Fovel went through his pockets and extracted a small book with a dark, well-worn binding on which I could just make out the name of this German thinker who had evidently made a great impression on the Master. He opened the book up to a place he’d marked and began to read.

To begin their own particular spiritual journey, the Free Spirit disciples would sit facing the panel and begin to meditate. When they reached the moment of maximum concentration, they would be lifted gently from this everyday world into a spiritual realm that they would discover little by little, and which, over time, would reveal to them truths of greater and greater significance. The only way to understand and enter into the panel was to concentrate on it unceasingly. Thus the viewer would become a cocreator of it, an independent interpreter of the solemn and enigmatic symbols in front of them. The painting was never static, but always alive and constantly animated by the living flow of transformation, the organic becoming, the ongoing revelation of life, all of this being in concert with the painting’s evolutionist intellectual structure.¹²

Fovel finished and waited for the words to sink in. I didn’t need long.

“Does that mean,” I searched for the right words, “that you know how to open the portal? Can you enter the painting? Use the tool?”

“I’m afraid not.” Fovel said. “Not even Fraenger managed to do that. After the Allied bombers bombed Berlin and destroyed his apartment and his notes, he spent years trying unsuccessfully to enter the portal and cross over. The one useful hint to emerge from his attempts and research was that the voyage would begin with the viewer’s gaze fixed upon the fountain of life in the left-hand panel, in the opening containing the owl. From there, one would be transported. Believe it or not, I have tried. In the process, you come to realize just how many of these owls there are scattered about the painting, like multiple keys to the same door, and while I have no problem understanding their significance, getting them to work is another matter.”

“Really? What do you think that significance is?”

“Well, these are creatures that can see in the dark, Javier. Since the earliest of times owls, have stood for the ideal of knowledge and for that which can penetrate the invisible. Only owls can move precisely through the darkness, and to the eyes of the ancients this meant that they could also navigate the territory of death. Of the hereafter. They are psychopomps, guides of souls to the afterlife.”

“So this is another painting that acts like a medium.” I observed.

“In a sense, yes. It’s up to us to determine what particular medium the artist is suggesting to get to the other side, to God. Is it simple meditation? Drugs? Perhaps Claviceps purpurea—ergot fungus—which in the Low Countries was often used in drinks. Fraenger is not very clear on this point, but I’d wager that by the time this triptych got into the hands of Philip II, in the late 1500s, he and his trusted inner circle would already have known all about the work’s visionary power.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Hieronymus Bosch, Owls in The Garden of Earthly Delights (details). Panels I and II. The Prado Museum, Madrid.

The Master smiled. “It’s no secret that Philip was a man of contradictory convictions. On the one hand, he was bound to defend the Catholic faith to the end, to prosecute the Inquisition throughout his territories, and to keep Protestants and other heretics at bay. But then on the other hand, he financed the alchemical experiments of his architect, Juan de Herrera, he was an avid collector of secret, magical, and astrologic texts, and kept no fewer than six unicorn horns in his own personal treasure chest.¹³ He was a man in whom orthodoxy and heterodoxy, faith and paganism, walked hand in hand. I’d bet that he had heard about the visionary properties of the painting and made sure that he had it near him at the end.”

“But wasn’t that controversial?” I objected. “Didn’t anybody question the king’s interest in such a strange painting, or cast doubts on Bosch, in the most Catholic court in the world?”

“They certainly did!” replied Fovel. “Bosch was called every name in the book. ‘Painter of devils’ was one of the kindest. Most of those who actually saw his paintings couldn’t explain the king’s fascination with them. Perhaps fortunately, Bosch was not a prolific painter—there are no more than forty of his paintings all told. But Philip became his biggest collector. He had no fewer than twenty-six of those forty paintings in his possession when he died, most of which he had hung in El Escorial. It could be that Father Sigüenza was mostly able to convince critics that the works were satirical, that they were an invitation to good Christians to contemplate the perversions that lurked around every corner and a warning lest they fall prey to these. What’s remarkable is that this explanation was almost universally accepted, and didn’t start to fall apart until well into the next century.”

My mind was still on what Fovel had said earlier. “Doctor, getting back to the king—why do you think he wanted to have this strange painting at his bedside?”

Fovel gave me a particularly impish look, adjusting his coat and tugging on his lapels. He half turned, his back to the Bosch, and fixed his gaze on me.

“What about you? Can’t you think of a reason?”

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I. Beware, beware! God sees.