by John Crowley
—In the new-found-lands, he said, there are people who live today just as we did in the Golden Age. So I am told.
—If there are, Bruno said, they had another father than Adam, and never fell. They will.
—All men are children of Adam, said the Emperor.
—Oh yes? Bruno said (not noticing how the Emperor drew back from his aggressive chin, and from his language, better suited to the brawling of the schools than to these halls). Oh yes? And if they are, how did they get so far from home? Walked, across the seas? Sailed, before boats were invented? Maybe they were swallowed by whales, and vomited up on those far shores? Nonono. Nature makes men wherever men can be, and makes them suited to their land and clime.
—More than one Adam? said the Emperor.
—More than one Adam, more than one fall, more than one history of the world. More (if it please Your Majesty) than one world.
The Emperor, in his suit of black decorated richly in black, a midnight sky whereon his jewels burned, stars and planets, put his hand upon the brow of a tall and melancholy dog that sat beside him; the beast lifted his liquid eye to his master.
—If Toil destroyed the Age of Gold and made Injustice, how can Justice be made again?
He seemed to ask this of the dog. Bruno (his ardor fading in this cold room, in this silence) knew the answer.
—More toil, he said. Action and Change made Difference. Only more can overcome it, and make all men happy. Or happier. The wheel of Fortune rules everything, making high low, good bad, lucky unlucky, rich poor. But if we are strong patient asses for toil we can give that wheel a shove at just the right moment, or put a nail in it to stop it where we like.
—It was Idleness that made men asses, the Emperor said. So you say.
—There are asses and asses, Bruno said.
—It is prophesied, the Emperor said, that a New Age is at hand. That many kingdoms will fall, crowns too fall from heads.
—Pay no attention to prophecies, Bruno said. They only tell us what we ourselves intend to do.
—This Empire too, the Emperor said. Vanished, contracted, fallen.
—This Empire cannot pass away, Bruno said. And what if it does?
The Emperor opened his eyes wide at that, and Bruno knew he should look away—one does not duel with an Emperor and subdue his regard—but he did not. The rays of his spirit, fired from his eye by the force of his heart’s contractions, entered in at the Emperor’s own eye and thus into his spirit. It was a shuttered mansion, colder than this room; bare as a sepulcher, and a stone throne within it, empty. And Bruno knew what the Emperor must do, and knew he could tell him how.
—You have seen my collections, the Emperor said, as though to change the subject rather than having to respond to the Brunian impertinence.
—I have. Your Gracious Majesty: your wonderful collection is complete and perfect. But it lacks a center. If it had a center, then whatever you moved or changed within it would, at the same time, move or be changed outside.
—And how am I to give it a center?
—Turn it inside out, said Bruno.
—How?
—I will tell you how, Bruno said. Your Majesty has for many years enlisted the signs and symbols of things in the service of your power. You should rather have put your power at the service of your signs.
The Emperor was still for a long moment, his eyes seeming to cross a little; and then their light went out.
—Love, said Bruno. Memory. Mathesis. These three. And the greatest of these is Love.
The big Hapsburg head began slowly to nod, but not in understanding. After a little while (how did they apprehend the Emperor’s desire, how was it transmitted to them?) a pair of attendants opened the doors and came to stand one on either side of Giordano Bruno like guards.
Bruno would have told him much more about how the universe is ordered and how full it is. He would have told him how every star is a sun as bright as our own, and how suns enchant the cooler beings called planets, which travel around their suns forever in adoration and delight, whose lands are filled with rational beings and whose seas are filled with fish, as are ours, fish with their own natures and their own societies of which we can know nothing. Dæmons and spiritual creatures fill the air and the spaces between the stars, fill the seas and the caves of earth, some of them gloomy and silent, some hot, active and canny, some interested in the lives of men, some not. Humankind is everywhere, everywhere humankind can be, rushing out to greet us when our ships come into sight, as amazed to see us as we are amazed to find them there, black or brown or golden, foolish or wise or both.
