Endless Things

by John Crowley

  —Let's begin, he said to the players gathered around him. He had clothed his nakedness in Faust's scholar's robe from their play, its hem somewhat cinder bitten from the squibs and firecrackers the demons threw on poor Faust at the play's ending. Tom tapped idly on the drum as they spoke. It was midnight in the Heilige drei Königen.

  —What is it we are to begin?

  —The unbinding of all men from their limits, said the Ass. Since we have begun with ourselves—with myself, I mean—let's continue.

  Tap tap.

  —And how are we to do such a thing as that?

  —I have a plan, said the Ass, the former Ass.

  Men can be freed from their bonds, he told them, but not from all bonds, for that would leave men beasts: it is in what binds them that they are men. To decide which of those bonds most leads to happiness is the goal of the sapiens who knows how binding is accomplished. He will give—or seem to give, in this matter there is no real difference, the sign is the thing—to every person what he or she most wants. Unicuique suum, to each his own: and to all as to each, for though every man and every woman is more or less different, the mass of men and women are more or less the same. And what do they want? Stories that end in happiness, weddings after adversity, triumphs of righteousness. Wonders and signs fulfilled. Then Adam returns refreshed and renewed; all is forgiven. Mercy, Pity, Peace. The Golden Age begins again, and lasts forever, until it ends.

  —And how, said doubting Tom, are we to seem to give to all men what they most want? How are we to speak to the mass of men and women all at once, and yet give unicuique suum?

  —How? said Philip à Gabella, the Ass made Man. We do it every day and twice on holidays. We will (here he lifted his new hands to them, his large gray eyes alight; it was hilarious and sad how they could still recognize in him their former companion), we will put on a play.

  —A play?

  —Let's, he said clapping, put on a play. A ludibrium, a show, a jest in all seriousness, a seriousness in all jest. Not in one place only but across the world, across this Europe at least. Such a play as has never in the history of the world been seen, a play that will force them all to suspend their disbelief, and not only watch and laugh and weep, but take part as well, and be themselves our actors.

  —Who?

  —Anyone who can hear. Kings, bishops, knights, magi, ploughmen, wives, nuns, wise men, fools, young, old, not yet born, already dead. All. The kingdom will be our stage, sun our lights, night our curtain.

  —A kingdom for a stage! one player cried, and strutted and lifted his hand to raise the eyes and spirits of an imaginary audience. A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

  —And what bonds will bring in our audience? asked grinning Thomas. What strengths seen to be ours alone will change the world before their eyes and ears?

  —Love, Magic, Mathesis, said the Ass. And the greatest of these is Love.

  —Religion, added a player piously. The will of Almighty God swayed by earnest prayer.

  —Well said, the Ass proclaimed. Jesus was the greatest of the magicians, and the bond of religion is a strong one: let us decide which, of all religions, will best serve the mass of men now, and which will do the greatest harm. Promote the one, abjure the other. I myself (he added, to the astonishment of the players) prefer the Catholic religion. But the Lutheran is the more useful and commodious now.

  —Then let's choose the more commodious and useful, the players said.

  —We will be good Christians and Germans, said the Ass.

  —Ach du Lieber, said Tom.

  —We will condemn the Pope and the Sultan, and love Cabala and prisca theologia and Ægypt and the Jews. We will love the Emperor above all men. We will not blaspheme. We will speak with reverence of the Most High, and the life to come.

  —Amen, they said.

  —Will we be brothers? cried the Ass, Philip à Gabella, and held out his nine-fingered hands to them. Will we vow loyalty to one another, vow to do no hurt to men, to help, to heal, to make right?

  —We will, said the others. We are Giordanisti. We are at your service.

  —No more of that, or them, said Filippo: for there is no more Giordano. We are all brothers now. And we are the brothers of all those who have sought for us, dreamed of us, hoped that such ones as we might now live, or might one day come to be; all those who are novatores, and wish to make all new, and all those who long for the return of the prisca theologia of Orpheus, Ægypt, and Pythagoras. We will invite them all. For them the brothers will be both lure and lured, both the bait and the fisher.

  —A sign, said the players. We must have a sign for our brotherhood.

  The former Ass sat down, gathering his skirts from beneath him with a gesture he hadn't used in years. He put his new elbow on his new knee, and his new chin in his small hand, and drummed his fingers across his new soft cheek.

  —A rose, he said at last. And a cross.

  The players looked on one another, and nodded, considering. A rose and a cross: good.

  —Fraternitas Rosæ-Crucis, he said. The players saw that there were tears in his large gray eyes. A rose, for the roses of many-named Isis that he had fed upon, after growing them in his own heart's hothouse. And a cross, not the Christian one but the cross of Ægypt that he had borne on his hairy back, the cross the players recognized, the Monad that the English doctor had rediscovered, which he had explicated for poor dead Giordano in the inmost room of the high castle above the very city where they now sat: the crux ansata, the little man with arms akimbo, the sign of himself.

  —Now let us go, he said, rising, and ourselves bring this cemittá to an end, and usher in another, a better one, Mercy Beauty Peace, made by ourselves for all.

  5

  There was war in Heaven then.

  Edward Kelley had first seen it in chrystallo in the city of Cracow long before: the angel bands issuing from their watchtowers at the four corners of the universe: red as new-smitten blood, he told John Dee, lily white, green and garlic-bladed like a dragon's skin, black as raven hair or bilberry juice, the four kinds of which the world is made, coming together in war: and not long until they met. In the lower heavens the souls of heroes, the great dæmones, the tutelary spirits, the angels of the nations, were thereupon set upon one another. They couldn't know that what was being fought over in Heaven was the shape of the world to come, in which none of them would figure. Yet since the lowest of the rulers of the air are coterminous or contiguous with the highest rulers of the earth, the states and nations, princes and churches, were agitated too, and thought they were plotted against, and had better preempt their enemies, and strike before they were struck.

  In 1614 there began to appear those weird announcements of the Invisible Brothers among us, of the Universal Reformation of the Whole Wide World, starry messengers, and a More Secret Philosophy concerning a man-shaped cross (stella hieroglyphica), explicated by one Philip à Gabella, whom no one could find, to thank or to burn. And a hundred other brothers then made themselves known, all on their own, from England to Vienna: yes, I share in their plans and secrets; yes, I am a soldier of that unseen army of the wise and peaceable.

  Then disaster: in June 1617, the Bohemian Estates met in Prague city and elected the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria to be their next king.

  How could the estates have done it? Christian of Anhalt had urged and cajoled and begged them to elect Frederick, Prince Palatine, instead, a Protestant who would protect the rights of the Bohemian Protestant majority and all its churches, brotherhoods, congregations, a knight sans peur et sans reproche who was truly the one favored by all the powers of Heaven, whose father-in-law was King James of England, whose wife was named for their old English champion Elizabeth, the queen who confounded the Spanish fleet and sent it to the bottom. But no one else believed as yet in the pleasant young man or his wonderful fate. And as if in a dream where you can't help but do just what you mustn't, the baffled estates in the e
nd voted for the Archduke Ferdinand, a rigid and ultra-Orthodox Catholic, a Hapsburg, a despot, and a very able and tenacious man, who was certain to be elected emperor soon as well.

  It took a year of insults and punitive laws from the hand of this Catholic king-elect and his factors, but the Protestant nobles of Bohemia at length awakened, and revolted. On May 23, 1618, a deputation of great men, followed by a much larger crowd of citizens, went to the Hradschin, climbed the huge stair, took over the offices and rooms, herding the imperial officers like sheep before them, until the two imperial governors of the city were found in the last high chamber to which they had retreated. Po staro ... esku! Throw them out!

  The throwing-out-of-the-window of Prague. The elder governor, Martinic, went out first; Slavata, the other governor, begging for a confessor, clung to the jamb until his hand was struck with a dagger hilt and he went too. Their secretary, who was attempting to slip away quietly, was thrown out after them. None of the three was killed; they fell on a pyramid of dung below the window, which broke their fall, or maybe (as the Catholics claimed) they were aided by the Virgin Mary, who spread her sky blue cloak to catch them. Dung and the Virgin, and not much harm done: for this happened in Prague.

