Mercurius - part 1/4 (English version)

Mercurius - Fantastic Fiction - Part 1/4

Mercurius - part 1

Afonso Jr. Ferreira de Lima

Biblioteca Nacional

535801, 08/08/2011

Mercurius - parte 1/3 

https://afonsojunior.blogspot.com/2019/07/mercurius-part-13-english-version.html 

*

I felt anguish in my chest. Jonas. They were indeed macabre people, capable of everything.

- But what are vampires, anyway? This all seems so fanciful ...

- All cultures were afraid of the loss of the most precious liquid: the strix, the undead who feed on the bodies of the dead, incubus, and succubus relatives who visit at night, witches who cause malefic even after death, lycanthropes returning to feed themselves in their relatives... You must know that we all have vital energy. The ancestral peoples were much more aware of this energy and could even perceive at a distance the approach of a living being. There have always been people who can suck energy. But, in fact, it seems that blood has always been seen as the seat of the soul, the chalice of the vital principle of every creature. In the myth of Osiris, the god is trapped in a leaden tomb and reborn. Or he was represented by a round vase, on whose wing a snake was carved, representing the numen that transformed the god. It can be a symbol of the body as a place for the enhancement of consciousness.

- And what is Lord Kevin, anyway? Despite seeing him from my childhood, I could only feel his immense contemptuous contempt for me.

- What do we know? A demon who hates humanity, democracy, ties. He has several excuses, as you intuited. It is not only the expulsion of the population from the central areas of the city, for real estate speculation, the project that will transform the river and end the indigenous community on the outskirts of São Paulo. His conglomerates sell guns, work with privatized reconstruction and invaded countries... He preaches slave wage labor. His employees live almost below the poverty level and are prohibited from joining any representation entity. His private chains put a guard to take care of a block with 200 inmates, and two of them have already been murdered. You were right: your father was surrounded by monsters.

- Augusto Coligne, as you know, is a detestable man on his own merit, said Vampírica. He controls public opinion. He seems to have been an Enlightenment scientist. While Lord Kevin may invade a country for pleasure, Coligne wants wealth and will get anyone in his way. We are all despicable to him. When we started protesting against a Nazi organization that had killed a young gay man, did he write an article entitled "Vampirians or Psychotics?" Saying that we were "a result of the decrepitude of education" and that our protests were "jokes, black marketing, and gay politics ". "Only freedom guarantees diversity, and thinking that we must save the poor is a kind of fascism," he said.

- But that's just the beginning. We know they are in search of something and we know that your grandfather has to do with you.

- Do you have any information about my grandfather? Who was he anyway?

- No, almost nothing. But let's go to someone who knows. Today we are going to rescue the Pianist, a man who researched the Music of the Spheres and who we know has a lot of information about Lord Kevin. To the horror of all of us, he is trapped in the Tower, a place of torments of these demons.

- And we're going there?" But what will we do?

- Before we go to the forest, perform a ritual, said Vampírica. We need to evoke the cosmic forces for guidance. We know the surprise will be on our side.

-You know I do not agree, said the blond girl. Hello, my name is Ariel. I'm getting a feeling. Fairies are looking for us. They are terrible beings, who love to eat raw meat. They were probably what the Greeks called Lamiai, who attacked children and sucked their blood.

- We have the canis lupus, Vampírica replied.

I must have looked at her with an "enough  Disney" look. She smiled.

- You see, you must have heard that the Paleolithic hunters had a strange connection with certain animals they hunted. Some of these rituals involved the dismemberment and consumption of animals, ecstasies that lasted until the time of Dionysus. Certain tribes believed that using sacred masks in dances, they could access atavistic, ancestral consciousness, connected with generational and collective memories. And also with animal consciousness. They were not just the wolf tribe. They became wolves.

- And they will help us?

- If we call for them!

- Let's go. The moon is in the sky, Üle said. (...)

