This herb is called Devilbane by the Philosophers. It has been demonstrated that only its seed can expel devils and their hallucinations...When given to a young woman who was tormented by a devil during the night, this herb made him flee.
¡XJohannes de Rupescissa, Tractatus de Quinta Essentia, 11
During the next few days, I neglected the Plan. Lia's pregnancy was coming to term, and whenever possible I stayed with her. I was anxious, but she calmed me, saying the time had not yet come. She was taking a course in painless childbirth, and I was trying to follow her exercises. Lia had rejected science's offer to tell us the baby's sex in advance. She wanted to be surprised. Accepting this eccentricity on her part, I touched her belly and did not ask myself what would come out. We called it the Thing.
I asked how I could take part in the birth. "It's mine, too, this Thing," I said. "I don't want to be one of those movie fathers, pacing up and down the corridor, chain-smoking."
"Pow, there's only so much you can do. The moment comes when it's all up to me. Besides, you don't smoke. Surely you're not going to start smoking just for this occasion."
"What'll I do, then?"
"You'll take part before and afterward. Afterward, if it's a boy, you'll teach him, guide him, give him a fine old Oedipus complex in the usual way, with a smile you'll play out the ritual parricide when the time comes¡Xno fuss¡Xand at some point you'll show him your squalid office, the card files, the page proofs of the wonderful adventure of metals, and you'll say to him, ¡¥My son, one day all this will be yours.' "
"And if it's a girl?"
"You'll say to her, ¡¥My daughter, one day all this will be your no-good husband's.' "
"And what do I do before?"
"During labor, between one wave of pain and the next, you have to count, because as the interval grows shorter, the moment approaches. We'll count together, and you'll set the rhythm for me, like rowers in a galley. It'll be as if you, too, were coaxing the Thing out from its dark lair. Poor little Thing....Feel it. Now it's so cozy there in the dark, sucking up humors like an octopus, all free, and then¡Xwham¡Xit pops out into the daylight, blinks, and says, Where the hell am I?"
"Poor little Thing. And it hasn't even met Signer Garamond. Come on, let's rehearse the counting part."
We counted in the darkness, holding hands. I daydreamed. The Thing, with its birth, would give reality and meaning to all the old wives' tales of the Diabolicals. Poor Diabolicals, who spent their nights enacting chemical weddings with the hope that eighteen-karat gold would result and wondering if the philosopher's stone was really the lapis exillis, a wretched terra-cotta grail¡Xand my grail was in Lia's belly.
"Yes," Lia said, running her hand over her swelling, taut vessel, "here is where your good primal matter is steeping.
"Those people you saw at the castle, what did they think happened in the vessel?"
"Oh, they thought that melancholy was grumbling in it, sul-ftirous earth, black lead, oil of Saturn, a Styx of purifications, distillations, pulverizations, ablutions, b'quefactions, submersions, terra foetida, stinking sepulcher..."
"What are they, impotent? Don't they know that in the vessel our Thing ripens, all white and pink and beautiful?"
"They know, but for them your dear little belly is also a metaphor, full of secrets..."
"There are no secrets, Pow. We know exactly how the Thing is formed, its little nerves and muscles, its little eyes and spleens and pancreases..."
"Oh my God, more than one spleen? What is it, Rosemary's baby?"
"I was speaking in general. But of course we'll have to be ready to love it even if it has two heads."
"Of course! I'll teach it to play duets: trumpet and clarinet...No, then it would need four hands, and that's too many. But, come to think about it, he'd make a great pianist. A concerto for two left hands? Nothing to it! Brr....But then, my Diabolicals also know that on that day, in the hospital, there will be born the Great Work, the White, the Rebis, the androgyne..."
"That's all we need. Listen. We'll call him Giulio, or her Giulia, after my grandfather. What do you say?"
"I like it. Good."
