Page:The Hermaphrodite (1926).pdf/9

 PREFACE

Maybe it was more than a coincidence, for there is a profound courage in certain forms of credulity. And so, on second thought, I will call it literary, or psychic magnetism.

I was deep in a second reading, after a quarter of century, of Balzac’s “Seraphita,” that amazing imaginative flight of the French writer into the realms of the occult. Seraphita-Seraphitus, the hero-heroine of Balsac’s book, is a hermaphrodite, a mysterious and divinely beautiful boy-girl of the Norse Mountains, who is loved by both a girl and a man. She is an epiphany, an incarnation, the final evolution of the human being before its evanescence into a super-dimension, where male and female are one, a union in one body of eternal mates lost to one another for kalpas of time before the Fall into duality, a myth that is universal and which is the basis of profoundest mystical thought.

It was while deeply absorbed in the philosophy of “Seraphita” that Samuel Loveman, a poet whom I knew only vaguely by name, brought to my house casually a poem called “The Hermaphrodite.” I had not read the first four lines of it when I was completely under the spell of Loveman’s magic — for there