Fantastic Metropolis

True it is that, being composed of the purest parts of the elements wherein they dwell, and having no contrary qualities, they can live for several centuries; yet are they much troubled because of their mortal nature. It was, however, revealed to the philosophers that an elementary spirit could attain to immortality by being united in marriage with a human being. The children born of such unions are more noble and heroic than the children of human men and women, and some of the greatest figures of antiquity—Zoroaster, Alexander, Hercules, Merlin, to mention a few—are declared to have been the children of elementary spirits.

—Lewis Spence, An Encyclopedia of Occultism

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

—John Keats, self-composed epitaph

Dee was a gifted child, with a remarkable memory, and was able to work out complex mathematical problems in his head. Although the son of a servant, he obviously deserved to be educated.

—Damon Wilson, The Queen’s Astrologer, the Rogue Necromancer, and the Angel of Light

Ah, the elementals of lore. From time immemorial, if you believe some folks, they have been smarter than us, possessed of powers we cannot comprehend… and yet envious of our immortal souls, which will exist as long as time itself, while they are doomed to eventual death from which there is no continuance. In the Quran, the arch-fiend Iblis, king of the Efreet, refuses to follow the will of Allah and bow down before Adam. Why should the Son of Fire kneel to the Son of Clay? he asks, and for this, is doomed to the pit. Yet most of the elementals apparently submitted quite gracefully to the dominion of Adam, according to Abbé de Villars, anyway.

The Abbé himself was one of those oversized figures who seems to know a lot more than can be explained by simple erudition. His great work on the subject of the elementals, Comte de Gabalis, is a disguised philosophical treatise telling of a dialogue between a mysterious wandering Count, who reveals the secrets of the elemental courts. It is told in novel format, but in great degree it is really a satirical refutation of the writings of La Calprenade (unfortunately, I don’t have the time to get into that, or we’d be here all week) and by the 1670’s was widely read in both France and England, and it managed to get the Abbé, a churchman and preacher in the faith of Rome, in serious hot water with the Pope, who was his boss after all. Despite persecution from his former brothers in Christ, the Abbé kept on writing, producing the Traité de la délicatesse before he was assassinated on the road to Lyons in 1673. While he was not the first ‘enemy’ of the church to be so removed, his death apparently did little to slow down his literary output: L’Amour sans faibless, Anne de Bretagne et Ailmanzaris, and Critique de la Bérénice de Racine et de Corneille were all published after he died (whether or not he actually wrote them before he died or they were written posthumously by some admirer… or perhaps another explanation… is as yet undetermined, although most people accept that the Abbé did write them) and in 1715, some forty-five years after he died, Nouveaux Entretiens sur les sciences secrètes was published, supposedly written by the Abbé, as a sequel to Comte de Gabalis. How this dead man kept writing books must be passed over for now, for there is the matter of that first book to contend with.

In Comte de Gabalis we learn that before the Fall of Adam, the first man had absolute sovereignty over the four kinds of elementals, fire, air, earth and water, on account of his having been formed from the pure admixture of all four himself. (So presumably, when Iblis called Adam the son of clay, he was deliberately ignoring both the inspiration of elemental air and the spark of elemental fire that would be required, along with the earth and water that would make said clay. This divides spirit into fire and air, and matter into earth and water, in the divine scheme of things.) Once Adam fell, and was no longer pure, he could no longer command such elementals… until his descendants discovered the proper incantations, which could restore the bonds of fealty between man and elemental, a rather feudal way of looking at the relationship. Yet the Comte hints at another reason the elementals are so eager to follow the commands of mere humans; for while human flesh is frail, and dies easily and young compared to the stuff of the elementals, our spirits are immortal, while theirs are doomed to slow dissolution. Only by uniting with a mortal may the elemental spirits gain spiritual immortality, and thus live forever.

Dee believed by communicating with angelic or other higher spiritual entities as Enoch and the biblical prophets did, it would be possible to gain knowledge not previously available to humanity: I have often read in Thy books and records, how Enoch enjoyed Thy favor and conversation; with Moses Thou was familiar; and also to Abraham, Isaack and Jacob, Joshua, Gideon, Eddras, Daniel, Tobias, and sundry others the good angels were sent by Thy disposition, to instruct them, informe them, helpe them, yea in worldly and domestick affaires, yea and sometimes to satisfie their desires, doubts, and questions of Thy Secrete; and furthermore concerning the shewstone, which the High Priest did use, by Thine own ordering… that this wisdome could not be come by at man’s hand or by humaine power, but only from Thee, O God.

Dee began his magical experiments early in 1581. His intent was to contact higher spiritual beings through crystal gazing guided by ritual invocation.

