by Richard Long
He didn’t recognize Johnny’s voice the first time, yelling for him to run back to The Plaza after he stupidly went to the Carnegie Deli. He didn’t recognize it the second time either, as he was leaving Paul’s suite. When the voice spoke to him a third time in the taxi on his way home, he didn’t even hear it. He was lost in his thoughts, debating battle tactics. Always blessed with the barest trace of an internal dialogue, Martin had been chattering in his own head so ceaselessly in the last half hour that he was starting to get a migraine.
“Can you step on it?” he shouted to the driver. “I’m in a hurry!”
The driver muttered, but stepped on it so hard Martin’s neck jerked backwards. The traffic was lighter than usual. Was it a holiday? He wasn’t even sure what day it was, though he thought it might be Friday. Clouds were gathering quickly, as if on cue. The dream of a peaceful day with Rose had long vanished and now the sun was going with it.
“That girl is not for you!” Paul screamed last night. When he found out about Johnny and Rose, he knew why. But when he replayed Paul’s shouting voice on the ride home, this time he heard it differently. There was something in the way he said it. With the accent on the last word. If she wasn’t supposed to be with him, then who?
That kid! Who was he? Where did he come from? What did Paul want with him?
To take my place. No, not just my place in the crazy clan vendetta. My gold. My girl. Paul wants Rose for him! But why? Just to hurt me? He couldn’t imagine Paul caring about Bean’s romantic longings. It didn’t make any sense.
“You’re wasting time,” said an urgent voice in Martin’s mind. This time he knew it wasn’t his own. He shook his head, trying to clear it. His brain was already aching. Now he was hearing things. He rubbed his temples and took a long, deep breath.
I need to find that book, he thought, glad to hear his own familiar voice in his head.
“Go there now!” the other voice shouted.
“Johnny?” Martin asked, loudly enough for the driver to look back over his shoulder.
“Yes,” Johnny grunted, like every word was a strain equivalent to lifting a boulder off his chest. “Go there. Kill Bean. Take the Book.”
“Bean has the book? What about Paul?” Martin whispered into his hand, but the driver was still eyeing him in the rearview mirror.
The voice was silent. In the absence of any other competing internal dialog, Martin pictured himself wrapping his fingers around Bean’s smelly, stubbly throat. Then an image flashed in his brain with all the clarity of a Polaroid. In fact, the image was a Polaroid…of Bean. Where had he seen it?
“Pinned on the wall behind the candles,” came a new whispering. “In the chapel.”
This time it didn’t sound like Johnny. It sounded suspiciously like…Paul? No. It wasn’t that much different from his own voice. Except it sounded…it felt…more grown up.
Martin clutched his knees. There was a strange new voice in his head that was him? But instead of the angry, sullen texture of his familiar thoughts, this voice was completely relaxed. Maybe even articulate. Adult.
“Where’s the chapel?” Martin asked, willing the wonderful new “him” to return.
He sat. Waited. Nothing. Not even Johnny. His eyes snapped open and he pounded the armrest. He needed to find the chapel! He needed the white room!
“Step on the fucking gas!” he yelled, not sounding adult at all.
When the taxi screeched to a halt in front of his stoop, Martin threw some cash at him and barreled up the stairs, unfastening his myriad locks. I closed my eyes and watched him rummage around, gathering his supplies. Then I turned my attention back to Rose. Dear Rose.
Too bad Johnny didn’t have the strength left to set Martin straight about his more misguided assumptions. Like what Paul meant when he said, “That girl is not for you!”
Martin was correct in thinking that Paul wanted her for someone else.
But it wasn’t Michael. It was me.
I said earlier that I told Rose everything. That wasn’t exactly true. After all, I was just starting to gain her trust. When I told her about Mother’s deathbed plea for me to save Martin, her eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. And later, once her grief from the loss of her treasured family heirloom subsided a tad, she went right back to that salient point and barraged me with a slew of new questions. All about Martin, of course.
I obliged her curiosity, spinning the web of our strange, sad tale…even though I had to make some more judicious edits. Like the one I made earlier, when I told her about Paul and The Striker and the serial killer website. I left out the part about her being my intended victim. I figured she was scared enough already. She was still in that chair! Besides, if I told her she was the one dear ole Dad wanted me to kill, she’d start asking even more questions.