*

AJR, 2011
See too -

https://www.amazon.in/Vampires-other-assassinos-Mercurius-Portuguese-ebook/dp/B0054JJ6V6

Mercurius - part 1/3 (English version)

Mercurius – parte 1

                                                                                                                 Afonso Jr. Ferreira de Lima

Biblioteca Nacional

535801, em 03/08/2011

Mercurius - parte 1/2 

https://afonsojunior.blogspot.com/2019/07/mercurius-part-12-english-version.html

*

I awoke from my memories when the sage said:

- Hymns, prayers, sermons, worship of statues, sacred banquets, ritual kisses, symbols of the spiritual elite. They were groups that followed holy men in the Roman and Hellenistic period. They were to renounce the world, despising the world. The text was sacred.

We heard a bang.

- Quickly!

He showed me a trapdoor, down a ladder into the rock. I heard an explosion. I was quiet for a moment.

Then I ran as hard as I could down the stone corridor.

I went out on a field at the edge of a forest. Only then did I understand where I was, I saw a mansion with two Gothic towers, but the landscape told me that we were still in Brazil. The building was on fire and I wanted to scream, wondering where that man had gone.

I heard a voice coming from the woods.

- Come on! Hide.

I could not think too much, the voice seemed friendly to me. I ran to the middle of the trees. A woman with a purple cloak and a bow in her hands came to meet me.

- My name is Nuriá, but they call me Vampiric. Let us help you.

- What happened here? I asked.

- You must be safe first.

She started to run and I followed. We came to a clearing, and there were many of them, in leather coats and Victorian style, on many bikes.

- These are your friends now. Climb.

We walked a considerable time. Sometimes someone chanted a mantra, imposing a kind of amulet. My mind wandered, I tried to gather strength to understand all that. Suddenly, I felt my strength drain away, I was really exhausted. I fell asleep.

I woke up in a stone chamber, lit by candles. It looked warm and beautiful, there was a delicate scent of myrrh in the air. But I was fed up with odd scenarios. I must have mumbled something, and a bearded, kind man approached, in a black velvet jacket with a blue vest, clearly imitating an esthete of Burne Jones's time. He offered me a glass of wine and fruit. Behind him was Vampiric, a young blonde with braids and leather clothes - which, in fact, reminded Xena - and a handsome young man with a melancholy face.

- Eat. You slept for twelve hours. My name is Üle, a fancy name. Yes, there is a reason to fear. There are forces out there that we do not control. Not only does the world seem to be a stage of opposing forces, with gods in their favor and gods against, as we ourselves are battlefields, as the Greeks wanted. Yes, we are friends. He must be thinking who we are and how we find him. We are the Vampirians, a group that gathers to celebrate and watch over the vampires. Do not worry, we do not drink blood. 

I ate and drank voraciously.

- Well, at first we just wanted to live in Victorian ways, we wanted a bit of romanticism, ritual, mystery. We fought to escape the standards, against the empire of the publicized bodies. We wanted magic, the past, the invisible. Nobody can be so skinny, even the models go hungry to stay that way. We wanted to think of ways of living other than the ideology of consumerism and accumulation, we thought that our world was structurally violent, with the concentration of power and unification of consciousness, which made frustration, envy, rivalry and contempt the pillars of our society. We saw the world with a lot of technology, but little wisdom to live, to distinguish the most important and the least. Can you recognize your feelings? To distance yourself from them? Can you forgive? How do you react when things do not go the way they should?
The melancholy face.
- We believed that democracy needed equality and so - if native peoples had been enslaved or killed, without the survivors having had much access to the new code of symbolic goods - democracy was under construction, and still on the foundations. We were fed up with racist teenagers, homophobic and middle-class intellectuals who despised the poor as solid waste and spoke of "welfareist fascism." Educated people, but narrow-minded and uncompromising, unable to open up to new issues, guided by intellectual prejudice, without self-awareness and self-criticism, patience. "Well informed" people, but who do not have access to information from the contradictory, other social fields, other points of view, and end up obsessed with their own principles and the values ​​of their community. Previously, we only held conferences against marketing for babies and recalled Einstein's phrase: "It's the theory that decides what can be observed."

