Smoothing out a couple of little wrinkly excrescences from the manuscript before him, Roger Bacon now leant back in his chair and contemplated the curtained alcove near his bed where stood his now almost finished Brazen Head, the boldest as well as the most intricate of all his world-changing inventions.
“What it now needs,” he told himself, “is something — something I mean in my own peculiar way of thinking — to play the part for it that the priests assure us is played for us in Baptism. And, I know very well the kind of Baptism that my Head wants. O I know so well!”
And lifting one of his hands from the manuscript before him he rubbed the back of his knuckles against his forehead. “What it wants is the inspiration of Virginity. The best Baptism of all for it would be from an old maid, for old maids — O and don’t I know it! — are the ones who have the Secret. For who in Iscalis taught me the rudiments of Latin, and more than the rudiments of the Lingua Franca, but great-aunt Katharina? And who but Aunt Katharina collected for me what scraps of learning came blowing across the roofs of Iscalis and whirling like drifting leaves through its market-place? One day when they elect a Pope again as interested in learning as Fulcode was, I must write a treatise on all the prophetesses and oracular teachers in human history from the beginning of the world, who have been old maids. I begin to think there is something in the loss of virginity, especially when followed by pregnancy, that destroys the power in a woman to become a medium for that ‘Secretum Secretorum’, that ‘Secret of Secrets’, through which the ultimate Mystery of Life is revealed.”
At this point in his exciting thoughts Friar Bacon rose from his seat at the table and began walking up and down that small room. Any intelligent onlooker peering in upon him through some crack in that chamber’s wall would have noted that the excitement within him was not worrying him or troubling him or making him anxious or distressed. It was filling him with elation.
At last he stopped before the black curtain that concealed this thing of brass which he had created out of nothing. “O Head of all my Labour,” he cried in his heart with a sudden desperate outburst of long-suppressed feeling. “O child of the essence as well as of the being of my deepest soul! O thou only son of both the energies of my soul! If only I could baptize thee with the living spirit of a true Virgin, whether she were an old maid or a young maid, I would be content!”
Suddenly there arose a most extraordinary sound from behind the black curtain which covered that alcove near the head of his bed. “It’s beginning! It’s beginning!” cried the especial self within the Friar that he was so anxious to establish once for all as a soul much more complicated than any of his contemporaries could imagine. And it certainly would have seemed, to any invisible reader of human thoughts, that mingled with this exultation there was a throb of something very like pure unmitigated terror.
“Have I, plain man as I am,” the Friar evidently couldn’t help thinking, “just by my obstinate perseverance in dissecting, as they say Democritus did, every nerve and sinew and fibre in the skulls of the dead, actually played the part, without knowing it, of God? Have I actually created a rational soul, above and beyond those others that are engendered out of the substance of Matter? Have I flung this new soul into the machinery of my entirely artificial and purely material Head of Brass, so that it has come to life? Have I created an angelic superhuman creature, to be my living oracle for the rest of my days?”
He listened intently for any recurrence of the strange sound he had heard. Was this newly-created Being, he asked himself, going through a period parallel to human babyhood? Was it even now uttering unintelligible and inarticulate babblings?
Yes! By God and Christ! There was that sound again! “I must take a look at it!” And although he caught himself in an actual shiver of fear, he rushed to the alcove and pulled the curtain aside! The Brazen Image regarded him with a cold, callous, indifferent, non-human stare. It was a figure constructed to be about the height of a man, but it looked larger than human owing to the fact that it was without legs or arms. It was in fact what in ancient Greek cities used to be called a “Herm”—that is to say, a four-square milestone or miniature obelisk, like the formal pedestal of a classic bust, the bust of an emperor if it were Roman, and of a philosopher if it were Greek.
In the case of this angelic or demonic creation of his, the Brazen Head itself, whose massive base was of marble, rose from this short column as a head might rise from a square neck on narrow shoulders and, as their eyes met, the Head’s creator fancied he heard his creation mutter these queer Latin-sounding words: “Birginis, Sirginis, Flirginis, Virginis.”
Roger Bacon behaved now as if he were indeed so excited by the result of his creative power that he felt an emotion filling him at one and the same moment with joy and fear. Hurriedly he pulled back the black curtain over the Brazen Head. And it was then that any crafty spy peering in at him—not from the window where the sweet-scented twilight hovered over the tops of the forest-trees and through which a lovely air was blowing, but through a crack in one of the other three walls — would have heard him give an exultant little cry: “By Christ, I’d forgotten! Didn’t a voice wake me in the night with the word ‘ghosta’?”
And then such a spy would have seen him rush with the excitement of a boy in his teens to a small square of wood set among the bare boards of that attic-chamber and marked with the letter “A”. This piece of wood the excited Friar extracted neatly from its fixed position, using his nails to achieve this result, and bending down above the orifice, stared at a vellum-covered volume that lay hidden there, on the outside of which was written in bold purple letters the words Fons Vitae Avicebron, “You are my master and teacher.” He thought as he stared at these words, “You, you, you, more than anyone else in the world!”
And as he bent and stared at that title Fons Vitae and at that name Avicebron, he made one of the greatest efforts he had ever made in his life to visualize, as if they really could be apprehended by our ordinary senses, that plurality of separate souls within us, of which he had finally decided that what we generally call, and feel too often enough, to be our normal human soul, actually is composed.
Intensely he struggled, as he stared at the name of his admired Jewish thinker, actually to visualize the primal elements in these souls of ours that he had come to the conclusion arise automatically within the body by the potentiality of matter itself and have no connection with the rational soul which is created directly, immediately, and instantaneously, by God Himself, and created ready and prepared to be joined with the body, as soon as the infant, already possessed of the primal elements of its soul, is born into this world.
At this moment as he stared at that square hole in the floor, at the title Fons Vitae, only just visible in the growing twilight, and at the name Avicebron, whose darkened letters he had to supply from his own head, he saw the first evolution of the primal soul within the womb as a wave of incurving, ingathering, insatiable water, desperately craving nourishment and rushing furiously through the solidest as well as through the softest substances, and possessed of the swallowing mouth of a hungry fish. And he saw the second evolution of this same primal soul as a wave of quivering vapour, rushing also through everything, but endowing the matter out of which it springs, the matter that is from the start able to engender it, with all the reactions of our human senses.