"On the evening of the summer solstice in Prague in 1585, a group of men made their way from a house on Bethlehem Square then known as the House at the Green Mound. The owner of the house was one Thaddeus Hajek, sometimes also called by his Latinized name Hagecius. Hajek was physician to Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, nephew of Philip II, King of Spain. In addition to his appointment as physician to Rudolf, who had moved the court of the Holy Roman Empire from Vienna to Prague, Hajek was regarded as one of the leading astronomers in Central Europe, renowned both for the accuracy of his observations, along with Tycho Brahe, of the famous Nova sighting of 1572, and for his use of clocks. In keeping with his Roman Catholic monarch's encouragement of religious tolerance and interesting research, Hajek was a Protestant. He had inherited the house from the alchemist Simon Bakalar.
"The Square was one of the more curious locations in a city that under Rudolf was becoming increasingly known for curiosities. Although only a few minutes' walk from the Old Town Square, Bethlehem Square was located on the edge of a pauper district called Prague Venice that had been the object of reforming zeal since the days of Charles IV. It had developed into a Renaissance melting pot, home at various stages in its history to brothels, pubs, cutpurses, religiously motivated projects for civic and moral reform, such as 'Jerusalem' (a home for fallen women), crackpot healing methods, dubious potions and elixirs, and some of the most ground breaking scholarship and thought of the entire Renaissance era. Here was humanity in all its unsanitized complexity, with squalor and glory living side by side. This was the age of Shakespeare, the supreme master at distilling this terrifying, ungainly raw material of illumination and darkness, enlightenment and obscurity into a guiding vision of the human that married the light with the shadows.
"The ill starred John Dee, a countryman and contemporary of Shakespeare, was at that time still in favour with his gracious Queen Elizabeth and Emperor Rudolf II. He was among the party accompanying Taddheus Hajek that evening. In 1585, all still appeared to be well with Dr John Dee. His son Michael had been born in Prague and baptized only three months earlier. Having summoned a vision of Michael the Archangel, Dee had been instructed by the latter to name his son after him. Another in that small Solstice company was Emericus Sontag. Sontag had been assigned to assist Dee in his work by the Polish prince, Lord Albert Laski of Sieradz, who had traveled extensively in Europe, including a visit to the court of Queen Elizabeth.
"Like Hajek, Dee also counted as a Protestant, but his beliefs and practices were more along the lines of his Queen's own creed, which asserted: "There is only one Jesus Christ. The rest is dispute over trifles."
Dee was, it is true, openly critical of the institution of the Catholic Church, but this did not necessarily mean that he rejected the Catholic faith. On the contrary, his diaries reveal a pious man who became increasingly deeply attached to Catholic ritual, as, ironically enough, Henry VIII himself had been, despite having set himself up as Defender of the Faith in the teeth of the authority of Rome. There was far less of a real doctrinal and ideological divide between Catholic and Protestant in the Elizabethan Age, than a need on the part of certain interest groups to cultivate and underscore such a divide in the interests of particular ruling houses and power groups in the Europe of that time. Where the interests of power divide, the ideologies must be brought into line with them.
"Dee believed in a 'truth' that was not only a matter of faith alone, however important that might be, but also of learning and reason. What one believed needed, in his view, to be confirmed by science. Dee thus stood with at least one foot on the threshold of the Age of Enlightenment. He cherished the dream of a Europe undivided by religious schism and intolerance. Dee's reputation as an alchemist and scholar, despite his bold critical visions of Rudolf's reign, had earned him the favour and support of Rudolf for the time being. However Dee's idealism and visions of tolerance were already starting to bring about his undoing. Regular reports of Dee's activities on Bethlehem Square and at court in Prague were being delivered to San Clemente, the Spanish Ambassador to Rudolf's court, and further afield, to Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's spymaster back in England. Meanwhile the English Hospice in Rome, later reinvented as the English College, which operated as something of a training centre for Catholic missionaries and spies, sought to offset Dee's potentially damaging influence by dubbing him "a married priest, given to magic and uncanny arts." If Dee could not be coerced into supporting the cause of Habsburg, and therefore Roman Catholic hegemony in Central Europe, then the only recourse was to discredit him.
"Although Dee had one foot in the Age of Enlightenment on that summer solstice evening, his other foot was walking in a place of murky shadows. To his left was the man he now knew as Edward Kelley, deprecatingly dubbed Il Zoppo, 'the cripple', by one Papal official. Kelley had turned up as a disfigured itinerant at Dee's house in Mortlake three years earlier in 1582. A series of famines in the late 1570s, combined with the unsettling effects on the economy of an influx of large quantities of gold and silver from the New World, had led to a rapid increase in destitution and urbanization in England. Just as the silver miners of Saxony to the north of Bohemia were facing economic catastrophe, so too the roads of Elizabethan England were frequented by dispossessed itinerants seeking their fortunes in London, or wherever else they could eke out a living.
