by A. S. Byatt
Avram Snitkin, you bastard, why don’t you write? I am in a professional position very few sociologists have been in, bang in the middle of the dynamic of the formation of a new religion or cult. I can test Weber’s and Durkheim’s theories of charisma and the collective against each other. I can look into group psychology. But I’m compromised and contaminated by being part of the group I’m studying. I do really need another pair (a pair) of objective eyes. I sit here at night and imagine all sorts of things, starting with ritual sex with Joshua Ramsden (not an entirely unattractive idea, if I’m scrupulously honest, and what does that prove? He is very very handsome with his leanness, and white hair, and dark dark eyes. He will have to watch the other women getting jealous of Lucy. That isn’t the sort of thing he thinks about, but others do, such as Clemency Farrar, who watches him constantly. I can’t read her expression, and my view of her expression isn’t evidence.).
The thing is, Avram, I’m scared. I do what I do because I’m an onlooker not a do-er and that suits me fine. I understand that ethnomethodology requires observation in situ, and on the spot, and I’m on the spot. But if a group of people are boiling like a cauldron, my useless friend, it’s hard to stay cool. Foxes are taking the hens. What will happen if my cover gets blown? Now, or later.
I do need a human hand and a bit of honesty. I was going to write, for God’s sake, but I’m getting superstitious—for Talcott Parsons’s sake Avram, answer my letters, or better, put on yr walking boots and come up here.
From Elvet Gander to Kieran Quarrell Dec. 23rd 1968
Here, my cautious friend, is my unofficial report on The Hearers of Dun Vale (the Vale of Darkness, of Tears) to accompany my official reports of the health and progress of Josh Lamb sive Joshua Ramsden, and Lucy Nighby, or it appears, Santa Lucia, the Maiden of Light. All shall be made clear in the fullness of time. Selah!
We’ve just celebrated the Winter Solstice. Since I wrote that sentence, I have sat and watched sand sift through the hourglass timelessly, uncounted times. The dark clouds whip across the firmament, edged with gilded lace and scattering showers of silver sparkles. Zag and I celebrated the Winter Solstice privately with a little lysergic acid. Half of me now wishes I had not done so for how can I give you a true record of what floats in and out of form accompanied by harmonious twanging and flashing glories? But I must try, my dear, I must try. It is also possible, even probable, that the acid droplet gave me a vision of the true nature of events wch I’d have only glimpsed, unaided.
I saw also what lurks on the rim of the hills, at the rim of the skull-pan, outside the dancing circle. I saw it.
There are more things in heaven and earth.
To our muttons. There were a lot of muttons, but We are Vegetarians.
Sorry, Kieran, I skitter. Pull myself together.
We had a ceremony of the Solstice, which was also a ceremony of the inauguration of the Hearers. So that you’ll know the import of the ceremony, I need to tell you the tale of the formation of the cosmos according to Mani. Selah. We have a nightly gathering for tale-telling and talk—by fire-light and candle-light, in the old hall of this place. Gideon wanted to make the tale-telling into a personal confessional, but Josh Ramsden has hijacked it and tells tales of the Manichees and tales of the cosmos. He tells them well, with a note of scholarly scepticism and a poetic passion and a kind of entrancing hypnotism. It’s all fiendishly complicated (literally, my friend, fiendishly) but I’ll have a stab at the telling.
In the beginning were two Realms, the Dark and the Light, and they were quite, quite separate. The Kingdom of Light was in the East, West, and North, and the Father of Greatness reigned in it. The Tree of Life grew there (grows there) crowned with flowers, unvarying in its beauty. The Kingdom of Light is made of Five Things—Air, Wind, Light, Water and Fire. The Father of Greatness is surrounded by Aeons—twelve by twelve, made of light. They dwell in the “unbegotten air” in “the unbegotten land.”
