Imajica: Annotated Edition

by Clive Barker

  ZARZI

  Yzordderrexian Express A point of crossing from the Fifth Dominion to the Second. Oscar Godolphin would often cross from the Retreat directly into the basement of Hebbert Peccable’s house in Yzordderrex using the Express built on his family’s property some two hundred years prior.

  Zarzi An insect common to the Second, Third, and Fourth Dominions with the wingspan of a dragonfly and a body as fat and furred as a bee. Zarzi typically feed on sheep’s ticks, though they’re happy to dine on anything that bleeds when ticks can’t be found.

  Zenetics Extreme religious order found throughout the Second Dominion whose origins and practices are shrouded to the uninitiated. As long as anyone can remember, the Zenetics have been waging a subtle war against the Scintillants, though their religious beliefs vary only slightly.

  Afterword(s): Clive Barker on Imajica

  Editor’s note: The reader who wishes to navigate all of Imajica’s twists and turns unaided by a map is advised to read the novel itself prior to reading the material that follows.

  I wanted to create my own legends

  Imajica took fourteen months from the time I first put pen to paper till the day I turned it in. That was writing seven days a week, fourteen hours a day. Towards the end it was sixteen hours a day. But it was a book which obsessed me, right from the very beginning. I don’t quite know yet why that is. Part of it was the fact that the sheer scale of it required total immersion if I was going to pull it off. If I hadn’t gotten it right — and I hope I’ve gotten it at least part right — then I would have looked like a real fool, because here I am dealing with Christ and God and magic and all that stuff.

  And when, halfway through the book, the audience realises that Hapexamendios is the same God that people are worshipping when they go to Sunday Mass, the danger was that the audience would say, “Oh, give me a break. I’ll accept the idea of an invented god, but now you’re asking me to believe that this god is Jehovah, this god is Yahweh, this god is the God whom people worship in the Western world” — and that’s a very different thing from one of the gods of a [Stephen] Donaldson novel.

  There is a danger of alienating [some readers]. I am sure there are going to be people who will say, “Sorry, this is too long.” But I also think there’s an audience that says, “Give me everything. Tell me everything you can tell me.”

  Over the last forty years there’s been a huge and consistent audience for Lord of the Rings and there’s certainly a huge audience for the Dune books. I wanted to create my own legends; I wanted to create something that my readership could enter into and invest their time and emotion in and feel deeply about over a period of many days, or even weeks, and that would stay with them as a world they could enter and re-experience if they wanted.

  From “Boundless Imajination” by W.C. Stroby, published in Fangoria, January 1992.

  Knocking down the whole damn wall

  The worlds which open up in Imajica, just in terms of their physical scale, not to mention their metaphysical scale, are so much larger than I would have dared attempt even a couple of years ago. My readers . . . are very glad that they have more than the shock tactics to engage them through an 850-page book. And remember, the horror, the darkness, has never gone. Imajica has still got some very dark passages in it. So have The Great and Secret Show and Weaveworld. What’s been added is this, hopefully, transcendental level.

  What’s also been added is a sense of thoroughly created worlds — I mean worlds with names, tribes, flora and fauna, religions, cults, and so on. I did hint at dimensions hidden in secret places in the horror fiction, obviously, and a lot of it contains the sense that if you open the wrong door you’re going to find yourself lost in another world. The way I’m doing it now, it’s not just opening the door but knocking down the whole damn wall and saying, “Here it all is.” The readership, I think, is very excited by that prospect.

  In order to get through a big novel like Imajica, both as a reader and as a writer, you need mystery — and you can’t have one mystery, you need to have many. There’s a pulling away of the veils constantly. What I’ve tried to do to the reader is say, “There isn’t the solid moral clarity of Lord of the Rings.” I do the reverse of that. Imajica’s characters are human beings like you and I who, of course, discover a larger purpose for themselves. But in discovering a larger purpose, rather than becoming more themselves — like the hobbits out there in the wilderness becoming more hobbity — my characters skin themselves. The lives they have fall away.