Like how and where and when.
And then, if I insisted on being completely honest, I would have had to tell her something even more terrifying: that according to my profile on the site, written five months earlier, I was supposed to have murdered her with an impaling device, after torturing her with knitting needles and pliers, in the Ambassador Suite of The Plaza Hotel on Good Friday at 3:15 in the afternoon.
I’ve got some big, fat acorns to squirrel away so I’d better start scribbling. When Paul told me to come up with some answers before I dirtied his doorstep, I took it as both a challenge and a reprieve. The good news was: I didn’t have to see his detestable face for a while. The bad news was: pretty much the same thing. I really don’t understand how I can hate someone more than I’ve ever hated anyone in my life and at the same time, miss his company when he’s not around. One minute I’m plotting to murder him, the next I’m panting like a puppy, waiting for him to walk in the door. Fortunately, my obsession with Clan Kelly and the Hermetic lineage helped me stuff those fucked-up feelings and channel my energy into digging for gold. Even though I can’t confirm everything conclusively and I’ve come up with a lot more questions than definitive answers, I’ve got some big nuggets to deposit.
I’ve been awake for almost two full days now, fueled by endless pots of coffee and surrounded by a mountain of books, my eyes glazed from reading countless pages of paper and Internet ink. Paul gave me some decent breadcrumbs to follow: the Clan Kelly feudal dynasty (which I’m now certain is linked to both the Hermetic lineage and the Celtic druids); the shift in succession from disciples to progeny (still not sure exactly when it happened, but I’ve got a new theory on why it’s more advantageous); his lofty pronouncements about death and immortality (more to come); and his rage at the Church.
He has a serious ax to grind with Christianity, but why? Then again, why not? Anyone who’s spent any time reviewing the history of Christianity can find plenty of ammunition to piss them off. For Paul, the wholesale destruction of ancient temples and writings associated with so-called pagan religions was a good starting point. Then you have the Crusades (the Children’s Crusade, that’s a sweet one), various witch hunts, and of course, the mother—excuse me, the father—of all heretical purges: the Spanish Inquisition.
Obviously, Paul can really milk a grudge, so his beef probably stretches all the way back to Peter and his own namesake. And since we’re talking about King Kelly here, the Good Olde Land O’Green has to be a huge part of the story, most likely starting with Saint Patrick’s war on paganism. But the more I pondered Paul’s ravings, the less I thought they had to do with his loathing of Catholicism or his rival clans.
No, Paul’s primary, defining characteristic, as far as I can tell, is his unbounded ambition disguised as disinterested contempt. His whole stinky-bum shtick is a perfect example. Here is a guy who is extremely intelligent, the High King of his very own secret feudal society, and with all the treasure and artifacts Clan Kelly looted, he’s probably richer than Midas. Yet he dresses like a derelict, smells like a sewer and lives in a bombed-out tenement without modern plumbing. He’s like one of those billionaires who still rides in, no, rides and sleeps in his
‘65 Ford LTD faux-wood-paneled station wagon, so he can thumb his nose at conventional society and act like all he gives a shit about are the simple down-home aw-shucks pleasures of life—fly-fishing, bird watching, eviscerating rivals. Yet there’s a hunger burning inside him. He wants something and he wants it really, really badly. The zillion-dollar question, of course, is: what?
Immortality is the obvious, if preposterous answer. Paul is no spring chicken. Maybe he needs a recharge. Maybe he’s a fucking vampire. He sure loves being alive. Never met anyone who loves it more.
Soul transmigration is a core belief of the Hermetic and Pythagorean traditions. Has he figured out the key to an eternity of Paulness? One of his more enthusiastic proclamations still rings in my ears: “Pythagorus, Apollonius—they shared something else in common—they housed the very soul of Hermes Trismegistus!”
What if soul transmigration is actually possible? Was he including himself in the list? His gigantic ego wouldn’t have any problem sharing the stage with such luminaries, or kicking everyone else off the podium. What if he’s already been around the block a few times and wants to take another lap?
