It is Christmas. Before visiting my friends who invited me to Christmas Eve, I decided to wander through the town. Through the windows of the old town I saw some beautifully decorated Christmas trees glowing in candlelight. I could hear the happy laughter of children and feel the passion of the fathers and mothers. Both sadness and happiness overwhelmed me. The bells began to announce the celebration, the ancient festival of light of the middle of winter. The sun god Helios-Apollo, Mithra, and even Chronos, the father of Zeus, were all born on this day, and time again they are born of a virgin mother. At midnight in the church of this old town, the choir will resound: “Today is born the lord, who is Christ the Lord, in the City of David!”
Lucifer could easily complain that mankind has turned its back on him, for long ago, his birthday was celebrated on this date. The Light Bringer suffered and nobody remembers him—except I! Some twelve paces beyond the entrance to the town’s cathedral, I will touch with my hand a stone that fell from the heavens. According to legend, the devil was so upset over the construction that with this stone he bombed the half-finished church in order to destroy it. He just missed, goes the story. The stone is called Teufelstein.14 Oddly, the devil threw it from the heavens!
How contradictory are Christians! In Cologne, they had burned at the stake heretics who should ascend to hell, while Isaiah placed hell at the bottom of all. And here in Halberstadt, the devil supposedly threw a stone from the heavens when, as we all know, he is the lord of the depths of hell. Christians will believe anything!
When I stand before the mild irradiance of the teufelstein, which found its way, undisturbed, through the stars in their divine firmament, I am forced to think of the Gral, the stone that fell from Lucifer’s crown and was won by Parzival. Further, I cannot forget the Gral messenger Lohengrin, whom some called the Light Bringer Helias, which means Helios. In the depositions of the Inquisition, I read that the Cathars were awaiting an apparition, and according to the fifteenth-century Halberstadter Sachsenchronik, “the chroniclers believe that this youth,
24[Devil’s stone. —Trans.] Helias the swan knight, came from the mountain where Lady Venns resided with the Gral.” When I visit the devil’s stone, I will also think ol Apollo, that light bringer who is born to a virgin every winter solstice in the land of the Hyperboreans and is carried to mortal men by swans in order to bring the law to mankind. Names are more smoke and thundci when they belong to divinities. After all, it is Christmas.
's I walk down the wide and long streets of this city and look at the bustling people, when I look from the room where I live into the big patio of the apartment building and observe the exhausted people who almost never leave their apartments or who leave them only briefly, I am filled with pity. They don’t know how deep and beautiful life outside can be— in the mountains, on the plains, in the towns and villages and hamlets. Bitter is the fact that most big-city people would never exchange their desert of cement houses for what they call contemptuously the provinces. Not for a second will they leave. They are condemned to extinction.
I again attended Richard Wagner’s musical dramas Parsifal and Lohengrin. When I saw the doves on the costumes of the Grail knights, I thought of that tiny clay dove that an old man showed year after year in Lavelanet in the Pyrenees. When Lohengrin sang his tale of a castle “in a remote land, far from your steps,” my mind wandered to Montsegur, that Pyrenean rock with its marvelous citadel in whose ruins clay doves were unearthed. After the performance of Lohengrin, I returned home on foot with a friend. It had just rained. The street’s wet asphalt mirrored the lights of the street lamps and the headlights of the cars and, even more, the bright lights beaming from the shop windows and the department-store window displays. In short, the night had been turned into day. The air was laden heavily with the smell of gasoline and artificial aromas that are mistakenly called perfumes. The roar of automobiles and the chatter of the city’s inhabitants boomed in my ears. I thought that my old professor of religion was right: Hell is nothing other than the absence of God. In the big city that is so proud of the title “world metropolis,” God goes silent quickly. To live forever in such a place would be like being banned in Gehenna.1
I spoke of these thoughts to my companion. He became a pastor early on, but one day, he gave up preaching biblical fairy tales from the pulpit and, trying to prove that they had actually taken place, began to write for the German spirit. Now he tells his congregation that what he preaches is the word and revelation of God—but of a God other than the one in the Bible—and whoever wishes to listen to this God shall hear him.
