The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  “Thought you’d backed out,” he muttered as I took off my damp coat.

  “Sorry. I got held up. Laura not here?”

  Edward sniffed and looked away. “Laura has work of her own.” I waited for further explanation and none came. Edward’s fingers drummed on the edge of the desk. I was the new boy at the office, he the old hand wondering what to make of me, but if he was having second thoughts, he dismissed them in a sudden grin. “Right, there are some books I want you to look at – general background to give you the feel of the thing. But I thought we might take a quick look at the muniments room first. Come on through.”

  A door from the library led through into an oak-panelled room with tall mullioned windows. “I’ve sorted out all the stuff from our period,” he said. “It’s over there.” He pointed across to where a corner of the room was stacked with coffers, cabin trunks, packing cases, pile upon pile of what looked like shoeboxes and other cardboard containers. “They’re all full of papers,” he said. “You see my problem?”

  I saw. But already I was half in love with the old library. I hadn’t been there by daylight before and my bibliophile heart had lifted at the sight of those tall glass cabinets, shelf over shelf of finely bound volumes, each of them a door on the possible. The air was still as a church in there, the rainy light playing through the leaded windows with their view across the parkland and the lake. It was a dream-chamber, redolent of leather and polish and the scented dust of books. And, yes, smelling of centuries of privilege too, of aloof refined seclusion. In the normal run of things I would have had no business there, no access. This, however, was not the normal run of things.

  Nor were the books that Edward showed me the kind of thing I would normally have read – not, at least, as anything more than a casual browse among the dustier nooks of human eccentricity. It was like stepping from the main street into a cobbled alley’s curiosity shop – that shock of surprise to discover again what an intricate and peculiar organ the imagination is, what extravagant uses it has found for time.

  Even under Edward’s guidance, it proved difficult to feel my way into the texts he gave me to read. They were tantalizingly obscure – no sooner did you think you’d begun to grasp the gist when it slipped through your fingers. Again and again apparently rational lines of argument suddenly congealed into a porridge of images, while some texts dispensed with argument completely and the mind was left to wrestle with Olympian assertions that left Edward’s own rhetoric sounding like cool logic. Witness the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, which was, he assured me, the seminal document of all alchemical thought:

  True, without error, certain and most true; that which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, for performing the miracles of the One Thing, and as all things were from One, by the mediation of One, so all things arose from this One Thing by adaptation; the father of it is the Sun, the mother of it is the Moon; the wind carries it in its belly; the nurse thereof is the Earth. This is the father of all perfection, or consummation of the whole world. The power of it is integral, if it be turned into earth. Thou shalt separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross, gently with great sagacity; it ascends from earth to heaven, and again descends to earth, and receives the strength of the superiors and the inferiors – so thou hast the glory of the whole world; therefore let all obscurity flee before thee. This is the strong fortitude of all fortitudes, overcoming every subtle and penetrating every solid thing. So the world was created. Hence were all wonderful adaptations of which this is the manner. Therefore am I called Thrice Great Hermes, having the Three Parts of the philosophy of the whole world. That which I have written is consummated concerning the operation of the sun.

  Faced with such rhapsodic prose I felt it would take more subtlety and sagacity than I could command to make obscurity flee before me.

  “But don’t you see?” Edward encouraged. “The whole point is to excite curiosity, to stimulate the sleeping powers of the mind. If I talk about ‘psychic integration’ or reunion with the Divine Archetype, these are abstractions on which the mind has little purchase. But if I speak of a stone that turneth all to gold, or a treasure hidden in the menstruum of whores, then the imagination is set to work. The rational intellect is sidestepped and one must look within. I mean even the highest spirit of Reason which, according to Nicholas of Cusa, guards the gate in the wall around paradise – a wall which is built of contradictions. If we are ever to pass through what Percy Wyndham-Lewis once named the ‘moronic inferno’ into what I call ‘the oxymoronic paradiso’, then responses from a deeper level are required. That’s what these texts demand.”

