by Harold Bloom
The Way Out and Down: Ruha
Time itself seemed to have fled away; Perscors had no notion of how long he had marched. The stones had turned to black soil, except where the ground gaped open, revealing nothing but an endless abyss. Skirting one of these fissures, Perscors saw for the first time in this underworld some growth. Along the fissure’s edge he found a clump of milky flowers, stark white in their dark setting. Drawn to them, he tried to pull one up, but was amazed at the root’s resistance. Crouching down, he struggled obstinately and some moments later finally drew out the black root. So great was the fatigue caused by the root’s obduracy that he felt more drained than he had been by the battle. The plant gave off an unpleasant odor, strong and garlicky, but he felt comforted by it and placed it in the right-hand pocket of his torn robe.
As he strode on, vegetation began to appear in the form of clumped shrubs, sparse at first, but progressively thicker, until indeed their presence started to slow his pace. He moved through darkened groves of cypress trees, illuminated obscurely by the reddish light from above. Abruptly, Perscors faced a vast lake sunk in deep shadow; nearby yawned the wide mouth of a rocky cavern. He did not hesitate but advanced into it.
He now moved along in complete darkness, until he rounded a turning, and would have stumbled but for an inner voice again slowing him down. The giant eddy of a whirlpool churned below him, emitting light, but only in sudden bursts. A winding path led down to his left, and Perscors followed it, slowly and uncertainly, because of the flickering of the light. After he had descended through many windings, he saw more clearly; a huge river coursed before him at the end of the turnings and, despite the strength of its motion, gave off a steadier gleam. With a sense of return, Perscors made his way down to the river. The image of Ruha rose within him, for he seemed to have come back to her realm, while actually before him stood two figures over by the river, momentarily compelling him to break away from his dream of the woman.
Two bearded men of almost his own height confronted him. Both were in black armor, though unmasked, and neither bore a weapon; their dark, languid faces, not identical, almost rhymed with each other. Princely in their bearing, they awaited him without expression, yet their eyes were intent upon him.
Perscors felt only impatience and angry curiosity as he stared back at these apparent nobles. He did not wait for them to speak. “My name is Perscors. I have had many misadventures. I seek either directions out of here, to the world above, or else information that will take me to a woman named Ruha.”
One of the black armored beings replied in a tone of disdain: “I am Urpel; this is Marpel, my brother. We are princes of the earth of Siniavis, which is this region of the underworld. There will be no woman for you here.”
Marpel, after a silence, spoke also: “You are not welcome here. There is blood for which you are accountable, but you are not our concern. We will neither help you nor attack you. Go from us.”
His now characteristic rage possessed Perscors, and almost without willing it, he rushed at the brothers. Though they cried aloud for aid in high, piercing, effeminate voices, no one came, and their struggle was brief. In a few seconds, Perscors had crushed the face of Urpel and broken Marpel’s neck. He felt no remorse but only a continued frustration, a kind of rage against meaninglessness.
He exchanged the torn robe of Achamoth for the black armor of Marpel, and felt relief at shedding her garment. On impulse, he transferred the milky flower with its black root to his left gauntlet. He wished that he were equipped with a weapon, and twenty paces down the riverbank, he discovered the short thick swords of his princely victims. With one in each hand, and the need to find the woman Ruha, he marched down along the darkened river of light, convinced that his fate would bring him to her.
At the river’s turn, a man stood waiting for him. The murderous intensity of his quest left Perscors as he came up to this beautiful being—tall and with fair straight hair falling to his shoulders—who stood clothed in azure robes and who emanated an aura of blue-white radiance. Saklas the Demiurge smiled a welcome to Perscors, who found himself kneeling at the feet of this apparent angel of light, his uncrossed swords falling with a muffled sound into the dust as if before an exalted presence.
“I am Saklas, who made this world upon which you trespass.
“The two who carried you here seek to teach you their evil.
“I am immutable, and I imitate the Father as best I can.
“Do not consider that my world is badly made, only because there is so much sorrow and pain in it.
“The Aeon who brought you refuses immortality to the entire heaven and all the stars.
“Why does Olam care to inhabit the copy of a world that he hates?
“Believe in your own fire, embrace your own fate, and you will come home to me.”
The high crystal tone of the Demiurge’s voice died away, and Saklas vanished from the sight of Perscors, who rose to his feet and repossessed the two swords. He was greatly bewildered. One impulse urged him to find his way back to the surface in order to reach Valentinus, and to be able to decide truly which side of this violent struggle was his own. But a deeper force drove him along the river that he might learn what his relation to the woman was to be.
It was only a few moments later that she was coming toward him, across a blue meadow. Her smile was disdainful, yet less so, he thought, than it had been when they had embraced. He walked with her, feeling the brutal dullness of his black armor near her green robe, yet he did not let go of the two swords. Around them, the caverns had become gardens again, gardens flourishing under a light which turned the deep green of shading foliage into the blackness of cast shadow or of what had been burned, gardens fit for Proserpina as the Queen of Hell in an old legend.
