by Brian Godawa
The burial chamber was just tall enough for him to stand with a slight stoop, and wide enough to contain several “beds” carved out from the walls to lay corpses upon. Enough sunlight leaked in through the entrance to light the interior with few shadows.
He walked up to a carved out shelf at the back where several ossuaries rested. They were small stone boxes, about three feet long and two feet wide, marked with prayers that housed the bones of his deceased parents. These were his adopted parents who lost their lives in a plague years back.
This world was cold and brutal, like the edge of a gladius. Not many lived into their thirties or forties with all the sicknesses, thuggery, war and revolution under Roman oppression. Demas and his brother Gestas had survived too much in this life, and that was one of the reasons why Demas had given up. Their birth parents had been lower class Jewish citizens of Sepphoris, not too far from Nazareth in the west. Their father had been a stone mason who helped build some of the Herodian structures that he and his brother had ended up performing within later in life.
In the thirty-third year of the reign of Augustus Caesar, a Jewish rebel named Judas the Galilean rose up and led a revolt against Rome. The Roman governor had ordered a census of Judea in order to increase their taxes. Judas and a fellow Pharisee, Zadok, were driven by a holy zeal for the Law of God and used as their model of inspiration the Maccabean revolt of a hundred and seventy years earlier.
Jews had a particular animosity toward censuses because they felt it was an encroachment upon Yahweh’s right to number his people and upon his ownership of the land. Judas considered armed rebellion the only option for faithful Jews and even started a slogan, “No king but God.” “Caesar” was Latin for emperor or universal king. Such slogans were therefore a denial of the emperor’s universal rule. And for Romans, such insurrection would not be tolerated.
Judas gained two thousand followers, but was ultimately defeated in Sepphoris when the Romans sacked the city. They crucified all the rebels on poles along the thoroughfares of Galilee as a warning sign for the disobedient. The Imperial legions were not known for respecting innocent civilians and killed too many of them as collateral damage in their frenzied retribution. Demas’s parents were among the victims of this barbarous atrocity. He and his brother were but two and one-years old respectively. They were then adopted by their Hellenistic Jewish parents in Scythopolis, which remained their home to this day.
But this evil of Rome was only the half of his grief.
In response to this provocation from Judas, Caesar placed Judea under direct provincial administration from Rome. The Herodian rulership over the Jews was restricted to Galilee, but the Roman army made its presence felt with quartered troops all over the territory. They delivered harsh punishments for every minor offense. The people lived in abject fear for their lives with the grip of Imperial Rome around their throats. It was within this disarray that Demas had grown up.
His face grew flush with hatred of these vile memories as he picked up an empty ossuary box. He breathed a sigh and turned to face the body that lay on the other side of the crypt.
He could not hold it back any longer. Tears flooded his eyes as he looked upon the bones of his beloved wife, Natasa. She had been dead over a year. The flesh and blood had decayed from her bones, leaving an intact skeletal form in quiet rest on its burial chamber bed. It was now time to take her bones and place them in the ossuary as was the custom.
He knelt before her and set the box next to him. As he looked upon the remains, he thought what a tragic pity it was for this to be the end of all men. Everything that made her unique, her beauty, her loving and kind personality, her creativity and talent, had all melted away, leaving the same bones that every other worthless and cruel criminal had. In the end we are all the same—dead bones.
He now really hoped the Pharisees were right and that there would be a resurrection. His beloved Natasa deserved it. Demas would, no doubt, burn in the fires of Gehenna, but at least she would have a reprise of existence.
He gently lifted her forearm bones to place them in the ossuary. Touching the bones of his beloved triggered memories of that fateful day. He broke down in a trembling howl.
They had been married but a few short years when Roman legions quartered in his city’s homes again. One of the soldiers had seen Natasa’s beauty and had come back one night to take her. When Demas was out of the home, the soldier broke his way in and tried to rape her. But in her defiant struggle, he accidentally broke her neck and killed her.
