Book-2-Study-Canto-7

Book Two: Canto VII

The Descent into Night

Summary
With a calm mind and detached heart, Aswapathy seeks to find the cause of the world-failure he has just experienced and penetrates the surface view of Nature. He sees in the depths below the fount of Pain and the black pit of Ignorance and Evil. He espies a dark Nescience looking up at this Creation, a hidden Power of Doom and Death beneath all life. He observes a fatal influence creeping forth and stamping itself upon all created existence, corrupting and perverting everything in it. A deformation comes over all being. A sorrow breathes over the world. Beings of Evil arrive and erect the frame of sin and adverse Fate. The whole appearance and character of Life undergoes a change. Beauty, Love, Light yield to ugliness, lust, darkness. Ego thrives, falsehood usurps the place of Truth, Knowledge is displaced by Ignorance.

Aswapathy sees emerging in a visible form a dark Power whose very breath is poison. A peril begins to haunt the air and menacing Energies gather.

Tempting snares crowd around him. All there are misled by false appearances; only Aswapathy sees through by his inner discrimination. He is keen to discern the cause of this Evil and goes further along the dim track.

He enters a no-man’s-land where traffic is heavy but dwellings none. All here is one vast deception. Joy hides pain and good yields evil; love leads to hate, truth disappears into falsehood and life presages death. The ruling hostile Power cloaks itself in the garb of Light, quotes the scripture and slays the soul with self-righteous virtue. The path of heaven here leads to hell. Ruse and treachery are common. Selfishness is at a premium, each wars against the other, but all continue to put down any who dare to seek some higher good. Truth is exiled lest she disturb this state of affairs.

The scene changes. There appears a city of ancient Ignorance, a centre without circumference, a place with none to rule over the warring groups. It is a city where Light is unknown, Ego and Falsehood are the arbiters. A deceptive code of ethics gives a look of nobility to the ruthless warrior. Power and utility are the Truth and Right. Religion oppresses, spirituality is exiled and truth is tabooed as a tie and lie is enthroned as the truth.

Aswapathy passes through this dangerous passage warily with the Name of God on his lips, constantly aware of treachery from behind. None questions him; the heights of the Spirit above beckon to him, the abysses below desire him. He chooses to fathom the abysses of the Night and turns downwards.

A greater darkness greets him. It looks as if God and Light have never been there or at any rate have no more any power there. His sight fails and he feels his way with the soul. Ugliness, perversion, lust, cruelty vie with one another in dominating the scene. Worship is offered to the Undivine. A new aesthesis valuing what the soul hates is cultivated. Beauty is banned, pure emotions are deadened. Evil is cherished, brute passions hold undeterred sway. Here is Hell in its naked glory.

The inhabitants of these regions are a race possessed by the demoniac force that lurks in the depths of men, suppressed by the law of the human heart and controlled by the thought of the refined mind. This force is a monster of greed, aggrandisement and exploitation. The beings of this world look like men but are in truth viler than the vilest of creatures. There is no touch of pity or love anywhere; all is force, tyranny, cynicism. Light is despised by these creatures of Darkness, loud in their slogan of loyalty to their Lords of Falsehood.

Aswapathy advances alone into these menacing realms, combats the powers that seek to deprive his mind of its light, smites away their clinging influences. Soon he emerges into vast blanks; all peopled tracts are left behind. It is a deathlike oppressive Void. He becomes aware of an active hostility in Life opposing light and truth, spreading despair and doom, and he strives to resist its onslaught. The Abyss from below rises to claim his soul which is now alone with the confronting Night; he is being sucked in, pressed down from all sides. Hope disappears and a nameless fear arises in him. His mind is struck dumb. However, he endures, stills the terror and bears the agony.

Soon the peace returns and the gaze of his soul. The Godhead in him awakes and he faces the danger with Calm. He masters the waves of this formidable Nature with a look. He meets naked Hell with his bare spirit.

Towards the World-Failure’s Cause

A mind absolved from life, made calm to know,
A heart divorced from the blindness and the pang,
The seal of tears, the bond of ignorance,
He turned to find that wide world-failure’s cause.

Aswapathy wants to find out the cause of this large-scale failure of the world to become what it was intended to be. He is properly equipped for that task: his mind is not enmeshed in the whorl of life. It is above it and free from its vitiating desire-movements and calm enough to perceive, unmixed and undistracted, the truth of things. Similarly his heart is not overcome by the blind sufferings of life, the badge of the ruling ignorance; it is detached from these obscurations and it is also free and reacts to the truth without deviation.

Gaze into the Viewless Vast

Away he looked from Nature’s visible face
And sent his gaze into the viewless Vast,
The formidable unknown Infinity,
Asleep behind the endless coil of things,
That carries the universe in its timeless breadths
And the ripples of its being are our lives.

Those parts of Nature visible to the normal eye do not hold the truths of her workings; in fact her surface movements veil the truths. Aswapathy, in his will to know the truth, shifts his gaze from the misleading surface and plunges it into the vaster indefinite Infinity that opens behind the front of the finite. It is the great unknown beyond the known, the latent upholding the patent, the unmanifest projecting the manifest. What is in movement as the universe is upheld by this vast stable Being. All movements that constitute our lives in the universe are but some pretty currents of that Immensity of Existence.

Worlds Built by its Breath

The worlds are built by its unconscious Breath
And Matter and Mind are its figures or its powers,
Our waking thoughts the output of its dreams.

This vast Unknown is the real source of our universe. The latter is a product of its spontaneous vibratory stir. Matter and Mind which pose to be self-existent realities in the universe are in fact forms or formulations of this Infinity. What we take to be our own conscious thinkings are really a result of its formative movements.

Fount of Pain

The veil was rent that covers Nature’s depths:
He saw the fount of the world’s lasting pain
And the mouth of the black pit of Ignorance;
The evil guarded at the roots of life
Raised up its head and looked into his eyes.

The penetrating gaze of Aswapathy cuts through the veil of external Nature and reaches into the hidden depths. There he sees the origin of the Pain that afflicts the world, the dark source of the Ignorance that covers all, the poisonous growth of Evil that attacks Life at her very roots.

Nescience Stares

On a dim bank where dies subjective Space,
From a stark ridge overlooking all that is,
A tenebrous awakened Nescience,
Her wide blank eyes wondering at Time and Form,
Stared at the inventions of the living Void
And the Abyss whence our beginnings rose.

On a border where even subjective extension fails, Aswapathy becomes aware of a dark Nescience which comes to life as it were and stares at all that has come into being and assumed form in the unrolling of Time and at the depths of being from which all has arisen. The insentient Void regards the living Void—even the living appears to be but a void as nothing lasts, all dissolves.

Watching the Birth of all

Behind appeared a grey carved mask of Night
Watching the birth of all created things.

A hidden Puissance conscious of its force,
A vague and lurking Presence everywhere,
A contrary Doom that threatens all things made,
A Death figuring as the dark seed of life,
Seemed to engender and to slay the world.

Watching the birth of things in this creation stands Something behind an assumed mask of Night, of Darkness. The Darkness is only a cloak for a Light that burns concealed. And how does it all come to be? How does it appear to the watching spirit? A Power acts but from behind the veil; a Presence is felt but not embodied; things are made but are ever faced with extinction; Death which is not the end but becomes the beginning of another life seems to bring the world into being only to slay it thereafter.

A Fatal Influence Steals

Then from the sombre mystery of the gulfs
And from the hollow bosom of the Mask
Something crept forth that seemed a shapeless Thought.

A fatal Influence upon creatures stole
Whose lethal touch pursued the immortal spirit,
On life was laid the haunting finger of Death
And overcast with error, grief and pain
The soul’s native will for truth and joy and light.

It is then, as the awakened Nescience regards the creation that .has come into existence, that a dark emanation issues from her and falls upon all that is created, tainting all, corrupting and destroying all. The immortal spirit, the soul in its venture, is pursued everywhere by this shapeless evil, this dangerous element that haunts it and besieges it by its agents of error, grief and pain which overwhelm its natural will to seek and manifest the truth and joy and the light in which they thrive, that are its own by right.

