We consider societies druidic if they are druidic in their titles or their aims, or if their initiations are inspired by druidism.
—M. Raoult, Les druides. Les sociétés initiatiques celtes contemporaines, Paris, Rocher, 1983, p. 18
Midnight was approaching, and according to Agliè’s program the second surprise of the evening awaited us. Leaving the Palatine gardens, we’resumed our journey through the hills.
After we had driven three-quarters of an hour, Agliè made us park the two cars at the edge of a wood. We had to cross some underbrush, he said, to arrive at a clearing, and there were neither roads nor trails.
We proceeded, picking our way through shrubs and vines, our shoes slipping on rotted leaves and slimy roots. From time to time Agliè switched on a flashlight to find a path, but only for a second, because, he said, we should not announce our presence to the celebrants. Diotallevi made a remark—I don’t recall it exactly, something about Little Red Riding-Hood—and Agliè, with tension in his voice, asked him to be quiet.
As we were about to come to the end of the brush, we heard voices. We had reached the edge of the clearing, which was illuminated by a glow from remote torches—or perhaps votive lights, flickering at ground level, faint and silvery, as if a gas were burning with chemical coldness in bubbles drifting over the grass. Agliè told us to stop where we were, still shielded by bushes, and wait.
“In a little while the priestesses will come. The Druidesses, that is. This is an invocation of the great cosmic virgin Mikil. Saint Michael is a popular Christian adaptation, and it’s no accident that he is an angel, hence androgynous, hence able to take the place of a female divinity….”
“Where do they come from?” Diotallevi whispered.
“From many places: Normandy, Norway, Ireland … It is a very special event, and this is a propitious place for the rite.”
“Why?” Garamond asked.
“Certain places have more magic than others.”
“But who are they—in real life?”
“People. Secretaries, insurance agents, poets. People you might run into tomorrow and not recognize.”
Now we could see a small group preparing to enter the clearing. The phosphorescent light, I realized, came from little lamps the priestesses held up in their hands. They had seemed, earlier, to be at ground level because the clearing was on the top of a hill; the Druidesses had climbed up from below and were approaching the flat, open hilltop. They were dressed in white tunics, which fluttered in the slight breeze. They formed a circle; in the center, three celebrants stood.
“Those are the three hallouines of Lisieux, Clonmacnoise, and Pino Torinese,” Agliè said. Belbo asked why those three in particular. Agliè shrugged and said: “No more. We must wait now in silence. I can’t summarize for you in a few words the whole ritual and hierarchy of Nordic magic. Be satisfied with what I can tell you. If I do not tell you more, it is because I do not know … or am not allowed to tell. I must respect certain vows of privacy.”
In the center of the clearing I noticed a pile of rocks, which suggested a dolmen. Perhaps the clearing had been chosen because of the presence of those boulders. One of the celebrants climbed up on the dolmen and blew a trumpet. Even more than the trumpet we had seen a few hours earlier, this looked like something out of the triumphal march in Aïda. But a muffled and nocturnal sound came from it, as if from far away. Belbo touched my arm: “It’s the ramsing, the horn of the Thugs around the sacred banyan….”
My reply was cruel, because I didn’t realize he was joking precisely to repress other associations, and it must have twisted the knife in the wound. “It would no doubt be less magical with the bombardon,” I said.
Belbo nodded. “Yes, they’re here precisely because they don’t want a bombardon,” he said.
Was it on that evening he began to see a connection between his private dreams and what had been happening to him in those months?
Agliè hadn’t followed our words, but heard us whispering. “It’s not a warning or a summons,” he explained, “but a kind of ultrasound, to establish contact with the subterranean currents. You see, now the Druidesses are all holding hands, in a circle. They are creating a kind of living accumulator, to collect and concentrate the telluric vibrations. Now the cloud should appear….”
“What cloud?” I whispered.