He sighed deeply and looked thoughtfully over the horizon.

- Until we realized there was a lot at stake. Blood-drinking beings existed.

I thought of saying "you're not going to convince me of this madness, bunch of freaks," but before I could complete the thought, he said:

- Think about what you saw. Yes, I read my thoughts a little. Not everything, a little. If the person is open. Who were they? At home? Well, there are evil spirits that can be realized for some time on Earth, and we call them Ushers, in honor of Poe. Our friend Ariel saw them before we could arrive.

"And who was that man?"

- H. P. is an intellectual, Doctor of Law, versed in Philosophy, Philology and related, who has been working for more than 40 years to research the supernatural. Many say it has reached a degree of wisdom that can speak to the spirits of nature. We maintained regular contact, despite hermit's style. He was waiting for you, he warned us. Oh, you want to know about your friend. He probably died. He was taken by the Lord, and yes, you were right.

*

AJR, 2011
veja também -

https://www.amazon.in/Vampiros-outros-assassinos-Mercurius-Portuguese-ebook/dp/B0054JJ6V6

Mercurius - part 1/2 (English version)

(This is a rush translation. The version may not be in its final form.)

Mercurius - part 1/1 

https://afonsojunior.blogspot.com/2019/06/mercurius-part-1-english-version.html

* 

I could not understand; I had taken the material to my friend Jonas, a know-it-all. He was one of the victims of recent events: gone, just like my father. All I needed now was his, and my friend Lorena, whom I had hurt. And thinking about it, I remembered the witch named Luisa. An innocent man had also been murdered.

I tried to erase from my mind what I had seen in the games room. I felt feverish, delirious, the train shook. I thought that with some effort he would restore the laws of nature to the world, everything would be explained. Our perception, after all, was a heap of bundles of sensations, deceptions, opinions.

I remembered my father and how he had not trusted me. Since the age of eight. I had become the little fool. And I had taken refuge in my inner life. I remembered one of the texts, perhaps written by my grandfather.

He said:

The divine water is brought by the winged Amnaël, says the "Isis to Horus", séc. I. I am the egg of nature, the old dragon; the sages create from me the microcosm, says the "Aurelia occulta".

The Anthropos, the fire that gives life to everything: The Alchemist, so he wanted to be called, worked in the vas, countless nights, even having to stop to meet the request of a friend astronomer and calculate. The old magic will help me talk about the attraction. Who would have thought he was in science as the god of the mechanism? Damn calculations, did not anyone know Euclid? Writings of Art, full trunks.

The artificial Trinity hides the unique structure of Solomon's Temple. The universal force: the omnipresence of God the Father; the vegetable actions in the micro-craft: the look of Christ. Atman, purusha: as Mephistopheles was a spirit, it was from him that could come, from antiquity, the homunculus. The sun with its tentacles of divinity. It was a microcosm: the stone walls seemed alive, there were nightmares, skeletons came out of the earth. Inside the dome, they lived, so tiny they could barely be seen, plant, tower, land, lake. Spirits.

At night he heard the laughter of Wotan's mates, legions of souls, winners of the battles, or woke up to the cry of Merlin, who came out of the woods after leaving the human world beyond and beyond reason. How to penetrate the whole? The nature of matter, God himself. The Tower began to lose its sharpness. Dark clouds covered the glass. Green burned, poisoned liquid. The theologian did not sleep, the stars were spinning. Come on, overcome the friction of the earth, extract the inherent logos in the dense mass. Why is life so fragile? Collapse.

I remembered a conversation with my grandfather, the times he had gone to his farm, around the age of twelve. We were in the library - where I spent some time reading Shakespeare, Montaigne, and other fables - and wrote a book with a picture of Catherine de Medici and the caption: "The Sorceress Queen."

