The Flight to Lucifer

by Harold Bloom

  The raven vanished from the tree. Perscors felt little confidence that he had persuaded the shaman, and resolved to look out for further ambushes. But when he turned to his left, he found the dark-haired archer, standing weaponless and staring at him with curiosity but without hostility.

  “Abaris sent you across, yet you are no shaman.”

  Perscors pondered the statement before he answered: “I dreamed the initiations, but I refused them. They were mixed up with Saklas, Achamoth, and this world of bondage.”

  “You dreamed the wrong dreams,” Aristaeus said. “Those are your own dreams, and not those Abaris would have sent.”

  “In any case, I am here. Send for your people.”

  Aristaeus smiled savagely. “They will return after you have marched still farther north. Only Abaris and I have the knowledge you seek.”

  Perscors shook his head in wonderment, and then found himself laughing out his questions: “Here is a whole planet of Knowers, where no one knows well enough not to provoke me! I came here from a tower, and the twin tower is nearby; but where? Yet I myself don’t know precisely what I expect of that tower. What is in it? Why did Saklas steal it from Olam? And why did he move it here?”

  Aristaeus appeared bewildered. His reply came in a voice very different from either his raven or human tones. Remote and cold, an ancient voice spoke through him, even as he fell on his back to the ground in front of Perscors and writhed in an ecstatic trance.

  “Go farther north until you find a high ladder in a grove of olive trees. Mount it if you dare. What you will see you will see from atop that ladder.”

  Abandoning Aristaeus where he had fallen, Perscors marched northward through the hills again. When night came, he rested in a broad valley, eating apples from a lovely orchard. He lay down to sleep, and dreamed of the grotesque old Abaris, who had wounded him with a golden arrow.

  In the dream, Perscors rode the arrow, now grown to a great size. He moved through space, too high to see earth or Lucifer, until he found himself unexpectedly in a courtyard, an open place, surrounded by low walls, where an audience had gathered around the naked Abaris. Abaris stared at a door at the end of the courtyard, and it seemed to Perscors that the crowd of hunters and herdsmen were careful not to look at the door or to go near it. In his left hand, Abaris held a stick, one end of which had a figurine upon it. The shaman’s right hand held two arrows, points upward; the point of each arrow had a bell attached to it. Intoning a wordless song, Abaris accompanied himself by striking the two belled arrows against the stick. As Abaris reached a point of paroxysm in his chant, the audience began to sing wordlessly in chorus.

  The augmented sound woke Perscors. Since it continued, he was slow to realize that he was out of the dream. He rose and moved through the dark grove to the other side of the valley, where he beheld the courtyard of which he had been dreaming. Abaris went through the door, the singing ceased, and the Hyperboreans waited in silence as Perscors came up to join them.

  Séance of Abaris

  The Hyperboreans fell back as Perscors drew near. Noting that they were unarmed, he walked between them, looking straight ahead as he followed Abaris through the door of a high stone house.

  Abaris, ignoring the interruption, continued to stare at a fierce fire on the hearth. After a while, he began to shake violently.

  The fire in the hearth burned down. Abaris fell to the floor and lay on his back with his face turned to the south. Piercing cries came first from one direction in the room, then another; cries of lapwing, falcon, and woodcock. Perscors realized that the bird cries were being projected by the shaman.

  When silence followed, Abaris rose to a sitting position and began to beat on a small hand drum, while chanting a wordless song. Gradually the song and drumming rose in volume until Abaris was bellowing. Bird calls echoed within the song, and then silence came again abruptly.

  A rush of wind heralded the arrival of the shaman’s tutelary spirit. The wind, violent and sudden, toppled Abaris over backward. As the fire on the hearth died, then rekindled itself, Abaris leaped upward, drumming continuously. Perscors judged the roof to be ten or eleven feet high, and was startled as the shaman’s leaps took him higher and higher, until he scraped the stone ceiling. At his last descent, Abaris cried out fiercely, and then fell forward upon his face.

