The Secret Magdalene

by Ki Longfellow

  I put this away.

  What means it to me who have no father but Addai?

  Seth and Simon Magus and Dositheus and Helena and I are coming away from a theater near the south harbor on Lake Mareia; we have just seen a very poor Roman play. Seth and Simon remain proper Nazoreans in white, as do I, but Helena has taken to wearing what the women of Alexandria wear, a thin almost transparent chiton, slashed to the thigh. In Judaea, she would be stoned for such wicked daring. Dositheus, more melancholic than ever, has taken up the Egyptian kilt and has curled his hair. Arrayed thus, we are passing by a bone carver’s workshop and I am thinking of the actor I have just seen, a man with red hair. I find myself asking this question, “Seth, these many years in Egypt we have learned so much, and yet, we have still to hear the innermost teaching. When shall we know the deepest secret that lies at the heart of your Nazorean?”

  Seth studies me for a long moment. I know this look. He is disappointed in me. “John, you have held the secret since that day on the Nabataean road.”

  Salome turns on a thought. From bemoaning the bloody Roman play to Dositheus, who has been bemoaning the bloody Roman acting, she asks, “What day?”

  “The day I voiced our secret.”

  “Seth!” I wail as if I were a child once more and had not been in Alexandria all these years. “Do not tease. You told us the secret then? If you did, I did not hear it.”

  Seth looks at me, straight in the eye and then he fixes Salome with this same straight eye, and he says, “Then hear me now. The secret of the inner Nazorean is to place no blame, nurse no guilt, seek no redress, harbor no hatred, follow no Law, suffer no priest, and look not to an angry arrogant god, or to a messiah, but within for knowledge of Source.” At my stricken face, he softens. “As I love you, John, do you not yet know the still, small voice that sounds within? That the secret is to listen and by listening to hear? You are the secret. Know yourself and you know the All.”

  Know myself. Again and again, this is what it comes down to.

  As it is written over the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, Gnothi Seauton, this is where Seth’s teaching begins and this is where it ends. Over and over, Seth tells us of gnosis. If we do not hear him one way, he tries another and another. Time after time he calls it this, or he calls it that, “raised from the Dead into Life,” or “turning water into wine.” He says that one who knows can say of themselves: I AM. But most often he calls it “knowing one’s Name.” And yet, and yet, I do not know in the way he means by knowing. And even though there is a thing I tell no one, that I have never told anyone, and even though both Theano and Philo take Salome and me to the Passion of Osiris each year and have passed through the sixth level of initiation into the Therapeutae, I fear we are as yet water, not wine; we are as yet Dead, not full of Life; we do not know our own names. I cannot answer for Salome, but I begin to think I shall never be other than this.

  “I will tell you one more secret.”

  I am pulled away from myself. Seth will tell us one more secret?

  “Five hundred years ago, the Greek philosopher Xenophanes wrote, ‘There is one God, always still and at rest, who moves all things with the thoughts of His mind.’ In this year, I, the philosopher Seth, mathetes of the philosopher Philo Judaeus, teaching my favorite students in Alexandria, would add, it is not that there is one God but that God is One, meaning All There Is. There is nothing that is not God. It follows then, that it is not his Mind that moves all things, for we are not separate, but ‘our’ Mind.”

  I walk the rest of the way home in perfect silence and perfect wonder.

  I understand this! I do understand. I may not know my own name, but this I know in my sinew. God is not a separate being called Yahweh or even a godman called Osiris, or Dionysus, or Mithras, or Buddha. God is One, meaning God is All. Therefore, All is God. We are all in and of the Mind of God. We are the Mind of God.

  Like myself, Salome walks home in silence. Does she think as I think? Is she too stunned by simplicity?

  In the fifteenth year of Tiberius, Seth and Dositheus are summoned back to the wilderness. Salome and I are to go too for it is thought by all who concern themselves that we shall have been forgotten by now, and what could be safer than neglect?