The body-switcheroo he practiced on me was as real as real gets. Has he figured out a way to do it, not for a few seconds, or a few hours, but forever? If so, he’d need a host. A younger body, with a decent brain, like mine, or a lean, mean fighting machine with sawdust between the ears like his beloved prodigal son Martin. Is his fixation on the line of succession about more than passing down knowledge? Did the Master use one of his disciples as a host? When the line of succession became hereditary, was the shift less about discouraging rogue offshoots and more about improving ease and efficiency? If you’re in the soul-transferring business, it might help to have a genetic link to your unlucky successor. And if genetic memory exists, it could provide a handy socket to plug into. Voila! How to become an immortal parasitic messiah in one easy lesson!
I can’t believe I’m even thinking these things, let alone writing them down, but some of this stuff…it might be possible. Unlikely. Crazy. Absurd. But to my mixed-up, probably hypnotized brain…it could be possible. And if it’s more than possible, if it’s true, does that mean he’s aching to slip into a new skin suit for another sixty years or so? Even if it isn’t true, but he believes it is—a much more plausible scenario—what then? Will he try to psychically invade Martin? Me? Shack up together until the next generation comes of age? Go on and on like that for all eternity? Or to the end? But what end? If someone as ruthlessly ambitious as Paul did have an infinite amount of time on his hands, he’d need a really big project to keep him motivated, no matter how much he loved being alive or how long he lived. So what does he really want? What’s the ultimate goal of his real-life sword-and-sorcery Clan Kelly RPG? World domination? Armageddon? Transcendence? Fun and prizes?
I went back to the beginning to search for the end: Hermes Trismigestus, or more precisely, Thoth. According to various legends, Hermes Trismigestus could have arrived on the scene as early as 2,000 or even 4,000 BCE. The Pyramid Texts are all about the Pharaoh’s resurrection and ascension into the heavens—essentially a recipe for immortality. The earliest copy dates from 2,400 BCE and is probably the world’s oldest religious text. That would imply a very long line of Masters and seems highly doubtful. The more likely lineage would begin in 500 BCE with Pythagoras. His Greek followers (especially Plato in his unburned writings) carried the torch for centuries, all the way down to one of the most interesting figures in the lineage—Apollonius of Tyana—who happened to be a contemporary of Jesus Christ and shared an interesting list of godlike similarities. There’s a mysterious (virgin?) birth, plenty of miracles (casting out demons, raising the dead, curing the blind) and best of all: a heavenly assumption! Was he the real Christ? His best buddy? Co-Godman? Did they sit on the porch, having a glass of water-turned-to-wine? Talk about the good old days in the Garden of Eden?
Christ has never been a big interest of mine. One thing I absolutely have in common with Paul is my distaste for organized religion, particularly Christianity and even more specifically, the Catholic Church. As much as I’d like to think of myself as well versed in spiritual traditions, before today I had never spent much time poring over the gospels or other early Christian writings or beliefs, including Gnosticism (much like ninety percent of born-again Christians, I imagine). When I started dipping my toes into the murky waters of mysticism and the occult, I tried to avoid the Bible as much as I could—which is hard, because all the grimoires I’ve collected use incantations and magical symbols derived from the Torah or the Kabala—like the Tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable four-letter name of God, or the ten Sephiroth that make up the Tree of Life in the tarot. But as far as the Oh, So Holy Bible is concerned, I’d rather leave it than take it.
Then just as dawn was breaking today, while I was rooting through everything I could find on Hermeticism, Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism—what to my wondering eyes should appear but my barely glanced at copy of The Gospel of Mary (Magdelene). It was discovered at the turn of the nineteenth century in Upper Egypt but was never published until 1955, ten years after the discovery (also in Egypt) of the Nag Hammadi Library, a treasure trove of thirteen ancient codices, mostly Gnostic writings, which I’ve also largely ignored until today, with the exception of three chapters from the Corpus Hermeticum. After I gave Mary’s Gospel a more careful read, I plunged into all the other codex translations. Lo and behold—the Gnostic material has so many Hermetic parallels that the two are sometimes indistinguishable. I’ve been speed-reading the Nag Hammadi Library, and so far I’ve tackled The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Thomas, The Apocalypse of Paul, The Sophia of Jesus Christ, The Gospel of Truth and a creation myth, On the Origin of the World.
