by John Crowley
They talked of urgency, but they seemed not to conceive of it as mortals did; they had leisure to pause in the work to praise God at length, or prophesy, or to tell long strange stories for the two to ponder and allegorize, never sure that the meaning they arrived at was meant and not some other. In Bremen, in Lübeck, in Emden, in the cramped bedrooms of inns and borrowed houses, Kelley and Dee set up their glass and their table (constructed now so it could be folded up on hinges, collapsed and carried) and took down further gibberish; late, late at night they waited on the angels while Rowland and Katherine and Arthur were rolled up with their mother asleep; Joanna Kelley in a chair watched with her fox’s eyes her strange husband, and thought of her unthinkable fate.
Laski took them across Germany, leaving them on occasion to go wait upon some potentate, the Duke of Mecklenburg, the Bishop of Stettin, to shore up his fortunes. His star was sinking—the angels had stopped praising him—though he knew it not. He began to talk to them of gold: how it might be made easily now, with the spirits’ help; why could not the question be put to them, why. A magnate of Laski’s stature could live for years on credit: for years, not forever.
Winter set in, early and very hard, but they pushed on, in wagons, coaches, and carts. Hurry, hurry. From Stettin to Posen (where they saw the tomb of the good king Wenceslaus) is two hundred miles, and on all of them the snow lay deep and crisp and even; the Duke hired twenty men to cut ice for two miles so their coaches could pass. Wide water-meadows, ice-locked now (little figures in the distance let down lines through the ice to catch fish), at last brought them to Lask in Poland. The Duke had been gone long. His people were not overjoyed to see him.
There by the enameled stove Kelley set up the table. And then Madimi returned, without greeting or apology, a little wench in white Kelley said, not at first recognizing her; she had grown.
—I have been in England, she said. The queen is sorry she hath lost her philosopher. But the Lord Treasurer answered her, and said you would come home again shortly, begging to her. Truly none can turn the queen’s heart from you.
An awful wave of homesickness washed the old man. The Queen. He saw the loved pockmarked face. O God.
—I have been at your house too. All is well there. I could not come into your study there, for the queen has caused it to be sealed.
But had not Madimi said once to them that men’s locks were no hindrance to her? Doctor Dee looked into the study in his mind, not knowing what hurt had been done to it. Silence and dust.
What house, then, would they have now? How were they to live? They have been advised to go to Cracow. How shall they fare there?
—As wise as I am I cannot tell.
She seemed to grow dull and aimless in the foreign cold (it was their own brains, doubtless, gelid beneath their skullcaps and furs, their own contracting hearts). Kelley’s breath clouded the cold stone into which he looked.
—Sir Harry Sidney is dead, Madimi said. He was a secret enemy of yours.
She was nearly asleep. The three of them bent nearer the stove. John Dee felt tears rise to his eyes. He wrote down what Madimi had said, a secret enemy. He had always loved Harry Sidney, Philip’s father. There was to be nothing left of his life, nothing to return to, he would die an old man in foreign parts.
(In Prague in August, after the English news at last caught up with him, he would write a note on this page: Sir H. Sidney was not dead in February nor March, no not in May last. So this must be considered.)
Cracow, royal city of Great Poland, piled up in the middle of a great flat plain flooded and muddy when they crossed it in March. Kelley and the women were silent seeing it at a distance, thinking Lord the world is huge: who would have thought great plains and cities went on coming into being one upon another to the farthest east. And all of Russia beyond. Doctor Dee, who had traveled widely, only groaned at his ague, and did not look up.
Once established in a tall house near the Cathedral, John Dee went to call on an old correspondent of his, Dr. Hannibal, a Capuchin monk, then coming to the end of his Commentaries on the Pimander of Hermes Trismegistus, many times longer than the Ægyptian book itself.
What did they talk of for hours? Jane Dee wondered, struggling with foreign coins and foreign foods. They talked of angels: of the nine choirs of the angels, who are not different from the Governors who, Hermes says, maintain the frame of the heavens and the distinctions and hierarchies that make things things and not mere chaos. They talked of the divisions in religion, when rash unlearned ungodly men by force and the sword impose their churches like beds of Procrustes on suffering men. How would it end? Dr. Hannibal turned the much-marked pages of his Pimander and read:
In that day 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 will men, in boredom, give up thinking the world worth their reverence and adoration, this greatest of all goods, this All … Then the earth will lose its balance, the sea no longer hold up ships, the heavens will not support the stars.
Was not that the state of the world now? Could not a case be made that their own age was likewise ending in disasters? Then the outcome was in God’s hands, and Hermes foresaw that too:
… 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.
Dr. Hannibal wondered—bending his round tonsured head close to Doctor Dee’s white one and speaking in a low voice—if Christ’s church was now falling in fragments because her age was past; and after a time of troubles would dawn a new age, the Age of the Holy Spirit, which would need no churches, no friars, no bishops, and each man would be priest to his neighbor.
—As Abbot Joachim of Flora preached, said Dee. So long ago.
—Who was condemned, said Dr. Hannibal. Let us speak no more of it.
