“All Europe’s cathedrals are built where the Celts had their menhirs. Why did the Celts set these stones in the ground, considering the effort it cost them?”
“Why did the Egyptians go to so much trouble to erect the pyramids?”
“There you are. Antennas, thermometers, probes, needles like the ones Chinese doctors use, stuck into the body’s nodal points. At the center of the earth is a nucleus of fusion, something similar to the sun—indeed, an actual sun around which things revolve, describing different paths. Orbits of telluric currents. The Celts knew where they were, and how to control them. And Dante? What about Dante? What was he trying to tell us with the account of his descent into the depths? You understand me, dear friend?”
I didn’t like being his dear friend, but I went on listening to him. Giulio/Giulia, my Rebis planted like Lucifer at the center of Lia’s womb, but he/she, the Thing, would be upside down, would be struggling upward, and would somehow emerge. The Thing was created to emerge upward from the viscera, and not make its entrance with head bowed, in sticky secrecy.
Salon by now was lost in a monologue he seemed to repeat from memory. “You know what the English leys are? If you fly over England in a plane, you’ll see that all the sacred places are joined by straight lines, a grid of lines interwoven across the whole country, still visible because they suggested the lines of later roads….”
“The sacred places were connected by roads, and people simply tried to make roads as straight as possible.”
“Indeed? Then why do birds migrate along these lines? Why do flying saucers follow them? It’s a secret that was lost after the Roman invasion, but there are those who still know it….”
“The Jews,” I suggested.
“They also dig. The first alchemistic principle is VITRIOL: Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem.”
Lapis exillis. My Stone that was slowly coming out of exile, from the sweet oblivious hypnotic exile of Lia’s vessel; my Stone, beautiful and white, not seeking further depths, but seeking the surface … I wanted to rush home to Lia, to wait with her, hour by hour, for the appearance of the Thing, the triumph of the surface regained. Salon’s den had the musty smell of tunnels. Tunnels were the origin that had to be abandoned; they were not the destination. And yet I followed Salon, and new, malicious ideas for the Plan whirled in my head. While I awaited the one Truth of this sublunar world, I racked my brain to construct new falsehoods; blind as the animals underground.
I stirred. I had to get out of the tunnel. “I must go,” I said. “Perhaps you can suggest some books on this subject.”
“Ha! Everything they’ve written about it is false, false as the soul of Judas. What I know I learned from my father….”
“A geologist?”
“Oh no,” Salon said, laughing, “no, not at all. My father—nothing to be ashamed of; water under the bridge—worked for the Okhrana. Directly under the chief, the legendary Rachkovski.”
Okhrana, Okhrana? Something like the KGB? The tsarist secret police, wasn’t it? And who was Rachkovski? Wasn’t there someone who had a similar name? By God, the colonel’s mysterious visitor, Count Rakosky … No, enough of this. No more coincidences. I didn’t stuff dead animals; I created living animals.
When White arrives in the matter of the Great Work, Life has conquered Death, the King is resuscitated, Earth and Water have become Air, it is the domain of the Moon, their Child is born….Then Matter achieves such a degree of fixity that Fire can no longer destroy it…. When the artist sees perfect whiteness, the Philosophers say the books must be torn up, for they are now useless.
—Dom J. Pernety, Dictionnaire mytho-hermétique, Paris, Bauche, 1758, “Blancheur”
I mumbled some excuse, in haste. I believe I said, “My girlfriend’s having a baby tomorrow.” Salon haltingly offered me congratulations, as if not sure who the father was. I ran home, to breathe some clean air.
Lia wasn’t in. On the kitchen table, a piece of paper: “Darling, the waters have broken. Couldn’t get you at the office. Taking a taxi to the hospital. Come. I feel alone.”
A moment of panic. I had to be there to count with Lia. I should have been in the office, reachable. It was my fault: the Thing would be born dead, Lia would die with it, Salon would stuff them both.