Deformation

A deformation coiled that claimed to be
The being’s very turn, Nature’s true drive.

And this leads to a deformation in the creation, a deformation that seems so total and lasting that it claims to be the very nature of the being in embodiment, the characteristic movement of universal Nature. This deformation that has intervened wants to pass as the intrinsic nature of creation, as if creation is this and nothing more.

Perverting Mind

A hostile and perverting Mind at work
In every corner ensconced of conscious life
Corrupted Truth with her own formulas;
Interceptor of the listening of the soul,
Afflicting knowledge with the hue of doubt
It captured the oracles of the occult gods,
Effaced the signposts of Life’s pilgrimage,
Cancelled the firm rock-edicts graved by Time,
And on the foundations of the cosmic Law
Erected its bronze pylons of misrule.

This contrary and perverting element works through the Mind which operates in the entire field of life and imposes its own formulas on the Truth that is trying to manifest. As the beings try to listen to truth-knowledge through its subtle hearing, this Mind interferes and casts its shadow of doubt on whatever Knowledge succeeds in reaching it. It stops the spontaneous workings—active and reactive—of the inner faculties from reaching the surface. It covers up with its own constructions the guiding turns provided by Nature for the March of life and on the foundations of the cosmic Law it erects its own glittering edifices of wrong standards and misconceived ordinances.

A Danger

Even Light and Love by that cloaked danger’s spell
Turned from the brilliant nature of the gods
To fallen angels and misleading suns,
Became themselves a danger and a charm,
A perverse sweetness, heaven-born malefice:
Its power could deform divinest things.

Even Light and Love that are by nature divine come to be so deformed by this perverting agency of Mind that they forfeit their bright and godly nature and assume baser forms. Instead of being the guiding and saving elements that they truly are, they become sources of danger and harmful attraction; their baser forms misguide and lead into suffering.

Wind of Sorrow

A wind of sorrow breathed upon the world;
All thought with falsehood was besieged, all act
Stamped with defect or with frustration’s sign,
All high attempt with failure or vain success,
But none could know the reason of his fall.

As a result sorrow broods over the world. All thinking is enmeshed by falsehood, all action is rendered defective or tinged with hues of frustration. Great efforts end in failures or Pyrrhic successes. None are aware of the root cause of this degeneration which lies in the original Nescience and its issue, the perverting Mind.

Seed of Suffering

The grey Mask whispered and though no sound was heard,
Yet in the ignorant heart a seed was sown
That bore black fruit of suffering, death and bale.

It is the breath and the subtle entry of the Nescience into the creative movement that is the seed-cause of all evil, suffering and death that have appeared in life.

Ambassadors of Evil

Out of the chill steppes of a bleak Unseen
Invisible, wearing the Night’s grey mask,
Arrived the shadowy dreadful messengers,
Invaders from a dangerous world of power,
Ambassadors of evil’s absolute.

Along with the unheard whisper from the Mask of Night there is an unseen entry of agents of Evil from another world. These denizens of a world of perverted power are shadowy in form and strike terror wherever they go. They creep in under the mask of darkness from out of cheerless regions not visible to the eye.

Even as there are ambassadors of Light and Good there are ambassadors of Darkness and Evil the Antagonists.

Dire Work Done

In silence the inaudible voices spoke,
Hands that none saw planted the fatal grain,
No form was seen, yet a dire work was done,
An iron decree in crooked uncials written
Imposed a law of sin and adverse fate.

These Agents of Evil do not act in the open. Their voices are not heard as they communicate; their hands are not seen as they work. All the same they do their evil deeds: they lay the foundations of an order of crookedness, sin and antagonistic fate.

Life Changed

Life looked at him with changed and sombre eyes:
Her beauty he saw and the yearning heart in things
That with a little happiness is content,
Answering to a small ray of truth or love;

As a result of this evil intervention, Life undergoes a change. Aswapathy notes that her look is different, less bright. Her beauty remains, but he finds that her seeking, her quest is not as insatiable and demanding as before; she is content with what little happiness she can snatch, responding quietly to what little truth or love comes her way.

Dreadful Powers

He saw her gold sunlight and her far blue sky,
Her green of leaves and hue and scent of flowers
And the charm of children and the love of friends
And the beauty of women and kindly hearts of men,
But saw too the dreadful Powers that drive her moods
And the anguish she has strewn upon her ways,
Fate waiting on the unseen steps of men
And her evil and sorrow and last gift of death.

Aswapathy sees how full of beauty, charm and goodness life is, but he sees too that she is driven by fearful powers. He notes the consequent pain and suffering that have sprung up in her course, the hostile fate waiting to confront man in his journey forward, the evil, the sorrow and the culmination in death dominating the field of life.

Progress Purveyor of Death

A breath of disillusion and decadence
Corrupting watched for Life’s maturity
And made to rot the full grain of the soul:
Progress became a purveyor of Death.

Even as Life develops and takes shape, frustration and decay act upon her and things begin to crumble from within. The very movement of progress brings with it elements of death.

A World of Slain Light

A world that clung to the law of a slain Light
Cherished the putrid corpses of dead truths,
Hailed twisted forms as things free, new and true,
Beauty from ugliness and evil drank
Feeling themselves guests at a banquet of the gods
And tasted corruption like a high-spiced food.

Aswapathy regards a whole world infected with the spirit of decadence and death: the Light that leads and saves is extinguished and dead truths are erected as high values; unnatural things are welcomed as true and natural; corruption is highly prized and even beauty partakes of the ugliness and evil that are rampant.

Darkness Settles

A darkness settled on the heavy air;
It hunted the bright smile from Nature’s lips
And slew the native confidence in her heart
And put fear’s crooked look into her eyes.

The lightness and the brightness in Nature fade away. Shadows gather and happiness is extinguished. Nature’s inborn robust confidence of strength is slain and instead fear implanted in her.

Fear gives an unnatural and hunted look to one whom it possesses. The candid gaze of the soul is eclipsed when it is overlaid by fear.

Manufactured Virtue and Vice

The lust that warps the spirit’s natural good
Replaced by a manufactured virtue and vice
The frank spontaneous impulse of the soul:
Afflicting Nature with the dual’s lie,
Their twin values whetted a forbidden zest,
Made evil a relief from spurious good,
The ego battened on righteousness and sin
And each became an instrument of Hell.

The spontaneous turn to what is right and good in the soul is twisted by an intruding lust into an artificial and imposed pattern of virtue and vice. A duality comes into play falsifying all operations, suppressing and thus giving an added unnatural force to the natural zest of life. The artificial good that does duty for what is naturally right and wholesome becomes irksome, and evil becomes attractive. Self-righteousness breeds in the votaries of this artificial good and ego flourishes in them in a false sense and enhanced awareness of their own virtues and the sins of others. All in all, everything leads to hell, whether it is virtue or vice, both become means to the rule of hell.

Life’s Descent into Night (I)

In rejected heaps by a monotonous road
The old simple delights were left to lie
On the wasteland of life’s descent to Night.

All glory of life dimmed tarnished into a doubt,
All beauty ended in an aging face;

On this dull route of life’s decline into darkness and obscurity the old natural joys of life are discarded. Life’s original glory of confidence is afflicted by doubt and reduced in its glow. Beauty is overtaken by care and decay.

Life’s Descent into Night (II)

All power was dubbed a tyranny cursed by God
And Truth a fiction needed by the mind;
The chase of joy was now a tired hunt;
All knowledge was left a questioning Ignorance.

Power has no more its free and uninhibited play; it comes to be looked upon as an unjust force to be condemned and checked. Truth ceases to be a self-evident fact; it is regarded as a fictitious prop erected by the mind for its own purpose. Joy is no more an invigorating pursuit in the play of life, but an exhausting search. Knowledge ceases to fulfil; it dwindles into an imperfect, incomplete and unsatisfied Ignorance.

