At last, our sixth card, the Hierophant, the Pope: see him in all his Earthly Splendour, robed in gold and adorned with the triple-crown, he sits upon a marble throne between the twin pillars of Law and Obedience. His right hand is raised in benediction, making the gesture of blessing: first and second finger raised to Heaven; third and fourth finger pointing down to Earth, making the Pontiff a literal bridge between gods and men. In his left hand he holds a golden wand, the staff of life. At his feet are two keys, heavy of blade and cut with a Christian cross, one key made of gold and one of lead, the keys of Heaven, or more accurately, the key to Heaven and the key to Hell.
Lead and gold, lead into gold, the secret of alchemy, the secret of life.
See here on the Hierophant's staff, the symbol of lead, the barred "h" symbol of Saturn, combining the Christian Cross with the tail of the devil.
And Saturn is the god of time and age, the cruel god-fatherer who consumed his own children until Gaia revolted and hid the babe Jupiter from the old goat, Jupiter who later overthrew his father, castrating old Chronos with his own evil sickle. With age comes wisdom, but also infirmity.
This Pope's supporters are strange indeed: at the top left, a young black man plays the fiddle, with a scarlet devil at his shoulder; to the top right, an old woman crouches in a cave with serpents, the oracle; to the bottom right, a man in a wheeled chair, his body wasted and crippled but his mind supreme of genius; and at the bottom left a steam-powered automaton, a dancing toy, her life governed by a mechanical motion, a puppet of her programmer.
This card is about control. Wisdom proceeds only from the Hierophant; the Pope keeps the keys of Heaven. The Hierophant is numbered five in the tarot trumps, and the fifth element, the quintessence, is æther, the very light of which Heaven is made, the Heaven we can but glimpse as the Hierophant bars our way. Through his teaching alone are we to be admitted.
The black man's talent must be Satanic; the genius must be crippled. The Oracle knows everything and can change nothing; the automaton has no choice at all, her choices are all made by her creator.
The card is edged in bronze.
Part 1
The Titan, Saturn, sought total control over his offspring in devouring them, and was overthrown for it. Control has its limits.
Our Saturn, our leaden hierophant, is the Service, and the Service is all about control: keeping it; maintaining it; hoarding it. Not for nothing did Le Carré name the very head of his Service "Control"; making the principle into its principal, you might say. Information is the tool they use to do it. They do say, that to control a system, you need at least as many levers of control as there are degrees of freedom in that system. And the Service likes to say they have something on everyone. Or at least everyone who matters. Like a spider, bloated and evil, the Service sits in the centre of its world wide web devouring information, attaching threads to us by any means it can find.
So, imagine what happens when someone starts to unpick their carefully woven web of mist and words, cutting the control wires to their great machine.
I'm reminded of Dr Edward Edgar: a black man; a genius; an oracle, some would call him; and some maybe would call him a puppeteer, a puller of strings.
A mathematician of prodigious reputation, particularly in the fields of code-breaking and computing, quite capable of talking with the Thinking Machines of the Azarine on very nearly their own level, at least so long as he was provided with a fraction-time device to accelerate his frame of reference to their speeds.
An approximately vegetarian diet and a habit of bicycling everywhere kept him lean as a whippet and he had none of the conventional vices. He lived in a tidy little cottage, kept for him by West Indian Grandmother – not his own – called Leticia; the most trouble he was to her was getting in her way as she vacuumed around his desk.
Certainly with no discernible yearning for control.
And yet, of course, that was exactly what he did crave. That and possibly the luscious Leticia.
And so one day, he must have been arranging it for years, but to everyone else it was out of the blue, he organised a party. Half-a-dozen "top people": an academic, a leading actress, a couple of people who were, in that well-heeled phrase, "something in the city", even a notorious wizard, famous in occult circles anyway. And I was invited. Oh yes, I wonder if Monkfish wasn't to be his plaything too, but alas business of an altogether less wholesome nature kept me detained up in town at the time, and I only learned afterwards what transpired from interrogation of many witnesses, only the first of which was the fulsome housekeeper, Mrs L.
So, Dr Edgar invited his guests and Leticia served tea and cakes in the drawing room-cum-library.
