The White Dominican

by Gustav Meyrink

  ‘Deeds, deeds, deeds, that’s what is needed’, I feel. ‘Yes, that’s it. It’s not the selfish desires of our forefathers that I should be carrying out’, I try to convince myself, ‘no, it’s something much greater I should be aiming for.’

  It is like seeds that were slumbering inside me, now they are sprouting, shoot after shoot: ‘You must go out into the world, and do great deeds for the sake of mankind of which you are, after all, a part. Be a sword in the general battle against the head of the Medusa.’

  The atmosphere in the room is unbearably sultry. I fling open the window. The sky has turned into a leaden roof, an impenetrable, blackish grey. In the distance there is a flicker of lightning on the horizon. Thank God, a storm is coming. For months there has not been a drop of rain, the grass is all withered, during the day the woods quiver in the shimmering haze of the parched earth.

  I go over to the table to write. What? To whom? I do not know. To the Chaplain, perhaps, since I am thinking of starting out on my travels to see the world? I cut a quill and set pen to paper, but then I am overcome with tiredness. My head sinks onto my arm and I fall asleep.

  The table-top is like a sounding board, amplifying the beat of my pulse; it turns into a hammering, and I imagine I am hacking open the metal door in the cellar with an axe. As it falls from the rusty hinges, I see an old man come out. At that moment I wake up.

  Am I really awake? There is the old man here in the room, looking at me with his dull, aged eyes. The fact that I still have the quill in my hand, proves that I am not dreaming and that I am in my right mind.

  ‘I must have seen this peculiar stranger somewhere’, I think to myself. ‘Why is he wearing fur ear-muffs at this time of the year?’

  “I knocked at the door three times”, the old man says. “When no one answered, I came in.”

  “Who are you? What are you called?” I ask in bewilderment.

  “I have come on behalf of the Order.”

  For a moment I wonder whether it is a ghost I see before me. The ancient face with the sparse, oddly shaped beard does not go with those muscular, workman’s hands. If it were a picture I was looking at, I would have said it was badly drawn. There is something wrong with the proportions. His right thumb is misshapen, too; that also seems strangely familiar to me.

  Secretly, I touch the man’s sleeve, to prove that it is not my senses that are playing tricks on me, and then turn the movement into a gesture asking him to sit down.

  The old man ignores it and remains standing. “We have received news that your father has died. He was one of us. According to the rules of the Order, you, as his son by birth, have the right to demand that you be received into it. I have come to ask you, do you intend to make use of that right?’

  “To belong to the same community as my father would be my greatest joy, but I do not know what purpose it serves, what its goal is. Can you tell me something about it?”

  The old man’s dull eyes wander over my face. “Did your father never talk to you about it?”

  “No. Only in vague hints. I presume from the fact that he put a kind of habit on in the hour before his death that he must have belonged to some secret society, but that is all that I know.”

  “I will tell you then: since time immemorial there has been a circle of men on earth which guides the destiny of mankind. Without them chaos would have descended upon the world long ago. All the great leaders of the nations have been blind instruments in our hands, that is, if they were not members of our Order. Our goal is to remove the differences between rich and poor, between master and servant, the initiated and the ignorant, rulers and oppressed, to make this vale of tears that we call the earth into a paradise, a land in which the word ‘sorrow’ is unknown. The burden under which mankind is groaning is the cross of individuality. The world-soul has disintegrated into separate beings, and that is the source of all disorder. Our determination is to turn the multiplicity back into unity.

  The noblest minds have put themselves at our service and the time of harvest is at hand! Every man is to be his own priest. The masses are ready to shake off the yoke of the Church. Beauty is the only god to which mankind will pray in future. But there is still need of men of vigour to set it on high. That is why we fathers of the Order have sent out currents of thought into the world which will sweep like wildfire through the minds of men and burn out the madness of the doctrine of individualism. The war of everyone for everyone! Creating a garden from the wilderness is the task we have set ourselves. Can you not feel how everything within you is crying out for action? Why are you sitting here dreaming? Arise and save your brothers!”

  I am seized by a wild eagerness. “What should I do?” I cry. “Command me! Tell me what I should do! I will sacrifice my life for mankind, if it must be! What conditions must I fulfil to join the Order?”

  “Blind obedience! Renunciation of all personal desire! To work for the whole and no longer for yourself! That is the way out of the desert of multiplicity into the promised land of unity.”

  “And how will I know what it is I have to do?’ I ask, suddenly filled with doubts. “I am to be a leader, what shall my teaching be?”

  “When you teach, you learn. Do not ask, What shall I say? If God gives you an office, he will also give you understanding. Go forth and speak. The thoughts will come, do not worry. Are you ready to take the oath of obedience?”

  “I am ready.”

  “Then put your left hand to the earth and repeat after me the words I shall say.”

  In a daze, I am bending down to obey when I am suddenly seized with suspicion. I hesitate, look up, and a memory twitches at my mind: I have seen the face of the old man standing before me, carved out of haematite on the pommel of a sword; and the misshapen thumb belongs to the hand of the tramp who fell down dead in the market-place when he saw me, all those years ago.

