Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  "Ah yes,” Barr said again, though Pierce was unconvinced he actually remembered this exchange, in a dark hotel bar so long ago.

  "As an example,” Pierce said, “you asked why so many people believe that Gypsies are able to tell fortunes. Prophesy. Do magic. Where they get these supposed powers."

  Taffy, who was years younger and a couple of inches taller than her husband, watched and listened as she made a cold supper in the condo's tiny galley. Pink shrimp and avocado and bright tomatoes. Her coloring was what Pierce thought was called roan in horses; she had that strong and slightly desiccated look of women who were cute early on and are going to make it through to handsome age, but just barely.

  "That's where it began,” Pierce said.

  "It,” said Barr.

  "Yes, I found out,” Pierce said.

  "Simple enough,” Barr said.

  "You said,” Pierce said, and swallowed—this was hard to recount, because it was Pierce's book, which he had been compelled by Barr's question to set out on, and which he already suspected would never be completed. “You said that there is more than one history of the world. More than one. One for each of us, you said."

  "Yes."

  "I thought what would happen if you took that as true. Literally true, not metaphorically or."

  "Not just more than one history of the world,” Barr said. “More than one world?"

  "It seemed to me a case could really sort of be made.” He knew he was saying too much, and couldn't stop, as though here before these beings, regarding him kindly enough but with a shaming wisdom in their tolerant smiles—so lucky, too, unlike him, lucky in each other—he had perforce to unburden himself of this, this. “So then I'd consider how such other worlds are made, or were made,” he said. “How does one world turn into another, become the next. How are they, you know, cast."

  "Cosmopoeia,” said Barr. “World-making."

  "Um yes."

  "That poeia being the root of our word poetry, of course. Poets being makers. Makers of poems, and of the worlds in them.” He sipped the martini he held. “So I'd guess you're embarked on a piece of poetry too. And that your taking this metaphor literally is itself a species of metaphor."

  Pierce said nothing in response to this, tried to smile inscrutably, knowing he could not himself have thought of that formula, and wondering if it was so.

  Taffy was now stripping the skin from tiny blood oranges and dropping the sections in a cut-glass bowl. “I'd need an example,” she said. “An instance."

  "That's what I mean,” Pierce said. “I mean that's where the question led me. To Egypt, which is where Gypsies come from, and where magic was invented, and the gods first worshipped."

  "Oh?"

  "Only of course they don't,” Pierce said. “They were believed to come from there. But the place they were believed to come from wasn't the Egypt we know. It was another Egypt."

  "Ah yes,” said Frank Walker Barr.

  "Another Egypt,” said his wife. “Well, now."

  Pierce began to explain about the ancient writings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, priest and king of Egypt, and the error that Renaissance thinkers had made, to suppose that these late-antique Greek metaphysical vaporings were authentic Egyptian beliefs; and Barr put in that at that time hieroglyphics of course couldn't be read, and were interpreted as mystic signs when mystic signs were all the rage; and Taffy went on working, raising her eyes now and then to one or the other of them; and Pierce had the impression that she actually knew all this already, and that Barr knew she knew it, and they were both at work eliciting it from him, Pierce, like cops at an interrogation, or parents listening to a child's story, not news to them.

  "Ægypt,” he said. “A land that never existed. Where Hermes was king, where magic worked; and the memory of it descends to us to this day, and we can remember it even though the land ceased to exist, and now never existed. We made a new one to replace it. Egypt."

  "'When I was a king in Egypt,'” Taffy declaimed, “'and you were a Christian slave.’”

  "Babylon,” said her husband.

  "I'm not babbling,” she said. “It's a poem."

  She had enough oranges now in her bowl, it seemed, and to them she added a bag of tiny marshmallows. She noticed Pierce watching her preparations.

  "Ambrosia,” she said. She poured honey over it from a jar. Sue Bee. “That's what it's called. I don't know why. Frank loves it."

  Frank smiled, in fact he beamed, and the beam fell upon Pierce. “Want some?” he asked.

  "Oh no,” Pierce said. “Oh no. None for me, thanks. None for me."

