by Thomas Mann
“And now I have to summon all my faculties and try to remember what alchemy was more or less about. Alchemy—making gold, the philosopher’s stone, aurum potabile . . .”
“Yes, that’s the popular understanding. Put more academically, it is the purification, mutation, and refinement of matter, its transubstantiation to something higher, its enhancement, as it were. The lapis philosophorum, which is the male-female product of sulfur and mercury—the res bina, the bisexual prima materia—was nothing more and nothing less than the principle of that enhancement, the application of external influences to force matter upward: magical pedagogy if you will.”
Hans Castorp said nothing. But he blinked, and glanced upward out of the corner of his eye.
“The primary symbol of alchemistic transmutation,” Naphta went on, “was the crypt.”
“The grave?”
“Yes, the scene of corruption. It is the epitome of all hermetism—nothing less than the vessel, the carefully safeguarded crystal retort, in which matter is forced toward its final mutation and purification.”
“ ‘Hermetism’—that’s well put, Herr Naphta. ‘Hermetic’—I’ve always liked that word. It’s a magic word with vague, vast associations. Forgive me, but I can’t help thinking about our old canning jars, the ones our housekeeper in Hamburg—her name’s Schalleen, with no Frau or Fräulein, just Schalleen—has standing in rows on shelves in her pantry: hermetically sealed jars, with fruit and meat and all sorts of other things inside. There they stand, for months, for years, but when you need one and open it up, what’s inside is fresh and intact, neither years nor months have had any effect, you can eat it just as it is. Now, it’s not alchemy or purification, of course, it’s simple preservation, which is why they’re called preserves. But the magical thing about it is that what gets preserved in them has been withdrawn from time, has been hermetically blocked off from time, which passes right by. Preserves don’t have time, so to speak, but stand there on the shelf outside of time. But enough about canning jars. That didn’t get us very far. Beg your pardon, you were going to teach me more.”
“Only if you’d like me to. The apprentice must be fearless and hungry for knowledge—to speak in the style of our topic. The crypt, the grave, has always been the primary symbol in their initiation ceremony. The apprentice, the novice hungry to be admitted to such knowledge, must remain undaunted by the grave’s horrors; the rules of the lodge demand that he be tested by being led down into the crypt and that he remain there until he is brought forth by the hand of an unknown brother. Which is the reason for the maze of corridors and dark vaulted chambers through which the neophyte must wander, for the black cloth with which the halls of lodges of the strict charges are draped, for the cult of the coffin, which plays such an important role in their meetings and initiation ceremonies. The path of the mysteries and purification is beset with dangers, it leads through the fear of death, through the realm of corruption, and the apprentice, the neophyte, is the young man who is hungry for the wounds of life, demands that his demonic capacity for experience be awakened, and is led by shrouded forms, who are merely shades of the great mystery itself.”
“Thank you so much, Professor Naphta. Excellent. So that is what is called hermetic pedagogy. It certainly can’t hurt for me to have heard something about that, too.”
“All the less so, since it is a guide to final things, to an absolute confession of those things that transcend the senses, and so to our goal. The alchemistic rites of such lodges have led many a noble, inquisitive mind to that goal in the decades since. But surely I need not spell it out, since it cannot have escaped you that the degrees in the Scottish Rite are but a surrogate for another hierarchy, that the alchemistic knowledge of the Master Mason is fulfilled in the mystery of transubstantiation, and that the mystic tour with which the lodge favors its novices clearly corresponds to the means of grace, just as the metaphoric games of its ceremonies are reflections of the liturgical and architectural symbols of our Holy Catholic Church.”
“Oh, I see!”
“Beg your pardon, but that is not all. I already took the liberty of suggesting that the development of Freemasonry from guilds of respectable manual laborers is historically extraneous. The strict charges, at least, provided lodges with human foundations that went far deeper. Like certain mysteries in our Church, the lodges’ secrets have a clear connection to the solemn cults and holy excesses of primitive man. As regards the Church, I am thinking of the supper that is a feast of love, the sacramental partaking of body and blood. As regards the lodges, however—”
“Just a moment. One moment for a marginal comment. There are also so-called regimental love feasts in the disciplined community to which my cousin belongs. He often wrote me about them. Of course, except for people getting a bit drunk, it’s all quite respectable, not nearly as rough as things get in cadet taverns or—”
“—as regards the lodges, however, I was referring to the cult of the crypt and coffin, to which I previously called your attention. In both cases, we are dealing with a symbolism of last and ultimate things, with elements of orgiastic primal religion, with unbridled nocturnal sacrifices in honor of dying and ripening, of death, transformation, and resurrection. You will recall that both the cult of Isis and the Eleusinian mysteries were carried out in dark caves at night. Well, there were and are a great many mementos of Egypt in Freemasonry, and among its secret societies were some that used the name Eleusinian. Those lodges held feasts, feasts of the Eleusinian mysteries and the secrets of Aphrodite, which at last got the female involved—and the Feast of Roses, an allusion to the three blue roses on the Masonic apron, which, it seems, frequently ended in bacchanalian excess.”
“Now, now, what’s this I hear, Professor Naphta? And it’s all part of Freemasonry? And I’m supposed to picture our clearheaded Herr Settembrini mixed up with all that?”
“You’d be doing him a great injustice. No, Settembrini knows absolutely nothing about any of it. I told you, after all, that later on people like him purged the lodges of all elements of a higher life. The lodges were modernized, humanitarianized—good God. They were led back from their aberrations to reason, usefulness, and progress, to the battle against prince and priest—in short, to social happiness. The conversations inside them are once again about nature, virtue, moderation, and the fatherland. And, I assume, about business as well. In a word, it is bourgeois misery organized as a club.”
“What a pity. A pity about the Feast of Roses, too. I’ll have to ask Settembrini if he’s ever even heard of it.”
“The doughty Knight of the T-square!” Naphta scoffed. “You must realize that it was not all that easy for him to be admitted to the site where the temple of humanity is being built, because he’s as poor as a church mouse, and they not only demand higher education, humanistic education, but, beg your pardon, one must also be well-to-do just to afford the hefty initiation fees and annual dues. Education and property—behold the bourgeoisie! There you have the foundations of the liberal world republic!”
“Yes indeed,” Hans Castorp said, laughing, “there you have it right in front of your nose.”
“And yet,” Naphta added after a pause, “I would advise you not to take the man and his cause all too lightly, would even go so far, now that we are on the subject, as to beg you to be on your guard. Inanity is not synonymous with innocence. Nor is obtuseness necessarily harmless. These people may have poured a great deal of water into wine that was once quite heady, but the concept of brotherhood is itself strong enough to tolerate a lot of water. It retains traces of its fecund secret; nor can there be any doubt that Freemasonry has its hand in world politics, just as there is more to our charming Herr Settembrini than the man himself—standing behind him are powers, whose kin and emissary he is.”
“Emissary?”
“Well, yes—proselytizer, fisher of souls.”
“And what son of emissary are you?” Hans Castorp thought. But aloud he said, “My thanks, Professo
r Naphta. I’m much obliged to you for your reminder and warning. Do you know what? I’m going to go up one floor now, if you can call it a floor, and check the pulse of our lodge-brother in disguise. An apprentice must be fearless and hungry for knowledge. And cautious, too, of course. Caution is definitely required when one is dealing with emissaries.”