“Tradition calls it the green cloud. Wait…”
I didn’t really expect a green cloud. Almost immediately, however, a soft mist rose from the ground—a fog, I would have said, if it had been thicker, more homogeneous. But it was composed of flakes, denser in some places than in others. The wind stirred it, raised it in puffs, like spun sugar. Then it moved with the air to another part of the clearing, where it gathered. A singular effect. For a moment, you could see the trees in the background, then they would be hidden in a whitish steam, while the turf in the center of the clearing would smoke and further obscure our view of whatever was going on, as the moonlight shone around the concealed area.
The flake cloud shifted, suddenly, unexpectedly, as if obeying the whims of a capricious wind.
A chemical trick, I thought, but then I reflected: we were at an altitude of about six hundred meters, and it was possible that this was an actual cloud. Foretold by the rite? Summoned? Or was it just that the celebrants knew that on that hilltop, under favorable conditions, those erratic banks of vapor formed just above the ground?
It was difficult to resist the fascination of the scene. The celebrants’ tunics blended with the white of the cloud, and their forms entered and emerged from that milky obscurity as if it had spawned them.
There was a moment when the cloud filled the entire center of the little meadow. Some wisps, rising, separating, almost hid the moon, but the clearing was still bright at its edges. We saw a Druidess come from the cloud and run toward the wood, crying out, her arms in front of her. I thought she had discovered us and was hurling curses. But she stopped within a few meters of us, changed direction, and began running in a circle around the cloud, disappearing in the whiteness to the left, only to reappear after a few minutes from the right. Again she was very close to us, and I could see her face.
She was a sibyl with a great, Dantean nose over a mouth thin as a cicatrix, which opened like a submarine flower, toothless but for two incisors and one skewed canine. The eyes were shifty, hawklike, piercing. I heard, or thought I heard—or think now that I remember hearing, but I may be superimposing other memories—a series of Gaelic words mixed with evocations in a kind of Latin, something on the order of “O pegnia (oh, e oh!) et eee uluma!!!” Suddenly the fog lifted, disappeared, the clearing became bright again, and I saw that it had been invaded by a troop of pigs, their short necks encircled by garlands of green apples. The Druidess who had blown the trumpet, still atop the dolmen, now brandished a knife.
“We go now,” Agliè said sharply. “It’s over.”
I realized, as I heard him, that the cloud was above us and around us, and I could barely make out my companions.
“What do you mean, over?” Garamond said. “Looks to me like the real stuff is just beginning!”
“What you were permitted to see is over. Now it is not permitted. We must respect the rite. Come.”
He reentered the wood, was promptly swallowed up by the mist that enfolded us. We shivered as we moved, slipping on dead leaves, panting, in disarray, like a fleeing army, and regrouped at the road. We could be in Milan in less than two hours. Before getting back into Garamond’s car, Agliè said good-bye to us: “You must forgive me for interrupting the show for you. I wanted you to learn something, to see the people for whom you are now working. But it was not possible to stay. When I was informed of this event, I had to promise I wouldn’t disturb the ceremony. Our continued presence would have had a negative effect on what follows.”
“And the pigs? What happens to them?” Belbo asked.
“What I could tell you, I have told you.”
“What does the fish remind you of?”
“Other fish.”
“And what do other fish remind you of?”
“Other fish.”
—Joseph Heller, Catch 22, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1961, xxvii
I came back from Piedmont with much guilt. But as soon as I saw Lia again, I forgot the desires that had grazed me.
Still, our expedition left other marks on me, and now it troubles me that at the time I wasn’t troubled by them. I was putting in final order, chapter by chapter, the illustrations for the wonderful adventure of metals, but once again I could not elude the demon of resemblance, any more than I had been able to in Rio. How was this Reaumur cylindrical stove, 1750, different from this incubation chamber for eggs, or from this seventeenth-century athanor, maternal womb, dark uterus for the creation of God knows what mystic metals? It was as if they had installed the Deutsches Museum in
