Ten valiant knights once gathered in one of the world’s oldest nooks looking like a rhombus-shaped talisman around the neck. What the united representatives of various spiritual trends — noble Rosicrucians, faultless clairvoyants, cabalistic bankers, democrats chanting incantations — was a common, very important, and secret cause. As always in such cases, a different version was drawn up for the plebeians, which the knights diligently played for effect: they communicated with beach people, posed for street photographers, visited a shaman session of a modern muse’s priests, and sailed under a velvet marquee across the Pontus Euxinus. They smiled, smiled, and smiled their teeth off. Work is work, as the Germans say.
In the evening, under the veil of a murky night, the knights in long cloaks and masques secretly arrived at an old castle. Unlike other old local structures, this one had a special feature usually typical of English castles: it was haunted, and not by some commonplace past-epoch parvenus but by world-renowned, powerful, and omniscient ghosts, three of them.
It should be added that the events under description occurred in hard and formidable times: the Black Death was taking its terrible toll, the end of the world was hanging like the sword of Damocles, the abyss of the oceans was devouring all possible foundations, even nuclear ones. Something had to be done immediately. But what exactly?
All the knights assembled in that far-off land to consult the spirits. The latter were famous for the fact that they when still alive never allowed themselves to be guided by circumstances (even the end of the world). They had willingly manipulated these circumstances and often created them on purpose. Thus the cream of knighthood wanted the ghosts to give them practical advice: how to make gold from copper, diamonds from glass, dollars from hryvnias, and natural gas out of air. What can keep their armor and swords from rusting? What also interested the knights was the formula of a chemical reaction which could produce in a test tube the elixir of eternal presidential youth. In short, the issue was the philosopher’s stone eternally hidden from the uninitiated behind the veil of Isis.
As of today, the esoteric technique of communication between the living and the spirit world (the so-called Great Mystery) has been developed in detail on a high scholarly level; all the knights were famous for their erudition, knew the laws of the energy flow of spirit invocation, and were ready to use it, no matter how their hearts might bleed.
Here is a fantastic stage setting. It is a dark and calm night behind the closed doors of the empty castle, with not a living soul around. Great tension — whispers, agitation, subdued commotion — is felt in only one room. As midnight approaches, someone lit a candle in a human skull. On a black-cloth-covered table lay an open book, The Emerald Tablet by the great alchemist Hermes Trismegist, in the middle of the table there is a small “altar” with the burning mixture of brimstone, gum-resin, and coal tar. It is from this fire that the great ghosts’ voices were to enunciate after the magical rites be performed. Hopeful signs appeared at the very beginning of the seance: a good cigar smoke smelled in one corner and good Georgian tobacco in another, a chair caster squeaked somewhere near the door. It had begun!
However, as an hour or two passed, the knights’ voices grew hoarse from incantations, but the ghostly savants remained silent. What was the matter? The flame was slowly dying away, and a draft carried away the infernal smell. There was desperation and the gnashing of teeth. At last, at daybreak, the spirits showed pity, and two scraps of paper suddenly fell onto the black table (from the ceiling or from the fire?). Then a sound came, as if somebody, pardon me, had remembered the Party. Here are the texts of the messages from the next world, which so greatly disappointed the eminent knights. Nobody has so far deciphered what the authors had meant to say.
1: “Those who have never been backstage, cannot even imagine who really rules the world.”
2: “It is only the living, not phantoms, who have the right to seek advice from the dead.”
