by John Crowley
Should this sound too much like the world that has (quite suddenly) come into being in our time, yours and mine, it should be remembered that al-Kindi also knew that feelings produced rays—the strong feelings of gods, dæmons, and human persons, love sorrow hate rage desire: these rays too were able to bring about effects, to reach the hearts of others and alter them. Words too, sounds, the called names of things, the real names: oldest magic there is almost, words called or sung aloud. The universe was a part-song for an infinite number of voices, things forever speaking their own names and hearing their names and the names of other things called, and responding. Listen. Vox es, præterea nihil: you are a voice, nothing more.
Propagated spherically outward from Baghdad in the ninth century, al-Kindi’s rays reached down through time as well as out into space, passing through collections of Arabian and Jewish magical lore, refracting and reflecting, eventually reaching Europe, collecting in Latin magical Black Books that smelled excitingly of the infidel, attracting restless souls seeking novelties. ‘Tis Magic, Magic that has ravish’d mee. By the late sixteenth century the rays had reached the cell of a young Dominican monk named Giordano Bruno, by way of a crude manual of magic practices called Picatrix, written first in Arabic and translated into Latin.
Men could do wonders, said Picatrix, not through the power of the Devil, as the ignorant believed, but through their knowledge of the rays: the chains of being running down from the stars to the star-formed human spirit and back again, up to the stars themselves, thence to the angels who moved the stars, thence to God Himself. That’s what the Ægyptians had known, what they had been taught by Mercurio Egizio sapientissimo: but their religion was destroyed by the impious, who called them idolators. Idolators! Well if they were, Bruno was too. And from the Picatrix Fra’ Giordano learned the words to say, the images to cut, that would draw the heavens’ strong rays into his own fast-growing soul.
By the time Bruno fled his monastery and Italy (the Roman Inquisition had wanted to talk with him about his philosophical interests), he knew Picatrix by heart, and knew that there was in him a nature like that of the stars, and in the stars a voice like his own, that he might hear. He had read the works of Hermes himself; he knew how the wise man might influence and even compel the imaginations of others—of gods and dæmones perhaps, but certainly of his fellow humans, causing them to see what they do not see, hear what cannot be heard.
In his student days Frater Iordanus had liked to pester his teachers with unanswerable questions. If God one day decreed that everything in the universe was all at once to double in size, everything, including ourselves, then would we be able to tell? And he was given no answer, except that God’s power cannot be constrained, or that God has better things to do with His omnipotence.
But Giordano Bruno came to know that yes, you could tell.
When he looked back to see the young man who had fled Rome with a purse of coins and his Dominican habit stuffed into a bag, he seemed to himself to be tiny—not only having shrunk with distance but a small thing, too small to contain all that he had since come to contain. He had crossed the Alps, growing: he thought now that he could recross those Alps by stepping over them, and brushing their snows from the hem of his gown, except for the fact that as large as Giordano Bruno had grown, the world and the skies had kept pace; as he had grown and travelled, they had receded from him into further, into endless distance.
In England Giordano Bruno had lived in the employ of the French Ambassador to the court of Elizabeth. Diva Elizabetta Bruno called her, joining the crowd of her English apotheosizers but with a plan of his own, never fulfilled: for in 1586 he returned to Paris when that Ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, Seigneur de Mauvissière, was recalled: he was considered too politique, not Catholic enough for the present moment; he was even in danger because of it. Bruno was dismissed from his service; the things he had done for his master, the Seigneur de Mauvissière no longer needed done; he was retiring to his estates, and wanted neither to think nor hear of the great world and the powers.
Bruno had served his master and his master’s master well: now he was turned out, an abandoned dog. Once again he would have to make his way with only his own strengths to rely on. Today he would call on Don Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador to Henri’s Court, and Henri’s master too. It was a fine French silver day, April in Paris, a beautiful city which he despised.
At Notre-Dame des Augustins he found himself stopped by a vast religious procession: musicians and choristers, crosses, wonder-working statues, shuffling friars, the Sacrament in its pyx borne on a golden car. A dense crowd lined the route. The King, with every noble he could persuade to join him, was making penance.
