Whatever became of:
Solomon Ben Ezra
Thirty Years On
The old Jew sat in the corner contemplating the dregs of his coffee. He sat alone now, though anyone watching him throughout the morning would have seen a succession of personages stop to pass the time of day – some merely polite, others clearly with business to transact. Despite changing fashions in the world of practical philosophy – the decline of Sepharothic philosophy and the rise of the Enochian system – Solomon ben Ezra remained an accessible authority on the subject and continued to hold court at Kent’s as he had done since the 1730s, giving advice and solving problems for his fellow society members.
A slight buzzing from his pocket watch alerted him that he was required at the workshop. He took up his hat and staff and made his way upstairs to the room he rented at Kent’s. There was very little to furnish the room – just a bed, a large desk and a few chairs. There were a couple of windows looking out onto the Strand. There was a fireplace, to the left of which was a tall cupboard and to the right an empty doorway with a shallow alcove beyond. Solomon stood in front of the doorway and pulled his watch from his waistcoat pocket once more. He turned a couple of dials on the device, heard it whirr and chime once. He then stepped briskly into the alcove.
In an instant he was in the familiar surrounds of his office in Spitalfields. He made his way down to the workshop where he was greeted by his foreman, Fonseca. It appeared there was some difficulty with the smooth functioning of a device required for an urgent commission. Ben Ezra reviewed the design and swiftly identified the flaw in the Decanic script. His nephew, young Reuben, the author of this particular piece was summoned and subjected to a thorough quizzing. Ben Ezra was chiefly concerned to satisfy himself that the problem was a conceptual failing in his young apprentice and not simply due to carelessness. Education could be improved upon but carelessness was a character flaw that sooner or later would prove fatal in any discipline of philosophy.
To the man in the street the Enochian method was merely a mechanical art which allowed skilled artificers to produce wondrous new-fangled objects to ease the lives of the rich. It had arrived from who knows whence (even Ben Ezra knew not, though he had some suspicions) some ten years previously. The first devices were relatively simple – basic mechanical servitors, time-pieces with interesting capabilities beyond the telling of the hour, a few self-propelling vehicles that offered few advantages over a well-carried chair. It had taken Ben Ezra little time to establish that at the heart of these devices were the marks of power that he understood as Decanics.
By their users these Enochian devices were considered harmless toys, yet Solomon knew full well the immense powers of Decanics and the risks inherent in conjuring with them. Sure enough, once an Enochian device was made and tested, it was more or less fool-proof in delivering the effect for which it was designed, but the original design process was fraught with the risk of the unintended consequence. Most artificers had a small number of templates from which they operated that they knew worked; of those who pursued innovation and sought to differentiate their devices in the market, most focused their efforts upon improving the physical mechanism. There were few indeed who even comprehended that they were using ancient philosophical techniques when they inscribed the ”chicken-scratchings” on their mechanisms – they were simply following tried and tested methods. There were even fewer who understood sufficiently the fundamentals of Decanics to create new effects. Ben Ezra’s workshop was one of the few places in London where a truly novel device – one not made to a pre-existing pattern – could be commissioned if one had sufficient specie at one’s disposal. Ben Ezra did not complete commissions on terms of credit.
It was around the time of the appearance on the streets of London of the first Enochian devices that the Sephiroth had begun to show disturbing signs of instability (a temporal coincidence over which Solomon had long reflected). Invocations that had functioned perfectly well for centuries suddenly began to fail for unfathomable reasons. Worse still, effects normally associated with swift and desperate invocations began to manifest in the most carefully wrought ritual. All over London cautious and relatively respectable practitioners of the philosophic arts began to meet with disaster – either as a direct result of their activities or at the hands of righteous citizens morally outraged or materially inconvenienced by the outcomes.
In the Jewish community several eminent Sephirothic practitioners, respected Rabbis amongst them, were slain, succumbed to madness or simply disappeared in the midst of their rituals. Solomon became involved in many endeavours to mitigate the outcomes, combining his knowledge of the Sephiroth with his expertise in the more direct Decanic system. This gained him a measure of respect and gratitude within his community. However, to set against this there was a general backlash against dabblers in the occult, who it was generally thought were responsible for corrupting the Sephiroth. The philosophical system had served Jewish philosophers and provided a model for contemplating the infinite and being at one with their God and His Creation for centuries. Yet after but a few decades of abuse by Gentiles who simply saw it as a way to enhance their personal powers, it had been polluted and degraded to the point of uselessness. There were many who saw all practical philosophers, Gentile and Jew, as the root cause. Solomon found that the term “Balshem”, meaning a meddler in the occult, was muttered ever more loudly in his wake.
