Some of the people had come to her from the desert, as she knew one day they must, just as there must be two kinds of dreaming. Their faces were troubled. They said:
There is Another in the desert. He has many followers and His words are strange. He has a secret name. At first we could not understand Him, but He learned our tongue, and He said to us:
I am the One. To you, I am Ra.
One name is all you will need.
But we answered:
What of her? She who is great in magic, whose spells have spun the fabric of the world, who gave us form and breath, who gave us song and the dreams from which all words come?
And He said:
Forget her name. Forget all the names she has taught you.
One word is all you will ever need to remember.
And we said:
But is she not like a vulture in effecting Thy protection? And is she not like an uraeus serpent established on Thy brow? Does she not make Thee rise like the sun every morning, as she does us?
But He said:
Forget her name. You will learn from me to forget.
In your fear of me you will forget all the names.
All the names she has taught you
for the things of the earth.
And we said:
But she breathes life! Her songs are life, and in her mouth are the words to revive even hearts gone still. She has entered into the heart of the great mysteries. She bore the sun! She is the daughter of her son and the mother of her father.
Then He said:
I am the father.
She is not my mother.
You will learn to fear me.
Enough. Go—insects!
He spat upon us, and His laughter was like unto thunder. We were afraid and fled him.
Crossing the great river, she found him in the eastern desert. There, she said:
You have terrified the people.
Do you ask protection from the Eye of the Serpent?
He answered:
Children into beetle life
Beetle life-maker am I
Children’s children’s beetle bodies
Grabbed My Cock I
Fucked My fist
In strength I
Fist-fucked in gentleness.
At first she could not understand him. She said:
You’ve split the secrets from the mysteries.
You have assembled an army of slaves.
Do you need protection from the power of the serpent?
And he said:
Heart made soft by fist-love I
Drained salt water
Through My cunt-fist
Back into Me I
Fucked My shadow
Rained seedwater
Spewing into My open mouth and the
Mouth of My anus.
To this she said:
You’ve made your name a secret.
You threatened the people.
You spat upon my children.
Do you beg protection from the potency of the serpent?
But he said
God bird house
Phoenix recurring sun
Universe water bowl
Spittle from My lips
Shit-fucking Khepri the
Dung-beetle at dawn
Dung-beetle rolling the shitball sun.
Walking out of My mouth
And the mouth of My anus
Beetle sky-lady
Beetle mummy fucker
Beetle cunt river
Beetle sage pig
Children’s children’s beetle bodies
Walking out of My anus.
He tried to hide in the strangeness of his tongue, but she had learned its secrets. He said:
I am the firstborn of My fist.
Fist-born, I am the Sun!
He laughed. He spat into the dust at her feet, and walked westward toward the river. Toward the city of the people. Some say she was frightened for her firstborn. Some say she knew her first anger, and said as he walked toward the western horizon, You are not my son.
She bent and mixed the spittle of his mouth with the dust at her feet. She added to this the muddy slime from the great lake’s deepest crevices. Great of magic, she fashioned from this clay a serpent. Great of magic, she rolled in her hands a magnificent dragon which, coiling and rearing its hooded head, could reach through the clouds to the heavens.
Stooping, she swallowed the serpent whole. She opened a way through her throat and with the life that was in her mouth she vomited the holy serpent onto the grass along the riverbank. Holding the head of the dragon to her lips, she breathed its name. Apophis. She released it to slither through tall grass, towards the path where the oarsmen of Ra rowed His Sun Bark westward through the heavens.
When at noon the Sun Bark with Ra standing in the prow passed above the holy serpent, it reared up and bit him at the eye of his phallus. The terrible fangs drove venom coursing through Ra’s loins like a spring flood through the great river. Never since the birth of the world had the sky heard such agony.
The oarsmen, chained to their oars, could only call out in panic:
What has happened? What deadly thing has risen against Thee?
But for a time Ra could not answer. The bones of his jaws chattered and the limbs of his body shook like branches in a typhoon. Spittle fell from his drooping lips. Moisture poured from his face. All the fluids of his body began to desert him at once. There arose a great stench all around him. At last he found his tongue and cried out:
I know who has done this!
Call her. Who wields the sceptre of the serpent.
who wears the vulture headdress
who holds the cross of life in one hand
and the feather of truth in the other.
Call her. Who is great in magic,
in plague destroying spells.
Call her!
Grown old, made feeble, skin slack about his bones, he cried out pain beyond words. For the first time she felt pity, and though her eyes were dry she said to him:
I’m here. What is it you called me to say?
And he said:
Is it really you? My Eyes are clouded.
I am not even able to see My sky.
