The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

associate with Solomon,” Dacian conceded. “Yet an entire range between the Indus Valley and Afghanistan, just south of where the hidden city is thought to be, is named for him: the Suleimans. There, in a hollow crater on top, his throne—the takht-i-Suliman—was regarded by the ancients as another axis connecting heaven to earth.

“With Solomon, myth is often mingled with fact: it’s said he was a magus with dominion over water, earth, wind, and fire; that he understood the language of animals, employing the services of ants and bees to build the Jerusalem temple; that doves and feys designed his magical city of the sun in Central Asia, a place long sought by Alexander the Great through many lands. When Solomon took Balqis, Queen of Sheba, on a tour of the many cities he’d created, aboard a magic carpet on which he placed a royal throne, and the queen looked back toward her homeland, Solomon’s genie scooped the hollow from the mountaintop and set down the throne so she had a better view. A real takht-i-Suliman was recorded in the expedition survey of the region in 1883. There was also a Persian fire temple from the time of Alexander built on the very spot. The link with fire worship is of importance to our story. Alexander and Solomon, each with one foot dipped in history and one in legend, are linked in other ways, too—in the lore of Hindus, Buddhists, Tantric Tibetans, Nestorian Christians—even the holy book of Islam, the Qur’ān.”

“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