If I had only stopped there. If I had only written a white book, a good grimoire, for all the adepts of Isis Unveiled, explaining to them that the secretum secretorum no longer needed to be sought, that the book of life contained no hidden meaning; it was all there, in the bellies of all the Lias of the world, in the hospital rooms, on straw pallets, on riverbanks, and that the stones in exile and the Holy Grail were nothing but screaming monkeys with their umbilical cord still dangling and the doctor giving them a slap on the ass. And that the Unknown Superiors, in the eyes of the Thing, were only me and Lia, and the Thing would immediately recognize us, without having to go ask that old fool de Maistre.
But no. We, the sardonic, insisted on playing games with the Diabolicals, on showing them that if there had to be a cosmic plot, we could invent the most cosmic of all.
Serves you right, I said to myself that other evening. Now here you are, waiting for what will happen under Foucault's Pendulum.
78
Surely this monstrous hybrid comes not from a mother's womb but from an Ephialtes, an Incubus, or some other horrendous demon, as though spawned in a putrid and venomous fungus, son of Fauns and Nymphs, more devil than man.
¡XAthanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus, Amsterdam, Jansson, 1665, II, pp. 279-280
That day, I wanted to stay home¡XI had a presentiment¡Xbut Lia told me to stop acting the prince consort and go to work. "There's time, Pow; it won't be born yet. I have to go out, too. Run along."
I had almost reached my office when Signer Salon's door opened. The old man appeared in his yellow apron. I couldn't avoid greeting him, and he asked me to come inside. I had never seen his laboratory.
It must have been an apartment once, but Salon had had all the dividing walls demolished, and what I saw was a cave, vast, hazy. For some obscure architectural reason, this wing of the building had a mansard roof, and the light entered obliquely. I don't know whether the glass panes were dirty or frosted, or if Salon had installed shades to keep out the direct sun, or if it was the heap of objects on all sides proclaiming a fear of spaces left empty, but the light in the cave was late dusk. The room was divided by old pharmacy shelves in which arches opened to passages, junctions, perspectives. The dominant color was brown: the objects, the shelves, the tables, the diffuse blend of daylight and the patchy illumination from old lamps. My first impression was of having entered an instrument maker's atelier, abandoned from the time of Stradivarius, with years of accumulated dust on the striated bellies of the lutes.
Then, as my eyes gradually adjusted, I saw that I was in a petrified zoo. A bear cub with glassy eyes climbed an artificial bough; a dazed and hieratic owl stood beside me; on the table in front of me was a weasel¡Xor marten or skunk; I couldn't tell. Behind it was a prehistoric animal, feline, its bones showing. It might have been a puma, a leopard, or a very big dog. Part of the skeleton had already been covered with straw and paste, and it was all supported by an iron armature.
"The Great Dane of a rich lady with a soft heart," Salon said with a snicker, "who wants to remember it as it was in the days of their conjugal life. You see? You skin the animal, on the inside of the skin you smear arsenic soap, then you soak and bleach the bones...Look at that shelf and you'll see a great collection of spinal columns and rib cages. A lovely ossuary, don't you think? You connect the bones with wire, reconstruct the skeleton, mount it on an armature. To stuif it, I use hay, papier-mache, or plaster. Finally you fit the skin back on. I repair the damage done by death and corruption. This owl¡Xdoesn't it seem alive to you?"
From then on, every live owl would seem dead to me, consigned by Salon to a sclerotic eternity. I regarded the face of that embalmer of animal pharaohs, his bushy eyebrows, his gray cheeks, and I could not decide whether he was a living being or a masterpiece of his own art.
The better to look at him, I took a step ba
ckward, and felt something graze my nape. I turned with a shudder and saw I had set a pendulum in motion.
A great disemboweled bird swayed, following the movement of the lance that pierced it. The weapon had entered the head, and through the open breast you could see it pass where the heart and gizzard had once been, then branch out to form an upside-down trident. One, thicker prong went through the now-emptied belly and pointed toward the ground like a sword, while the two other prongs entered the feet and emerged symmetrically from the talons. The bird swung, and the three points cast their shadow on the floor, a mystic sign.
"A fine specimen of the golden eagle," Salon said. "But I still have a few days' work to do on it. I was just choosing the eyes." He showed me a box full of glass corneas and pupils, as if the executioner of Saint Lucy had collected the trophies of his entire career. "It's not always easy, as it is with insects, where all you need is a box and a pin. This, for example, has to be treated with formalin."
