Aegypt

by John Crowley

  ‘Atlantis,’ Julie breathed.

  ‘It was like that hour before waking when your dreams are clearest and most memorable. A moment when all the histories and sciences of this old other world were put into their most complete and striking form, and seemed the most hopeful and convincing: just when it was all about to be suppressed and smashed and forgotten forever . . .’

  ‘Not forever,’ Julie said. ‘Never forever.’

  ‘Well so completely that a person, me, could go to Noate University, and get a degree in Renaissance Studies, and get only the teeniest glimpse of the tip of the drowned mountain. Even though the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance, the very ones who were inventing science, thought that the great project of their age was rescuing all that lost knowledge! Not coming up with new modes of feeling, new sciences, new machines, but Recovery! Memory! The power contained in ancient theologies, old magic systems, Noah’s science, Adam’s language! Ægypt!’

  The diners at the next table were once again turned to them. Pierce drew back into his chair, which he had been leaving, and Julie leaned forward to hear him. ‘Ægypt,’ he said softly.

  ‘And what kind of stuff,’ Julie said, ‘could they do?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean what could they do, these magicians?’

  Pierce blinked. ‘Do,’ he said. ‘Well now see this wasn’t at all the boiling-pot medieval stuff, conjuring, which was all based on the power of the Devil and the dead. The Renaissance magus mostly thought: he acquired power just by being attuned to the wholeness of the universe, and his own innate knowledge of it.’

  ‘Power,’ Julie said.

  ‘Well power,’ Pierce said. ‘So they supposed. I mean they did do alchemy. They made talismans of the planets, to draw into their minds and souls the planetary energies. They looked into crystal balls, and thought they saw angels. Bruno dreamt up a dozen elaborate mnemonic systems, for memorizing everything in the world, containing everything somehow. But a Renaissance magician’s power wasn’t used to enrich himself, or curse people. It was used simply to know. It was a system of science, with the same goals as the other kind of science, the kind we call science . . .’

  ‘Only we’ve forgotten what they did. What they could do. All that got suppressed, right?’

  ‘We’ve forgotten this whole story,’ Pierce said. ‘All we retain are details, impressions, bits and pieces scattered through our mental universe, like parts of a huge machine that’s been smashed, and can never be put back together again. Gypsies. Angels. Moses’s horns. The Age of Aquarius. That’s my point, that’s what I . . .’

  ‘But well just tell me a second,’ Julie said. ‘I mean all your little stories about history are interesting, and all. But tell me now. Tell me why it is you want to do this book. What your reason is for wanting to do it.’

  Pierce thought he saw a snare in Julie’s look, but didn’t know what it was. ‘Well, for its own sake,’ he said cagily. ‘Because I just think it’s a fascinating story, a kind of intellectual mystery story. I’m not sure you have to have any kind of practical reason. I mean History . . .’

  ‘’Cause I don’t see this as a history book at all,’ Julie said.

  ‘Well, a book about history.’

  ‘Or a book about history either. I think what you’re really writing is a book about magic. About the great lost tradition of magic. And that’s a book I know I can sell.’

  ‘Well no but see . . .’

  ‘You talked about a lost world-view,’ Julie said, and with an impulsive gesture took his wrist in her hand. ‘And bits and pieces of a smashed machine, that can never be put back together again. Well I don’t believe it can’t be put back together again.’

  ‘There are scholars, historians who are trying,’ Pierce said, ‘trying . . .’

  ‘And you know what I believe?’ She had leaned close to him, her summer-light eyes all soft fire. ‘I believe that machine worked. And you know what else? I think you believe it worked too.’

  FIVE

  ‘Nonononono,’ said Pierce.

  ‘Pierce you know I think it’s just so amazing that you’ve brought this idea to me now, I think it’s just so right. The time. The world. You.’ She raised her arm, and waved, smiling, as to a friend; her bracelets of wood and lacquer clashed. ‘See, that old tradition is so important to me. I believe in it. I believe in it. You know I do.’