The Kingdom of Darkness is the Kingdom of Light in a glass darkly, id est, reversed. It lies in the South, and the Tree of Death grows there, which is Matter as opposed to Light, Death as opposed to life, “as unlike the Tree of Life as a king and a pig.” Ramsden read out a passage in which Mani describes the king in his palace in his airy chambers, and the pig wallowing in filth, eating foul things, creeping round “like a snake.” The Kingdom of Darkness is boggy, full of pits, fens, gulfs and dark pools. It is smothered by Smoke, the “poison of death.” There are five worlds also in the Kingdom of Darkness—Smoke, Fire, Wind, Water and Darkness, inhabited by foul beasts or demons—bipeds, quadrupeds, flying things, swimming things and reptiles respectively. The Prince of Darkness is called Pentamorphos for he combines all these foul devilish shapes in one arch-Dragon. The Tree of Death is full of maggots which prey on the fruits of the tree, which oppress the branches of the tree, for all is disharmony.
The principle of the Kingdom of Darkness, nota bene O Kieran, is the random motion of aimless and excessive Libido or Desire. Ramsden smiled directly at me when he used this word, his sweet, sad smile of distant complicity, which is lovable in him. Selah.
Slopping randomly about in the dark and the smoke and the stench of the pit, some of the bipedal demons came to glimpse the Light, and lusted after it.
So they churned and stirred and boiled up, and invaded the Kingdom of Light.
And Light didn’t begin to know what to do, because it was used to unvarying calm and peace.
So it divided itself into emanations. It made a female Mother of the Living, and they made (but did not engender) a Primal Man, who armed himself with the Five Elements—Air, Wind, Light, Water and Fire, which together make up the Life of the Father, which is also known as the Maiden of Light. The Primal Man wore the Elemental Maiden as armour, and went out to do battle with the Dark.
Which defeated him, and laid him out. And the infernal powers sucked in, ingested, the Light Elements of the armour.
Which acted like a baited hook, or a honey-trap, to make the Dark dependent on the Light.
Then a lot of subdivided deities were sent out to rescue the Primal Man, which they did. They all have very abstracted names, and are all part of the One.
Then the imprisoned Light had to be rescued. This gets complicated and I shall skip many of the operations. The Demiurge made the earth out of the defeated demons, and the sky from their flayed skins. The mountains are their bones. Matter is Darkness, is the message.
Pure light sits in the sky, in the form of the unchanging sun, and the changing moon, and the (slightly defiled) stars and planets.
Then it gets sexy. (Ramsden didn’t. He remained serious-looking and gently expository.)
The Demiurge evoked the Maiden of Light who was also Twelve Maidens (the twelve signs of the Zodiac). Then the Demiurge and the Maiden revealed themselves naked in the sun and the moon to the female and male Demons. This overexcited the demons who ejaculated the Light they had swallowed which became seed and fell on the earth. It was mixed with the sludge of Sin in the dark beings, which worked in them like yeast in dough. From the sin came five trees, and from them all vegetable life.
The female demons were already pregnant but miscarried when they saw the Demiurge’s beauty. Their foetuses fell to earth and survived, eating the buds of light from the trees, and becoming the animal kingdom.
So the Light is still bound in plants, and even (though less) in animals.
The first man, Adam, was the child of two demons, as was Eve. Their birth was engineered by the Prince of Darkness. Adam was a replication of the cosmos, containing Light in Matter—like an elephant engraved on a ring in miniature, according to the Chinese, the human world replicates the cosmic one, without addition or subtraction.
Adam knew nothing of his dark origins, or his infernal flesh.
Jesus of Light came to him as a messenger and revealed his true existence to him, eat and be eaten, shit and be shat, fuck and be fucked, stink and inhale the stench. Jesus of Light gave
Adam to eat of the Tree of Life, and Adam uttered a cry, which Ramsden says is at the centre of the understanding of the Manichaean Universe. He howled like a maddened lion, “Woe, woe, to the maker of my flesh! Woe to him who has imprisoned my soul in it, and woe to the lawless whose actions led to my enslavement.”