I smelled its morgue odor. "It must be an enthralling job," I said. And meanwhile I was thinking of the living creature that throbbed in Lia's belly. A chilling thought seized' me. If the Thing dies, I said to myself, I want to bury it. I want it to feed the worms underground and enrich the earth. That's the only way I'll feel it's still alive...
Salon was still talking. He took a strange specimen from one of the shelves. It was about thirty centimeters long. A dragon, a reptile with black membranous wings, a cock's crest, and gaping jaws that bristled with tiny sawlike teeth. "Handsome, isn't he? My own composition. I used a salamander, a bat, snake's scales...A subterranean dragon. I was inspired by this..."
He showed me, on another table, a great folio volume, bound in ancient parchment, with leather ties. "It cost me a fortune. I'm not a bibliophile, but this was something I had to have. It's the Mundus Subterraneus of Athanasius Kircher, first edition, 1665. Here's the dragon. Identical, don't you think? It lives in the caves of volcanoes, that good Jesuit said, and he knew everything about the known, the unknown, and the nonexistent..."
"You think always of the underground world," I said, recalling our conversation in Munich and the words I had overheard through the Ear of Dionysius.
He opened the volume to another page, to an image of the globe, which looked like an anatomical organ, swollen and black, covered by a spider web of luminescent, serpentine veins. "If Kircher was right, there are more paths in the heart of the earth than there are on the surface. Whatever takes place in nature derives from the heat and steam below..."
I thought of the Black Work, of Lia's belly, of the Thing that was struggling to break out of its sweet volcano.
"...and whatever takes place in the world of men is planned below."
"Does Padre Kircher say that, too?"
"No. He concerns himself only with nature...But it is odd that the second part of this book is on alchemy and the alchemists, and that precisely here, you see, there is an attack on the Rosicrucians. Why attack the Rosicrucians in a book on the underground world? Our Jesuit knew a thing or two; he knew that the last Templars had taken refuge in the underground kingdom ofAgarttha..."
"And they're still there, it seems," I ventured.
"They're still there," Salon said. "Not in Agarttha, but in tunnels. Perhaps beneath us, right here. Milan, too, has a metro. Who decided on it? Who directed the excavations?"
"Expert engineers, I'd say."
"Yes, cover your eyes with your hands. And meanwhile, in that firm of yours, you publish such books....How many Jews are there among your authors?"
"We don't ask our authors to fill out racial forms," I replied stiffly.
"You mustn't think me an anti-Semite. No, some of my best friends...I have in mind a certain kind of Jew...."
"What kind?"
"I know what kind..."
79
He opened his coffer. In indescribable disorder it contained collars, rubber bands, kitchen utensils, badges of different technical schools, even the monogram of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. On everything, in his madness, he saw the seal of the Antichrist, in the form of two linked triangles.
¡XAlexandre Chayla, "Serge A. Nilus et les Protocoles," La Tribune Juive, May 14, 1921, p.3
"You see," Salon went on, "I was born in Moscow. And it was in Russia, when I was a youth, that people discovered the secret Jewish documents that said, in so many words, that to control governments it was necessary to work underground. Listen." He picked up a little notebook, in which he had copied out some quotations. " ¡¥Today's cities have metropolitan railroads and underground passages: from these we will blow up all the capitals of the world.' Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Document Number Nine!"
It occurred to me that the collection of spinal columns, the box with the eyes, the skins stretched over armatures came from some extermination camp. But no, I was dealing with an elderly man nostalgic about the old days of Russian anti-Semitism. "If I follow you, then, there's a conventicle of Jews¡Xsome Jews, not all¡Xwho are plotting something. But why underground?"
"That's obvious! Any plotter must plot underground, not in the light of day. This has been known from the beginning of time. Dominion over the world means dominion over what lies beneath it. The subterranean currents."
I remembered a question of Agile's in his study, and then the Druidesses in Piedmont, who called on telluric currents.
"Why did the Celts dig sanctuaries in the heart of the earth, making tunnels that communicated with a sacred well?" Salon continued. "The well goes down into radioactive strata, as everyone knows. How was Glastonbury built? And isn't the island of Avalon where the myth of the Grail originated? And who invented the Grail if not a Jew?"
