The Secret Magdalene

by Ki Longfellow

  Salome clasps her hands before me. It seems almost a supplication. “Remember what is sung at the Passion? Remember, Mariamne? ‘Have they sacrificed thee? Do they say that thou hast died for them? He is not dead! He lives forever! He is alive more than they, for he is the mystic one of sacrifice. He is their Lord, living and young forever!’”

  Has my skin paled to white? Isis, Queen of Heaven, do I hear what I hear? Salome would be as her hero Pythagoras. She thinks to bring salvation to an entire people. I howl out in my grief, “Salome! Are you mad?”

  The face of Salome is replaced on the instant by the face of Simon Magus. For the space of one eternal moment, he stares at me, his features hardened to stone, and when finally he speaks, what he says is said quietly, but there is more power to it, more finality, than a mighty shout. “Leave me now. And do not return.”

  Eloi! Eloi! Beyond all hope of forgiveness, I have mortally offended my friend. But I cannot leave her. I cannot walk away from Salome. I must try one last time. I begin, “On my life, Salome—”

  “My name is Simon. Leave me.”

  THE ELEVENTH SCROLL

  Silver in the Hand

  We will walk to Galilee, Yeshu and Jude, Eio and I, and we will go as the Cynics of Diogenes do, and as Pythagoras did, taking nothing but the clothing on our backs, our staffs, and our wallets. Jude goes because Yeshu goes. I go because I said I would go. I go also because I am sure my heart is broken. I cannot remain unoccupied now that Salome is lost to me. Eio goes because Addai thinks her a protection for me, as well as a diversion. Yeshu goes because he would teach in Galilee.

  On the third day after John and Simon Magus set forth, followed by a great company, we four also set forth, climbing down before the coming of the sun to the shores of the Sea of Pitch, and then north along the Jordan, its waters brown with the first of the rains, intending to pass through the city of Jericho. As we go, Yeshu asks that I talk of philosophy.

  By the moon, what a task teaching turns out to be! I, who have always been a student, and who has had such dreams of teaching, had no idea. Salome has done it. I have seen how the women hang on her every word. I have assumed if she could, I could. More fool, I. I wish to tell him of Pythagoras, thinking this a good place to start, and I make a point that cannot hold if I do not make another point, so I run back to find what I have missed, and in no time at all, I am thoroughly muddled.

  Yeshu smiles at me. He nods his head. With the patience of Job, he encourages me. And by and by, I say a thing and he understands a thing, and we make progress. All of it seems as water to Yeshu; he drinks as he would from a well. I range from the Greeks to the Egyptians to the Persians to the ancient Vedas written when the Hebrew was as yet unknown to life, and of each of these, especially the life-loving Epicurians, Yeshu questions me closely. And even more closely when I come to what Sudheer has said of the Buddha, whom he called the Light of the World, and who is said to have lived when the greatest of the Greeks lived. And more closely still when I talk of the Tao-te Ching, written by an ancient master of China called Laotzu, another who lived when the greatest of the Greeks lived. I quote from memory, amazed I do not stumble: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The Nameless is the Source of Heaven and Earth; the named is the Mother of the Ten Thousand Things. Desireless, one may behold the mystery; desiring, one may see the manifestations. Though one in origin, they emerge with distinct names. Both are mysteries, depth within depth, the threshold of all secrets.”

  Hearing this, Yeshu says, “And this was also when Socrates drew breath? It seems the Father bent close in those years, to send so great a company among us.”

  As we go, Jude follows along; I can see that though he says nothing, he listens.

  And as we go, the sun climbs in the sky, and under it Eio finds much to eat, and most delights the palate of an ass. She becomes a spring lamb. She lowers her head, humps her back, and kicks out her back legs, braying and bounding about in the dust of the road.

  By and by, we come away from the river and walk across a flat plain toward sharp toothed mountains rising to the west and then through the gates of not the old Jericho, but the new Herodian Jericho. It has taken us all of this day, but here we are now, dusted and weary with the miles. We are also without food and without shelter for the coming night. All around is the clamor of a great marketplace, a thing I once went to in fevered excitement, my purse full, fierce Tata hovering near. But for the first time in my life, I cannot buy a single thing for I have not a coin to my name.

