At the corner of a street, the part of the cortege in which he was stopped. A plank of a cart that he had not seen in front of him had given way and the books piled in the cart had spilled out into the street and were blocking it.
They were Arabic and Hebrew books that had been condemned, like him, to be burned publicly. Familiars of the Inquisition, dropping their ebony and silver staffs, picked them up in armfuls and threw them in a heap into the cart. Almazan distinguished delicate illuminations, characters that expert calligraphers had spent years reproducing on the parchment. He read the titles on the gilded bindings:
The Alchemy of Happiness by Ghazali. The Guide to Those Gone Astray by Maimonides. Ah! The poet Attar, the mystic Ibn Arabi and Khayyam, and all the rest! It was a little of their thought that was accompanying him through the Moorish streets of Catholic Seville, in the promenade toward death; and he thanked them all internally.
At a window of a new house, white against the shadow of the massive architecture, there was the silhouette of a woman, in the middle of a frame of gilded gauze and Byzantine velvet with mauve reflections. The unique glance that Almazan cast in that direction permitted him to see the arms of the Cardenas family on the fronton of the door and the silhouette of the woman leaned forward slightly, and the veil of silver lamé fabric that parted like two white petals, and an oval of tender flesh between the petals, like the spring pulp of the flower, and irises in which the gold was rusted, misted and extinct.
A single glance! His candle scarcely quivered in his hand and the pyramidal coroza, the grotesque bonnet of the hardened impenitent, barely trembled on his head.
And in the human vociferations, the brazen clamor of the bells that had resumed ringing, Almazan perceived a murmur of syllables that no mouth articulated, that no conscious soul formulated mentally, but which were nevertheless pronounced:
“I have been the terrestrial perfume of your life. When your spirit wanted to launch forth toward the heavens, I caused it to fall back into the bed where you enjoyed me. I have been your pleasure and your pain, the indecent form of the human body, the apparition under the citrus trees, the mysteries of the gardens of the Alhambra, the poison of nights inflamed by the war. I desired so much to repose in your arms! Something in you elevated me and I desired to destroy it. Nothing has been able to take away from me the desire for sumptuous fabrics, rare substances and secret debauchery, and I was sad because my breath did not succeed in tarnishing the diamond of your spirit. You have been the best of what I have had and yet I don’t know whether I loved you. Adieu, my love!”
Almazan perceived the Quemadero on the Plaza de San Fernando, on to which the cortege emerged. It was a large square scaffold from which crosses emerged, pillories, gibbets and stakes, which enclosed in its masonry flanks a host of executioners, with nails for crucifying, ropes for flagellating, swords for slashing wrists, and faggots to aliment the pyres.
Around the Quemadero the masses were coming to an end. On the improvised altars, silver candelabra and golden pyxes shone, and there were metallic flashes, stones on the sparkling surplices and symbolic gems on the miters of bishops.
The faces of Dominicans could be seen, exalted by the ardor of prayer. Some had been there for two days, sometimes striking the ground with their foreheads, begging God to save the souls of those who were about to be burned. And there was a tragic and sincere dolor in their features, as if they sensed that the cause was desperate and lost in advance. A great green banner with black crepe had been planted in the ground to attest the mourning of the Church because of the sinners who were about to die impenitent. But in that ecclesiastical despair no forgiveness was visible.
Stages covered with monks and functionaries of the Holy Office surrounded the Quemadero. But there was a sense in which the entire square, with its altars, its torture stakes and its multitude of spectators was orientated toward the broad balcony of the house of the Duke of Medina Coeli. There stood King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, surrounded by the Court, and the condemned filed before them.
Almazan was able to contemplate the brilliant Queen Isabella, with her broad, short neck, her massive stature, her plain and olive-tinted face, like the somber, arid land of Spain from which she extracted gold avidly, where she paraded iron, the feminine symbol of the tyrannical, avaricious, destructive and fanatical race. And the Christ of the torture chamber was once again in that inanimate face, which watched its subjects tortured and burned with such perfect serenity.
