But he wasn't in power yet, and not only was he a member of a league that economicall benefitted Germany--all of it including Austria, not just the North, and tried to bring at least an economic unification of Germany by the peaceful means of trade and money dropped into Hanseatic coffers. The Bohemian King was also an influential member of the Electoral College, whose members were composed of princes of Germany and princes of the Church who elected the Holy Roman Emperor, the symbol of German political unity. The Emperor was influential, but in those days did not have a great deal of power, and he usually derived his true political power from the country--or Electorate--from which he emerged. But the men who elected the Emperor, and sometimes dictated German policy, foreign and domestic, were called Electors,, and they were given substantial lands oveer which to rule. Some men who were Electors were neither princes nor kings, but they had more authority in their country than the Emperor himself, and at least as much as any King or prince in Germany. The King of Bohemia was also an Elector who aspired to become Emperor, and he would use his Imperial power to maneuver at least a more stable--and powerful--position of himself as Emperor to not be "Holy Roman Emperor" but Kaiser--Emperor of all the Germans. The present Emperor was old, and the Bohemian King surrepticiously prepared his own candiacy for the Imperial throne, which mean good relations with all, or at least most, of the Electors.
But the Crown Prince had no interest in this. He considered treaties and alliances to be "effeminate," and he was determined to rule all of the Germans by right of arms and conquest. The King was not ignorant of this fact, so he tried to disinherit his son--unsuccessfully because the laws of primogeniture--the eldest son's indisptable right to inherit everything, inluding the Crown--prevailed in his Kingdom, and even an attempt to change this law in an assembly of the Lords and Commons of his country, a sort of Parliament that was convened only on very special or urgent conditions like this one, rejected the King's plea, "for the Sake of Jesus Christ, Who is the Prince of Peace," was rejected by a large majority of the Lords, which included a large number of Churchmen, and also by the Commons. The King was no murderer, least of all of his son, so he decided to relieve the prince of all his military and some of his more influential political offices, which was clearly within his right, and hoped for the best; he believed his own election as Emperor would preclude the prince's aspirations of a take-over by conquest, that it would be unnecessary and the Crown would pass peacefully from father to son.
Little Hilde was probably the best-informed person--not only woman or girl--in Germany, not just Bohemia, and even though she was a commoner whose father was a small-time trader, she was determined to become the wife of this homely, straw-colored haired prince, even though she herself was lovely, with an ivory complexion, clear and free of the pimples that haunted the faces of so many of the youth, blond hair, blue eyes, a straight, well-fashioned nose and full lips, and an almost immaculate figure, she would be the power behind the throne, because she knew the Crown Prince, in spite of his war-like behavior and ambitious, was morally weak and easily swayed, especially by his mistress and other, less-close members of the fair sex, including his sister. The Crown Prince, August, was14 and of marriageable age, and the King was searching for a bride--with accompying political and economic treaties and fat marriage dowry--all over the West, and Central Europe, even Eastern Europe, but no King or Prince was willing to submit his daughter to this physically ill-favored--and seemingly hot-headed--Prince.
So little Hilde, from the time she was 14-years-old (her father had taught her how to read and write Latin), began studying the art of alchemy. She knew, unlike so many others, even Kings, that alchemists sought indeeed to "change base metal into gold," but that was only metaphorical. The "base metal" that true alchemists worked with was man, and the "gold" they sought was his spiritual perfection, the great strength that lay in his unconscious that could make him among the most stable--and powerful--of men. This rudimentary form of psychology, Hilde believed, could enable her to tap into her unconscious, to bring out a power strong enough to change nature itself.
But she found that the study alone of alchemy alone was not enough; much of it was concealed inextremely obscure, archaic, and most of al figurative language that only the "initiated" could understand. Naturally she needed help. Unfortunately alchemy was forbidden in the province where she lived was forbidden. The petty "und dum," as Hilde termed them, mayors of the townships of her province, or cluster of cities and townships where Hilde lived, believed alchemy was "on the right-hand side" of witchcraft, and any practicioners of it that were found faced death by burn, supposedly to prepare them for the fires of Hell that awaited them. The King protected alchemists in his personal Electorate"; they were important advisers. But the political division of Germany in general even permeated the Kingdom of Bohemia itself, and provinces had almost autunymous authority to act except in matters of foreign policy and the pre-eminence of the Hanseatic League--and the yearly taxes that were accorded to the King. As long as the provinces outside of the King's personalrule followed these rules, they were left alone (at least for now, thought the King).
Strangely, though the practice of alchemy was by fiendish mean supreed in little Hilde's province, the titular "governor" of the province, who actually was the equivolent of a sheriff, allowed the distribution of books on alchemy to colleges and universities, the few of which were sonsored by religious housed for the training of future priests, friars--and lawyers, since Church law was often inextricably connected to civil and crminal law (though most lawyers did not enter the servive of the Church). Hilde's brother was in training to be a lawyer, and he brought armloads of books, which nobody noticed she kept, on all sorts of books on alchemy, Aritotelian science, and the few books dedicated to the study of man in exclusion to the Christian interpretation of the soul. These men believed in God, but they were part of a super-secret but also--ironically--super-influential college that rejected Christianity, and the Church altogether. These books helped the girl to understand the natural world to the fullest extent, and then some, of the naural world, which she sought to change but only to the limited extent featuring her, of the nature of man, body and spirit (all of these writers excluded the word "soul" because of its Christian connotations), again to the limited extent man knew of his own nature at the time; and naturally a great number of these writers of medieval psychology borrowed a lot--if not most or even all--of their ideas of alchemy, either disguising their writing in "figures"--similies and metaphors, and a secret language known to a few of these writers as "Encryption," but used by all of them. Hilde's brother looked high and low at his college, which was considered one of the best in Germany, for a book on this mysterious writing's translation, but he found nothing, since the men who knew it were taught it by word of mouth from master to student, and death was the penalty for revealing its interpretation to people outside of the secret college--too many lives were at stake: encryption was one of the languages of alchemy, and alchemists were killed under the sheriff and province. Hilde had a very fine mind--she was keen, bright--but try as she might she could not decipher encryption. She tried every means at the disposal of the linguistists of her time: she tried understanding encrypted words and sentences leding to the (only apparently) logical outcome of the sentence, but when she tried to find ANY logic that followed encrypted language, she failed. This was one of the most common means of deciphering this deadly serious language. She studied Hebrew a little, and from this found the existence of a body of arcane knowledge and tradition known to a few scholars in Muslim Spain as the Kabala, but of course she didn't even know if that knowledge had even been written down, and there were no Jews, educated or not, in her province. Everything she knew of it was from heresay, and though none of this appeared in encryption, what she read of it appeared only to be a repetition of what she had read of alchemy and her study of man.
Hilde decided that all the knowledge in the worl of alchemy, science, psychology, would not assist her in her goal to become the Warrior-Queen of Bohemia, leading to her coronation as Empress of All the German, the very personification of Germania; her people and the Vikings who were related to them had conquered a large part of Western Europes, overcoming the Romans, the kelts of Gaul and Britai as well as those in Spain, and the Mediterrnian peoples of so many countries, and even large parts of the Slavs in Eastern Europe including modern Russia: just think what a united Germany could do! And she, little Hilde the bookworm, would rule most--if not all--of Western Europe. At that time, she knew, she was a party of one, but with her goal of transforming nature to her own advantage, and her newest, suddenly realizing the additional power of transforming man, not to his own advantage but to her own, she could accomplish her god-like goals.
Well, it was just a hop, skip and a jump from the study of alchemy, the early form of psychology but paying close attention to the alchemist's chemicals used, some rather ignorant ones who tried to create gold, usually for the Kings and princes who employed her, and used to change matter--which some of them including that self-educated but amateure girl-semi-alchemist Hilde believed could affect and change the natural world--to her study of the natural world as Aristotle presented it, to her study of man, body and spirit--without Christian interpretations but based upon the clearest observations of people and the purest of logic from the most recent philosophists and medieval psychologists then available, her study of man based primarily on alchemy, but not exclusively on this. When she came across the Jewish body of knowledge caled Kabalah, she studied Hebrew and acquired books and tracts of the greatest Jewish philisophers of Muslim Spain, translated into Latin, to finally her basically unsuccessful but learned approach to the understanding of encryption--all of which she believed would lead to her espousal of that hot head but contrarily easily-manipulated August, Crown Prince of Bohemia, either election of the King of Bohemia as Emperor combined with his peaceful plan to acquire the governments of all the German Principlalities and Electorates, including the not-yet powerful but still influential Duchy of Austria, with herself naturally as Queen-Empress (she believed--rightly--that her prospective husband was only interested in the glory and fame he would acquire as King-Emperor, not in the great power that would accompany this title); well, she would fill this vacuum and become the real ruler of Bohemia and then Germany, and as Queen-Empress Regnant, become the warrior-Queen who would conquer all of the West. She decided, this very naughty, very ambitious 18-year-old girl decided she needed to turn to another source, magic, which she knew somewhat about but believed at first that it was only a fairy-tale; magic, she knew, could be accomplished by "spells and incantations" that, she believed that through that portion of nature--and supra-nature--that she believed she could dominate through her knowledge of alchemy, her study of the natural world, and her knowledge of the bodily-psychological nature of man--she came to believe that she could master simply through the seemingly miraculous, even magic, command of the most esoteric books, tracts, treatises she could find, from some of the oldest to--primarily--most recent treatment of the subject. She believed she needed only one more work from her brother, who would graduate and be admitted to the bar, or practice of law, in less than two months: "An Historie of the Practise and Performanse of the Ancient Arte of Magick, From the Time Of Babalonian Mages to the Present Day." This the title of an English manuscript, produced not more than twenty years before by an obscure English philosopher, who wanted to replace Latin with English as the language of learning in England, was considered a masterpiece of literature which was eagerly acquired by bishops, archbishops, earls, dukes, even King Richard II, who, though he spoke primarily French, yet also spoke, understood, could read and write in the English language--he was the first one to receive a copy of this manuscript--not necessarily because of its content, though that too was of interest to scholars, philosophers and men of secret knowledge such as alchemists, and was considered the most comprehensive study of this body of knowledge to date--but to the beauty, grammatical and linguistic knowledge this man had of the English language, though he knew many languages, that was every bit as good as Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and exceeded the most successful books written in English for the elegance of the command of the English language. The writer of the book has been lost, but the title alone was enough to remind people that English was a living language, in speech and in writing that was written in better English tan the translation of the Bible provided by the followers of Wycliff (some of whose followers had been burned at the stake by Church and state of Bohemia at the Very beginning of the Fifteenth Century for rejection of papal supremcy, the Mass in Latin, and, maybe most important of all, their rejection of Transubstantiation. The leader of these men was John Hus).
The book on knowledge was translated into Spanish by a Jewish mystic of Muslim Spain, and little Hilde simply HAD to have this book, in Spanish, a faulty form of which she had managed to learn to understand manuscripts on the Kabalah that had not been translated into Latin but still collected dust on the shelves of the colleges rather comparatively large library--many of which were nothing but long scrolls, since printing had not yet been invented and it took a long time for the monks and other men who wished to disseminate knowlege to collate and copy down what was written in their colligraphic style, many times with beautiful illustrations and paintings accompanying the first capital word of each chapter, section, or paragraph of the work--and books were even rarer; but Hilde's brother's free library had everything she needed. Her brother searched for the Spanish translation and yes! It was there, and her brother duely "checked it out," the monks and other religious who operated the library never suspecting any "evil" intent from him, since he specialized in laws against heresy and, naturally, he had to understand the beliefs that many of the most "dangerous" heretics--including alchemists and witches, espoused .There was no due date on the books and scrolls, so Hilde could keep them and use them for as long as she wanted. As it happened these books, including her coveted book on magic--a book, not a scroll and rather long and these days worth a fortune--were never returned. Nevertheless her brother was awarded his degree and place in the court as a prosecutor of heretics,, absolutely no questions asked about the unreturned--and largely monumentally expensive--books and scrolls "borrowed" for Hilde by her devoted brother. He knew Hilde was a heretic, or at least a little too deeply interested in heresy, but his great love for his sister, as well as his position as the only prosecutor of heresy in the province, protected her against any investigation, or even suspicion of, heresy. Hilde was a lucky girl.
