by Rob Brezsny
I wanted to test its staying power. It was one thing to be lying alone in a quiet room, but could I remain in touch with my new secret while rubbing auras with folks on the street? I decided to take a walk down to Mandrake’s bookstore to see if the weighty tome I’d ordered, Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, had come in yet.
All the clothes I’d brought from home for Operation Erasure were purposely unflashy. Now, from among the mass of drab colors and baggy shapes in the closet, I grabbed black jeans and a dark khaki green sweater. After gingerly covering my fresh wound with a large piece of gauze, I pulled on a black beret.
Half an hour later I stopped at a cafe. After a slow-motion communion with soup, scones, and tea, I trekked on to Mandrake’s. Alas, Psychology and Alchemy had not arrived. But the clerk told me he’d just acquired a used copy of another one of Jung’s alchemical treatises, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. Would I like to look at it? He led me to where he’d shelved it, and I sat down on a stool as I opened it up.
Turning to random pages to divine whether the book and I had any future together, I quickly found a couple of juicy parts. First there was Jung quoting Karl Kerényi: “ ‘Basic to the antique mysteries … is the identity of marriage and death on the one hand, and of birth and the eternal resurgence of life from death on the other.’ ”
The second discovery, on another page: “In ecclesiastical allegory and in the lives of the saints a sweet smell is one of the manifestations of the Holy Ghost, as also in Gnosticism.”
I’d never heard that one before, that the Holy Ghost smelled good, but I liked it. What exact odor, I wondered. I fantasized it might be like the sweet almond oil that I could still sense coursing through me, my link to the Drivetime.
In the spiritual beliefs of the Pomegranate Grail, there is a third party in a Trinity which also includes Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalen. “Holy Ghost” is not the name this character goes by, though, but rather “Mercuria”—feminine form of the phallocratic archetype “Mercurius.” Like the Holy Ghost, indeed, like Mercurius in the alchemical tradition, Mercuria is regarded as a go-between or messenger, and sometimes as the spirit of the union between any two opposites, especially Jesus and Mary themselves.
Ha! On page 462, two paragraphs after the Kerényi quote, I found Jung saying, “Mercurius … is not just the medium of conjunction but also that which is to be united, since he is the essence or ‘seminal matter’ of both man and woman. Mercurius masculinus and Mercurius foemineus are united in and through Mercurius menstrualis.”
“Now what the Hades does he mean by Mercurius menstrualis,” I puzzled. As I was contemplating this delightful enigma, I became aware of a new fragrance. Had my sweet almond oil mutated? No, this smell was definitely on the outside of my body, arriving from an unknown source. I tried to describe it to myself. Like parchment on an ocean beach, maybe. Ancient but fresh. But also like the aromatic lacquered woodiness of a guitar, with a hint of moist carrots just pulled out of the rainy ground.
“Hey, Artaud,” I heard a voice whispering. “Artaud. How are you?”
Looking around, I saw that someone had silently crept up behind me in the narrow aisle. It was this person who owned the delectable fragrance.
I say “person” because I could not immediately discern what gender the creature was. He or she was about five feet nine or five feet ten, and wore all white—work boots, baggy pants, an oversized man’s shirt not tucked in, and a long cloth coat of the kind I’d seen worn by Sikhs. Breasts were not discernible, but they could have been cloaked by the abundant folds of white fabric. His or her face was a perfect hybrid of elegant male and witchy female. It was both noble and tricky. The thick, jaw-length flaxen hair and turquoise eyes reminded me of the style of the medieval Page of Wands, a figure depicted on a court card in the Pomegranate Grail’s official Tarot deck. The person’s age? I guessed mid-twenties, but I was not confident in that assessment. There was an ageless quality in his or her face.
“You talking to me?” I blurted out.
“Mais oui, Artaud. But I am not just talking to you. I am beaming at you. Gleaming my joy at having found you again after all this time.”
His/her voice was, like the rest of him/her, exactly halfway between male and female. At this point I decided I couldn’t tolerate the cognitive dissonance. Until further notice, I would think of this person as a him. I gazed at his throat, trying to decide if the swell in the middle was big enough to be an Adam’s apple. Hard to tell.
“You must be mistaking me for someone else,” I said, though I was in no hurry to drive him away. I hadn’t had many social interactions in recent days and was a bit starved. I considered the possibility that he was just a dude on the make, but thought it might be fun to expose him. I rose to stand. We were the same height.
He took my left hand with his own and gave me what felt like a secret handshake.
“Remember this?” he asked slyly, his left eyebrow rising comically. “Blasphème sacré?” His middle finger stroked the base of my palm while his thumb thumped the top of my thumb.
French for “sacred blasphemy”?
“I’m your bonne amie (or did he say bon ami?) from last incarnation,” he continued. “Not two lifetimes ago in Germany, but the one right before this one, in France.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “Last time I was on Earth before this was in Palestine, almost two millennia ago.”
He held his head in his hands and uttered a “waaaaa,” as if imitating a baby’s cry.
“Wait here,” he commanded. “Do not move. I will go retrieve some evidence.”
I turned my attention back to Mysterium Coniunctionis, leafing to the index to glean where else Jung might have discussed Mercurius. Of the many entries under that heading, “dressed as woman,” on page 442, caught my eye first. There Jung wrote that the hermaphroditic Mercurius was often dressed like a woman in the alchemical illustrations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nearby that passage was another seed: “In alchemy Mercurius is the ‘ligament’ of the soul, uniting spirit and body.”
In a couple of minutes the odd stranger had returned. He was holding a book called The Theater and Its Double, by Antonin Artaud.
“I imagine this will still sound familiar,” he said. “It has been a long time, but you did write it yourself, after all.”
“Are you suggesting I was this guy Artaud in my past life?” I asked, rising off the stool to face him more directly.
“I am not suggesting,” he replied. “I am stating as a fact.”
“But I have no idea who he was.”
“We can do a hypnotic regression later. I’m sure it will all spill out.”
“Can you give me a few hints?”
“You were a mad poet who liked to say that all writing was pigshit. Merde du pourceau. You were a tormented actor and a visionary playwright who lusted to kill and resurrect the theater.”
There was that word “kill” again, being applied to me. But other than that commonality, the description of Artaud was so far from my self-image that I had to laugh.
“You were the genius that thought up the Theater of Cruelty, Artaud,” he continued. “Probably had something to do with you having meningitis as a kid.”
“Ouch!”
“A sick little joke there. Sorry. You did not mean cruelty in the usual sense of the word. Not the way I just used it. You did not mean any word in its usual sense. That is one of the things I loved about you so much. You would say ‘pourquoi’ and really mean ‘pourquoi pas?’ Or you would say ‘animal yawns’ and actually mean ‘the sound of sap rising in the tree.’ Here is how you defined cruelty.”
He read conspiratorially from The Theater and Its Double. I could still smell his aroma as vividly as when it first bloomed, which was curious. Normally a scent hits in all its fullness, then wanes as you get used to it.
“ ‘My cruelty is not synonymous with bloodshed, martyred
flesh, crucified enemies. Rather, it is an appetite for life, a cosmic rigor and implacable necessity, in the gnostic sense of a living whirlwind that devours the darkness.’ ”
“Oh yeah, I remember writing that,” I lied.
“You did not want the theater to be simply a silly diversion,” he said brightly. “You hated how it had become a showcase for pitiful little catharses about personal ambition and sentimental love and social status. You wanted it to be a real religious ritual. You plotted and schemed to strip people of their defenses and terrify them with so much beauty that they could not help but get high.”
“Yes, I was pretty cruel.”
“Once a wacko high priest, always a wacko high priest?” he winked.
“I resemble that remark,” I said, quoting one of my mom Burgundy’s favorite lines.
“I was simply hoping to jar loose a memory or two from some of your other past lives,” he said.
“Such as?”
“Such as Eumolpus, for one.”
“Oh yeah, Eumolpus. I seem to remember being Eumolpus. That was when I was Plato’s barber, right? Slight hunchback. Big broken nose. Bad teeth.”
“No, ma’am. Guess again. Much further back than that. You have identified the right part of the world, at least. When you were Eumolpus, you were—how shall I say?—a self-made hierophant. You even started your own mystery school. Once every year you threw a sacred party, and once every five years a really big sacred party. Which was actually an occult ceremony. Which was also a riveting theater piece starring the Goddess Persephone and her mother Demeter. Remember? You called them the Eleusinian mysteries. They lasted long after your death, more than a thousand years.”
Now that was a weirdly apt guess, I thought. Wrong, of course, but having a strong resonance with the truth. What would be the odds of a complete stranger guessing there was a connection between me and Persephone? If riffing about reincarnation was his game for picking up chicks, he was good at it.
“Oh, here is one of my favorite parts in The Theater and Its Double,” he was reading again, “where you compared the Theater of Cruelty to alchemy. You remember you were also the sixteenth-century German alchemist Paracelsus, right? Listen to this.
“ ‘Alchemy permits us to attain to the sublime, but with drama, after a meticulous and unremitting pulverization of every insufficiently fine, insufficiently matured form …
“ ‘The theatrical operation of making gold, by the immensity of the conflicts it provokes, by the prodigious number of forces it throws one against the other and rouses, ultimately evokes in the spirit an absolute and abstract purity …
“ ‘I believe that the Mysteries of Eleusis must have consisted of projections and precipitations of conflicts, indescribable battles of principles joined from that dizzying and slippery perspective in which every truth is lost in the realization of the inextricable and unique fusion of the abstract and the concrete.… They [the Mysteries of Eleusis] brought to a climax that nostalgia for pure beauty of which Plato must have found the complete, sonorous, streaming naked realization: to resolve by conjunctions unimaginably strange to our waking minds, to resolve or even annihilate every conflict produced by the antagonism of matter and mind, idea and form, concrete and abstract, and to dissolve all appearances into one unique expression which must have been the equivalent of spiritualized gold.’ ”
“Wow. I was pretty pompous, wasn’t I?” I said with mock admiration. “Especially for someone who accused other writers of spewing pig shit.”
