The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt Page B

drawings were magical, like the drawings on the Lapp drums which are used in the
sejdhr
, or shamanic ritual. CL, a poor draughtsman, drew reindeer, anatomised, horned, pulling sledges. He drew also owls, naked women and
female pudenda
, intent on his classification. There are some pages, in a private collection, which I have been able to see, apparently detached from the notebook, which are written in an agitated hand, with fragmentary disjointed sentences, and hastily sketched drawings, which suggest that CL had experiences of Samic magic, of the
sejdhr
itself, which had affected him profoundly, although he was too cautious, or too shaken, to record them for the general public. He was, and remained, a respectable, God-fearingbourgeois, however great his international reputation. His ideas on the sexual life of plants aroused opprobrium amongst the respectable—a hostile spiritual atmosphere not so distant from one of the forms of northern magic,
nídh
, a series of magical acts designed to ruin a man’s life and reputation by destroying him with sexual taunts and humiliations. Magic is closely entwined with science; alchemy, the occult sciences, astrology, however strange or to modern men unacceptable their systems of belief or projects, resemble the true sciences in their preoccupation with techniques of studying, and changing, the physical world. Magic, like science, is concerned with
matter
, with the world of
things
, of rocks, stones, trees, creatures, also clouds, rain, wind and water vapour.
    The world of magic is double, natural and supernatural. Magic is impossible in a purely materialist world, a purely sceptical world, a world of pure reason. Magic depends on, it makes use of, the body, the body of desire, the libido or life-force which Sigmund Freud said stirred the primitive cells as the sun heated the stony surface of the earth-cells which, according to him, always had the lazy, deep desire to give up striving, to return to the quiescent state from which they were roused. Our savant might mock the divination of cow-stomachs and milking-sticks, but he was the author of
Nemesis Divina
, a collection of tales of divine retribution, including that of the Pastor of Kvikjokk, encountered on this journey—“The pastor’s wife whores with the regimental quartermaster Kock. The pastor in despair takes to the bottle; his daughter becomes a strumpet and is tumbled by a Lapp.” There are several scatological and raucously erotic anecdotes in this work. There is also the tale of Yeoman Slickert,who loved the widow von Bysen and gave her a manor house. This upset his son-in-law, who fired three bullets through the window one night; the shots entered the Yeoman’s stomach, and killed him. The son-in-law in due course developed cancer of the stomach, with three gnawing tumours, that killed him. A gentleman who fell asleep in one of CL’s lectures went home and died of an apoplexy. This is sympathetic magic, though its title invokes a grim Greek deity, and its dedication, to CL’s son, invokes a god whose vengeance is a principle of order in a chaotic and dangerous world.
    You have come into a world you know not.
    You see it not, but you marvel at its glory.
    You see confusion everywhere, the like of which no-one has seen or heard.
    You see the fairest lilies choked by weeds.
    But here there dwells a just God who sets everything right.
    Innocue vivito, numen adest
.
    Innocue vivito, numen adest
. It was his own motto, carved over his bedroom door. “Live harmlessly. The spirit is close.”
    H E CAME to a place called Lycksmyran—“lucky marsh”—after a long period of stamping through freezing marshland up to his knees in water; he remarked that if he had had to undergo this misery as a punishment for sin, it would have been severe, and asked
cur non
Olycksmyran, unlucky marsh. Here his Lapp guide, sent out for shelter, returned with
    â€œa human being, but whether