“I traveled extensively before I settled and taught
high-born students. I covered the world, from Andalusia, in Spain, to the Delhi
lands. I spoke to devotees of Mohammed, Buddha and Christ.” He stopped,
surprised at his own words. “After so much time, it didn’t matter to whom I
spoke, instead, I just listened.”
“What did you hear?” Kosta was intent on his reply,
forgetting his earlier questions.
“I heard no reason for distinction. They’re all the
same. They are but different interpretations of the unexplained. I can’t tell
you what this is, because the only understanding I have is my own and you have
to come to yours.”
“Why now? Why me?” Kosta repeated his questions,
though, slowly, he started to understand, even without explanation. His
questions ended up being rhetorical.
“Any path, or way you follow, is someone else’s.”
Plethon added, “Now, because so much faith has eroded, reason has, once again,
become our best tool. Just as in Plato’s time, we use humanity as the measure
of all things. I’ll go a step further. Properly prepared, we can find all things
within ourselves. In ourselves, we can find what we revered in gods. It will be
different for you, as it was for me, as well as for others who searched for
their own way. I can’t explain any further. Any words will only sully it. Will
provide an even more incomplete explanation.”
“But why me?” Kosta wanted to know the reason why
this duty fell to him, rather than any other Truth, his Uncle George or Malone.
There were many people more deserving, or capable of understanding all that
Plethon had said.
“Nobody else would understand.” He waved his hands
about the ruined
Palataki
,
indicating far more than the crumbled, stone walls. “What the Truth did to
those unfortunate Byzantines in
Kostadinoupoli
is what the world now needs.”
“The world?” Kosta was overwhelmed.
The old teacher laughed. “No, not like that. The
change you’ll make is one of perception. Within the pages of many books,
starting with the
Idammah-Gan,
are keys which will unlock a sequence, releasing the
world from a shackled understanding.” He smiled. “I don’t mean each person,
individually, rather, collectively. You’ll see.”
“All right then.” Kosta touched the old man’s frail
chest, sending him to his reward. It was where they now stood, but it was warm
and roofed. The room was filled with Laconian sunlight. He sat at a table and
pondered an obscure scroll, atop an open, vellum leafed book. Plethon had
already known peace in his lifetime. It was a peace that he easily recalled.
Before Kosta could leave, the old philosopher asked
him if he needed to know the location of the entrance to the Library’s
catacombs. Kosta replied that he knew where to look. He thanked him and walked
out of the building - from where he came, to where he had originally intended
to go.
Home: Alexandria.
TIME: AUGUST 10TH, 1961. ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT
So much forgotten; so much more lost.
The thought weighed as heavily on Kosta’s mind as the
tons of earth above him. He felt the burden every time he stood still and wiped
sweat away from under the miner’s helmet, which emitted just enough light for
him to be able to see the path. Signs, worn by the millennia, were almost
impossible to follow beneath the ruins of the Royal Library. Above him, bare
foundations marked where the complete knowledge of antiquity had been housed
and twice burned alive.
It had taken five centuries, a Caesar and a Bishop,
to destroy the Library of Alexandria. The Ptolemies, Egyptian successors to
Alexander the Great, had erected it beside their busiest port. They had ordered
that every ship and traveler must surrender all books, or texts, in their
possession. They were then copied and returned. Their owners were never able to
tell that the originals were never returned, but remained at the great library,
whose renown grew to mythical proportions.
Kosta knew about libraries; he was pained when he
first saw these ruins. His search through the underground had begun, and
stopped, more than a year before. After leaving Plethon at Mystra, he had
tried, and failed, to find the entrance to the library’s catacombs. He had then
been forced to search elsewhere for clues. He traveled the world, going from
one exclusive, unique library to another, searching for knowledge lying long
dormant, thought lost, forgotten, more powerful and dangerous than anybody
believed. He searched through tomes, codices and secret texts, incredulous that
he was able to understand every language he read: French, Latin, German,
Aramaic, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and ancient Greek.
In order to have access to these private libraries,
he bargained, bribed and used every subterfuge, wile, trickery, deceit and
deception. If necessary, he even gained entry through impersonation. Rothschild
Institutes & Depositories, Sufiya and Astan-Quds Razavi, Medici Library,
Mortlake Residence and The Philosophical Research Society, all willingly opened
their doors to him. He also went through many of the newly discovered works
from Nag Hammadi, later called the
Gnostic
Gospels,
which included
La Tome de
Les Parfaits, L’Histoire des Elites, the Sangrael Gospel.
In addition to the private collections of the wealthy
elite, there were other texts, guarded and kept well hidden by clandestine
parts of the Roman Catholic Church. In the Vatican, itself, there was more than
thirty miles of shelves, known as the Secret Archives. The church’s judicial
bodies — the Roman Rota, Apostolic Signatura and the Apostolic
Penitentiary — each had their own chanceries.
At any time during his quest, had he been discovered,
his life would have been at risk, not only as a result of his subterfuge, but
also because of where he ventured and who he was. More than the church’s
judicial bodies roamed the secret corners of the Vatican. Kosta passed many
priests, their hands scarred from fighting. He looked into many blankly staring
eyes, but his lies were always sufficient to dissuade further suspicion. They
wanted to believe the lies, so he let them.
By itself, much of the knowledge he uncovered was
unique and innocuous. Each individual piece came alive to him from information
he had uncovered in unrelated codices, fitting together the puzzle pieces as no
one else had ever done. The deeper he penetrated, the easier it was to remain
unknown.
