by Harold Bloom
BY HAROLD BLOOM
SHELLEY’S MYTHMAKING
THE VISIONARY COMPANY
A Reading of English Romantic Poetry
BLAKE’S APOCALYPSE
A Study in Poetic Argument
Commentary to THE POETRY AND PROSE OF WILLIAM BLAKE
(edited by D. V. Erdman)
YEATS
THE RINGERS IN THE TOWER
Studies in Romantic Tradition
THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE
A Theory of Poetry
A MAP OF MISREADING
KABBALAH AND CRITICISM
POETRY AND REPRESSION
Revisionism from Blake to Stevens
FIGURES OF CAPABLE IMAGINATION
WALLACE STEVENS
The Poems of Our Climate
The Flight to Lucifer
A GNOSTIC FANTASY
Harold Bloom
Farrar • Straus • Giroux
New York
copyright © 1979 by harold bloom
all rights reserved
printed in the united states of america
published simultaneously in canada
by mcgraw-hill ryerson ltd., toronto designed by irving perkins
first edition, 1979
library of congress cataloging in publication data
bloom, harold.
the flight to lucifer.
i. title.
PZ4.B65377F1979[PS3552.L6392]813’.5’478-31897
For John Hollander
What makes us free is the Gnosis
of who we were
of what we have become
of where we were
of wherein we have been thrown
of whereto we are hastening
of what we are being freed
of what birth really is
of what rebirth really is
The Flight to Lucifer
The Living Book of Olam
Olam came down to Krag Island on an evening in late May. He came down from the spheres of the living Aeons, spheres as much superior to this world as any living person is superior to his or her image.
His descent was difficult. The Archons intervened against him several times. Knowing they could not stop Olam, they determined to hinder him. But what appeared to be the craft that transported him slipped through the storms that the world-making principalities raised against it. When it emerged from the gateway of a black hole, Olam woke up from a long sleep. For a few moments he did not know where he was, and his yellow eyes blinked uncertainly in the inner darkness out of which he stared. He had been dreaming the living book of his everlasting life as an Aeon, and in the moment of awakening he held that entire book together in a single mental image.
In the beginning was the Pleroma, the Fullness of thirty Aeons, who made up the Chariot that was also the Abyss, a Depth that was there first, before existence. Or rather (as Olam thought and saw it) the true Fullness— before even the beginning, before the Pleroma—was one perfect Aeon and with him his thought and sight, she who was his silence and his grace.
Yet from that beginning eventually had come the Kenoma, a cosmic emptiness into which all had been thrown. Olam peered out through a crystal transparency in his craft, coldly contemplating the infinite immensity of spaces which did not know him. What was it but a world of eyeless will, of mindless power? And what kept it in existence? Ignorance.
Olam’s care in coming down was to seek again the true seer of the knowing called the Gnosis. Across space, from Alexandria to Point Rachel in New England, and eighteen centuries across time, he quested again for a prophet, the one who had been his companion in the old battles against the Archons.
“And who will not remember me, perhaps.”
The sound of his own voice surprised him, as did his realization that he looked forward to seeing Valentinus again. Being an Aeon, Olam had known implicitly the meaning of his own history, but he had learned from the doctrine that made the meaning explicit; he had watched the doctrine of Valentinus vanish from most of this cosmos, while seeing also its survival in a few worlds not so afflicted by time as the earth was. Coming down closer to earth, he understood more clearly than before how dark its history was, and how much of the struggle remained his own.
Knowledge, the Gnosis, was spread out before him as he stared at the wide prison of space and contrasted it to the spheres of the Aeons. The Gnosis was in the contrast, in Olam’s overwhelming realization that this cosmos of darkness around him, so apparently the spatial home of the human planet and its companions, was absolutely alien to mankind and to God. Neither man nor God had made, or ruled in, these terrible spaces, which had been created by the Archons and ever since had been misgoverned by them. This solar system, ruled by the Archon called Elohim, was as much a dungeon as any wretched stone cellar, with its inhabitants locked into earth by a cosmic warden. Laws of nature, instituted by the Archon, enslaved earth’s universe and blocked even the ascent of the souls after death. The Creator or Demiurge, Ialdabaoth, miscalled Jehovah, had fashioned his entrapments most subtly.
The small blue globe of earth appeared before Olam. Whereas hitherto he had been traveling forward, now, in the region of gravity and its centrality, his flight became a descent. A great sadness moved him as he stared at the fragile world down to which as a messenger he had come before and now descended again in what would look, from the earth, like falling. The Fall was within the true Godhead and not among men, and the world’s Fall was one with this beautiful ruin of a creation, which drew all who neared it down rather than up or into it.
At nine in the evening, Glam’s craft brought him down gently onto the flat roof of a tower on Krag Island. He clambered down into the tower and walked through it. Though a hulking, hunched-over, yellow-complexioned figure, with a massive head all but sunk into its body, he moved with force and cunning always, shaking and disturbing even from here the spaces of the Archons.