Doctor Dee took Communion with the brave little round man at the church of the Bernardines, taking on his tongue the living God, glimpsing afterward the monk fumbling his spectacles from his face to wipe away tears (were they of joy? gratitude?). Kelley would not receive, though Dee urged him to, though even the angels spoke to him of the Bread in wonder and adoration: The Flesh of God is all we know of meat, His Blood of drink; He may not refuse it to us. Did you think it was yours alone? We ate and drank before the foundation of the world. If a rich man gave to you to eat, would you not praise him? If he gave you the food of his plate, would you not praise him? Be content, be joyful, He has given you the whole Flesh of His Body.
Why did he refuse? Doctor Dee wanted to know. What holier preparation for the work they had now to do, what better.
He would not. There was a row, a row like so many others, Dee had thought they had been left behind in England but they had not been. The spirits were lying, Kelley said, they had done nothing these two years but lie, Dee was a fool to believe them, if they knew anything of worth they had not revealed it yet and would not reveal it to the mortals no though they begged them; they two mortals were objects of the spirits’ scorn and derision, he had no doubt of that, he could hear their laughter in their spheres. Look: here in Agrippa his book De occulta philosophia, here were all the names of the angels that govern the nations of the world, names that Kelley had spent days on his knees to be told! He would be toyed with no more. And he banged shut his door in Doctor Dee’s face.
Gabriel came to him, that night, and corrected him.
Kelley would never tell his master what had been said or done that night to him, and Dee did not insist. He only knelt again with Kelley before the stone, his old kneebones crackling like broken kindling; and Gabriel, mildest and sweetest of the spirits who talked to them, joined them once again together in tears of repentance and thanksgiving: again, again, once again. On the next day Kelley received the Body of Christ in his mouth at the Church of the Bernardines.
The great plain fruited. In May, lying in bed of a morning, Kelley felt his
head and breast opened as by a butcher’s cleaver or an oysterer’s knife, and a voice (not a voice, or a voice speaking no words) poured knowledge into the breach: why they had been chosen, what the prophecies spoke of, what the tales figured.
There was war in heaven.
Four watch-towers or castles stand in the four corners of the Earth, North South East West. Kelley started in his bedclothes as four trumpets sounded from them, and four cloths or banners rolled out vastly from the towers’ tops. One as red as new-smitten blood from the East, one lily white from the South, a green one garlic-bladed like a dragon’s skin from the West, one the black of raven hair or bilberry juice from the North. Then out of the towers came the hosts, colored the same, roiling and outpouring, like banners, like words from a mouth, a seeming confusion and yet no confusion, every troop with its senior, every army with its general, great captains; they march toward the center court, ranged about their ensigns, ready for a battle.
This was happening now, he knew, but not why or to what end, except that, happy as the warriors looked, splendid as their banners, the war was a desperate one, and the issue in doubt. Was it the war of the Lamb against the Beast, against the Wind that bloweth where he listeth? What Kelley could not tell was if the angelic troops moving toward one another from all directions were about to combine into a single mighty army, or whether when they met they would fall upon one another, a war of all against all. He only knew it would not be long until they met.
Still in his shirt he roused his brother, and sent him off to Dee’s house in St. Stephen Street, and John the servant-boy to the Franciscan convent where Laski lay. And stood then at the window of his room trembling and gritting his teeth with a sound that made his wife in the bed draw up the covers to her neck in fear.
Past midnight that night, John Dee rose from his place by the table of practice. A mass of scribbled papers slipped from his lap to the floor, the names of angels, the order of their march. The clear sphere was empty at last, nothing but a stone; Kelley slept in his chair, his mouth open, a whinny like a sick child’s coming from his lips with each breath. All the house was asleep.
He climbed the stairs past the room where his wife Jane had left a candle burning by the curtained bed. The children and their nurse were dark humps in the next room like sleeping bears, their books and pages of childish work scattered on the floor, they had got their father’s vice of disorder, a small one but hard to conquer. He went silently past to a ladder at the hall’s end, up it, out through a cockloft (the pigeons murmured and fluttered as he passed) and onto the house’s roof. A balustrade was built there where a man could stand.
No moon, a few clouds, their hems ermine-trimmed. Stars.
The four corners of the world. Kelley had called them by the compass points but he had meant the solstices and equinoxes, the four corners of the year, the gates of time.
If the battle was being fought among the angels that govern the heavens, and the issue was in doubt—that would explain the prophecies they were continually given, that the Turk would be overthrown, that Tartary would fall, that states would alter: prophecies which changed from week to week without ever coming about. He saw now that they were not false: they were reports of the battle only, how it went. The conclusion in doubt.
Why would God allow His angels to fight over the world?
He looked up into the confusion of the stars, so many visible, so huge a horizon, that he did not immediately recognize the old familiar constellations. The turning heavens, bound by the colures, fixed at four corners. Changeless. They were not, though: John Dee and every astronomer in Christendom (in Araby and Cathay too doubtless) had seen a new star born in Cassiopæia’s chair only ten years before. A new star, come forth from nothing by God’s will, the first since Bethlehem.
Unless it was not new, had merely come suddenly closer to the Earth, close enough to be seen: charging from its circular course like a racehorse faulting and rushing the crowd, just because it chose to.
