by John Crowley
“So can you see how exciting this must have been? Here was the oldest knowledge in the world, and what do you know? It sounded like Genesis; it sounded like Plato. Hermes must have been divinely inspired to foreshadow Christian truth. Plato himself must have drunk at this source. In dialogues between Hermes and his pupil Asclæpius and his son Tat you can see not only a philosophy of ideas like Plato’s but a philosophy of light like Plotinus and even an incarnated Word like the Christian logos, Son of God, creative principle. Hermes practically became a Christian saint. A rage for Egypt and Egyptian stuff began that runs right through the Renaissance.
“More, though. These Egyptian dialogues are intensely spiritual, pious, abstract; they talk a lot about escaping the power of the stars, about discovering the soul’s power to be like God, but there’s almost no real practical advice about that stuff. Where there was practical advice, though, was in those old magic books the Middle Ages had transmitted and ascribed to Hermes; and who knew, maybe they were the practical side of the abstract principles. Corrupted, of course, and terribly dangerous to use, but still containing the power of the good ancient Egyptian magic of Hermes. So Hermes was responsible for serious people taking up the practice of magic in a big way.”
“Wow,” Julie said. “Huh.” Her eyes had begun to shine in a way he remembered; her finger idly wiped the sugar from the rim of her daiquiri. He had her now.
“And the new science too,” Pierce said. “If man is brother to dæmons, and capable of anything, what’s to stop him working in the world, doing amazing things? If the whole plentitude of Nature can be ordered and reflected in the knowing mind of man, like Bruno believed? I think Bruno did get encouragement from Hermes to take up the Copernican system, not because the idea was evidentially more convincing, but because it was more marvelous, more wonderful, the true secret Egyptian view come back again.”
“Well,” Julie said, “everybody knows the Egyptians knew the earth went around the sun. They kept it secret, but they knew.”
Pierce stopped in his spate, mouth open. Julie’s eyes were still ashine with intelligence and attention. “So go on,” she said, and licked her finger.
“Well but remember,” Pierce said. “Remember now, there was almost nothing really known then about the culture and beliefs of ancient Egypt. Even before the Roman era the understanding of hieroglyphics had disappeared; they wouldn’t be understood again until the nineteenth century. Nobody in the Renaissance knew what was written on obelisks, or what the pyramids were for, or anything. Now, in the light of these intensely spiritual, semi-Platonic magical writings, they began studying. Hieroglyphics: they must be some sort of mystic code, picture-story of the ascent of the soul, aids to contemplation, maybe hypervalent, like Rorschach blots or Tarot cards. …”
“Sure,” Julie said.
“And pyramids, obelisks, temples—they ought to contain encoded Egyptian science, geometry older than Euclid, secret proportions and magical properties maybe now able to be unlocked. …”
“Sure.”
“But it’s not so!” Pierce cried, displaying his palms. A diner at the next table cast a cool eye in his direction, lovers’ spat probably, don’t show them you noticed. “It’s not so! That’s the most wonderful and amazing and strange thing. These writings that the Renaissance ascribed to the god-king-priest Hermes Trismegistus, and from which they got their whole picture of ancient Egypt, weren’t really ancient at all. They certainly weren’t written by one man. They weren’t even Egyptian.
“Whoever wrote the writings that came to Florence in the 1460s didn’t know a thing—anyway knew very little—about real Egyptian religion. Scholars today have a hard time finding even a trace in them of the real corpus of Egyptian myth or thought.
“Not even a trace.
“What they really are, these writings, as far as we can tell now, are the scriptures of a late Hellenistic mystery cult, a gnostic cult of the second or third century A.D. A.D.,” he emphasized. “There were lots of them flourishing in Alexandria around then, among Hellenized Egyptians and Egyptian Greeks; Alexandria then must have been sort of like California now, cults, everybody into something. So if these scriptures contain stuff that foreshadows Christianity, it’s no surprise; if they sound like Plato or Pythagoras or Plotinus, it’s not because they influenced Plato and them, but the other way around. Platonism was just very much in the air just then.