I made the initial Gnostic/Hermetic connection in The Gospel of Mary. The first six pages are conveniently missing. Then it picks up where the resurrected Jesus is answering questions about the “nature of matter”—a totally Hermetic-alchemical concept. And next, you have this:
“And she began to speak to them these words: I, she said, I saw the Lord in a vision and I said to Him, Lord I saw You today in a vision. He answered and said to me: Blessed are you that you did not waver at the sight of Me. For where the Nous is, there is the treasure.
“I said to Him, Lord, how does he who sees the vision see it, through the soul or through the spirit? The Savior answered and said, He does not see through the soul nor through the spirit, but the Nous that is between the two, that is what sees the vision and it is…”
Pow! As soon as she mentions the Nous, a big Pythagorean tent pole, the next four pages are missing. In the next section, they’re still talking about her vision, which is all about “seven divine worlds”—much like Hermes Trismigestus’s Poimandres.
I found another Gnostic manuscript called The Pistis Sophia that is mindbogglingly weird. All the writings about Sophia are incredibly strange. In The Sophia of Jesus Christ, the resurrected Christ says to his disciples, including Mary Magdalene:
“I want you to know that First Man is called ‘Begetter, Self-perfected Mind.’ He reflected with Great Sophia, his consort, and revealed his first-begotten, androgynous son. His male name is designated ‘First Begetter, Son of God,’ his female name, ‘First Begettress Sophia, Mother of the Universe’. Some call her ‘Love.’”
The Begetter? The Begetress? The First-begotten androgynous son? This shit is so totally nuts. In On the Origin of the World, one of the more entertaining (and confusing) telling-it-like-it-really-was creation myths, Sophia is the creator of the world. After that feat, she creates a Yahweh-type God, who thinks He is the one and only God, and soon gets a lesson in humility from Sophia. She also creates Eve (first!) who is called Sophia Zoe. It’s Eve who breathes life into Adam. Then seven archangels show up, look at Eve and wonder, “What sort of thing is this luminous woman?” The not-so-angelic angels then proceed to rape Eve, put Adam into a deep sleep, and while he’s snoozing tell him Eve c
ame from his rib and she really needs to obey him because he is “lord over her.”
It goes on and on and on, contradicting itself over and over, making zero sense most of the time. In most cases, Sophia is the Prime Mover, The Great Mother consort of the First Infinite Light. She created the material realm and everything in it. In The Pistis Sophia, she’s bushwhacked by the Rulers of the Twelve Aeons who are pissed at Pistis for striving toward the Light of Lights, so they create a “great lion-faced power” called Yaldabaōth who devours Sophia’s light power. She then makes thirteen repentances, spending the next hundred pages trapped in the dark realm, before Jesus comes to the rescue and restores her Light.
Crazy, crazy crazy. But there’s something going on with these Sophia stories that makes me think about Paul and his all-male-all-the-time lifestyle. Sophia means wisdom in Greek. To Gnostics, Sophia is usually the syzygy, or female counterpart to Christ. In all the Gnostic creation myths you have androgynous beings who pop up, then become yin/yang counterparts. But the males don’t always have the upper hand. In fact, some of the writers are so gaga over Sophia that the misogynistic finger-pointing that inevitably follows seems like it was tacked on later to make sure disciples don’t get the wrong idea and think She’s at the head of the table. I’m dying to ask Paul more about Sophia when I dirty his door again, but he hates women, absolutely hates them. I’m guessing his response will be to nail me to the cross with the angel.
Speaking of which, these Gnostic writings have angels coming out the wazoo. They’re everywhere. Angels, Archangels, good angels, bad angels, most of which are androgynous angels. What’s the connection between them and Paul’s crucified angel? Once again, I don’t have a clue. What I do know is that at some point during or after the lives/deaths/resurrections of Christ and Apollonius, Gnosticism and Hermeticism were joined at the hip, Mary Magdalene sat in the front of the bus, and the patriarchal/monarchal model for Christianity and its dogma was just a gleam in Peter’s eye. Fast-forward a few hundred years and you have a Christian Roman Empire, the Council of Nicea, Popes with fancy hats sitting on thrones, and a very successful campaign that wipes out just about every scrap of Gnostic and Hermetic literature. Gone, all gone, except for these few crumbling codices.
