The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene

by Frank G. Slaughter

  Mary was dancing the part of Pentheus’s mother, the leader of the Bacchae. As the tragic ending of the scene rose to its inevitable climax, she staggered from the place in the hills where the final tragedy had occurred, carrying the dripping head of the king who was her son in her hands. Joseph could not help shuddering with horror, so realistic was her portrayal, even to the last lines when she realized what she had done and, revolted, cried out against the god who had caused her to kill her own son.

  Then the god spoke the line, “Ye mocked me, being God; this is your wage.” And she answered, “Should God be like a proud man in his rage?” before beginning the tragic dance that ended the play, culminating in death by her own hand in expiation for her sin. As the applause of the crowd thundered through the great theater, Joseph realized that he had just witnessed what might well be the last performance of a superb actress in a real play, and perhaps, he thought with a shiver of dread, a preview of what would happen on the morrow.

  Although Mary had consistently refused to tell him the means by which she planned to bring about Gaius Flaccus’s death, Joseph was quite sure now that he knew. All Alexandria knew that the new praefectus vigilum, whose rank among the equestrian order placed him next to the imperial family itself in nobility, would be the god Dionysos. And that the most beautiful and beloved woman in all of Alexandria, the dancer Flamen, would naturally portray Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

  By what diabolic genius Mary had been able to arrange her triumph of revenge during the culminating drama of the great festival, only she knew. Watching her these past few months, Joseph had seen how great a strain it was to pit two jealous and powerful suitors against each other in order to attain her own ambition. Now, like surging waters sweeping with inexorable force through a tidal rip, the currents were in motion. There could be no stopping now. And thinking of the morrow, Joseph felt a cold fear for the woman he loved grip his heart.

  Joseph had no chance to talk to Mary the next morning before she left for the landing place on the shores of Lake Mareotis where the god Dionysos would arrive to claim his bride, the divine Aphrodite. Because of the size of the crowd, the festival was to be held in the great stadium instead of the theater. At one end of the amphitheater, a stage had been built with dressing rooms beneath. Upon it were erected the throne of the god and the marriage bed, through whose thin transparent curtains the audience could share vicariously the ritual union of the wedded deities. There Dionysos would be symbolically killed to represent the seed as it died in the ground. And from the nuptial couch the dead god would then arise, symbolic of the seedling bursting from the fertile soil. Afterward would come the greatest and wildest celebration of all, climaxing the three-day festival of the Great Dionysia.

  Joseph, Matthat, and Bana Jivaka attended the festival together. A great crowd of people was gathered on the shore near the stadium, where a landing had been built for private galleys and barges of the royal court when they visited the gladiatorial games. Here the god Dionysos would land and be met by his bride-to-be, the goddess Aphrodite. Following a triumphal procession through the streets of the city, they would repair to the stadium itself, where a great entertainment had been prepared in their honor preceding the divine marriage. And after that would occur the ritual death of the god, a make-believe tragedy that Joseph fully expected to be real.

  The crowd was packed so tightly that Joseph and his friends were not able to force their way through it, but from the steps leading up to the stadium they were able to watch the events from a distance. The people were in a festive mood, as befitted the occasion, and shouts of “Flamen!” and “Aphrodite!” rose as an elaborate chair with closed curtains was carried down to the pier upon which the god would land.

  From behind one of the eight islands in the lake a huge barge now appeared, rowed by a hundred slaves. Upon the great golden throne that had been built on the barge a man sat, while rows of beautiful dancing girls whirled and postured before him. Behind the chair a tall black slave held the traditional bull’s-head mask of the god Apis when Dionysos appeared in that form.

  At the sight of the barge the crowd set up a great shout, “Hail, Dionysos! Hail to the god of the vine!” And upon the floating dais the dancing girls whirled in a mad rhythm of adoration before the throne, until the barge itself was a mass of rippling color from their diaphanous garments. When the barge touched the pier and was secured against it, two tonsured priests of Serapis approached and knelt before it. One tinkled the sistrum, a rattle traditional in this service, while the other waved a palm frond of peace and welcome in his hands.