"During Dee's first encounter at his home in Mortlake with this mysterious hooded visitor, the latter had introduced himself as Talbot, perhaps to impress Dee with a borrowed pedigree from Lancashire, or perhaps to conceal his true name of Edward Kelley because he was in trouble with the law. One version of the story is that Kelley had been surviving as a conman, had managed to divest a woman of her jewellery, and was being pursued in an attempt to retrieve the jewels. Kelley is described as having a disreputable appearance. In addition to the limp he was said to have a deformed ear. A possible explanation for this is that the lopping off of an ear was the usual punishment for forging or adulterating coins. The skin of his face was also pockmarked, perhaps as a result of illness, or from having had stones hurled at him while being punished in the stocks. Even less salubrious versions of Talbot's career prior to meeting Dee have him practicing necromancy in Lancashire. His name was also linked with Thomas Langton, a local squire in Lancashire whose interest in the occult led him to arrange for Kelley's release.
"It may be, therefore, that Kelley's principal intention on arriving at Dee's house in Mortlake was no more than to lie low with his booty, the jewels conned from the unnamed lady. Dee makes no reference to this alleged incident in his diary, although three months after the man's arrival Dee had come to the conclusion that Talbot was a charlatan. Talbot, or Kelley, had been introduced to Dee by a Mr. Clerkson, an agent for 'skryers', or 'cunning men', who could summon spirits in return for bed or board.
"Fraud or no, Edward Kelley was an unusually well educated person for one of such dubious status, and also seems to have been determined to follow Dee to Bohemia. Why Dee himself, having exposed the man's fraudulent past, would agree to take him and work with him, is a question that remains unanswered. Once established among the alchemical fraternity of Prague, Kelley went on to become famous for his 'alchemical projections', which involved the use of a mysterious magic powder. Pursued there doggedly by the man from England who had been entrusted with the retrieval of the lady's jewels, Kelley is reputed to have used this powder to produce two thousand pounds' worth of gold, handing this over with a sample of the powder to the man in recompense for the booty. This money was apparently used to purchase substantial estates in Warwickshire. The man is also said to have found a piece of flint on these estates and turned it into a huge diamond.
"On this particular summer solstice evening, however, we find Edward Kelley walking alongside Dr John Dee, together with Taddheus Hajek and Emericus Sontag, out of Bethlehem Square and through the adjoining streets to the tower of the Old Town Bridge. It is shortly before eight in the evening and sunset is approaching as they make their way quietly, but with some suppressed excitement.
"Being among the most learned scholars of their age, Dee and his companions will have been familiar with the custom of the Etruscans, later adopted by the Romans, of basing the construction of a settlement on the demarcation of a cross. An Etruscan priest or augur would mark out two intersecting lines, at the centre of which a hole would be dug in the ground, known in Latin as a mundus, using a curved holy stick called a lituus, which looked rather like a bishop's crosier. In ancient times, before subsequent ages became characterized by an increasing separation of the sacred and secular, this demarcation of the cross with two intersecting lines, called in Latin the cardo and the decumanus respectively, signified a cult division not only of the earthly space on the ground, but also of the heavenly sphere above it, into quadrants, each of which had a significance. Using this ceremonially established Holy Cross, a sacred circle could be drawn around the planned circumference of the city in the places where the moat and fortifications would later be constructed. Nor was the location of the city gates left to chance. The main road, or via principalis, which led into a Roman military camp, corresponded to the cardo line, while the line perpendicular to it was analogous to the decumanus. Some military camps, especially on the outskirts of the Roman Empire, later developed into towns or cities with this layout. Vienna, Budapest and Cologne, for example, were all originally planned along these fundamental lines.
"It should not surprise us to hear mention of the expression 'Holy Cross' in connection with the work of ancient, prechristian augurs and priests in the rituals associated with the planning of a military camp or town. The procedures and practices of Roman geodesists have been preserved in the rites of the Roman Catholic Church in the demarcation, limitation and blessing of cemeteries as holy ground, for example.
"It was already known to the party that similar geodesic practices, such as cross formation, had been employed in important churches connected with monasteries founded by Charles IV in Prague. The ground plans of these buildings were analogous to cruciform sacred buildings in Hildesheim and Paderborn. For John Dee and his companions in the 1580s, the medieval revival of these ancient sacred ground plans, and the sacred, harmonious division of earthly and heavenly space, were of highly topical interest. In 1527 the German painter Durer had drawn a plan for an ideal city very reminiscent of the concept underlying the structure of Prague. Only a generation before this summer solstice night, Leonardo da Vinci had drawn up a plan for Imola, a circular variant on this ancient ground plan. Most of these drew some inspiration from the ideal state of Atlantida formulated in the 4th century BC by the Greek philosopher Plato.
"The Romanesque Rotunda of the Holy Cross, a church they had passed only a stone's throw from Bethlehem Square, thus marked the geodesic centre of Prague, the point of intersection between the cardo and the decumanus. This spot was, as Dee and his alchemist companions well knew, the magical centre of the city. For them, the fact that the alchemist Simon Bakalar had chosen to live in a house as close as possible to that centre, and then to bequeath it to Taddheus Hajek, was a decision that required no further explanation. Bethlehem Square lay at the centre of the inscribed circle of Prague, at the heart of a microcosm. But where there is heaven, there is earth, and where there is power and light, there is also refuse and corruptibility. Dee and Kelley walked side by side.
