by Harold Bloom
“Therefore I departed from the East, and went downward, accompanied by two guards, since the way was dangerous and I was too young for such a trip. I passed beyond the place where Eastern merchants gathered, until I reached the land of Babel and entered the walls of that great towered city. I went down then into the land below, and my companions abandoned me. Immediately I went to the serpent and took up my stance near his dwelling place, until he should drowse and fall asleep, so that I might take the pearl away from him.
“Because I was all alone, and a stranger to others in that place, I was glad when there I saw one of my own clan, a fair and handsome youth from the East, another son of kings. He came to me, and I made him my friend and the companion of my mission. Though he warned me of the people of that land below and against sharing with the Unclean, nevertheless I clothed myself in their robes, lest they suspect that I had come from outside to take the pearl and so awaken the serpent against me.
“Yet somehow they discovered that I was not of their country. With cunning they set a trap for me; I ate of their meat and I drank what they mixed for me. I served their king and forgot that I myself was the son of a king. I forgot the pearl for which my parents had sent me. Heavy with their food, I was thrown into a deep slumber.
“All this that I suffered my parents saw, and they grieved for me. There was a proclamation in their kingdom that all should come to their gates. And the kings and nobles and all the great ones of the East together devised a plan so that I would not be abandoned in the land below. They wrote a letter to me and each one signed it in his own name.
From your father, the King of Kings, and from your mother, possessor of the East, and from your brother, next to us in rank, to our son in the land below, our greeting. Awake, and rise up out of your sleep and recognize the words of our letter. Remember that you are a king’s son; gaze upon that which you have served in your bondage. Remember the pearl, for whose sake you descended into the land below. Recall your robe of glory, remember your mantle of splendor, that you may put them on again and your name be read in the book of courage, and then you will be, together with your brother, heir to our kingdom.
“The king sealed the letter with his right hand against the children of Babel and against all the demons of tyranny. In the form of an eagle, king of all birds, the letter flew up and landed beside me and became speech entirely. At the sound of its voice I woke up, rose from my slumber, took it, kissed it with tenderness, broke its seal, and read. Just what was written in my heart was written in it. I remembered at once that I was the son of kings, and I longed for freedom. I remembered also the pearl for which I had been sent to the land below, and I began to charm the hissing and terrible serpent. I put it to sleep by naming to it the name of my father, the name of my brother and that of my mother, queen of the East. I took the pearl and turned back to the home of my father. I put off the filthy and impure garment and left it behind in the land below. Immediately I directed my way so that I might come to the light of my homeland, the East.
“On the way, I found the letter that had awakened me. Even as its sound had raised me up from slumber, so now its light shone from it and showed me the way.
With love drawing me on and guiding me, I steered past Babel on my left and reached my home country.
“My parents sent their treasurers to meet me, bearing my robe of glory and my mantle of splendor. I had forgotten my own brightness, for I had left it behind in my father’s palace when I was still a young child. Suddenly I saw the mantle, and to me it seemed to become the mirror image of myself; I saw myself whole in it; that while the reflection and I were separate, yet our forms were the same. I saw also the treasurers who carried the mantle, that they were two, yet one form was present in each, one royal sign in both. The image of the King of Kings was shown throughout all the mantle.
“Also, I saw the movements of the Gnosis tremble all through the mantle. I saw that it was ready to speak. It said: ‘I belong to him, most courageous of all men, whose acts have augmented my stature.’ The impulses of the king stretched the mantle toward me, and my love aroused me to rush to meet the king and receive the mantle. I reached out and took it and decked myself with the beauty of all its colors.
“When I had put it on, I rose up to the gate of salutation and worship. I bowed my head, and I adored the radiance of my father, who had sent the mantle to me. I had fulfilled his instructions, and he had fulfilled his promises. He rejoiced over me and received me, and I was with him in his kingdom. All his servants praised him with pleasant voices, because he had promised I would journey to his court, and now my pearl and I indeed appeared before him.”
Olam stared at the fire. Some of the bitterness had ebbed in him. He smiled and spoke in a voice so gentle that he hardly recognized it as being his own: “The gift is to me. And the serpent, the sea, and the land below— all are this cosmos. You wore their garment to deceive the Archons, and yet the deception deceived you also.”
“I heard the call of the letter,” the youth said simply.
“You were both called and caller. We are as much a deadly poison for the Darkness as the Darkness is for us.”
“They never told me the meaning of the pearl.”
Olam stared at him for a long time.
“You do not need to be told. Your meaning and its meaning are separate but the same.”
The young man puzzled it out, as he looked at Olam, who now would not avert his eyes from the fire.
“Then there was no quest,” he said at last to Olam.
“There is always the quest. But you, subject and object of it, cannot know that you know.”
“I did not suffer,” the young man said.
“There need be no suffering, of one for another. That is a great unwisdom. The combat is with ignorance and not with sin.”