  I shift my gaze from stall to stall, from the goods of this one to the goods of that one. But I have no thought for the oddities, the trinkets, no thought even for the sellers of books—it is the smell that intoxicates! Fruits of all kinds. Wines and breads and sweetmeats, delicacies sizzling over fires. I turn this way and that, sniffing the air. My mouth floods with spit, my heart with self-pity. Fasting before the Passion, I have known hunger; but since I fasted then by choice, this I endured. And now that I would eat by choice and cannot? Eloi, and by Isis, how hunger hurts.

  I look at Yeshu with all this in my watering eyes. I look at Jude. How can they smell these heavenly odors and not fall upon a loaf on the instant? I enter their minds without second thought. Jude is waiting only for what Yeshu will do. Yeshu is thinking, How to begin, by which he means not eating, but teaching. He is thinking that it is one thing to be on fire with Divine Insight and very much another to find oneself jostled by uncomprehending strangers in the middle of a great market square in the new Jericho. We could be any three men with an ass. He and Jude have red hair and beards of red, but red hair has been seen before. They are as alike as alike, but twins can be found in any land. We are not rich, nor are we rabbis or scribes or the Pharisee. We are not famous, not John the Baptizer or the young man we have lately heard tell of, a certain Apollonius of Tyana who travels about claiming to be Pythagoras come again. Apollonius is said to be gifted with beauty as well as wealth, performing miracles and healing whomsoever asks him, even if they be at a distance, but all magicians can do such things. All that sets us apart is that we are wanderers and perhaps not so beset with the constant troubles of this life: how to feed our children, how to pay our taxes, how to avoid the lambastings of yet another prophet.

  People push by us; a man shoves Eio out of his way, which earns him a lowering glare from Jude that makes him move off as fast as he can. But Yeshu stands still as a rock in a tide pool. I know the Glory in him as I know the blood in my veins, but who else shall know? Why should any listen to Yehoshua the Nazorean who is lately Sicarii? And how shall he begin?

  I know he will not teach that these are the last of the days. He has asked me how can there be a last day when the world is as it has always been and always will be, as endless as a circle? He will not teach that the Father would judge his world. How should a creator judge the Lion more worthy than the Lamb, value the sky over the sea, prefer a beetle to a bee? Does he curse the night? Nor can he teach that some will prove worthy of the Kingdom of God, and some will prove unworthy, and that those judged unworthy will be cast out into Darkness forever. He will not teach that any need saving, since none are lost.

  How Yeshu will teach what he has learned and not be stoned, I do not know.

  Holding Eio’s head halter, I look about me. I hear these people. They are filled from birth with “truths” they are too tired or too preoccupied to question. They are whipped to madness by prophets and doomsayers. They are battered on all sides by taxes and Law and prophecies of doom. And if not by these, then by poverty and ill health and endless misfortune. And if not by these, then by ignorance or hatred or guile or some other nameless misery. These are those he would teach. To these he would show his heart. I shudder in my skin. I glance at Jude. Knowing Jude stands near, balanced for anything that might happen, gives me strength. I notice there is a sudden eager jostling on the far side of the square. A crowd gathers under a great sycamore tree, a
nd I strain to see what attracts them. A storyteller! As a child in Jerusalem, I would do as these people now do, eagerly push forward when a teller of tales comes weaving his spell. The man sits on a low wall that encircles the tree, and around him now stand the women with their water jugs, and the young males who for the moment have nothing better to do, and the farmers in for the market. Among these, there is also a gaggle of assorted beggars and bumpkins. And under the feet of all, there are chickens and children. Yeshu has begun to move. He too would hear the man’s tales. Jude and Eio follow on by rote, but I go happily.

  Already, the storyteller has made the people laugh, and for the pleasure of laughter they press closer around him. As he tells his tale of jackals and broken pots and a wife whom a dozen children and a lazy husband plague, he mops the fetid sweat from his face. He smells. He is unwashed. But there is not one here who cares, so long as he makes them laugh. In moments, I too no longer care. Even my hunger leaves me as I lean forward, following the story of the poor woman whose every move causes more calamities. Comes a moment when even Jude laughs aloud! But Yeshu has laughed from the beginning.