By the time Demas had tracked down who it was, and what company he belonged to, he was too late. The soldier had been killed in a battle with wilderness brigands.
Not only was she taken away from him, and made to suffer horrific terror, but Demas was denied the ability to exact revenge on her behalf or to receive even a shekel of satisfaction. From that moment on, he lived a life of eternal emptiness and despair.
That was why Demas no longer retained a belief in a just god. Yahweh was not just. He allowed terrible suffering to the good and innocent, while rendering satisfaction to the guilty and evil. No, Yahweh was not just. He was a cruel jokester of death and suffering in whom Demas could no longer maintain faith.
Will these bones live? If he could only find the bones of her killer, he could at least grind them to dust and cast them into the flames of Gehenna, so that he could insure the evil would not resurrect along with the good and somehow find forgiveness. That would be the worst mockery of all.
He placed the forearm and humerus into the box.
He stared at the skull. Her precious skull. He lifted it gently, as if it were a glass object of inestimable value. He looked into the sockets, trying to imagine the face that once filled his life with grace, beauty, and love.
“Demas.” The voice came from the grave entrance.
It was Gestas, his brother. A year younger, and a more passionate soul than Demas. He was more handsome as well.
“I knew you would be here.”
Demas placed the skull softly into the box.
Gestas said, “Here, let me help you, brother.” Gestas stepped in and took a place next to Demas to help him respectfully place the bones in an orderly pile in the box.
Gestas felt terrible for his brother. He knew how deeply he had loved. In fact, he envied Demas. As an actor in the theater, Gestas had become quite well known and allowed to frequent the elite circles of Herodian power. He developed a reputation for being a philandering cocksman, seducing the women of wealth. But he saw that his immoral frivolity resulted in an aching emptiness of soul. He didn’t believe in love. He only saw it from a distance in his brother.
Until he fell for an Herodian princess. A brunette beauty unlike any he had ever encountered. She was a rare and honest soul in a pit of immoral snakes, as he considered these treacherous Herodians. He wanted her purity to save him. When Gestas sought to marry her, he came to realize the delusion he had been living. He was suddenly cut off from the inner circle, disinvited from the palaces and parties. He, a lowly actor, no matter how famous he became for his talent in the theater, was still a lowly craftsman. He had never been and would never be nobility. They had been using him as much for their pleasure as he had been using them for his ambition. But in the end, it could never be. He could never transcend his social class. He had believed the masquerade he had been playing, and it had blindsided him.
His one chance at being known and loved by a woman had been dashed forever on the rocks of the Herodian ruling class. These were the traitors that fornicated with Rome and exploited the Jewish poor. These were the wealthy who bought and paid for the priesthood of Israel, turning the holy into an abomination. These were the bastards who were responsible for his brother’s loss.
They finished placing the last of the bones in the ossuary.
Demas placed it on the stone bed and fit the top onto it.
“She was a good woman,” said Gestas. “I still do not understand why she chose you and not me.�
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Demas forced a smile. There had been no competition. He was only trying to cheer him up.
“I could not make it to the venatio,” Gestas interjected. “I had preparation for the play tonight. Did you slay the audience?”
“You could say that,” muttered Demas.
Then Gestas spoke what he came there for. “Come to the play tonight, Demas. I want to take you somewhere afterward.”
“Where?”
“Just trust me, brother.” Gestas looked at the ossuary before him and pressed his palm against the engraved prayers and images along the exterior. “Opportunities for justice and retribution have a way of presenting themselves when you least expect it, when all other avenues have been exhausted.”
Demas looked askance at Gestas. “What do you mean, ‘retribution’?”
Gestas got up and stopped at the grave entrance. “Just come tonight. You will not regret it.” And he left him.
