by Harold Bloom
Turning his head, he brought the titaness into focus. She sat facing him, a few feet from the bed, with her handmaidens standing ranged behind her. He saw that there were now only three, two of them much battered. The missing one, as he was to discover later, he had slain. Days afterward, he was to reflect on how many beings he had killed on the star Lucifer, and he was to think back to this one as a harbinger of much sorrow.
A voice, harsh and haughty, jolted him as though a great bell were tolling a few inches from his head: “Hear Achamoth, who once was Sophia-Prunikos, youngest of the Aeons in the Pleroma.
“I fell farthest, and into a passion apart from any embrace.
“You came with my enemies, and would have defiled my sanctuary, even as you have defiled Ruha my daughter.
“Your life is forfeit to my women, to die slowly where you are bound.”
She rose and departed, leaving her attendants, three slighter but still sinister versions of herself. One of these went to a fire, to heat implements. Another ripped away the Sethian garments from Perscors, cutting him in six places with her dagger while doing so. The third began to flagellate his back and buttocks with a whip of many strands. Exasperated beyond measure with humiliation and suffering, Perscors broke from the bed in a movement so sudden as to seem miraculous even to him. The ropes came apart, and the hand chains tore away from the bedstead. Naked and bloody, his enormous strength magnified many times by his ordeal, he came at his tormentors, swinging the chains still manacled to his wrists. His right chain cut down the woman with the whip, crushing her forehead, while the left chain first blinded and then partly decapitated the dagger wielder. Bellowing and crazed, he closed upon the last woman, who vainly sought to hold him off with a glowing hot iron. Perscors knocked it aside and split open her head with several blows of the right chain, which partly shattered in the last stroke. Still screaming in exultation and bloodmadness, he turned to look for Achamoth.
But that demoness was gone, away from his vengeance. His fury continuing, he went from chamber to chamber of the single-story house, slashing at every object with his chains. In the act of breaking apart a metallic caldron, he freed his right wrist from the chain, and staggered to a sudden halt. He stood in what seemed the central chamber, surrounded by wreckage, and employed fragments of ruined vessels to pry his other wrist free. Then he collapsed into a corner, crouched against the wall, breathing in great gasps while his body and spirit descended from madness into something like his ordinary state. He shivered in his nakedness, bleeding in many places, with the greatest hurts on his scalp and in the furrows made upon the whole of his back. His first thought was to vow revenge against Achamoth, whom he would seek before finding Ruha and then going west to his companions.
Reflection altered the sequence of his resolutions. He bathed and tended his wounds as best he could, and then foraged for food and drink amid the chaos of the wrecked rooms. Unable to find other garments, he settled for a loose fur robe of Achamoth’s. Wearing her attire, eating her fruits, and drinking her wine, he wandered through her ruined house until in his weariness he knew he must sleep. But he armed himself with a dagger, and with a lance he had found, and kept these at hand as he sank down upon the bed where he had been tortured. In the house of the demoness, he was thrown into a deep sleep.
The Doctrine of the Limit
Many distances to the west, Olam woke up at midnight of his second day on Lucifer. Valentinus had vanished earlier in the day, while they had moved through the lands of the Manichees. But Olam had no concern for the well-being of his experienced disciple, who would turn up again at the appointed time and place, some days hence, as self-reliant as ever. The Promethean Perscors, Olam reflected, would be of concern only if he died prematurely or went thoroughly bad too soon. Olam smiled formidably, his yellow eyes aglow in the night. All beings—whether demons, sorcerers, or men and women—who came in the path of that quester would be thoroughly scorched for their misdeeds. “I have let a scourge loose among them.” Olam laughed to himself, expecting that even a Demiurge would find this human spirit too much to subdue or contain. But having work of his own to do, Olam turned his will to the night journey awaiting him, a journey toward the place of the being called Horos. This was neither god, demon, nor man, but a living hypostasis, an abstract existence.
