by Harold Bloom
“The Mother of God,” he whispered bitterly as he followed her, limping somewhat, moved again to anguish and desire by Achamoth’s swift, stately movement. She did not deign to look around, but led him quickly south along the lake’s sandy shore.
Within one of the cypress groves, she entered a round stone house. He followed warily, looking about lest her handmaidens be poised for an attack; yet this time he seemed alone with her. “Wisdom the Whore,” an ancient voice whispered within him, but he was wary now of all voices, whatever their origin.
After he had washed in a great round basin and robed himself in a thick gown, he sat near her before a low table on the fur-covered stone floor. She would not watch him as he ate and drank. He scarcely noted what fruits he devoured with his bread, or when he drank wine or water. Sometimes he stared at her, coldly admiring the contrast between the dark of her hair and the terrible whiteness of her skin. At other moments he saw nothing, but brooded upon the broken wall, the bare holy-of-holies, the cistern, and the ceiling of fire at the first level of the tower stairs.
“I have survived prison, cistern and pitfail, torrent and sea, the desert and night of the Kenoma. What demons are left for me upon Lucifer, except you and your son?”
His tone had been quizzical, since he sat as her guest. Achamoth condescended only to stare at him. The expressionless gaze reminded Perscors of Ruha, and he grew sad.
“You are the demon set loose upon us here. Olam knew you for what you were and are, and brought you here for the combat.”
Her voice, even and flat, almost toneless, indicated to Perscors that the final struggle between them was yet to be. Rest before battle, he thought, but then felt a desperate desire for knowledge.
“What was I?”
“He who is born of the mother is brought forth into death and the cosmos, from the dark light to the dark light. So my children were born. But you, and I, were not born of the mother.”
Perscors brooded on the words, but without shock. What he had begun to learn among the Manichees, he now began to know. The Fall truly had been of the divinity, and not of men and women alone. At the origin of fate came a double divine fall of those not born of the mother, of the Primal Man and the female Thought of God.
“As well myself as another!” He laughed, but this moved her to a sudden bitterness.
“Anguish and terror are beyond your depth! You cannot know an inward suffering, because always you remain a child, though truly you never were the child of anyone! Go on in blindness, die here still blind. It cannot matter. You will wake to life in yet another cosmos, remembering nothing, learning nothing. Abandoned in the void, you will blunder on to another void!”
“Slow!” he whispered back to her hoarsely. “Be just a little slower in having me go to death in this world! I intend to take one or two more with me out of here, whether they waken elsewhere or not.”
“You do not make the truth,” she answered with a curiously soft decisiveness. “There are negatives in the truth, losses that even such as you must take. You are not here for your own victory, even if you should win. Olam gains, whether you live or die. If you live, you remain his weapon. If you die, then the death purchases full remembrance for Valentinus.”
Perscors battled his anger, seeing that madness would take him by it. He knew again that he was not ready to understand her words.
In the long silence ensuing, night came on. Achamoth withdrew to another chamber, but the desire to follow her left him for a while. He had to reflect and to rest, and to sleep if he could, one final night.
He lay down, knowing that tonight, at least, she would not attack him. What had Valentinus said her name meant, when first it had come to him on the cliffs of Krag Island? A dark intention? What was his own purpose, in the time remaining to him? And was it his own?
“Are we not all versions or remnants of Primal Man or of the Thought of God?” He heard his own voice and something too tentative or too exhausted in that voice moved him to a sleepy anger. With the anger came the pride of self-identity, of having discovered his own share in the godhead. And after the pride came the guilt, from the text taught him in childhood:
“Because thy heart is lifted up, and thou hast said: I am a god, I sit in the seat of God, in the heart of the seas;
“Yet thou art man, and not God …”
He had chanted loud enough for Achamoth to have heard him, or to have been awakened, if she slept. Drowsy as he was, he would have gone on chanting, yet could not remember more. But just before he fell asleep, another fragment returned, and he recited it softly:
“They shall bring thee down to the pit; and thou shalt die the deaths of them that are slain, in the heart of the seas.
“Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee: I am God?”
“I shall die soon, but I shall not be slain,” he whispered fiercely, even as he fell asleep.
In his dream, Perscors returned to the empty cedar chamber of Saklas, only to find two crouching female figures facing each other there. Were they of flesh or of ivory? He saw them in profile: Achamoth and Ruha, or their representations. Each stretched forth both her arms to the other, and behind each arm was a wing.
They crouched upright, their legs bent under so that their knees reached forward to each other and their buttocks rested upon their upturned heels. Arms and legs were naked, but they wore wide metallic collars around their shoulders, and heavy breastplates hung down from their necks. With bare heads and streaming hair, they reached toward but could not touch a small winged cherub set between them.