He would have told the Emperor that all this infinite mutability was not so great that we should feel afraid of it or overwhelmed by it, for Man is a being whose nature partakes of all and, therefore, is an equal to all, and by the arts peculiar to himself can ascend to knowledge of all: by Mathesis, to reduce infinitude to natural categories of sense and order, and create seals that are the secret souls of its complexities. By Memory, to contain within us those seals and open them at will, to go through the world within in any direction, combine and recombine its stuff and make new things unheard of before. And by Love, to bend our souls to the worlds in conquest and submission at once, to drown in infinity without drowning: Love cunning and foolish, Love patient and stubborn, Love mild and fierce.
He would have said all that and more, but the two attendants walked him away backwards out of the Presence, cuing him to bow, once, again, and one last time as the doors closed on the Emperor by then grown small with distance.
That evening the Emperor summoned his new Imperial Astronomer into his presence. When the man came, Rudolf gave him the little book about mathematics that Bruno had dedicated to him. Seeing the author’s name on the title page, the Imperial Astronomer let out a loud ghastly laugh with mouth wide open, a gesture so shockingly rude that the Emperor drew himself up scandalized. Why was he to be affronted at every turn today? He should never have hired the man, a fine astronomer but gloomy and resentful, a Frenchified Italian whose name was Fabricio Mordente. Go away.
The Emperor sent a new message to the man he had always wanted to come to Prague and be his astronomer, the noseless Danish knight Tycho de Brahe. (Like a persistent though despised suitor, the Emperor wrote a similar note every so often, whenever his heart was full and heavy.) In the note he also asked Brahe’s advice about Bruno. After a time Brahe wrote back, once again declining, with manly courtesy, to come to Prague. He said yes, he knew Bruno’s work. Nolanus nullanus he called him, and said that figure and every number the man had ever written down he had got wrong, including 1 and zero.
So the Emperor put Bruno’s book away; he gave an order that Bruno should receive the sum of five hundred thalers from the Imperial treasury (something about him made the Emperor want to be cautious), but he never sent for him again.
That August, in another part of the vast Hradschin castle, a band of men met nightly to complete, or at least to continue, a work they had joined together to do. The room they met in was a workshop; John Dee would have recognized many but not all of the fine tools hung on the walls, he would have known that the boxes of small gears and piles of brass rods, springs, concave glasses, fusée wheels and pendula were clockworks, but would not have known what some of the other odd things were, for they had never existed before, had only recently been invented in this room. In this room many of them would remain, too: they had been inconceivable in the past, and in the future they would no longer work.
He would have recognized one other thing in the crowded room, where now the candles were being lit against the fall of evening. It was a small Latin book, a book dedicated to the Emperor’s father, Maximilian: Dee’s own work, the Monas hieroglyphica. It lay on the great central workbench, open, a weight laid upon it to keep it from closing.
Jost Bürgi was among those who had gathered there; indeed it was his workshop. Still a young man then, but already among the greatest clockmakers of that cloc
k-mad age, the first to divide a minute into sixty seconds and make a clock that counted them accurately. It was said that Jost could cut the sixty teeth of a brass minute wheel freehand. He had already invented the cross-beat escapement, which, combined with another invention of his, the remontoir, had doubled the precision of his clocks; he was about to invent the pendulum, twenty years before Galileo. He would build clocks for Tycho to make his stellar observations by when at last Tycho came to Prague; and he would serve Kepler too.
The Venetian gold-maker who called himself Count Bragadino was there. He was soon to be hanged (by that same Duke of Bavaria who so feared the little homely spirits) because his alchemical processes no longer worked, not his fault of course but the Duke couldn’t know that.
Cornelius Drebbel, was he there? Or still going from court to court? He was a masque-deviser, architect, inventor of the Perspective Lute and of a dozen perpetual-motion machines, one of which was laboring away ceaselessly on the bench at that moment, expending its little energies on the air, but soon to become part of the work in progress.
