The Discovery of Heaven (29 page)

—
Dear me, that was a close thing.

—You're telling me. The trouble with human beings is that we can lead them to the water, but we can't make them drink. For example, it's no trouble for us to make someone stand up and pace about his room, or to make him slip so that he breaks his neck; but to get someone to do something that runs counter to his feelings is less simple. People aren't puppets— they have a will of their own; before you know it, they've slipped through your fingers. Take the meeting of Max and Onno.

—
Did you fix that?

—Who else?

—
It might have been coincidence.

—Of course, but it wasn't.

—
Quite a feat. If Delius had driven past thirty seconds later, Onno might have gotten a lift from someone else.

—Then everything would have fallen through. Thank you for the compliment, but that kind of thing is routine for my department; for us that is almost as easy as some mechanical operation or other—for example making a tree blow over, or a meteorite strike, say—although in those areas too we often face uncertainties. Of course it was part of an extensive plan of action, because we had first to ensure that Max went to Rotterdam on the day of Onno's father's birthday, and so on and so forth, but as far as that was concerned there was no resistance to be expected.

—But why would have everything have fallen through in that case? What was the point of the meeting? After all, it's only made matters more complicated. You could have left Onno completely out of it and simply have had Max meet Ada and have a child.

—In the first place, he would probably not have given her a child in that case; and in the second place, it will become clear that Onno's presence was essential for us to achieve our ultimate objective. When you're involved in a project like that, you work not only on the moment that is immediately present, but are constantly keeping in mind everything that has already happened, what must happen in the future, everything that can go wrong, and how that has to be coped with and what will in that case have to be prepared, if you are to avoid it slipping through your fingers. You can compare it with a war: in retrospect in the history books it's a nice, rounded story, the result of which is known; but while it was going on, you as a field marshal may have had your plan of campaign, but it was still largely a chaotic succession of events, stupidities, and unforeseen surprises, which demanded new decisions every moment. And in the third place. . . . Oh, I've forgotten. Excuse me, you have touched on an essential point that we should perhaps be clear about from the outset. You asked me to tell the story at length and in detail and I've started. But to be honest, I don't feel like telling the story and at the same time saying why it is like it is and where I've intervened and where I haven't and why.

—
Have I touched on a sensitive spot?

—To start with I have no sensitive spots, because in our pneumatic domain we exist entirely of intelligence, and moreover .. .

—And moreover?

—Let's leave it. I don't mind justifying myself now and then, or explaining something more fully, but I don't intend to keep biting my own tail.

—
You do have a tail, then?

—The story may have one.

—
I don't know if you know but the Ouroboros, a serpent biting its own tail, is a symbol of eternity on that same earth.

—That's as may be, but if I can't tell the story in the way that is implicit in the events themselves, then you will simply have to make do with the announcement that the matter is settled. You can ask me a hundred questions, or a thousand or a hundred thousand; you can ask me . . . for example, why Cuba had to be dragged in, and so on and so forth—that will all become clear. Take it from me that nothing has happened that wasn't absolutely necessary, at least as far as my interventions were concerned. It's no coincidence that I haven't once said "I" yet.

—
Except for those three times, that is. And let me tell you this. The fact that you are also in the top rank of the Celestial Hierarchy doesn't give you the right to strike such a damn impertinent tone with an official who is just a little superior to you. Anyway, that's how things are here these days. It's starting to depress me, but that may also be partly due to your story. You know, none of us has a view of the whole Pleroma, but if you operate at the edge of the Eight, as we do, with a view of the demonic world of Darkness, things are harder for you than for those higher entities who are scarcely aware of it; and you even more than I are standing with your back to the Light and facing Darkness. If my memory serves me well, once or twice in the past you even appeared in that Archontic area, which cannot even claim to have been created by the Chief, as most of those windbags there believe, because that anthropic explosion of light, which was to lead to them, was the work of our center. Compared with me you are already almost one of them, although for them you are infinitely far removed—at least if they even have an inkling of your existence. Most of them know beings like us only in the shape of infantile fantasies like Superman or Batman. Would you like to know why that is? It's because by now they have almost all our powers themselves, in the shape of their technology. And that's our own stupid fault. For centuries we have been complacently been asleep here, and in the meantime Satan-El has been doing his work.

—Satan-El? What's that you're saying? In what form?

—All those characters are scum anyway: Belial-Satan, Beelzebub-Satan, Asmodee-Satan, Azazel-Satan, Samael-Satan, Mephistopheles-Satan, and so on and so on, they're all the same. But of course it was Lucifer-Satan again.

—What was the swine doing then?

—
We only found out recently. Five hundred years ago, without our realizing it, he entered into a pact with mankind, a sort of diabolical counterpart of the Chiefs testimony.

—You must be joking! I only know the story that Mephistopheles is supposed to have entered into a pact with a certain Dr. Faust, that Faust is supposed to have sold his soul to him, but that seemed to me to belong more to literature.

—
That is true, but there now turns out to be a very dangerous aspect to it. Can I refresh your memory a moment? The historical Johannes Faust was a traveling German magician from Württemberg, with an infamous reputation, like many others in the first half of the human sixteenth century. In 1587, when he had been dead for about forty or fifty years, his legend began with the appearance of a chronicle.
Historia von D. Johann Fausten dem weitbeschreiten Zauberer und Schwarzkünstler,
in which that story of the pact with the devil occurs. That Faust legend, we believe, goes back to a similar traveling character, fifteen hundred years earlier, who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, Simon Magus. He fell out with Peter, because he wanted to buy the Holy Ghost. That character, a Samaritan, had gotten it into his head that he himself was the Chief.

