Later.

Pierce in the little city below the ruins of Heidelberg castle read Dame Frances, who knew all about Christian Rosencreutz and Johann Valentin Andreæ and the Chemical Wedding, how it told of the founding of a Brotherhood of the Golden Stone, and of a wedding that takes place amid the magical gardens of a magical castle guarded by a lion. There are fountains described that are like Heidelberg's were. There is a knightly initiation, a little like the one whereby the real Frederick was really invested with the real Order of the Garter in actual Jacobean England. There is a play described in it that is like those the English actors really brought to Germany, and within that play a play. And look—the page was reprinted in Dame Frances's book—here in the Chemical Wedding, where the woman clothed as the sky and stars proffers her wedding invitation, right by the words Sponsus and Sponsa, there was (in the German) a crude mark that looks like, and in the English printings certainly becomes, the sign of the Monas, John Dee's own invention or discovery.

So she was right, and Johann Valentin's romance certainly does turn back to England, and the old English wizard, and that bright couple Shakespeare blessed, and their joined lions: the hopes the English placed in a smart dynastic coupling, the marriage of Thames and Rhine. But what if imagination could make it more? What if the hope then was that a story told about that wonderful and hopeful marriage might change its nature backward, and make it far more wonderful; what if language of the right kind, describing that more wonderful thing, could be powerful enough to change altogether what it described, even when what it described was something that had already happened? Gematria: the alteration of preexistent things by the alteration of the letters that constitute their true names, which first brought them into being.

And then to go on from there along the new way.

Pierce had come to think that magic, and stories intended to work magic, were made just opposite of the way stories in literature are made. In the stories of world literature, at least as he knew them in his own reading, one particular couple with a particular fate will stand for all couples in the toils of love and loss and struggle; Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl, or doesn't. But in magic, a general, universal couple—in alchemy the Sponsus and Sponsa, who near the end of the endless Work become pregnant with the Child who is the Stone—are at the same time each particular couple: they are Adam and Eve, Sun and Moon, Gold and Silver, Active and Passive, copper Venus and iron Mars, God and Mary, you and me, all of us at the work of generation. What they do is as though done by all, and the fruit of their union is for all to have, indeed all do have it just as soon as it's made. If it ever is.

So it would be no category error to identify one couple, one royal couple whom the whole world can see, with that general couple that is engendering the Stone. Because every couple can be so identified. That's what the Chemical Wedding did, and Frederick and Elizabeth were it, or It.

Beau Brachman once told him (whatever had become of Beau anyway, where was he now?) that there is no history. The world, he said, is like a hologram: break apart the photographic plate on which a hologram has been printed, and you can show that every part of it contains the whole image, if you look at it with laser light. Every part of every part, down to the smallest resolvable crumb. In the same way (Beau said) our original situation is present in every divisible moment of all succeeding situations, but (he said, and smiled that smile) you need a special light to see it.

If the Rose Cross was the Monas hieroglyphica, and the Monas hieroglyphica was the Golden Stone, and the Golden Stone was born of the coupling of the alchemical spouses, then (as in the best alchemical paradoxes) the Stone could only be generated by the action of the Stone, which, before it was generated, could not exist.

No wonder Andreæ called his work a comedy.

The culmination of the whole story, at the end of the Seventh Day, was the reception of the guests into the Order of the Golden Stone, after which they sailed away in their ships. So Yates said. Sailed away: either for the Fortunate Isles of the West to live happily ever after, or more likely to all the lands of men, to undertake the universal reformation of the whole wide world.

But what she didn't say is that Christian himself is left behind.

For on an earlier day of the story, Christian, roaming the wonderful castle to which his letter admitted him, went farther than he should. A mischievous young page told him that in a deep-down chamber Venus herself lay buried or asleep—did Christian want to see? He showed Christian a trapdoor of copper they could go down by. And Christian, trusting and terrified, followed him down.

By the torch's light I saw a rich bed all made, hung with curious curtains. The page drew one aside, and there I saw the Lady Venus, stark naked—for he threw aside the coverlets too—lying there in such beauty, and somehow so astonishing, that I was almost beside myself. I could hardly say she wasn't a piece of marble carved, or a human corpse that lay there dead, for she was completely immobile, and yet I didn't dare touch her. The page covered her again, and drew the curtain, and yet she was still in my eyes, so to speak.

My page put out the torch, and we climbed out again to the chamber above. Just then, in flew little Cupid, who at first was a little shy in our presence, considering what had been done to him the day before; but seeing us both looking more like the dead than the living, he couldn't help laughing, demanding to know what spirit had led me here. I answered, trembling, that I had lost my way in the castle, and just by chance happened to come here, and that the page had been looking everywhere for me, and at last had found me here. I hoped, I said, that he wouldn't take it amiss.

"No, it's all right, my busy old grandpa,” said Cupid, “but you might easily have played a nasty trick on me, if you had known about this door. I'd better fix that.” And he put a strong lock on the copper door we had gone down by. I thanked God that he hadn't come upon us sooner! My page too was very glad that I had got him out of a tight spot.

Maybe Cupid believes him, maybe not, but the winged boy declares he has no choice but to punish Christian for coming so close to where his mother lies sleeping. He heats the tip of his golden dart in a candle flame and pricks Christian's right hand, laughing to see the blood well up. The mark will never vanish.

That naughty page. That cold goddess. That laughing boy.

The story of the wedding goes on from there. Guests are weighed and the lightweights expelled. The remaining guests travel to another, darker castle, where arduous labors of fire and water are undergone, plays are acted, boxes containing precious eggs are opened, and at last the dead king and queen are brought to life and the stone their son is manifested. Then the King (newmade, golden) brings the guests, all now sworn Brothers of the Golden Stone, back to the Wedding Castle. At the gate stands an aged porter—the very porter who once admitted Christian to these precincts, who was kind to him, who saw that he got safely inside. Long ago, the King tells the brothers, this porter came too as a guest to the castle, but after he was admitted he went wandering where he should not have gone, and spied prematurely on Mother Venus. For his sin he is condemned to stand here by the door, to let others in or keep them out, until the day when one comes who has done as he did, and who is willing to relieve him.

And—though I hated myself and my tattling tongue that I couldn't keep quiet—Christian must tell the King that he is, himself, that one. And he says that he will do what is required of him. I said that if I could wish for anything at all right now, and have it come true, I would wish myself back home again. But I was told plainly that wishing did not stretch so far.