  “You don’t think it’s more likely to put people off altogether?”

  “That too is the point. The one-sided man who clings to rationality will dismiss it all as gibberish – a word, incidentally, derived from Jabir, one of the greatest of Arab adepts. If he goes hunting through the texts for a quick recipe for gold or earthly power, he’ll soon get lost and give up. But the man who desires to know himself more completely – however strange and confusing his discoveries may be – he is drawn further within until he finds in the texts a mirror of his own complexity. And – if he is lucky – of the simple secret at its heart.”

  “So the language acts as a kind of filter?”

  “On one level, yes. But as a poet you will appreciate that some experiences are communicable only through symbols – symbols which lose all virtue in any attempt at paraphrase or analysis. Symbols are the deep grammar of experience, and the alchemist inhabits a symbolic universe. He means precisely what he says – but one must enter the language on its own terms or the meaning vanishes. However, without access to the transforming experience from which those symbols spring, they remain impenetrable.”

  “Like much of your own verse?” I hazarded.

  Caught on the hop, Edward frowned. For a moment I expected a knuckle-rapping response, but after a brief hesitation, he said, “My verse was obscure because I was obscure to myself. I was a young man then… a young fool. I heard the music but I had no inkling how serious these matters were. Or how dangerous.” He returned from a pained abstraction, and smiled at me a little ruefully. “I was much like you – infatuated with my own talent, worshipping only my own intellect… A crime for which, as Ficino points out, a capital punishment is appointed. And in the symbolic domain the punishment is entirely appropriate – dismemberment, beheading.” His thoughts shifted quickly away. “Ficino. The Asclepian Dialogue of Hermes… Now there’s a text that speaks plainly enough.” He wandered to the shelves and came back thumbing through an old volume. “Listen to this: No one shall look up to heaven. The religious man shall be counted insane; the irreligious shall be thought wise; the furious, brave; and the worst of men shall be considered good. For the soul, and all things about it, shall not only be the subjects of laughter, but shall be considered as vanity. Every divine voice shall, by a necessary silence, be dumb; the fruits of the earth shall be corrupted; and the air itself shall languish with a sorrowful stupor. The language may sound archaic,” he commented, “but he got his facts right. Henry Agnew saw that time coming. Look here.” He showed me the page of the book – the passage had been furiously scored with a pen nib. “Well, it’s here now – and it’s time that silence was broken.” Edward looked up again and stared into my frown. “Stay with it. Eventually things will become clearer. Or better still – ignore the words for the moment. Concentrate on the pictures. I think you’ll find they speak the language of your dreams.”

  From the densely stacked bookcases he took down some lavishly illustrated volumes and left me alone to wonder at them. Those illustrations were like admission to someone else’s dreams – at times glowing with visionary fire, at others the pitchblende hallucinations of a tormented mind. Set in rich Venetian palaces or wild surrealist landscapes, they might depict the slow death of a bearded king, or miners at work beneath an enchanted hill. There were chariot
s driven by demons, pulled by strange winged beasts. Sun kings and moon queens stood in stately adoration of each other or, in other guises, warred. Childish lovers sported in a glass retort. A black three-headed hellhound rent and devoured the pathetic human figures in its power. I was an innocent let loose in an exotic, heraldic kingdom of mythical beasts and grotesque hermaphroditic figures that rose from the copulations of the kings and their sister-queens. Yet in that fantastic cavalcade of monsters, freaks and angels, there were two moments in which I recognized something of myself.

  The first was when I came across a picture of a heavily armoured man jousting with a naked woman, like knights at a tournament. He had the sun for his head, she the moon. He was riding a lion, she side saddle on a black gryphon, and they were fighting. But they both had shields against which the lances struck, and the beauty of it was that on her shield was the insignia of the sun, on his that of the moon; so they were each protected by the principle they opposed. The background against which they fought was arid red desert; they might have been fighting to make it green again; yet one had the feeling that if either defeated the other it would be disaster. More eloquently than a thousand words the picture showed the need for, and the difficulty of, reconciliation between the sexes. I began to loosen my armour.

