The Magic Circle (28 page)

“Tell me then,” said Lovernios.

It was dusk, and the fog had encased the beach below. It would quickly grow dark, so Lovernios collected some nearby brush and a few branches and twigs, and chopped at the flint he’d extracted from his thong-tied sack, to make a hastily improvised fire. The two men sat on a nearby rock plateau as Joseph recounted the tale.

THE THIRTEENTH TRIBE

The story begins with our ancestor Jacob as a young man. Twice Jacob had tricked his older twin brother Esau out of his birthright. When he learned Esau had threatened to kill him as soon as their father died, Jacob fled the land of Canaan and headed north, to the country of his mother’s tribe. Arriving in the mountains near the Euphrates River, the first thing Jacob saw was a beautiful young shepherdess who brought her sheep to a well, and Jacob fell in love with her. As it proved, she was his own cousin Rachel, the younger daughter of his mother’s brother, Laban. At once Jacob asked for her hand in marriage.

Jacob worked seven years for his uncle to earn Rachel as his bride. But the dawn after his wedding night he learned he’d been tricked: the woman he’d lain with that night—substituted under cover of darkness for Rachel—was her squint-eyed older sister, Leah, for it was the custom in the north to marry off the eldest first. When his uncle Laban offered Jacob Rachel as a second wife, Jacob agreed to pay her dower by toiling seven years more in his uncle’s fields. The number seven is also a key number in our people’s history. God created the world and took his rest within seven days. The number seven marks the fulfillment and completion of all creative undertakings, the number of divine wisdom. It is therefore significant that seven is the birth sequence of Jacob’s only daughter, as are the key events leading up to her birth:

While God ignored Rachel’s desire to have children, her sister Leah gave birth to four sons. Rachel offered to her husband her servant Bilhah, who gave birth to two more sons. Because Jacob no longer came to Leah’s bed, she offered her own servant, Zilpah, who likewise had two sons by Jacob—while the unhappy Rachel still remained barren. But things were about to change.

One day the eldest son, Reuben, found some mandrakes in the wheat fields and brought them to his mother, Leah. Mandrakes, like May-apples, promote conception and are associated with the temptation of Eve. Rachel asked Leah to share them, but Leah would agree only in exchange for Jacob’s restored services as a husband. The desperate Rachel said yes, after which Leah gave birth to two more sons. And then the vital event was about to occur. Leah’s
seventh
and final child—the eleventh of Jacob’s children—was a girl, who was given the name of Dinah.

Upon Dinah’s birth, Leah’s fertility and Rachel’s barrenness were both at an end. Rachel’s firstborn son Joseph, later viceroy of Egypt, therefore became Jacob’s twelfth child. And the final child was Benjamin, whose birth resulted in Rachel’s death and the end of the family cycle. His number was thirteen.

The sequence in which the children were born, the way each was blessed by Jacob before his death, and even the way in which the tribes were later blessed by Moses in the desert, are all known to be important in the history of our people. But Dinah herself does not reappear in the story until her father Jacob returns from self-imposed exile in the north, and brings his family back into the land of Canaan.

Jacob bought land from the local prince, Hamor, and dug a well that’s still there today at the foot of the sacred Mount Gerizim, and settled in with his family in the land of Canaan. When Dinah went through the wheat fields one day to meet some of the local maidens, Hamor’s son Shechem saw her and wanted her, and he defiled her there in the field. But when Shechem realized he was in love with Dinah, he took her home and asked his father Hamor to arrange that they might marry.

When Hamor went to Dinah’s father and her brothers, he offered to share half his estates if they’d permit this marriage. Jacob and his sons agreed, only if all males of the Canaanite clan would agree to be circumcised, as Jewish covenant requires. But two of Dinah’s brothers were lying—for no sooner had the Canaanite men undergone surgery than Simeon and Levi fell upon their households, killing all the men, removing Dinah forcibly from the house of her captors, looting and destroying the houses, and making off with the women and children, sheep and oxen and material wealth. Jacob’s family was forced to flee Canaan in fear of retribution for this deception and bloody massacre.

