Melusine
Page 24
Sublime artists, saints or accursed, they have approached the key to the enigma, they have touched the profound secret of nature that is in the intimate liaison of beauty and dolor, and which creates one with the other by means of a sacred chemistry. They have found their salvation in the tempest. For all the wisdom accumulated by the centuries informs us that it is necessary to be shipwrecked in order finally to be cast up by the sea on the isles of silver springs and golden lemon trees.
Notes
1 In the earliest written version of the legend of Melusine—and hence of most of the literary versions based in it—the hero is named Raymondin. The Lusignan family ruled the island of Cyprus from 1192 until 1489; the first of them to be called Henri became king in 1218 while still a baby, assumed control in 1232 and ruled until 1253; he was the only one of that name who could have been associated with Louis IX, alias Saint Louis (1214-1270), who became King of France in 1226 and participated in the seventh crusade, launched in 1248, and the eighth, launched in 1267.
2 According to the dates logically implied by the version of the story just cited, fewer than eight centuries have gone by, but other details added to the story is subsequent chapters suggest a different chronology.
3 The name of “l’Agrippa” [the Agrippa] is derived from an apocryphal volume appended after his death to the survey of occult science compiled by Cornelius Agrippa von Nettelsheim (1486-1535), which acquired a considerable reputation as a handbook of black magic. “Egromus” is a trifle enigmatic, but is cited in works by the folklorist Anatole Le Braz as one of several alternative names employed in Brittany for the same grimoire.
4 Magre was 64 when Melusine was published, but the narrator appears to be younger than that, although he is careful not to provide any precise information.
5 The reference is clearly to the death-head hawk moth Acherontia atropos, a member of the family Sphingidae [sphinx moths]. The image of the death’s-head is, however, on the thorax of the actual species, not on the brown wings.
6 The body of Saint Roseline (1263-1329) was deposited in the chapel in question following its exhumation five years after her death, when it was allegedly found intact and well-preserved. The reliquary apparently only contained her eyes until the mid nineteenth century, but remains that were embalmed in 1894 were then placed in a glass case and still remain on display today, accompanied by a mural mosaic by Marc Chagall. Roseline’s legend includes “the miracle of the roses,” when food that she was removing from the family reserves to give to the poor during a famine was supposedly transformed into a bouquet of roses.
7 Antoine Vallot (c1594-1671) was Louis XIV’s physician from 1652 until his death. He and the king visited Saint Roseline’s reliquary in 1660.
8 The Catholic Church recognizes several saints named Eleutherius [Eleuthère in French], but none associated with the region in which the present story is set; the one featured in the story is a pure invention.
9 The largest of the Lérins islands off the coast of the Riviera near Cannes is the Île Saint-Honoratus, so-called because of the abbey founded in the year 410 or thereabouts by Saint Honoratus [Honorat in French.] An old fortified abbey still stands, but the present day monastic community inhabits a much more palatial complex of buildings nearby. According to the contemporary writer Sulpicius Severus, the island was swarming with snakes until Honoratus arrived, but they were expelled. The patron saint of Ireland, Saint Patrick, who probably arrived there from Lérins Abbey, was credited with a similar success.
10 The chronology of the story is confused; the massacre of monks described in next chapter occurred in 732, not “five centuries after the death of Honoratus”—but neither can the latter date be fitted with the era attributed to the career of Melusine in an earlier chapter.
11 Abbot Porcarius eventually became Saint Porcarius. The story of his premonitory vision is part of his legend, but other versions of the legend suggest that he sent a considerably larger number of monks to safety as a result.
12 The naturalist Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours (1739-1817) included a supposed dictionary of the language of crows in his Quelques memoires sur différens sujets, la plupart d’histoire naturelle (1807).
13 Lero, an obscure Celtic god, was invoked along with his female counterpart Lerina as the spirit of the isles of Lérins. The connection with the Grimaldi family, whose generally-recognized historical origin is much later than the reign of Childebert II (575-595), and also later than the date credited here to the life of Eleutherius, is entirely fictitious.
14 Gaspard Bouis, alias Gaspard de Besse (1757-1781) was a notorious Provençal brigand whose preference for robbing strangers won him much local support and legendary status. The rumor that he had buried some of his loot near Cuges-les-Pins attracted treasure hunters for many years.