His command of forgotten dialects and languages
became unparalleled. During the seventh months of his immersion in rare,
forgotten texts and unique volumes, he discovered the repeated prophecies of a
unique birth. It was spoken of at length in many manuscripts. It was detailed
in the reputed, original collections of Nostradamus’
Quatrains, the Gnostic Gospels,
the
Apocrypha, Idammah-Gan Codex
and early Christian volumes, not
included in the modern
Bible
.
After he completed that odyssey of discovery, he
returned to Alexandria to find the original text, about which Plethon had
spoken. During his first week, he had searched the wider ruins, along the
major, original book stacks and reading rooms, finally discovering the entrance
to an abandoned stairway. It was close to where Caesar’s men had carelessly lit
the fires, which had burned down Alexandria’s wharfs and docks. The collateral
damage was never even mentioned in his memoirs, the
Civil Wars
, because it would’ve pricked at his vanity, worse than
the pugios did on the Ides of March.
After Kosta found the stairway, he descended and
searched the honeycomb of passages for a passage to further stairs, leading to
where all the original works, ever held at the Royal Library, were stored. It
was true that every book entering Alexandria had remained there. Even Marc
Anthony’s wedding gifts to Cleopatra were copied — every one of the
200,000 Pergamon scrolls, texts and codices.
After another ten-day search in the dark, Kosta
finally located the stairway. Near the hidden entrance, he found a corroded,
ancient cross and bent down to rub some of the dirt off its surface. Some
deluded, early Christian zealot, under the influence of Patriarch Theophilus’
mob, had nearly done what
Kostadinoupoli’s
St. John Chrysostom called, “Vanishing from the face
of the earth, every trace of the old philosophy and literature of the ancient
world.” They had almost been successful, Kosta thought with a chill.
He suppressed a shudder and felt for the edges of the
stone door, pushed five specific points in exact order, and ancient pulleys
screeched the door open. At first, clouds of dust hid the doorway, but soon
dispersed, revealing the foot-thick stone-hinged opening, much like any other
door. He walked through the opening easily enough, pushing the door shut behind
him. Kosta was very careful. He didn’t want anybody else to know about the
resurrection of the Royal Library. He was absolutely sure that no living person
knew of the lost entrance, let alone its exact location, but was prudent,
nonetheless.
He stood for a moment, and snuffed out the light on
his helmet. As his eyes adjusted to the dark he sensed phalanxes of shelves,
with heaps of scrolls and leather-bound vellum, leafed volumes and rows,
stretching past perception. He sensed the vast breadth of storehouse; its edges
stretched for hundreds of feet to his left, right and before him. Every other
library and archive that Kosta had visited— private, secret, rare or
unique — was now forgotten. Some of those places had contained rare
volumes on forbidden subjects and lore, which would’ve damned or maddened lesser
men, yet there he stood, sensing pregnant danger in this dark. All other past
dangers paled in comparison to that which he now felt. This danger was latent,
rolled up in parchment, bound in vellum or forgotten pelt. The dark, itself, or
the reading of these words, freed them, allowing them to coalesce into their
most vicious possibilities.
Their danger lay in their essence, what they were
— lies. Lies were valuable. The best lies were able to stand the test of
time and weren’t measured in black and white, fact and fiction. Rather, they
became society, respected thought, accepted dogma. If enough people believe
these lies long enough and hard enough, they will them to become fact. The
belief of these lies transmuted them over centuries into truths, for which
faithful millions had killed and been killed.
Christians were told that somebody had died and three
days later, had come back to life. This was an old lie that many believed and
continue to believe. None of it was real, rather, it was the product of human
imagination — and all-powerful want and desire. This lie had been
believed and told long enough, that it became a something, without which faith
couldn’t continue. This particular belief illustrated that if something is
desired for long enough, imagination makes it real.
In the past months Kosta had read myths that spoke
about the creation of all life. These creation stories explained that when the
cosmos was alone and there was nothing else, it wanted to breathe and
experience and, therefore, started life. It then furthered experience and went
on to touch, to eat. In time the cosmos wanted to experience more and made the
overwhelming abundance of life we know today. These myths explained that all
the diversity of life was made so the cosmos can experience itself. Nobody knew
what was before the desires for experience. The need to live became more basic
than thought. It was unquestioned. The questions came with why life existed at
all. Clerics, priests and philosophers, whose musings filled libraries, had
tried to answer with mixed results. History called them Pagans, Christians,
Luciferians, Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists. It was all a matter of personal
choice. That was the essence of what Kosta had read, of all the combined lies:
desire.
He came across many references to two copies of a
singularly unique tome, whose owners believed each was original, but was
actually a reproduction of
the
Idammah-Gan Codex
— a single, hand-written book. One copy was located
in the private library of a self-styled, poseur Satanist in the south of
France. The other was much harder to access. It was kept in the bowels of the
Vatican, in its Secret Archives, which spanned over thirty miles of shelves.
The Secret Archives held heretical works, by men such as Copernicus, Galileo
and the like, who were later exonerated by the light of reason and science. The
Vatican had held onto these works because in the past they were dangerous,
inflammatory and if dissipated to the population at large would damn the world.
Most people now believe that words, ideas and written
discourse are not dangerous and would not damn anybody. They were intellectual
curiosity and dialogue no more. True danger only resides in the physical, but
over the course of his research, Kosta had discovered that danger was also hidden
in the pages of some books and texts. It wasn’t the ideas and beliefs of the
Martin Luthers, Newtons, Marxes and Hitlers that were dangerous. Rather, it was
the lost and better-forgotten texts, which revealed our true nature. Some
people couldn’t abide this revelation and went insane, their minds snapping
from the weight of this realization. For most people, the real truth was better
left unknown, lost and forgotten, the lies never revealed.