According to Mani—who felt sex and food were the roots of evil—Eve’s first two children, Cain and Abel, were sons of demons, not of Adam. His only child, conceived in a moment of human weakness, was Seth, who is the ancestor of all of us in whom the Light particles are still imprisoned. Our world, according to Mani, according to Ramsden, is a Smudge, and evil in it is not caused by our Sin but by demons of darkness, whom we aid and abet. We must release the Light, but the only ways to do this are both painful and self-destructive. Still, we must do what we can. So Ramsden says. He has instituted two ceremonies—the grip of the right hand, on meeting, which he says the Manichees took from the grip of the hand of the Demiurge or Living Spirit when he released the Primal Man from sleep, and the touching of the Three Seals—mouth, hands and breast. The sealed Mouth eats no meat, drinks no wine (!), the sealed Hands will hurt no creature containing Light Particles, the sealed Breast is a reference to elective chastity and abstention from procreation. These rather graceful rituals remove some of Gideon’s more touchy-feely explorations from our daily encounters, and give relief to some, and suppressed irritation to others. I have to say that Gideon appears to be carried away on a general wing of enthusiasm and renovation and vision—shared vision—and when I say shared, I do include myself, and of course, Zag. Aided or not by acid.
We celebrated the Solstice yesterday. It was decided to have a fire at midnight—the midnight of the longest night. Canon Holly—a predictable enthusiast for the Golden Bough view of interchangeable rites—came up with the idea of incorporating a dead Tree into our fire as a symbol of renewal. He also came up with the Savonarola-like idea of a bonfire of vanities—everyone should cast something into the flames. So we built our fire round a suitably gnarled and withered old apple-tree, which hasn’t produced fruit for years. It’s on the edge of the orchard, and there were moments when I thought the whole thing would go up, and flames would sweep the plums and pears and crab-apples. Did I tell you that the Manichees believe Jesus wasn’t crucified at all—that the account of the Crucifixion is a symbolic account of the crucifixion of Suffering Jesus on the Light-Cross (crux luminis), which is all trees and all vines and all plants where the light is imprisoned in the flesh of fruit and flowers—and further imprisoned of course, for longer, every time we eat an apple. Anyway, we built our fire well, using old furniture and bits of hen-houses. Did I tell you we have released all the birds—the broiler-house was like some demonic hideout from Tolkien, with great red lights like eyes, and all the white feathered beasties huddled together, crying, in the bloody light. They’re all over now, but their feet suffer.
On the Night, there was a procession to light the Fire—Lucy was given the honour of pushing the burning brand into the mound. Then we all threw in a treasured possession. Lucy began with her wedding-ring. Clemency Farrar immediately added hers. So then Gideon added his. They did not look at each other. Clemency provided roast chestnuts and baked potatoes and toasted cheese throughout the evening, and mugs of apple-juice, cider, cocoa, spring water. Zag put in a teddy-bear. He said anyone could see he loved it, looking at how worn it was. It was most unpleasant watching it shrivel. Various women brought garments—a pretty dress, a sweater—or rings and bracelets. And I, you will ask? I decided I had to play fair (and I was under an influence, which is now wearing off ). So I cast into the flames my much-loved copy of The Interpretation of Dreams, with all my layers of notes, and interleaved commentary. It was a true sacrifice, for there was no one there to know what it meant to me—and indeed, I should be interested to know, professionally, what it means to you.
So there we were. The flames went up into the black, and you could see, I thought, the Particles of Light returning to air at the edge of the burning sheet which surrounded the pyre. Zag brought out some warm coats—Afghan I think—sewed with gold stitching, suns and moons and flowers—on blond leather, and lined with shaggy fleece. He put them on Ramsden and Gideon and himself, and finished them off with Tibetan goatskin kind of hats, with dangling ears and a tassel. We are at a stage where everybody accepts everything gracefully. No one said fleece wasn’t vegetarian. They did look like priests.
The tree went up in great cackling shoots, most satisfactorily. We danced a bit, in a circle. Canon Holly quoted St. Lucies’ Day, by Donne. “ ’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s.”
He ruined me, and I am rebegot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
He made an impromptu little sermon. There were many of those, during the long night, listened to with more or less rapt attention. I shall spare you the rest, including my own, which I don’t remember too well, owing to the acid. I do remember Holly’s. He twisted Donne’s brilliant black extravaganza of erotic despair into a prayer to the Deus Absconditus, the Dead God, to be reborn in the Particles of Light in all of us. Religious men always twist. Or maybe they see the truth, or a truth, we mostly miss.
