The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  I hope readers will forgive this long, not altogether irrelevant, digression. In the field of the human sciences, which in the last century has seen progress comparable to that made in the physical sciences, the discovery of the Petra manuscripts is an event of the same importance as the discovery of Hiram Bingham and Heinrich Schliemann of the ruins of Onessa. The Petra manuscripts have modified profoundly our knowledge of the history of Eastern mysticism. They have thrown new light on centuries of history. They have radically altered our ideas on the religious evolution of a large part of the world. Above all, they give us essential information about what was hitherto a practically unknown period in the life of Alexis. Thus, across the centuries, are indissolubly linked the lives of Armand Bourdaille, Jewish-Moslem scholar and Uniate priest, and Alexis, priest of the sun and Emperor.

  It will be noted that the discovery of the Petra manuscripts dates from 1952, a certain number of additional texts having come to light at the end of 1954.[2] Furthermore, the Ritter manuscript, which has already been referred to in connection with Arsaphes and Simeon,[3] was found by the Berlin historian in the archives of the Sublime Porte in 1953. So around the middle of this century there was a complete renewal of historical knowledge concerning the origins of the Empire. Without the Petra manuscripts we should know nothing of Alexis’s withdrawal. They enable us to arrive at at least a rough idea of the meaning and religious background of that withdrawal. All we shall say here about what has been called the “secret years” of Alexis is taken from the Petra manuscripts, from Armand Bourdaille’s and Father Badalwi’s interpretation of them, and from Sir Allan Carter-Bennett’s and Robert Weill-Pichon’s comments on that interpretation.

  Alexis left Alexandria the day after the execution. With him went Philocrates, to whom he owed not only his life but also the constant moral support that he needed even more. He had two deaths on his conscience; he had committed a crime against religion; to degradation and debauchery he had added lying, dissimulation, and cowardice; he had brought about the murder of the priest who had initiated him into the cult of the sun; and he had delivered his mistress over to the most horrible torture. Seven (or twelve) years of renunciation and penitence would not be enough to erase the memory of these crimes from his mind and heart. Later on we shall see the attitude of the Catholic Church toward Alexis, and the honors it lavished on him. But at the same time the Church would also number him in the ranks of the criminals, and describe him as a “stinking goat” and “Antichrist.” Dante, while weaving him immortal crowns, gives him a place in the Inferno, at the bottom of the Malebolge, between Archbishop Rugghieri, who betrayed Ugolino, who himself betrayed his country, and Bocca degli Abati, who betrayed the Guelphs.[4] Bossuet, Lacordaire, and Montalembert hold up to the opprobrium and execration of the ages the picture of Helen’s son wallowing in the pleasures and follies of Alexandria. Only Armand Bourdaille forgives him everything and absolves him. For Alexis, the day when he left Alexandria for the wilderness and a new exile was the beginning of a second or even a third life, after the disaster of bastardy, after the tragedy of love and death. And, as Sir Allan Carter-Bennett puts it, “this second life opened upon a first death.” For what Alexis would be seeking was the death of the flesh, the death of the mind.

  It seems Philocrates stayed with his pupil a few months, and that Alexis then sent him away, in order to be alone with himself. Then, somewhere in the deserts of Arabia, he led the most wretched and retired of lives. According to the Petra manuscripts he at first took refuge in a cave, where he lived on goat’s milk and dates. But soon even this existence no longer brought him peace—it was too easy, it left him too much time for memories and remorse. He needed to mortify and crush the flesh, to prevent the mind from thinking and the memory from functioning. Then he passed several months sitting motionless on top of a pillar, burned by the sun and whipped by the wind, tortured by insects and vermin, revived by the water and vinegar reached to him in a sponge on the end of a stick by pious women or passing caravaneers. Buñuel’s unfinished film, Alexis Stylites, outlines in a few images, aesthetically very fine if sometimes historically debatable, this period in the life of the future emperor. But Vanessa’s murderer had to look for and find something even worse than the torture of immobility, which at least left the body intact and upright and open to the sky. He had to descend under the earth, hide away from the sun, and break the limbs that had abandoned themselves to forbidden caresses.