—Go on. Was Satan-El behind that, too?

—
We assume so now. He was going with a Phoenician whore, whom he maintained was an incarnation of Helen of Troy.

—How can you claim such a thing?

—
On earth you can claim all sorts of things, and there are always people who will believe you. But be careful, don't underestimate him. He said that the Feminine Principle was the first Idea in Thought—that is, in the Chiefs thought; that is, his own. That Principle next created us, whereupon we in our turn created the world. But according to him we do not want to be regarded as creatures, only as creators, and so we dragged our creator from Light to the Darkness of our creation and forced it into the physical shape of a centuries-old series of women, including Helen, and finally into a whore in the brothel in Tyre from where the Father, having descended to earth and become flesh, finally rescued the imprisoned Mother.

—What a story! Of course that bit about the abduction and all those women is a scandalous lie—but how did that magician find out the truth about creation? Did Lucifer tell him about all that?

—
Can you think of another explanation?

—And what did he have up his sleeve in doing that?

—
It was a red herring to disguise his real intention. Without anyone realizing it Simon Magus returned toward the end of the sixteenth century in the legend of Faust, the restless seeker after knowledge, who entered into a pact with the devil. The first literary adaptation was Christopher Marlowe's,
The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus
, which was performed in London in about 1590. That was the beginning of a continuous succession of adaptations of the theme, down to the present earthly day, the high point of which was, naturally, Goethe's version, in which Helen again appears. In one of the most recent versions,
Doktor Faustus
by Thomas Mann, a syphilitic whore again crops up as the companion of the hero, and that was, significantly enough, inspired by a fatal whore in the life of Nietzsche, whom we were talking about just now. She was the cause of his fatal madness.

—I know all about that. At the time I even dispatched that creature to get him. People shouldn't pronounce the Chief dead. But where was Lucifer's red herring? What was he trying to distract attention from?

—
The intention was to impress upon mankind that a pact with the devil was a literary matter: the noncommittal story of an imaginary individual thirsting after knowledge, who sells his soul. That was how it was possible for a dreadful, far from literary but very real event to go unnoticed until today—namely, that in that same last decade of the sixteenth century, also in London, Lucifer entered into a pact with mankind, a collective contract in which the whole of mankind sold its soul to him.

—Good God! How should I imagine that? Did someone sign that contract on behalf of mankind?

—
Yes.

—Who was that?

—
Francis Bacon.

—Francis Bacon?

—
Francis Bacon. He has always been regarded as a man who prophetically foresaw the modern scientific and technological world. In a number of epoch-making works he sketched the outlines of a world in which science and technology would no longer be in the hands of a few individual amateurs, as was the case in his own days around 1600, but would have changed into an internationally organized, collective endeavor, subsidized by governments, with conferences and systematic publications. Only in that way could a full mastery of nature be obtained; and the scientific method would have to be that of induction, in which one progressed from the particular to the general, from empirical phenomena to natural laws, although you and I of course know that the only true method is the reverse one, that of deduction. At the end of his life he wrote
Nova Atlantis
, "The New Atlantis," which remained as a fragment and was published after his death. In it he sketches a central institute of a Utopian island called Bensalem, which he dubs "Solomon's House," but it is not something like the blessed temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, which is so dear to our hearts, not even something like a Christian church, but more like a modern research center, in which new biological species are manufactured.

—From a human point of view, that all seems obvious.

—
So obvious that in the twentieth century he is scarcely mentioned on earth any longer. That's the danger of being absolutely right: virtually no one realizes that things were ever any different. Just imagine, in his day even scientific experiments were virtually unknown. That is why it has always astonished us that this rational founder of modern science and technology of all people should be surrounded by mystery. He is supposed to be the founder of freemasonry, he has been called a clandestine Rosicrucian and an initiate in numerous other secret societies. There has long been a Baconian sect, which with a lot of numerological hocus-pocus tries to prove that he wrote the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare. All nonsense, of course, but why is it that all this has become attached precisely to that cool, realistic combater of delusions? Not only has he been called the true author of Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy
, but all kinds of acrostics have been dragged in to prove that the work of Edmund Spenser were actually by him—and of course, inevitably, that of Marlowe too. Bacon as the author of the first Faust play! It is claimed that at his funeral an empty coffin was consigned to the earth, because he is claimed to have lived for a further twenty-one years in Germany under another name.

—In Württemberg, of course!

—
In the capital no less, Stuttgart. The so-called discovery finally woke us up, and we can now reconstruct the course of events. Baconians sometimes claim that he was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and the earl of Leicester, but in reality he was born in 1561 as the son of Elizabeth's Keeper of the Great Seal. Because he was the youngest son, he was left penniless on his father's death; as a twenty-three-year-old lawyer he obtained a seat in Parliament. He was determined to become as rich and powerful as his father, but his career did not progress well. His bosom friend the earl of Essex, the queen's lover, did what he could for him, but Elizabeth did not trust Bacon. When all his attempts to secure his friend a high office had failed, the loyal Essex gave him one of his own estates as a consolation. That was in 1595. However, four years later Essex himself fell out of favor, a charge of high treason was prepared against him, and now Elizabeth suddenly intervened. She asked Bacon if he would be so kind as to draw up the indictment. And now the hour of the devil had struck—because, what do you think? He did it, although he knew that it would lead to the execution of his benefactor. The serpent promised him that he would rise even higher than his father, but for that he must first put his signature to the indictment and then publish a number of books, which would be dictated to him.

—Why did Lucifer choose Bacon, of all people? Had he already written anything?