It would be so very easy to mock our doings. The English style is fatally mocking—we can only have the Sublime, it seems, if we include the grotesque as a safeguard. So yes, we were absurd, a lot of predominantly middle-aged English people, some dressed-up, some not, shuffling and very occasionally prancing, round a bonfire, chanting hymns we didn’t know the words to, tumtitty, tumtitty, waving our arms in spontaneous gestures. Canon Holly pointed out that Lucy was Lucy’s name, and she was Lux, Lucis, the Maiden of Light, and was blessed amongst women for providing the Hall for the Hearers. It was half after-dinner speech, half pagan paean. I saw his horrible teeth glitter in the fire-light and I didn’t smile. Clemency (her first error?) said Lucy wasn’t a Maiden, and Ramsden (who hadn’t said anything, just stood in his robe with the red light on the white wool of his head) said that from now, she was, for all was new at the moment of the turning of the Solstice—which, by a half accident happened exactly as he spoke. So there she stood in her fiery fleece, an appley little woman, with a lamb pressing against her legs (she has a tame one called Tobias) and greying hair coming out of its hairpins, and tears running all over her little round face.
The world is turning into the Light, said Ramsden. Hens were chooking all round us, stirred up by the light and heat and disturbance. A fox coughed, not far away. I heard an owl. The sky was full of sparks, and stars beyond the sparks. I felt. I felt—why not? Why can’t we have back the tyger burning bright, and the burning lamb, and the Tree of Life and the Tree of Death (fire streamed from the dead fingers of the convulsed apple-tree). Why can’t there be singing and ritual and meaning and a grand purpose, as men once thought there was? I didn’t feel mocking, I felt like a Son of God.
At the end, at dawn, it was decided to take a brand from the burning and light a fire in the hearth of the hall in the Hall. Zag said he would take the brand. He said he liked lighting fires. No one quarrelled with his self-election—indeed, it was as though he had spoken with the common voice. So we followed him in, and (with the help of a cigarette-lighter, I have to confess) he started the home-fire.
And we all went to bed in the morning.
Chapter 16
The family dressed the tree for Christmas. It was a bushy spruce, with a few cones, smelling still of wet resin and the life of sap. They hung it, as they now always did, with the golden wire hexagons and polyhedrons Marcus had made for Stephanie. The gathering was grown—Bill and Winifred were there, with Stephanie’s children, Will and Mary, Frederica and Leo, and Daniel, who had just arrived. Agatha and Saskia were also there, staying this year in Freyasgarth. Marcus had made new decorations to add to the traditional ones, after his conversation with Vincent Hodgkiss. He had made gold and silver spirals and abstract lapped cones, Fibonacci angels. He wound a great snak
ing spiral around the form of the tree, measuring the intervals. Will hung the pin-points of light—red, blue, green, white—at random amongst Marcus’s order. He was singing, loudly “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Frederica said to Agatha that she would never have believed, never, that her father would live in a house with pop music singing from the attic, round and round, over and over, on and on. Agatha said she had heard Bill himself humming “Eleanor Rigby.” “It’s a good poem,” said Agatha. “Yes, but you wouldn’t expect him to notice,” said Frederica.
Will was fourteen, and was singing in order not to have to speak. He was heavy like his father, and dark like his father. Mary, who was twelve, was singing solo in the Carol Service in the church. It was the first day of her first period, which she had learned from girls at school to call the Curse. She retired often to stare with a kind of awe at the red spots of blood on the soft white space of the towel. She had bought the towels herself, and had said nothing to Winifred, who as only a grandmother, however loving, was outside this female thing, was withered. She had said nothing to her schoolfriends, either, although the event was much discussed in the abstract. It was private, and strange, and satisfying. She needed a confidante, and thought of Frederica, and rejected her. She wasn’t a sympathetic person, she wouldn’t listen. She thought she would tell Agatha Mond, who was quiet and kind, and also a private and secret person. In her mind, darkly, she thought of the wet red traces in terms of the tale of Snow White, whose mother had seen three drops of blood on the snow, had borne her daughter, red as blood, black as ebony, white as snow, and had died. Her own mother had carelessly let herself be killed by an ice-machine, and Mary punished her, by never thinking of her. She was singing Christina Rossetti’s “In the Bleak Midwinter.” She was singing of white things, snow on snow, a breast full of milk, a lamb. She had the beginnings of breasts herself, and was not invulnerable. She would speak to Agatha. There was a grave conversation about what to do, what to look out for, that was proper to have.
