‘Who was now what – six months old?’ said Miriam.
‘That’s right,’ replied The Man.’
I cut in on her next question. ‘Both Matthew and Luke stress the importance of Joseph’s family tree. Matthew follows it as far back as Abraham. Luke tracks it all the way back to Adam, then God. But if Joseph wasn’t your biological father, you could not have been a blood-relation of Abraham – which makes it a rather pointless genealogical exercise.’
The Man nodded. ‘If it’s taken literally. But if you visualise it as referring to some kind of spiritual seed being passed down through Adam to Abraham’s line, generation after generation, then those passages begin to make some kind of sense.’
I turned to Miriam. ‘I don’t know how you’re coping but if we keep going at this rate, I’m going to have to put in for a brain transplant. He’s been coming out with stuff like this since I got back from the office at seven.’
‘I know how you feel.’ she said.
‘Yes, but do you really think anyone else is going to believe it?’ I insisted. ‘That’s what bugs me. The thought that he is telling us all these amazing things and it’s all being recorded faithfully but, at the end of the day when we start playing back these tapes, people are going to say we made it all up.’
Miriam exchanged a look with the The Man. ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure he’ll think of some way to help us put the message across.’
As I write this, I can’t help asking myself: Did she know then? Is it possible that he had told her what was going to happen? Or am I, with hindsight, reading more into her words than was ever intended?
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s get to where you were born in the manger. You know – “because there was no room in the inn”.’
‘Sorry,’ he smiled. ‘You’ll have to delete the straw, the animals and the shepherds watching their flocks by night. That was all written in later to give the story popular appeal. To underscore the idea of rejection by a cruel, uncaring world and give you all a guilty conscience.’
‘So,’ said Miriam. ‘No manger.’
He shook his head. ‘I was born in the same room of the same house as Gabriel. There were some animals in the barn underneath but…’
‘When exactly was your birthday?’ asked Miriam.
‘Twenty-second of September in the thirty-seventh year in the reign of the Emperor Augustus. Under your present dating system it works out at 7 BC.’
‘That makes you a Libran,’ said Miriam.
‘A good sign,’ I said. A weighing in the balance. Justice. I checked through some books later. His birthday was well into the middle of Tishri, the seventh month in the Jewish calender. Libra was also the seventh sign of the Zodiac. 7 + 9 + 22 = 38, which by reduction (3 + 8) became 11. I know critics of this unproven science say you can manipulate almost any combination to give the desired result but, to students of numerology, it was an interesting set of what were called ‘cosmic numbers’. Tishri was, by tradition, the month of ploughing. The opening up of the soil to prepare it for the seed. And I was reminded that the Crucifixion had taken place in Nisan, the first month of the harvest, and that the gift of power to the Apostles had taken place in the month of Sivan, the period devoted to the tending of the vines.
I looked beseechingly at Miriam. ‘There’s one more question I’ve got to ask.’ I turned to The Man. ‘Something that’s been worrying me ever since we got on to this subject.’
‘What’s that?’ he said.
I hesitated, trying to frame the question as coherently as possible. ‘Well – if, as you suggest, ‘Brax had created the conditions that left you marooned on this planet, had fouled up your communication link with Michael and had jammed all signals to the Empire – why didn’t he try and wipe you out during that first period of regeneration when you were most vulnerable?’
‘Yes,’ said Miriam. ‘I’d like to know the answer to that too.’
He lifted his palms. ‘It’s simple.’
I really don’t know why he kept saying that.
‘The first thing to understand is that ‘Brax could not actually “wipe me out” in the sense that term implies. He didn’t need to. He had already achieved his objective.’
Miriam got in ahead of me. ‘You mean by forcing your regeneration within a human host?’
‘Yes,’ said The Man. ‘You remember me telling you why I was reluctant to take that step. Because it meant that I would be subject to the law of karma. As long as I remained tied to a human host, I would be at the mercy of ‘Brax – just like anybody else. Of course, I had more power to fight him with, but that only meant he would concentrate more of his energies against me. If I lost that fight and acquired a fatal degree of karma, I would be trapped in the World Below for ever.’