Finally, we sat at a round table in the soft light of the lamp. My friend read aloud passages from the manuscript of his new book, which he has called The Birth of the Millennium:16
The time has come to hand over all power to the strong. Only in this way, can the “sins” of the world die, because sin is weakness. Strength is the recognition of the law, the self in all its facets with all its limits and perceptions. Strong is he who is the lord of himself in relation to society. The aspiring have rebelled and demand the fulfillment of their duty. The religion of redemption is dead. The religion of strength has been born: That is the law.
He continued:
The history of this lost law is short: The people of the north brought the unwritten law to the tired, decadent city-states of the south that had given up their blood and morality in democracy. As the people of the north stood before the exposure of the law and saw the consequences of democracy and examined its basics, the teachings of the cross swept over them. Poignantly, the northerners realized that they could give structure to the teetering ancient world, decaying under the influence of Oriental Hellenism. The old world was educated but tired. The prophets of Apocalypse preached fear. As a consequence, the old word’s essence was fast dissipating. In its last frenzy, it committed a crime. At this apocalyptic moment, it announced its grim teachings. Sustained was the din of the death march of the young people of the north. The Orient held the cross aloft and overshadowed the young people. Although their young bodies were willing to fight under the foreign sun, their souls were defenseless against the poisonous teachings of the Orient. Despite
26[Rahn’s friend was Kurt Eggers (1905-1943), a German author and a National Socialist cultural writer. He volunteered for the Waffen SS and was killed in Russia in 1943. Accord ing to Rahn biographer Hans Juergen Lange, Eggers was in part responsible for Rahn’s suicide when he refused to give him his passport to flee Germany in 1939. —Trans. | enriching the world with its youth, the north was poisoned. The cross prepared its attack. Defeat became the gospel—a belief that damned the strength of will and praised surrender. The old world sucked the blood of the northern peoples because their spirit was too childlike: Its will was not properly focused and its actions were not planned. So the people of the north lost the law. With their calculated experience and hatred of the God-fearing, the prophets of defeat overcame the joy of the living and the bearers of the will. Goodness and honor stopped the young from killing the old, so that they should live among the young and teach. Lessons took the place of action. Because the law was lost, nations lost their sense for following a course and for arrival, life, truth, and greatness. More than once, the silence of the cemetery reigned in the north. But the will to life of the Germanic peoples was so strong that, time and again, it grew in the light. The much-accursed law broke the deadly policies of the cross—only to be covered up at the decisive moment.
So it is, I thought. We should not forget that there were wars against heretics, so-called crusades against heretics. We should never forget this. And my friend continued:
Groups of the weak-willed have erected a dark and somewhat secretive idol: destiny. Destiny once played an important role in the world of northern ideas. Destiny stood as a law over the being, and consequently stood outside the natural order of things. The life of an individual, his clan and his people was enclosed in destiny. To believe in destiny meant to believe in the validity, value, and sense of life. A believer no longer feared death.
His actions were based on the knowledge of the validity of the law that not only survives individual life but forges—exactly through action—those links in a large chain that reaches into the eternity of a people. Whoever believed in destiny recognized his own responsibility for his life, but was also aware that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Destiny was not a secretive, threatening power, but the basis of legality. Whoever consciously trod upon the road of life as a believer in destiny could not tire of struggling with the desire to survive. The knowledge of the validity of the law protected the believer from doubts and insecurity and gave him dignity, the unique and admirable quality of paganism that seems so far from the religions of redemption and seems unattainable. The belief in the validity of this concept of destiny means that mankind utters a happy “yes” to life and death despite all the obvious senselessness of everyday life, and allows him to praise the sunshine despite the fog, night, ice, and snow. To believe in destiny means to live heroically. This attitude can be discerned in the sagas and ballads, as long as we have the insight to see the real meaning of the sonnets through the false works that were created over time.
