I drew an invisible X with my finger across the axis, making a six-pointed asterisk, a Hagal rune like the one Wolfgang had drawn earlier in the air.
At this point, it seemed far from coincidental that the first line passed through Eleusis, home of the Eleusinian Mysteries, continuing to the Macedonian peninsula where Mount Athos projects into the Aegean—a site plastered here on the map with dozens of tiny crosses. A famous group of twenty monasteries built by the emperor Theodosius, patron of Saint Hieronymus, Athos was once a major repository of ancient manuscripts repeatedly looted by the Turks and Slavs in innumerable Balkan wars. Its unusual location, equidistant from Mount Olympus on the Greek mainland and Troy on the Turkish, was visible from each. Perhaps Athos itself was yet another axis?
The other line of my asterisk was even more interesting. It led to Olympia on the Alphaeus river, home of the Olympic games. I’d been there one weekend after a concert of Jersey’s in Athens. We’d hiked over broken stone beneath Mount Kronos. Aside from Olympia’s famous ruins like the temple of Zeus, there was a relic at Olympia that stuck in my mind: the Heraion, temple of the goddess Hera, wife and sister to Zeus. Though built of plastered wood and less impressive than the Zeus temple, the original Heraion was constructed as early as 1000 B.C. and is the oldest extant temple in Greece.
Then I knew why the name Hermione seemed so familiar (not just familial) to me. In the myths, Hermione was the place Hera and Zeus first landed when they came to Greece from Crete—the entry point of the Olympic gods to the continent of Europe.
Wolfgang, who’d been watching in silence as my finger traced the map beneath the glass, now turned to me.
“Astounding,” he said. “I’ve often walked by this map, but I never saw the connection you’ve seen at first glance.”
A uniformed guard arrived and secured open the high inner doors, and Wolfgang and I entered the gold and white Baroque library of the monastery of Melk. A wall of French windows at the far end overlooked a sprawling terra-cotta-colored terrace; beyond it lay the Danube, its surface glittering like crystals in the morning sun, filling the vast library with bouncing light. As a custodian wiped one of the glass display cases dividing the room, a wiry grey-haired man in a priest’s cassock adjusted leather-bound books on a shelf partway down. He turned as we entered, smiled, and came toward us. He seemed somehow familiar.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Wolfgang said, taking my arm. “I’ve asked someone to assist us.” We went forward to greet him.
“Professore Hauser,” said the priest, his English heavily flavored with Italian, “I’m happy you and your American colleague were able to arrive early, as I asked. I’ve already prepared some things for you to see. But scusa, signorina, I forget myself: I am Father Virgilio, the library archivist. You will excuse my poor English, I hope? I come from Trieste.” Then he added, with a somewhat awkward laugh, “Virgilio, it’s a good name for a guide: like Virgil in the Divina Commedia, no?”
“Was that who escorted Dante around Paradise?” I asked.
“No, that was Beatrice, a lovely young woman I imagine very much as yourself,” he added graciously. “The poet Virgil, I apologize to say, guided him through Purgatory, Limbo, and Hell. I hope your experience with me will be better!” He laughed and added almost as an afterthought, “But Dante had a third guide, as few seem to recall, one whose works are treasured here in our collection.”
“Who was the third guide?” I asked.
“Saint Bernard de Clairvaux. A most interesting figure,” Father Virgilio said. “Though he was canonized, many thought him a false prophet, even the Prince of Darkness. He initiated the disastrous Second Crusade, resulting in the destruction of the Crusader armies and the eventual return of the Holy Land to Islam. Bernard also inaugurated the infamous Order of Templars, whose mission was to defend Solomon’s temple at Jerusalem against the Saracen; two hundred years later, they were suppressed for heresy. Here at Melk we have illuminated texts of the many sermons Saint Bernard delivered on the Canticle of Canticles, and dedicated to King Solomon.”
But as Father Virgilio turned and headed off down the long room, distant bells started clanging in my head, and not for his mention of Song of Songs. As we followed our shepherd, I scanned the books lining shelves to my right and the contents of the imposing glass cases to my left. And I racked my brain, trying to figure out exactly what was bugging me about this black-clad priest. For one thing, Wolfgang hadn’t mentioned any spiritual guide on today’s agenda, nor any knightly orders I ought to be boning up on. I studied Virgilio as we followed him, and all at once I bristled with anger.