  * * * *

  That wasn't all that befell Pierce there in the Sunshine State that week. It was then that he discovered something he had once promised he could find but had never actually believed existed, a thing he had told Julie Rosengarten would be disclosed in the last pages of his book, a thing—maybe the only thing—that had survived from a former age when things were not as they are now but worked in a different way, something that really still worked that way, the way things once did. He found it in the place where he should have known it was, but had not before been able to see into; down a different passage, in the deep dark, and yet not far away at all. That's all been told; the story's still there to be discovered in at least a few libraries and in those blessed stores that keep unwanted books until their time at last comes around, if it does, or at least until they catch someone's eye or stir someone's heart, unless their paper yellows and crumbles into illegibility first: the whole story of how Pierce found the thing that he had sought for, right in his own backyard. Not that it mattered then, really, materially, since Pierce was never going to write that book nor any other like it; and this he confessed to Barr in the Olympic Club at JFK.

  "That's too bad,” Barr said. “Too bad. Because of course there's been some remarkable new thinking on the subject lately. Egypt and Greek wisdom. You must have been following. Major controversy."

  Pierce nodded cautiously. He hadn't been following.

  "I'm guessing,” Barr said, “that you got your grounding in this matter largely from Frances Yates. Dame Frances Yates."

  Pierce was vaguely shocked, hearing the name said aloud, a cloudlet of actuality emitted on the stale false air. A sort of category error. No one should speak that name but him, in his heart.

  "Wonderful woman. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. It's where we all got it, isn't it? You're going to London? You should look her up. She's at the Warburg Institute, you know."

  "Yes."

  "Wonderful woman. Major influence. Give her my regards when you see her. She could be wrong, though."

  "Wrong in what way?"

  "Well, centrally, her thesis—it's hardly hers alone—is that the Renaissance made this colossal mistake in the dating of the pseudo-Egyptian manuscripts that they attributed to a single author, this semidivine Hermes Trismegistus; that what they had were in fact Hellenistic writings that had been given a false provenance by their author, or authors, as was so common in that time. So the wonderful mystical Egyptian world they depicted was in fact post-Plato, even post-Christian. A dream."

  "Yes."

  "That's the consensus view. All the scholars. But what if they're wrong? They were the latest word when you were at school, but that was some time ago.” Twinkle. “I think a case can be made—well, it is being made—that those writings, the so-called Hermetic Corpus, go back well before Christianity."

  "Really?"

  "Half a millennium before. Not all of them, of course, maybe not even all of any one, but large parts of them. It may be that some of them date to a time when the temples of Egypt were still standing, the priesthood still functioning."

  "But everybody says. Not just Yates. Everybody agrees."

  "Well, of course there's good philological evidence that the writings as we have them are late Greek. But that doesn't mean they don't contain older materials. Much older.” He drank. “Anyway, everybody doesn't agree. Flinders
Petrie didn't agree."

  That impossible name, a name for an archæologist in a comic book, breaker of stones, studier of fragments, Flinders Petrie. Pierce had got Petrie's books from the State Library in Kentucky, back when he had himself first set out for those realms. In childhood: that long ago. The sand-colored photographs, sand-colored man in pith helmet and wrinkled shorts.

  "Petrie thought that the writings, the core writings, dated to the fifth century BCE. And because the Egyptian religion was so insular—remember, the Greeks held the Egyptians in high regard, but the Egyptians didn't have much regard for the Greeks—you could at that date still have found remote temples in Upper Egypt where the scribes were writing in hieroglyphics, copying magical and theological papyri, ‘writings of Thoth,’ as some are described in Greek. Kom Ombo. The Temple of Isis at Philæ. And the Hermetic manuscripts we know, even if they were written in Greek and collected in the first centuries AD, might have been based on what was still a living tradition. Might well."

  "But don't they incorporate a lot of Platonic philosophy? Or stuff that sounds like Plato, or even the Gospel of John?"

  "Sure. And scholars have assumed that the Egyptians had no such metaphysics, only ritual and myth, and so the metaphysics of the Hermetica must derive from Plato, and not the other way around."

