Miss Garnet's Angel (35 page)

The Book of Tobit has been part of Jewish literature for over two thousand years. Although it is set in the aftermath of the first Jewish holocaust, when the ten lost tribes of Israel (a separate country from the longer-surviving southern kingdom of Judah) were deported to Assyria in 722 BCE, it was probably not written down in its present form until the last quarter of the second century BCE. Speculation about its likely date varies: some scholars believing it was composed during that early period, some seeing it as deriving from the time of the later, more famous, exile from Judah to Babylon, and yet others seeing it originating from the Jewish Diaspora in Egypt.

The Apocrypha (from the Greek word meaning hidden or stored away) is made up of those books of Jewish scripture which the translators of the 1611 King James Bible, the ‘Authorised' version, excluded from the Anglican Old Testament. In this the translators followed the Hebrew Bible which had come to place these books outside the Jewish canon. But there exists an older version of the Jewish scriptures, the so-called Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of around 250 BCE which predates the much later Masoretic (traditionalist) decision to keep certain well-established books from the Hebrew Bible. Many of these ‘apocryphal' books were part of Jewish Wisdom literature, often considered too holy or precious to be made commonly available. That the Book of Tobit was certainly in use as a holy book among the Jews around the first century CE is confirmed by its discovery among the Dead Sea scrolls finds. As the Eastern Orthodox Church still uses the Septuagint translation for its Old Testament, the Book of Tobit remains in currency there; as it does in the Catholic
Bible, which,
following St Jerome's translation, has Tobit blinded by swallows' rather than sparrows' dung!

The origins of the tale remain obscure. Although set in Nineveh, in the period of the Assyrian Empire, the most dramatic and mysterious part of the story takes place in Media and many scholars agree that key features contain strong hints of Zoroastrianism, the old Iranian religion adopted by the Magi of Media and later by the powerful empire of the Persians (from whom the Parsis of today are descended). From my researches into the story I formed the view that the dog, which in its positive representation is unique in Judaic/Christian literature, could be explained by an earlier Zoroastrian foundation to the story, a supposition which is borne out by the fact that Raghes, to which Tobit travelled in his youth, was known as ‘Zoroaster's city'.

For the Zoroastrians the dog was a sacred animal whose function was twofold: the dog was one means by which the bodies of the dead were disposed of, a practice which makes good practical sense in a hot climate but which, for the Zoroastrians, had the more important religious function of sparing human contact with dead matter. The Assyrians, in fact, like the Jews they took into captivity, practised grave burial. Tobit's preoccupation with burial of the dead is made more intelligible if seen to be set against the Magian practice of exposing the corpse to wild dogs and carrion-eating birds of prey.

More crucially, the dog was used in Magian ritual to exorcise the ‘corpse spirit', or ‘spirit of corruption', and to help guide the departed soul across the Bridge of Separation. In the Zoroastrian religion this defines the moment of judgement, when the sum of a person's good or bad deeds is weighed. It seemed to me likely that the
dog might
equally have been used to heal the mortally sick, or in cases of psychological possession, such as that of Tobias's Sara.

This idea was reinforced when I discovered that Asmodaeus, the evil spirit who inhabits the body of Tobias' eventual bride and has caused her to strangle seven men before him, probably takes his origin from Aesma daeva, the arch demon who is given ‘seven powers' to destroy humankind in Zoroastrian demonology and whose principal feature is wrath or anger. Just as the Archangel Raphael is pitted against Asmodaeus, the counter or opposite to Aesma is the immortal being Sraosha, who is central to Zoroastrian angelology.

Both Judaism and Christianity owe much to the vision of Zarathustra (more commonly known to us by his Greek name, Zoroaster); not least among the ideas we have inherited is the concept of a hierarchy of ‘Bounteous Immortals', supranatural beings who aid mankind in the fight against destruction and evil and towards health, happiness and right conduct. These are almost certainly the originals of our Judeo/Christian angels. Among them is Sraosha, whose remit was specifically to protect the body and to escort the departed soul to the ‘Bridge of Separation', where he also acted as a benevolent final judge of a person's life. Sraosha seems to be associated with a dog (as are other psychopomps, or soul guides, in ancient literature) and this not only reinforces the parallel with Raphael in the Book of Tobit but also provides another explanation for the presence of the dog in the story.

The Talmud tells us that when the Jews returned from their exile in Babylon (encouraged by their tolerant new masters, the Persians) they brought with them from captivity the names of the angels. My hunch is that Raphael, whose name in Greek means ‘God's healing',
was imported then into Jewish lore, but that he appeared first as Sraosha, one of the Bounteous Immortals, and that the Book of Tobit is really an old Magi tale which has been overlaid with Jewish pieties and strictures. Nor is it commonly known today that the three ‘wise men' (who, in Christian mythology, followed the star to Bethlehem) were in all likelihood Zoroastrian priests, their famed gifts of myrrh and frankincense being typical of the sweet woods and resins used in the ritual practices of the religion whose founder, perhaps fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, had predicted the virgin birth of a world saviour.

Salley Vickers

T
he old town of Chartres, around which the modern town unaesthetically sprawls, is built on a natural elevation that rises from a wide, wheat-growing plain in the region of Beauce in central France. Visitors and pilgrims, who since earliest times have made their ways to the ancient site, can see the cathedral of Notre-Dame from many miles off, the twin spires, like lofty beacons, encouraging them onwards.

Five successive cathedrals have stood on this site; all were burned to rubble save the present cathedral, which grew, phoenix-like, from the embers of the last devastating fire. On June 10, 1194, flames sped through Chartres, destroying many of the domestic dwellings, crowded cheek by jowl in
the narrow medieval streets, and all of the former cathedral save the Western Front with its twin towers and the much more ancient crypt.