This full, comprehensive study of the earliest forms of magic known to Western man in those days, which was believed to have begun in Babylon, very-educated guesses and logical inferences and conclusions reached from the Bible, and the tiny amount of Babylonian history and literature known in those days, to commentators of the Kabalah from Old Spain, and the non-secret but still very esoteric writings of alchemy and students of it, greatly enhanced the girl's apprehension of magic, which earlier she thought she did not known but in fact had been before her eyes, and even incorporated into her thinking almost the whole time--opened her eyes to the "fact" in those days that one had to understand first the natural world before she could alter it--though only to a limited extent--to her liking to suit her purposes, and that the study of the holistic nature of man, and its under standing, were essential to her, somehow, of changing a man--or limited number of men--to her way of thinking and behaving that did not necessitate the long and rather boring study of rhetoric, argument, and dialectic, to even believe and do things to fit her will of them, up to and including their worship of her as a goddess. The latter idea greatly exhillerated her interest in magic, and was in fact something that had not occurred to her before.
The Englishman said that, after a thorough study of the matters she needed to know, then the student was ready for the understanding if not the practice of magic. The argument ran that there were two kinds of magic, and alchemy too was composed of these types. The one was to improve the condition of man hollisticall, so that he could understand and tap into the great power that lay in his unconscious, which was the original purpose of alchemy, and the production of medicines, which though not always used had proven very effective in the healing of diseases; a large number of alchemists were even looking for the then-terminal conditions of cancer, consumption (tuberculosis and pneumonia) and the horrible blood-poisoning disease that wiped out a third of the European population in the 14th Century--until recently thought to have been bubonic plague. Anyway, magicians and alchemists of this type used prayer, from the Babylonians to the medieval Europeans of the author' and Hilde's day, potions and newly-created chemicals--largely medicines--and, to an extent, spells and incantations, used to drive, not the "evil spirits" that were said to inhabit a sick, or even chronically "melancholic"--depressed--man that were believed by the ignorant to inhabit a man's body, but to somehow manipulate the certain "humors" that already existed in a man and change their positio from that which created illness to that which created health. This branch of knowlege of magic, though theoretically considered heretical by large numbers of European branches of the Roman Catholic, and to a lesser extent, the Eastern Orthodox Church, was called by this scholar of the esoteric "white magic," and was advanced by the Powers of Light--a Zorathastrian term for their Great God and His followers, morally good and powerful spirits.
Now, Hilde read about another kind of magic, one that sought to change a limited--and sometimes large--part of the natural world, so that the practicioner may gain the herbs and plants that he or she can collect to produce the potions and chemicals useful for the kind of magician to achieve his or her goals--almost always for his own ends, or for the end of others who have given him a great amount of money or valuable tokens of exchange for his services. As in white magic prayer too was involved in this kind of magic. But, instead, this kind of magician does not pray to the Powers of Light, or God as in the Middle Ages to these days. Instead, they pray to the old gods--Isis, Anubis--to the Ancient gods of Darkness of the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks; some of them even pray to Satan and offer their very bodies and souls in exchange for power over the natural world that effects them, for power over the body and spirit of man--not all men but a limited number of men (though not THAT limited) to operate under their will, to give them riches, money, power; and to change their own nature to be free of disease and early death, to even change their appearance to be more attractive to women and men, to contract a profitable marriage, even to a princess--and here it was for little Hilde--a prince! These magicians also uttered spells and incantations--enchantments, summoning the minions of the Old Gods--or even demons--to help them achieve their goals. If they were carried out in the right way, if the initial prayers and concluding enchantments, were said in the "immaculate" language of summons to the Old Deities, or in Latin, with appropriate praise, to the Devil and his demons, and carried out the chemical and "medicinal" creations which were to be ingested by several of the wealthiest, influentia and powerful men in a given vicinity, even a palace--so said the Englisman--then the belief was that the entire enterprise of these magicians would prevail. The alchemis-scholar said that there were indeed substantiated cases in which all these procedures worked; but he said no more about the successes of these encantations. A Spanish writer, Jewish or Christian Hilde did not know, since she had hear that the Christian Goths and Kelts were somewhat rapidly gaining control of Spain, and though the Jews were not initially expelled or even harrassed--at first--the flower of Jewish scholarship fled to Northern Africa and were now outside the scope of European knowledge--this "footnote," clearly identified as such, claimed that the significance of this--questionable--magic could be traced to what now would be known as hypnotic drugs, the contents of which could be in the unchanged natural world, which altered the condition of a man to do the will of the one who administered the drug through what again we would call hypnotic suggestion. Whatever this Spanish scholar said, the name of this kind of "bending of the will," be it of the natural world or of man, but almost always both, was called "black magic," which some men called "witchcraft."
Hilde, of course, was delighted to read this. Her natural inclination had been to naughtiness, and really the only way she could achieve her goals was through witchcraft. Hilde read avidly all the rest of what the Englishman said. Hilde rejected Satan. She had an inkling sense of the Divine, but not of the Christian God. Her patron was to be Isis, said to have been the most powerful of the Egyptian goddesses, some said of the entire, HUGE Egyptian pantheon. Here Hilde had reached the limit of her self education. She did not know Egyptian; the general alphabet of heiroglyphics was unknow, and their pronuciation and fashioning of words was impossible. However, there were a few scholars who knew that the Egyptian language was similar to the Hebrew and Phoenician languages, that were known--Hebrew for the most part--so little Hilde had taken a step in the right direction in her study of the old language of the Old Teatament, of the Ancient Israelites, even though it was limited. She knew a little about Isis--some of the myths and adventures that surrounded her--but she knew very little about her religion, worship, and her attributes. Hilde NEEDED a teacher; a few short weeks later her brother came to her with the news that there was an old "wizard" (wise man), or sorcerer (enchanter) in Hamburg, Northern Germany, who was seeking an erudite apprentice to assist him, and maybe take over for him after his death--which as it happened would not be for some years yet. Anyway, Hilde's brother, to the girl's delight, had sent a missive by a courior in speed to the sorcerer that his sister was very knowledgeable in the arcane, and that she wished to apply for the position. The sorcerrer responded that he wished to meet her. And so she told her parents of her wish to continue her education--in what? she never told them, and when they insisted on an answer, she lied. Unfortunately her father could not afford too send her to Hamburg in anyway. But Hilde had a solution--a somewhat wicked one. She asked her father if he could afford to send her to the King of Bohemia's capital. Without asking why her father said yes. She was going to sell all the expensive books and manuscripts she had gotten from her brother through his college, that altogether were worth thousands of crowns--easily a hundred thousand dollars these days, and live of the proceeds--and go to Hamburg. She knew there were alchemists and scholars and students of the arcane that were hungry for books and scrolls like these and would pay any price for these books and the learning they contained. Everything worked according to the little would-be witch's plan, and soon she was in Hamburg, yaken on as the sorcerer's apprentice, far away from those, bigoted, backward "hillbillies" of the Bohemian province of her bith.
Hilde had been a student of the arcane, of necessity secretly, because of the oppressive laws against alchemy and magic, or even the study of them by scholars at the college Hilde's brother Heinz attended. It was falsely assumed that all alchemy and magic was an aspect of the worship of the Devil, or Satan, or of the beautiful angel who had fallen from grace in the Kingdom of Heaven because of his, and his followers, which comprised one third of the angels, rebellion against God, attempting to usurp Power from the Almighty and consigning Him to Tartarus, Lucifer taking the leadership of all the angels in Heaven. Lucifer's failed attempt, said the priest and their scholars, many of them very intelligent and educated men such as St. Thomas Aquinas of the 13th century, St. Augustine, who had experienced first hand the mysterious beliefs of the Romans and the Ancient, almost buried as far as the West was concerned, beliefs of the Egyptians, Babylonian, Phoenician, and Indo-Iranian (whose people in control of the government and religion were almost the same ethnically as the "Indo-European" peoples of the German, Keltic, and Slavic peoples of the West, though because of intermarriage with native Indians and Iranians--many of whom people still called Persian--were a little darker than their brothers in the West; but only a very few scholars were able to piece together the later-proven membership of the Iranian and Indian languages with the language of the West, making all these languages members of the same family. Naturally Hilde studied all this, and she noted the great similarity of the Persian-Iranian religion of the Zoroathians, wich scolars in Germany knew by the name of Zarathustra, the fabled founder of this religion.
Naturally, even the study of this faith for its own sake, outside of priest and monkish scholars and heresy hunters, like Hilde's brother, who needed to understand non-Roman Catholic-canonical religions in order to fight it and prosecute adherents and students of them, was deemed heresy in the old-fashioned province of Bavaria from which Hilde haled, and almost always burned to death unmercifully. But in Hamburg, which was considered by many to be the jewel of the Hanseatic league, scholars and anyone who could read were allowed to study the arcane because of the beautiful tales told by merchants of the Hanseatic League and their sailors, who did busines not only in the West but also in the fabulously wealthy East, that were listened to not only by the common folk of Northern Germany but also by their rulers, which latter wanted to know more and more, even the Eastern version of the study of the arcane and magic. Merchants of the Hanseatic League brought back beautiful, and plain, books from the East of the Jewish mystic book, the Kabalah--no longer simply a "body of knowledge" that Hilde had to try to put together by the smattering of Hebrew she had learned, but now a very thick book written in Greek, which educated men in Germany understood and spoke fluently, easily translating the Kabalah, complete with figurative laguage and the fine illustrations that editors of the Ancient mystical learning of the Jews used instead on encryption, making it far more accessible to scholars, including Auber, the Sorcerer that Hilde apprenticed with, and his gift of the book, translated into Latin, since as yet Germany did not have a written language, which book Hilde studied avidly, but she found, even in the figurative language and mysterious illustrations only a basic repetition of Alchemical ideas combined with a modified Judaism--though the latter played a far less important part in the book than the arcane, even secret ideas of Alchemy. The role Judaism played was a mystic exegesis of the Old Testament, which Hilde knew in Latin. Now she was in a position to piece together the secret knowledge of Alchemy, the "common knowledge" of the Old Testament, and the mystic, semi-alchemenical interpretation of it, and she knew much more about alchemy, that rudimentary form of psychology and a study of an advanced theory of science as it applied to nature and Man as a whole, body and Spirit.
The Sorcerer had a fine grasp of alchemy--not illegal in Hamburg thanks in large part to the prince's deep interest in it and the permission he gave scholars to study it primarily because of the additional, useful interpretations of it they provided court alchemists. There were several of them. All this was made possible by the trade of and exchange of ideas the Hanseatic League, the merchants of which were generally non-bigoted Roman Catholics, because they did so much business with the so-called Infidel Turks," which in those days was an all-inclusive term Catholic Europe applied to all Muslims what ever their true nationality. Auber had a thick book of alchemy which he provided as payment to Hilde for two months' work--much of which was simple housework in addition to study.
The Sorcerer was not only in a position to teach Hilde other secrets of the alchemists, but she learned numerology, which he connected to the old deck of cards called the Tarot, which were numerologistic in character, each card assigned a number. The card that was assigned to or cosen by a particular subject was said to match his personalty. There was a death card, which did mot indicate the imminate death of the subject nor yet that he was an "evil" man who committed murder or contemplated it. It denoted instead that his Spirit was "dead"; his willingness to learn new ideas, and perhaps embrace some of them, on his own through study, did not exist. Instead he believed in the traditional teachings of the Catholic--or other, established--religion, and believed without question what the priests told him, never bothering to investigate his ordinances for himself, either through the established written word of Germany, Latin, or by the tongue of Wise Men like Auber, who for a small price could teach the subject the origin of the priests dictums and their interpretation. The Wise Man was always careful to avoid hertical tteachings--heresy was still illegal, even in Hamburg--but he did give the subject other interpretations of the Church's ordinances that were generally not known by "the herd" and he gave the subject ideas of how he can learn things the Sorcerer did not know. But refusal to study--to study nature or the nature of man or of the ideas of the Church, or everything, simply following the beliefs (not knowledge) blindly of the majority: such a person was considered "dead" by the creators of the Tarot cards, hence the death card. It was assigned a numerical value. This was just an example; there were other cards, each having a number assigned to them, except, notably, the Fool, which was accorded the number zero. Just why this was so was a mystery, even to the Sorcerer. It was the card with the most versions, the most interesting, even beautiful illustrations; but its general meaning was unknown. Hilde deduced, however, that the card denoted witchcraft; that the card was the card of the Anti-Christ, which, though she rejected the Devil, yet as a prospective practicioner of Black Magic, she was in opposition to the teaching of traditional Judaism, which called for the execution of witches, and through that and tales--many true, of witches' intimate connection with Satan, or someone they believed was Satan, and the selfish, often "evil" nature of Black Magic, was banned and relentlessly persecuted by the Church and the "secular arm," the governments. So many witches, and so many people falsely but successfully accused of it, faced the horrible death of burning. Hilde knew all this; but she was courageous, an important aspect of true scholarship besides the study and practice of Black Magic, and she pusued her ambitions. No one knew, not even Auber, because so much of herr knowledge and ideas regarding it, as well as logical deductions of it often achieved by the oid Platonic method of dialectic method of learning, based on the question-and-answer method of arriving at some sort of major truth, and enhanced by the production of syllogisms. Thomas Aquinas was a brilliant dialectician, following Aristotle; and Hilde studied both Avidly, learning dialectics from the masters, and her knowlege of them far exceeded that of her master. Even though alchemy and magic introduced a supra-knowledge, out of the reach of regular logicians--many people considered alchemy the enemy of logic, which is patently untrue, but it also espoused the supra-knowledge of the mystics. But without a knowledge of earthly-extending-to-Heavenly knowledge, the study of alchemy would be impossible, since so many of its ideas were based on logic, and supra-knowledge, which assumed scholoing in dialectics, even though the exponents of mystics and mystical writers, both of which included alchemists, claimed a supra-knowledge, acquired, perhaps from God Himself, or contemplation, or study of logic in search of holes, or the interviewing of men of learning, including alchemists and other mystics, even personal intuition leading to "enlightenment," as opposed to logical "conclusions,"--all of these matters led to the learning, memorization and incusion of logically deduced ideas in Hilde's mind and conversation.
