Endless Things (11 page)

Far famed, Schloss Heidelberg is part ruin, part restoration. The restored parts are largely without interest, resembling a combination of a Swiss
Stübli
and the smoking room of a Dutch ocean liner. Be sure to engage a
Führer
(official guide) if you wish to go through the maze of passages, rooms, belvederes, towers, and corridors, or you may never find a way out.

He might have liked to see what the smoking room of a Dutch ocean liner, or something resembling one, looked like; but the interiors were
geschlossen
for the winter months and there was no
Führer
. He wandered in the Schlosshof, the castle yard. A silver fog hung over the river Neckar and the toy town far below. Pierce followed the obvious way, down the sloping walks and
the famed terraced gardens
, beneath a great arch—
the Elizabeth-Pforte, built as a birthday surprise (legend has it) in a single night by the besotted Frederick V for his English queen
—and into a broad bare terrace. Where were the famed gardens?

"Here,” said Dame Frances Yates. “The designer was Salomon de Caus, a French Protestant and an extremely brilliant garden architect and hydraulic engineer. He was on intimate terms with Inigo Jones..."

Fine rain had begun to fall. She took from her bag a collapsible umbrella, pointed it like an épée, and pressed a button; the umbrella opened as it lengthened. Pierce held it over the two of them, for she hardly reached his shoulder. She told him how de Caus had blasted away the mountain with gunpowder to level it for his gardens, how he constructed grottoes where musical fountains played, and a water organ based on a design in Vitruvius, and a statue of Memnon that sang when the sun struck it, “as in the classical story,” which Pierce couldn't remember.

Nothing of what she described—geometrical beds, obelisks, an airy palace, a maze, another maze—could now be seen; only a mossy and almost illegible river god at the entrance to a grotto. A cave. Empty. The dumpling-shaped tourist with umbrella and walking shoes who had reminded him of Dame Frances stared with him into the dark echoey silence, and withdrew.

It was a ruin, more even than a ruin, a quasi-natural object, vine grown and shapeless, devolving from its status as a work of hands and minds to a complex lump of stone, disorganizing every day a little further in the entropy of hope and desire, which proceeds only one way. What had destroyed it? Lightning, said the guidebook, striking not once but twice, and a dynastic dispute with a French king in the following century. But Dame Frances said it was the two of them, Frederick and his Elizabeth, the might-be-happy couple blessed by Shakespeare's ambivalent mage. The two who in 1619 reigned for a winter as king and queen of Bohemia, a reign as brief and illusory as a masque: and who brought down upon their magic kingdom on the Rhine the
tercios
and the pikemen and the musketeers and the sappers and the end of everything.

She called him Celadon, after the shepherd-knight in d'Urfé's
L'Astrée
, that vastly popular romance about the Golden Age and the return of Astræa, goddess of Justice and Peace, ears of corn wound in her hair.
Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna
. He wrote his love letters to her in French; she never learned German. The marriage had been the work of the nobleman Christian of Anhalt, a ferocious little man with wild red hair, tireless bearer of a heavy destiny (so he believed), and the counselor closest to Frederick. Frederick called him
Mon père
.

Anhalt was there to receive the Princess Palatine when she first arrived at Oppenheim in the Palatinate, and he brought her to Heidelberg, her new seat, by means of a series of masques and processions designed by wise workers to assure her and her spouse's health, happiness, and success, drawing down upon them the best astral and divine influences by the right arrangement of signs, persons, geometries, and words. She passed through arches covered with roses, with images of Church Fathers, Ancestors, Deities. A pretty boy gave her a basket of fruit in the name of Flora and Pomona—Spring and then Autumn, flower and then fruit—for Fertility; and she ate hungrily, and everyone laughed and rejoiced in her. Her husband came out to meet her in a wagon made like Jason's ship, sailing with the Argonauts to recover the Golden Fleece. Music, in Venus's mode (the Hypolydian) and generous Jupiter's (the Lydian) and smiling Sol's (the Dorian), but not the melancholic Hypodorian; there would be time enough for Saturnine music later.

