Aegypt

by John Crowley

  Thus Hermes (Kraft wrote, Pierce read), and what if Bruno, having taken to heart this ancientest and most sacred of myths, and opening Copernicus’s book one starry night in Paris, in London, suddenly put the two together: and felt within his buzzing brain the puzzle solved? For if the sun is at the center and not the earth, then there are no crystal spheres to hold us in; we have only and always fooled ourselves, we men, kept ourselves within the spheres which our own flawed and insufficient senses perceived, but which were never there at all. The way to ascend through the spheres that hem us in was to know that we had already so ascended, and were on our way, in motion unstoppably. No wonder Bruno felt a titanic dawn approaching, no wonder he felt compelled to cry it across Europe, no wonder he laughed aloud. Mind, at the center of all, contains within it all that it is the center of, a circle whose circumference is nowhere, stretching out infinitely in every direction he could look in or think about, at every instant. Dare you say men are as gods? the shocked inquisitors in Rome would ask him. Can they change the stars in their courses? They can, Bruno answers; they can; they have already.

  Here Pierce had put down the book for a moment, surfeited and laughing himself, wondering what his twelve-year-old self could ever have made of all that; and when he raised it again, he found a footnote.

  Whether or not (the footnote read) this understanding which we have ascribed to Bruno is the true secret teaching intended to be discerned in the writings of Hermes Trismegistus (Oh hm, Pierce thought, that name) we leave to others to pursue. The interested reader might begin with Mead, who writes: Along this ray of the Trismegistic tradition we may allow ourselves to be drawn backwards in time towards the holy of holies of the Wisdom of Ancient Egypt.

  ‘And there it was,’ Pierce said. ‘There it was.’

  ‘Trizma-what?’ asked Julie.

  ‘Just listen,’ Pierce said. ‘Here it comes.’

  The book of Mead’s to which Kraft directed him (and perhaps his young self once too, who knew) was unfindable: Thrice-greatest Hermes, by G.R.S. Mead (London and Benares; the Theosophical Publishing House, 1906; three volumes). Looking for it, though, led Pierce to some strange places, the shops and shows of cranks and mystics he had not realized were quite so numerous, places he could not wholly bring himself to enter and yet could not deny must have some connection to the place he sought. Certain at least that he had not made it all up, he withdrew from their imaginings as from a private ritual; he turned away into better-lit places. And he was getting warm. History of ideas, History of Magic and Experimental Science, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, which he had thumbed in graduate school.

  He was definitely getting warm. There were others on the path suddenly, greater scholars than he; they were finding things out, they were publishing. Gratefully Pierce turned away from Bruno’s Opera omnia latine which he had glimpsed far down a stack at the Brooklyn Public, and into the shallow waters of Secondary Sources: and at length the University of Chicago mailed to him (he had been awaiting it more eagerly than he ever had any golden decoding ring of Captain Midnight’s) a book by an English lady who – Pierce knew it even before he tore the brown paper from the volume – had trekked his lost land from mountain to sea, and returned; returned, at the head of a caravan of strange goods, maps, artifacts, plunder.

  ‘And this,’ Pierce said, feeling just for a moment like the helpless narrator of that old endless campfire joke, ‘this is the story that she told.’ He drank again, and asked: ‘Do you know the word “hermetic”?’

  ‘You mean like hermetically sealed?’

  ‘That, and also hermetic, occult, secret, esoteric.’

  ‘Oh yes sure.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Pierce, ‘this is the story:

  ‘Sometime in the 1460s, a Greek monk brought to Florence a collection of manuscripts in Greek which caused a lot of excitement there. What they purported to be were Greek versions of ancient Egyptian writings – religious speculations, philosophy, magical recipes – that had been composed by an ancient sage or priest of Egypt, Hermes Trismegistus: Hermes the Three Times Very Great, you could translate it. Hermes is the Greek god, of course; the Greeks had made an equivalence between their Hermes, god of language, and the Egyptian god Thoth or Theuth, who invented writing. From various classical sources they had – Cicero, Lactantius, Plato – the Renaissance scholars who first got a look at these new manuscripts could find out that the author was a cousin of Atlas, the brother of Prometheus (the Renaissance believed that these were real ancient people), and that he was not a god but a man, a man of great antiquity, who lived before Plato and Pythagoras and maybe even before Moses; and that these writings were therefore as old as any in the history of mankind.

