by Harold Bloom
At the end of the visions he saw fire on every side of him. Yet this seemed his own fire, and he remained cold, chilled through.
Perscors came out of the visions and rose, stiff from his long crouching. The javelin lay on the dry floor of the forest. He could hear a wind moving upon him from the north, but no sound of water. After a while, he picked up his javelin and resumed his westward march.
Saklas in Siniavis
Below, in Siniavis, Saklas the Demiurge tried to rejoice in his apotheosis. He stood in the great central hall of his temple, before his own image, and accepted the homage of his worshippers.
The Saklaseum, towering above Siniavis upon a foundation a hundred steps high, was a gigantic domed structure surrounded on all four sides by chambers, stairs, and secret corridors, and above by quarters for the priests and cells for sacrificial victims. An open court surrounded the building, and about this ran four porticos. Gold and ivory were dominant in the façade of the structure.
So colossal were the proportions of Saklas’s statue that its outstretched hands touched either wall of the central hall. It was fashioned of gold and ivory over a wooden core, which was sacred. The walls of the temple were plated with bronze, with a second inner plating of silver, and an innermost plating of gold. The entire great chamber was windowless but was lit by a luminosity radiating from Saklas himself.
Amid the fervor of his devotees, and despite his customary sense of exaltation, the Demiurge felt an uncertainty and even an anxiety spreading both in them and within himself. The Aeon Olam marched west on Lucifer, and probably no force could suffice to restrain him. Only deception, which kept Olam moving in the wrong direction, seemed available to Saklas.
He needed allies, he reflected, even as he acknowledged the uneasy raptures of his subjects. Too much enmity at once was loose upon his world: Olam; the obsessed heresiarch, Valentinus, who would be dangerous when memory was wholly restored to him; Perscors, a violent form of the Anthropos, of pre-existent man, now returned inopportunely. The thoughts of Saklas turned to his terrible mother: Achamoth. She was the most ambivalent of allies, but against three such adversaries he required a formidable force if his laws were to prevail.
His ceremony over, his followers withdrawn, he lapsed into reverie. There was always a confusion in his mind when he contemplated the Beginnings. His earliest memory was of seeing himself reflected in a glassy ocean. He had reached forth into the waters to embrace himself, and had entered a whirlpool, from which his mother had rescued him. He could recall precisely the shock of being plucked out by her and his wild grief at abandoning the embrace of his own shadow.
The trace of confused dread seemed always to be gaining in him. He had spirited away Olam’s tower, in the absence of that Aeon, and had concealed it in his own secret place. For how many ages he had struggled to make this world, only to see it threatened each time his ugly, yellow-hued enemy returned! The curse of his own powerlessness lingered during Olam’s absences and became a humiliation beyond endurance whenever Olam quested again for the ruin the Aeons miscalled “freedom.”
He would go up and into the waste places of Lucifer, Saklas suddenly decided. There, in the Kenoma, Olam, Valentinus, and Perscors each marched west, in the land without a people, between the Marcionites and the Arimaneans. And there, in the waters of Night, let them drown or be swept to the farthest west, where no life was, or could be. But he would need help, Saklas realized again. His strength was of his mother, and to her, despite his dread, he must turn.
Saklas emerged from below at dawn in a green valley, only a short space from the Temple of Ennoia. He came up in the person of a priest of Ennoia and waited beneath a plane tree for whichever of his adversaries first arrived. But he waited in the cunning of desperation, heartsick at his own waning strength and in growing terror at the advent of Achamoth.
Valentinus at the Temple of Ennoia
An hour after dawn, Valentinus stood in front of the Temple of Ennoia.
Except for one priest who sat smiling under a plane tree, the temple’s front seemed deserted. Valentinus hesitated for a few moments, suffering from an indistinct return of many memories.