Dark Unseen

As from a womb obscure he saw emerge
The body and visage of a dark Unseen
Hidden behind the fair outside of life.

Its dangerous commerce is our suffering’s cause.

Its breath is a subtle poison in men’s hearts;
All evil starts from that ambiguous face.

As Aswapathy watches he sees a dark Form emerging from behind the fair front of life. This dark Entity hitherto unseen is the real cause of all suffering that befalls man; for it is not something that lies beneath, inactive, it is constantly putting itself out into the movements of life and vitiating them, bringing on pain and suffering. Its very breath deposits poison in the hearts of men, unknown to them. This dark Element of uncertain appearance is the parent of all evil in the world.

Haunting Peril

A peril haunted now the common air;
The world grew full of menacing Energies,
And wherever turned for help or hope his eyes,
In field and house, in street and camp and mart,
He met the prowl and stealthy come and go
Of armed disquieting bodied Influences.

Aswapathy becomes aware of a perilous atmosphere around him. He sees forces and energies aflow in a threatening surge. He turns here and there looking for help, for some brighter issue; but everywhere he encounters only hostile and unnerving presences in concrete forms prowling about stealthily.

Ominous Beings

A march of goddess figures dark and nude
Alarmed the air with grandiose unease;
Appalling footsteps drew invisibly near,
Shapes that were threats invaded the dream-light,
And ominous beings passed him on the road
Whose very gaze was a calamity:

Powerful beings, dark and unveiled, spread alarm as they stride the scene. Footsteps approach unseen and cause fear. Forms gather breathing threats. Beings portending evil, carrying disaster in their very looks, pass him by.

Alluring Lips

A charm and sweetness sudden and formidable,
Faces that raised alluring lips and eyes
Approached him armed with beauty like a snare,
But hid a fatal meaning in each line
And could in a moment dangerously change.

Danger threatens not openly alone. Apart from the terror-spreading fearful elements at work undisguised, there are also attractive appearances that hide harm behind their compelling beauty and appeal. They too approach Aswapathy with all their danger-loaded charm.

All Belied and Beset

But he alone discerned that screened attack.

A veil upon the inner vision lay,
A force was there that hid its dreadful steps;
All was belied, yet thought itself the truth;
All were beset but knew not of the siege:
For none could see the authors of their fall.

Nobody there can see things as they are; the vision is overlaid by a veil. Danger comes unexpectedly as the menace advances unseen. Truth is nowhere to be found; what passes for it is pseudo-truth which, however, believes itself to be the Truth. And this hold of perversion is so complete that the attacked victims are unaware that they are besieged. No one can see the cause of this state except Aswapathy, who has the light and the sight to see and discern the developments behind the veil.

He Follows the Track

Aware of some dark wisdom still withheld
That was the seal and warrant of this strength,
He followed the track of dim tremendous steps
Returning to the night from which they came.

A tract he reached unbuilt and owned by none:
There all could enter but none stay for long.

Aswapathy sees all and feels convinced that there must be some justification, some necessity somewhere for this strong and formidable formation. And he pursues his way across dim spaces and reaches at last a dark starting tract, a kind of no-man’s-land, built by none, owned by none, where the passage is open but no settlement is possible.

Unreality Nature’s Lord

It was a no-man’s-land of evil air,
A crowded neighbourhood without one home,
A borderland between the world and hell.

There unreality was Nature’s lord:
It was a space where nothing could be true,
For nothing was what it had claimed to be:
A high appearance wrapped a spacious void.

The air here is full of evil. This passage to hell is crowded with people but there is not a single shelter for them. All is in transit. Unreality rules everywhere. It is an order of existence where the real withholds itself and everything is spurious. There is an imposing façade with nothing at all behind it.

Deception the Law

Yet nothing would confess its own pretence
Even to itself in the ambiguous heart:
A vast deception was the law of things;
Only by that deception they could live.

This false pretension is so pervading and so complete that nothing will admit even to itself—let alone to others—that it is not what it wants to pass for. Here even the heart which is a natural seat of conviction and unveiled truth, is uncertain and doubtful. Deception is the very law of this domain and all lives and survives by conforming to this pattern.

Mirrors of a Fantasm

An unsubstantial Nihil guaranteed
The falsehood of the forms this Nature took
And made them seem awhile to be and live.

A borrowed magic drew them from the Void;
They took a shape and stuff that was not theirs
And showed a colour that they could not keep,
Mirrors to a fantasm of reality.

The falsehood of the forms that Nature takes on here is upheld by a mighty Nothing which by its very presence—or seeming presence—makes them appear for a while as if they are real. They assume shapes and substances not their own and their colours keep on changing. They do not exist by their own right, they are, as it were, conjured up from a nowhere. The whole configuration is like a mirrored reflection of a fantasy thrown up by some reality.

Each Brilliance a Splendid Lie

Each rainbow brilliance was a splendid lie;
A beauty unreal graced a glamour face.

Even beautiful forms are a cheat. The beauty that adorns an enchanting face is found to be not real at all. Each striking brightness is a spectacular falsehood.

Beauty here is no guarantee of Truth; it is, on the other hand, a decoy, a snare, a trap.

Nothing can be Relied on

Nothing could be relied on to remain:
Joy nurtured tears and good an evil proved,
But never out of evil one plucked good:
Love ended early in hate, delight killed with pain,
Truth into falsity grew and death ruled life.

One can never be sure that what one sees here will remain as it is seen. Everything reveals itself to be its contrary. Joy becomes a source of tears and pain. What appears good proves to be evil— though the opposite never happens viz. no evil ever results in any good! Love culminates in hate and delight in suffering. Apparent Truth unrolls itself as falsehood and life is overshadowed by death.

Sardonic Rictus on God’s Face

A Power that laughed at the mischief of the world,
An irony that joined the world’s contraries
And flung them into each other’s arms to strive,
Put a sardonic rictus on God’s face.

There is an unmistakable merriment in the air from this pervading spirit of mischief that corrupts everything. It exults in throwing together into ceaseless combat the contraries of joy and pain, good and evil, love and hate, delight and suffering, truth and falsehood, life and death.

However, the creative Spirit is not cast down at these developments. There is a significant gesture of scorn on his visage; for even these he makes to serve his purpose. The rise and struggle of contraries is turned into a process towards the realisation of a transcendent Verity.

Sinister Influence

Aloof, its influence entered everywhere
And left a cloven hoof-mark on the breast;
A twisted heart and a strange sombre smile
Mocked at the sinister comedy of life.

Though this Dark Power is apart and uninvolved, its influence enters everywhere and vitiates all forms and movements. It leaves its stamp on all. Perverse and twisted, it enjoys the prospect of tragedy inevitably overtaking the little joys of life.

Advent of Peril

Announcing the advent of a perilous Form
An ominous tread softened its dire footfall
That none might understand or be on guard;
None heard until a dreadful grasp was close.

Danger approaches. It comes stealthily on purpose as it aims to strike unawares. It takes care to see that none knows of its coming until it is too late to escape its fearful hold.

Fiend Cloaked in Light (I)

Or else all augured a divine approach,
An air of prophecy felt, a heavenly hope,
Listened for a gospel, watched for a new star.

The Fiend was visible, but cloaked in light;
He seemed a helping angel from the skies:
He armed untruth with Scripture and the Law;
He deceived with wisdom, with virtue slew the soul
And led to perdition by the heavenward path.

Or, it is a brightness everywhere, an air of coming fulfilment, an expectation of an advent of something new—a new truth, a new light. The Dark Adversary puts on a mantle of light and appears in a misleading form, acting as a helpful angel, manoeuvring to give falsehood the appearance of truth by twisting the Scripture and the Law in its favour. His pseudo-wisdom is deceitful and the Virtue patronised by him kills the soul by smothering it with self-righteousness. The path he leads on is ostensibly towards heaven but in reality it moves to perdition.

