Free The White Dominican by Gustav Meyrink

which you, as a Catholic, mistakenly think of as the ‘Master of the Left Hand’. Tools they were, nothing else, and their sole purpose was to preserve certain mysteries in symbolic form for posterity, until the time shall be ripe. They always came to a halt part of the way along the path, for they kept on hoping that human lips would give them the key that would open the door. They never suspected that it lies in the execution of their art itself; they never understood that art conceals a deeper meaning than merely producing pictures or creating literature, namely to develop within the artist a kind of hypersensitivity of perception and sensation, of which the first expression is called a ‘right sense of art’. Even an artist alive today, insofar as his profession has opened his senses to the influences of that power, will be able to bring those symbols back to life in his works. There is no need at all for him to learn of them from the lips of a living person, nor to have been received into one or other of the Lodges. On the contrary, there are ‘invisible lips’ that speak a thousand times more clearly than the tongues of men. What is true art other than scooping up a portion of this eternal abundance?
    It is true that there are people who may justifiably bear the title of ‘artist’, and yet are possessed by a dark force which you, from your standpoint, can certainly designate as the ‘Devil’. Their creations resemble the Christians’ conception of the Devil’s infernal kingdom, down to the last jot and tittle; their works give off the icy breath of the frozen north, which from earliest antiquity has been seen as the home of the demons that hate mankind. The means of expression their art uses are pestilence, death, madness, murder, blood, despair and depravity.
    How can we explain this kind of artistic temperament? I will tell you. An artist is a person in whose mind the spiritual, occult side of man has achieved dominance over the material side. That can come about in two ways: on the one hand there are those, let us call them the ‘satanic ones’, whose brain is beginning to degenerate through excess, through syphilis, through inherited or acquired vices; as a consequence it weighs lighter, so to speak, in the scales, with the result that the spiritual side is automatically made ‘heavier and manifest in the world of appearances’. It is only because the other side has become lighter that the pan of the scales with the occult faculties sinks, and not because it has become heavier itself. In such cases the works of art are suffused with a putrid odour. It is as if the spirit were wearing a garment which shone with the phosphorescence of decay.
    In the other artists – I like to call them the ‘anointed ones’ – the spirit has, like St. George, attained mastery over the animal. In them, the pan with the spirit sinks into the world of appearances thanks to its own weight. In such cases the spirit wears the golden garment of the sun.
    In both kinds of artist, however, the balance of the scales has been tilted in favour of the occult, whilst in the average person it is the animal alone that has weight; both the ‘satanic’ artist and the ‘anointed’ artist are moved by the wind from the invisible realm of eternal abundance, the former by the north wind, the latter by the breath of dawn. The average person, on the other hand, is as unyielding as a solid block of wood.
    What is that power that uses the great artists as an instrument to preserve the symbolic rites of magic for those that come after?
    I tell you, it is the same power that once created the Church. It builds two living columns at the same time, the one white and the other black; two living columns, which will hate each other until they realise that they both support the same triumphal arch.
    Remember the place in the Gospels where St. John says, ‘And there are many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written