The Shattered Realm

The light of the monitor blinked silently into still void. All that remained visible of its flat obsidian slab was a throbbing white glare imprinted like frozen light trapped between screen and retina. The soft whirring of the hard drive slumped into a low quietus, its dying, slow breath the only remaining noise within the room for a brief moment before the abrupt reign of dark silence was finally established. Outside, the furious wind rumbled and moaned, singing a bleak song of displeasure composed in hatred by the black autumn sky. Those cold, tuneless messages became all the more dreadful when the thin, hateful treetops that surrounded the upper levels of the tower began their tapping, bloodless rhythms at the lead glass of my window.

I shifted away from the empty screen, treading noisily upon the oak floorboards of the study with sightless caution until my hands came to rest upon the rough, ornate iron key that marked the lock of the storage chest in the corner of the room. I turned the key with a sharp click before pushing the heavy lid up to rest against the stone wall, hinges squeaking against the swollen wood, rich with the sound of stiff years of wear and decay. I took a fresh white candle from within and illuminated its virgin wick with the gold petroleum lighter that nestled in the pocket of my black silk gown. The soft flickering flame painted the room a warm, deep yellow, though the shadows still blustered and danced in sway with the growing menace of the desolate winds that shook the world outside.

I left the dark of the study, moving instead to the newer and paler darkness of the stone floored corridor that waited beyond the heavy wooden door. My bare feet cold against the dusty slabs of rock, I moved to the carpeted spiral staircase that thread through the core of the ancient and lonely tower I called home like a climbing serpent. A flash of light from the window in the hallway above marked the approach of the storm. Being impassioned by the atmosphere of dark storms and autumn evenings I passed into the small library that dominated the fourth level, choosing to immerse myself within the cosy and romantic aesthetic that the fallen power lines had imposed upon my humble and remote tower.

Before the electricity had failed I had been using the computer to aid me in a deep and contemplative study of the copies of the rare texts of ancient lore that I had managed to sneak past the monks of the Basilica San Giorgio Maggiore. With the microfilms and transcripts that held those hidden words being kept inaccessible to the lay explorers of Renaissance and Dark Age arcana, it had been a burning necessity to use a copy of the keys I had briefly removed from beyond the ropes that segregated the tourists from the High Altar of that ancient church. After I had attained my own copies of the keys, many opportunistic visits in the guise of a worshipper led to me finally opening the locked portals to the old tunnels that ran between the Sala del Conclave and the Benedictine cloisters that the duplicitous Venetian church harboured. Then, like now, I had squinted through murky darkness in the pursuit of my long quest for answers. Those tunnels had held the prize I yearned for, and now, when finally back within the shores of my island home, the harvest of my labour was in hand. The loss of electrical power would not stand in my way. In fact I saw it as the excuse to complete my task in an atmosphere conducive to its ancient origin.

After igniting the candelabras that scattered the old library to add a workable light and ambience to the room, I placed the white candle at a large desk at the north end of the curved library and gathered the prints of the documents before me. Intellectually I had already gained the understanding of the task in hand, yet there was a final knowledge – an understanding derived from beyond conventional experience – that was not yet fully aligned in my psyche. I understood the synchronicities of the past and how they led to my being in this place at this time with the gathered materials of my quest in my possession. The purchase of the broad cylindrical tower (whose name was Vulcan) with its short triangular roof, crown-like parapet and triple chimneys at such a relatively frugal price; the chance finding of my tower’s mirror image in the forms of the furnaces depicted in the Mutus Liber; the finding of an antique set of Tarot cards amongst the cobwebs beneath a cracked floorboard in the study; the overheard conversation in the British Museum about the Mutus Liber’s lost plate being harboured in some unknown Italian monastery; the picture of my home I stumbled upon on the island of San Giorgio in the Venetian lagoon and the unconscious connections that drove my instinct to search beneath the vaults of the church there; the unnatural ease with which I slipped in and out of those secret tunnels undetected…. all suggested an undeniable purpose that correlated directly between my Will, my movements and the opportunities that the unknown hurled into my path.