  It was, for the time, a gentle revolution, a revolution made in the name of keeping all things as they were, as they had been under Rudolf, who never changed anything. A mob did invade the Jewish quarter, as a mob always did in upheavals of all kinds, but with less damage than was usual; Catholic churches were disestablished, but only those that had been recently built on land seized from Protestant congregations, and the Jesuits were expelled. And then the crown of Bohemia was offered to Frederick, the Elector Palatine.

  This changed everything. Frederick was among few who were not surprised.

  Should he accept? Did God truly want him to take up this cup? Or let it pass from him? He asked his wife. There would be hardships, he said. I had rather eat cabbage as a queen than roast beef as a princess, said Elizabeth.

  He would be called a rebel against his emperor, an outlaw, he told her; he would be at war against his sworn sovereign, God's anointed, whom he should respect above all. Emperor Ferdinand has but one eye, and that one not good, Elizabeth said.

  Still he couldn't choose.

  And at that moment there arrived at the gates of Heidelberg a troupe of actors, Englische kömoedianten, come with new plays, drum and tabor, beasts and tumblers, scattering rose petals and salt. Elizabeth clapped her hands. Oh, these are the best, said Anhalt, who knew everything, the best for tragedy, comedy, history, historical comedy, tragical history, pastoral tragical historical comical.

  What were they playing? A Game at Chess, showing the Wedding of the White Queen and the Red King, together with the infinite jests of Cupid, and the waking of his mother Venus; the Weighing up of those thought powerful and wise, and who is found wanting; the Solemn Vows taken of the Brothers of the Golden Stone to defend the King and Queen, their Son, their Daughter, and all persons of good will; Transformations and Wonders of earth, air, fire, and water, the joining of the Rose and Cross, and the return of all good things in the course of time.

  The play's the thing, whispered Tom to his fellows, by which we'll catch the conscience of the king.

  * * * *

  And Frederick accepted the crown of Bohemia. In September 1619 he wrote to the Bohemian Estates: It is a divine calling, and I must not refuse. Next month the couple set out from Heidelberg, walking hand in hand beneath the Elizabeth-Pforte in dress of appropriate astrological colors, Venus's blue and white for her, Mars's gold and red for him. As though to reverse the music of loving-kindness that had played when Elizabeth had arrived from England, the drums and trumpets played in vehement Phrygian mode as they went out. Behind them came their soldiers, servants, lords, ladies, squires, pages—and their troupe of actors. Over the hills and far away.

  It took them weeks to reach Prague. To transform the world as you pass through it takes a longer time than simply to cover ground. At every city and town of the Rhineland the people wept to see them go by, as though they took their homeland with them. On the other side of the border the towns and cities of Bohemia met them with joy and flung roses; then, as they climbed the mountains, there came at them out of the forest a crowd of harvestmen, Hussite farmers (or actors dressed as them) who made a roaring with their grain flails; their leader, a Hussite preacher, made a long speech of blessing and welcome. The land of Hus was safe beneath their rule.

  And yet they were still just two happy people, young parents (one son already squalling in his crib, another in the oven), liable to offend their new subjects and tread on toes, but what could it really matter? In Prague city Elizabeth's gowns shocked the Calvinists, her breasts symbolic of course but also just breasts, and too exposed. The king swam naked in the Moldau, and she and her ladies watched from the bank: that upset the elders. Well, let them mutter, look at him rising from the waves like Leander, like a young river god. More people were shocked when she decided to take down an ancient corpus from his cross in the middle of the Caroline bridge. It had worked wonders for thousands, its nailed foot worn smooth by the kisses of the devout. That naked swimmer, said vengeful Elizabeth.