The moon would not rise for three hours, but Olam could see in the dark rather better than he could in the day. Sure of foot, he climbed rapidly through heights. Horos spent its existence on a pinnacle in the western mountains. Its presence was shunned equally by the Manichees, living to its east, and by their enemies the Marcionites, living in the valleys to its west. Horos was a voice that neither slept nor ate, a voice that kept watch from its pinnacle. Intruders were met by avalanches.
Olam climbed for nearly three hours. The oval moon rose, throwing a blue-white light, as apparently radiant and unreflected as its own, on the mountains. Olam looked upon the scene, unmoved by its obvious beauty. As he swung himself lithely over a precipice, he gazed ahead at a narrow ridge that would be his pathway to the Place of the Limit, where the pinnacle of Horos was centered. Without surprise, but with intense distaste, Olam saw a figure standing at the midpoint of the ridge. A moment later and he and Saklas confronted one another, a few feet apart over a deep, narrow abyss.
Saklas stood in the moonlight, his azure beauty made more vivid by contrast to the twisted yellow ugliness of Olam. The Demiurge’s eyes were luminous, giving forth the same light as the moon of Lucifer. Olam looked down at the bare feet of Saklas, because they were surrounded by seven concentric circles of blue radiance, scored into the stone of the ridge. Between the Demiurge’s feet, one thick black line of shadow ran across the circle, dividing the diagram in half.
“I’m not here to wrestle with you, Saklas. You don’t need your diagram as a defense against me.”
“The circles are there to keep your evil out of this world’s soul” was Saklas’s stern reply. His voice sounded with a crystal ring, in fine distinctness to Olam’s deep, low growl.
“A splendid device for warding off evil,” jeered Olam. “What is that thick black line if it isn’t your Gehenna?”
“A Tartarus for demons like you and your sect. What are you doing here?”
“Just what you are doing,” Olam mocked. “I am on my way to prefigure a few events or perhaps to see where the balance lies in these parts.”.
“This time you aren’t getting through to the pillar of the Limit.” Saklas worked his will on the diagram, which rose up, ring by ring of light, into the air, to advance against his enemy.
Everlasting as his conflicts had been, Olam had no direct experience of this sorcery. Hunched into himself, he waited for the combat.
The first circle came at him in the shape of a lion. As Olam struck a fist in what seemed the face of a golden lion, he saw dissolving before him the face of a being whom he had confronted in battle before, and whom he knew as the Archon Michael.
Next came the bull-shaped Souriel. Olam disdainfully threw the force aside, jabbing his finger at its hot nose. Impatient, Olam moved forward against the oncoming system of Archons. The serpent-shaped Raphael darted against him but was stunned by a two-handed blow. Gabriel, shaped like an eagle, went down as Olam grabbed its wing and whirled the creature around his head until the wing cracked off. There now loomed up against him the bear-shaped Thauthabaoth. But the impetus of the Aeon’s forward movement dashed the bear aside, and trampled the dog-shaped Erathaoth, who came on next. The seventh circle, Onoel, screamed at Olam, but the ass-shaped Archon was swept aside in the onrush. Olam came at what should have been Saklas, but it dissolved. The power of his yellow hands held only the blue moonlight. The Demiurge, shaken, had vanished to choose another time and place.
Olam did not pause to exult at his victory in this skirmish but hastened down the ridge to a rocky plateau. Rising out of its midst was a stone pillar, looking from certain
angles and distances like a cross and from others like a jagged pinnacle. Horos waited at the top of the pillar, glaring down at the interloper. A shower of rocks descended, coming at Olam seemingly from all directions. Warily he dodged and retreated, until he stood out of range, staring up at the grotesque, ageless figure of the keeper of the Limit.
“You are wasting your energies, you odd wretch, and may give me a useless injury. Answer a few questions only and I will go out of here.”
“I know you, Olam” came the querulous reply, in a voice infirm yet piercing. “I do not give knowledge for the asking. This is my place, and mine alone, and I will not be bothered by anyone.”
