“It’s easy. We learn to weave together stones, herbs, odors, perfect and godlike, to form—how can I say it to you?—some vessels of sympathy that condense the strength of many elements. You know, a flower, a stone, even a unicorn, all have a divine character, but by themselves they are unable to evoke the greater gods.
Our compounds, thanks to art, reproduce the essence that one wants to evoke, they multiply the power of each element.” “And then—when you have evoked these greater gods?”
“That point is only the beginning. We learn to become messengers between what is above and what is below, we prove that the current in which God emanates himself can be retraced, only a short way, but we show nature that this is possible. The supreme task, however, is not to connect a sunflower with the sun, it is to connect ourselves with our origin.
This is where ascesis begins. In the beginning, we learn to behave in a virtuous manner, we do not kill living creatures, we try to spread harmony among the beings that are around us, and in doing this, we can revive hidden sparks everywhere.
You see these blades of grass? They are now yellowed, and are drooping to the ground. I can touch them and make them vibrate again, make them feel what they have forgotten. Look: little by little, they regain their freshness, as if they were just now springing from the earth. Yet this is not enough.
To revive this blade of grass, it suffices to exercise the natural virtues, achieve perfection of sight and hearing, vigor of body, memory, and facility for learning, refinement of manners, through frequent ablutions, lustral ceremonies, hymns, prayers.
You make a step forward by cultivating wisdom, strength, temperance, and justice, and finally you arrive at acquiring the purifying virtues: we try to separate the soul from the body, we learn to evoke the gods—not to speak of the gods, as the other philosophers did, but to act upon them, causing rains to fall through a magic sphere, setting amulets against earthquakes, testing the divinatory powers of tripods, animating statues to obtain oracles, summoning Asclepius to heal the sick.
But you have to be careful: in doing this we must always avoid being possessed by a god, because in that case we become unruly and agitated, and therefore move away from God.
We must learn to do this in the most absolute calm.”
Hypatia took Baudolino’s hand; he kept it motionless so as not to end that sensation of warmth. “Baudolino, perhaps I am making you believe I am already far advanced in ascesis, like my older sisters. … If you only knew, on the contrary, how imperfect I still am. I still become confused when I put a rose in contact with the superior power who is its friend. …
And, you see? I still talk a great deal, and this is a sign that I am not wise, because virtue is won in silence. But I speak because you are here, and you must be instructed, and if I instruct a sunflower, why shouldn’t I instruct you?
We will reach a more perfect stage when we are able to be together without speaking; it will be enough to touch each other and you will understand all the same. As with the sunflower.” She stroked the sunflower, in silence. Then, in silence, she began stroking Baudolino’s hand, and said only, at the end: “You feel?”
The next day she spoke to him of the silence cultivated by the hypatias, in order, she said, for him to learn it too. “You have to create an absolute calm, all around you. You remain alone, remote from everything we have thought, imagined, and felt; you find peace and serenity.
Then we will no longer experience wrath or desire, sorrow or happiness. We will have moved out of ourselves, rapt in absolute solitude and profound calm. We will no longer look at things beautiful and good; we will be beyond goodness itself, beyond the chorus of virtues, like someone entering the sanctum of the church, leaving behind the statues of the gods, as his vision is no longer of images but of God himself.
We must stop invoking intermediary powers; passing beyond them, we will overcome the flaw, in that retreat, in that inaccessible and holy place, we will arrive beyond the race of the gods and the hierarchies of the Eons, all these things will now be in us as memory of something we have cured of its sickness of being.
That will be the end of the journey, the loosening of every bond, the flight of one, now alone, towards the Only. In this return to the absolutely simple we will no longer see anything, except the glory of the darkness. Soul and intellect drained, we will arrive beyond the realm of the mind; in veneration we will rest there, as if we were a sun rising, with closed pupils we will gaze at the sun’s light, we will become fire, fire in that darkness, and along paths of fire we will complete our arc.
And, at that moment, when we have traveled against the current of the river, and have proved not only to ourselves but also to the gods and to God that one can move against the current, we will have healed the world, killed evil, made death die, we will have dissolved the knot in which the fingers of the Demiurge were entangled. We, Baudolino, are destined to heal God, to us his redemption has been entrusted; we will bring back, through our ecstasy, all creation in the very heart of the Unique One. We will give the Unique One the strength to take that great breath that enables him to absorb into himself the evil he has exhaled.”
“You do it? Some one of you has done it?”
“We are waiting to succeed in it; all of us have been preparing ourselves, for centuries, so that one of us will succeed. What we have learned, since childhood, is that it’s not necessary for all of us to achieve this miracle: it’s enough if one day, even in another thousand years, just one of us, the chosen one, reaches the moment of supreme perfection, in which she feels one with her own remote origin, and the miracle will be achieved.
Then, proving that from the multiplicity of the suffering world it is possible to return to the Unique, we will have given back to God peace and security, the strength to recompose himself in his own center, the energy to resume the rhythm of his own breath.”
Her eyes were glistening, her complexion was as if warmed, her hands almost trembled, her voice had a heartbroken tone, and she seemed to be imploring Baudolino also to believe in that revelation. Baudolino thought that perhaps the Demiurge had made many errors, but the existence of this creature made the world an intoxicating place, sparkling with every perfection.
He could not resist, he boldly took her hand and grazed it with a kiss. She made a kind of start, as if she had experienced something unknown. “You, too, are inhabited by a god.” Then she covered her face with her hands, and Baudolino heard her murmur, stunned: “I have lost. … I have lost my apathy….”
She turned and ran towards the wood, without another word, without looking back.
“Master Niketas, at that moment I realized that I loved as I had never loved, but again loving the one woman who could not be mine. One woman had been taken from me by the sublimity of her station, the other by the baseness of death, now the third could not belong to me because she was dedicated to the salvation of God. I moved away, I went to the city, thinking that perhaps I should never return. I felt almost relieved the next day, when Praxeas told me that, in the eyes of the inhabitants of Pndapetzim, I was surely the most authoritative of the Magi: I enjoyed the confidence of the deacon and I was the one the deacon wanted at the command of that army that the Poet was now training so well.
I couldn’t evade that invitation, a rupture in the group of the Magi would have made our situation untenable in the eyes of everyone, and all were by now so passionately devoting themselves to preparing for war, that I accepted—also so as not to disappoint the skiapods, the panotians, the blemmyae, and all those other fine people of whom I had become sincerely fond. Above all, I thought that, in dedicating myself to this new venture, I would forget what I had left behind in the wood. For two days I was taken up with a thousand duties.
But as I worked hard, I was distracted, terrified by the idea that Hypatia might have come back to the lake and, not finding me there, would think that her flight had offended me, that I had decided never to see her again. I was distraught by
