The Magic Circle (80 page)

It’s impossible to put into words what can only be grasped through experience, such as one might attain through the process of initiation. But I shall try as best I can.

It has always been my belief that in all he said or did, the Master was expressing himself at dual levels, though he made a clear distinction between them. Let us call them the levels of teaching and of initiation. In teaching, he was fond of using allegory and parable to provide an example of what he wished to communicate. But beneath such parables always lay hidden the second level, the level of symbol, which I believe the Master used only within the context of initiation.

The Master told me that a single symbol, picked up in this way, would touch many levels in the mind of the disciple. Once someone experiences a specific image in this way, its deeper meaning works on him beneath the skin at a primal, almost physical, level.

In a way, the Master was like one of those Eastern magi he’d studied with—always on a path, seeking, questing, looking for his special star to follow into a night of endless mystery. In that sense, one could see that he constantly scattered clues in his path, on his personal quest for the initiate who might pick up those clues and follow him down that road. Even today, so many years since he left us, I feel the same chill at recalling his tone when he first told me, “Put down your things and follow me.” I now understand he meant it to be taken at both levels, that I was not only to follow him but to follow his example in learning to ask the right questions.

The Master’s questions on that last night seemed to me, as always, every bit as important as his answers. He told the others that I would know how to answer his question about the significance of the Shulamite, Solomon’s lover in the Song of Songs. Then the Master proceeded to give his own answer: The Shulamite represents Wisdom. But do you recall, at first, he’d mentioned it was a “knotty” problem? He once used that expression to ask
you
what was “unchanging and imperishable”—suggesting his answer on each occasion was only a partial one.

The Master thought the initiate must always strive to unravel the full answer for himself. In this case, I believe I can suggest the full answer he had in mind. The Greek root of the word knot is “gna”—to know—from which we also derive gnosis, or hidden wisdom. There are words in many languages that come from this root, but all have meanings that suggest ways of gaining such hidden knowledge.

By identifying the Shulamite with the Eastern or morning star, the Master has again pointed our attention to these mysteries. In the poem, Solomon’s love is black and beautiful: she represents dark matter, the Black Virgin of ancient belief, or the black stone that falls from the skies.

The three chosen disciples of the Master’s inner circle were Simon Peter and James and Johan Zebedee, who wanted to sit beside him when the kingdom arrived. But he assigned them instead—significantly and symbolically, in my opinion—to fulfill individual missions, just after his death, at three very specific spots here on earth: James to Brigantium, Johan to Ephesus, and Peter to Rome. The first is the home of the Celtic goddess Brighde; the second, home of the Greek Artemis or, in Latin, Diana. And Rome itself is home to the earlier Phrygian Great Mother, the black stone brought from Central Anatolia that now sits enshrined on the Palatine Hill. The first initials of these three cities strung together spell BER—the acronym of that goddess herself, in the form of a bear.

These three spots on earth represent three faces of an ancient goddess—a goddess represented by the Shulamite of the poem.

So the Master’s very question—Who was the dark woman of the Song of Songs?—drives right to the heart of his message that the Song itself was a formula of initiation, to be undertaken only by those setting out to conduct the Great Work. The marriage between the white king of the apple orchard and the dark virgin of the vineyard represents the marriage of divine and carnal that lays bare the very core of the Mysteries.

When I finished reading and looked up, Sam, still sitting with Jason in his lap, was grinning at me.

“That was one of the ones I’d translated myself, before Wolfgang made off with the copies of my manuscripts,” he said. “If it means what it sounds like, it would sure knock the stuffing out of a few of those good old celibacy theories—but I’d find it pretty hard to believe. And why did you say you thought it had to do with the ‘voice upon the waters,’ or the death of the Great God Pan?”

“It may be exactly what connects all Pandora’s manuscripts together,” I told him. “What this letter here is telling us, I think, is that initiation—
any
initiation—requires a kind of death. Death to the world, death to the ego, death to the ‘former’ self of one’s existence, just as the earth has to die and be reborn every year for its renewal. Don’t forget, the two gods who traded off at Delphi each year were Apollo the apple king and Dionysus, god of the vineyard—same jobs as our hero and heroine in Song of Songs. By the same token, the birth and baptism of a new aeon, of a brave new world, requires the death of the old way of thinking, old belief systems—even the death of the old gods.”