What did I have to say his words? asked my friend.
“I say yes, an unconditional yes. Read more.” I listened:
The believers in destiny were bound to unity at every manifestation of the law. They knew the natural laws governing the stars and observed life in all its forms. These people could honestly say that they could understand the language of the animals or the rustling of the forests, the singing of the fields and the clap of thunder. They understood the all-comprehensive law. Because the strong were marked by destiny, they were victorious. In this way, the songs of heroes praise the struggle for life. What was everyday life against this? Nothing worth talking about, just sheer irrelevance.
Lucky to have found a fellow seeker, I started to talk about Lucifer and Lucifer’s court; the restlessness of Pytheas; the self-discovery of Hercules, Parzival, and Tannhauser; the earthly Paradise of the Gral; the rose garden; the gay Savoir of the troubadours and Cathars, whose destruction was the work of the cross. Our conversation continued as the night slowly turned into day, until sunshine burst into the room. As we greeted the sun, it was already shining over the roofs of the huge city. In the middle, as if it cut the sun in two, was the spire of a church. I said that the church was like a sun column in which the Prophet Isaiah and the children of Israel were as hated as the proud Lucifer. As it is written in the holy scriptures of the Jews:
And his eyes for the holy one of Israel. . . and he shall not look to the altars, the work of his hands neither shall respect that which his fingers have made neither the groves or the images [idols of Ashera; Ashera is Artemis, Apollo’s sister, the Moon goddess] nor the sun ... At this time the Lord will seek a place for his armies in the highest. . . then the moon shall be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the Lord of the Hosts shall reign in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem and before his ancients gloriously . . . And it shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains ... and many people shall go and say, come ye and let us go up to the mountain of the lord, to the house of the god of Jacob . . . and he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths for out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the lord from Jerusalem.
Because the sun is not bashful but instead is smiling and shining, I was happy in the morning, loyal to our law that is not the law of Zion.
My ferry is plowing through the choppy waves of the North Sea. Very few passengers are on deck. Some doze, while others like me sit in the smoking room. Some time before, I stood on the stern and watched Germany disappear into the distance until Warnemiinde’s lights had melted into the moonshine that illuminated the ferry’s wake, enveloping in tranquillity the air, steam, and ferry and even myself. The beacon of the lighthouse traced its circle. As I looked astern, my eyes fixed upon the Little Dipper and Big Dipper through the lasts and tackle blocks. At one time long ago they were known as Arktos, the Bear. Arktos will show us the way north, as it did for that daring sailor from Marseille, Pytheas, some two thousand years ago.
I am now traveling to Iceland. Only there can I hope to resolve the mystery of the midnight crown, the secret of Lucifer’s crown. I am going to the land of the Edda.
Our ship anchored for a day in the harbor of Leith. In the afternoon, while coal was trimmed, I visited Edinburgh and enjoyed the fabulous view from the castle where Mary Stuart once reigned over Scotland’s largest city, down to the sea, and over to the rough mountain peak of Arthur’s Rock. Because I am on British soil, I should not forget to mention England’s greatest poet, William Shakespeare, and in the same breath the Lollards, those English heretics who also belong to Lucifer’s court. They were accused of teaching evil and—in a ballad composed by the staunchly Catholic Thomas Occleve about the most celebrated Lollard of all, Sir John Oldcastle—they were accused of “holding every knight for unworthy who busies himself with the Bible.” In his lifetime, Oldcastle was reproached for preferring tales of chivalry to biblical scriptures.
Arthur was more important than Abraham or David to English heretics. He was a Parzival/Perceval who was more meaningful than Christ, a Dietrich who was more important than Peter. Priests burned or branded a key on heretics’ foreheads for this reason.