15 The speleologist Édouard-Alfred Martel published the two-volume La France ignorée in 1928-30, summarizing information published in many other works over the previous forty years.
16 The Flemish mystic John van Ruysbroeck (c1294-1381) was an ascetic lavish in his praise for meditation and solitude, whose hermitage attracted so many followers that it became a monastery, after the pattern of Honoratus. I have back-translated the florid title of Maeterlinck’s French version of his most famous book into English rather than substituting the most common English version, The Spiritual Espousals.
17 The devotional text De Imitatione Christi [The Imitation of Christ] (c1420) was published anonymously, but modern sources attribute it to the Dutch cleric Thomas van Kempen, known in English and French as Thomas à Kempis—an identification that the narrator apparently accepts, as he calls attention to van Kempen’s assiduous labor as a copyist.
18 Milarepa (c1050-c1135) was the most famous of Tibet’s yogis and poets, who claimed to have committed evil deeds in his youth, of which he repented bitterly in old age, when he became an ascetic.
19 It is not clear why this remark should be included in the text unless the young woman in question is the female ghost of whom mention has been made previously by both the earwig and Porcastre. It is possible that the mystery is abandoned hereafter because the author abbreviated the planned story in order to finish the book before he died, but whether or not that is true, the interpretation of the ghostly presence can only invite speculation, depending on the interpretation of the novel’s allegory. It might not be irrelevant that the author appears to have made contact with his ex-wife again before writing the novel.
20 In the chapter of Magiciens et illuminés translated in The Angel of Lust, Magre suggests that the person in question was Christian Rosenkreutz.
21 The healer and seer born Philippe Anthelme Nizier (1849-1905), who ran a school of “magnetism” in Lyon in his later years.
22 Some readers might have assumed that “Madame D” refers to the famous English medium Elizabeth Hope (1855-1919), who used the pseudonym Madame d’Esperance, and held séances all over Europe, but Magre’s earnest interest in spiritualism could not have preceded her death by very long. It is, in any case, unclear why he does not spell out the name in full.
23 The title of the book in which Marcel Schwob included his “biography” of Empedocles, Vies imaginaires [Imaginary Lives] (1896) gives a strong clue as to the fanciful origin of the detail—the comment is ironically disingenuous, as are many others in this set of essays.
24 Agartha was the name attributed by the French occultist Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre to a subterranean city of wise men, which he located beneath Tibet. Madame Blavatsky appropriated the idea as a core element of her esoteric doctrine, making Agartha the location of the White Lodge, whose members were the custodians of all esoteric earthly wisdom—hence Magre’s use of the definite article.
25 Guru Nanak (1469-1539) was the founder of Sikhism; his name still remains relatively little known in the Occident.
26 Caitanya Mahapreabhu (1486-1534) was the founder of the religious movement nowadays most familiarly known in the Occident as “Hare Kri
shna” after its most widespread mantra.
27 Author’s reference: “See S. Chakravarti, Caitanya et sa théorie de l’amour divin.”
28 The book in question was published in 1891, when Magre would have been fourteen. It does not feature in the account of a suspiciously similar brief relationship with a prostitute rendered in Magre’s Confessions; as to whether either anecdote is true, one can only speculate, but it is worth noting that this particular anecdote can be seen a contraction of the theme of his early novella La Tendre camarade (1918; tr. as “The Tender Comrade”), which must have been based in similar feelings of remorse based in personal experience—sentiments that were obviously long-lasting.
29 I have translated le Gardien du seuil straightforwardly, because it became a common motif of the literature of the French occult revival, detached from its usually-unacknowledged source. However, the English original of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Zanoni (1842)—one of Madame Blavatsky’s favorite sources of inspiration—the entity in question is called the Dweller on the Threshold.
30 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture XVI. I have reproduced the original English text that is equivalent to Magre’s French version, which is somewhat paraphrased, perhaps by the translator of the French edition he is citing—although he gives no reference, and might be translating from the English himself, a trifle freely.
31 Magre was born on 2 March 1877. under the astrological sign of Pisces.
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