The rabbi walked silently for a moment, as though testing against his inward understandings this remark, to see if it could be so.
—In any case, he said at last, those tales are false. There is but one age, one world, one Torah, one soul for each man.
The Ass didn't dispute the Great Rabbi, wise enough to know better, patient enough to wait. That he himself was the proof that a man could have more than one soul made for him in the bosom of Amphitrite he forbore to say. He only paused and parted his hind legs, and sent a stream of urine into the gutter, while the rabbi tactfully went on ahead, and paid no attention.
* * * *
The work was long: the rabbi said it would be. The Giordanisti took rooms in a house in the castle district named after the Three Kings, die Heilige drei Königen (where one day in another world Franz Kafka would live, and dream about metamorphosis). To make their daily bread and board they put on plays once again, safer in this city than anywhere in the Empire. They acted, besides Onorius and Lucius, a new play of Johannes Faustus, like the ones the Pragerei loved—only in theirs the devil with whom Faust negotiates the sale of his soul was not a schwarze Pudel but a well-spoken Ass.
Meanwhile, every day if he could, the Ass traveled to the Jewish quarter, to the rabbi's house, to learn and hope.
He studied the nine chief methods of calculation or gematria, as Moses Cordovero lists them. Every letter by which the world was first called into being has a numeric equivalent, and gimetry is but the substitution of one name with another of the same numerological value—which value can however be calculated in an endless number of ways, for the letters of the names of the letters—the aleph of aleph, the beth of beth—have their own numerical values that can be drawn on too, and this being so no two numerically identical words are ever exactly identical, since their identity derives from different calculations.
He learned—indeed he already knew it, as he seemed already to have known everything he had learned as an ass, except how to sleep standing up and bear loads as large as himself—that all the names of the deity, the potent semhamaphoræ, which are the shadows of ideas, are all hidden in the letters that compose the scripture's tales and truths and laws. The whole of the Hebrew scripture is not other than the one Great Name, expressed in the quasi-endless vicissitudes of alphabetic calculation.
But for that to be so, then mustn't each of the stories that the scripture contains have been made to happen in the first place only so that it could be written down in certain words, having the value of certain numbers? If Samson had picked up not the jawbone of an ass but the thighbone of a tiger, one name of God would not be able to be read from the story.
—Are they all nothing but fables then? he asked the rabbi.
They sat (at least the rabbi and his secretary sat) studying in the inner court of the bet ha-midrash. The Ass, still an ass after many lessons, watched the rabbi's blunt quill dip in the inkhorn his secretary held, and make vermiform letters one after another.
—No, said the rabbi. Those events did occur, and they also have the hidden meanings that they have. The Almighty favored Abraham not because he was a good man, but because he was Abraham: and yet Abraham would not have been Abraham if he had not striven to be a good man. It is the same for all of us.
—The same for all of us, said the rabbi's secretary in Latin. Idem ac omnibus.
Was it, though, was it the same for all of us, the same as for Abraham? The Ass thought, as they studied, of his own story: a story he could not have imagined in advance of its coming to be, the story that had plucked him as a brand from the burning, marked him as the bearer of a knowledge he could no longer apprehend, brought him here to this land, to this city, to this crowded and odorous quarter. With how much farther to go, in what form, for what end.
We try to choose the good, he thought, and darkling and ignorant, to be wise: and in doing so we make the choices that will spell the stories, the stories that will body forth or contain or clothe the thousand- and ten-thousand-letter names of God. Those names—the skeleton of the made World, of the Year we inhabit, of the Soul we recognize within—all come to be in the stories we make. But the stories cannot be known before our labors make them; therefore neither can the names; therefore neither can the ending of the world we make.
—We are not required to complete the work, the rabbi said to the little beast. But neither are we free to desist from it.
* * * *
A year passed before the Ass discovered the solution to his quandary, and when he did it was all on his own.
The stories that great Moses told, of the making of the world and the coming to be of men and beasts, angels and demons, fathers and heroes, sinners and journeys and judgments: they contained all the names of God in the permutations of the numbers of the letters of their words. So the rabbi said. But then, the Ass concluded, it must be that all those sacred histories could be exactly substituted by other stories about other journeys, judgments, heroes, et cætera, and—so long as they were told in words that had exactly the same numerical values—those stories would yield up the same names and numbers, indeed the same Great Name and Number. When he expressed this discovery to the rabbi, the rabbi at last sent him away, scandalized.
But it was so, and he knew it. And, finally and therefore, his own little name and its number, the number of his whole tale, could be reversed, construed, inverted, reduced, multiplied, and divided, and then made to spell out a new name, the name of a new being different from but exactly equivalent to the old, with a new tale, a tale both having been and still coming to be.
And into or onto that name and tale he could press or tack or strap or infuse or pour or discover his self and soul, as he had once before infused the same self and soul into the body and heart of an ass, and by similar means perhaps, only not numerological ones. (What ones, then? How had he done it? He couldn't remember.)
So he took the gold he had made as a comedian, and he caused to be made (by the same instrument maker then serving Johannes Kepler up in the castle on the hill) a vast set of interlocking brass wheels, which were etched and numbered like an astrolabe, or like the proportional compass of Fabricio Mordente, with the Hebrew letters, and the letters of Latin and Greek, and the lettered Divine Qualities of Raimundus Lullus for good measure. For the signacula of Moses were wonderful, and the hieroglyphs of Ægypt are wonderful, but all letters and the images made from them are finally just as wonderful and eternal, and are equally the world.
As the Giordanisti turned and turned these wheels at his instruction, he combined and transliterated and reflected the resulting nonsense in the mirror of his heart of hearts. His soul studied it in that mirror, where of course it appeared backward, upside down too like the reflection in a silver spoon's bowl; studied and read until it all ran backward again, that is forward, and so at last made sense, sweet sense, which raced through his fibers and his sinews and the macaroni of his veins and nerves, remaking him as it went.
He was a tabby kitten; then he was a stick of elmwood; a silvery trout with a rainbow belly wriggling in air; a live coal, shedding sparks; a gray pigeon, drop of ruby blood at its beak. For an infinitesimal instant he was an infinite number of things, and then for an endless moment he was one thing eternally.
Then he was a man. A small naked man, though not smaller or more naked than he had been in the Campo dei Fiori. His name was Philip à Gabella. Instead of hooves he had ten fingers—no, nine fingers, one minimus lost somewhere along the way or failing to be produced in metamorphosis. Big headed, exophthalmic, with large yellow teeth. A large membrum virile too: that and his loud and horripilating laugh being marks he would henceforward keep hidden, for he remembered how, long ago, they had frightened off the giants in their revolt against the gods—that is, the powers and the principalities. He remembered the tale, and the names of those gods and powers, and the names of the giants too. It was a well-known tale; its occurrence in many authors ancient and modern unrolled within him. The strong image of the ithyphallic Ass up on his hind legs displaying was one that he possessed; here it was.