It is a very well-known fact, one with which Bulwer Lytton dealt with great power, that an intolerable sadness is the very first experience of the neophyte in Occultism.  A sense of blankness falls upon him which makes the world a waste, and life a vain exertion.  This follows his first serious contemplation of the abstract.  In gazing, or even in attempting to gaze, on the ineffable mystery of his own higher nature, he himself causes the initial trial to fall on him.  The oscillation between pleasure and pain ceases for—­perhaps an instant of time; but that is enough to have cut him loose from his fast moorings in the world of sensation.  He has experienced, however briefly, the greater life; and he goes on with ordinary existence weighted by a sense of unreality, of blank, of horrid negation.  This was the nightmare which visited Bulwer Lytton’s neophyte in “Zanoni”; and even Zanoni himself, who had learned great truths, and been entrusted with great powers, had not actually passed the threshold where fear and hope, despair and joy seem at one moment absolute realities, at the next mere forms of fancy.

This initial trial is often brought on us by life itself.  For life is after all, the great teacher.  We return to study it, after we have acquired power over it, just as the master in chemistry learns more in the laboratory than his pupil does.  There are persons so near the door of knowledge that life itself prepares them for it, and no individual hand has to invoke the hideous guardian of the entrance.  These must naturally be keen and powerful organizations, capable of the most vivid pleasure; then pain comes and fills its great duty.  The most intense forms of suffering fall on such a nature, till at last it arouses from its stupor of consciousness, and by the force of its internal vitality steps over the threshold into a place of peace.  Then the vibration of life loses its power of tyranny.  The sensitive nature must suffer still; but the soul has freed itself and stands aloof, guiding the life towards its greatness.  Those who are the subjects of Time, and go slowly through all his spaces, live on through a long drawn series of sensations, and suffer a constant mingling of pleasure and of pain.  They do not dare to take the snake of self in a steady grasp and conquer it, so becoming divine; but prefer to go on fretting through divers experiences, suffering blows from the opposing forces.

When one of these subjects of Time decides to enter on the path of Occultism, it is this which is his first task.  If life has not taught it to him, if he is not strong enough to teach himself and if he has power enough to demand the help of a master, then this fearful trial, depicted in Zanoni, is put upon him.  The oscillation in which he lives, is for an instant stilled; and he has to survive the shock of facing what seems to him at first sight as the abyss of nothingness.  Not till he has learned to dwell in this abyss, and has found its peace, is it possible for his eyes to have become incapable of tears.