[quote=Edward Warren]I scrolled down really fast and that picture almost made me jump out of my chair holy shit.
Looks like Red Grail-o-vision.[/quote]
That’s supposed to be the Emperor as Vertumnus, god of the seasons.
I rather like John Crowley’s saturnine portrait of the occultist Emperor in Love & Sleep:
[quote=Valetudo, Chapter Four]Earthly empires pass. But Rudolf’s empire had been instituted by God; like Christ’s Kingdom, it was not, or not entirely, of this world. No matter how his sway was challenged, no matter how many lands were hived off from it, the Empire itself could not die. It would contract for a time, shrinking like a snail; its peopled lands, governments, armies, navies, would be distilled into potent symbols small enough to be carried in procession, carved onto jewels, worn around the neck of the Emperor. Though it contracted so far, even to the compass of his own sacred person, still it contained within itself the power of sublimation, and when a new age had come it would regrow all its parts from the seeds, the jewels and the symbols, which the Emperor kept in his caskets. No matter what they thought, those contentious bishops, princelings, reformers, nuncios, truculent populaces of walled cities, they all still lived within the One Holy Roman Empire.
Meanwhile the Emperor himself, in advance of his Empire, had been withdrawing from visibility. He would not marry, despite his counselors’ pleadings. He had left his city of Vienna, seat of his ancestors, and removed his court to Prague. He retreated into his castle, into his private apartments, his bedchamber, his bed often enough. Like many who suffer from melancholy, his spirit tended to become fixed on unanswerable questions. How was the essence of Empire contained in a jewel cut with an emblem? What counted more, the nature of the jewel or the construction of the embalm? And when he sought distraction from his obsessions, in his collections, his clocks, in paintings, metallurgy, genealogy, the distractions tended to become obsessions too. He gave more and more time to less and less.
He had lately conceived a plan for making an automation which could replace himself at his official duties: processions, christenings, feasts, masques and Masses. Clockwork could animate it, prayers and conjurations (white ones, white ones) done in the proper times could give it a temporary intelligence. But what could be done with it so that its touch was healing, its prayers were heard by God, its blessings efficacious?
A jewel, the right jewel, carved with the right sign, enclosed in its empty heart of hearts.
The Jews of the city were rumored to be able to make a man of dirt, who would be given life when the right Hebrew letters were marked on its brow. What heart was it given? When its tasks were done the rabbi erased one letter of the word on its forehead (what word? The emperor could not remember) and changed the word to Death.
He might talk to the Great Rabbi, ask him the trick of it. He had not yet, but he might. He thought about it, and waited for his gemhunters to come back from their expeditions in the Giant Mountains. When they came back with nothing, nothing of extraordinary value, the Emperor went to bed again.
He was the most famous melancholic in Europe, and employed a dozen doctors of several nations and schools, listening to all and to none, and always ready to hear others. The regiments they prescribed appalled his torpid heart: diets, exercise, abnegations, copulation with young women, music while he slept, tiger’s milk taken in wine wherein a pearl has been dissolved, a man would have to have an unappeasable lust for life to be willing to undertake all the bother of it. As the disease was obscure, ramifying, and mutable, there should be one, simple, pellucid medicine; the Emperor was certain such a medicine existed, and that it was his curse to need it, and his destiny to find it. His doctors told him that to believe so was only a further symptom of his condition; but the medicine, of course, would cure that too.[/quote]
edited by Anne Auclair on 4/1/2018
