Many have tried to link the masonic magician, miracle worker and petty crook Giuseppe Balsamo, self-advertised as the Count Alessandro Cagliostro, with the brilliant and tragic career of Jean Baptiste Gaspard Bochart de Saron, Attorney General of the Kingdom of France and later third President of the Paris Parliament, i.e. the House of Justice. In fact, at least once the two may have been co-conspirators in a plot whose import probably exceeded the understanding of either one. The result was the fall of the Bastille (improbable only because it was so unnecessary), predicted by Cagliostro during a seance ten months in advance.

The false Count escaped a like fate by being expelled from France and sentenced to a life term by the Roman Inquisition at his wife's request. Bochart was duly guillotined at the end of a bloody revolution, when real aristocrats had become hard to find.

Thanks to the erudition of my friend Dr. Elsa Gonzalez, I know all about the tragic destiny of this undeservedly forgotten genius. Bochart never incurred the most widespread Christian sin: poverty. In fact, not only was he rich, but he had considerably increased his wealth by marrying Mlle d'Anguesseau, a descendant not of the bourgeoisie de robe but of prosperous merchants. He built one of the more solid immeubles of eighteenth century Paris, a private hotel (mansion) located at number 17, Rue de l'Universite, which still today fails to appear inconspicuous; it houses the publisher Gallimard.

Now Bochart was also involved in a far more consequential plot: he was one of the founders of the Secret Society of Weights and Measures. This fraternity schemed to implement an ideal, universal system of measurement of all the states of matter, this through furtive and occult subdivisions of the earth's diameter and other subtle constants. Had it not been for the reactionary British, the Society might speedily have achieved its purpose. Still, in revolutionary Paris the select brotherhood had much to fear: the stupidity of aristocrats, the stupidity of the mob, in fact everyone's stupidity. Bochart kept a private laboratory whose entrance was hidden behind the shelves of his library. There he achieved the melting of platinum and produced the first standard meter, the metre-etalon which eventually conquered the globe.

Scholarly opinion is split on the question of Bochart's inconveient fate — the guillotine and the burning of his papers. Did he merit it as a leading member of the mysterious Society of Weights and Measures, or as former President of the House of Justice? (In her learned study, Dr. Gonzalez favored the latter explanation.)

Less known is it that Bochart positively claimed to have discovered — whether by chance or deduction, none can say — the language used by God before the creation of the world. Which means, of course, the language used by God in creating the world. Moreover, there are indications that, to put this momentous discovery within reach of humankind Bochart built a sort of music box that held the mysterious sounds of the divine tongue.

Displaced by secret and indeterminate expectations, I was at large and had become a whirl of raw and innocent sensations — bitter smell of decomposing upholsteries, herrings, ancient feather cushions, heinous cigars and crimson draperies; subtle air currents, swinging doors, voices and volumes. I had entirely forgotten where I was, and what I was doing in that unknown place. In fact, I was waiting for the auction of an inestimable object. Yet, before explaining how I encountered it in this concrete storehouse in an unexpected and unglamorous part of the Continent or perhaps how it lured me there, I should mention at least a few of those who preceded Bochart in what I then believed to be a glorious adventure.

It started long before 1274. Much, much earlier: even before the wheels of the Sefer Yetsira or Book of Creation, noble progenitor of the Kabbalah. These wheels, arrayed with multiple Hebrew alphabets, produce the infinite combinations of letters capable of recapitulating the sublime language of Creation, the language enunciating all the worlds, seen and unseen.

By the end of the twelfth century more than one authority could say that the alphabetical wheels were the heavenly spheres: one was Rabbi Yehuda ha-Levi, another — his friend Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra, whose extinct commentary on Sefer Yetsira was mentioned in the sixth chapter of Moshe Idel's book Golem. Thus the movement of the wheels became the movement of the celestial bodies, and language became the universe.

Nevertheless, by 1274 those researchers who could claim to have mastered the hidden language were fewer than prosperous alchemists. That winter the forty-year-old Catalan Ramon Llull, latinized Raymundus Lullus, was struck by a revelation in the wild, mountainous landscape of Palma de Majorca. He called his discovery The Art, and to practice it became a solitary monk. In any century no more than three scholars in the world understand the import of Lullus' speculations. (At a recent Congress of Orientalists one of them assessed Lullus' logical machine as far more consequential for humankind than the discovery of penicillin. The others strongly disagreed.)

