Following the Sun

by John Hanson Mitchell

  I had other, more established friends in the city, though, one of whom was a man named Chrétien Berger, whom I found in the phone book and called. Chrétien and I had worked together in a restaurant on Corsica and in the winter, back in Paris, almost every Sunday, he would invite me to his parents’ apartment for dinner. They must have had some money since they lived in an airy sunny place near the Champs-Elysées and always managed to put on a fine five-course meal, sometimes with champagne. Chrétien had a pretty cousin named Micheline and often, after our midday meal, the three of us would go over to the Jardin des Plantes and stroll arm in arm.

  Chrétien was overjoyed to hear from me and later that first day we got together, rehashed the old times and made more plans to meet again for dinner with Micheline. I spent the rest of that day and the next wandering around my former haunts. I went out to the zoo, and the Bois de Boulogne, and I found a gardener at the Jardin des Plantes whom I had befriended and who remembered me and chatted with him about flowers and trees, and then I went back to the Saint Placide and chatted up the waiter Gilbert. After that, I went over to Notre Dame and looked at the famous stained glass window in the south transept.

  The immense expanse of glass was glowing as usual, even in the half light of the cloudy afternoon beyond the cathedral walls. There were a few informed tourists there who knew exactly what they were looking for and had trained the binoculars on the details.

  Stained glass windows were a crucial element in the spiritual foundation of the design of the interiors of Gothic cathedrals. They had the effect of bathing the interior architecture of these sacred buildings with a subdued, colored light that tended to dissolve the dark weight of the stone building material. The great wheels, or rose-patterned circular windows, were always set at the center of the main and transept façades as a climax to the long axial vistas down the forestlike aisles of the shaded interiors. This use, or reuse, or re-forming of light was an expression of the metaphysics of the Middle Ages, which held that light was the most noble of all the natural phenomena, the closest physical approximation of pure spirit, an expression of spirit embodied. According to scholars, the idea originated with Plato and his correlation of goodness and wisdom with sunlight. The Neo-Platonists and later St. Augustine transformed this concept and saw light as a divine intellect that enlightens the mind. The idea is expressed repeatedly in the great work of the age, Dante’s Paradiso, which concerns itself with the theme of la luce divina or divine light.

  In spite of the fact that Paris is supposed to be the City of Light, as it often does in northern France in spring, it began to rain the next day, and as I had in Madrid, I began killing time in some of the museums that I had overlooked or merely perused indifferently during my callow student years.

  On my way over to the Louvre I walked through the Place de la Concorde, where there is an Egyptian obelisk that was lifted from the ruins of the temple of Luxor, and all that day and even into the next I kept running into little museum rooms stuffed with remnants of the first and in some ways the foremost civilization of the sun.

  The obelisk at the Place de la Concorde once stood at the main pylon gateway to the great temple, constructed over 3,300 years ago by Ramses II, the king who helped establish the cult of the divine pharaoh by erecting statues of himself as a god throughout the country. Pharaohs were, of course, at the top of the social and political hierarchy, like kings and queens the world around, but in Egypt the pharaoh was an essential part of the cosmos, an integral part of what was known as ma’at, or the divine order of things. The pharaoh fulfilled the role of the god Osiris while on earth, the generative force of nature, but more importantly he was the living descendant of the sun god Ra, who was recognized as the preeminent god of all the many deities of the ancient Egyptians.

  Everyday in ancient Egypt, Ra floated up out of the east in his celestial boat, sailed across the sky, and then descended into Duat, the dark region below the earth. Here he debarked, boarded a different vessel, his night boat, and began a voyage from west to east, sailing toward morning. As with the Maya, this night journey was known to be dangerous for the god of the sun. He was often threatened by a giant serpent as he made his way eastward, and demons and the souls of the damned would begin wailing and calling out as he passed. Undeterred, he sailed on through the dark seas. Toward midnight, he would come upon the body of the slain god Osiris, who supplied the power of life and rebirth to those living above. At this point, Ra and Osiris intermingled with one another. Osiris became the sun, and the sun became Osiris, and thereby gained his regenerative powers. Then Ra voyaged onward toward the gates of dawn and soon approached the horizon. Those on earth could now see his light, the light of predawn, but they could not see Ra himself until he changed to his day boat and sailed above the horizon, now visible as the solar disc.

