by Harold Bloom
“My mother, Achamoth, begot a thought on herself. Her desire was to make a likeness, but without the consent of the Spirit who was her husband, for he did not approve. Her power was invincible, and her desire did not remain idle. But the thing that came out of her was not perfect, and was like her and unlike her as well. When Achamoth saw the work of her desire, it had changed into the semblance of a serpent with the face of a lion, and its eyes flashed with the fire of the stars.
“Achamoth cast it away from her, so that it lay outside her place, where no one of the Aeons could see it; for she had made it in her ignorance. And she enclosed it in a luminous cloud, and in the midst of the cloud she placed a throne, that only she might see it. And she called his name Saklas. This was the first Archon; he took great power from his mother. And he removed himself from her and away from her places.
“Out of himself he made the world. And took his sister, the daughter of Achamoth, as his wife . .
This recitation infuriated Perscors. “I know all this and more. But what are you trying to tell me? What have I to do with you?”
She looked at him more directly than before. Bewilderment worked in her features; she struggled to speak, but it was as if her face would not let her.
Perscors pointed north. “I go there to put an end to my misadventures. What belongs to the Aeons, and to me, must be taken back from Saklas. If you would leave Saklas and come with me, then come. But only if indeed you can and will leave him.”
She stared at him, and then was able to answer very softly, but only with a question that, it seemed to Perscors, it was too late to ask: “But what are you? Are you here only to burn yourself away? Are you one of the Everlasting?”
Perscors wondered at how little he felt just at this moment. The pain of this parting was being postponed; there might be time, before the end, to know that pain truly. He searched for the words of truth and grace, but a hoarse whisper emerged from him instead. He was speaking only to himself.
“What I am will be shown, by and to me, before this place and I are quit of each other. Much will be burned away with me, if I vanish into my own fire. Fear will come upon the Archons in my presence, fear of the preexistent man who is in me, and who was not created by the Demiurge. They will be terrified, and in their terror the Archons will rush to conceal, and then to ruin, their work.”
She stepped back and away from him, her eyes like locked, unshining doors. Perscors turned from her, knowing it was for the last time, and resumed his search for his own place.
End of the Way West
After he had sailed to where the slowly receding flood waters ended, Olam did not march inland. He hade farewell to Norea and his other orphans plucked from the waves, and wandered south along the margin of the flood—a wide shore, in what had once been a broad valley, but was now ringed closely with low cliffs. Uneasiness, which he had known so rarely, now wandered with him. He had come down to earth to recover Valentinus, and out to Lucifer to reclaim his own place of rest, his own share in the Pleroma. But the way had been more difficult than he had prophesied, and his own memory now seemed as maimed as the memory of Valentinus.
As he walked away from the water, he mused aloud: “I have been duped since I landed here. What I seek is not in the West, no matter how far I go.”
He was closer to the cliffs than he had realized, and his growing self-chastisement echoed back to him: “How far I go,” but the words were now an affirming sigh. He looked up and studied the rocks above him. Before the flood had lapped so far, there had been a cleft through them. It was time, he decided, to rejoin Valentinus.
Olam turned around and stared north along the shore. He had not walked long when a glance out toward the ebbing flood showed him a small boat approaching. Without curiosity or elation, he stood quietly as Valentinus ran the craft aground. They stared at one another. Valentinus came ashore in the robes of a priest of Ennoia, having appropriated them from the stone chamber of the disguised Saklas. Olam was in Manichean garb, having borrowed it from one of the refugees picked up by his raft. Intent and puzzled as ever, Valentinus disregarded the grim laughter of the Aeon at the misleading garments that covered each of them, like inadvertent falsehoods.
“Old friend, two survivors like ourselves can laugh a little at the oddness of what we take on.”
Valentinus ignored the remark, and stated his own concerns: “Olam, where is Perscors now? And where do we go next?”
Exasperated, Olam kicked at a feeble tongue of wave: “By Achamoth’s vile womb, I don’t know the answer to either! Your friend is probably this side of the flood by now, whoring away and killing, as usual! Doubtless, he is with Nekbael, or Ruha, or even Achamoth herself. Or with some other Lilith. Or he is frightening Arimanes, or whatever Archon is in these parts, and he is slaughtering their idolaters by the bushel. What does it matter—he will get worse until he is crazed altogether, and dead of his madness.”
Valentinus’s voice was cold in reply: “Did you bring him here for that?”
Olam grew more irate. “He has what he wants! How can I know what the wretch will turn into before he is done? I seem to have lost some memories myself! What he was back there in the origins, I don’t know. But probably not human, anyway …”
Olam grinned uncertainly as his voice trailed off. Valentinus continued to scowl, but the impasse broke as Olam’s mood changed. He shrugged, and spoke more soberly: “Old friend, we shall go to the North. He who was Thomas Perscors may get there before us. The trick of this world is that it repeats earth, but very belatedly! When there was a remnant of the Pleroma on earth, it always lay beyond the north wind.”
Valentinus experienced another return of memory. “They used to say that the land of the Hyperboreans, beyond the north wind, was beyond the wandering Scythians, who neither plow nor sow.”