  Next came two beautiful priestesses of Isis, the gold bands about their foreheads wrought into a likeness of the sacred cobra of the goddess. Behind them was the high priestess, with the sacred fringed mantle about her shoulders and the golden cobra upon her forehead. She carried before her a bowl containing waters from the great Mother Nile, so sacred that her hands could not even touch the container, it being protected from contact with her flesh by the fringes of a white drapery covering her head and hanging down over her shoulders and arms. As the priestesses of Isis knelt to welcome the god Dionysos in the name of their own deity, still another priest, waving wands, led a great chorus in chanting a hymn of welcome and praise to the divine visitor.

  Now the slaves bearing the chair upon which Mary sat enthroned as Aphrodite lifted the carrying handles to their shoulders and moved to the pier, setting it down just behind the priests of Serapis and the priestesses of Isis. Beside the goddess of love marched the gymnasiarch Plotinus, who was to direct the festival, garbed in spotless white. “Welcome to Alexandria, O divine Dionysos!” he shouted. “Descend from thy craft, we pray, and join us for a celebration in thy honor.”

  A shout of approval rose from the crowd as Plotinus lifted aside the curtain of the chair and held out his hand to the lovely woman who stepped from it. “Flamen! Flamen! Aphrodite!” they roared again and again, and long minutes elapsed before Plotinus could be heard again.

  “We have brought you this day a divine bride,” he continued then, “with beauty and grace worthy of the gods. Hail, Aphrodite! Goddess of Love and Beauty! Hail, Divine One!”

  Mary stood erect. She seemed in truth a goddess of love and beauty with her coppery hair, bound only by a white circlet, shining in the morning sunlight, the regal lines of the white gown she wore emphasizing the loveliness of her divine body.

  “By the prophets of Israel,” Matthat breathed. “There has never been so beautiful a woman. She is a bride fit indeed for a god.”

  In the morning sunlight Gaius Flaccus did resemble a god, with his handsome body and features, a gold chaplet upon his curls, and gold-laced sandals upon his feet. He wore no armor, and his short tunic, leaving his handsome muscular legs bare, was of a snow-white material, as was Mary’s robe. The transparently costumed dancers advanced from the barge to the pier, escorting the god as he descended from his throne and marched with stately tread to meet the goddess. Before her he stopped, while Plotinus knelt to welcome him and the crowd shouted, “Dionysos! Aphrodite! Dionysos! Aphrodite!”

  “Welcome to Alexandria, O Divine One,” Mary said clearly. “I bow in homage before my husband-to-be.” She dropped gracefully to one knee, but Gaius Flaccus, in the capacity of the vine god, reached out and took her hands, lifting her to her feet. When he drew her to him and kissed her upon the lips, the crowd shouted its approval again and again. Then, holding Mary’s hand, he stepped with her into the waiting chair, whose curtains were now raised so that the whole city might see the divine visitor and his bride-to-be.

  Slaves ran forward now with another ornately decorated chair for Plotinus, who would lead the procession. And at a word of command the great parade began. In the next few hours it would pass through all parts of the city before returning to the stadium for the celebration in honor of the divine visitor. The ritual marriage, consummation, death, and resurrection of th
e god would mark the beginning of another growing season in the earth’s cycle of fertility, growth, harvest, death, and renewal of life from the seed.

  First was the chair of Plotinus, and behind it the mummers—men and women in all sorts of fantastic costumes, representing the many gods worshiped in Alexandria, each in the form in which they were said to appear. Next a group of small girls in white strewed flowers along the way, followed by the dancing girls from the barge, their bright costumes of transparent bombyx a riot of color.

  Now came the priests of Serapis, tonsured and bare to the waist, carrying the ritual palms and shaking sistrum rattles. The sacred mark of the god who took his name from both Osiris and the sacred bull Apis was on their foreheads. In their hands they carried golden tokens of the god, lamps shaped like Nile boats, tiny altars upon which the sacred bull was sacrificed, and even a veiled image of the god Serapis himself.

  Behind the priests of Serapis marched the devotees of Isis, never very widely separated, for Osiris had been the dead and risen lord of Isis and father of her infant son, Horus, as well as father of the man-made god of the Ptolemies, Serapis. The priestesses of Isis were chosen for their beauty. They, too, shook sacred rattles while they chanted a song of adoration to the goddess, and the crowd roared its approval as they passed in the bright morning sunlight.

  The great chair in which the visiting god and his bride sat was borne next. Gaius Flaccus, quite evidently flattered at being the center of attraction, bowed and smiled at the plaudits of the crowd, but Mary sat erect, smiling mechanically, her cheeks as pale as her white robe. Watching from the crowd, Joseph wondered if she would be able to go through with what she had planned, and found himself praying that she would come to her senses and give it up at the last moment. Yet, remembering how the past five years had been a preparation for this moment of triumph over the man who had treated her so cruelly, he hardly dared hope that reason would prevail over the almost insane obsession that guided Mary now.

  Behind the gods came hundreds of masquers, marching, dancing, cavorting in the streets. Satyrs and sileni, bacchantes, maenads, Bacchae, nymphs, victories, all the traditional celebrants of the Dionysian festivals held throughout the empire thronged the street in the wake of the divine pair. And after them moved a procession of great floats drawn by sweating slaves pulling ropes covered with golden cloth, while overseers marched beside them cracking long whips.

  On one of the floats a statue of Nysa, twice a man’s height and marvelously lifelike, rose automatically to pour milk from a golden bowl. And upon another, satyrs cavorted amidst a great load of grapes, pressing out wine that streamed from spouts attached to the float, so that any who seized a cup from the girls distributing them could drink. Another showed the horned infant Zagreus being torn to pieces by the Titans at the front, while in the center Zeus, his father, held a glass jar in which the infant’s heart continued to beat rhythmically, bringing cries of wonder from the crowd. The end of the float represented the bridal chamber of Semele, where she was impregnated by the living heart of Zagreus and gave birth to Dionysos himself.

  On still another float the youth Dionysos played with a bevy of nymphs in a cave, from which doves, pigeons, and swallows were let out to be caught by the onlookers. The last and greatest of the floats depicted the vine god. Upon it a great figure of Dionysos himself rode an elephant whose mahout was a satyr.

  After the great floats came smaller ones bearing living tableaux depicting the other gods favored by the Alexandrians. Here was Alexander the Great, deified and attended by his patrons, Victory and Athena. Next in the procession was the deified Ptolemy I and his queen Berenice, then the Emperor Augustus and the living Roman god, Tiberius. Regiments of soldiers followed on horse and on foot, so that, all in all, it was more than three hours from the time the procession left the pier where the barge of Dionysos had come ashore until it circled the city and returned to the great stadium where the festival in honor of the visiting god would be held.

  Enthroned upon the stage built at one end of the stadium, Dionysos and Aphrodite were now honored with a vast program of entertainment. Before them in the arena gladiators fought with sword and with net and trident, and charioteers battled from swiftly moving vehicles with naked swords. The grassy floor of the great amphitheater was soon slippery with their blood, but the crowd only shouted for even more spectacles and more carnage.

  As the afternoon waned, skilled acrobats performed marvelous feats of strength and skill, interspersed between the acts of mimes depicting events in the life of both Dionysos and Aphrodite. And troop after troop of dancers of various nationalities performed the traditional dances of their people in honor of the divine betrothed pair.

  In his seat near one of the vomitoria, the passages leading to the dressing rooms under the stands from which the actors emerged into the stadium itself, Joseph watched the performances, sick with horror at this travesty of divine worship and tense with anxiety for Mary. And as the celebration wore its way toward the crowning event of the day, where the god and his divine bride would retire into the transparently curtained room at the very top of the stage, the tension of anticipation became almost beyond bearing.

  Now the last mime was finished and the actors scampered off the stage. Somewhere offstage great drums rolled out a sonorous beat like the crash of summer thunder, and before the ornately decorated nuptial chamber a towering figure appeared, taller than any human Joseph had ever seen, wearing silver armor and bearing on his head the crown of the gods.

  “It is Jupiter,” Matthat said, “come to wed Dionysos and Aphrodite. I have seen that fellow play the part before.”

  At a command from the Father of the Gods, Dionysos and his bride-to-be knelt before him and joined hands. Over their heads the actor intoned the solemn words joining them in wedlock, and when he finished, Gaius Flaccus lifted Mary to her feet. Momentarily she swayed, and Joseph thought she was going to fall in one of the fainting spells that had troubled her as a young girl. She seemed to have become freed of them since coming to Alexandria, however, a not unusual occurrence, for girls often outgrew such conditions as they reached womanhood.

  But Mary regained control of herself, and as the god Dionysos gathered the goddess of beauty in his arms and bent to claim her lips in the nuptial kiss, the crowd went wild. Now he took her hand and led her to the nuptial chamber, through whose transparent curtains their every movement would be visible to the audience. And as the curtains closed behind them, a torch set back of the room erected on the stage burst into flame, silhouetting their shadows in brilliant pantomime.

  A great “Ahh” of pent-up emotion went up from the crowd as Gaius Flaccus lifted his bride in his arms and carried her to the great nuptial couch, taking her into the embrace signifying consummation of the divine marriage. A hush fell over the audience as they waited for the next act in the drama.

  Joseph turned his head away. Now, if ever, he knew, Mary must carry out her purpose. With Hadja somewhere backstage to take care of the details, it would have been a simple matter to substitute a real dagger for the one made of parchment or some similar flimsy material that would give the illusion of reality, yet crumple when it struck Gaius Flaccus’s body. The victim would have no warning, before the blade found his heart, that the weapon was of steel, not paper.

  Sitting there sick with horror and powerless to stop the rushing tide of tragedy, Joseph fought against the impulse to leap to his feet and shout a warning to the unsuspecting Gaius Flaccus. Nor would he have accomplished anything if he had, for in the great expanse of the stadium, with the crowd roaring its approval of the mock consummation and the symbolic death of the seed that was to follow, a single voice, even in warning, could hardly be heard. And if he had been heard, he would only have been lessening whatever chance Mary had to escape once her revenge was achieved.

  Every eye in the stadium was upon the dagger in Mary’s hand as, outlined upon the g
auzy screen of the curtains surrounding the nuptial bed as vividly as a picture painted in bold strokes, her arm rose above the body of the divine lover clasped in her arms. Even though the audiences of Alexandria were fully accustomed to such realism and knew that the dagger would actually crumple when it struck the body of Dionysos, a sudden tension gripped the crowd. When the blade finally plunged downward, the pent-up suspense was expressed in a mighty groan from the onlookers, so real was the tense drama being played out there before them in the nuptial chamber where the marriage of the gods had just been ritually consummated.

  Then a man’s scream of pain rang through the great stadium, breaking the spell. The sound had hardly died away when Mary leaped from the nuptial bed and tore the curtains apart. Like an avenging goddess indeed she stood, silhouetted by the flaming torch behind the stage, a bloody dagger held high in her right hand. Blood was frequently spilled in the mock deaths of the Greek theater by means of small bladders filled with a red fluid, so the crowd still did not realize that they were witnessing a real, and not a pantomime, tragedy. But when Mary turned and ran for the wings of the temporary stage instead of remaining to receive the resurrected god as her consort, a few of the onlookers realized that this was something more than the realism of the stage.

  People began to surge to their feet then, caught up by the real-life drama they were witnessing. And now another figure appeared through the torn curtains of the nuptial chamber. It was Gaius Flaccus, no longer divine, for blood was staining his immaculately white tunic. “Help me!” he shouted, his voice hoarse with terror. “I am dying!”