  And when the tale is told, immediately there is a woman, still weeping from laughter, who presses upon the teller a coin, and another who gifts him a cake—a cake! Even a child holds out a bit of something, a date or a fig. Closer than I leaned to listen, I now lean in to watch the storyteller slip the coin into his purse, but more, I lean in to watch him eat the fruits of his labor. Oh, but how the pain of my hunger washes over me.

  “Yeshu, we—” I stop when I notice that Yeshu is no longer beside me. Nor is Jude. Not even Eio remains. I spin on my heel. All three are halfway across the marketplace. I scramble after them.

  As I catch up, I hear Yeshu explaining to Jude that he has still much to learn, that there is a way to teach and a way to tell a tale, and that he is sure that people will listen to a thing if it is told as a story. “John! Would you not agree laughter is life’s greatest gift?”

  I might answer this if I was capable of thinking of else but my stomach.

  Yeshu answers for me, “Did not Abraham’s Sarah say, ‘God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me.’” And then he falls quiet as he continues across the square, past all the heaped and odorous food, and down a narrow alley. We three follow along and all the while I mourn my hunger.

  It is only when we emerge once more into a smaller market, quite as crowded as the one we have left behind, that he speaks again, saying, “I think, my friends, that we must be about the business of an evening meal.” Yes! I offer up a moment of thanks be to whichever god might chance to listen. “And as it is too late to hammer and nail for our supper, and as I have not yet learned all I need, we shall have to depend on young John here, and on his magical skills.”

  At this they both turn to me, smiling smiles of complete confidence. I am left gaping.

  Yeshu means to travel to Galilee not by way of the Jordan River, which is where John and his followers walk, but by the difficult way of mountainous Samaria, the land of Addai and Dositheus. In this way, and by the time we arrive in a poor village called Kefar Neba, I am become quite the street magician. I speak Chaldee, the language of magicians taught me by Joor, the very tongue that Tata and Dositheus knew before me, and that Addai once astounded me with long ago in the house of Heli and Dinah. And Yeshu has become quite the storyteller. Some are the reworkings of folk stories all children are told, and some are the stories told by rabbis and sages, but some are his very own, and these last are by far the best. But no matter the intent in the tale, to instruct or to delight, he has labored over each and every one of them. If we are not careful, we shall make a reputation for ourselves.

  Along the way, we have heard how goes John of the River. Word travels from village to village that John baptizes again and that greater crowds than ever before flock to see him. I am sure this is so, for in some of the villages we have come through, there is scarcely a soul left to notice us. But if we hear all this, what does Herod Antipas hear, he who is now at war with the Arab king, Aretas, his former father-in-law? And what of the new Roman governor, Pontius Pilate? Shall these sit back and do nothing, while a man they would jail if not kill walks among them? I try not to think of John. I try not to think of Salome. It is hopeless. My mind, as ever, knows nothing else but runaway thought.

  As a village well is where one can always find people, even in a land made rapt by John the Baptizer, we pause by a well on the day that, yet again, all things change. It is on this day that Yeshu does more than tell a tale.

  This is another small village, so small we have not learned its name, and it sits on the high road to Shechem. We are not hungry, nor are we thirsty or tired, though the way is rocky and steep; we mean merely to pass through. But here Eio brays out her thirst, so here we stop by the well. To wait her out, Yeshu seats himself on a nearby wall, and I seat myself at his side. His knife prominent in his belt, his hand on its hilt, Jude strolls a bit farther into the village. Once a Sicarii, always a Sicarii—Jude would know what is in a place before Yeshu would come there. Besides, this is Samaria, and despite his loving Addai, as all must love Addai, and despite his knowing Dositheus, Jude has the Galilean’s and the Jew’s lifelong distrust of Samaritans. Just as the Samaritans distrust Jews and Galileans. There are those here who might harm us for being either.

