by John Crowley
Dicson—a man of their country himself, Scotland, after all—was shocked and affronted by this charge of licentiousness, lewdness, hotness. But of course the man was right. Bruno had asked Dicson: Do your memory images make your heart beat, your breast warm, do they make your male part stand? They should; they must. If we dare not use Love ourselves, Love will use us, there is no escaping him; hate too, revulsion, disgust, they are only the obverse of his coin, let us use them too, let us capture and not be captured.
The English gentlemen of Bruno’s acquaintance—Sidney, Dyer, Fulke Greville—had laughed at the Cambridge dominie and his strictures against the Art of Memory, they seemed to think such men comical, Bruno knew better; but still they were quite capable of talking with great seriousness and wrinkled brows of Ramus and his trivialities, they could be moved by what they called Reformed Religion and the new plain style. Bruno cast in his mind the emblem: nursemaid Thames, shelterer of many orphaned children, suckles among them unwittingly a wolf.
This memory controversy, Bruno said to them, was easily settled. Let the gentlemen sponsor a great Tourney of Memory or Remembering Contest, in which a champion of the Great Art handed down from Ægypt through the Greeks to Albertus, Aquinas, and the present would be set against a champion of the new anti-pictorial method of the Frenchman. The best man to bear away the palm. Bruno projected it to them vividly: the amphitheater, decked with myrtle and rosemary (for Apollo and Venus) and cloths of solarian blue and gold; high seats for the nobility, and one, the highest, for the Judge herself, Justice, Astræa. In the center the two lecterns, water or wine beside them; the Ramist to have reams of paper and sharpened goose-feather pens and a jug of ink if he likes. The Brunist needing nothing but heart and mind.
First problem set, the names of the inventors of all human arts and useful things. The Ramist slowly starts his cart’s wheels with a General—Agriculture. A Special beneath that, Grain; a more special Special, Sowing of; and at length the name of the inventor of sowing, Triptolemus. Meanwhile the Brunist sheds the light of an inner sun out through the spheres of the planets, to the elements they inform, to the life of man on Earth, to the inventors of things rank on rank in their places, colored by the planets’ colors, each holding the sign of his Art: in the circle of Saturn alone were Chiron inventor of surgery, Zoroaster of magic, Pharphacon of necromancy, Circe of fascination; under Sol Apollo there was Mirchanes who first made figures of wax, Giges who first painted pictures, Amphion who invented the musical notes; Mercury had Theut who invented writing, patron of the scribbler at the next lectern; Prometheus, Hipparchus, Atlas, dozens more, the ladies and gentlemen stare and murmur in awe; and the Brunist allows himself here one pretty jest, the name of the inventor of Remembering by Seals and Shadows—Giordano.
The struggle goes on for hours. In the examen Latin histories are read, the Ramist scribbling Specials and Generals and watching his outline press relentlessly toward the right-hand margin while the Brunist only opens his great heart. Repeats the matter backward and forward while the Ramist hems and haws, searching for the gist. The Ramist does better in the adlibitum, with all the propositions of Euclid, though the listeners grow restless; the Brunist summons to his aid the Century of Friends, and has them repeat in their galliards and gallops all the names of the ladies present, in the order of their entrance (impressed upon his memory by means of the Century as they entered and took their seats), and the crowd murmurs in delight.
More problems set, remembering the contents of ships unloaded at Wapping, inventories of the Queen of Sheba’s jewels, names of the children of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the price of turnips throughout the reign of the Emperor Charles. Ramist sweats and grinds his teeth, his white bands wilting. Brunist asks for harder matter, the order of all the trees by their species in Windsor Forest, the disposition of their leaves. And now by degrees, more quickly for some than for others, a strange and wonderful motion takes place: the memory arts of the Brunist have begun to create within the souls of the ladies and gentlemen the image of a living world, a world of innumerable and endless processes producing an infinite number of things, inside every one of which is a divine spark that orders it without error or hesitation into its place in the ranks of creation from lowest to highest.