“So the knot is just a different way of looking at the warp and woof,” said Sam.

Then I thought of something else, and I pulled up on my screen one of the documents I’d just translated earlier, of Uncle Laf’s.

“Do you recall all that stuff about the Knights Templar of Saint Bernard and the Temple of Solomon? Well, guess what this manuscript says was the logo on their flag? The skull and crossbones—same as the Death’s Head squadron of Heinrich Himmler’s SS. But it doesn’t mean death in
this
document. It means life.”

“How so?”

“There are two figures of importance in the Greek pantheon that keep appearing over and over in these manuscripts,” I told him. “Athena and Dionysus. Can you think what they had in common?”

“Athena was goddess of the state,” said Sam. “But also of the family, the home, and the loom—ergo, of order. That’s
cosmos
in Greek. While Dionysus was lord of chaos. His pagan festivals, which still survive in Christian ones like Mardi Gras, were a license for drink and debauchery and madness. They’re connected in ancient cosmogonies, where cosmos is often born from chaos.”

“I found another connection—in the way they were born,” I told him. “Dionysus’s pregnant mother Semele was burned by his father Zeus when he appeared to her in the form of a thunderbolt. Father Zeus took the unborn baby from the mother’s ashes, sewed him up in his own flesh, and gave birth to him later from his thigh. That’s why Dionysus is called ‘twice-born,’ or ‘god of the double door’—”

“And Athena was swallowed by Zeus and later born from his forehead,” finished Sam. “So she can always read his thoughts. I get it. One was born from the skull and one from the thigh of the father. Skull and crossbones, two kinds of creation or generation, spiritual and profane, only together are they
whole
or
holy
—is that it?”

I recalled Saint Bernard’s words in his Song of Solomon commentaries, “Divine love is reached through carnal love.”

“I’m sure that’s what this story is hinting at, about the Mysteries,” I told Sam. “The message must be that there’s no death without sex.”

“Pardon
me
?” said Sam.

“Bacteria never die, they divide,” I said. “Clones just keep on mimeographing the same material. Humans are the only animals that understand and anticipate death. It’s the basis of every religion, all religious experience. Not just spirit, but the
relationship
between life and death, spirit and matter.”

“Our nervous system has two branches that tie consciousness to emotions called the cranial and sacral. They connect the brain and sacrum,” agreed Sam. “Your skull-and-crossbones, where the knee-bone’s connected to the thighbone, are associated in many languages with powerful generative properties, in words like ‘genius’ and
genoux
. There’s plenty of evidence, physical and linguistic, for Pythagoras’s famous line: As above, so below.”

“That was the whole job of Dionysus in mythology: to
connect
the sacred and profane. The only way to do it was to hybridize. To yank women from the loom, get them away from the hearth and out of the house, up on the mountain, dancing and cavorting with young shepherds. Dionysus destroyed his hometown of Thebes, not once but twice. Or rather, they destroyed themselves.”

“One time, it was because of incest,” Sam said. “Oedipus had killed his father, been crowned king in his place, and married his own mother. When it comes to our family, I do quite take your point. But what was the other time?”

“It was when the young king of Thebes, Pentheus, refused to let the women, including his own mother, take part in the celebration of the Dionysian mysteries up on the mountain,” I said. “Pentheus claimed that the Lord of the Dance wasn’t a true god, not the son of Zeus. He actually wanted to keep the women home at night, so landowners could feel confident that their offspring and heirs weren’t sons of satyrs or shepherds.”

“What happened to the young king of Thebes?” asked Sam.

“His mother was driven mad,” I said. “She cannibalized her own son.”

“That’s pretty gruesome,” said Sam. Then he added with a grin, “So basically you’re saying that Dionysus—the god of the coming age—also provides the long-awaited answer to Freud’s question, ‘What does a woman want?’ You want a night off now and again, so you can run howling around up on the mountain, dancing, getting drunk, cavorting with young shepherds—is that it?”