The first record we have of a heretic presence in England goes back to 1160. Thirty farmers and their wives, all of German heritage and language (they were probably Flemish), left their homeland to escape brutal persecution by the west Frankish archbishop of Rheims and were brought before a bishop’s council at Oxford. Because they openly confessed to being heretics, they were flogged and a key was branded into their faces. They were then chased into the fields, where (in the winter) they were stripped to the waist, whipped, branded, and left as helpless prey to a quick and miserable death. They ended with a Dietrich in their hearts and the key of Peter branded on their faces. I think, however, that the heart is more important to God.
Two hundred and seventy years later, the most famous heretic of England, the celebrated Sir John Oldcastle, was executed in a most barbaric way: He was hanged over a smoldering fire with an iron chain wrapped around his body, and he was roasted to death. In the end, he commended his soul into the hands of God. After an agitated life, he had eternal peace. An English monk dedicated an epitaph to the deceased that began: “that Dog of Hell, the archheretic and Lollard John Oldcastle, whose stench rose into the noses of Catholics ... Sir John Oldcastle was a knight in peacetime and a strong man in battle.” He went down in history because he was a heretic. Thanks to the king’s favor, he was openly able to proclaim himself a Lollard. This explains why the clergy did not dare openly and decisively move to arrest him. First, they went after his chaplain, a man named John who had great success as a wan dering preacher, casting an interdict on several churches in which he had preached. In 1413, they began an investigation into some books that had belonged to Oldcastle and that were found at a bookseller. Alas, nothing was turned up. Soon, however, the clergy went to the king with even graver charges: Not only did Oldcastle give shelter to nonordained priests, but he also encouraged them to go out and preach! The king gave him a strong warning, which prompted Oldcastle to take his leave of the royal court, retiring to Colling Castle, not far from Rochester in Kent, where he locked himself away.
Angrily, the king left the Oldcastle affair in the hands of the archbishop. Oldcastle ignored the archbishop’s summons and did not allow any envoy entrance to his castle. He declared that he did not recognize any religious court. Nevertheless, he was publicly summoned, and at least twice the summons was nailed to the door of Colling Castle. Still, Oldcastle did not show up. Ultimately, he was forcibly brought before the religious court under the archbishop, who resorted to the authority of the commander of the Tower. Without answering the questions posed to him, Oldcastle offered to explain his religious beliefs. They were far less heretical than was thought. Obviously, and with some justification, the truth of all this was put into question. His interrogators demanded straight answers to their questions. Once pushed, Oldcastle explained that he had nothing for which to be sorry. He had to answer only to God and look only to God for forgiveness. “Those who wish to judge and condemn me will seduce themselves and wind up in hell. Be careful of them,” said Oldcastle to the public. Then the religious court handed over the lord to the secular arm. Oldcastle became a prisoner in the Tower—but he escaped. For a long time he wandered in the countryside before he was captured and brought before Parliament. There, he was condemned to death for high treason and heresy. And Sir Oldcastle, who was called the “good lord” by the public, ended as I described.
England’s greatest poet, William Shakespeare, was reproached by his
Protestant contemporaries for converting Sir Oldcastle, now a hero of the faith, into that obese, indebted, and womanizing Sir Falstaff. In his epilogue to the second part of the royal drama Henry IV, Shakespeare defended himself: “Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man.” Whatever the truth, Shakespeare certainly falsified the Oldcastle character by making him funny.
Today, it is generally accepted that Shakespeare’s Falstaff episode in Henry IV, Part 2 had as its model, in the spirit of the most hated and dishonest clerical traditions, the drama The Famous Victories of Henry V Furthermore, as we can easily ascertain, “in Shakespeare’s epilogue and other sources, the fat knight was in reality Sir John Oldcastle. The Puritans were upset that the author had made their honored martyr into a comical figure. In the second part of Henry IV, Sir John Oldcastle is introduced as a former page of the duke of Norfolk, Sir Thomas Mowbray [which in fact was true]. This was seen as an insult to Oldcastle, so Shakespeare changed his name to Falstaff.”