  One of the most valuable things the Petra manuscripts give us is information about certain mysterious sects, about which we knew almost nothing before, that were scattered over a vast area between the Red Sea and the Euphrates and that carried the religion and mysticism of the sun to sometimes terrifying extremes. Bourdaille has shown clearly the links between these sects and later phenomena connected with Islam, such as the practices of the Hachchachin (or Assassins, or Fidda’iyyun, Nizarites or Batinians) and of the howling and dancing dervishes. He also proved beyond all dispute, with the help of Professor von Grünefeld of the University of California, that the person referred to in the Petra manuscripts as Alachian or Alechia or Alaouis is none other than Alexis himself. During his years of penance and fasting, Alachian, Alechia, or Alaouis arrived at such mortifications and self-violence that the memory of them was consigned to secret documents kept safe from military expedition or religious inquisition. And these documents, hidden in the cave at Petra, were to be found centuries later by a shepherd searching for his lost sheep.

  The sun worship of the sects Alexis went among consisted essentially of two complementary and opposite practices. The first, a kind of penance, consisted of hiding from the sun in the depths of the earth; the second consisted in exposing oneself to the sun until unconsciousness or sometimes even death ensued. To carry out this second practice, worshippers would lie on huge, flat stones, usually on a slight rise and in places where the air was driest and reflection most intense. There was a great risk of becoming totally blind, and these sects included a large number of people who had given their sight to the sun in exchange for the raptures of inner contemplation. Death from burns or dehydration was very frequent. Those who survived led a miserable life fleeing from persecution. Surrounded by popular fervor that could find little outlet in the extreme solitudes where they took refuge, they were pitilessly harassed and sometimes massacred both by the priests, who saw their excesses as heresy and provocation, and by the rulers and military chiefs, who regarded them as potentially subversive.

  Probably even more painful than exposure to the sun were the practices connected with burial. The ascetics who did not deem themselves worthy of the violences of the sun voluntarily eschewed its rays and its other gifts and buried themselves underground for months and months, in tunnels, mostly hollowed out by hand, which often collapsed on top of them, and in which they led a vegetative life in solitude and darkness.

  The two methods were often followed consecutively, and months underground would be succeeded by sudden exposure to the sun. In such cases death was rapid. Alexis first of all offered himself to the vengeance of the sun, but his youth and strength enabled him to survive. Then, since death would have none of him, he decided to bury himself alive.

  Both Armand Bourdaille and Sir Allan Carter-Bennett stress the possible motives that may have led Alexis to submit himself for so long to this kind of suffering. It is very probable that at first he saw obedience to the strictest precepts of the sun cult as a reparation for the sins he had committed toward it, its laws, and its priests. But it is also possible, and even likely, that in the particular practice of burial he found a reminder and expiation of Vanessa’s death. The Petra manuscripts give a rough and no doubt inaccurate location for the underground temples where Alexis interred himself. But they also give a comprehensive description of them that have been confirmed by various recent archeological discoveries, from the Red Sea to Yemen and even beyond the Tigris.

  The temple or tomb—whichever one chooses to call it—opened ou
tward on to a comparatively large kind of lobby, where worshippers and disciples would sometimes come to pray and leave offerings, food, and drink. Out of this atrium opened a sloping tunnel with niches in the walls that seem to have been filled with rough statuettes and other cult objects. The tunnel ended in a cul-de-sac formed by a slight widening in the form of an inverted cone. It was, of course, impossible to stand upright in the sacred chamber, and even though the occupant was immobile the slippery, uneven floor forced his body into the most painful contortions. Skeletons found on such sites confirm that the limbs and whole frames of the inmates became cruelly deformed. These constructions resemble in some respects the huge temples of the sun at Emesa and Edessa and Alexandria, where Alexis was initiated. Several of these tombs were quite large, and built not only by local craftsmen out of local materials but sometimes by quite famous architects using brick and wood to begin with, but later even such fine materials as stone and marble. Form, lighting, the slope of the tunnel were carefully calculated. At fixed dates—probably the summer and winter solstices—the rays of the sun at its zenith were made, by means of systems of movable mirrors, to reach the penitent in the depths of his cul-de-sac. But in addition to these impressively large and technically sophisticated edifices, the excavations conducted by Professor Bourdaille, from the time of the discovery of the Petra manuscripts until his death, have brought to light the almost vanished traces of many individual temples-cum-tombs, crudely constructed by hand and obviously doomed to rapid destruction. It seems Alexis first hid himself away in one of the large underground temples housing several ascetics, and afterward took refuge in a little vault hollowed out with his own hands in some deserted spot, where the death he yearned for would soon have overtaken him had an unforeseen circumstance not given his life yet another twist.

