by John Crowley
2 Another mystic seven. In a religious allegory, these would be the seven virtues that in moral philosophy combat the seven deadly sins. We learn below that Pride is the sin against the Fourth Weight.
3 Considering how the writers of bad books will be treated, we can guess this book was a quack treatise on alchemy. But the whole of CW is surprisingly suspicious of books.
4 Again, Christian seems to be recognized as the necessary person, the hero, which he only ambiguously turns out to be. But see also the final note to the last line of the book.
5 CW exhibits an ambivalence about hierarchy and rank that seems to be pervasive in the period’s literature. On the one hand rank is assumed to be justified and is honored; on the other it is thought to be artificial and not correlated with virtue. Christian’s dream of the preceding night is an example, and more will come in the trials that the dream allegorizes.
6 A real order of chivalry, founded in Bruges in 1430 by Duke Philip III of Burgundy to celebrate his marriage to the Portuguese princess Isabella of Aviz. The Fleece is derived from the legendary golden fleece sought for by Jason. Many European monarchs and nobles were (and still are, Queen Elizabeth II among them) members of this very exclusive club. I don’t know why it appears here. (The winged lion will appear again in a page or two.)
7 Those who understand CW as a direct allegory of the Work of alchemy through its various stages make much of these successive colors, as the prima materia in the alchemical vessel goes through some of these colors, though not in this order.
8 If we could be as sure as some commentators claim to be about which weights represent which virtues, we could sort out who is punished in what way for what. Obviously those who were outweighed by the sixth and seventh weights were let off easily because they’d performed pretty well.
9 John Warwick Montgomery, whose lengthy commentary (Cross and Crucible, vol. II) is devoted to proving that CW is a Lutheran religious allegory, provides the following equation showing how this is possible:
Cr(n) is the total number of different combinations of r elements out of n possible elements. For example: if our elements are 1, 2, 3, then n=3, and if we are looking for distinct combinations of two elements, then r=2 and C²(3)=3, and the distinct combinations are 1 and 2, 1 and 3, and 2 and 3. In CW, n=7, the number of the weights, and r can vary from 1 to 6, depending on the number of weights lifted.
10 In some alchemical texts, these represent successive transformations of mercury in the alchemical Work. It’s clear that such terms and figures allude to the processes of alchemy, but it’s difficult indeed to see how they might be fitted into an allegorical scheme whereby all the events recounted in the book stand for those processes.
11 This is a healing fountain, as we will learn in the next Day. Water and washing are central alchemical processes.
12 More metafiction: The Chemical Wedding contains a castle, in which is kept this huge book; the huge book contains in turn the same castle in every detail, including, no doubt, the book itself that Christian is examining, which must again contain the castle and everything in it, etc.
13 It’s impossible to decide how Christian, and thus Andreae, feels about this mass book-burning. Montgomery, Andreae’s champion, claims that Andreae was appalled by the Reformation book-burnings. There were few at the time who argued that the books of the other side in the religious conflicts ought to be preserved: destroying them was a duty.
14 It’s impossible to understand this page as a figure in an allegory – what does his breaking of the rules, and Christian’s covering for him, stand for? (He’s about to do much worse.) But he certainly is a vividly real character in a novel.
15 Clockwork and its possibilities stood at the height of Renaissance and Baroque technology (along with firearms and fortifications), and marvelous clocks with elaborate movements showing planetary motions, phases of the moon, and allegorical or religious or fantastic figures with lifelike movements were the rage. There are more to come.
16 Atlas is the mythological Titan who supports the earth with his strength. All astronomy before Galileo adopted Copernicus’s heliocentrism was earth-centered – the movement of the heavens around the earth was its subject and study – so Atlas is a good name for an astronomer.
17 This is the kind of marvelous and just-possible machine that a modern science fiction novel would be furnished with. Star globes – globes that pictured the constellations on the outside of a sphere, as though seen from God’s point of view – were common, but this one, giving the illusion of a night sky and moved by mechanisms not described, modeling the apparent movement of the stars, would have seemed way cooler.
