The White Dominican (20 page)

The farther I penetrated into the lower rooms, the darker, grimmer, plainer became the surroundings: rough deal tables; a stove instead of elegant fireplaces; whitewashed walls; pewter plates; a rusty chain-mail gauntlet; earthenware jugs. Then came a chamber with a barred window; parchment volumes scattered about, gnawed by rats; clay retorts such as alchemists used; an iron candlestick; phials in which the liquid had solidified: the whole room was filled with the dismal aura of a life of dashed hopes.

The cellar, in which, according to the chronicle, our Founding Father, the lamplighter Christophorus Jöcher, was supposed to have lived, was blocked by a heavy lead door. It was impossible to break it open.

When I had completed the investigation of our house and returned, as if after a long journey into the realm of the past, to my living room, I had the feeling I was charged to the fingertips with magnetic influences. The forgotten atmosphere from down below accompanied me like a horde of ghosts whose dungeon door had been unlocked, releasing them into the open; desires that my ancestors’ lives had left unfulfilled had been dragged out into the light of day and had woken up, filling me with unrest and bombarding me with requests, “Do this, do that; this is still undone, that only half finished; I cannot sleep until you have completed it in my stead.” A voice whispered to me, “Go back down to the retorts, I’ll tell you how to make gold and the philosopher’s stone; I know how to do it now, I couldn’t manage it before, I died too soon.” Then I heard soft, tearful words, “Tell my husband I always loved him, in spite of everything; he doesn’t believe it and he can’t hear me now I’m dead; he’ll understand you.” “Vengeance! Seek out his brood. Slay them. I’ll tell you where they are. Remember me! Yours is the inheritance, yours is the duty of the blood feud!” another hissed with breath that scorched my ear, and I felt as if I could hear the rattle of the gauntlet. “Go out into the world! Enjoy life! Through your eyes I want to see the earth again”, the cripple in the armchair called out, trying to ensnare me.

When I drive them out of my brain, these spectres, they seem to turn into unconscious scraps of electric life fluttering about that is absorbed by the objects: there is an eerie cracking noise in the cupboards; a notebook lying on the shelf rustles; the floorboards creak, as if under the weight of a foot; a pair of scissors falls off the table and sticks with one point in the floor, imitating a dancer balancing on one toe.

I pace up and down, full of unease. ‘It must be the legacy of the dead’, I feel. I light the lamp, for night is falling and the darkness makes my senses too sharp. The spectres are like bats; ‘Surely the light will drive them away; I won’t have them going on raiding my consciousness.’

I have silenced the desires of the departed, but I cannot get the restlessness of the spectral legacy out of my nerves.

To take my mind off it, I start rummaging around in a cupboard. I come across a toy my father once gave me for Christmas: a box with a glass lid and base with little figures formed from the pith of elder branches in it: a man, a woman and a snake. When you rub the glass with a leather pad they become electric and join, separate, hop about, stick to the top or bottom, and the snake wriggles and jiggles with joy. ‘Those figures in there think they’re alive, too’, I muse, ‘and yet it’s only the one, universal force that makes them move.’ However, it does not occur to me to apply this example to myself. I am suddenly overcome with a desire for action towards which I feel no suspicion: the vital urge of the departed is approaching me behind another mask.

‘Deeds, deeds, deeds, that’s what is needed’, I feel. ‘Yes, that’s it. It’s not the selfish desires of our forefathers that I should be carrying out’, I try to convince myself, ‘no, it’s something much greater I should be aiming for.’

It is like seeds that were slumbering inside me, now they are sprouting, shoot after shoot: ‘You must go out into the world, and do great deeds for the sake of mankind of which you are, after all, a part. Be a sword in the general battle against the head of the Medusa.’

The atmosphere in the room is unbearably sultry. I fling open the window. The sky has turned into a leaden roof, an impenetrable, blackish grey. In the distance there is a flicker of lightning on the horizon. Thank God, a storm is coming. For months there has not been a drop of rain, the grass is all withered, during the day the woods quiver in the shimmering haze of the parched earth.

