Aegypt

by John Crowley

  Behind Rebiba as he went out, as though caught up in the angry swish of his red satin skirts, went the rest of the priests, secretaries, guards, and servants who had filled the rooms. One only was left, standing by the far door, a young and smiling boy Giordano had not before noticed, fair-haired, his arms crossed before him. Without words, he crooked a finger, signaling Giordano to follow. Featly he went down the narrow stair, which after a long time debouched into a disused suite of rooms, all painted, empty and lit by the day.

  —Look, the boy said, at that wall, beneath the zodiac. Who holds the book? Hermes.

  Giordano looked. An armillary sphere representing the heavens hung over the head of a sweet-faced man, who spoke to others, Ægyptians perhaps, in a garden.

  —Pinturrichio painted it, the boy said. Come. You will see Hermes again, in the farther room.

  They went through connecting chambers, a room of Apostles instantly recognizable by the emblems they carried, Peter’s keys, Matthew’s book, Andrew’s cross; and through a room of Arts – Astrology and Medicine and Geometry and Grammar – all pictured there much as they were pictured in their rooms in the memory palace Giordano had within.

  —Who do you see there? the boy said, bringing Giordano into the last room. Who is on that wall?

  —Mercurius, Giordano said.

  —Who is Hermes too.

  A young man with the same sweet face as the man beneath the armillary heavens: with a curved sword he was striking down a grotesque figure who grew eyes not only in his head but all over his body, in his cheeks, arms, thighs. Behind these two a placid cow looked on: Io. Transformed into a cow by Juno, she was put to be watched over by Argus the thousand-eyed, but Argus was slain by Mercury, and Io escaped into Ægypt.

  —Look, said the boy. Ægypt.

  Along the borders of the wall, all around the room, were pyramids, hieroglyphic bulls, Isis, Osiris.

  —It was Alexander the Sixth who made these rooms, the young man said. His sign was the Bull; he studied magic; he knew Marsilius, and loved him. He loved wealth, too. He was a very bad man.

  His clear laughing eyes directed Giordano’s to another wall: a seated queen, not Our Lady; a bearded prophet on one side of her, and the same strong sweet-faced man on the other, pensive, smiling faintly.

  —Queen Isis, said the boy. Who was Io once. And Mercurius, who went into Ægypt, and gave to the Ægyptians their laws and letters. The other man is Moses, who lived then too.

  —Yes, said Giordano. He looked from the clear dreaming wise eyes of Mercurius in the picture to the clear laughing eyes of the fair-haired boy, and a weird shudder flew over him.

  —Come, the youth said. Down.

  They went into a tiny and shabby chapel, and down a twisting flight of stairs into a chamber whose smell Giordano knew at once. Books.

  —It is called the Floreria. Sit.

  There was a broad scarred table onto which the light fell from a high window; there was a bench before it. Giordano sat.

  In after times he would not remember much of his sitting there, or even how many days he sat. He was brought food, now and then, to his table; a pallet was made for him, in a corridor, between piles of books waiting to be bound, and there sometimes he slept. And the smiling youth came and went, and put the books before him, and took them away, and brought more. It was he too who brought the dishes of food, and tugged at Giordano’s hair when he had fallen asleep on the open pages.

  Had there been others there? There must have been, other scholars, librarians, students harmlessly looting the Pope’s treasure: some of the faces which, ever after, the speakers in the dialogues of Thrice-great Hermes would wear in Bruno’s imagination must have been borrowed by him from the readers whom he saw there: but he wouldn’t remember them. What he remembered was what he read.

  They were great folio volumes, a hundred years old almost, Marsilio Ficino’s translation into Latin of the Greek originals (which had come out of the Ægyptian somewhen): bound in gold and white, printed in a clear and smiling Roman type. Pimander Hermetis Trasmegisti. He began with Ficino’s awed commentary:

  In that time in which Moses was born there flourished Atlas the astrologer, brother of Prometheus the physicist and maternal uncle of the elder Mercury whose nephew was Mercurius Trismegistus.

  He read how Pimander, the Mind of God, came to this Mercurius-Hermes, and told him of the origins of the universe: and it was an account strangely like Moses’s in Genesis, but different too, for in it Man was not made of clay but existed before all things, was son and brother at once to the Divine Mind and sharer in Its creative power, sharer with the seven Archons – the planets – in celestial nature. A God himself, in fact, until, falling in love with the Creation he had helped to shape, Man fell: and mingled his substance with Nature’s matter: and came to be earthy, bound up in love and sleep, and subject to heimarmene and the Spheres.

  Back upward he must go then, through those Spheres, taking from each of the seven Archons the powers he lost in his fall, and leaving behind the layers of material garment he has worn, until in the ogdoadic sphere he returns to his true nature, and sings hymns of praise to his Father:

  Holy is God the Father of all, who is before the first beginning; Holy is God, whose purpose is accomplished by his several Powers; Holy art Thou, of whom all nature is an image . . . Accept pure offerings of speech from a soul and heart uplifted to thee, Thou of whom no words can tell, no tongue can speak, whom silence only can declare . . .

  What sort of journey was this, how was it made, how were the powers to be acquired so that a man or his spirit could go so far? Giordano read Pimander’s words to Hermes:

  All beings are in God, but not as though placed somewhere; no more than they are placed in the incorporeal faculty of representation. You know this yourself: Direct your soul to be in India, to cross the seas, and it’s done instantaneously. To travel up into heaven, the soul needs no wings, nothing can prevent its going thither. And if you wish to break through the vault of the universe, and see what’s beyond it – if there is anything beyond it – you may do it.

  Do you see what powers, what speed you have? That is how God must be imagined. All things are contained within God – the universe, himself and all – just as thoughts are contained within a mind. Unless you make yourself like God, though, you cannot understand God, for like is only intelligible to like.

  Therefore make yourself huge, beyond measuring; with one leap free yourself from your body. Lift yourself out of Time and become Eternity: then you will begin to understand God. Believe that for you as for God all things are possible; conceive of yourself as immortal, capable of understanding everything, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Climb higher than the highest height; sink lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself the sensation of all created things, of fire and water, of wet and dry, cold and hot, imagining that you are everywhere on earth and in the sea, in the haunts of the animals, that you aren’t yet born, in your mother’s womb, adolescent, old, dead, past death. If you can embrace in thought all things at once, all times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, then you might understand God.

  All, all contained within the thinking mind, just as all the things Bruno had ever seen or done, all the tools, birds, articles of clothing, pots and pans on the lists of the brothers in Naples, were all contained – separate, findable, distinct – within the circular memory palace of his skull. He knew. He knew.

  Say no longer that God is invisible; never say so, for what is more manifest than God? God has created all so that you may see an All in what he has created; it is the miraculous power of God to show himself in every being. Nothing is invisible, not even bodiless beings. The mind makes itself visible in the act of thinking, just as God makes himself visible in the act of creating.

  Giordano read, his heart beating slow and hard; he read with calm certitude and the deep satisfaction of a child sucking the nourishment it knows it needs. He had been right, right, right
all along.

  Hermes, become a priest and a king, taught others what Mind had taught to him. There were dialogues between himself and his son, Tat, and one long one between him and his disciple Asclœpius, instructing him in the now fully formed religion of Ægypt and its cult. God dispenses life to all through the medium of the stars; he has created a second God, the Sun, an intermediary through whom the divine light is spread to all. And next the Horoscopes whom Giordano had read of already, the decans responsible for the persistence, through infinite diversity and constant changefulness, of the Reasons of the World: themselves changing form continuously like the talismanic images of Picatrix, but persisting nonetheless. And the name of the chief god of these gods was Pantomorph, or ‘omniform.’ Giordano laughed aloud.

  And there are other gods beside, whose powers and operations are distributed through all things that exist . . .

  The book of Asclœpius told how the priests of Ægypt were able to draw down dæmons from the stars, and cause them to take up residence in the zoomorphic statues of stone which the priests had had made, whence they would speak, prophesy, tell secrets. So well did those priests know how divinity permeated the lower world, which animals and plants were governed by which stars, which odors, stones, music the dæmons could not resist.

  All that knowledge lost now, all that omniform heavens-and-earth, lost; as though that armillary sphere which Pinturrichio had floated above the heads of Hermes and the Ægyptians had been smashed, scattered, the ruins of it only to be come upon now by chance and puzzled over in this latter Age of Brass; surviving only in rumor, debased stories, cantrips, shards. Picatrix.

  But how lost, why, why lost?

  A time will come when it will be seen that the Ægyptians have honored the Divinity in vain. All this holy worship will become ineffectual. The gods will desert the earth, and return to heaven; they will abandon Ægypt; and this land, the home of religion, will be widowed of its gods and left destitute. Strangers will fill this country, and not only will men neglect the worship of the gods, but – still more terrible – so-called laws will be enacted, which shall punish those who do worship them. In that day this most holy land, this land of shrines and temples, will be filled only with tombs, and with the dead. O Ægypt, Ægypt: there will remain of your religion only fabulations, and your own children will not be able to believe them; nothing will survive save glyphs engraved on stone, to tell of your piety!

  He read, and wept to read. He knew how the old religion had come to an end; he knew what strangers had come to supplant their pieties. When all the old gods had run to hide their heads, when the women wept that Pan was dead. When the Christ whose colors Giordano wore, whose soldier he was, had banished them all, all but Himself and His Father and the emanation of the two of them that made three: a tangle of triplex Godhead too jealous to allow any mysteries but the mystery of itself.

  Does it make you weep, Asclœpius? There is far worse to come . . . In that day will men, in boredom, give up thinking the world worth their reverence and adoration – this greatest of all goods, this All which is all the best of past and future. It will be in danger of passing away; men will think it a burden, and despise it, this incomparable work of God, glorious structure, one creation made of an infinite diversity of forms . . . Darkness will be preferred then to light, death to life, and none will raise his eyes toward the skies . . . So the gods will depart, separating themselves from men – sad! – and only evil angels will remain . . . Then the earth will lose its equilibrium, the sea no longer hold up ships, the heavens will not support the stars . . . The fruits of the earth will moulder, the soil be fruitless, the air itself thick with sadness. Such will be the old age of the world . . .

  Yes. Eyes clouded with tears, his nose running, Giordano brow in hand made out the words. They had not been banished; they had departed of their own free will, disgusted by the upstarts who scorned and hated their knowledge and their powers, free gifts for men, now withdrawn.

  But if by their own free will they had gone away, then, one day, they might return; they might be induced to return. They would return!

  That is what the rebirth of the world will be: a coming-back of all good things, a holy and awesome restoration of the whole wide world imposed by the will of God in the course of time.

  He saw them as he read, returning, the godlike men or manlike gods who are true inheritors of and sharers in God’s restoring power; he saw the turgid air clearing at their passage, the creatures of night fleeing away, dawn bursting.

  And if such a time had been to come all those centuries ago, then why might it not be coming now, right now – now when this old knowledge had come back to man again, and been cast in this type, printed on these pages? Why not now?

  —Now, said a soft voice behind him, and the boy who had brought him this book sat down beside him on the bench. Now listen carefully and don’t be alarmed.

  Bruno put his hand on the page to mark his place, to stop the knowledge flowing for a moment.

  —What is it?

  —There is news from Naples. Proceedings have been started against you with the Holy Office. Don’t turn around.

  —How do you know this?

  —You are to be prosecuted for heresy. The Holy Office here has been given notice. A hundred and thirty articles of heresy.

  —Nothing can be proven.

  —Did you, the boy said lightly, ever leave books in the privy?

  Giordano laughed.

  —Writings have been found in the privy, the boy said. Erasmus. The commentaries on Jerome.

  —Erasmus? Nothing more terrible?

  —Listen, the boy said. They have prepared this long and well. It will go hard with you. They have it all arranged, the interrogation, the witnesses, the evidence.

  —They are men, Bruno said. They possess reason. They’ll listen. They must listen.

  —Believe me, Brother. You can never go back.