—Listen, Bürgi said to them all. He read from John Dee’s little book: He who has fed the Monad will first himself go away into a metamorphosis and will afterward very rarely be beheld by mortal eye. This is the true invisibility of the magus, which has so often (and without sin) been spoken of, and which (as all future magi will own) has been granted to the theorems of our Monad.
He looked around at the company, and they nodded: they understood. The time was short: they all knew that, the time short in which to do what they had gathered here to do.
They were the Emperor’s magi. They were Italians, Dutchmen, Swedes, Poles; they had studied at universities in Paris and Cracow and Wittenberg, had attended Della Porta’s Academia curiosorum hominum in Naples, had visited London and met Sidney and smoked pipes with the “Wizard Earl” of Northumberland, done religious magic for the King of France or for his cousins or rivals; they had published books carefully set out with false imprimaturs and misleading title pages and had them seized and burned anyway, better the books than their own persons, they dropped them as caught lizards drop their tails, regrew them again in freer countries, at kindlier courts.
Doctors Kroll and Guarnieri were there, the Paracelsian and the anti-Paracelsian, unable to agree on anything, not even what elements composed the world, Paracelsus’s three or Pythagoras’s four; they were both present here, though, side by side, for who knew what the future would make its world out of? The Emperor’s own lapidary, Anselm Boethius de Boodt, was also there: no one knew more about the life enclosed in mineral species than he.
—Hermes Thrice-great, said the clockmaker Jost Bürgi to them, died at a very great age in Ægypt where he had been priest, philosopher, and king. Or he did not die but was interred alive, in a certain manner known to them but lost to us, to remain alive thereafter though suspended in a profound sleep. Or yes he was thus interred alive, but did not thereafter survive the whole length of his journey from that time to the time when his tomb was opened. All these tales and others are told.
—But whether the virtue of causing or sustaining that sleep resided in Hermes himself; or in the manner of his interment; or the tomb he was laid in; or was God’s special providence: all that is not now able to be known.
That was the doctor who spoke, Oswald Kroll or Croll. Kroll was then at work on the book by which he would be known to the ages, the Basilica Chymica, stone-dead now, as he is himself.
—However it was, Bürgi said, in the following age that tomb was opened. Some say by Alexander the Great; some say Apollonius of Tyana. And the uncorrupted body of Hermes was found within, holding in its hands a tablet.
—The Smaragdine Tablet, said Kroll. One solid emerald, written on in Phoenician characters.
—Or hieroglyphs of Ægypt.
—It contained the whole of the chemical art in brief.
—As above, so below, quoted Bürgi. Thus is accomplished the miracle of the One Thing.
—In the longer writings of Hermes it is told how Ægypt failed and died, said Kroll. How the temples were neglected, the rites forgotten, until the gods of Ægypt left their homeland. How in that time the world grew old, the air thick and unbreathable; how the sun weakened, the sea ceased to hold up ships.
—In illo tempore, in that time, said Bürgi. Think of it. How in the wreckage of the world Hermes consigned himself to his tomb, with his Tablet, all that he could hope to bring into the future; hoping to be carried into that new time alive, asleep, knowing that he might not survive, but that his wisdom might, if there was anyone in that new age wise enough to read it.
They all pondered that, and lowered their eyes; each wondered if he were the one wise enough, or would become so, or if one of the others here were: or if perhaps the words that Hermes inscribed on emerald had actually died along with their author, in the centuries that had fallen between his age and this one. They had all worked to make the Stone, and none had yet entirely succeeded.
Then they lifted their eyes, for Jost Bürgi had lowered a lamp suspended over his workbench so that it illuminated what lay there.
—He did what he could to save his knowledge for the next age, said Bürgi. So must we. We must save his knowledge, and our own.
Unfinished, its parts and components around it in various stages of completion. Drebbel’s little humming engine; Bürgi’s astronomical clock, designed to turn as the stars turned—to turn because the stars turned—for centuries, from then on in fact: if, that is, the stars went on turning as they did now, which was not certain.
