The reception room was grandly lit, music played and servants hurried past, backwards and forwards, carrying food and drink to be laid out on the long table. She was dressed simply and could seem like one of them, and so she slipped in unnoticed. She was not prevented from finding Jesus at the table and from going to him where he was seated on a couch. She saw that he was in deep conversation with the Pharisee Simon, and with the other rabbis who were scattered amongst the closest disciples of Christ Jesus.
Simon said to him, ‘This evening John’s disciples asked you if you were the awaited one. You said you were not a prophet, for the age of prophets is past, the age of Abraham is past. You said you were something more. What do you say that you are then? John the Baptist would not eat and drink with us, but fasted and lived in the wilderness. You, on the other hand, are here among us, drinking and eating. Is this the conduct of a Messiah?’
Magdalena came from behind him to kneel at his feet. She set down the jar and took out the stopper. She bent reverently to pour the oil but paused, for he had begun to speak.
She heard him say, ‘How shall I liken the sons of Abraham? They are like children who sit in the market place, and say to one another: ‘We have played a happy tune, and yet you do not dance to it! We have played a mournful tune, but you have not wept!
‘You have long expected quite another Elijah, and quite another Christ. You have expected a prophet who was one of you, and a king who will not be among you for his high mightiness! You say that John the Baptist is no prophet, for he will not eat bread nor drink wine with you, and you say the Son of Man, who eats with you and drinks with you, is a gluttonous man, a wine bibber and therefore cannot be the Messiah! But your eyes see only outward forms and so you do not recognise that what lives within John the Baptist makes him the greatest of the sons of Abraham, the greatest of those that are born of a woman. And you do not see that I am not a king, but that I am the kingdom, for I am not the son of a woman, I am the Son of God!’
At this point, he turned to look at Mary and in that moment the sun and the stars were his eyes! She saw a darkened chamber and moonlight and she was once more a bride, for recognised the bridegroom of her dream.
Her heart fluttered with panic, like a bird caught in the confines of a house. And yet, in her heart’s voice she heard these words,
When a bridegroom knows his bride, this knowing leads to love. So it is with a teacher and a pupil. I love you because I see the light in your heart. See these men, they are learned, but you possess in abundance what they do not have.
Stunned, trembling, her heart asked him, ‘But I am a sinner…I have a curse!’
You see many things, Mary. In the past those who had spirit sight, carried this power in the length and thickness of their hair, now you must let go of this power, if you are to gain a new knowledge through me.’
He had said this in silence, and she felt the warmth of his life entering into her.
‘If you do so, I shall close your eyes to what is troubling you…’
She began to cry and her tears fell over his feet. Hastily, for she did not wish to defile him, she gathered her hair to wipe them away, and realised, that in so doing, she was laying at his feet all of her old treasures. This affected her heart so dearly, that she found herself bending further and touching her lips to his feet in a kiss! And another! In a moment she was pouring her mother’s oil over them, and while the tears continued to flow, she rubbed his skin and anointed his feet with her mother’s very essence, and kissed them again and again, for he was now her comforter and her guide.
This is what I have done for you so that you will perform a task for me. One day, before my death, you will anoint me with this oil again and wipe my feet with your hair. You will be the tower that will bring the God in my soul closer to the man in my body so that I can accomplish my task. Until then you shall be the flooring of my soul.
She would give up her life, she said to him silently, to do this.
He touched her head with one hand and a spark flew from it and entered into her spine. Of a sudden she was a child again and yet wise also. Rest, warmth, love, goodness had entered her to the marrow, and from the heights of this ecstatic ritual of forgiveness and acceptance, she heard the thoughts of the Pharisee and they pulled her down to earth:
If you are the prophet why do you not know what kind of woman this is that touches you? She is a sinner and she defiles you!
She had heard it, but once again, not with her ears, with her heart-sense.
Taking his eyes from her, Jesus said to Simon the Pharisee, ‘Why do you forsake this woman?’
The man was aghast. Christ Jesus had read his thoughts!
‘Answer me this riddle,’ Christ Jesus said to him. ‘There was a certain creditor who had two debtors: the one owed five times more than the other. When they had no money to repay the debt, the creditor forgave them both. Tell me, therefore, which man loved the creditor the most?’
Simon did not need to think on it, for he spoke directly, ‘I suppose it must be the man who was forgiven the most. He will love the most, who owes the most. Much for much…little for little.’
‘Shall I apply your principles to this woman then…?’ he looked down at Mary, ‘See how she kneels! How she washes my feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair. When I entered into your house, you did not give me water for my feet, you did not anoint my head with oil. This woman has anointed my feet and kissed them, while you have not even given me a kiss of welcome. You, who have much, have given me little, yet she, who has little, has given me much. Why does she treat me so well, while you show me not even those polite attentions and tokens of respect that one should offer a guest at a feast? It is because in her heart, she has a light that sees who I am, and that is why she loves me! She does not love me because I forgive her the most. It is her abundant love, the light in her heart, which attracts my forgiveness. The little love you show me is a sign, that you do not know who I am, that is why I forgive you less.’
