ar those rich in characteristic types. Bear in mind the founders
of religion. (They do not always have to be individuals--schools, myths.)
There are, however, others than the religiously inspired natures, who are
preeminently endowed to produce suggestive symbol groups with anagogic
value; the artists. I suspect that it would prove that the purifying
(cathartic) action of a work of art is the greater the more strongly the
anagogic symbolism (the groups of types that carry it) is developed, or in
other words, the more they express a tendency to a broadening of the
personality. This tendency, to which belong the motives of the denial of
the selfish will (father figure) of the love that is connected with
sacrifice (incest motive, regeneration) of the devotion to an ideal
(longing for death), etc., is manifested in the artist as also in the
devout observer of the work of art in his very devotion to it. Being lost
in a work of art appears to me essentially related both to introversion
and to the unio mystica.

I have already spoken of the creations of the myth forming imagination and
its anagogic import. In alchemy, to which I wish now to return, the
mythical and the individual images meet in the most vivid way, without
destroying each other.

In regard to the high ethical aspirations of alchemy, we understand that
as a mystic art it preserves those attributes of a royal art which it
seems to have had at first merely as gold making and magic. In fact what
art may more justly be called royal than that of the perfection of
mankind, that art which turns the dependent into the independent, the
slave into a master? The freeing of the will in the mystic (and in every
ethical) process has already, I believe, been commented on enough to be
comprehensible. And the power of rule that has been extolled as a magical
effect of the Philosopher's Stone lies in the harmonizing of the
individual will with that of the world or with God's will. In the new
birth--so remarks Jane Leade casually--we acquire a magic power; this occurs
"through faith, that is, through the harmony of our will with the divine
will. For faith puts the world in our power, inasmuch as the harmony of
our will with the divine has the result of making everything ours or
obedient to us. The will of the soul, when it accords wholly with the
divine, is no longer a naked will lacking its raiment, power, but brings
with it an invincible omnipotence."

To-day, too, there is a