Aegypt

by John Crowley

  —You see, he said, in their wisdom the Ægyptians made multiform images, a man with a dog’s head, a baboon with wings. They were not so foolish as to worship such monstrosities. No. They concealed in their images truths for the wise to uncover. The baboon is Man, the Ape of Nature, who reproduces Nature’s effects by imitation, but whose wings take him above the material plane as his mind pierces through appearances.

  The monk said nothing, only still stared.

  —A fly, said Della Porta. It means Impudence, because no matter how often it is driven away, it always returns. You see? And out of these images, linked, they made a language. A language not of words but of corporeal similitudes. Like your memory images. You see? In that book of Horapollo’s there are seven dozen of them explained. Hieroglyphs.

  The library of San Domenico did not have a book by Horapollo, or Fra’ Giordano did not know of it. He felt – he had felt since Della Porta had begun speaking of hieroglyphs – a weird hunger at the bottom of his being.

  —What other books? he asked.

  The mage withdrew slightly from the monk, who leaned toward him with an intensity Della Porta disliked.

  —Read Hermes, he said. Hermes who gave to Ægypt her laws and letters. It grows late, my young friend.

  —Marsilio Ficino, said Giordano. He translated the works of that Hermes.

  —Yes.

  —Marsilio knew images too. Was he taught by Hermes? Images of the stars, to draw down their power.

  —That is not lawful, the mage said, standing suddenly.

  —He made them in his mind only.

  —It is not lawful and it is not safe, the mage said, lifting Fra’ Giordano by a hand on his shoulder, and propelling him toward the door of the chamber.

  —But, said Giordano.

  —Your memory is God’s gift, said Della Porta, almost a whisper into the monk’s ear as, arm linked in his, he walked him to the street door. Your memory is God’s gift and you have improved it wonderfully. By natural art. Be content.

  —But the stars, Giordano said. Cecco says . . .

  Two servants had pulled open the double doors onto the piazza. Della Porta pushed Giordano out.

  —They burned Cecco, he said. Do you hear me? They burned Cecco. Good night. God help you.

  But why was it unlawful to push past accidents, and proceed to the reasons for things? Once put Venus in your mind to stand for Love – Venus with her dove and her green branch – and Love will glow in the mind with its own glow, for Venus is Love; place her in her own sign of Virgo and Love pours down through all the spheres, warm, living, vivifying, Love both inside and out.

  Natural magic like Della Porta’s allowed you to discern Venus in those things of the world most impressed with Venus’s qualities: her emeralds, her primroses, her doves; her perfumes, herbs, colors, sounds. Venus and Venus-ness pervaded the universe, a quality like light or flavor; doctors and wise men and wonder-workers knew how to trace it and put it to use, and that was lawful. But to cut – in your mind or on an emerald – an image of Venus, dove, green branch, young breasts; or to sing, in her own Lydian mode, a song of praise to Venus; or to burn before your image a handful of her rosemary – dangerous. And why?

  Why? Bruno asked of no one, honest eyebrows raised, palms open and reasonable. But he knew why.

  To make an image, or a symbol; to sing an incantation; to name a name: that was not simply manipulating the stuff of the earth, however wisely. That was addressing a person, an intelligence; for only a person could understand such things. It was invoking the beings behind the stars, those countless wise beings Cecco talked about who lurked there. And to invoke such beings would put the worker who attempted it in mortal danger.

  Cause Venus by your songs to take notice of you, to open her almond eyes and smile, and she may consume you. The Church was no longer certain that the potent beings who filled the spheres were all devils, as She had once thought. They might be angels, or dæmons neither good nor bad. But it was certain that to ask them for favors was idolatry, and to attempt to conjure and compel them was madness.

  That was the answer. Bruno knew it, but he didn’t care.