When they have begun to grasp this infinite inward world, they also begin to feel the memory artist directing their attention (he is their guide, though they do not know it) to the Kingdom into which they have been born, fortunate Kingdom in the midst of all the mountains, oceans, lands of Earth who rides round the Sun amid the infinite suns of creation; and next, to the Queen of their Kingdom, here present, to the great ardent multicolored soul within her garments, within her body, their own Sun of justice and peace. They understand. Love floods their hearts, and each renews his, her vows of fealty and duty to her.
The Brunist steps forward (the Ramist long since silent, or adding by his cackles and his paper-handling a note of hilarity) and makes his own obeisance. About them palpably the divine intelligences look on, Peace, Fecundity, Pleasure, Truth, Intellectual Delight, summoned here by his spirit’s exertions. He knows by her eyes that she knows what he has accomplished for her but not only for her; and she, unica Diana, lifts him up. To sit by her.
Giordano Bruno looked out his high small window in the French Embassy at the winter river. Up and down the stairs behind him the serving-men went, carrying the packed trunks and impedimenta of the household.
Well it was not to be. He had got no forum here beyond the Ambassador’s dinner table, and when he wrote a sort of Copernican comedy about a dinner party (complete with aged watermen, rude English mob, Oxford pedants, negligent noble lords) they failed to see the fun, and failed also to see the Sun rising. A feast of ashes was his lot here.
Perhaps living isolated at the muddy end of the world had made the English dense, hard to work with; they were not unintelligent, not ignoble, but somehow unable to take any important matter seriously. His own motto had always been In hilaritate triste, in tristitia hilare, but the English always took him wrong, offended and affronted by his jokes, but then unable to believe he meant what he said in earnest. Sir Sed-Ne, with his careless smile. Who affirmed nothing, and therefore (he said) never lied.
Even the Queen, when he had sent forth his spirit to her in love and (a man must) command, was able to deflect and avoid it, turn herself to toy fortifications against which real siege was useless.
A remarkable woman, a remarkable spirit.
They said she had always had the advice of the Doctor across the river, who had cast her nativity, and taught her his arts. Treated her aches and pains too no doubt.
He (if it had been he) had made her strong, but he had made her small, too.
No matter. He did not often truly expect that kings and monarchs could understand or imagine how to use the powers he offered them. Henri of France, offered the Shadows and a sure method of generating potent love for his own divine person in his subject’s hearts, love that would assure his Kingdom in perpetuity, had instead sent Bruno to idle here. High as they were in the order of things, they were no wiser, usually, than other men; their souls were infants in their aged hearts, squalling for praise and comfort, or dry stones that could not be struck.
So he would go on; return to France, but not stay long there. Out on the river a fat Hanseatic merchantman was being tugged into the wind by laboring galleys, her sails luffing, flags being run up.
He asked his soul: Little wanderer, where will you go now, what will become of you?
There had been talk at Court that John Dee had had audience with King Stephen of Poland, and was now resident at the Emperor’s court in Prague, waited on by the wise men of that city. Making gold. So it was said.
Paracelsus, the German philosopher, had once written that he who wishes to explore Nature must tread her books with his feet. One country, one page: thus the codex Naturæ, thus the leaves must be turned. Alexander Dicson had told him that; Bruno had never read Paracelsus and
never would, but that statement he liked. One country, one page. If kings and princes would not hear his call, perhaps an Emperor would.
He rose from the sill where he had leaned. He had, himself, little to pack; a box or two of books, cases of paper. If they were lost at sea, he could re-create them all from memory.
Set out, he thought, set out, set out.
FOUR
There are many Monarchs, and many Princes, but only one Emperor. Rudolf II, King in his own right of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduke of Austria, became Emperor by election and the chrism with which the Pope had anointed his head: Singular and Universal Monarch of the Whole Wide World. Or at least his shadow.