  From “A Strange Kind of Believer” by Stan Nicholls, published in Million, February 1993.

  An act of massive consequence

  Imajica started with my thinking about the images which appear in the great paintings of Christian mythology. Whether or not they’re true, they seemed to me to be potent, powerful, and important cyphers of image and meaning. So I considered writing a book which would be a fantasy, but which would also be about God, about belief, about a man who discovers that all his life he has been preparing for an act of massive consequence but didn’t realise it.

  In Imajica we have someone who is like the half-brother of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, but who is completely unaware of the fact. Not only this, but he also had a massive past responsibility which he has screwed up and forgotten.

  A lot of this came from the feeling that there is so much more in us than we completely comprehend, that our day-to-day lives with their petty annoyances perhaps shouldn’t distract us from a grander and deeper perception of ourselves.

  From “Barker USA” by David Howe, published in Starburst Yearbook 1991/92.

  Imajica stands to the life of Christ

  As Weaveworld stood to the story of the Garden of Eden, this stands to the life of Christ. It’s about what magic is really for, and it’s not for bringing rabbits out of hats.

  From “The Meaning of Magic” by Mark Salisbury, published in Fear, October 1990.

  All kinds of villainies against women

  Hapexamendios, the villain of Imajica, is the . . . . personification of the joyless, loveless, corrupt thing which has over eons created his own city of his own flesh. It happens to be, when you look at it, an extraordinary city, a glorious city. But when you look really closely at it, you see that it is a completely empty city. There’s nobody there, there’s no love there, there’s no joy there; there’s no compassion there because there are no people there. It’s just a self-serving system of self-glorification. Hapexamendios is, in a curious way, its prisoner.

  He’s finally dispatched simply because he wanted to destroy Goddesses. So the second part of the problem of the patriarchal God is that he’s been so successful, that he’s basically beaten out all the women, beaten out the matriarchs, and beaten out the Goddesses. I’m not saying that every Goddess out there was a good Goddess, because clearly there were some real villains among them. I’m sure really terrible things were done in the name of a Goddess — human sacrifice, castration, and all kinds of other things.

  I do believe that a certain balance is healthy. And the balancing of images of divinity in both sexes is what’s important here. The balancing of the Goddesses against the God, the image of procreation as against the image of the fertiliser. Enup, the sky Goddess of Egyptian mythology, overreaching the God who lies below. A wonderful, frightening image of sexual compatibility and the geographical compatibility of nature, of light and dark. What we’ve got in our system is one but not the other. We’ve got this incredibly one-sided vision of what the divine is.

  What Imajica does is create a mythology in which we go about trying to understand why Hapexamendios has done this. What terror it is in men that makes them control and engage in all kinds of villainies against women. What a mingling of desire and envy will do. You look at most of the males in Imajica, they have one or the other where women are concerned, and in some cases they have both. So that is where that mythology is based.

  From “Confessions” by Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentze
n, published in Lost Souls, June 1995.

  On Imajica becoming a movie

  I think it’s impossible. In fact, I hope it’s impossible! I believe strongly that there are experiences which are best left on the page. An example: though I enjoyed Patrick Stewart recently playing Captain Ahab, nothing will ever convince me that the poetic density and metaphorical richness of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick has a cinematic equivalent. Somehow, what is a literary vision of the page simply becomes a big ol’ whale story on the screen. I fear the same thing would happen with Imajica — that once the language which is used to describe this spiritual journey is removed, much of its power will be diminished.

  From People Online, July 30 1998.

  On Imajica being reality

  Yes, in a strange way I do believe it’s possible. I don’t believe that our consciousness has fully grasped the complexity of reality, or, perhaps I should say, realities, in which we live. Our imaginations seem to offer us glimpses of other possibilities, other states of beings, other dimensions. I believe we will one day access those dimensions.

  From People Online, July 30 1998.

  The foreword to the 1995 two-volume edition

  Back and back we go, searching for reasons; scrutinizing the past in the hope that we’ll turn up some fragment of an explanation to help us better understand ourselves and our condition.

