by A. S. Byatt
It was a curious coincidence between his readings in Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy and the description of Whitby Abbey in the Red Guide which led Lucas to select the ruins of the Abbey as the site for their experiment. He chose Whitby partly because it was the place in which Caedmon the illiterate cowherd had been visited by an Angel who had enabled him to sing an English Song of Creation. More tenuously, he was much taken by the myth, recorded in the Red Guide, and supported by a quotation from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion, about the gifts of the founder of the Abbey, the ferocious St Hilda.
They told how, in their convent cell
A Saxon princess once did dwell
The lovely Edelfled;
And how of thousand snakes, each one
Was changed into a coil of stone
When holy Hilda prayed;
Themselves, within their holy bound
Their stony folds had often found;
They told, how sea-fowls’ pinions fail
As over Whitby’s towers they sail,
And sinking down, with fluttering faint
They do their homage to the saint.
They thought, of course, he told Marcus, that the ammonites were petrified snakes, made stones by Hilda’s holiness. But the truth is different – the ammonites are early records of the true history of creation, and the secret meaning of the petrified snake, its real relation to holiness, is to be found in Jung’s account, in Psychology and Alchemy, of Mercurius – as a dragon. He read out a whole page to Marcus, with mounting excitement:
“The dragon symbolises the vision and experience of the alchemist as he works in his laboratory and ‘theorizes’. The dragon in itself is a monstrum – a symbol combining the chthonic principle of the serpent and the aerial principle of the bird. It is … a variant of Mercurius. But Mercurius is the divine winged Hermes manifest in matter, the god of revelation, lord of thought and sovereign psychopomp. The fluid metal, argentum vivum, ‘living silver’, quicksilver – was the wonderful substance that perfectly expressed his nature: that which glistens and animates within. When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver, but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter. Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like the dragon biting its own tail. For this reason the opus was often called circulare (circular) or else rota (the wheel). Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the work: he is the prima materia, the caput corvi, the nigredo: as dragon he devours himself and as dragon he dies, to rise again as the lapis. He is the play of colours in the cauda pavonis and the division into four elements. He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the traditional brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught – a symbol uniting all opposites.”
Lucas was of the opinion, he said, that Scott’s passage contained more wisdom than he knew, traces of a powerful but corrupted primitive or occult symbol in the combination of serpent and failing pinions precisely at Whitby Abbey, because together bird and snake made the finished circle, tail-in-its-mouth dragon, a meeting of earth and air which was just what he and Marcus wanted, was it not, the raising of the earth to the fluid state of light, less actualised than the earth, and they could add the other of the four old elements, too, fire and water, if they were very clever, yes and quicksilver and the piece of vegetable mercury, the dog’s mercury. The place was no longer in doubt: the exact experiment or rite, depending on your terminology, still needed thought.
There was a boy, a chess player, once, who revealed that his gift consisted partly in a clear inner vision of potential moves of each piece as objects with flashing or moving tails of coloured light: he saw a live possible pattern of potential moves and selected them according to which ones made the pattern strongest, the tensions greatest. His mistakes were made when he selected not the toughest, but the most beautiful lines of light. Something like this took place in Marcus’s mind, listening to Lucas’s chattering switchboard of crossed lines of reference. The spider-web had its beauty, but it was tenuous, tenuous. Marcus did not mind this: there was a pattern, even if it was one composed of dotted lines of intermittent flashes. It was not his place to comment on the exiguous nature of the invisible threads. Maybe in these realms everyone’s inner spider web had its own necessary and different thickness and tension anyway. Maybe Lucas’s was like woven steel.
They set off, then, for Whitby, in the sportscar, side by side, one hot and sunny Sunday. In the boot were baskets, two of them, one containing a large picnic and one containing various pieces of equipment packed by Lucas secretly and wrapped in various white napkins and handkerchiefs and silk scarves. He wore a red and white spotted silk handkerchief himself, jauntily at the open throat of his white shirt, under a navy blue college blazer. Marcus had his usual aertex shirt and a school blazer, which had a turret woven on the pocket in gilt thread with the motto “ad caelum hinc”. No Latin master had ever quite liked this, which had been written by Crowe’s ancestor: the turret, which was said to represent the building itself as a tower of strength, was known in the staffroom as the Tower of Babel, or the Leaning Tower.