  Perscors went up to the old shaman and turned him over. The face of Abaris was set in trance-like ecstasy. Perscors sat down on the stone floor and waited for the tutelary spirit to speak to him, through his rigid mouth. The voice of Achamoth, mocking and harsh, rose out of the shaman.

  “Climb the tree-ladder in the olive grove, even as this fool would have told you. But when you mount into the tower, find me there, and through me your death.”

  Perscors turned, went out the door, marched past the waiting Hyperboreans out into the valley, and headed north. After so many false starts, he sensed that only now was he at the true beginning of his quest. The menace of Achamoth he ignored wholly.

  At dawn, after walking all night, he rested in an olive grove, after determining that there was no shamanistic tree-ladder there. He had willed not to sleep again until he came to Olam’s tower, but sleep overcame him. He dreamed that his own tutelary spirit came to him. She appeared as a slight, birdlike woman, unlike any other he had seen, darker than Ruha and draped in blackest silk. She gestured toward an archway, and he went through, only to find her gone and to stand upon another threshold. Archway after archway, and threshold after threshold; he moved on, and at last he emerged onto a half-lit high place, with a great silver ladder hanging in the air, shining before him.

  Perscors counted the intricately turned rungs, but when he got to seven, the ladder vanished.

  He looked around the high place again and saw that it was a vast landing in a maze of narrowing staircases.

  The labyrinth was not roofed everywhere. Perscors walked up one staircase that was lit as if with daylight from above. He moved to another wide landing and found other staircases leading downward.

  At one landing he found himself to be standing on a sort of summit. To the right, a wide prospect opened across hilly groves and sudden valleys. In a central grove a high tree-ladder appeared, seven-runged. Then, beyond this, he saw men standing on other summits; they now seemed to be everywhere, and he concentrated his gaze upon one dressed like himself, in Scythian gray. The man slowly toppled down; he had evidently yielded to a vertigo which started to spread, as other men fell from other summits into the same depths. With the vertigo seizing him, Perscors woke up.

  It was full day. A few groves ahead, Perscors now knew, he would come to his own tree-ladder, from which the lost tower could be surveyed. Confident of victory, and with the image of fire before him, he took up his march again.

  Olam on Origins and Aims

  Close behind Perscors, Valentinus and Olam rested in a grassy dell by a waterfall, having marched through the night and the morning. Olam amused himself by throwing stones at the waterfall, while Valentinus, motionless, continued to struggle with returning memories.

  He recalled that, in an earlier life, he had journeyed from Alexandria to Rome, in order to clarify his beliefs. Rome he could not remember at all, but an image from the journey crowded upon him. At sunset, on an island just off an Italian port, he had seen a windowless, deformed, and dreary fortress-like building, with a ruined, open tower at its top. In the radiance, the tower’s bell had tolled hoarsely, reminding him of a catastrophic experience in a town near Alexandria. What was that experience?

  “Pause a moment, Olam, in your stone-throwing labors and help me to remember one thing.”

  Olam picked up more stones, while grimacing. “No, that is just what I cannot do. You, of all beings, must remember for yourself.”

  He let the stones drop, and rose. His ugly yellow face was creased with perplexity as he motioned to Valentinus to join him in resuming the
journey. Hesitantly, thinking aloud, he began to justify his own reticence: “The origin of every darkness, and of every breaking, is within the Light itself. The tragedy is of the Pleroma. These stones I throw themselves derive from our error and our failure.”

  Valentinus nodded as he rose. “This rocky world is a battered affection of the Pleroma. When the inwardness fell away from itself, through the passion of Achamoth, this became its furthest reach, outward and downward.”

  “This abides through ignorance,” Olam rejoined, “but the ignorance is only our knowledge reversed. This materiality will pass.”

  Valentinus, who heard his own doctrine, remained troubled. “But if the godhead is broken, my knowing ought to have helped mend it. On Lucifer as on earth, the knowing seems not to change the known, and yet it should.”

  Olam answered, but with reluctance: “The knowing makes for change, but very slowly. Have you forgotten why you left Rome?”

