The spine, the covers, the numbers, the corners, the margins, the flaps, the fold down the middle that suggests both closure and opening. This is a book. This is the book in its barest, coldest, anatomical reality. If it does not actualize (or conceal, dissimulate, reveal, fulgurate) in any other manner than this empty ontological proposition wherein we enumerate its constituent properties, then the book may not be essentially differentiated from the chair, the caboose, the walls of a house, the hinges on a door. A book—as mirror—must both say and play; or rather that you say, it plays. You play, it plays more. It will always exceed your capacity for play by its nature of excess. Deceptive, it is always more than the sum of its parts. It is even more than its constituent whole, more than anything. It is still bifurcating, being transcribed upon, giving off another surface. Always another angle. The spine or its covers—that thick hide, that skin that encloses textual innards—does not inhibit its growth like it would a body. The pages, like Borges’ book of sand, are always multiplying, in a kind of cell division. This being the definition of the infinite book nested within the infinite library.
[At this point, the manuscript breaks off once more and attempts to satisfy explanation for the first reference, the leitmotif of the mirror (”The mirror [John Lerida]”). Again, I am named, a story within a story, and the mirror splits or twins here given that the mirror I was being prompted to see was initially between “myself” and Castellemare. This may pass as sophomoric pop-psych thesis of saying Castellemare and me are one and the same. The style shift here with the John of Lerida story is, again, very abrupt.]
John of Lerida and the Mirror of Fire
But of sublimer powers is that device by which rays of light are led into any place that we wish and are brought together by refractions and reflections in such fashion that anything is burned which is placed there.
-Roger Bacon, Epistola fratris Rogerii Baconis de secretis operibus artis et naturae et de nullitate magicae (1252)
While entertaining a friend and colleague one evening from the University of Reggio Calabra, I was treated to a copy of his article that was currently in press on Peter of Maricourt, a 13th century French scholar who worked diligently on magnetism, including a text entitled Epistola de Magnete (1269). As I came to understand from my learned friend, Peter of Maricourt's interests extended beyond magnetism and he was attributed to having fashioned a mirror that produced combustion at a distance. Given my fascination with mirrors, this anecdotal point intrigued me, and that was when my friend dropped the name of John of Lerida. Of course, the specialist nature of my friend's research made study of this figure outside the scope of his pursuit, but I was currently aimless in my hungry desire to grant myself some kind of intriguing glass bead game to occupy my time. This story is more a capsule summary of my findings, a rather unskilled attempt at providing my readers with a few clues to disperse the mists that surround the name of this obscure thinker. As is the case with most of my researches, I seem to multiply rather than resolve mystery, but this is what I have learned:
John of Lerida's birthdate is not precisely known, but it is assume that he died in 1456, and was born on or around the leap year of 1404, when Pope Innocent VII came to papal reign. From the scant historical offerings, John of Lerida created a doctrine that was reprobated by the Church and eventually silenced altogether. He belonged to the Franciscan Order. The source of this doctrine has been lost to time, but some rumoured accounts as to its contents remain.
In the year 1444, the anti-Pope Felix V and his notorious desire for potable gold came to learn of John of Lerida, and asked him to write a text on how to transmute base metals into gold, expressed in Aristotelian terms. From a source of dubious authority, John of Lerida is said to have assented to this request. However, according to this same account, John of Lerida had a secret enemy in the Franciscan ranks, a bishop named only Xinevius (I have not found, in any of my research, any further mention as to validate this person's actual existence). John of Lerida spent two years compiling the text which he entrusted to his servant for delivery to Felix V. En route, the servant was detained and the text confiscated for review. Xinevius' agents had intercepted the servant and, on his order, hired a few copyists to alter the original document by the insertion of various heretical statements. The document was then rerouted to the current Pope, Nicholas V (a Dominican) who issued the order of reprobation. Given that the anti-Pope in Avignon did not receive the document he had requested of John of Lerida, the latter fell from favour. The text itself, originally entitled Secretum de auro potabili was changed to the more forceful Testamentum, filled with heretical invective not of John of Lerida's authorship. However, it is not as though John of Lerida had not already been suspect in his true opinions and writings, and so it was not so farfetched that he would be held in contempt.
John of Lerida cleaved to the unorthodox - if not heretical - view that God was composed of four substances, each corresponding to the four winds. This view he deduced from an obscure commentary (author unknown) of Al-Ghazali and a creative interpretation of the Almagest (the latter having already been listed in the Index for its profane novelties). His view of a four-winds deity had its oriental inflection, but this view was very meticulously couched with fidelity to the current doctrinal acceptance of Aristotle.
Due to a metaphysical storm that arose among the clergy at the time that John of Lerida distanced himself from, his being suspected heresy was seemingly forgotten until after his death when the case of John of Lerida was reopened by a zealous Cardinal who had the Pope's ear.
Like Amaury of Bena two centuries prior, he was disinterred from his consecrated resting place, and his followers sentenced to the stake, thus bringing an end to the Leridans.