I go over to the table to write. What? To whom? I do not know. To the Chaplain, perhaps, since I am thinking of starting out on my travels to see the world? I cut a quill and set pen to paper, but then I am overcome with tiredness. My head sinks onto my arm and I fall asleep.

The table-top is like a sounding board, amplifying the beat of my pulse; it turns into a hammering, and I imagine I am hacking open the metal door in the cellar with an axe. As it falls from the rusty hinges, I see an old man come out. At that moment I wake up.

Am I really awake? There is the old man here in the room, looking at me with his dull, aged eyes. The fact that I still have the quill in my hand, proves that I am not dreaming and that I am in my right mind.

‘I must have seen this peculiar stranger somewhere’, I think to myself. ‘Why is he wearing fur ear-muffs at this time of the year?’

“I knocked at the door three times”, the old man says. “When no one answered, I came in.”

“Who are you? What are you called?” I ask in bewilderment.

“I have come on behalf of the Order.”

For a moment I wonder whether it is a ghost I see before me. The ancient face with the sparse, oddly shaped beard does not go with those muscular, workman’s hands. If it were a picture I was looking at, I would have said it was badly drawn. There is something wrong with the proportions. His right thumb is misshapen, too; that also seems strangely familiar to me.

Secretly, I touch the man’s sleeve, to prove that it is not my senses that are playing tricks on me, and then turn the movement into a gesture asking him to sit down.

The old man ignores it and remains standing. “We have received news that your father has died. He was one of us. According to the rules of the Order, you, as his son by birth, have the right to demand that you be received into it. I have come to ask you, do you intend to make use of that right?’

“To belong to the same community as my father would be my greatest joy, but I do not know what purpose it serves, what its goal is. Can you tell me something about it?”

The old man’s dull eyes wander over my face. “Did your father never talk to you about it?”

“No. Only in vague hints. I presume from the fact that he put a kind of habit on in the hour before his death that he must have belonged to some secret society, but that is all that I know.”

“I will tell you then: since time immemorial there has been a circle of men on earth which guides the destiny of mankind. Without them chaos would have descended upon the world long ago. All the great leaders of the nations have been blind instruments in our hands, that is, if they were not members of our Order. Our goal is to remove the differences between rich and poor, between master and servant, the initiated and the ignorant, rulers and oppressed, to make this vale of tears that we call the earth into a paradise, a land in which the word ‘sorrow’ is unknown. The burden under which mankind is groaning is the cross of individuality. The world-soul has disintegrated into separate beings, and that is the source of all disorder. Our determination is to turn the multiplicity back into unity.

The noblest minds have put themselves at our service and the time of harvest is at hand! Every man is to be his own priest. The masses are ready to shake off the yoke of the Church. Beauty is the only god to which mankind will pray in future. But there is still need of men of vigour to set it on high. That is why we fathers of the Order have sent out currents of thought into the world which will sweep like wildfire through the minds of men and burn out the madness of the doctrine of individualism. The war of everyone for everyone! Creating a garden from the wilderness is the task we have set ourselves. Can you not feel how everything within you is crying out for action? Why are you sitting here dreaming? Arise and save your brothers!”

I am seized by a wild eagerness. “What should I do?” I cry. “Command me! Tell me what I should do! I will sacrifice my life for mankind, if it must be! What conditions must I fulfil to join the Order?”

“Blind obedience! Renunciation of all personal desire! To work for the whole and no longer for yourself! That is the way out of the desert of multiplicity into the promised land of unity.”

“And how will I know what it is I have to do?’ I ask, suddenly filled with doubts. “I am to be a leader, what shall my teaching be?”

“When you teach, you learn. Do not ask, What shall I say? If God gives you an office, he will also give you understanding. Go forth and speak. The thoughts will come, do not worry. Are you ready to take the oath of obedience?”

“I am ready.”

“Then put your left hand to the earth and repeat after me the words I shall say.”

In a daze, I am bending down to obey when I am suddenly seized with suspicion. I hesitate, look up, and a memory twitches at my mind: I have seen the face of the old man standing before me, carved out of haematite on the pommel of a sword; and the misshapen thumb belongs to the hand of the tramp who fell down dead in the market-place when he saw me, all those years ago.