We know how the Lollard and knight Sir John Oldcastle died. Before his terrible death, he said with a smile that he would go to heaven in a carriage and rise on the third day. A monk named Thomas Elmham took down Oldcastle’s last words. I believe these words are authentic because I can read in Shakespeare’s work how Falstaff, alias Sir John Oldcastle, died. The proprietor of the tavern was with him in his last hours. She reported:
Nay sure, he’s not in hell; he’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom.... ’A parted ev’n just between twelve and one, ev’n at the turning o’ th’ tide; for after I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his finger’s end, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and ’a babbl’d of green fields. ... So ’a cried out, “God, God, God!” three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him ’a should not think of God; I hop’d there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet. So ’a bade me lay more clothes on his feet. I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone; then I felt to his knees, and so up’ard and up’ard, and all was as cold as any stone.
Like Sir Oldcastle, Falstaff did not go to hell. Nor are the two resting in Abraham’s lap. (My Falstaff expert says that the uneducated tavern keeper meant Abraham’s lap.) After death, Falstaff and Oldcastle went to King Arthur, the king in the north who is named Artus. He keeps he. carriage ready to transport them to Lucifer’s kingdom, to the lights ol the Asphodelos fields. The northern Germans called him Thor, “stretigi h of God,” or just the Great Father. Oldcastle loved books of chivalry ili.ii praised Arthur, Artus, and Dietrich, but not the Old Testament.
Not surprisingly, the other Sir Oldcastle, Falstaff, didn’t trust Jew* When he swore an oath, he would say: “or I am a Jew else, an old Ebrcw Jew.” Falstaff did not believe that life was a vale of tears or (equally senseless) a bowl of cherries. Perhaps, like the Cathars, who saved tin wisdom of weaving and the weaver’s ship in the Middle Ages, False at I thought life was similar to a weaver’s ship.
Who would have thought that the name of the Spanish knight wlm founded the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola, the successor to the chai.u ter Amadis of Gaul and then Jesus, would come up while discus:.uh Sir John Oldcastle’s books on knighthood? Sir Oldcastle grasped th. spirit of knighthood; Loyola understood only the deadly letters ol I li<> books. That old buffoon Alonso Quejana, alias Don Quixote, consult! d his books on knighthood day and night until they destroyed his brain His old nag became the steed Rocinante, comparable to Pegasus <n Alexander’s trustworthy horse, Bucephalos. But then Don Quixote w.h far wiser than any buffoon.
We have left the North Sea and have entered the North Atlantic. Little by little, the lighthouses along the Scottish coast and the high mountains of the Orkney Islands disappear. The sea rises and falls in long and large waves. A fishing boat with a brown sail seems stuck on the horizon. The first breaker slams over the deck. Although it is night, it is so light, like a cloudy day in winter back home. We are traveling toward the midnight sun. Leaning on the railing, I watch for a long while. Back in my cabin, I have started to read and take some notes.
In Spain, as I read in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, a priest, a barber, a housekeeper, and the homeowner’s niece gathered in the house of a man whose brain was so burned by books of chivalry that he had dedicated himself to errant adventure.
He was still sleeping; so the curate asked the niece for the keys of the room where they could find the books, the authors of all the mischief, and right willingly she gave them. They all went in, the housekeeper with them, and found more than a hundred volumes of big books, very well bound, and some other small ones. The moment the housekeeper saw them, she turned around, ran out of the room, and came back immediately with a saucer of holy water and a sprinkler, saying, “Here, your worship, Senor licentiate, sprinkle this room; don’t leave any magician of the many there are in these books to bewitch us in revenge for our plan to banish them from the world.”
