Still Running Off at the Keyboard

IS THIS WHAT STEINSALTZ WAS TALKING ABOUT ?

Consider the passage below, taken from a Rosicrucian story, in the light of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz's assertion in THE THIRTEEN PETALLED ROSE that man creates angels by his thoughts and actions, as the quotes I blogged yesterday from the first chapter of the book indicate.

Steinsaltz wrote:

...there are the subversive angels created by the actions of men, by the objectification of malevolence: the evil thought, the hate-inspired wish, the wicked deed. For beside its visibly destructive consequences, every act of malice or evil creates an abstract Gnostic being, who is a bad angel, an angel belonging to the plane of evil corresponding to the state of mind that brought it into being.

There is a Rosicrucian book online at the Wright American Fiction website, under the auspicies of Indiana University. There you can read THE ROSICRUCIAN'S STORY, written by Pascal Beverly Randolph. The story is about a group of men killing time while traveling on a ship. One of the men is a storyteller. He tells the story of Tom Clark and his wife who nags Tom to the point that he desires her death. His wife in turn nags because she dislikes her husband and wishes that he were dead.

The scene is their bedroom. The window is open. Both husband and wife have gone to bed with thoughts of murder in their head. They gazed at the stars through the open window and have subquently fallen into a dreamless sleep. This is what follows:

Just as Tom Clark and his wife had been magnetized into a sort of restless sleep from gazing at the star--an uneasy, disturbed, nervous, but dreamless sleep--as if a heavy, thick and murky cloud just floated off a stagnant marsh, there descended upon the roof of the house a pestilent, slimy mist, and it gathered over and about the roof; and it entered, rolling heavily, into the chamber, coming through that little window at the foot of the bed, the littler window whose upper sash was down. It was a thick, dense, iron-greyisn mist, approaching blackness, only that there was a sort of turgid redness, not a positive color, but as if it had floated over the depths of hell, and caught a portion of its infernal luminosity. And it was thick and dark, and dense and very heavy; and it swept and rolled, and poured into the room in thick, voluminous masses--into the very room, and about the couch where tossed in uneasy slumber the woman and the man. And it filled the apartment, and hung like a pall about their couch; and its fetor oppressed their senses; and it made their brath come thick, and difficult, and wheezing from their lungs. It was dreadful! And their breath mingled with the strange vapor, apparently endowing it with a kind of horrid life, a sort of semi-sentience; and gave it a very peculiar and fearful movement--orderly, systematic, gyratory, pulsing movement--the quick sharp breath of the woman, the deep and heavy breath of the man. And it had come through the window at the foot of the bed, for the upper sash was down.

Slowly, and with regular, spiracular, wavy motion, with gentle undulations, like the measured roll of the calm Pacific Sea, the gentle sea on which I am sailing toward the Pyramids and my Cora--six years old, and so pretty! Pyramids six thousand years old, and so grand! Like the waves of that sea did the cloud begin to move gyrally around the chamber, hanging to the curtains, clinging to the walls, but as if dreading the moonlight, carefully avoiding the window through which it had come the little window at the foot of the bed--whose upper sash was down.....Soon, very soon, the cloud commenced to change the axis of its movements, and began to condense into a large globe of iron-hued nebulas; and it began a contrary revolution; and it floated thus, and swam like a dreadful destiny over the unconscious sleepers on the bed, after which it moved to the western side or end of the room, and became nearly stationary in an angle of the wall, where for a while it stood or floated, silent, appalling, almost motionless, changeless still. At the end of about six minutes it moved again, and in a very short time assumed the gross, but unmistakable outline of a gigantic human form--an outline horrible, black as night, frowning human form--cut not sharply from the vapor, but still distinctly human in its shapeness--but very imperfect, except the head, which was too frightfully complete to leave even a lingering doubt but that some black and hideous deviltry was at work in that little chamber; and IT had entered through the window at the foot of the bed--the little window, whose upper sash was down. And the head was infamous, horrible, gorgonic; and its glare was terrible, infernal, blasting, ghastly--perfectly withering in its expression, proportions, and its aspect. (p. 31-32

The story goes on to explain in greater detail the form that this spectre took. There is no need for me to continue quoting. I'm sure the idea that this is a ghastly spectre is clear.

You can read the passages here.
Use the drop-down menu above the book to select pages 30-31.

Pascal Beverly Randolph was the founder of the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis in 1858 according to this website.