As the fire took hold, the forest of roof timbers crashed, burning to the ground amid frenzied clouds of burning cinders; the walls split, tumbled and collapsed while lead from the roof poured down in a molten stream, as if enacting a scene of eternal damnation in a Last Judgement.

The reaction among the citizens of Chartres was one of uniform horror. According to contemporary reports, they lamented the loss of their beloved cathedral even more than the loss of their own homes. Perhaps this was in part because, as today, their livelihoods depended on the many parties of pilgrims visiting the town to pay reverence to its most venerated relic, the birthing gown of the Virgin Mary, a gift to the cathedral by the grandson of Charlemagne, Charles the Bald.

Three days after the fire was finally quenched, some priests emerged from the crypt with the marvellous cloth still intact. As the fire took hold, they had apparently snatched it from its hallowed place and retreated for safety into the most ancient part of the cathedral, the lower crypt, the province of Our Lady Under the Earth, incarcerating themselves behind a metal door which had held firm while the fire raged destruction outside. The missing men had been presumed dead. The holy relic presumed lost. When it was seen to have been restored, and its rescuers returned to safety, it was agreed that this was a miracle, a sign from Our Lady that the
town should build in her honour an edifice even finer than before.

The new cathedral was completed within twenty-six years, thanks to the devotion and hard labour of the townspeople, who pulled together to create a building worthy of the Mother of God with whom their town had so fortunately found favour. The bishop and his canons agreed to donate the greater portion of their salaries to aid the cost of the building works. Sovereigns of the Western world were approached for funds, and many dug deep into their coffers to ensure that their names were attached to the noble enterprise, which would gain for them fitting rewards in the life to come. People from neighbouring dioceses brought cartloads of grain to feed the citizens of Chartres, who were giving their labours for nothing more than the love of God. The whole astonishing structure was conceived, designed and accomplished by a series of master builders, men of clear enterprise and shining genius.

But of them and their companies—the scores of talented sculptors, stonecutters, masons, carpenters, roofers, stained-glass artists and manual labourers who implemented their plans—nothing is known.

Nor was anything known of Agnès Morel when she arrived in Chartres nearly eight hundred years after the building of the present cathedral commenced. Few, if asked, could have recalled when she first appeared. She must have seemed vaguely always to have been about. A tall, dark, slender woman—‘a touch of the tar brush there', Madame Beck,
who had more than a passing sympathy for the Front National, chose to comment—with eyes that the local artist, Robert Clément, likened to washed topaz, though, as the same Madame Beck remarked to her friend Madame Picot, being an artist he was given to these fanciful notions.

As far back as Philippe Nevers could remember Agnès had been around. She had been an occasional babysitter for himself and his sister, Brigitte. Brigitte had once crept up with a pair of scissors behind the sofa, where their babysitter sat watching TV, and hacked an ugly chunk out of her long black hair. Philippe had pinched Brigitte's arm for this and they had got into a fight, in which Brigitte's new nightgown was ripped by the scissors, and when their mother came home Brigitte had cried and shown her both the nightgown and the pinch marks.

Although their mother had punished Philippe, the boy had not explained why he had set about his sister. Agnès was odd, with eyes, he might have suggested, had he overheard Robert Clément, more like those of the panther he had seen at the zoo, pacing up and down its cage in a manner the crowd found amusing. Philippe liked Agnès in the way he had liked the panther and had hoped that it might escape and get a bit of its own back on the laughing crowd. With the sensitivity which, even at age six, was a hallmark of his character, he knew their mother would be quick to blame Agnès for the episode with the scissors. So he bore the unfair punishment in silence.

Professor Jones, had he been aware of it, would have been
able to date Agnès's arrival quite precisely, since it was the same summer that his second wife left him. The weather had been uncharacteristically inclement, even for central France, which does not enjoy the dependable climate of the South.
Professor Jones had taken a sabbatical year in order to embark on a long-cherished research project of documenting each of the supposedly four thousand, five hundred sculptures which embellish the nine great portals of Notre-Dame in Chartres. The work was to be definitive in the field and he had dared to hope that it would make his name. But the parochialism of the small town, the depressing steady drizzle and her husband's preoccupation with insensate figures of the long past had lowered Marion Jones's spirits, the very spirits which her husband had hoped to raise by bringing her to the famed medieval town.

This mismatch in taste and comprehension was only one of a long list of incompatibilities between Marion Jones and her husband. That summer, a renowned Japanese cellist visited from Paris to play Bach's Suites for unaccompanied cello at one of the cathedral's prestigious summer concerts. Marion, bored to tears by the life she was leading, wandered into the cathedral while the cellist was practising, and it was noted by Madame Beck that he was not unaccompanied when, a while later, he left the cathedral to return to his hotel. Not long after the concert, Marion took to making shopping trips to Paris, which is barely an hour's train ride from Chartres. The trips became longer, and more frequent; one day she left with a larger than usual bag and never returned.

Professor Jones waited mournfully, long after his sabbatical year had come to an end. Finally, giving in to despair, he resigned his university position and made a permanent home in Chartres, but not before a small parcel containing a wedding ring had arrived with a note telling him where he could ‘stick his bloody sculptures'.

The current dean, the Abbé Paul, might have remembered Agnès's arrival since he too, at that far date, had only lately come from his seminary to serve as a curate at the cathedral. He had found Agnès under a man's coat, asleep in a convenient niche in the North Porch. Although the dean at the time, Monsignor André, a stern administrator, had let it be known that tramps should not misconstrue the nature of Christian charity by taking the cathedral for ‘a doss house', the young priest found himself turning a blind eye to the intruder.