Facing the royal balcony was a stage higher than the others. And on that stage, surrounded by a triple row of halberdiers dressed in white, in the middle of the Procurator Fiscal, the members of the Tribunal of the Holy Office, above an entire superimposition of dignitaries, functionaries, commissioners, noble Familiars, Alcaides, there was a dominant throne. On that throne was seated the Grand Inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada, very small beneath his miter and his pleated camail, like a microscopic drop of violet poison at the summit of the magnificent edifice of the Church.
The Grand Inquisitor looked at the ground when Almazan passed by. His miter cast a shadow. There was no face.
The mortuary and religious formalities unfolded with a sacred slowness.
The kings made the oath of fidelity to the Church. The bearer of the Holy Gospels made the tour of the Quemadero three times, preceded by the bearer of the standard of the Faith. A majordomo of the Fraternity of Saint Peter the Martyr took the sentences of the condemned from an ebony casket. The latter listened on their knees. There were more masses, predications, and abjuration.
And suddenly, a supernatural silence descended over the crowd in the square and in the streets that ended there, which was as breathless as the human throats. The mothers lifted their children over their heads to show them the punishment of sinners, and the majority of the men must have desired to be executioners in order to nail and to cut, in order to transmit pain.
For the moment had come for the executioners to nail hands to pillories, to sever wrists with double-edged swords, to strangle with garrotes.
An explosion of unlimited joy, a delirium of cries, rose up to the heavens and prevented the moans of the tortured from being heard, with the result that only their contortions of pain were seen, and those grimaces were more terrible by virtue of their appearance of silence.
A single cry was perceptible, a single cry going far away, as if borne by strange wings. It was the last cry of the witch of Triana, whose gag had been removed.
“Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Save me!”
And the apparition of Jesus was manifest then for many eyes, and Almazan, whose turn had come to climb the Quemadero in order to be attached to the stake of the pyre, thought of the other Christ, the one that did not receive in holocaust the smoke of grilled flesh, the Essene clad in white who, according to tradition, had cried at the moment of dying: “O my Father, thou hast abandoned me!”
Beside him, the discouraged Dominican repeated, mechanically: “Repent! Confess to me!”
The executioners seized Almazan from the hands of the Familiars, hoisted him up on seeing the state of his feet, and suspended him by means of cords with enough care that he did not have to put his weight on his legs, thus sparing him an atrocious final dolor.
Almazan’s heart broke for that unique mark of pity that the furious earth brought him. He would have liked to thank the executioners, but they were already crouching down some distance away to watch him burn, ignorant of their own pity.
Then, as if he were seeking a point of support before launching himself into the unknown, Almazan darted a glance at the crowd that was fixing him with its thousands of gazes.
And in those few seconds, in the midst of the extraordinary landscape of flame that the Plaza de San Fernando formed, while the pyres commenced to crackle within the flanks of the Quemadero, he finally saw the face of a man in the hallucinatory circle of evil Christs.
It was Rosenkreutz, such as he had seen him in his dream in Malaga, with a sack atta
ched to his back by straps and a staff in his hand. He had come. Man did not abandon man. He was in the first row, and made him a sign.
Narrow columns of smoke rose up around Almazan like black candles. The stages, the windows and the balconies, and the aligned cavaliers, took on a strangely geometrical appearance around him. He was still looking at Rosenkreutz, who was waving his staff.
He was about to depart. He would reach France, and then Germany, where he had been born. He would stop there, wherever an alchemist’s lamp was shining, would knock on doors in ghettos where old rabbis were poring over the mysteries of books. Everywhere, he would explain the secrets of the Kabbalah, he would extend the fraternity of the intelligent and the pure.
Toward the sky, abruptly charged with a tide of blood, like a nocturnal breath, rose a black smoke full of sparks. The human swell, the pillories, the magnificent kings, the houses and their miradors, the churches with their menacing towers and the sun setting in crimson, everything that was the varied and multiform tableau of the universe, disappeared from Almazan’s sight.