Then to Mary he said, ‘Magdalena…your love is great, and in the same measure, so are your sins forgiven you…go in peace.’
She gathered up her alabaster jar and left the room. Behind her she could hear a great commotion, for those who were present were saying in their hearts, ‘Who is this sinner who can see what others cannot? How can this Jesus of Nazareth think himself able to forgive sins, when he is only the son of a Carpenter…he is not even a rabbi?’
Magdalena came out into the night, leaving those words behind as if they were dirt on her shoes, and looked about at the trees and the air and the sky. She saw no devils, she heard no whispers, she saw only the light of those pinpointed stars above and she heard only the nudging of the sky onwards in its rounds. There was a solace in this quiet, in this peace, a solace that she could not describe even to herself!
The chill autumn air touched her skin only lightly, as she walked back to where she was staying with her brother Lazarus and her sister Martha. For within her there radiated a warmth like unto a midday sun.
42
THE DANCER
Her mother had always told Salome she was a creature conjured from a dream; created, essentially, not from blood, like a mere mortal, but from thin air shaped and moulded and sculpted into a pleasing likeness of Herodias.
The sorceress, the performer of miracles, the wonder-worker, said that Salome’s father, Herod Philip, had contributed only a seed, while she had breathed life into a dead thing and without her, her mother assured her, nothing would have been made that was made. Salome therefore grew up thinking that her heart moved to the rhythm of her mother’s blood, that her thoughts were begotten from impulses in her mother’s will, and that her limbs were motivated by the tenor of her mother’s thoughts, and while she believed this, harmony ruled the universe.
On the day Salome’s body began to issue forth, from its own free will, that individual substance that marks a girl a woman, the spell was broken. The woman inside the girl saw that
she was made from blood after all, and she understood that Herodias had kept this from her. Afterwards Salome began, little by little, to shed her mother’s image, like a snake sheds its skin, and to dream herself a second birth. In so doing she discovered what her mother had not told her:
Salome was beautiful. This was her first awakening. For she was possessed of those seven sought after attributes: luxurious hair, well shaped eyes, full bodied lips, breasts like moons, wide hips, rounded buttocks and shapely legs. And Herod Antipas, her stepfather had been the one to confirm it.
From the first, Herod was the only man who dared to look at her. His fiery, lustful hunger had quickened a sense of womanliness, an urgency and a vitality that had seduced her. But an instinct told her that to be desired while remaining desire-less was a far more potent elixir. With such an elixir a woman could bewitch her image so deep into a man’s soul that it would be known beyond the annihilation of sleep…perhaps even beyond the extinction of death, making her eternal, immortal!
This was her second awakening.
With a new vehemence did Salome set about growing her talents, cultivating the power of her endowments, and educating the efficacy of her seductions. She contrived with calm purpose to learn the seven pagan dances, the hardest of them being an artifice of seduction so exacting that it had not mastered by many. Such a dance could make a woman’s body a messenger of lust and delectable provocation, a labyrinth of secret potions and concoctions and magic spells – the instrument of an immortal goddess and the undoing of the Tetrarch of Galilee.
For sport she had set out to seduce her mother’s new husband, with the patient concentration of an artisan creating a box of tempting Jewels. Each gem was carefully shaped to attract the light and the eye and therefore the man. But that had been before John the Baptist.
That day at Ainon, she had felt a great attraction for the tall man browned by the sun, muscular, strong and serious. When her mind, despoiled of its devices and enchantments, had listened to the voice of this attraction, it had discerned that it came not from those places where pleasure pulls and tugs, but from her very heart! The joy of discovering the feeling of love was, however, soon traded for fury, when she realised that the man who had quickened it was himself rejecting her as if she were filth.
After that, Herod moved them to the odious fortress of Machareus and she had applied herself during those endless, tedious days, to driving her stepfather to madness. But when news reached her that his guards were bringing John to the dungeons of Machareus in chains, in her soul was ignited her love afresh, and she had waited for an opportunity to go to him.
Now, as she slipped out of the citadel and made a way across the compound to the dungeons, she was full of a strange anticipation. She paid a guard handsomely and he allowed her passage to the cell and left her alone with the man in chains. She took the ring of keys from a nail in the stone and went to a barrel of water and took a cup full. She would clean the sweat from his brow and the blood from the whippings on his arms and shoulders before releasing him.
After a moment of indecision, standing in the shadows, she dared to come to him. To her eye he seemed less than he had been and yet that strange sensation now came over her again, not a thrill of ardour, not a pounding of her heart for the passion of her loins, but something tender. She would be his selfless, willing disciple.
Later, she would wonder how she, a princess of Judea, could have bowed so low before such a man, but for now she was not thinking of herself, she was thinking only of the bond that existed between them, and how it had drawn her heart from its prison and changed its nature.
She set down the cup and contrived to kneel before him, to take the shackles from his hands and feet, but his eyes came suddenly open, arresting her movements. In them she saw no reflection of her warm-hearted thoughts, only confusion and exhaustion and what more?
He said to her, ‘Who is this that looks upon me?’
She hesitated and stood then in the light from the torches, so that he might see more clearly how she had changed. ‘I am the Hasmonean Princess, Salome. You met me at Ainon, but I am not as I was.’
