Daemonomania

by John Crowley

  Both were let in together. They went in an embarrassed silence across a further courtyard and in a door. Someone was coming down toward them, hands held out in greeting.

  It was Jacopo Strada who met them, welcomed them without betraying anything of the Emperor’s intentions or inclinations toward or away from either one of them. Signor Strada was officially the Emperor’s antiquarian, a learned Italian who acquired for the Emperor’s collections the statues and objects out of Greece and Rome and Ægypt, the books and manuscripts, the gems and coins and medals that filled the Emperor’s cases and cabinets. He was more than that, though; he was as close as anyone ever came to being the Emperor’s immediate family, for his daughter was the Emperor’s mistress and had been for many years; the beautiful (so the people believed she must be) Caterina, Katerina Stradovà, mother of his children.

  —You have been asked to await His Sacred Majesty’s pleasure in the neue Saal, Signor Strada said to them, inclining his head and with his long and beautiful hand showing them the way. The Sala nuova, he said to Bruno. It is a singular honor. Such men as yourselves will of course understand.

  He took them through halls being rebuilt in the modern style: on high scaffoldings workmen labored, architects with rolled drawings directed master builders with squares and plumb lines, and in spandrels and lunettes paint-spattered artists worked quickly in wet plaster, limning gods and goddesses, virtues and vices, heroes and ancestors. Transformations. Bruno looking upward stumbled over piled lumber, and John Dee caught his arm.

  —Where do we stand now? he asked Signor Strada.

  —In Hradschin’s center, said the antiquarian.

  Strada pulled open the shining-new doors of a chamber and bade them enter. There are souls that can hear harmonies, and souls that can’t; souls that in hearing a melody can also hear it inverted, reversed, transferred to another mode. So there are souls that can perceive geometries, even when they are cast in stone and plaster. Both John Dee and Giordano Bruno knew immediately the figure within which they had been brought.

  —A Tetrad, said Dee.

  Strada clasped his hands behind his back and inclined his head, smiling.

  The room’s plan was indeed a philosophical Tetrad—that is, two identical squares sharing a center, one of which is rotated forty-five degrees in respect of the other, making an eight-pointed star, within which they stood. Such a Tetrad describes the created world, its four Elements connected by four Qualities: cold-dry Earth, cold-moist Water, hot-moist Air, hot-dry Fire. Around them, in alcoves formed by the eight star-points, were cases cunningly made to hold just the items that they held, labelled with signs and made of appropriate materials, so that the contents could almost be guessed.

  —Perhaps we may open the kammern, said Strada gently. The ratio will become clear.

  He led them within an alcove. He pulled open a slim drawer and drew out a picture, a stiff sheet made of something like a thin slice of glowing raincloud.

  —Alabaster, he said. It seemed to be the stone that his own translucent skull was cut from. It was the material of which this division’s guardian pillar was made too.

  —See, he said, how the artist has employed the natural colors and variations of the surface, and with only a little brushwork, made them waves, or clouds.

  —And the subject? asked Doctor Dee.

  —Andromeda, said Bruno, flinging his arms behind himself and catching one forearm in the other hand. The rock she is bound to. Her chains. Vincula. Her bonds.

  —The monster, Dee said as the figure resolved itself in his gaze. There. And Perseus flying through the air. Coming to free her.

  Signor Strada turned the piece in his spectral fingers. On its underside was another picture.

  —The verso, he said.

  —More freeing, said Bruno.

  —Yes. The Freeing of the Winds. You will remember the story, in Vergil.

  Putti with distended cheeks leapt blowing from Æolus’s Cave, and roamed the tormented air. North, South, East, West Winds; the Little Breezes beside them. The gray and yellow swirls and flaws in the glowing stone were cast, like actors, to be stormclouds, windblown seafoam, rockbound coast.

  —Sea and wind, Bruno said. So there is a place for it here, between Air and Water.

  —Yes.

