The White Dominican

by Gustav Meyrink

  Mutschelknaus and the old woman are nodding ecstatically, the words to them are glad tidings promising the fulfilment of their longing; but to me they are the prophecy of a terrible time to come.

  Just as, before, I saw the head of the Medusa in the eyes of the phantom, so now I can hear its voice from the lips of the man with long hair, both of them disguised behind the mask of sublimity. It is the forked tongue of a viper from the realm of darkness that is speaking. It talks of the Saviour and means the Devil. It says, ‘The ravenous beasts will once more eat grass.’ By the grass it means the innocent, the unsuspecting, the great mass of people, and by the ravenous beasts it means the demons of despair.

  The dreadful thing about the prophecy is – and I can feel it–that it will come to pass. But the most dreadful is that it is a mixture of truth and fiendish cunning. The empty masks of the dead will arise, but not the ones we long for, not the departed for whom those left on earth shed their tears! They will come dancing to the living, but it will not be the dawn of the millennium, it will be a carnival of Hell, a fiendish rejoicing in expectation of the cock-crow of a never-ending, gruesome, cosmic Ash Wednesday!

  “Should the day of despair dawn today for the old man and the others? Is that what you wish?” I can hear it resounding, like a mute, mocking question, in the voice of the Medusa. “If that is so, I will not stop you, Christopher. Say the word. Tell them, you who believe you have escaped my power, tell them that you have seen me in the pupils of the phantom that I created and made to walk out of the cancerous cells of the decaying robe that clothes the soul of the seamstress! Tell them everything you know. I will back you up, and they will believe you.

  I will be happy for you to carry out the work that is the task of my servants. Be a harbinger of the great White Dominican who is to bring the truth, as your ancestor hopes. Be a servant of the glorious truth, I will willingly bring about your crucifixion. Be bold, tell those gathered here the truth. I look forward to seeing how ‘redeemed’ they will feel.”

  The three spiritualists are looking at me, full of expectation of my reply to the man with long hair. I remember the place in Ophelia’s letter, where she asked me to assist and support her foster-father and I hesitate. Should I tell them what I know? One glance at the joy in the shining eyes of the old man robs me of all my courage. I remain silent.

  I feel that it is only in the hearts of those who have come alive in the spirit that the dead can find true peace; there alone is rest and refuge for them. If the hearts of men are sleeping, then the dead will sleep in them too; if their hearts wake to spiritual life, then the dead will also come alive and partake of the world of appearances, without being subject to the torment that accompanies earthly existence.

  I am overcome with a sense of impotence, of complete powerlessness, as I wonder what I can do, now that it is in my power to speak or to remain silent. And what shall I do later, when I am mature, perhaps one of the perfected, one who has achieved spiritual completion? The time is at hand when belief in mediums is about to inundate the world, like a pestilential flood-tide, of that I feel certain. I picture the abyss of despair which will engulf mankind when, after a short frenzy of delight, they see that the dead that are rising from their graves lie, lie, lie worse than any creature on earth ever could lie, they are demonic phantoms, embryos sprung from an infernal act of copulation.

  In that day, what prophet will be strong enough to halt such a spiritual end of the world?

  All at once my silent reflections are interrupted by a strange sensation: I feel as if my two hands, which are still lying idle on the table before me, have been grasped by beings that I cannot see. I sense that a new magnetic chain has been forged, similar to the one at the beginning of the séance, only in this one I am the only living link.

  The seamstress gets up from the floor and comes to the table. Her expression is calm, as if she were fully conscious.

  “It is Py … Pytha … Pythagoras”, says the man with the long hair, but the hesitant, wavering tone of his voice is full of doubt. He seems puzzled by the normal, sober look on the face of the medium.

  The seamstress looks me in the eye and says, in a deep voice like a man’s, “You know that I am not Pythagoras.”

  A quick glance at the others tells me that they cannot hear what she is saying, their faces are devoid of expression. The seamstress nods in confirmation. “I am talking to you alone, the ears of the rest are deaf. The linking of hands is a magic process; if hands are joined that have not yet come alive spiritually, then the realm of the Medusa rises from the abyss of the past and the depths spew forth the masks of the dead; but the chain of living hands is the rampart protecting the refuge of the upper light. The servants of the head of the Medusa are our instruments, but they do not know it; they believe they are destroying, but in fact they are creating space for the future; like worms devouring dead flesh, they gnaw at the corpse of materialism and devour it; if they did not, its putrefying stench would corrupt the earth. They hope that their day is dawning, the day when they can send the ghosts of the dead out among the living. We are quite happy to let them be. They want to create a void, one that goes by the name of madness and absolute desperation and that will swallow up all life, but they do not know the law of ‘fulfilment’. They do not know that the fountain of help only starts to flow from the realm of the spirit when the need is there.

  And it is they who are creating this need!