  ‘You seemed to, once.’ What had he done. He took a paper pouch of tobacco from his pocket, and began to make a cigarette, a habit that had initially intrigued, and ended by annoying, the woman opposite him.

  ‘I feel it much more strongly now. There are things that have happened – well, never mind, someday I’ll tell you, but I might not even be here if, well anyway I know. I know those old ways of knowledge don’t die or get outdated. They might go underground. But there will always come a time when people are ready to understand them again, and the tradition is rediscovered. Isn’t that really what you’re saying? The Renaissance was one time. Now is another.’

  ‘Now,’ Pierce said.

  ‘Well yes! You can see it all around. Pierce you used to talk about nothing else. You were fascinated by it. Synchronicity. Recurrences. Act theory. The Age of Aquarius. And why? Why?’

  ‘Why,’ Pierce said.

  ‘Because! Because it’s time! The cycle has turned, and . . .’

  ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, Julie. It doesn’t. It’s only one way.’

  ‘No but like you said,’ Julie said. ‘It’s rediscovered, this tradition, but in a new way; you remake it, in your own terms, and that remaking of it changes the way you understand the whole history of it. Right?

  That’s what taking it up again means.’

  Pierce paused, his half-made smoke lifted to his tongue.

  ‘To take it up like we’re taking it up right now, this kind of knowledge, like you’re taking it up, means understanding it newly.’

  ‘Hm,’ he said. Noncommittally he sealed and lit the cigarette. ‘Hm.’

  ‘Because don’t you think regular science, the kind you said won out over the older kind, don’t you think it’s sort of run itself into the ground? Doesn’t the old, other stuff seem right now actually more modern?’

  ‘In what ways more modern?’

  ‘Well you tell me. I mean it just took in more, didn’t it, things that the regular kind of science leaves out. Telepathy. Intuition. Other ways of perceiving. Didn’t you say that Bruno and so on believed the earth was alive? Well it is.’

  ‘Ecology,’ said Pierce, the notion just then occurring to him. ‘Bruno’s planets, those living beings: our earth was one too, he thought, constantly in process. One big animal, and Man a part of it. A Biosphere.’

  ‘Yes!’ Julie said. ‘Yes, and what else, what else?’

  ‘Well the Monad,’ Pierce said. ‘The idea that the universe is one thing – that everything in it is intimately connected, interpenetrated by everything else. A dance of energy. Modern physics talks that way. It’s why the Renaissance magicians thought the magic that they did could work: why the casting of a talisman could reverberate in the interior of a planet.’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘The union of observer and observed,’ Pierce said, warming. ‘The idea that the observer, his mind-set – they might have said his spiritual intention – can alter what’s observed.’

  ‘Influences,’ Julie said, waving away Pierce’s smoke. ‘Affinities.’

  ‘A sense of the marvelous, of possibilities. Electricity wouldn’t have baffled those guys. Or X rays, or radio. The magicians believed in causative action at a distance, but the rationalist scientists of the time threw it out; then they had a hard time with it when Newton proposed it again as basic to the universe. Newton called it gravity. The magicians liked to call it Love.’

  ‘Love,’ Julie said, and a sudden sparkle bloomed in her eyes, Pierce had always marveled at how swiftly it could come. ‘See?’ she said.

  ‘You’d have to
be so careful though,’ Pierce said, ‘careful to distinguish . . .’

  ‘Oh sure, sure,’ Julie said, and her red thumbnail furled and released the corners of his few pages. ‘We have to talk, we have to think. To shape this thing, and focus it. But I know there are people, lots of people now, who want to hear this news. I know it.’ The waiter’s hand placed on the table, in neutral ground between them, the check. Julie’s hand covered it. ‘And I tell you, Pierce. That book I can sell. The history book, just history, I don’t know.’