His grandfather Charles, who had been king of all the lands Rudolf was king of, had been king of Spain too, ruler of the Netherlands and Low Countries; had been king of Savoy, lord of Naples and Sicily, he had had the Pope at his feet and sacked His City, Rome. God’s scourge. Charles had had a device made for him, of all the famous devices and signs and emblems of great rulers the most famous, known and seen throughout Christendom and in lands around the world that the old emperors in Rome had never known existed. Charles’s emblem showed two pillars—they were the Pillars of Hercules that stand at the Gates of the Sea, the gates to the New World. Around these two pillars ran a banner, that bore these words: Plus ultra, “Even farther.” The emblem was cut on medals and embossed on shields and breastplates, it was engraved in wood and printed on the title pages of geographies of the New World, and it was stamped on coins made of gold that was dug on the other side of the world. This emblem was so famous that it went on being stamped on gold coins long after Charles was dead, for so long that the dies lost their detail, and the words of the motto were worn away, and still it kept being stamped on Spanish coins, though all that was left to be seen were the two pillars and the twining banner, no longer meaning “Empire” or “Charles” or “Even farther” but only “dollar”:
No kingdom is eternal.
Rudolf had read the histories, he had read Aurelius, he knew. Earthly empires will not last. Charles’s possessions (on which the Sun could not set) he had had to divide finally among his sons, Italy, Spain, Austria, no single man great enough to hold them all in his embrace. Now the sons’ sons faced each other warily across the map, as though the world were not big enough for all of them.
Earthly empires pass. But Rudolf’s empire had been instituted by God; like Christ’s Kingdom, it was not, or not entirely, of this world. No matter how his sway was challenged, no matter how many lands were hived off from it, the Empire itself could not die. It would contract for a time, shrinking like a snail; its peopled lands, governments, armies, navies, would be distilled into potent symbols small enough to be carried in procession, carved onto jewels, worn around the neck of the Emperor. Though it contracted so far, even to the compass of his own sacred person, still it contained within itself the power of sublimation, and when a new age had come it could regrow all its parts from the seeds, the jewels and the symbols, which the Emperor kept in his caskets. No matter what they thought, those contentious bishops, princelings, reformers, nuncios, truculent populaces of walled cities, they all still lived within the One Holy Roman Empire.
Meanwhile the Emperor himself, in advance of his Empire, had been withdrawing from visibility. He would not marry, despite his counselors’ pleadings. He had left his city of Vienna, seat of his ancestors, and removed his court to Prague. He retreated into his castle, into his private apartments, his bedchamber, his bed often enough. Like many who suffer from melancholy, his spirit tended to become fixed on unanswerable questions. How was the essence of Empire contained in a jewel cut with an emblem? What counted more, the nature of the jewel or the construction of the emblem? And when he sought distraction from his obsessions, in his collections, his clocks, in painting, metallurgy, genealogy, the distractions tended to become obsessions too. He gave more and more time to less and less.
He had lately conceived a plan for making an automaton which could replace himself at his official duties: processions, christenings, feasts, masques and Masses. Clockwork could animate it, prayers and conjurations (white ones, white ones) done in the proper times could give it a temporary intelligence. But what could be done with it so that its touch was healing, its prayers were heard by God, its blessings efficacious?
A jewel, the right jewel, carved with the right sign, enclosed in its empty heart of hearts.
The Jews of the city were rumored to be able to make a man of dirt, who would be given life when the right Hebrew letters were marked on its brow. What heart was it given? When its tasks were done the rabbi erased one letter of the word on its forehead (what word? The Emperor could not remember) and changed the word to Death.
He might talk to the Great Rabbi, ask him the trick of it. He had not yet, but he might. He thought about it, and waited for his gemhunters to come back from their expeditions in the Giant Mountains. When they came back with nothing, nothing of extraordinary value, the Emperor went to bed again.
He was the most famous melancholic in Europe, and employed a dozen doctors of several nations and schools, listening to all and to none, and always ready to hear others. The regimens they prescribed appalled his torpid heart: diets, exercise, abnegations, copulation with young women, music while he slept, tiger’s milk taken in wine wherein a pearl has been dissolved, a man would have to have an unappeasable lust for life to be willing to undertake all the bother of it. As the disease was obscure, ramifying, and mutable, there should be one, simple, pellucid medicine; the Emperor was certain such a medicine existed, and that it was his curse to need it, and his destiny to find it. His doctors told him that to believe so was only a further symptom of his condition; but the medicine, of course, would cure that too.