They drove south and east, over the moors, reasonably quietly, dropping down high hills eventually towards the coast road along the cliffs, taking a loop round the Goathland moors, along the road where Frederica, her thigh and breast rudely pushed by the solid Ed, had brooded on the Alexandrine, so as to approach the Abbey itself, on foot, from the cliffs to the south, avoiding the town altogether.
On the top of the cliffs the weather was what it was meant to be, as Lucas put it to Marcus, blue and deep and empty with a high sun and a light wind from shore to sea. They walked to the Abbey through fields thick with buttercups, cow parsley, speedwell, brushing them with white and yellow dust. The naked unsupporting arches were white against this weather and the stone trunks seemed weightless and visual only, as Lucas again remarked, though they were cold to touch in the shadows. He was put out to find trippers wandering along the bare choirs, or stepping from designed empty space to empty space: somehow, Marcus gathered, he had expected to be alone at an altar, or where an altar had been, and little girls singing and running, old men with knapsacks, stumping booted motorcyclists dangling goggles from gloved hands, disconcerted him. He and Marcus stood as trim as reserve players on a visiting cricket team, gripping their tidy baskets, and stared at the site, the looped and windowed walls through which the seawind ran, the ancient stone paving surrounded by cliff grass. Marcus remembered the oppressive geometry of the enclosure of St Bartholomew’s and took pleasure in finishing and extending these broken sweeps and rhythms in his mind’s eye. The sunlight danced on seawater swell and polished stone and blades of grass and buttercup-enamel. Little streams of it ran, like visible convection currents, in eddying circles everywhere between ground and sky, sprinklings and shoots and trailings of brightness. Lucas Simmonds stepped with military or processional precision round the bounds of the building, as he might have marked out a rough cricket stump or football pitch on Far Field, stepping and turning where the white lines would follow. He carried the mysterious basket. Marcus, the acolyte, stepped after, with thermos and bottle, bakelite beakers, bread, meat, apples, sweets and wine.
And why should they not, after all, said Lucas in an urgent whisper, do what they had to do as well alone in a simple field as here, where there was so much interference. He gestured at the little girls, who were mopping and mowing and chanting about Tom Tiddler’s Ground, as though they were so much materialised static. Marcus said irreverently that they might after all accidentally light on the site of Caedmon’s cow-byre, which was where the Angel had actually come, and Lucas said quite seriously that the grass must have been the grass which Caedmon’s cows pastured on,
that was so. Not the exact grass, said Marcus. Not so different, said Lucas, giving his flapping trouser leg a hoist, shifting his basket from one hot hand to the other. They set off again, along the cliff-edge, past the weather-hut and its rough garden. After a time, they found an ideal patch of ground sheltered enough to support not the wiry cliff grass and blown scabious and sea holly but a dense yellow thicket of buttercups hazed with the lace of the cowparsley. In such richness of tall grasses and various pollens Marcus wondered briefly about the asthma, took an experimental breath, sneezed pollen, but felt no machinery of constriction or seizure moving inside him, only a hot dazed sense of vegetable too much. He heard an echo of the little girls –
“We are on Tom Tiddler’s ground, Picking up gold and si-ilver” and remembered a hymn they had sung when he was little. Daisies are our silver, buttercups our gold. This is all the treasure we can have – or – hold. Lucas took out a tartan rug from the basket and laid it on the grass, where it stood suspended and prickling, air running under it. Now we begin, said Lucas. On empty stomachs, as at Owger’s Howe.