‘Well, not quite for ever,’ I said, remembering his words about the final triumph of Empire.
‘That’s true,’ he smiled. ‘But I would have become, like you, a prisoner of Time and Space. A tyranny you cannot fully understand until your return to the World Above. As you say, there is an end, but I would have had an awful long wait.’
‘Am I right in thinking that the Massacre of the Innocents never happened?’ asked Miriam.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But the ingredients of the story were there. If Herod had known about the arrival of the three magi and their claims that I was the new-born Saviour of Israel, there certainly would have been a massacre. Herod certainly had no intention of allowing his line of succession be usurped by a dubious descendant of the Royal House of David. Herod was no fool. He knew that fulfillment of the prophecies was a cherished tradition among his Jewish subjects. The basis of their philosophy was the unshakeable belief that their past had been shaped by the personal intervention of God, and that their future was in his hands. Herod, on the other hand, tended to believe that both he and his subjects would be better served by applying his own management skills to the task of shaping the nation’s destiny.’
‘So the news never reached him,’ concluded Miriam. ‘But the three wise men did get to Bethlehem – ’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘With gold, frankincense and myrrh?’ I added, anxious to air my newly acquired biblical expertise. ‘Or are you going to tell us they came empty-handed?’
He laughed again. ‘No. They came bearing gifts. But the value of them was mainly symbolic.’
‘Okay,’ replied Miriam. ‘Let’s take them one at a time. Gold – that’s easy to understand. I checked out the other two with my botanist friend who identified those thorns from your scalp. She told me they were both aromatic gum-resins that were burned like joss-sticks. One from a tree, the other from a shrub. Why two lots of gum?’
He treated her to a patient smile. ‘They had different qualities. Frankincense was solely for burning. Myrrh was normally used in perfumes, and in medicines for its antiseptic qualities. It was also mixed with the wine given to criminals before their execution. To deaden the pain. To my parents, they were three welcome, practical gifts. But their symbolic significance formed another code message. To those who, like the magi, were versed in the Chaldean Mysteries, gold was the symbol of spiritual wisdom and the power of thought. Frankincense was the symbol for love and compassion. Myrrh symbolised incorruptibility–force of will. They represented the attributes of Ahura Mazdao. The leader of the Forces of Light whose transcendent power they believed had now been transferred to me.’
‘Was Ahura Mazdao someone else from the Empire, born into the world like you?’ asked Miriam.
I answered for him. ‘No. He was a notional super-god that Zoroaster, the great Persian mystic, placed at the head of a pantheon of lesser deities, angels and demons. As I understand it, it was Zoroaster himself, who is sometimes known as Zarathrustra, who was the agent for the Empire in the sixth century BC.’
The Man confirmed my statement with a nod.
Miriam refreshed her memory with the aid of the Bible I had brought back from Sleepy Hollow. ‘Does this mean that there
was also no trip to Egypt?’
‘I’m afraid it does,’ said The Man. ‘That was the last code message hidden in Matthew’s account of my birth. What you might call ‘the Egyptian connection’. The story of a three-year sojourn in the Lands of the Nile was inserted to underline the link between Thoth and myself.’
Thoth, whose Greek name was Hermes Trismegistus, was one of the pre-dynastic Egyptian gods. A spiritual entity who figured in their Creation legends and was the alleged inventor of numbers, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. He was also credited with the setting up of an intriguing item known as the Siriadic Columns, on which were inscribed the history of all things past. When I dug out this information it seemed to tie in, albeit tenuously, with The Man’s revelations about Mother Earth’s encyclopedic memory-banks.
I gathered our cups on to the tray and flashed a smile at Miriam. ‘I’ll go and make some more coffee. Keep talking.’ A totally unnecessary instruction.
When I returned, it was time to put on a fresh tape. Joseph had taken his young bride back to Nazareth where their infant star-child was playing happily among the wood shavings of his father’s workshop. At least, Joshua was. The Man’s meta-psyche was commuting regularly to Bethlehem to compare notes with Gabriel.