Olam laughed mirthlessly. “Be assured that Saklas is no more inventive than earth’s Demiurge, Ialdabaoth. Between us and the windless land, as on earth, the worst of his minions will be found; no matter—Perscors will burn through them ahead of us, and we will push through against the remnant.”
He turned his eyes up to the cliffs, saying: “I cannot trust this new shoreline. We must climb north. You are as good a scrambler in rocky places as I am.”
Valentinus, as they moved to higher ground, remembered better the old stories of Scythians and Hyperboreans: “We are going against the shamans, against Abaris and Aristaeus.”
“Excellent,” rejoined Olam. “They are fair game for you, and even an amusement for me, if indeed they survive Perscors long enough to entertain us.”
He led the way, springing among the rocks with remarkable agility. But Valentinus, following with effort, was absorbed in an inner bafflement again. Whatever this quest was, it seemed not to need him. The image of a man riding upon an arrow wavered before him. He shook his head impatiently, and concentrated upon keeping up with his vehement guide.
Voyage to the Hyperboreans
Perscors had followed the Scythians for only an hour when they came out of the undergrowth onto the bank of a narrow river, which must have been quite deep, as the waters moved very slowly. A small group of their company awaited them with a wide raft, which some of them boarded; the others clung to its sides as it crossed the deep stream. On the other bank, under the heavy branches of trees, another group of Scythians waited with the full war party’s horses and with a boatwagon. Concealed among rushes, watching the crossing, Perscors wondered how he was to go on following them.
When they had landed and quickly cleared the other bank, moving beyond his sight among the trees, Perscors went down to the river. He drank some of the water, which was pleasant to the taste. Low-growing branches, like those of stunted fig trees, bore a peculiar fruit, beanshaped berries, varying in hue from black to ashy gray. Yet they were sweet and juicy, and Perscors ate as many of them as he could.
A north wind rose forc
efully, and troubled the water. He wandered along the river, waiting for a sign. When a crow flew past his right ear, and alighted upon a fruit tree, the sign was evident. Perscors approached the tree and the crow simply vanished before his eyes. Turning then from the tree toward the river, he saw a grotesque old man squatting before him on the ground: he had not been there before. Naked and tattooed, the old creature grinned toothlessly at Perscors, who felt unease and some disgust. Fawns and snakes alternated in the green and brown tattoo pattern, reaching up the sides, of the old man’s neck and branching around across his forehead. “Are you here to get me across this river, old one?” He had intended his tone to be jocular, but Perscors felt chagrin as the seriousness of what he had said seemed to echo silently from the damp air itself. The chagrin vanished as the old man’s lunatic grin continued; studying him, Perscors knew that he had surmised correctly the tattooed creature’s function, and he waited patiently until at last the old man spoke in a high whisper: “I ride across on my arrow.”
Still grinning, he produced an arrow from beneath him, whose shaft head and feather seemed to be painted gold, and rammed it at the back of Perscors’s left hand. Perscors dodged, and the wound was shallow; but it burned, and he cried aloud. Even as he did so, as if at a signal, the old man disappeared, as swiftly as the crow had vanished.
Perscors picked up the arrow; its weight told him it was all of gold. It was the matter of a few moments for him to use his Arimanean bow to send the shaft speeding across the river. But it fell a few feet short of the other bank. He swam to it, tried to dive for it, failed, and hauled himself up, but without bow or javelin—they had been left on the other side, and he would not return to them now. Leaving his useless quiver behind, he marched through the trees toward the North again, uncomfortably drenched, and with his hand aching. He had no hope of catching up to the Scythian horsemen, and none of stealing a mount from them.
“I need my drum as a horse,” he surprised himself by saying. A consciousness of change that was not merely a response to the chill of dampness troubled him, but he compelled himself not to brood upon it. Beyond the hills by the river were open meadows; as he walked across them, he felt a growing weariness, and dropped limply onto the grass. Sleeping where he fell, he dreamed that he was being carried by the north wind to a high place. Before him were seven tents, each with a torn roof, which flapped violently but soundlessly in the wind; he vowed not to enter any of them. The wind caught him up again and carried him higher, until he touched down upon an island surrounded by an endless sea.
The island was treeless and wasted. Perscors stared at seven large, tall stones, placed far apart, and suggesting neither a colonnade nor a ring. He realized that these were the island’s holding stones; they would speak to him if he waited, but he resolved not to and called upon the north wind to carry him away again. This time the wind took him to the summit of a high, hemispherical mountain. Perscors descended into a cave which, after a few feet, gleamed brightly from the mirrors on its walls and a fire of green flame in the center of a wide chamber, whose ceiling sloped gradually down to the sides. Before the fire stood Ruha and Achamoth, each naked. He understood that they would show him another opening out of the cave, but unhesitatingly he turned back upward and out the way he had entered. The north wind came again, and carried him over a desert to a still higher mountain. This had no easily discernible contour —cones and humps, high pinnacles vanishing into clouds presented different aspects as he approached it. He was set down among some rocks which glinted with a kind of red mica. There was a cave entrance here, too. When he entered it, Perscors soon came upon a vast room and a naked Saklas, working an ugly bellows. On a huge fire was a brown, rusted caldron, eight feet in diameter. Saklas saw him, and tried to catch him with a huge pair of tongs, but Perscors stepped behind a monstrous anvil, upon which the tongs shattered. Saklas cried out: “Nothing is got for nothing!” But Perscors went out of the cave and descended with the wind again.
