The White Dominican

By Gustav Meyrink and John Clute

The White Dominican is Meyrink's most esoteric novel, and draws on the wisdom of a number of mystical traditions, the most important of which is Tao. It is set in a mystical version of the Bavarian town of Wasserburg, which sits on a promontory surrounded on three sides by the River Inn. The novel describes the spiritual journey of the simple hero, who, guided by a number of figures, (his eccentric father, the spirit of a distant ancestor, the protecting presence of his dead lover and the mysterious figure of the White Dominican), escapes the 'Medusa head' of the world to a transfiguration, through which he joins the 'living chain that stretches to infinity'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dedalus Ebooks
• Release date: Jan 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781907650758

Gustav Meyrink

Gustav Meyrink (Meyer), geboren am 19. Januar 1868 in Wien; gestorben am 4. Dezember 1932 in Starnberg. Erzähler, Dramatiker, Übersetzer. 1889-1902 Bankier in Prag. 1902 erleidet er zu Unrecht wegen Verdachts der Geldunterschlagung drei Monate Gefängnis. Er kann sich strafprozessual rehabilitieren, sein geschäftlicher und sozialer Leumund sind freilich zerrüttet. Meyrink begibt sich nach Wien, arbeitet temporär als Redakteur der satirischen Zeitschrift »Der liebe Augustin«. 1906 zieht er nach München, 1911 nach Starnberg. Seine Hauptwerke sind zugleich Klassiker der phantastischen Literatur: »Der Golem«, »Das grüne Gesicht«, »Walpurgisnacht« und »Der weiße Dominikaner«.

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Chapter 1

Christopher Dovecote’s First Revelation

For as long as I can remember, the people in the town have maintained that my name is Dovecote.

When I was a boy, trotting from house to house in the twilight, bearing a long pole with a glowing wick at the end to light the lamps, street-urchins would march before me, clapping their hands and singing, Doo’cot, Doo’cot, diddle diddle Doo’cot.

I did not get angry with them, even if I never joined in.

Later, the grown-ups took up the name and used it whenever they wanted something from me.

It was different with my first name of Christopher. That was written on a scrap of paper which was hanging round my neck when I was found one morning as a tiny baby, naked on the steps of St. Mary’s. Presumably my mother wrote it before she left me there.

It is the only thing I have from her, and that is why I have always regarded the name of Christopher as something sacred. It has imprinted itself on my body, and I have borne it through life like a birth certificate issued in eternity which no one can steal from me. It kept on growing and growing, like a seed emerging from the darkness, until it once more appeared as what it had been from the very beginning, fused with me and accompanied me to the world of incorruptibility. Just as it is written, ‘Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible’.

Jesus was baptised when he was a grown man and fully aware of what was happening: the name that was his self came down to earth. Nowadays people are baptised as infants: how can they grasp the significance of what has happened to them?! They wander through life towards the grave, like puffs of mist that the wind drives back to the swamp; their bodies decay, and they have no part in that which will rise again: their name.

But, insofar as any man can say of himself I know, I know that I am called Christopher.

There is a legend current in the town that St. Mary’s was built by a Dominican, Raimund de Pennaforte, from donations sent by unknown people from all over the world.

Over the altar is an inscription, Flos florum: thus will I be revealed after three hundred years. A painted board has been nailed over it, but it keeps on falling down; every year on Lady Day.

It is said that on certain nights of the new moon, when it is so dark you can hardly see your hand before your eyes, the church casts a white shadow on the black market square. That is supposed to be the figure of the White Dominican, Pennaforte.

We children from the Home for Orphans and Foundlings had to go to confession for the first time when we were twelve years old.

Why did you not come to confession? the Chaplain barked at me the next morning.

I did go to confession, Father.

You’re lying. Then I told him what had happened:

I was standing in the church, waiting to be called, when a hand waved to me, and when I entered the confessional I found a white monk there who asked me three times what I was called. The first time I did not know; the second time I knew, but forgot before I could speak; the third time a cold sweat broke out on my brow, my tongue was paralysed, I could not speak, but a voice in my breast screamed, ‘Christopher!’ The white monk must have heard, for he wrote the name down in a book, and pointed to it and said, ‘Henceforth you are entered in the Book of Life.’ Then he blessed me and said, ‘I forgive you your sins, your past and your future ones’.

