The Angel of the West Window

but I am filled with a nameless fear, Does it come from Jane? Her hand is trembling, no, her whole body is quivering. I pull myself together: I must do it! Did Kelley not say this morning that tonight at the second hour the Angel would have a great commandment for us and would ... reveal the ultimate mystery, so greatly yearned for, so hotly prayed for through so many years? I open my mouth to pronounce the first word of the conjuration when I see the figure of Rabbi Löw rise up, as if a great distance away; his hand is raised and in it he holds the sacrificial knife. And then – for the fragment of a second – the figure of the Cat Goddess reappears over the shaft; in her left hand she is holding a small Egyptian mirror and in her right an object in onyx that looks like the tip of a lance or a dagger held upwards. Immediately both figures are swallowed up in a dazzling green radiance which comes from Kelley and falls on me. Blinded, I shut my eyes. It is as if I am closing them for good, never to see the light of the sun again, but I do not fear death, I feel I am already dead: calmly, all passion spent, I say the words of the conjuration out loud.

When I look up, Kelley has ... disappeared! There is still somebody sitting up there on the pile of sacks, and the crossed legs are Kelley’s – I can clearly recognise his tramp’s hobnailed boots in the green light – but his body, chest and head have been transformed. Incomprehensibly, mysteriously transformed: it is the Angel, the Green Angel crouching cross-legged up there just like ... just like a seated devil portrayed in ancient Persian images. The Angel is much smaller than I have ever seen it but the features, the threatening, awful and sublime features, are the same. The body becomes radiant and transparent, like an immense emerald, and the slanting eyes gleam like living moonstones; the narrow, delicate lips are turned up at the corners in a beautiful, enigmatic, fixed smile.

The hand in mine is lifeless as a corpse’s; is Jane dead? – Just as dead or alive as I am, I think. I can feel she is waiting, waiting as I am for some fearful command.

What will the command be? I ask myself. No, I do not ask, for within me there is knowledge of what it will be, but the “knowledge” does not surface in my conscious mind. – – – I ... smile.

Words are issuing from the mouth of the Green Angel ... Do I hear them? Do I understand them? ... It must be so, for my heart stands still: the sacrificial knife that I saw at the Rabbi’s house tears at my breast, at my entrails, at my heart, cutting through sinew, skin and brain. In my ear I can hear a loud voice, as of a torturer, counting slowly, cruelly slowly, from one to seventy-two. – – – Have I lain for centuries, rigid with death, only to wake to the dreadful words of the Angel? I do not know. All I know is: I am holding an ice-cold hand in mine and praying, wordlessly, that Jane is indeed dead! – Within me the words of the Green Angel burn like fire:

“As ye have all sworn allegiance I will now reveal to you the mystery of all mysteries. But first ye must take off all that is human, that ye might become as gods. John Dee, faithful servant, thee I command: Thou shalt lead thy wife Jane and my servant, Edward Kelley, to the bridal couch, that he may enjoy her as an earthly husband enjoyeth his earthly wife and that they too may become one in the night: for ye are blood brothers, forged in the fire with thy wife Jane into a triple union which shall continue for ever in the Realm of the Green Empire! Rejoice, John Dee, and be glad!” –

Again and again the terrible knife twists and turns in my body and soul, and bottled up inside me a voice screams a prayer, a desperate prayer to be released from life and consciousness.

I wake with a start, my whole body a prey to shooting pains: I am sitting hunched up in my desk chair, my numb fingers still clutching John Dee’s polished coal. The sacrificial knife has cut me, too! Cut me into seventy-two pieces! – And the inconceivable pain, the waves of pain, like razor sharp bands of light pulsating through boundless space, through boundless time, strike me too, pass through me ... from galaxy to galaxy, for aeons of light years – or so it seems to me.

Heaven only knows whether the pains in my limbs come from the awkward position I found myself sitting in when I woke from the trance, or whether it was the fault of the drugs Lipotin got me to inhale. Whatever the reason, I feel wretched as I stumble up out of my chair. My head is still ringing with the echo of the strange events that – half spectator, half active participant – I experienced in my abstraction, or whatever the name is for that absorption into the strange coal crystal, for that entrance to the past through the darkly gleaming portals of the lapis praecipuus manfestationis.

I need time to find my way back into the present. My muscles are still burning with the sharp pains. There is no doubt in my mind that everything that I experienced in my “dream” – what a ridiculous word! – that everything that I experienced in my magic transportation into the past was actually experienced then by me when I ... was John Dee in flesh and blood and mind and soul.

But I have no time for reflection now, although such thoughts pursue me, even into my restless sleep. For