Valentinus and Perscors
Seth Valentinus got to bed a few minutes after nine that same night. He was accustomed to falling asleep just before dawn and to awakening after only two or three hours. But it had been an unusual day for him. Entering a room at ten that morning, he had stumbled and struck his head painfully on the door. A slight but persistent dizziness had caused him to cancel afternoon appointments. Medical examination had revealed nothing amiss, but the vertigo continued, and he sought relief by retiring at nine. Three dreams came to him before he woke at midnight.
In the first he voyaged upward and outward through a starry realm. The spacecraft seemed familiar to him, and yet a dread of something hovered nearby. “They will not let me through,” he heard himself saying. In his distress, he wandered through the ship and somehow emerged beyond it, floating by himself through the starry darkness. Intense pleasure attended his drifting, but the freedom which it reflected ceased when he came down upon a broad flat surface. He stood, a solitary mind among the waste places, hemmed in by endless emptiness.
The Archon stood before him, uttering repeatedly the one name: Ialdabaoth. Valentinus studied the eyes of the Archon. They were of all colors, but a blank white at the center. Then he realized that the Archon was blind.
Without willing himself to speak, Valentinus found himself denouncing the Archon: “Blind god and god of the blind! I am a word of the unmixed Spirit, a perfect work to the Father, bearing a symbol imprinted with the character of Life—I open the world-gate which you have locked, and I pass by, scorning your power. For I am free again.”
But the Archon’s huge face grew enormous and surrounded Valentinus, the sight of it pressing against him from all sides
. The blank centers of the Archon’s eyes became an ocean of whiteness, and in that ocean Valentinus bobbed along, desperately struggling not to drown.
The struggle yielded to waking and then to a second dream. A tower rose beside the sea. Valentinus descended from his flight to stand upon the tower’s flat roof, where an ugly, yellow-eyed man stood before him, grinning cheerfully and benignly.
“Not know me, old companion? Come to me with your friend Perscors at midnight two days hence. Come to the tower in Bodman’s Gully on Krag Island …”
Olam vanished, and Valentinus stood alone upon the tower. A great wind blew in from the sea. Valentinus listened to the wind, and a menacing voice was in it:
“Heresiarch, be warned against returning to old ways. Beware of the demon Olam, lest he lead you to accursed worlds. The flight to Lucifer is an impiety …”
Valentinus leaned over the edge of the tower and fell forward, but without fear, and found himself in some kind of unimpelled flight over the sea. But storm clouds intervened, and he came down below them and finally stood on’ a small island. Out to sea was a line of rocks, each the size of a man, with the horizon seemingly just beyond them. Olam, not looking at Valentinus, was leaping from rock to rock; he then faded into the horizon. The rocks remained but seemed now more men than rocks, steadily moving in toward Valentinus. He focused upon the single one closest to him and saw a version of himself coming near. This other Valentinus cried out to him, but a wind carried the sound away, except for what seemed the single word: “Remember.” As one Valentinus merged with another, the second dream dissolved into a third.
He sat in his office, facing a couch upon which lay his friend Thomas Perscors. Perscors faced away from Valentinus and talked in a steady drone; not one word was intelligible. Some other presence was in the room; it was invisible but its murmur could just be heard beyond the level of Perscors’s voice. Another sound, a dull thud, came intermittently from the door.
The alien murmur grew until Valentinus could hear it as a voice. Its clarity of speech increased until he could make out its words:
“… Since through ‘Ignorance’ came about ‘Deficiency’ and ‘Passion,’ therefore the whole system springing from the Ignorance is dissolved by Knowledge …”
The voice fell away. Attempting to hold together and understand its statement, Valentinus felt a shock of memory, for it had been his own voice, and he had read or heard the formulation before. The murmur was gone, but the thuds at the door still punctuated Perscors’s accompanying drone. A particularly hollow thud woke Valentinus, who cried out in pain. He listened for a moment, but with waking consciousness had come a deep silence. His watch showed midnight.
Pondering the three dreams confirmed his need to speak to Perscors. He knew his friend to be as sleepless as himself, and telephoned him. The two arranged to meet day after next in Point Rachel, so as to take the ferry to Krag Island. Valentinus had time enough to brood on “Deficiency,” which more than “Passion” seemed his predicament and Perscors’s as well. But he brooded even more on forgetfulness and wondered if that were his form of the “Ignorance.”
He did not know how little he himself had changed, inwardly or outwardly, across the eighteen centuries in which he had lived and died in his incarnations, since his first existence in Alexandria. Dark, almost hairless, his body slender but tempered to every ordeal, he rarely looked other than grim and puzzled. An endless spiritual hunger conflicted in him with the failure of memory, though he knew that he had died from many previous lives, and that the first of them had been the most crucial.
Perscors knew nothing certain of his friend’s experience of earlier incarnations. A giant of a man, good-natured but easily provoked to violence, he too had his version of a quester’s temperament. A desire for the transcendental and extraordinary had led him to a series of debacles. What drew him to Valentinus was the obscure recognition that his friend finally would serve as a link to a spiritual apotheosis, to a crisis in which Perscors himself would be transformed or destroyed.
