strayed traveller sees it, in all its bewildering intricacy of leafy detail.

      The frescoes in the papal palace at Avignon are almost the sole survivors of what, even in the time of Chaucer, was a widely practised form of secular art.  A century later this art of the forest close-up came to its self-conscious perfection in such magnificent and magical works as Pisanello's St Hubert and Paolo Uccello's Hunt in a Wood, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.  Closely related to the wall paintings of forest close-ups were the tapestries, with which the rich men of northern Europe adorned their houses.  The best of these are vision-inducing works of the highest order.  In their own way they are as heavenly, as powerfully reminiscent of what goes on at the mind's antipodes, as are the great masterpieces of landscape painting at the furthest point - Sung mountains in their enormous solitude; Ming rivers interminably lovely; the blue sub-Alpine world of Titian's distances; the England of Constable; the Italies of Turner and Corot; the Provences of Cézanne and Van Gogh; the Ile de France of Sisley and the Ile de France of Vuillard.

      Vuillard, incidentally, was a supreme master both of the transporting close-up and of the transporting distant view.  His bourgeois interiors are masterpieces of vision-inducing art, compared with which the works of such conscious and so to say professional visionaries as Blake and Odilon Redon seem feeble in the extreme.  In Vuillard's interiors every detail however trivial, however hideous even - the pattern of the late Victorian wallpaper, the Art Nouveau bibelot, the Brussels carpet - is seen and rendered as a living jewel; and all these jewels are harmoniously combined into a whole which is a jewel of a yet higher order of visionary intensity.  And when the upper-middle class inhabitants of Vuillard's New Jerusalem go for a walk, they find themselves not, as they had supposed, in the department of Seine-et-Oise, but in the Garden of Eden, in an Other World which is yet essentially the same as this world, but transfigured and therefore transporting. [ See Appendix V.]

 

I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience and of its interpretation in terms of theology, its translation into art.  But visionary experience is not always blissful.  It is sometimes terrible.  There is hell as well as heaven.

      Like heaven, the visionary hell has its preternatural light and its preternatural significance.  But the significance is intrinsically appalling and the light is 'the smoky light' of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the 'darkness visible' of Milton.  In the Journal d'une schizophrène, [M.A. Sechehaye, Paris, 1950.] the autobiographical record of a young girl's passage through madness, the world of the schizophrenic is called le pays d'eclairement - 'the country of lit-upness'.  It is a name which a mystic might have used to denote his heaven.

      But for poor Renée, the schizophrenic, the illumination is infernal - an intense electric glare without a shadow, ubiquitous and implacable.  Everything that, for healthy visionaries, is a source of bliss, brings to Renée only fear and a nightmarish sense of unreality.  The summer sunshine is malignant; the gleam of polished surfaces is suggestive not of gems but of machinery and enamelled tin; the intensity of existence which animates every object, when seen at close range and out of its utilitarian context, is felt as a menace.

      And then there is the horror of infinity.  For the healthy visionary, the perception of the infinite in a finite particular is a revelation of divine immanence; for Renée, it was a revelation of what she called 'the System', the vast cosmic mechanism which exists only to grind out guilt and punishment, solitude and unreality. [See Appendix VI.]

      Sanity is a matter of degree, and there are plenty of visionaries who see the world as Renée saw it, but contrive, nonetheless, to live outside the asylum.  For them, as for the positive visionary, the universe is transfigured - but for the worse.  Everything in it, from the stars in the sky to the dust under their feet, is unspeakably sinister or disgusting; every event is charged with a hateful significance; every object manifests the presence of an Indwelling Horror, infinite, all-powerful, eternal.

      This negatively transfigured world has found its way, from time to time, into literature and the arts.  It writhed and threatened in Van Gogh's later landscapes; it was the setting and the theme of all Kafka's stories; it was Géricault's spiritual home; [See Appendix VII.] it was inhabited by Goya during the years of his deafness and solitude; it was glimpsed by Browning when he wrote Childe Roland; it has its place, over against the theophanies, in the novels of Charles Williams.

      The negative visionary experience is often accompanied by bodily sensations of a very special and characteristic kind.  Blissful visions are generally associated with a sense of separation from the body, a feeling of de-individualization.  (It is, no doubt, this feeling of de-individualization which makes it possible for the Indians who practise the peyote cult to use the drug not merely as a short cut to the visionary world, but also as an instrument for creating a loving solidarity within the participating group.)  When the visionary experience is terrible and the world is transfigured for the worse, individualization is intensified and the negative visionary finds himself associated with a body that seems to grow progressively more dense, more tightly packed, until he finds himself at last reduced to being the agonized consciousness of an inspissated lump of matter, no bigger than a stone, that can be held between the hands.