It was very little. He died tranquil. The invincible spirit continued its route.
CHRISTIAN ROSENKREUTZ AND THE ROSICRUCIANS
The Life and Travels of Christian Rosenkreutz
In the south of France there are certain regions covered with pines that are periodically ravaged by fires. The pines often grow again, and one sees, a few years later, where there was nothing but calcined dust, a new forest of resinous trees. But sometimes, as if the power of the fire had descended into the very source of the seeds, the hill once covered by tresses of pines remains bare and sterile. It happens then that at the summit of the bare hill, a unique tree springs forth, strangely vivacious, which rises up alone, as if to attest the lost presence of a dead forest.
Thus, of the great Albigensian forest, cut down, burned and reduced to dust, only one man subsisted, who was to perpetuate he doctrine while transforming it. Like the solitary pine on the hill, he plunged his vigorous thought into the human soil of his time and caused it to float in the blue sky of the centuries with the foliage of books.
From the Albigensians issued, in the middle of the thirteenth century, the wise man who has been known under the symbolic name of Christian Rosenkreutz, and who was the last descendant of the German family of Germelshausen.32 On this point there are no longer any precise details, but only a tradition. No written text exists, no historical proof. How could there be? So great was the desire to suppress the history that, not only were the bodies of the heretics destroyed, but also the stones that had sheltered them and the documents that might have been the receptacle of their thought.
In any case, those heretics understood quickly that they only had a chance of subsisting by enveloping themselves in obscurity and hiding under false names, only corresponding by means of cryptographic writings. We can only recover their history under the vestment of legend. But an individual who left such a profound trace, after such an obscure life so devoid of marvelous actions and miracles, cannot have been created by legend. Christian Rosenkreutz is as real as Jesus or the Buddha, whose more illustrious features are cited, but who have scarcely more historical foundation.
The Albigensian doctrines had spread in a fragmentary fashion in the north of France, the Low Countries and Germany. Fleeing families had traveled over the roads. Solitary men had fled, as beggars, the sunlit land where they were henceforth accursed. Many would die, but some would attain distant regions where there are no more vines, where the rivers are more impetuous and the sun less warm. There were some who reported what they had heard down there, in the low houses sheltered by the ramparts of Toulouse or in the shadow of Montségur, which still burned in their heart. And a few were understood. Little nuclei of Albigensians formed in the north around the preaching of a thin, slightly bronzed man whose face as reminiscent of that of the Saracens. Thus, the seeds thrown by the wind went to germinate in the lands to which hazard carried it.
Under the influence of an Albigensian traveler, the doctrine traversed mountains bristling with firs and flourished in the region of Rhoen on the frontier of Hesse and Thuringia. In the heart of the forest of Thuringia stood the Schloss of Germelshausen. The lords were of grim humor, half-brigands and their Christianity was mingled with pagan superstitions. They spent their time making war on their neighbors, and they did not disdain setting ambushes on the roads in order to rob travelers. They rendered a worship of sorts to a stone divinity that was worn away, and whose origin was unknown. It must once have been the fruit of some distant pillage Perhaps the statue was a Hellenic Minerva. They had set it up in the courtyard of the schloss beside the door of the chapel.
It was the middle of the thirteenth century. Germany had just been ravaged by the Dominican fanatic Conrad of Marburg, an envoy of Pope Gregory IX. The Dominican Tors was continuing his work. He was accompanied by a one-eyed layman named John, who claimed that his one eye had received the faculty of recognizing a heretic or a good Christian at first glance.33 Almost all those who entered the visual ray of that terrible eye were marked with the sign of heresy.