  The former Giordanisti—unrecognizable to their old audiences, before whom they had once played the Faustspiel and the comic inventions of Onorio the ass—played now under the ægis of the king and his queen, before cloths of gold, in Prague's palaces and great houses, with music drawn from ancient sources, in dramas that were great Seals acted out by hypostases of Virtue and hilarious Vice, and the people laughed and wept and resolved to change their lives. They played The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, they played The Wedding of Agent and Patient, they played The Apotheosis of Rudolf II in the Happy Isles. Philip à Gabella and his troupe of actors took no part, though, in the celebratory Pageant of All the World Systems that was held in the streets, maybe prematurely, in honor of the royal couple—how could his infinite universe of suns and planets, forever continuing, be pictured?—but they could watch, and laugh. The scholars from the Carolinum presented the Ptolemaic world, replete with spheres and epicycles and green earth sheltered in God's arms, apple of his eye; Tycho Brahe's vision was produced by the artisans of the Imperial Observatory, with crane-flown acrobats as the circling, leaping planets around the gold-foil sun, but both sun and planets revolving together (the crowd cheered to see them fly) around the same green earth; and then there was Copernicus's great cart, drawn by thirty oxen, with the sun aboard, titanic lamp shining through a sun of glass, all the planets including little earth outflung. A face able to be seen glowing in the glass sun was said to be God Almighty, but some said it looked more like Galileo. And next came Kepler's variant of this, a merry cart, the planetary orbits around the central sun expressed by the five geometric solids, and each of them producing an appropriate liquor, old beer for Saturn, white wine for Venus, golden Tokay for Jupiter—maybe it was these, dispensed too freely, but the pageant by degrees became disordered, pageant carts colliding, oxen and dray horses shunting one another, drivers unable to brake, and finally the World Systems themselves tilting and the flags and explanatory seals and spheres and mappamundi falling together, just plaster and lathe and paper after all, becoming finally inextricably mixed up, with priests, scholars, artisans, and partisans coming to blows, Copernicus's sun put out, the actors dressed as the planets tearing the finery from one another's persons to show the bare human within. So a good time was had by all, though some who witnessed it took it as an unsettling omen: the picture worlds colliding, and if they, why not the worlds they pictured?

  Nevertheless the reign of King Frederick and Queen Elizabeth went on evolving. Hand in hand they walked through Rudolf's castle, nourished on Rudolf's jewels and stones, pulling out Rudolf's albums and turning over the gorgeous leaves; Frederick tried to brush away a gilded fly from one page, and found it was painted there! They laughed and laughed. And now what is this room? The ancient antiquary (
he had served Rudolf, he was preserved like a mummia of Ægypt by handling precious things forever and ever) opened the tall narrow figured doors and let them into the tetradic chamber in the center of the castle, which was itself in the center of the world (as every true castle is). On the walls the Arcimboldo portraits, Summer Fall Winter Spring; Fire Water Earth Air; North South East West. They took hands.

  In the center of the chamber, center of the floor's geometries, there was a humpbacked black ironbound trunk waiting to be opened.

  * * * *

  Soon enough a Catholic mercenary army was on its way to Bohemia to suppress the rebellion of the Bohemian Estates and eject the so-called king they claimed to have anointed. The combined forces—Silesian, Austrian, Bavarian, Italian, Savoyard, Spanish, Flemish, French—advanced on Prague. As armies will, they left the country through which they passed a Brueghel hell: naked refugees, corpses of gutted cattle, dead children, the light of burning farmhouses. During the same weeks the Protestant forces of Europe gathered in Prague, and their generals pledged their arms to the queen.

  And there were other forces on the way to battle, unseen but perhaps felt by the Catholic combatants as they went—forces shadowing them, or leading them. Cherubim, seraphim, nerozumim. Earthlier forces too, passing through the Böhmerwald by night, through the high forest without misstep: long low four-footed shapes, red and brown, gray and black, eyes alight and long tongues panting. They were themselves—in their waking lives—Catholic, Utraquist, Protestant, Calvinist, Orthodox, but at night they all knew whose side they were on: the side that did not hate them, and would if they helped to win the victory accept their duty, forgive their crimes, and honor them as fighters for the world to come.

  On the day of the battle little redheaded Christian of Anhalt commanded the king's forces on the summit of a white hill outside the city, flying the huge royal banner of green and yellow velvet, bearing the words Diverti nescio, I know no different way. No one could read the words, though, for a great dead calm prevailed, as still and clear as glass, here and elsewhere; in the light of dawn the opposing army seemed suddenly shockingly close to them, as though they saw themselves in an unexpected mirror at the turning of a corridor. A terrible clarity: those in the Protestant van could actually see (they never forgot it, those who survived) the teeth and tongues of the Catholic captains as they shouted the word of command.