RUBEN DARIO's intuitive response to and poetic interpretation of the universe were simultaneously reinforced and molded by the intellectual currents with which he came into contact. His sensitivity to the lush tropical environment that surrounded him from his birth and his religious and even superstitious character combined to produce a propensity to see God in nature.' This tendency to a pantheistic view of the world was given impetus by his early familiarity with the writings of Victor Hugo and, shortly thereafter, with the Symbolist poets.2 But it was only after his zealous immersion in occult doctrine that Dario's youthful attitudes began to jell into a coherent conception of the universe as a single living being animated by a single divine soul.3 The occult cosmology to which Dario was drawn is Pythagorean in origin. Because the occult religions posit the unity of all religions-what is commonly called philosophia perennis-, Pythagoras is seen, along with the other great religious leaders of the world from Rama to Jesus, as an initiate of the esoteric tradition, and the tenets of Pythagoreanism are considered an intrinsic part of occult doctrine.4 Thus, through the occult, Dario became familiar with the fundamental Pythagorean belief that God is the One that is everything: the Supreme Mind distributed throughout all the parts of the universe, the Cause of all things, and the Power within all things. He absorbed the teaching that both man and the universe were made in the image of God and the corollary belief that it is necessary to understand the order of the macrocosm to hope to imitate it and establish a similar order in the microcosm, that is, to become orderly of soul. Dario also learned that, although God is present in all things, the elements of the universe are set up in a hierarchy based on their resemblance to God. In order for the human soul to have attained its present position, it had to traverse all the kingdoms of nature, gradually becoming developed through a series of innumerable existences. A blind and indistinct force in the mineral, individualized in the plant, polarized in the sensitivity and instinct of animals, the soul tends toward the conscious monad in this slow unfolding. This faith in the ascending life of the soul through a series of existences-to which Dario was greatly attracted-is made possible by the concept of the essential unity of all life. The whole world is akin, for the cosmos is one, eternal, and divine. While the belief in the oneness of the universe permeates all of Dario's poetry, it is at the heart of seven major poems. Six of them will be examined here to demonstrate his varied and subtle use of this conception of the cosmos and to shed light on its integration into his poetic vision. The seventh poem, Coloquio de los centauros, written in 1895, was Dario's first sophisticated utilization of Pythagorean pantheism, but because of its length and complexity, this masterpiece is analyzed in a separate study that seeks to reveal the pervasive impact of this occult cosmology upon it.5 As Dario himself later indicated, the poem concerns las fuerzas naturales, el misterio de la vida universal, la ascensi6n perpetua de Psique.6 Shortly after composing Coloquio de los centauros, Dario wrote a series of thirteen poems entitled Las ainforas de Epicuro, which he added to the 1901 edition of Prosas profanas. Four of the thirteen deal with occult themes; two-La espiga and Ama tu ritmo ...-center on the Pythagorean concept of the unity of all life. If, as suggested by Marasso, La espiga (p. 615), the first of the series, was produced under the influence of Verlaine's C'est la f&te du bl . . .,7 Dario chose to intensify the pantheistic view expressed in the French poem. The elements of nature are described in such a way that, from the outset, it is clear that the poet's concern is not with external appearances but with the hidden realities that they represent. The key word is signo, for all of nature is seen as a sign of the unity of life in and through God.