  My heart is broken, but Salome rejoices that she shall see John of the River again. How can she be so eager to see a man she has not seen for seven years, and then, only once? How can she be so eager to leave this place? Of all that she has gathered in these years, little will go back with her, and the most important seems to be a tiny vial Sabaz the physician gave her long ago. This she slips into Tata’s leather bag, hanging, as ever, at her waist. She says her good-byes to all who have taught us for so long and so willingly, looks one last time out over the Royal Harbor, and is ready. Even her farewell to Theano is abrupt. The woman who first showed her the wonder of Pythagoras, who instructed her in the eternal truths of numbers and shapes, by the stars, even to Theano! As for Philo, a quick good-bye and that is all.

  I stand aghast. The wind is blowing in from the Egyptian Sea, and with it comes a sea green spray that wets my face until no one could tell which is sea and which are tears. Seven years of a life such as is lived by few, and it does not break her heart to be going back? Oh, Isis and Osiris! Oh, Serapis and Harpocrates, his son by Isis! It is breaking mine. It is breaking mine even as I think of Addai and of Tata and of Eio, even as a small hope that I should once again see Father rises in my throat.

  I swear that I will return one day.

  I will come back to Alexandria and its library.

  THE SEVENTH SCROLL

  “Damascus”

  No matter where I look the very air trembles with heat. To breathe it is like inhaling an open flame. It is Elul, the height of summer, the time of the date harvest. The flat blue sea below us sends up all the smells of Sheol. I am back in the wilderness.

  I am John the Less. Beardless as his uncle Seth the Maccabee remains beardless, John the Less is a quiet young man, a contemplative, and much given to his own company or to that of his brother, Simon Magus. I am also very thin. Gone is the lovely fat of privilege that padded and softened me. I am thin and I am brown and by my daily work I am become very strong. The ache in my arm from falling into a tomb in the City of the Dead comes no longer now that I am stronger.

  Since we returned from Alexandria, John the Less and Simon Magus have done little but toil in the sun.

  There are moments still under the date palms of our nahal, but they are not many. Fat and furry hyraxes still sun themselves on the same rocks, though perhaps they are not the same hyraxes. Eagles still circle as motes in the blue eye of the sky. The unburning sun still rises each day over Moab. From time to time, and with my beloved Eio on guard, we allow ourselves to become Mariamne and Salome, for though there is much to be said for being the grave John the Less and the lofty Simon Magus, there is also much to be said for being Salome and Mariamne—though for the moment, I cannot think what.

  Salome goes about with great content because John of the River visits the settlement. John is still much the taller, but Salome seems no longer so small. Behind her trails the black Phoenician, Helena, who once again dresses as befits the Land of Israel. She has attached herself to Salome, perhaps because though Salome is kind to no one, she is kind to Helena, though the poor thing goes about in almost Delphic trance. To ease her constant pain, she takes many times more rosh than Tata takes, and it makes of her a wraith in the land of the living.

  I see that John more often chooses the company of Simon Magus than he does those he has favored for years. Does all this disturb the walking gloom that is now Dositheus? I do not know. John of the River might also walk with me, but I avoid him. This is not always possible, and in such moments I find him a wealth of odd information and odder opinions. I would so love to love him. Perhaps I blame him for our return from Egypt. Perhaps not. Perhaps I blame him for changing Salome. And perhaps not. I am too ill humored to know much of anything.

/>   Tata is as fierce as ever, though thinner. She has also grown shorter in these seven years. Where once I looked up into her face, now she looks up into mine. But to smell her and to touch her brings me joy. She has learned to make pots; they encircle the women’s tents, full to bursting with roses and poppies.

  Addai is unchanged, even in face. Perhaps a line or two, a streak here and there of white in his beard, but that is all, and for this my heart, such as it is, is truly grateful. If there could be a thing that made a heaven of a place, it would be the presence of Addai of Samaria.

  Yet, I think of nothing but Alexandria. Where is the sweet scent of books, the soft murmur of scholars, the blue secrets of the sea, the walks and talks in Philo’s garden? Here there is nothing but work. Salome grows further and further away. I would read, but the only books are those in the domed and star painted room under the settlement, and I have read them all. It seems in seven years I have not learned ataraxia. For all my philosophizing, and all my writing of poems in the style of Theocritus, I have not achieved peace of mind.

