The Solitudes

  —There will be help given here. There will not be any answer withheld from you. They promised that to me. I’m sure of it.

  —Now God his grace to us be praised, said Doctor Dee almost under his breath. Given sight in chrystallo. I have written it all down.

  A warming shudder covered Mr. Talbot head to toe; he turned his eyes to the stone in its frame on the table, so far from him now, so small, the stone in which there were depths like the depths inside himself. Annael Annachor Anilos Agobel. If he opened his mouth now the names of a hundred more, a hundred thousand more, would come trooping out.

  He opened his mouth, a huge yawn filled him up, stretching his jaws and crossing his eyes. He laughed, and Doctor Dee laughed too, as at a child overtaken with weariness.

  When he had been given some supper, and put exhausted to bed upstairs, and Clerkson had been sent home with his gift of books, Doctor Dee wiped and put on his spectacles, and trimmed his lamp, and sat again before the book that Mr. Talbot had brought.

  He knew a dozen codes, some of them of as great antiquity as this book appeared to be. He read several of the old secret monkish manuscript hands; he knew the oghams of old Wales. His friend the great magician Cardanus used the trellis code: a page of writing to be read down the first line of letters and up the next and down the next, revealing the true message hidden in a false message read in the usual way, in lines left to right: it seemed to Doctor Dee a childish trick, and easily broken.

  All codes, all that he had been presented with, could in the end be broken. There was only one kind that could never be: a kind of code he had conceived of while studying the great book of Abbot Trithemius, the Steganographia, which Christopher Plantin had found for him in Antwerp long ago. A code impossible to break was one that did not transpose letters into other letters or into numbers, did not transpose words or sentences into other words or sentences, but that transposed one kind of thing—the thing to be secretly spoken of—into another kind of thing entirely. Translate your intentions into a speaking bird, and let the bird speak of your intentions; encode your message in a book on automata, and the automaton when built will trace the message with a clockwork hand. Write (it was what Abbot Trithemius had done) a book on how to call down angels, and if you do so correctly, you will instruct the angels how to write the Abbot’s book themselves, in a tongue of their own, which when used will translate into works, miracles, sciences, peace on earth.

  In a more practical way, this was how Doctor Dee often encoded: he kept a huge number of stock phrases in various languages, which would be substituted for the key words of the secret message. The word “bad” could be enciphered by “Pallas is blessed of charm” or “You are admired of women, Astarte,” or “A god of grace enthroned.” If the same phrase were in Greek, it meant a different thing: “crown” perhaps, or “stealthily.” Whole fictions could be constructed out of these phrases, they were designed to fit together with standard couplings to yield long tedious and half-intelligible allegorical fantasies that actually meant something brief and fatal: The Duke dies at midnight. In fact the great trouble of the method was that the encoding was always so much longer than the message.

  Late at night, unraveling such a one, Doctor Dee would sometimes think: All creation is a huge, ornate, imaginary, and unintended fiction; if it could be deciphered it would yield a single shocking word.

  This night, with this book, he began with the first page, trying to find a simple anagram for these barbaric dense marks. He found none. He used the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, translated these into numbers, arranged the numbers as a horoscope of zodiacal signs and houses; the horoscope he translated into days and hours, and these numbers into letters in Greek. The wind died down; the moon set behind gathered clouds. In one of the one hundred and fifty cipher alphabets the Welsh bards knew, different trees stood for the letters; in another, different birds; in another, famous castles. A black rook calls to the nightingale in the hawthorn tree below the fortress of Seolae. It began to rain. Doctor Dee tossed into the fire each fruitless line of inquiry as it turned to nonsense. Dawn came; Doctor Dee wrote out in his scribble hand (he had four different hands he wrote in, besides a mirror hand) one meaning for the first line of Mr. Talbot’s book:

  IF EVER SOM POWR WITH 3 WISHES TO GRANT

  Which made little sense to him. But if he went backward—backward through the forest where the rooks called in the hawthorns along the track below the fortress, backward through the ogham and the Greek and the stars and the letters and the numbers—the same line could be read this way:

  THERE WERE ANGELS IN ye GLAS 246 MANY OF THEM

  … and that made his heart pause for an instant, and fill again with a richer blood.

