Imajica

by Clive Barker

  Thes ‘reh’ ot One of the few surviving Eurhetemecs left in Yzordderrex, Thes ‘reh’ ot served as the prosecution before Lu ‘chur’ chem in the trial of Pie ‘oh’ pah.

  Thomas Roxborough A wealthy merchant and scholar who often kept company with the Maestro Sartori. Thomas Roxborough’s home later served as the heart of the society known as the Tabula Rasa.

  Three Rivers A particularly desolate region in the Third Dominion between Mai-ké and L’Himby. While the soil is rich and the water supply for potential agricultural irrigation is abundant, a photosynthesis-inhibiting microorganism makes the waters toxic for terrestrial plant life.

  Tick Raw The Maestro who represented the Fourth Dominion in the Synod during the Reconciliation. Tick Raw had also been an assistant to Uter Musky during the Maestro Sartori’s first attempt at Reconciliation. Also known as the Evocator.

  Tishallulé One of the Sisters of the Delta, the Goddess Tishallulé was trapped in the lake at the Cradle of Chzercemit by Hapexamendios as he passed through the Third Dominion. Also known as the Cradle Lady.

  Tolland Self-proclaimed leader of a tribe of homeless people occupying the cardboard towns of the South Bank. A vicious, violent, and unforgiving fellow, even on his best behavior. Tolland is also the less-than-affectionate name given to the striped mule that Monday and Gentle rode through the desert to the Erasure. Also known as Tolly.

  Tolly See Tolland.

  Tombs of the Vehement Loki Lobb Fabled tourist attraction of the Fourth Dominion. Much like the Fifth Dominion’s lost city of Atlantis, the tombs are an important part of the Fourth’s folklore. Not only is the location of the Tombs in question but the historical importance of Loki Lobb himself seems to be the subject of great debate.

  Trevor One of Monica’s ex-boyfriends.

  Troy Marlin’s friend that recommended the Neo-Nativity play to Marlin and Judith, stating it was the best thing since Bethlehem.

  Tyburn An area west of London famous for its public executions. The Autarch Sartori learned justice there, witnessing the hangings at the Tyburn tree before leaving the Fifth Dominion. Tyburn is also the place where Dowd procured Celestine for the Unbeheld.

  Ugichee A small fish that inhabits the depths off the Yzordderrexian coast. During certain stages of its life, it lives within the belly of another fish, feeding off the contents of its host’s stomach.

  Uma Umagammagi An ancient Goddess of the Imajica worshiped since before Hapexamendios’s great journey across the Dominions. She is one of the three Sisters of the Delta. Also known as Mother Imajica, Uma is the acting matriarch amongst her fellow Sisters.

  Unbeheld, The See Hapexamendios.

  Underground Refers to London’s famous railway system, much of which travels beneath the city itself.

  Uredo A poisonous feit that slowly dissolves its unfortunate victim. The spell is snatched from its caster’s eye before being thrown at its intended target.

  Uter Musky Maestro who represented the Fourth Dominion during Maestro Sartori’s first attempt at Reconciliation. Uter died in the Reconciliation’s chaotic conclusion, too focused on maintaining the Ana to protect himself from the terrors of the In Ovo.

  Van Gogh Nineteenth-century Dutch postimpressionist painter. His works were highly favored by Chester Klein’s selective clientele.

  Vanaeph Shanty town on the outskirts of Patashoqua where Gentle and Pie begin their journey across the Dominions. It is a haven for refugee and rogue alike. Also known as Neo Vanaeph.

  Vandenburgh’s Department store in London where Judith once worked.

  Vanessa Gentle’s live-in lover and financial support for fourteen months.

  THE UNBEHELD

  VANAEPH

  YZORDDERREX

  Viaticum Kesparate A particularly volatile Kesparate in Yzordderrex on the eastern slope of the city. The Viaticum is home to a handful of sacred locations that are revered by a number of minor religions. Consequently, it is a breeding ground for theological terrorists.

