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IV

THE HOLY CARNIVAL

NOTHING DISTRESSFUL TO me can clamber over that Threshold now. But anything and everything that shows me deference may play its part in my relaxation. I have had some very entertaining divine conferences. The gods men worship are difficult to assemble and impossible to count, because of their incorrigible habit of dissolving spasmodically into one another. I have remarked already upon the permutations and combinations, if those words are permissible, of Isis, the original Virgin Mary. Cleopatra’s infinite variety was nothing to it. The tangle of the Trinities is even more fantastically versatile. There is the Athanasian Trinity and the Arian Trinity, the Catholic and the Orthodox, the Logos and that ever ambiguous Virgin. There is the Gnostic Godhead, which makes Jehovah out to be the very Devil, and Pope’s consolidated Deity:

“Father of all, in every age

in every clime adored,

By Saint, by Savage and by Sage,

Jehovah, Jove or Lord.”

The vast theogony galumphs about in an endless confusion of identities with a stern transcendent solemnity that never deserts it. “Which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.”

A few such cries are uttered with an air of profound significance; a considerable amount of thunder goes on, a crackle of miracles, but never a laugh. To laugh is to awaken.

And in and out and round about this preposterous dance of the divinities, circulates an innumerable swarm of priests and prophets and teachers, wearing the oddest of robes and garments, mitres, triple crowns, scarlet hats, coquettish hoods. No Carnival gone mad can compare with this insane leaping and tumbling procession. They pour endlessly through the streets of my dreamland; striking strange symbolic attitudes, some with virgin beards, some grotesquely shaven and shorn, hunchbacked with copes, bellowing strange chants, uttering dark sayings—but always incredibly solemn. They tuck up their petticoats, these grave elderly gentlemen, and one, two, three, leap gulfs of logic.

I noted the present Primate, chief now of the English order of primates, his lawn sleeves like the plump wings of a theological Strassburg goose, as, bathed in the natural exudations of a strenuous faith, he pranced by me, with the Vatican a-kicking up ahind and afore, and a yellow Jap a-kicking up ahind old Pope. I had a momentary glimpse of the gloomy Dean, in ecstatic union with the Deity, yet contraceptive as ever, and then, before I could satisfy a natural curiosity, a tapping delirium of shrilling cymbals swept him away, “Glory!...Glory!... ALLELUIA!...”

As, on the verge of awakening, I watch this teeming disorder of the human brain, which is always the same and increasingly various, I listen for one simple laugh, I look for one single derisive smile. Always I encounter faces of stupid earnestness. They are positively not putting it on, unless earnest self-deception had become second nature. They are not pretending to be such fools. They are such fools…

There is this phase between dreaming and awakening, there is a sense of rapidly intensifying conflict and strain before the straining catgut snaps—exactly as it snaps when we come out of anaesthesia. The Brocken Witches’ Sabbath begins dispersing and dissolving, becomes a wildly spinning whirl. Will there be enough broomsticks for everybody? Hi broomstick! Are you engaged, broomstick? That’s my broomstick. They all leap for the nearest one. They rush to and fro about me and through me, terrified at the Berlioz clangor that heralds the night of the Gods. The Archbishop, Inge, His Holiness, Rabbis, thrust about me. They spin up towards the zenith colliding and fighting among themselves—serious to the end.