=1 "The old shop"
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The old shop
It stood in the oldest part of town in a little lane winding away from the market place and under the very shadow of the gothic cathedral. From outside it looked just like all the other dusty little shops on the same street.
Over the door the word 'OCCULTISM' was written, and in the little show-window lay thousands of small heteroclite objects, some medieval and some modern in appearance: old books, old bottles, little carved or inlaid caskets, talismans, strange Tibetan prayer wheels, copper yantras.
An old-fashioned chime sounded on the door when I entered, and surprisingly the dark shop, not at all small, was crowded with people, both buyers and sellers, pressing around the counters. It was full of heavy medieval and oriental furniture: tables and chairs of gothic woodwork and chests with heavy iron locks; full to the ceiling with the strangest things: Talmudic books, African fetishes, shrunken heads of South American Jivaros, North American medicine bags, Shamanic cups, tikis from the South Seas, music stones from Australia, Arabic amulets, Egyptian scarabees...
Not much interested in these things, I turned into a side room. Here too furniture was heavy and carved, and here also were many people, and everybody was busy bargaining. I looked at the merchandise offered: 7-league books, mandrakes, helbanes, and dried herbs hanging from the ceiling. On the shelves I read the labels of the medicine bottles: salves to make you invisible, quintessentia for long life, syrups of power, sleeping pills, pandora boxes, materials for the black mass, dream pills, aphrodisiacs, etc. etc.
Then I discovered the entrance to a third room. In it were shelves and shelves of books: books with Latin names, Greek names, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Chinese; books of formulas, holy mantras of knowledge, books written on birch bark, books of magic bound in white pigskin, Lemegeton the book of conjuration, the Malleus Maleficorum by Henry Kramer, the 1489 edition of King Solomon’s Ring, the Legomerva.
Beyond this was still another room, the first of a long series; less furniture now, fewer people: magic drums, magic mirrors, crystals for crystal gazers. . . apparently no end to the rooms. A few ‘tables-serve-me’, a few ‘open sesames’, a whole panel of magic keys, in the corner a pile of magic wings, on the walls brooms to ride upon. Then came dark passages leading apparently deep underground.
There, dark and musty, was a stable, the home of innumerable animals: geese with golden eggs, hounds of heaven, an old tired Pegasus, a pair of centaurs. Then came a huge underground laboratory of alchemy. The wooden shelves lining the walls were filled with alembics, phials, filters, copper vessels, and in the centre of the room were ovens with attached bellows.
Beyond it was a cellar with sealed amphoras labeled “serviceable spirits, clean and unclean”: alrauns, alspiels, afrets, imps, kobolds, lamiae, incubi and succubi, leprechauns.
And now for the first time the prices indicated were no longer in currency but in service: 2-year service, 7-year service, etc. Here I found the needle which sews everything, the knife which can cut anything, the sword which protects against everybody, magic wands, each with its price: 2-year, 3-year service, or labours to be accomplished: cleaning of a stable, killing of a dragon, hunting a deer, were the prices asked. An old fashioned spyglass was there, “the glass with which to see hidden things,” a helmet of invisibility, a cap to change yourself into an animal, an old-fashioned glass phial with a drop of dragon blood which you have to put on your tongue to understand what the birds sing.
I went deeper and deeper. Wooden furniture had disappeared, now there were only stone tables. A kind of tin-opener was labeled: ‘Opener of the third eye’; price: breathing exercises for ten years, ten hours a day. The ‘sword of discernment’ cuts everything, even the toughest knots; price: 30 years of solitude. A Phoenician bottle with the water of life stood alone in an underground Egyptian temple. No price visible.
In a dark empty cave, glowing by the light of a single oil lamp, were golden fruits, apples of the Garden of the Hesperides, the apples of immortality; price: ego. The holy grail and the holy blood on an altar in a romanesque chapel together with the holy spear and its healing power; price: perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. In another room the philosophers’ stone which transforms any base metal into pure gold, a bargain for 49 years of apprentice labour in an alchemy laboratory.
Mistletoe cut by the golden sickle of a druid priest on one of the twelve nights, conferring eternal love; price: baptism by fire.
All alone in a deep underground vault glittered Odin’s ring of commandment; price: to accept the curse of corruption. In another underground crypt, alone on a stone table, a cup, the cup of knowledge; price: one eye. In another room Aladdin’s lamp; price: peace (simply that).
By this time the rooms had become smaller, more and more austere, more and more tomblike, and the passages between them narrower. In one was an empty sarcophagus, the broken cover lying beside it. “Resurrection,” proclaimed the inscription; the price: life.
Suddenly I was almost overwhelmed by a feeling of claustrophobia and started to look for an exit. I found a door. Before it sat an old man in the lotus pose. He looked at me, and I asked him, “May I go out?”
“Yes,” he said. “You were wise, my son. You didn’t buy anything. Not only can you go out here, but from now on all the riches of the store belong to you. You will enjoy them all because you did not desire any. Go in peace. You have paid the price for everything: Renunciation.”