  Vigor N’ashap Oethac in charge of the Maison de Santé. An honored veteran of the Autarch’s regime, Vigor was given reign of this asylum housing criminally insane men.

  Village, The Refers to Greenwich Village in New York City. The Village is a mecca for the creative, the rebellious, and the bohemian.

  Voider A brutal species that haunts the wastes north of the Lenten Way in the Third Dominion. Voiders come in many shapes, being made, some said, from collective desire. Their intelligence is limited, but their loyalty, once attained, is unwavering. Most Voiders were banished to the In Ovo by powerful clergymen in the Third, but rumors that some still remain have thwarted settlement of that otherwise desirable land.

  Wanderer, The See Hapexamendios.

  Waterloo Bridge Bridge spanning the Thames River in London designed by John Rennie.

  William Older brother to Vanessa. It was at one of William’s parties that Gentle was introduced to Martine, one of his many lovers.

  Willis An officer of the parish whom the Maestro Sartori had once beaten for being cruel to his charges.

  Writs Magical writings or spells.

  Yark Lazarevich Yzordderrexian guard who led Gentle through the labyrinth of the Palace and to the Pivot Tower.

  Yoke Small English village in the shadow of the Godolphin estate. Yoke residents suspected Joshua Godolphin of sacreligious acts and subsequently set his house afire. Even in modern times, Yoke remains a simple hamlet with perpetually superstitious inhabitants.

  Yzordderrex A coastal city in the Second Dominion that has been the reigning capital seat of the Imajica since the Autarch Sartori’s rise to power. Almost incomprehensible in size, the “city-god” of Yzordderrex towers above the Second Dominion like a mountain. The Autarch’s Palace sits atop the city’s crest, overlooking the innumerable buildings and their dwellers below. Yzordderrex is comprised of several city-states called Kesparates, each with its distinct social, cultural, and political differences. Despite their differences, the Kesparates are subject to the laws of Yzordderrex and are policed by agents of the Autarch.

  ZARZI

  Yzordderrexian Express A point of crossing from the Fifth Dominion to the Second. Oscar Godolphin would often cross from the Retreat directly into the basement of Hebbert Peccable’s house in Yzordderrex using the Express built on his family’s property some two hundred years prior.

  Zarzi An insect common to the Second, Third, and Fourth Dominions with the wingspan of a dragonfly and a body as fat and furred as a bee. Zarzi typically feed on sheep’s ticks, though they’re happy to dine on anything that bleeds when ticks can’t be found.

  Zenetics Extreme religious order found throughout the Second Dominion whose origins and practices are shrouded to the uninitiated. As long as anyone can remember, the Zenetics have been waging a subtle war against the Scintillants, though their religious beliefs vary only slightly.

  Afterword(s): Clive Barker on Imajica

  Editor’s note: The reader who wishes to navigate all of Imajica’s twists and turns unaided by a map is advised to read the novel itself prior to reading the material that follows.

  I wanted to create my own legends

  Imajica took fourteen months from the time I first put pen to paper till the day I turned it in. That was writing seven days a week, fourteen hours a day. Towards the end it was sixteen hours a day. But it was a book which obsessed me, right from the very beginning. I don’t quite know yet why that is. Part of it was the fact that the sheer scale of it required total immersion if I was going to pull it off. If I hadn’t gotten it right — and I hope I’ve gotten it at least part right — then I would have looked like a real fool, because here I am dealing with Christ and God and magic and all that stuff.

  And when, halfway through the book, the audience realises that Hapexamendios is the same God that people are worshipping when they go to Sunday Mass, the danger was that the audience would say, “Oh, give me a break. I’ll accept the idea of an invented god, but now you’re asking me
to believe that this god is Jehovah, this god is Yahweh, this god is the God whom people worship in the Western world” — and that’s a very different thing from one of the gods of a [Stephen] Donaldson novel.