The temple had a single, small blue dome, set over an undistinguished boxlike structure, which was stark white. But the six steps leading up to the entrance were blood red. He took the steps in rapid stride, but on the sixth he stopped and did not go through the temple door, which he could see was ajar. Perhaps returning memory alone might have stopped him, but at his feet on the sixth step was a gold inscription: to simon the powerof god which is called great. As he read the inscription, Valentinus recalled the story of Simon the Mage, and remembered that Simon’s whore Helena had been called his Ennoia, the Thought of God fallen into exile— his Sophia-Prunikos. Was he recalling what he had read, Valentinus wondered, or was the knowledge based on experience? And how did he know that this was Ennoia’s temple?
He pushed the door open and went in. The bare temple consisted of a stone floor, stone sides, the dome above, and nothing more. Valentinus gazed up at the dome. There was a menace conveyed by it, but too obscurely for Valentinus to be able to interpret the danger. He turned, went out and down the six stairs. The priest was gone from under the plane tree.
Valentinus sat in the tree’s shade. He knew better than to strive to remember. For the first time on Lucifer, he felt the imminence of full recall.
The shade darkened. He saw himself within, below the dome, yet knew it was not his temple. Robed men and women sat before him, on marble benches, Perhaps they were forty in number. They were not his disciples but of an earlier teaching, which he had come to fulfill. Though they listened gravely to his homily, they gave no signs either of agreement or of dissent. Gradually Valentinus became aware that he could see into the past, but that he could not hear what he himself was saying. He strained to hear, despite his realization that he would not hear unless he ceased the attempt.
A clatter of voices rose around him, challenging, threatening, denouncing. But within this outer rim of tumult he began to hear his own voice, addressing the congregation in the temple. An armed band of Marcionites had surrounded the plane tree, but they fell silent when Valentinus spoke to the congregants of his vision:
“From the beginning you are immortal and children of life eternal. It was your wish to take death as your portion to yourselves, that you might destroy death, that you annihilate it utterly, so that death might die in you and through you. For when you destroy the world and yourselves are not destroyed, then you are lords over the whole creation, then you are lords over all decay.”
The congregation faded before Valentinus. He looked up at what should have been blue sky beyond the plane tree, but saw the blue dome and realized that he was within the temple. It was no longer bare, though he was alone. Whether he was in an earlier time or not, he no longer knew or cared. Nor did he care about the patrol, which must be startled and bewildered by his vanishing, and which might enter the temple, if it dared and if its time was one with his time. But he doubted this, as he stared at the murals on the temple walls. Great serpents swam and danced before him on the murals. “Ophites,” he said, and sat down on a marble bench to study them. They were not murals but screens, and upon them living pictures played, dissolving and flickering, reminding Valentinus of the doctrine that had preceded him and that he had revised into his truth.
The Archon Ialdabaoth took Adam, soon after the Archons had created him, and placed him in a paradise, that he might forget the pre-existent Adam, the Primal Man, by delighting in the deceptions of the Archons’ world. Ialdabaoth thickened the eyes of Adam, that he might fail to gain knowledge through them.
But Ennoia, the lost thought of God, mother of the Demiurge Ialdabaoth,—and by her other name, Achamoth, mother of Saklas—sent the serpent, that Adam and Eve might defy Ialdabaoth and taste the fruit of knowledge. So the Gnosis began, when Adam and Eve had eaten and knew the pow
er from beyond and turned away from their makers, the Archons.
Valentinus glanced at the serpent writhing beneath the Tree of Knowledge. This was the mystery of Eden; this was the serpentine river of life that flowed out of the paradise that was prison. And at last Valentinus recognized the words of his own evangel returning to him:
“Olam became a fruit of the knowledge of the Father. He did not, however, destroy those who ate of it. He rather caused them to be joyful because of this discovery.”.
He had been brought to Lucifer, Valentinus now understood, to find again the place of the Pleroma, the place of rest, which did not belong to the Archons. Resolving to quest on toward the place, he turned away from the murals to the door. An impulse caused him to turn around again. The temple again was bare and ruined, the murals gone. Before Valentinus could turn again, the door swung open and the smiling priest of Ennoia entered quietly, with a finger to his lips, warning Valentinus to be silent. Still smiling, he indicated with nods of his head the continued danger of the patrol outside the temple.
Valentinus stared at the priest, but waited for guidance. Taking Valentinus by the arm, the priest of Ennoia led him behind the ruined altar, where stairs led downward. A tunnel, Valentinus guessed, as without emotion he followed the priest, who was Saklas, downward and into labyrinthine turnings.
Ruha: Escape to the Sea
Farther west, Perscors lay on the floor of the forest, ear pressed against the ground, listening. He sensed a danger ahead, and yearned to hear some presage, but none came. Sleep, fought off for a time, overwhelmed him.
In dream, a figure of light appeared before him, stepping into the filthy mud, stepping into the clouded water. Bending over Perscors, he implored anxiously: “Since you are a Son of the Great, why has your living fire become transformed?”
“Ruha,” Perscors answered, and in answering he was awake. She must be ahead somewhere; and in serenity he prepared his spirit for whatever ordeal might come.
He knew now that west, for him, was only more painful pleasure and pleasurable pain. Why he had the vision that the Pleroma, lost tower and place of rest, truly lay north, he could not know, yet the vision was his and was not open to Olam and Valentinus.
Though he alone knew that west was a deception, he would keep on: to meet Valentinus a last time, if he could, but also to confront and overcome his own fate. If he survived to go north, then it would be well; if not, then not. Returning to earth held no interest for him.
The daemonic women were involved in his fate: Ruha, Achamoth, Nekbael. He had a dim foreboding that there yet might be a fourth. Rising, he started west again in the forest.
Perscors did not go far. One thicket ahead, Ruha waited for him. He experienced neither rancor nor fear when he saw her again. Some part of him mused on the detachment that seemed so total in him. To feel consciously neither curiosity nor desire ought to have bewildered him, but acceptance of what might come dominated instead. Or was it that his calm protected him from understanding the nature of his desires?
Their reunion began as an idyll, played against a gentle clearing. When he emerged into the cool green light, Ruha sat only a few yards away, on a great black stone covered with moss. A stream ran nearby through the meadow, ringing out four notes, each higher than the last. Ruha was clad in a loose white robe gathered at her wrists and throat. Her feet were bare. Her black hair hung loose and was draped over her knees. Expressionless, her huge black eyes stared through Perscors, not as though he was absent, but as though his presence was a momentary accident.
“To her I am an instrument, to be used, to be broken,” Perscors told himself as he came up to Ruha. He touched her forehead with his left hand, holding on to the javelin with his right. Still looking through him, she brushed his hand away and rose up, saying: “Not here,” in a commanding voice. She walked along the stream, for only a few steps, and abruptly she vanished. Following her, Perscors stepped onto the place of her disappearance, and at once found himself in another place, alone in a vast hollow cavern, pleasantly soft and dark. He rounded a single turning and found her waiting for him in a halflit chamber of black stone. At its farther end was the entrance to another chamber, still more dimly lit.
Ruha stood expectantly, her elbows drawn back, her eyes narrowed. Mounting desire was tempered by wariness in Perscors. The chamber disturbed him because of a sense that he had been there before, though he had not, and also because of his awareness that it was only a prelude to the chamber beyond, of which he felt an obscure dread.
“Are we alone here? Or do you have others nearby, ready to surprise me?”
She did not answer, her stance and smile remaining the same. Perscors did not believe that she was alone, but doubted also that there was anyone in the next chamber. Yet he continued to hesitate, while alternately studying her face and the room. He recalled in her features no actual persons whom he had seen, even in his childhood, but rather visions of a possible woman that had haunted him as far back as memory could go. The room, decorated in white and scarlet furs, and empty except for a large wide couch, could not be identified with either his fantasies or his experience and yet was intensely familiar.
“How deep down are we? Surely not back in Siniavis, where you play murderous games with drugged, crazed doubles?”