  ‘A terrific stir was started in Florence by the arrival of these Egyptian writings. They’d been rumored to exist, even in the Middle Ages: Hermes Trismegistus was one of those shadowy ancients who had a medieval reputation as a great wizard, along with Solomon and Virgil, and various Black Books and treatises were ascribed to him – but here was the real original thing. Here was Egyptian knowledge older than the Romans and the Greeks, older maybe than Moses – in fact there would be speculation that Moses, raised an Egyptian prince, got his secret wisdom from this very source.

  ‘See, what you have to remember in thinking about the Renaissance is that they were always looking back. All their scholarship, all their learning, was bent toward re-creating as best they could the past in the present, because the past had necessarily been better, wiser, less decayed than the present. And so the older an old manuscript was, the older the knowledge it contained, the better it must turn out to be, once it had been cleansed of the accretions and errors of later times: the closer to the old Golden Age.

  ‘So can you see how exciting this must have been? Here was the oldest knowledge in the world, and what do you know? It sounded like Genesis; it sounded like Plato. Hermes must have been divinely inspired to foreshadow Christian truth. Plato himself must have drunk at this source. In dialogues between Hermes and his pupil Asclepius and his son Tat you can see not only a philosophy of ideas like Plato’s but a philosophy of light like Plotinus and even an incarnated Word like the Christian logos, Son of God, creative principle. Hermes practically became a Christian saint. A rage for Egypt and Egyptian stuff began that runs right through the Renaissance.

  ‘More, though. These Egyptian dialogues are intensely spiritual, pious, abstract; they talk a lot about escaping the power of the stars, about discovering the soul’s power to be like God, but there’s almost no real practical advice about that stuff. Where there was practical advice, though, was in those old magic books the Middle Ages had transmitted and ascribed to Hermes; and who knew, maybe they were the practical side of the abstract principles. Corrupted, of course, and terribly dangerous to use, but still containing the power of the good ancient Egyptian magic of Hermes. So Hermes was responsible for serious people taking up the practice of magic in a big way.’

  ‘Wow,’ Julie said. ‘Huh.’ Her eyes had begun to shine in a way he remembered; her finger idly wiped the sugar from the rim of her daiquiri. He had her now.

  ‘And the new science too,’ Pierce said. ‘If man is brother to dæmons, and capable of anything, what’s to stop him working in the world, doing amazing things? If the whole plentitude of Nature can be ordered and reflected in the knowing mind of man, like Bruno believed? I think Bruno did get encouragement from Hermes to take up the Copernican system, not because the idea was evidentially more convincing, but because it was more marvelous, more wonderful, the true secret Egyptian view come back again.’

  ‘Well,’ Julie said, ‘everybody knows the Egyptians knew the earth went around the sun. They kept it secret, but they knew.’

  Pierce stopped in his spate, mouth open. Julie’s eyes were still ashine with intelligence and attention. ‘So go on,’ she said, and licked her finger.

  ‘Well but remember,’ Pierce said. ‘Remember now, there was almost nothing really kno
wn then about the culture and beliefs of ancient Egypt. Even before the Roman era the understanding of hieroglyphics had disappeared; they wouldn’t be understood again until the nineteenth century. Nobody in the Renaissance knew what was written on obelisks, or what the pyramids were for, or anything. Now, in the light of these intensely spiritual, semi-Platonic magical writings, they began studying. Hieroglyphics: they must be some sort of mystic code, picture-story of the ascent of the soul, aids to contemplation, maybe hypervalent, like Rorschach blots or Tarot cards . . .’

  ‘Sure,’ Julie said.

  ‘And pyramids, obelisks, temples – they ought to contain encoded Egyptian science, geometry older than Euclid, secret proportions and magical properties maybe now able to be unlocked . . .’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘But it’s not so!’ Pierce cried, displaying his palms. A diner at the next table cast a cool eye in his direction, lovers’ spat probably, don’t show them you noticed. ‘It’s not so! That’s the most wonderful and amazing and strange thing. These writings which the Renaissance ascribed to the god-king-priest Hermes Trismegistus, and from which they got their whole picture of ancient Egypt, weren’t really ancient at all. They certainly weren’t written by one man. They weren’t even Egyptian.