At these last words, which I had spoken very softly, so that none of my classmates should hear, for I was afraid, the Chaplain stepped back in horror and made the sign of the cross.

That very same night was the first occasion when I left the house in some inexplicable manner and without being able to explain how I returned home. I had gone to sleep in my nightshirt and had woken in my bed in the morning, fully dressed and with dusty boots on. In my pocket were some alpine flowers, which I suppose I must have picked in the mountains.

It happened again and again, until the supervisors in the orphanage found out about it and beat me because I could not say where I had been.

One day I was sent to see the Chaplain in the monastery. He was with the old gentleman who was later to adopt me, and I guessed that they had been talking about my nightwalks.

Your body is not yet ripe. It must not accompany you. I will tie you down, said the old gentleman as he lead me by the hand, with an odd gasp for breath after every sentence, to his house. My heart was fluttering with fear, for I did not understand what he meant.

The door to the old gentleman’s house was made of iron and decorated with huge nails; punched into the metal were the words: Baron Bartholomew von Jöcher, Freeman and Honorary Lamplighter. I could not understand how a nobleman came to be a lamplighter. Reading it, I felt as if all the miserable knowledge they had taught me at school were falling from me like scraps of paper, so filled with doubt was I, that I was incapable of thinking clearly at all.

Later, I learned that the Baron’s line had been founded by a simple lamplighter who had been ennobled, though for what I do not know. Since then the coat of arms of the Jöchers has shown, along with other emblems, an oil-lamp, a hand and a pole, and from generation to generation they have been Freemen of the town and received a small pension, irrespective of whether they perform the office of lighting the street-lamps or not.

The day after my arrival the Baron commanded me to take up the duties of lamplighter. Your hand must learn the task your spirit will later carry on, he said. However low the occupation, it will be ennobled when the spirit can take it over. A task that the spirit refuses to inherit is not worthy of being performed by the body.

I gazed at the old gentleman in silence, for at that time I did not yet know what he meant.

Or would you rather be a merchant? he asked in a friendly, mocking tone.

Should I put the lights out again in the morning? I asked shyly.

The Baron stroked my cheek. Of course; when the sun comes, people need no other light.

Occasionally when the Baron talked to me he had a strangely furtive look; there seemed to be a mute question lurking in his eyes. Was it Do you understand at last?, or did it mean I am worried that you may have guessed? At such times I often felt a fiery, burning sensation in my breast, as if the voice that had shouted the name of Christopher to the white monk at my confession were giving some answer I could not hear.

The Baron was disfigured by a huge goitre on his left side which was so big that the collar of his coat had to be cut open down to the shoulder so as not to hamper his neck. At night, when it was hanging over the back of the armchair, looking like the body of a man who had been beheaded, the coat often caused me a sensation of indescribable horror. I could only free myself from it by thinking of the friendly influence the Baron radiated through life. In spite of his affliction, and the almost grotesque sight of his beard sticking out like a bristly brush from his goitre, there was something uncommonly fine and delicate about my foster-father, the child-like helplessness of someone who could not hurt a fly, which was even intensified on the infrequent occasions when he put on his threatening look and stared at you severely through the thick lenses of his old-fashioned pince-nez.

At such moments he always looked to me like a huge magpie, squaring up to you for a fight, whilst its eyes, on the look-out for the slightest danger, can hardly conceal its fear, as if it were saying, You wouldn’t have the cheek to try and catch me, would you?

The house of the Jöcher family, where I was to live for so many years, was one of the oldest in the town. It had many storeys, and each generation of the Baron’s forebears had made its home in rooms one floor higher than the previous one, as if their longing to be nearer to heaven had grown ever stronger.

I cannot remember the Baron ever entering those older apartments, which stared out onto the street with blind, grey windows; he and I occupied a few bare, whitewashed rooms high under the flat roof.

In other places, the trees grow up from the ground and people walk beneath them; we had an elderberry tree with fragrant white flowers growing high above us on the roof in a rusty old iron tub originally intended to gather the rainwater, the outlet of which was now blocked up with earth and dead, rotting