18 These are less problems in logic than insoluble paradoxes, and posing and debating such paradoxes was as popular then as it is now. Montgomery (II, 374-5) goes to terrific lengths to interpret the various figures in the problems as Christ or Christ-like, even the man torn between the old lady and the maiden.
19 This story is actually taken from the Decameron of Boccaccio (Day 10, Story 5) and also appears in Book Four of Boccaccio’s Il Filocopo [Love’s Labor] (1536). Bleiler thinks the entire structure of CW is based on Italian models, particularly on Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione [Amorous Vision] (1342-43), “in which the narrator receives a supernatural summons from a maiden (Virtue) to a fête, sets out, chooses between various ways, reaches a splendid edifice where various maidens symbolize abstractions, and sees remarkable displays and festival vehicles.” [Bleiler, 2008]
20 This story is also taken from Boccaccio. Montgomery notes this lift, while still attaching a religious allegory to the tale; other commenters draw a theosophical or alchemical moral. This all seems a bit strained since the story is from another source, outside this romance. I myself would use the technical term padding.
21 Occasionally CW resembles not a novel but a video game, where you have to solve various puzzles in order to ascend to the next level. This puzzle of the lady’s name can be solved in more than one way, but I think Bleiler’s is the most elegant: The key is substituting letters for numbers in 123 = ABC order. So if there are nine men present, and the young lady’s name contains eight letters, then the seventh letter of her name is 9; therefore we know the seventh letter (the ninth in the alphabet) is I. She says the fifth letter and the seventh letter are equal, so in the range 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 we have 1 2 3 4 I 6 I 8. Then, since the third letter is ⅓ of the fifth letter (that is, the third letter’s numerical value is ⅓ the numerical value of the fifth letter, I, that is, 9) the third letter’s numerical value is 3, or C. Now we have 1 2 C 4 I 6 I 8. The sixth letter is four more than the third tripled (3 x 3 + 4), or 13; the 13th letter of the alphabet is M. “The third letter is one-third of the fifth letter, which if you add it to the sixth letter, will give you a number whose square root is more than the third letter by the amount of the first letter, and is half the fourth”: the third letter, C (value 3), plus the sixth, M (value 13), produces 16, whose root (4) is the third (3) plus the first (which then must be one) and is half the value of the fourth letter (which must be 8). This produces A 2 C H I M I A. Andreae, who enjoys ambiguities and misdirection and double solutions to a puzzle (as in the love stories, or the interpretations given for the letters stamped on the gold tokens), has misdirected us with the “hint” that the young lady’s name “contains fifty-five,” which is irrelevant to the solution but has led several analysts (including, apparently, Leibniz!) to assume an algebraic solution and generate pages of calculations.
22 These girls and their two young men undoubtedly have a symbolic aspect, but what it is I don’t know.
23 Obviously the young lady isn’t all that physically strong, but the weights themselves signify virtues, and the ability to lift them is a part of character, not muscle. Some of the others lifted heavy weights, but not effortlessly, as this lady can.
THE FOURTH DAY
I was awake and lying in bed next morning, looking idly at the wonderful images and inscriptions all around my room,
when suddenly I heard the sound of trumpets, as if a procession were already underway. My page jumped out of bed as if crazed, looking more dead than alive, and you can imagine how I felt when he cried, “They’re already being presented to the king!”
I could only groan in frustration and curse my lazy bones. I got dressed, but my page was quicker than I was and ran out of the chamber to see what was what. He soon came back and gave me the good news that I actually hadn’t overslept; all I’d done was miss breakfast: they hadn’t wanted to wake an old man who needed his rest. But now I had to get ready to go with him to the lion fountain, where most of the others were gathered.