Michael, who had been sitting out the double-barrelled delivery of his Celestial shipmates aboard the Star of Bethlehem, now began the return trip to the Time Gate. Which, according to my calculations, meant that the ‘star’ whose origins has confounded so many astronomers was a permanent feature of the Mediterranean night sky until late December – beginning of January. When I asked The Man why Michael had stayed on station for so long instead of heading home to get help, he explained that the three magi did not begin their journey until the ‘star’ had stopped its movement across the heavens, thus confirming his arrival and his location.
According to the books, Herod the Great died on 13th March, 4 BC. I don’t know about you but it always amazes me the way historians confidently cite dates of this period. When you discover the tinkering that went on with the Julian and Gregorian calendars right up to the eighteenth century it’s a wonder that any of us know which day it is. When this story gets out I’m sure there will be more than one scholar who will tell you that The Man got his dates wrong.
With Herod’s death, the seemingly eternal problems of Palestine returned to plague the Romans. The surviving members of his family squabbled amongst themselves, each trying to carve out the largest possible chunk of Herod’s palace-strewn real-estate, his fortune in money and jewels, his fifty per cent stake in the lucrative mining operations in Cyprus and his business interests in Rome. And his Jewish subjects wanted out from under.
The Romans split Herod’s kingdom between his three surviving sons but they were as unpopular as their old man, despite everything he had done, and they continued to do, to court favour with their subjects. Like rebuilding the Temple on Mount Zion in Jerusalem; a ninety-year labour of love that was still incomplete when the Romans levelled it in 70 AD along with the rest of the city.
It is depressing to discover that the current animosity between Arab and Jew was poisoning the body politic even then. And even more so when you considered how well the Jews fared under Islam, compared to their fate at the hands of Christians everywhere since Theodosius gave the Church of Rome its licence to kill.
The province of Judea, with its prized city of Jerusalem, the political, religious and financial centre of the nation became the scene of sporadic uprisings then, finally, open armed rebellion. Alarmed by the news that Palestine was coming apart at the seams, Varus – the Roman Governor of Syria – marched south with two full legions. About twenty thousand professional soldiers from the most powerful and best organised army the ancient world had ever known, and which has only been matched for its machine-like efficiency and calculated ferocity by the Waffen SS.
The Man’s face tightened as the recalled his memories of Varus’s short, sharp, bloody campaign. Mary and Joseph had taken him to Bethlehem to visit Eliza and her son Johanan-Gabriel when news came that Varus’s legions were heading south. One along the coast; the other through Galilee. Their objective was Jerusalem – where Eliza’s husband, Zacharias, now held a modest post in the Temple hierarchy. Eliza went to fetch him. Mary and Joseph took Joshua-Ya’el and Johanan-Gabriel into the open country south-west of Bethlehem setting up camp near the present-day Gaza strip.
‘We waited there for weeks,’ recounted The Man. ‘Hoping that Eliza and Zacharias would be among the stream of refugees coming from the direction of Jerusalem. Finally word came that the Romans had regained control of the province. So we started back towards Bethlehem. People we met on the road told us that the Romans were looting the towns and villages so we stayed in open country. Mary went into Bethlehem after dark and made contact with her relatives. They told her that Eliza had not returned from Jerusalem …’
The Man paused. Reflecting on what, for a young child, must have been a harrowing experience. ‘We headed north. It was terrible. The Romans had crucified over two thousand people. The crosses were set up all the way around the walls of Jerusalem. Some of the bodies had hung there for weeks.’
‘Must have been a bad scene,’ I said, displaying my mastery of useless observation.
The man looked across at me. His face suddenly haggard. ‘It was. The memory of it haunted me for the rest of my earth-life. In fact, it still does.’
And us too, I thought. The scene he had described was one that had been repeated time and time again. Different methods, different locations, new executioners. Variations on a theme by ‘Brax: Masada, Auschwitz, Warsaw, Babi Yar. And Jerusalem.