  “No, but the memory comes slowly. I saw that the Gnosis alone was sufficient for salvation and freedom, and I cast out the sacraments and rituals of the Great Church’s mysteries.”

  As he spoke, there came flooding back over his feelings a part of his old greatness. In vision, he stood in the Roman Church, dividing his auditors forever into those who believed and his own, who knew. Across eighteen hundred years, the power that had surged through the climax of his sermon returned to him, and he said, almost chanting now:

  “It is not for us to perform the mystery of divine power through corporeal things wrought by the demiurgic creation. Perfect salvation is the very cognition itself of the ineffable greatness: for since through ignorance came about Defect and Passion, the whole system springing from the Ignorance is dissolved by the Gnosis. Therefore the Gnosis is salvation of the inner man; and it is not corporeal, for the body is corruptible; nor is it psychical, for even the soul is a product of Defect and is as a lodging to the spirit or pneuma; pneumatic, therefore, must be the form of salvation. Through knowledge, then, the inner man, the pneuma is saved; so that to us the knowledge of original being suffices; this is our freedom; this is the true salvation.”

  . Olam listened in great peace, and then waited. But the restoration of his own true voice was only another confusion for Valentinus. He brooded: the clouded image of a tower rose again. On the south of Alexandria, situated above the Mareotic Lake, on a low-lying hill, he had hved for a while in the community of the Therapeutae. The simple, low houses of the society went along the lake to a point where it debouched into the open sea close by. The tower had stood on a high point directly where the sea began. There he had gone, after being driven from Rome.

  The Therapeutae had knowledge, but still lived under the old law. Yet they had taken him in, to rest and contemplate. In the tower, at midnight on the seventh Sabbath of his stay, the darkness had come upon him. Achamoth, the Dark Intention who dwelt among the Aeons, had appeared to him that he might be afflicted.

  The vision faded away again. Valentinus looked hard at Olam, who was impatient to depart.

  “Aeon, if the error and the failure belong to the truth itself, then what is divine is degraded. How will going back to the origin restore me, or even you?”

  Olam would not answer. Valentinus went on, but speaking now more to himself. “Or, is this the measure of our strength? That we admit to ourselves, and without perishing, that the world of original being had ceased to be true?”

  Olam, provoked to a reply, seized a stone and threw it, underhand but with amazing force, far into the sky. It did not descend. He grinned cheerfully and spoke with assurance: “You are a stone of wisdom, and I sling them. We are both star-destroyers! You threw yourself so high, when first you found me! But every thrown stone—must fall! The aim is not to return to the Pleroma as it was, at the origin! For that All was less than All, that Fullness proved only an emptiness. The aim must be to gain a past from which we might spring, rather than that from which we seemed to derive.”

  Swiftly they marched together across the fields and groves of the Hyperboreans. Olam, now the more divided of the two, discovered to his chagrin that he had to hasten to keep up.

  Place of the Demiurge

  Perscors mounted the tree-ladder until he stood on the seventh rung. Beyond the next grove was a broken wall set upon a hill, and beyond the hill a lake. At the northern end of the lake, a single tower rose beside the water, set against a cypress grove.

  He descended the ladder, and marched through and beyond the next grove, until he had climbed the hill and stood before the broken wall.

  It rose above him in fourteen jagged rows of huge stone blocks, facing west. He looked beyond it down to the lake, and north along the lake until he could study the tower. But, to his own surprise, he paused at the wall, troubled by its familiarity.

  Where had he seen such mammoth blocks? Phoenician or Roman, the shaped stones carried about them the aura of a temple overthrown.

  Perscors shook the impression away, turned north, and descended the hill. As he walked along the lake, shadowed by cypresses, he stumbled upon a rock. Its dimensions startled him. Was it a natural altar, or an exposure of an ordeal to come? Extending from where he stood for some forty feet or so, and curiously symmetrical, as broad as it was long, the rock’s evident solidity and strength were greatly impressive to him.