Without those priestly vestments—but with the addition of a dark, battered hat—Father Virgilio might well be the spitting image of someone else. Then I recalled that those few whispered words I’d heard in the vineyard last night had been in English, not German. By the time Father Virgilio stopped before a large glass case near the end and turned to us, I was seething with fury at Wolfgang.
“Is this not a great work of art?” he asked, gesturing to the richly detailed hand-colored manuscript beneath the glass as he glanced from Wolfgang to me with dewy eyes and fingered his crucifix.
I nodded with a wry smile, and said in my rusty German:
“Also, Vater, wenn Sie trun hier mit uns sind, was tut heute Hans Claus?” (So if you’re here with us now, Father, what’s “Hans Claus” up to today?)
The priest glanced in confusion at Wolfgang, who turned to me and said, “Ich wusste nicht dass du Deutsch konntest.” (I didn’t realize you could speak German.)
“Nicht sehr viel, aber sicherlich mehr als unser österreichischer Archivar hier,” I told him coolly. (Not very much, but surely more than our Austrian archivist here.)
“I think perhaps you’ve helped us enough for the moment, Father,” Wolfgang told the priest. “Could you wait in the annex while my colleague and I have a word?”
Virgilio bowed twice, said a few quick scusa’s, and bustled from the room.
Wolfgang had leaned over the glass case with folded arms and was gazing down at the gilded manuscript. His handsome, patrician features were reflected in the glass. “It’s magnificent, isn’t it?” he observed, as though nothing had happened. “But of course, this copy was executed several hundred years after Saint Bernard’s time—”
“Wolfgang,” I interrupted this reverie.
He straightened and looked at me with clear, guileless turquoise eyes.
“That morning back at my apartment in Idaho, as I recall, you assured me you would always tell me the truth. What exactly is going on here?”
The way he was looking at me would have melted the Titanic’s iceberg, and I confess it did a pretty good job on me—but that wasn’t all the ammo up his sleeve.
“I’m in love with you, Ariel,” he said simply and directly. “If I say that there are matters in which you must simply trust me, I expect you to believe me—to believe in me. Do you understand? Is this not enough?”
“I’m afraid not,” I told him firmly.
To do him credit, he registered no surprise, just complete attention, as if waiting for something. I wasn’t sure exactly how to say what I knew I must.
“Last night I believed I was falling in love with you, too,” I told him sincerely. His eyes narrowed, as they had when he’d passed me that first day in the annex lobby. But I couldn’t hold back my frustration. “How could you make love to me that way,” I said, glancing to be sure no one could overhear, “then turn around and lie to me, as you did in the vineyard? Who is this damned ‘Father Virgilio’ following us around like a wraith?”
“I suppose you do deserve an explanation,” he agreed, rubbing one hand over his eyes. Then he looked at me again with an open expression. “Father Virgilio truly is a priest from Trieste; I’ve known him for years. He has worked for me, though not in the capacity I told you earlier. More recently, by doing research here in this library. And I did want you to meet him—but not late last night when I had …
other things in mind.” He smiled a little self-consciously. “After all, he is a priest.”
“Then what was all that Hans-Claus business this morning, if you knew we were coming here to meet him?”
“I was worried last night, when you thought Virgilio looked familiar,” Wolfgang said. “Then this morning, when I made that slip and you pursued it, it was already too late to change plans. How could I imagine you’d be able to recognize him from earlier yesterday, just by one glimpse in darkness last night, and at such a distance?”
I was getting that déjà-vu-all-over-again feeling as I racked my brain for when I’d seen Father Virgilio “earlier.” But I didn’t have to ask.
“You have every right to despise me for what I’ve done,” said Wolfgang apologetically. “But it was at such short notice, when I learned I wouldn’t be joining you and Dacian Bassarides for lunch—that man is so unpredictable! I shouldn’t have been surprised if he’d spirited you away and I’d never seen you again. Luckily, I had chosen a restaurant where they knew me well enough to accept Virgilio as a ‘temporary employee’—to look out for you during the afternoon—”
So that was it! No wonder he’d seemed familiar to me in the vineyard. In my frenzied preoccupation yesterday afternoon at the Café Central, I’d hardly glanced at the faces around me, yet I must have registered that same figure performing some service around our table perhaps half a dozen times. Now, torn between relief and worry, I wondered just how much our impromptu busboy had overheard of our luncheon conversation. Though it seemed Wolfgang had only been trying to protect me from the vagaries of my unknown grandfather, I cursed myself for not being more vigilant, as Sam had taught me all through childhood.