Chapter 3
Fifty miles north of Scythopolis, the city of Caesarea Philippi was a hive of buzzing merchant and religious activity. Herod the Great was the first provincial ruler to embrace the cult of the emperor instituted during the reign of Augustus. He poured hundreds of talents of gold into rebuilding the city, still called Panias at that time, in Greco-Roman fashion to honor Augustus Caesar. A brilliant white palace he called the Augusteum sat above the city on a raised platform dedicated as a temple of Rome. The city’s location was just twenty-five miles north of the Sea of Galilee, placed at the crossroads of east-west traffic between Damascus and the port city of Tyre, and north-south traffic between Syria and Galilee. This prime real estate made it a nexus of economic and cultural interchange.
When Herod split his Jewish kingdom into tetrarchies before he died, he gave Galilee to his son Antipas, Samaria and Judea to Archelaus, and the northern regions, which included the old city Panias, to Philip. Philip renamed Panias after himself as Caesarea Philippi.
Its population was a hybrid mixture of Greek, Roman and Semitic residents. Its religion, a fusion of Greco-Roman polytheism. But its real power lay just outside the city, up the hill, a brief walk away to a sacred grotto, the cave sanctuary of Pan. When Philip had renamed the city, the local priesthood retained the title Panias for their holy site. Its location in the foothills of the cosmic mountain Hermon, in the ancient land of Bashan, made it a spiritual nexus. Bashan meant, “place of the serpent,” a heritage that went back to Og of Bashan, the last of the Rephaim giants that Joshua defeated. Bashan became the inheritance of the Jewish tribe of Dan, and the location for Dan’s idol worship of the golden calf of Ba’al. This area would forever be the bane of Israel, as prophesied by their forefather Jacob, “Dan shall be a serpent in the way, a viper by the path, that bites the horse’s heels.”
It was to this sacred grotto that the two large eight-foot-tall beings walked as they passed the outskirts of Caesarea Philippi.
One was an overly built muscular male carrying a mace and wearing a conical cap of Canaanite deity. The other was a mature battle-maiden with buxom breasts and blood-stained battle skirt.
They walked along the river banks, up to its origin in a cave opening below a three hundred foot tall rock face. All along the face of the cliff, Greek-looking architectural frontispieces appeared carved out of the rock, creating a small necropolis of stone. What lived inside those elevated entrances was not readily apparent.
The beings came to the mouth of the grotto, where a large pool formed outside the cave as the headwaters of the Jordan River, a reflection of Eden’s own cosmic mountain and rivers of living waters. Lush bushes and trees all around hid a thousand eyes that watched the beings approach the cave’s entrance.
A small group of six nymphs met them to escort them inside. The nymphs wore transparent gowns and exotic jewelry. Nymphs were the seductive sexual courtiers of Pan, the god of passions and nature. The High Priestess, dressed in an exotic silken robe, embroidered with gems, had been expecting them.
“Welcome to our sacred space,” she said, “I am the Ob of Panias.”
She continued with a deep bow, reiterated by the others with her. “The sacred order of Pan welcomes, with humble submission, the most high god, Ba’al and his escort, the mother of the gods, Asherah.”
The gods were not so formally inclined. They had a job to do, and no time to delay. “Ob, we need your skills with necromancy,” said Ba’al. “The time is come to call up the hordes of the dead.”
They entered the large cave opening and followed the river back into the dark recesses. It had been so many ages since their primordial fall from heaven, that Ba’al and Asherah had forgotten their original names as Sons of God. Their gender was male, but some of them, like Asherah, were masquerading as goddesses, so they played the part to the full by modifying their bodies to appear female.
Ba’al had come so far in his quest for power. He began as an upstart deity before the Flood, when Anu and Inanna ruled the pantheon in Mesopotamia. When the Flood ravaged the earth and most of the gods were bound in Tartarus, Ba’al began to build his skills and strength until he became the most formidable of divinities, calling himself Ninurta, and then Marduk. It was not until he arrived in Canaan that he was able to ascend above the stars of heaven and become Elyon Ba’al, the Most High.
During the time of Israel’s forefather, Abraham, the archangels invaded his palace on Mount Sapan in the far reaches of the north and cast him into the molten magma that flowed beneath the earth. But he came back with a vengeance when he was vomited out of the great volcanic island of Thera during the time of King David, their anointed one.