He did not know where or what Lucifer was, or why the voyage there was necessary. It would not have stopped him had he known that one of his traveling companions was an Aeon, a heretical angel by the canons of the faith in which Perscors had been raised. Nor would his departure have been prevented had he confirmed what he suspected, which was that his other companion, Valentinus, had indeed been reincarnated from earlier lives. The image of an inner fire, which had haunted him from childhood, flared more strongly than ever after his summons by Valentinus.
On Krag Island
Two afternoons later, Perscors and Valentinus took the Point Rachel ferry for Krag Island. The weather had changed suddenly that morning, with violent gusts and occasional fierce rain coming in from the coast. In the sharp chill of the ferry’s upper deck, Perscors and Valentinus sat alone. The passengers who had not canceled their trip were all below, unwilling to confront the unusually cold air. Perscors gazed out over the sea swell, taking a savage satisfaction in the roughness and the dark sky, and wondering what was motivating his allegiance to this quest. Valentinus had volunteered little information, and Perscors therefore asked for nothing. He fought off the cold with a brandy flask, as the ferry heaved on, and he brooded on the insane notion that in only a few hours he would be on a flight to an unknown world.
A little after five, with evening coming on prematurely, Perscors and Valentinus left the ferry and walked off the dock onto Krag Island.
“How far have we to walk, Valentinus?”
“Bodman’s Gully is less than two miles, Perscors, and so half an hour will do it. But there will be time enough to meet Olam. He is not likely to be early. I want to take you somewhere else, first.”
“You know this island well, then? You have voyaged out beyond space from here before?”
Valentinus frowned, with a painful look of perplexity. “I don’t know … I can’t remember … Don’t ask me to explain, but just come!”
The two friends set out on a path leading from the harbor to nearby sea cliffs. Each had only a light pack, and both were agile, determined climbers. Soon after reaching the cliffs, they began a rapid ascent, and within half an hour they stood together in a high spot, surrounded by whirling hawks whose nesting place had been disturbed.
“What have you brought me to see, Valentinus? The view is only another sight of ocean.”
“I have brought you to hear something, not to see, Perscors. From this cliff you can hear very turbid water, water of the abyss, perhaps.”
Both men stood quietly for a few moments. Perscors smiled and gestured at the hawks. “I can hear them, and the normal sounds of the sea, but nothing remarkable at all.”
“No, I mean nothing remarkable,” Valentinus commerited. “Listen, listen very carefully, and see if you cannot hear something alien calling out to you.”
Perscors shut his eyes and waited; after a few moments he could hear nothing, no wind or rain, no sound of waves, no bird cries. He listened intently to silence, and then he ceased to listen. A bewilderment came over him, then a fear, and finally a shock, as though an inward wind had begun to blow against him. From a great way off, faintly, he began to hear a call of waters, but a call that seemed to be voiced, as though a more primal ocean had been able to form speech. He began to hear it as a woman’s voice calling out a name in a tone of desperate frenzy, and he responded with a terrifying sexual arousal. Straining to hear the name, he lost consciousness. A few moments later he found himself stretched out on the rocky ground, with Valentinus, worried, kneeling by him.
“What did you hear?” Valentinus demanded.
To his own amazement, Perscors found himself whispering a name unknown to him.
“Have you ever heard the name ‘Achamoth,’ or one like it?” he asked Valentinus, as he pulled himself to his feet.
“Yes, somewhere, once,” Valentinus replied, standing up. “It
means something like ‘a woman’s dark intention,’ in some old tongue, but I do not think that was the alien call I expected you to hear. Though what I expected I still cannot remember clearly.”
Perscors, a touch irritated both with himself and his friend, stared at him uneasily for a moment.
“You have a queer memory, Valentinus. You almost remember a great many mysteries, but when you come close up to them, something fails you.”
Valentinus remarked only that it was growing dark, and he led the way down the sea cliff. After a walk on the twilit roads, which were nearly deserted, the two friends started down off the main way onto a footpath leading into Bodman’s Gully. This was a large marshy stretch of ground marked by underwater vegetation, as the hollow was well below sea level. Valentinus led Perscors ever deeper into it, where the opulent vegetation began to assume a luxuriance that seemed more appropriate to another latitude. Soon there was no path, and Perscors was wondering what house could be located in so uncleared a place when suddenly he found himself standing in front of a round turret, apparently quite windowless, squat-looking yet towering up a surprising seventy feet to a curiously flat roof. Perscors reflected that this brown stone structure seemed at once banal in its ugly commonplaceness and sinister in its uncanny uniqueness.
The Tower
The tower, as Perscors now saw, was not only windowless but evidently without a door. In the cold, dim light he could make out no entrances as he walked about the tower, which seemed nearly as broad as it was tall. Perscors came back to where he had started his circuit, to find that Valentinus was digging vigorously at a spot a few yards in front of the tower. A tunnel was thus uncovered, through which Valentinus preceded Perscors, each of them employing a kerosene torch. The way was surprisingly long, longer than seemed reasonable to Perscors. Finally, Valentinus pulled himself up through a trapdoor. Perscors followed to the bare stone of the tower’s first floor. The round room, as he probed it with his light, appeared to be totally empty except for the circular steps leading up to the next floor, which seemed to he lit up. Valentinus hesitated at the foot of the stairs.