  ‘Whoever wrote the writings which came to Florence in the 1460s didn’t know a thing – anyway knew very little – about real Egyptian religion. Scholars today have a hard time finding even a trace in them of the real corpus of Egyptian myth or thought.

  ‘Not even a trace.

  ‘What they really are, these writings, as far as we can tell now, are the scriptures of a late Hellenistic mystery cult, a gnostic cult of the second or third century A.D. A.D.,’ he emphasized. ‘There were lots of them flourishing in Alexandria around then, among Hellenized Egyptians and Egyptian Greeks; Alexandria then must have been sort of like California now, cults, everybody into something. So if these scriptures contain stuff that foreshadows Christianity, it’s no surprise; if they sound like Plato or Pythagoras or Plotinus, it’s not because they influenced Plato and them, but the other way around. Platonism was just very much in the air just then.

  ‘So. The Renaissance made this titanic mistake. There were lots of reasons for it. Church fathers like Augustine and Lactantius in the postclassical period had talked about Hermes Trismegistus as though he were a real person, and so did Roger Bacon and Aquinas in the Middle Ages. There was no extrinsic evidence to show that the writings were fake, or not what they purported to be. There was, however, a lot of internal evidence; and by the middle of the seventeenth century the writings had been shown to be late Greek (there’s a mention in one manuscript of the Olympic games, for one thing), but the enthusiasts didn’t pay any attention; through the seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries they went right on believing in the Egypt of Hermes. The body of esoteric Egyptianism grew huge. Even in the nineteenth century – after Champollion, after Wallis Budge, after the real actual Egypt came to light – people like Mead and the Theosophists and Aleister Crowley and the mystics and magicians were still trying to believe in it.’

  ‘Aleister Crowley!’ Julie’s eyes widened further.

  ‘And all because of this crazy error, because of these pseudo-Egyptian scriptures! Because of the Hermetic writings – see, there’s that word, hermetic, magical, secret, sealed like an alchemist’s jar – because of those writings, Egypt came to mean all things mystical, encoded, profound; ancient wisdom lost; old age of gold now perhaps able to be recovered, to enlighten degenerate moderns. That’s the tradition; that’s what came down to us, in a thousand books, a thousand references. It’s the tradition that continues in the founding of the Freemasons, for instance, who always make a big deal out of their connection to Egypt, and through the Masons it comes to the Founding Fathers, some of whom were Masons, and so the pyramid and the eye of Egypt get onto the Great Seal of the United States and onto the dollar bill. And in the same way, the Sphinx and the temples and the wise priests get into The Magic Flute, which Mozart based on the pseudo-Egyptian lore of his Masonic lodge.

  ‘And somehow – I don’t know exactly how – somehow it all descends to me. Somehow this intensely magical, other-worldly, imaginary country comes to me, is revealed to me, in Kentucky, through books of different kinds, through the goddamn air maybe. But at the same time I knew about the actual historical Egypt too, about which real knowledge has been accumulating through the centuries; I knew about mummies and King Tut and Ra and Isis and Osiris and the Nile rising and all those slaves hauling blocks of stone. So what it seemed like to me was that there were two different countries, somehow near each other or at right angles to each other. Egypt. And Ægypt.

  ‘And I was right! There are two different countries. The one I dreamt and thought about, it has a history too, as Egypt does, a history just as long but different; and different monuments, or the same monuments with completely different meanings; and a literature, and a location. You can trace the story of Egypt back, and back, and at a certain point (or at several different points) it will divide. And you can follow either one: the regular history-book one, Egypt, or the other, the dream one. The Hermetic one. Not Egypt but Ægypt. Because there is more than one history of the world.’

  He finished his drink. A waiter had appeared beside them, had been beside them for some little time, perhaps listening to Pierce’s peroration. Julie at length drew her eyes from Pierce and looked up at the waiter. ‘We’d better order, huh?’

  ‘That’s the story I want to tell,’ Pierce said. ‘But it’s just one story, and not the tenth part of it. Not the tenth part.’