They passed through the arbor with its silver couch, on which they had embraced, but Ruha walked on, frowning for a moment, or so he thought. Despite his desire, he began to feel his weariness, thirst, and hunger; he wondered how long it was since he had moved into and through his own image in Achamoth’s mirror.
Then Perscors abruptly stopped, and spoke to Ruha: “I need to rest and to eat and drink. Have you no words?”
Her voice was low, intense, and to him wholly compelling: “We go to feast close by.”
She walked on, looking straight ahead, and he saw that she would say no more, for now. Perscors hesitated, but then realized he must go with her. Between the hesitation and the resolve, a vertigo of sight had begun for him, and he was stunned to disbelief by what he now saw. Though he still stood where he had stopped, he also was walking on ahead, by her side. He looked down, in great alarm. There was the black armor and the sword in each hand. He looked ahead again, and there he strode, in black armor by her green robe and her black hair, and the striding Perscors that he saw carried a sword in each hand. Either he watched his double walking with Ruha, or he himself was that double, and what watched him was something other than himself.
He thought back to Achamoth’s mirror. What he saw getting farther ahead of him, with Ruha, was that reflection of himself through which he had then passed. Had he entered it? Or was he now that reflection, looking on at the active figure who had passed through him? Would he, or his image, or both, get back to the world above? And in any case, had he lost himself to his image? His heart pounding with anxieties, he began to run after Ruha and the being by her side.
But he could not catch up, however fast he ran, though Ruha and the other Perscors continued to walk steadily; as in a dream, the distance increased the more rapid his efforts. In exhaustion, Perscors fell upon the river path. His left gauntlet slipped off and he saw that the harsh, black-rooted, milky flower was not there. Had he lost it, or was it in his double’s gauntlet? “How long do you mean to be content?” a voice whispered to him, and he remembered one meaning of the sight of one’s double—that its appearance preceded death. Perscors struggled to his feet, fearing
not for himself but for his double, whose end was so close.
With renewed energy, Perscors hastened down the river path. It baffled him that so much time had elapsed and yet there was still no sight of Ruha and his other self. The river grew wilder. Perscors glanced off to his right and saw Ruha and her lover, a good distance across the meadow, moving toward a house of smooth yellow stone. He watched them enter, as he ran toward them.
It did not surprise him, as he came up to the house, that a walk around it revealed no door. On his second circuit, he observed an oval window halfway up one wall of the house. How to climb twenty feet of smooth stone seemed beyond his reckoning; yet his curiously increased strength and agility, particularly in this underworld, had added to his natural daring. Even if he could not save his double, he wished to behold this fate that was somehow both his own and that of another.
A close survey of the walls revealed almost enough overgrowth of vine to carry him up to the ominously lone window, provided the vine held. Perscors left his swords below and scrambled up, but with great difficulty. The window proved to be of opaque crystal. In another sudden fury, Perscors kicked at it. Without shattering, it swung open, and he lowered himself into a bare chamber. This led to a long passageway onto a balcony, overlooking a banqueting room below, built as a kind of amphitheater. So many voices were rising from below— laughing, screaming, singing—that Perscors believed himself to be unheard. He crept along the balcony until he could peer down. His first sight startled him with revulsion, but he compelled himself to stare long and steadily at a medley of grouped sexual couplings and tortures. In the midst, the other Perscors aggressively participated, roaring in exultation.
The Way Out and Down: Defilement
For a while, Perscors was able to watch, focusing with ambivalent fascination upon the group at the center, comprising Ruha, his apparent self, and two attendant women who resembled her, though each was slighter and less glowing than her mistress. While Perscors’s double was spontaneous and exuberant in his movements, totally abandoned in both active and passive postures, Ruha and her women were expressionless and seemed rehearsed or ritualistic in every gesture and every act. The three women in turn bent down before the lustful double, each draping her arms about the necks of the other two, and presenting herself for penetration. While these cycles of substitutions went slowly on, they exchanged places in scourging, and being scourged by, him.
Abruptly, Perscors moved back from the balcony to the passageway, unable to sustain more of the scene. From the fire of ignorance he had passed to the air of grief, and he could not order his thoughts or feelings. Whatever was to happen to his double might happen without his observation, though a sense of foreboding lingered in him. Toward Ruha, he did not know what he felt, and he could not be jealous of his own shadow or blame his other self for the setting or nature of the ritual orgy. But what was the cause of the profound sadness that pervaded him? Rather than confront his own double, he would not enter that revel, and only an escape upward seemed a possible release from the sorrow of a spectacle that was more than that, even if it placed him back in the violent activity of the house of Achamoth.
“Or have I ever left that house?” he said aloud. Without intending it, he had gone down the passageway beyond the empty chamber of his entrance, and he came now to a vast room so different that it seemed to be in some other structure. A kind of octagonal courtroom, was his first impression, but when he looked again, it seemed more like a chapel or meetinghouse. Because the light was so dim, he only gradually saw a shrouded form standing behind a lectern. Facing him, Perscors moved closer, but stopped halfway, some yards from the shrouded figure, who fixed his eyes upon Perscors and began to chant in a voice so strong that it overflowed the huge hall with thunderous resonance: “Perscors! How do you think your trial will end?”