  He had begun to assemble around him now a group of younger or wilder brothers, a loose association of devotees and hangers-on everyone called his giordanisti, as though Giordano were a brigand chieftain. They sat around him and talked in loud voices and said extravagant things or, hushed, listened to the Nolan expatiate; they ran errands for him, got into trouble with him, spread his fame. When Giordano enraged the prior by deciding to clear his cell of images, plaster statuary, blessed beads, Madonnas, and retain only a crucifix, the giordanisti did – or talked of doing – the same thing. The prior, unable to understand at all, suspected Giordano of northern heresies, luteranismo, iconoclasm: but the giordanisti laughed, knowing better. Giordano pestered the librarian, and got the giordanisti to pester him too, to buy the books of Hermes that Marsilio Ficino had translated; but Benedetto wouldn’t hear of it. Idolatry.

  Paganism. But had not Thomas Aquinas and Lactantius praised Hermes, and said he had taught one God, and foretold the Incarnation? Benedetto was deaf.

  When his monks traveled, Giordano gave them lists of books to look for, and sometimes he got them, borrowed or bought or stolen: Horapollo on hieroglyphs, Iamblichus on the Mysteries of Ægypt, the Golden Ass of Apuleius. And in the privy on a winter day a young brother, trembling with anxiety or cold or both, took from his robe and gave to Giordano a thick sewn manuscript without cover or binding, written in a crabbed quick hand full of abbreviations.

  — Picatrix, the boy said. It’s a great sin.

  —The sin will be mine, Giordano said. Give it to me. Picatrix! Blackest of the black books of the old times, and there was no doubt about the intentions of anyone found studying it, no way a doctor of theology might defend himself as he might if he was caught with Horapollo or even Apuleius. It was madness to keep such a book, and Giordano did not keep it long; every page memorized was torn out and cast behind him forever.

  Man is a little world, reflecting in himself the great world and the heavens; through his mens the wise man can raise himself above the stars. So Hermes the Thrice-great says.

  Spirit descends from the prime matter which is God and enters into earthly matter, where it resides; the different forms which matter takes reflect the nature of the spiritus that entered it. The mage is he who can capture and guide the influx of spiritus himself, and thus make of matter what he wishes. How?

  By making talismans, as Marsilio had hinted: only here were exact instructions, what materials were to be used, what hour of the day was best, what day of the month, month of the zodiacal calendar; what incantations, invocations, lights were to be used, what perfumes and songs would most attract the Reasons of the World, the Semhamaphores, all mind, who fill up the universe. There were long lists of images to be used on talismans, and Brother Giordano, who had no materials to make them of, no lead for Saturn, tin for Jupiter, could nonetheless cast them inwardly and unforgettably:

  An image of Saturn: The form of a man, standing on a dragon, clothed in black and having in his right hand a sickle and his left hand a spear.

  An image of Jupiter: The form of a man with a lion’s face and bird’s feet, below them a dragon with seven heads, holding an arrow in his right hand.

  Better yet, and more potent, were long lists of images for thirty-six gods of time, nameless, vivid, of whom Giordano had read in Origen and in Horapollo’s hints: horoscopi, the gods of the hours known to Ægypt and then forgotten or ignored by later ages. They were called decans also, because each one ruled over ten degrees of the zodiac, three decans to each of the twelve signs. The images of the thirty-six, Picatrix said, had been cast by Hermes himself, as he had cast the hieroglyphs of Ægypt’s language; Giordano hardly needed to memorize them, they stepped off the crowded page directly into his brain and took their seats there, where they had all along belonged, though he hadn’t known it:

&nbs
p; The first decan of Aries: A huge dark man with fiery eyes, holding a sword and clad in a white garment.

  The second decan: A woman clad in green, and lacking one leg.

  The third decan: A man holding a golden sphere, and dressed in red . . .

  He imbibed this weird congress like food, like a fiery liquor, and almost as soon as they had entered within him he began to dream of them and of their doings. Who was he who had discovered them, this Hermes?