  There is a danger of alienating [some readers]. I am sure there are going to be people who will say, “Sorry, this is too long.” But I also think there’s an audience that says, “Give me everything. Tell me everything you can tell me.”

  Over the last forty years there’s been a huge and consistent audience for Lord of the Rings and there’s certainly a huge audience for the Dune books. I wanted to create my own legends; I wanted to create something that my readership could enter into and invest their time and emotion in and feel deeply about over a period of many days, or even weeks, and that would stay with them as a world they could enter and re-experience if they wanted.

  From “Boundless Imajination” by W.C. Stroby, published in Fangoria, January 1992.

  Knocking down the whole damn wall

  The worlds which open up in Imajica, just in terms of their physical scale, not to mention their metaphysical scale, are so much larger than I would have dared attempt even a couple of years ago. My readers . . . are very glad that they have more than the shock tactics to engage them through an 850-page book. And remember, the horror, the darkness, has never gone. Imajica has still got some very dark passages in it. So have The Great and Secret Show and Weaveworld. What’s been added is this, hopefully, transcendental level.

  What’s also been added is a sense of thoroughly created worlds — I mean worlds with names, tribes, flora and fauna, religions, cults, and so on. I did hint at dimensions hidden in secret places in the horror fiction, obviously, and a lot of it contains the sense that if you open the wrong door you’re going to find yourself lost in another world. The way I’m doing it now, it’s not just opening the door but knocking down the whole damn wall and saying, “Here it all is.” The readership, I think, is very excited by that prospect.

  In order to get through a big novel like Imajica, both as a reader and as a writer, you need mystery — and you can’t have one mystery, you need to have many. There’s a pulling away of the veils constantly. What I’ve tried to do to the reader is say, “There isn’t the solid moral clarity of Lord of the Rings.” I do the reverse of that. Imajica’s characters are human beings like you and I who, of course, discover a larger purpose for themselves. But in discovering a larger purpose, rather than becoming more themselves — like the hobbits out there in the wilderness becoming more hobbity — my characters skin themselves. The lives they have fall away.

  From “A Strange Kind of Believer” by Stan Nicholls, published in Million, February 1993.

  An act of massive consequence

  Imajica started with my thinking about the images which appear in the great paintings of Christian mythology. Whether or not they’re true, they seemed to me to be potent, powerful, and important cyphers of image and meaning. So I considered writing a book which would be a fantasy, but which would also be about God, about belief, about a man who discovers that all his life he has been preparing for an act of massive consequence but didn’t realise it.

  In Imajica we have someone who is like the half-brother of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, but who is completely unaware of the fact. Not only this, but he also had a massive past responsibility which he has screwed up and forgotten.

  A lot of this came from the feeling that there is so much more in us than we completely comprehend, that our day-to-day lives with their petty annoyances perhaps shouldn’t distract us from a grander and deeper perception of ourselves.

  From “Barker USA” by David Howe, published in Starburst Yearbook 1991/92.

  Imajica stands to the life of Christ

  As Weaveworld stood to the story of the Garden of Eden, this stands to the life of Christ. It’s about what magic is really for, and it’s not for bringing rabbits out of hats.

  From “The Meaning of Magic” by Mark Salisbury, published in Fear, October 1990.

  All kinds of villainies against women

  Hapexamendios, the villain of Imajica, is the . . . . personification of the joyless, loveless, corrupt thing which has over eons created his own city of his own flesh. It happens to be, when you look at it, an extraordinary city, a glorious city. But when you look really closely at it, you see that it is a completely empty city. There’s nobody there, there’s no love there, there’s no joy there; there’s no compassion there because there are no people there. It’s just a self-serving system of self-glorification. Hapexamendios is, in a curious way, its prisoner.

  He’s finally dispatched simply because he wanted to destroy Goddesses. So the second part of the problem of the patriarchal God is that he’s been so successful, that he’s basically beaten out all the women, beaten out the matriarchs, and beaten out the Goddesses. I’m not saying that every Goddess out there was a good Goddess, because clearly there were some real villains among them. I’m sure really terrible things were done in the name of a Goddess — human sacrifice, castration, and all kinds of other things.