Always Jerusalem …
He smiled wryly at Miriam. ‘Perhaps now you can understand why I almost did not have the courage to go through with it when it came to my turn.’
Miriam leaned across from where she was sitting and touched his arm. ‘We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.’
The Man took her hand. ‘I want to tell you about it. It’s important for you to know what happened.’
‘Was – was Zacharias one of the people who were crucified?’ asked Miriam.
‘No,’ said The Man. ‘He’d been killed earlier in the street violence, along with hundreds of others that the Romans didn’t even bother to count. Gabriel and I were able to guide Joseph and Mary to where Eliza was hiding in a cellar. The atmosphere was still tense and there were troops on patrol everywhere. So we went on up to Nazareth in Galilee, where we had heard that things had stayed relatively quiet.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Miriam. ‘But I have to ask this. Why did you let it happen? And if you couldn’t stop it, why does God – I know that may not be the name of whoever you work for, but you know who I mean – why does he allow such things? It’s easy to say that ‘Brax is to blame for what we do to each other but why must there be all this suffering in the first place?’
His reply reflected the gentle concern with which she had put the question. ‘Has it occurred to you that God might suffer too?’
Miriam shrugged. ‘We’ll have to take your word for that.’
Which, I thought, was a pretty good reply. After all, how could we know? And anyway, what kind of suffering could be experienced by a disembodied, transcendent being who, as far as I could gather, was safely separated from the nastiness of the World Below by the impregnable ramparts of the Empire? Were we talking about the spiritual equivalent of a finger and toe-nail pulling session laid on by the Gestapo? Or the less traumatic self-inflicted agonies of doubt that besiege every artist who attempts to create a master-work?
I know that both of us were too timid to press him on this point but the fact was that his answer begged the question. I could only see one solution to the problem Miriam had raised. And that was by positing a situation where God was neither omnipotent nor unique. He might be the head of the Celestial Empire but in the way that Louis B Mayer had been head of MGM. God could be imagined as the prod
ucer who had come up with a great story idea which he’d given to ‘Brax – a Celestial Eric von Stroheim – to direct. ‘Brax had then departed with his film crew into the depths of the cosmos where he had promptly torn up the script, taken the telephone off the hook and begun shooting his own version of the movie. What had begun as The Sound of Music now resembled The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre.
The battle now in progress could be viewed as the struggle for creative control of the project: The Man, Gabriel, Michael et al, as executives despatched to the location by Head Office in an effort to talk or beat some sense into ‘Brax. The problem was compounded by the fact that ‘Brax could not be fired because he had a cast-iron contract with Celestial Studios, and Head Office could not suspend production because everything they owned had been sunk into the locations, cast and costumes. And God, up there in the penthouse, kept telling his weary staff that there was nothing wrong with the original story. It was still a great idea. And that maybe, if they could just stop ‘Brax from going completely overboard, when shooting was completed, they would be able to splice their own version together from the out-takes.
I liked this idea better than the Celestial block-buster of which God was the sole author and in whose pages we were reduced to puppet status. As someone with a great idea that had gone wrong, God appeared – to me at least – a lot more lovable. It also shifted most of the blame on to ‘Brax.
The trouble with the book analogy was that, if you thought it through, it meant that we were as insubstantial as the characters that populated the world of literature. It brought us right back to the ‘I think, therefore I am/I am therefore I think’ controversy. If the Hindus were correct in their ancient belief that the external world, which they called Maya, was an illusion, then you could posit a situation in which we, this wretched planet and the whole cosmic drama were nothing more than products of God’s imagination.
Now I am aware that that statement may seem diffuse but, as a theory, it was no more untenable than the widely-held alternative world view which consisted of looking up at the wonder of the star-lit heavens and accepting that it all existed without rhyme or reason. Or that, conversely, if it had any meaning then we wouldn’t understand it, so why waste time trying? And it was infinitely preferable to the third, most popular, alternative which consisted of keeping your nose stuck firmly in the trough and never thinking at all.
Mission Page 28