  This, for the Egyptians, was the great miracle of the solar transit, this reforming. It was a reaffirmation of the triumph of life over death and a critical aspect of their religion. Ra was the most powerful god in the Egyptian pantheon; he manifested himself in the form of many of the other gods and assumed many names. Prayers to him are inscribed on stelae throughout the land, often in the same hymnal language, “Hail to thee, Ra—Oh primeval one, coming into being of thyself, lord of what thou hast created—”

  Even though there was a plethora of deities in the ancient world, the Egyptians knew that the sun, the singular celestial object that rose each day, throwing off heat and light, was the prime mover, the first force, and the source of all life on earth. But after the ascension of the pharaoh Akhenaton at the end of the eighteenth dynasty in the fourteenth century B.C., some 3,360 years ago, all the myriad gods of Egypt were diminished, the sun became the one true god, and the first monotheistic religion was born.

  Akhenaton assumed the kingship in Thebes when he was still a young man, and immediately, in the first five years of his reign, began to reorder the cultural and religious landscape of all of Egypt. He began to question the role of the other gods and determined that they were failing. In their place, he established an all-powerful god, the living Ra, he “—who decrees life, the lord of sunbeams, maker of brightness,” in the words of one hymn. The great temple of Amon at Thebes languished. The temples to the other gods fell into disrepair, and the priests, who played such an important role in the Egyptian bureaucracy, had little to do. In the fifth year of his reign Akhenaton officially decreed, in so many words, that there was but one god, and Ra was his name. All other gods were deemed of little value and banished.

  Akhenaton moved the royal city from Thebes to the new city of Amarna and reordered the courts. He laid out the city on a plain and oriented the streets toward double peaks in the east through which the rising sun would appear each dawn. Under the new religion, the sun god was no longer depicted as a falcon or a human form. He was abstracted and depicted as a disc emitting rays that formed the ankh symbol, the hieroglyph for life. Under the new religious philosophy, the artists and artisans focused on new themes. Formal ritualistic events in the underworld or the courts gave way to naturalistic representations of the family life of the pharaoh and his beautiful queen, Nefertiti.

  Ever since the first discoveries at Amarna, and well into the 1960s, scholars and interpreters of this individualistic reformer have swept through the world of archeologists and spread into the fields of history and religion and even psychology. Freud, for example, interpreted the rise of Akhenaton as a way of explaining the later development of Mosaic monotheism. Akhenaton was seen by some religious scholars as a forerunner of Christ—not an illogical comparison, since Akhenaton was wont to describe himself as the son of god—he who made Ra’s will known on earth. Historians have also compared the sun cult of Ra as the forerunner of the pre-Christian solar cult known as the sol invictus deus, the Invincible or Unconquerable Sun, which was established as the state religion of Rome under Emperor Aurelian in the third century. By any standards Akhenaton’s new state religion appears to be the first example of m
onotheism, predating the Hebrew Jehovah.

  But it was not to last. The thousand-year evolution of the order of Egyptian society and politics was weakened during Akhenaton’s reign. Unlike many of his predecessors, he appears to have been a considerate man, slow to strike down his enemies, of which, after a few years of rule, there were many. He allowed insults to mount. He relished the home and the hearth, his children, his famously beautiful wife. He reveled in arts and jubilees, gave traitors and rebels a second chance, refused to send out retaliatory expeditions, and in his last years never left his palace, poisoned, some historians speculate, by a slow-acting magic. He died in 1353 B.C. at the age of thirty-two.

  In spite of the rain I went out toward the Bois de Boulogne for a walk, got caught in another downpour, and ended up at the Marmottan Museum, which had recently acquired a collection of Monet paintings, many of them from Monet’s garden home at Giverny. Also hanging here, at least at that time (later it was stolen), was a painting called “Impression—Sunrise.” It was this canvas, with daubs of broken color, which close up looked like a mottle of short multicolored brush strokes, but which at a distance merged into one smooth landscape, that gave the group that painted in this manner the name Impressionists.