Such a relief ! My spirits recovered, and as soon as I had got into my habit, I followed him to the garden I have already told about. I found that the lion, in place of his sword, now held a rather large plaque. Examining this, I could tell that it had been taken from those ancient monuments I’d seen and put here for some special reason. The inscription on it was fading away, so I should set it down here as it was then, and ask my readers to ponder it:
PRINCE HERMES:1
NOW AFTER HUMANKIND
HAS SUFFERED SO MUCH HARM
HERE I FLOW
HAVING BY GOD’S COUNSEL
AND WITH THE HELP OF ART
BECOME A HEALING BALM.
Drink from me if you can; wash, if you like; trouble my waters if you dare.
Drink, Brethren! Drink and live!
(This inscription2 is simple to read and understand, and I put it down here because it’s easier than the ones to come.)
We all washed there at the fountain, and each of us drank the water from a golden cup. Then we followed our mistress back into the hall, and there we put on new robes, all cloth of gold beautifully embroidered with flowers. Everyone also received a new Order of the Golden Fleece, set with gems, each one the work of a different skilled craftsman. On each order hung a heavy gold medallion, on which was shown the sun and the moon; on the back was engraved The light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, but the sun will be seven times brighter than now.3 We put our previous orders in a case that one of the waiters took away.
Our young mistress led us out in order to the door, where the musicians waited, all dressed in red velvet belted in white.4 A door I hadn’t noticed before was unlocked, revealing the royal winding stairs, and our mistress, with music playing, led us up three hundred and sixty-five steps, with all around us nothing but highly finished workmanship and astonishing artifice – the farther up we went the richer it got, until at the top we came before a painted arch, where sixty maidens welcomed us, all finely dressed. As soon as they curtsied to us and we returned a bow as best we could, our musicians were sent away – they had to go all the way down again, and the door at the bottom was shut after them. A little bell rang, and in came a beautiful young woman bringing us all crowns of laurel,5 and branches of laurel for our troop of girls.
Just then a curtain was lifted, and there I could see the king and queen, seated in majesty! If the duchess I’d met the day before hadn’t spoken to me with such force, I’d have forgotten myself and compared this astonishing beauty to Heaven itself. Apart from the fact that the whole chamber glittered with gold and gems, the queen’s robes were made in such a way – well, I couldn’t even look directly at them. I thought I’d seen wonderful things in this place, but this surpassed those things as stars do the earth.
The maidens each took a hand of one of us, and with a deep curtsy presented us to the king. “Your Royal Majesties, most gracious king and queen!” our mistress said. “These gentlemen have ventured here, risking life and limb, to honor you, and Your Majesties have reason to be glad of it, since almost all of them are qualified to help improve your lands and realm, as you will find if you examine each of them carefully. I ask your permission, then, to present them to you, and also ask that I may now resign my commission. Please question them all about how I have performed my duties, both what I did and what I failed to do.”
With that she laid down her laurel branch.
Certainly one or another of us should have spoken up right then and said something, but we just stood there all tongue-tied. At last old Atlas the royal astronomer stepped forward and spoke on the king’s behalf: “The king and queen rejoice at your arrival, and want you all to know you have their approval and love. Now, Lady, Their Majesties are quite satisfied with your management, and you will be royally rewarded – but still they wish you to remain in their service, as they know they can rely on you.”
So our mistress took up her branch again. And with her at last we stepped away.
This great room we had come into was rectangular, five times wider than it was long. At the western end were the thrones under a high arch; like a portal, and there were not one but three of them, the middle one higher than the others. Two people sat in each throne: in the first, a very old king6 with a gray beard, and his consort, who was young and extraordinarily beautiful; in the third throne, a black-skinned king in middle age, and with him a refined elderly woman, not crowned but veiled. The young king and queen sat in the high middle throne, with laurel wreaths on their heads; and over them was suspended a great golden crown. They actually weren’t as attractive as I would have thought they would be, but there it is.7 Behind them on a curved bench sat a group of old men, none with a sword or weapon of any kind, which surprised me – there were no bodyguards at all, only a few of the girls who’d been with us the day before, sitting at each side of the arch.