There was no reason to be shy about turning to Herr Settembrini for further information; inasmuch as the Italian had never been particularly careful about making a secret of his membership in that harmonious society, he could not reproach Herr Naphta for a lack of discretion in the matter. The Rivista della Massoneria Italiana lay open on his table; Hans Castorp had simply never noticed it before. And so when he brought the conversation around to the “royal craft,” as if he had never been in any doubt about Settembrini’s association with it, he met with little reticence. There were topics, of course, that the literary man would not discuss, and at their mention he simply set his lips tight with some ostentation, presumably bound by the terroristic oath that Naphta had said drew a veil of secrecy over the curious organization’s ceremonial usages and his own rank within it. But otherwise he was downright boastful and provided his inquisitive visitor a full picture of the fellowship’s worldwide operation, with approximately 20,000 lodges and 150 grand lodges, even reaching the cultures of Negro republics like Haiti and Liberia. He was also quite liberal about naming names of those great men who had been or were now Masons: Voltaire, Lafayette, and Napoleon, Franklin and Washington, Mazzini and Garibaldi; and among the living, the king of England and a great many other men, members of governments and parliaments, in whose hands lay the affairs of Europe.
Hans Castorp expressed respect, but no surprise. It was much the same with university fraternities, he suggested. Their members stuck together their whole lives and knew how to take care of their own, so that it was difficult for anyone to get very far in the hierarchy of civil service without having been a member of a fraternity. It was, therefore, perhaps counterproductive for Herr Settembrini to present the membership of such prominent men as an argument in favor of the lodges, since one might turn it around and assume that if so many of his brothers occupied important posts, that only proved the power of the society, which surely was much more deeply involved in the affairs of the world than Herr Settembrini was willing to admit.
Settembrini smiled. He even fanned himself with the issue of Massoneria he was holding in his hand. Was that intended as a trap? Was he now supposed to make imprudent statements about the lodge’s political nature, its fundamentally political character? “Cunning, but pointless, my good engineer! We admit we are political, admit it frankly, openly. We discount the odium that a few fools—most of them residing in your native land, my good engineer, hardly any elsewhere—attach to that word. For the man who loves his fellow man, there can be no distinction between what is political and what is not. The apolitical does not exist—everything is politics.”
“Without exception?”
“I am well aware that there are those who enjoy pointing to the apolitical origins of Masonic thought. But those people are merely playing with words, drawing distinctions that it is high time we recognize to be imaginary and absurd. Firstly, the Spanish lodges, at least, took on a political tone from the very beginning.”
“I can well conceive of that.”
“You can conceive of very little, my good engineer. Do not presume that you can conceive of much of anything on your own, but rather attempt to receive and ponder. And therefore I beg you—in your own best interest, as well as in the interest of your own country and of Europe itself—to imprint on your mind the ‘secondly’ that I am about to offer. Secondly, you see, Masonic thought was never apolitical, not at any time—it could not be, and if it ever believed itself to be, then it was denying its true nature. What are we? Masons and hodmen who build, all with but one purpose. The good of all is the fundamental principle of our brotherhood. And what is this good, this building we build? The well-crafted social edifice, the perfection of humanity, the new Jerusalem. And what in the world does that have to do with politics or the lack thereof? The social problem, the problem of human coexistence is politics, is politics through and through, nothing but politics. And the man who consecrates himself to it—and he who withdraws from that sacred task does not deserve the name of man—belongs to politics, foreign and domestic. He understands that the craft of the Freemason is the art of governance.”
“Governance?”
“He knows that among those Illuminati who were Masons there was a regent degree.”
“Very nice, Herr Settembrini. The art of governance—and I like your regent degree, too. But I need to know one thing: are you Christians, all you fellows there in your lodge?”
“Perchè?”
“Forgive me, I shall put it another way, more generally, more simply. Do you believe in God?”
“And I shall give you an answer—but why do you ask?”
“I wasn’t trying to trap you just now. But there is a biblical story, where someone tries to trap the Lord with a Roman coin, and the answer he receives is that one should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s. It seems to me this method of differentiating establishes the difference between what is political and what is not. If there is a God, then the difference exists. Do Freemasons believe in God?”