  Both sides, both pictures, were air and water; both were also fables of binding and unbinding. Dance of the cosmos, in one direction running toward order and the stern elements; and along another axis toward meaning and yearning, toward a thought about liberation. Freedom. No freedom without bonds.

  Bruno turned out of the alcove of Air and Water and returned to the Tetrad’s center. He saw that at the entrance of each of the eight alcoves a small portrait was mounted. He went to the northernmost, which should be the starting or ending point of the series. The picture was of a gnarled, woody ancient; his mouth was collapsed where the teeth had fallen out, his skin all warts and folds, eyes rheumy and peering. He was not, however, like wood or woody or rooty (Bruno came closer) but in fact made of wood: he was nothing but an aged chestnut stump, yellow leaves or few or none for hair, his ear a broken limb’s rotted bole, his lips a fungus.

  He was Winter. Old Age. Drought.

  Bruno turned to look northeast. The portrait there was a man warmly dressed in furs. No a man made of furs, made of furbearers, beasts of every earthly kind. The muscle of his neck was the back of a reclining bull. His eye was only a fox’s open mouth, his brow a seated ass, his cheek an elephant’s smooth head, his ear its ear. He was not anything but beasts, every beast as real as real, yet the face they made also real, with real wit and wisdom in it, a human face that looked out at the viewer in recognition: you and I are alike.

  —The beasts of Earth, said John Dee, coming up beside him. For Earth is the element of the North, and of Winter.

  They turned east. The portrait there was a mass of early flowers, tulips, violets, dogwood, dents-de-lion, crocuses. It was a person too, a smiling woman. The rosy blush in her cheek was a rose; those two minute sprigs were the living glitter in her eyes.

  —Spring, Bruno said. Jacopo Strada came closer, and looked up as into the face of someone he knew well, and he did, for it was his own daughter Caterina as well as Spring and youth and flowers.

  —Spring is to Air as Winter is to Earth, said Bruno. He pointed southeast: and the portrait there was all of birds, an impossible wild rookery of every kind, as though frozen in just the single instant when by chance as they all took flight they made the form of a face. Air.

  In the south was Summer, King of Seasons, smiling with lips of a fat splitting peasecod, his teeth the peas, cherry lips, come too close and he is nothing, nothing, nothing but a pile of victuals. In the coat of barleycorn he wore, as though woven by a peasant with time to spare, were words:

  GIUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO F.

  Giuseppe Arcimboldo fecit.

  To the southwest was Summer’s element, Fire: he was a boy all made of flames, flints, guns, matches, all exploding at once, a firework. His hair was fire, and his moist lip was a candle flame, but—oddly—his eye, a candle too, was unlit, its black wick his pupil. The two visitors couldn’t know that it was the Emperor’s bastard son Don Julius Cæsar, furious and fiery and soon to be mad and murderous.

  Autumn in the west was fruits and harvest piled into a basket, and the basket of fruits was a man: his pear nose, mushroom ear, beard of bearded wheat and hair of green grapes and their leaves. And in the northwest, cold-moist Water, Autumn’s element, was of course a catch of fish—a flat flounder’s eye her eye, and a string of cold pearls around her neck—just as Air opposite was a flock of birds.

  —Thus you see, Signor Strada said. You will excuse me if I leave you now. You will be made aware of His Sacred Majesty’s intentions toward you. You may continue to study here. Go in any direction, north, south, east, west. Open the albums, inspect the gems in their cases. Everything is in its place.

  He lowered his head, and backed away, placing
his long hands together as though in prayer; they seemed silvered, as though themselves made precious by all they had handled.

  John Dee and Giordano Bruno stood side by side in the midst of the universe.

  —But why, John Dee asked, are they faces? Why persons?

  —Because this is what we are ourselves, Bruno said, looking around him. If all these pictures could be laid over one another, and commingled, they would form one person: one man, or woman. They would not appear strange or singular then but fully human. For we are only composites of the elements of this world, held together while we live by our soul. This soul is perhaps nothing more than the form within matter, the form particular to us. It dissolves when we do, as those faces would vanish if the animals stirred and took themselves off, or when the flowers faded and the fuses and matches burned up.