  Yeshu and I fall to talking. I speak again of my old teacher, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, and of his hope of the Jewish Mysteries. By now, Yeshu knows much of what I know about the Passion of Osiris, that Philo and his Therapeuts name as Moses. Yeshu has come to understand that Philo and others like him, those Seth calls men of maturity, meaning those with understanding, seek to do as Pythagoras once did in Greece; they would establish a godman among the Jewish people in order to free them from the shackles of the Law. But knowing how this would outrage the Sadducee and the men of the Sanhedrin, as well as the Pharisee and the priests of the Temple, all of whom live fat on the fear of others, knowing how it would drive to murderous frenzy those who call themselves zealous for the Law, Philo would do as Pythagoras once did. Pythagoras made the godman seem a Greek idea by transforming a minor Greek deity called Dionysus into Osiris. Philo thinks to slip Osiris past the Jews—who have no gods save Yahweh—as the One Who Comes, their promised Messiah. In Greek, the word for Messiah, or the Anointed One, is Christ.

  Understanding this, Yeshu is very quick. Before I need tell him how my brother, Simon Magus, he who was also taught by Philo, sees John of the River, he has surmised it; he sees suddenly and clearly that Simon Magus would also create the Jewish Mysteries, and would use a living man to effect it.

  This is what we speak of in a nameless Samaritan village, when two men fast approach us, talking each to each. Their voices so carry, we cease trying to hear our own. When they are but a pace or two away, one of the two puts back his head and howls. I find this so surprising, I clutch at Yeshu’s mantle, and Eio pulls her head out of the trough, lips spraying water, yellow teeth bared, eyes rolling back in alarm. But the companion of the howling man, a fellow whose hair, both head and beard, is entirely white, is not a bit surprised, rather, he flushes with impatience. “Hush, Ismael. You do him no good.”

  But the man, Ismael, howls all the louder, loud enough for Jude to hear, and to cause him to come running back from halfway through the small village. “I can do him no good, Gadia? You tell me this, who have done him nothing but harm!”

  At this, the second man stops still, his mouth an O of indignation. “Nothing but harm? If not for me, he would be already dead.”

  “He is already dead!” shrieks Ismael, who stumbles on, tearing at his beard.

  Yeshu stands away from the wall. He slips his head cloth from his head so that his face might be seen and puts himself before the man Ismael, who seems not to see him and so continues blindly walking forward. Yeshu must stop him by reaching out his hand and laying it on the man’s shoulder. It is only now that Ismael looks o
ut of his eyes and at Yeshu before him. What does he see? I know for a certainty that where before a man such as Ismael, a poor Samaritan living in a small village on the barren spine of Palestine, would see a warrior, a Zealot—for the bearing of a true Sicarii is not to be missed—and seeing this, would take fright as naturally as sighting an asp, now I swear it seems he sees. Perhaps because he suffers so, perhaps his very suffering would allow him sight; whatever it is—and while the man Gadia continues another few steps on his way—Ismael stops his howling and stands quietly staring into the face of my friend, Yehoshua the Nazorean.

  “How may I help you?” asks Yeshu of the man Ismael.

  “No one can help me. My son is dead.”

  Yeshu speaks quietly, asking, “Where is your son?”

  Tears coursing down his cheeks and into his beard, lips bit and bleeding from grief, Ismael points at the village before us, in particular to the first small house on the road, the one with an open door, the very house that Jude now trots by on his way back to Yeshu.

  Yeshu touches the man again, this time low on his forearm. The man Ismael shudders in his limbs; his eyes roll back in their sockets. Yeshu says, “Take me to him.”

  I stare at Yeshu. What good will this do the man or his child?

  Gadia has walked back to us. Seeing only his own anger, he does not see what Ismael sees. By now, Jude is with us as well. Jude has not heard what has passed between Gadia and Ismael, nor between Yeshu and Ismael, but it does not matter. Yeshu follows Ismael to the small house with the open door; therefore Jude follows Ismael. So here am I, following Jude. The man Gadia is left behind, but not for long. Cursing under his breath, he has caught up with us by the time we stand on the threshold.