—Who is this now coming? someone in the crowd near Bruno’s ear said.
—It is the Confrérie des Pénitents Bleus de Saint Jérôme, said another, eating nuts from his pocket. See? All in blue, and each carrying a stone with which to beat his breast.
All of the penitent confréries taking part in the procession wore rough habits of homespun, heads entirely covered by hoods drooping like elephants’ trunks before them, with only two eyeholes cut out; but each group had its special badge and color and function. Some carried whips and were bared to the waist to flagellate themselves. The Hieronymites had these stones. Bruno felt the blow each gave. Blood had begun to seep through the robes of some; they stumbled. But the music was sweet, yearning, in the Mixolydian mode, sorrowing and hopeful as a lost child. In Paradisum deducant te Angeli.
—The Duc de Joyeuse is one among them, someone said. Who knows which.
When Bruno had first come to Paris, King Henri III and his pretty mignons were celebrating this Duc de Joyeuse’s wedding day; in their nightlong pageants they had dressed up as nymphs and satyrs and done battle with Eros, bound him and tamed him, to different music than this music. They had thought, those fine, careless, pleasure-loving boys and boy-girls, that by their rituals and songs they could bind Love, and make Love do what they liked: or if not that they could abandon Love, and do without him. But though the King might abjure the love of women, there was no man more entangled than Henri in the web of his own desires—which is Love—and fears—which is Love too, only his obverse or other face.
Bruno had once told the King that. Love is magic; magic is love. The love of the lover is a passive love, an enchaining love: but the active love of the magus is a power of the imagination, a knowledge by which he binds and is not bound.
The great mage understands what others desire, and with his projections offers the image of satisfaction; by their hunger he grows. For it is images that bind, whether physical signs coming in through open eyes and ears, or built in the imagination by the binder, enchainer or enchanter. Masses of men are easier to bind than individuals, he told the King, for to the commonest bonds all men are subject. And of all the bonds of the soul the strongest is Eros, vinculum summum præcipuum et generalissimum: the highest, most excellent, and most general bond.
Who can be bound? All can be: dæmons, gods and men; no one is immune from Love’s dominion. Those are easier to bind who have less knowledge; in them the soul is open in a way that allows for the passage in of impressions created by the operator: hope, compassion, fear; love, hate, indignation; disdain for life, for death, for risk. Wide windows which, in others, are always closed.
The King had listened (while breaking a chicken’s wing and feeding the meat to a tiny dog or doglet he held like a baby) and pondered, and sent Bruno to England, to do what he could.
That was then. Now the King had forsaken magic and turned, apparently, to religion alone.
—Who is this now come carrying his own head on a plate?
—St. Jean-Baptiste. Who could not see that?
—Those who follow him are his penitents?
—The Confrérie des Pénitents Noirs de Saint-Jean Décollé. Pray God you never need their services.
The penitents of the Headless John Society, all in black, dedica
ted to ministering to condemned prisoners, most especially to heretics whose souls might at the last moment be saved. Their appearance at one’s cell signalled the beginning of one’s own brief procession. Time to go.
—Here is the King’s own Confrérie.
Here came white-robed penitents stumbling under the weight of tall crosses, or perhaps of their shameful sins. The King’s own, the Confrérie des Pénitents de l’Annonciation de Notre-Dame. It was impossible to know who was who among the shambling groaning breast-beating crowd, but those around Bruno seemed to know that the Cardinal of Guise was one, and his brother the Duke of Mayenne another, great magnates of the Catholic League. One of them, in no way differentiated from the others, was the King.
Now there are two things necessary for the successful accomplishment of any enterprise of magic, and religious magic is no different. (Bruno had told the King this too, and the King had had his Secretary make a memorandum of it.) Faith is necessary, first, and like Love it is of two kinds, active and passive: the agent must believe that his processes will work, and the patient must believe the agent.
The other necessary thing is a complement of the first: the operator must not become entangled in his own imaginal processes, catch himself in his own net. He must not, that is, work his magic on himself. Which is just what this King had done, it seemed.
Rex Christianissimus. Bruno shook his head and crossed his arms, and he wasn’t the only one. The King had put aside every awe-making love-wielding power he might project, eschewing strong images of Kingship, starry Destiny, human Prominence, divine Favor, wise Governor ship. He was not accompanied, as he should be, by properly constructed allegories of his Genius, his Munificence, his steadfast Immobility, by the right gods and goddesses, heroes and virtues in the right order, bearing the right symbols. He had not elicited green Venus to calm and stupefy the red Mars whom his enemies had evoked; could not dissolve his peoples’ sorrows in a vast Jovian smile. Instead here he was, one among many, unrecognizable in his gown of knee-stained white wool (he had stumbled somewhere along the way under his heavy cross, just as Jesus would have, or maybe that one wasn’t him)—well: he might sway God with his humility, but he would not sway his people. Yes that was him: Bruno had identified him by the anxious loose energy leaking away from him, the Universal Love, while the wolfish eyes of the better magicians around him in their sheep’s clothing gazed sidelong at him unfooled.
—War, said Don Bernardino de Mendoza. War between the Church and her enemies. The same war, in heaven and the abyss, is even now engaged between the good and the fallen angels. A war that may last to the ending of the world, and yet not be a long one.
Giordano Bruno had known Don Bernardino when the Don was Spain’s ambassador to England; Don Bernardino had been expelled by the Queen of that country for fomenting Catholic revolt. It was he who paid the Guise’s Spanish pension and financed the Catholic League. Bruno had come to call upon him because he had decided that in order to get work in Catholic Paris he ought to be received back into the Church, and thought the Spaniard might help; he had actually snapped his fingers and said Sisi! aloud when he remembered his useful if slight acquaintance with the great man. And perhaps the gods were shaking their heads over him, as he sat there in Mendoza’s house before Mendoza: amazed (for now and then a man amazes the gods) that any man made of their own starstuff could contain so many contradictions, such innocent cunning, such farsightful ignorance, such unwise wisdom.
—Just now that war is a cold one, said the Don. I mean one in which little blood is shed. It is nonetheless war; a war for—how shall we express it?—for hearts and minds. In this cold war, clerks and scribblers and deep thinkers like yourself are valued soldiers. And those who have seen their former errors are most valued of all.
—Of all religions, Bruno said, the Catholic pleases me best.
Don Bernardino regarded him without readable expression. He was dressed in Spanish black from head to foot, his shirt and simple collar of whitest white to make the black more deep.
—Certain difficulties stand in the way, he said. Certain obstacles.
There were indeed obstacles. There was Giordano’s flight from his order under threat of a Holy Office investigation for unorthodoxy. There were the periods he had spent in heretic capitals: Geneva, Lyons, London. Also his books, deep-dyed magic, a fact obvious to anyone who could read them; fortunately few could, and Don Bernardino was apparently not one.
—I hoped, Bruno said, to be reconciled to the Church, yes, but. But not to return to my Order’s rule. To live as a lay person. If possible.
Don Bernardino had invited Bruno to sit; he himself remained standing, and now Bruno saw why. The Don, his hat, even the silver head of his ebony stick, rose above Bruno’s head.
—And do you, Don Bernardino said, profess and believe what the Church teaches? That Jesus Christ is God made man, that He died for our sins, rose from the grave? That we who believe in Him shall also rise?
Bruno clasped his hands before him, raising his two index fingers like a steeple.
—I would not, he said, wish to alter any of Mother Church’s doctrines.
—You do believe and hold these things.
—I believe and hold all that the Church teaches. Understood in a certain sense. Not all men understand alike.
Don Bernardino studied the small smiling man seated before him. The head of his tall stick revolving in circles around its foot seemed to think for him. At length he said:
—I am no theologian. But it seems to me you wish to be a Catholic again without actually being a Christian.
He came a step closer to where Bruno sat.
—Life is short, he said. There is no salvation outside the Church. Another tenet you perhaps hold in a certain sense. My advice is, Return to your Order. You may bring it glory, as Aquinas and Albertus did, men of firmer faith than yours.
—I honor them. I, I …
—There is no place in such times as these for parties of one. Who is not with us is against us.
All this time the man had been advancing by degrees upon his visitor. It occurred to Bruno that the room they sat in and the maison the Spanish Embassy occupied were, by diplomatic convention, Spanish soil; French law did not run here. As a Neapolitan, Giordano Bruno Nolano was—in a certain sense—a subject of the Spanish King. Somewhere a door slammed, echoed. Bruno leapt up from his seat, where he had sat frozen like a small animal before an onslithering viper.
—I thank Your Excellency for this advice, he said.
—Because of the honor I owe to your former master, said the Don, I will submit your request to His Eminence the Nuncio. You should expect little.
He nodded almost imperceptibly, and turned away.
When Bruno had gone, Don Bernardino returned to his private chamber, and the business to which he gave every waking moment he could; it often filled his dreams as well. The Enterprise of England. How many ships, how many men. How long, O Lord, how long.
So.
A freelance now, Bruno advertised a lecture at the Collège de Cambrai on the errors of the Aristotelians (always bound to draw a crowd, even if a hostile one) and by dint of able self-advertisement and a day and time well chosen by the stars, drew a good one: young students, who laughed at his extravagances, got his jokes, safe themselves from his assertions. At the end of the lecture he surveyed the crowd, lifted an arm, and invited someone, anyone, to defend Aristotle and attack himself, Brunus Nolanus; he would take on all comers. But the smiling man who rose (after a pregnant silence gave birth to him) and came forward to oppose him was a man Bruno knew to be an intimate of the King’s inner circle of spiritual advisors, Orphic musicians, and Hermetic doctors. This sign or signal from the King was clear: Bruno was not just out of favor, he was to be actively opposed, maybe suppressed. Bruno in the speculum of his huge heart saw the King, his white makeup and the false roses in his cheeks. His little evil dog. His lifted eyebrow.
He yielded the chair, prego, and reti
red. Before the King’s man completed his refutation, Bruno had slipped from the hall.
After that there was the incident of Fabricio Mordente and his wonderful compass. Bruno came to know the man among the Italian emigrés of Paris, and he was remarkably like his name, a lank-haired mordant melancholic and a great fabricator. Mordente had invented a new sort of compass, one that could be used not for constructing figures but for deducing the proportions between various shapes, lines and surfaces—not only on the page but on Earth.
—The two arms have several scales inscribed on front and back, Mordente told him, and scales are drawn too on this disk, the nocella, by which they are connected. And see, the different scales inscribed on the quadrant, into which I fix the compass arms by these little screws, these galletti.
Bruno handled the beautiful brass thing, unwilling to give it up. Entranced with the luster of it, with the screws, with Mordente who had called the screws “cockerels” for some reason, most of all with the operation of it: Mordente showed him how to sight along one arm of the compass to a distant object (a tower, a door at the street’s end) and by examination of the scales to construct a triangle that was proportional to the triangle formed of the object, the eye and the ground. And thus to find the distance. Useful, Mordente said gloomily, for armies on the march, or surveyors; Bruno laughed.
He would make Mordente famous. He borrowed the compass and set to work to write a funny dialogue in Latin. It was evident that Mordente had not understood what he had created, just as Copernicus had not understood that his system had destroyed Aristotle’s universe: that was for Bruno to reveal. For what Mordente had done was to build an engine by which the geometries of which the earth is made could be extracted: their souls, Pythagoras would say, lying hidden within them, fooling us into thinking they had none, until this new knife laid all things open to show them. Useful for armies on the march! Mordente, plodding mathematical pedant, was like the ass in the parable who bears unwittingly the ineffable effulgent Sacrament upon his back: strong, patient and good, but deeply ignorant. No matter; he benefitted mankind anyway; the ass of useful toil is a divine being compared to the braying fools who willfully oppose knowledge. Bruno called his little dialogue Idiota triumphans: the idiota being, of course, Mordente himself.