The naivete of the housekeeper made the licentiate laugh, and he directed the barber to give him the books one by one to see what they were about, for there might be some among them that did not deserve the penalty of fire. “No,” said the niece, “there is no reason for showing mercy to any of them. Every one of them has done mischief; better to fling them out of the window into the courtyard and set fire to them, or else carry them into the yard and make a bonfire there so that the smoke doesn’t annoy anyone.” The housekeeper said the same, so eager were both of them for the slaughter of those innocents, but the curate would not agree to this without first read-
The first that Master Nicholas put into his hand was Amadis de Gaula. “This seems mysterious,” said the curate, “for I have heard that this was the first book of chivalry to be printed in Spain, and from this are derived all the others. It seems to me, then, that wc ought to condemn it to the flames as the founder of so vile a sect.”
“Nay, sir,” said the barber, “I too, have heard that this is the best of all the books of this kind. Thus, being so singular, it ought to be pardoned.”
“True,” said the curate. “And for that reason, let its life be spared for the present. Let us see that book which is next to it.”
“It is Las sergas de Esplandian, the lawful son of Amadis de Gaula, ” said the barber.
“Then verily,” said the curate, “the merit of the father must not be put down to the account of the son. Take it, mistress house keeper, open the window, fling it into the courtyard, and with it lay the foundation of the pile for the bonfire we will set.”
The housekeeper obeyed with great satisfaction, and the worthy Las sergas de Esplandian went flying into the courtyard to awaii patiently the fire that was in store.
“Proceed,” said the curate.
“This that comes next,” said the barber, “is Amadis of Greece, and indeed I believe that all those on this side are of the same Ama dis lineage.”
“Then to the yard with the lot of them,” said the curate, “for I would burn my father if he were going about in the guise of an errant knight in order to burn as well Queen Pintiquiniestra and the shepherd Darinel and his eclogues and the bedeviled and involved discourses of his author.”
“I am of the same mind,” said the barber.
“And so am I,” added the niece.
“In that case,” said the housekeeper, “here, into the yard with them!” The books were handed to her, and because there were so many of them, she spared herself the staircase, and flung them out-of the window.
Another book was opened, and they saw that it was entitled The Knight of the Cross. “For the sake of the holy name of this book,” said the curate, “its ignorance might be excused; but then, they do say, ‘behind the cross there’s the devil.’ To the fire with it.”
Taking down another book, the barber said, “This is The Mirror of Chivalry.”
“I know, his worship,” said the curate. “That is where Senor Reinaldos of Montalvan figures with his friends and comrades, greater thieves than Cacus and the twelve peers of France, along with the veracious historian Turpin. I am not for condemning them to more than perpetual banishment, however, because at least they have some share in influencing the famous Matteo Boiardo. From the same place as Boiardo, Christian poet Ludovico Ariosto wove his web—and if I find him here, and he is speaking any language other than his own, I shall show him no respect whatever. But if he speaks his own tongue, I will put him upon my head.”
“Well, I have him in Italian,” said the barber, “but I do not understand him.”
“Nor would it be well that you should understand him,” said the curate, “and on that score we might have excused the captain if he had not brought him into Spain and turned him into a Castilian. He robbed him of a great deal of his natural strength, and so do all those who try to turn books written in verse into another language; for, with all the pains they take and all the cleverness they show, they never can reach the level of the originals as they were first produced. In short, I say that this book and all that may be found treating of those French affairs should be thrown into some dry well, until, after more consideration, it is decided what is to be done with them—except Bernardo del Carpio and Ronc-esvalles. These, if they come into my hands, shall pass at once into those of the housekeeper, and from hers into the fire without any reprieve.”
Not caring to tire himself with reading more books of chivalry, he told the housekeeper to take all the big ones and throw them into the courtyard. This charge was given not to one dull or deaf, but to one who enjoyed burning these texts more than weaving the broadest and finest web. Seizing about eight at a time, she flung them out the window.
“But what are we to do with these little books that are left?” asked the barber.
“These are not chivalry, but poetry,” said the curate, and opening one he saw it was Diana of Jorge de Montemayor. Assuming all the others to be of the same sort, he said, “These do not deserve to be burned like the others, for they neither do nor can do the mischief the books of chivalry have done. They are books of entertainment that can hurt no one.”