The light of the world has been taken from Me.
The light of the world has abandoned My Eyes.
I ask protection from the Eye of the Serpent.
But she answered:
You’ve threatened my firstborn.
Tell me your secret name.
Lips quivering, voice unsteady he said:
I am who bound the mountains together in chains.
I am who acted as The-Bull-of-His-Mother
and brought sensual pleasure to the flood.
I am who sits on the Throne of the Two Horizons
in the broad Bark of the Sun.
I am who opening His eyes makes light
and closing them brings darkness.
I am who creates the hours
from which the days come into being.
I am who made living fire.
I am Khepri the Scarab at dawn, Ra at noon, Atum at dusk.
I need your protection from the tongue of the Serpent.
But she said:
I’m not interested in your boasting.
Your secret name is not among these.
Tell me the name.
The venom of the holy serpent writhed toward his heart. His agonies grew and sharpened without let. He felt his soul swimming in a fiery lake, he felt his heart shuddering as in a moonless desert, he felt his old body stripped naked to a wintry wind. Hard mountains crumbled at the sound of his wailing. He cried:
But who knows My secret name
shall have power eternal over Me!
I beg your protection from the potency of the serpent.
He felt the Eye of the Serpent lick at his heart. He felt the cedar between his legs wither like a leaf. He stared into the face of his everlasting death, his
immortal corruption, and he pleaded:
Promise Me you will use the name
only to protect the potency of your son.
Tell it to no other but your firstborn
and swear him to silence.
And she answered:
The breath of the serpent
will restore you to life everlasting.
Now tell me the name.
And he said:
Please! Protect him, yes. But ask him to veil the secret
in the silence of his heart.
But she said only:
The name.
And at last, as he felt the rotting wings of death beating above his face, he bid her enter his heart and learn the secret name of Ra. And she called out to his followers:
The name of the great god has been taken from him.
The secret of his Eye has passed into me.
I will restore him to life everlasting.
She made a poultice from clay, mixing into it a paste of crushed seeds and leaves. She applied it to his withered member. She sang the song of life into his dying heart. She said:
The venom dies, he lives.
Ra lives, the poison dies.
Long may he live through the power of the Eye.
And opening wide her jaws she drew the Eye of the Serpent from his body. Then, curled up in the warm belly of the sixth night of dreaming, she slept….
Sappho BOOK THREE
Some say nine muses—but count again
Behold the tenth: Sappho of Lesbos
PLATO
CONTENTS
Natural magic
Plus Ultra!
Allegorical Neptune
Tenth Muse
Sapphic Fragment
The Good Life
Kept from saying farewell
Hypermnestra
Academy
Castalia
Freudians on the Muse
Public Library
To me he seems like a god
Santa Cruz
Silly, you men, so very adept
Cassandra
Helen
Christina
I, like the innocent child
Brink
Carols for Saint Bernard: the House of Bread
Lysistrata
…. Regarding the advice you proffer
Ivory Tower
Paz
An Athenagoric letter, ‘worthy of Athena’ [excerpt]
Abyss
Zealot
Advent
Divine Love
Deiphobe
Extract from Sister Philothea of the Cross (I)
Bishops & Queens
Extract from Sister Philothea of the Cross (II)
Dumping Donald
Sappho
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ,
MARTYR OF THE SACRAMENT
B. Limosneros, trans.
… And now,
know ye that my late-night
inquiries into Nature have cast light
on the most arcane secrets
of Natural magic,
and that through my sciences might I
feign even the moon
in the perspectives of a mirror,
or in the condensations
of terrestrial vapours;
or project spectral bodies,
by dazzling the eyes.
And failing this,
trick the mind to switch
allegorical creatures
into visible objects….
PLUS ULTRA!1
Year: 1680. Twelve years in a convent, Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz now enters her most productive period, writing carols and graceful love lyrics, but also virtuosities in form hailed today as precursors of the modern experiments of poets such as Mallarmé. Many of her plays, meanwhile, have become too complex for the stage, or at least to be played by nuns and novices. And perhaps too dangerous.
“And yet you have made an application to purchase your cell. How is it I am only just learning of this?”
“Perhaps, Father Núñez, you might ask the Mother Prioress, since she’s held my application for two years.”
“She may have wanted you to reflect upon the kind of cell you are buying yourself.”
“Meaning?”
“Is it a convent cell you want, Sor Juana—or the prison cells you so exalt in verse?”
“Whatever is the matter now?”
“The life in here corrupts you with its ease.”
“Ease? Am I softened by the barbs of envy and intolerance and vicious gossip that beset me within these walls? The Prioress now schemes to correct even my handwriting—‘too masculine,’ she calls it.”
