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

inventions might work. But he experimented extensively with harmonics, inventing oscillators so tiny they could be carried in a pocket, yet whose vibrations, when applied to a structure like the Brooklyn Bridge or Empire State Building, could cause it to sway and break to bits in a matter of minutes.”

“So let’s get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying the Soviets might have attempted a controlled chain reaction, trying to somehow invoke this Tesla-type force in 1957—and then it went haywire? But if Tesla didn’t write anything about it, how would they know what to do?”

“I said he didn’t publish—not that he didn’t write,” said Wolfgang. “In fact, it’s possible such specifications were among his papers, many of which mysteriously disappeared when he died in New York at the age of eighty-seven—significantly in 1943, at the height of the Second World War, when the race was on for a new kind of weapon. Indeed, Hitler announced just thereafter, to his intimate confidants, that scientists were on the brink of developing a fabulous new ‘superweapon’ which would shortly end the war in Germany’s favor.”

My mind was flooded with unbidden thoughts: Nikola Tesla from Yugoslavia, Virgilio from Trieste, Volga Dragonoff who was given his name by Pandora for the “dragon forces” of the earth and who hailed from the Caucasus.

“What does all this have to do with Pandora and her manuscripts?” I asked—wondering if even at this late date I was really prepared for the answer.

But Wolfgang had stopped dead on the walk to gaze through the mist rising from the Champs de Mars to where the Eiffel Tower loomed like an apparition before us. Looped up its sides a message in neon letters was spelled out. Deux Cent Ans—two hundred years.

Good lord! I glanced quickly at Wolfgang, who’d started laughing.

“Though I mentioned it myself to you only last week, I’d already forgotten,” he told me. “This year, 1989, is the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. But 1789 was also the year the new element uranium was discovered by Klaproth in Saxony. He named it after the planet Uranus that another German, Herschel, had discovered with his sister at their observatory in England not ten years earlier. These three events marked the beginning of the destruction of the old aeon your grandfather was speaking of, and Uranus became regarded as the planet governing the new age—the age of Aquarius. I think that’s what Pandora’s manuscripts are all about. Do you see the connection?”

I began to say I didn’t get it—but all at once, I thought I did.

“Prometheus?” I said.

Wolfgang snapped his eyes from the neon lights and stared at me in surprise.

“That’s correct,” he said. “In the myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to men—just as in the coming age, as Dacian Bassarides said, the water-bearer pours out a great life force for mankind. Such gifts often turn out to be curses as much as blessings. In the Prometheus myth, Zeus turned around and gave us Pandora. She opened a box—a jar, actually—and released all the evils into the world. But there are those who don’t think the story of Prometheus and Pandora was totally a myth. I suspect your grandmother Pandora must have been among them.”

“You think the manuscripts Pandora collected told how to make a nuclear pile? Or how to tap into the earth’s energy forces?” I said. “But I understood that her documents were ancient—or at least much older than any modern technology or inventions.”

“Most inventions would be better termed discoveries—or even rediscoveries,” said Wolfgang. “I don’t know if the ancients had such knowledge, but I do know that there are places on the planet where the components of sustainable chain reactions—radioactive materials, heavy water, other ingredients—exist together naturally. It has often been commented that the Bible and other early texts describe scenes very much resembling atomic explosions—the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is only one—just as there are indeed specific spots on the earth’s surface most conducive to Tesla’s power vortices, artificial creation of thunderstorms and ball lightning, and harmonic oscillations. In most of these places, we know that the ancients built monuments, raised standing stones, or left shamanistically significant cave art—well before recorded history.”

“But even if all Pandora’s documents were collected, translated, decoded, deciphered, and understood—what would someone be able to do with the knowledge?” I said in frustration. “Why would it be dangerous?”

“Since I’ve only just glimpsed the documents for a few moments myself, clearly I don’t know all the answers,” Wolfgang said. “But I do know two things. First: the early philosophers from Pythagoras to Plato believed the earth was a sphere suspended in space through equilibrium, and attuned to the music of the spheres. But the details of the power sources themselves were always kept veiled, since they were believed to be a key element of the Mysteries.

“On his deathbed, just before Socrates drank hemlock, he told his disciples that the earth, if viewed from above, resembles ‘one of those balls made of twelve pieces of skin in different colors.’ That is the description not of a sphere but of the largest Pythagorean polygon—the dodecahedron, a figure of twelve sides where each face is a pentagon. This was the most sacred form to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. They conceived of the earth as a gigantic crystal—today we’d say a ‘crystal set’—a transmitter that harnessed energy from the heavens or the depths of the earth. They thought it could even be used for psychic control on a broad scale if one manipulated these key pressure points. And further, they imagined that the forces within the earth, if properly ‘tuned,’ would vibrate like a tuning fork to harmonic correspondences in the sky.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s say the earth really is a gigantic energy grid, as everyone seems to think. Then I could certainly understand why people who were after power would want to get their hands on that hidden map of trigger points. But when it comes to ‘mysteries,’ let’s not forget