  She allowed his thoughtful silence a long moment’s room, and then – ‘Listen, Pierce,’ she said softly, almost shyly, ‘I know this sounds really dumb, but I have to go now and eat another lunch.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Well I don’t think I’ll really eat. But it’s so crazy, so much of this business is done at lunch. And I’ve been away for three weeks now, and so I have to make up for it. Two lunches a day. Why is that, books and lunch.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We never really got to talk.’ She regarded him, cheek in hand, and seemed to remember an old smile she had once kept for him. ‘I thought about you so much, these last few weeks. Lots of stuff. I wondered: did you ever come up with that third wish?’

  ‘No,’ he said. It had been with her that he had first begun working out the constraints and possibilities of three wishes. He didn’t want to say that she herself, her person, had been the tentative subject of the third, what time she had been off in California; the subject, in more than one casting. ‘No. Not finally.’

  ‘Maybe now,’ she said. ‘You’re learning all these new powers.’

  ‘Not for me,’ he said. ‘What should I do, practice conjuring?’ He tossed his napkin onto the table, rising. ‘You’ve got to remember the one great drawback of practical magic, Jewel. It didn’t work.’ She was rising too, but he forestalled her. ‘Sit, sit for a sec while I, and then we’ll go. One sec.’

  She sat, becalmed, before her cold cup, her hand on the typed pages.

  She really hadn’t been suggesting that his book ought to teach magic procedures. No. The meaning, the world-view behind them, the soul-sense they made: that’s what she meant. The practices themselves – that was much too dangerous. She knew more than one person who had been hurt that way: or who had hurt others.

  Pierce would laugh to hear her say that.

  What a strange guy. She had used to ask him what good does it do you, Pierce, working out these wishes, protecting yourself every which way, if you don’t believe you can make wishes?

  And he would say: Believing in it doesn’t make it so, Jewel.

  Old Pierce, she thought with a welling of pity. He thinks he’s so sharp, so unfooled: like a color-blind person, undeceived by color. What he could never see is that those powers he had been just talking about weren’t wandering around in the world free like mutts waiting to be adopted; they were the creations of souls, created between souls, they were creation itself, and bringing themselves into being was the use they had. If you can create such power in your life, then it’s your duty to create it. If you are somehow granted it, it’s not for no reason. That’s what evolution is.

  One day he’ll learn, she thought, if not in this lifetime, the next, or the next. It’s the task set for him, even if he doesn’t know it: he who knows so much else.

  There was a reason she was here, no longer Pierce’s lover but with her hands on Pierce’s work. The world is changing, evolving in a new and accelerated way, and its evolution too is up to people, people bringing the future into being.

  Evolution. She felt a soft surge as of sea foam through her veins.

  All that summer she had heard about these noises off the Atlantic coast, a series of great booms like sonic booms but not sonic booms. The TV had reported them but could give no explanation. No one knew what they were. The little group that Julie was one of, a group which kept in touch coast to coast as much by an interlock of thought and feeling as by phone and letter, had all come to think that what this might be – just might be – was the signal that Atlantis was rising: the time had come ripe at last. At Montauk Julie had stood sunburned on a headland in the salt breeze, growing certain that it was about to be: that the blazing tip of its pyramid would any moment break the rolling sea’s surface, then its towers and ramparts too, shedding green water, she knew it, she just knew it.

  She felt it still, that certainty, just as she still felt the burn on her shoulders and the sweet tone of her muscles. She should tell him: and tell him too that her certainty itself was part of what was calling that drowned world back: like calling to like. She should.

  ‘Okay,’ Pierce said beside her, hands in his pockets and a guilty impatient air about him that she had used to know. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. And she placed on the bill a card of gold-colored plastic.

  She took a cab; Pierce walked home, the September sun in his face and Julie’s new business card in his pocket (midnight blue, with the stars of Scorpio picked out on it in silver). In the fading elation of his two scotches he could not tell if he was downcast or triumphant.

