The Magical Mystery Tour of Switzerland
by Timothy Leri

Sergius Golowin, a Swiss historian and member of the Bernese Legislature, lives between the lungs at Interlaken.  His arcane specialty is the magical, occult, Celtic thread of Swiss history.  During my exile Sergius took me around to the sacred shrines of the Confederation.  The Witches Meadow.  The enchanted valley of Brother Nicolas.  The charmed Celtic forest high in the Lycergic Alps. The cave of the Irish hermit above Interlaken.

Sergius, as though in a dream or trance, would escort me to a carefully selected site, read from a history book about the events which occurred there, strike a pose and have his picture taken with me.  I later discovered that Golowin was re-enacting scenes from ancient paintings, re-living the visits of former philosophers -- re-making old Celtic Reality Movies.  I got the strong impression that I could not leave Switzerland until I had traced the steps of the Celtic migrants who passed through the High Valleys on the voyage to the western lobes.

One day we drove in the yellow Porsche to Einsenin, south of Zurich, to visit the birthplace of paracelsus.  We carved through pastoral beauty (hip Swiss in their boredom call their country the Green Hell), past meadows and tidy farms, into a small village where, amazingly, there rose a medieval cathedral, towering, expansive, fronted by a broad St. Peter's cobblestone plaza where three hundred thousand pilgrims used to assemble from all over Europe.

Inside was dark, heavy oppressive, high, solid like the cathedral of Sevilla.  In the enormous mausoleum there were so few people walking like ants.  Old women dressed in black.  In the stone floor under the central dome was a circle, fifty feet wide, of mosaic designs.  As journey-men, Intelligence Agents always looking for secret keys that open to higher levels, Sergius and I picked up Brotherhood of Masons vibes.  Secret psychedelic cult-spoor.

The game is to look for the hidden message.  In the cathedral of Einsenin, once center of European Christianity, there is a large circle of the twelve astrological signs hidden by the pews.  They are so large and scattered that only the time-traveler would notice.  Astrology, with its evolutionary and caste implications, was one of the dangerous drugs of the Middle Ages.  How did they get away with embossing pagan symbols in a Catholic Cathedral?  Maybe the Zodiac was so suppressed that the local inquisition didn't know the details of the heresy.

We returned to the car and drove past neighboring convents and seminary dormitories out along a country road overlooking the lake, down a side road and across a bridge.  Sergius is an impressive navigator, considering that he's directing time ships calibrated in centuries; but he does get vague in the fine tuning.  He knew the house of Paracelsus was just beyond a bridge.  He asked at the nearest farmhouse and came back with the information.  Everything in sight had belonged to the family of Paracelsus.

We walked down a path to a high vantage spot and thought about the great alchemist who played here as a boy before wandering around Europe, teaching, studying, experimenting, getting arrested, deported from Basel, hiding from the Bernese police, seeking asylum in Prague (home of alchemists).  He was the father of modern chemistry, modern medicine, and Jung claimed him as founder of dynamic psychology.  He was basically an alchemist, dealing drugs which provided the illuminated vision, the philosopher's stone which, when swallowed, tuned you into the bio-physical network and focused your neurological microscope so you could identify the web of energy.  Paracelsus was the wisest and most influential mind that Europe produced, but the chemical companies in Basel don't like to talk about him too much now because he was an illegal magician.

We drove back to the bridge and Sergius said "Stop" in front of the charred debris of a burned-down house.  "This is the house that was built on the site of the house of paracelsus."  We poked around the ruins.  There were shards of melted glass in different colors.  I stuck one in my pocket.  The symbolism was asphyxiating.  In front of the house, just on the other side of the bridge away from town was a metal sign.  It read:  PARACESUS.  "The L. is missing," said Sergius.  He nodded knowingly.  In this, the tidiest country in the world, the birthplace of wisest product of Swiss gene-pools was a neglected shambles.

"It's called 'Devil's Bridge," said Sergius.  "The Bishop who controlled the town was in charge of all road construction.  Now and then dissatisfied farmers would build bridges themselves.  When the agents of the Bishop would come around asking who built the unauthorized bridge, they would say, "The devil built it.'"

My house on Zug Lake, where from the balcony I watched seven swans swim stately to be fed, was just below the hill where William Tell hid in wait for the tyrant Gessler, slew him with the extra arrow, and thus began the Swiss War for Independence.  Twelve twenty-one was my phone number in the Villars Chalet.  And the house on Zug Lake was in the exact center of Swiss space and time.  When one moves free, Sci-Fi high above gravity pull, it's all mystic, mythic, connected overground comics.