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Silence was not required, but Tommaso had urged the necessity of maintaining a receptive mental state, and Urban obligingly stood mute throughout the operation. Kneeling like a mason, Tommaso filled the cracks around the door with a clay that had been excavated from the banks of the Tiber at a propitious hour. “The spiritus is a vapor subtler than the common air,” he had explained, “and will escape the room through the smallest opening.” He finished the task with more beeswax, smoothing away the smallest ridges. Rising with an effort, he turned to the prelate and gestured toward the tables, where the devices and substances they would employ were laid out like the instruments of Eucharist.

All magical exercise consists of directing oneself to the spheres, the stars, the higher worlds or to the devils by means of various kinds of veneration and worship and submissiveness and humiliation, wrote Ibn Khaldun, a hundred years before Ficino. Magical exercise is thus devotion and adoration directed at beings other than God.… Sorcery is unbelief. And Ficino would not have disputed one word of it, save perhaps for diaboli rather than animae, up until that last sentence. And even there, thought Tommaso as he prepared the rose vinegar, Cosimo’s pet platonist might have acknowledged (in an unwindowed chamber of his soul) that to entreat favour of these celestial creatures was to worship strange gods; his lifelong doctrine of the soul’s ascent toward a union with God dissolved like a hide that was tawed in too harsh an agent.

You will not denature my faith, thought Tommaso as he poured the vinegar over laurel branches and then shook them at the four corners of the room. Animae celestes, I neither fear nor petition you. The flux of powers that flows through you originates in God, and you can no more impede it than the rock in the river can deflect the torrents that race past.

Urban, following Tommaso’s instructions, was sprinkling the room with aromatic substances from a series of sealed containers: liquids, then powders, leaving his fingertips colored with a dark pigment Tommaso had told him not to wipe clean. When he was finished, they lit a brazier at the room’s center and burnt myrtle, rosemary, and cypress, upon which Tommaso finally threw the laurel branches, which hissed and produced an eye-stinging smoke. As the room dimmed, the two men brought forth white silken cloths and draped them over the wall hangings, then they brought forth branches and decorated the room until it looked like a shrine to a forest god.

Two candles were lit, representing the sun and the moon, then five torches for the remaining planets. All other lights were now extinguished, and the chamber was illuminated only by Tommaso’s simulacrum of the heavens, intact and proportional as the real heavens (deformed by the imminent eclipse) were not. With a gesture from Tommaso, two of the men raised their instruments, a lyre and a flute, and the third stood. A youth, he began a recitare in the half-chant, half-song that Tommaso had coached him in, an Orphic Hymn determined to be Jovial in character. Ficino had placed greater importance on the words of his astrological songs than on the music, but 140 years of cultural rinascita had brought the art of music out of the dark ages, and Tommaso had taken care to commission the finest composers to produce melodies of Jovian and Venerean character, which would fill the chamber and allow it to vibrate in harmonic sympathy with the celestial powers of those planets.

The chamber prepared, Tommaso commenced the operation itself. Under his direction, Urban inscribed images upon the smooth surfaces of stones, symbols of the sun, Jove, and Venus. He was bade to contemplate these talismans, to look through them to the face of God beyond. (This last instruction was merely a precaution against the charge of idolatry; by attuning his soul to that of the appropriate planets, the pontiff would facilitate the flow of beneficence to himself. It would work equally well if the image of Venus inspired thoughts of the Pope’s mistress.) He drew the images upon paper made from the fibers of special plants, with inks compounded of selected herbs. Together the two men ate from loaves of specially prepared grain, then drank astrologically distilled liquors.

It is not like a mass, Tommaso had assured His Holiness, realizing how the protocols sounded like one; there is no ceremony. After sufficient attunement and exposure, the Pope will have replenished his spiritus from the heavenly flux, like a cistern that has slowly filled. Then, their task completed, they simply close up shop and leave. Should the musicians’ fees not secure their prudence, Tommaso wanted them to carry no tales of a procedure that seemed a rite.

And so the endeavor proceeded. Tommaso stood to one side as Urban meditated upon a medallion bearing an image of Apollo, and imagined His Holiness’ spirit like a ship’s sail, now being mended and then carefully trimmed so as to catch the wind from the sun. Urban might already be feeling the vivifying power that Ficino ascribed to the renewed spiritus; Tommaso had no practical experience with celestial magic, but was ever mindful of Galen: “The doctor who enjoys his patients’ trust heals all the more.”

At the end of it, Tommaso—by now feeling oppressed by the close air, and aching in his bones—lifted a corner of the tablecloth and draped it over the remains of their conjurations. “It is finished,” he announced in a normal tone. “Thanks be to God.” Urban was standing alone, head bowed, and the musicians—looking bewildered by the proceeding, although it had gone exactly as Tommaso had described it to them—stood and bowed, murmuring, before they withdrew. And after that it was merely clean-up: airing a stinking chamber, recovering the clothes (which would be laundered in an appropriate hour), and pocketing the few talismans that would not be discarded with the dregs and trash. For tasks of such sensitivity the See employed a special crew, slaves obtained from the Ottomans who understood no known language.

Writing in his work book that night, Tommaso recalled Ficino’s vision of the universe as a machine as intricately ordered as a genealogy, in which “All the intelligences, be they those of the highest rank and superior to the souls, or be they inferior and part of the souls, are so interconnected that, beginning with God who is their head, they proceed in a long and uninterrupted chain, and all the superior ones shed their rays down on the inferior ones.” Should one only add Thomas’s injunction in his Opusculum, that these angels should be revered with dulia as the servants of God who convey His celestial gifts, and not worshipped with latria as though they were the creators of these gifts, then Ficino’s beautiful image—each level meshing with the next like the nested gears of a brass watch—was as doctrinally irreproachable as the celestial orders of angels.

From the sun radiates an endless stream of the celestial material of which the spiritus is made: penetrating everything, filling the universe. Urban believed that he performed a series of exercises upon his imagination the better to receive it; Ficino secretly believed in guaranteeing its supply by supplicating the planetary intelligences who control it, even unto worshipping them. Fra Tommaso believes that if he preserves the Pope’s life—and there are more procedures to be done; the second, more serious eclipse comes only at year’s end—he may win pontifical support for his evangelical missions, which take on increased urgency as the earth slowly approaches the sun. Does he care which theory of the spiritus is correct?

Intellectually he cares. The true nature of the celestial spirit—the relationship of the spiritus mundi to the anima mundi, and what the Lord could have meant in Job when He spoke of “When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” if not that the stars were the physical bodies of angels—these are surely matters of importance. But the Spaniards still occupy Calabria, the Curia seethes with corruption, and the peoples of the New World remain unconverted even in these late days of the world. Tommaso is old, and there is not time for everything.