Awed when he heard his name, Perscors changed to a state of anger at the question. “I do not know who you are, though you know me! And where and how am I on trial? Who dares to try me?”
“You are not fit to learn my name. Nor can it do you good. The Archons try you even as you burn here in your ignorance.”
“Try me for what?” Perscors roared back.
“Can you not see anything at all? Your self is below, and by now it feasts its fill upon the flesh of one of Ruha’s women. They have drugged you into their horror.”
Perscors vowed silently that he would depart from this world of darkness.
“Depart? Yes, your spark can go, but your soul they will execute here. Go back, without understanding, to the den of Achamoth, but look in no more mirrors, for your shadow self, your psyche, is gone from you.”
“Who are you?” Perscors burst out.
“Yet another messenger, another stranger to whom you will not listen. Go from me, or accept some instruction before you come to judgment. You, who cannot see two steps in front of you!”
“Judgment? Judgment?” Perscors laughed with a force paining his chest and throat. “What can judgment mean, whether on or below the star Lucifer? The star has been judged, and existence itself is a punishment here!”
The shrouded voice altered tone: “Some knowledge evidently you have attained. But listen!
“In the name of the great Life! I cry to you, I instruct you.
“I will tell you of the worlds of Darkness, and what is said in them.
“Beyond the earth of Light downward and beyond that earth outward is the earth of Darkness.
“That earth is black water and its depths are caverns of gloom.
“From the black water, Saklas the King of Darkness was fabricated through the passion of Achamoth and the evil of his own nature, and came forth.
“His Darkness grew strong and multiplied through demons, devils, genii, spirits, hmurthas, Liliths, temple-and-chapel spirits, idols, Archons, angels, vampires, goblins, noxious sprites, imps of anxiety, monsters, elves of nets and locks, and Satans, all the detestable modes of Darkness of every form and type, male and female of Darkness; clumsy, gloomy, rebellious, furious, raging, stubborn, poisonous, foolish, lazy, abominable, filthy and stinking. Some among them are deaf, dumb, mute, stupid, stuttering, unhearing, perplexed, ignorant. Some among them are insolent, violent, hotheaded, shrill, debauched, irascible, children of blood, attended by flashing fire, makers of devastating conflagration: do you not hear your nature in these words the Great Life has sent me to speak? And some among them are and will be sorcerers, forgers, liars, swindlers, robbers, deceivers, exorcists, false oracles, soothsayers. All these together are master builders of every abomination, inaugurators of oppression who commit murder and shed blood with no compassion or pity. These are the artists of every hideous rite. The taste of their lips is like trees of gall and poison, the sap of their bodies is like naphtha and pitch.”
Perscors stood in silence. Then he asked of the shrouded messenger: “What of the woman Ruha?”
The great voice of the Shroud came forth again: “Ruha the Holy Archdemoness: daughter of Achamoth; sister of Saklas.
Her mind is malice, replete with lies.
She is full of sorcery,
Full of witchcraft and false wisdom.
Ruha sits there with her hmurthas,
Amulet-spirits masking as handmaidens.
There she sits and practices false magic.
Who gave the liar instruction?
Who called her the Holy Spirit?”
For Perscors, it was enough, and more than enough. He turned and fled the vast vault of the room. But where was there release for him from this underground realm? He had descended through his reflection: he sensed that the voyage back also must involve his shadow self. Stealthily, he went back upon the balcony and peered down into the now quiet amphitheater.
Ruha sat enthroned, naked and triumphant, in the midst of the company, upon a silver dais. Saklas stood off at her left side, one of her women at her right. The oth
er Perscors lay bound in chains at her feet. Whether dazed or drugged, he seemed lost in a stupor. Next to him lay the corpse of Ruha’s other woman, mutilated, with terrible deep ridges torn into her flesh. On every side, the former revelers were massed expectantly. Drumbeats began to reverberate, and the crowd parted to allow a masked, hunched figure to make his way up to the bound Perscors. With astonishment, Perscors himself, crouched above, read in the color and folds of the mask a parody of the yellow, grinning countenance of Olam.
Ruha addressed her assembly, in a high, clear voice:
“This murderous wanderer has slain my hmurtha, who sought only to give him pleasure.
“He tore and devoured her flesh. He lies there bestially drunk upon the blood of her body.
“He came with the Knowing Ones. Olam brought him; let Olam destroy him!”
As the drumbeats increased, the creature masked as Olam knelt down, encircled the throat of Perscors’s double with a necklace of iron hands, and strangled him to death.
Perscors returned to the passageway from the balcony. An overwhelming sense of defilement possessed him. It was a fury to him that his reflected self should have died so helplessly; he was filled with a rage against every being on or under Lucifer. He returned to the bare room, went out through its oval window, and lowered himself by vines to the ground. With a sword in each hand again, he took up his stance near the stone house, determined to slaughter all its occupants when they emerged.
