—From a ritual of Aleister Crowley
Agliè lived in the Piazzale Susa area: a little secluded street, a turn-of-the-century building, soberly art nouveau. An elderly butler in a striped jacket opened the door and led us into a small sitting room, where he asked us to wait for the count.
“So he’s a count,” Belbo whispered.
“Didn’t I tell you? He’s Saint-Germain redivivus.”
“He can’t be redivivus if he’s never died,” Diotallevi said. “Sure he’s not Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew?”
“According to some, the Comte de Saint-Germain had also been Ahasuerus.”
“You see?”
Agliè came in, impeccable as always. He shook our hands and apologized: a tiresome meeting, quite unforeseen, forced him to remain in his study for another ten minutes or so. He told the butler to bring coffee and begged us to make ourselves at home. Then he went out, drawing aside a heavy curtain of old leather. It wasn’t a door, and as we were having our coffee, we heard agitated voices coming from the next room. At first we spoke loudly among ourselves, in order not to listen; then Belbo remarked that perhaps we were disturbing the others. In a moment of silence, we heard a voice, and a sentence that aroused our curiosity.
Diotallevi got up and went over, as if he wanted to admire a seventeenth-century print on the wall by the curtain. It showed a mountain cave, to which some pilgrims were climbing by way of seven steps. Soon all three of us were pretending to study the print.
The man we had heard was surely Bramanti, and the sentence was: “See here, I don’t send devils to people’s houses!”
That day we realized Bramanti had not only a tapir’s face but also a tapir’s voice.
The other voice belonged to a stranger: a thick French accent and a shrill, almost hysterical tone. From time to time Agliè’s voice, soft and conciliatory, intervened.
“Come, gentlemen,” he was saying now, “you have appealed to my verdict, and I am honored, but you must therefore listen to me. Allow me, first of all, to say that you, dear Pierre, were imprudent, at the very least, in writing that letter….”
“It’s an extremely simple matter, Monsieur le Comte,” the French voice replied. “This Signor Bramanti, he writes an article, in a publication we all respect, in which he indulges himself in some fairly strong irony about certain Luciferans, who, he says, make hosts fly though they don’t even believe in the Real Presence, and they transmute silver, and so forth and so on. Bon, everyone knows that the only recognized Eglise Luciferienne is the one where I am the humble tauroboliaste and psychopompe, and it is also well known that my church does not indulge itself in vulgar Satanism and does not make ratatouille with hosts—things worthy of chanoine Docre at Saint-Sulpice.
In my letter I said that we are not vieux jeu Satanists, worshipers of the Grand Tenancier du Mal, and that we do not have to ape the Church of Rome, with all those pyxes and those—comment dit-on?—chasubles…. We are, au contraire, Palladians, as all the world knows, and, for us, Luciferre is the principe of good. If anything, it is Adonai who is the principe of evil, because He created this world, whereas Luciferre tried to oppose…”
“All right,” Bramanti said angrily. “I admit I may have been careless, but this doesn’t entitle him to threaten me with sorcery!”
“Mais voyons! It was a metaphor! You are the one who, in return, caused me to have the envoûtement!”
“Oh, of course, my brothers and I have time to waste, sending little devils around! We practice Dogma and the Ritual of High Magic: we are not witch doctors!”
“Monsieur le Comte, I appeal to you. Signor Bramanti is notoriously in touch with the abbé Boutroux, and you well know that this priest is said to have the crucifix tattooed on the sole of his foot so that he may tread on Our Lord, or, rather, on his…
Bon, I meet seven days ago this supposed abbé at the Du Sangreal Bookshop, you know; he smiles at me, very slimy, as is his custom, and he says to me, ‘Well, we’ll be hearing from each other one of these evenings.’ What does it mean, one of these evenings? It means that, two evenings after, the visits begin. I am going to bed and I feel chocs strike my face, fluid chocs, you know; those emanations are easily recognized.”
“You probably rubbed the soles of your slippers on the carpet.”
“Yes, yes, then why were the bibelots flying? Why did one of my alembiques strike my head, and my plaster Baphomet, it falls to the floor, and that a memento of my late father, and on the wall three writings appear in red, ordures I cannot repeat, hein? You know well that no more than a year ago the late Monsieur Gros accused that abbé there of making the cataplasms with fecal matter, forgive the expression, and the abbé condemned him to death, and two weeks later the poor Monsieur Gros, he dies mysteriously. This Boutroux handles poisons, the jury d’honneur summoned by the Martinists of Lyon said so….”