  I remember when I was younger wandering through gallery upon gallery of some museum that was organized chronologically. I passed through hall after hall of dark religious subjects and somber nobility and then entered into a room where the Impressionists were collected. Suddenly the gallery burst into natural light. The effect was dazzling, I literally felt as if I had stepped outdoors on a sunny morning.

  No one knows exactly why this group of French painters should have chosen to go against the grain of the French Academy and begin, among other new styles, to break a scene up into a mass of short primary-colored brush strokes, but there were a number of scientific breakthroughs that were taking place in optics at the time that may have driven these artists to look at the world with a fresh eye. One of these was the invention of the camera and the development of photography. But it was during this same period that the chemical basis of light was revealed. In 1859 two German researchers had improved spectrum analysis dramatically and, for the first time, the complex chemical basis of colors came to be understood. As a result, the chemical makeup of the sun could be read through the analysis of the colors of the prism. The great surprise, to artists, chemists, geologists, and astronomers alike, was that the chemistry of the sun and the chemistry of the earth were similar. This suggested—as the ancient mystics appear to have known all along—that the sun was the parent of the earth.

  On my way back from one of these rambles I passed one of the cafés at Montparnasse where Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, and all the other American expatriates congregated in the 1920s. One member of this troupe was a talented but eccentric writer named Harry Crosby, who was a poet and a publisher who started a journal called Black Sun with his wife, Caresse. Crosby was raised in the bosom of tradition in Brahmin Boston; his father had been a well-known and successful banker and clubman, but early on Harry broke from Boston, or “The City of the Dreadful Night,” as he liked to call it, and executed a flight to Paris. Here, he converted to a new religion (actually a very old religion) of his own devising—worship of the sun. He tended to identify himself with the mythic young figures who died while attempting to overreach the bounds of tradition, such as Icarus, the son of Daedalus, who during the ingenious flight from the labyrinth of King Minos dared to fly near the sun and died in the process.

  Having discovered his religion, Crosby threw himself into the solar orbit with fanatical devotion. He composed poems and paeans to the sun, collected together in Shadows of the Sun and Chariot of the Sun. He invented an elaborate admixture of Christian faith in the afterlife, pagan solar rituals, Egyptian sun cults, Aztec ceremonies, Roman mystery cult practices, and “sacred” writings from other solar-influenced writers such as Goethe and D. H. Lawrence. He closely identified himself with the principles of the sun-figures in the tarot pack, the astral monarch who dispenses heat and light, and the Chariot of Fire, which carries the hero, Phaeton. Apollo was among the favorites of his gods and he was especially attracted by the rash folly of Phaeton, who dared to take the reigns of the wild horses that drew Apollo’s Chariot of the Sun across the sky each day—with disastrous results for both the earth and Phaeton. No matter that the young hero died in the process, that was part of the attraction.

  At the age of thirty-one, having first removed his precious golden sun-ring that he acquired at Al-Karnak in the Valley of the Kings and having stamped upon it, Harry Crosby, along with his lover, Josephine Bigelow, committed a spectacular double suicide during a visit to New York. The press was alive with stories after the event, but the flaming young sun acolyte was dead.

  That evening I met Chrétien and Micheline for dinner at an odd restaurant on the Left Bank called the Garden of the Frog King. The two of them were handsome people, still in good shape, considering all the wine and food they consumed. Micheline was as pretty as I remembered, slightly fuller but with the same bright blue eyes and black hair, and that Gauloise warmth that had originally so attracted me.

  We met again for a midday dinner on Sunday at the apartment of Chrétien’s parents. Madame Berger, a quiet person who favored long wool skirts and cardigan sweaters, was a little grayer, but M. Berger had not aged in ten years. He still had black hair and the same twinkling bright blue eyes inherited by his son. I happened to know from Chrétien that he was in the Resistance and had seen horrendous acts of inhumanity during the war, and yet I never knew anyone who enjoyed eating and drinking and the spirit of the moment as much as he. Everything was a great adventure for him, even his bad experiences. Chrétien himself had some of the same joie de vivre. Madame Berger was less celebratory, “c’etait affreux!”—it was horrible—was one of her favorite phrases, often affixed as a coda to one of the long adventure stories from M. Berger.

