Free Where the Bird Sings Best by Alejandro Jodorowsky Page A

enchantments, that an angel appeared before him flashing rays of fury: “Isaac Abravanel, you have upset the equilibrium of the angelic choruses, you have opened in your time and world the door of madness. Just look at what you’ve done!” The magus was transported to the heights, and from there he could see Jewish congregations invaded by divine madmen: David Reubeni, Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, Asher Lämmlein, Mordecai Mokiah, Yankiev Leibowitz Frank, Jacob Querido, Sabbatai Zevi, Miguel Cardoso, and many more. Armies of messiahs spread like the plague, demanding (though they were caught between fervor and rapacity, pride and fear of death) holy wars and betraying their followers.
    “Your punishment will be lucidity,” said the angel, just before abandoning him. Isaac collapsed on the pews in the synagogue as if struck by lightning.
    “Magic is useless,” he said. “I’ve opened the Fifteenth Arcanum and let the demons loose in our world. I searched using the wrong road. The only hope is for us to reach ourselves, because God is hidden in our hearts. What isn’t done here will not be done in the beyond. No miraculous messenger will come to offer us a homeland. We were expelled from the land so that we would transcend it and inhabit pure spirit, not so that we go on clinging to the roots, to childhood, setting up the past as an ideal future. One day, all humans will be wandering angels who dance through the Universe in luminous freedom. Estrella, Salvador, you two were right, forgive me. I’ve led you away from the true path; I interpreted the words of your dying son badly. He wasn’t addressing them to you but to my madness. Forget about the books, go back to being lions, go on voyaging ceaselessly through all worlds.”
    Abravanel, making a superhuman effort, awoke from the illusion that is life and entered the reality of death, bursting into a laugh that was heard many miles away. He died the way all true clowns die: standing on his head.
    The Arcavis went back to their old ways, slowly forgetting Hebrew. As her only souvenir of Abravanel, Estrella kept the Tarot deck, while Salvador held on to the wise man’s red shoes. From then on, he and his son and his son’s son and all his descendants used them during performances as an important part of the lion tamer’s costume. They traveled for two centuries through Italy and Greece, Sicily, Egypt, and Turkey. They did it surreptitiously, generation after generation, staying poor, using only their one hundred Spanish words as a language. And in that way, as social outcasts, they could live in peace.
    At first, Estrella’s Tarot readings were answers to practical questions: Where is the stolen cow? Will the boyfriend be a good or bad husband? Will the harvest be affected by the weather? Will family members get sick? She kept silent about the rest. After so many years studying the cards, it was easy for her to see when and how the client would die. She hid that power. It was painful and useless to know the future, because nothing could be done to change it.
    But despite knowing that, she read her own fortune. When the Thirteenth Arcanum turned up next to the Wheel of Fortune, Power, and The World, Estrella felt a chill. The moment they feared so much, that of the lions’ deaths, had come. She turned over one more card: the House of God. It would be in an earthquake! They were in Smyrna. They fled to Constantinople. There was no earthquake in Smyrna, but there was in Constantinople, and a crevice swallowed the lions. It had been time. Their bodies had stretched, and their hides were almost transparent. Each time they breathed it was so deep the lions seemed to sob. They had practically no animal nature left. They were aged nobles with the humble serenity that comes with the acquisition of self-awareness.
    Without lions, the Arcavis had to become merchants, to transport cinnamon and camphor over seas infested with pirates. They had to sell furs, swords, eunuchs, export