  They are doing more than we do. They are calling down the new prophet. They are overthrowing the old church and do not realise that they are calling up the new one. They want to devour living things, but all they devour is what is decaying. They want to eradicate humanity’s hope for a life after death and only eradicate what must anyway fall. The old church has become black and lightless, but the shadow it casts on the future is white. The forgotten doctrine of the ‘Dissolution with Corpse and Sword’ will be the basis of the new religion and the armoury of the spiritual pope.

  Do not worry about him” – the seamstress turned her gaze towards the carpenter, who was staring blankly ahead – “or his kind; no one who is honest is heading for the abyss.”

  The rest of the night until the sun came up I spent on the seat in the garden, happy in the knowledge that it was only the form of my lover that was sleeping there at my feet. She herself is as awake as my heart, is inextricably bound up with me.

  The dawn rose from the horizon, night clouds hung down to the ground like heavy, black curtains; orange and violet patches formed a gigantic face whose rigid features reminded me of the head of the Medusa. It hovered there motionless, as if it were lying in wait to devour the sun. The whole looked like a shroud from hell with the face of Satan imprinted on it.

  Before the sun came, as if in greeting, I broke a branch off the elder tree and, so that it would flourish and grow into a tree itself, planted it in the ground. I felt as if, in doing that, I was enriching the world of life.

  Before the great light appeared, the first harbingers of its radiance had erased the head of the Medusa. The clouds that had been so dark and menacing were transformed into an innumerable flock of white lambs drifting across the glorious sky.

  Chapter 12

  He Must Increase, but I Must Decrease

  I woke one morning with these words of John the Baptist on my lips. From the day I spoke them to my thirty-second year they were like a motto governing my life.

  “He’s getting to be an eccentric like his grandfather”, I heard the old folk mutter when I met them in the town. “He’s going downhill month by month.”

  “He’s an idle layabout who wastes every hour God gave us”, said my hard-working neighbours. “Has anyone ever seen him work?”

  In later years, when I was a man, the gossip had hardened into the certainty that I had the evil eye – “Keep out of his way, his look brings misfortune!” – and the old women in the market-square would hold out the ‘fork’ – index and middle fingers outspread to ward off the ‘mag
ic’ – towards me, or they would cross themselves.

  Others maintained I was a vampire, one of the undead that came back in the night to suck the blood from the children as they slept; if two red spots were found on the neck of an infant, then people would say they were the marks of my teeth. Many claimed to have seen me, half wolf, half man, in their sleep and would run away screaming whenever they caught sight of me in the street. The place where I used to sit in the garden was considered bewitched, and no one dared to pass through the alleyway.

  There was a series of strange happenings, which gave the rumours some semblance of truth.

  Once, late in the evening, a large shaggy dog with the look of a beast of prey and which no one had ever seen before ran out of the house of the hunchbacked seamstress and the children in the street cried out, “The werewolf! The werewolf!” A man hit it on the head with an axe and killed it.

  At about the same time a tile fell off the roof, wounding me in the head; when I appeared the next day with a bandage round my head, people said I had been the nightmare beast and that the werewolf’s wound had transferred itself to me.

  Another time, in the middle of the day in the market square, it happened that a man from outside the town, a tramp who was generally considered to be weak in the head, threw up his arms in apparent horror as I came round the corner, and fell to the ground, dead, his features contorted as if he had seen the Devil.

  Then again the police were dragging a man through the streets who was resisting with all his might, moaning all the time, “How can I have murdered someone, I’ve spent the whole day asleep in the barn?” I happened to come along, and when the man caught sight of me, he threw himself to the ground and pointed at me, crying, “That’s him! Let me go, he’s come back to life!”

  Each time this kind of thing happened a thought appeared in my mind, saying, ‘They have all seen the head of the Medusa in you. It lives inside you, and those that see it all die, while those who just sense it are filled with horror. That night you saw mortality in the pupils of the spectre, the seed of death that resides in you, as it does in all men. Death resides in men, that is why they do not see it; they do not carry ‘Christ’, they carry death within them, it consumes them from inside like a worm. Only someone who has disturbed it, as you have, can see it face to face; such people it will ‘face up to’.’

  And truly, at that time the earth became, from year to year, an ever darker valley of death for me. Everywhere I looked, in every shape and word and sound and gesture, I was surrounded by the constantly shifting influence of the terrible lady that rules in the world, the Medusa with the beautiful, and yet so gruesome face.

  ‘Earthly life is the continuing torture of giving birth to death, to a death that is renewed every second’, that was the insight that stayed with me night and day. ‘The only purpose of life is the revelation of death.’ Thus all thoughts within me had been transposed into the opposite of normal human feeling. ‘The desire to live’ seemed like theft from the being that shared my earthly form, and the ‘inability to die’ like the hypnotic command of the Medusa, “I want you to remain a thief, a robber and a murderer, and to walk the earth as such.”

  The verse from the Gospel, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal”, began to rise from the darkness for me, shining brightly. I understood its meaning: the one that must increase is our Founding Father, but I must decrease!

