by Harold Bloom
“They are singing some god to a battle,” he murmured into the rock. But whom could that god battle?
Perscors drowsed off, but only for a few moments. As he came awake, the two trumpets cried out to one another from much closer to him.
He rose sluggishly and turned around. Suddenly it came upon him that this was indeed the place! Mists had enshrouded the noonday sun, but in the semidarkness Perscors detected a light neither from above nor from himself. All about the open, circular, darkened space in which he stood, a horizon of fire burst forth like an imprisoning dawn. Between that distant fire and himself, uncertainly in the midst, Perscors felt rather than saw a wilderness of spectators. Whoever they were, he knew that they came to view the last of him.
He stood ready on the rocky ground.
As the winds blew in upon him, Perscors realized his danger. Saklas indeed was coming to the combat, for the Demiurge had been goaded beyond desperation. But the god would come as wind and cloud.
“I have set myself against the invisible. So let it be. At the least, he and I must grapple.”
Barely were the words out when the great winds came in against Perscors.
End of the Quest
Behind Perscors, the sound of waters almost convinced him that the lake was crying out in pain. The rocks trembled, and the clouds now flooded forth water, even as the skies sent out a sound of mourning. Did arrows or lightning dart by him? Perscors asked himself. A voice spoke his name in the high wind, or was that the thunder? Drenched and uncertain, but exultant, Perscors stood in the stone circle.
The stones shook and quaked, and smoke rose up all about Perscors. He stood upon burning coals in a darkness, and then he was thrust off his feet as hailstones mixed with boltlike flaming arrows flew all about him. Rolling to his left until he could find solid rock again, Perscors rose, but he had lost shield and sword.
A lightning-arrow struck his left side, yet was deflected by the armor. The force of the blow spun Perscors around, and as he turned he looked up to the sky’s northern quarter. The wings of the storm wind darkened the sky, or were those actual wings?
A terrible darkness appeared directly in front of Perscors. Out of the midst of it a huge double ax swung at him and smashed into his left arm. Pain and shock sent Perscors to his knees; the armor had given way and his arm was severed.
Roaring his own name, he charged into the darkness, which receded before him, the double ax being flung aside. A body twisted away from the grasp of his right hand. Raising his right fist, still rushing forward, Perscors put all the strength of his furious will into one blind downward blow. His hand broke at the impact, but his invisible enemy shouted in terrible agony.
Perscors fell upon the fiery stones. A glance ahead showed him the retreating Saklas, dragging his shattered back into the shelter of the cypresses.
The will to follow the maimed Demiurge ebbed in Perscors. He felt neither pain nor desire but only the peace of exhaustion. After a few moments, a fire broke forth from his own loins. When he realized that it was indeed his own fire, he smiled in contentment. Triumph was his final thought as his head became the fire.
Valentinus at the Dark Tower
“From my turning back, all the Soul of the world and of the Demiurge took its origin; from my fear and grief, the body of the world and of the Demiurge had its beginning.”
Achamoth stood in the top chamber of the northeastern tower, attempting to instruct Valentinus, who shook his head impatiently, like a man being told what he already knows.
“Seek not to teach me my own speculation. Tell me what only you can know; tell me what you told me once, far back, the telling of which afflicted me and sent me into the silence.”
The storm that raged outside the tower suddenly ceased. Achamoth raised her head and frowned bitterly. “There will be no storms to prevent your departure from Lucifer. The battle is over. Saklas my son is badly wounded and I must go to him.”
The urgency of Valentinus’s tone detained her. “I have not come to change you, or to hasten the end, but only to remember. You halted my prophecy once. Give back only what you took away then.”
She frowned with her own impatience to depart. “My memory too has waned. I know what I was and what I am. But you know my story.”
“The story alone, no matter who told it, would not have driven me out to vanish into the desert. You came to me at Pentecost, in the tower of the Therapeutae, and deranged me. The time and the world are different, yet this is that tower!”
She struggled to remember, but nothing came. Smiling a little in farewell, Achamoth turned away to descend the tower. The soft echoes of her final footfalls reverberated in the chamber.
Valentinus climbed the stairway and pulled himself up to the tower’s flat roof. Achamoth was already out of sight, vanished into the cypresses. Looking west, he gazed long at the other tower, knowing it to be empty.
Halfway between the towers, he saw Olam, standing rigidly upright by the side of the lake. Something in his stance seemed strange to Valentinus, but he returned to his own broodings. After some moments, lost in himself, he resolved to descend.
But he halted on the stairs, halfway down the tower. A sense of defeat oppressed him, and an actual vertigo made him grip the staircase with both hands. His strength of desperation crumbled chunks of the stone stairs away, and he rolled partway down the steps.
How long he lay prostrate he did not know. Consciousness wavered, but did not leave him. He understood, despite his helplessness, that his predicament could not be the work of the Demiurge, who had been expelled from the struggle. It was the lesser Archons, bereft of their master, who sought to injure him.
Flickeringly at first, but then more steadily, a figure materialized on the landing just below where Valentinus lay. The being grinned up at him. Studying the face, Valentinus realized that it was his own. Speech returned to him, in a shocked whisper.
