Chapter 20: The Worship of Lyone, Supreme Goddess

The worship of the goddess began with the appearance on a revolving stage between the nearest worshippers and the base of the throne itself of a veritable forest of trees about one hundred feet in width. There were trees like magnolias, oaks, elms and others splendid in foliage, and amid these there was an undergrowth of beds of the most brilliant flowers.

It was the work of the magicians and sorcerers!

There were thickets of camellias and rhododendrons, amid which bloomed flowers like scarlet geraniums, primroses, violets and poppies. What appeared to be apple, peach, cherry and hawthorn trees, all in full bloom, tossed their white and pink foam of flowers.

They were real trees and flowers, made to exist for a time by the sorcery of the masters of spirit power. They had never before known the outer air. The priests of Harikar had made them, and would dissipate them as living bodies are dissipated by death.

A sacred opera was chanted by the priests of invention, art, and spirituality, on their terraces of silver above the trees and flowers. As the music continued, groups of singers would at times sweep forth on wings and float in wheeling circles around the throne. Their delightful choruses swelling upward were like draughts of rich wine, keen and intoxicating. The priests and spiritual powers marching beneath filled the vast building with broad recitatives, full of vividly descriptive passages and finely contrasted measures, until the soul seemed melted in a sea of bliss.

The throne was bathed and caressed by a blue vapor of incense, while from the great dome above, filled with figures formed of enamelled glass, there streamed lights of all mysterious colors, that illuminated its gleaming sides and lit up the amphitheatre with ineffable effects.

A warm, rosy beam, falling perpendicularly, enveloped the goddess like a robe of transparent tissue. She sat, a living statue, the joy of every heart, the embodiment of a hopeless love that kept the worshipper in a fever of delicious unrest. Wherever the eye wandered, it always came back to the goddess; whatever the soul thought, its last thought was of her.

Amid a tempest of music and the thundering song of two hundred thousand voices repeating a litany of love, the throne itself began to revolve upon the silver cone that supported it. A fresh rapture took possession of the multitude.

In the soul of the goddess what must have been the joy of being surrounded by such an ocean of adoring love?

As I mused on the scene, I thought of the Coliseum at Rome raised to the glory of barbaric force, of empire founded on the blood of its victims, and, being such, has necessarily passed away, becoming a heap of ruins.

Here, thought I, is a temple founded on a nobler idea, the glory of the human soul, its ingenuity, art, and spiritual forces.

Many in the outer world would say it was an idolatrous attempt on the part of the creature to usurp the throne of its Creator. Yet it was strangely like the religion of such people themselves. There, as here, I thought, is the same worship of gold, the same dependence on the material products of man’s invention, the same worship of art, the same idolatry of each other’s souls between the sexes. There is this difference, however: in the outer world men pretend that they worship something else other than such objects; here they have the honesty to say what they do actually worship.

Apart from the idea of attempting to realize a friendship that can only exist in a realm that knows neither interest, fortune, time, ambition, temper, nor sensual love, their idolatry had one splendid truth to unfold, viz., the necessity of a soul for an arid and mechanical civilization. “Every intellect shall enfold a soul” was their motto, and there was this sanity in their creed that sentiment was the breath of its life. Science abhors sentiment; it is the cold investigation of that which once thrilled with the passion of life.

While the singing continued, a band of neophytes of occult force performed marvellous feats of magic, led by the Grand Sorcerer, Charka, chief of the magicians of Harikar. The people sat enraptured as miracle after miracle was performed. At the waving of fans by the adepts, plants issued from the hands of every god of gold, clothing the throne in one endless wreath of brilliant crimson blossoms and green foliage. The fans again waved and that crimson mass of flowers turned to a pale green, while again the green foliage changed to a vermilion color. The throne appeared like one enormous Bougainvillea glabra, whose leaves are flowers.

Again the fans were waved and the flowers changed to bloom all snowy-white, while the foliage became blue.

The adepts disappeared at a given signal and thereupon entered another band of beautiful girl adepts, who seated themselves, each body in a crouched mass with flowing drapery, around the base of the throne. These priestesses were in a state of catalepsy. The ego, or soul, in each case had been separated from the body, which floated in a state of apparent death. They had so developed their will by thinking enormous thoughts, yearning for spiritual power, that they could suspend the functions of the body and give all their existence to the soul. Thus hypnotized, it was stated their souls were floating freely in the dome above, in blessed converse, and that their reincarnation would afterward take place.