  As if curiosity and admiration were fated to gather round him in renunciation as in pleasure, a fame remarkable in that place and time began to attach to his withdrawal, his wretched existence, and his attempt to achieve anonymity and secrecy. The Petra manuscripts mention the rumor that drew crowds of believers and sightseers and spread far and wide, in more and more modified forms, the name of Alechia or Alaouis. Among the documents discovered in 1954 by Armand Bourdaille and Father Badalwi is a mystical text known as the Book of the Dead, in which appears the mysterious and attractive figure of the “Teacher of Goodness.” We have good reason to identify Alexis with this figure, the subject of some remarkable studies carried out by the Center for Oriental Studies at the University of California. For the present this can only be a hypothesis, but is is to be hoped that in the next few years new documents and new discoveries will enable us to resolve the problem and establish definite links between the Teacher of Goodness and Alexis. Hitherto we have kept strictly to our rule of putting forward only firmly established facts. It must be admitted that some people deny any connection between Alexis and the Teacher of Goodness; but although, of course, we do not wish to press too personal an interpretation, we are prepared to assert that we have no doubt about the matter. However that may be, how long did Alexis lead that gradually less and less secret life in the tombs of the sun? Three or four years, perhaps. We find traces of it beyond the Tigris and Euphrates, in Isfahan and Bamian, and on the banks of the Indus.

  By a paradox, sun worship was linked with moon worship, its converse and complement. On nights of full moon the priests of the sun would emerge from their tombs at midnight and proceed, if not to worship the moon, at least to go through the motions of sacrifices combining mystical elements with mockery, and with aspects both magic and erotic. Armand Bourdaille said this cult of the moon “was to the worship of the sun as the Black Mass is to the liturgical one.” It was probably this cult of the moon that served as a link between the ascetics of the Book of the Dead and the schismatic seers and soothsayers farther east. These existed as powerful secret sects in Babylon, Seleucia, Dura-Europos, Zingara, Nineveh, and all over Persia; and through the ages their occult influence had helped to undermine the ancient religion of Zoroaster, Ormazd, and Ahriman, to which they ostensibly belonged. Within this inverted cult of darkness and the moon, light and the sun reappeared in the form of a flame destroying the darkness. This flame, in turn, was put out by the priests in solemn and still unknown circumstances, probably connected with the positions of the stars, the calendar, the weather, seed time, and harvest. Sun and moon, light and darkness, good and evil alternated with one another. And light was in darkness, evil in good.

  Do the Petra manuscripts and the Book of the Dead actually mention Alexis’s connections with the cult of the moon and the priests of Persia and Babylon? The question has given rise to endless discussion, but the obscurity and ambiguity of the texts themselves have so far prevented any definite answer. At any rate, there is no doubt that Alexis was in Persia and was familiar with the moon worshippers. These facts, like that of his secret life in the tombs of the sun, have only been established in the last twenty years. Before that it was only a matter of legends and conjectures, supported by texts, stone inscriptions, chronicles, and travelers’ tales of which the true meaning has emerged only recently.

  On the other hand, orientalists have been familiar for three or four hundred years with the figure of a mysterious pilgrim whose historical reality seemed sure enough, but whose origins, role, nationality, and even identity gave rise to many questions. Despite certain inconsistencies, most commentators saw him as a Chinaman who became a traveler for reasons of trade, religion, and curiosity. This nationality was attributed to him because he appeared in chronicles and inscriptions under the name of Ha Li-chien or Ha Lee-chiang. He was mentioned as having been in Isfahan, Samarkand, Bamian, on the banks of the Indus and the Ganges, and even on the way to Nepal and Tibet. His name figures in a Buddhistic reliquary discovered by Tavernier in 1661 and is described by Chardin in 1686 in his Travels in Persia and the East Indies. He is mentioned on a trilingual stele erected by a Buddhist ruler on the borders of Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan. His travels and trials are alluded to by Voltaire, Montesquieu, Maxime Du Camp, and Claudel, who was consul in China. Some accepted all the traditions and myths that lent his name a legendary halo; others rejected them all. Believers and unbelievers were equally mistaken.

