AEgypt (48 page)

—But, said Giordano.

—Your memory is God's gift, said Della Porta, almost a whisper into the monk's ear as, arm linked in his, he walked him to the street door. Your memory is God's gift and you have improved it wonderfully. By natural art. Be content.

—But the stars, Giordano said. Cecco says...

Two servants had pulled open the double doors onto the piazza. Della Porta pushed Giordano out.

—They burned Cecco, he said. Do you hear me? They burned Cecco. Good night. God help you.

But why was it unlawful to push past accidents, and proceed to the reasons for things? Once put Venus in your mind to stand for Love—Venus with her dove and her green branch—and Love will glow in the mind with its own glow, for Venus
is
Love; place her in her own sign of Virgo and Love pours down through all the spheres, warm, living, vivifying, Love both inside and out.

Natural magic like Della Porta's allowed you to discern Venus in those things of the world most impressed with Venus's qualities: her emeralds, her primroses, her doves; her perfumes, herbs, colors, sounds. Venus and Venus-ness pervaded the universe, a quality like light or flavor; doctors and wise men and wonder-workers knew how to trace it and put it to use, and that was lawful. But to cut—in your mind or on an emerald—an image of Venus, dove, green branch, young breasts; or to sing, in her own Lydian mode, a song of praise to Venus; or to burn before your image a handful of her rosemary—dangerous. And why?

Why? Bruno asked of no one, honest eyebrows raised, palms open and reasonable. But he knew why.

To make an image, or a symbol; to sing an incantation; to name a name: that was not simply manipulating the stuff of the earth, however wisely. That was addressing a person, an intelligence; for only a person could understand such things. It was invoking the beings behind the stars, those countless wise beings Cecco talked about who lurked there. And to invoke such beings would put the worker who attempted it in mortal danger.

Cause Venus by your songs to take notice of you, to open her almond eyes and smile, and she may consume you. The Church was no longer certain that the potent beings who filled the spheres were all devils, as She had once thought. They might be angels, or dAEmons neither good nor bad. But it was certain that to ask them for favors was idolatry, and to attempt to conjure and compel them was madness.

That was the answer. Bruno knew it, but he didn't care.

He had begun to assemble around him now a group of younger or wilder brothers, a loose association of devotees and hangers-on everyone called his
giordanisti
, as though Giordano were a brigand chieftain. They sat around him and talked in loud voices and said extravagant things or, hushed, listened to the Nolan expatiate; they ran errands for him, got into trouble with him, spread his fame. When Giordano enraged the prior by deciding to clear his cell of images, plaster statuary, blessed beads, Madonnas, and retain only a crucifix, the
giordanisti
did—or talked of doing—the same thing. The prior, unable to understand at all, suspected Giordano of northern heresies,
luteranismo
, iconoclasm: but the
giordanisti
laughed, knowing better. Giordano pestered the librarian, and got the
giordanisti
to pester him too, to buy the books of Hermes that Marsilio Ficino had translated; but Benedetto wouldn't hear of it. Idolatry. Paganism. But had not Thomas Aquinas and Lactantius praised Hermes, and said he had taught one God, and foretold the Incarnation? Benedetto was deaf.

When his monks traveled, Giordano gave them lists of books to look for, and sometimes he got them, borrowed or bought or stolen: Horapollo on hieroglyphs, Iamblichus on the Mysteries of AEgypt, the
Golden Ass
of Apuleius. And in the privy on a winter day a young brother, trembling with anxiety or cold or both, took from his robe and gave to Giordano a thick sewn manuscript without cover or binding, written in a crabbed quick hand full of abbreviations.

—
Picatrix
, the boy said. It's a great sin.

—The sin will be mine, Giordano said. Give it to me.

Picatrix
! Blackest of the black books of the old times, and there was no doubt about the intentions of anyone found studying it, no way a doctor of theology might defend himself as he might if he was caught with Horapollo or even Apuleius. It was madness to keep such a book, and Giordano did not keep it long; every page memorized was torn out and cast behind him forever.