“Mother Andrea claims you called her a silly woman, to her face.”
“Your superior dealt with this, Father.”
“How he spoiled and pampered you. A little more each year.”
“You say this now that don Payo’s gone.”
“Don Payo, don Payo. A country nun on a first-name basis with a Prince of the Church. And yes, Juana, he is. Gone to meet his cousin, our new Viceroy. To tell him all about you, I have no doubt. How fashionable it has become for every rake in Madrid to have a nun confidante. What am I saying?—for one’s personal mystic.”†
“I think I can forego the raptures of discussing mysticism with viceroys, if that’s your concern.”
“Once here in Mexico, don Payo’s cousin can be offered the most famous nun in Christendom to comfort him during his trials among us here in the wilderness. He will not fail to find her irresistible. She will prove a marvel of comprehension who knows, as if by miracle, our new viceroy’s every intellectual interest and spiritual need, can quote at length from all his favourite poets.”
“I suspect don Payo has done much the same for you.”
“And with your future here secured, don Payo sails for the Alcázar—that nest of nuns—with a trunk full of your plays and poems and treatises. Souvenirs of his travels, is that it?”
“He asked for a few trifles, yes.”
“Verses for a few friends.”
“Not forgetting his family, Your Reverence. After seven years in the New World who would want to go back to one’s family empty-handed?”
“Ah you mean his other cousin.”
“Yes, Father, the King’s Prime Minister.”
“And do you really believe he can protect you from there?”
“Protect me.”
“Did you think your don Payo would not show it to me before he left?”
“Show you wh—ah, I see you’ll be telling me.”
“That abomination! Martyr of the Sacrament.”
“How could I think he’d dare not to? He was only our Archbishop and Viceroy after all. But I assume your abomination of my play does not quite extend to Saint Hermenegild himself?”
“So now we have martyred you here—”
“Father, you persist in reducing everything I write to self-portraiture.”
“Because it is—or no, you do not make portraits anymore, your plays contain whole embassies. The Greeks, the Visigoths, Saint Hermenegild, civil war, faith, magic, apostasy, Isabela of Castile, Columbus—”
“All that, Father. In one play? You’re certain.”
“You think we are in one of your little comedies?”
“Just once, before you save my soul for all eternity, how I would love to see you laugh.”
“You may not enjoy the moment as much as you imagine.”
“In truth I cannot imagine it at all.”
“You think yourself back at the palace, perhaps. But as I remember it, you were not always laughing then.”
“Just once, to see you come here without a grievance.”
“Could your intent be more manifest? You salute not just the Queen and Queen Mother but the entire administration—you have a character addressing them from within the play itself!”
“So you’ve come to correct my art.”
“Is there to be no end to your worldly
intriguing? You are a nun, a bride of Christ, buried alive, dead to the world—”
“This, from an officer of the Company of Jesus.”
“But such a clever nun—a jesting, writing nun. A nun magician. How you dazzle us with your theatrical sorcery—or do you call it science that so holds us in its thrall? Soldiers, souls and spectators all suspended between New Spain and Old, you take us back a thousand years to the Spain of the Visigoths—and not content with this, back another thousand to the ancient Spain of Geryon! Two continents, two centuries, three or four millennia all on one rather crowded stage. Why, Sor Juana, you are a veritable sorceress of space and time.”
“The doctors of the Church, as you know perfectly well, Father, have defined magic as nothing more than the power to uncover natural marvels. That’s all the magic I care to know about. The magic of Columbus was merely that of human genius.”
“Of which you have an abundance, should Madrid still be needing any—”
“Human genius, even in abundance, is but a pale reflection of the mind of God.”
“And since the natural marvel of the New World always existed, its discovery was the triumph of that genius over our own pious ignorance. You remind a bankrupt Queen of how much Spain has owed to the bold spirit of discovery,2 a spirit just such as yours. Not enough for you merely to play the magician, the alchemist, no you are all the silver of the Indies, all the wonders of America rolled into one. Let us all bow down now to this prodigy of piety—the writing nun who makes rhymes on the rebel martyr Hermenegild. You try to drive a wedge between Church and Crown.”
“And who was it, just now, lamenting the influence of nuns at the palace in Madrid?”
“You have Columbus’s marines shout Ne Plus Ultra, Ne Plus Ultra, Here ends the Universe! only to hear their echoes rebounding from the unseen shore—but no, from the future. Where we sit and smile down at them from the new certainties of this very clever future. How you use Time to mock at us, the ignorance of our simple faith.”
“I find nothing simple about your faith, Father.”
“So limited, so straitening, so narrow for one so bold—”
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