The Magic Circle (79 page)

I had a moment of panic, that I might fall or that I might actually be dead and leaving the earth forever! But then I suddenly realized I wasn’t alone up here. There was someone beside me: Sam. It was almost as if he were speaking to me from inside my own mind, though if I looked, I could actually see both our bodies sitting side by side, down there on the earth below!

“Don’t look down, Ariel,” Sam had whispered in my mind. “Look up ahead. Let’s enter the light together.…”

Oddly enough, we’d never spoken of it afterwards, not once. And odder still, it had never seemed to me that it was all only a dream. If anything, it was more vivid than reality, just as our three-dimensional, Technicolor world is so much more solid than a two-dimensional black-and-white photo pasted on cardboard. This was many exponential dimensions greater and deeper. But if I’d had to really pin it down in specific words, I would never have known where to begin.

We had entered the light together as children, Sam and I. Now we were about to do so once again. This time, I knew, it was going to be very, very different from the last. We two were about to be transformed into one, on a spring morning among the wildflowers.

And this time, I was no longer afraid.

As I lay in Sam’s arms hours later, instead of feeling drained I felt exhilarated, as if my veins were suddenly filled with something light and bubbly and effervescent.

“How exactly would you describe that?” I asked him as he wove his fingers together with mine. “I mean, what happened to us?”

“Hmm,” said Sam. “I suppose if you must have a name, the technical term would be ‘mutual orgasm.’ A very
long
mutual orgasm. More or less your basically endless, drawn-out, hours-long,
nonstop
mutual orgasm—”

I shoved my hand in his face.

“On the other hand,” said Sam, smiling as he kissed my bare shoulder, “you could simplify things a lot and just call it love. Were you surprised?”

“I’ve never felt anything like that before,” I admitted.

“I guess I should be relieved,” said Sam. “But to be honest, neither have I.”

He sat up and looked at me lying in the grasses, and he ran his finger from my chin down the center of my body until I vibrated. Then he leaned over and kissed me on the mouth as if we were slowly pouring Stardust into each other. I couldn’t believe how it felt.

“I think we’re tuned up,” said Sam. “No more rehearsals—what about a real live performance?”

Sam and I were still in the mountains six months later, early November, when Dark Bear sent us snowshoes, cross-country skis, and some bearskins in preparation for the expected first big snow.

We’d nearly finished translating the manuscripts—Earnest’s, Lafcadio’s, Zoe’s, and the runes Jersey’d stolen from Augustus. As Wolfgang and others thought, these pointed to locations on earth that formed a grid the ancients had not only believed possessed enormous powers but which apparently they’d actually
used
in ceremonies and rituals, documented here in detail, over a period of at least five thousand years. The closely held secret of early mystery religions like the Orphics, Pythagoreans, and early Egyptians was that activating this grid was an alchemical marriage that would transform the earth, bringing down energy that connected us in a kind of “marriage” with the cosmos.

“Do you know what a ‘center of symmetry’ is?” Sam asked me one day. When I shook my head, he explained. “In some mathematical models, like those in catastrophe theory, you can pinpoint the absolute center of a shape. There’s a model for wildfires, for instance. If a wildfire starts around the edges of a field, regardless of the field’s shape, you can predict precisely where the fire will burn out, at true center, by drawing a straight edge at each contour around the periphery and dropping a ninety-degree line from it. The place where most lines overlap is the absolute center, the center of symmetry—a kind of path of least resistance. Many field models can be analyzed that way—fields of light, of the brain, of the earth, and possibly the cosmos. Let me show you.”

He drew the shape on his small computer screen for me:

“You think these locations we’re looking for on earth aren’t necessarily just connected by straight lines or six-pointed stars?” I surmised. “You think they’re important because they’re acting as centers of symmetry?”

“A kind of vortex or maelstrom,” Sam agreed. “Something that pulls energy into itself and magnifies its power, because it’s the
true
center of the form.”