Naturally, Hilde was very interested of the importation of Ancient Middle Eastern texts brought in for purchase by the learned of Hamburg, and Auber, like Hilde, was deeply interested in Ancient Egyptian religion thought, and myth. Many of these were translated into Greek, and Auber acquired as many manuscripts and scrolls as he could afford. Unfortunately most of the key books were old-Egyptian books translated into contemporary Egyptian, and some were written in heiroglyphics, undecipherable by anybody, including Egyptians, in those days, and the Anccient but far more accessible, translatable--first into contemporary Egyptian into Egyptian and thence to Greek, both because of its recent connection to the withering Byzantine Empire and because of the Ancient Alexandrian monarchy, which included the luxurious, mysterious Cleopatra, which was established there by the Greco-Macedonian conquest of the Egyptian Kingdom by Alexander the Great. Many manuscripts, unfortunately, were lost in a terrible fire in a library Alexander established for the advancement of knowledge, but there were enough of themleft for an intelligent person to make accurate conclusions about Egyptian history, religion and myth.
Auber taught Hilde all he knew about Egyptian lore, and the quick mind of Hilde quickly assimilated it. For 6 months he tried, with no success, to teach Hilde Greek, and she was downhearted for that. Her master did not know Egyptian and Hilde, intelligent as she was, could not learn Greek, so he sent her to a Christianized Muslim for a few weeks, so he could teach her the basics of what Auber knew from Hilde herself wanted to learn about Ancient Egypt. The Muslim was a very friendly and kind man who patiently showed books that he had of Egyptian religion and myth which included invaluabe hand-drawn and perfect representations of statues and bass reliefs depicting gods and goddesses in their mythological and traditional roles. He told her that the government advanced the religion of Amen-Re, which it claimed was the King of the gods and should be worshipped before all others; but the people were far more interested in the less intellectual, more mythological, myth of Osiris and his Queen and fellow deity Isis. The belief ran that Osiris, then a Pharaoh, was treacherously murdered by his rival Set, who became Pharaoh in his place. In order to prevent Osiris' reincarnation--and vengeance--against Set and him or his dynastic house, Set ordered the body of Osiris to be chopped into pieces, not mummified and preserved, and these pieces thrown into the Nile. But Isis, demonstrating her great love for her late husband, her corage, and her greatness, took a sarcophagus and rode it and swam by it, unaccompanied, and by sheer determination found every piece of the body of Osiris, took it to the srgeon-mumifiers who stitched it together and "guaranteed" its preservation by mummification, and sailed it back to its home for proper interment. Osiris was created Judge and King of the Dead. In combination with his colleague Aubis, whom some mythographers said was good, others evil, being the personification of Death, the departed was required to present his heart to Osiris or Anubis--it is unclear which--which was placed on one side of the scale, and a feather was placed on the other. If the heart weighed more than the feather, it was said to be heavy with wrong doing, and not only was the departed denied entrance into the Underworld, which was saiid to be really only a reflection of his Earthly life, he was also denied reincarnation and even continued life as a monter rose up and devoured them. In that case who could make it to the semi-blissful Underworld? The story was that , supposedly only the pure of heart; but they were few and far between But, it was said, Osiris, Anubis, and probably Isis had their ways of weighting the scale, on the sly, on the side of the feather. So Isis had provided a King for the Underworld, and her influence there was great. Her assistance of the dead won her many friends among inhabitants of the Underworld, and her influence was, supposedly, second only to her husband Osiris', and exceeded Anubis', to his jealousy. As Queen of the dead the large minority of matriarchs in Egypt said her power exceeded Osiris'. In the Underworld Isis and Osiris made love, and Isis conceived and bore a son, that the couple named Horus. He was raised in both the Underworld and the diurnal world of men, having experience of both. He would grow to be a great King and a great god--so great that many Egyptians considered him the greatest. When he reached manhood he went to his mother and father's kingdom and challenged and slew the usurper King Set, a god that many scholars said could be identified with the Greek Titan, a giant who tried to overthrow Zeus and become the premier god of the Greek godhead, which would be totally replaced by his Earth-born monters, Titans. Miraculously Zeus defeated him and imprisoned him in Mt. Aetna, which became volcanic because Titan, his proper name Typhous, came from the mid-part of Earth, and he had the mastery of fire that even the Greeks knew reigned supreme there--their Underworlds safely removed from this. To return, Horus then became King or Pharaoh, owing practically everything to Isis, maybe the power behind the Throne. Hilde knew the story of Zeus and Typhous, but she had never heard of the story of Isis and her heroism and motherhood of a divine King, of the wronged Osiris, murdered by Set and chopped into pieces so he could not be reincarnated, of the treacherous Set, the enemy of Isis and Osiris, murderer, usurper, finally avennged by Horus, the son of the Queen and King of the Dead, of the God-King Horus, who killed Set and made Egypt into one country, finally uniting Upper and Lower Egypt--just how he managed to do this was attributed to the godly powers he inherited from Isis and Osiris and his own manly power (he too was a god, as was Set, though "dead"); but Horus was completely irrelevant to Hilde's ambition.
The Christianized Muslim also taught Hilde what she knew all along: that Isis was the Supreme Being among the combined Egyptian godhead--among the people; the government still advanced the religion of Amen-Re; but "Isisists" corrected this. The belief was that Amen-Re was advanced in years and, like many older people, found it necessary to take a nap in the afternoon. One day in the spring, when Amen-Re had dropped off to sleep, Isis decided to usurp the Old King's authority. From behind a large rock the Queen watched as Amen-Re dropped off in a chair outside. She had perforce hidden behind a rock because Amen-Re would have discerned her presence. But after he fell asleep Isis put on her very own--no other deity had one--cloak of invisibility, and Amen-Re's guards knew nothing as she approached the Great Ruler, seizing the drool that always fell from the old man's mouth when he slept. Isis waited; when the King of Kings awoke Isis poured separate drops of his drool, surrounding him, and, with a supreme magic that she had mastered, been conceived with, and awarded to her for her bravery, she turned the drool into deadly--even to a god--poisonous vipers that surrounded Amen-Re was sitting in. The Chief god's powerful drool and the Great Queen's magic had made this possible. After Amen-Re saw with terror the hissing serpents surrounding his chair, Isis presented herself to him and told him, "I can rid the Great God of these serpents, but first he must perform for me a servive."
Nervously the Divine King asked, "What is your demand, my daughter?"
Isis responded, "Before I free you from the captivity the serpents have imposed upon Your Majesty, you must create me and recognize me as the Supreme Ruler of All Gods everywhere, including yourself. If you do not acceed to my demand, you will surely die, and I will take your power anyway, through magic and power."
Amen-Re found that he was not given much alternative in his choice. He would die, and his "second-in-command" would not succeed him; he knew that she was the greatest among the gods of practitioners of magic, and it was such that she could raise an army of innumearable men from the grains of the sand; she also had command of the innumeable dead; and her responsibility for the death of him, Amen-Re, would perhaps give her the greatest power. So Amen -Ra told Isis, "Be it as you say; you are the King and Queen of all the gods, which I now tell the other divinities through the access I have to their minds, which power I now rescind to you. By my will all of the divine powers I have, except immortality which you also possess, I surrender to you. Finally I give you my Kingly Ring, fully charged with all the authority I possess that I have not mention. You are King and Queen of all life. And by myself, and now by you, in pain of great illness and even lessening of the powers you condescend to leave me, I swear I acknowledge the truth of all I have said." Then the former King, now in the presence of so many of the gods and goddesses, knelt in homage to the new Master of all Living, including the gods and goddesses. He took her right hand in his and kissed the back of it, which the others did afterward, the vipers that had surrounded the former King's chair Isis had already waved away with her magic. Amen-Re then escorted Isis into his Imperial palace, seated her on the Pharaohs Throne, placed the Imperial, heavily jeweled Crown on her head, and gave her the Scepter, which signified her position as King-Queen, directing her government, and the Imperial Fascies or whip, that showed her as the dispenser of justice. There was no myth afterward that showed her overthrow; Isis remained Queen-King Regnant of the gods unchallenged, and later became Patroness of the Greek Mysteries, which gave her even more power. Hilde had suspected that Isis was the greatest of Egyptian gods, and had a dark aspect, in part because of her Queenship of the dead--but she did not know any of the myths that brought the myth and cultus of Isis the Queen-King that brought everything together.
After Hilde's viewing of the story-telling figures in stone, stone relief, and illustrations, Hilde was almost ready for her self-initiation into witchcraft. But it was still necessary for the Westerized, ex-Muslim to teach her the speech of Ancient Egypt, so that she could successfully summon her and her invulnerable army of the dead to assist Hilde in achieving her goals.
So this Christianized-Muslim scholar, whose baptismal name was Eugene, and whose god-parents were the Elector of Hamburg and his wife and who was a personal friend of Hilde's master, patiently led Hilde through the ends and out of the only form of communication of the Egyptians that was then understood by Western man, the Heiotic writing developed by the priesthood of Ancient Egypt, a script designed at first to maintain religious and mythological secrets, but was later used by the nobility and by merchants, it being an excellent way of keeping accounts (before they had used Phoenician, and not all merchants were fluent in that language, so that costly mistakes were made). In spite on their "secret language' being made use of by the "profane," priests kept their greatest secrets in heiroglyphics but continued to use heirotic writing to account mythological stories and the religio-ritualistic significance of them, accounts of money reseived by various temples, changes in ritual, the rise of new gods, and many other important information. The priests kept these secret, but when the Macedonian-Greeks came and established new and sometimes popular religions, and the Old Priesthood declined in power and influence, their hiding places were forgotten, and after the power of the greeks lessened in Egypt--though it never disappeared, and many rulers of Egypt were often still Greek--like Cleopatra--and the Greeks were quickly replaced by the Romans, there was a brief flourishing of the Ancient religion, and the priesthood again rose in significance, they did not primarily use heiroglyphs to record mytho-religious knowledge, but re-learned the ancient writing called heirotic, which they believed, rightly, that the noble and merchant class had long discarded in favor of Greek, and since the commons could not read at all--well, the priestly secrets were safe for many, many long years. However, not all that long before, a group of Greek scholars uncovered a significant amount of papyrus scrolls on which was written this ancient and secret-sacred writing. They went to Muslim-Egyptian scholars who knew Gree and a smattering of Ancient Egyptian, and as fellow-scholars of the Greek historica-religious scholars, worked very hard to first pronounce the Ancient language represented by the heirotis, then they were able, slowly and carefully, as an archaeologist slowly and carefully dusts off old bones and gingerly lifts them so they don't crumble in his hands, to give a pretty accurate summary of the contents of each papyrus, which the Western scholars took down in a rudimentary Greek shorthand. But before the Muslims, themselves devoted to scholarship, could begin to translate word-for-word of the Old writing, led the Greek scholars to the common people who still worked the Nile. At that time not one of them knew Arabic, notwithstanding that Arabic and Egyptian were both Semitic languages and rather closely related. All of the educated men, nobility, and middle class merchants and tradesmen were well-versed in the Koran, and oh-so-many Arabic words, derived from the now-divine language of most of the Middle East, were incorporated into Egyptian, even though the Language of the Pharaohs was by no means extinct, and Egyptian remained a separate living language apart from Arabic, and before that Latin and Greek. But the poor illiterate-uneducated, and cut-off folk who worked the Nile River, just as their ancestors had many thousands of years before, now simple farmers, no longer slaves but obliged to live off the crops they grew and the milk and meat provided by the poor amount of cattle and goats they could keep, were even cut off from many of their fellow-Egyptians, and they had no dealings with traders or other foreigners: they spoke a dialect of Egyptian that was not understood by any of their other countrymen; THEY spoke the language of the Ancient Ones better than anyone, and they were the ones to approach for the proper pronunciation of Ancient Egyptians. What the Christo-Muslim group of scholars learned was that their original pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian was almost totally wrong. The men spent six months with these simple, hospitable people, communicating with them with great difficulty in the official Egyptian then spoken--though the Muslims exempted all Arabic, Latin, and Greek words and phrases. After six months, the scholars had mastered Ancient Egyptian, the Greeks again using their early form of shorthand that preserved exactly the words they learned. The Muslim and Western scholars now not only knew how to pronounce the Old Tongue, but how to understand it and how to carry on daily conversations in it. On their way back to the site where they had met, the Greeks and the Muslims spoke to each other exclusively in the pristine Ancient language, so --elegantly!--preserved by the common people of the Nile. The Muslims, though they had not originally known how to pronounce it, still knew how to interpret the Old Heirotic writing, and guess about how to pronounce it, now found they had made a few important errors in their translation. The Muslims and the Christians shared their information, and now the West began to understand one of the oldest, most mysterious languages in the world then known.