  I related stories from my pilgrimage, and in contrast to many of the people I had met along the way, they all heartily approved of my plan to go to Scotland, a place that virtually all southern Europeans seemed to hold in horror, as if it were the repository of all the cold ills of all the frozen worlds. Chrétien and his family thought it a great lark.

  “Instant death,” Chrétien shouted. “Wonderful. It’s a good place for you to die. You will freeze. It is said to be a painless death, freezing.”

  “But before you die you will have to eat sheep belly stuffed with oatmeal,” M. Berger said, laying a finger aside his nose. “That will be worse than death.”

  “That’s what will kill him,” Chrétien said.

  “No, no, he will die of cold,” Madame Berger said. “He will have to wear a kilt.”

  “But no underpants,” Micheline said.

  They opened a bottle of champagne—and this before the midday meal—to celebrate my safe return to Paris. They always knew I would come back someday for a Sunday dinner, Madame Berger said. “We have missed you.”

  After that we shared some tiny crab pǎté she had prepared, and then went to table.

  Here was the usual fine setting. M. Berger brought out a bottle of Côte de Beaune, winked at me in a conspiratorial manner, and drew the cork. And then we set to: first a clear consommé and then a serving of mushrooms stuffed with a liver pǎté, followed by a poached trout, and then a plate of fresh-picked asparagus with a refined Hollandaise sauce, followed by a salad with chives, and then a board of cheeses, and then a flan, and along with all this, another bottle of Burgundy, and bottles of sparkling waters with the salad, and finally a café, followed by a tiny glass of calvados. By then it was three o’ clock and time for a stroll on the Champs-Elysées, with Madame and Micheline linked arm in arm, and Chrétien and I walking side by side, and leading the troop, glancing this way and that and nodding to his familiars, Monsieur Berger himself, his hands clasped behind his back—the contented bon vivant, who had experienced the worst that
the world can throw at itself and, having survived that, the best that the world can offer, or at least the best that he could suck from the world in that unfortunate age.

  “This sun pilgrimage of yours,” Chrétien asked as we strolled along. “What about the Sun King himself?”

  “What about him?”

  “The great solar palace of Versailles. You must go see it. You must.”

  Three days later, having lost even more days from my theoretical schedule, Chrétien, Micheline, and I drove out through the fresh green tunnel of the beech forests to the great main gate of the palace, where, arranged around the Court d’Honneur, were the giant statues of the distinguished statesmen and marshals of the age, and looking over them on his horse the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, who occupied the throne of France for seventy-two years. At either side rose the impressive walls of the architectural masterpiece of what is generally held to be the most brilliant era of French history, a golden age of letters and arts, and the darkest age of the French peasantry. Here, in this singular place, are the creations of the architects Jules Mansart and Louis Le Vau, the murals and decorations of Charles Le Brun, portraits by Pierre Mignard, the sculptures of Antoine Coysevox, and, most impressive of all, the great stretching gardens of André le Nôtre. This court, in its glory days during the seventeenth century, was the seat of government and, until the coming of the Revolution, the haunt of some of the greatest sycophants, decadents, and courtesans, as well as writers and artists of the age—Molière, Racine, the famous courtesans Louise de La Vallière, Mesdames de Montespan, de Maintenon, de Pompadour, and du Barry, and Queen Marie Antoinette, and all the other members of one of the most hedonistic, pleasure-loving, and extravagant courts of one of Europe’s most dissolute and profligate and absolutist kings. It was, after all, Louis XIV who is credited with the motto l’état c’est moi.

  Michéline and Chrétien, promoters of the new Europe and the then aborning Common Market, were indifferent, even dismissive. They had grown up with the myth of France and were unimpressed by glories of the past. After a few turns around the Hall of Mirrors and other extravagant splendors, since the day was lovely, we retired to the gardens to stroll and reminisce.