  This Chinese traveler attracted the attention of several scholars, including Armand Bourdaille, by reason of certain surprising physical descriptions, occasional allusions to his blue or green eyes, and especially the strange name he was known by in Isfahan and Samarkand, where he was called the Soul’s Traveler or the Fool of God. Now the idea of the Fool of God is neither Buddhist nor Chinese, but obviously belongs, if not to monotheism or one of the other religions in which the term itself is frequently encountered, at least to some mystical or stellar cult. Bourdaille was struck by this, and toward the end of his life examined the whole matter in the light of the supposition that a Chinese or Chinese-sounding name might have been attributed to a traveler who really came from the West, from the regions that, either before or after the time of Alexis and sun worship, were the home first of Judaism, then of Christianity, then of Islam. This working hypothesis turned out to be fruitful, and soon led to a new discovery that rounded off beautifully those of the Petra manuscripts and the Book of the Dead. As the reader will have guessed, Ha Li-chien or Ha Lee-chiang, the Chinaman with green eyes, was none other than Alachian or Alechia or, in other words, Alexis.

  It was then possible to reconstruct with reasonable probability the spiritual and geographical itinerary of the Teacher of Goodness. Sun worship had brought him into a symmetrical, contrasting relationship with the sects in Babylon and Persia which practiced the cult of the moon. The Middle East constituted what Sir Allan Carter-Bennett has called “a huge melting pot of religions and cultures,” and in the midst of it Alexis, anxious for retirement and solitude but inveterately curious and open-minded, and in search also of peace and salvation, entered into contact with Persian sages, Indian mystics, Chinese pilgrims and merchants. He
continued his flight toward the East. He went as far as India and joined caravans that, in exchange for spices and silk, brought to the outskirts of the Himalayas arms, objets d’art, and the produce of the vineyards of the Mediterranean. The Persian and Indian chronicles, and travelers in their accounts, accustomed to countless visits from sages and merchants come from a legendary China, and probably doing no more than the Chinese did themselves, bestowed on this other traveler a Chinese name. Experts on India and China take over at this point from Professor Bourdaille and Father Badalwi. They already knew much about the mysterious Ha Lee-chiang. The only thing they did not know was that he was Alexis. For us, who have been able to identify Alechia, Alaouis, Alachian, Ha Li-chien, Ha Lee-chiang, and Alexis as one, the whole life and destiny of the son of Helen and Fabrician the priest takes on new proportions and new meaning.

  After the years in Arabia, and the quest for at least a spiritual suicide, our Chinese-dubbed traveler was profoundly affected by two other doctrines, Buddhism and Taoism. We learn from several different sources that a Tibetan traveler, whom he probably met in Isfahan or Bamian, opened the eyes of the so-called Ha Lee-chiang to a world of which he had hitherto known nothing. Within the limits of this historical biography it is impossible to set out even the main features of the metaphysical systems that have influenced all this part of the world for centuries. But we can imagine those evenings in Babylon, Isfahan, or on the banks of the Indus when, for him who had been one of the living dead, the doctrine of a transcendental power ruling the universe according to immutable principles was replaced by the idea of the void, of cosmic multiplicity and ontological unity. Today, for those who know and admire Alechia, Alaouis, or Ha Lee-chiang, it is certain that if Alexis had not become a leader of men he would have played a key role in the development of ideas and the history of religious doctrine. Resplendent proof of this is given by the poems of his which have come down to us and which date from about this period. The traveler from Tibet who had initiated him into the mysteries of Taoism and Buddhism made him relive in imagination the great myths of Asia so well calculated to confound a child of Greece and of the Empire: the four meetings of Sakyamuni or Siddhartha Gautama, later to become the Buddha, with the old man, the sick man, the corpse, and the monk; the birth of Lao-tzu, the Old Master, over whom his mother meditated in her womb for eighty years; the flight of the same into exile and retirement, and how the keeper of the pass to the West said, “Since you are going to live as a hermit, write a book to teach me what you know”—and the master wrote the Tao Tê Ching.[5] All these new visions were matter for wonderment and meditation. “Next, after Helen, Philocrates, and Vanessa, who taught him to live and love,” writes Sir Allan Carter-Bennett, “Alexis’s true teachers are the sages of the East—Buddha, Lao-tzu, and the Master K’ung whom we call Confucius. He did not follow them all the way, but they taught him to think.” He was far from being converted by them, but they encouraged him to meditate, to look at the world, and to take in all at once the most ambitious systems, the most farfetched intellectual constructions, and the pitiable heart of man.