And the barber went on, “These that come next are The Shepherd of Iberia, Nymphs of Henares, and The Enlightenment of Jealousy. ”
“Then all we have to do,” said the curate, “is to hand them over to the secular arm of the housekeeper—and ask me not why, or we shall never be done.”
That night, the housekeeper burned to ashes all the books that were in the courtyard and in the whole house; and some must have been consumed that deserved preservation in everlasting archives . . .
One of the remedies that the curate and the barber immediately applied to their friend’s disorder was to wall up and plaster the room where the books were, so that when he got up he should not find them. (If the cause was removed, the effect might end.) They could say that a magician had carried them off, room and all, and this was done with great haste. Two days later, Don Quixote arose, and the first thing he did was to go and look at his books, but not finding the room where he had left them, he wandered about, looking for it. He came to the place where the door used to be and tried it with his hands. He turned and twisted his eyes in every direction without saying a word; but after a good while, he asked his housekeeper where the room was that held his books.
The housekeeper, who had already been well instructed as to what she was to answer, asked, “What room or what nothing is your worship looking for? There are neither room nor books in this house now, for the devil himself has carried all away.”
“It was not the devil,” said the niece, “but a magician who came on a cloud one night after the day your worship left, and dismounting from a serpent, which he rode, he entered the room. What he did there I know not, but after a little while, he made off, flying through the roof, and left the house full of smoke. When we went to see what he had done, we saw neither books nor room ...
“But, uncle,” asked the niece, “who mixes you up in these quarrels? Would it not be better to remain at peace in your own house instead of roaming the world looking for better bread than ever came of wheat, never reflecting that many seek wool and come back shorn?”
“Oh, niece of mine,” replied Don Quixote, “how much astray art thou in thy reckoning. ’Ere they shear me I shall have plucked away and stripped off the beards of all who dare to touch only the tip of a hair of mine.”
The two were unwilling to make any further answer, for they saw that his anger was kindling. In short, then, he remained quietly at home for fifteen days without showing any signs of a desire to take up with his former delusions. During this time, he held lively discussions with his two gossips, the curate and the barber, on the point he maintained: Knights-errant were what the world most needed, and he would revive knight-errantry. The curate sometimes contradicted him and sometimes agreed with him, for if he had not observed this precaution, he would have been unable to bring Don Quixote to reason.
I put down Don Quixote for a moment and reflected.
The curate who chose the books for the pyre and would not budge a bit represented the Catholic Church. The “secular arm” was the housekeeper. Who were the niece and the barber? I dare not say. The books that were burned were undoubtedly written by the members of Lucifer’s heretical court.
I continue reading:
Thus setting out, our new-fledged adventurer traveled along, talking to himself and saying, “Who knows but that in time to come, when the veracious history of my famous deeds is made known, the sage who writes it, when he has to set forth my first sally in the early morning, will do it in this way?: ‘Scarce had the rubicund Apollo spread o’er the face of the broad, spacious earth the golden threads of his bright hair; scarce had the little birds of painted plumage attuned their notes to hail with dulcet and mellifluous harmony the coming of the rosy dawn which, deserting the soft couch of her jealous spouse, was appearing to mortals at the gates and balconies of the Manchegan horizon, when the renowned knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, quitting the lazy down, mounted his celebrated steed Rocinante and began to traverse the ancient and famous Campo de Montiel.’” In fact, he was actually traversing this path. He continued, “Happy the age, happy the time in which shall be made known my deeds of fame, worthy to be molded in brass, carved in marble, limned in pictures for a timeless memorial. And thou, oh sage magician, whoever thou art, to whom it shall fall to be the chronicler of this wondrous history, I entreat thee to forget not my good Rocinante, the constant companion of my ways and wanderings.”
So he went on, stringing together these and other absurdities, all in the style taught him by his books, imitating their language as well as he could. And all the while he rode so slowly and the sun climbed so rapidly and with such strength that it was enough to melt his brains if he had any.
