The Magic Circle (45 page)

“Solomon and Alexander are mentioned in the Koran?” I said, surprised.

“Indeed,” said Dacian. “One of the hallows so intriguing to Wolfgang was described in the Qur’ān: a magical, luminous green stone believed to have fallen from the sky millions of years ago. Solomon, an initiate into the secrets of the Persian magi, had a chunk from it mounted in a ring which he wore at all times, until his death. Alexander later sought this stone for the powers it rendered over heaven and earth.”

Still listening, I resumed stuffing books as Dacian began his tale.

THE STONE

He was born at midnight in the heat of high summer, in the dog days of the year 356 B.C., at Pella in Macedonia. They called him Alexander.

Before his birth, the Sibylline Oracle predicted the blood-drenched slaughter of Asia by the one who was about to come. With his first birth cries, it’s said the Artemision, the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus, burst spontaneously into flame and was totally destroyed. The magi of Zarathustra who witnessed this cremation, so Plutarch tells us, wept and wailed and beat their faces, and they prophesied the fall of the far-flung Persian Empire which began at that very hour.

Alexander’s mother, Olympias, princess of Epirus, was a priestess of the Orphic mysteries of life and death. As a girl of thirteen she’d met his father, Philip II of Macedon, on the isle of Samothrace during their initiation into the darker Dionysian mysteries that ruled the winter months. By the time of her marriage to Philip, five years later, Olympias was also a devotee of the rituals of the bacchantes, the followers of Dionysus the wine god, who in the god’s Thracian homeland were called bassarides after the fox furs they wore (and little more) when they danced wildly over the hills all night, drunk on undiluted wine and mad with both sexual and blood lust. In possession by the god, the
bassarides
captured wild animals with their bare hands and tore them apart with their teeth. In such states they were called
maenads
—the frenzied ones.

Olympias often shared her bed with the oracular serpent, a full-grown python—a habit that frightened her husband so badly that, for some time, it postponed the conception of a child. But at last the oracle told Philip he would lose an eye for watching his wife engaged in a coupling with the sacred reptile, a mystical event when her womb was opened by the thunderbolt of Zeus and flames poured forth, heralding a child who would one day set the East ablaze. The oracle said their marriage must be consummated in the flesh. Their child would unite the four quarters and awaken the dragon force latent in the earth, bringing the dawn of a new age.

Alexander was fair, rosy, and handsome, of fine form, with one blue-grey eye and one of dark brown. He had a melting glance and exuded a marvelous spicy fragrance from his mouth and all his flesh due to his warm, fiery nature. The young prince’s education by Aristotle included training in metaphysics and the secrets of the Persian magi. He was soon wise beyond his years. By his mother, Olympias, he was tutored in the Mysteries. He became a fleet sprinter, a champion horseman, and an accomplished warrior, and was admired throughout his father’s kingdom.

But when he turned eighteen, Alexander’s life changed. His father divorced his mother, exiled her, and married a young Macedonian woman, Cleopatra, who quickly produced an alternative heir to the royal line. Olympias flew into a black rage and exercised her magic powers, which were formidable. She arranged by ruses and curses to have Philip assassinated by one of his male lovers, so Alexander might succeed to the throne. Alexander was twenty when, upon his father’s death, he became king of Macedon.

His first act was to bring his neighbors Illyria and Thrace within the Macedonian fold. Then he torched the rebellious city of Thebes in central Greece and enslaved its population. On the Ionian coast of modern-day Turkey, for more than one hundred fifty years Greek cities had labored under Persian vassalage. Alexander set about to defeat the Persians and restore democracy, and in some cases autonomy, to the former Greek colonies. His initial mission, to break a two-hundred-year hold by the Persian Empire over the Eastern and Western worlds, was soon revised into a mission of world domination. His final mission would be to bond himself with the divine fluid—to become a living god.

Alexander’s armies entered Asia through Phrygia—today Anatolia, in central Turkey—and came to the city of Gordion. In the eighth century B.C., four hundred years before Alexander, the people of Phrygia had been told by an oracle that the true king of their people would appear one day and be recognized by the fact that, as he entered the city gates, a raven would perch upon his cart. A shepherd, Gordius, had arrived down the eastern road. When he came to the first town, a prophetic raven perched on the yoke of his oxcart, and together they entered the city. Cheering throngs escorted Gordius to the temple and crowned him king. It was soon discovered that no one could untie the complex knot in the leather thong with which the yoke was fastened to the pole of his cart. The oracle said whoever undid the knot would one day be lord of all Asia. This was the Gordian knot that, four hundred years later, Alexander would cut in two with his sword.

Gordius married the oracle of Cybele—a name meaning both cave and cube—the great mother goddess of all creation since the Ice Age. Cybele’s birthplace was Mount Ida on the Ionian coast, from which the gods looked down to observe the Trojan War, but her principal shrine was at Pessinus, only a dozen miles from Gordion, where she was enshrined as a meteoric black stone. One hundred twenty years after Alexander’s death, as protection against Hannibal and his forces during the Carthaginian Wars, this rock would be brought to Rome and enshrined on the Palatine Hill. It remained there, wielding Phrygian power, well into the time of the Caesars.

Gordius and his prophetess wife adopted the half-mortal son of the goddess Cybele, a boy named Midas because, like the goddess, he was born on Mount Ida. Midas became the second king of Phrygia. While still a young man Midas, accompanied by the centaur Silenus, tutor to the god Dionysus, traveled to Hyperborea, a magical land beyond the north wind, associated with the pole star and the world axis. Upon their return, Dionysus rewarded Midas with anything he wanted. Midas asked for the golden touch. Even today, the rivers where he once bathed flow with gold.

In the year 333 B.C., when Alexander cut the Gordian knot, he paid a visit to the tomb of King Midas, also to the temple of Cybele to see the black stone, and lastly to the temple of the patron god of the Phrygian kings, Dionysus. Having refreshed himself in the springs and wells of the Eastern gods, he then proceeded to conquer the East: Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Central Asia, and India.

The key event of these campaigns was in Central Asia, at the Bird-less Rock—a city built on a seven-thousand-foot tower of rock believed to be the pillar holding up the sky, so high that it could not be besieged by catapult. Alexander selected three hundred soldiers from the mountainous regions of Macedon who were capable of scaling the cliffs and the city walls by hand; once above, they fired arrows down on the defenders, who surrendered.

Somewhere near this site, the Qur’ān tells us, Alexander built a pair of vast iron gates to seal a difficult mountain pass against tribes from the east called the Gog and Magog—tribes in later times called Mongol. It was here also that he built his sacred city on the earlier site of the seventh city of Solomon. It’s said the sacred stone of Solomon is buried as a cornerstone, enabling the city to rise at the dawn of each new aeon.

Once the region beyond the Oxus was pacified, a troop of nobles visited from Nysa, a valley at the other side of the Hindu Kush. When they laid eyes upon Alexander, he was still in battle armor and covered with dust. But they were struck speechless and fell to the ground in awe, for they recognized in him those divine and godlike qualities already recognized by the Egyptian high priests and, indeed, the Persian magi. The Nyseans invited Alexander and his men to visit their homeland, which they claimed as the birthplace of the ‘god of Nysa’—Dio-nysus, who was also the chief god of Macedon.

It’s said that Alexander’s visit to Nysa was the turning point of his short but influential life. Approaching this verdant valley spread out between mountain ranges was like entering a lost and magical domain. The valley not only boasted rare vineyards and the heady wines Alexander loved to drink, it was also the only place in this part of the world where ivy, sacred to the god, was known to grow.

The vine represents the journey into the outer world, the quest. The ivy describes the journey within, the labyrinth. Alexander and his troops, always ready to toast the principal god of their own birthplace, twined sacred ivy upon their brows and drank and caroused and danced across the hills in celebration of this new invasion of India—for the legends told that the god Dionysus himself was the first to cross the Indus astride his steaming, perfumed panther.