  There are among the Chaldeans very perfect masters in this art of images, and they affirm that Hermes was the first who constructed images by which he knew how to regulate the Nile against the motion of the moon. This man also built a temple to the Sun, and he knew how to hide himself from all so that no one could see him, though he was within it. It was he too, who in the east of Ægypt constructed a City twelve miles long within which he constructed a castle which had four gates in each of its four parts. On the eastern gate he placed the form of an Eagle; on the western gate the form of a Bull; on the southern gate the form of a Lion; and on the northern gate he constructed the form of a Dog. Into these images he introduced spirits which spoke with voices, nor could anyone enter the gates of the City except by their permission. There he planted trees, in the midst of which was a great tree which bore the fruit of all generation. On the summit of the castle he caused to be raised a tower thirty cubits high, on the top of which he ordered to be placed a lighthouse the color of which changed every day until the seventh day, when it returned to the first color; and so the City was illuminated with these colors. Near the City there was an abundance of waters in which dwelt many kinds of fish. Around the circumference he placed engraved images and ordered them in such a manner that by their virtue the inhabitants were made virtuous and withdrawn from all wickedness and harm.

  The name of the City was Adocentyn.

  The name of the city was Adocentyn.

  Pierce pushed back the wheeled chair he sat in, and with the page (Adocentyn!) still in his hand he started out of the room. Then he returned, and put it back. He went out again, got lost in the toils of the tiny house, came into a second parlor matching the first, and thought for a bad moment that he had only imagined that glass-fronted bookcase and its key and its contents, for it was nowhere to be seen; got straightened around; went into the first parlor, opened the bookcase, and took from it the plastic envelope marked PICA TRIX.

  Absurdly, his heart was beating hard. But the thick vellum leaves he pulled out, covered top to bottom in double columns of manuscript, were in a dense black-letter script unintelligible to him, curt monkish Latin, or code for all he knew.

  He locked it up again, and went through the house to the front hall and the stairs, calling Rosie’s name.

  ‘Up here!’

  ‘I’ve found something,’ he said mounting the stairs. ‘Rosie?’

  Down a corridor at the top of the stairs, a corridor whose walls were covered with framed etchings, people places and things, so many of them that the colorless paper behind could hardly be seen. He turned in at the door of a bedroom.

  She stood with her back to him in the stuffy dimness, drawn blinds making a nighttime in the room, someone else’s bedroom. Pierce felt suddenly caught in the toils of an awful pun, a misunderstanding, a rebus, a palindrome. Rosie turned; what light there was in the room gathered in her eyes.

  ‘Satin sheets,’ she said, gesturing to the big bed with her bottle. ‘Check it out.’

  SIX

  ‘It’s a novel,’ Pierce said to Boney Rasmussen. ‘Unfinished, apparently. It seems to end with a bunch of notes, and hints about further scenes.’

  ‘You’ve read it all already?’ The rainy day outside the library was so silver, the sparkle of the new greenery so various, that it made a vague darkness inside, and Boney at his desk was hard to see.

  ‘No,’ Pierce said. ‘No. I’ve started it. But we didn’t want to move it.’ Like a corpus delicti. ‘So I quit reading when it got dark yesterday.’

  Boney was silent.

  ‘Rosie’s pretty sure it’s not just a draft of one of the ones he published. It’s all new.’

  Still Boney said nothing.

  ‘It is,’ Pierce began, and halted; he wasn’t sure he should make the claim, or the revelation, which he had thought to make, or reveal, when he was shown into this room; but then he said, ‘It is really a very strange and remarkable thing to find and a very unlikely coincidence.’ He fell silent himself then, and they both sat amid the tick and pop of raindrops outside as though under a spell, Boney thinking thoughts Pierce could not imagine and his own mind filled with the wonderment of what had befallen him.

  Adocentyn.

  ‘I,’ he said at length, ‘am at work on a book.’

  ‘Rosie told me.’

  ‘Well what’s remarkable is,’ he said, ‘the things and the people in this book are things and people I’d been thinking about and studying for a long time, in a completely different way. Doctor John Dee, for instance, the English mathematician. Giordano Bruno.’

  ‘He’s written about them before.’

  ‘Well. Not quite in this way.’

  ‘What way?’

  Pierce crossed his legs, and took his knee in his interlaced fingers. ‘This book begins,’ he said, ‘with John Dee talking to angels. Now in fact Dee left extensive records of the seances he held with a person named Talbot or Kelley who claimed to see angels in a kind of crystal ball. All right. Only in this book of Kraft’s he’s really seeing them, and talking to them.’

  Boney waited unmoving; but Pierce had begun to feel a kind of intensity of attention growing in him.

  ‘Next comes a chapter about Bruno,’ Pierce said. ‘And all the biographical details are right, I think, and the milieu; only the reasons for everything happening are not the reasons we would give now.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What reasons then?’

  ‘It’s as if,’ Pierce said. ‘As if, in this book, there are angels but not laws of physics; as if theurgy could work, and win battles; prayer too. And magic.’

  ‘Magic,’ Boney said.

  ‘Glastonbury’s in this book,’ Pierce said. ‘And a Grail. The book might be about a Grail, somehow hidden in history.’ Leafing forward with the same horrid yet eager fascination he might feel if allowed to leaf through his own life to come, he had glimpsed Kepler’s name, and Brahe’s; he had seen kings, popes, and emperors, famous battles, castles, ports, and treaties: but he had seen also the City of the Sun, and the brothers of the Rose; the Red Man and the Green Lion; the angel Madimi, the Death of the Kiss, a golem, a wand of lignum vitae, twelve minims of best gold in the bottom of the crater.

  ‘And your book,’ Boney said. ‘It’s the same?’

  ‘Not the same. This is fiction. Mine is not.’

  ‘But it deals in these same matters. This same period.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And maybe it wasn’t so different, no not so different. Kraft’s was only going to be the strong wine undiluted: no subtleties of qualification, no might-it-not-seems, no it-is-tempting-to-thinks, no it-is-as-thoughs. None. Only this extraordinary colored toy theater of unhistory.

  ‘You would notice then,’ Boney said slowly, ‘if there was anything in this book about an elixir. Not medicine exactly, but.’

  ‘I know the concept,’ Pierce said.

  ‘Anything about that?’

  Pierce shook his head. ‘Not so far.’

  Boney rose from his desk, and helping himself with his knuckles along its edge, he went to stand looking out the window.

  ‘Sandy knew so much,’ he said. ‘He joked all the time, and you never knew when he meant what he said. He knew so much that you were sure that behind the joke was something he knew. But he wouldn’t tell.

  ‘He said. He often used to say. What if once upon a time the world was a different place than it is now. The whole world I mean, everything, well it’s hard to express; so that it worked in a way it no
longer does.’

  Pierce held his breath to hear the small old voice.

  ‘And what if,’ Boney went on, ‘there remained somewhere in this new world we have now, somehow, somewhere, some little fragments of that lost world. Some fragments that retain something of the power they used to have, back when things were different. A jewel, say. An elixir.’

  He turned to look at Pierce, and smiled. The Fabulous Monster. So Rosie had called him. ‘Wouldn’t that be something, he used to say. If that were so. Wouldn’t that be something.’

  ‘There are such things,’ Pierce said. ‘Unicorns’ horns. Magic jewels. Mummified mermaids.’

  ‘Sandy would say: they didn’t survive the change. But somewhere, somewhere there might be something. Hidden, you see; or not hidden, just overlooked; hidden in plain sight. A stone. A powder. An elixir of life.’ Standing had caused him – so it seemed to Pierce – to sink ever so slightly, as though his spine were slowly melting. ‘He was teasing, I suppose. I’m sure he was. And yet in the Giant Mountains once . . .’

  Nothing more followed. At length Boney left the window, and climbed into his chair again.

  ‘So it’s a good book?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve only begun it. The first chapters. Bruno. John Dee at Glastonbury. I think Dee and Bruno are going to meet, eventually. I doubt very much they ever did. But surely they could have.’

  ‘Maybe you should finish it,’ Boney said. ‘Finish the writing of it, I mean.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ said Pierce. ‘Not my line of work.’

  Boney pondered. ‘You could edit it. For possible publication.’

  ‘I’d certainly like to read it,’ Pierce said. ‘At least.’

  ‘I’m too, it’s a little beyond me now,’ Boney said. ‘And I’m not sure I’d recognize it if I saw it there.

  But you. You.’

  Through the open door just then there came a bouncing rubber ball, a large one painted with red and white stripes, and white stars on blue. It bounced twice and rolled to a stop, vivid on the rug.

  ‘Does it,’ Boney asked, ‘have a title?’