Hilde listened enraptured to every word of her teacher. She found the brillance and persevence of the old scholars and their quest to accurately translate heirotic writing, which both spelled phonetically so that their peoples could read it with proper pronunciation--errors in this would inevitably lead to errors in interpretion--serious ones--Hilde was almost thunder-struck! She asked Eugene if he could teach her Ancient Egyptian and help her pronounce, read, and translate heirotic writing.
"Of course, my dear!" responded Eugene, "You are by far the brightest and most enthsiatic student I have ever had! If only ALL students were like you!"
So the long process of learning this Ancient, sacred language for Hilde began, two hours a day in the afternoon, Monday-Saturday. First the girl was introduced to the now-famous myth, made available in Germany in the original, Ancient language, by way of heirotic writing--thanks to the wonderful Hanseatic League--of Osiris' murder and subsequent vivisection by Set and Isis' heroic, awe-inspiring sailing on a sarcophagus and successfule collection of all his parts and subsequent mummification.
With great and loving patience Eugene the brilliant scholar took Hilde through the long, hard road of learning Ancient Egyptian through the phonetical (pronunciation)-translation-interprtation of Ancient Egyptian words and phrases in Heirotic writing, the secret writing of the priests, much easier for them to use than heiroglyphics. It took altogether 3 months for Hilde to learn this method of learning Ancient Egyptian as well as being able to write it, before she was able to interpret the opening portion of the Isis-Osiris myth. Fortunately for Hilde, trading ships of the Hanseatic League brought back a less-thick, less expensive kind of paper than used by other Europeans at the time, and both Auber and Eugene acquired a large amount of it. The paper was still parchment, just not quite as thick, so not only could the sorcerer and Eugene pay less for it, they could acquire more of it; and it was on this paper that the young student Hilde was able to take a few important notes from Eugene, and to write an interpretation of the old myth of Isis sailing the Nile to recover the bits and pieces of her husband's remains. As she was learning the old, magic language, she and Eugene began to speak ancient Egyptian during her lessons, and to informally converse in that language, just as the Greco-Muslim scholars had done approximately 200 years ago. Any missives the scolar and Hilde sent to each other were written in heirotic writing; Hilde mastered the tongue itself before she could write in this writing, and she made several mistakes in her written communication, so Eugene began patiently to teach the young scholar how to reproduce the letters, words and phrases that were contained in heirotic writing. Without stopping to speak ancient Egyptian to one another, Eugene, again spent as much time as she needed to master heirotic writing. Hilde told the scholar of her brief study of Hebrew, to help her to understand better the writings of the Holy Kabalah,, which the Jews who wrote it and recited it to their students, always did so in Hebrew, which they considered to be the first language, the language of God Himself, and as such had great power, both Divine and even secular, hidden within it, there for the finding of anyone who looked for it. This is one reason that students of the work carefully studied the Old Hebrew Old Testament, looking for hidden power, or magic. And they found certain words, phrases, stories--even individual letters--that might serve in better understanding of the arcane, at least in the eyes of students of secret knowledge and wisdom.
Even though Hilde's study of Cabalistic study ended in frustration, first because she could not master most of the language or writing of Hebrew, and second because she found that much of what she read was already quite familiar to her, since it represented alchemic, and semi-alchemic ideas, so she gave up her still-impressive self-study of Hebrew. Fortunately, she found the Jewish-Spanish scholars to be of inestible valur to her, since they presented a phonetic guide to the pronunciation of the entire Hebrew alphabet, and though her Spanish was faulty owing her translation of it to her fine knowledge of Latin, she did manage to pronounce a good number of words, and even some phrases. She was even able to understand and interpret, in faulty Hebrew, a story in the Old Testament Cabalistically, one that other students of the Old, secret knowledge had not assayed before. There were as mentioned no Jews, let alone Jewish scholars in her bigoted province, but the King of Bavaria had opened his door to them, as he had the alchemists, and even sorcerers like Auber, whether they were converted or not; the King was a great patron of learning, and he relied on his alchemists to "change the naural world and the nature of the Princes and Electors of Germany" so that they would create him the next Holy Roman Emperor. Many of the alchemists who thoroughly understood their craft warned the King that this was a classic case of Black Magic--witchcraft, since he wanted to change the natural world and incline the wills of men to choose him sd Emperor; that he was using alchemy to benefit himself only, not other people. Though the King was at first unaware of the allleged connection of his intention with Black Magic, he answered, after conferring with his advisers, at least two of which were alchemists, that he was not looking out for his own interests but rather that of the German people, that he believed would benefit tthem because a great German army would keep the people safe from war, both internal and eternal, would save Germany from incursions of the Turk, and make Germany strong and thoroughly united, and he was going to try to impose on all germans the standard language of the Germans of the North, which he was convinced was a purer form of German than other dialects, including his own country's--his Council and Court spoke exclusively this so-called standard German, so much so that they needed interpreters to understand the needs of his own people. in addition, the King argued that Northern German was the language of trade, business in the rich Northern States and Electorates, and, perhaps most important of all, was the speech of the Hanseatic league. With such a defense the King won over to his side that his dabbling in "Black Magic" was actually an attempt to practice the White Magic of a united and powerful Germany, with him as Emperor, of course--but achieved by peaceful means. As an after-thought the Bohemian monarch argued that a united, powerful germany under the leadership of one ruler, the Emperor, would help to guarantee peace through alliances and trade agreements that would frighten war-like European states into laying down their arms, whether they were a direct threat to Germany or not. Peace was the ultimate goal, and potential gift, of the King of Bohemia as Holy Roman Emperor, to Germany, and all Europe. It was in this way that the King was able to separate himself, in the all-important eyes of his counselors and the body of alchmists that stood in his Court, from Black Magic or witchcraft allying himself with White Magic, at least in the over-all results in the spells, incantations, prayers to the God of Light, and powerful, perhaps hypnotic chemicals, that altogether would change the course of the natural world and influence the minds of men to bend to his will, to bring peace at last to the german nation, and the sometimes fratricidal wars within it, and general peace, at least in Western and Central Europe, and be a powerful bastion against the Turk. Hilde, however, could not claim peace as her goal, but personal aggrandisement, war, power, and conquest as her goals, so she allied herself to the Dark Powers to achieve her goals. Auber and Eugene, of course, knew nothing of this; they only thought Hilde was a very precocious and studious-curious girl, and both of them fully expected that, once she had passed her "Egyptian phase" of her learning, she would move on to more Western traditions. They were wrong.
After appproximately four and one-half months after she began her study of Ancient Egyptians and the heirotic writings of the priests--and Egyptian being a Semitic language like Hebrew she found a certain similarity between the two languages, and this assisted her in her understanding of Ancient Egyptian. Her exegesis, or compositional explanation, of the myth was that Isis was the more powerful deity over Osiris because without his wife's bold recovery of his remains he would be stuck in a limbo, beyond the help of anyone in the Underworld, incapable of reincarnation, his spirit at last fading away when the people's memories of him disappeared and his body was lost forever, skeletenized in the Nile, unembalmed, unmummified, never able to achieve the status of a god. She also argued that, since Osiris was busy judging the dead, Isis herself assumed the position of Queen of the Dead, invulnerable, from which she could raise an invulnerable army, serving exclusively her and her causes, whatever they were. Hilde's essay was brief, but Eugene said it was the work of a bright, intelligent mind. He told her that most scholars believed that Osiris was the superior deity, being King of the Underworld, Judge of the Dead, father of the Great King Horace, and having at his servive the powerful god Anubis, the guide of the dead to the Underworld, or rather the vestibule of it, for Osiris' judgement. But Hilde argued, in very good Ancient Egyptian, that the most Ancient belief, still honored by many of the Egyptian slaves, that women held the hegemeny of Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld; this was a matriarchal society, and this alone was enough to make Isis supreme, on Earth because of her Nile-shaking undertaking, and in the Underworld because of Osiris' pressing duties as judge of the dead. Finally, Hilde said that, because she was the mother and teacher of Great Horace, teaching him among other things that he was rightful God and Pharoah of a united Egypt, whose first duty was to slay her and her father's great enemy Set, and, using a kind of logic mixed in with a technicality, since Horace was born in the Underworld, the abode of the dead, and Isis was the Queen(--at least Regent--) thereof, Horace was born a subject to his mother, and that made Isis superior even to Horace, who was popularly worshipped all over Egypt, but whose myths were less popular in the common world than that of Osiris-Isis-Set-and Horace--and most of the common people considered Isis to be the central figure; as a result she was prayed to more widely than even Horace. Hilde could argue that Isis was the Queen of the Underworld, and in fact of the world of the living; and she asked Eugene if she could read the story of Isis' assumption of absolute authority in Heaven over Amen-Re, thus becoming the Empress--the Queen-Regnant (ruling female monarch) of Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld. Once again, Eugene was happy to oblige her.
Eugene patiently led her through the pure, Ancient Egyptian story of Isis' usurpation of power in Heaven, taking possission of the title ans power of Great Holy Pharoroh of Heaven; she had already demonstrated her effective godhead of the world of living men by her courage and success of the recovery of Osiris' remains and their subsequent mummification, providing for his admittance into the underworld, and because of his position as a Great Phararoh on Earth was created King and Judge of that place. But, because of his duties as Judge he was unavailable for the day-to-day government of the Underworld, which took up at least 14 hours of his day--he was not only the Judge of the Egyptians but also the dead of all men, whatever their "nationhoodhood,"--he needed his rest; thus, he was constrained to promote her from Queen Consort of the Underworld to Queen Regnant of the dead--all of them the blessed dead, awaiting their bodiesr eunnion with their Bas, which were part of themselves but had for a while took the form, primarily of splendid birds like eagles and falcons, or majestiv beasts such as lions, who still roamed the outskirts of the Nile civilization of Egypt, primarily at peace with man. While the still-sentient bodies of men, undecayed, indistinguishabe from living men, enjoyed life as it had been when they were "alive"--they still lived--but it was paradisical and luxurious, and men and women were equal under the sway of their rulers. Their were no slaves; everybody enjoyed a comfortable life. Ther were horses to ride and cows for milk from cows. But death did not exist in the underworld; the dead were invulnerable; any wounds or broken bones heeled within a matter of hours, sometimes minutes, and severed limbs were replaced by new ones, growing out of the body. However, without his Ba, which was an absolute equal with his ka, or physical body, man had a shared consciousness; he did in fact have two of them, and the spiritual mind longed for his reunion with his other self, with whom he shared his consciouness,--man in the Underworld was only half a man--not as intellectual or even as intelligent as earthly man, even the lowliest slave, and could enjoy only pleasure, missing the physical excitement, the intellectual challenges, and the spiritual union the men living men of the world.