Man is a little world, reflecting in himself the great world and the heavens; through his
mens
the wise man can raise himself above the stars. So Hermes the Thrice-great says.

Spirit descends from the prime matter which is God and enters into earthly matter, where it resides; the different forms which matter takes reflect the nature of the
spiritus
that entered it. The mage is he who can capture and guide the influx of
spiritus
himself, and thus make of matter what he wishes. How?

By making talismans, as Marsilio had hinted: only here were exact instructions, what materials were to be used, what hour of the day was best, what day of the month, month of the zodiacal calendar; what incantations, invocations, lights were to be used, what perfumes and songs would most attract the Reasons of the World, the Semhamaphores, all mind, who fill up the universe. There were long lists of images to be used on talismans, and Brother Giordano, who had no materials to make them of, no lead for Saturn, tin for Jupiter, could nonetheless cast them inwardly and unforgettably:

An image of Saturn: The form of a man, standing on a dragon, clothed in black and having in his right hand a sickle and his left hand a spear.

An image of Jupiter: The form of a man with a lion's face and bird's feet, below them a dragon with seven heads, holding an arrow in his right hand.

Better yet, and more potent, were long lists of images for thirty-six gods of time, nameless, vivid, of whom Giordano had read in Origen and in Horapollo's hints:
horoscopi
, the gods of the hours known to AEgypt and then forgotten or ignored by later ages. They were called
decans
also, because each one ruled over ten degrees of the zodiac, three
decans
to each of the twelve signs. The images of the thirty-six,
Picatrix
said, had been cast by Hermes himself, as he had cast the hieroglyphs of AEgypt's language; Giordano hardly needed to memorize them, they stepped off the crowded page directly into his brain and took their seats there, where they had all along belonged, though he hadn't known it:

The first
decan
of Aries: A huge dark man with fiery eyes, holding a sword and clad in a white garment.

The second
decan
: A woman clad in green, and lacking one leg.

The third
decan
: A man holding a golden sphere, and dressed in red...

He imbibed this weird congress like food, like a fiery liquor, and almost as soon as they had entered within him he began to dream of them and of their doings. Who was he who had discovered them, this Hermes?

There are among the Chaldeans very perfect masters in this art of images, and they affirm that Hermes was the first who constructed images by which he knew how to regulate the Nile against the motion of the moon. This man also built a temple to the Sun, and he knew how to hide himself from all so that no one could see him, though he was within it. It was he too, who in the east of AEgypt constructed a City twelve miles long within which he constructed a castle which had four gates in each of its four parts. On the eastern gate he placed the form of an Eagle; on the western gate the form of a Bull; on the southern gate the form of a Lion; and on the northern gate he constructed the form of a Dog. Into these images he introduced spirits which spoke with voices, nor could anyone enter the gates of the City except by their permission. There he planted trees, in the midst of which was a great tree which bore the fruit of all generation. On the summit of the castle he caused to be raised a tower thirty cubits high, on the top of which he ordered to be placed a lighthouse the color of which changed every day until the seventh day, when it returned to the first color; and so the City was illuminated with these colors. Near the City there was an abundance of waters in which dwelt many kinds of fish. Around the circumference he placed engraved images and ordered them in such a manner that by their virtue the inhabitants were made virtuous and withdrawn from all wickedness and harm.

The name of the City was Adocentyn.

The name of the city was Adocentyn.

Pierce pushed back the wheeled chair he sat in, and with the page (Adocentyn!) still in his hand he started out of the room. Then he returned, and put it back. He went out again, got lost in the toils of the tiny house, came into a second parlor matching the first, and thought for a bad moment that he had only imagined that glass-fronted bookcase and its key and its contents, for it was nowhere to be seen; got straightened around; went into the first parlor, opened the bookcase, and took from it the plastic envelope marked PICA TRIX.

Absurdly, his heart was beating hard. But the thick vellum leaves he pulled out, covered top to bottom in double columns of manuscript, were in a dense black-letter script unintelligible to him, curt monkish Latin, or code for all he knew.

He locked it up again, and went through the house to the front hall and the stairs, calling Rosie's name.