  ‘Eggs Florentine, I guess,’ Julie said. ‘No potatoes.’

  ‘Magic cities,’ Pierce said. ‘Cities of the Sun. Why was Louis the Fourteenth the Sun King? Because of Hermes.’

  ‘Tea,’ Julie said. ‘With lemon.’

  ‘And there are other stories,’ Pierce said. ‘Other stories just as good. Angels, for instance. That’s a story I want to tell. Why are there nine choirs of angels, do you think, and not seven or ten? Where do the little bodiless cherubs on Valentine cards come from? And why “cherub”?’ He looked at the waiter, ordered (his stomach was a dark pit), and showed him the glass he had emptied. ‘Another,’ he said. ‘If I may.’

  A certain light seemed to have been withdrawn from Julie’s eyes. He was going too fast for her, overloading. How could it be communicated, how? If you had not had one history, one Renaissance drilled into you, the plain one, then how could you feel astonishment to discover this other one, the fancy? ‘And a dozen others I could tell,’ he said. ‘A dozen others.’ Rich, inexpressibly rich, the false histories and systems of thought that had been opened for him to look into by the wise scholars he had come to know, as rich as strange, incomprehensible even, stories somehow once conceived in and understood by minds that purported to be like his, yet couched in books whose thousands of folio pages, surreal illustrations in weird perspective, geometric charts and diagrams and mnemonic verses, seemed to be trying to describe some different planet altogether. Martin del Rio, Jesuit of Spain, had written a book of a million words, about nothing but angels.

  Pierce snapped out his napkin and drew it across his lap. Lost planet found, fanfares and wind-tossed drapery, it was the surprise he wanted most and felt least able to express: the surprise not only of having found it, but of having found it to be, however faintly, familiar.

  ‘It’s as though,’ he said, ‘as though there had once upon a time been a wholly different world, which worked in a way we can’t imagine; a complete world, with all its own histories, physical laws, sciences to describe it, etymologies, correspondences. And then came a big change in all of them, a big change, bound up with printing, and the discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler, and the Cartesian and Baconian ideals of mechanistic and experimental science. The new sciences were hugely successful; bit by bit they scrubbed away all the persisting structures of the old science; they even scrubbed away the actually very stran
ge and magical way the world appeared to men like Kepler and Newton and Bruno. The whole old world we once inhabited is like a dream, a dream we forgot on waking, even though, as dreams do, it lingered on into all-awake thinking; and even now it lingers on, all around our world, in our thought, so that every day in little ways, little odd ways, we think like prescientific men, magicians, Pythagoreans, Rosicrucians, without knowing we do so.’

  ‘So yes okay but Pierce . . .’

  ‘So what I’m proposing,’ he went on, holding her off with a raised palm, ‘is a kind of archaeology of everyday life; a sort of scavenger hunt or paper chase, tracing backward these old persistences. Discovering them, though, first of all; discovering old mythical religious ahistorical accounts of the world in their modern versions, and then tracing the elements that compose them back to their earlier appearances, to their sources, to their first forms, if those can be found, the same way I did for my Egypt, Ægypt; back to the door into dream they issued from, the Gate of Horn.’

  ‘Horn,’ Julie murmured, ‘horn, why horn I wonder.’

  ‘And you know what?’ Pierce said. ‘More and more often I’m learning that when you do trace them back, these false histories and magic accounts of the world, and follow them to the crossroads, so to speak, to where they take off on their own from the regular history of Western civilization, then you always keep coming to the same juncture: somewhere between 1400 and 1700. Not the notions themselves, no, they’re mostly much older; but the forms in which they come down to us. Because at that time, I’m not certain why though I’ve got some ideas, right at that time when what we recognize as modern science was coming into being, there was also an enormous revival and codification of all kinds of Ancient Wisdom and magical and traditional pictures of the world. Not only Hermes and Ægypt, but Orpheus and Zoroaster and Jewish Kabala too, and Lullism – don’t ask – and the wildest neo-Platonists, like Proclus and Iamblichus, who was also a big Egyptianizer. Alchemy, all reimagined and hugely inflated by Paracelsus that nut; and astrology given a big impetus by new modes of computation; and angel-magic, and telepathy, and Atlantis . . .’