his exact term—"it has never been published. The centaur is the elemental spirit and the woman the divine spirit of the path Samec and the golden heart is the central point upon the cabbalistic tree of life and corresponds to the Sephiroth Tipereth." I was full of excitement for now at last I began to understand. The "tree of life" is a geometrical figure made up of ten circles or spheres called Sephiroth joined by straight lines. Once men must have thought of it as like some great tree covered maybe with fruit and foliage, but at some period, in the thirteenth century perhaps, touched by the mathematical genius of Arabia in all likelihood, it had lost its natural form. The Sephiroth Tipereth, attributed to the sun, is joined to the Sephiroth Yesod, attributed to the moon, by a straight line called the path Samec, and this line is attributed to the constellation Sagittarius. He would not or could not tell me more, but when I repeated what I had heard to one of my fellow-students, yachtsman, yacht-designer, and Cabbalist, he said: "Now you know what was meant by a wisdom older than the serpent." He reminded me that the cabbalistic tree has a green serpent winding through it which represents the winding path of nature or of instinct and that the path Samec is part of the long straight line that goes up through the centre of the tree and that it was interpreted as the path of "deliberate effort." The three who saw must, he said, be those who could attain to wisdom by the study of magic for that was "deliberate effort." I remember that I quoted Balzac's description of the straight line as the line of man, but he could not throw light on the other symbols except that the shot arrow must symbolize effort, nor did I get any further light.
A couple of weeks after my vision, Lady Gregory whom I had met once in London for a few minutes, drove over to Tullyra and after Symons' return to London, I stayed at her house. When I saw her great woods on the edge of a lake, I remembered the saying about avoiding woods and living near the water. Had this new friend come because of my invocation, or had the saying been but prevision and my invocation no act of will, but prevision also? Were those unintelligible words—"avoid woods because they concentrate the solar ray"—but a dream confusion, an attempt to explain symbolically an actual juxtaposition of wood and water? I could not say nor can I now. I was in poor health. . . .
