Feast of Shadows, #1

by Rick Wayne

  Alchemy, for example, wasn’t actually about turning lead into gold, even though that’s what everyone thinks. It’s really about the deep structure of creation. Not like atoms and stuff—that’s regular old chemistry—but below that. Resolving the conundrums of existence. The whole thing with lead and gold was a cipher, a riddle to throw off the greedy and foolish. Those who were too stupid to realize it, who got bewitched by the lure of wealth, got hung up there and wasted their lives chasing after a fiction. The truth was much simpler. Gold is bright, like sunshine. It’s a light metal that’s easily made into different things. Lead is heavy. Dull. Dark. Impenetrable. Not even Superman could see through it. In the symbolism of turning lead into gold, gold represents wealth of knowledge and all that. And lead is ignorance. So, alchemy is the transmutation of ignorance into knowledge—ultimate knowledge. That’s what it was all about, the search for Truth.

  There were lots of different alchemical investigations, but the big thing everyone wanted to produce was the lapis philosophorum, the “stone of truth” or something like that. But not like a rock—more like an opal or a gem, like how all the old sutras refer to the teachings of the Buddha as a jewel. That’s what the lapis is, the “jewel” of ultimate knowledge—namely, how to be like God, a return to the divine state pretty much every religion says existed way back at the beginning. Before we were corrupted. Immortality, I guess. Sounds like heresy, right? And it is. Which is why these guys, The Masters, worked for hundreds of years or whatever to suppress any investigation into the “sacred marriage,” which, the more I read, I imagined to be sort of like combining matter and antimatter. To keep the knowledge from falling into the wrong hands, the steps and ingredients—the recipe—for marrying the male and female principles were encoded in alchemical ciphers, like the athame and the chalice. The old Taoist sorcerers were the real masters—mixing yin and yang and all that through a process that could only be grasped, never articulated—which is why there are so many bearded sages in Chinese mythology. The famous Eight Immortals, for example, who each rode a dragon and who could transfer their power to a relic or tool that could be wielded by ordinary men and whose tiny fat statues now adorn pretty much any Chinese restaurant anywhere.

  Only nobody knows how to do it anymore. Supposedly.

  I heard the scuff of the old man’s feet on the floor. At first I thought he was coming to shoo me out. But when I lifted my head to defend myself, I saw he had a teacup and saucer in his hand. He set them carefully on the broad arm of the chair.

  “Charles thought you might like some tea.”

  I looked at the time on my phone. It was almost 5:30. Shit. It didn’t seem possible that much time had passed. There were no messages from Kell on the lock screen, which kinda sucked because I really wanted someone to talk to about everything. I wanted my best friend. I checked my messaging app, like we all do obsessively on the ridiculously off chance it had failed to display, but there was nothing. I still had no bars.

  I looked at the tea. It was hot.

  “Ceylon,” he said from near the rear door. “I’m afraid it’s all I have.”

  “I thought you closed at five.”

  “We do.” He nodded to the front.

  It was shut and a shade pulled over the glass. I scrunched my brow. I hadn’t even noticed.

  “It seemed a shame to break the spell,” he said without facing me.

  I looked at the tea. It was steaming. The scent was heavenly. You can get really good tea in America, but generally you have to go looking for it or make a special trip. This smelled amazing. I took a sip. It was warm, and I realized how safe I felt there, curled up in an old chair with a dust-and-vanilla-scented book. But my eyes were getting tired. I’d been reading for a while and I was losing concentration. I shook my arm and watched as the pale triangle floated up to the window of my watch.

  Not yet.

  I took another sip and thumbed to the back of the book, to the index, past a bunch of text-heavy tables that seemed to have been assembled in old movable type, with strong lines and a highly serifed font. There was nothing about a stone table, but the word “scapegoat” had two page numbers after it. ‘Mizzen” had about two dozen. I looked up the easier first, although it was about what I expected—an animal ritually burdened with the sins of others. There was a quote from the Bible, the book of Leviticus, where some guy named Aaron cast lots—magic, it sounded like—on two goats, one for God and one for Azazel, and then drove them into the desert. I didn’t think there was magic in the Bible, or that holy men made sacrifices to appease dark powers, but there it was in black and white.

  Finding a definition for “mizzen” proved much more difficult. The book never came right out and said. At times, it sounded like an occupation, like blacksmith, but then it also seemed to be the name for an ethnic group derived from the same. All I got for sure was that they were people whose ability to cast magic had been removed—by force, it seemed—and lots of people didn’t like them and they were often persecuted.

  I flipped to the back again but stopped at the tables. I turned from one to the next: Schools of Magic; Classical Symbology; Mystical Doctrines; the six basic summoning circles; several timelines, including a list of all reigning Masters, minus a handful of gaps, “from the fall of the Templars to the destruction of the Great Eye;” and so on. I stopped at a chart labeled Orders of Practice. It had script titles in the first column and block descriptions in the second, with a third reserved for notable examples, not all of which were filled. A Magician, it said, is any practitioner of magic. However, it also said that term tended to be avoided because it didn’t distinguish from the stage magician, who offers nothing but mechanical sleight-of-hand. A Conjurer is anyone who brings forth that which was not there. A Summoner, then, is a Conjurer that brings forth a creature from another realm, such as a demon or evil spirit. SEE: FAUST. Diviner is the formal name for fortune teller. This includes the “low” variety like palmists and tarot card readers as well as the more specialized schools: anything with the suffix -mancy in the title. Most of what historians know about the ancient Shang dynasty, for example, comes from their widespread practice of plastromancy, where they inscribed questions on turtle shells before piercing them with hot irons and interpreting the cracks that ran through the characters.

  A Seer is anyone who has visions, which don’t always have to be of the future. Most of your run-of-the-mill psychics fall into this category. SEE: CASSANDRA. Similarly, a Medium is anyone who carries messages from one place to another, such as between the dead and the living. The table also noted that Mediums, also called Sensitives, are also particularly prone to possession since they’re basically living receivers.

  A Witch is any practitioner of witchcraft, which got a bad rap because it never bothered to separate light from dark. Despite the common misconception, though, a witch isn’t necessarily evil, or female. Rather, it’s simply that “earth magic” attracted more women than men, first, because women were historically excluded from the more arcane schools, and second, because the Druids, the founders of the art, had no such chauvinist proscriptions—at first, anyway.

  A Warlock, on the other hand, is specifically a servant or priest of the “Old Ones.” They are typically male but occasionally female and organized into different schools, called covens, whose high elders sit collectively before a stone table. SEE: RASPUTIN.

  Here there was an asterisk pointing to a footnote at the bottom of the page where the author admitted to omitting “the Shamanists and Witch-doctors.” As practitioners of the most ancient form of magic, he said, there was no agreed-upon definition, nor did the shamans themselves adhere to one or another school but preferred instead to “salt and pepper their practice” with bits from every tradition “like leeches.”

  On and on it went: Wizard, Sorcerer, Thaumaturge, Alchemist, Magus, Malefactor . . . to the second-to-last entry: Enchanter/Enchantress.

  I read it aloud.

  “A master of mind-magic; a caster
of charms, often with the help of sprites and other spirits, whom they keep as fam—” I stopped at the word, just as Bastien had. “Familiars. SEE: PROSPERO.”

  I got up and practically ran out the door, nearly spilling the tea, which wobbled precipitously before righting itself.