Both sat silently.
“Were not the dangers real?” the youth broke silence to ask.
“The dangers are there to be overcome. But the ordeal is not the quest. That is the error of those who believe and do not know, and of the Archons. And of the Primal Man, each time he comes again.”
Olam rose, gravely saluted the youth, and turned his darkening path again to the West.
The Marcionites: Captivity
Carried west by his captors, Perscors passed from his shocked semiconsciousness into the abysses of sleep. In a dream, he stood in the wastes of the Kenoma, watching Valentinus march by on the horizon, going west. He realized that Valentinus could not see him, and wondered if they would speak to one another ever again.
Olam marched up to him. It had begun to snow. Perscors stood directly in Olam’s path and called out: “West is not the way! We are all deceived! All we oppose and what we seek are now in the North!”
Olam pushed him aside and marched westward.
“Olam!” Perscors called out, and was awake. He was dressed in green, in garments stripped from the corpse of some Manichee, and he shivered in a stone dungeon, his wrists chained to the wall.
The door to his cell was opened, and three guards armed with swords escorted in a tall, white-bearded figure of authority, magnificently attired, with a gold cross sewn on his white robe. Cerdo, bishop of the Marcionites, had come to view the captive Manichean demon.
He addressed Perscors skeptically but with a touch of respect: “Stranger, you look to me neither demon nor Manichean. You called out Olam’s name? Are you a companion and follower of Olam?”
“I came to this world with him.”
“Why did you fight against us? We have no love for Olam, but until now he has been at peace with us.”
“I fought because you were many, and the Manichees were few. And you came against us. I fought in selfdefense.”
“So it was not at Olam’s command?”
“He brought me here, but I am not his follower, or anyone’s follower. What is Olam, anyway? Is he a man or
something beyond?”
Cerdo studied his prisoner carefully. Rather doubtfully, he replied: “No, he cannot be a man. The Knowing Ones call him an Aeon. To us he seems something worse, though we are not certain. Better than a demon but not part of the glory of the Aeons.”
Perscors shook his head in bafflement. Cerdo reflected for a while and then spoke slowly: “Whatever you are, you have killed many of ours and in a quarrel not your own. Is there some reason why we should spare you?”
Perscors was silent. His strength slowly was returning to him, and with it came his confidence that this sect of warriors would not be the cause of his death.
“If you have nothing to say, then hear my judgment. I give you over to the ordeal of fire, after torture by the women of the fighters whom you killed. Justice is all you merit, and Olam cannot hold our justice against us.”
Confronting Perscors’s impassivity, Cerdo felt an ebb of his own confidence. This stranger, though a man, might be more than a man, without knowing it. Old prophecies might touch upon him, and truth might speak through him, though he himself embodied no truth. Uncertain and troubled, Cerdo resolved to contend for Perscors’s soul, while consigning the stranger’s body to the fire.
“What is your faith?” Cerdo asked.
Despite his situation and his slowly mounting fury, Perscors found himself laughing at the prospect of explaining his dried-up American Presbyterianism to a belated representative of second-century heresy. The madness of phantasmagoria was coming upon him again, and with it the need to kill or be killed. But he had cunning enough to suppress his hysterical laughter.
“I believe nothing, except that I am here to some purpose. I will not perish by your fire or any fire but my own, and those who seek to murder me will suffer for it.”
Cerdo tried to summon anger, but felt only dread. “Who sent you to be a scourge unto this world?”
“I came of my own will, seeking my own freedom.”
“Freedom,” Cerdo said severely, “is only of the will of the Father.”
“There is no freedom on Lucifer or on earth,” Perscors replied, “except knowing your own fate and either coming to love it or fighting against it.”
“Hear the gospel of Marcion,” Cerdo cried out, and his voice began to take on authority. “There is nothing worth saying about Beginnings, and neither you nor these Knowers have any knowledge worth the having. Redemption is by faith, faith in the unknown God who is not of this world. Those who proclaim the Gnosis are in the right only about this world. God did not make it, and his Son cannot save it. Olam knows correctly that the good God is an alien god. What he does not understand is that we always were, we are, and we must remain strangers to the true God. Until we are saved, we wholly belong to our maker, the Demiurge.”
“From what are you saved, then? Why should the true God save you if you are not his?”
Cerdo answered unhesitatingly: “We are saved from our creator, to be adopted by the new and alien God, who reaches out to us because of his goodness, though we are not his.”
“What difference does that make to this world?” Perscors asked slowly.
“This world cannot be bettered. Neither our nature, nor the world’s nature, can be altered. These puny elements, this miserable cell of the Demiurge, deserve only the rule of justice. The good God does not deign to touch this world.”
“I hardly see why you and the Manichees should be at war,” Perscors observed. “They brood on Beginnings and say they are transformed by knowing God, but they despair of this world as much as you do. And at least they are less bloodthirsty in their justice than you are.”