Yet it was there — among rocks, the sky, and infamous shrub that Lullus suddenly realized the striking simplicity of the Arabic language, the way that it sprouts through permutations of three-letter clusters. Since God created this world through mathematical formulae, it followed that the language of Creation must have been capacious, yet endowed with shining simplicity. Lullus knew well the many ancient nocrypha which claim without substantiation that a Semitic language — more often Hebrew or Chaldaean, which is Aramaic — is the language of Heaven. But Lullus now knew he could prove it scientifically.

Today, of course, computers simulate organisms and social environments through open-ended, interactive programs. Plenty of artificial languages spring from a basic rule which resembles Arabic in the sense that its words are patterned permutations of three consonant clusters. 300 years before Llull certain honorable Apulian physician, in his commentary on the fourth chapter of the Sefer Yetsira, listed the possible permutations of the consonants Z-M-R: in one of the permutations they convey the meaning of "flow", in another they stand for "hint", in another for "song",  n another still they mean nothing. Long before the race of computers, Ramon Llull came upon the idea that the divine and human mind work like a digital machine through endless combinations deriving from a simple set of generative rules.

Lullus extrapolated from this principle to demonstrate to his satisfaction that everything conceivable is the result of the permutation of three symbols or notions. At the same time, being a practical man, he realized that if this prolific code is the language of Creation, then it must have persuasive force on human beings, whatever be their idiom, culture, or race. After writing several books in which he explained his Universal Art, he left the steep rocks of Mount Randa and, armed with his secret logical weapon, embarked upon his mission to convert the Arabs to Christianity. The success of his device was ambiguous at best.

Some three hundred years after Lullus' death, which legend hallows as martyrdom at the hands of the infidels, a defrocked and somewhat debauched Dominican monk called Giordano Bruno, who could only have been born in Naples, resumed Lullus' research. Like everyone else during that period, Bruno looked for the language of Creation in the mysterious Egyptian hieroglyphs. In his book Aegyptt, Dr. John Crowley of Barnabas College finds evidence that the errant monk discovered the tongue of the angels. It should therefore come as no surprise that certain parties credit Bruno with the construction of an automaton capable of reproducing the sounds of the divine language. Bruno remains the greatest commentator of Lullus' works and a first rate practitioner of The Art, who thought himself to be immortal. Only a few decades after that foggy, epochmaking February morning of the year 1600 when Giordano was burned for witchcraft in the Campo dei Fiori, a vagrant scholar whose greatest love was sleeping late (and who died of pneumatic exhaustion when a mad queen had him awakened at five o'clock each morning), took the next logical step. That scholar was the Frenchman Rene Descartes, and only he had the courage and mettle to think out to its extremest consequences the likely story that man had been put together by someone radically different called God (or in this case, Dieu). Descartes reached the conclusion that we humans were nothing but the automata of the latter (lit by a spark of his Mind). Language again came into the picture, for it was obvious that man's languages were not God's language, not even French, and that God's secret language must have illimitable power over human beings, who have a special organ (the pineal gland) able to understand it. With Descartes, even more than with Lullus, it became clear that whoever would decipher God's language would come into possession of a formidably versatile weapon, capable of achieving every terrestrial goal and even more.

Taking inspiration from both Lullus (whom he knew through Giordano Bruno's commentaries) and Descartes, Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz dreamt recurrently of a universal language which he endeavored to reconstruct. Meanwhile, secret societies throughout Europe kept inventing artificial languages (at least two of which have survived thus far) in the hope that one day all humankind would be united by a common idiom. Today intervening circumstances may have made this ideal more unappealing than ever before. Yet human history has this distinctive characteristic about it, that many ideals fail without being necessarily wrong, and grand enterprises often produce trivial results. But I anticipate myself. For we have now come to the heart of the matter; we have returned to Bochart de Saron and the enigmatic box resting on the auction block.

It was some ten inches deep, perhaps a little wider. It was wooden, grimy, and sadly upholstered in ancient blue velvet now worn and discolored. Under the lid, the mechanism was concealed by a tarnished copper plate. It was one among the lesser items of a lesser auction in a lesser country, and no visitor had yet shown interest in its minuscule identification mark, the Hebrew letters Aleph, Resh, Lamed incised on its right side: one Mother, one Double and one Simple. They stood for 231, the number of Gates of Creation, marked by Bochart undoubtedly not as a sign of belief in Kabbalistic lore, but of respect for tradition.

The history of this object had emerged through painstaking research. To begin with, one of Bochart's servants saved it from destruction together with a useless recipe. He later sold the box for a few sous (there was nothing appealing about the box, in fact, it soon became apparent that it lacked the most elementary quality commonly attributed to music boxes) to the mistress of a young Corsican officer. The box reemerged in the Waterloo loot, was bought by a retired judge from Calcutta, ended up in the family of the logician Boole and was one of the few items which Mary Boole took with her during the unfortunate years of vagrancy precipitated by her husband's bigamy. Passing from hand to hand, it came free of an existentialist philosopher killed in a car accident, and disappeared from sight.

