Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The image of the Inferno is a constant in the literature of London. Poets, hacks, lively journeymen, they all return to this sense of entrapment, the heart as a labyrinth. Maureen Duffy in her wonderfully strange 1975 novel, Capital , anticipates Michael Moorcock’s Mother London . The person who undertakes research into the city’s history, minutiae and odd particulars, will become unbalanced. Identification with London’s biography is too intense. The familiar mental bonds tighten. Duffy (in character) writes:

I suddenly saw the city as a series of anonymous concentric rings each further and further from the centre point which is always I or in childhood me: department, faculty, college, university, city, each increasing the depth of anonymity and isolation, wrapping the gauze layers tighter and tighter until all sound and sensation are padded away. Only the eyes are left free to blink and water as they stare at a world that they can’t make meaning of by themselves.

Peter Ackroyd, completing his magnum opus, London: The Biography , suffers a heart attack. Typescript on desk. Quadruple bypass. Biography of city: autobiography of city writer. Resurgam .

Breaking away from the motorway, Renchi and I spent a day in London. I guided him around a few of my favourite loci: the remnant of the City’s Roman walls, lanes and passageways near St Paul’s, Fountain Court and the Temple Church. The Round Church, consecrated on 10 February 1185, was built on the model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The building, found within the collegiate enclosure of the Inner Temple (cloisters, courts, gardens, Oxbridge name boards), is a respite from the east/west fluster of Fleet Street. The traffic chaos that was already being felt at the time of the demolition of Temple Bar. The Temple Church, in plan, resembles a stubby thermometer: an elongated chancel with the mercury bulb at the west end. The church has no parish and is not subject to the authority of the Bishop of London.

We come to the Round Church with firm but undefined expectations. There is, inevitably, some talk of the Templars, the way London divides into enclosures, cities within cities; the survival of this spirit in the area around Smithfield. It is the effigies of the sleeping knights, within a circle of six pillars, to which we are drawn. The status of the knights is a matter of debate; Templar or Templar associate, it is unresolved. Here are William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, and his sons, Gilbert and William the younger. Hands on sword pommels, shields at the ready, feet (in some cases) resting on heraldic beasts. The circuitry is still active. It’s easy to promote these rafts of the dead as the original circle from which all the other rings of energy drift out. Memory and meaning have a form. The church is both accessible and private, known but not overwhelmed with fake narrative. It has presence in place of the strident absence of the Millennium Dome, the money-eating tent. We see the mandala of the fixed effigies, within the circumference of Purbeck marble pillars, as an earthing device for the M25; a validation of the motorway as a symbol of wholeness, without end or beginning.

Renchi sits on a stone bench to ponder the complex geometry of triangles within the nave, pillar to pillar; window, column, arch. How does the circular nave relate to the rest of the building? The Round Church to the Inner Temple? The Inner Temple to the other Inns of Court? The Inns of Court to the heart of London?

Edward Clarkson, in Illustrations and Account of the Temple Church , published in 1838, outlined his notion of the mystical significance of the six free-standing four-faced columns. David Lewer and Robert Dark, in The Temple Church in London (1997), explain Clarkson’s theory. When the columns were taken ‘together with twelve columns of the aisle walls, within which are seven minor columns, the 42 columns of the triforium arranged in groups of seven, he concluded that this was no accident but had direct links with sacred numbers that can be traced back to Egyptian masonry, Jewish cabalists, Pythagorians, Gnostics, the Romans and the Druids’.

The cross-legged knights were repositioned more than once. The fact that they are unbearded has to be taken as evidence that they were not Knights Templar. They may or may not have been crusaders. The effigies are made from Sussex marble, Reigate stone, Purbeck marble. What we project, as we drift around the knights, around the church, is the emblematic force of the figures as the true patrons of our journey. They seem to be sleepwalkers, laid on boards, frozen in mid-stride. They died on their travels and were brought back, rotting, to this place; the sanctity of the enclosure.

Our London wanderings follow contrails of previous excursions. Fleet Street, Farringdon Road, Smithfield. The church of St Bartholomew-the-Great with its dim interior, incense, its flattened circuit. A walk around the pillars, the stone forest of London’s most numinous church, is a re-dedication of our motorway trance. This, at last, was the paradigm, the contemplative circuit that would make our 120-mile slog tautologous.

I knew that a circle of alchemists, among whom David Dee (kinsman of Dr John Dee and rector of St Bartholomew’s) had been a prominent member, were associated with Bartholomew Close. I explored the Close, photographing fig trees, dirty lab coats hanging on pegs; the film was lost. I guided Renchi around the church, monument to monument, in search of one name: Dr Francis Anthony (1549–1623).

The monuments, Elizabethan and Jacobean, were like stage sets in alabaster. Posed groups that presented an idealised, three-dimensional portrait of a life. Francis Anthony was on the north wall. If the nave is a model of the M25, then Francis Anthony must be lodged in Waltham Abbey. His epitaph was composed by his son John.

Religion, virtue and thy skil did raise

A threefold pillar to thy lasting Fame

Though poisonous envye ever sought to blame

Or hyde the fruits of thy intention

Yet shall they all commend that high desygne

Of purest gold to make a medicine

That feel thy helpe by that thy rare invention .

Anthony discovered and marketed ‘Aurum Potabile’, a gold extract which, when dissolved, was a cure-all for the credulous. The doctor’s fortune was made. He bought property near the church. He wrote a defence of his potion and dedicated it to Michael Maier. Maier, author of Arcana Arcanissima , was a considerable figure in hermetic circles in Europe. He had been court physician to Rudolph II in Prague. Joy Hancox in her book The Byrom Collection (Renaissance Thought, the Royal Society and the Building of the Globe Theatre) quotes Elias Ashmole on Maier, saying that he came to England that he might ‘so understand our English Tongue, as to translate Norton’s Ordinall into Latin verse!’

Hancox tells us that ‘Maier visited Anthony in Bartholomew’s Close and also met Robert Fludd’. One of the illustrations she publishes from Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens shows ‘a philosopher pointing with dividers to a geometrical figure which consists of two circles, a square, a triangle and, at the heart of the pattern, a man and a woman… It is entitled “Monas or the One”, a clear reference to John Dee.’

We were close to the ‘heart of the pattern’, but it would only become clear when we moved back, out to the road. Part of John Anthony’s epitaph for his father was clarified by the design that went with it. ‘A threefold pillar to thy lasting Fame.’ The three pillars carved on the monument are crowned by a chaplet of roses, a Rosicrucian emblem for our orbital pilgrimage. As we turn away from the monument to the church itself, we find the arrangement repeated, made actual in the galleries. Stuart monument mirrors Norman stone. The first and last three-line elements of Anthony’s coded epitaph play against the middle line, the reflecting surface. The message is revealed by reading the capital letters (RAFT), against the neutral line’s ‘Or’. And then the reversed capitals of the second triplet: TOY. We had our instruction: RAFT Or TOY.