Alexander’s career was brief, but the oracular dice had been cast before his birth. In thirteen years and many campaigns he conquered most of the known world. Then, at age thirty-three, he died in Babylon. Because his hard-won and far-reaching empire was dismantled immediately after his death, historians believe he left nothing but his golden legend. In this they are mistaken. In those thirteen years he accomplished all he’d set out to achieve: a mingling of East and West, spirit and matter, philosophies and bloodlines. In every capital he conquered, he held public mass marriages between Macedonian-Greek officers and native noblewomen; he himself took several wives of Persian stock.

Iris known, too, that Alexander was an initiate of Eastern esotericism. In Egypt, the high priests of Zeus/Jupiter/Ammon recognized in him an incarnation of that god, and conferred upon him the ram horns of the figure who was associated on all three continents with Mars, the planet of war, and with the current age of Aries, the ram. Up north in the lands of the Scythians—Central Asia, the part of the world we are speaking of—he was called
Zul-qarnain:
the Two-Horned God. This term also means ‘lord of the two paths’ or two epochs—that is, he who’ll rule the transition between two aeons.

“Alexander’s mother, Olympias,” Dacian finished, “told him he was the seed of the serpent power, the cosmic force. The ambition she’d nurtured in him as a child grew into an unquenchable thirst for world dominion. To this end, he built a sacred city at each ‘acupuncture point’ on the earth’s power grid. Alexander thought that to pin these points along the spine of the earth, like driving the axis of a nail into a tree, would enable him to harness the ‘dragon forces’ of earth—and that one who possessed the sacred stone of the new age and planted it precisely at the center of the grid would bring about the last revolution of the wheel of the aeon, would have it under his control and dominion, with the rest of the earth. This was so important, Alexander stopped his campaigns to survey each locale before breaking ground, and he insisted on naming each city himself—seventy in all—before he died.”

“Seventy cities?” said Wolfgang, looking up from the book he was stuffing.

“An interesting number, is it not?” Dacian agreed. “With the earlier seven cities of Solomon, it makes seventy-seven points in the grid, a profoundly magical number.”

I hadn’t missed the parallel between the seventy-seven cities of Alexander and Solomon and the Group of
77
nonaligned nations I’d spent the morning being briefed on. As I passed Wolfgang the book I’d just stuffed, the door swung inward on its hinges and a librarian popped his head around the side and nodded to indicate it was time to close. Dacian rolled his leather map up and replaced it in his bag as Wolfgang neatly stacked the last pile of books and headed with them toward the door.

“Even if there were some kind of grid that harnessed such mysterious energies,” I asked Dacian, “what would be the value of controlling it?”

“Remember, Solomon was regarded as lord of the four quarters—not only of earth, but of the four elements, too,” he said. “Thus, he possessed the powers of an immortal. And Alexander, in his short span, became the first Western man to be regarded even before his death as a living god.”

“You don’t believe there are gods who come to earth in human form?” I said. “I love these old myths—but this
is
the end of the twentieth century.”

“Precisely the moment they’re expected to arrive,” said Dacian.

We went out into the darkened street and the library door closed behind us. Dacian looked rather drained as he stood in the golden light of the first streetlamp that had just switched on above our heads—but his face was still so handsome.

“I must leave you in a moment; I’m very tired,” he said. “But I shall see you again—at least, if the gods we spoke of are willing. And though I’ve just scratched the surface of what you need to know, at least it
has
been scratched so you can peer through the glass a bit. I shouldn’t be concerned about those manuscripts. They’re of little use by themselves. It’s not enough to read; one must also understand. This ability, as I said, calls for a questing mind—and for something more.”

“Something more? Like asking the right questions,” I said. “But earlier, at the Hofburg, you told us you were the one person who could explain why everyone wants these manuscripts, and the hallows too—that you alone could answer the question of what’s so dangerous about them. So the question is, why haven’t you?”

“I said only
one
person could answer the question—not that
I
was the one,” Dacian clarified. “Perhaps you’ll recall my saying that Sanskrit was a key to this mystery? Or that the ancient fire temple built on the site of Solomon’s throne in Afghanistan was also of importance? These are both related to that quality I’ve called ‘something more.’ It’s best described by a Sanskrit word,
salubha
, meaning ‘the way of the moth or grasshopper’—to fly into fire, to rush without thought into danger as the salamander does. To dance upstream like the salmon. To possess the powers of salt.”