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

Jacob and his family left Canaan, never to return. Near the well he’d dug there—Jacob’s well—grew the Oak of Shechem, where Moses would one day instruct the Hebrews to build their first altar upon their return from Egypt to the promised land. Beneath that now famous tree, Jacob buried all the clothes and jewelry and treasures, and even the statues and idols—all the belongings of his wives and concubines and servants and the captives from Canaan—so that each might put on clean clothes and begin a new life before starting into the land of his father’s people.

Between the land of Canaan they’d left behind and the land of Judea that lay before them, near Bethlehem, Rachel gave birth to the thirteenth and last child, whom she called Benoni but whom Jacob named Benjamin—and then she died.

“And what of Dinah, the cause of all these changes in fortune, these beginnings and endings and reversals of fate?” asked Lovernios when Joseph had finished his tale.

“We’ll never know how she felt about the treachery that had been done by her brothers in her name, for this is the last time she’s mentioned in Torah,” said Joseph. “But the objects that were buried beneath that oak are often called ‘Dinah’s legacy,’ since they changed the destiny of the Hebrew people from what it might have been, stripping them of their past and even their identities. From that day nearly two thousand years ago when they left Canaan—modern Samaria—and entered Hebron—now Judea—they were reborn into a new and different life.”

“Do you think this was the hidden message of Esus of Nazareth?” Lovernios asked. “To strip ourselves of our past and be reborn to a new way of life?”

“That’s what I hope to learn from the contents of these cylinders,” Joseph replied.

“I believe by this woman’s letter I can already guess what was in the mind of Esus of Nazareth, and why he told that tale to his disciples,” said the prince. “It has to do with the well of Jacob you spoke of, and the tree.”

Joseph looked into those deep blue eyes, nearly black pools in the firelight.

“My people have oak trees too, my friend,” said Lovernios, “groves of them, each with its sacred well, fed by a sacred spring. And in each of these holy spots we pay tribute to a special goddess. Her name is neither Dinah nor Diana. But it is Danu—my own tribe, for instance, the Tuatha De Danaan, are the people of Danu—which seems rather too close for chance. Danu is the great virgin, mother of all ‘found waters’—that is, fresh waters like those of springs and wells. Her very name means ‘the gift,’ for such water is life itself. And we pay tribute to her much as your ancestor Jacob did, only we don’t bury our treasure under an oak, we throw it down the well near the oak, where it’s received into the waiting arms of the goddess.”

“But you can’t really think the Master’s final message was—” Joseph began.

“What you might call heathen or pagan?” Lovernios finished for him with a wry smile. “I fear you never understood him, any of you, even since his boyhood. You saw him as a great philosopher, a mighty prophet, a saviour king. But I saw him as one fili, or seer, regards another, with unveiled eyes: naked, as it were. Naked as when we come into the world, and naked as when we die. A fili can see the raw soul of another—and his soul was ancient, your Esus of Nazareth. But there was something more.…”

“Something more?” said Joseph, though he was half afraid to ask.

The Prince of Foxes gazed into the fire, watching the sparks that crawled like living things across the ground before slipping soundlessly into the black night sky. Joseph felt his skin prickle in anticipation before hearing the drui’s whispered words:

“He has a god in him.”

Joseph felt his breath let out suddenly, as if he’d been struck a sharp blow.

“A god?” he said. “But, Lovern, you know for our people there can be but one God: King of Kings, Lord of Hosts, the One whose name is not spoken, whose image is never graven, whose breath created the world, and who creates Himself simply by saying ‘I am.’ Do you suggest this God might actually enter into a living human being?”

“I’m afraid I saw his resemblance to another god,” the prince said slowly. “For even his name is that of the great Celtic god Esus, lord of the netherworld, of wealth sprung from the earth. Human sacrifices—or, more properly, those who sacrifice themselves to Esus—must hang upon a tree in order to gain true wisdom and the knowledge of immortality. Wotan, a god of the far north, hung for nine days from a tree to obtain the secret of the Runes, the mystery of all mysteries. Your Esus of Nazareth hung for nine hours, but the idea is the same. I believe that he was a shaman of the highest degree—that he sacrificed himself to enter the magic circle where truth resides, in order to achieve divine wisdom and spiritual immortality.”

“Sacrificed himself? And for wisdom? For some kind of immortality?” cried Joseph of Arimathea, leaping to his feet in agitation. It was true that the Romans spoke of human sacrifice among the Keltoi, but this was the first he’d heard a drui mention it. “No, no. It simply isn’t possible. Jesua may have been a Master, but I raised him—I thought of him as my only child. I knew him better than anyone. He could never have turned his back on mankind, or turned away from his life’s mission of seeking the salvation of his fellow beings through love, right here on earth! He strove always toward life and light. Don’t ask me to believe that the Master would engage in some dark, barbarian ritual to invoke the bloodthirsty gods of our ancestors.”

Lovernios had stood too. He put his hands on