"A cross drawn inside a circle traditionally symbolizes the Earth, forming four quadrants indicating the basic points of the compass. By further dividing these quadrants into thirds, twelve sections are created, representing the twelve signs of the zodiac, which proceed in anticlockwise direction from the first zodiacal sign of Aries, which forms the first section. In Prague, therefore, the four fixed signs of the zodiac are located in the directions of the main points of the compass: Taurus in the north, Leo in the west, Scorpio in the south and Aquarius in the east.
"The world would have to wait another seventeen years for Campanella's essay on the Sun State or Civitas Solis, published first in Italian in 1602 and in Latin in 1613. In this essay Campanella offers his inspiring vision of the ideal town: "When they built their city, they laid down the fixed signs at the four points of the compass." Campanella may have been describing the horoscope of Heliopolis, a city founded by Aristonicus on 2nd August 133 BCE.
"What Dee and his learned companions could see, as they looked out from the tower towards Prague Castle, waiting for the sun to set on that summer solstice evening, was that they now found themselves in a living ideal city. Two centuries earlier, Charles IV had left nothing to chance when founding it. The Old Town Bridge, now called the Charles Bridge after its founder, was at that time not only in practical terms the only bridge over the river Moldau (Vltava) in that age, but also represented the bridge between the astrological signs of Taurus and Gemini as laid down in the ground plan of the city, and in keeping with Charles IV's own personal horoscope, in which the mutable signs, such as Gemini, were predominant. There was a firm belief among the learned scholars of that time, for example, that the sequence of prime numbers, 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9, represented a particularly powerful and propitious combination that would protect and enshrine Charles' beloved city. Finding himself able, therefore, to lay the foundation stone for the bridge in the year 1357, he ensured that the stone would be laid on the 9th July, at 5.31 am, thus ensuring both a forward and reverse sequence of the propitious numbers 1,3,5,7,9 and 9,7,5,3,1. His city was conceived as a foundation made both on earth and in the heavens, expressed in sacred mathematics, a New Jerusalem.
"Equally significantly, when Charles IV founded Prague he took care to ensure that sacred relics were located at key places within his city. As Dee and Kelley had learned from Hajek, the remains of St Vitus, for whom the Cathedral in the Castle precincts was named, were buried behind the Cathedral presbytery. At first sight, the choice of St. Vitus, who was not a popular saint in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, might have seemed an odd one. Unless one knew that the name Vit, Vitus in Latin, was a derivation of the ancient Slavonic god Svantovit, the supreme god of Slavonic mythology.
"In ancient times a Slav prophetess or sibyl called Libuse, had seen a vision while standing on the hill of Vysehrad, south of the present Castle, or perhaps at the modern day site of Sarka. She saw a city built on seven hills whose glory would reach to the stars. The triangular ground plan of the historic core of Prague is today sometimes said to reflect the tripod of Libuse the prophetess. But concealed within the architecture of the city are no less than four triangles, one isosceles and three equilateral ones, as well as three crosses. The triangles represent the four elemental triangles of the astrological structure of the zodiac. The triangles and crosses together make up seven points, all marked by important buildings. The mystery of the seven points dates back to early Slavonic times, when the calendar was based on measurements of the rising and setting sun on the local horizon, particularly at the equinoxes and solstices. Ancient Slavonic religion took the form of a solstitial cult. Even by Romanesque times such a calendar would have been regarded as an anachronism, and yet we find it built into the very architecture of Prague and being honoured by each succeeding generation of Prague architects, not only through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but into the Baroque era. What Hajek, Dee, Kelley and Sontag were witnessing was not merely a wonder of architecture, but an unbroken line of ancient Slavonic culture that had survived from the prechristian era through to their own day. Prague's glory not only reached up to the stars, but was even clothed in them.
"Standing looking out over the River Vltava and Hradcany Castle, they saw at 20.13 in the evening how the setting sun of the summer solstice, viewed from the Old Town Bridge tower, lit up the main spire of the Cathedral, then the second tower to its right at 20.20. At 20.27 it settled on the ridge of the Cathedral roof. Finally, the last visible beams of the sun settled directly over the place where the relics of St. Vitus were entombed, just before darkness fell on the city."
Eva closed her book and looked up. She loved the way you could unfold a whole world in a book, or close it and open it at will in all its fullness, as if time were an irrelevance. There was a hum of excited voices below the window of the first floor cafe. A crowd was beginning to form in front of the astrological clock on the Old Town Square in readiness for the chiming of the hour, when the figures of the twelve apostles would appear and circulate above the clock face. A sense of richness and immediacy, a deep fabric of meaning, enfolded her. Her whole sense of self had been reshaped in this place. It was odd how the specifics in the structure and history of this city had become for her a catalyst for something timeless against which all she now experienced was increasingly being measured. The deeper she went into this place, the more substance she found in herself and the less she found in the trappings of the life she appeared to lead on the surface. She felt lit up from within. In this city, even nightfall was a tribute to light.
聚合中文网 阅读好时光 www.juhezwn.com
小提示:漏章、缺章、错字过多试试导航栏右上角的源