According to Joseph’s words, they appeared in history again during the iconoclastic crisis that shook Byzantium. Already punished once because of magic and idolatry, they were the most enthusiastic iconoclasts. With the victory of the iconodules, the heresy disappeared from the face of the earth again, resurfacing after three hundred and sixty-five years when the monk Chrysostom found the third of the entire six copies of the secret texts of the Little Brothers and gave it on his deathbed to his pupil, Callistus, who took the secret teaching to Paris where it gained a large number of followers. Using the most conniving of intrigues, the Inquisition accused the most prominent brothers of colluding with the Devil. Callistus, Enguerrand and the Marquis of Rocheteau were burned at the stake, and a small group led by Josephus Ferrarius found sanctuary with King Charles the Hideous. From there, in a boat, led by a constellation which will be discovered only in the future, they reached the most distant Thulae, an island hidden by ice and fog, which I myself had found.
“One hundred years ago,” Joseph told me, “my great-grandfather who, like my father and myself, was named Joseph, just as all the Grand Masters of the order of Little Brothers are called Joseph, dreamed that a castaway came to the island. He left his dream as a testament to his son who improved it, made it more profound and then introduced my father into its secrets. When my father experienced the honor of dying, everything was finished, you were born and it was my responsibility to maintain the whole dream, to dream it anew every night until a few days ago when it finally became reality. We needed you and that is why we created you. In return, you will compose a record of everything you see and learn; our time, the time of the inhabitants of this island has run out; we are preparing to return to our father. Now, get some rest, and when you gather your strength go see everything and ask questions about it all. Then take up the pen.”
“Did it really have to be me?” I asked. “Couldn’t you find a way to hand down your teachings earlier? Did my sailors have to die so that I would come here and try to save your manuscripts?”
“You’re wrong,” said Joseph, preparing to leave, “your sailors had to die because they had to die; they were mortal beings, and the circumstances of death are not important whatsoever. You got here because you had to get here. None of us is able to hand down the teaching because we all know it, and teaching is always passed on by those who are not dedicated to it, but who believe in it. From tonight onward, I will teach you every night in your dreams, and you will come to believe it because you already do. And now, good-bye.”
It will be hard for the one who finds this text to believe its contents. I saw things with my own eyes, but as the Savior said: “Blessed is he who believes without seeing.” Anyway, Joseph tried to convince me that the text will go from one hand to another until it falls into the right ones, because it is not looking for just any reader, but for a certain one. To that unknown person, certainly as yet to be born, I dedicate the pages that follow.
The island itself is not big; it is about ten miles long and not more than three miles wide. At first I thought that was the reason that it remained unmarked on the nautical maps but Joseph, approaching me in a dream, revealed the secret to me. Fleeing from Normandy, the forebears of the islanders kept a copy of the Vulgate and the text The Purgatory of Dreams; they cast their mirrors, weapons and devices into the sea. And without mirrors, watches and swords there is no history; history is, after all nothing but a hall of mirrors in which it is not known which faces are real and which are only reflections.
Without chronology, without history, the island becomes objective insofar as it is the spiritual projection of its inhabitants; it is no less real, no less tangible than Britain, but it lies outside of time and space, or better said in parallel with them, due to the fact that there is no continuous series of events. Thus, I did not reach it, as I thought, by means of my raft, but rather by means of my delirium.
Those are things of which I could not conceive. Not even in the dreams in which Joseph patiently taught me the impossible.
“You see,” he said, “it’s not that difficult to understand. I will use an analogy. Just as America, from where you sailed, did not exist but was rather created by the longing of people for a place where they could extend their exodus to the west, so did our island exist, but it vanished to the senses of the world, because generations and generations of islanders despised space. Then again, it would not be correct to say that America and the island are two different worlds. It’s like when you turn a glove inside out. It remains the same glove except that what was up becomes what is down and instead of the left it turns into the right. At the same time, that is the only possible explanation for your mission. You belong both to the world of America and to the world of the island; you are the mediator in transmitting the secret. That is the real purpose. The description of the situation and of the island is of no importance whatsoever. It’s just a way for all the things we are talking about here to become a part of history. Otherwise, it would all dissipate into nothingness. It wouldn’t even be a fantasy.”
I could swear that, except for Joseph and a couple of other dignitaries, I never saw the same face twice in a row, even though the island did not have many inhabitants. My arrival surprised no one. It was known about for ages, down to the last detail. The smallest of children spoke of the Masters who had died many generations before, and the adults spoke of events that were supposed to happen in the distant future. In great detail they described the assassination of an Austrian archduke in the middle of a Balkan gorge, and with horror they spoke of a great war that would be fought with only one goaclass="underline" to kill and destroy as much as possible.
From time to time, the patriarchs of old would appear and then just as unexpectedly disappear, but this did not disturb anyone. However, perhaps the most interesting, those people were not sinless, lifeless creatures. Robberies happened, adultery, and even murder, not to mention all the lies that were told. The attitude toward the offenders was interesting. They were not punished, not judged, nor were they despised. On the contrary, they were showered with attention, and they were even envied because, by doing evil, they had obtained the saving possibility of repentance, and thereby the possibility of advancing in their spirituality. These occasional outpourings of evil served to remind everyone of the highest good, God, and so that no one forgot that among created beings none are perfect or without sin.
Still, their graves are the most interesting of all. Placed just along the shore of the ocean, facing eastward, they consist of a series of vertical recesses in which the corpses stand erect, their eyelids half-opened, mummified by the cold in the expectation of that day when the earth and sky will dissolve and when the unimaginable flame of the living God will flood light into the darkness of the human heart. Visits to those graves, scattered among the hills, are the only external manifestation of religiosity I have been able to observe. I have often noticed men and women going to the recess intended for them, getting into them, and practicing their death for hours. Hundreds, thousands of years of solitude that come before the moment when everything will become one.