There are more things in heaven and earth

“There are more things in heaven and earth” is a recurring expression in the novel that turns an open-ended Shakespearean thought into a refrain for Project Hermes and the occult world it seeks to attract. First printed as a promise of knowledge beyond science, it returns amid theatrical ritual and speculative talk, where its capaciousness allows wonder and doubt to coexist.

The phrase as a publishing promise

The expression appears on the flier for the Manutius series, above a pitch for knowledge drawn from Egypt, Chaldea, and Tibet and offered as a spiritual rebirth of the West. The design reinforces the promise: a golden seal Garamond identifies as the Pentacle of Solomon sits against a black ground, framed by interwoven swastikas. Garamond insists that these are sunward Asian swastikas, not Nazi emblems. The phrase thus crowns an advertisement that packages esoteric learning as an answer to a contemporary hunger for truths supposedly deeper and more luminous than those offered by science.

Garamond’s campaign extends beyond the printed flier. He writes under different names to reviews of Hermeticism, astrology, tarot, and UFOlogy, asking about the new series announced by Manutius. Their editors contact Manutius for information, and Garamond responds mysteriously that the first ten titles cannot yet be disclosed, though they are in preparation. This deliberate drumbeat alerts occult readers to Project Hermes before the books exist as a visible series. The phrase belongs to that staged anticipation: it promises an expansive unknown without specifying what the unknown contains.

A refrain at the gathering

The expression returns at a country-house gathering, where a girl in a blue garment spangled with golden stars stands with a herald’s trumpet and large white wings. Professor Camestres, costumed in a white toga with a red sash and a hat pinned with four red roses, kneels before her and speaks. Garamond murmurs the phrase in response. The flier’s confident motto has now entered a scene of deliberately theatrical occult display, where costumes and ceremony make the promise of other worlds visible but do not establish that such worlds are real.

The guests crowd around a buffet in a spacious hall with staircases leading to the upper floors. Among them are Bramanti and Commendatore De Gubernatis, one of Garamond’s previously exploited authors. The gathering places the phrase within a social world shaped both by esoteric belief and by Garamond’s publishing enterprise: its mystery is not separate from promotion, performance, and professional self-interest.

Wonder without resolution

The refrain appears again during a conversation about vessels and possible beings kept in them. Diotallevi dwells on the practical burden such a responsibility would entail, including carrying the vessels everywhere and finding manure for them; Aglie offers a more deflationary possibility, that they might be Cartesian imps or automata. Garamond responds with the phrase, then adds that one must fight as one can. His wonder is explicit, while Diotallevi remains cynically curious and Belbo shows no feeling.

Across these appearances, the expression does not settle whether the extraordinary claims are true. It begins as an advertising promise, accompanies a staged occult tableau, and finally answers speculation that has already admitted a mechanical explanation. Its force lies in that unresolved reach: it licenses astonishment, but its recurrence also shows how easily an attractive phrase can make uncertainty feel like evidence.