      It is worth remarking that many of the punishments described in the various accounts of hell are punishments of pressure and constriction.  Dante's sinners are buried in mud, shut up in the trunks of trees, frozen solid in blocks of ice, crushed beneath stones.  The Inferno is psychologically true.  Many of its pains are experienced by schizophrenics, and by those who have taken mescalin or lysergic acid [diethylamide] under unfavourable conditions. [See Appendix VIII.]

      What is the nature of these unfavourable conditions?  How and why is heaven turned into hell?  In certain cases the negative visionary experience is the result of predominantly physical causes.  Mescalin tends, after ingestion, to accumulate in the liver.  If the liver is diseased, the associated mind may find itself in hell.  But what is more important for our present purposes is the fact that negative visionary experience may be induced by purely psychological means.  Fear and anger bar the way to the heavenly Other World and plunge the mescalin taker into hell.

      And what is true of the mescalin taker is also true of the person who sees visions spontaneously or under hypnosis.  Upon this psychological foundation has been reared the theological doctrine of saving faith - a doctrine to be met with in all the great religious traditions of the world.  Eschatologists have always found it difficult to reconcile their rationality and their morality with the brute facts of psychological experience.  As rationalists and moralists, they feel that good behaviour should be rewarded and that the virtuous deserve to go to heaven.  But as psychologists they know that virtue is not the sole or sufficient condition of blissful visionary experience.  They know that works alone are powerless and that it is faith, or loving confidence, which guarantees that visionary experience shall be blissful.

      Negative emotions - the fear which is the absence of confidence, the hatred, anger, or malice which exclude love - are the guarantee that visionary experience, if and when it comes, shall be appalling.  The Pharisee is a virtuous man; but his virtue is of the kind which is compatible with negative emotion.  His visionary experiences are therefore likely to be infernal rather than blissful.

      The nature of the mind is such that the sinner who repents and makes an act of faith in a higher power is more likely to have a blissful visionary experience than is the self-satisfied pillar of society with his righteous indignations, his anxiety about possessions and pretensions, his ingrained habits of blaming, despising, and condemning.  Hence the enormous importance attached, in all the great religious traditions, to the state of mind at the moment of death.

      Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience.  Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites.  Visionary experience is still within that realm.  Heaven entails hell, and 'going to heaven' is no more liberation than is the descent into horror.  Heaven is merely a vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individualized existence.

      If consciousness survives bodily death, it survives, presumably, on every mental level - on the level of mystical experience, on the level of blissful visionary experience, on the level of infernal visionary experience, and on the level of everyday individual existence.

      In life, even the blissful visionary experience tends to change its sign if it persists too long.  Many schizophrenics have their times of heavenly happiness; but the fact that (unlike the mescalin taker) they do not know when, if ever, they will be permitted to return to the reassuring banality of everyday experience causes even heaven to seem appalling.  But for those who, for whatever reason, are appalled, heaven turns into hell, bliss into horror, the Clear Light into the hateful glare of 'the land [country] of lit-upness'.

      Something of the same kind may happen in the posthumous state.  After having had a glimpse of the unbearable splendour of ultimate Reality, and after having shuttled back and forth between heaven and hell, most souls find it possible to retreat into that more reassuring region of the mind, where they can use their own and other people's wishes, memories, and fancies to construct a world very like that in which they lived on earth.

      Of those who die an infinitesimal minority are capable of immediate union with the divine Ground, a few are capable of supporting the visionary bliss of heaven, a few find themselves in the visionary horrors of hell and are unable to escape; the great majority end up in the kind of world described by Swedenborg and the mediums.  From this world it is doubtless possible to pass, when the necessary conditions have been fulfilled, to worlds of visionary bliss or the final enlightenment.

      My own guess is that modern spiritualism and ancient tradition are both correct.  There is a posthumous state of the kind described in Sir Oliver Lodge's book, Raymond; but there is also a heaven of blissful visionary experience; there is also a hell of the same kind of appalling visionary experience as is suffered here by schizophrenics and some of those who take mescalin; and there is also an experience, beyond time, of union with the divine Ground.