Of the fifty or so Leridan followers (accounts vary), most were brought to ecclesiastical justice, and if any survived, history has been silent. The Leridan sect did not enjoy the obsessive historical attention the Cathars, Albigensians, or other heretical sects have since been subject to. Even a corresponding connection to a follower of Raimundi Lulli is based on conjecture unsupported by any reliable documentation. However, legend (which has the ability to flourish without the fetters of textual proof) has it that John of Lerida had been inspired by Lulli's idea for devising the cipher wheel, and that the two men shared a close intellectual bond that went willingly unrecorded for reasons of secrecy and protection.
Like Peter of Maricourt, John of Lerida is attributed with having perfected upon the former's work for a mirror capable of creating fire. The value of such a potential weapon in the late medieval world is beyond dispute. The alchemical method required to bring this fantastic mirror to term would have made obfuscation from Church concern challenging.
If the Lerdians, or what remained of them, had survived the purge and took with them the works of their Master, it is most likely they remained in hiding and delved deeper into the secrets of the Mirror of Fire. If this is the case, it is yet again an instance of operation in the blind spot of recorded history.
There have been a few loose mentions in the modern day, although these may be a jape or a product of hasty and nostalgic connection. A self-proclaimed “Leridan” was declined a position at Lockheed Martin for a proposal involving a space-based mirror that could amplify the sun's rays and be directed at any target on earth via computer - effectively functioning as an enormous and devastating magnifying lens.
However, these airy speculations and scant clues cannot be adequately corroborated by any authoritative source, so we must well leave them for more patient hands. It is best to return to the inventor himself, and the mysterious properties of his mirror.
It is said that he applied a tain of his own alloy on the back of a mirror, a recipe he refused to divulge. Some say it was of specific parts mercury and obsidian, while others go as far as to say that John of Lerida discovered the substance that unites the terrestrial and celestial realms, harmonizing matter and form in ways far more conclusive and concrete than any of
Aristotle's abstract syllogistic proofs. Others have declared (without due authority) that he was a student of optics, and this his use of light and reflection was a matter of clever trickery. However, none of these reports record ever having witnessed the product of John of Lerida's feverish pursuit, and there has been no physical evidence of any such mirror bequeathed to the ages.
In actual fact, John of Lerida was not in any serious danger of being placed under the Church's severe scrutiny given its preoccupation with more pressing political matters, and so it is unlikely that he would have felt any need to destroy a mirror of this nature in order to spare himself or his secrets. It is probably speculation (confessedly my own) that the mirror never advanced beyond the design phase, and so its manufacture would have been entrusted to his followers.
We come now to the dubious and contradictory information concerning his followers – the only trace clue that may bring us back to the man himself. One account lists them to be as many as fifty in all, whereas other accounts differ by a more modest twelve to thirty-six. Church records are equally as inconsistent since in two separate documents of relatively high authority, the number of Leridans burnt in 1459 were seventeen and thirty-six in the two respective records. A difference of nineteen followers is a considerable gap, especially given the refined and meticulous nature of Church record.
It would be tempting to believe that John of Lerida had at least one secretly sympathetic figure of high authority willing to sign off on a death order for thirty-six Leridans on paper while giving nineteen pardons in secret. The authority charged with executing the sentence would not have known the initial number, and would have recorded only those who appeared at the stake on the appointed day. It is tempting to believe this because I want to believe it; otherwise, I would have to admit that time has removed any trace of the Leridans and any hope of retrieving the truth.
Unlike other purges, the immolation of the Leridans was not made a matter of public record. The burnings were executed privately, and inquiries were silenced or lost in a maze of bureaucratic shuffling. Future popes had no knowledge of the Leridans – since the matter was of no memorable account – and so it is as though the history of the Leridans was written in invisible ink.
Of John of Lerida, there is scantly more information, but there is no explicit mention of magical mirrors or the sect he authored (if he in fact did so, and it was not created posthumously). The record merely itemizes unrevealing information: his ordainment, degree in the Franciscan Order, a few attributed works, suspected for novelty, and death. The four substantial scriptural commentaries he penned are listed, but are curiously absent from the Vatican's library holdings. In terms of his dealings with the anti-Pope Felix V, anti-Pope historians have found no mention of John of Lerida in any of Felix V's correspondence or personal notes. The same holds for Xinevius, which is odd given that a fierce opponent would have written something about and against John of Lerida. This is where the more solid connections of the history end, and a temporal gap emerges until the heyday of the Jesuit Order.
A one Xavier of Lerida took some interest in the history of his region and came across mention of John of Lerida. In 1571, Xavier of Lerida appointed the task to a group of mendicants to locate John of Lerida's written works. Lacking critical apparatus, a group of careless copyists (that pledged faith to the master in name more than deed) forged a hopeless confusion. Corrections were attempted by more schooled and conscientious minds, but this only made matters worse, compounding error with more error. Interpolations, elliptical phrasing, glaring lacunae, overwrought guesswork, and wild speculation transformed the Leridan doctrine (as it began to be called) from an elegant treatise to a veritable dog's breakfast.