Fiend Cloaked in Light (II)

A lavish sense he gave of power and joy,
And when arose the warning from within,
He reassured the ear with dulcet tones,
Or took the mind captive in its own net;
His rigorous logic made the false seem true.

He fills men with a false sense of exultation, a feeling of power and joy. When the inner being warns against this falsity, he neutralises the prompting by sweet suggestions to the contrary and lulls into false security. Or he disables the mind from discovering the truth by involving it in its own gossamer constructions. He uses its logic that deadly weapon which can be made to serve truth or falsehood with equal ease to pass off untruth as truth.

Full of Treachery and Ruse (I)

Amazing the elect with holy lore
He spoke as with the very voice of God.

The air was full of treachery and ruse;
Truth-speaking was a stratagem in that place;
Ambush lurked in a smile and peril made
Safety its cover, trust its entry’s gate:

He cites from the scripture with facility, successfully imitates the voice of God and misleads. The place reeks with cunning and deceit. Even if truth is spoken at any time anywhere, it is more as part of a plan to create confidence and then betray. Even a smile is full of hazard as behind it there is a trap. What looks like safety is only a decoy to land one into peril and a feeling of trust becomes an open door for danger to enter.

Full of Treachery and Ruse (II)

Falsehood came laughing with the eyes of truth;
Each friend might turn an enemy or spy,
The hand one clasped ensleeved a dagger’s stab
And an embrace could be Doom’s iron cage.

The whole environment is treacherous in the extreme. Falsehood is inviting in an appealing garb of truth. No one can be trusted as a friend; he may turn out to be an enemy in disguise or the agent of an enemy. Even a handshake may be a prelude to a dagger-thrust, an embrace turn into a grip by the hosts of Death.

Danger and Fear

Agony and danger stalked their trembling prey
And softly spoke as to a timid friend:
Attack sprang suddenly vehement and unseen;
Fear leaped upon the heart at every turn
And cried out with an anguished dreadful voice;
It called for one to save but none came near.

Agony and danger attack everywhere; they enter into the atmosphere under false and alluring colours and pounce all of a sudden with dire force. The heart is filled with an agony of fear at every turn and men in their fear cry out piteously for help, but of help there is none.

Death ever Close

All warily walked, for death was ever close;
Yet caution seemed a vain expense of care,
For all that guarded proved a deadly net,
And when after long suspense salvation came
And brought a glad relief disarming strength,
It served as a smiling passage to worse fate.

With all this danger around and death threatening to overtake, all tread their path watchfully. But this caution is a waste of vigilance. For whatever one uses to guard oneself with turns out to be a fatal and deadly snare. Even when, ultimately, some welcome relief arrives and slackens the tension, it soon reveals itself as a treacherous passage to a greater doom.

World of Battle and Surprise

There was no truce and no safe place to rest;
One dared not slumber or put off one’s arms:
It was a world of battle and surprise.

It is a place where none can afford to relax his vigilance. Nothing is safe, there is nowhere to stay in peace. All around is strife and treachery. There is a perpetual tension.

Truth Exiled

All who were there lived for themselves alone;
All warred against all, but with a common hate
Turned on the mind that sought some higher good;
Truth was exiled lest she should dare to speak
And hurt the heart of darkness with her light
Or bring her pride of knowledge to blaspheme
The settled anarchy of established things.

The denizens of this world are all exclusively self-centred. Each one ranges himself against the rest and yet if anyone seeks some nobler end, all the rest make common cause and attack him. Truth stands banished from this realm lest she expose the falsehood that is regnant, dissolve the darkness with her light, and upset the existing order or disorder of things with her superior and disturbing knowledge. Ignorance guards itself furiously against the intrusions of Knowledge as they strike at the very roots of its reign.

City of Ancient Ignorance

Then the scene changed, but kept its dreadful core:
Altering its form the life remained the same.

A capital was there without a State:
It had no ruler, only groups that strove.

He saw a city of ancient Ignorance
Founded upon a soil that knew not Light.

The scene changes, there is a different formation but the main features remain. It is a highly unnatural state of affairs; there is a centre but it extends nowhere. There is no order and nobody to enforce it; everywhere there is strife—between individuals, between groups. It is an organised realm of ancient Ignorance built on a foundation that has not known Light. If it had been exposed to Light in any manner, it could not have survived.

Each in his Darkness Walked

There each in his own darkness walked alone:
Only they agreed to differ in Evil’s paths,
To live in their own way for their own selves
Or to enforce a common lie and wrong;

In this realm all are severely self-centred. Each one hugs his own ignorance and insists on forging his own way irrespective of the interests of others. The only point on which all agree is that there are many ways of pursuing the Evil and each one must have freedom to indulge in his way. Where they unite it is to pool their common strength to give added force to the prevailing falsehood.

Ego the Lord

There Ego was lord upon his peacock seat
And falsehood sat by him, his mate and queen:
The world turned to them as Heaven to Truth and God.

The master whom all serve here is the Ego seated on the throne of pride. Ego is supported and seconded by his spouse, Falsehood. Without Falsehood to support and buttress, Ego cannot thrive and without Ego, Falsehood has no monitor. This dark world turns naturally to this biune and sinister formation of Ego-Falsehood even as the world of light turns spontaneously to Truth and God.

Injustice Justifies Error

Injustice justified by firm decrees
The sovereign weights of Error’s legalised trade,
But all the weights were false and none the same;
Ever she watched with her balance and a sword
Lest any sacrilegious word expose
The sanctified formulas of her old misrule.

Injustice instead of justice holds the scales with weights that are all false. Error is legalised. Any word of truth, any ray of light that would expose this established rule of falsehood is vigilantly kept out.

Each Group its Naked Law

In high professions wrapped self-will walked wide
And licence stalked prating of order and right:
There was no altar raised to Liberty;
True freedom was abhorred and hunted down:
Harmony and tolerance nowhere could be seen;
Each group proclaimed its dire and naked Law.

Each asserts his self-will and prating high-sounding principles, does what he wants; under the cover of order and justice, rank licence prevails. There is not even a recognition of the Ideal of Liberty; if any elements of freedom are seen or suspected anywhere, they are hated and hounded out. None tolerates another. Harmony is conspicuous by its absence. Each group holds to its own interests in the name of a law and seeks to impose it on others at the point of the sword.

Posture of Nobility

A frame of ethics knobbed with scriptural rules
Or a theory passionately believed and praised
A table seemed of high Heaven’s sacred code.

A formal practice mailed and iron-shod
Gave to a rude and ruthless warrior kind
Drawn from the savage bowels of the earth
A proud stern poise of harsh nobility,
A civic posture rigid and formidable.

Injunctions of scripture key-set in a framework of ethics or some theory which derives its strength not from any higher truth but from the vehement beliefit commands in the laity, pass for the Law of God. An outer imposing adherence to such a code gives to the ruthless barbarians who wield sword and fire a stamp of nobility and a halo of uncompromising strength and right.

Nature they Obeyed

But all their private acts belied the pose:
Power and utility were their Truth and Right,
An eagle rapacity clawed its coveted good,
Beaks pecked and talons tore all weaker prey.

In their sweet secrecy of pleasant sins
Nature they obeyed and not a moralist God.

Practice belies professions everywhere. Not Truth, not Right, but Utility and Power are the guiding criteria. The strong prey upon the weak; capacity, not legitimacy, is at a premium. Sin is enjoyed and cherished without any feeling of guilt. Amoral Nature and not a moralist God sets the norm. Self-assertion, self-aggrandisement are the rule irrespective of their moral or immoral bearings.

Persecution of others’ Vice

Inconscient traders in bundles of contraries,
They did what in others they would persecute;
When their eyes looked upon their fellow’s vice,
An indignation flamed, a virtuous wrath;
Oblivious of their own deep-hid offence,
Moblike they stoned a neighbour caught in sin.

In a general state of unconsciousness contradictions and oppositions are heaped together pell-mell and passed off under false labels. Each one is blind to his own defects but would condemn the same failings in others. Insincerity is at a premium. Perverse cruelty delights in oppression of others. It is the rule of the Pharisee.