  I shall go mad.

  Just as I am changed, so too is the wilderness. It is every bit as hot and dry and pale under the yellow cliffs and the yellow sun. The Sea of Pitch is every bit as salty; the thistles are just as brown, and the thorns as sharp. The same harvesters cut balsam with knives of bone or stone and the same hopeful faces come to be cured. Shipments of aromatics and medicines and black healing stones are, as ever, sent here and sent there, all bringing profit to the Poor. And Ananias is still a merchant here, though I see little of him since he is so often busy keeping far from his wife, the greedy Sapphira, and farther from the four greedy sons she has borne him.

  But where before the wilderness was no more than a muttering and a railing half the night, now it is full of an ominous silence and a tension that buckles the very air. For everywhere the zealots grow more zealous, the righteous more righteous, the Lawful stricter, the prophets louder, and all grow more intolerant. The very land groans under their complaint. As for the expectation that comes the Messiah, the “warrior king” of zealotry, this has spread fast and as far as Jonah’s gourd, which came up in one night. Salome cannot resist mentioning that Jonah’s gourd also perished in one night. Nor can dour Dositheus help but say, “Who are kings but successful bandits? And what are bandits but would-be kings?”

  So stern, her eyebrows seem a single brow, Tata says, “All this talk of End Times and Final Judgment, pah. The prophets are roosters startled by shadows. Their constant crowing of doom drives the people to madness. Comes here now those who need be healed of what the prophets have wrought!”

  As for the daggermen, Rome crucifies the Sicarii in their thousands; crosses line the roads for miles. Yet there spring up more Sicarii.

  And the Poor, who were once one sect, are now perhaps four sects, each new breakaway group becoming less and less peaceful until the latest is now more warlike than the Germans. Where once men came here to separate themselves from the children of the pit, they now come to plot more war.

  To add to this roiling brew, Rome has sent Judaea a new governor, the fifth of such men appointed over the course of twenty years. He is called Pontius Pilate, and I have heard nothing but ill of him. Yet were he the best of men, as this Pilate is sent from Rome, still he should be loathed. Already men excoriate his name as they excoriated the name of the outgoing Valerius Gratus. I do not envy the Roman his new position. But I do at long last learn why the wilderness is called Damascus, and I learn that not only our camp, but all the camps are called this.

  Damascus is code taken from the prophet Amos, the shepherd from Bethlehem who said that before the Day of Reckoning, the repentant would live exiled in the Land of Damascus until the Lord once more raised up the fallen tent of David. The repentant are the men who do not suffer the Romans in Jerusalem, nor do they suffer the Jews who do. The fallen tent of David is not only the Temple but also the House of David.

  We have surely come home to a Damascus afire with blood and struggle. And in the midst of all this madness, Helen of Adiabene lives for the moment in Jerusalem. Her son, Izates, is now the King of the Assyrians, and she is building a palace in the city of David. Addai is become her master builder. The foundations of Helen’s palace are already in place at the southern end of the Temple Mount near Herod’s hippodrome and the city’s east wall. I find it odd for a queen to build a palace in a city she is no queen of, but in truth it bores me. Why do things not interest me when once, and not so long ago, everything interested me? Here there are only Hylics, a word meaning “unconscious matter,” as Philo calls the simple. Once again I am cast among people of the body; those who know nothing but do not know they know nothing. People who believe the body is all there is of self. People, as Socrates lamented, who live unexamined lives, and who do nothing but look for a king, or a prophet, or a messiah to rescue them. Oh, why could not Seth have left me behind in Alexandria? I am no use to anyone here, least of all to myself. Everything has changed, but it is I who seems changed most of all. I do not laugh, and I do not talk, and worst of all, I do not know my Salome.

