Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  The battle for the end of the world was long. From the heights of the castle, the ladies and the children gathered with their queen to watch its progress: for the two armies could be seen easily from this distance, toy armies suspended upside down in the middle of the air at the foci of Emperor Rudolf's great parabolic mirrors. The queen and the women wept for the hurt and the slain, cried out the names of their particular champions when they could be picked out from the heaving, thrashing throng. Other combatants seemed to wrestle in the disordered sky around them. And what or who was that now shambling out from the Bohemian rearguard, hugely tall? The ladies gathered at the mirror to see. Look what damage he does! A man? A beast? Ours? Whose?

  It's the man made of earth the Great Rabbi has brought to life and released. The Maharal after long thought overcame his persistent doubts, and though he was certain that he could never be forgiven and would now go down in guilt into Sheol, he has asked himself: is it good for the Jews? And it is. The city must not fall; if help is given to King Frederick, the secret promises of old Emperor Rudolf will be kept. If not, not; there will be no mercy for the Jews, no justice either.

  Look, now it's lost a huge arm, struck and blown to dirt by a cannonball, but seems to be undeterred. Eyeless and noseless it sees and smells and does harm, treading heedlessly on corpses and wounded men; the Catholic forces fall back before it. Darkness comes at last, and then that other troop, those long-tailed ones that have dogged the Catholics through Bohemia, comes upon the field: and in the face of such a horror—a wolvish army—the Catholic army breaks. The battle is over. The dead lie scattered, but though night's ravens are already picking up the good scent of slaughter, these wolves will not feast: like lions, the noble bristle-backs will not touch a dead man. By dawn they are gone away, and the wagons come for the bodies, ours and theirs, dead and near-dead.

  * * * *

  On that day, while the city rejoiced, in the Giant Mountains far from the battlefield there was carried with simple ceremony a great casket. Its attendants in black, the black wagon hung with faded roses and strewn with papery dry petals. A very large casket, because it contains a great corpse: Philip à Gabella, who despite his human form reached no farther than an ass's age, and who as death approached reverted, feature by feature, to the simple beast he had been. Speechless too finally as the brothers gathered in his byre to weep, and unable to give to them the last blessing they asked of him.

  The cave is deep and cold where they inter him, in a cell no larger than the cell of his convent in Naples, his prison in Rome, but glittering with ten thousand carbuncles that have grown up in the still matrix of the earth and encrust the wrinkled walls: Andreas Boethius de Boodt, gem hunter to great Rudolf, discovered this place long years before, and told no one, knowing perhaps that one day a guest would arrive fit to lie in it.

  No tears any longer. The brothers know that there is no death, that neither their friend Philip nor the little ass that embodied him nor great Bruno whose spirit found refuge in his body are passed away; the infinitesimals that composed them, in their transmigration across the infinite universe, will form other beings just as strange and plain and wonderful. He had only hoped—he even expected—that the atoms that composed his own soul might, in far centuries, be drawn again to one another, might seek for one another through the infinite spaces, and at length agglomerate somewhere, elsewhere, into another soul again, his own: and in their coming together know themselves as they had been. Somewhere, elsewhere, on this world or another, or this world when it would be another. Because you can't be born in the same world twice.

  * * * *

  Te Deum and Non Nobis were sung that night in the Cathedral of St. Wenceslaus, the king and queen not in red and white any longer but in gold and silver, sun and moon, Apollo and Cynthia, resetting the clocks of creation to the first hour. A flight of putti filled the sanctuary during the service, their voices were heard, everyone saw: it seemed clear to all that this was a sign of God's blessing and congratulation upon them. (Really, though, the angels were only younglings, careless, passing through on their way elsewhere.)