“Peculiar, foul monstrosity! I am here to help you do your work, to keep some spark uncontaminated on this world. Where does Achamoth locate herself? Where is the Topos of the Demiurge? Where have they moved the tower I built among the Manichees?”
A torrent of small rocks whirled down from the plateau, crashing far away from Olam.
“I shall not stir from here until you convey a few facts. You will run out of rocks yet, and then I will climb up there and bother you a bit more closely!”
“Ungrateful monster and demon!” Horos wailed at a high pitch. Suddenly he began to intone a chant of warding-off, which told a story Olam knew too well already. Olam winced and sat down on the rocky ground, knowing he must hear the complaint through, and confident that patience would compel the obsessed voice to answer his question.
“The very last and youngest of the Aeons, Sophia, plunged forward and fell victim to Pathos, to Passion, to Suffering, without the embrace of her consort.
“This Pathos she called Love, but it was Impudence, as she had no such intimacy with the Forefather as she asserted.
“Yet this Pathos is the search for the Father.
“Sophia fell into Achamoth, because of her wish to embrace this greatness.
“Achamoth suffered great distress due to the depth and inscrutability of the Father.
“Achamoth kept pushing on and on and would have been swallowed up by the sweetness of self-satisfaction.
“But I, Horos, am the Power consolidating the cosmos.
“She fell against my Limit, and so was kept at a distance from the sweetness.
“Someday she will push again, be held up again, and will return to herself.
“Her Dark Intention will cease, and she will return to herself.”
“A pretty fable,” Olam jeered. “Speak it as often as you want, you feeble oracle, but for now and time to be, I know that she and all other horrors are running loose, here as elsewhere. Tell me where she is, where the Place of the Daemon is, and whereto they have stolen my tower!”
“Achamoth has fled as far as she can,” Horos wheezed out. “As for Saklas’s place, you will find it when you find her! And of your precious tower, I neither know nor care. Let me be!”
Horos had ended with a scream and stood trembling now, rocking to and fro upon its pillar.
“As far as she can flee,” Olam reflected aloud, “and to the Place of the Demiurge. That is probably all the wretch knows. She has only a short start, and I have some days more on this accursed world. West! Due west, and I will find her!”
Without glancing at Horos again, Olam clambered past him, and rapidly began a descent that was a course westward.
The Way Out and Down: The Battle
In pain and humiliation Perscors woke at dawn of his third day on Lucifer. As his eyes opened, he saw his own right hand clenching a lance, and then looked at the dagger resting in his left one. He rose in that house of pain, gripping the weapons.
Stiffly, Perscors went toward the door of the house, but found only another chamber, and then another, all littered by his fury. He stumbled upon the corpse of the first of Achamoth’s women whom he had killed, but no door was by her, though it was at her station by the door that he, with his bare left hand, had destroyed her. His circuit of the windowless rooms went on, but still no door appeared. “Sorcery,” he cursed, and compelled himself to remain still.
Perscors stared at the chamber’s wall, where he stood, and realized that he was staring at himself. The whole of this wall was a mirror, or something like one. A revulsion came upon him as he gazed at the murderous and baffled expression of his own countenance. He felt no identity with the figure he confronted. A dark humor rose in him. At least, he thought, I am hardly idolatrous of—or to— my own shadow. Responding to a drive, he entered the wall, walking into and through his own image, and immediately was thrown downward.
He felt his falling direction as an outward one, and angrily set himself against fear, relaxing his body except for the hands, which held his weapons all the harder. Whatever waited at the end of this sorcery, he vowed to himself, would find in him no helpless victim. His fall through this dark void grew slower and slower, curving outward in great sweeps. Perscors sensed his own weightlessness and prepared his spirit for an end to the long descent.