But I had no chance to dwell on these thoughts. Father Virgilio, peering through the entrance doors, seemed to have decided that adequate dust had settled to cushion his return. Seeing him, Wolfgang bent toward me and spoke quickly. “If you can read Latin half as well as you speak German, I shouldn’t comment in front of Virgilio on the first line of this manuscript of Saint Bernard’s: it might embarrass him.”
I looked down at the book and shook my head. “What does it say?”
“‘Divine love is reached through carnal love,’” said Wolfgang with a complicitous smile. “Later, when we’ve a free moment together, I’d like to test that theory.”
Father Virgilio had arrived with a map of Europe, a modern one. He unfolded it on a trestle table before us and said, “It is important that from ancient times a mysterious tribe in this region held the female bear as their totem, and that they were possessed of an almost mystical reverence for a substance with many alchemical properties: salt.”
THE BEARS
At age seven, I carried the sacred vessels … when I was ten I was a bear girl of Artemis at Brauron, dressed in the little robe of crocus-colored silk.
—Aristophanes, Lysistrata
Bernard Sorrel—the saint’s family name—was born in A.D. 1091, at the dawn of the Crusades. On his father’s side he was descended from wealthy nobles of the Franche-Comté, on his mother’s from the Burgundian dukes of Montbard—“bear mountain.” The family castle, Fontaines, was situated between Dijon in northern Burgundy and Troyes in the province of Champagne—a region of vineyards planted from Roman stock that were consistently under cultivation since ancient times.
Bernard’s father died in the First Crusade. The young man suffered a nervous collapse when his beloved mother died also, while he was away at school. At the age of twenty-two, Bernard joined the Benedictine monks. Always of fragile health, he soon became ill, but was given a small cottage on the nearby estate of his patron Hugues de Troyes, count of Champagne, where he recuperated. The following year Count Hugues visited the Holy Land to see at first hand the Christianized kingdom of Jerusalem that had been established after the successful First Crusade. On his return, the count at once ceded part of his property to the Church: the wild valley of Clairvaux branching off the river Aube. There, at age twenty-four, Bernard Sorrel established an abbey and became first abbot of Clairvaux.
It is relevant to our story that Clairvaux is situated at the heart of the region that in ancient times encompassed today’s French Burgundy, Champagne, Franche-Comté, Alsace-Lorraine, and adjacent portions of Luxembourg, Belgium, and Switzerland. This region was once ruled by the Salii, whose name means People of the Salt. These Salic Franks, like the Roman emperors from the time of Augustus, claimed their ancestors came from Troy in Asia Minor—as place-names on the map like Troyes and Paris attest. Ancient Troy itself had profound connections to salt. Bounded on the east by the Ida range of mountains, its Halesian plains are watered by the Tuzla River, whose pre-Turkish name was Salniois—all these names meaning salt.
The Salii claimed that their ancestor Meroveus, “Sea-Born,” was the son of a virgin who’d been impregnated while swimming in salt water. His descendants, the Merovingians, lived in the time of King Arthur. They were believed, like the British king, to possess magical powers associated with the polar axis and its two celestial bears. The name Arthur means bear, and the Merovingians took for their battle standard the figure of an upright female fighting bear.
This connection between salt and bears goes back to two goddesses of ancient mystery. The first is Aphrodite who, like Meroveus, rose “foam-born” from the salt sea. She is ruler of both the dawn and the morning star. The other is Artemis, the virgin bear goddess, whose symbol is the moon, which nightly pulls the tides of the sea. This forms an axis between dawn and night, and also between the celestial pole of the bear and the fathomless sea.
It’s no accident that many place-names in the region just described are connected with aspects of these two. Clairvaux itself means vales of light, and the Aube, the river at Clairvaux, means dawn. Of equal or greater importance then there are those names beginning with arc-, ark-, art-, or arth-, like the Ardennes, named after Arduinna, a Belgian version of Artemis—and the German bär or ber found in place-names like Bern and Berlin. All these names, of course—like Bernard’s itself—mean bear.