Isi became absolute Queen of the Underworld. Of course, any kind of punishment in the Underworld, really a paradise where the dead awaited the reunion of their physical bodies with their supreme, godlike selves, the ba, usually a bird because of man's persistent desire to fly, his easy escape from danger through this power, the freedom that flying represented, and even his proximity to Heaven, the abode of the gods. The priesthood of Amen-Re, and the short-lived priesthood and its Imperial support , Aten was the sole God, and the Pharaoh who imposed His worsh, abolishing the power of the priesthood of Amen, during his Kingship, Akhenaten, the first of the Monotheistic Pharaohs, undoubtedly influenced Moses and the slave-bound, then freed, Israelites in Egypt. But Akhenaten's religion came to an end (though the concept of Monotheism, many of Aten's attributes, and even His worship, was reborn with Moses, his lieurenants, and then the whole of the race of Istrael) with his own death of natural causes--no one dared to kill Pharaoh, even if he was a "heretic" like Akhenaten, since he was a god in his own right--though Akhenaten denied this, though he did claim to be Aten's son--and the disappearance, either through death or flight or death, of Akhenaten's beautiful, mysterious, anf highly intelligent and intellectual Queen Nefetiti, who probably contributed much to the intellectual side of Aten's position as Sole God and His ritual and worship (though Akhenaten deserves full credit for the belief and worship of Aten, the One and Only God--maybe Moses' God--or a facsimile of Him)--Akhenaten was not interested in this division of the nature of man--ba and ka), believing in some other arrangement of man and the afterlife (I don't know what it was); but the priesthood of Amen-Re probably encouraged man to identify entirely with the Bird-like ba, which they considered more spiritual of the nature of man, immortal (since the ba was a sacred being), and therfore much, much closer to the old concept of the traditional priesthood of Amen-Re, first to kake him King of the Gods, leading they themselves to try to establish at least a kind of Montheism with Amen-Re as God.
But the common people continued to believe in the multitude of gods--even the creation of gods out of mortals for extraordinary deeds, including even a failed but completely draining, even death, of a mere slave, attempting to follow an impossible task imposed on him by his masters, or even death after leading the slaves in creating a seemingly impossible task of creating a godlike structure--these people were created gods. They also believed in the old mythical cycle of Isis-Osiris--Set--Horace, and they believed in the hegemony of Isis.
Inconjunction with her Queenship of the Underworl and supremacy over Osiris was her conception through Osiris of the man--child--god Horace: she was his teacher, and as his mother had more influence over him than Osiris, occupied as Judge, and ehorting him to kill Set and establish a united Egypt--once there were two Pharaohs, one of Lower and the other as Upper Egypt--which when he came to manhood he accomplished with divine help, meaning the help of Isis. Old, Old Egypt was basically matriarchal, and lowly peasants and slaves did not have time, slaves and forced laborers as they were, did not have time for the intellectual battles between the priesthoods' battles between Aten and Amen-Re--anf even his own superiority over male and female gods, including Isis, these priests trying, very slowly over conservative Egypt, to establish their own version of Momotheism. They clung instead to the older, almost matriarchal, faith in the superiority of a goddess over the gods, and since, though she was relatively "new," Isis was the only goddess they new, so they worshipped chiefly her. For reasons described above--supra-godhead rescue of Osiris' remains, her supreme power over the underwrld and--at least theoretical--command of an invulnerable army of the dead--or the kas, her supreme influence, even power over Horace, a very popular god, all these things made her Goddess of Earth and Underworld--and her control of the Earth made her goddess of the natural world, and even the ba--himself almost god-like--had to bow to her will.
Hilde, though she was familiar with many of these stories, except that of Akhenaten and his Only God Aten, neither of whom she had heard of, and the intellectual nature of the worship of Amen-Re that the priesthood tried to impose on Ancient Egypt, both over the many goddsses and gods its people worshipped, not to mention the priests and servants of these deities, whose jobs depended on the continued worship of these Upper Spirits, a kind of Monotheism with Amen Re as God--and maybe the other former deities as his servants and messangers, or "angels" to Hilde. Hilde was uniterested in the ba. She believed that man, body and spirit united, entered into the Underworl, and after a period of rest from the labors of life on Earth and a concommitant time of fun and pleasure, maybe lasting hundreds of year, was reincarnated into another body, which Hilde, like the Roman Catholic Church in the ascendency in Hilde's day, was only a vessel containing the spiritual, human nature of man, both physical and god-like. However she never confided to either Eugene or Auber her personal beliefs; both of them assumed she was a regular Catholic-Christian, though nothing could be further from the truth.
By the time Hilde had complete grasp, in Ancient Egypt of Isis' control and Queenship over Earth and Underworl, Hilde asked Eugene to teach her, in Ancient Egyptian, of the story of Isis' assumption of Amen-Re's power--including his own--over all the gods. The Old language that Hilde was studying was still a little faulty, but her speech and writing were still considered good by Eugene, and easily recognizable with the exception of a few grammatical errors and mistakes in spelling--as you know, Germany did not have a written language at this time; rulers, princes, the clergy, scholars, students, and high officers of the Hanseatic League used Latin or French as their mode of written communicatio, and Hilde used Latin--thus the phonetic code and spelling of Ancient Egyptian was Latin based. Eugene believed Hilde was ready to hear the next-to-last story of Isis' accession to ultimate power in Heaven, and she learned the story, in Ancient Egyptian, of how Isis usurped Power,already related, and she composed a beautiful essay, in almost perfect Old Egyptian, analyzing this story, asserting Isis' ultimate power over All Life and Death.
To Hilde's delight, Eugene told her the precise prayer--incantation to Christians, and of course Eugene called it that, said by the ancient Egyoptians , in Old Greece and Rome, and even a few people in their own time--witches to a one--invoking the once-Great Goddess' assistance in bending the will of the natural world and the nature of man to his or her will. However, unlike one of the earlier books she had read, Eugene told her that only the name, titles, attributes, and personal relationship to the goddess needed to be said in perfect Ancient Egyptian. The rest of the incantation, as long as it sung with love, respect, reverence, and acknowledgement of Isis' supreme power over Life and Death and the witch's personal cantation that Isis was his or her goddess and expression of allegiance and alliance to her, made without recitation from a book or scroll but from the heart, and as long as the supplicant's request that Isis allow him or her to bend the wiill of the natural world as it applies to the encantator, and the bending of the nature of man, again to the supplicant's will, and as long as all this was encantated precisely, without written aid except that written on the heart, all this can be prayed in the everyday language of the supplicant, showing Isis' godhead over the entire world; but the encantation needed to be worded precisely, or the reverse of the encantator's desire would esult. Naturally, Hilde took careful notes on this, in ancient Egyptian that as soon as she could she would translate into Latin: this may have been the most important information she acquired from Eugene.
But Isis' title was incomplete without acknowledgement of her patronage and guardian of the secrets of the famous (among scholars, Hilde included) Later Egyptian, Ancient Greek, and Imperial Roman Mysteries--a secret indecipherable then as now. A follower of Isis now did not--really could not--know the contents of these mysteries; all participants were silent, and, maybe, all the activity was in the mind of the priest or priestess of the Mysteries, and the mind of the initiate, connected by the speech of the priest (always of Isis). Maybe the initiate was under the influence of a special mushroom that, while it did not disconnect the user entirely from reality, enabled him to see beautiful visions (really hallucinations) brought on by Isis through the mind of the priest through the mushroom that the initiate would take. All of the secrets of the Mysteries--one of which is known to have been revelations of life after death, but just what these revelations were is unknown. So, the initiate's experience with the revelations provided him by Isis were altogether personal, and the priest or priestess of Isis who presided over the initiation, were conducted always by word of mouth--no text containing the secrets of the Mysteries ever existed, and the secrets wentm with the priest and initiate to --whatever version of Heaven Isis revealed to them. Anyway, all the supplicant of the goddess needed to know was that Isis was the Queen, the Patroness, the Guardian, and the Revealer of the Great, Ancient Mysteries.
The knowledge of the Language of the Pharaohs--and Isis--that Hilde needed to know was complete. Eugene told her there was nothing else really that he could teacher her of the language of Ancient Egypt, its mythology and religion, and of the Great Goddess Isis, but he invited her to visit him, again for two hours everyday and the two of them would converse, as informally as possible, in the old, dead language, which she did, Monday through Friday, for the rest of their lives. Eugene was later able to help her a little in the deciphering of encryption regarding alchemy, which gained her primary interest, after the secrets of Isis and her religion.
Auber now taught her about the chemicals used by Good and Evil alchemists; without asking him, Hilde received from Auber the last pieces of information she needed regarding Black Magic--the use of strange roots, herbs and other plants, including hypnotic ones--all of which Auber had in his laboratory and even showing her which one was which. He also had the necessary mushrooms, the aroma of which while boiling in the cauldron was enough to enchant (actually hypnotize) the object of the magical chemicals--but the other ingredients, too, were indispensable. Hilde had sworn to him by the Holy Family that she would practice only White Magic, that her goal was to help people, and that she would distill only medications that were beneficial to men when she first became his apprentice. She was lying, of course, except with repect to the distilling of only good, helpful medications to men. Hilde would be a witch, but she was no murderess. And so now Hilde was prepared to practice her secret craft, and for her convenience Auber told her he was leaving in two days on an important trip to visit a colleague for two weeks, that he would close the lab because he felt, rightly, that Hilde was not prepared to deal with either people, theirdemands for advice, or their need of medicines. However, she would stay in her room and study, and enjoy some time off. So, in two days, Hilde's adventure in witchcraft, based entirely on her erudition ans bright mind, could begin: she set the Friday of that week--it was now Tuesday--as her first dabbling into witchcraft; Friday was considered by some to be a day of Evil and Witchcraft.
And so, Auber bade good bye to his young apprentice, now 19-year-old and probably-the best educated girl--or woman in Hamburg, maybe even better-educated than any boy or man, even college boy, in Hamburg. Some of her research and conclusions reached the level of scholarship, and there were times when the girl lost site of becoming Ruler of a the Germans, and tence, through war, of all of Western Europe, and concentrated on her studies, which, though demanding, yet revealed secrets to her of the unconscious of man; though this term was not really understood by medieval men, even the most brilliant of alchemists. Instead, though they did know that man only used a relatively samall amount of his mind, which they did know, unlike the generally uneducated masses, and even uninformed princes, nobles, and rich merchants, who believed the spirit of man dwelt in the heart, was actually originated in the brain, but permeated the entire body but was articulated by the brain; these scholars of the arcane, and even some religious and othe kinds of scholars, knew there was a basically untouched but massive part of the mind that man did not even know existed.
Alchemists and others knew that brilliant government from Kings, unusually bright and very successful generals in the conduct of war, many of them conquering great lands or territories, often combined with supra-intelligent government of these territories--they were think of the Ancient Israelites under Moses the Prophet, Aaron the Priest, and Joshua the General, who somehow seemed to come out of nowhere to conquer an exceptinally rich territory in what later became Palestine but then was known as Israel; naturally, they thought of Caesar, who relatively easily conquered Gaul and was a more-than-able dictator of Rome on several occasions: only his brutal murder prevented him from becoming King of Rome and thus disbanding the old Republic.
Going backin time somewhat, they thougt of Alexander, the King-general-conqueror, Greek-speaking but originating from the then rather insignifican kingdom of Macedon, who conquered almost all the nations East of his kingdom, including Persia, even making inroads into India, which possibly only his premature death prevented him from absorbing it into his massive Empire. Even after his death the touch of Alexander was felt, especially in Old Egypt, which Alexandrian Kings, the Ptolemys, ruled for several centuries, speaking Greek and bringing greek brilliance to the Ancient Kingdom--an exceptinally superior language, up-to-date weaponry, philisophy, including logic and a deeper understanding by the Egyptians of their own nation, religions, and myths. The Greco-Macedonians likewise brought the immortal ideas, and maybe some of the works, of art that the Greeks generated, religion and advanced education. If the alchemists and other studentof the rudimentary understanding of the unconscious, they would undoubtedly been able to see Napoleon, whose law code exists in many European nations to this day, the creators of the British Empire, claiming land as far West as the Americas, to as far East as India, eventually creating an Empire upon which the sun never set, so secure that many of the British went so far as to say "God is an Englishman:and it was the near-genius general and Prime Minister of Prussia who crushed Napoleon III's Imperial France and absorbed almost every German state, basically exceptional diplomacy, forging the powerful German Empire (alas, it was not Hilde). There were other examples of military and political genius, especial the United States, whose territory extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. But this was in the future, and medieval scholars were not psychic. But they did know what had happened before, and they believed that these Kings and conquerors had a way of tapping into their subconscious, accomplishing great feats, making great achievements, forging impressive and stable Empires--the Roman conquest of Gaul, later France, was so total that in time the Gauls became more Roman than the Romans, to the point of conceit, maybe even rabiedness.