Because it chose to. With perfect clarity he saw the face of the little Italian who had stood in his study in Mortlake and challenged him. A new heaven: and if there was a new heaven, there must be a new earth too.
Was the war now taking place in heaven about the courses of the stars? Were the angels who turn the spheres (if there were spheres) engaged in their milliards in violently shifting the stars from their rounds? As though Earth and the Sun were not only to be newly understood to be standing in each other’s former places, but were even now on the move to their new places, the one to the center, the other (Earth, our star, and we on it) out to the middle row of the planets.
An awful laughter arose in John Dee’s breast, and he clutched the balustrade by which he stood. That would raise winds, that would throw down states. The Earth lose its balance, seas not hold up ships: yes.
If God meant now to roll up the heavens as a scroll, if He was now at work doing that, and a new heavens was to be revealed behind the old; if there was no longer to be lower and higher, up and down, no longer any measure by which a place in the universe could be found—no more four corners to the world—then men would have to be new, too.
Was God about to grant men new powers? Were all of John Dee’s and poor Kelley’s labors now to come to fruition, and all the tedious numeration they had been given to write down resolve itself, appear all at once to be the plain science of a new world? He was certain of it: not certain that he would ever live to understand or use it, but certain he had been chosen to give it to the men of the coming world, who would someday take it up, perhaps after it had lain long obscure and dusty, look into it and say Yes yes of course, yes just so it must be.
He thought of—he felt in his breast like the scar of an old branding—his own Monas hieroglyphica, child of his heart that he had never truly understood.
How would they use it? Please God they did no harm. They could not, God would not allow it to pass into their hands if their souls were not prepared for the use of it. That was why his heart shrank in his bosom when Bruno Nolano had bragged of the new powers to be had. The child Madimi had warned Dee: He has stolen fire from heaven. Like Phæton he could burn up the world.
That, then, was what John Dee was to do, that was the warning he had been given to issue, that was why he and not another had been chosen to issue it. He thought of words from Job: I only am escaped to tell thee.
He knelt on the starlit rooftop and prayed. O God let not sharp swords be put into the hands of children; let their hearts be made wise before their hands are made strong. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. And yet Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done. World without end. Amen.
In May Adelbert of Lask set out for Transylvania, to his estates there. Before he departed he knelt before John Dee, profoundly embarrassing the doctor, and asked for his blessing, which Dee gave; Laski also asked, head bowed, that the angelic powers Dee and Kelley spoke for might aid him, in his journey, in his suit before King Stephen for relief of his debts.
They might not, he said, see him again. He would return through Prague, and if they had reached there, he might see them, if God and His Angels willed. And if, if ever the angels spoke of him, or made any suggestion as to how his troubles might be resolved, please please do as they instructed.
He went out on a tall horse into the spring, knuckles on his sword-belt and his elbow turned proudly out. In that month King Stephen died, all of Laski’s business unresolved; the angels expressed no surprise at this, though they had said they expected great things of Stephen: as though the right hand of God could not know what the left hand was doing.
By then John Dee and Edward Kelley and their wives and children, relations, servants, carts, furniture, books and papers had gone down into Bohemia to see the Emperor.
TWELVE
What is the one thing we inherit from the past which still retains the powers it once had? Pierce had promised to reveal such a thing in the course of his book, and Julie had written him to say tha
t the publisher really liked this idea, a lagniappe, a bonus for purchasers better than a give-away record or a revealing questionnaire, oh much better. Now Pierce had actually to come up with something, pull it out of his empty fist like a string of magician’s scarves.
If it were like the Stone of the alchemists, it would be lying around in plain sight, unrecognized by everyone except the fool and the wise man, the one who had never forgotten and the one who at length must learn.
It might not be a thing at all, though, Pierce thought, it might be a word, it might be a thought the mind could think by chance, sudden conjunctio oppositorum that starts a mental blaze.
What, what persists into this time from that near or distant past when the laws of the universe were not as they are now, but different; when such things as jewels and fire had properties they no longer have; when people witnessed, and carefully recorded, marvels we now know to be (and believe to have always been) impossible?
Pierce thought about it. At his work at Kraft’s house, at the Donut Hole, drinking alone or at Val’s Faraway Lodge, he thought what in hell he could actually discover, or be seen to have discovered, that would fit the bill. On the toilet he pondered; in his bath, with the Monitor and Merrimack of the soap and sponge floating before his submerged chin; in line at the supermarket.
It could be something actual, physical—there were a thousand possibilities for contemplation. The amulet that John Dee had supposedly cast, by means of which he raised the wind that blew away the Spanish Armada. The creepy arch-mage and blusterer Aleister Crowley (how had Pierce learned this fact or nonfact?) had actually seen this item, in the British Museum. No no no. That would only turn out to be another of those dead things that Kraft enjoyed, Grails that were nothing but golden cups, objets de vertu from which the vertu has evaporated. Then what about a journey to find such a thing? Set out to locate it, trace down the rumor, find it’s worthless, but in the journey find the true magic in oh understanding, wisdom, so on. Would he be torn apart by outraged believers if he pulled such a trick?