My grandfather commented:

- Do not believe what you see. In the Renaissance, it was thought that the king should be an initiate in the secrets of the universe, leading the people to the correct way of living and loving God. Today, science thinks it has this secret. Adoration toward the center: an Inflexible God, a wise-tyrant, a dominant culture. Wisdom exists but belongs to the gods, a few mortals. There was in Athens, shortly after Plato's death, in 347 BC, a group of sages called the College of Surveillance. They kept young atheists, supposed witches, and depraved in jail, under torture, in what they called the House of Return to Reason.

It was by things like these that I was a little afraid of him, though I also saw him as a sage emanating a sort of incomprehensible serenity.

The game room. I saw the scene yet. Are you coming for me? But what would that be? My father had sent an e-mail saying he had to travel by surprise, I had not any news from him for two days.

I'd walk into the living room, wake up in the middle of the night. I had seen two figures. The creature does not turn me around, but it's as if we've mentally talked to each other.

I say creature because, despite the human form, there was something insane, savage: was he bent over a woman? Was he attacking her? It seemed to me to glimpse his face, a spasm of pain. I had had several times the sensation of "leaving the body" and flashes of scenes that showed me something. I was exhausted, I felt sick. Without having been noticed, I had run away, taken all the money I could, clothes, credit cards, and gone.

The train simply shuddered, as if the ground had moved. I was surrounded by a dark cloud of unpleasant smell. I looked out and it seemed to me that it snaked from a dark, wet thing that moved quickly, and I could hardly think what it would be like when the very roof of the car opened, a blinding light all invaded and I saw something which condensed in my direction, grabbing me and snatching me. I lost consciousness.

I woke up in a place that looked like a cave, but it was definitely out of time. An old man, naked, his body covered with symbols and staff, was watching me; the walls had ancestral paintings.
- Shamans all over the world make a family. They are the beings that fly and apprehend with the gods. What is the reason? How many reasons are there? The reason is jail? Is there only truth or falsehood? What to do? How to find the way?

- Who are you? I finally managed to articulate.
- Drink in the Water where life flows. The tribe. Get together. Earth educates. Accepted. The meaning is imprinted on the fire. Everything is one thing: the forest speaks. Everything here is a dream, the shadow exists only with the real. They were many people, of stone, of clay, of fish, of the forest. Word-arrow, being of language. Tune the light body. The sound calls the four elements, Mother Earth, Father Sun. The emptiness within us. We are not divided into parts and groups that do not communicate. Men of pleasure, of knowledge, of spirituality, of wealth. Your body is energy. Now I can transmute your atoms. You will never be the same again. It will never be yours. For this way, there is no turning back.

I feel as if I have fallen from a great height.
- Ask. I'll answer if you want. There is a lot you need to find out and not much time.

It was still a cave, but it felt like the world as I knew it. There were several shelves and a fireplace. In the background, behind a passage, I saw ancient instruments, like a laboratory. A man with long beards, in an old-fashioned coat.

- Yes, there are forces you still do not know. When you were younger, those three men convinced your father that you were crazy, lived in the fantasy world. Your father is not evil, but has an inflexible personality, and was used. You wonder about the murder. Where is the man, how could he have disappeared from the face of the earth? I will tell you about M., a sage who in 1617 published the book Atalanta. At the time, in the Italian courts, after presenting the rules of the game, an emblem, a painting, a poem or a saga were motes for the discussion of a theme. Extract the hidden virtues of things and overcome emanations from evil. Festivals, paintings, tombs attracted similar forces from the universe. Atalanta was a Greek princess abandoned by her father in the forest and suckled by a bear. Crafted by hunters, she despised marriage. Because she was very fast, she swore she would marry only someone who would beat her in a race. The protege of Aphrodite, Hipomenes, overcame her by dropping the golden apples the goddess had given him. Aristotle said that at first dense vapors created stones and minerals, and moist vapors, the metals. This story illustrated the relationship between invisible mercury and sulfur. A papal decree forbade anyone to speak of alchemy in Venice, and M. changes the name of his art by publishing the treaty under papal patronage. Soon after, it disappears without a trace. I know what you're thinking. Take this little book. Inside it is a man's hair.
I opened my mouth to ask something.