“I pledged I would give you an answer. You are speaking of a unity that we are working to achieve, but which, to the great sorrow of all good men, does not yet exist. An international union of Freemasons does not exist. It shall be established—and I repeat, we are very quietly, very diligently working to achieve it. And then, without a doubt, we shall likewise be united in our religious confession—and it will be: ‘Écrasez l’infâme.’ ”
“Will it be compulsory? That would hardly be tolerant.”
“You are hardly up to dealing with the problem of tolerance, my good engineer. But imprint this on your mind: tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
“So, then, God would be evil?”
“Metaphysics is evil. For it serves no purpose except to lull us to sleep, to sap us of the energy we should bring to building the temple of society.
Only a generation ago, the Grand Orient of France provided us a fine model by erasing the name of God from all his works. We Italians followed his example.”
“How Catholic of you!”
“By which you mean?”
“I find it terribly Catholic—erasing God.”
“What you are trying to say is—”
“Nothing worth hearing, Herr Settembrini. You should not pay any real attention to my babblings. It just seemed to me at the moment as if atheism were something dreadfully Catholic, as if one erased the name of God so that one could be that much better a Catholic.”
And if Herr Settembrini followed this with a pause, it was clear that he did so solely out of pedagogic circumspection. After a proper period of silence, he replied, “My good engineer, I have not the remotest desire to disconcert or offend you in your Protestantism. We were speaking of tolerance. It is superfluous for me to emphasize that I feel more than tolerance for Protestantism, that I have the deepest admiration for it as the historical opponent of forces that enslave the conscience. The invention of the printing press and the Reformation are and shall remain Central Europe’s two most sublime contributions to humanity. Without question. But, considering what you have just said, I do not doubt you will understand me implicitly when I point out that this is only one side of the matter, that there is a second. Protestantism harbors within it certain elements—just as the Great Reformer himself harbored such elements within his personality. I am thinking here of a sentimentality, a trancelike self-hypnosis that is not European, that is foreign and hostile to our active hemisphere’s law of life. Just look at him, this Luther. Look at the portraits, both as a young man and later. What a skull, what cheekbones, what a strange set to the eyes. My friend,
that is Asia. I would be surprised, would be astonished, if Wendish-Slavic-Sarmatian blood was not at work there, and if it was not this massive phenomenon of a man—and who would deny him that—who proved to be a fatal weight placed on one of the two precariously balanced scales of your nation, on the Eastern scale, which caused—and still causes—the Western scale to fly heavenward.” Herr Settembrini had moved now from his humanist’s folding lectern to the round table with its water carafe, closer to his pupil, who was sitting on the backless divan pushed up against one wall, his elbows on his knees and his chin propped in one hand.
“Caro!” Herr Settembrini said, “Caro amico! Decisions must be made—decisions of incalculable significance for the future happiness of Europe, and your country will have to make them, they must come to fruition within its soul. Positioned between East and West, it will have to choose, will have consciously to decide, once and for all, between the two spheres vying for its heart. You are young, you will take part in this decision, you have been called to exercise an influence upon it. And so let us bless the fates that have thrown you upon these dreadful shores, giving me the opportunity to influence your educable youth with my not unskilled, not yet totally enfeebled words, and to make you aware of the responsibility that you and your country bear, while the civilized world looks on.”
Hans Castorp sat there, chin in hand. He stared out the dormer window; a certain obstinacy could be read in his ordinary, blue eyes. He said nothing.
“You are silent,” Herr Settembrini said, deeply moved. “You and your country allow unconditional silence to reign, a silence so opaque that no one can judge its depths. You do not love the Word, or do not possess it, or sanctify it only in a sullen way—the articulate world does not and cannot learn where it stands with you. My friend, that is dangerous. Language is civilization itself. The Word, even the most contradictory word, binds us together. Wordlessness isolates. One presumes that you will seek to break out of your isolation with deeds. You will ask your cousin Giacomo”—Herr Settembrini had fallen into the habit of calling Joachim “Giacomo”—“you will ask your cousin Giacomo to step out in front of your silence. ‘And two he has slain all unaided, the others his sword have evaded.’ ”