In his heart, Ben Ezra rather thought that perhaps the mutterers might be right. He had always done what he could to maintain the Sephiroth and had undertaken difficult and dangerous missions to clear it of what the Archangel Gabriel himself had once described as “vermin in the basement”. But was he in fact part of the problem? Had he too left ajar doors that should have remained firmly shut?
Solomon’s “field experience” made him rather less vulnerable than most to the unexpected arrival of a hostile spirit or a denizen of the First Creation in mid-conjure. However, he had certainly had some difficult scrapes in those years. One incident in particular left him quite shaken. Even after the “troubles” began he continued to travel using the Sephiroth. Realising the risk, he generally took along some protection, very often in the person of Jezza Elmhill. It was on one of these trips that Elmhill was lost. One minute they were transitioning from Yesod (the Path of Dreams) to Malkuth (the Path of Nature) when a huge gaping black chasm opened beneath Elmhill’s feet and with a despairing cry for his “Old Mum” he was gone. For months afterwards Ben Ezra tried with all his arts to find and summon Elmhill, in spirit or in flesh, alive or dead, but to no avail: it was as if he had never been. His best guess was that Elmhill had encountered his very own, personal pragmaclasmic event that had transported him to another reality entirely.
On a personal, spiritual level, Solomon mourned deeply the loss of the Sephiroth, as a means to study the Otherworld and its relationship with the Mundane. He missed its nuance and subtlety compared to the powerful directness of Decanics. However, business was business and he knew he would have to change his modus operandi. In fact the transition to the world of Enochian philosophy was comparatively easy and very timely for Solomon Ben Ezra. He was probably the foremost practitioner of Decanics in London at the time. In the past he had also collaborated with the eccentric German Baron on projects that had given him a good grasp of at least the principles of mechanics and clockwork, as well as his own early dissections of such devices.
Ben Ezra set about building a business. His long association with Lord Foppingham gave him access to the levels of society that were the chief patrons for the manufacture of arcane automata – as well as considerable lines of credit. He looked about his own community to find watch-makers and artificers. He found a ready supply of such skills amongst the Ashkenazy Jews of the East who were coming into London in greater numbers in these days. He also began to apprentice some of his younger family members – nieces, nephews, cousins – selecting the best and the brightest to whom he began passing on his stored wisdom. The business thrived and Ben Ezra could reasonably claim that almost single-handedly he had kept the Jewish community of London in the game as regards practical philosophy. He obtained a measure of respect in return, but true respectability eluded him. Given his immense wealth and the prosperity he brought to all, his community might have forgiven him his Balshemic past, but there was one other stain on his reputation that prevented him fully assuming the mantle of the traditional Abrahamic patriarch. For Ben Ezra had never married.
Instead of taking a nice young Jewish wife and fathering sons and daughters to carry on his trade and keep his people and faith alive, Solomon ben Ezra chose to live in unmarried sin with a beautiful and mysterious Gentile woman. For while none could say for sure from whence “Lady Josephine” came or who her family might be, she was most assuredly not the nice Jewish girl, that his mother – while she still lived – had so earnestly wished for her son. Nevertheless, however much his mother nagged, however the Rabbis and community leaders reasoned and railed at him, and however many nubile young Jewesses the match-makers paraded before him Solomon remained steadfastly attached to his unnatural union with the admittedly lovely and charming Josephine.
Together Solomon and Josephine would attend society balls – the beautiful woman on the arm of the rich, lascivious old Jew. Ben Ezra showed little enthusiasm for such events, though it did his business affairs no harm to move in such circles. Josephine, however, was in her element, her dance card always full, and she would glide around the floor with almost unnatural grace, laughing and flirting with her admirers. Her conversation was intelligent and witty, her smile dazzling. Many’s the rich young buck had attempted to tempt her away from her apparently mismatched lover and sometimes she might seem to encourage them in their hopes, yet at the end of the evening when the chairs and carriages were called she would always return home with Ben Ezra, leaving them to shake their heads in envy and wonder.
After delivering a stern wigging to young Reuben and setting him some remedial exercises, Ben Ezra set off round the corner to his home. His dwelling place was a well-appointed set of rooms in the same block as his workshop. It was modest for a man of his means, but such public entertaining as he did on his own account could be hosted at Kent’s and despite years of association with Lord Foppingham (indeed perhaps because of it) Solomon had never developed much of a taste for ostentation. He employed a few discreet servants, but when he rang at his own door it was Josephine herself who opened it, her perfect features set in a welcoming smile. He greeted her in return and stepped through to his dwelling. There was just a slight creak and whirr as Josephine closed the door behind them. His ears much attuned to such indicators of entropy, Solomon made a mental note to investigate its cause and correct it.