“Not Achamoth, but you! The antimimon pneuma, my Counterfeit Spirit! My psyche feigning the glory of my spark.”
His double, now fully materialized, continued to smile triumphantly at Valentinus. Memory and rage flooded back together, and Valentinus painfully scrambled up to confront this mockery of himself.
“You entered my soul and overgrew me, hardened and enclosed me, and made me impotent to know!”
The double, still smiling, bent down to retrieve a jagged chunk of stone that Valentinus had broken away. Straightened up again, the Counterfeit Spirit mounted toward Valentinus, the stone held high over its head by both hands, ready to strike.
“Elaborated error,” Valentinus unflinchingly cried. “Dissolve back into the ether!”
The stone fell and crumbled upon the lower stairs. Valentinus peered into the half light, but his double was gone.
“The heart,” Valentinus brooded, “is unclean and the abode of many demons. But what could this weak counterfeit have said or done to block me up for so many centuries?”
Musing, he descended the remaining stairs until he came to the tower’s open door. But he could not bring himself to go out, the puzzle unsolved. Whether Achamoth had appeared to his double, or a counterfeit Achamoth to his true self, the repressed image or thought that had wounded him would not return. How was he again to proclaim knowledge, he who was ignorant of his own catastrophe?
“A degraded godhead,” he said slowly. “And a degraded heresiarch to celebrate it.”
He would go to Olam, he decided. The Aeon might know no more than he did, but at least he would know how to continue the struggle.
“I am darker than this tower, as dark as any cave,” Valentinus said, and went out into the clear afternoon of a world momentarily free of its maker.
Olam at the Pleroma
Halfway between the towers Olam, still stunned, stared at the waters of the lake. The waters rose up and were one with the air.
Olam loo
ked down. Rock and water and air flowed into one another.
He understood then that it was not his wounds that made the vision. The combat must have gone against Saklas, and this world, for now, had opened to the Aeons.
Olam tried to remember when he had last been at the Fullness, but then he saw that he need not remember. The goodness of the Abyss was all around him.
He looked for his brethren.
“But I am here alone.”
Where, then, were the others? He had not expected all of the Aeons, for only when all the worlds came to an end, in one act, would all together go into the Pleroma.
But why should he be alone in the Fullness?
That it was the Fullness, he knew beyond knowing. He stood in the pure Abyss, in the Forefather.
He tried to recall to whom he owed this gift, but already he had forgotten the name of that last incarnation of Primal Man. It was not required of him that he should remember.
There was no trouble in him, yet the solitude surprised him.
He walked up to the heights. The stillness was profound, and the pure serenity healed his wounds.
Yet he knew he was but one of thirty. Could so many have strayed or been detained?
Perhaps it did not matter. The Fullness was in him, and he was in the Fullness. He was, at last, in his place of rest.
Why not abide here?
A voice called to him from outside the Pleroma: “Olam!”
He did not answer. Why stir from out of this great peace?
“Olam!”
He drifted away from the call.
But a thought entered to disturb him. Was he the last?
It could not be that the divine degradation had gone that far. And the peace was necessary to him. Other Aeons would be called, and would answer …
“Olam!”
The third call moved through him. It was the voice of Valentinus, a voice that had roused him before and that would not let him rest.
“Here I am,” he cried out gruffly, and discovered himself staring at the lake. Valentinus stood by his side, watching him intently.
A terrible pain returned to Olam’s head, and with a groan he came out of the peace of the Abyss and back to the worlds of estrangement.
Freedom
They were preparing to depart, though only the two of them. Valentinus postponed meditation upon the loss of the third.
Olam, engrossed in the forthcoming flight, had returned to his customary rough cheerfulness. Spells of pain continued to afflict him, but their duration and intensity lessened each hour. By midnight and departure, the Aeon calculated, only traces would remain.
Valentinus stood apart on the hill of the Therapeutae, overlooking the serene ocean. In the calm twilight, memory of his own speculation became complete for him. The ancient cause of his failure of nerve remained hidden, but he had accepted that lapse.
What, then, did he know, he thought to himself, and how could he sum up the knowledge?
He knew freedom.
Between the cosmos, between all of the heavenly systems and spaces, and the true, alien God, our Abyss, there was eternal war.
In that war, a person’s self or spark fought on the side of the alien God.
But the sparks have fallen into the cosmos; they sleep in the prison of the cosmos, and do not know how to escape from prison.
The call from the Abyss calls to freedom.
But the battle is endless, and even the spark that has answered the call cannot go home to freedom until all the systems and spaces are destroyed.
Valentinus gazed at the ocean and thought with love of the Therapeutae.
He passed into reverie, and from reverie into his own Pleroma, his own place of rest.
Toward midnight, Olam came for him. It required many efforts for the Aeon to startle Valentinus back to the world.
He returned from the Pleroma slowly and reluctantly, murmuring so softly that Olam could not hear him.
“What were you chanting when I pulled you back?”
“The end of my discourse to the Therapeutae,” Valentinus said, his voice softer than it had been before.
“How did it end?” Olam asked.
“Such is the place of the blessed; this is their place,” Valentinus answered. “As for the others, then, may they know, in their place, that it does not suit me, after having been in the place of rest, to say anything more.”