“Well, it sure might flush out a few of those coagulated bloodlines,” I agreed. “Nobody seems ever to have introduced folks like Hitler or Wolfgang to the concept that hybridization breeds strength. I think a little shepherd-pollen might also answer Zoe’s question, ‘What makes them think they
can’t?’
I think it’s just what you said to me about lying versus loving. If you do it to someone else, you’re doing it to yourself.”

“Yesterday, I may have learned something that connects this stuff together,” Sam told me with one of his mischievous looks. “The Essenes, who lived down at Qumran in the time of Jesus, believed that Adam had a secret wife, a first wife who came before Eve. Her name was Lilith—it means ‘owl,’ wisdom,
sophia
. Lilith deserted Adam, though. Guess why.”

“No clue,” I told him.

“Adam wouldn’t let her be on top,” Sam said. When he saw my face, he started to laugh. Then he said, “No, really, I’m serious—I think I’m onto something. Just listen.”

He sat up from his bearskin and faced me.

“Lilith is not only wisdom, she’s Mother Earth—wise enough to support all life, if we don’t dam her up but leave her free to do what she does best. Maybe the mystery is the ancient wisdom, how to use earth’s natural rhythms and energies to support us, instead of damming up rivers that are her arteries, ripping minerals out of her belly, cutting down trees that are her breath, building walls to confine all life to allotted spaces.

“You know that the Indian nation is matriarchal,” Sam added. “But you may not know this Nez Percé prophecy. During the Last Days, in any lands where women have been reduced to minions under male tyranny—or where the earth has been parceled out according to some patriarch’s land-grabbing—those lands in the End Time will be destroyed in the second flood.

“So when it comes to Mother Earth,” Sam finished with a smile, “I think we should let her be on top from now on, as she truly deserves. Just like you and me.”

And he
was
telling the truth.

A Biography of Katherine Neville

Katherine Neville (b. 1945) is an American author, best known for her spellbinding adventure novels
The Eight
,
A Calculated Risk
, and
The Magic Circle
.

Neville was born in the Midwest and from an early age spent many of her summers and holidays in the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. She would listen with fascination to the yarns of cowboys, miners, lumberjacks, riverboat folks along the Mississippi, Native Americans, and the legendary Mountain Men of the Rockies. These tales sparked her early desire to have adventures and to become a storyteller herself. However, that desire was to be deferred for quite a while.

While growing up, Neville disliked having to sit in stuffy classrooms, listen to lectures, and take exams. She preferred to be outside climbing trees. Instead of reading the dull texts assigned in her history, geography, and social studies classes, she escaped into sagas like
The Odyssey
and
Jason and the Argonauts
, swashbuckling adventure tales like Rafael Sabatini’s pirate novels
Scaramouche
,
The Sea Hawk
, and
Captain Blood
, and Jules Verne’s fantasy adventures
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
and
Around the World in 80 Days
. When she was sixteen, she saw a movie that changed her life:
Lawrence of Arabia
. The film thrilled Neville more than all those imaginary tales combined and inspired in her a yearning to live in a wild and remote foreign land one day.

Throughout high school and college, Neville earned money by drawing and painting people’s horses, dogs, and grandchildren and by teaching art classes. Later on, during years of economic boom and bust, she turned to modeling to support herself. Not only did she get to meet interesting new people, she had an opportunity to work with highly skilled photographers and learn the art of photography. Eventually, she saved enough money to buy a Nikon F and a set of lenses, and she started snapping shots of everything and everyone.

When Neville graduated from college, she found that job opportunities for women were limited. After searching for work in several cities, she took a national exam for a new field called data processing, scoring in the top one percent nationally. It landed her a job in New York at IBM in the Transportation and Utilities industries, automating businesses for clients like Con Edison and Long Island Railroad. She became a devotee of early computer wizards Admiral Grace Hopper and Alan Turing and discovered a passion for code making and breaking. This was the inspiration for her first novel,
A Calculated Risk
, which she would complete nearly twenty years later.