She brought with her a troupe of English actors, for she loved plays and shows and let's-pretend above all things. They performed old plays and new,
Love's Labour's Lost
and
Love's Labour's Won, The Merrie Divil of Edmonton, A Game at Chesse
, which mocked the Spanish. Her Celadon delighted to see her laugh, delighted to see her delighted, and if plays delighted her there would be plays. No matter that his family was not only Calvinist but fiercely Calvinist: his father had once held up a consecrated host before the congregation and ripped it into shreds: “Fine god
you
are! We'll see who's stronger!” From then on it was tough bread and wooden mugs at the infrequent communions in his whitewashed chapel.

Frederick and his Elizabeth were beings of a different order. Of course they stood for True Religion, of course they were Evangelical, but they were also Hope and Beauty and Conciliation and Possibility and Fructification and Peace; somehow this seemed obvious to all, all at least who came within range of the happy rays their persons emanated. There were two young men in the throngs when He and She first met beneath the Arch at Heidelberg: one was a peregrinating Lutheran pastor, Johann Valentin Andreæ, and the other a student at the university, a Moravian and a member of the Moravian Brethren, a gentle pietist sect—his name was Jan Komensky, which he latinized to Comenius. And both of them felt it: good stars in conjunction, the world going the right way after a long wandering, Saturnian cold hatred and Martian hot fury both abating. Sun and the scent of roses.

More than that even.

They both imagined, Jan and Valentin—they talked about it long in the halls of the university, in the thronged inns and the silences of the
Bibliotheca palatina
where the great Johannes Gruter was librarian—that a universal reformation of the whole wide world might be beginning, now, right now. What did it matter that the almanacs and prophecies had so far been wrong—the fateful year 1600 had brought no vast changes that they could see—that didn't mean the world wasn't in the throes of a transformation, one that remained invisible so far. Anyway it filled their own souls. How could they help to forward it? Smuggled out of the dungeons of the Inquisition came manuscripts of Tommaso Campanella, who taught that the earth was now growing closer to the sun, and the temperature of the cold north was warming, and Love was increasing. Campanella projected a great city, perfect city, City of the Sun, ruled by a philosopher hidden in a circular tower inside a square inside the cubic walls of the city. A universal hieroglyphic picture-dictionary would cover those walls, instructing all the citizens in virtue and wisdom by the immediacy and force of its magic images.

Magic. Theurgical, cabalistical, alchemical, hieroglyphical, historico-alchemical, cabalistico-theurgical, thaumaturgico-iatrochemico-astrological. As the alchemist recreates in his furnace the entire world, which thereupon grows gold as gold grows in the
matrix
of the earth, but faster; as the cabalist manipulates the letters of the words by which God commanded the world to be and to be fruitful, thus sharing in the divine creative power; in the same way couldn't the slow-advancing history of the world be accelerated, if only its events could be read right? In 1614—when the sacred couple had been two years in Heidelberg and the two friends had parted, Comenius returning to the Czech lands, Andreæ to Tübingen to be a Lutheran pastor—there came the outfolding, the sudden way opening, the cry of summoning and possibility.

Universal and General Reformation of the Whole Wide World; together with the
Fama Fraternitatis
of the laudable Order of the Rosy Cross, written to all the Learned and Rulers of Europe
. It was a little gray pamphlet printed in Cassel, it was a manuscript read in Prague, it was a letter warmly responded to in Germany, the respondent thrown into the galleys by the Jesuits (so the pamphlet itself proclaimed).
This happy time, when there is discovered not only the other half of the world, which lay hidden from us before, but also many wonderful and never-before-seen works and creatures; and men reimbued with great wisdom, who might renew all arts, so that Man might understand his own nobleness and worth, and why he is called Microcosm, and how far his knowledge might reach into Nature.

Impossible not to be moved by these huge certainties. Andreæ in Tübingen, Comenius in Moravia, scholars and Inquisitors in Bavaria and Saxony read and reread. Who were these Brothers? They had long been among us, it appeared, awaiting their hour. The wisest of them, C.R., had traveled the world and discoursed with the wise in every land. The realms of the Turk too, Fez, Damascus, Ægypt and Arabia Felix. And from C.R. the wisdom passes to R.C., his brother, and B., a painter, and G., and P.D., their secretary. Thence to A., and D., and to J.O. in England, master of Cabala, as his book H. shows. With the whole alphabet seemingly summoned, the pamphlet then tells how the Brothers went out into various lands, not only to communicate their
Axiomata
secretly to the learned but to heal the sick for free; and they vow to keep their brotherhood a secret for a hundred years. Why now have they broken their silence? Because the lost tomb of Brother R.C. (or C.R.C. as he apparently becomes) has at last been discovered, and the door opened.
As also there shall be opened a door to Europe, which has already begun to appear, and which many expect and long for.