Perscors stared more intently. Ivory or flesh, the small cherub was a shrunken version of himself. He came up in terror from the dream, and the remainder of the text came back to him:
“Thus saith the Lord God: Thou seal most accurate, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty, thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the carnelian, the topaz, and the emerald, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the carbuncle, and the smaragd, and gold; the workmanship of thy settings and of thy sockets was in thee, in the day that thou wast created they were prepared. Thou wast the far-Covering Cherub, and I set thee so that thou wast upon the Holy Mountain of God. Thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of the fire … But they filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned. Therefore I will destroy thee O Covering Cherub, from the midst of the stones of the fire … I will bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it will devour thee, and I will turn thee to ashes … thou art become a terror, and thou shalt never be any more.”
Perscors had recited this curse in a clear, strong tone, and had listened carefully. Achamoth stood before him, watching intently, her expression alert but poised in some reserve.
He stood up to face her, and he spoke with a bitterness that surprised them both: “They taught me that thus saith the Lord God. But I see now that thus saith the Lord Saklas. Wherever I was, there is no workmanship in me. I am no part of this creation, or of any other. I was one with the Abyss, from whom Saklas stole to make his worlds.”
She watched him silently, as though she expected an attack. But he had bathed, eaten, and slept as her guest, and he went forth in her robe. They would meet again as enemies, perhaps to the death. Perscors saluted her gravely, and went out into the night.
Aeon and Archon
That night, Olam and Valentinus had gone separate ways, agreeing to meet at midnight later, when they would depart from Lucifer. Valentinus marched around the western edge of the lake, while Olam followed the eastern path to the tower, at the lake’s northern edge.
Olam grunted as he went by the huge stone wall, and he spared a single snort for the black rock.
“Saklas’s toys,” he muttered, and went on up to the tower.
But on arriving there, he became uneasy, and did not enter.
“Too quiet,” he mumbled
again, and sat down upon a single slab of loose stone, some distance back from the 204
iron door. Wherever Perscors was, he was not in the tower.
“If the mad giant indeed had been caught in some trap, he is out of it again by now. He is most likely playing love-and-death games with Achamoth! Someone will be murdered, anyway!”
After cheerfully reviewing the possibilities aloud. Olam composed himself for some contemplation. He felt pleased enough with himself. Perhaps Saklas had been a touch cleverer than usual, but it had gone well enough. At least everyone had converged upon the right place! Valentinus was being a little recalcitrant and solitary, but then he had been something of a problem long before. Perscors was rather wild even as embodiments of the Primal Man went, but he was certainly not Olam’s responsibility. Doubtless he would maim or destroy another Archon or two and perhaps rid this particular cosmos of a few vicious presences.
“Minor gains, side benefits!” Olam chuckled. As good humor grew in him, he leaped over contemplation and happily fell asleep.
But he failed to dream his customary dreams. The visions that held together the living book of his eternal life as an Aeon avoided him. He writhed on the stone slab, indignantly dreaming another life, one which he could not recognize at all. Achamoth was in the arms of the life he dreamed, and tha< personification was violently penetrating the demoness, in a jagged, disordered rhythm of deep thrusts, long pauses, and hurried, twisted soundings of her depths and shallows. No music of their motions claimed any part of their coupling as tenderness. Trapped in the dream, Olam furiously tried to disengage from the dream’s actor, but the more fierce his effort, the more tightly he embraced Achamoth. Her eyes shone with a dark light of laughter as Olam intensified their mutual imprisonment of body in body. With an effort that blacked out something vital in him, Olam finally smashed himself awake, to find himself bruising his own head repeatedly upon a ridge in the slab of stone.
He was badly hurt, he realized, as he pulled himself up and staggered into a cypress grove. Despite the pain’s intensity and his own anxiety at the extent of physical self-damage, his greatest suffering was shame that he could have been so vulnerable to sorcery.
“Take on materiality, and take on ignorance,” he groaned out as he doubled up against the trunk of a cypress tree. The tree gave against his weight, tottered, and, with almost a moan, was uprooted abruptly; he fell over hard with it. He scrambled up blindly, fighting for self-control, as he began to know the danger of the contest. The true ownership of the tower might be his, but he had journeyed in a material guise into a world otherwise wholly the Demiurge’s, and he had let himself be trapped in a moment of unwariness.
A titanic storm burst from the night around him, and the entire grove cracked, gasped, and came crashing down, spitting smoke. Hunched over, shielding his head, Olam ran to the lake’s edge and dived in. Swimming with terrible velocity, he bounded out of the water and into the tower’s open entrance. Once inside, he rested on the stone floor, watching the lightning and torrents of the Demiurge descend outside, but knowing that the tower was not subject to the world of the storm god, for truly it was not Saklas’s.
A Ruined Shrine
Seeking refuge from the sudden storm, Perscors darted into one of the cypress groves, where he dodged the crashing and smoldering trees. Running farther east, he took shelter just beyond the grove, within massive stone ruins in a circular clearing, on high ground. Because of the night and the torrent, he could make out only the roughest shape of the ruined structure, and then only by the intermittent lightning.
When the storm ended as abruptly as it had begun, Perscors felt himself to be upon the threshold of some great change. A moonlit night had succeeded the storm, and by what he knew to be the light of Achamoth he investigated the ruined shrine of his refuge.
The stone building he stood in seemed to have had holes torn in all its sides and its roof, as though the masonry were cloth. It was a longhouse, quite empty, and all one continuous room. He recalled having seen houses somewhat like this on a tour of Palestine. A search revealed nothing minute or hidden.