  Then to the golden city was summoned the brotherhood of the Monas, those who were not already resident there: men, women, and others, Jews, Italians, Dutchmen, priests, knights, gardeners, beggars, thieves. Those who knew how to handle angels, knew their tricksome and contrary natures; who knew the Artes magnæ lucis et umbræ, the great arts of light and shadow, which are greater even than the goldmakers’ arts, though the goldmakers would be summoned too, and the shape-shifters and nightwalkers, and the daylight healers and the doctors of all sciences: all those who had sought for the Brothers of the Rose-Cross, or pretended to be among their number, or believed themselves to be, or knew they ought to be. They were summoned by a worldwide steganography that had long lain waiting to be sent out, an invisible inaudible Messenger, who came forth at just the right astral hour, and on great peacock-eyed wings, robed in blue and stars, bearing her packet of invitations, moved over the earth and the waters even as that Hour itself moved: and he, or is it she, is trumpeter and trumpet call in one, whisper-crying into each ear just the word that causes this heart to turn in the right direction: to go and pack with needful things a ragged bag, or an ironbound trunk, or a train of pack mules, and set out.

  And there, in the tetradic chamber in the center of the castle in the center of the Golden City called Adocentyn, wouldn't they at last come together at the obvious hour of the obvious day? Wouldn't they at last put off their old garments, the garments they had worn so that they might go unremarked among all peoples in all places, the furred judge's robe, the armor and gauntlets, the motley, the threadbare scholar's gown, whore's finery, Gypsy bangles, cope and miter? Brother, they would say to one another; brother, and embrace, because at last they could. You, they would say, and laugh, or rejoice; I never thought to see you here. And others too, whom they could not see but could sense and delight in, beings come gently or wildly or somberly among them, agents and representatives of other realms, deep or high or far, come with blessing, warnings, gifts, challenges.

  Then at last would be the Great Instauration, not all at once or without costs or sorrows, but at last everywhere: a backward revolution, a backflip of wonder performed to turn the progress of the world around like a galleon and head it again for the Age of Gold, which lies in the past, in the beginning, but which could now be sought for in the time to come, as Hermes Thrice-great in Ægypt so long ago predicted: the restoration of all good things in the course of time by the will of God. Or by means of the gods, as the Giordanisti would always say it; meaning by gods nothing other than the reasons of the world, the grammar of divine fecundity endless and ordered. The reasons that make all things to be as they are and yet make them always capable of transformation, the reasons that work and will go on working forever, just because they can: we call them gods because they are within us, because they made our bodies and our minds for us too, because we recognize their faces from long ago, because we love and need and fear them, every one.

  And that is how the world came to be in which we would come to be. This world, our great wide wonderful beautiful world, and our benignant sun, Sol Apollo, since then grown even larger and more kind; and the great good beings who, like our Terra, circle him in love, those animals whom in time our æronauts will set out to visit, on winged ships that will be drawn up into the air and beyond the moon's sphere by Will and his cousin Eros. Our seas teeming with metamorphosis, the great gems growing in our caves, watched over by solitary dæmons; our walled and towered cities guarded too by their own genii, our famous colleges and abbeys where no sort of wisdom is forbidden and no error punished except by laughter. Our many well-loved monarchs, kings, and emperors holding their inoffensive dream empires together simply by sitting still at their centers like queen bees, to be fed on royal jelly by wise magi, who then can draw from those princes’ fattened hearts the alphabet of all good things, Peace, Plenty, Justice, Delight, Wisdom, and Com
fort. Mere signs, yes: but signs are food and nurture for us, they are in fact all the food and nurture that we need: all of us in here.

  6

  What happened next was that, twenty years earlier, Giordano Bruno chose not to escape from the papal prison in Rome and go wandering forgetful on four legs into the world.

  —No, he said to his gray visitor, who seemed to have grown older as the years of their dialogue went on, older and yet no wiser. No.

  Then you must sign the papers, revocations, confessions, admissions that they wish you to sign. Or they will burn you.

  —No. I never will. Were I to do that, then their small world would go on existing for centuries more, for no philosopher would dare to speak out and tell them otherwise, and in his telling make it so. If I show they have power only over this aggregate of atoms, which they may render or discompose as they like or must, then another man may take heart. Finally they will cease. In time men will laugh at their strictures rules bulls anathemata.