- Lord Kevin has a newspaper, you know. It has to do with a terrible political force that penetrates the judiciary, the parliament, and the executive. They legislate everything from education to prison work, free labor. They divide the planet into niches. We need maintenance, expansion, they say. They lay down thousands of employees, and things go unrepaired. It is about buying members of Parliament with consultancies in exchange for support in passing laws. There is something being prepared. It is the end of the water, of fish. This project will destroy people, a way of seeing the world.

- Who are they?
- Yes, in a deeper way, it is also a matter of creating an idea of ​​reason, of intelligence, of chosen people, of development - also the erasing of the Phoenician and Egyptian structures of Greek construction; the erasing of magical research and imagination as the foundations of modern science. The myth in reason. A Platonic Structural Analogy between the State and the Human Soul.

I remembered a conversation with my grandfather when watching TV, we saw the shocking case of a pregnant girl, who, being very weak, prostituted herself to maintain her addiction. The client, in a violent sexual fantasy, threw her on the wall, and she died.

- Have you heard of that group that invades funerals of young gay men with plaques reads: "Fags, go to hell?" It is the world of fear. How to enter the world of the other? How can we believe that we do not unravel everything without falling into fanatical sectarianism? Empiricism is a fable, like any other. We live an unstable identity, constantly depending on our professional success and consumption. Can science answer everything? Kant, the German philosopher, said that the spiritualist Emanuel Swedenborg was a fraud. He had, for example, had a vision and told those present that a fire was occurring in his distant city, which was later confirmed. Thus "reason" closes the circle of the real. There has been a closure of the human sciences in themselves, people, lost, companies and consultants create better or worse theories to explain the human.

- We, young people, see the gray future, I said. The world seems so dangerous. I'm always afraid of people.


- The world must be rebuilt, my son. Young people with the hikikomori syndrome, more than 1 million in Japan, are 8, 10 years locked in their rooms, playing online at night and sleeping during the day. Their mothers leave food outside the door. The educational world has become sinister and oppressive to them. Even though the Japanese government has taken many steps to make education more sensible, parents tend to put their children in even tougher schools. Traditionally, a child who does not have "success" is viewed as a shame to the family. Salvation comes from knowledge. Of course, antiquity also bequeathed other ethics, of the collective, of the love of nature, of meditation. But the great educational force today is an avalanche of propaganda for the external, goals, sensory pleasure, appearance, speed, individualism, forgetfulness. It is a time of intolerance. But we know that those who overestimate material success are more likely to be depressed than those who build an inner world, values ​​creativity and exchange with the group, the city. We live the metaphysics of the experiment and the onychompetence of quantitative science. (...)

*

AJR, 2011
veja também -

https://www.amazon.in/Vampiros-outros-assassinos-Mercurius-Portuguese-ebook/dp/B0054JJ6V6

Mercurius - part 1 (English version)

(This is a rush translation. The version may not be in its final form.)

Poor devil,
What will you give me? (...) You have delicacies
which do not kill hunger; gold that flickers,
but equal to mercury escapes the fingers (...)
What I need,
if you have it, they are fruits to put of top
always leafy, and that before being caught
do not have the rotten and the worms inside already.
Goethe, Faust.

I thought, "I fall asleep." Now I was on a train trying to escape to my grandfather's farm in the south, of something I did not even know what it was. As if the whole world were dark, silent and wrapped in the shadows of the night. The landscape, a cold gray that turned dry trees, sharp stones and solitary birds into a great ruined ruin. Heavy clouds seemed about to strike with lightning and storm.