  When the tramp fell down dead in the market-place and his features began to go rigid, I was standing among the people crowding round him and I had the uncanny feeling that his life-force was seeping into me, like refreshing air after a shower of rain. I slunk away, laden with a sense of guilt, as if I really were a bloodsucking vampire, aware of the ugly fact that my body only survived by stealing life from others; it was a walking corpse that was cheating the grave of its due. It was only the strange coldness of my heart and my senses that stopped me from rotting alive like Lazarus.

  The years passed. I can almost say that the only thing by which I noticed their passing was the way my father’s hair became whiter and whiter and his figure more bent and aged.

  So as not to encourage the townsfolk in their superstition, I went out less and less until finally I stayed at home for years and did not even go down to the garden seat. In my mind, I had carried it up to my room and sat on it for hours, letting Ophelia’s presence flow through me. Those were the only hours when the kingdom of death had no power over me.

  My father had fallen into a strange silence; often weeks would pass without us exchanging a word apart from a ‘Good morning’ and a ‘Good night’. We had almost abandoned speech but, as if thought had carved out new channels of communication, each of us could always tell when the other wanted something. Now I would hand him some object, now he would take down a book, leaf through it and give it to me; almost every time I found it opened at the place that had been going through my mind.

  I could tell by the way he looked that he was perfectly happy. Sometimes his eye would rest on me for a long time with an expression of absolute content.

  Sometimes we were both aware that for a whole hour we had followed the precisely same train of thought; we were, so to speak, marching intellectually side by side, keeping step with each other, so that eventually the silent thoughts did turn into words. But it was not like in the past, when the words came too soon or too late, but never at the right time. Rather, we were continuing a thought process, not feeling our way or looking for an opening.

  Such moments are so vivid in my memory that the whole surroundings come alive in the smallest detail whenever I think back to them. I can hear my father’s voice again in every word, in every note, as I write down what he said one day when I had been reflecting on what the purpose of my strange deadness might be.

  “We all have to turn cold, my son, but with most people life is not capable of bringing it about and death has to do it. Dying does not mean the same for everyone. With some, so much dies at the hour of death that one can almost say that there is nothing left. All that remains of some people is their works here on earth; their fame and their services live on for a while and, strangely enough, in a certain sense their bodies live on, for they have statues built in their honour. How little good and evil are involved can be seen by the fact that even the great destroyers such as Nero or Napoleon have their monuments. It is all a matter of how outstanding their deeds were.

  The spiritualists maintain that suicides, or people who have come to some grisly end, are bound to the earth for a certain period. I rather tend to the opinion that it is not their spectres that manifest themselves at séances or in haunted houses, but their images together with certain factors connected with their deaths. It is as if the magnetic atmosphere of the place preserves the event and releases it from time to time. Many features of the conjuration of the spirits of the departed in Ancient Greece – that performed by Tiresias, for example – suggest that this is the case.

  The hour of death is merely that point in a catastrophe at which everything in a person that could not be worn down during life is blown away, as if in a storm. You could also put it this way: first of all the worm of destruction eats away the less important organs – that is what we call growing old – but once it reaches the pillar of life, then the whole building collapses. That is the normal course of things.

  Such will be my end, for my body contains too many elements which it is beyond my power to transmute by alchemy. If you were not here, my son, then I would have to return to continue the interrupted work in a new incarnation. It says in the books of wisdom of the East, “Have you fathered a son, planted a tree and written a book? Only then can you begin the great task.”

  In order to avoid having to return, the priests and kings in ancient Egypt had their corpses embalmed. They wanted to avoid the legacy of their cells being passed back to them and forcing them to return to new work on earth.

  Earthly talents, wea
knesses and defects, knowledge and intellectual gifts belong to the bodily form and not to the soul. I for my part, as the last branch on the family tree, have inherited the body cells of my ancestors; they went from one generation to the next, and finally to me. I can sense you wondering, ‘How can that be? How can the body cells of my grandfather be passed on to my father if he did not die before the birth of his off-spring?’

  The cells are passed on in a different way. It does not take place at conception or birth, nor in a crude, physical manner, as if you were pouring water from one vessel into another. It is the particular fashion in which the cells crystallise around a central point that is inherited, and even this does not happen all at once, but gradually. Have you never noticed – it is a comical fact that gives rise to much amusement – how old bachelors who have a pet dog transmit their likeness to the animal over the years? What happens there is an astral transfer of ‘cells’ from one body to another; you impress the stamp of your own being on anything you love. The reason why pets have such social awareness is simply because human cells have been transferred to them. The more deeply human beings love each other, the more ‘cells’ they exchange, the more they fuse with one another, until one day, after billions of years the ideal state will have been reached in which humanity consists of one single being made up of countless individuals. On the day your grandfather died I, as his only son, came into the last inheritance of our line.

  I found it impossible to mourn for him, even for an hour, so quickly did his whole being enter me. The layman may find it a gruesome thought, but I could literally feel his body decomposing day by day in the grave, without finding it horrible or disgusting. For me, his decomposition released forces that until then were bound, and that entered my bloodstream like waves of ether.