How Can One Disentangle From Their Tapestry Web The Different Threads
Of A Spell?
And even if one could, if one could hold them up, and
explain, "The cause of the spell is that this comes in contact with
this, and that this, which I show you, blends with, fades into, this,"
how could it advantage any one?
Nothing could be made clearer, nothing
be really explained. The ineffable is, and must ever remain, something
remote and mysterious.
And so one may say many things of this painted chamber of Philae, and
yet never convey, perhaps never really know, the innermost cause of
its charm. In it there is obvious beauty of form, and a seizing beauty
of color, beauty of sunlight and shadow, of antique association. This
turquoise blue is enchanting, and Isis was worshipped here. What has
the one to do with the other? Nothing; and yet how much! For is not
each of these facts a thread in the tapestry web of the spell? The
eyes see the rapture of this very perfect blue. The imagination hears,
as if very far off, the solemn chanting of priests and smells the
smoke of strange perfumes, and sees the long, aquiline nose and the
thin, haughty lips of the goddess. And the color becomes strange to
the eyes as well as very lovely, because, perhaps, it was there - it
almost certainly was there - when from Constantinople went forth the
decree that all Egypt should be Christian; when the priests of the
sacred brotherhood of Isis were driven from their temple.
Isis nursing Horus gave way to the Virgin and the Child. But the
cycles spin away down "the ringing grooves of change." From Egypt has
passed away that decreed Christianity. Now from the minaret the
muezzin cries, and in palm-shaded villages I hear the loud hymns of
earnest pilgrims starting on the journey to Mecca. And ever this
painted chamber shelters its mystery of poetry, its mystery of charm.
And still its marvellous colors are fresh as in the far-off pagan
days, and the opening lotus-flowers, and the closed lotus-buds, and
the palm and the papyrus, are on the perfect columns. And their
intrinsic loveliness, and their freshness, and their age, and the
mysteries they have looked on - all these facts are part of the spell
that governs us to-day. In Edfu one is enclosed in a wonderful
austerity. And one can only worship. In Philae one is wrapped in a
radiance of color and one can only dream. For there is coral-pink, and
there a wonderful green, "like the green light that lingers in the
west," and there is a blue as deep as the blue of a tropical sea; and
there are green-blue and lustrous, ardent red. And the odd fantasy in
the coloring, is not that like the fantasy in the temple of a dream?
For those who painted these capitals for the greater glory of Isis did
not fear to depart from nature, and to their patient worship a blue
palm perhaps seemed a rarely sacred thing.
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