is not noted on any of the charts of the northern skies. I drew the configuration of stars onto the map, although I doubted that my discovery would ever be of service to anyone:
In my youth, I had read in a marine atlas, translated from Arabic, full of the fantastic deeds of Sinbad the Sailor and his company, about a constellation that appears every 365 years, when the year of years is fulfilled, and when the winter of centuries begins in which everything good dies out and the forces of evil grow strong. But, at the time, I could not remember how that constellation from the atlas looked, so that I could compare it with the one above my head. Nor did I have time. Already fairly exhausted, I reached for an ax, some rope and a hammer in order to make a raft. Wrapped in wax-cloth, on the raft I took the ship’s log, a Bible, writing materials, some gunpowder and lead, and at dawn on 12 October 1733, I sailed into the unknown.
One who has never been on the ocean’s expanse has also never experienced the sea of time with absolutely nothing to do. In spite of my desperation (or actually because of it), I measured time using instruments, and every twenty-four hours I carved a notch on the improvised mast, since day and night last for months at those latitudes. At the moment when, not believing my eyes, I spied land through the mist, there were seven notches on the mast. Setting foot on solid land, exhausted and hungry, I collapsed and fell sound asleep. I do not know how long I slept; perhaps an hour, maybe two, maybe two days, but I did not wake up on my own. Someone shook me gently, I opened my eyes and saw three people. One of them addressed me in some language, but I could not tell if it was broken Latin or Old French. To my surprise, when I spoke in English, the man picked up the conversation. I was expecting anything except the presence of a polyglot on such a distant island. But that would merely be the first of my surprises. To be honest, at first I thought that I was dreaming that I was awakened on a remote island by three blond men and that the eldest of them, who introduced himself as Joseph, was telling me that he had seen the sinking of the Invincible in a dream, and my suffering on the raft; that he had dreamt the place where I would land, and that he had come to meet me there. I thought to myself, “All of this is a nightmare; I have had similar dreams before; soon, I will wake up in my cabin on the Invincible, sailing smoothly for Southampton.” But I kept waking up in another place: in a warm hut, on bedclothes made of sheepskin, next to a man who was hovering over me. When the delirium caused by my exhaustion finally passed, it became clear to me that nothing in it had been a dream: I was in an unfamiliar hut, on an island isolated from the civilized world, surrounded by strangers.
Or, perhaps it was all a dream.
One afternoon, Joseph, the elderly man who had found me on the beach, told me the history of the strange community. In the 14th century, a group of laymen and clergymen, led by a certain Enguerrand, a monk named Callistus and Josephus Ferrarius, dissatisfied with the Church steeped in Simony, had accepted an ancient teaching – a heresy begun in Asia Minor at the very beginning of the acts of Christ’s apostles. This original group of master blacksmiths from Antioch sincerely accepted the Gospels, but they also committed a horrible sin. Namely, they undertook the construction of a Mechanical Bird which they intended to use to rise into the seventh heaven. This was the sin of pride. However, because of their unusual spirituality, the blacksmiths from Antioch were not condemned to vanish from the face of the earth. Their spiritual progeny was predestined to play an important role in the history of the world, but also to be exposed to constant exile, torture and scorn.
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
