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

Palatine Hill. The first initials of these three cities strung together spell BER—the acronym of that goddess herself, in the form of a bear.

These three spots on earth represent three faces of an ancient goddess—a goddess represented by the Shulamite of the poem.

So the Master’s very question—Who was the dark woman of the Song of Songs?—drives right to the heart of his message that the Song itself was a formula of initiation, to be undertaken only by those setting out to conduct the Great Work. The marriage between the white king of the apple orchard and the dark virgin of the vineyard represents the marriage of divine and carnal that lays bare the very core of the Mysteries.

When I finished reading and looked up, Sam, still sitting with Jason in his lap, was grinning at me.

“That was one of the ones I’d translated myself, before Wolfgang made off with the copies of my manuscripts,” he said. “If it means what it sounds like, it would sure knock the stuffing out of a few of those good old celibacy theories—but I’d find it pretty hard to believe. And why did you say you thought it had to do with the ‘voice upon the waters,’ or the death of the Great God Pan?”

“It may be exactly what connects all Pandora’s manuscripts together,” I told him. “What this letter here is telling us, I think, is that initiation—any initiation—requires a kind of death. Death to the world, death to the ego, death to the ‘former’ self of one’s existence, just as the earth has to die and be reborn every year for its renewal. Don’t forget, the two gods who traded off at Delphi each year were Apollo the apple king and Dionysus, god of the vineyard—same jobs as our hero and heroine in Song of Songs. By the same token, the birth and baptism of a new aeon, of a brave new world, requires the death of the old way of thinking, old belief systems—even the death of the old gods.”

“So the knot is just a different way of looking at the warp and woof,” said Sam.

Then I thought of something else, and I pulled up on my screen one of the documents I’d just translated earlier, of Uncle Laf’s.

“Do you recall all that stuff about the Knights Templar of Saint Bernard and the Temple of Solomon? Well, guess what this manuscript says was the logo on their flag? The skull and crossbones—same as the Death’s Head squadron of Heinrich Himmler’s SS. But it doesn’t mean death in this document. It means life.”

“How so?”

“There are two figures of importance in the Greek pantheon that keep appearing over and over in these manuscripts,” I told him. “Athena and Dionysus. Can you think what they had in common?”

“Athena was goddess of the state,” said Sam. “But also of the family, the home, and the loom—ergo, of order. That’s cosmos in Greek. While Dionysus was lord of chaos. His pagan festivals, which still survive in Christian ones like Mardi Gras, were a license for drink and debauchery and madness. They’re connected in ancient cosmogonies, where cosmos is often born from chaos.”

“I found another connection—in the way they were born,” I told him. “Dionysus’s pregnant mother Semele was burned by his father Zeus when he appeared to her in the form of a thunderbolt. Father Zeus took the unborn baby from the mother’s ashes, sewed him up in his own flesh, and gave birth to him later from his thigh. That’s why Dionysus is called ‘twice-born,’ or ‘god of the double door’—”

“And Athena was swallowed by Zeus and later born from his forehead,” finished Sam. “So she can always read his thoughts. I get it. One was born from the skull and one from the thigh of the father. Skull and crossbones, two kinds of creation or generation, spiritual and profane, only together are they whole or holy—is that it?”

I recalled Saint Bernard’s words in his Song of Solomon commentaries, “Divine love is reached through carnal love.”

“I’m sure that’s what this story is hinting at, about the Mysteries,” I told Sam. “The message must be that there’s no death without sex.”

“Pardon me?” said Sam.

“Bacteria never die, they divide,” I said. “Clones just keep on mimeographing the same material. Humans are the only animals that understand and anticipate death. It’s the basis of every religion, all religious experience. Not just spirit, but the relationship between life and death, spirit and matter.”

“Our nervous system has two branches that tie consciousness to emotions called the cranial and sacral. They connect the brain and sacrum,” agreed Sam. “Your skull-and-crossbones, where the knee-bone’s connected to the thighbone, are associated in many languages with powerful generative properties, in words like ‘genius’ and genoux. There’s plenty of evidence, physical and linguistic, for Pythagoras’s famous line: As above, so below.”

“That was the whole job of Dionysus in mythology: to connect the sacred and profane. The only way to do it was to hybridize. To yank women from the loom, get them away from the hearth and out of the house, up on the mountain, dancing and cavorting with young shepherds. Dionysus destroyed his hometown of Thebes, not once but twice. Or rather, they destroyed themselves.”

“One time, it was because of incest,” Sam said. “Oedipus had killed his father, been crowned king in his place, and married his own mother. When it comes to our family, I do quite take your point. But what was the other time?”

“It was when the young king of Thebes, Pentheus, refused to let the women, including his own mother, take part in the celebration of the Dionysian mysteries up on the mountain,” I said. “Pentheus claimed that the Lord of the Dance wasn’t a true god, not the son of Zeus. He actually wanted to keep the women home at night, so landowners could feel confident that their offspring and heirs weren’t sons of satyrs or shepherds.”

“What happened to the young king of Thebes?” asked Sam.

“His mother was