As she busied herself being "mother", the good doctor showed them his dossier. They all, so he claimed, had secrets: sharp practices, tax evasion, misdemeanours, addictions, sexual peccadilloes. And, and this was news to some if not all of them, they had all been found out. Oh yes. A journalist here, an inspector there, a curious relative or a jealous stalker; all of them had had their secret discovered. And one by one, he showed each of them a file from his dossier so that they would know that indeed he did know.
Now, said Dr Edgar, I believe I can help you. Your secrets will be my secrets and I will help you to keep them. I know the people who know, and I can keep them quiet.
Well, you can imagine how his guests reacted. I know how I should have done! Rashly. And not for his betterment it would have been I can assure you. The good doctor sought to calm their nerves. This was no blackmail. He could hardly blackmail them, now could he, not now that there were a handful of witnesses against him. No, he would keep their secrets and that would be all.
So, grudgingly and with many a complaint, his guests eventually agreed that there was no other way but to accept the situation, however uncomfortable or queer. And they finished their teas and cakes, not enjoying a morsel or a drop, and one by one they left.
And in the days and weeks that followed, there were… accidents. Only the guests at Dr Edgar's soiree guessed what was going on; they and later I, that is. A house fire; a failed brake; an icy patch; an incident on the London Underground that shut the Central Line for fifty minutes; Whipsnade Zoo. All innocently unconnected, to any other observer; all too obviously a pattern, to those in the know.
And then, from time to time, Dr Edgar would re-enter their lives. One or another would receive a telephone call, and an invitation to dinner or to a show or to the races. No question of an obligation, he would always pay, or at least go dutch. He would ask after them, see that they were all right and ever so casually slip in, just now and again, a question: was there anyone else, did they know, who he could help? And do you know, from time to time there was. And Dr Edgar would make a little note in his dossier, and a little bit later he would have another party and his little circle of friends would grow a little wider.
Quietly, secretly, he began to gain a reputation as a modern-day miracle worker. In a certain circle, that is. If you had a problem, of a certain kind, if you found yourself with someone breathing down your neck, a word with a friend of a friend of a friend and Dr Edgar could see you slip free.
Take, for example, the case of Sir Maxwell Melville, the chairman of an old and particularly staid private bank in the city. I met the good baronet at his club in Mayfair and, over a more than adequate repast of salmon and pheasant, I inveigled the whole story out of him.
One night, in their box at the opera, Sir Maxwell and his wife were joined by an old friend of Lady Elizabeth's who was, for the evening, accompanied by the distinguished Dr Edgar. During the second interval, when the ladies had retired to the powder room, Dr Edgar leaned across to his host and very casually asked him how long he intended to continue covering up for the losses being defrauded. Clients' returns on their investments were being paid from new deposits, not from the bank's non-existent profits on their European sovereign investments. A classic Pozni scheme that would go bust the moment the rate of new investors slowed. Of course, Sir Maxwell denied it. But Dr Edgar produced his dossier and showed him a page from the ledgers showing the monies being ticked round and around to hide the missing funds.
"But everyone in the City is doing it," protested the baronet.
"Indeed, and so long as the bubble continues to grow, they'll continue to get away with their game of pass the parcel. You, however, have been left with the hot potato." I think we can forgive Dr Edgar for the mixed metaphor.
"Too bloody right! If only we knew where the bally money had gone!"
"Hmm," said Dr Edgar, who had studied the bank's accounts in mathematical detail and knew exactly who had taken the money. But also, had observed how little of his ancestor's prudence Sir Maxwell had inherited to go with his title and his position on the board. Nevertheless, he was there to assist, and so said: "If you will put yourself into my care, I'm sure that I know a contact who knows an interested party who would be able to arrange a… substantial government investment in your company. So long as you don't mind losing, perhaps, the odd member of your team."
"You can do this?"
"Oh, I'm sure I can," said Dr Edgar leaning back into his chair as Lady Elizabeth and her friend returned bearing fresh gins from the circle bar.
And no one would later connect the – tragic – death at the wheel of his Porsche motor car of a young man with a promising career ahead of him with the unremarkable statement in the House on a quiet Tuesday evening from the junior defence minister concerning the new fiscal arrangements for the armed service auxiliary pension payment fund.
One small mark in his dossier, and Dr Edgar's game had begun.