  I feel a chill of horror, but now I know what I have to do. I jump up and shout at the old man, “Give me the sign!” and hold out my right hand to him for the ‘clasp’ my father showed me.

  But standing before me is no living man any more, but a thing of limbs loosely attached to a trunk, like someone who has been broken on the wheel. The head is hovering above, separated from the neck by a gap the width of a finger, the lips are still quivering from the expiry of breath. A gruesome jumble of flesh and bone.

  With a shudder, I covered my eyes with my hands. When I looked up, the phantom had disappeared, but hanging freely in the air was a shining ring, in which hovered the face of the old man with the ear-muffs in fine, transparent outline like pale blue mist. This time it was the voice of the Founding Father that came from its lips, “What you have seen was debris, spars from wrecked ships that had been drifting on the ocean of the past. In order to deceive you, the spectral inhabitants of the abyss created the image of our Master as a phantasm formed from the soulless remains of drowned men, from forgotten impressions in your own mind; with your own tongue they were speaking to you empty, hollow words of temptation to lure you, like will o’ the wisps, into the deadly swamps of aimless activity in which thousands before you, and greater ones, have sunk without trace. ‘Renunciation’ is the name they give to the phosphorescence with which they trick their victims; there was rejoicing in hell when they lit it for the first person to trust them. What they want to destroy is the noblest possession a person can acquire, our eternal consciousness as an individual. Their teaching is death and destruction, but they know the power of truth, so all the words they choose are true, but every sentence they form from them is a pit of lies.

  Whenever vanity and the lust for power reside in a person’s heart, there they are on hand to fan these dull sparks into a bright flame, so that the individual concerned imagines he is afire with selfless love for his fellows and goes forth to preach without being called, becomes a blind leader and falls into the pit with the halt and the lame.

  They well know that the heart of man is evil, from his earliest youth, and that love cannot r
eside within it, unless it is a present from above.

  They repeat the command, “Love one another”, until it is quite worn away. The one who first spoke these words gave those who heard them a spiritual gift, but they spit the words into people’s ears like poison, causing disaster and despair, murder, carnage and devastation. They imitate truth as a scarecrow imitates the wayside crucifix.

  Whenever they see a crystal that is threatening to form a symmetrical shape – an image of God – they do all they can to shatter it. No doctrine from the East is too fine but they will coarsen it, bring it down to earth, surround it and perforate it until it says the opposite of what was intended. “From the East comes light”, they say, and secretly mean pestilence.

  The only goal which is worth pursuing – the cultivation of one’s own self – they call egoism. They try to introduce into the minds of erring mortals the idea that they must save the world, without giving them any idea how to do it; they mask greed with the name of ‘duty’ and envy with that of ‘ambition’.

  Their dream for the future is a world of splintering consciousness, obsessions everywhere. Through the mouths of the obsessed they preach the coming of the millennium, as did the prophets of old, but the fact that the millennial empire will not ‘be of this world’ until the earth is transformed and man is changed through the rebirth of the spirit, that they omit to mention; they give the lie to the anointed ones by pretending the time is ripe before it is.

  If a messiah is expected, they pre-empt him; when one departs, they mock him. They say, “Be a leader”, well knowing that only one who has been perfected can be a leader. They invert it to deceive people, saying, “Lead, and you shall be perfected.”

  It is said, if God gives you an office, he will also give you understanding.

  But they whisper, “Take an office and God will give you understanding.”

  They know that life on earth is only meant to be a transitional state, so they cunningly tempt you by saying, “Make a paradise on earth”, well knowing the vanity of such attempts.

  They have released the shades from Hades and brought them to life with a daemonic force so that men will believe that the resurrection of the dead has come.

  They have made a mask, formed after the face of our Master, a spectre which pops up here and there, now in the dreams of those with second sight, now as apparently corporeal figures appearing at spiritualist séances, now as the automatic drawings mediums produce. To those who enquire after its name, the ghost calls itself John King, to give rise to the belief it is John the Evangelist. For all those who, like you, are mature enough to see the face in truth, they pre-empt it; they are preparing the ground so that they can sow the seed of doubt when, as now with you, the hour approaches when unwavering faith is needed.

  You destroyed the mask when you demanded the ‘clasp’. Now the true face will become the pommel of your magic sword, fashioned without joint from a single piece of ‘blood-stone’. Anyone who receives such a sword will find that the words of the Psalm become reality, “Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, and ride thou for the sake of truth and to do justice to the afflicted and the needy; and thy right hand shall perform wondrous things.”

  Chapter 15

  The Shirt of Nessus

  Just as the cry of the eagle, piercing the air above the snowy mountain tops, dislodges a cornice which rolls down the slope and turns into an avalanche, uncovering the splendour of hidden sheets of ice, so the words of our Founding Father have dislodged a portion of my self within me. The words of the Psalm are drowned by a howling blast in my ear, the room vanishes before my eyes and I feel as if I am falling out into boundless space.

  ‘Now, now I am going to smash against the ground!’ But the fall seems never-ending. The depths suck me in at ever greater, ever more vertiginous speed, and I feel the blood shoot up my spine and break out of my skull in a radiant sheaf. I hear the cracking of my bones, then everything is over. I am standing on my feet and realise that it was an hallucination: a magnetic current ran through me from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head, giving me the feeling I was plunging into a bottomless pit.

  Bewildered, I look around, surprised to see that nothing has changed, that the lamp on the table is still burning with an untroubled flame, for I feel as if I have been transformed, as if I had wings I could not use.

  I realise that a new sense has opened up within me, and yet for a long time I cannot work out what it is and in what way I am different, until I slowly become aware of a round object I am holding in my hand. I look at it: there is nothing to see; I open my fingers: the thing disappears, though I hear nothing fall to the ground; I clench my fist and it is back again, cold, round as a ball, and hard.

  I suddenly guess that it is the pommel of the sword. I feel for the blade; it is so sharp it cuts my skin.

  Is the sword hovering in the air?

  I take a step backwards from the spot where I am standing and reach out to grasp it. This time my fingers close on smooth metal rings forming a chain round my hips, from which the sword hangs.

  A sense of astonishment creeps over me which only disappears as it gradually becomes clear to me what has happened: my inner sense of touch, the sense that sleeps most soundly within mankind, has awoken. The thin partition separating earthly life from the world beyond has been broken.

  Strange! So infinitesimally narrow is the threshold between the two realms, and yet no one raises their foot to cross it! The other reality borders on our skin, yet we do not feel it! Our imagination stops here, where it could create new land.

  It is the longing for gods and the fear of being left alone with himself, to create a world of his own, which hinders man from unfolding the magic powers which slumber within him; he wants companions to accompany him, the power of nature to envelop him; he wants to feel love and hate, to do deeds and feel their effect. How could he do all this if he made himself creator of new things?

  I feel the warmth of passion luring me on, ‘You only need to stretch out your hand and you will touch the face of your beloved’, but I shudder with horror at the thought that reality and imagination are the same. Staring me in the face is the awfulness of ultimate truth.

  Even more dreadful than the possibility that I might have been touched by demons, or that I might be drifting out into the unbounded sea of madness and hallucination, is the realisation that there is no reality, neither here nor there, but that all is imagination.

  I remember my father’s anxious words, “Did you see the sun?” when I told him of my walk on the mountain. “Anyone who sees the sun will give up wandering; he will enter eternity.”

  “No, I want to remain a wanderer and see you again, father! I want to be united with Ophelia, and not with God! I want infinity and not eternity, I want the things that I have learnt to see and hear with my spiritual eyes and ears to become reality for my feeling. I renounce becoming a god crowned with creative power, out of love for you I want to remain a created man; I want to share life equally with you.”

  As if to keep myself from the temptation to stretch out my arms in longing, I clasp the hilt of the sword tightly.

  “I entrust myself to thy aid, Master. Be thou the creator of all that surrounds me.”

  So clearly does my exploring hand become aware of the face on the pommel, that I feel as if I can sense it deep within me, it is sight and touch at once, raising an altar to contain the holy of holies.

  A mysterious power flows from it, entering objects and breathing life into them.

  I know – as if I could hear it in words – that the lamp there on the table is the image of my earthly life, it illuminated the room of my solitude, now its flame is smoking: the oil is running out.

  I feel an urge to be out in the open air, under the sky, when the hour of the great reunion comes.

  There is a ladder leading up onto the flat roof, where I often secretly sat as a child to watch in amazement as the wind blew the clouds into faces and dragon shapes. I climb it and sit on
the parapet.

  The town below is immersed in darkness.

  Image after image from my past life floats up and anxiously presses up against me, as if to say, ‘Hold me fast, take me with you so that I might live in your memory and not die in oblivion.’

  The lightning is flickering all round the horizon, a glowing, gigantic eye, peering here and there; and the houses and windows reflect the glare up onto me, their flares treacherously sending back the signal: ‘There! There! There is the one you are looking for!’

  A distant howling comes on the air, “All my servants you have killed, now I am coming myself.” My mind is filled with the thought of the Mistress of Darkness and of what my father said about her hatred.

  “The shirt of Nessus!” hisses a gust of wind, tearing at my clothes.

  The thunder roars a deafening “Yes!”

  ‘The shirt of Nessus?’ I ponder. ‘The shirt of Nessus?’

  Then a deathly hush, an ominous pause; the storm and lightning are working out what to do next.

  Suddenly from below comes the sound of the river, very loud, as if it were trying to warn me, “Come down to me and hide.”

  I can hear the horrified rustling of the trees, “The strangling grip of the wind-demon! The centaurs of the Medusa, the Wild Hunt! Keep your heads down, the rider with the scythe is coming!”

  A quiet, exultant voice throbs within my heart, “I am waiting for you, beloved.”

  The clock in the church tower breaks out sobbing as it is hit by an unseen fist.

  In the glare of a flash of lightning the crosses in the graveyard light up questioningly. “Yes, mother, I am coming!”