She would not answer but continued to watch him with narrowed eyes, as though waiting for some break in his will that she knew must come. Without warning, he turned around and went back into the dark hollowness of the great cavern. “Let her come after vie if she wants me,” he said to himself, and he determined to find his way back to the clearing above. But the cavern became totally dark, and he had no choice but to wander back to her chamber.
It was the same, except that she was gone. Again he had no choice but to attempt the farther chamber. Here he found her, crouched in a corner, the pupils of her eyes now much wider as they focused upon him. Though she was alone in the room, he was oppressed by dread. As his eyes grew accustomed to the quarter light, he saw that they were in a torture chamber, with whipping posts and a long, low table embellished with chains fastened to each corner. A few feet above the head of the crouching Ruha was a rude shelf piled with an array of whips and clubs.
They stared at one another. Perscors realized that she would not resist him. He had been led here to punish and to possess her in that punishment. What ritual was involved he could not know, and yet he suspected that the ritual purpose was to implicate him in some further act of self-destruction, a completion of the fate met by his mirror image in Siniavis. A lust to torment her, to make her scream, rose up in him, to be answered by a stronger impulse to protect whatever of his soul was left after the destruction of his shadow self in the underworld.
He turned, rushed out of the room, and ran back through the next chamber into the darkness of the cavern. It was better to be lost in a labyrinth than to be guided out by the demoness after he had scourged her and so yielded. In his rage against desire he hoped for battle again, and as he went forward in the darkness, he had an intimation that some combat awaited him. How long and far he ran he could not tell, since the vision of Ruha crouching expectantly did not leave him. After a time he saw light ahead and slowed his advance toward it. The cavern opened out on cliffs facing a raging sea. Blinded momentarily by the full light, Perscors gaped at an ocean wilder than any he had known.
Return of Achamoth
Perscors stood on a cliff of some seventy feet above the eddying of the sea. The cliff’s point was marked with a square black stone. Evening approached, and in the light of the setting sun Perscors made out a kind of stair cut in the side of the cliff. Though the steps led nowhere except straight down into the sea and the light would soon fail, he resolved to go down.
His descent was rapid, and ended in a surprise. The ocean, which from above had been seen as washing the face of the cliff, appeared now to have ebbed far out. Between the waves and the cliff
a quarter mile of black sand had been left bare. Rocks of the same color rose out of this bareness at intervals. Directly up against the cliff was a black altar. Halfway between the altar and the sea, a tall woman leaned against a rock, bathed in the glow of the setting sun. Perscors went toward her at a steady pace, until he recognized her and stopped, just out of range of a javelin throw.
Achamoth, robed in black fur, scowled at him in recognition. He went forward again and stopped only a few yards away, javelin at the ready.
“You are in Manichean garb this time, and armed! Your life remains forfeit to me, but the time is not yet.”
Perscors weighed an attack. Could this being be slain or at least wounded? What stopped him was the necessity of grappling with her, if the javelin proved insufficient. The fear was of himself, whether in regard to mother or to daughter. He longed too greatly to humiliate, to lacerate, to enter Achamoth.
“A truce, for now, suits me also. But I offer an agreement. Wherever we are, I need to get back to the forest above. Guide me there. If not, I have no other way but to go up the cliff, find your daughter’s cavern again, and compel her to take me to my path.”
He waited, watching Achamoth’s face and tightening his grip on the javelin. Fury came and went in her features, to be replaced by a bitter smile.
“You want her, and precisely as she wills to be wanted. But you wish to keep what you can of your soul. Keep it, for now!”
“Will you guide me back?”
“Yes, but by my way. It will not be a straight road.”
He stood, pondering his choice. Whatever the turnings ahead, she had pledged his return. Better to follow her than to seek out Ruha again. The memory of Ruha’s eyes, the pupils distended as she crouched, troubled him now. He studied the large eyes of Achamoth, as colorless as her daughter’s were black.