It looked like a long strongbox of black ironbound wood, not particularly distinguished; but it was more or other than that. More than one of them thought it was like those chests or trunks of old in which royal babes were consigned to the sea to be drowned and lost but who persisted and were saved, and did the deeds we remember them by: this was a boat of that kind, to carry over the gulf that is fixed between one age and the next the wisdom of its makers, so that it would do work for men in the new age, if it could.
De Boodt, the Imperial gemhunter, thought: it will be like one of those stones we find in the mountains, dusty and unremarkable, that when struck with a chisel and mallet break open to reveal a glittering jewelled cave within, purple or green or icy blue, unseen for how long; and release a momentary odor of another world.
But Oswald Kroll thought of Æsop’s tale of Belling the Cat.
—We know what must be done, he said; we do not yet know who will be the one to do it, or if anyone can. Who will lie here?
—The man whose sign is the Monad, Guarnerius said. He must be the one.
Yes: they nodded, yes. The Emperor whom they all served had given them John Dee’s book and ordered them to study it. But each of them had come to know this Monad even before then. Seeing it on Dee’s frontispiece, each of them had at the same time remembered it—one how he had awakened from a vivid dream to find it inscribed on his palm, only to have it vanish quickly; another how he had without thinking drawn it one morning, or rather something, not quite it, and troubling, irritating, unsatisfying; another how he had perhaps seen it scribbled in the margin of a book given him, then taken away. Like a whisper in the ear.
—The old man, said Kroll. Joannes Dii.
—No it is not he. Read the book again. He has said it himself, that it was granted him, passed through him; not his. No, he is the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Vox clamantis in deserto.
—Who does he cry?
—The other, his companion. Formerly his companion. He has always said the other is the one who sees, who knows. Not himself. Gelleus? Is that the name? And now we see this Gelleus come into his own, flaunt his powers. As if to signify to us. If there is one among us who can carry the Tablet of our age …
—Odoardus Scotus, said Kroll. Edward Kelley, the Irish knight.
He looked down into the bed of the long black box. There was another thing, of course, that it closely resembled
; a very common thing. Remember, Man, that thou art dust.
He said: The man might refuse.
—He must not, said Bürgi. He may not.
He put his hand on the book. To those who have, more will be given, he said. From those who have not will be taken even the little that they have.
—I will bring him here, said Dr. Kroll. Assign me a troop of guards, and a sergeant at arms. If he has powers around him, I will deal with them. We must be certain, though, that we are right, that this is the man.
—We are certain, said Bürgi.
—And if we are wrong? Kroll said.
—If we are, said Bürgi, then neither he nor we will ever know of it.
6
Each new age that has befallen us has been very different from the age it succeeds. But passage times—those times that fall in between ages, through which we pass in going from one age to the next—are always in certain ways alike.
Passage times, though separated perhaps by centuries, seem (to those within one) to follow immediately upon one another rather than upon the ages they close, or open; they are successive visits to the same place, which at first we don’t recognize, though we know it’s familiar: like days of fever, whose onset we feel but don’t at first identify, what air is this, what earth; after a time of wary puzzling we say Oh yes I know this kind of life, it’s fever, and we allow ourselves to fall back or lie down into it, its former instances accumulating behind us to be remembered, the only days we can distinctly remember as the numbers mount and the mercury bar crosses into triple digits.
Like the way Bobby always remembers that one time, always comes upon it when a fever begins, that time in the little house in Bondieu, the kids’ little house attached to the big house: in their bed, those children staring at her, certain she was to die among them.
In all passage times the gate of horn is open, between dreaming and remembering, between being and meaning; the gate between wanting and having, between fearing and having too. Things that had been coming together to become one thing, perhaps coming together for a long time, fall apart again into two. Soul and body, for instance; male and female; pursuer and pursued; children of God and orphans, nobody’s children. But things that had always been different fall together then too, and are shown to be one thing after all: the fleeing one looks back, and sees she is the one she flees; the orphan turned out to weep is the same as the master of the house. The last is the same as the first. That (Bobby thought) is what that hard saying means. Nobody has to switch places at all; we throw ourselves out of our own chairs, and sit ourselves down instead.