Doubtless it was sufficient for him to glimpse, through its rocks and firs, the towers of the Schloss of Germelshausen to know by the color of its stones that it sheltered a nest of heretics. Perhaps a little of the force of the eternal spirit radiated from the ancient statue standing in the courtyard. The landgrave Conrad of Thuringia, who had razed the small village of Wilnsdorf, decided the destruction of the schloss. He endeavored to besiege it several times at intervals of a few years. The schloss finally fell and the entire family of Germelshausen, who had rallied to the mystical doctrine of the Albigensians, who practiced its austerities, and believed in reincarnation and the consolamentum that saves reincarnations, was put to death at the moment of the final assault.
The youngest son, then aged five years, was carried through the burning schloss by a monk who had chosen a domicile in the chapel and had been struck by the marvelous intelligence of which the child gave evidence. That monk, that ascetic inhabitant of the chapel of Germelshausen, was an Albigensian perfectus from Languedoc, and he was the one who had been the family’s instructor. He took refuge in a nearby monastery, where breaths of heresy had already penetrated.
It was in that monastery that that the last descendant of the Germelshausens, who was to be known under the name of Christian Rosenkreutz, was raised and educated. He learned Greek and Latin and formed a fraternal group with four other monks of the community, who resolved to devote themselves to the search for the truth. They formed the project of going to seek that truth in the source from which it had always departed, in the distant Orient.
Two of them set forth, walking: Christian Rosenkreutz, who was then fifteen years old; and one of the four monks, whom the Fama Fraternitas calls Brother P.A.L.34 The pretext of their voyage was a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher. Their real goal was to reach a center of initiation, about the location of which they must have had precise information.
Brother P.A.L. died on the island of Cyprus, to which the hazards of the voyage had brought the two companions. Young Christian continued his route, doubtless because of the indications he had, and headed for Damascus. He took that direction because the link with the Orient, which was about to break, still subsisted. Just as Apollonius had learned from the Pythagorean groups among whom he lived the exact location of the “abode of the wise men,” Christian Rosenkreutz knew, doubtless via the perfectus who had instructed the Germelhausens, that Damascus was the road of initiation.
It cannot have been easy to pass from the Christian kingdom of Cyprus into the land of the infidels. But for the man who sincerely seeks the truth, all religions are similar, and when he quit the Christian lands, Rosenkreutz put on the costume and the appearance of a Muslim pilgrim.
Damascus was then under the domination of the Mamelukes. All the scholars and poets of Persia had flocked there before the invasion of the Mongols of Hulugu. The destruction of Bagdad and Nis
hapur and the annihilation of their universities and libraries caused the intellectuals of the Orient to believe in a kind of decline of thought.35 Rumors were running around of the end of the world. There had been violent earthquakes in Syria and a rain of scorpions in Mesopotamia. The Mongols occupied Persia, and the horizon was scrutinized from the ramparts of Damascus with the apprehension of seeing their advance guard appear.
How astonished Rosenkreutz must have been in the city of three hundred mosques, in the midst of the erudite men of Oriental literature! What discoveries for a young man avid for learning! He read Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, Ghazali’s Alchemy of Happiness and Mac’oudi’s Golden Meadows. He heard the verses of Omar Khayyam recited, and strove to understand his treatises on algebra and his commentary of Euclid. He discussed astronomy with the disciples of Nazir al-Din. He meditated the Masnavi, the sacred book of Sufism and marveled at finding therein the mystical pantheism of his spiritual fathers the Albigensians. How barbaric Germany must have appeared in the bosom of the intellectual effervescence by which he was surrounded! In the presence of the great Arab civilization that was coming to its end, he understood more fully the necessity of his mission to conserve its spirit and transmit it to the men of his race.
After several years of study in Damascus, when he had acquired the greatest sum of knowledge possible for a man who has no other goal but education, he thought about a higher knowledge. He was then sufficiently mature to acquire it. The enigmatic name of the place for which he headed has been guarded by tradition. It is Damcar in Arabia, which doubtless designates a monastery in the sands, where a center of initiation was then found, and perhaps still is. Damcar was for him what the abode of the wise men as for Apollonius. He remained there for a few years, and then he went into Egypt, traversed the Mediterranean and reached Fez.
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