Scale of Ego’s Interest and Desire

A pragmatist judge within passed false decrees,
Posed worst iniquities on equity’s base,
Reasoned ill actions just, sanctioned the scale
Of the merchant ego’s interest and desire.

Thus was a balance kept, the world could live.

Judgement is based not upon the truth of things but upon their utility to oneself. In the name of equity unpardonable inequities are perpetrated. Wrong is adjusted to be right by skilful reasoning. Values are appraised not on inherent Verity but with an eye to their worth to ego and desire; they are heavily tainted. Such is the false scale of norms and laws by which this world lives.

Religion upon Blood-Stained Throne

A zealot fervour pushed their ruthless cults,
All faith not theirs bled scourged as heresy;
They questioned, captived, tortured, burned or smote
And forced the soul to abandon right or die.

Amid her clashing creeds and warring sects
Religion sat upon a blood-stained throne.

A hundred tyrannies oppressed and slew
And founded unity upon fraud and force.

There is an extreme religious fanaticism. Those of alien faith are hounded out. Not truth but agreement with one’s own belief is the criterion. Those who hold to their faith, to truth, are forced to forswear their conviction or be put to death. Intolerance is the order of the day, leading to incessant strife, clash and bloodshed. Over it all presides Religion severe and exacting, allowing no quarter to dissent.

There is a pervading repression, suppression of free thought. By force or by organised cheating, a semblance of unity is flaunted.

Spiritual Seeking Outcasted

Only what seemed was prized as real there:
The ideal was a cynic ridicule’s butt:
Hooted by the crowd, mocked by enlightened wits,
Spiritual seeking wandered outcasted,—
A dreamer’s self-deceiving web of thought
Or mad chimera deemed or hypocrite’s fake,
Its passionate instinct trailed through minds obscure
Lost in the circuits of the Ignorance.

What is apparent, actual at the moment is taken to be real, not what is true. Ideals are ridiculed and cynically brushed aside. Spirituality, seeking for the truth of the Spirit, is laughed at both by the laity and the lettered gentry and dismissed as an impractical undertaking, a delusion of speculative mind, a fantasy or a deliberate concoction of the hypocrite to deceive. The intensities of the Quest pass dulled through the corridors of the obscure mind and are lost to sight in the endless rounds of the reigning Ignorance.

Truth a Lie and Lie the Truth

A lie was there the truth and truth a lie.

This is the result of the unmitigated reign of falsehood in every sphere in this realm. What is regarded and revered as truth is in reality the reverse of it, a deliberate perversion into its opposite, a lie. And that is not all. If there be any element of truth anywhere, it is dubbed a lie and condemned. Things are topsy-turvy and yet they are accepted as the right and natural order.

Perilous Way to Heaven

Here must the traveller of the upward way—
For daring Hell’s kingdoms winds the heavenly route—
Pause or pass slowly through that perilous space,
A prayer upon his lips and the great Name.

The road to Light lies through tracts of darkness. One who aims to reach the goal of Truth and Immortality has to pass through the intervening inhospitable and dangerous realms of Falsehood and Death. The pilgrim of Light either pauses in these treacherous regions unable to make headway or passes warily praying all the while for safety, repeating the Name of his Saviour. The prayer in his heart links him with the Strength of the chosen Divinity and the Name on his lips infuses the Power of the adored and assures protection along the dangerous paths.

Falsity’s Endless Net

If probed not all discernment’s keen spear-point,
He might stumble into falsity’s endless net.

Over his shoulder often he must look back
Like one who feels on his neck an enemy’s breath;
Else stealing up behind a treasonous blow
Might prostrate cast and pin to unholy soil,
Pierced through his back by Evil’s poignant stake.

The pilgrim has got to be vigilant on all sides. He has to use his developed discriminative faculties to the full lest he might be lured into waiting traps of falsehood which are indeed endless. He needs often to look backwards and sideways lest a treacherous blow fall upon him unawares and cast him down helpless. Evil is ready to strike at any moment from any direction.

Fall on the Eternal’s Road

So might one fall on the Eternal’s road
Forfeiting the spirit’s lonely chance in Time
And no news of him reach the waiting gods,
Marked “missing” in the register of souls,
His name the index of a failing hope,
The position of a dead remembered star.

This is where and how spiritual casualties take place. The unfortunate victim loses the chances offered to him to reach the Kingdom of the Spirit and his awaited arrival there never ensues. He is written off as a failure and his name remembered at best as one who had tried to soar but failed on the way.

Heroes of Army of Light

The hand ready to smite, the eye to scout,
Casting a javelin regard in front,
Heroes and soldiers of the army of Light.

To walk safely through this perilous passage, one must invoke the presence of God and remain conscious of it in the heart, cover oneself with unfailing courage, wield the sword of faith with hands that are ready to strike at the enemy as soon as he is perceived by the watchful eye which goes on scrutinising piercingly the path ahead. Only such ones constitute the warriors of the army of Light that is out to conquer the worlds from the hosts of Falsehood and Darkness who hold them in their dominion.

Danger Past

Hardly even so, the grisly danger past,
Released into a calmer purer air,
They dared at length to breathe and smile once more.

Once more they moved beneath a real sun.

Even when the danger zone is crossed with all these precautions, vigilance and prayer, and a freer and purer realm is entered, the pilgrims are still unable to relax. For the memory and the strain of the immediate experience is still fresh, the shadows of the danger left behind still seem to cast their dire influence on them.

However, they have stepped into a realm where the bright sun shines untainted by the deceitful hues of the world of Falsehood.

None in his Way

Though Hell claimed rule, the spirit still had power.

This No-man’s-land he passed without debate;
Him the heights missioned, him the Abyss desired:
None stood across his way, no voice forbade.

This is the land Aswapathy has surveyed; hell claims to be the sole ruler, but the power of the Spirit has still a say. It is a no-man’s-land where he moves unquestioned, unchecked.

The heights above beckon, but the abyss below casts a longing look at him. He is free to choose, there is none standing in his way.

Towards the Night

For swift and easy is the downward path,
And now towards the Night was turned his face.

And Aswapathy chooses to fathom the inviting abyss of darkness below. Indeed, the path downward is always easy and rapid; it is the path upward that is difficult and steep. The downward pull of the established forces of Ignorance, Inertia and Darkness is incessant and any inclination towards them is swiftly turned by them into a precipitous plunge.

The Naked Worst

A greater darkness waited, a worse reign,
If worse can be where all is evil’s extreme;
Yet to the cloaked the uncloaked is naked worst.

A still greater darkness awaits Aswapathy. What he has seen is dark enough, but what he is to see further is yet worse. Can there be anything worse than the formation of Evil that he has just seen? Yes, what passed before was evil under veil; things existed and moved under false labels and colours. What he is to see now is naked, unveiled Evil.

God and Truth never there

There God and Truth and the supernal Light
Had never been or else had power no more.

God, Truth and Light do not appear to have ever existed here in this region of Evil. At any rate they are not effective here any more. Even if they had been so at any time before, they have now been completely displaced by the Lords of Falsehood and Darkness.

He Crosses a Boundary

As when one slips in a deep moment’s trance
Over mind’s border into another world,
He crossed a boundary whose stealthy trace
Eye could not see but only the soul feel.

Like one who in a state of deep meditative trance slides over the edges of the mind into a totally different realm of Consciousness, without effort or design, Aswapathy finds himself across a boundary which is so subtle that his eyes cannot see, only his soul can feel. The soul feels the transition.

Armoured Fierce Domain

Into an armoured fierce domain he came
And saw himself wandering like a lost soul
Amid grimed walls and savage slums of Night.

Around him crowded grey and squalid huts
Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power,
Inhuman quarters and demoniac wards.