  There were angels in the glass; his wish was to be granted.

  He rose from his stool; gray morning almost not distinguishable from night filled the mullioned windows. He knew, knew for certain, that he stood poised on this night at the beginning of a huge enterprise, one that he was not entirely sure he had the strength for, one that would not end with his own death, but still would require his lifelong aid for its completion; and at the same time he knew that in another sense, another deciphering, he was plumb in the middle. He blew out the lamp, and went up to bed.

  FOUR

  “Egypt,” Julie Rosengarten said dreamily.

  “Egypt,” Pierce said. “The riddle of the Sphinx. Pyramid power.”

  “Tarot.”

  “The speaking statue of Memnon.”

  “Eternal life,” said Julie.

  “Only that country isn’t Egypt,” Pierce said. “Not Egypt but this country, like this.” With a felt-tipped pen he wrote it out on the napkin brought with his whiskey:

  ÆGYPT

  “I remember this,” Julie said, looking down at this glyph. “I sort of remember this.”

  “It’s the story I want to tell,” Pierce said. “A story I somehow stumbled into when I was a kid, when almost everyone else had forgotten it; a story that’s just coming to light again—an amazing story. And it’s got a great twist to it, too.”

  “I sort of remember,” Julie said.

  “Anyway it’s one story,” Pierce said. “If this were a novel it would be the ‘frame story,’ isn’t that what they call it, but it would have an even bigger story inside it. About history. About truth.”

  Julie bent over the typed pages of his proposal, reading it or rather scanning it symbolically. Her freckled and vacation-browned breasts went white farther within the bodice of her summer dress; her hair had gone dark-honey color. “‘Where are the four corners of the earth?’” she read. “‘What is the music of the spheres, and how is it made? Why do people think that Gypsies can tell fortunes?’” She lifted her eyes to him, they too had gone light and honeylike. “Weren’t you going with a Gypsy for a while? How did that work out?”

  “Part Gypsy. For a while.” Hey, why do people say four corners of the earth, Pierce, how can a ball have corners? Why do people say they’re in seventh heaven, what’s wrong with the other six? Why are there seven days in a week, and not six or nine? Why is that, Pierce? “It didn’t work out.”

  Julie lowered her eyes again to the papers.

  They had embraced, Julie and he, tightly, at the door of the restaurant, both arriving there at the same moment, nearly colliding in fact. There was a cold stone in Pierce’s breast, there had been one all morning, for he remembered the finality, even cruelty, of his last words to her in person. They hadn’t seemed to sink in, back then; and they had not apparently persisted in her breast as they had in his. One advantage, maybe, of a real belief in Fate is that it takes the sting out of all past hurts, errors, shames; all that has been. Going through changes: that was as much as Julie would admit to having been doing, and all she would ever charge others with. A kind of new old purblind politeness that was weirdly endearing. Pierce drank of his whiskey deeply.

  “See,” he said, “when I was a kid I thought or imagined that there was a
country—Ægypt—that was like Egypt but different from it, underlying it or sort of superimposed on it. It was a real place to me, as real as America. …”

  “Oh right,” Julie said. “Gypsies.”

  “You remember,” Pierce said. “You were there. You were my guide, some ways.”

  “God we used to talk.”

  “And the ‘frame story,’” Pierce said. “It’s about my country; how I came to find out that it wasn’t me who made it up really at all; how that country came to be. Ægypt.” He touched the word he had written. “Because I did find out. I did.”

  She put down the proposal, to give all her attention to him, and rested her cheek in a dimpled hand.

  It was in the spring after Julie Rosengarten left him, first for the West Side and then for the Coast and Mexico not to be seen again for years—a spring somehow flavored differently from any spring before it or since—that Pierce picked up Fellowes Kraft’s little life of Bruno, and began to read it from the first page, as he had not done in more than twenty years. …

  “Remind me again,” Julie asked him, “who Bruno was.”