We know two more things regarding this tale:

Jacob and his family left Canaan, never to return. Near the well he’d dug there—Jacob’s well—grew the Oak of Shechem, where Moses would one day instruct the Hebrews to build their first altar upon their return from Egypt to the promised land. Beneath that now famous tree, Jacob buried all the clothes and jewelry and treasures, and even the statues and idols—all the belongings of his wives and concubines and servants and the captives from Canaan—so that each might put on clean clothes and begin a new life before starting into the land of his father’s people.

Between the land of Canaan they’d left behind and the land of Judea that lay before them, near Bethlehem, Rachel gave birth to the thirteenth and last child, whom she called Benoni but whom Jacob named Benjamin—and then she died.

“And what of Dinah, the cause of all these changes in fortune, these beginnings and endings and reversals of fate?” asked Lovernios when Joseph had finished his tale.

“We’ll never know how she felt about the treachery that had been done by her brothers in her name, for this is the last time she’s mentioned in Torah,” said Joseph. “But the objects that were buried beneath that oak are often called ‘Dinah’s legacy,’ since they changed the destiny of the Hebrew people from what it might have been, stripping them of their past and even their identities. From that day nearly two thousand years ago when they left Canaan—modern Samaria—and entered Hebron—now Judea—they were reborn into a new and different life.”

“Do you think this was the hidden message of Esus of Nazareth?” Lovernios asked. “To strip ourselves of our past and be reborn to a new way of life?”

“That’s what I hope to learn from the contents of these cylinders,” Joseph replied.

“I believe by this woman’s letter I can already guess what was in the mind of Esus of Nazareth, and why he told that tale to his disciples,” said the prince. “It has to do with the well of Jacob you spoke of, and the tree.”

Joseph looked into those deep blue eyes, nearly black pools in the firelight.

“My people have oak trees too, my friend,” said Lovernios, “groves of them, each with its sacred well, fed by a sacred spring. And in each of these holy spots we pay tribute to a special goddess. Her name is neither Dinah nor Diana. But it
is
Danu—my own tribe, for instance, the
Tuatha De Danaan
, are the people of Danu—which seems rather too close for chance. Danu is the great virgin, mother of all ‘found waters’—that is, fresh waters like those of springs and wells. Her very name means ‘the gift,’ for such water is life itself. And we pay tribute to her much as your ancestor Jacob did, only we don’t bury our treasure under an oak, we throw it down the well near the oak, where it’s received into the waiting arms of the goddess.”

“But you can’t really think the Master’s final message was—” Joseph began.

“What you might call heathen or pagan?” Lovernios finished for him with a wry smile. “I fear you never understood him, any of you, even since his boyhood. You saw him as a great philosopher, a mighty prophet, a saviour king. But I saw him as one
fili
, or seer, regards another, with unveiled eyes: naked, as it were. Naked as when we come into the world, and naked as when we die. A
fili
can see the raw soul of another—and his soul was ancient, your Esus of Nazareth. But there was something more.…”

“Something more?” said Joseph, though he was half afraid to ask.

The Prince of Foxes gazed into the fire, watching the sparks that crawled like living things across the ground before slipping soundlessly into the black night sky. Joseph felt his skin prickle in anticipation before hearing the
drui
’s whispered words:

“He has a god in him.”

Joseph felt his breath let out suddenly, as if he’d been struck a sharp blow.

“
A
god?” he said. “But, Lovern, you know for our people there can be but one God: King of Kings, Lord of Hosts, the One whose name is not spoken, whose image is never graven, whose breath created the world, and who creates Himself simply by saying ‘I am.’ Do you suggest this God might actually enter into a living human being?”

“I’m afraid I saw his resemblance to another god,” the prince said slowly. “For even his name is that of the great Celtic god Esus, lord of the netherworld, of wealth sprung from the earth. Human sacrifices—or, more properly, those who sacrifice themselves to Esus—must hang upon a tree in order to gain true wisdom and the knowledge of immortality. Wotan, a god of the far north, hung for nine days from a tree to obtain the secret of the Runes, the mystery of all mysteries. Your Esus of Nazareth hung for nine
hours
, but the idea is the same. I believe that he was a shaman of the highest degree—that he sacrificed himself to enter the magic circle where truth resides, in order to achieve divine wisdom and spiritual immortality.”

