The Order of Illusion
It seemed to him that the old mysteries had been made for another universe, and not the one he came to know. Yet there was no doubt that they had once deeply impressed him. Intoxicated by their wonder, by raw wonder itself, he might never have turned away from the golden blade held aloft by crimson hands, from the mask with seven eyes, the idol of moons, from the ceremony called the Night of the Night, along with other rites of illumination and all the ageless doctrines which derived from their frenzies. How was it they failed him? When was the first moment he found himself growing impatient with their music and their gyrations, when the first moment he witnessed these mysteries and descended into another kind of wonder?
Before his disillusion was discovered, he walked out on his old sect. He did not waste any time, however, in casting about for a new one. Unfortunately the same problems arose with each of them: they all, in his view, were nullified by their own profoundness and by a collection of mysteries that failed to break the surface of the bottomless soul, failed to place themselves at eye level with things. These mysteries thus condemned all that lay outside of them to triviality, whether deserving of this fate or not. Injustice was their essence and their power. Had these routines of enlightenment actually been intended for a universe not undermined by mockery and confusion? But to bother even with the dream of such a place was useless, especially when he could conceive a plan more to his purpose. This entailed nothing less than the invention of a cult, a solitary one to be sure, better suited to his profane vision.
He set out to locate a site of worship, a place abandoned, old, isolated, and decayed. Actually there were many such places to choose from, and, by a completely arbitrary means of selection, he soon managed to settle on one of them. This numinous structure — bashed in roof and battered walls — he cluttered with the fetishes of his new creed. These consisted of anything he could find which had a divine aura of disuse, of unfulfillment, hopelessness, disintegration, of grotesque imbecility and senselessness. Dolls with broken faces he put on display in corners and upon crumbling pedestals. Thin, lifeless trees he dug up whole from their natural graves and transplanted into the cracked tiles of the floor's mosaic; then he hung lamps of thick green glass by corroded chains from the ceiling, and the withered branches of the trees were bathed in hues of livid mold. As were the faces of the dolls and those of various mummified creatures, including two human abortions which were set floating in jars at opposite ends of an altar draped with rags. His vestments were also of rags, their frayed edges fluttering like dead leaves about to fall. Standing before the altar, he raised his arms over something that smoldered, which was his own dried excrement upon a tarnished plate. He glanced about at the defunct forest of which he was king, at the brittle twisting branches (some of which were adorned with hanging dolls and other things), at all the various objects of refuse he had added to his collection, finally at the green waters of those two occupied jars glowing upon the rags of the altar, and he widened his mouth to speak, and he said... nothing. So distracted was he with a gruesome contentment: his old wonder had been ravaged and his hunger for mockery fulfilled.
But this contentment did not last; how could it? Illusion throws its invisible shimmer over all things, no matter what level of debasement they have struggled to win. Whatever may appear, sooner or later, will appear in greatness. Thus, gradually, the pathetic, lusterless world he had made, and labored to make low, had rebelliously elevated itself beyond its surface decrepitude and assumed a kind of grandeur in his eyes. The naked limbs of what had once been trees and now were empty objects, hollow abstractions mocked by the sarcastic verdure of the green lamps, underwent transfiguration to inherit the suppleness of all symbols and the dignity of a dream. Each of the disfigured dolls, vile and insane mimics of the human nightmare, gave up their evil and revealed themselves as the protectors of countless inexpressible mysteries and myriad secret enchantments. And the precocious corpses upon the altar no longer drifted about pointlessly, embalmed in their wombs of foggy glass, but hovered serenely in becalmed fathoms of infinite wonder.
His effort to strip away the finery of objects and events, and to exist only in the balm of desolation, was a failure. The experiment had only resulted in the discovery of a deeper stratum of preciousness in things. And having revealed this substratum, his eyes began to attack its treasures with all their savage wondering. Everything became newly subject to a mockery that was not of his own making, and to an onslaught of confusion that threatened to violate his precious world of death and dolls. But was there perhaps a more profound source of mockery and confusion that could be excavated beneath the deceptive wealth which he had so quickly exhausted? If there was, he did not possess the ambition, at this point, to seek it out. Dropping to the shattered mosaic of the floor, collapsing under the now lovely doll-hung trees, he lay abject in ragged robes of despair throughout a full day and late into the night.
But toward the latest hour of evening he was disturbed by distant sounds. He had been away from his old sect so long that at first he did not recognize the peculiar clamor of the ceremony called the Night of the Night. When he walked out into the cold air outside his solitary temple, he saw the gyration of shadows upon the summit of the hills. How could they persist in their madness, he wondered. Nevertheless, for reasons beyond explanation, he joined them.
And they welcomed him, for they could see the ordeals he had undergone, the powers he had gained. He, on the other hand, felt nothing; but he easily devoured all the honors held out to him: these were the only sustenance left which satisfied his hunger for mockery. And when they presented him with the accoutrements of high priest, he could not suppress a smile as he gazed upon the wide, dead sky.
Now his are the crimson hands which hold aloft the golden blade, his the face behind the mask with seven eyes. And he is the one who stands in shining robes before the massive idol of moons, trembling the while with wonder.
Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary
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