Outside it, in the moonlit compound, Perscors counted six other ruined houses, each with gaps ripped into stone sides and roofs. He did not bother to enter any, anticipating that all were similarly empty.
At the center of the clearing, what may have been an altar rose from a black rock. So uneven were its pieces that Perscors could not decide if something had been deliberately overthrown there or whether some random violence had scattered its stones.
Just off to the left of the rock there was a glinting in the moonlight. He walked to it, reached down, and retrieved an ivory figurine, some eighteen inches in height; it was surprisingly heavy. When he held it up in full moonlight, he saw that it was a miniature Perscors, winged and armed with lance and dagger. Its eyes, sapphires set deep in the ivory, glared at him as he raised this cherub to the sky.
Then he set it down. Was this, then, a sanctuary where he himself had been worshipped? And if there had been a cult of Primal Man upon Lucifer, who had destroyed it, Saklas or Achamoth?
What had happened to his followers? Their sanctuary destroyed, had they been exiled or murdered?
He stood in the moonlight, lamenting only what he felt to be his lost glory. After a few moments he became aware of another light. He set aside the robe of Achamoth and stood in the cold night wind. A strong heat began to emanate both within and out from him. Around him in the cleared space the light condensed into concentric circles. Circle upon circle they extended and the farthest was a deep blue. He realized that this blue rim was the periphery of the pupils of his own eyes.
“My epiphany is here!” he shouted ecstatically into the winds, which rose to a sudden force, almost to a gale, yet failed to drown out his cry.
The desire to find Valentinus was now dead in him. He began to believe that he belonged neither to the Aeons, with their alien god of the Abyss, nor to the Archons, bound to their own creation.
“I am prior to all of these,” he whispered into the wind.
Knowledge was not the goal of his quest. He would go up to the tower to destroy Saklas and Achamoth, but not because they blocked him from access to the truth. They were usurpers who had stolen his sovereignty and dimmed his glory. He would avenge this wrong, but what would come after his revenge he could not yet know. Resolutely, and therefore untroubled by ultimates, he turned back toward the tower to accomplish not a task his fate might have assigned him but that very fate itself.
The Way In and Up
At the northeast corner of the lake, Valentinus stood in front of another tower. It was situated above the lake on a low-lying hill, rocked by continuous winds both from the lake and from what Valentinus now could observe as an open sea into which the lake debouched.
“The tower of the Therapeutae, above the Mareotic Lake of Alexandria; yet I am here alone.”
As he spoke, memories returned to him. He had sought out the Therapeutae because those monastics of the old law knew enough to worship the Self-existent who is better than the Good, purer than the One, and more primordial than the Creator, whom their fathers had worshipped.
For seven weeks he had been their guest. Every seventh day he had attended their assembly, when they met together and sat in order according to their age in the proper attitude, with their hands inside their robe, the right hand between the breast and the chin and the left withdrawn along the flank.
After seven weeks had passed, they assembled for his discourse. White-robed and with faces in which cheerfulness was combined with the utmost seriousness, they took their stand in order, their eyes and hands lifted up to the Self-existent, and they prayed that their feasting might be acceptable.
“How clearly the scene returns!” Valentinus called out joyously. Their seats, when they reclined, were plank beds of the common kinds of wood, raised slightly at the arms to give something to
lean on. No wine Was brought, but only the brightest and clearest water. The table was kept pure from the flesh of animals; the food laid on it was loaves of bread, with salt as seasoning. Tears came to Valentinus’s grim face as he remembered the flavor of hyssop, which had permeated the holy bread.
To these people, the whole book of the laws was a living creature, with the literal ordinances for its body, and for its soul the invisible mind laid up in its wording. There came back to him now something close to the end of the discourse that he had given them on the eve of the fiftieth day:
“Each one will speak concerning the place from which he has come forth, and to the region from which he received his essential being, he will hasten to return once again …”
The memory departed, even as Valentinus listened intently to his own voice. He needed to hear more, but he remembered no more to speak.
He had kept walking, and was at the open entrance of the tower.
“Is this truly the tower of the Therapeutae, or is it of the Sophia-Prunikos, Wisdom the Whore, who fell into Achamoth?”
He asked the question aloud, and a male voice whispered out of the wind, close to his left ear: “Enter, for the way is in and up. I entered the vileness of Tyre and redeemed the latest and lowest fallen Thought of God. Shall you do less?”
Valentinus hesitated, until the voice became more urgent: “In every heaven I took on a different form, according to the form of the beings in each heaven, that I might remain concealed from the Archons and descend to the Sophia, who is called also Prunikos and Holy Spirit, through whom I created the angels, who then created the world and man.”
Revulsion overcame Valentinus upon the threshold. He remembered now the voice of Simon Magus of Samaria, who deemed himself the Favored One, and shouted against the charlatan’s voice: “I did not come for spurious miracles or as a sham of the godhead! Nor did I come to hear your false claims once more. And it is not for me to raise up a fallen Wisdom …”