Despite Owger’s Howe, Marcus did not exactly expect anything to happen. Somehow, in his mind, the human precision and over-determination of Lucas’s planning made it less likely that anything would. He was a little afraid, but his fear was of being made to do something ludicrous or unbalanced. Lucas took out some of the contents of his basket, laid a large white napkin on the rug, and laid on the napkin: a fossilised ammonite, a bunch of dried grass in tissue paper, a cellophane packet of pressed flowers, a corked test-tube with a ball of quicksilver in it, some circles of smoked glass, a large circular magnifying glass, a handkerchief. There was also an implement resembling a surgical scalpel.
Lucas explained. The object of the exercise was to make contact with the noussphere, was it not, and this was hampered, as sages in all times had known, by man’s own too great actualisation as a physical entity. Thus, it seemed, to transmute Life into Spirit meant to consume matter into pure being. It seemed likely that that, symbolically and in part actually, was what the old burned offerings had been meant to achieve. He, Lucas, had also been struck, very struck, during Marcus’s description of the photisms and the figure of the crossed cones, if he might speak so, by Marcus’s recurrent references to a burning glass, which he took in retrospect to have been a Sign. So he proposed, in short, to make a burned offering, by means of a burning glass, releasing Matter into Light and Energy by communicating the energy of the Sun who was the source of our earthly light and heat. He had decided to offer, of course, those grasses which had already been a Sign, and the dog’s mercury and aconites and gentian of the vicinity of the Dropping Well – to be made into, not Stone, but Light, the Lumen Novum, another Sign. He had also brought with him an ammonite, which was a stony symbol of Creation and the Work (though he was afraid it came from Portland Bill, not Whitby – but it was a good one, one he had been given as a boy) – as he was saying, an ammonite as a symbol of the perfected Work, and some mercury to represent spirit imprisoned in matter, in a corked tube, and there should clearly be flesh as well as grass, to complete the burned offering, especially if one considered that Abel served God flesh and Cain served him fruit of the ground and the Lord only had respect unto Abel and his offering. He thought the flesh should be their own. He had thought of bringing worms or something but really it should be their own, didn’t Marcus think? Marcus, his mind jumping from Cain and Abel to Abraham and Isaac looked rapidly over the shining buttercups for signs of life other than himself but could see only butterflies in the distance, brimstone and small blue. The hair of their head and drops of blood should be enough, Lucas said, he had brought a knife. Did Marcus think anything else was necessary?
Marcus stared at the buttercups and the tartan wool of the rug, and listened to the sighing of the subsiding grasses under the rug, and said no. Unless, something from here, from this place exactly. Caedmon’s cow-byre. He smiled palely. Lucas pointed out that Caedmon and Abel were both herdsmen, and Marcus said there were no cows. There was milk, Lucas said, in the thermos, and they could gather some plant from the field and put them together, an excellent plan.
They hunted in the hedgerow for a suitable plant to offer: the yellow was somehow too pervasive to be considered. It was Marcus who found something unusual, a tallish plant, with small fierce blue, pink-tinged, trumpeted florets. The leaf was darkish and had prickles on it. Lucas, called to inspect it, said it was viper’s bugloss, and would do very well, another transmutable snake or dragon plant. He pulled it up by the roots and laid it, in a sprinkling of earth, beside the other grasses, the gentian, the mercury.