He came down knees bent, soundlessly and without effort but in total darkness. Unable, after some moments, to distinguish anything around him, he braced himself upon what seemed a smooth stone surface, his lance and dagger at the ready. In only a few minutes he heard the faint but unmistakable clatter of arms somewhere behind him. Swinging around, he saw dim lights at what seemed no great distance, and heard a muffled sound, as if of drums, moving toward him as if echoing the lights.
Another moment and the lights brightened and, crimson against a black horizon, rose, revealing seven advancing figures, masked and lightly armored, each with lance and dagger. Perscors counted them off, noticing as they came closer that the masks were animals’ heads. Here on Lucifer, or wherever he now was, Perscors had been coming slowly to realize that his physical strength was increasing, and a lust for battle possessed him as he waited for his masked enemies.
No more than seven yards away, as he judged, they halted at the ready, in a battle line that stationed them about two yards apart. Perscors, his heart pounding in triumphant fury, moved toward them. A few seconds after he began his advance they broke and ran. The lights darkened suddenly, and Perscors, frustrated and angrier still, was left alone in the abyss of blackness.
He stood again and listened. There was a low breathing coming toward him, off to his right. “Animal masks and now an animal!’’ he muttered silently but an even more inward voice told him not to strike as this beast now trotted toward him, with a yelp that seemed to be one of relief. It came up to him and licked his feet under his robe. Both bewildered and glad, Perscors transferred his dagger to his lance hand, knelt down, and found himself rubbing the head of what seemed a large and very friendly hound. The hound licked his fingers, and Perscors uttered words he half remembered from his childhood: “Prosper your journey, and the angel of God keep you company. So they went forth both, and the young man’s dog with them.”
Suddenly the hound raised his head and bayed, warning Perscors of danger. Perscors rose, with lance and dagger set, the hound for a companion by his side. The great red lights glared again, and to a drumbeat in a quadruple measure the seven armed men advanced on Perscors, but more warily and hesitantly than the first time. Perscors studied their animal masks, from left to right: lion, bull, snake, eagle, bear, dog, ass. The dog mask grotesquely combined the features of hound and wolf. Perscors spared a moment to study his own hound, whose large sympathetic eyes beamed back at him, as fearless as Perscors felt himself to be. A rage at all his mishaps surged again in Perscors, and he charged at the adversary line, his lance raised and his hound charging by his side.
The masked beings wavered, but this time held, and each wing circled in so as all but to surround Perscors as he charged. They ringed him, their armor flashing like fire. Perscors’s eyes glared a darker fire, for he was swifter and stronger than what opposed him. One lance came close enough to tear Achamoth’s robe, but by then Perscors had thrust his own dagger
into the heart of the one masked as a bear. Unable to retrieve either weapon, Perscors seized the serpentine one by the throat and broke his neck with a sharp tear downward to the right. The crimson gleam of fire was all about him as he dodged another lance and broke a hand that slashed him with its dagger. Amid the screams surrounding him, Perscors made out the furious baying of his hound and started toward it. Literal fire seemed to have broken out, and the lion-man ran past Perscors, shouting in agony, pulling vainly at his mask, which was crackling with flame. Into Perscors’s path rushed another tormented, howling enemy, tearing at a mask so full of fire as to be unrecognizable. Perscors kicked the creature aside and came up to the body of the hound, run through by a lance, but with its fangs still sunk into the groin of the dog-man’s corpse.
Nothing living was near Perscors as he stood and grieved, at the center of a ring of waning fire. For the first time on Lucifer, his sorrow had crept beyond the circle of his self. Yet he glanced at the bodies of his enemies and did not count them, feeling only contempt toward the fallen. Day of some sort had come to the underground world of Lucifer, and a pale, reddish, unsunlit sky was above him. He turned dully away from his hound to what he sensed was west and began to walk forward over the smooth stones. For a moment he thought of retrieving a weapon, but then shrugged the thought away. Bare-handed, he felt himself to be overmatched with anything this world could send against him, below or aboveground. The fires burned away into the stones, and Perscors shook with the cold pink of the day-glare, as he marched forward to his heimarmene.