  I do believe that a certain balance is healthy. And the balancing of images of divinity in both sexes is what’s important here. The balancing of the Goddesses against the God, the image of procreation as against the image of the fertiliser. Enup, the sky Goddess of Egyptian mythology, overreaching the God who lies below. A wonderful, frightening image of sexual compatibility and the geographical compatibility of nature, of light and dark. What we’ve got in our system is one but not the other. We’ve got this incredibly one-sided vision of what the divine is.

  What Imajica does is create a mythology in which we go about trying to understand why Hapexamendios has done this. What terror it is in men that makes them control and engage in all kinds of villainies against women. What a mingling of desire and envy will do. You look at most of the males in Imajica, they have one or the other where women are concerned, and in some cases they have both. So that is where that mythology is based.

  From “Confessions” by Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen, published in Lost Souls, June 1995.

  On Imajica becoming a movie

  I think it’s impossible. In fact, I hope it’s impossible! I believe strongly that there are experiences which are best left on the page. An example: though I enjoyed Patrick Stewart recently playing Captain Ahab, nothing will ever convince me that the poetic density and metaphorical richness of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick has a cinematic equivalent. Somehow, what is a literary vision of the page simply becomes a big ol’ whale story on the screen. I fear the same thing would happen with Imajica — that once the language which is used to describe this spiritual journey is removed, much of its power will be diminished.

  From People Online, July 30 1998.

  On Imajica being reality

  Yes, in a strange way I do believe it’s possible. I don’t believe that our consciousness has fully grasped the complexity of reality, or, perhaps I should say, realities, in which we live. Our imaginations seem to offer us glimpses of other possibilities, other states of beings, other dimensions. I believe we will one day access those dimensions.

  From People Online, July 30 1998.

  The foreword to the 1995 two-volume edition

  Back and back we go, searching for reasons; scrutinizing the past in the hope that we’ll turn up some fragment of an explanation to help us better understand ourselves and our condition.

  For the psychologist, this quest is perhaps at root a pursuit of primal pain. For the physicist, a sniffing after evidence of the First Cause. For the theologian, of course, a hunt for God’s fingermarks on Creation.

  And for a storyteller — particularly for a fabulist, a writer of fantastiques like myself — it may very well be a search for all three, motivated by the vague suspicion that they are inextricably linked.

  Imajica was an attempt to weave these quests into a single narrative, folding my dilettante’s grasp of this trio of disciplines — psychology, physi
cs, and theology — into an interdimensional adventure. The resulting novel sprawls, no doubt of that. The book is simply too cumbersome and too diverse in its concerns for the tastes of some. For others, however, Imajica’s absurd ambition is part of its appeal. These readers forgive the inelegance of the novel’s structure and allow that while it undoubtedly has its rocky roads and its cul-de-sacs, all in all the journey is worth the shoe leather.

  For my publishers, however, a more practical problem became apparent when the book was prepared for its paperback edition. If the volume was not to be so thick that it would drop off a bookstore shelf, then the type had to be reduced to a size that several people, myself included, thought less than ideal. When I received my author’s copies I was put in mind of a pocket-sized Bible my grandmother gave me for my eighth birthday, the words set so densely that the verses swam before my then-healthy eyes. It was not — I will admit — an entirely unpleasant association, given that the roots of Imajica’s strange blossom lay in the poetry of Ezekiel, Matthew, and Revelation. But I was well aware, as were my editors, that the book was not as reader-friendly as we all wished it was.

  From those early misgivings springs this new, two-volume edition. Let me admit, in all honesty, that the book was not conceived to be thus divided. The place we have elected to split the story has no particular significance. It is simply halfway through the text, or thereabouts: a spot where you can put down one volume and — if the story has worked its magic — pick up the next. Other than the larger type, and the addition of these words of explanation, the novel itself remains unaltered.