"Up here!"

"I've found something,” he said mounting the stairs. “Rosie?"

Down a corridor at the top of the stairs, a corridor whose walls were covered with framed etchings, people places and things, so many of them that the colorless paper behind could hardly be seen. He turned in at the door of a bedroom.

She stood with her back to him in the stuffy dimness, drawn blinds making a nighttime in the room, someone else's bedroom. Pierce felt suddenly caught in the toils of an awful pun, a misunderstanding, a rebus, a palindrome. Rosie turned; what light there was in the room gathered in her eyes.

"Satin sheets,” she said, gesturing to the big bed with her bottle. “Check it out."

[Back to Table of Contents]

"It's a novel,” Pierce said to Boney Rasmussen. “Unfinished, apparently. It seems to end with a bunch of notes, and hints about further scenes."

"You've read it all already?” The rainy day outside the library was so silver, the sparkle of the new greenery so various, that it made a vague darkness inside, and Boney at his desk was hard to see.

"No,” Pierce said. “No. I've started it. But we didn't want to move it.” Like a corpus delicti. “So I quit reading when it got dark yesterday."

Boney was silent.

"Rosie's pretty sure it's not just a draft of one of the ones he published. It's all new."

Still Boney said nothing.

"It is,” Pierce began, and halted; he wasn't sure he should make the claim, or the revelation, which he had thought to make, or reveal, when he was shown into this room; but then he said, “It is really a very strange and remarkable thing to find and a very unlikely coincidence.” He fell silent himself then, and they both sat amid the tick and pop of raindrops outside as though under a spell, Boney thinking thoughts Pierce could not imagine and his own mind filled with the wonderment of what had befallen him.

Adocentyn.

"I,” he said at length, “am at work on a book."

"Rosie told me."

"Well what's remarkable is,” he said, “the things and the people in this book are things and people I'd been thinking about and studying for a long time, in a completely different way. Doctor John Dee, for instance, the English mathematician. Giordano Bruno."

"He's written about them before."

"Well. Not quite in this way."

"What way?"

Pierce crossed his legs, and took his knee in his interlaced fingers. “This book begins,” he said, “with John Dee talking to angels. Now in fact Dee left extensive records of the seances he held with a person named Talbot or Kelley who claimed to see angels in a kind of crystal ball. All right. Only in this book of Kraft's he's really seeing them, and talking to them."

Boney waited unmoving; but Pierce had begun to feel a kind of intensity of attention growing in him.

"Next comes a chapter about Bruno,” Pierce said. “And all the biographical details are right, I think, and the milieu; only the
reasons
for everything happening are not the reasons we would give now."

"No?"

"No."

"What reasons then?"

"It's as if,” Pierce said. “As if, in this book, there are angels but not laws of physics; as if theurgy could work, and win battles; prayer too. And magic."

"Magic,” Boney said.

"Glastonbury's in this book,” Pierce said. “And a Grail. The book might be about a Grail, somehow hidden in history.” Leafing forward with the same horrid yet eager fascination he might feel if allowed to leaf through his own life to come, he had glimpsed Kepler's name, and Brahe's; he had seen kings, popes, and emperors, famous battles, castles, ports, and treaties: but he had seen also the City of the Sun, and the brothers of the Rose; the Red Man and the Green Lion; the angel Madimi, the Death of the Kiss, a golem, a wand of
lignum vitae
, twelve minims of best gold in the bottom of the
crater
.

"And your book,” Boney said. “It's the same?"

"Not the same. This is fiction. Mine is not."

"But it deals in these same matters. This same period."

"Yes."

And maybe it wasn't so different, no not so different. Kraft's was only going to be the strong wine undiluted: no subtleties of qualification, no might-it-not-seems, no it-is-tempting-to-thinks, no it-is-as-thoughs. None. Only this extraordinary colored toy theater of unhistory.

"You would notice then,” Boney said slowly, “if there was anything in this book about an elixir. Not medicine exactly, but."

"I know the concept,” Pierce said.

"Anything about that?"

Pierce shook his head. “Not so far."