“We vex the Demiurge,” Cerdo insisted gruffly. “But the Manichees do his work for him.”
Perscors shook his head. “I find no truth in what you say. Whatever the confusions of the Manichees, they tell a story of a Primal Man that explains what is strongest in me.”
Cerdo sighed in anger. “You are of the Demiurge, and justice condemns you. In an hour, you go to the revenge of our women and then to the fire.”
Left alone by Cerdo and the guards, Perscors considered his predicament. It would be unwise to wait, though his fullest strength had not yet returned. The daemon in him said: “Now.” He gathered his force, and pulled easily away from the wall. Until he recovered the armor and swords of Siniavis, his chains must be his weapons, as they had been against the women of Achamoth.
He went up to the cell’s door, dashed a chain against it, and then stood aside to the left of the door. It swung open and two guards ran in. Perscors crushed the face of the second with one sweep of his chained wrist and turned on the other, who collapsed onto the cell’s floor in terror. One impulse in Perscors told him to turn away, but rage dominated and he smashed in the cowering figure’s skull with another blow. Only then did he turn and march out of the cell of his captivity.
It was near dawn as he emerged into the central compound of the Marcionites. Though he seemed unobserved and felt confident he could break through whatever sentries were stationed at the western border of the Marcionites, he had no intention of departing without his armor and swords. In the lightening darkness he made his wandering way through the stone labyrinths of the Marcionite center, which seemed half town and half encampment. There were lights in just a few of the rude stone houses, most of which were oblong, barrack-like structures. Only once did he meet a sentry, whom he strangled from behind, swiftly and noiselessly. The chain had already fallen off his left wrist, and now he found his right wrist free also. He shrugged off the loss of the chains and walked west steadily through his enemies’ dwelling place.
A bleak dawn came. Perscors had reached the western precincts and realized he could not linger. The ground began to slope downward, and ahead was a heavily wooded valley. In the distance, Perscors saw a four-man patrol, which was moving away from him.. Bitter at the loss of armor and swords, he suppressed his rage and hastened down the slope into the valley.
Escape to Vision
Perscors lay in ambush in the woods, secure in the anticipation that a patrol would pass. He had ceased to question the daemonic inwardness that had taken possession of him. A plan seemed unnecessary; when the patrol came, he would know what to do.
A single Marcionite came down the forest trail, armed with a javelin and carrying a leather pouch containing what Perscors assumed were provisions. Whether the rest of the patrol were close behind did not concern him. As the Marcionite passed in front of him, Perscors rose and rushed at the man. A single strangled cry and the unequal struggle ended. Armed with the javelin, Perscors ran back on the path, seeking other victims, but the patrol fled before him, to seek reinforcements. Reluctantly, he turned back and retrieved the pouch, which contained a round, flat loaf of bread and a flask of water. Refreshed, he continued westward through the woods, though troubled now by recollections of his dream of the Kenoma.
Noon came, and he was still deep in the woods. But he began to be aware that the forest was changing. Mist rose everywhere and gradually became so thick that he could see only a few feet in front of him. Was it still a forest? The ground became damper and a rising wind blew against him. Somewhere up ahead there clashed a sound of waters, and Perscors felt the sense of reality ebbing in him. A third encounter with Nekbael might be imminent, and he vowed to avoid such agony if he could.
His pace slowed as the noise of breaking water came closer. Surely there was no ocean ahead, so that what he heard had to be illusion. He moved now through land closer to wilderness marsh than to forest. If he approached another ordeal, then he associated the trial with Nekbael. But suddenly he ceased to expect torment.
A single leaf that he had focused upon had changed from green to the silver color of shining water. Refocusing followed, and now everything he could see was silvery water.
Perscors felt himself ascending even as he saw himself descending to the glory of the water. He grippe
d the javelin tighter, as a defense not against any anticipated enemy but against what must be a vision.
He stood surrounded by the shining. So great was the glare that for relief he gazed at his own feet and saw only the glitter of marble. But when he prodded the marble with his javelin, he stirred up shining water.
“What is the meaning of these waters?”
Perscors had shouted the question aloud. He was answered by a hail of stones, coming at him from all sides. To protect himself, he dropped the javelin and crouched over, placing his head between his knees. He did not feel any stones striking.
He found himself saying a name he had not heard before: Ialdabaoth. How many times he repeated the name he could not know, for in his kneeling position he had passed into a trance-like state. Visions came by him which were not dreams, as he stayed awake, head pressed tight against himself. But the visions, though distinct, were too rapid to afford him more than glimpses. Enormous marble halls, one after another, came by him, or was it that he went from one to another? Each chamber initially seemed endless, with ceilings as high as the heavens, yet each yielded to another. And all were empty. They were bare of everything except the splendor of their own marble.