  "Even though Plato said it was the other way around, that he owed Egypt."

  "Yes. That's the new view. That Plato—and Thucydides and Herodotus and Pliny—knew what they were talking about when they said that their knowledge of the gods and the cosmos derived from Egypt. Their laws even. Certainly their writing. The historian's rule being this: that if a people's culture retains lots of stories about their history or origins that are not particularly to their credit, they ought to be taken seriously as likely to have some factual basis."

  "So maybe they aren't wrong."

  "They? Which they?"

  "The Hermeticists. The Renaissance Egyptophiles. Bruno and Fludd and Kircher. The Rosicrucians and the Masons, who think they all come from Egypt, because of the Hermetic stuff."

  "There is,” said Barr, “that possibility. Yes."

  Gentle voices had been speaking while the two men conversed, like spirit informants, telling of the world and the air, planes landing from Africa, Asia, Europe, and now they were told that Barr's to Athens, Cairo, and Delhi was ready for boarding. Barr looked at his watch and stood up.

  "Maybe I'll learn more,” he said. “It's all very controversial. A lot of people don't like this downgrading of the Greeks and Greek originality in favor of Africans. When new Hermetic manuscripts were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Father Festugière, the great student of Hermeticism, said he was sure not much could be learned from une jarre d'Egypt."

  "But you do think so,” Pierce said. “That it might be so. As the Renaissance thought. At least a little."

  "Well, it's a new age,” Barr said. He yanked out the handle of his nifty trundle and turned to go, lifting a parting hand. “All that stuff is coming back."

  * * * *

  No word yet from out of the air for Pierce, and (though uncertain it was permitted him) he sat in the Olympic Club while the ice in his drink turned to water, listening still to Barr's words and feeling the strangest feeling as he repeated them, the feeling of something healed, or knitted, or resealed, within him but not only within him: a thing that had once been one, and was then divided, becoming one again.

  He'd thought that if you went back, went back through the centuries far enough, at a certain point the way to Egypt—to the Egypt of archæology, the long-lived culture of the dead, the hard-headed small brown people with their revolting rituals of mummification and their gods ever multiplying as in a children's game—that way would part from the way that led to a land he called Ægypt: a name he'd found in that dictionary of the old or other world, the alphabetic world within the world. Ægypt: dream country of philosophers and healers, speaking statues, teachers of Plato and Pythagoras. But what if—like the Nile—this Y was actually right side up, and he alone had got it upside down; what if it had all always been one country, and only divided in two as it came close to the present, and you could reach it again by going back from here along either horn?

  It, the real country. Not Ægypt but Egypt.

  Maybe there was indeed something of Egypt—the place where actual men and women had lived and died and prayed and thought for centuries—preserved in the conversazione of Florentine Platonists, in the rituals and costumes of Freemasons. Not all that they thought there was, of course, but more than the scholars he'd been reading would allow. The real arcana of the real priests of Thoth and Asclæpius might have lived on, a slight, slim thread but never broken, tangled up in Hermes, passing down to Bruno and to Mozart and George Washington and the French Revolution, down to the Thursday night rituals in the halls of midwestern cities, the bankers and businessmen with their trowels and embroidered aprons, their eyeglasses and dentures.

  Another thing Barr had once said to him. Strange, he'd said, strange how the past continually enlarges, rather than shrinking with distance.

  Maybe that's because we actually move toward it rather than away. There is no world of tomorrow, no such thing: we move always toward what we were, to know it again. He did, anyway.

  What about that for an ending to his nonexistent book, the revelation that sober historians of the new age had made old Ægypt real again, and proved mad Bruno right. And they had done that because the making of new ages—in past as well as future—is what we do with the dark backward and abysm of time. Cosmopoeia. If he were a historian, he thought, a real historian, that's what he'd do, or help to do.

  * * * *

  Meanwhile Frank Walker Barr went down along the wide stream of travelers, thinking too: thinking of the basements of the library at Noate, a day a couple of months before when he'd sat at one of the long scarred wooden tables there, with a box open before him, one of the boxes that the Noate library used to store fragile and ephemeral things, worth it or otherwise, always worth it if you happened to be in search of one such, as Barr on that day was.