Then he picked up the little dissecting knife. “Put your hand out,” he said to Marcus. “I want to squeeze three drops of blood – or so – three drops would be good – onto this handkerchief. From each of us, mingled.” Marcus jerked involuntarily back. “It’s sterile,” Lucas assured him, putting out his own hand. “I assure you it’s sterile.” Marcus imagined the same little triangular blade turning back the lined wormskin from the rolling flesh. He hung his hand limply. Lucas gripped it, turned it palm to the sun, pounced, and made a little slit on the ball of the thumb. Blood spurted and dripped. Considerably more than the regulation three drops. Lucas laughed immoderately and pushed the blade down into his own forefinger. His blood ran onto Marcus’s, onto the white cloth. There was a patch of irregular red circular splashes. Lucas raised his hand and sliced away one of the springing curls from his own forehead, and then, for a moment, cupped Marcus’s head in a bloodstained hand and sheared a wisp of the limp, haylike hair. He twisted the hairs together, and put the flat little clump on top of the blood. After some thought, he put the ammonite under the handkerchief, under the grasses. It would be unrealistic, he said, to expect the sun’s energy to consume an ammonite. But it could be communicated to it, could transform it in some way, no doubt. Now, didn’t Marcus think, they should dance as they had at Owger’s Howe, in the successful figure they had made on that occasion. He held out his hand, gripped Marcus’s, blood smearing blood and drew him to his feet. He gave him a piece of smoked glass. “To look through. To look directly. To catch any indication of change, or intent, or …”
They spun. Marcus felt silly, sick, dizzy, unreal, outside himself. Their feet rose, crashed on buttercups, fell and thumped earth. When they stopped, the flowers were swirling in concentric circles of butter and cream, and the lines of green on the tartan rug were serpentining like the sea. Lucas raised his smoked glass, stared up into the blue at the gold flourisher, gold guinea, flaring helium, bowed solemnly and sat down on the tassels of the rug. Marcus quickly imitated these movements. Lucas raised the magnifying glass. He said, “Do you think we should address Them in any way.”
“No.”
“No, neither do I. Words sound silly. I think we should hold hands.”
So they sat, holding hands, and Lucas raised the glass circle, catching the prism of light for a moment and reflecting it on the napkin, and then held it steady.
It was hard to see whether there was a white flame, or only molten air: it was very steady: no tongues licked: only what was laid out was eaten away, shrivelled and charred black. The transmitted grasses flew into fine ash, a shadow that held shape and then trembled into dust, and with them the gentian. The cellophane containing the dog’s mercury flared gold and platinum for a moment, went treacly and then black, and then nothing. The hair, over the blood, crisped, squirmed, settled and was blackly gone, and the blood under it with it. The viper’s bugloss hissed, boiled, curled up: most startling, the glass tube containing the mercury gave a creaking cry, shattered, and released a multitude of separated silvery droplets that ran through threads of charred cloth into burned earth. On the napkin, a charred circle, a black hole, spread silently, eating away the glare, briefly gold where the black advanced. There was a smell, animal and vegetable, of protesting, consumed matter. Over the hump of the ammonite the cloth flaked into darkness and fell in shreds, le
aving a black and juicy tracery on the stone coils. Marcus stared: he remembered the earlier experience: this was concrete evidence of the power a lens could concentrate: flame or hot air it danced white, white, thick transparent white: a nothing into which if you put your finger you would most painfully be included.
Hold the glass, Lucas said, hold the glass steady and watch. I’m going to finish it off with a libation of milk and wine. He fiddled in Marcus’s basket, poured a little milk from a bottle into a tin lid, struggled briefly with a corkscrew and a bottle of Nuits St Georges. He splashed wine into the charred circle, where it steamed, flamed, smelled and went out. The milk in the tin lid contracted to wax-dark, then brownish traces and bubbles, producing a particularly nasty tortured smell which Marcus remembered from schooldays when he was five or six and the boys had clustered round the school stove, spitting bubbles of their ⅓-pint milk rations through straws onto the cast-iron surface. Lucas added a further drenching of wine, a reasonable puddle, on which charred fragments floated and which the earth supped up slowly.
Marcus put down the burning glass, which was truly burning to touch. He looked around him at air not molten, and down at the blackened sun-shaped patch which was the end result of their acts. It had been an extraordinary demonstration of the power of forces one normally had to take no account of. Lucas’s face and hair were sodden with sweat.
“Now what?” said Marcus.
“Now we sit and wait. We have made our cry, we have indicated what we want. Now we wait.”
Marcus watched the light move softly over the buttercups and wondered: what had they indicated that they wanted? To be consumed hotly and vanish? To become invisible? Black scraps and brimstone butterflies eddied and settled. They waited. The still afternoon went on.