Dead Languages

Following Yuri’s sudden death, Ore had immersed himself in occult study, which his therapist said was a common, if unhealthy, coping strategy. Reading about Ancient Greek and Roman necromancy, he was surprised to learn that it often had less to do with physical resurrection, and more with communication with the dead, usually through dreams while sleeping in certain kinds of places that were seen as gateways to the underworld, such as caves, lakes, and sulfurous springs.

Surprisingly, for many centuries necromancy was not considered to be dark or sinister. Even in early Christianity, with writers like St. Augustine, it was viewed favorably, as proof of the immortality of the soul. Even the more extreme version of bodily resuscitation was not seen as evil, since it came with extensive Biblical support. Jesus, of course, was a necromancer, having raised not only Lazarus, but also the widow of Nain’s son, and Jairus’ daughter from the dead, before returning from the dead himself, inspiring his follower Peter, and later Paul, to perform their own necromantic miracles. But other Biblical instances going back to the Old Testament, even include the prophet Elijah. Moreover, if one believes in the apocalyptical Second Coming, when all the dead would rise and be judged, necromancy would appear to be the central belief of Christianity.

It was only in medieval times that necromancy took one a dark meaning, and it was partly translation error. When the Ancient Greek nekromanteia, or “dead body divination,” was rendered into Latin, it became nigromantia. But the more common meaning of niger in Latin was “black,” so necromancy soon became synonymous with “black magic,” an interpretation that has stuck, up to the present.

Ore wasn’t particularly religious. He only ever believed in Yuri. Not in some “higher power” sense, something didn’t quite sit right with him when people elevated their lovers onto pedestals, it seemed the same but different as degrading them. No, he believed in Yuri in that through her he felt connected to the depth of the universe. Whereas most people appeared to him as dull, opaque, concrete slabs of meat, she was a diamond mirror, and when he was with her, together they would create an infinite corridor of reflections of reflections of reflections of… the French had a term for such recursion: mise en abyme, a glimpse of the abyss. Now, without her, he felt flat, as if an entire dimension has been torn from his world, similar to the residents of Flatland, one of Yuri’s favorite books in college.

Nor was Ore particularly scientific. Yuri was always much more knowledgeable than him when it came to the hard sciences, and often criticized Ore for his preference for obscure and archaic theories, in lieu of contemporary research, and his assumption that predictive powers are proportional to the knowledge of the past, a sort of linear model in which the more history we know, the more things we can anticipate. Yuri was more about catastrophes, irreversible phase transitions, and unpredictable revolutions, and in the end was her death not just such an irreversible catastrophe he did not anticipate? No, it was all always there, a frightening fractal fracture so clear now in every detail of memory. With her side of the reflection gone, all Ore felt now was an infinite hole in his center, drilled into his being by an infinity of signs emitted by Yuri in their time together, which stabbed like an infinity of glass shards in his heart.

What Ore did have going for him was music, the oldest form of magic, or what more generally he called the diachronic arts. While things like painting, sculpture, and architecture usually presented themselves all at once, fixed in time, that is synchronously, things like music, poetry, and life more generally, as Ore saw it, unfolded gradually “through time,” diachronously. Thus, he didn’t really know how to come to terms with finality. While the singer still had the power to keep going, the song wasn’t over, and as John Cage had shown back in the 1950’s with his composition 4’33’’, even silence can be a kind of music.

His ear for music gave him an aptitude for languages, which he picked up easily, as if they were flowers in a field. Each different language sounded like a melodic variation on a theme, and the more he listened to them, the easier they came to him. Yuri nicknamed him Ohr, the German word for “ear,” because of his obsession with sound, prosody, dissonance. With time, he went back to learn the ancient, dead languages, those old, classical melodies, of which the modern ones are so just many remixes. Now, as he deep dove into the necromantic occult, these dead, or maybe more accurately undead tongues, suddenly acquired a practical value.

A common misconception is that dead languages are hard. Sure, Ancient Greek grammar, for example, can be tricky, but at the end of the day, the number of surviving texts written in it is limited, a person who set their mind on it, could read all the existing Ancient Greek texts within their lifetime. In estimate, if you exclude the technical and Christian texts, and focus only on literature up to the fourth century, it adds up to just 16 million words, or about 320 light novels. Ore’s goal was both less and more ambitious. He didn’t need to read everything ever written, just the things having to do with finding Yuri. This wasn’t out of idle curiosity, he would be with her, one way or another. He wasn’t afraid of dying, but he needed to make sure that if it led to that, he would at least get to see her. No point in doing it if he just ended up being reborn as a cat on another continent or something. So he spent all his waking hours reading every grimoire and magical papyrus he could find, and after 13 nights he felt that he had learned all he needed to start his going under.