  He'd been reading those new polemical accounts of Egyptian and Greek history, which exposed the old standard histories as having a bias toward the North and the light-skinned peoples, against the South and the dark-skinned. Understandable but long unchallenged. He, Barr, though always glad to see the past reimagined, and older visions brought forward again in the course of time, hadn't himself made up his mind on the issues; but a note referring to a surprising source had struck him. W. M. F. Petrie, “Historical References in the Hermetic Writings,” Transactions of the Third International Congress of the History of Religions (1908), pp. 196-225.

  The library didn't have that volume, but it had, here in the basement, the same paper in pamphlet form, from a time when intellectual and political controversy was carried on by means of publications like these, gray cheap paper not meant to last, salvos or squibs. Ancient smell as of tomb dust or cerements. Petrie's argument for an early date for the so-called Hermetica was based on the fact that the Greek conquerors, or inheritors, of Pharaonic Egypt were demonstrably fascinated by the Egyptian past, and restored many temples and religious sites, and collected codices. He thought that the Hermetica were simply a small part of the copying of ancient Egyptian sacred manuscripts that the Greeks did. Most of those manuscripts were then lost, and the Greek copies lost too, lost with so much of everything. But not these. Found and not lost; not all.

  Barr had put down the pamphlet then, captured by the sudden unfolding of an inward image: desert, and a buried temple uncovered. A familiar image, an image he had been profoundly gratified and thrilled by once, as he was gratified by it now. From where had he acquired it to store it away untasted for so long? From the movies, of course, but which one? Movie sand, wind-disturbed, moving away to show the tips of pillars, then the heads of idols: so, the ground we stand on is not the floor of earth, there are floors beneath us. Look, now it's coming clear
as the wind, what a wind, pushes the sand away: it's a door, like a cellar door, a black block, and in its center a ring to grasp and pull it up by. Barr knew that when it was lifted there would be stairs that led down, and those stairs would lead somewhere we can't help but go.

  A little later that day, in Barr's house up on the heights of the Morningside Hills, where many famed scholars and teachers live backyard to backyard, Taffy B. Barr stood before her open refrigerator, one arm akimbo. On the counter by her lay a heap of tomatoes, a brain-shaped cauliflower, a cantaloupe and a clutch of beets with spreading red-veined greens. She had forgotten why she had opened the refrigerator and was pondering or pausing to see if the reason would return to her when the phone rang. She shut the great vault (the light within winking off and plunging the foodstuffs within again into darkness) and answered. It was Frank, calling from his office, with a plan to announce.

  "Frank, let's talk,” she said when he paused.

  "We're talking."

  "At dinner."

  "I need to find my passport,” he said. “I move it from place to place in order to remember where I put it, but it associates logically with nothing else. It's sui generis."

  "Frank. It's a bad idea."

  "It's a good idea. My best in months."

  "Okay. We'll talk."

  "Love you."

  "Love you too."

  Taffy hung up the phone; she looked up at the clock on the wall (a Regulator) and down at the vegetables on her counter, and remembered: aioli.

  She'd tried, his good wife, at dinner that night and at the breakfast and lunch that followed, to talk him out of it, and failed. And so (Frank Barr in Kennedy Airport said to himself) the youth arose, and took a plane. No youth any longer, but still hale; he patted ritually the pocket where his pills were kept.

  He would stop in Athens and be met there by an old—no, better say a former—graduate student of his, a woman dark and sloe-eyed enough to be Greek but in fact a Jewess from Schenectady. Zoe. Zoe mu sas agapo. Thence to Egypt, from where the gods of Greece had come at first, where the Greek wise men used to go to consult with the priests of Isis and Osiris, to sleep in the temples of Asclæpius and there dream a good dream. His colleagues had written that they might leave the conference for a day or two, rent a Land Rover, hire a guide. Make an expedition up the Nile to the temple island of Philæ. Would Frank like to come? He would. And may he (Frank Walker Barr prayed, to no particular god or goddess) dream there a good dream of his own.