Another aspect occulted in the deliberation of the Leridan Mirror was the tendency of overeager thinkers beguiled by optical sciences to insert their own findings in place of the Master's. Perhaps feeling well-intentioned to clarify any metaphysical or alchemical muddiness they erroneously perceived, they took gross liberties in editing our every nuance of the Master's preparatory design for the Mirror by merely imputing to him their own scientific prejudice and optical treatments. Namely, the simplicity of natural science in stating that mirrors in a particular configuration can cause rays of light to converge on a single point did ill-service to John of Lerida's rarefied exposition. If we were to take the Jesuit copyists' view as being a faithful reiteration, then John of Lerida's work would not have been suspected of any heretical danger. The problem with this selective rereading of the Leridan Mirror is the risk of leading subsequent scholarship to reduce John of Lerida as being merely another amateur observer of optical phenomena. If said interpretation held, John of Lerida and his invention would be of only minor and inconsequential anecdotal significance.
Despite the botched and brief-lived John of Lerida revival inaugurated by the Jesuits, which only seemed to bring the matter to a premature and uninteresting conclusion, I cannot in fairness dismiss the Leridan Mirror as settled or anything less than an enigma. To assume that he was some amateur observer or a trickster does not accord with much of the intrigue surrounding his name, nor several of the dangling ends of this mystery. Since I had come to an impasse, I approached my friend – the Peter of Maricourt scholar – with my findings to see if he could be of any assistance in directing my inquiry. This is the letter he sent me:
Dearest Friend Gimaldi -
I'm glad to hear that you are keeping mentally active with these research aerobics. I've always considered you a serious mind since I first met you, and serious minds in an age of academic celebrity are a sad rarity. I am afraid that you have made an appeal to one of my intellectual blind spots since I doubt that I can provide you with any other information than you have already quite astonishingly uncovered. Peter of Maricourt is a much more accessible topic, but you prove yourself the high pedigree of scholar that takes the hardest road in choosing a topic where nearly all the leads have gone cold. Although I most likely lack the finesse of mind you possess or the sources you have acquired your information from, could I be so bold as to make a speculative gesture by declaring that John of Lerida's Mirror is not actually so crudely an object as it is a metaphor for a more sophisticated metaphysical view? It was not uncommon for the time that learned men with dangerous ideas would conceal their ideas metaphorically, or in code, or by other means. This, of course, is just my humble suggestion, most likely incorrect, and something you have already considered (and since dismissed). I will make my inquiries here. For the time being, bon chance!
Although my colleague could not furnish me with any useful links, his suggestion that John of Lerida's Mirror was purely symbolic had considerable merit. I devoted my research time toward metaphorical uses of the mirror in matters of philosophy and theology. It was then that I came across a small work simply entitled Speculum Mundi by Theodotian of Patmos, 1493. In it, he claims that God is the culmination of all converging light. Against the view of a round earth that faces outward, he states that the sky is a pure illusion, and that we are all residing on the inside of a sphere. The sun (or God) is at the centre of this sphere and casts the light of creation upon the world. The world, in turn, reflects this light back unto God. A diagrammed model appears in this text where light emerging from a central source inside a sphere is reflected back toward the centre. Theodotian makes frequent mention of Heraclitus who said all was created by fire and would return to it. The strong Pagan and anti-Church doctrine nature of this text was obviously heretical. God becomes the fire-source of all created matters, and all created matters reflect themselves unto him, perpetuating God as a fiery entity. This co-dependence between God and matter reduced God's divinity as partially reliant on the empirical world. Theodotian cites Aristotle as his authority in only one instance, making a hasty deduction: Aristotle states that when we think of the past, we look down; when we think of the future, we look up. What would otherwise be an innocuous anthropological observation becomes something other in Theodotian when he
makes the connection here that God's fiery creation has already happened (past) and our future in returning to God-as-fire is yet to be (future). Humans, according to him, have an innate understanding of this temporal relationship, the kind that plants also possess in growing toward the sun. Furthermore, Theodotian states, it would be possible to make “smaller gods” by somehow suspending a source of light inside a perfect sphere that had a mirrored interior. The danger, he warns, of making either the mirror or the light source imperfect would be a disastrous conflagration.
Circumstances began drawing me away from my initial eagerness in recovering the truth behind John of Lerida. As a way of putting the matter to bed just as the Jesuits had done, I wrote an article that was subsequently published with my musings intact. The loose threads that suggested that the Leridans were possibly still active after all these centuries, using the Mirror of Fire as some representation of the true divine essence, factored a bit too strongly in my article. I say this because someone may have taken issue with my conclusions which may have brought to light something that wanted to stay hidden. The event took place three months ago at home. My curtains were open and it was a very sunny day. I was sitting beside the window and reading what would be my last book to be read in the usual manner. I saw two men in their 40s across the street. One made a bizarre gesture I have yet to recognize, while the other held some kind of oval object delicately curved on its edges, no bigger than a wallet. This object was turned just so and aimed directly at my eyes. The doctors did not believe me that this was the cause of my blindness, but rather I must have burned them by being too close to a flame. Suffice it so say, my condition was inoperable.
The Infinite Library Page 24