Something moved the muscles of his face, something flickered in his eye – what was it?
‘Why are you come, woman? Your presence profanes the chosen one of God! Do not touch me! Let me be!’ he said quickly, moving to get away from her.
This struck her a blow and she was assailed by incertitude. Could he be rejecting her again, as an unsuitable, blemished and unworthy sacrifice? Surely the great prophet could see beyond what she had been to the creature of devotion that she had become? Her heart was numb. Her hands trembled. Her image of herself, having faded through selflessness, now floated away from her grasp. Soon she would disappear, having slipped through her own fingers!
She clung to the edges of her mind with the fingernails of hope, ‘How can I, a princess, profane a filthy criminal lying in chains?’
He looked at her, ‘Put on a veil and pour ashes over your head…seek forgiveness for your sins and offer up what you have made pure to God. Do not come to me, to tempt me with beauty of the flesh, Lilith! I am beyond temptation!’
‘I did not come to tempt you!’ she said, with a flicker of anger in those magnificent eyes. ‘If I had come to tempt you, you would already have fallen victim to my wiles! I have come to gloat, to see how low is made the great man, the great prophet who does not see what is before his eyes! Perhaps, now that I see you my heart feels sympathy for your wretchedness, and I am of a mind to take away the chains, and to set you free!’
‘The freedom you offer is worse than these chains!’ he said to her, ‘It is a temptation to iniquity!’ His eyes softened then and his voice grew gentle, but this gentleness cut more deep into her flesh than anger would have done, for he spoke like a priest, who, from a high place, looks down on a poor, simple creature, ‘Oh, Lilith! You also tempted Eve, and Eve tempted Adam and because he was weak and succumbed the world is now ravaged by sickness and death! I will not succumb to you! Leave me to my misery!’
He was discarding her in the same way she discarded trinkets that did not please her. She had made a mistake and had lost herself for a moment, but not for always. If he did not value her pure offering of love then he was no prophet. He was just a man in a dungeon. How dare such a man, such a common man, treat her with disdain?
Anger blazed in her eyes and furies howled for vengeance in her head and these combined with the spite, hate and revulsion she felt in her heart for herself. She spat her frustrated hopes at the ground and walked out of the stinking cell. Burning with abhorrence and shame for her stupidity she took herself to her bedchamber to scheme.
This was her third awakening – a man’s desire for a woman might have the power to make her immortal, but a woman’s love for a man had the power to make her extinct!
For days she did not come out of her bedchamber, taking all her meals in silence, searching in her mind for ways to redress the balance. Finally, the opportunity came, on the night of the Belshazzar-feast, the anniversary of the death of Herod the Great and her stepfather’s ascension to the Tetrarchy.
That night she took long to ready herself: bathing and dressing, combing and primping until every inch of her was as polished smooth and inviting as silver. Herod’s vanity had given her the opportunity she had desired but had not been expecting so soon. And so it was with the cold, cruel heart of a woman scorned that she honed her finest asset, the instrument of pleasurable torture and delicious torment, towards achieving one end and one end alone.
Revenge!
43
DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS
In the dungeons of Machareus sat John the Baptist in a pool of filth and excrement and rat dung. His tortured body, chained to the wall of rock, was so contorted that every muscle and sinew screamed with pain and his mind, having held tight to it-self these months, now began a slow unravelling. He knew, therefore, that it was only a matter of time before those crawling things that lived in the
corners of his cell would come to feed upon his carcass.
For a time he had kept those dark things at bay, but recently Herod had come to him with news – John’s followers had returned with an answer to the question put to Jesus of Nazareth:
Are you the coming one? Or are we to await another?
According to the Tetrarch of Galilee Jesus of Nazareth had said that he was not a prophet or a king. That among those born of woman there was no greater prophet than John the Baptist and that blessed was he who was not ashamed of Jesus!
These had been painful words to hear! No tortures devised by Herod and his adulterous wife could have made him suffer more. No pincers or knives, no fire could have caused his heart more sorrow, his mind more torment! And now those serpents and dragons, those malformed devils that lay hidden and hungry in the darkness came out, attracted to him by his doubt.
Herod’s stepdaughter, Salome, had appeared in a dream and had stood before him with her emotions seething inside her. He knew the creature was not Salome but Lilith, an ancient feminine devil. Lilith, had come dressed in fineries, with her heart on her sleeve, but he knew that she was a shape-shifter and a temptress and that her desire was to take a man from his destiny and so he had sent her away and she had gone. But soon other devils had come in the guise of companions in the cold. In the black of night they came into his mind. In the black of day they stood before his eyes – those same eyes that had seen the Lamb of God in all His glory! How could these eyes have fallen so low and become so profane?
He could not remember if he had asked that question which had led to his madness –
Are you the coming one, the Olam Habba? Or shall we await another?
His mind, distorted and confused, unfed and tortured, could not recall the precise details, and yet, there it was, there it was the answer, with its dread-cold breath on his cheeks.
Fifth Gospel: A Novel (Rosicrucian Quartet) Paperback Page 24