  The return of the magus, bearing in his hands the old potent physics out of the past, secret doctrines decoded, the numbers of the pyramid, was that in the end what he had to sell? Then he would sell it. There had been a time when he had thought of nothing else, when he had stood on his rooftop watching the grimy spheres of heaven revolve around him, Oh I see, I get it: but to hear those notions in another’s mouth, unqualified, fitted to a different kind of consciousness, made them sound at once loony and banal, too much and not enough.

  And yet were they not brave, those old mages, knights of Egypt, were they not heroes? Wrong as they may have been in almost everything they thought they knew for sure, they were heroes, the more Pierce had read about them the more they had come to be his own heroes. An Agrippa, a Bruno, a Cardanus about to take up the wand, open the book of Hermes, incise strange geometries on a sheet of virgin wax: they may have thought they were only tapping into the ancientest wisdom, only cleansing corrupt sciences and restoring them to purity: but what they were postulating was a new heaven and a new earth, and it was one like our own.

  There were ten thousand dæmons in Bruno’s heavens: but for all its occult influences, for all its affinities and sympathies, the magician’s universe worked the way it did not because God or the Devil was interfering in it, but simply because that was the way it was. It was an immense, even a limitless universe, a nexus of spirit and matter in which the magus’s perceptions and aspirations were bound up, it was far more full of possibility than the small, enclosed, God-and-Devil-animated world of orthodoxy, and it was natural. The true magus didn’t need to believe in witchcraft, or in miracles in favor of believers, because his universe was not only large enough to contain reasons for any astonishing thing that happened, but so full of forces, world spirits, angels (themselves objects as natural as stones or roses), that anything was possible, any effect of desire or will working in the world.

  So despite how wrong the magicians might have been about any given feature of it, and they could be wildly wrong and amazingly gullible, the size of their world, and the fact that not only did they not know all that it contained but knew – with joy – that it was impossible to know all that it contained, makes their minds like ours.

  And not so incomprehensible then after all, or so inexpressible either.

  Well then.

  He was just then passing beneath one of the stone lions who guard the public library, and he sat there on the step and took a notebook from his pocket. The sun was dazzling. He wrote: ‘Travel backward to a lost land heard of in childhood; find it to be incomprehensible, rich, strange; then discover it is the place from which you set out.’

  Oh god you would have to be so careful though, so careful. Time doesn’t return, turn full circle, and bring back what is past; what turns full circle is the notion that time will turn full circle, and bring back the past. That w
as the secret Pierce knew, the one he must tell. Time turned not in a circle but a spiral, sleeping and waking; any Golden Age perceived to have dawned again, or sad decline repeating itself, or new millennium come, creates in the very perception all the past Golden Ages, or declines, or rebirths, or millennia that it seems to be repeating, Oh I remember, I remember: we ascend upward through the spheres that seem to hem us in.

  Wake up, his book must say, you can do nothing unless you wake up. Like Bruno shouting that the sun was rising: wake up.

  Bruno himself should be the book’s hero, in fact; Bruno with his cocksure announcing, Bruno with his infinitudes and his planets swimming through space like great placid beasts, alive alive-oh; Bruno with his endless impossible systems for remembering and thus mastering everything in the whole wide world – an enterprise that might after all turn out to be not so different from Pierce’s own. ‘Mind, at the center of all, containing within itself all that it is the center of’ – yes! Just as Pierce himself had felt the brains within him tightly packed with all that he had ever perceived, like a Kodachrome movie reeled up tightly, and all colored too, for if the mind is not colored, then nothing is.

  So could he not do that, then? Could he not entertain the notions that Julie thought would sell, the notions that brought that sudden sparkle to her eyes; could he not do that, and be paid to do it, while at the same time engaged on a different enterprise, the same he had been engaged on for so long: to grasp as in a hand the truth of stories patently false, to recover as a dream is recovered the dream-logic of history, because he had himself long dreamed it, and was now awake?