  Later I turned a page and uttered a gasp of stunned surprise that made Edward look up from the manuscript he scrutinized. He came across to look at the image open on my lectern: a wild man covered in shaggy green fur was fighting a little lion with a club. The drawing had a sprightly vigorous line, and there was a pleasing rhythmic balance between the sway of the wild man’s body and the crouch of the snarling beast. The Green Man wore a coronet of leaves and a girdle of stems at his waist. The unknown artist had painted the fur with such a delicate brush you felt you might stroke it. The bearded face smiled in its mantle of green hair

  “You recognize him?” Edward asked.

  I nodded, silent.

  “Another dream?”

  “I keep bumping into him. I’ve been trying to write about him for weeks.”

  Edward looked up from the picture and studied me for a long moment. “Perhaps you will,” he said eventually. “Perhaps you will.”

  I wasn’t left to ramble through this new realm for long. Edward brought me a box of Louisa’s file cards and a scholarly Latin dictionary. “Time you got stuck in,” he said. “You’ve seen how much there is to do.”

  The plain fact was I had not grasped the magnitude of Edward’s task when he first unfolded it to me. There was a mountain of paper in the muniments room, the neglected monument to decades of industry, neatly handwritten in paling ink. It was worse than a mountain – it was a maze, and how intricate its twists I soon discovered.

  I tried to picture what she must have been like, the young woman who had diligently allowed her life to fade away working at this solitary chore. The years of her youth had been sacrificed to her father’s obsession. Why hadn’t she rebelled – gone crazy even? Perhaps she had, but there was nothing mad about the composed face I’d been shown in the portrait and the photograph, only an infinity of patience. That patience must have been well-schooled here, and I would need lots of it myself if I was to follow her tracks from card to cryptic card through all the boxes. Still, I wasn’t being paid – I’d resisted Edward’s offer of money; I was pretty sure he didn’t have much and, for the moment, I didn’t need it. Unpaid, I could drop this when I chose.

  Yet once I started work I became increasingly absorbed. The oddly medieval flavour of the Latin notes intrigued me, and there were occasional memoranda in the formal English of Louisa’s day. Here is evidence, I read on one card, that the Pagan Mysteries were instituted pure. And on another: Here it is manifest how the Way of Life is found only through a Death, and that, without the deprival of all other knowledge, Self-Knowledge itself is not to be achieved. An admirable paradox! It was like listening to a voice whispering across time, an eerie sensation that became a frisson when I read: Time was, Time is and Time shall be, but here the Adept stands outside of time within the penetralium of mystery.

  Though much of what I translated defied comprehension, it was provocatively enigmatic. I began to see what Edward had meant about secrecy being a great enticer, about how the sleeping powers of the mind might wake. And there was something else. Daunting and preposterous as the task appeared, I was glad to be busy again, of use. When Edward saw that I was willing to work, and that the ground covered in a day could be almost doubled with my help, he relaxed and became more open with me.

  As the days passed in the library, I increasingly understood why Laura had been attracted to Edward – the wry, side-spin dart of his humour, the sudden shy warmth of expressed affection, the uncompromising certainty that in all things meaning inhered and the strict honesty which refused glib answers. Had I not worked closely with him I would have seen little of this. He wouldn’t have bothered to show it; I would have been too arrogant to look. But work is a firm bonder, and never more so than when a task is both fascinating and absurdly difficult.

  What we were faced with was an enormous puzzle – a cryptic crossword with the clues in Latin, unnumbered, and not much of a grid for guide. I translated the clues and passed them across to Edward, who frowned over them, making entries in his own files, collating cards with texts, referring often to Louisa’s journals and Henry’s copious notes, trying to piece a pattern together. Confronted with such vast heaps of material, one had to think of it as a game. That was how I saw it: Henry and Louisa Agnew, long dead but mysteriously alive under this mountain of paper, were one team; Edward and I the other. It began to feel – though I suppose this is true to the essential beauty of all sport – that we were working together, the four of us, for the love of the game.