  At the rock’s midpoint, Perscors knelt to examine what seemed a cistern. Had it been hewn, or was it natural? How deep did it go? Was it a place prepared by Saklas for his prisoners?

  Again he shook away forebodings, and marched off the rock toward the tower.

  His first impression, as he came closer, was that the tower itself was part of a ruin, a fragment of something that had been larger or more complete. Had it been a gate tower? There was space enough, there at the head of the lake, but he could see no traces of anything lost or destroyed in the large cleared area around the tower.

  “It is because of what one has not found,” he murmured, as he came close to the square, high tower— stone, backed on a cypress grove, and overlooking what seemed hot sand toward the calm blue water of the lake. It did not resemble the tower on Krag Island, from which he had departed with Olam and Valentinus. Belatedly he realized that he had hoped for a counterpart of that tower.

  “Nothing is given back,” he said aloud, and then wondered what he meant. He gave up wondering, in need of action.

  When he saw that this tower had a door, and that it stood open, he lost himself in a frenzy of laughter.

  “Is it so easy then, Saklas? Very well, indeed! May I not be more difficult for you than you expect?”

  Perscors went through the open door, to find himself alone in what was unexpectedly a wide, long, low courtyard of a room, bare of any image or furniture. Looking up, he saw only stone and no staircase. At the far end of the room was the source of light, coming through the wide opening of a vestibule. Beyond the opening, Perscors could see a dais, leading to what seemed a closed cedar cube, a small chamber or chapel.

  As he entered this holy-of-holies, he felt only indifference, neither curiosity nor dread.

  “As empty here as the rest of this place,” he said, but then looked up. Directly over his head, the stones opened to disclose a circular brass staircase, winding upward into bright cloud or mist.

  “Inside or outside?” he asked softly as he pulled himself onto the stairs. Though he knew he was referring to the mist, he was troubled at his own words.

  Rounding the first turn of the stairs, he suddenly confronted a sheet of fire and recoiled from it involuntarily. In the recoil he fell over sideways, and found himself falling outward, as though he were not in the tower.

  He came down calmly, in darkness, but on his feet, unhurt yet still startled. Surprise gave way to fury as he realized he stood in mire.

  “The cistern,” he whispered angrily, pushing his way through bog and darkness. Had it been a cave
or even a tomb, he would have lateral access, but how was even he to extricate himself from this floor of excrement?

  Perscors heard a roaring as of waters coming in, and understood that he faced drowning again, with circumstances now more fully in Saklas’s control.

  Braced against the flood, stunned by the force and tumult as it washed over him, Perscors lost consciousness for some seconds. He revived as he was rushed along, and noticed a huge black rock looming above and ahead of him. With all his will, he fought the waters, and entered a basin-like aperture in the rock. Gasping, he was washed upward and emerged at the mouth of the cistern. The last strength of his anger pulled him up, until he lay drenched at the rock’s midpoint. Ahead of him, mocking at his exhaustion and at the defeat of his first attempt, the tower rose at the lake’s head. Perscors as yet had no strength to speak, but the words formed in him soundlessly as he glared at the tower:

  “I will not go from this place of the Demiurge, until either he or I am consumed in the fire.”

  The Dark Intention

  Achamoth scowled down upon Perscors, who grinned savagely back up at her from the surface of the rock and scrambled to his feet, prepared for a death grapple if need be. She shook her head, with an expression of distaste for his bog-stained body. As she turned away from him, a single disdainful gesture indicated that he was to follow.

  Perscors hesitated as he watched her walk south along the lake. Northward lay the fire and Saklas, whose mother was now seeking to defer the end. A frenzy of desire for her, mingled with hatred, fought in Perscors with his own weariness of the quest, with his need to make an end of it, any end. Desire, the deeper need to lacerate the woman, to annihilate her disdain, won in Perscors, to his chagrin. Strength, which had enabled him to refuse Ruha and to evade Nekbael, seemed wholly lacking in him. Lack, he dully sensed, was his center as he followed Achamoth. He felt humiliated that he had no impulse to turn around and attempt the tower again.