"Der Schlaf der Seele: Night's Pore in Torments:
Abstract
The Sleep of the Soul David Lindsay, author of Voyage to Arcturus, claimed to be mainly influenced by George MacDonald. As Lindsay’s view of the world is the pessimistic gnosticism often to be seen in works of art of the late 19th and early 20th century, a connection to MacDonald, usually seen as a propagator of orthodox Christianity, does not seem obvious at first sight. Closer scrutiny, though, reveals the connection as well founded. Both MacDonald’s Lilith and his entire late work stand in a long tradition and form a link between modem gnosticism and the Neoplatonic and Hermetic school. MacDonald as a writer saw himself as an interpreter of Novalis. It is Novalis’s great pattem of the romantic philosophy of history that is taken over into Lilith: the slow change of the “Long Night” into the darker, then brighter, sides of Dawn until the break of the “Eternal Day” which is taken over by MacDonald. Lindsay’s Nightspore, representing the soul, is engaged in the universal process of suffering, being forced into the chain of birth and rebirth, after finally consenting to its fate, that being might be extinguished by a universal will to nothingness. MacDonald’s Vane clearly has a similar significance: Vane is a sufferer in the realm of the world’s “Long Night”, but with the final aim of a universal redemption and elevation of the whole being. As a symbolistic work of art, Lilith is a parable, and as such shows, in a hermetic way, the destiny of the world and especially of the soul. Both, the parable-structure and the central message, are founded - and this in many layers - on Swedenborgianism. The many elements of Platonic tradition, direct allusions to Plato, Plotinus, Proclos, Paracelsus, Böhme, Thomas Taylor, and Blake; again to Novalis, Coleridge and Schelling, are amalgamized by a Swedenborgian view, as may be seen in the very images and terms used, in the very manner of speech. The centre of the story is the image of incorporation, represented by the house of Adam and Eve, the cemetery in the world-cave; the sleep of the soul is earthly life, its awakening earthly death. The course of action before the consent of the soul to sleep must be understood then, of course, as taking place in the realms of the soul’s pre-existence, beginning with ist isolation (Plotinus) and going on with the stages of “descending” (tradition of the Mysteries). But the final stage, incorporation, is not, in the Platonic sense, the evil, but the beginning of resurrection, which however is not completely realised. Here, the Swedenborgian idea of the universal growing of the spiritual seed (“Keim” in Schelling) within the earthly body, connected with the idea of the cave’s “hallow’d ground” (Blake) of the Platonic tradition expresses a dynamism, interpreting the “Long Night” as an element of motion to a new and higher level of existence. “Adam’s Return to Paradise”, “The New Age”, “The New Jerusalem”, though, are experienced as the northern light of vision, while the aspiring soul is still enclosed by “the forests of the Night”.