So the vertical position is life, pointing sunward, and obelisks stand as trees stand, while the horizontal position and night are sleep, death. All cultures worship menhirs, monoliths, pyramids, columns, but nobody bows down to balconies and railings. Did you ever hear of an archaic cult of the sacred banister? You see? And another point: if you worship a vertical stone, even if there are a lot of you, you can all see it; but if you worship, instead, a horizontal stone, only those in the front row can see it, and the others start pushing, me too, me too, which is not a fitting sight for a magical ceremony….”
“But rivers…”
“Rivers are worshiped not because they’re horizontal, but because there’s water in them, and you don’t need me to explain to you the relation between water and the body…. Anyway, that’s how we’re put together, all of us, and that’s why we work out the same symbols millions of kilometers apart, and naturally they all resemble one another. Thus you see that people with a brain in their head, if they’re shown an alchemist’s oven, all shut up and warm inside, think of the belly of the mama making a baby, and only your Diabolicals think that the Madonna about to have the Child is a reference to the alchemist’s oven. They spent thousands of years looking for a message, and it was there all the time: they just had to look at themselves in the mirror.”
“You always tell me the truth. You are my Mirrored Me, my Self seen by You. I want to discover all the secret archetypes of the body.” That evening we inaugurated the expression “discovering archetypes” to indicate our moments of greatest intimacy.
I was half-asleep when Lia touched my shoulder. “I almost forgot,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
I should have listened to Lia. She spoke with the wisdom of life and birth. Venturing into the underground passages of Agarttha, into the pyramid of Isis Unveiled, we had entered Gevurah, the Sefirah of fear, the moment in which wrath manifests itself in the world. I had let myself be seduced by the thought of Sophia. Moses Cordovero says that the Female is to the left, and all her attributes point to Gevurah … unless the Male, using these attributes, adorns his Bride, and causes her to move to the right, toward good. Every desire must remain within its limits. Otherwise Gevurah becomes Judgment, the dark appearance, the universe of demons.
To discipline desire … This I had done in the tenda de umbanda. I had played the agogo, I had taken an active part in the spectacle, and I had escaped the trance. I had done the same with Lia: I had regulated desire out of homage to the Bride, and I had been rewarded in the depths of my loins; my seed had been blessed.
But I was not to persevere. I was to be seduced by the beauty of Tiferet.
TIFERET
To dream of living in a new and unknown city means imminent death. In fact, the dead live elsewhere, nor is it known where.
—Gerolamo Cardano, Somniorum Synesiorum, Basel, 1562, 1, 58
While Gevurah is the Sefirah of awe and evil, Tiferet is the Sefirah of beauty and harmony. As Diotallevi said: It is the light of understanding, the tree of life; it is pleasure, hale appearance. It is the concord of Law and Freedom.
And that year was for us the year of pleasure, of the joyful subversion of the great text of the universe, in which we celebrated the nuptials of Tradition and the Electronic Machine. We created, and we delighted in our creation. It was the year in which we invented the Plan.
For me at least, it was truly a happy year. Lia’s pregnancy proceeded tranquilly, and between Garamond and my agency I was beginning to make a comfortable living. I kept my office in the old factory building, but we remodeled Lia’s apartment.
The wonderful adventure of metals was now in the hands of the compositors and proofreaders. That was when Signor Garamond had his brainstorm: “An illustrated history of magic and the hermetic sciences. With the material that comes in from the Diabolicals, with the expertise you three have acquired, with the advice of that incredible man Agliè, we can put together a big volume, four hundred pages, dazzling full-color plates, in less than a year. Reusing some of the graphics from the history of metals.”
“But the subject matter is so different,” I said. “What can I do with a photograph of a cyclotron?”
“What can you do with it? Imagination, Casaubon, use your imagination! What happens in those atomic machines, in those megatronic positrons or whatever they’re called? Matter is broken down; you put in Swiss cheese and out come quarks, black holes, churned uranium!
It’s magic made flesh, Hermes and Hermes. Here on the left, the engraving of Paracelsus, old Abracadabra with his alembics, against a gold background, and on the right, quasars, the Cuisinart of heavy water, gravitational galactic antimatter, et cetera. Don’t you see? The real magician isn’t the bleary-eyed guy who doesn’t understand a thing; it’s the scientist who has grasped the hidden secrets of the universe. Discover the miraculous all around us! Hint that at Mount Palomar they know more than they’re letting on….”
To encourage me, he gave me a raise, almost perceptible. I concentrated on the miniatures of the Liber Solis of Trismosin, the Mutus Liber of Pseudo-Lullus; I filled folders with pentacles, sefirotic trees, decans, talismans; I combed the loneliest rooms of libraries; I bought dozens of volumes from booksellers who in the old days had peddled the cultural revolution.
Among the Diabolicals, I moved with the ease of a psychiatrist who becomes fond of his patients, enjoying the balmy breezes that waft from the ancient park of his private clinic. After a while he begins to write pages on delirium, then pages of delirium, unaware that his sick people have seduced him. He thinks he has become an artist. And so the idea of the Plan was born.
Diotallevi went along with the game because, for him, it was a form of prayer. As for Jacopo Belbo, I thought he was having as much fun as I was. I realize only now that he derived no real pleasure from it. He took part in it nervously, anxiously biting his nails.
Or, rather, he played along, in the hope of finding at least one of the unknown addresses, the stage without footlights, which he mentions in the file named Dream. A surrogate theology for an angel that will never appear.
FILENAME: Dream
I don’t remember if I dreamed one dream within another, or if they followed one another in the course of the same night, or if they alternated night by night.
I am looking for a woman, a woman I know, I have had an intense relationship with her, but cannot figure out why I let it cool, it was my fault, not keeping in touch. Inconceivable, that I could have allowed so much time to go by.
I am looking for her—or for them, there is more than one woman, there are many, I lost them all in the same way, through neglect—and I am seized by uncertainty, because even just one would be enough for me, because I know this: in losing them, I have lost much. As a rule, in my dream, I cannot find, no longer possess, am unable to bring myself to open the address book where the phone number is written, and even if I do open it, it’s as if I were farsighted, I can’t read the names.
I know where she is, or, rather, I don’t know where the place is, but I know what it’s like. I have the distinct memory of a stairway, a lobby, a landing. I don’t rush about the city looking for the place; instead, I am frozen, blocked by anguish, I keep racking my brain for the reason I permitted—or wanted—the relationship to cool, the reason I failed to show up at our last meeting. She’s waiting for a call from me, I’m sure. If only I knew her name.
I know perfectly well who she is, I just can’t reconstruct her features.
Sometimes, in the half-waking doze that follows, I argue with the dream. You remember everything, I say, you’ve settled all your scores, there’s no unfinished business. There is no place you remember whose location you don’t know. There is nothing to the dream.
But the suspicion remains that I have forgotten something, left something among the folds of my eagerness, the way you forget a bank note or a paper with an important fact in some small marsupial pouch of your trousers or old jacket, and it’s only later that you realize it was the most important thing of all, crucial, unique.
Of the city I have a clearer image. It’s Paris. I’m on the Left Bank. And when I cross the river, I find myself in a square that could be Place des Vosges … no, more open, because at the end stands a kind of Madeleine. Passing the square, moving behind the temple, I come to a street—there’s a secondhand bookshop on the corner—that curves to the right, through a series of alleys that are unquestionably the Barrio Gótico of Barcelona. It could turn into