The fierce domain he has stepped into is fully armoured against foes. Here he finds himself totally a stranger, with none to befriend him, walking without direction in surroundings that are dirty, dark and primitive. There are flamboyant edifices to the glory of tyrant Power but alongside there are poor, pitiful, ugly dwellings; also spread out are quarters full of inhuman and demoniac creatures, cruel and evil.

Haunting Misery

A pride in evil hugged its wretchedness;
A misery haunting splendour pressed those fell
Dun suburbs of the cities of dream-life.

Evil is always accompanied by art insolent self-pride and this pride hugs the wretchedness of the evil defiantly. That is why the mean state continues. There is in this realm an overall misery—looming over the peculiar splendour of the place—stamping itself on the dim-lit purlieus of the crowded cities of this dream-like existence.

Life, a Fallen Goddess

There Life displayed to the spectator soul
The shadow depths of her strange miracle.

A strong and fallen goddess without hope,
Obscured, deformed by some dire Gorgon spell,
As might a harlot empress in a bouge,
Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised
Her evil face of perilous beauty and charm
And, drawing panic to a shuddering kiss
Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts,
Allured to their abyss the spirit’s fall.

Here Life shows to the onlooker the depraved and deformed state to which she has been reduced and the way in which the fatal charm of her deceptive visage entices the spirit to plunge to its fall.

Nightmare Pomps

Across the field of sight she multiplied
As on a scenic film or moving plate
The implacable splendour of her nightmare pomps.

On the dark background of a soulless world
She staged between a lurid light and shade
Her dramas of the sorrow of the depths
Written on the agonised nerves of living things:

As if on a cinematographic screen, Life throws up a number of scenes imaging her nether glories in their engulfing terror. On a soulless stage she enacts, in a fearful play of light and shade, her dramas depicting the sorrow of her fallen states borne and suffered by the strained nerves of the living.

Pity Paralysed

Epics of horror and grim majesty,
Wry statues spat and stiffened in life’s mud,
A glut of hideous forms and hideous deeds
Paralysed pity in the hardened breast.

The characters in these dramas are embodiments of terror, cold and pitiless, dry and stiff in the muddy terrains of Life. There is a plethora of ugly forms and ugly movements leaving no quarter for pity anywhere.

Lust Turned into Decorative Art

In booths of sin and night-repairs of vice
Styled infamies of the body’s concupiscence
And sordid imaginations etched in flesh,
Turned lust into a decorative art:
Abusing Nature’s gift her pervert skill
Immortalised the sown grain of living death,
In a mud goblet poured the bacchic wine,
To a satyr gave the thyrsus of a god.

Things are changed out of form. Lust of flesh is passed off as movements of art. Life misuses God-given skills, prolongs the career of all pernicious elements, fills the meanest receptacle with heady intoxication and gives to the animal-human the emblem of a god.

Art-Parades of Distorted Forms

Impure, sadistic, with grimacing mouths,
Grey foul inventions gruesome and macabre
Came televisioned from the gulfs of Night.

Her craft ingenious in monstrosity,
Impatient of all natural shape and poise,
A gape of nude exaggerated lines,
Gave caricature a stark reality,
And art-parades of weird distorted forms,
And gargoyle masks obscene and terrible
Trampled to tormented postures the torn sense.

From the dark gulfs emerge devilish forms reeking with filth, cruel and mocking in their appearance. An ingenious art of perverted Life sets aside all norms of Nature and concocts monstrous exaggerations that caricature reality. Flaunting parades of these grotesque, obscene and frightful forms outrage the witness senses to the point of collapse.

Evil’s Worshipper

An inexorable evil’s worshipper,
She made vileness great and sublimated filth;
A dragon power of reptile energies
And strange epiphanies of grovelling Force
And serpent grandeurs couching in the mire
Drew adoration to a gleam of slime.

Life turns into a worshipper at the shrine of imperious Evil; what is vile is cherished as great and dirt is raised up in value. The scene is crowded with reptile-form energies of a dragon power. Novel formations of earth-sticking Force, imposing serpent-visaged energies waiting in ambush, inspire fearful homage to the lowly godlings.

Nature Twisted

All Nature pulled out of her frame and base
Was twisted into an unnatural pose:
Repulsion stimulated inert desire;
Agony was made a red-spiced food for bliss,
Hatred was trusted with the work of lust
And torture took the form of an embrace;
A ritual anguish consecrated death;
Worship was offered to the Undivine.

Nature herself is forced here to forsake the basic pattern of her movements and dragged into an unnatural state of functioning. Consequently her actions and reactions are all topsy-turvy. What repels, instead of deadening desire, stimulates it; agony does not bring about pain but augments bliss; not attraction but hatred promotes lust; torture does not create revulsion but effects union; anguish does not make death fearful and unwelcome but actually gives it a holy respectability; and worship is offered not to the Divine but to all that is undivine.

Aesthesis of Inferno’s Art (I)

A new aesthesis of Inferno’s art
That trained the mind to love what the soul hates,
Imposed allegiance on the quivering nerves
And forced the unwilling body to vibrate.

Even Art, in this veritable hell, has its different standards of approach and appreciation. The mind is educated to cherish not what the soul chooses but what the soul hates—the reverse of what should be. The nerves that are agitated at this unnatural requirement of the mind are pressurised to accommodate themselves. Even the body that protests against this contrariety is forced to yield and participate in this strange aesthesis.

Aesthesis of Inferno’s Art (II)

Too sweet and too harmonious to excite
In this regime that soiled the being’s core,
Beauty was banned, the heart’s feeling dulled to sleep
And cherished in their place sensation’s thrills;
The world was probed for jets of sense-appeal.

Beauty—real Beauty—which is inherently so sweet and so full of harmony, refuses to be stimulated by this vitiating turn of aesthesis and therefore it is exiled altogether. Feelings of sympathy, love, purity etc. which arise naturally in the heart are deadened and cheap sensations are promoted for their thrills. Everywhere there is a search for intensities of sense-attraction and sense-experience.

Material Intellect the Judge

Here cold material intellect was the judge
And needed sensual prick and jog and lash
That its hard dryness and dead nerves might feel
Some passion and power and acrid point of life.

The judge here is not the truth-perception in the awakened heart or the purified mind, but the cold intellect tied to its physical base. It is dry and unfeeling and needs the stab of pain and an intensity of sensations to awaken it so that it may know something of the power, passion and sharp savour of life.

New Philosophy

A new philosophy theorised evil’s rights,
Gloried in the shimmering rot of decadence,
Or gave to a python force persuasive speech
And armed with knowledge the primeval brute.

A philosophy is erected justifying the right of Evil to exist and rule, exulting in the glitter of the general onset of decline and decay, giving enticing appeal to a dangerous, encircling lowly force, equipping the primitive brute in life with Knowledge that makes it formidable and wildly extends its range and capacity for harm.

Mind Scrambling into the Pit

Over life and Matter only brooding bowed,
Mind changed to the image of a rampant beast;
It scrambled into the pit to dig for truth
And lighted its search with the subconscient’s flares.

Mind changes its direction. It no more looks and soars upward. It gazes downward, pores over life and matter below and like a restless animal digging into the ground, it enters into the nether regions hoping to find the truth there, lighting up its search with the raw flares of the subconscient domain. Its lights are not the purer Light from above but the lurid flashes from the mixed and muddy depths below.

Filth of Abyss

Thence bubbling rose sullying the upper air,
The filth and festering secrets of the Abyss:
This it called positive fact and real life.

This now composed the fetid atmosphere.

From these concealed depths of the subconscient rise elements that form the scum of life and they contaminate the air even of the regions above the subconscious and the semi-conscious. The result of this contaminated admixture, which poisons the whole atmosphere of the region, is looked upon in this nefarious regime as the real truth of life.

Bestial Ecstasy

A wild-beast passion crept from secret Night
To watch its prey with fascinating eyes:
Around him like a fire with sputtering tongues
There lolled and laughed a bestial ecstasy;

From the nether regions there comes up bestial passion with eager look, hungry for its prey. All around Aswapa thy there is a wild abandon of an animal ecstasy. The atmosphere is one of uninhibited passion and fierce enjoyment of pleasures of the lowest kind.