  There was no one else left in the cool tall room except Bruno and the blond young man, who still smiled, his hands folded loosely in his lap. A fire caught in the dry tinder of Bruno’s heart, and burned hot and painfully.

  —The Pope, he said. I’ll speak to Him. He said that I, He, He . . .

  The boy’s face didn’t alter, he only waited for Bruno to quit, to finish in a hopeless stutter. Then he said:

  —Stay here till dark. Then go out by that door, the small door at the far end. Follow the corridor. Go up the stairs. I’ll meet you there.

  He rose.

  —At dark, he said; and he smiled down at Giordano, a smile of complicity, as at a joke both he and Giordano well knew was afoot; only Giordano did not know it, and the small hairs rose on the back of his neck, and his scrotum tightened. The boy turned and went.

  Giordano looked down at the page where his hand lay. Already the long light of afternoon was leaving it.

  In that day the gods who once oversaw the earth will be restored, and will come to settle in a City in the extreme limit of Ægypt, a City founded toward where the sun goes to his setting; a City into which will hasten, by land and by sea, the whole race of mortal men.

  He read until he could no longer make out words. Then he had read all of it that he would ever read, and night had come. He rose. He thought: Tomorrow is the Feast of the Transfiguration, the sixth of August. He crossed the long vaulted room, past the scholar’s tables set beneath the night-blue windows, and opened the small thick door.

  *

  In darkness his feet found the steep stairs; he mounted toward the landing where a lamp shone beyond the turning. The fair-haired boy sat there on the stair, waiting for him. He had a bundle in his lap.

  —Get out of that robe, he said softly. And put on these.

  Bruno looked from the boy to the bundle held out to him.

  —What?

  —Quick, the youth said. Be quick.

  For an instant the solid stone beneath his feet seemed to tilt, as though the building were toppling. He pulled off the blac
k-and-white robe and thick underclothes, trembling slightly. The bundle was hose, boots, doublet, shirt, wrapped in a cloak. The boy sat on the step above, chin in his hand, and watched the monk struggle with the unfamiliar garments, trying to tie the points with shaking fingers. The cloak last, long and hooded. And a belt with a purse, and a little dagger. The purse was heavy.

  —Listen, the boy said, standing. Listen now and remember all I tell you.

  He spoke mildly and clearly, sometimes striking one forefinger against the other when he named a name, or raising a forefinger in warning. He set out Giordano’s route, the streets and gates and suburbs, the roads north, the towns and cities. Giordano, clad in someone else’s clothes, heard all and would not forget.

  —A doctor and his family there, the boy said. Ask them. They know. They will help.

  —But how, how . . .

  The youth smiled and said: They are giordanisti too. In their way.

  He laughed a small laugh then, at Giordano unfrocked, and tugged the cloak straight; he picked up the lamp, and led the way by its light up the curling stairs to another corridor, a narrow one, and along it to a double door.

  —Now, he said.

  He set down his lamp; he grasped the rings of the door and turned them, and thrust the door open. Giordano Bruno looked out into an empty cobbled square; a fountain gurgled in the center of it; torches were carried away down a far alley, and he heard a shriek of laughter. Night air in his face. Freedom. He stood, looking.

  —Go, said the boy.

  —But. But.

  —Out, said the boy, and he put his soft boot against Bruno’s hose-clad backside, and pitched him out; and the doors clashed shut behind him.

  EIGHT

  It wasn’t a small world: it was immense, made immense by the infinitesimal steps a man on foot could take, or a man on muleback for that matter, or borne in a litter or even astride a fast horse. The long road went ever on, a faint track sometimes and nearly lost in swamp or mountain, but always reappearing eventually. Which way is Viterbo? Siena? Another river to wade, wood to pass through (eyes wide, looking from side to side, knuckles tight on dagger hilt), always another walled town to come to: Siena, Vitello, Cecino, to a weary walker seeming to be only the same town repeated over and over, like the single tiny woodcut that in geographies stands variously for Nuremburg, Wittenberg, Paris, Cologne: a steeple, another steeple, a castle, a plume of smoke, a gate, a little traveler stunned and wondering.