The major exhibit of the present auction was a scale reduction of a sculpture by Antonio Canova, to whom the tag in English ascribed suspicious longevity: "A contrast of moods in marble. By the Italian artist Canova (1757-1882)." A local beauty with see-through clothing circumambulated it with jaws admiringly ajar.

At last came the shock of language recognition, for I had left Paris in the morning and I had remained unaware of crossing any linguistic boundary. The day before, a vague acquaintance exhibiting the pin of an extremist party had introduced me into a mildewed room whose space and time were clogged with bad French and solid cigarette smoke: a modest price to pay for finding out the whereabouts and import of the auction. Now I was somewhere, yet unaware of the place, for the place was the box. Yet I instantly recognized the alien language spoken by the auctioneer (far better than his own English translation), and in my initial amazement I had a thought linking this miracle with Bochart's box. Only after did I realize that I knew it, that I had spent in that country a time which seemed now altogether lost, that I had even been a civil servant somewhere in the North, in a place whose dialect not even I could follow. I still had a house and an ex-wife.

The auctioneer mentioned some of the most irrelevant moments in the history of the box, those moments which are assumed to be momentous by the kind of audience one would expect at an auction. Yet no one seemed to be interested in it, whereas the dubious Canova provoked a bitter contest, and before dark (which came with solicitous haste) I could revert to Paris and, in the crimson room of the hotel for nearly defunct scholars opposite the College de France, I opened the modest package. With Huguenotic care, the box had been wrapped in an entire issue of Del Telegraaf, announcing in bold capitals the invasion of Iraq, of which I had remained unaware and which failed to arouse my interest even after I had discovered it. Clearly, the box's untimeliness was more important to me than any vague external event. That would have been the same had the invasion of Iraq taken place in that very room in Paris, with me in it.

I realized at once that aside from the perfectly audible noise produced by the opening and closing of its lid, the box was irremediably silent. Only later would I verify that its mechanism—which I have all reasons to believe was the original, could not be fixed, for it was entirely fictitious, unable to operate a music box or any other human device.

After that memorable vigil in Paris I spent countless nights trying to figure out what conceivable pieces might be missing from this monstrous puzzle. Yet no piece could be added or subtracted mechanism was whole and symmetrical, yet absurd. It was reasonable to think that it reflected Bochart's original plan.

After I had exhausted all hypotheses concerning Bochart's music box I realized that, instead of being an embodiment of an eternal truth of some kind, just as a car is an embodiment of the first principle of thermodynamics, it was rather an object of historical value, in which one might decipher what Bochart and his generation had believed the language of God to be.

But no matter how much I researched the period and scrutinized the mechanism, I could not get beyond the well known principle of the Noetic heretics whom Hippolytus accused of reviving the teachings of the Presocratic Heraclitus, that is, that complete fullness and complete void are equivalent, and thus a music box designed to produce no sound is quite literally releasing at all times the silent, unfathomable language used by God to create the world. However persuaded of the truth of this thought, I hardly found consolation in it.

Now comes the hardest part of the story to tell.

I was a forty-year-old man living in a high-rise security building on the Lake with a purposeless box which was absorbing the best of my mental energies. In fact my mind was far, far from that painful alteration of accidental occurrences, tame desires, vain regrets and unfulfilled promises which most of us — successful or not — call reality. Given the character of my job, professor of history at a grey and renowned Midwestern university, my days were filled with eighteenth century thoughts and my nights with predictable dreams in which members of the Third Estate conversed in inscrutable dialects. Of course nowhere did I meet the language of Creation; I had understood by that time that any such language ought to approximate mathematical formulae, transformable into a sequence of sounds only by virtue of the convertibility of all systems of signs.

I knew however that I had become one of the possessors of the accursed box. And that as one of the possessors of the box, I was a researcher after the language of Creation, isolated from all other people and animals by an invisible wall. I sometimes thought that the box had posed a riddle which was absorbing my whole life, and had thereby fulfilled a certain purpose that could only have been achieved by the divine idiom itself. But such cheap wisdom satisfied me no more than the supreme Mahayana principle of the identity between full and empty. (And moreover, was I actually succumbing to the temptation that led Lullus and Bruno and Bochart to the sword, pyre, and gallows when I reasoned that if the divine language existed — and it certainly did — anything could be achieved through it, anything at all, for it would utterly recreate the perception which structures reality.)