“
Sacrificed
himself? And for wisdom? For some kind of immortality?” cried Joseph of Arimathea, leaping to his feet in agitation. It was true that the Romans spoke of human sacrifice among the Keltoi, but this was the first he’d heard a
drui
mention it. “No, no. It simply isn’t possible. Jesua may have been a Master, but I raised him—I thought of him as my only child. I knew him better than anyone. He could never have turned his back on mankind, or turned away from his life’s mission of seeking the salvation of his fellow beings through love, right here on earth! He strove always toward life and light. Don’t ask me to believe that the Master would engage in some dark, barbarian ritual to invoke the bloodthirsty gods of our ancestors.”

Lovernios had stood too. He put his hands on Joseph’s shoulders, searching his eyes deeply before he spoke.

“But that’s exactly what you
do
believe, my friend,” he said. When Joseph stepped back in protest, Lovernios added, “It’s what you’ve feared all along, isn’t it? Or why did you wait until James Zebedee’s departure before opening those clay cylinders? Why bring
me
from the isles to be here beside you when you opened them?”

Without awaiting Joseph’s reply, the prince reached down and picked up the net filled with clay amphorae, holding them near the fire to study them.

“Our only question now is whether to read these or to burn them,” he told Joseph. “Your master has taken a path I know well, you see. Among our people, only those who are chosen by destiny may follow the path of a
drui
, of a messenger to the gods. It’s a path that prepares one for the self-sacrifice that I think your Esus always intended to make in behalf of mankind. Such a path, as I said, also confers upon the messenger the wisdom and truth essential to the completion of such a goal. But there is another path, a path of far greater danger but bringing with it—if successfully carried out—vastly greater knowledge and power.”

“What sort of power?” asked Joseph.

Lovernios set the net down and regarded Joseph grimly. “We must find out exactly what those objects were, the ones buried by your ancestors beneath the roots of that oak tree in Samaria, and where they are today: whether they have indeed remained underground throughout these past two millennia, as I greatly fear they have not. For I suspect the story Esus of Nazareth intended to tell is not as simple as the rape of Dinah and the revenge wrought by her brothers. I think the kernel of truth in his story relates to a larger kind of transformation—and that the objects Jacob buried may be the key to the mystery.”

“But it was
I
who told you about those things,” said Joseph. “The Master never spoke of them. Besides, they were only clothes and jewels and personal treasures and the servants’ household gods, and they’ve been buried for two thousand years. So how could they relate to transformation, much less explain the Master’s actions?”

“You said the
place
they were buried was beside a sacred well and beneath a sacred oak, and the
reason
they were buried was to change the identity of the tribes descended from Jacob. This suggests they were not merely personal goods but talismanic objects invested with the
charism
of each individual member of the tribe,” said Lovernios. “The initiate who’s chosen that more difficult path I spoke of must first have possession of such talismans. They must be united in communal force during his invocation of the ancient mysteries. I feel certain this was your master’s objective. And if he elected to follow this path in behalf of your people, he himself must have obtained possession of your ancestors’ talismans. But whether he failed or succeeded in his final goal of transformation, now these objects must be returned to the earth again at once, to propitiate the gods.”

“I don’t understand,” Joseph protested. “You suggest the Master dug up objects that may have been buried for millennia—or perhaps never even existed—in order to gain for himself some mysterious power. But, Lovern, during his life the Master was capable of such feats as raising young Lazarus from death. And after his
own
death, he appeared to Miriam as in real life. What greater powers could there be than those he already held?”

The last flickers of fire had burned low, and by unspoken agreement the men started to break up the coals and prepare to return to Joseph’s ship. Lovernios hefted the net filled with clay amphorae, slinging it over his broad shoulder. Joseph could now see only the outline of the other’s muscular form. Lovernios’s voice came softly out of the darkness.

“When I told you that your master was possessed by a god, I fear I was not completely clear,” he said. “Instead, the
druid
believe that one is required to
be
a god—in order to bring forth a new Age.”