  “Giordano Bruno,” Pierce answered, crossing his hands on the placemat before him, which showed scenes of Italy, the dome of Peter’s, the tower at Pisa. “Giordano Bruno, 1546 to 1600. The first thinker of modern times, really, to postulate infinite space as a physical reality. He thought that not only was the sun in the center of the solar system, but that other stars were suns too, and also had planets going around them, as far and far farther than the eye could see—infinitely, in fact; infinitely.”

  “Huh.”

  “He was burned at the stake as a heretic,” Pierce said, “and since he had promoted the new Copernican picture of the heavens he’s always been regarded as a martyr to science, a precursor of Galileo, a sort of speculative astronomer. But what he really was, was something much stranger. The universe he saw wasn’t the one we see. For one thing, he thought that all those infinite stars and planets were alive: animals, he calls them. And they went around in their circles because they wanted to. Anyway …”

  Anyway Kraft’s book had proved to be on the whole pretty ordinary, all taken from secondary sources fleshed out with a tourist’s impressions of the scenes of Bruno’s frantic life: the monastery in Naples from which he fled, the universities and courts he haunted, looking for patronage, Venice where he was arrested, Rome where he died. The couple of hundred pages had neither the exactness of fiction nor the vividness of history. But midway through it Kraft divulged, or stumbled across in passing, or handed out without quite saying so, the key not only to Bruno but to the mystery Pierce pursued.

  What was it, Kraft was wondering, that compelled Bruno and Bruno alone to break out of the closed world of Aquinas and Dante, and find an infinite universe outside? It could not (Kraft thought) have been the discovery of Copernicus alone, for Copernicus posited no such frightening thing as infinite space populated infinitely; his sun-centered world was still bounded, as bounded by a sphere of fixed stars as Aristotle’s had been. Bruno always insisted that Copernicus hadn’t understood his own discoveries.

  No (Kraft wrote), the impulse must have come from elsewhere. Where? Well, Bruno seems to have looked into almost every book extant in his century, though certainly he didn’t finish all the ones he opened. He was versed in the most esoteric of studies. He sought regeneration for himself and his church at the ancientest and most hidden of wells. Could he not have found a way out of the crystal spheres of Aristotle in the teachings of old Hermes the Thrice-great?

  Pierce read this, and stopped. Hermes? Was this the same Thrice-great Hermes that Milton outwatch’d the Bear with? Wasn’t he a mythical sage of some kind in classical literature? Pierce had no clear memory. What teachings were these?

  Hermes teaches (Kraft went on) that the seven spheres of the stars enclose the soul of man like a prison, his heimarmene, his Fate. But man is a brother to those strong dæmons who rule the spheres; he is a power like them, though he has forgotten this. There is a means, great Hermes says, to ascend up through those seven, unfooled by their angry shows of resistance, passing each one by means of a secret word that they cannot refuse; exacting, in fact, from each of them a gift, the gift of arising to the next sphere; until, at last, in the eighth sphere, the ogdoadic sphere, the released soul perceives Infinity and sings hymns of praise to God.

  Thus Hermes (Kraft wrote, Pierce read), and what if Bruno, having taken to heart this ancientest and most sacred of myths, and opening Copernicus’s book one starry night in Paris, in London, suddenly put the two together: and felt within his buzzing brain the puzzle solved? For if the sun is at the center and not the earth, then there are no crystal spheres to hold us in; we have only and always fooled ourselves, we men, kept ourselves within the spheres that our own flawed and insufficient senses perceived, but that were never there at all. The way to ascend through the spheres that hem us in was to know that we had already so ascended, and were on our way, in motion unstoppably. No wonder Bruno felt a titanic dawn approaching, no wonder he felt compelled to cry it across Europe, no wonder he laughed aloud. Mind, at the center of all, contains within it all that it is the center of, a circle whose circumference is nowhere, stretching out infinitely in every direction he could look in or think about, at every instant. Dare you say men are as gods? the shocked inquisitors in Rome would ask him. Can they change the stars in their courses? They can, Bruno answers; they can; they have already.