“Slander,” Bramanti growled.
“Ah, that then! A trial in matters of this sort is always circumstantial….”
“Yes, but nobody at the trial mentioned the fact that Monsieur Gros was an alcoholic in the last stages of cirrhosis.”
“Do not be enfantine! Sorcelery proceeds by natural ways; if one has a cirrhosis, they strike one in the cirrhosis. That is the ABC of black magic…”
“Then all those who die of cirrhosis have the good Boutroux to blame. Don’t make me laugh!”
“Then tell me, please, what passed in Lyon in those two weeks…. Deconsecrated chapel, host with Tetragrammaton, your Boutroux with a great red robe with the cross upside down, and Madame Olcott, his personal voyante, among other things, with the trident that appears on her brow and the empty chalices that fill with blood by themselves, and the abbé who crached in the mouth of the faithful….Is that true or is it not?”
“You’ve been reading too much Huysmans, my friend!” Bramanti laughed. “It was a cultural event, a pageant, like the celebrations of the school of Wicca and the Druid colleges!”
“Ouais, the carnival of Venise…”
We heard a scuffle, as if Bramanti was attempting to strike his adversary and Agliè was restraining him. “You see? You see?” the Frenchman said in a falsetto. “But guard yourself, Bramanti, and ask your friend Boutroux what happened to him! You don’t know yet, but he’s in the hospital.
Ask him who broke his figure! Even if I do not practice that goety of yours, I know a little of it myself, and when I realized that my house was inhabited, I drew on the parquet the circle of defense, and since I do not believe, but your diablotines do, I removed the Carmelite scapular and made the contresign, the envoûtement retourné, ah oui. Your abbé passed a mauvais moment!”
“You see? You see?” Bramanti was panting. “He’s the one casting spells!”
“Gentlemen, that’s enough,” Agliè said politely but firmly. “Now listen to me. You know how highly I value, on a cognitive level, these reexaminations of obsolete rituals, and for me the Luciferine Church and the Order of Satan are equally to be respected above and beyond their demonological differences. You know my skepticism in this matter.
But, in the end, we all belong to the same spiritual knighthood, and I urge you to show a minimum of solidarity. After all, gentlemen, to involve the Prince of Darkness in a personal spat!
How very childish! Come, come, these are occultists’ tales. You are behaving like vulgar Freemasons. To be frank, yes, Boutroux is a dissident, and perhaps, my dear Bramanti, you might suggest to him that he sell to some junk dealer all that paraphernalia of his, like the props for a production of Boito’s Mefistofele….”
“Ha, c’est bien dit, ça,” the Frenchman snickered. “C’est de la brocanterie….”
“Let’s try to see this in perspective. There has been a debate on what we will call liturgical formalisms, tempers have flared, but we mustn’t make mountains out of molehills. Mind you, my dear Pierre, I am not for one moment denying the presence in your house of alien entities; it’s the most natural thing in the world, but with a little common sense it could all be explained as a poltergeist.”
“Yes, I wouldn’t exclude that possibility,” Bramanti said. “The astral conjuncture at this time…”
“Well then! Come, shake hands, and a fraternal embrace.”
We heard murmurs of reciprocal apologies. “You know yourself,” Bramanti was saying, “sometimes to identify one who is truly awaiting initiation, it is necessary to indulge in a bit of folklore. Even those merchants of the Great Orient, who believe in nothing, have a ceremony.”
“Bien entendu, le rituel, ah ça…”
“But these are no longer the days of Crowley. Is that clear?” Agliè said. “I must leave you now. I have other guests.”
We quickly went back to the sofa and waited for Agliè with composure and nonchalance.
Our exalted task then is to find order in these seven measures, a pattern that is distinct and will keep always the sense alert and the memory clear…. This exalted and incomparable configuration not only performs the function of preserving entrusted things, words, and arts … but in addition it gives us true knowledge….
—Giulio Camillo Delminio, L’idea del Theatro, Florence, Torrentino, 1550, Introduction
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