Nearly all day he traveled without anything remarkable happening to him—which caused him despair, for he was anxious to encounter someone at once upon whom to try the might of his strong arm. There are writers who say the first adventure he met with was that of Puerto Lapice. Others say it was that of the windmills. What I have ascertained on this point, however, and what I have found written in the annals of La Mancha, is that he was on the road all day, and toward nightfall, he and his hack found themselves dead tired and hungry. He looked all around to see if he could discover any castle or shepherd’s shanty where he might refresh himself and relieve his wants, and he perceived an inn not far from his path. It was as welcome as a star guiding him to the portals, if not the palaces, of his redemption. Quickening his pace, he reached it just as night was setting in.
At the door were standing two young women, girls of the district, as they call them . . . and so with prodigious satisfaction, he rode up to the inn and to the ladies who, upon seeing a man of this sort approaching in full armor and with lance and buckler, were turning in dismay into the inn. Yet Don Quixote, guessing their fear by their flight, raised his pasteboard visor; disclosed his dry, dusty visage; and addressed them with courteous bearing and gentle voice: “Your ladyships need not flee or fear any rudeness, for it belongs not to the order of knighthood which I profess to offer to anyone, including highborn maidens, as your appearance proclaims you to be.”
Don Quixote asked the name of one of the women in order that he might forever know to whom he was beholden for the favor he had received, for he meant to confer upon her some portion of the honor he acquired by the might of his arm. With great humility, she answered that she was called La Tolosa. . . . Don Quixote said in reply that she would do him a favor if from that time forward she assumed the “don” and called herself Dona Tolosa. . . . He then asked the name of the other woman, and she said it was La Molinera, and offered that she was the daughter of a respectable miller of Antequera. Likewise, Don Quixote requested that she adopt the “don” and call herself Doha Molinera.
In this way, Don Quixote, that pure and wise comedian, returned the Tolosa and the Molinera to honor.2 Tolosa is an Albigensian and Molinera or “miller” is a Waldensian. The Cathars were tisserands, or weavers, who were easily found in weavers’ cellars. The Waldenses were also called millers. Milling grain was the same as sacred weaving. In the Tyrol, a knight in the service of Dietrich von Bern left the mill to enter the rose garden and eternity.
I continue:
Sancho Panza [who was also called hombre de bien by Cervantes, or bonhomme] saddled Rocinante, readied Dapple, and stocked his alforjas [the leather pack on a mule] along with which went those of the cousin, likewise well filled. And so, commending themselves to God and bidding farewell to all, they set out, taking the road to the famous cave of Montesinos.
“Now tell me,” said Sancho, “who was the first tumbler in the world?”
“Really, brother,” answered the cousin, “I could not at this moment say positively without having investigated it. I will look it up when I return to my books, and I will satisfy you the next time we meet, for this will not be the last time.”
Sancho continued, “Look here, senor, don’t give yourself any trouble over it, for just this minute I have hit upon what I asked you. The first tumbler in the world, you must know, was Lucifer, when they cast or pitched him out of heaven, for he came tumbling into the bottomless pit.”
“Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “that question and answer are not thine own; thou hast heard them from someone else.”
“Hold your peace, senor,” said Sancho. “If I take to asking questions and answering them, I’ll go on till tomorrow morning. Nay! To ask foolish things and answer nonsense, I needn’t go looking for help from my neighbors.”
“Thou hast said more than thou art aware of, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “for there are some who weary themselves in learning and proving things which, after they are known and proved, are not worth a farthing to either understanding or memory.”
Like Holderlin, Don Quixote, the knight of the rueful countenance, beat Apollo!
-’[Gehenna or Gehenom or Gehinom is Jewish hell or purgatory. The term also appears in the Qu’ran. —Trans.\
[Tolosa is l lie Occitan name for the city of Toulouse. —Trans. ]