Chapter XV (part 1)

p. 166 CHAPTER XV Occultism and love. Love and death. Our different relations to the problems of death and to the problems of love. What is lacking in our understanding of love? Love as an every-day and merely psychological phenomenon. The possibility of a spiritual understanding of love. The creative force of love. The negation of love. Love and mysticism. The "wondrous" in love. Nietzsche, Edward Carpenter and Schopenhauer on love. "The Ocean of Sex." THERE is not a single side of life which is not capable of revealing to us an infinity of the new and the unexpected, if we approach it with the knowledge that it is not exhausted by its visibility, that beyond this visibility there is a whole "invisible world"—a world of to us new and incomprehensible forces and relations. The knowledge of the existence of this invisible world: this is the first key to it. A wealth of "newness" unfolds to us in the most mysterious sides of our existence, in those sides through which we come into direct contact with eternity —in love and in death. In Hindu mythology love and death are the two faces of one deity . Siva , god of the creative force of nature, is at the same time the god of violent death, of murder and destruction. His wife is Parvati , goddess of beauty, love and happiness, and she is also Kali or Durga —goddess of evil, of misfortune, of sickness and of death. Together Siva and Kali are the gods of wisdom, the gods of the knowledge of good and evil. In the beginning of his book, The Drama of Love and Death , 1 Edward Carpenter very well defines our relation to these deeply incomprehensible and enigmatical sides of existence: Love and death move through this world of ours like things apart—underrunning it truly, and everywhere present, yet seeming to belong to some other mode of existence. p. 167 And further: These figures, Love and Death, move through the world like closest friends indeed, never far separate, and together dominating it in a kind of triumphant superiority; and yet like bitterest enemies, dogging each other's footsteps, undoing each other's work, fighting for the bodies and souls of mankind. In these few words is shown the contents of the enigma which confronts us, encompasses us, creates and annihilates us. But man's relation to the two aspects of this enigma is not identical. Strange as it may seem, the face of death has ever been more attractive to the mystical imagination of men than the face of love . There have always been many attempts to understand and define the hidden meaning of death; all religions, all religious doctrines begin with giving to man this or that idea about death. It is impossible to construct any system of world-contemplation without some definition of death; and there are numerous systems such as contemporary spiritism which consist almost entirely of "views upon death," of doctrines about death and post-mortem existence. (In one of his articles, V. V. Rosanoff 1 observes that all religions consist in substance of teachings about death.) But the problem of love, in the contemporary way of looking at the world, is regarded as something given, as something already understood and known. Different systems contribute little that is enlightening to an understanding of love. So although in reality love is for us the same enigma as is death, yet for some strange reason we think about it less. We seem to have developed certain cut and dried standards in regard to an understanding of love, and men thoughtlessly accept this or that standard. Art. which from its very nature should have much to say on this subject, gives a great deal of attention to love; love ever has been, and perhaps still is, the principal theme of art.