Her heart was deeply stirred, and yet her head
holding all religion to be fiction or metaphor, it occurred to her to
invent a story which might be a religion or a religion which might be
a story into any degree of belief in which she could lapse at will.
The name and the form of her new deity was revealed to her in a dream.
He was Corambe, pure as Jesus, beautiful as Gabriel, as graceful as
the nymphs and Orpheus, less austere than the Christian God, and as
much woman as man, because she could best understand this sex from her
love for her mother. He appeared in many aspects of physical and moral
beauty; was eloquent, master of all arts, and above all of the magic
of musical improvisation; loved as a friend and sister, and at the
same time revered as a god; not awful and remote from impeccability,
but with the fault of excess of indulgence. She estimated that she
composed about a thousand sacred books or songs developing phases of
his mundane existence. In each of these he became incarnate man on
touching the earth, always in a new group of people who were good, yet
suffering martyrdoms from the wicked known only by the effects of
their malice. In this "gentle hallucination" she could lose herself in
the midst of friends, and turn to her hero deity for comfort.
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