Johnyxxx
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Hello there,
Can anybody help me with understanding the story paragraph?
"There, in the blackest hour of night, the Vinum Sabbati was prepared, and this evil gruel was poured forth and offered to the neophytes, and they partook of an infernal sacrament; sumentes calicem principis inferorum, as an old author well expresses it. And suddenly, each one that had drunk found himself attended by a companion, a shape of glamour and unearthly allurement, beckoning him apart, to share in joys more exquisite, more piercing than the thrill of any dream, to the consummation of the marriage of the Sabbath.It is hard to write of such things as these, and chiefly because that shape that allured with loveliness was no hallucination, but, awful as it is to express, the man himself. By the power of that Sabbath wine, a few grains of white powder thrown into a glass of water, the house of life was riven asunder and the human trinity dissolved, and the worm which never dies, that which lies sleeping within us all, was made tangible and an external thing, and clothed with a garment of flesh. And then, in the hour of midnight, the primal fall was repeated and re-presented, and the awful thing veiled in the mythos of the Tree in the Garden was done anew. Such was the nuptiæ Sabbati."
What I do not comprehend is what allured the individual who had drunk the evil potion (the author writes about "a shape of glamour and unearthly allurement" but then "the shape that allured with loveliness was no hallucination, but the man himself.")
Really cannot make head or tail of it ...
Arthur Machen, The Novel Of The White Powder, 1895
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606981h.html
Thank you
Can anybody help me with understanding the story paragraph?
"There, in the blackest hour of night, the Vinum Sabbati was prepared, and this evil gruel was poured forth and offered to the neophytes, and they partook of an infernal sacrament; sumentes calicem principis inferorum, as an old author well expresses it. And suddenly, each one that had drunk found himself attended by a companion, a shape of glamour and unearthly allurement, beckoning him apart, to share in joys more exquisite, more piercing than the thrill of any dream, to the consummation of the marriage of the Sabbath.It is hard to write of such things as these, and chiefly because that shape that allured with loveliness was no hallucination, but, awful as it is to express, the man himself. By the power of that Sabbath wine, a few grains of white powder thrown into a glass of water, the house of life was riven asunder and the human trinity dissolved, and the worm which never dies, that which lies sleeping within us all, was made tangible and an external thing, and clothed with a garment of flesh. And then, in the hour of midnight, the primal fall was repeated and re-presented, and the awful thing veiled in the mythos of the Tree in the Garden was done anew. Such was the nuptiæ Sabbati."
What I do not comprehend is what allured the individual who had drunk the evil potion (the author writes about "a shape of glamour and unearthly allurement" but then "the shape that allured with loveliness was no hallucination, but the man himself.")
Really cannot make head or tail of it ...
Arthur Machen, The Novel Of The White Powder, 1895
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606981h.html
Thank you