I knew before I enlarged the microfilms at the local library earlier that same day that one of them would bear the lost plate of that enigmatic, wordless pictorial of Renaissance alchemy that had fuelled the sense of mystery behind my explorations. But what I had seen in the screen of the microfiche had left my mouth dry and my heart racing with the shock, excitement and fear at the implications that my discovery could herald. That rough piece of black on white print of the micro-document removed from its underground tomb was the key to the silent voices that beckoned me forward with my fanatics rush towards the unknown. Such a simple key to a vast and complex lock whose mechanics not only spanned centuries, but also seemed to defy the causal laws of chance in the universe.

I opened the drawer of the desk and removed the Tarot deck which had appeared to have spent the major part of the last century in the blackness from which I had salvaged them. In spite of my efforts to trace the vendor of Vulcan Tower I had been unable to further any contact with him to ask the many questions about the place that my time living there had raised. My own enquiries and synchronistic experiences taught me that the Tower had been commissioned by Sir Thomas Browne shortly before his death. Browne had been a renowned naturalist, scientist and general philanthropist whose delvings into alchemy and the esoteric were well documented. Indeed it was in his work The Garden of Cyrus that the name of Vulcan was cited as the ‘higher man’ who enlightens and liberates mankind, though it is of no coincidence that he was also the Roman god of the forge.

The portrait I had found in the small conical attic had revealed the ageing face of Browne, whose visage I had first seen just a few days previously during a visit to the National Portrait Gallery in London. In hindsight I recognised that it was this chance find that had been the first step onto the road of discovery that was consuming my waking life with its fire. The sale of the portrait also made me wealthy enough to pay off the sizeable mortgage I had taken out to pay for my gothic indulgences as well as funding the transformative travel that was vital to both my project and my sanity. 

 Laying out the Major Arcana of the deck I recalled the tenuous connection between the Mutus Liber and the Tarot that I had chanced upon during my lonely night time vigils at the computer screen. An Italian name for the Tarot, I had discovered, was Mutus Liber Tarocchi. Although my work led me to believe that there was no direct link behind the archetypes depicted in the Major Arcana and the fifteen remaining hermetic illustrations that portrayed the attainment of the Philosophers Stone in Mutus Liber, the discovery of the transcript of the missing plate led to the disposal of all previous logical conclusions.

There was one card missing from the Arcana of the ancient deck that lay before me, and that card was The Tower.

 I laid the printout of the stolen microfilm on the desk in front of me, my gaze fully fixed on the familiar shape that the ink formed. The form was that of Vulcan – my tower - in whose half lit darkness I now sat. Vulcan itself was the missing link between two non-linear visions of the secrets of the Universe. In the context of the Mutus Liber, Vulcan took the shape of a solitary furnace blasting forth liquid flame with explosive force, yet there was no mistake that The Furnace, The Tower and Vulcan were one.

Placing the missing imagery of one Mutus Liber into the gap left by the missing card of the other changed the very nature of my existence within the Universe. With a spark of understanding that belittled all others with its enormity I realised that the missing penultimate plate of the Mutus Liber and the card of The Tower formed a devil’s crossroads in the scheme of the Universe. Not only did their convergence represent the force of destruction that brings stagnation to a gasping, surprised death, but it was also the raging furnace that annihilates the dross of the Ego into cohesive consciousness – the state of completion depicted in Mutus Liber’s final plate. I now knew that The Furnace and the Tower were the perpetual symbols of necessary destruction – the dwelling place of the Prince of Darkness himself. The place in which the forces of death and rebirth, darkness and light, and chaos and structure generate themselves at an archetypal level within the microcosm and the macrocosm for all eternity. I saw with the understanding of the consciousness of the Universe itself for a brief moment. I saw with the pure vision with which our Souls were always gifted despite the distractions and efforts to ignore it that may convince us otherwise. And that momentary change brought everlasting wakefulness, life and Remembering into being. I became aware that the world within me and the world beyond me were the very same, and yet my Utmost Self was still separate and aware of Itself rather than drifting away into the forgetfulness and indistinctiveness of the Lethe.

My senses became hyperaware, and I knew that the merging of my material and psychic realities would bring death to my flesh. The Tower must be struck down, and The Furnace must incinerate its contents beyond recognisable form. I knew that the lightning bolt from the passing storm would rape the top of my tower at the precise moment that it did so, and I knew that the resulting explosion from the gas boiler in the roof would soon engulf my Tower and my body with the flames that would surely come. And come they did.  Yet despite the death of my old self I am stronger and more aware, and more awake and more alive than ever before.