The Grail again, my God. But what grail? There was only one grail: my Thing, in contact with the radioactive strata of Lia's womb, and perhaps now swimming happily toward the mouth of that well, perhaps now preparing to come out, and here I was among stuffed owls, among a hundred dead and one pretending to be alive.
"All Europe's cathedrals are built where the Celts had their menhirs. Why did the Celts set these stones in the ground, considering the effort it cost them?"
"Why did the Egyptians go to so much trouble to erect the pyramids?"
"There you are. Antennas, thermometers, probes, needles like the ones Chinese doctors use, stuck into the body's nodal points. At the center of the earth is a nucleus of fusion, something similar to the sun¡Xindeed, an actual sun around which things revolve, describing different paths. Orbits of telluric currents. The Celts knew where they were, and how to control them. And Dante? What about Dante? What was he trying to tell us with the account of his descent into the depths? You understand me, dear friend?"
I didn't like being his dear friend, but I went on listening to him. Giulio/Giulia, my Rebis planted like Lucifer at the center of Lia's womb, but he/she, the Thing, would be upside down, would be struggling upward, and would somehow emerge. The Thing was created to emerge upward from the viscera, and not make its entrance with head bowed, in sticky secrecy.
Salon by now was lost in a monologue he seemed to repeat from memory. "You know what the English leys are? If you fly over England in a plane, you'll see that all the sacred places are joined by straight lines, a grid of lines interwoven across the whole country, still visible because they suggested the lines of later roads..."
"The sacred places were connected by roads, and people simply tried to make roads as straight as possible."
"Indeed? Then why do birds migrate along these lines? Why do flying saucers follow them? It's a secret that was lost after the Roman invasion, but there are those who still know it..."
"The Jews," I suggested.
"They also dig. The first alchemistic principle is VITRIOL: Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapi-dem."
Lapis exillis. My Stone that was slowly coming out of exile, from the sweet oblivious hypnotic exile of Lia's vessel; my Stone, beautiful and white, not seeking
further depths, but seeking the surface...I wanted to rush home to Lia, to wait with her, hour by hour, for the appearance of the Thing, the triumph of the surface regained. Salon's den had the musty smell of tunnels. Tunnels were the origin that had to be abandoned; they were not the destination. And yet I followed Salon, and new, malicious ideas for the Plan whirled in my head. While I awaited the one Truth of this sublunar world, I racked my brain to construct new falsehoods; blind as the animals underground.
I stirred. I had to get out of the tunnel. "I must go," I said. "Perhaps you can suggest some books on this subject."
"Ha! Everything they've written about is false, false as the soul of Judas. What I know I learned from my father..."
"A geologist?"
"Oh no," Salon said, laughing, "no, not at all. My father-nothing to be ashamed of; water under the bridge¡Xworked for the Okhrana. Directly under the chief, the legendary Rachkov-ski."
Okhrana, Okhrana? Something like the KGB? The tsarist secret police, wasn't it? And who was Rachkovski? Wasn't there someone who had a similar name? By God, the colonel's mysterious visitor, Count Rakosky....No, enough of this. No more coincidences. I didn't stuff dead animals; I created living animals.
80
When White arrives in the matter of the Great Work, Life has conquered Death, the King is resuscitated, Earth and Water have become Air, it is the domain of the Moon, their Child is born...Then Matter achieves such a degree of fixity that Fire can no longer destroy it...When the artist sees perfect whiteness, the Philosophers say the books must be torn up, for they are now useless.
¡XDom J. Pernety, Dictionnaire mytho-hermetique, Paris, Bauche, 1758, "Blancheur"
I mumbled some excuse, in haste. I believe I said, "My girlfriend's having a baby tomorrow." Salon haltingly offered me congratulations, as if not sure who the father was. I ran home, to breathe some clean air.
Lia wasn't in. On the kitchen table, a piece of paper: "Darling, the waters have broken. Couldn't get you at the office. Taking a taxi to the hospital. Come. I feel alone."
Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum Page 46