What had I seen? Was it attacking a woman? Were there even beings who fed on blood? I had read from childhood about uncovered corpses intact in their tombs, earth tossed over tombs, coffins found open, nails and hair growing after death, bodies with blood in their mouths, and families that died shortly after the departure of a loved one. My strange drawings frightened successive teachers.

It did not help my day-to-day humiliation, "know-all", "daddy's boy", "fagot", "library mouse", because, in addition to being quiet, I did not like football. In fact, I had not realized very much such things, cause I was living in the other world. "He's rich, but he has no mother," one girl said once. Lucky to have a friend, Jonas - very clever. I always had an indomitable imagination, but I was now saying to myself, "There is a limit." My psychologist thought that I was both too adult and fled into fantasy to avoid the pains of reality. What reality?

Lord Kevin, my father's great industrial friend, was a frightening figure to me: as a child, I imagined seeing him by my bed, at my window or perched on the tree in front of my bedroom, in a sort of parallel reality in which I tried to move and could not.

As a child, I had often dreamed of this tall, blond man with hair on his shoulder: in one of those horrifying dreams, we were in a dark forest, surrounded by other macabre men. The delusions that the cruel dream fairy imposes on us! I seemed to see in the shadow monsters with bluish faces and fangs, some pale with claws, a feline-eyed woman with a tiger skin. 

Prisoners were tortured. One of them, who looked like a policeman, had around his neck specters with animal faces that bit him. Another, a dark-skinned man, perhaps Arab, was bitten by a dog in the leg, kicked by a young man, while another beat him with a staff. Lord Kevin threw him into a fire.

Now I was afraid to return to this state of conscious sleep, where he would be easy prey, like a fickle candle, a book not well open, a church in ruins, watching the sea of ​​sleep, unusual logics as if the real were a veil of the look.

I had always been a sort of prisoner in my father's dark mansion. I felt lonely and felt the world more and more frightening. It seemed that somehow a mantle of violence had covered all souls, who could only communicate through aggression. The terror - visible and invisible - was very concrete. Subways exploded, offices ruined, storms and snow created by pollution, waters carrying crowds of fragile slopes, ambitious politicians dying the public thing rotten, the state seemed helpless against the proliferation of robbers and white-collar criminals.

Besides, my life had turned upside-down recently. Since the death of my grandfather.
That's when I opened the chest. There were some documents, scrolls, letters, and texts - plus the medallion I carried with me - that seemed to have been handwritten by him with a large bird's feather.

My mother died when I was ten. My father never wanted to marry again. He became a sad, business-oriented man. But he was kind to me, though I thought I should make money, conquer realms, "win." The problem was his sinister friends. Maybe someone says that everything has already been explained. This is not the case, even when it comes to what we can call the domain of the visible. More: people are strange.

I, for example, remember my mother leaving to work and me crying at the door. I should have less than a year. The world is strange.

I remember at twelve when I entered the room and saw my father surrounded by his three best friends whom I never liked - Lord Kevin, Augusto Coligne, the arrogant journalist, and Marcos Toledo, the astute executive secretary - kind of glass heart, filled with a red liquid, on the table. That scared me, but I did not even dare ask.

I sensed there was something between this macabre man and my family. Inside my grandfather's chest was a gold ring with an engraved symbol, which I carried on my finger now. But why should my grandfather have a trunk with such strange texts? One of them said:

And since these things are properly dealt with, it does not appear from the phenomena that there is an incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent being, which in infinite space (as space would be in its sense) sees things in themselves intimately, and perceives them totally, and fully comprehends them by their immediate presence before them?

A parchment showed an Egyptian lion, next to the goddess Bastet. Or two lions and the sun.

Another, looking like an old Latin print, which I discovered meant:

 We drink Sum: we become immortal
We went to the light, we met the gods
What can hostility do to us now? (...)

*

AJr, 2011

veja também -

https://www.amazon.in/Vampiros-outros-assassinos-Mercurius-Portuguese-ebook/dp/B0054JJ6V6