When he got John Dee’s letter (his secretaries had known not to delay such a letter, as they knew to delay others that might contain unsettling news or unanswerable requests), he went to find the copy of the Monas hieroglyphica that had been sent as a gift to the Emperor Maximilian years ago. Rudolph had never read it, and did not know if Maximilian his father had either. He asked that it be laid on the table by his bed, where he might pick it up if he awakened sleepless and frightened in the night. When he had been readied for retiring he opened it and stared at the complex knot on its title page, which was taken apart and reassembled within. The book said it was composed of a point, which generated a line, which formed a circle, the Sun, and a Cross, which was the four elements; the seven planets were in it, the geometry of Euclid, the signs of the Zodiac, starting with Aries at the foot—Cardinal Fire, which was its incipit and beginning.
It was a Hieroglyph of the Work. Rudolf could see that; he had struggled with enough of them, secrets encased in an emblem, emblem wrapped in verse, verse explained in mysteries.
O thrice and four times happy, the man who attains this quasi-copulative point in the Ternary and rejects and removes that somber and superfluous part of the quaternary, the source of obscure shadows. Thus after some time we obtain the white vestments brilliant as snow.
Change black to white, dress the Child, prepare for the Marriage, Gamaæa of Earth and Heaven. He had heard it before.
O Maximilian! May God through His mystagogy make you (or some other scion of the House of Austria) all-powerful when the time comes for me to rest in Christ, so that His potent Name may be restored amid the unbearable shadows hanging over Earth.
Unbearable shadows. If they could lift. The Emperor turned back to the page whereon the Monad was displayed. Though he stared long at it, it communicated nothing to him; yet that night he slept without waking. In the morning he sent to Dee’s lodgings to call him to the Castle.
A thousand steps lead up from the Old City of Prague to the gates of the Hradschin palace, called Hradçany in the Bohemian language. The steps are carved from the stone basis on which the Castle stands, they wind and climb and are of uneven heights and widths, the foot continually mistaking its place on the next, una
ble to find a rhythm. On the steps, in hovels and in caves in the stone, in tents and out in the open air, beggars and fortune-tellers cluster, and those suffering from hideous diseases and disfigurements (or those pretending to such disfigurements for alms); whores, lost children, saints who have had visions of the end; also those bringing pleas or petitions to the Emperor, who, halfway up the endless climb (so it seemed to Doctor Dee), had abandoned their search for justice or mercy and now reclined in positions of despair, hardly able to lift an imploring hand to passers-by.
He climbed, hale old man impelled by his purpose, glad of the strength of his legs, increased by his years of clambering over the heights of Britain searching for her antiquities and sacred places. He rehearsed as he climbed the words of the Angel Uriel to them this midnight past: If he live righteously and follow me truly I will hold up his House with pillars of hyacinth, and his chambers shall be full of modesty and comfort. I will bring the East Wind over him as a Lady of Comfort, and she shall sit upon his castles with Triumph, and he shall sleep with joy.
The guards and stewards at the gates seemed to have been set there to keep people out and not to let them in. Doctor Dee spent half the morning knocking at this wicket and being sent away to that one and thence to another before his bona fides were finally admitted, and then he was swept within joyfully, His Majesty awaits you, why have you delayed, up up we go.
The Emperor’s Lord Chamberlain, Octavius Spinola, a learned courtier from whom Dee had had kind letters in extraordinary Latin, took the skirt of his robe and led him up a further titanic flight of stairs where (he said) armed men had once ridden their steeds to Mass; beneath fantastical fan vaulting spreading like laced fingers and hands, through doors opened for them, past rows of cabinets and cases where who knew what was kept, into the private apartments where the shutters were half-closed against the summer sun; through the dining chamber to the Emperor’s own chamber. Full neither of modesty nor of comfort, a tall chill room, a huge table of black mahogany where the Emperor sat with a great silver service beside him, and an open casket, from which he had taken a copy of the Monas, bound in gilt leather: Dee recognized it.