So what became of me? It may be necessary at this point for the reader to, at least momentarily, suspend his disbelief. For the idea that something strange, but this time strange in a quite unpredictable way was happening to me began during the last summer I spent in the city. I was caught in the middle of a bank robbery. The robbers collected valuables from everyone present, except me. It was as if they discounted me or as if I had modified their perception in such a way that to them I Was invisible. Nonplused, I slowly stepped out the door, and no one paid any attention to me. I know of no report about my escape. I have since experienced regular episodes of my Charism of Inconspicuity, which is also listed among the mystical Sufi charismata (karamat) by Ibn Arabi in his account of the Sufis of al Andalus, Ruh al-Quds. The same thing happened, for example, once during a conference in Cincinnati, where I tried to speak and, significantly, no one paid any attention to me.

A second charism was manifest shortly thereafter. I do not shop frequently, and therefore I usually spend one whole afternoon going after various items. In most cases the vendors would undercharge me, and in a few instances I came back home with more money than I had when I left. Once a cashier in a mall opened the register and would have given me all she had inside, had I not promptly alerted security. Another time a large sum of money was credited to my bank account through a distortion of an insurance payment; it cost me much trouble to find out at whose expense the money came, and to correct the imbalance. I call this one the Charism of Undercharging.

I was fairly often the victim of another charism, the Love Charism, much less satisfactory than the other two, and, upon reflection, rather frightening. A number of individuals fell precipitously in love with me without necessity. This caused me some trouble when I was unable to share their feelings, and infinite pain if ever they convinced me that I did.

Another charism, that of forecast of future events during dreams, might have been useful were it not generally confined to petty events. Thus I was "gifted" with premonitory dreams about a cat fatally hit during a corner basketball game, about taking a shower, about the night doorman of the building cutting his mustache (that man died soon after), about an insurance agent ringing the bell one dull morning, about a trivial book I was soon to find in the used bookstore on 57th street, about a bleak lunch with since subtracted colleagues, about a red stain which mysteriously appeared on my necktie after dinner in an Italian restaurant.

I believe that these four charismata — the Charism of Inconspicuity, the Charism of Undercharging, the Misplaced Love Charism, Divination of Petty Events and a few others which together I call the Lesser Charismata — do exist. They manifested themselves only after I had attained possession of the mysterious box. The trait they share nicely matches the expectation one would have of brain language, i.e. modification of perception. People would fail to notice me, would miscalculate my financial standing, would fall in love with me although there is not much lovable about me.

I only gradually began to feel that all of this, which could perhaps be envisioned as some near-monumental manipulation of the language of Creation, is the result of my ownership of Bochart's box, even as ancient talismans were supposed to catch in their fabric the fuzzy decrees of the heavens and domesticate them. The question also arises of whether if one possessed the divine language, would one know? And how many chances are there to attain it, if any?

I have often wondered if Bochart had this in mind when he conceived of his manifestly absurd mechanism: that magicians, however misguided, are closer to truth than mechanics. And that we are automata of another sort, whose minds are able to perceive the language of Creation only as sheer absurdity.

But in this case couldn't the useless mechanism of Bochart's music box truly produce the primordial language, of which we remain utterly unaware, except for such petty instances as my Lesser Charismata? And thus, would not perhaps all absurdities be vindicated as signs of something even more powerful than our inability to comprehend them?

If I am not mistaken, a number of philosophers known today as Nominalists dwelt on such endless speculations. And I know that one day I will join them in the comfortable untimeliness of past centuries; yet the hunt for Bochart's box will never cease, and those who will experience the mixed blessing of finding it may suffer alterations perhaps similar to mine. For, if there is so far little hope of understanding the language of creation, still the hunt for Bochart de Saron's music box is open to everyone, if only until it closes upon them.

Yet doubts persist. Both about the link between my charismata and the box, and about a more acute problem which had developed in the meantime. At a certain moment my conviction of an occult connection between the charismata and the box had become so solid that I was tempted to make a test of its powers against a distasteful political regime. The hypothesis that I might imminently resume the fate of Lullus, Bruno, Bochart and the inheritors of his creation came to haunt me. The presence of the mute and immovable object in my life was increasingly experienced by me as a threat.

For a long time I contemplated destroying it. But now I decided to hide it in such a way that I would add to its absurdity. I canceled all its marks, the number of Gates and even the pale initials J.B G.B.d.S.; I stole one of the useless wheels inside and placed it in a safe in Los Angeles; I put the box casually on a pile of refuse called "Yard Sale" somewhere in Massachusetts (I will not name the place), and left pretending to avoid the looks of the improvised vendors, as does one of those innumerable clients who, tempted one moment to buy an item, would eventually decided to let it go.