  On this day of tiresome heat more wild men have come to the wilderness. Scowling with irritation, I watch them from the shadowed door of a room near the tower. Salome is with me, though not in spirit, which only makes me the more irritable. Before we left for Alexandria this room was a storage room; now it contains a forge to make weapons. Someone has diverted water; someone has made a chimney. Even the fact my home has a place and a way to forge weapons barely stirs my blood.

  Ananias has his fat hand on Salome’s shoulder, which he grips in great excitement. Any moment she will pull away, but for the time being she is as excited as Ananias, and so is oblivious. In another doorway stand the women of the inner Nazorean: Tata, and Helena of Tyre, and a certain Joanna. These keep their faces covered with head cloths, all but their eager eyes. Joanna is short but sturdy; her eye is as shiny as obsidian, and I have seen a marking on her jaw the color of wine. She is wife to Chuza, the steward of Herod Antipas, who is son to the dead Herod the Great. Salome does not trust this one. If Herod Antipas wanted a spy, and he surely would for the followers of John the Baptizer grow daily more numerous and clutter Herod’s east bank of the Jordan, who better than this one who professes such devotion to John she has left her rich husband and her fine home to follow a crazy old man? Does her husband not wish her back? Does he not begrudge the money she spends in abundance? Has she no children?

  I know that Salome often seeks her out, listens carefully to what she says, but I cannot muster the interest, though Joanna of the court of Herod Antipas, King of Galilee and Peraea, would once have consumed me. Now I slip away in my mind, thinking other thoughts, thoughts of heat and escape from heat. On our return from Alexandria to the wilderness, we sailed on a cargo ship carrying vintage wine from the best Lake Mareia vintners all the way to the port of Joppa. How fine the wind felt. There is nowhere here that is cool save deep in the marl of the caves, or down in our underground chambers. There is nowhere here that is even tolerable. Why are we out in this leaden heat?

  Addai and Dositheus wait by the sundial in the middle of the west courtyard. A group of men are gathered round the steps leading up to the largest settling basin. These are as excited as Ananias and Salome. But over and above these, there are men and women and children everywhere, on top of the tower, on the hot flat roofs two stories down from the tower roof, on every wall. Overhead, an eagle circles as if we might be prey. Eio, who stands behind Addai, snorts at the sight, laying back her ears.

  I droop where I wait, but John asks us to greet more wild men. Why? There are always so many, they come, they go—entire caravans arrive with all their attendant confusion of color and noise and smell—how could these be different? Whole villages of the ill come to be cured, or to die. By now there are two cemeteries and plans for a third. There is John himself. Year after year, John makes his entrances and his exits, and never alone. Wherever he goes, a mul
titude of his raggle-taggle followers go with him. In this place, there is always a coming and a going, therefore, why does every human soul in the wilderness jostle for space to view this coming? And why has John of the River bid us greet these newcomers? More to the point, why me? Addai may know, certainly Dositheus does, even Salome may know, but I do not know. More than irritation, this has put me in a fine temper. So, like Simon Magus, John the Less wears a clean tunic of the purest white linen, his hair grows uncut as befits a Nazorean, he has rinsed his mouth three times. He is furious.

  At last, through the north gate come now the latest arrivals to the wilderness.

  By Isis, these have to be the worst of the lot! Their mantles of brown sackcloth are dirtier, their sandals more worn, their beards more matted, their skin more leathered by wind and by sun, their eyes deeper sunk in their heads. Each walks with greater purpose and a larger awareness of worth than any man come before them. I think how Queen Helen held herself, how Izates who is now a king held himself. To them, pride was as natural as flight to a bird. But with the men who stride up our path from the reeking Sea of Stink, it feels fought for, held on to, like a prize hard won, much valued, and jealously guarded.

  There follows on the women. Comes with these the usual goats and chickens and children and dogs. And I would yawn and turn away, but—who is it that walks with this family? Who looks as this man looks, with legs like a bull and back like a bear? I am flooded with memory. The murderer and swaggering braggart Simon of Capharnaum had legs like this—and by Apis, he still does! For there he is, striding along, a great scowl over his familiar face. And next to him, his brother Andrew. Even after these seven years, my heart beats like the tail of a fish trapped in a net.