I feel a chill of horror, but now I know what I have to do. I jump up and shout at the old man, “Give me the sign!” and hold out my right hand to him for the ‘clasp’ my father showed me.

But standing before me is no living man any more, but a thing of limbs loosely attached to a trunk, like someone who has been broken on the wheel. The head is hovering above, separated from the neck by a gap the width of a finger, the lips are still quivering from the expiry of breath. A gruesome jumble of flesh and bone.

With a shudder, I covered my eyes with my hands. When I looked up, the phantom had disappeared, but hanging freely in the air was a shining ring, in which hovered the face of the old man with the ear-muffs in fine, transparent outline like pale blue mist. This time it was the voice of the Founding Father that came from its lips, “What you have seen was debris, spars from wrecked ships that had been drifting on the ocean of the past. In order to deceive you, the spectral inhabitants of the abyss created the image of our Master as a phantasm formed from the soulless remains of drowned men, from forgotten impressions in your own mind; with your own tongue they were speaking to you empty, hollow words of temptation to lure you, like will o’ the wisps, into the deadly swamps of aimless activity in which thousands before you, and greater ones, have sunk without trace. ‘Renunciation’ is the name they give to the phosphorescence with which they trick their victims; there was rejoicing in hell when they lit it for the first person to trust them. What they want to destroy is the noblest possession a person can acquire, our eternal consciousness as an individual. Their teaching is death and destruction, but they know the power of truth, so all the words they choose are true, but every sentence they form from them is a pit of lies.

Whenever vanity and the lust for power reside in a person’s heart, there they are on hand to fan these dull sparks into a bright flame, so that the individual concerned imagines he is afire with selfless love for his fellows and goes forth to preach without being called, becomes a blind leader and falls into the pit with the halt and the lame.

They well know that the heart of man is evil, from his earliest youth, and that love cannot reside within it, unless it is a present from above.

They repeat the command, “Love one another”, until it is quite worn away. The one who first spoke these words gave those who heard them a spiritual gift, but
they
spit the words into people’s ears like poison, causing disaster and despair, murder, carnage and devastation. They imitate truth as a scarecrow imitates the wayside crucifix.

Whenever they see a crystal that is threatening to form a symmetrical shape – an image of God – they do all they can to shatter it. No doctrine from the East is too fine but they will coarsen it, bring it down to earth, surround it and perforate it until it says the opposite of what was intended. “From the East comes light”, they say, and secretly mean pestilence.

The only goal which is worth pursuing – the cultivation of one’s own self – they call egoism. They try to introduce into the minds of erring mortals the idea that they must save the world, without giving them any idea how to do it; they mask greed with the name of ‘duty’ and envy with that of ‘ambition’.

Their dream for the future is a world of splintering consciousness, obsessions everywhere. Through the mouths of the obsessed they preach the coming of the millennium, as did the prophets of old, but the fact that the millennial empire will not ‘be of this world’ until the earth is transformed and man is changed through the rebirth of the spirit, that they omit to mention; they give the lie to the anointed ones by pretending the time is ripe before it is.

If a messiah is expected, they pre-empt him; when one departs, they mock him. They say, “Be a leader”, well knowing that only one who has been perfected can be a leader. They invert it to deceive people, saying, “Lead, and you shall be perfected.”

It is said, if God gives you an office, he will also give you understanding.

But they whisper, “Take an office and God will give you understanding.”

They know that life on earth is only meant to be a transitional state, so they cunningly tempt you by saying, “Make a paradise on earth”, well knowing the vanity of such attempts.

They have released the shades from Hades and brought them to life with a daemonic force so that men will believe that the resurrection of the dead has come.

They have made a mask, formed after the face of our Master, a spectre which pops up here and there, now in the dreams of those with second sight, now as apparently corporeal figures appearing at spiritualist séances, now as the automatic drawings mediums produce. To those who enquire after its name, the ghost calls itself John King, to give rise to the belief it is John the Evangelist. For all those who, like you, are mature enough to see the face in
truth,
they pre-empt it; they are preparing the ground so that they can sow the seed of doubt when, as now with you, the hour approaches when unwavering faith is needed.