“Yes. Exactly correct. But no longer, I think. This time around you have arranged for a personality that allows you to take yourself less seriously. Am I right? Same intensity, but more humor.”
I found myself imitating the response I had made to Madame Blavatsky while in the Drivetime a few hours back. Scrunching my face in the ugliest expression I could manage, I danced like a chicken as I whisper-sung “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
“No doubt we should get a theater group together,” he said when I was done.
“Starting with a surrealist production of ‘The Wizard of Oz’?”
“No. I do not mean the kind of theater group that puts on cute little plays. I am talking about radical rituals.” He flipped through the pages of The Theater and Its Double, then read: “… by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior.”
“Don’t you think we should get to know each other better before we dive into such a serious commitment?” I said.
“But we have known each other for decades!” he protested. “Thirty-five centuries if you include our time together back in Germany and England and Eleusis. Do you not remember? Paris, June 11, 1923? The day we first met last incarnation? True, we both had different bodies at the time. But I recognized you the moment I saw you here in the bookstore. You cannot hide that—how should I describe it?—spasmodically rhapsodic soul of yours. Remember how you said, when you were Artaud, ‘I am the man who has best charted his inmost self’? Well, it still shows all over your new face.”
If this guy was making this stuff up, it was pretty entertaining.
“And how did you just happen to be here,” I said, “in the same little bookstore in the same small city in Northern California at the exact same time I was?”
“Your wound,” he replied. “As soon as you began showing up in my dreams with a bloody forehead, I knew that the real flesh-and-blood you was about to re-enter my life. In all our dream adventures up until recently, you see, you have always been a majestic and flawless goddess, not anything like a real human being. Our rendezvous have always been in archetypal landscapes—windswept battlefields and thousand-foot waterfalls and crystalline palaces. Last night, I dreamed I found you in this shabby bookstore with uncombed hair and dark circles under your eyes.”
The implications of what he was saying were boggling. I could barely focus on sorting them out. For the moment, I obsessed on how he could have known about my forehead. Instinctively, I put my hand up and found there was a tiny corner of gauze jutting out from beneath my beret. So maybe that explained it. I’d inadvertently given him a clue to use in his confabulations, if indeed he was confabulating.
I longed to ask him more about his dreams of me. Had he really, as he seemed to be implying, had an ongoing series of adventures with me over a long period of time—comparable to my experience with Rumbler? But I wasn’t ready to hear the portentous answer to that question just yet; if it were “yes,” it would be too spooky.
“I would consider getting a theater group together with you,” I said instead. “There’s a slight problem, though. I have no experience as an actress whatsoever.”
“Are you telling the truth? I find that hard to believe. I can plainly see a strong thespian streak in your physiognomy. But de toute façon, the more important question is: Can you bleat like a charging rhino? You could do that back when you were Artaud. Can you whirr like a cloud of locusts? And ululate like a beautiful young woman dying from the plague?”
“I can feel all those skills right on the edge of my memory.”
“I have a very good idea,” he said suddenly. “Shall we give you a crash course to help you get over your amnesia? I mean this very evening, a full-immersion exercise in the good old le Théâtre de la Cruauté? By the way, back in France I used to be Luçienne. You can call me that if you want. Or you may use my new name, Jumbler.”
“Jumbler? What kind of name is that?” I said, not meaning to sound as shrill as I did.
“ ‘Jumbler’ is a name I gave myself eight years ago—in honor of my coming of age. It means I am the kind of person who loves to mix things up and put them back together in new combinations. What about you? Who are you this time around?”
“Rapunzel. Rapunzel Blavatsky.”
Before I could expound,
he reached out his left hand, and when I offered mine in return, he gave me the same secret handshake he’d applied before.
With his last announcement, the tide turned dramatically away from the interpretation that this character was merely a guy cruising for babes. First there had been his delectable aroma, which arrived just moments after I’d read about the Holy Ghost’s sweet smell. Then he conjured up the scenario of me being connected in a past life to the Goddess Persephone, and confessed (I think) that he’d been dreaming of me for years. Now I’d found out that his name was one letter away from that of my magic companion in the Televisionarium.
I was torn about going along with the crash course he’d proffered. My imagination had become so excited by his improvisations that I was practically swooning. And wasn’t this exactly the kind of adventure I had invited into my life by launching my apostasy against the Pomegranate Grail? But I worried that I should be more self-protective. I’d had surgery that morning, for one thing. And given the fact that I was an underage runaway, shouldn’t I lay low and remain inconspicuous?
“Come on now, I will buy you these two books,” he said, plucking Mysterium Coniunctionis out of my hands and heading towards the front of the store. I followed behind, hoping to find a definitive clue to his gender in the way he walked. There was the slightest swinging of the hips—more than most men I’d ever observed, at least, though less than most women.
My taproot to the Drivetime was surging deliciously again: linen and sweet almond and gold-tinged terra cotta and a spritely but mournful Irish-Chinese tune. There was no way, I decided firmly, that I was going to break the spell.