Part of the blueprint was inherent in the pages we had before us. For instance, as we figured out in a flash one day, those patent drawings Nikola Tesla had made for his own high-voltage tower built in Colorado Springs—the tower he claimed would channel energy across the world grid—closely resembled a famous drawing of the first alchemical retort, the Chrysopoea of Cleopatra, from the oldest extant alchemy text. And both of these resembled—literally to a T—the tau cross, power symbol of the ancient Egyptians, as well as the
Tyr
rune Zoe spoke of, which invoked the magic pillar of Zeus. And, eerily, even the Irminsul itself, destroyed by Charlemagne but rebuilt in the Teutoburg Forest one thousand years later by Adolf Hitler.

Tyr Rune

Irmin Saule

Tesla Tower

The Chrysopoea of Cleopatra

Still, Sam and I knew our task had a long way to go. Some documents pointed to others that weren’t in our possession. We figured out where many had been hidden millennia ago—a crevasse on Mount Ida along the coast of Turkey, Mount Pamir in Central Asia, a cave where Euripides wrote his plays in central Greece—but although some ancient documents had recently been found in these regions, clearly there was no guarantee the ones we were looking for would be there today. We decided that when we finished our task here, in the spirit of Pandora and Clio, we’d try to find at least a few of those others.

It was uncanny, too, that as each event popped out of our Pandora’s box of ancient revelations, it seemed to be echoed simultaneously somewhere on earth, in the present. We knew we must be getting close to the transformation we were awaiting.

Not only had the Soviets withdrawn from Afghanistan in February, but other countries with walls, whether political or physical ones, began to be hit by democratic urges and surges that were suddenly moving in torrents, like dammed water trying to seek its natural level, its center of symmetry.

In June, Tienanmen Square in China, the country most famous for a wall that could even be seen from outer space, had erupted in social protest. Though the tanks rolled in, the yeast of ferment had already started. Then, on the November ninth we’d been awaiting—the date Wolfgang had identified as a turning point for Napoleon, de Gaulle, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Adolf Hitler—we received the astonishing news, via our Appaloosa express, from Laf and Bambi in Vienna. The Berlin Wall, symbolically separating East and West for more than twenty-five years, had come down overnight. The tidal wave had at last broken through; it was rolling now and couldn’t be stopped.

But it wasn’t until late December—almost the anniversary of the ninetieth year since Uncle Laf’s birth in Natal province, South Africa—that I made the breakthrough of my own that Sam and I had been hoping for. I was working on the text of a long roll of very old and fragile linen, written in Greek, that I’d just unsealed from one of Sam’s lucite tubes. I knew I hadn’t seen it before. But as I was tapping the Greek words into my laptop, I thought something about it seemed familiar.

“Do you remember a document of Zoe’s we translated around two months ago?” I asked Sam, who was working on his computer across the room, sitting cross-legged with an upside-down Jason sacked out in cat nirvana on his lap. “I mean the story about a voice calling across the waters from the isles of Paxi, telling an Egyptian pilot to announce, when he was off Palodes, that the Great God Pan was dead.”

“Yes, Tiberius had the pilot brought to Capri for interrogation,” said Sam. “The pilot’s name, coincidentally, was Tammuz, like the dying god in the ancient mysteries. And he announced Pan’s death the same week Jesus died. What have you figured out?”

“I’m not sure,” I told him, still tapping text into my computer. “But from just the amount of Greek I’ve picked up these past months by watching the machine translate, I think this letter may provide at least some kind of key to how things fit together at a deeper level. Unfortunately it’s torn, and some is missing. But it’s clearly written by a woman to a man—a woman that I think we’re already pretty familiar with.”

“Read it aloud?” Sam suggested, pointing to the snoring cat on his lap with a smile. “I hate to disturb folks in deep contemplation,” So did I.

Perdido Mountain, Pyrenees, Roman Gaul

Beloved Joseph,

Following your advice, my brother Lazarus and I have put the alabaster box, the chalice, and our other objects the Master touched in his last days, here in a secure hiding place within the mountain, where we pray they will remain safe until they are needed. I’ve made a list of these, and directions to find them, and will send these separately.

In your last letter, Joseph, you expressed the thought that since you’ve now reached a great number of years, you may yourself soon be going to join the Master. You asked whether I, as the only true initiate of the Master, could find it possible to share my perspective of what occurred at that last supper he passed with his disciples, and how it related to the earlier descriptions I’d sent you, written by others present on that occasion.