  Here Pierce had put down the book for a moment, surfeited and laughing himself, wondering what his twelve-year-old self could ever have made of all that; and when he raised it again, he found a footnote.

  Whether or not (the footnote read) this understanding that we have ascribed to Bruno is the true secret teaching intended to be discerned in the writings of Hermes Trismegistus (Oh hm, Pierce thought, that name) we leave to others to pursue. The interested reader might begin with Mead, who writes: Along this ray of the Trismegistic tradition we may allow ourselves to be drawn backwards in time towards the holy of holies of the Wisdom of Ancient Egypt.

  “And there it was,” Pierce said. “There it was.”

  “Trizma-what?” asked Julie.

  “Just listen,” Pierce said. “Here it comes.”

  The book of Mead’s to which Kraft directed him (and perhaps his young self once too, who knew) was unfindable: Thrice-greatest Hermes, by G.R.S. Mead (London and Benares; the Theosophical Publishing House, 1906; three volumes). Looking for it, though, led Pierce to some strange places, the shops and shows of cranks and mystics he had not realized were quite so numerous, places he could not wholly bring himself to enter and yet could not deny must have some connection to the place he sought. Certain at least that he had not made it all up, he withdrew from their imaginings as from a private ritual; he turned away into better-lit places. And he was getting warm. History of ideas, History of Magic and Experimental Science, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, which he had thumbed in graduate school.

  He was definitely getting warm. There were others on the path suddenly, greater scholars than he; they were finding things out, they were publishing. Gratefully Pierce turned away from Bruno’s Opera omnia latine that he had glimpsed far down a stack at the Brooklyn Public, and into the shallow waters of Secondary Sources: and at length the University of Chicago mailed to him (he had been awaiting it more eagerly than he ever had any golden decoding ring of Captain Midnight’s) a book by an English lady who—Pierce knew it even before he tore the brown paper from the volume—had trekked his lost land from mountain to sea, and returned; returned, at the head of a caravan of strange goods, maps, artifacts, plunder.

  “And this,” Pierce said, feeling just for a moment like the helpless narrator of that old endless campfire joke, “this is the story that she told.” He drank again, and asked: “Do you know the word ‘hermetic’?”

  “You mean like hermetically sealed?”

  “That, and also hermetic, occult,
secret, esoteric.”

  “Oh yes sure.”

  “Okay,” said Pierce, “this is the story:

  “Sometime in the 1460s, a Greek monk brought to Florence a collection of manuscripts in Greek that caused a lot of excitement there. What they purported to be were Greek versions of ancient Egyptian writings—religious speculations, philosophy, magical recipes—that had been composed by an ancient sage or priest of Egypt, Hermes Trismegistus: Hermes the Three Times Very Great, you could translate it. Hermes is the Greek god, of course; the Greeks had made an equivalence between their Hermes, god of language, and the Egyptian god Thoth or Theuth, who invented writing. From various classical sources they had—Cicero, Lactantius, Plato—the Renaissance scholars who first got a look at these new manuscripts could find out that the author was a cousin of Atlas, the brother of Prometheus (the Renaissance believed that these were real ancient people), and that he was not a god but a man, a man of great antiquity, who lived before Plato and Pythagoras and maybe even before Moses; and that these writings were therefore as old as any in the history of mankind.

  “A terrific stir was started in Florence by the arrival of these Egyptian writings. They’d been rumored to exist, even in the Middle Ages: Hermes Trismegistus was one of those shadowy ancients who had a medieval reputation as a great wizard, along with Solomon and Virgil, and various Black Books and treatises were ascribed to him—but here was the real original thing. Here was Egyptian knowledge older than the Romans and the Greeks, older maybe than Moses—in fact there would be speculation that Moses, raised an Egyptian prince, got his secret wisdom from this very source.

  “See, what you have to remember in thinking about the Renaissance is that they were always looking back. All their scholarship, all their learning, was bent toward re-creating as best they could the past in the present, because the past had necessarily been better, wiser, less decayed than the present. And so the older an old manuscript was, the older the knowledge it contained, the better it must turn out to be, once it had been cleansed of the accretions and errors of later times: the closer to the old Golden Age.