  —As when we see faces in clouds, Dee said.

  —The same.

  —My soul is not of this earth, said John Dee. It is cut to a different pattern, and when the elements of me disperse, it will return home. To Him Who made it. I am assured.

  —Soul is soul, Bruno said curtly. Mine or yours, a god’s or a pumpkin’s or a snail’s. Vergil says: Spiritus intus alit, Spirit nourishes all from within.

  He looked into John Dee’s long face, which looked, somewhat downward, into his. They two, surely, were made to different patterns: a coniunctio oppositorum. The two of them laid one over the other would perhaps make a man of the next age; or would fly instantly into flinders, and bring down this castle.

  —Before you came to my house in Mortlake, John Dee said, I was told of you.

  —That land was as full of spies as a dead dog of maggots.

  —These were no human spies. Those that spoke to me were not of this earth but beyond it. They told me of your nature and your fate, but not your thoughts.

  —Well well well, Bruno said. Benebene. Give them my greeting when next you speak to them, and thank them for their attention to me. I am sure I have not made their acquaintance.

  —They said that you intended me no good that day. That you intended to steal from me a thing you could have had for nothing—and which would have left me no poorer to give you.

  —And what is that? Bruno asked, grinning wolfishly and knowing in fact very well what John Dee spoke of.

  —They said my stone, my letter. They meant, I think, a certain sign.

  Giordano Bruno could see—his inward scene changing, as in a masque—the dim and crowded library in Mortlake on the left bank of the Thames, to which three no four years ago he had gone in the company of the Polish count Lascus or Alasco. How he found there a book (he saw his own hand push aside another book, an almanac, to find it): the book containing the thing, the thing that was in fact not a stone, or a letter, or a name, or a person, or a sign, but all of those things.

  —I drew that sign before I understood its use or its nature, John Dee said. I drew it with a compass and a rule. I was a young man, not yet thirty.

  With his staff the Englishman began to draw upon the center of the floor of the neue Saal the sign he had been given or had made. For seven years, like Jacob tending Laban’s sheep, he had cared for it, taking it out now and again and puzzling over it: a key to which the lock was lost, or not yet found.

  —It contains firstly the sacred Ternary, Dee said, two lines and their crossing point. The Ternary generates the earthly Quaternary, and here it is, four right angles and four straight lines.

  Bruno watched it come to be as though scored upon the tiles of the floor with a graver’s tool. From the four corners and four divisions of the room the elements and the seasons also took notice: their eyes (made of a fox or a fish, of asters and cornflowers, of fire or wood-rot) looked down and turned toward it.

  —The Cross of Christ is in it, Dee said; in these lines are the signs of the four elements, Earth Air Water Fire; in these lines the twelve signs of the Zodiac, and the seven planets.

  It began to burn in Giordano Bruno’s mind. At every turning of his path this sign had appeared, like a great-headed one-eyed handless infant: cut on the seal rings of doctors and booksellers, stamped on the bindings of old books, drawn on privy walls, gone when he looked for it again, wiped away, blurred, not what he had thought he had seen. Summoning him, or warning him; naming him. Or not. There were months when he did not remember it; months when he could not cease thinking of it. All the hundred signs that he had cut in wood or ruled with a pen, all the ones he had drawn in his mind or on the earth with Mordente’s marvelous compass, had been attempts to avoid this one, supersede it with his own. He was visited by the dreadful thought that in the end he would see nothing else.

  —I have believed, John Dee said, that it is a sign of the one thing of which the world is made. Hieroglyph of the monad, the One whose vicissitudes comprise all the multiform species we see. …

  —There is no such sign, said Bruno. The One is unfigurable. If it were to have a sign … No. It has none.

  —Well then, said John Dee. Since you so much desired it—if you did—perhaps you can tell me what it is.

  —I cannot. Synesius says that the signs of the greatest dæmons are composed of circles and straight lines. Perhaps it is one of those; his name, his call.