  It seems a slight chance, to go and be burned for.

  Bruno didn't need to look upon his visitor to know that he meant this as a challenge, or a tease, or even an awed compliment. The gods are astonished by men, who can choose to do or say or seek what will bring them to destruction; and not even the gods who destroy them can always say they are mistaken to do it: though as often as not they are.

  That long epic in verse that once upon a time Giordano Bruno wrote—The Triumphant Beast Thrown Out, the one that puzzled the inquisitors—told of a conference of all the gods in which, having themselves grown old and unlovely, they vow to reshape the heavens, and make all things new: a job they cannot, in the end, agree on how to accomplish. And—fortunately for us—they give it up.

  Those men who wish to bring about the same universal reformation—the alteration of the whole wide world, with the end of making all men happy forever—should likewise give it up. It's not that it can't be done: perhaps no man, or men, or men and others, will ever be powerful enough to do it, but Bruno was sure there was no limit to the power that was available to the soul willing and able to forgo everything else to gain it—self, and ease, and peace, and complimentary love, and natural procreation. But it was not wisdom to try; ruin was far more likely than glory; give the great ball a kick and you can't know where it will rebound, or how far it will roll.

  That's what he had learned from the thousand journeys he had made in thought, all the beings he had seen and been, in all the years he had sat in his cell on his bed of stone. Not escape or salvation: or rather, no other one but this one. The turnkey (and after he was gone his son) had looked in now and then through the small barred window to see him there, his eyes sometimes a little crossed and his mouth sometimes working as though he spoke, then listened, then spoke again; his hands moving in air, meaninglessly—the turnkey didn't perceive the pages of the books he turned—and sometimes shifting his cold hams on the stone; meanwhile Bruno had been sifting the days of his past, and walking the roads of this future and that one, to see where they would lead; in one, looking into the house of that Englishman, the empty house, and the man himself old and empty too it seemed, selling to a vile tradesman a gray glass wherein a spirit was surely contained, although he said there was none. Oh she was there, she was: she saw Bruno looking in to see her there, and he knew that she knew him, and would live forever. But the old man—a greater and better man than he had ever been, as his wisdom was greater than Bruno's knowledge—had surrendered his own magic, given it up, and by his own renunciation bade magic depart from the world. Because the time was past in which even the strongest spirit could be sure he would draw only goodness out of the future for man's aid.

  So he would do that too. He would burn his books—or they would burn them, the books of which he was composed, the Book of Everything and Other Things that he contained, that he was. Giving up magic as that old Englishman did or one day would do. Silence and prayer at the end.

  And perhaps he was wrong after all: perhaps no spirit was so strong as to refashion the earth, or even to choose to try. Maybe—it seemed to come to be so even as he thought it—maybe earth and time and the endless things were not to be ruled, for like cannot rule like. Was that another and opposite meaning of the tale of Actæon? Actæon: Why did the story seem to make a different sense to him now than it had made before?

  If you won't bind the things of this world on men's behalf—as you have learned to do, and even to bind us gods on occasion—will you not stay to teach them to unbind themselves?

  —To teach unbinding is only to bind further. Every man's bonds are his own: only that one who learns his unbinding from his own soul and the love of his neighbors and equals is truly unbound.

  The reverend cardinals wish to teach the world that a free man can be destroyed as easily as a coward or a fool.

  —That's not the lesson that the world will learn.

  You must know that you renounce me in renouncing all that you have been and all that you have fashioned from the soul the gods gave you. I cannot aid you at the last.

  —That soul was not mine to keep. It will go its own way. Animula vagula blandula. Let them catch it if they can.

  Son.

  The man Bruno crossed his arms before him, arms in his threadbare sleeves.

  —Tell me only this, he said.

  One last thing.

  —Will it be you I see at the gates of Avernus? Conductor of souls, will it be you who guides me down?

