The Goddess of Atvatabar: Being the history of the discovery of the interior world and conquest of AtvatabarBradshaw, William Richard
Science
The Goddess of Atvatabar: Being the history of the discovery of the interior world and conquest of Atvatabar
Bradshaw, William Richard
Science fiction
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.
The organ rolled a blessed monotone, with variations exquisitely
sweet. The light in the dome faded perceptibly by the magical
shadowing of its windows until the rapt audience sat in complete
darkness. A circle of electric lights burned around the goddess on the
top of the throne, illuminating her figure. The lights faintly lit up
the dome, and presently appeared as nude spectres the fifty souls of
the priestesses who crouched beneath.
The organ, re-enforced with the wailing of a hundred violins, produced
a storm of the most delirious music, while the souls flashed with a
strange phosphorescence like a circle of fire. They wheeled with their
arms extended horizontally, each aura lying at an angle of forty-five
degrees with the horizon. Then, with hands clasping each other's feet,
they became a vertical circle like the wheel of fortune, and thus went
round and round. Again, they revolved in a circle faces downward, with
arms and hands stretched in an attitude of worship, forming for the
goddess a wreath of souls. Presently each soul sought its own body
floating beneath. The bodies expanding themselves absorbed each its
own soul. With the returning light of the outer sun the forest beneath
the throne had disappeared and the circular stage was occupied by a
band of sorcerers--each having balls of jelly of various colors
floating before him. At the command of the grand sorcerer the balls
would transform themselves into strange animals resembling cats, dogs,
monkeys, serpents, geese, wolves, and eagles. This was a tableau
representing man's supremacy over inferior life.
A company of twin souls of the greatest beauty and splendor of raiment
took possession of the circular platform beneath the throne and
thereupon danced in rhythmic circles wonderfully entrancing and
involved, chanting, in harmony with the movement of their bodies, the
following hymn to Lyone:
TO LYONE.
I.
Oh goddess, oh deity glorious,
With golden wan face, and the bloom
Of spirit and figure victorious!
Oh jewel that lighteneth gloom,
Men call thee the soul of a lover,
Invested with purest of clay,
A chrysalis, eager to hover
And fly from thy prison away!
II.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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