  —Whose sign? Whose call?

  —Microcosmos, said Bruno. Greatest of all the Intelligences. The Sun the head of him, the Moon his crown; the cross of the four elements, the planets and the signs composing him. Halfway between immensum and minimum, worms and angels. No other can claim that. His other name is Man.

  —The great Jew of this city, John Dee said, tells me that before the creation of the world there was made an Adam out of a circle and a line.

  —Before the creation of the world?

  —He said: God withdrew himself from a space within himself; that withdrawal generated a point, which was all that the universe was, or is; it was bounded by a circle, and crossed by a line. Adam Kadmon.

  —The emptiness in God’s heart … is Man, Bruno said. He shuddered hugely, and shook his head: No, no.

  —Well, John Dee said. It may be that I will never know. For she is gone.

  —She?

  —The one who promised to tell me of this sign; who warned me against you. She is gone and I cannot ask her more.

  —Your semhamaphores do not speak, Bruno said. They are the Reasons of the world; they say only their own names.

  —She told me: There is war among the powers. Fly from them, she said, but beware you fly not into the arms of other powers.

  The sign burning in the center of the Emperor’s floor had cooled, from red to blue-black, like a cinder. Giordano Bruno erased it.

  —A question of who is to be master, he said. That’s all.

  The doors at the end of the gallery opened, and a chamberlain entered. They stood and waited while the man approached gravely down the length of polished floor. When he came close they saw that he bore two letters, one for each of them. He presented them with a slight bow.

  —Well well, Giordano Bruno said, after opening his. I am summoned into his presence now.

  He tapped the letter to his brow, and signalled with it: lead on. The chamberlain bowed again and stepped backward, turned to lead him out.

  John Dee read the brief note handed to him: SS Majestas requires that you deliver to him immediately the thing of great value that was by you lately promised him. And if you are not able to do this he wishes returned to his officers without fail that person who was lately given into your care.

  He folded it, pocketed it, and thought: It is time to be gone. It is time, it is time, it may already be past time.

  5

  Once upon a time, somewhere other than here, there was an Age of Gold, when men were asses. (This is the story Bruno told the Emperor of the Romans, who thought he had heard it all before.)

  There isn’t anybody who doesn’t glorify that old Age. Men didn’t know how to work the land then or how to lord it over one another; nobody knew more
than anyone else; they all lived in dens and caves; the men leapt on the women as the beasts do, there was little concealment in their lust—and little jealousy, or spice. No spice in their gluttony either; everyone got together to eat oh apples and chestnuts and acorns, raw as Mother Nature made them.

  Idleness was then the only guide, and the only god. If we call up before us the figure of Idleness to defend that age, what shall she say? (Here Bruno projected before himself, where he alone for the moment could perceive it, exactly this personage, and transmitted to the Emperor what she said.) Everybody exalts my Golden Age, says Idleness, and at the same time they praise and call a “virtue” the very villain that destroyed it! Who do I mean? I mean Toil, and his friends Industry and Study. Haven’t you heard them being praised, even as the world realizes, too late, mourning and weeping, the ills that they cause?

  Who (says Idleness) introduced Injustice into the world? Toil and his brothers. Who—spurred on by Honor—made one man better and smarter than another, left some in poverty and made others rich? It was Toil, this same meddler and stirrer-up of discontent. Little did our first parents see that from the time they plucked the fruit of Knowledge, nothing would be the same again; they had unleashed Change, and with it Pain, and Toil.

  —It is said, the Emperor put in at that point, that the old Age of Gold is now to return. If we can bring it in.

  —Nothing returns, Bruno said. Everything changes. Evolution. Transmigration. Parturition. Metamorphosis. The coincidence of opposites. Fortuna has so many variations to produce that change will last for eternity, and nothing will return.

  The Emperor regarded him. He might have pointed out that the heavens are changeless, and do return; but his astronomers had taught him that the heavens change too, and new stars are born. He might have named God, Who never changes, but the Emperor didn’t think of God; he almost never did.