  Gradually the outlines of the Hermetic myth came clear to me. Like more orthodox Christians, the alchemists maintained that mankind had suffered a fall, but this lapse from grace was not seen merely as a matter of original sin. It was a critical moment in the great experiment of Nature. It was the very access of consciousness – life’s arrival at the moment where it might contemplate and shape its own existence. But consciousness comes at a price, and the price is banishment from the Garden. When we wake, it is to find ourselves alone and separate, trapped in the toils of matter.

  There were close links between the alchemists and the gnostics, and for the gnostics the picture was bleaker still. Life in the material world was tragic, they claimed – so evil that it could not be the work of a benevolent God. The universe itself was cracked. It was the creation of the Demiurge, the Archon, the mad lord of this world. It was wrong to value it, wrong to bear children even, for that was only to add to the sum of suffering. It was the task of the spirit to resist complicity, even to the point of burning for this belief – this knowledge – for it was, of course, entirely unacceptable to orthodox Christianity.

  For the Christians the only answer to the human plight was trust in the redemptive love of Christ. For the alchemists such passive dependence was not enough. In every human body, they insisted, there remains a spark of the Divine Principle which once irradiated its entire being. Cased in the base metal of our fallen state, this “star-fire” yearns to return whence it came. It longs to be golden again. The alchemists maintained that through the correct disciplines such a return might be made. If one knew how to go about it, the Fall was reversible.

  The transmutation of base metal to gold was the paradigm of this sacred task. Unlike the Indian mystics, they did not regard the material world as mere illusion, though they were not blind to its illusory aspects. A seed of star-fire lay imprisoned in all things. It might be freed. Matter itself might be redeemed and made translucent. In working to change the substances, the alchemists also changed themselves. In changing themselves they added their own weight to the effort by which the world itself might be changed. It was clear that their economy was based on no common gold.

  But what to make of this? Much as I might
personally long for a world where sun and moon danced together and all the trees clapped their hands, it remained intangible. It remained a myth. And, yes, Edward could point out that we live in a time when the very meaning of the word myth has been debased, that it has come to signify only what is untrue, false, misleading, and yes, I could largely agree that it is nevertheless by myths we live, and what matters is how large the contrary truths a myth reconciles in its embrace. But here I still sat, unenlightened, puzzling.

  I saw only that, in this magical new view of the world to which I had been introduced, scepticism and openness must be harnessed in tandem if nothing was to be missed. Such an attitude required fresh springs of energy, and the effect – I was delighted to sense it as I woke each day – was to make me more bouncy and mettlesome than I had been for weeks.

  For three days I went into the library at the Hall hoping to find Laura there and each day I was disappointed. Each evening when we tidied away our papers, I expected Edward to invite me over to the Lodge for a drink or a meal, and the invitation was not extended. Much as the work fascinated me, and fonder each day as I became of Edward, there was nevertheless a growing sense of frustration. It was Laura who had first recruited me to this task, she who had seen that I might be involved. It was the thought of her that had drawn me back to the Lodge with my dream, and if this odd enterprise had any meaning at all, it must lie, I believed, somewhere between the three of us. Yet studiously, subtly, with no obvious exertion on Edward’s part, Laura and I were being kept at a distance. Was that perhaps what she wanted? Or need I look no further than the old man’s unspoken mistrust of my intentions? I suspected the latter.

  It both peeved and amused me. From my angle Edward and I were now firm friends. His charm had seduced me. He had my affection and my loyalty, and I thought I deserved his trust. Yet he had a way of manipulating our conversations onto ground of his choosing where he spoke so admirably that only afterwards did one realize how other issues, other questions, had been delicately sidestepped. So Laura remained, like Louisa herself, a silent, invisible presence between us.