The Three Impostors; or, The TransmutationsMachen, Arthur
Science
The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations
Machen, Arthur
Fiction; Horror tales, English
believed, for it serves to conceal much that it is better should not be
known generally. However, if you care to read the appendix to Payne
Knight's monograph, you will find that the true Sabbath was something
very different, though the writer has very nicely refrained from
printing all he knew. The secrets of the true Sabbath were the secrets
of remote times surviving into the Middle Ages, secrets of an evil
science which existed long before Aryan man entered Europe. Men and
women, seduced from their homes on specious pretences, were met by
beings well qualified to assume, as they did assume, the part of devils,
and taken by their guides to some desolate and lonely place, known to
the initiate by long tradition and unknown to all else. Perhaps it was a
cave in some bare and wind-swept hill; perhaps some inmost recess of a
great forest, and there the Sabbath was held. There, in the blackest
hour of night, the _Vinum Sabbati_ was prepared, and this evil graal 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 represented, and the awful thing veiled in
the mythos of the Tree in the Garden was done anew. Such was the
_nuptiæ Sabbati_.
"I prefer to say no more; you, Haberden, know as well as I do that the
most trivial laws of life are not to be broken with impunity; and for so
terrible an act as this, in which the very inmost place of the temple
was broken open and defiled, a terrible vengeance followed. What began
with corruption ended also with corruption."
* * * * *
Underneath is the following in Dr. Haberden's writing:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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