The Pattern of Hell

The air was packed with longings brute and fierce;
Crowding and stinging in a monstrous swarm
Pressed with a noxious hum into his mind
Thoughts that could poison Nature’s heavenliest breath,
Forcing reluctant lids assailed the sight
Acts that revealed the mystery of Hell.

All that was there was on this pattern made.

Passionate and animal desires throng the place. Disturbing and corroding thoughts hover round Aswapathy incessantly and press on the doors of his mind for entry; they are a veritable poison. Movements and activities revealing the worst features of Hell impinge upon his reluctant eyes and force them to see.

Such is the world that Aswapathy beholds.

A Race Possessed

A race possessed inhabited those parts.

A force demoniac lurking in man’s depths
That heaves suppressed by the heart’s human law,
Awed by the calm and sovereign eyes of Thought,
Can in a fire and earthquake of the soul
Arise and, calling to its native night,
Overthrow the reason, occupy the life
And stamp its hoof on Nature’s shaking ground:
This was for them their being’s flaming core.

The inhabitants of these regions are possessed by a fearful nether force.

In the concealed depths of man’s being there is a demon-like force which normally is kept under control by the refined law of the heart and obliged to shrink back into itself under the masterful gaze of the calm mind. However, in a moment of upset or crisis of the being, this nether force can rush up with all its dark power, overthrow the sovereign reason of the mind, dominate life and put its impress on the agitated nature. Such a condition is the natural state for the denizens of this world, it is, indeed, their strong point, the centre of their dynamism.

Unpitying World of a Monster God

A mighty energy, a monster god,
Hard to the strong, implacable to the weak,
It stared at the harsh unpitying world it made
With the stony eyelids of its fixed idea.

Pity is banished from this world the creator of which is a monstrous god, a mighty energy that allows no quarter to the weak and is unyielding to the strong. It has shaped this creation in the mould of one unchanging idea and it is vigilant to keep it along this fixed course.

Music of Death and Ruin

Its heart was drunk with a dire hunger’s wine,
In others’ suffering felt a thrilled delight
And of death and ruin the grandiose music heard.

This demon-Power is consumed with an unmitigable hunger and leaves nothing unappropriated. It enjoys with great relish the suffering of others. Ruin and death are celestial music to its ears.

Dark Dictatorship

To have power, to be master, was sole virtue and good:
It claimed the whole world for Evil’s living room,
Its party’s grim totalitarian reign
The cruel destiny of breathing things.

All on one plan was shaped and standardised
Under a dark dictatorship’s breathless weight.

Power is Virtue and to dominate is the sole good. The demon-Power seeks to reserve the whole world for Evil and her hosts who are the sole ruling hierarchy. The way of Evil is the only law to which all are compelled to submit. The whole of life is cast and governed in strict conformity to the oppressive and dark spirit of Evil.

Lower than the Lowest

In street and house, in councils and in courts
Beings he met who looked like living men
And climbed in speech upon high wings of thought
But harboured all that is subhuman, vile
And lower than the lowest reptile’s crawl.

Aswapathy moves in varied quarters and encounters the beings living there. They resemble the humans; like humans they talk high, think high. But in reality they embody in themselves the basest of infra-human elements and are meaner in their nature than the meanest reptile.

Reason Enhances Monstrosity

The reason meant for nearness to the gods
And uplift to heavenly scale by the touch of mind
Only enhanced by its enlightening ray
Their inborn nature’s wry monstrosity.

Reason, which is meant to uplift nature nearer to the level of the Gods by its action of enlightenment through the mind, finds itself put to pervert use in this world. It is used to justify and put a premium on the naturally distorted, evil doings of these beings. It glorifies their downward state.

Hell’s Trade-Mark

Often a familiar visage studying
Joyfully encountered at some dangerous turn,
Hoping to recognise a look of light,
His vision warned by the spirit’s inward eye
Discovered suddenly Hell’s trade-mark there,
Or saw with the inner sense that cannot err,
In the semblance of a fair or virile form
The demon and the goblin and the ghoul.

Appearances are very deceptive here. Aswapathy pauses at times on seeing what appears to be a familiar face with a look of light on it. He tries to recognise it, but as he observes, his inner perception warns him and he suddenly finds that it is a creature of darkness masquerading under that misleading form. Thus he sees many a form that looks fair or manly, but his unerring inner sense points out to him that the fair form clothes some ugly and lowly creature like a goblin or a ghoul or a demon.

Insolence Reigns

An insolence reigned of cold stone-hearted strength
Mighty, obeyed, approved by the Titan’s law,
The huge laughter of a giant cruelty
And fierce glad deeds of ogre violence.

A powerful insolence commands everywhere under the aegis of the Titan’s will. There is an overwhelming cruelty that fills the spaces with its deafening laughter. Deeds of fierce violence are enjoyed by their ogre perpetrators.

Cynic Den

In that wide cynic den of thinking beasts
One looked in vain for a trace of pity and love;
There was no touch of sweetness anywhere,
But only Force and its acolytes, greed and hate:
There was no help for suffering, none to save,
None dared resist or speak a noble word.

The beings here think, no doubt, but they are only thinking beasts. They believe little in love or pity. They are cynical to the core. Sweetness, love, compassion are all foreign to them. They believe only in force and its helpmates of greed and hatred. None offer to help or to save others. Under these conditions of open hostility, none have the courage to oppose the wrong or to defend the truth or to express a sentiment of a noble kind.

Darkness Proclaims her Slogans

Armed with the aegis of tyrannic Power,
Signing the edicts of her dreadful rule
And using blood and torture as a seal,
Darkness proclaimed her slogans to the world.

Darkness trumpets its catchwords with the sanction of the tyrant Power. She brings into force the dread Will of the ruling Power, ensuring its execution by violence and compulsion.

Soul Slain on the Altar of a Lie

A servile blinkered silence hushed the mind
Or only it repeated lessons taught,
While mitred, holding the good shepherd’s staff,
Falsehood enthroned on awed and prostrate hearts
The cults and creeds that organise living death
And slay the soul on the altar of a lie.

The mind is browbeaten and reduced to a state of abject silence; or it is turned into a mechanical instrument repeating what it is told, instead of thinking its way to truth. Falsehood reigns supreme. Propagatory cults and creeds stifle the breath of life, crush all independent action and make the lie so pervasive and oppressive that the soul dies suffocated.

Truth could not Live

All were deceived or served their own deceit;
Truth in that stifling atmosphere could not live.

The falsehood is so powerful and enveloping that all subscribe to it believing it to be the truth; whatever they do in this atmosphere only serves to plunge them deeper into this deceitful falsehood. The inhospitable air is too oppressive and stifling for truth to breathe and survive.

Wretchedness and its Joy

There wretchedness believed in its own joy
And fear and weakness hugged their abject depths;
All that is low and sordid-thoughted, base,
All that is drab and poor and miserable,
Breathed in a laxed content its natural air
And felt no yearning of divine release:

Wretchedness takes here a perverse delight in itself and thrives. Fear and weakness cling passionately to life. Lowliness, meanness, dryness, indifference, misery, all that impoverishes, constricts and arrests the proper growth of life—flourish in an atmosphere that is natural to this growth. There is no wish anywhere, no seeking to break out of this self-confinement into a higher state of freedom.

Autarchy Excluding Light

Arrogant, gibing at more luminous states
The people of the gulfs despised the sun.

A barriered autarchy excluded light;
Fixed in its will to be its own grey self,
It vaunted its norm unique and splendid type:
It soothed its hunger with a plunderer’s dream;
Flaunting its cross of servitude like a crown,
It clung to its dismal harsh autonomy.

The denizens of this lowly world glory in their state of mean obscurity and despise all states of more light. As a body they guard themselves against Light and are resolved to continue for ever their way of living; they proclaim their own laws and standards as the ideal ones, gratify their hunger with pitiless exploitation, are proud of their slavery in their abjectness and cling fanatically to their depressing and severely organised existence.