Aside from political leaders the alchemists studied the great philosophers and artists, past and persent, that they knew had access to their unconscious--obviously Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the great Greek, and to some extent Roman--architecture; they also knew of philosophers, great writers and poets of their own time--St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, the author of the famous, still read and still readable "Inferno," written in contemporary, showing Italian to be more than just developing language but a large one, alive, fresh, as compared to Latin, in comparison too limited, old-fashioned, and stale, already proving to be a slowly -dying language; Chaucer in England, whose English "canterbury Tales," read and enjoyed to this day, even by people well-outside the pale of scholarship, written in so-called Middle English, but basically understood by intelligent readers, non-scholars, till today.
Again the schoars of the unconscious as it was understood in the Middle Ages looked at the ever-present Arthurian legends of basicall England and France, but permeating Germany and a large part of all Western Europe. Many people, including educated men, believed King Arthur really existed (he did, but he was basically a successful Roman Governor who valliantly fought, with a significant if short-lived success, the Teutonic invaders of Britain, the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons who would eventually conquer all of the land East of Hadrians Wall, designed to keep the "wild" Picts and later Keltic Scots from invading Roman Britain, and these invaders bacame known as the Saxons, and later the familiar English. Anyway, the real Arthur must also have been able to take out part of his much-unused mind to be so great a ruler that men wrote poems, prose and songs celebrating him, which grew into the massive Arthrian legends, written and sung to this day) Well, the King Arthur of myth and legend, said to have become King in Britain while still a boy, said to be educated and maybe raised by the great sorcerer Merlin, was considered the model King who could not fail; he sonsored the search for the Holy Grail, which was said to be the very cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper, and from which He shared with His Disciples, His Blood, becoming a part of Him and sealing (meaning establishing) the New Covenant between Himself and man, replacing the Ancient Laws said to be promulgated originally by God but added onto and explicated to exhaustion by Jewish scholars so that many of the Laws were unrecognizable by Jesus' time and in fact were made to denote the very opposite of what they were originally were meant to be understood. Anyway, the Grail or cup of Jesus, the original Vessel of His Blood, was under the guardianship of a seemingly-permanently wounded, very sick and very weak, King, Amfortas. Parsifal, or Sir Percival, a knight of King Arthur's court, found the place of the Grail, and because of his foolishness in youth but accompanied by purity and great sympathy for the Grail King, and his demonstratratively unmovable chatity, overcame the evil spells directed against him by the sorcerer Amfortas, and after many years of fighting for his master King Arthur, returned to the Grail Kingdom, healed the unfortunate Amfortas, and was recognized as King and Guardian of the Grail. Parsifal did not return to King Arthur's court, but he himself was full of Arthrian ideals, and his supra-human purity and chastity, aspects of the very God and His Son, enabled Parsifal to defeat Klingsor, be a greatly successful and unexpendable warrior for King Arthur, finding again at last the Kingdom of the Grail, and with his other already mentioned characteristics and his practically Divine sympathy was able to heal the Grail King and himself become Grail King. The story of Parsifal is basically German, his story told by a highly gifted novelist, Eshenbach, and has been as recently redited by Wagner, the great composer, and later writers. But his story originates in Britain, where he is known as Sir Percival, who was one of King Arthur's knights who searched for the Grail, in company with the famamous Sir Gawain, about whom great poetry has been written depicting his adventures, and later the fabulous Sir Galahad, maybe the most famous of King Arthur's knights. Little Hilde was acquainted with all this knowledge and all these legends, and she--momentarily--forgot about witchcraft. She was, now and then, interested in learning for its own sake, for the widom it provided, advancing Hilde's mind and helping her to tap into her own unconscious. At times she came to conclude, in company with so many regular scholars, scholars of the arcane, and alchemists was a mysterious region of the mind of man meeting the Mind--or Spirit, since alchemists and others believed was the immortal Spirit of man--the mind of man was touched in the unconscious by the Mind of God, and if man could only tap into this rich source, if only a bit, he could accomplish many thing that would last forever; the more man was able to reach into this rich source, carried by himself, in his own brain, the great keeper of the mind, the more god-like he would become. Alchemists believed they had the answer; however, alchemists believed there was a Dark Side of the unconscious, and here the little would-be witch came to herself and returned to HER godlike plan to rule Germany, then Western Europe. Nevertheless, Hilde was a seeker of knowledge, an apprentice alchemist who searched for truth of all kinds, in spite of her soon-to be sworn allegiance to Isis and the Dark Force as materialized as Black Magic.
So, with all her knowledge, and with her fluency of Ancient Egyptian, the Sacred Language of Queen Isis and other Dark divinities, and Auber gone for two weeks, Hilde decided to test her magic skill; she wanted to tap the Dark Side on her unconscious so she could master Black Magic, thence the Bohemian prince, and with magic and sword overcome the princes and Electors of Deutschland, becoming Empress, or Kaiaerina, expanding her rule to the Atlantic Ocean
She had read that many witches wore a black, long pointed black hat and black robes to practice their magic, but she had also read--and heard that some witches, especially younger ones, practiced their craft completely in the nude, believing magical power accompanied nudity in casting spells, uttering incantations, and invoking the Powers of Darkness. This belief may have descended from Keltic lore which held that the naked bodies of Keltic warriors, as long as they wore their sacred, leather belts around their waists, were surrounded by magic, and though individual warriors in Keltic armies of conquest and marauding might die, the armies of this warrior people would not fail, and, naked as they were, they conquered SO mauch territory in Western Europe. Hilde knew all about this, and since the Teutons were closely related to the Kelts, Hilde adhered to the belief of the magic that surrounded a nude body, as long as the person wore some sort of token of magic power: Hilde chose the traditional black hat of the witches.
Hide knew about the nude, Satanic witches who danced around a fire, doubtlessly representing the fires of Hell, invoking the Evil One to appear and ravish them body and spirit--or soul, as they called it, and in return he would grant them fabulous powers. These witches, even they did not see the Devil, would ravish their souls and, maybe invisibly ravish their bodies, and they would sacrifice goats and eat the creature raw, and to show their disdain for God would kill a pig--m-an abonibly unclean beast to the Jews, and the sacrifice of one to God was a horrible sacrelige, punishable undoubtably by stoning--or worse. But Hilde accounted all this Satanist stuff as nonsense, and totally rejected. But she knew that some of the priestesses of Isis officiated naked, and here she felt very much at home. She did not discern an established reason for this; she assumed that Isis did not want her priestesses to wear anything profane or created by man, that she demanded instead the nakedness of a young priestess, whom she considered sacred and pure, untouched, during the ceremonies, by the profane garb of man. But this was just an educated guess on the part of young Hilde.
Yet there was another--possible--reason for the nudity of young, non-Satanic witches, and to Hilde, naughty girl that she was, this was prhaps her favorite reason. The practice of Black Magic was bad, and in Christian Western Europe nudity was considered bad, or would lead to--at least--mischief. This came from the Jewish idea that God insiste His Levtical priests to wear breeches, coviring their private parts, while they officiated; at times they would have to climb ladders to reach a certain part of the Sanctuary, maybe to ascend to a platform to prform a Holy Service or Sacrifice to God, usually a cow. The first few Books of the Old Testament said that if God or the people saw the nakedness of the priest under his robe, it was a great abomination to God and he would shame himself and the people; God was said to have told Moses that if the priests did not wear breeches while officiating they would be struck down dead by the Lightning of God. The belief in the West that nakedness was evil went so far as to discourage many not to bathe (but Hilde did everyday)--at least not very often, and even sex itself, performed in the nude, was punished by the loss of one day in the lives of the participants, hence the poetic metaphor , found in so much Renaissance, and even modern day poetry and writing, "Let us go and die together," let us make love. There were other connections between nakedness, and at least "bad" behavior, such as the naughtiness of children who went naked, contrary to parental orders, outside, away from home, having fun displaying themselves, etc; even a kind of "strip poker" existed in the Middle Ages, and was banned by governments, with the participants, if they were found in the act, were arrested and jailed naked, and then publicly displayed naked, and, since they were almost always under 21, some under 15, were birched and then jailed for two more days. Then they were released, but they were not clothed, and in broad daylight had to walk home, in public, shamefully naked. Anyway, since Hilde was "bad" by practicing Black Magic, in her aspiration to be a witch, she wanted to be "bad" in her attire, in her wearing of the black witch's hat, and in her nudity. Then too there was a certain thrill for the youthful apprentice, in being totally naughty--Black Magic, witchcraft, nakedness, and all--in being TOTALLY naughty, but still in danger of getting caught, in this case in mortal peril, facing hanging or even burning (in Hamburg witches could recant once, but if they were found to be practicing witchcraft again, they were uncermoniously hanged, and their bodies burned to nothingness).
So Hilde disrobed and put her clothe outside the room--her living room, which she was determined to make sacred to Isis. The she put on her black hat, and got on her knees. She greeted and hailed, in perfect Ancient Egyptian, Isis, the Great Goddess and all her attributes. Then she was ready to switch to her usual tongue, German in the Northern accent (she was going to use Latin, but she was more comfortable in the language of the people she sought to rule). She implored the goddess, Queen of Life and death, to give her power to move the naural world, objects that have been manufactured by men, and the nature and power of the minds (spirits) and bodies of men to do her personal will--through her power. Well, so far, so good. She knew some witches were said to ride brooms in the sky; Hilde had her doubts about this. But she knew her dream to be Kaiserina was also, or would be in the eyes of others, even among witches and other practicioners of Black Magic, would likewise be doubtful. So, in order to demonsetate her power--at least to herself--she chose the broom she used so often in household chores, to fly, to be used by her for not for the unpleasantness of work, but for the fun of riding it naked, to show her witchly powers to other, who she believed she could cause to forget, through her magic, what they had seen, and especially whom they had seen, so they would not describe her, or even identify her, and she, possibly, face the hangman's noose.
Having completed her prayer and her gift of allegiance to Isis, the witchly candidate went into Auber's laboratory and obtained wood for a fire--there was a place on her floor for this--and a small cauldron, and brought these to her room. It was unnecessary for her to go to the well to obtain water, since she had already drawn a large amount of drinking and batwater, which she--with difficulty since it was full of water and the pan was heavy, but with success, filling the cauldren up 3 quarters. She left the cauldron for a moment and ten arranged the wood to make a small fire, but enough for the cauldron to boil after a litle while. She lith the fire rather easily, using kindling from a lit torch. Then she put the cauldron on the fire, after which she returned to the sorcerer's lab and chose the eact herbs, roots, plants, berries--all unfit for human consumption but the fumes of which only affected the object of the witch's attention. Since her object of her spell was only an inanimate object, she did not take thall-important mushroom (it was unnecessary, and was not an error). Then, while uttering a prayer for the efficacy of her potion, Hilde took the ingredients, cut them in the middle so their power would come oy sooner, threw them slowly in the cauldron praying for success as she did so. Then the girl stood in a corner of her room, waiting for the cauldron to boil.