…there were no bodyguards at all, only a few of the girls who’d been with us the day before, sitting at each side of the arch.
Now I really must tell you something. All around the thrones, in and out of that high ornamental crown, flew little Cupid himself!8 Sometimes he’d flit down and sit laughing between the two lovers, teasing them with his little bow – in fact he sometimes pretended to be ready to shoot one of us. He was just so full of fun, he wouldn’t let even the little birds alone who flew around in that space, chasing and tormenting them. The girls played their games with him too, and when they managed to catch him, he had a hard time getting away. The little villain provided so much delight and laughter!
A small altar of exquisite workmanship stood in front of the queen on her throne, and on it lay a book bound in black velvet stamped with gold, and a little candle in an ivory candlestick. It was a very small candle, and yet it went on burning and never growing shorter, and if Cupid hadn’t mischievously blown on it now and then, you wouldn’t have known it to be fire. Next to this was a small sphere that showed the movements of the planets, very neatly turning all on their own; a small chiming watch; and a sort of little glass fountain that bubbled continuously with blood-red fluid. Lastly there was a skull or death’s head, and inside it a white snake. The snake was so long that it could slide out an eyehole and wind itself around the objects on the table, yet the tip of its tail still remained inside, even after its head went back in through the other eyehole, so that it never entirely left its skull; but when Cupid gave it a playful tap, it vanished in a moment completely inside. We were amazed.
Up and down the whole room too were statues or figures that moved by themselves just as if they were alive, worked by hidden mechanisms I couldn’t possibly explain.9 And as we were passing out of the hall, there came a wonderful sort of singing, and I couldn’t tell for sure if it was the maidens who stayed behind who sang, or the figures themselves. By now we had seen and experienced so much that for the time being we could take in no more, and our maidens led us down the stairs the musicians had gone down, and the door was locked carefully behind us.
When we were in our own hall again, one of the girls teased our lady president: “I’m amazed, sister, that you dare walk around so freely among so many men.”10
“Well, sister,” said our president, “the only one I need to be careful of is this one,” and she pointed at me.
This hurt. It was obvious to me she was making fun of my age, and in fact I was
the oldest man there. She saw that I was abashed, and she whispered to me that, if I behaved myself properly with her, she knew how to deal with that problem of age…
But, well, meantime a light supper was again brought in, and everyone sat with his appointed young girl11 beside him. Those girls were all very skilled in passing the time with interesting conversation, but what their talk and jokes were about – well, I won’t tell tales out of school! Honestly, most of the talk was about the higher arts, and it was clear that, old or young, they knew what they were talking about. For myself, I couldn’t stop thinking about how our lady had said she knew how I could maybe regain my youth, and if so how she’d do that, and it all made me a little blue.
The lady saw this and said to everyone, “I’ll bet if this young fellow slept with me tonight, he’d wake up feeling a lot better.”
Everyone laughed, of course, and I blushed, though I had to laugh too at my own sad situation. One of those present tried to turn the joke back onto the lady who’d started it, and said, “We all heard it, didn’t we, and you ladies too, that our directress has offered to sleep with our brother tonight!”
“I’d be very glad to,” she responded, “except I’m afraid of my sisters’ jealousy – there’d be no dealing with them if I went and picked the handsomest and best man here without their permission.”
“All right, sister dear,” said another of the maidens, “we can tell that your high position hasn’t made you conceited. So it would it be all right with us if you have him, so long as we’re allowed to choose – by lot – among all the brothers here, and see which ones we’ll get to sleep with.”
We didn’t respond, because we thought it was certainly just joking, and began talking of other things; but our young leader kept teasing us about it. “Come, gentlemen, what about it? Shall we let Chance decide who sleeps with whom tonight?”