  But there was no answer, for there was no longer one who could answer. There was also no Avernus to go down to, there was no down, no up. With no further word, that genius or friend or master slapped his knees, rose, and departed: he would never in that age speak again to anyone, though many would think they heard him, and the images of him (finger to his lips and winged feet) would in those years vastly multiply. He went out, and up the dark passage into the sun. Then he took the few steps up to the doors of the papal apartment, to the Sala Paolina and its high frescoes—of the Archangel Michael sheathing his sword, the war in Heaven done; of the victories of Alexander the Great; the life of Saint Paul. If I give up my body to be burned, and I have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Having reached that room without being hindered, he opened a small door at the side, and put his foot upon a stair. Then he stopped—stood stock-still, as though he had thought of something, and if he could remember what it was, might turn and go back—but that wasn't it. It was that, with Bruno's refusal (whether because of it or merely on the occasion of it could not be known, and only Bruno himself could have thought adequately about the question), the gods, angels, monsters, powers, and principalities of that age began their retreat into the subsidiary realms where they reside today, harmless and unmoving, most of them anyway, for most of us most of the time. The bright god came to a stop there on his upward way, because the upward way just then ceased to be, and then the door that led to it ceased to be a door, and then he ceased to be himself, his head remaining half turned in wonder at what was coming over him. What wind is that? And there he is today, stopped in midstep, all in black, as flat and still as paint, unrecognizable even to those who most need to know him. Pierce Moffett, for instance, passing the same way nearly four centuries later, at a dark day's end climbing out from that prison too and reaching the same high still empty chamber, alone himself and grieving without reason: he turned his own head in that direction, where—according to his, that is Kraft's, guidebook—the chamber's decorator had painted a trompe-l'oeil door and staircase, apparently just to match a real one at the hall's far end. And on that imaginary stair was painted an imaginary young man in black, just going up, just turning to look back. Legend claims this to be a portrait of Beatrice Cenci's advocate, said that cunning heartless guidebook, but if it is he, then he must have wandered backward fifty years from Beatrice's time to when these walls were painted; actually no one knows who he is, if indeed he is anyone at all. And in the book's margin, beside the place, one of Kraft's little gray stars, ne
arly vanished.

  * * * *

  So it was really Bruno, and not an eidolon or ghost or substitute or figment or illusion or spirit cognate made of thought, who burned to great acclaim and cries of loathing in the Campo dei Fiori in the Jubilee Year 1600. It was him, his flesh, his life, the books his mind was made of. The crowds were able to see the skin blister and blacken, the hair and beard combust, finally the body collapse into a shapeless mass like a burning building falling. Some said (later) that they saw his spirit rise up from the pyre and be snatched away by devils or angels, but people often say they see those things, and once having said them they begin to believe they really happened, and they never forget them.

  Thereafter the rolling ball went that way and not the other way, to arrive again in the course of things at the year 1619, when a young man named René Descartes, a lawyer's son of no particular profession, went traveling in Germany, just as the Bohemians were making their stand against the Empire. He visited Heidelberg in its days of beauty, and later would remember the famed statues he saw there, moving solely from the force of water piped within them. Acis and Galatea. Echo and Narcissus. Apollo and the Muses. Midas and the Singing Reeds. Was it perhaps in some similar way, René wondered, that the fleshly statues of our bodies also worked? When winter came he put up in a house in Neuburg, on the border of Bavaria. For weeks he stayed all alone in a room heated by a large ceramic stove—very warm—and thought. He was thinking of how a foundation for all knowledge might be discovered that had the certainty of the self-evident truths of mathematics, a philosophy free from the ambiguities and ambivalences of words. He had heard about the Rosicrucians, and of their promise of new and fruitful philosophies, and had thought of seeking them out; he even wrote out (but maybe it was just a joke) the elaborate title page of a book that would be dedicated to the Frères de la Rose-Croix, so famous in Germany.