Hilde had to wait patiently for this, saying prayers and uttering praise to Isis off and on the whole time. She had put the top on the cauldron to make it heat up faster and, most importantly, to preserve the aroma and the chemicals created in the concoction; but she was, in spite of her prayers and invokations, listening closely for the unmistakable sound of bubbling in the cauldren, all so familiar to her as the assistant to the sorcerer when he was making his own, but unselfish, concoctions. Her heart was beating fast, her breathing was abnormal: never had she been so excited in her life. In the name of Isis the Great Goddess, Queen of life and death in Heaven--though there death was unknown (but age was known, and divine beings who grew very old turned themselves into majestic birds; the deposed god Amen-Re was said to have transformed into the fabulous Phoenix, who lived for a thousand years and then dived fearlessly into a divine fire, from which he re-emerged, more beautiful and powerful than before, in age at the time childhood met youth. The myth of Amen-re was that he re-emerged human, divine and powerful, a boy-youth. Somemythographers said he went on to overthrow Isis as Queen of Heaven, but the most common myth was that he married Isis--gods could marry more than one man or woman--and together they establish a dual monarchy. The tradition was that Amen-re would retain his youth for four thousand years; then when he reached age 25 he would age no more, remaining young and potent forever. The only other gods, it was said, who did not age, were Isis, Osiris, Horace, and Anubis). Hilde also chanted that Isis was paramount, Queen of all life, nature and man, life and death, on Earth, and she was Queen of the dead, and supreme commander from the Underworld of an invincible army, that Hilde prayed would come to her aid if necessary.
Then the youthful with opened the cauldron and waved the aroma and invisible chemicals in the direction of the broom, which she had stood up against a wall nearby. She enchanted the broom, but her wording was terribly, horribly wrong: she had made a schoolgirl mistake, but she did not know this for a while. Instead of asking Isis to bend nature to her own will, Hilde asked that power be instilled in the broom: she would pay for this mistake, sorely. Incidently the broom was not made of the usual straw, but of birch.
After about 10 minutes of praying, atill sadly erroneously, and fanning the chemicals toward the broom, Hilde at last felt some sort of power inthe room, i the room, not inher, as she expected. Instead she noticed some movement in the room, and she experienced a wild, galloping heart. She was fantstically excited, but at the same time frightened: the broom was moving! She clutched her heart a little. She thought to herself: "Am I really going to be able to fly on the broom?"
Soon the broom rose from the floor. She believed that, in a matter of seconds, she would have her answer, and so she did. But soon her great excitement was replaced by fear. As the broom rose, Hilde retreated to the farthest distance she could make between the broom and herself in the room. It then occurred to her that magic, even if it was favorable to her, was a scary thing, so she had to show courage in totally manipulating it, in mastering it. So she began to take a step toward the enchanted broom--even though SHE was the one who was to be enchanted!--She moved as gingerly, as prayerfully, and as humbly as possible. As she approached it, the broom likewise began to move slowly toward her, and she decided that it must be offering its services for her to ride it; part of her prayer to Isis to enchant the broom was to cause nature to bend, in whose direction? she simply didn't specify, and allow her to ride the broom to through the skies.
But a couple of other matters were erroneous in her prayer to Isis, which should be accounted to nervousness on her part, as well as inexperience in ACTUALLY practicing magic: she did not ask for control of the broom; she didn't know that the broom was given tthe power, altogether inadvertently by her, so that the broom could take her, no matter how hard she tried to control it, could take her anywhere it wanted on a whim, even far, far away, even to the moon if it wished. Secondly, and oh-so-significantly, a genuine witch, a genuine priestess to Isis as Hilde had aspired to be, would never have failed to as the goddess to grant HER the ower to morph nature on her own behalf; instead, poor Hilde had prayed that Isis herself give the BROOM power to bend its own nature and in effect come alive; but again Hilde did not even specify that the broom come alive for her own benefit. Hilde was afraid, but she still believed she had power: maybe she would have if she had said her encantation, or prayer, to Isis, aright. Instead, the only power Hilde had was her knowledge and intelligence; her extensive knowledge of alchemy, which exceeded that she had of Black Magic to a significant degree and her "crash course" in the sacred language of the Ancient Egyptians, so that the hail she made to Isis as Queen of Life and Death and as her own honored Deity and, she prayed and encanted, Patroness, the only way Isis would turn her attention to the girl. Incidently, as Hilde made this prayer, she felt again the thrill of naughtiness, of doing something very bad, that is, practicing Black Magic, in spite of the fact that she might be caught and punished for it; and the thought that she would become a witch, flying stark naked on a broom in broad dalight, daring punishment but somehow "getting away" with this naughtiness, gave her a tremendous , almost orgasmic a nd exstatic thrill.
So she continued to slowly approach the broom, which was now off the ground and beginning to turn the side of its birch sweeping side to the girl simultaneously. The n Hilde stopped. It was clear to her that she was unable to study enough just HOW a witch rides her broom According to tradition, a with rode her broon with the handle part in front and the straw portion in back. But poor Hilde was confused: was the birch portion in back of her or in front? She asked her goddess for assistance in finding the answer, but Isis, but actually the unknown, Dark Power she had prayed to had left this to the broom itself, but Hilde still did not realize the great error she had made in her encantation. In her studies and note-taking she had made under her master Auber, basically on aspects of alchemy she did not know and corrections he had made for her when she had misapprehended about it, and those that she had taken under her tutor Eugene of Ancient Egyptian language, religion and mythology, almost all of it based on Isis, and the essays she had written in phonetically-written in the old, hidden priestly heirotics, were all made very precisely and correctly by the girl. She knew that even only one misplaced or omitted phrase, word, even syllable of the Ancient writing could change the entire meaning of EVERYTHING she had written. Hilde was the most precise apprentice-student that either Auber or Eugene had ever encountered, and bot of them were quite pleased, indeed proud of her, more than satisfied with her progress. Auber intended to begin her training in alchemenic, White, magic upon his return home, and in the meantime Hilde continued her weekday, 2 hour meetings with Eugene, who conversed informally, as much as Ancient Egypt would allow them since so many things existed in Hilde's time for which there was no concept of in the Old Language, and things existed in Ancient Egyptian that had no relevance at all to things that were prevelent nowadays. In addition, philosophy, the world of adventure in learning and knowledge that existed in the Middle Ages, was simply so advanced that there were absolutely no words in Ancient Egyptian to express it. So the one time Muslim scholar, who, being a Spanish Muslim, had, ironically, barely a drop of Arabic blood but was instead descended from the Kelts and Goths, who were regaining control of the Iberian--once called Keltiberian--peninsula, whose ancestors, retaining their own ethnic identity converted to Islam a long time ago to avoid paying the rather large, but one-time, tax that was imposed upon Christians who chose not to convert to Islam. As long as Christians, and soon Jews, paid the tax and swore fealty to the Islamic Sultan or Calaph, or King who ruled in their province, or city, they were left in peace--Eugene taught Hilde Spanish, which she quicly picked up, and she and Eugene merely switched to that language, which contained many Arabic words, or words that had Arabic roots; and so much information about the Kabalah existed in untranslated Spanish, written in untranslated Spanish by Jewish scholars that Hilde found the language to be of inestimable value. She and Eugene also studied a little more Hebrew together, assisted by Jewish-Spanish scholars who wrote in their adopted language about the tongue spoken by the ancient Israelites, the writing of whom the Bible was written, was a language Jesus understood thoroughly, though He spoke Aramaic, a newer language spoken by many people in the Middle East, and was considered by the Jews, and even many Christians, to be the Divine Language, the Language of God Himself, Who created the world by His own Word, in Hebrew, the world's oldest and most perfect language; and Hebrew, being the Divine language, as the Jews believed, was held by Jewish alchemists located in Spain, who may largely have written in Hebrew but, since it was an old language like Ancient Egyptian, spoke informally basically in Arabic or, primarily, Spanish, often wrote in Spanish, since it was a reletively new language descended from Latin, with transmuted Arabic, Keltic and Teutonic words, was used because it could convey easily so many of the new ideas that Jewish students of the Kabalah, or especially out-right alchemy, had made or discovered very recently, or in comparatively recent times (from the time of the Muslim conquest of Spain, c. AD 701).
By the way, since so many Goths and Kelts continued to lve in Muslim Spain, even if they converted to Islam, continued to marry into their own people, they retained Gothic and Keltic characteristics. The ex-Muslin scholar Eugene was basically Keltic. He had auburn hair, blue eyes, a fair complexion, and a bright red beard, and even though beards were basically out of fashion during the latter Western European Middle Ages (though Auber had a rather long, majestic white beard), people might notice Eugene but once and not take a second look, since he resembled a regular German, since many Germans had red hair, as did Scandinavians.
But when Hilde practiced magic finally , for the first time, a beautiful, almost perfectly figured lass of 19, she "blew it, big time." She had stopped approaching the broom but the broom had not stopped approaching her. She commanded it in the Ancient language, incantating in the name of Isis, to stiop, but it continued: and now she was desperately afraid. Then a deep, burning sensation blew up in Hilde's stomach, and simultaneously it hit her mind, and she--almost--swooned: she now realized she had uttered her encantation totally wrong; instead of praying Isis that her power devolve on the girl, she had mistakenly prayed for Dark power to be conferred on the broom itslelf, and there was no telling WHAT it would do! The BROOM was enchanted, and she was in its power!
Realizing that her only chance of escape from her enchanted broom was to escape through a back door in her room that led to the street. She was so desperate to escape from this Power-instilled broom that she didn't give a thought to her nudity, and that she would have exposed herself to the public's view, with laughter and looks and words of shame and disgust greeting her; but she was now AFRAID of the Dark Power; it had turned on her!
Well, to her terror and desperation, she found her backdoor locked. She turned the nob over and over; she pulled on the doornob with all of her stength. But it was all to no effect. As she tried desperately to open the backdoor, she was bending over, and her bare, pretty white bottom was sticking out. If she had momentarily lost thought of her--deliberately naughty--naked condition, the girl was soon reminded of it. The broom, made up of a few tough birch branches, came close to Hilde, without the youthful "witch's" knowledge, swooped up high in the air, and SWOOSH. . . . WHOP!. . . . The birch broom had suddenly become a birch rod, as if she were being thrashed on her bare, naughty schoolgirl bottom by an irate tutor!
"AHHHHHH!" Hilde screamed, in pain and in shock, "What th. . . . ?!? HELP! Is anybody out there? Help me! Something is terribly, horribly wrong!" But there was no help coming. Poor Hilde! Desperate as she was, and blushing violently at the thought that her Paroness Isis was displeasec with her because of her foolish, obviously un-thought-out encantation, continued to work on the door, and as she did so she thoughtlessly continued to thrust out her bottom. Twice more the enchanted broom struck her hard on the bottom, this time leaving marks. Hilde stopped suddenly and stood up for a moment. She thoght to herself, "Could I be enchanted--bewitched, too? Could it be that I am constrained to take the tanning the birch is giving me, as when I toughtlessly bent over to try to open the door, and the broom thrashed me three times?"
She turned around to face her now-magical adversary, but she couldn't see it. She looked from side to side, forward and backward, but there was no flying broom inside. The door to her room was closed, and the backdoor was locked. "Where could it have gone?" Hilde asked herself; then since she knew the broom was magic, it could possibly fly through walls, or could have turned invisible. But neith was the case. The broom had been right behind her the whole time, she had just not been able to position herself to see it. But it was there!
There was enough room for the make-shift "birch rod" to swoop down and smack her bottom stingingly; she screamed and ran to the front door of her room, which she had closed so that the aroma of the incantations and chemicals in her boiling cauldren would not waft through the vestibule outside her door and permeate the rest of the house; even after two weeks the odor would still linger, and Auber would be sure to notice it. She thought it best to confinee everything to her room. The sorcerer never came in. He was a gentleman, and believed it was improper for a man to enter a young maiden's room, unless he were accompanied by several matrons, or if the man were her father. She would think of a way to get rid of the smell in her room later, and start performing her rituals at night, outside thcity - Mitternacht, the witching hour!
But behold a wonder! The door to her own room was locked--somehow--or stuck! Again she bent over, unconsciously, as she tried topen the door, and theinstrument of her punishment WHAPPED her on the butt ONE!. . . . TWO!. . . . THREE!. . . . FOUR!. . . . times in supra-rapid succession. Again she screamed. "AHHHHHHHH!" then in tears of pain she said, in anger yo herself, "Auch! So dum! How could I have bent over again so the birch could smack me FOUR times!" She started running around the room in panic, screaming, and praying to Isis to end the punishment.
"O Isis! The Great Goddess! Greater than all other Deities and Potentates! I beg you! I plead with you! I implore you! End this most painful and humiliating punishment! I know I have offended you. I beg your forgiveness! I have done wrong in my spell. Iam so very, VERY sorry! I've learned my lesson! If it be your will, I will stop practicing Black Magic forever!"