Johann Valentin Andreæ stayed up all night reading, walked the streets, unable to stay still. What was he being told to do? What was being asked of him? How could the universal reformation of the world be both at hand and impossible? In a later age, unimaginable then, you would say: the current of that work passes through him, and the resistance of his soul heats him to incandescence.

Then silence.
Silentium post clamores,
the little screed promised, a pause for the leaven to work in souls, nothing more needing to be said.

Then in the following year a new call, another
libellum
, this one in Latin:

A brief consideration of a More Secret Philosophy, written by Philip à Gabella, a student of philosophy, now published for the first time together with the Confession of the R.C. Fraternity. Printed at Cassel by Wilhelm Wessel, printer to the Most Illustrious Prince, in 1615.

The more secret philosophy was a sign, one he seemed both to have always known and to be seeing for the first time:

The
Consideratio
of the sign was an arithmetic, or a mathesis; the sign itself was a
stella hieroglyphica
—so it said of itself. It began with a Pythagorean Y, and therefore it might be a story, the history of the universe described as a soul's journey, or maybe a soul's journey described as the universe. Johann Valentin Andreæ stared at the sign, which seemed to him to be something like a small human figure, and then he studied the paragraphs that followed, recounting the vicissitudes, divisions, and reassemblings through which that figure was put. The more he stared the more he understood and the less he knew. He shook his head, laughed, felt tricked, wondered; he cast it aside, he picked it up again. It was a joke, but a good joke. Or it was no joke: the old cold world was ending, and an influx of the truth, light, and glory that God had commanded should accompany poor Adam from Paradise and sweeten his misery was about to poured upon the world.

For the past year Johann Valentin had studied in secret the Great Art of transmutation, as the Fraternity was said to be doing in many places, as he was seemingly commanded to do if he wanted to be one of them, if there were really any of them at all: to see how far his knowledge might reach into Nature. His own mother was a chymist and worker in
materia medica
; he had stood by her as she worked at her stills and her ovens when he was a boy, but alone now he was too timid to start a physical fire, and to mix physical
alchymia
in physical cucurbites, to torment actual
materia
and lay his athenor within an actual physical stove. That was not the only way to work in the Art, though, he was sure. The heart was a stove too, the brain an athenor. He thought that this figure, this
stella hieroglyphica
that he looked at, might itself be a
précis
or epitome of the whole Art. It was the mathematical bones of the homunculus, a stick figure to be clothed in flesh, and that clothing was the Work, and the Self that resulted was the object and goal.

But there was, in the numbered and lettered paragraphs of the
Consideratio
, finally no story told. And transformation (Andreæ thought) was above all a
story
, whether in the fire or in the heart. So if he wanted a story he'd have to write it himself.

He would have to write it himself
. A transmutation painful and sweet occurred in his own heart as he thought it—he would have to write the story absent from these pages. A story in which every chapter would relate the tale of another piece of the disassembled man reassembled, until the necessary happy ending.

Nor would he be throwing whatever pearls he owned before the swine of ignorance: for his story of the Art's workings would not reveal those workings except to those who already knew them. To anyone else it would be merely a pleasantry, a funny story. It was said that Apuleius's wicked story of the Golden Ass was actually the story of the transmutation, told in a comic tale that no one needed to believe

Johann Valentin Andreæ, Lutheran pastor of Tübingen, with the
Consideratio
beside him to guide him, sat down to write a comedy or
ludibrium
("in imitation of the English actors,” he said later.) He put down its title:
The Chemical Wedding, by Christian Rosencreutz
. Brother C.R.C. is the hero and the author, and his name is now revealed: he is Christian Rosencreutz, an elderly fellow, but not yet a knight, and as Andreæ's play or
ludus
opens, he is preparing his heart in prayer for the Easter celebration when a wind, a strong wind, a terrible wind blows up: