The Magic Circle (54 page)

“Good grief,” said Agrippa. “What could be worse than what you’ve just told?”

“Plenty,” said Claudius. “During Drusilla’s official mourning period he made it a capital offense to laugh, bathe, or dine with one’s family, and then required all state oaths to be sworn to her divinity. He accused both of his other sisters of treason, exiled them to the Pontian Islands, then sold off their houses and jewelry and slaves to raise cash. Then he built a stable of ivory tusks and jewels for his racehorse Incitatus. He often throws lavish dinner parties where Incitatus, dining on golden barley, is guest of honor. He has seized and liquidated people’s property on the merest pretext, and has opened a brothel in the west wing of the imperial palace. I myself have often seen him run barefoot, or even roll about on the floor, in those piles of gold coins he hoards.

“A year ago, he mounted a military expedition through Gaul and Germania, with the express intent of conquering Britannia. But after a long, hard winter and a six-month march, when the legions reached the Channel at last, Gaius only had them collect thousands of seashells; then they headed back to Rome!”

“But Caligula had planned that mission ever since Tiberius died and he first became emperor!” cried Agrippa. “Why did he abandon it—and in such bizarre fashion? Has he gone mad?”

“Doomed, rather—and he knows it,” Claudius replied gravely. “Of late, the omens have not been good. On the ides of March the capitol at Capua was struck by lightning; then when Gaius was sacrificing a flamingo, he was splashed by its blood. Sulla, the astrologer, cast his horoscope this past August for his birthday and said he must prepare to die soon. That same evening, Mnester danced the tragedy that was performed on the very night Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon, was assassinated.”

“You can’t believe such things really carry weight?” asked Agrippa, at the same time recalling from his youth just how obsessed the imperial family had always been—like most Romans—by omens read in the entrails of birds and beasts, and with all forms of prophecy. Did they not keep the ancient books of the Sibylline Oracles encased in gold?

“What does it matter what I believe?” Claudius replied. “You don’t understand. If my nephew dies just now, with all we’ve learned, I may have to invade Britannia myself!”

Syrian Antioch: Passover, A.D. 42

EPISTLES FROM THE APOSTLES

To: Maryam Mark

at Jerusalem, Roman Judea

From: John Mark

at Antioch, Syria

Revered and beloved Mother,

What shall I say? So much has changed this past year here at our church of Antioch, it is hard to know where to begin. It’s more impossible yet to think that this week’s Pesach marks the tenth since the Master’s death—it shocks me just to think of it. Young as I was, I still recall the Master so clearly from his constant visits to our home. And especially vivid is my memory of that last supper he and his disciples ate together at our house.

I was so proud that it was I he’d chosen to run to the fountain with the water pitcher, so that when his disciples arrived there they might follow me and learn where their meeting would take place. But indeed, it’s that very memory that has impels me to write to you today.

Uncle Barnabas—who asks that I send warmest brotherly regards to you as always—tells me he feels that by this coming summer when I turn twenty-one, I shall have enough grounding in the Master’s work—and my Latin and Greek should be sufficiently developed—that I’ll be ready to accompany him on my first official mission among the Gentiles. Of course, this is excellent news, and I knew you’d be proud I had come so far in this, our second major church outside Jerusalem. But there is one thing that rather sours the matter, and I want your advice. Please share this with no one—not even your closest friends like Simon Peter. I ask this for reasons you’ll soon understand.

There is a man who’s come to Antioch at the express request of Uncle Barnabas to work with our church. He’s a diaspora Jew of the Benjamin tribe who grew up in the north, in Cilicia. As a young man, he studied with
Rahh
Gamaliel at the temple in Jerusalem, so it’s possible you know him. His name is Saul of Tarsus—and, Mother, he is the problem. I fear matters will only grow worse if nothing is done about it.

I hasten to add at the very outset that Saul of Tarsus has many positive qualities: he’s extraordinarily educated, not only in Torah, Mishnahim, and classical Hebrew, but he also is fluent in Latin, Greek, Punic, and standard Aramaic. He comes from a wealthy and respected textiles family who retain the main concession to supply the eastern Roman legions with that sturdy goat-hair cloth,
cilicium
, that they use for everything from tents to shoes. As a result, the family holds hereditary Roman citizenship. Clearly, the assets adhering to Saul of Tarsus go far to explain Uncle Barnabas’s attraction to the man.