  For the psychologist, this quest is perhaps at root a pursuit of primal pain. For the physicist, a sniffing after evidence of the First Cause. For the theologian, of course, a hunt for God’s fingermarks on Creation.

  And for a storyteller — particularly for a fabulist, a writer of fantastiques like myself — it may very well be a search for all three, motivated by the vague suspicion that they are inextricably linked.

  Imajica was an attempt to weave these quests into a single narrative, folding my dilettante’s grasp of this trio of disciplines — psychology, physics, and theology — into an interdimensional adventure. The resulting novel sprawls, no doubt of that. The book is simply too cumbersome and too diverse in its concerns for the tastes of some. For others, however, Imajica’s absurd ambition is part of its appeal. These readers forgive the inelegance of the novel’s structure and allow that while it undoubtedly has its rocky roads and its cul-de-sacs, all in all the journey is worth the shoe leather.

  For my publishers, however, a more practical problem became apparent when the book was prepared for its paperback edition. If the volume was not to be so thick that it would drop off a bookstore shelf, then the type had to be reduced to a size that several people, myself included, thought less than ideal. When I received my author’s copies I was put in mind of a pocket-sized Bible my grandmother gave me for my eighth birthday, the words set so densely that the verses swam before my then-healthy eyes. It was not — I will admit — an entirely unpleasant association, given that the roots of Imajica’s strange blossom lay in the poetry of Ezekiel, Matthew, and Revelation. But I was well aware, as were my editors, that the book was not as reader-friendly as we all wished it was.

  From those early misgivings springs this new, two-volume edition. Let me admit, in all honesty, that the book was not conceived to be thus divided. The place we have elected to split the story has no particular significance. It is simply halfway through the text, or thereabouts: a spot where you can put down one volume and — if the story has worked its magic — pick up the next. Other than the larger type, and the addition of these words of explanation, the novel itself remains unaltered.

  Personally, I’ve never much cared about the details of one edition over another. While it’s very pleasurable to turn the pages of a beautifully bound book, immaculately printed on acid-free paper, the words are what count. The first copy of Poe’s short stories I ever read was a cheap, gaudily covered paperback; my first Moby-Dick the same. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Duchess of Malfi were first encountered in dog-eared school editions. It mattered not at all that these enchantments were printed on coarse, stained paper. Their potency was undimmed. I hope the same will proved true for the tale you now hold: that the form it comes in is finally irrelevant.

  With that matter addressed, might I delay you a little longer with a few thoughts about the story itself? At signings and conventions I am repeatedly asked a number of questions about the book, and this seems as good a place as any to briefly answer them.

  Firstly, the question of pronunciation. Imajica is full of invented names and terms, some of which are puzzlers: Yzorddorex, Patashoqua, Hapexamendios, and so forth. There is no absolute hard and fast rule as to how these should trip, or stumble, off the tongue. After all, I come from a very small country where you can hike over a modest range of hills and find that the people you encounter on the far side use language in a completely different way to those whose company you left minutes before. There is no right or wrong in this. Language isn’t a fascist regime. It’s protean, and effortlessly defies all attempts to regulate or confine it. While it’s true that I have my own pronunciations of the words I’ve turned in the book, even those undergo modifications when — as has happened several times — people I meet offer more interesting variations. A book belongs at least as much to its readers as to its author, so please find the way the words sound most inviting to you and take pleasure in them.

  The other matter I’d like to address is my motivation for writing the novel. Of course there is no simply encapsulated answer to that question, but I will offer here what clues I can. To begin with, I have an abiding interest in the notion of parallel dimensions, and the influence they may exercise over the lives we live in this world. I don’t doubt that the reality we occupy is but one of many; that a lateral step would deliver us into a place quite other. Perhaps our lives are also going on in these other dimensions, changed in vast or subtle ways. Or perhaps these other places will be unrecognizable to us: they’ll be realms of spirit, or wonderlands, or hells. Perhaps all of the above. Imajica is an attempt to create a narrative which explores those possibilities.

