Poe's Mysticism 3

As gravity pulls everything together, eventually it is revealed that we can view "Matter, as created � solely to serve the objects of this spiritual Ether. � [This Ether] is Spirit individualized. It is merely in the development of this Ether, through heterogeneity, that particular masses of Matter become animate - sensitive � some reaching a degree of sensitiveness involving what we call Thought and thus attaining Conscious Intelligence" (188). In these sentences is echoed the Neoplatonic sense that the cosmos emanates downward, from a source through hypostatic phases which are increasingly diverse, to nature. For Poe, as in a way parallel to the myth of the forward- and backward-running universes in Plato's Statesman, the gravitation created by Matter is pulling everything back into itself, and it has an end point, which is its beginning point: "With the return into Unity these purposes cease. The absolutely consolidated globe of globes would be objectless: - therefore not for a moment could it continue to exist. � Let us endeavor to understand that it would disappear, and that God would remain all in all" (189). Further: "In sinking into Unity, [Matter] will sink at once into that Nothingness which, to all Finite Perception, Unity must be - into that Material Nihility from which alone we can conceive it to have been evoked � Let us endeavor to comprehend that the final globe of globes will instantaneously disappear, and that God will remain all in all" (191).
This is remarkable language when identified with its tradition. The paradox that all is necessarily nothing runs through all mystical sensibilities, from Buddhism and Taoism to Meister Eckhart and Annie Dillard, and the return of all to the all rings in the same key as Plotinus' figures of the One as "simplex," and as the Way being "the flight of the alone to the Alone."
The effect Poe intends Eureka to have is that it create, at the first prosaic level, an understanding of the rational evidence for, and the general Truth of the unity of everything in the cosmos at transcendent levels of reality. At another, poetic level, Poe intends Eureka in its language and metaphor, to create or inspire a sense of awe and enormous beauty in its readers. The aim is to effect a unity of the apprehension of Truth and the experience of Beauty.
Eureka makes clear that Poe was not an occultist, and not simply a warped character with inclinations to the morbid, but that in fact, his intuition of the nature of reality was, in this central sense of the word, mystical. The idea here is not that Poe utilized or appropriated Plotinus or Plato, or any other mystical writings, but that his intuition of the nature of reality is directly in line with the rest of mystical literature. They are all saying the same thing, in the end, though they differ in the details, descriptions and logic.

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References
Eliot, T.S. "From Poe to Valery" in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, Eric Carlson, ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966. pp. 205-219.
Griswold, Rufus Wilmot. "The 'Ludwig' Article" in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe pp. 28-35.
Hoffman, Daniel. "The artist of the beautiful." American Poetry Review,
Nov/Dec95, Vol. 24 Issue 6, p. 11.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Vintage Books, 1990.
Plotinus. The Enneads. Stephen MacKenna, trans. Larson Books, 1992.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Eureka: A Prose Poem. Green Integer Books, 1997.
---. Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Perennial Library, 1970.
---. Literary Theory and Criticism. Leonard Cassuto, ed. Dover Publications Inc., 1999.
St. Armand, Barton Levi. "Usher Unveiled: Poe and the Metaphysic of Gnosticism"
Poe Studies, vol. V, no. 1, June 1972, pp. 1-8.
www.eapoe.org/pstudies/PS1970/P1972101.HTM
Stace, W.T. Mysticism and Philosophy. MacMillan, 1960.
Wilbur, Richard. "The House of Poe" in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe,
pp. 255-277.