Ba’al had been nursed back to health by Asherah on the shores of Tyre, and she conspired with him to betray Dagon, chief god of the Philistines, in order to renew Ba’al’s place as head of the pantheon. Over the generations of Israel’s growth in her Promised Land of inheritance, Ba’al and Asherah had managed to worm their way into the hearts of Israelites like a couple of parasites. Though Jews were expressly forbidden by Yahweh from worshiping other gods or making images of them, the populace nevertheless became infatuated with them and whored after the Canaanite deities. The extent to which Jews gave them obeisance is the extent to which the gods had freedom and power to occupy the land and keep it from being inherited by Yahweh’s people.
Ba’al was called by other names in various locations. He went by Ba’alzebul in the Philistine coastal cities, which meant, “Ba’al the Prince.” He had various Israelite locations named after him such as Ba’al-Berith, Ba’al-Gad, Ba’al-Peor, and others. When his palace on Sapan was destroyed by the angels, he decided not to rebuild it and took as his own the holy cosmic mountain where the gods assembled, and in whose foothills lay this very Cave of Pan. Mount Hermon was now called Ba’al-Hermon.
Asherah, on the other hand, had been a great support to Ba’al. She did not seek to usurp his authority and became his ally in the pantheon. She worked patiently through subterfuge and cunning intrigue. In the days of the Israelite monarchy, she had managed to infiltrate Israel with her cult prostitutes and Asherim poles placed right beside the Yahwist altars of sacrifice on the high places.
She and Ba’al had both cursed the day that the pious prig King Josiah of Israel uncovered long lost scrolls of the Law of God they had neglected in their backslidden ways. He reformed the culture, cleansed the holy temple, and purged Israel of her high places and cult objects of idolatry. The gods’ previous control diminished. Asherah and Ba’al wanted to ring Josiah’s neck for the inestimable damage he had done to their stronghold of dominion.
Belial then pushed Assyria to decimate the ten northern tribes of Israel and guided Babylon to exile Judah for seventy years. With the Greek Hellenizing effect of Alexander the Great and then Rome’s hegemony of worldwide control, Belial got his talons on Israel in a way Ba’al and Asherah were never able to. They were still delegated authority within the region, but as god of the world, Belial was the chief prince whom they supported.
; Belial liked to rub it in their noses with the chores and responsibilities he gave them. Thus the current task at hand.
They arrived at a towering twenty foot tall golden statue in the center of the cave. The six nymphs held their torches high in adoration of the being: a satyr god with horns on his head, the torso of a man, and the hairy legs and hooves of a goat.
The Ob bowed before the graven image of Azazel, the ancient one. God of the desert wastelands and lord of satyrs. Jews called satyrs goat demons, but that was far too harsh and judgmental. The satyrs were almost all gone now, as a result of the Jewish desacralization of nature. Yahweh’s creation narrative was different from all the others in that it had divested the world around them of gods and spirits. It spoke of a natural world tamed in the hands of the Creator. Rather than revere the elemental spirits and see themselves as slaves of Mother Earth, the earth was instead seen as a wilderness of chaos that was to be harnessed and domesticated by man. Yahweh had the gall to command mankind to take dominion over the earth and subdue it by pushing back the chaos and bringing order through agricultural, economic and energy technology. Yahweh had depersonalized nature, which lessened the captivity of man to the gods of nature.
Pan was a god of nature, the last of the satyrs. He now stood before the group of nymphs and their visiting divinities. He had stepped out from a crevice in the rocks to meet with them, the sound of his hooves clacking softly on the rocky floor.
“Welcome to my lair, Most High Ba’alzebul, and Lady Asherah of the Sea.” Pan’s eyes moved greedily over Asherah’s voluptuous body. What I wouldn’t give to ravage this bitch, he thought. She was a goddess of sexual vigor and fertility, and he was a god of passion and sexuality. He would give her an experience of ecstasy she would never forget, with some bruises and marks to remember him by.