  It is also a book about Christ. People are constantly surprised that the figure of Jesus is of such importance to me. They look at The Hellbound Heart or at some of the stories in the Books of Blood and take me for a pagan who views Christianity as a pretty distraction from the business of suffering and dying. There is some truth in this. I certainly find the hypocritical cant and derisive dogmas of organized religion grotesque and oftentimes inhumane. Plainly, the Vatican, for instance, cares more for its own authority than for the planet and the flock that grazes upon it. But the mythology that is still barely visible beneath the centuries-old encrustation of power plays and rituals — the story of Jesus the crucified and resurrected; the shaman healer who walked on water and raised Lazarus — is as moving to me as any story I have ever heard.

  I found Christ as I found Dionysus or Coyote — through art. Blake showed him to me; so did Bellini and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and half a hundred others, each artist offering his or her own particular interpretation. And from very early on I wanted to find a way to write about Jesus myself; to fold his presence into a story of my own invention. It proved difficult. Most fantastique fiction has drawn inspiration from a pre-Christian world, retrieving from Faery, or Atlantis, or dreams of a Celtic twilight creatures that never heard of Communion. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it always left me wondering if these authors weren’t willfully denying their Christian roots out of frustration or disappointment. Having had no religious education, I harbored no such disappointment: I was drawn to the Christ figure as I was to Pan or Shiva, because the stories and images enlightened and enriched me. Christ is, after all, the central figure of Western mythology. I wanted to feel that my self-created pantheon could accommodate him, that my inventions were not too brittle to bear the weight of his presence.

  I was further motivated by a desire to snatch this most complex and contradictory mystery from the clammy hands of the men who have claimed it for their own in recent years, especial
ly here in America. The Falwells and the Robertsons, who, mouthing piety and sowing hatred, use the Bible to justify their plots against our self-discovery. Jesus does not belong to them. And it pains me that many imaginative people are so persuaded by these claims to possession that they turn their backs on the body of Western mysticism instead of reclaiming Christ for themselves. I said in an interview once (and meant it) that the Pope, or Falwell, or a thousand others, may announce that God talks to them, instructs them, shows them the Grand Plan, but that the Creator talks to me just as loudly, just as cogently, through the images and ideas He, She, or It has seeded in my imagination.

  That said, I must tell you that the deeper I got into writing Imajica, the more certain I became that completing it was beyond me. I have never come closer to giving up as I came on this book, never doubted more deeply my skills as a storyteller, was never more lost, never more afraid. But nor was I ever more obsessed. I became so thoroughly immersed in the narrative that for a period of several weeks toward the end of the final draft a kind of benign insanity settled upon me. I woke from dreams of the Dominions only to write about them until I crept back to bed to dream them again. My ordinary life — what little I had — came to seem banal and featureless by contrast with what was happening to me — I should say Gentle, but I mean me — as we made our journey toward revelation.

  It’s no accident that the book was finished as I prepared to leave England for America. By the time I came to write the final pages, my house in Wimpole Street had been sold, its contents boxed up and sent on to Los Angeles, so that all I had that I took comfort in had gone from around me. It was in some ways a perfect way to finish the novel: like Gentle, I was embarking on another kind of life, and in so doing leaving the country in which I had spent almost forty years. In a sense, Imajica became a compendium of locations I had known and felt strongly about: Highgate and Crouch End, where I had spent a decade or more, writing plays, then short stories, then Weaveworld; Central London, where I lived for a little time in a splendid Georgian house. There on the page I put the summers of my childhood, and my fantasies of aristocracy. I put my love of a peculiar English apocalyptic: the visions of Stanley Spencer and John Martin and William Blake, dreams of domestic resurrection and Christ upon the doorstep some summer morning. Gamut Street I placed in Clerkenwell, which has always seemed haunted to me. The scenes with the returned Gentle I set on the South Bank, where I had spent many blissful evenings. In short, the book became my farewell to England.