The wind set him down once again upon a river that flowed north, in a boat shaped like a flat drum, the hide laced over its frame dyed gray. Whether the skin was reindeer or horsehide he could not tell, but he saw that he too now wore gray, like the Scythians. Before him a gray sail billowed out before the wind, which added its force to that of the current. A great joy came to Perscors, but the joy itself throbbed with the beating of a drum and urged him to wakefulness.
He awoke and looked about him for the thick grass of the meadow where he had fallen. But he was in a boat, coursing swiftly through rushing water. It was the gray, drum-shaped boat of his dream, but he did not doubt its reality now.
“The old shaman put me into a trance with his arrow, and I stole this boat in that trance.” He spoke this in defiance to the north wind, but wondered whether he believed himself. He understood that he had somehow refused the initiations of the shaman, and yet had nevertheless won what he needed from that tattooed old grotesque.
A voice almost Achamoth’s seemed to speak in the wind, but not distinctly enough for Perscors to make it out. He went back to take the boat’s rudder, and now the voice spoke directly into his left ear: “If Abaris sends you to the Hyperboreans, it is for his purposes and not for yours or Olam’s.”
Perscors shrugged and did not deign to answer. An exultation burned in him; it was as if the very feeling promised him that his purposes were his own. The north wind would take him beyond the north wind, to a place he would proclaim to be his own place, and not the realm of god or of demon.
The Shamans
Perscors studied the more curious features of his boat. A lance decorated with a ladder-like tree pattern rose from its precise middle, below the mast. Perscors attempted to dislodge the lance, for a potential weapon, but he gave up when he discovered that it was strongly wrought into the frame, as if it were another mast. He realized that the cost of the lance must be the breaking apart of the boat. A gray wooden raven was the figurehead, but it broke apart and fell into the water when he tried to examine it closely.
But the most disturbing feature, Perscors felt, was the gray sail. As the wind rose or fell slightly, it changed its shape radically, wrapping itself into cloudlike configurations that, even from as close as he was, could be read for their momentary resemblances: serpent, hog, horse, lion, and owl were among the outlines he could recognize.
Along the river Scythian horsemen shook their spears at him and loosed flights of arrows, but Perscors laughed as his boat sped by them. He had the sense that he voyaged through the sky, though his drum-boat kept to the river. As he got farther north, he began to experience intense cold. The river moved among lofty and precipitous mountains capped with snow. No more Scythians were to be seen, and these northern wastes seemed uninhabitable.
Night came on, and Perscors slept through it though cold and hungry. When he awoke at dawn, he was in another landscape. The river had emptied into the wide bay of some great lake or inland sea. The mountains were blue in the distance—they seemed as fragile as clouds. Nearby gentle hills, covered with groves and orchards, sloped down to the water, all about the shore. The wind had ceased, and his boat had drifted serenely into harbor.
Perscors went ashore to find himself in an olive grove at the foot of one of the soft hills. He devoured a number of olives, and drank water from a nearby spring. The day was windless and bright; groves opened into gardens, all obviously cultivated. But no one was to be seen; he walked on and up through the hills, wondering at the absence of inhabitants. Here was the land beyond the north wind, but where were the Hyperboreans?
As he descended one of the higher rises, Perscors came upon a rough-hewn wooden altar, half concealed by shrubbery. The altar was in the form of a tree-ladder, resembling that decorating the lance at the middle of his drum-boat.
“A shaman is not far off,” he muttered, glad of the prospect of some information. A drum beat off to his right, and he went toward the sound. Just as he turned, an arrow
sped close by him and vanished into a clump of bushes.
He fell forward and began to crawl rapidly in the direction from which the arrow had come. Out of the grass emerged a slender, dark-haired man, of middle height and middle years, carrying a bow and wearing a tunic that came to his knees. Perscors lay still as the man stalked by, and then leaped up at him, only to grasp nothingness. By the sudden disappearance, Perscors recognized the nature of his enemy; he looked around for a bird. A raven perched in the upper branches of a nearby tree.
“Which shaman are you, hiding there as a raven?”
“Aristaeus” came the croaking reply.
“Why try to put an arrow into me?”
“You have frightened everyone away” was the hesitant answer.
“So that is it,” Perscors wearily remarked, looking around at the deserted hills. “I have a bad name here, and the Hyperboreans have fled from me.”
“You have a bad name everywhere,” the raven retorted crossly.
“I suppose I do, by now,” Perscors brooded aloud. “But my only quarrel is with the Archons,” he added, and directed a question to the raven: “Do you serve Saklas, or some other Archon?”
“I am a Hyperborean,” the raven croaked. “We serve only the sun. Saklas made the sun, but not the true sun, beyond.”
“We have no quarrel, then. I am only looking for stolen property, and if Saklas has stationed it here, so much the better.”