Brag of the Brazen Tongue

A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;
Its hard and shameless clamour filling space
And threatening all who dared to listen to truth
Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;
A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,
And braggart dogmas shouted in the night
Kept for the fallen soul once deemed a god
The pride of its abysmal absolute.

Falsehood raises its trumpet voice and fills the spaces with its claims for the monopoly of being right, threatening at the same time those who dare to turn to its opposite, the truth, with frightful consequences. Victims of this propaganda yield to its clamour; the soul forgets its innate divinity and a misplaced pride in the abysmal state is buttressed by the proud braggings of falsehood.

Through the Menacing Realms

A lone discoverer in these menacing realms
Guarded like termite cities from the sun,
Oppressed mid crowd and tramp and noise and flare,
Passing from dusk to deeper dangerous dusk,
He wrestled with powers that snatched from mind its light
And smote from him their clinging influences.

Pushing forward his journey in this hostile land cut off from the saving Light, passing through the crowded, noisy and oppressive thoroughfares, Aswapathy crosses from dim regions into regions still more dim. He has to combat the powers that seek to deprive him of the guiding light in his mind and ceaselessly throw away the unwelcome clinging influences cast by these hostile elements.

Failing Eve

Soon he emerged in a dim wall-less space.

For now the peopled tracts were left behind;
He walked between wide banks of failing eve.

Very soon, however, Aswapathy emerges into an open space; the crowded and cramped tracts are passed. It is still dim all over and the darkness is gathering on both sides of his path.

A Spiritual Blank

Around him grew a gaunt spiritual blank,
A threatening waste, a sinister loneliness
That left mind bare to an unseen assault,
An empty page on which all that willed could write
Stark monstrous messages without control.

The spaces around Aswapathy are increasingly empty of the Spirit; there yawns instead an aggressive waste, an unholy solitariness that bares the mind and leaves it defenceless against any unseen attack; it weakens the mind to such an extent that anything can stamp itself on it without resistance.

Downward Roads of Dusk

A travelling dot on downward roads of Dusk
Mid barren fields and barns and straggling huts
And a few crooked and phantasmal trees,
He faced a sense of death and conscious Void.

But still a hostile Life unseen was there
Whose deathlike poise resisting light and truth
Made living a bleak gap in nullity.

In that desert land, travelling alone on the slopes of gathering Darkness across occasional hutments and sparse trees, twisted and misshapen, Aswapathy senses the spirit of Death everywhere, an oppressive emptiness. And yet all is not a nil. There is a positive element and that is the presence of a hostile Life setting itself against the entry of any light and truth into that realm.

Abyss Rises to Claim the Soul

He heard the grisly voices that deny;
Assailed by thoughts that swarmed like spectral hordes,
A prey to the staring phantoms of the gloom
And terror approaching with its lethal mouth,
Driven by a strange will down ever down,
The sky above a communiqué of Doom,
He strove to shield his spirit from despair,
But felt the horror of the growing Night
And the Abyss rising to claim his soul.

Aswapathy is rapidly engulfed by horrid voices dinning negations of everything, invaded by dark thoughts in masses and subjected helplessly to visions of gloom and terror. He is pulled down and further down the slopes; above him stretches the sky of doom. He fights to guard his spirit from this onslaught of despair but the horror of the Darkness creeps over him and he feels as if the Abyss below is rising up to swallow his soul.

Python Night

Then ceased the abodes of creatures and their forms
And solitude wrapped him in its voiceless folds.

All vanished suddenly like a thought expunged;
His spirit became an empty listening gulf
Void of the dead illusion of a world:
Nothing was left, not even an evil face;
He was alone with the grey python Night.

Aswapathy then enters a zone where forms and dwellings are no more. There is only a smothering solitude; all else has vanished. He feels himself to be just a vacant chasm. The malevolent forms, evil and ugly, that he has been encountering till now have all disappeared like an illusion that never existed. He is severely alone with the dark endless Night coiling before him.

A Dense Nothing

A dense and nameless Nothing conscious, mute,
Which seemed alive but without body or mind,
Lusted all being to annihilate
That it might be for ever nude and sole.

There is a dense, featureless, soundless Nothing. Though without body or mind, it is yet something conscious, alive, out to swallow up everything that may exist so that it alone could exist, bare and solitary.

His Being Disappears

As in a shapeless beast’s intangible jaws,
Gripped, strangled by that lusting, viscous blot,
Attracted to some black and giant mouth
And swallowing throat and a huge belly of doom,
His being from its own vision disappeared
Drawn towards depths that hungered for its fall.

Aswapathy finds himself sucked into the bowels of the hungry Abyss of Night and feels his own being disappearing from his vision.

**He Struggles

A formless void suppressed his struggling brain,
A darkness grim and cold oppressed his flesh,
A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart;
Haled by a serpent-force from its warm home
And dragged to extinction in blank vacancy
Life clung to its seat with cords of gasping breath;
Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue.

As he is losing his identity, Aswapathy struggles, his brain suppressed by the enveloping void, his flesh oppressed by a cold and grim darkness. Unnerving suggestions cast a chill over his heart and a powerful force from its seething depths drags his life towards an extinction which with difficulty he manages to escape. His body is exposed to the hungry lickings of an obscure devourer.

Hope Perishes

Existence smothered travailed to survive;
Hope strangled perished in his empty soul,
Belief and memory abolished died
And all that helps the spirit in its course.

Through all the smothering his struggling being strives to survive. But hope dies in his denuded soul, belief and memory of existence are no more; and all else that helps the soul in its journey Godward is also extinct.

An Implacable Eternity

There crawled through every tense and aching nerve
Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail
A nameless and unutterable fear.

As a sea nears a victim bound and still,
The approach alarmed his mind for ever dumb
Of an implacable eternity
Of pain inhuman and intolerable.

Aswapathy’s nerves are all tense and aching; they tremble with a fear, indescribable and vague but intense. His benumbed mind senses with alarm the approach of Something perpetual, inexorable, some unbearable and inhuman pain.

He must Bear

This he must bear, his hope of heaven estranged;
He must ever exist without extinction’s peace
In a slow suffering Time and tortured Space,
An anguished nothingness his endless state.

But there is no help. Aswapathy has to bear this condition, with all hopes of bright realms gone, without any possibility of the peace of Nirvana; he sees that he has to live in constant pain and suffering in a state of anguished nullity.

Godhead Lost

A lifeless vacancy was now his breast,
And in the place where once was luminous thought,
Only remained like a pale motionless ghost
An incapacity for faith and hope
And the dread conviction of a vanquished soul
Immortal still but with its godhead lost,
Self lost and God and touch of happier worlds.

His heart is now a dead emptiness. His mind once used to luminous thought has now lost even the capacity to have the faith to be; he is seized with the conviction of defeat. No doubt his being is still immortal in its essence, but it has lost its poise in God-state, lost its selfhood and its contact with God and Heaven.

He Endures

But he endured, stilled the vain terror, bore
The smothering coils of agony and affright;
Then peace returned and the soul’s sovereign gaze.

Aswapathy endures the ordeal, calms down the causeless terror, bears the oppressions of agony and fear without going under. Then a change comes over him. His normal peace returns and the sight of the soul is restored.

Calm Light Replies to Blank Horror

To the blank horror a calm Light replied:
Immutable, undying and unborn,
Mighty and mute the Godhead in him woke
And faced the pain and danger of the world.

The staring horror of the scene is countered by a calm Light from within him. The immortal, unshakable, mighty and silent Godhead in him arises to face the danger and the pain of that world.

Bare Spirit Meets Naked Hell

He mastered the tides of Nature with a look:
He met with his bare spirit naked Hell.

With a mere look of the surging Godhead the threatening waves of the turbulent Nature are mastered. Aswapathy meets Hell at its worst with his bare and unaided spirit.