The task

Abbey of ... There ... 1962

Your Eminence,

I humbly allow myself to write to you to make you aware of some circumstances that have weighed my soul so much, that I am going to ask you for an audience for the Holy Confession. To you alone, who were so magnanimous as to bring me back to the path of vocation when I feared that I had lost faith, I would like to reveal the weight that anguishes me to such an extent that I fear to make the slightest mention of it to any confrere or superior, in this Abbey.

My former name does not matter. Since I took the vows, I am known by the name of friar Ignatius. I liked to think, perhaps sinning of pride, that the flame, ignis precisely, from which this name originates, represented the need for knowledge, which can never go out, and which in our order was held, I thought, in great consideration.

My first official position was that which I still faithfully hold today: curator librarian. The library of our abbey is very old and contains editions of some of the oldest texts of the whole Christianity, whose access is however limited to the superior fathers only and only on particular occasions. Usually, we use copies for our studies.

For this reason, months ago, I was very surprised that our prior father entrusted to me the cataloguing and reproduction of an esoteric manuscript in Latin, dating at first sight to the first years after Christ, known as “Fish Manuscript”, officially considered apocryphal and blasphemous before it even came to us and of which nobody seemed to want to care too much.

It was rumoured that it dealt in explicit terms with the moment of Satan’s rebellion against God.

Usually, these tasks are entrusted to much more specific roles than mine, to more educated and prepared people than me, while at best I am only the custodian of the work of these more capable confreres. The assignment was passed to me almost casually as if it were routine when it was my first job in this sense and I already felt all the responsibility for it. It was, moreover, a very ancient text and, in my humble opinion, certainly precious. Instead, it was made clear to me that the importance of that text was purely historical dating and that the sooner I did that task, the sooner I would be free to return to my usual occupations.

I do not usually raise questions, but it seemed to me that in giving me this task, the prior father had an unusual concern.

So I set about my work with all the attention of the case. There was no detail of the unknown author. This is why I thought it was important to date the text historically. The only trace available to me, for what already looked like a difficult research work, was a sort of epigraph in Latin, probably added much later than the original text, but written in a sort of Arabic style, with influences not better defined between the kabbalistic and the astrological, which referred to the unknown author.

The inscription said:

In the light of Sadalmelik,

from the waters of Athesis,

arose he who opened the doors

to the Age of Aquarius.

He turned ideas upside down

upsetting reality,

revolving the world upside down,

marked by the twelfth Arcanum.

He brought opposites back to the original Unit

and brought together the sacred waters.

He arose to bring light to the darkness