“So. The Renaissance made this titanic mistake. There were lots of reasons for it. Church fathers like Augustine and Lactantius in the postclassical period had talked about Hermes Trismegistus as though he were a real person, and so did Roger Bacon and Aquinas in the Middle Ages. There was no extrinsic evidence to show that the writings were fake, or not what they purported to be. There was, however, a lot of internal evidence; and by the middle of the seventeenth century the writings had been shown to be late Greek (there’s a mention in one manuscript of the Olympic games, for one thing), but the enthusiasts didn’t pay any attention; through the seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries they went right on believing in the Egypt of Hermes. The body of esoteric Egyptianism grew huge. Even in the nineteenth century—after Champollion, after Wallis Budge, after the real actual Egypt came to light—people like Mead and the Theosophists and Aleister Crowley and the mystics and magicians were still trying to believe in it.”
“Aleister Crowley!” Julie’s eyes widened further.
“And all because of this crazy error, because of these pseudo-Egyptian scriptures! Because of the Hermetic writings—see, there’s that word, hermetic, magical, secret, sealed like an alchemist’s jar—because of those writings, Egypt came to mean all things mystical, encoded, profound; ancient wisdom lost; old age of gold now perhaps able to be recovered, to enlighten degenerate moderns. That’s the tradition; that’s what came down to us, in a thousand books, a thousand references. It’s the tradition that continues in the founding of the Freemasons, for instance, who always make a big deal out of their connection to Egypt, and through the Masons it comes to the Founding Fathers, some of whom were Masons, and so the pyramid and the eye of Egypt get onto the Great Seal of the United States and onto the dollar bill. And in the same way, the Sphinx and the temples and the wise priests get into The Magic Flute, which Mozart based on the pseudo-Egyptian lore of his Masonic lodge.
“And somehow—I don’t know exactly how—somehow it all descends to me. Somehow this intensely magical, otherworldly, imaginary country comes to me, is revealed to me, in Kentucky, through books of different kinds, through the goddamn air maybe. But at the same time I knew about the actual historical Egypt too, about which real knowledge has been accumulating through the centuries; I knew about mummies and King Tut and Ra and Isis and Osiris and the Nile rising and all those slaves hauling blocks of stone. So what it seemed like to me was that there were two different countries, somehow near each other or at right angles to each other. Egypt. And Ægypt.
“And I was right! There are two different countries. The one I dreamt and thought about, it has a history too, as Egypt does, a history just as long but different; and different monuments, or the same monuments with completely different meanings; and a literature, and a location. You can trace the story of Egypt back, and back, and at a certain point (or at several different points) it will divide. And you can follow either one: the regular history-book one, Egypt, or the other, the dream one. The Hermetic one. Not Egypt but Ægypt. Because there is more than one history of the world.”
He finished his drink. A waiter had appeared beside them, had been beside them for some little time, perhaps listening to Pierce’s peroration. Julie at length drew her eyes from Pierce and looked up at the waiter. “We’d better order, huh?”
“That’s the story I want to tell,” Pierce said. “But it’s just one story, and not the tenth part of it. Not the tenth part.”
“Eggs Florentine, I guess,” Julie said. “No potatoes.”
“Magic cities,” Pierce said. “Cities of the Sun. Why was L
ouis the Fourteenth the Sun King? Because of Hermes.”
“Tea,” Julie said. “With lemon.”
“And there are other stories,” Pierce said. “Other stories just as good. Angels, for instance. That’s a story I want to tell. Why are there nine choirs of angels, do you think, and not seven or ten? Where do the little bodiless cherubs on Valentine cards come from? And why ‘cherub’?” He looked at the waiter, ordered (his stomach was a dark pit), and showed him the glass he had emptied. “Another,” he said. “If I may.”
A certain light seemed to have been withdrawn from Julie’s eyes. He was going too fast for her, overloading. How could it be communicated, how? If you had not had one history, one Renaissance drilled into you, the plain one, then how could you feel astonishment to discover this other one, the fancy? “And a dozen others I could tell,” he said. “A dozen others.” Rich, inexpressibly rich, the false histories and systems of thought that had been opened for him to look into by the wise scholars he had come to know, as rich as strange, incomprehensible even, stories somehow once conceived in and understood by minds that purported to be like his, yet couched in books whose thousands of folio pages, surreal illustrations in weird perspective, geometric charts and diagrams and mnemonic verses, seemed to be trying to describe some different planet altogether. Martin del Rio, Jesuit of Spain, had written a book of a million words, about nothing but angels.
Pierce snapped out his napkin and drew it across his lap. Lost planet found, fanfares and wind-tossed drapery, it was the surprise he wanted most and felt least able to express: the surprise not only of having found it, but of having found it to be, however faintly, familiar.
“It’s as though,” he said, “as though there had once upon a time been a wholly different world, which worked in a way we can’t imagine; a complete world, with all its own histories, physical laws, sciences to describe it, etymologies, correspondences. And then came a big change in all of them, a big change, bound up with printing, and the discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler, and the Cartesian and Baconian ideals of mechanistic and experimental science. The new sciences were hugely successful; bit by bit they scrubbed away all the persisting structures of the old science; they even scrubbed away the actually very strange and magical way the world appeared to men like Kepler and Newton and Bruno. The whole old world we once inhabited is like a dream, a dream we forgot on waking, even though, as dreams do, it lingered on into all-awake thinking; and even now it lingers on, all around our world, in our thought, so that every day in little ways, little odd ways, we think like prescientific men, magicians, Pythagoreans, Rosicrucians, without knowing we do so.”
“So yes okay but Pierce …”
“So what I’m proposing,” he went on, holding her off with a raised palm, “is a kind of archæology of everyday life; a sort of scavenger hunt or paper chase, tracing backward these old persistences. Discovering them, though, first of all; discovering old mythical religious ahistorical accounts of the world in their modern versions, and then tracing the elements that compose them back to their earlier appearances, to their sources, to their first forms, if those can be found, the same way I did for my Egypt, Ægypt; back to the door into dream they issued from, the Gate of Horn.”
“Horn,” Julie murmured, “horn, why horn I wonder.”
“And you know what?” Pierce said. “More and more often I’m learning that when you do trace them back, these false histories and magic accounts of the world, and follow them to the crossroads, so to speak, to where they take off on their own from the regular history of Western civilization, then you always keep coming to the same juncture: somewhere between 1400 and 1700. Not the notions themselves, no, they’re mostly much older; but the forms in which they come down to us. Because at that time, I’m not certain why though I’ve got some ideas, right at that time when what we recognize as modern science was coming into being, there was also an enormous revival and codification of all kinds of Ancient Wisdom and magical and traditional pictures of the world. Not only Hermes and Ægypt, but Orpheus and Zoroaster and Jewish Kabala too, and Lullism—don’t ask—and the wildest neo-Platonists, like Proclus and Iamblichus, who was also a big Egyptianizer. Alchemy, all reimagined and hugely inflated by Paracelsus that nut; and astrology given a big impetus by new modes of computation; and angel-magic, and telepathy, and Atlantis …”
“Atlantis,” Julie breathed.
“It was like that hour before waking when your dreams are clearest and most memorable. A moment when all the histories and sciences of this old other world were put into their most complete and striking form, and seemed the most hopeful and convincing: just when it was all about to be suppressed and smashed and forgotten forever …”
“Not forever,” Julie said. “Never forever.”
“Well so completely that a person, me, could go to Noate University, and get a degree in Renaissance Studies, and get only the teeniest glimpse of the tip of the drowned mountain. Even though the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance, the very ones who were inventing science, thought that the great project of their age was rescuing all that lost knowledge! Not coming up with new modes of feeling, new sciences, new machines, but Recovery! Memory! The power contained in ancient theologies, old magic systems, Noah’s science, Adam’s language! Ægypt!”
The diners at the next table were once again turned to them. Pierce drew back into his chair, which he had been leaving, and Julie leaned forward to hear him. “Ægypt,” he said softly.
“And what kind of stuff,” Julie said, “could they do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what could they do, these magicians?”
Pierce blinked. “Do,” he said. “Well now see this wasn’t at all the boiling-pot medieval stuff, conjuring, which was all based on the power of the Devil and the dead. The Renaissance magus mostly thought: he acquired power just by being attuned to the wholeness of the universe, and his own innate knowledge of it.”
“Power,” Julie said.
“Well power,” Pierce said. “So they supposed. I mean they did do alchemy. They made talismans of the planets, to draw into their minds and souls the planetary energies. They looked into crystal balls, and thought they saw angels. Bruno dreamt up a dozen elaborate mnemonic systems, for memorizing everything in the world, containing everything somehow. But a Renaissance magician’s power wasn’t used to enrich himself, or curse people. It was used simply to know. It was a system of science, with the same goals as the other kind of science, the kind we call science. …”
“Only we’ve forgotten what they did. What they could do. All that got suppressed, right?”
“We’ve forgotten this whole story,” Pierce said. “All we retain are details, impressions, bits and pieces scattered through our mental universe, like parts of a huge machine that’s been smashed, and can never be put back together again. Gypsies. Angels. Moses’s horns. The Age of Aquarius. That’s my point, that’s what I …”
“But well just tell me a second,” Julie said. “I mean all your little stories about history are interesting, and all. But tell me now. Tell me why it is you want to do this book. What your reason is for wanting to do it.”
Pierce thought he saw a snare in Julie’s look, but didn’t know what it was. “Well, for its own sake,” he said cagily. “Because I just think it’s a fascinating story, a kind of intellectual mystery story. I’m not sure you have to have any kind of practical reason. I mean History …”
“ ’Cause I don’t see this as a history book at all,” Julie said.
“Well, a book about history.”
“Or a book about history either. I think what you’re really writing is a book about magic. About the great lost tradition of magic. And that’s a book I know I can sell.”
“Well no but see …”
“You talked about a lost world-view,” Julie said, and with an impulsive gesture took his wrist in her hand. “And bits and pieces of a smashed machine, which can never be put back together again.
Well I don’t believe it can’t be put back together again.”
“There are scholars, historians who are trying,” Pierce said, “trying. …”
“And you know what I believe?” She had leaned close to him, her summer-light eyes all soft fire. “I believe that machine worked. And you know what else? I think you believe it worked too.”
FIVE
“Nonononono,” said Pierce.
“Pierce you know I think it’s just so amazing that you’ve brought this idea to me now, I think it’s just so right. The time. The world. You.” She raised her arm, and waved, smiling, as to a friend; her bracelets of wood and lacquer clashed. “See, that old tradition is so important to me. I believe in it. I believe in it. You know I do.”
“You seemed to, once.” What had he done. He took a paper pouch of tobacco from his pocket, and began to make a cigarette, a habit that had initially intrigued, and ended by annoying, the woman opposite him.
“I feel it much more strongly now. There are things that have happened—well, never mind, someday I’ll tell you, but I might not even be here if, well anyway I know. I know those old ways of knowledge don’t die or get outdated. They might go underground. But there will always come a time when people are ready to understand them again, and the tradition is rediscovered. Isn’t that really what you’re saying? The Renaissance was one time. Now is another.”
“Now,” Pierce said.
“Well yes! You can see it all around. Pierce you used to talk about nothing else. You were fascinated by it. Synchronicity. Recurrences. Act theory. The Age of Aquarius. And why? Why?”
“Why,” Pierce said.
“Because! Because it’s time! The cycle has turned, and…”