This is where my principal conflict arises, Mother. For Saul of Tarsus must be regarded, first and foremost, as a man of privilege even from birth: rich, educated, well-traveled, a Roman citizen. And what single thing was the Master most opposed to, as being contrary to the kingdom? It can be said in one word: privilege—most especially, privilege of this particular sort. To highlight the contrast I must be more specific about the events preceding Saul’s own conversion to our order—observe I do not say “to our belief,” for he has an established set of beliefs of his own. I assure you that everything I’m about to tell you I have garnered from the fellow’s own lips.

While studying under Gamaliel at Jerusalem, Saul for the first time became acquainted with the many activist factions in the region—Zealots, Sicarii, Essenes—all agitating for liberation from Rome. And he was also exposed to those, like the Master’s cousin the baptizer, who even went “back to nature” dressed as wild men in fur pelts and subsisting on wild locust and honey. The most despicable of all of these, in Saul’s opinion, were the Master and his followers.

As a sophisticate from cosmopolitan Cilicia, Saul felt horrified repulsion at these sickeningly primitive peasants. Did not he himself, though a Jew, hold the highest honor on earth: citizenship of the Roman Empire, the only passport to the civilized world? He regarded these Judeans as no better than terrorist rabble. Their hysterical demands for freedom from Roman rule, both religious and political, enraged him beyond words. For a paltry freedom they thought they desired, they were relentless in pitting provincial Jews against the whole vast Roman empire. They had to be stopped.

Saul begged permission from his teacher Gamaliel to hunt them down—he wanted to haul them to the temple where they could be tried as heretics, as Roman law allowed, and put to death by stoning. But Gamaliel wisely replied that such was expressly opposed to prescribed Jewish law, as already established in the time of Gamaliel’s grandfather, the great Hillel. In frustrated rage Saul resigned his studies and next took his plea to the Roman-appointed
zadok
Caiaphas, who was glad of a new recruit to his private mission of supporting the Romans by handing over any rabble-rousers who opposed their rule. Saul soon proved to be the perfect candidate for this bloodthirsty persecution.

Mother, you will hardly credit it when I tell you Saul of Tarsus was actually among the mob that was screaming for blood outside Pilate’s palace the night of the Master’s trial! Not long after, Saul was there again with the mob that stoned our compatriot Stephen to death—though now he claims he never cast a single stone himself, but merely held the cloaks of the others, that they might take better aim! The man is completely unconscionable—and the story of his own “conversion” may be the least believable of all.

Despite his many gifts, Saul of Tarsus has a serious physical shortcoming. He has the falling sickness, the malady of the Caesars that the Greeks call
epilepsia
—grasped by an outside force. I’ve seen it myself, and it was not a pretty sight. At one moment he was giving a speech—and he does have a golden tongue—at the next he was lying on the ground, foam at his lips, eyes rolled back in their sockets, gurgling from his throat as if possessed by demons. Today he even travels with his own physician.

The story of his conversion to follow the Master, which is rich and strange and completely unverifiable, involves such a seizure. Saul claims that shortly after the stoning of Stephen, he was on a mission to Damascus to spy on some of our number in behalf of the high priest Caiaphas. But just as Saul reached the city gates, he had one of these attacks. He fell to earth and was blinded by brilliant light. Then he heard the Master’s voice, asking why Saul was persecuting him!

Some of our cohorts found Saul there in the road, brought him within the city walls of Damascus, and cared for him. And although he did remain blind for a number of days, at last they succeeded in restoring his vision. Afterwards he went into the wilderness, where he remained for several years—doing what, he declines to discuss.

The upshot, however, is that in the end he convinced himself he’d received a personal calling from the Master that provided him and him alone with special insight. So he went down to Jerusalem to meet with the Master’s brother James, and Simon Peter, to announce his intention of becoming a leader of our church, based solely upon this highly suspect vision. As I’ve heard it, they brushed him off—so he turned to Uncle Barnabas, as independent leader of the northern church.

I mean to say, Mother, this fabrication cut of whole cloth seems of the sort that only a master weaver like Saul of Tarsus might be capable of turning out! What better design than to entrench oneself in the bosom of the very community one has been attacking? To present oneself as a miraculous gift, and pass through the gates of Damascus like a Trojan Horse? To conquer as a worm does, from within! How is it that Barnabas could be taken in by so obvious a charlatan, or by so transparent a scheme?

But if that were all he’d done, I should not be writing this letter. It’s something far worse, and I believe it bodes serious ill.

Do you recall some eight or nine years ago, not long after the Master’s death, Miriam of Magdali came round at the behest of Joseph of Arimathea and asked each of us to recount what we could of the Master’s last week on earth? Though I was a child at the time, even I was asked to tell her all I knew—which proved lucky, as it seems.

Only last year I received a letter from Miriam just before she decamped from Ephesus to join her brother and sister at the mission they’ve begun in Gaul. In this letter, Miriam told me she’d sealed up a great many scrolls of those eyewitness reports in clay cylinders and dispatched them, by the hand of James Zebedee, to Joseph of Arimathea in Britannia. At first, the rest of her letter meant little to me. It was only when Saul of Tarsus revealed he knew something of those documents, and began asking questions about them, that I took a closer look at what they might mean.

Miriam heard back at last from Joseph, to the effect that the documents, combined with information he’d gathered on his own, had enabled him to see a much larger picture than was possible just after the Master’s death. Though Joseph has declined to share this in detail with Miriam until she arrives in the Celtic lands, she was able to pass along to me what he did reveal: It appears, in my role as water-jar boy at that last Pesach supper, I might have seen or heard, or perhaps even done, a few things to help expand that view. But the secret I didn’t understand myself, until Miriam’s letter, involves the Master’s last instructions to me on that fateful evening exactly ten years ago, and what those directives really meant.

He told me I should go to the Serpent Pool carrying a big pitcher, and when others arrived and followed, I should pass through the Essene Gate and lead them to our house on Mount Zion. They’d been told to look for one sign: to follow the water-bearer. But what I didn’t realize until Miriam pointed it out is that the Water-Bearer is also a constellation, as well as the symbol of the world age after this one. “For I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and last,” the Master said. Did he mean to connect himself to both the beginning and the end of the current aeon?

This question brings me again to Saul of Tarsus, Mother. Though I’ve lived near the man every day for nearly a year, he remains an enigma. But just now, I believe a key has surfaced: he’s changed his name from Saul to Paul. Some think he’s merely copying the Master’s well-known quirk of giving all his disciples nicknames. But I think I’ve deciphered the truth—that it has to do, instead, with the Master’s passion for finding hidden meaning in numbers: the
geomatria
. I calculated for myself what hidden meaning might be produced by such a symbolic change.

The numerical value of “Saul” in Hebrew letters adds to ninety, which equals the letter
tzaddi
, a letter that also represents the astrological constellation of Aquarius. But “Paul” in Hebrew numerology has the value of one hundred ten,
qoph-yod
, signifying the signs of the fish and the virgin—that is, the new age of Pisces and Virgo we’ve just entered.

In Greek numerology the meaning of the letters is much the same: “Saulos,” with the value of nine hundred one, represents
Iakkhos
—Bacchus or Dionysus—the water-bearer who brings forth not this age but the one after it, whereas “Paulos,” seven hundred eighty and eighty-one, symbolizes Sophia or Virgo on the one hand and Ophis, the serpent or sea beast, that is, fish, on the other.

Hence, Mother, I believe that through this change of spelling from Saul to Paul, he intends to announce himself, rather than the Master, as avatar of the coming age.

To: Miriam of Magdali

at Massilia, Roman Gaul

Front: Maryam Mark

at Jerusalem, Roman Judea

Dearest Miriam,

I apologize for the untidiness of both my penmanship and my thoughts. Although a ship bound for Massilia now leaves from Joppa weekly, I know you don’t plan to stay there on the coast of Gaul for long, that you’ll soon be heading north to join the rest of your family in the Pyrenees—so I’m hastening to dispatch this letter at once.