—Bill Whitcomb, The Magician’s Companion

We all remember Enoch, right? Guy who dropped the dime on the fallen watcher angels to God and caused the flood, and the destruction of the Nephillim? Well, let us ask ourselves a few questions. Isn’t it odd that both elementals and angels should wish to unite with mortals? On the surface, this would seem a degradation of both parties, yet both parties seem to wish it so much that they are willing to incur God’s wrath to do it… a pretty big deal, one would think. Second, Iblis (who calls himself the Son of Fire when refusing Allah’s command to bow down before Adam) is the Quranic equivalent of Lucifer, a fallen Archangel… and he also seems to be an elemental spirit, doesn’t he? Furthermore, the whole lynchpin of Dee’s Enochian magic is the command of four elemental kings, whose names are Tahaoelog, the king of air, Thahebyobeaatnun, the king of water, Thahaaothe, the king of earth, and finally Ohooohaatan, the king of fire. Besides the fact that these four elemental kings have names out of a Lovecraft story (and that king of fire reminds me of the last word written down by the vanished colonists of Roanoke, Croatoan), the entirety of the Enochian system of magic was supposedly handed to Dee and his somewhat deceitful scryer Ed Kelly by angels.

Well, perhaps they were… or perhaps, when angels fall themselves, they are stripped of their divinity, and reduced to mere elemental beings without the grace of God, unable to endure eternity. Perhaps the reason conjurors and magicians can control elemental spirits is twofold; by using ritual, they can briefly regain a sense of the divine in themselves, and thus contact the angelic uncorrupted spirits of the elements who freely served Adam before the fall… and by using necromancy, as Dee often did, they can contact those fallen angels who seek a back-door into immortality and offer them the one thing they need… union with a human.

Not every authority has painted so attractive a picture of the creatures of the elements as has the Abbé de Villars. By some it is believed that there are numberless degrees among these beings, the highest resembling the lowest angels, while the lowest may often be mistaken for demons.

—Lewis Spence, An Encyclopedia of Occultism

Happy, happy glowing fire,
Dazzling bowers of soft retire,
Ever let my nourish’d wing,
Like a bat’s, still wandering,
Nimbly fan your firey spaces
Spirit sole in deadly places;
In unhaunted roar and blaze,
Open eyes that never daze:
Let me see the myriad shapes
Of men, and beasts, and fish, and apes,
Portray’d in many a firey den

—John Keats, Song of Four Fairies: Fire, Air, Earth and Water

So we have a disgraced churchman, wandering about Europe telling beautiful and sacrilegious tales of elementals who are all friendly to man, who seek nothing but to serve and aid them, yet concealing in his stories a brief mention of their desire for union with man in order to gain for themselves immortal souls… much like a salesman who conceals the fine print of the deal yet dares not discard it. We have Dee, a century earlier, making contact through Ed Kelly (a notorious liar and thief, yet undoubtedly possessing the scrying talent Dee himself lacked) with supposed angels who teach not divine secrets, but elemental lore and who order Dee to engage in wife-swapping with his dubious compatriot, and both point back to the biblical tales of Adam and Enoch and their dealings with spirits who sought flesh and blood offspring through union with mortal men and women. It seems our elemental brothers and sisters are not always what they appear to us as. It’s easy to see in Villars’ tale a harbinger of the mysterious black-garbed Comte de Saint Germain, of course… who claimed, furthermore, to have been thousands of years old and to have met the patriarchs of the Bible. The Saint Germain connection becomes still more interesting when we realize that among the Comte’s associates was one Horace Walpole, who wrote dreary Gothic romances (indeed, he founded the genre with his Castle of Otranto) and who owned, among other interesting artifacts, Dee’s shewstone itself, which he kept at his dreary Gothic manor, Strawberry Hill, in the Twickhenam area. Furthermore, Dee himself, during his travels in Europe, deliberately spent time in the Louvain region of France in order to complete his researches on the extra-natural mathematical ideas of Cornelius Agrippa, and supposedly gained his personal copy of De occulta philosophia at this time. (I won’t mention that Lovecraft argued that it was at this time that Dee translated the Necronomicon into English, tempting though it is.)

Imagine, then, the following. Horace Walpole, youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole (former Prime Minister of England) goes on a tour of Europe with his friend Thomas Gray in 1739. On their travels they make the acquaintance of the strange magus calling himself, the Comte de Saint Germaine, who reveals to them occult secrets. Gray, finding the entire subject distasteful, cuts Walpole and leaves his company. Walpole, being of a morbid turn of mind, finds the whole thing fascinating and decides, upon his return to England, to make use of the information he gains. He gets hold of Dee’s shewstone and contacts the elemental intelligences lurking in the Enochian Aethers, and makes them a deal. They need union with grand human spirits to gain immortality; he desires power and influence, being dissatisfied with his lot as the youngest son of a great peer. The deal is struck… he soon reconciles with Gray, who has no choice, having been somehow lured into a situation where an elemental spirit could bond with him. (Remember, the having of offspring is not what gives the spirit immortality, merely the union with a mortal. Offspring are more like happy side effects rather than direct consequences.) Over the course of the next sixty years, Walpole and his contacts in the British Aristocracy (men like John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty and notoriously debauched member of the Hellfire Club, who Walpole would have known through his family) maintain a kind of quid pro quo with the elemental spirits, making alliances and offering human partners to bond with in defiance of the law of God in exchange for a subtle expansion of Britain’s power over the four elements… and thus, over the whole of the world. There are some missteps, of course… for one thing, allowing Benjamin Franklin access to the Hellfire rites allows his brilliant mind to devise countermeasures which create weakness and confusion in the British ranks during the Revolutionary War… but overall, the alliance is a sound one. Men like Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington are the results of such an alliance, half-elementals with strange powers of reason and perception and control over their various elements. (Nelson would obviously be a water hybrid.) All goes well until the Gordon Riots.

