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

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