I entered the hospital on unsteady legs, asked directions of people who didn’t know anything, twice ended up in the wrong ward. I shouted that they had to know where Lia was having the baby, and they told me to calm down, because here everybody was having a baby.
Finally—I don’t know how—I found myself in a room. Lia was pearly pale but smiling. Someone had lifted her hair and put it under a white cap. For the first time I saw Lia’s forehead in all its splendor. Next to her was the Thing.
“It’s Giulio,” she said.
My Rebis. I, too, had made him, and not with chunks of dead bodies or arsenic soap. He was whole, all his fingers and toes were in the right place.
I insisted on seeing all of him, his little cock, his big balls. Then I kissed Lia on her naked brow: “The credit is yours, darling; it all depends on the vessel.”
“Of course the credit is mine, you shit. I had to count all by myself.”
“For me you are all that counts,” I told her.
The subterranean people have reached the highest knowledge…. If our mad humankind should begin a war against them, they would be able to explode the whole surface of our planet….
—Ferdinand Ossendowski, Beasts, Men and Gods, 1924, V
I stayed at home with Lia because, once she left the hospital and had to change the baby’s diapers, she cried and said she would never be able to cope. Somebody explained to us that this was normal: the excitement over the victory of birth is followed by a feeling of helplessness in the face of the immensity of the job. During those days, while I loafed around the house, useless and not qualified, of course, for breast-feeding, I spent long hours reading everything I had been able to find concerning telluric currents.
On my return, I sounded out Agliè on them. He made a gesture of boredom. “Weak metaphors, referring to the secret of the serpent Kundalini. Chinese geomancy also sought in the earth the traces of the dragon. The telluric serpent simply stands for the occult serpent. The goddess reposes, coiled, and sleeps her eternal sleep. Kundalini throbs gently, binding heavy bodies to lighter bodies. Like a vortex or a whirlpool, like the first half of the syllable om.”
“But what secret does the serpent refer to?”
“To the telluric currents.”
“What are the telluric currents?”
“A great cosmological metaphor, which refers to the serpent.”
To hell with Agliè, I said to myself, I know more than that.
I read my notes to Belbo and Diotallevi, and we no longer had any doubt. At last we were in a position to supply the Templars with a decent secret. It was the most economical, the most elegant solution to the problem, and all the pieces of our millennial puzzle fit together.
So: the Celts knew about the telluric currents; they had learned the secret from the Atlantides, when the survivors of the submerged continent emigrated, some to Egypt, some to Brittany.
The Atlantides had learned it from those ancestors of ours who ventured forth from Avalon across the continent of Mu as far as the central desert of Australia—when all the continents were a single land mass, the wondrous Pangaea. If only we could still read (as the Aborigines can, but they remain silent) the mysterious alphabet carved on the great boulder Ayers Rock, we would have the Answer.
Ayers Rock is the antipode of the great (unknown) mountain that is the Pole, the true, occult Pole, not the one that any bourgeois explorer can reach. As usual, and this should be obvious to anyone whose eyes have not been blinded by the false light of Western science, the Pole that we see is not the real Pole, for the real Pole is the one that cannot be seen, except by some adepts, whose lips are sealed.
The Celts, however, believed it was enough to discover the global configuration of the currents. That’s why they erected megaliths. The menhirs had sensitive devices, like electric valves, planted at the points where the currents branched and changed direction. The leys marked the routes of currents already identified. The dolmens were chambers of accumulated energy, where the Druids, with geomantic tools, attempted to map, by extrapolation, the global design. The cromlechs and Stonehenge were micro-macrocosmic observatories from which they studied the pattern of the constellations in order to divine the pattern of the currents—because, as the Tabula Smaragdina tells us, what is above is isomorphic to what is below.
But there was more to the problem than that. The other branch of the Atlantidean emigration realized as much. The occult knowledge of the Egyptians passed from Hermes Trismegistus to Moses, who took care not to pass it on to his band of tatterdemalions, their craws still stuffed with manna; to them he offered the Ten Commandments, which was as much as