The Gordon Riots were the result of Lord George Gordon (no relation to Byron), an unrepentant anti-Catholic bigot and, I believe, a puppet of the magical counter-measures squad devised by Benjamin Franklin. On June 2, 1780, he began a riot that lasted for a week, caused 500 casualties… and, I believe, disrupted the web of elementals around the Admiralty for long enough for many of the bound spirits to escape, as well as preventing the Hellfire cabal from engaging in the mystical rites to draw replacements. Gordon was suitably chastened with prison, but by then the momentum was lost, and would not be regained until 1805, when Lord Horatio Nelson died at Trafalgar. Nelson (who admitted to seeing globes of light that gave him spiritual instruction and a sense of destiny) dying over water was enough to create a significant sense of grief in the water elementals who created him, thus allowing for a reforging of the bonds Gordon snapped with his arrogance and violence. However, by then, the freed elementals had found union with new hosts… and one of them was a London man who kept a stable near the houses of Parliament, a man named Thomas Keats.

The Sigillum Dei Aemeth is a magical synthesis of ideas of a purely spiritual nature with regard to the divine, archangelic and angelic names associated with the celestial spheres wherein the planetary forces operate. The operation of the Sigillum occurs in the worlds of Yetzirah and Briah. Moreover, the four small sigils attributed to the Tablets of the Watchtowers receive their elucidation from this Sigillum, whence they are resolved into the names of the four.

—Thomas Head, as quoted by Israel Regardie, Complete Golden Dawn System of Magick

There is a basic Keatsian structure—a literally spatial conception of two realms in opposition and a mythlike set of actions involving characters shuttling back and forth between them-that appears in a great many of the poems and can usefully serve as a device for relating poems, passages and situations one to another in a view of what Keats work as a whole is preponderately “about.”

—Jack Stillinger, introduction to The Complete Poems of Keats

By 1795, the time John Keats was born, Walpole was only two years away from the grave, and the original pact with the elementals had ended in failure, disrupted by the very mortality that made the humans so irresistible to the elementals. The shewstone was packed away at Strawberry Hill, Sandwich was dead, and with the bonds between the elementals and man fraying, it was only a matter of time until unfortunate incidents would occur. The rampage of tuberculosis through the Keats family, striking down Keats’ mother, his younger brother Thomas, and eventually himself (as well as his father’s death in 1804, the year before Nelson’s death at Trafalgar) may merely be unfortunate luck, but it’s telling that George only escaped by moving to America, and that Fanny (his sister, not his love Fanny Brawne) is the only member of his family to have escaped an early death in England. As we know the elemental half-breeds follow the melded parent, is it possible that the instrument of their birth and all of them had to be purged by an agent of the divine? Was the Angel of Wrath, he who destroyed the Nephilim of Enoch and the dark cults of Sodom and Gomorrah and the half-divine offspring of Pharaoh, loose in England, destroying those who were aberrations in God’s sight? (Poor Edward Keats lived barely a year.) Throughout his work Keats has a sense of his own alienation, and perhaps there didn’t need to be an angel hunting his family… if they were magical crossbreeds as the cement lockstep Victorian era approached, perhaps the world was too much with them, late and soon, and the tide of conformity laid waste their powers.

Hard to say. But if we are the playthings of debauched elementals, we are also their masters. We should remember that, I think. The son of fire ultimately was cast down before the son of clay.

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Matt Rossi, the author of Things That Never Were (MonkeyBrain, 2003), is entirely unexciting on first glance. His hair is a dirty blond color, his eyes a dull green that calls to mind beer bottles abraded by the ocean, and his demeanor mildly absent-minded. He has no dark secrets. He does not know the 72-fold Name of God, nor can he catalogue the mysterious hosts that populate the otherworld lying alongside this one. Any rumors that he raises young turtles to grow up and become Gamera are lies intended to smear him. His leather jacket does not hold the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the Yellow Sign, or the secret true path of the Otz Chaim, and he is certainly not Atlantean in any way. He’s from Rhode Island.