Well, the Dark Power would not help her. As she was running her arms were extended, and her bottom was unprotected. Naturally a tempting target for the broo, which gave her whack after whack, too fast to cover her rear with her hands. The broom was chasing her mercilessly swatting her, leaving red (not bloody) welts on her backside, while that part of her was rosy-red. Her dire situation was compounded terribly by her cllapse ove a mis-placed cushion, and her bottom was easily accessible to the birch for six more lashings. "AUCH!" she cried, no more! I entreat you!" The girl could not yet rise--besides, she knew she would be bending over to do so--she turned on her back, her but hurting more because of its brush with the cushion, and put her hand over her face.
"Mighty Power!" she addressed the broom, "In the name of Isis! Please let me rise and go." Her voice became more resigned gradually as she addressed the broom. The birch was still, suspended over her, and, somehoe allowed her to rise; she had to bend over with her butt exposed for just a moment to maneuver herself to rise--she was, after all in considerable pain, and had to rise slowly. Then the girl ran as fast as she could, once again with hands thoughtlessly extended, her but helplessly exposed to the several swats of the birch broom, stinging as ever, once again happening too fast for her to cover. The girl and her pitifully sore bottom reached the back door, and yet once more Hilde had to stick out her hind-quarters to jerk open the door, long enough for the birch to thrash her twice, this time dead-on target of her "bottom line," the crease between her bottom and the very top of her back legs. She screeched in pain, stopped what she was doing and bent over backwards, screaming at the ceiling, her hands rubbing the afflicted area to try as much as possible to ease her pain. Then, suddenly, she pulled open the door and ran naked outside. She didm't notice at the time, since the birch was giving her three or four more lashes as she fled through thfront door, giving her a swat or two more oyside the door, but no one was around, and she began running to the more private, back part of the house. Meantime the broom started sweeping her effectively on the ground, then her legs and feet, and she ran even faster; then suddenly the broom dropped, lifeless and inanimate, no longer enchanted, but it has chatised tis very, very naughty girl well. Hilde noticed there was no more sweeping at her feet. She turned around and saw the broom supine, motionless on the ground. She rubbed her bottom in bitter tears.
As she stared at the instrument of her punishment, Hilde, even thuogh she was full of pain and humiliation from her birching, stopped crying and, as she rubbed her bottom, began to reflect on her life until now. First of all, she was a vey naughty girl, and she knew it. She knew, even right after it was over, that she definitely deserved a birching for this--painfaul as it was. By no means did she enjoy it. However, it did serve to open her eyes. She knew now, thanks to the broom's chastisement of her, where her true future lay. It was not to study witchcraft, or Black Magic, or yet to become Queen of Bohemia. The very one suject that had commanded most of her attention, for the past several years was alchemy, te discovering of its secrets, her attempt at deciphering encryption, how it can help man to bend nature, how it can "change base metal into gold"; how alchemists and men who sought their advice could change themselves from mere common men--and women such as itself--having nothing important to contribute to society, or to their own advancement, into gold; a person who could tap some, though not all of the power of the unconscious, so that they could become great artists, rulers and leaders of men, writers, orators, revolutionary thinkers, distillers of medicine that could heal, even prevent, diseases that man dreaded, even perhaps one day, the plague. The great religions of the time, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the assorted religions of the East, were all founded by men who had a fine grasp of a portion of their unconscious; and if men and women could accomplish all thes great feats by having an access to only a bit more of their inner power than ordinary men, just think of the tings men and women could do if they could tap into a little more of it! So it was the study of alchemy, for her benefit and for the benefit of other men, that she had decided to set her life's work on. She already knew much of it, but so much of it being from the Dark Side; now it was time to hear from, and turn to, the good guys!
Meanwhile as Hilde rubbed and tried to soothe her sore bottom, she audibly enounced her allegiance to Isis and all the Powers of Darkness, pledging herself to the service of God--not the Judaeo-Christian God but to the Supreme Being, the Source and Guardian of all creation--and man, including herself, for his advancement in life, his education and knowledge, for her job as an alchemist's job to work on already existing elixirs, and to devlop new ones, to assist him by creating medicines to improve his health and to heal them of disease, to assist Kings and rulers to become good, or great, princes of the people, and to find ways of increasing men's--and her own--knowledge of the unconscious, to help people, at least, to live improved, more enhanced lives, to help them to embrace God long before his death, to develop a widom that would equal or surpass that of Moses and Socrates, to become closer to God, to share in His Power and wisdom, in a way that the conventionally "religious" had not dreamed was possible. THIS is what little, naughty, Hilde committed herself after that good birching tat, though it was so painful for her bottom turned out to be so salutary for her mind.
But now Hilde faced a more immediate situation. Was the "flame" of the broom truly extinguished? Dare she again go into the house. She had access to the back door, but having checked it before found it was locked or otherwise jammed unopenable. Hilde had to proceed with caution. First she tried to open the back door, but that indeed was locked. She looked at the windows to the back of the house and then she tried each one, but egress for the girl into the sorcerer's house was not possible for her. First they were locked, second, if she thre a rock at one of them she faced laceration on her naked body from the remaining glass in place in the broken window, as well as shards entering or otherwise injuring her bare feet, and 3rd, and perhaps most insurmounted, Hilde, even though she was on the slender size, was simply too thick to fit through the openings. Sighing, Hilde realized that she had only one other choice: she had to enter, somehow, through the front door. However, there were two matters that stood in her way. First, she asked herself, "Is the broom dead? or will it attack me again as soon as I pass by it?" She peeked out from the safety of the backyard of the sorcerer's house to look at the condition of the broom. It was just lying there, appearing not to move, lifeless, just a man-made tool. "Well,," Hilde said to herself, "It doesn't look like the birch is going to give me more trouble--I hope!" But another difficulty faced the young girl. She heard a few voices; the house was located on a major avenue, and people walked down it all day long. She finally realized that some how no one had been around earlier in the morning, when the birch broom had literally thrashed and swept her out of the house; now a number of people were going up and down the street, some of whom were walking their dogs. The animals scented her presence and barked, seeming to alert their owners that she was there. The presence of dogs worried the girl. Some of the animals were so well trained that people didn't even take them out on a leash, and even though they were basically tame, they may come toward her as she was going to or trying to enter the house through the front door. She was desperate! Uncertainty about the broom, people and their dogs--what could she do? Her bottom was red, welted and burning. It demanded some kind of relief. She was also tired. She had been up for a long time preparing for her ill-fated adventure; but the event had led to a good result. Hilde, now, took the only sensible option that was avaiable to her: she would get on the grass, lie on her stomach, and try to go to sleep.When she woke up, she hoped, traffic on the street will have slowed; and, even if it had't she hoped that night will have fallen and, hidden in relative darkness she could quickly go and slip inside the house, no one having seen her in her nakedness, which she knew would evoke laughter. Aside from that, she had to protect the reputation of the sorcerer. If anyone saw a naked girl running on his property, they might think that he was being visited by a "lady of the night." At least many people, all of whom had more respect for and trust in than the priest, and a good many people came to see him before, or instead of the priest. Nothing must happen even to only slightly stain his standing in the community. So Hilde trudged onto the grass. With her feet she could feel there was no moisture on it, and it was only slightly cooler than the dust upon which she had been standing before, she could also feel there were no stickers to prevent comfortable rest. Fortunately, there also happened to be no insects around, such as ants or, worse, bees--but she did not think about this at the time. Gingerly she lay on her stomach on the grass, thinking about what had happened to her earlier, her failed encantations and alliance with the Powers of Darkness combined with her decisision to devote her life to alchemy, which was perfect because Auber and Eugene were both knowledgeable and to some extent successful alchemists, who in their own time had served as apprentices to alchemical masters. It was now about 12 noon. The sun was high in the sky, but the temperature was comfortable. Hamburg has bad winters, but its summers were almost perfect, the weather being not too hot nor yet too cold. The girl had had a busy, stressful morning, and it occurred to her that she was exhausted, and she found the blades of grass comfortable; she was as comfortable in spite of the fact that it had been as if a hundred bees had stung her rear one at a time, and left their needles there. But, only about 30 minutes since she had decided to lie on the grass and sleep, and then wait until darkness fell--and it fell hard, since the l
ligting of the street was less than satisfactory--she fell asleep.
Hilde slept for 7 hours, and when she woke up it was 7:30, pitch dark. During her rest she had temporarily forgotten about the birching her snow-white bottom had received fro the broom. Her bottom agai hurt and burned from the punishment she had received.
She had to get in the house, aomehow. She rose from her place on the green grass to peek over the side of the hose to see if anyone was coming, and she didn't see anyone. Besides, it was so dark now, the lighting was so dark, that she didn' think anyone would see her--unless of course she was cornered by a dog. People often walked their animals at night, it being a tad cooler then and the dogs would enjoy the climate better. But Hilde saw no sign of dogs. Either. So saying to herself, "Let's go--and fast!" giving no thought to the fallen birch broom, Hilde ran as fast as she could to the front door, and, finding the door unlocked went inside the house and, now remembering the broom, which was still lying harmless on the ground, she locked and bolted the door behind her. Auber had never found this necessary, almost always leaving his house ulocked, even when he wasn't at home. Hamburg was a peaceful, friendly and generally law-abiding town, and by far most people left their house doors unlocked, unless the family was away from town for a few days, or if Father had to go out of town on a business trip. Young Hilde was ever-so-grateful for this.
"I've GOT to find some relief from the pain I got this morning!" Hilde said to herself, then suddenly she remembered, saying to herself gratefully, "Oh!" She ran to the lab where she kept a large pan of water that she had drawn from the well; the pan was easily large enough for her to sit in. She ran to Auber the Sorcer's lab and found the water-pan on the floor, half-full. She had used almost half of it for her ill-fated incantation in the morning, but there was still enough water, which Hilde stuck her hand in and found cool, for her purposes.
The girl pulled the pan into the center of the room and stepped in. Then slowly she began to lower her rear into the water, careful not to sit in the pan since she knew the pin of sitting on the hard floor, where the pan was, would be too painful for her. So she put her hand behind her and her feet braced in font of her, and rested her poor, sore bottom in the cool water. The relef she felt was tremendous. "AHHHHHHH!" She said once she had positioned her rear in the pan. She tited her head back and closed her eyes, and she opened her mouth in relief.
Never again would Hilde practice the Black Arts with its encantations and spells. She would commit herself to the study of alchemy, whose knowledge of the suject was vast. She was herself an alchemist. Eygene too was proficient in the knowledge of alchem, was also an alchemist. Hilde wanted to be the best person she could be; she wanted to tap as much of her unconscious as possible, and see where it would lead her. Also she would delve into the practice of psychology, as it was understood in those days, basically. if not excusively, through the study of alchemy; she wanted to help people who were plagued with "melancholia," the old name for depression. She felt that she had some positive, useful answers for them regarding their affliction, and she had means, or "exercises," by which, over time, her clients or "patients," could somehow enter their unconscious, the Home of the Great God in the mind of man.
This nearness of man to God, found in the unconscious mind, which Hide felt that if people entered their unconscious mind, man could bring to the surface and, at least, cure or ease men, women and children of the affliction they had of melancholia--and that at least. In the future there would come a time, even before Auber's death, that people in mental pain preferred to go to her before the parish priest for relief or advice on many matters, because her methods were indeed more effective and far more useful than the platitudes of the priests of the time of Hilde--and a good while longer. Her success was marked also by the invitation of three grade school, and one from the Hamburg secular college, for her to become a teacher or even a professor, notwitstanding her amost total lack of formal schooling, except for a while in gradeschool or tutoring in Latin, which was essential to her studies. But all this lay in the future. In the meantime she thought only of her immediate plans.
In the meantime Hilde continued to soak her bottom, still red as a cherry, in the pan, gaining relief, but really not as much as she would have liked--that birch had really "done a number on her"! Anyway she continued this therapy for about and hour and a half and then slowly rose, her butt still rosy, and her face still hot from embarrassment. She would have to draw more water from the well for drinking in the morning. She decided to skip any bath for tonight. She went to her room where there was a large mirrie on her closet door--an expensive one--and saw the damage by torch light. She was unhappy to see the redness, but those welts! they were giving her the most trouble. She went back to the lab and brought back a small canister of aloe, which she knew would help those welts heal, and the redness of her rear eased and lessened. She lay on her bed, lifted her nightgown, and, gingerly, applied the lotion to her sore backside. To her delight she found the aloe cool, and as relieving to her as the water had been. Then she put the canister on the floor and, not covering, deciding to clean up the mess she had made earlier. Hilde, the girl who wanted be Queen, went to sleep on her simple bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment