Rain, Riddles, and the Race to Save Europa
An Excerpt from Gothic Olympus by Christian Chensvold
From Christian Chensvold, the author of the “Decadent Chronicles” series in Arktos Journal, comes this sneak peek into his epic novel Gothic Olympus — coming soon on February 27th from Arktos.
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On a rainy night in 1899, Julien Stanwyck has been summoned to the island of Poveglia — the most haunted place on earth — in the fog-shrouded lagoon of Venice. His twisting and turning journey from New York into the shadows of the Old Continent has now brought him to meet a mysterious magus, Zapfe, who reveals Julien’s true identity and prepares him to embark on his heroic mission to seek the old gods. The fate of the people of Europa — and the life of Julien’s enchanting companion, Zoe — hangs in the balance.
It was nearly 7 by the time Julien reached the small island in the Venetian lagoon, as he’d been forced to solicit six gondoliers before one finally agreed to ferry him. A mist fell in the twilight, and there was not a soul around, but the tower was easy enough to spot. He walked past unlit buildings until he reached it, where he found a lone figure leaning against the tower with a large hat pulled over his head, concealing his face. It could only be one person.
“Where’s Zoe?” asked Julien.
“In the Alps. Hard at work saving Europa. As we all are.”
“Who the hell are you people?” demanded Julien, advancing closer.
“Once we stood at the center of our civilization,” said the man known as Zapfe. “Then when the theater of action shifted from Hellas to Rome, the people lost their way, the empire fell, and amid the ruins they embraced the story of the foreign savior. We preserved the Primordial Tradition through six centuries of the Dark Ages, and, in the Medieval period, persecuted by the church of the Hebrew god, we became known as The Order of the Sword and Rose. Now there is too much at stake for us to bother with what we are called.”
Julien asked whether Zoe was ever coming to Venice, and Zapfe shook his head negatively. When Julien expressed the urge to strangle him then and there, Zapfe replied that then Julien would definitely never see Zoe again.
“Are you some kind of necromancer?” Julien shouted, grabbing Zapfe by the lapels. “Tell me what you’ve done with her!”
Unthreatened, Zapfe said that this was the very reason Julien had been chosen. He had courage and devotion, and would soon learn to control his rage and discover his dormant powers. Julien released his grip, but continued to shine his piercing gaze upon the man, who suggested they get out of the rain, and that it was easier to simply show him the cosmic drama in which he was now involved. Zapfe led him to a nondescript building where they descended a spiral staircase into a workshop where anonymous men tinkered with strange contraptions, bowing their heads to the magus as he passed, and eyeing Julien with curiosity and awe.
“What is this island?” asked Julien. “Why is no one here?”
Removing his hat to reveal his high brow and gray goatee, Zapfe explained that Poveglia was the most haunted place in all the world, and that Christian superstition had worked to their advantage. They had maintained a magical workshop there for two centuries, but now the time had come to face the crisis of the entire continent.
“To receive divine inspiration and create works of art,” said Zapfe, offering Julien a seat at a workbench, “this is a noble thing and something we can do. To become initiated into the Mysteries, smelting vital energies to be reborn not as a human powered by spirit, but as a spirit in the form of a human — this magnum opus of alchemy is something we can do. To guard the flame of our ancestors, coalesced out of the ether at the top of the world in the land of Hyperborea, to preserve the wisdom of Atlantis and Hellas, when men and gods lived in communion and our race lived alone, untainted by the influence of others — whether as slaves, masters, or equals — to project images into the Astral Light and create magical chains in the minds of men — all this we can do.”
“It sounds like you can do anything,” said Julien wryly.
“Alas, we cannot. Zoe Wingate can see the Astral Light, which she often did from an early age without understanding her ability. In our alpine castle, and this workshop, we have assembled every kind of initiate with gifts like hers. We have alchemists, Neoplatonists, occultists, women gifted in clairvoyance, visionary artists — what we don’t have, and have waited for so patiently, is a hero.”
Julien scoffed, yet his body began to tingle.
The word “hero” comes from the Greek, meaning “protector” or “defender,” Zapfe explained, and once referred to a man who had been forged by the divine science of the Royal Art. “Your stars signal the undertaking for which you are destined, which is the reason you have the stars in the first place. You have the face of a god and the voice of an angel, whose troubled art is that of a race facing extinction. You have the instincts of a warrior, the reflection of a philosopher, the soul of a poet, and the sensibility of a voluptuary — though obviously that will have to be sacrificed. There’s only one man in the world with nothing to lose because he’s already lost everything, whose mother sacrificed herself that her son might one day be king.”
“Then I am cursed,” said Julien, sick with confusion.
“In a certain way, yes. To be chosen is a kind of curse. Consider your lifelong obsession with aristocracy, the noble identity of your true father, your journey to the Old World, the chance meeting with Zoe, which was not chance but destiny. You acquired earthly nobility only to lose it, and stand now on the threshold of true acquired nobility, which is nothing less than conditioned immortality.”
Julien begged him to stop, pleading that he was just a tormented artist, a court jester with a handsome face. But Zapfe said that in his ignorance Julien did not realize that his birth had been caused by things beyond his understanding.
“Did your father not say in his letter that an inexplicable force had caused him to make love with your mother, which her soul had already accepted, even though her human personality did not comprehend it?” Zapfe reasoned. “Have you not always dreamed of heroic epochs, despised the world of money and materialism, even as you reveled in its spoils? Stop resisting what you know to be true. Look at where you are: in a magical workshop in Venice, falsely accused of killing a royal, in a living nightmare of mass-hysteria. Your Tarot spread with Zoe was correct; we have all seen in the Astral Light that you have been not only called but chosen.”
“But chosen for what?” Julien asked, his resistance faltering.
Zapfe sighed, paused, and said “theurgy.” After receiving a befuddled look from Julien, he explained that it was from the Greek for divine workings.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we need you to re-establish contact with the old gods.” Zapfe explained that Julien must go to Hellas, search the islands, find the slumbering gods of Olympus, and plead for their assistance. They would not give up on the land of Europa if a hero successfully found them.”
“But how would I…? Where would I even…?”
Zapfe calmed Julien, asking whether he still possessed the books his father had left him. Julien opened his rucksack and lay them on the table, saying that he had wanted to destroy them a hundred times but could not bring himself to do it.
“Because you solved the riddle?” asked Zapfe.
“No,” replied Julien, “because I could not.”
“Then I shall help you,” said Zapfe, “because you cannot embark until you have a heading and understand how the navigation system works.”
“Navigation system?”
“Never mind that for now. The puzzle lies in the books’ titles. Look beyond rationality, into the cosmic code of destiny.”
Julien stared at the three books lying on the table:
Les Fleurs Du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
Ion: An Investigation into the Power of Electricity by Ronald Carter
Pygmies: Quest for the Lost Little People by Gerald McClosky
Slowly Julien’s vision began to separate the wheat from the chaff, the gross from the subtle, everything that wasn’t David, as Michelangelo said, from the block of marble in which David lay imprisoned.
Pygmies: Quest for the Lost ….… Les Fleurs du Mal…
…. Ion: An Investigation into the Power…
Zapfe watched closely as Julien continued meditating on the titles as if in trance:
Pygmies: Quest….
… du Mal…
… Ion: An Investigation…
“Yes,” Zapfe said encouragingly, “You’ve almost got it…”
PYGmies… du MALION
“Pygmalion,” Julien blurted out, breaking his trance. “Pygmalion? Is that it?”
Zapfe smiled, said that Julien would no longer be needing the books, and gave them to an attendant. “Books have a destiny of their own,” he explained, “for they are filled with words, and words are a form of magic, which is why it is said that in the beginning was the Word. At some point the late Comte de la Tour-Abolie received the books, though I couldn’t tell you how. He was unable to solve the riddle, but I did. Yet in the magical dimension where we perform our operations, we are often obliged to be as silent as the Sphinx. I did not reveal the answer, nor did I tell your father what to do with the books, because I understood that a higher intelligence was at work. It was he who devised the hiding place inside the piano, bolted to the floor, knowing that you, too, would one day come to the château and, in striking the Devil’s Interval, release the latch.”
When Julien protested that he still had no idea what Pygmalion meant, Zapfe said that the ways of the gods were mysterious and that man could only understand the sacred science of theurgy up to a point. Pygmalion was merely a heading; the navigation system would do the rest.
Zapfe snapped his fingers and an attendant handed him a cloth of purple and gold, which he unwrapped to reveal a large sea shell he called a magic compass. “This is believed to have belonged to the great Hermes Trismegistus himself, its origins going back through Hellas and Egypt, to the time before the Parthenon, before even the Great Pyramid. It was lost for centuries after the fall of Rome, but was returned to us by the Arabs, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude.”
Julien took the shell in his hands and asked how it worked.
“Hermes, in his lower form, is known as the messenger god,” explained Zapfe, “ruling over communication through the fast-moving planet Mercury, whose energy drives the miraculous creation known as human consciousness. Hermes is considered the bridge between heaven and earth, between the mortal part of man and his spirit. The vibrational frequency of consciousness where the divine realm begins — above the seven planetary metals corresponding to the seven visible astral bodies in the sky, which in turn correspond to the seven energy wheels, or clusters of intense nervous-system energy — is that of Neptune. This frequency rules the archetypal imagination. Can you say for certain where your music and poetry comes from?”
“No,” replied Julien. “I’ve chased my muse my whole life and she always disappears.”
“Neptune is the frequency at which she enters your mind and to which she returns,” said Zapfe. “Common people never experience it, artists such as you channel it instinctively without understanding how, and initiates can summon it at will and control the images it produces. This is why the planet Neptune is said to be the god of the unseen world of the sea, and why Hermes Trismegistus owned this shell. This shell is a consecrated communication device between our world and the overworld, and is capable of passing through the Neptunian frequency to the Olympian realm. Do we not tell children that one can hear the roar of the sea when pressing a seashell to one’s ear?”
Julien placed the shell to his ear and could hear the imaginary roar of the ocean, just as he had as a boy at school.
“The shell can also receive communications,” Zapfe continued. “All you need to do is speak your intention and it will guide your way through divine magic.”
But what Julien could not fathom was where they would find a captain willing to take him from island to island while he talked to a sea shell, without branding him a lunatic and throwing him overboard.
“Oh, no one can know what you’re doing,” said Zapfe. “Also, you won’t exactly… well, you’re probably not going to be on earth. We’re not entirely sure, which is why we need a hero. Consider that when you sleep your body remains on earth, but you enter a different state of consciousness where dreams take place. Your mind experiences these dreams as real, and awakening from them is often a shock. It will probably be something like that, the ancient state of being called mag, from which we get the term magic. You slipped into it just now when you solved the riddle of Pygmalion.”
Assuming he would even accept the mission, Julien could not understand whether he would actually be going to Hellas or just slipping into a trance and imagining it. Zapfe said that it would likely be a combination of both, that he would be crossing the Neptunian realm physically through the ocean, and metaphysically through its vibrational frequency in the Astral Light. “If our calculations are correct, you will enter a twilight realm of Being where gods and men once lived together in communion, a dimension outside of space and time because it lives in eternity, and this is where you will find Olympus. Now, let me show you what will take you to the threshold.”
Zapfe wrapped the shell in the ancient cloth, placed it inside Julien’s rucksack, and handed it to him with a nod. He crossed the workshop with Julien in tow, and the pair took a staircase down to a dank chamber where a short stone dock extended along an underground canal. To the right the water of the canal lapped against the gray stones, while to the left it led through a Gothic-shaped opening into a dark tunnel and out into the Venetian lagoon. Zapfe snapped his fingers once again, and a dozen attendants set to work amid the sound of cranking gears and jostling cables until the black water began to ripple, bubble, and finally yield up a fantastic brass-colored vessel some 20 feet long, which came to a rest, floating half-submerged on the surface of the water.
“Behold your submersible watercraft,” said Zapfe. “Man spent centuries seeking to manifest it until Jules Verne, the author of the fantastic, birthed one from his imagination in 1869, calling it The Nautilus. A magical chain in the Astral Light was created by way of Verne’s description and the illustrations that accompanied his book 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. By accessing this chain on the subtle plane we were able to glimpse the technics of the future, which we combined with our own divinely inspired images received through the Universal Plastic Medium. We have been working on this watercraft ever since, not knowing the hero who would eventually pilot it. Zoe gave the ship its name: the Scorpitaria.”
Nauseated at the very sight of the ship, Julien said that the name meant nothing to him. Zapfe explained that it was a combination of “Scorpio” and “Sagittarius,” and that it represented the Venus and Mercury placements in his birth chart — the stars that would help guide him, along with the sea shell of Hermes.
“Think back to your time with Zoe,” expounded Zapfe. “Did she not guess you were born under the sign of Aries? And did she not also manage to pull the exact date from you? And later, in a completely separate conversation, did she not inquire whether you had been born in New York, not just raised there? From that she had nearly all she needed; the last detail was the time of your birth, which you yourself offered when you said that you took your first breath on the last stroke of midnight. Your sun is in Aries, ruled by the planet Mars, which governs action, assertion, and war. And you have it in the Fourth House, which represents history, heritage and home.”
“I have no home,” Julien said coldly.
“You’re still thinking with your human intellect,” countered Zapfe, “not the divine intelligence which is its root and source…”
Julien pleaded for time to absorb everything, but Zapfe said that time was something they didn’t have.
“You must know by direct intuitive perception,” he said, “beyond all personal desires, hopes, and fears, that this is what you must do. You must do it right now, for Zoe.”
“What do you mean for Zoe?” asked Julien with concern.
Zapfe explained that the past 18 months had been very hard on her. While she was extremely sensitive as a prophetess, in order to be of greater use in the cosmic confrontation unfolding it was necessary to undergo the process of alchemy. This was difficult enough for a man — many abandoned the process and went mad or died — but it was even harder for a woman. “Her entire being has to be repolarized from Mother Earth to Father Sky, to belong not to Life but to Being, not to vital energies but the Spirit that gives form to such energies through divine intelligence. I’m afraid she is trapped in the putrefactio state, and that’s why we need the golden apple.”
Julien was too overwhelmed to even react.
“The Apple of the Hesperides,” Zapfe said. “Somewhere in Hellas. You’ll find it. One will suffice. Unbitten, please.”
Julien stared at the bronze-colored submersible. “You have no idea what I went through on that damned ocean liner,” he sighed. “I’ll die of claustrophobic hyperventilation before I reach Sardinia.”
Zapfe burst out laughing, grabbed the iron step-handles on the side of the Scorpitaria, and climbed on top. With a scowl of trepidation, Julien followed to receive a lesson in how the ship was powered. Zapfe explained that sunlight was absorbed from the god Apollo through a kind of circulatory system of narrow pipes containing an amber fluid that fed the motor. Then Zapfe knelt and turned the handle on the hatch, showing how the interior was quite comfortable and suited to Julien’s taste, with a leather seat and turndown desk for reading and writing, animal hides and cushions for sleeping on the vessel’s floor, and images of Hellenic heroes painted on the walls between the portholes. “There’s clothing, wine, water, figs, smoked meat… and see up there? That’s the golden pedestal on which you place the navigation shell. There’s also a philter with an elixir to calm your nerves when it submerges for the first time.”
Julien marveled at the creation with awe and dread while, unbeknownst to him, Zapfe gestured to an assistant. Moments later there was a great deal of shouting and marching footsteps.
“Herr Zapfe!” a man shouted from across the dock. “The Chosen One must have been followed from the Lido. A dozen gondolas just landed on the island, filled with officers of the Arma dei Carabinieri!”
“What are they?” asked Julien tensely.
“Military police. You’ve got to hide.”
Julien asked whether there was another way out, but Zapfe shook his head. Eyeing the canal, Julien said he would swim for it, but Zapfe said that it was too far and he would drown. All the attendants were running around the workshop in great distress, shouting that the police were barging through the door upstairs.
“Quick!” Zapfe said. “We’ll submerge the vessel and hide you underwater. It’s your only chance!”
Julien screamed in rage and climbed inside the Scorpitaria. Zapfe ordered him to place the sea shell on the pedestal by the aperture at the bow. Julien rushed astern.
“The other way!” shouted Zapfe. “Hurry, we can’t stall them much longer. And we can’t lower you until you put the shell on the pedestal and say, ‘Take me to Pygmalion.’”
When Julien had done as he was told the amber pipes began to glow and the propulsion motor started to whirr. Zapfe slammed the hatch shut, turned the handle, and climbed off the ship as it began to submerge.
“It’s making all kinds of noise!” Julien shouted through the porthole, the vessel already heading towards the opening leading to the lagoon.
“Julien,” Zapfe replied from the dock with a stroke of his goatee, “I’d take that elixir now if I were you.”
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This has been an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Gothic Olympus by Christian Chensvold, coming soon from Arktos on February 27th—
Pre-order Gothic Olympus on Amazon or directly from Arktos:
This made me dream as when I was an adolescent reading occultism, Verne, and Poe. Thanks! Can’t wait to read the whole thing.