In his first ten years as abbot, Bernard de Clairvaux rose swiftly—one might say miraculously—to become the leading French churchman, a confidant of popes. When two popes were elected by separate contingents of Italians and French, Bernard healed the schism and got his own candidate, Innocent II, seated on the pontifical throne. This success was followed by the election of a former Clairvaux monk, Eugenius, as the next pope, for whom Bernard preached the launching of the Second Crusade. Bernard was instrumental, too, in gaining Church sanction for the Knights Templars, an order founded jointly by his uncle André de Montbard and his patron Count Hugues de Troyes.
The Crusades began a millennium after Christ and lasted some two hundred years. Their mission was to reclaim the Holy Land from the “infidel,” al-Islam, and unite the Eastern and Western churches, Constantinople and Rome, with a common focal point in Jerusalem. Of specific importance was to gain Western control of key religious sites, like Solomon’s temple.
The real Temple of Solomon, built around 1000 B.C., was destroyed by the Chaldeans some five centuries later. Though it was rebuilt, many holy relics already were reported missing, including the Ark of the Covenant from the time of Moses, which had been brought back to Jerusalem by Solomon’s father, David. This second temple, refurbished by Herod the Great just before the time of Christ, was razed by the Romans in the Jewish Wars of A.D. 70 and never rebuilt. So the “temple” guarded by the Templars in the Crusades was actually one of two Islamic structures built in the eighth century: the Masjid el-Aqsa, or Farthest Mosque, and the slightly older Dome of the Rock, site of David’s threshing floor and of the Hebrews’ first altar in the Holy Land.
Beneath both these sites ran a vast man-made system of water conduits, caves, and tunnels, begun before the time of David and mentioned many times in the Bible as honeycombing the entire Temple Mount. In these catacombs also lay “Solomon’s stables,” caves used by the Knights Templar, reputedly
capable of sheltering two thousand horses. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, the Copper Scroll, lists an inventory of treasure once hidden in these caves, including many ancient Hebrew holy relics and manuscripts, and the spear that pierced the side of Christ.
This spear was discovered by the first Crusaders while besieging Syrian Antioch. Trapped by Saracens for over a month between the inner and outer siege walls, the Crusaders resorted to eating horses and pack animals, and many died of starvation. But one monk had a vision that the famous spear was buried in the Church of St. Peter beneath their very feet. The Crusaders exhumed the spear and bore it before them as a standard. Its powers enabled them to conquer Antioch and march on successfully to storm Jerusalem.
The name Frank—Franko in Old High German—meant spear, while the Franks’ neighbors, the Saxons, were called Sako, meaning sword. These tribes of Germanic warriors proved so formidable that Arab chroniclers called all Crusaders Franks.
“Although the Second Crusade, propagandized by Bernard de Clairvaux, had proved a disaster,” Father Virgilio concluded, “the Templars continued to flourish throughout his lifetime. The abbot of Clairvaux then set himself the curious task of writing one hundred separate allegorical and mystical sermons on the Song of Songs, of which eighty-six were completed at his death. More peculiar still is the fact that Bernard is known to have identified himself with the Shulamite, the black virgin of the poem—with the Church, of course, identified with Solomon, her beloved king. Some believe the Songs are an encoded form of an ancient esoteric initiation ritual which once provided a key to the mystery religions, and that Bernard had deciphered it. Yet the Church’s regard for Bernard was such that he was canonized only twenty years after his death in 1153.”
“What about the Order of Knights Templar that he helped launch?” I asked him. “You told us that later they were convicted of heresy and wiped out.”
“Hundreds of books have been written on their fate,” Virgilio said. “It was chained to a star that rose swiftly, burned brightly for two centuries, then vanished as quickly as it had come. Their initial charter from the pope was to protect pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land, and to secure the Temple Mount. But these Poor Knights of Jerusalem and the Temple of King Solomon soon became Europe’s first bankers. They were eventually ceded properties amounting to a tithe by the crowned heads of Europe. Highly political, they held themselves independent of Church or State. Eventually the Templars were charged by both these institutions with heresy, treason, and deviant Satanic sexual practices. They were rounded up to a man, and tortured and burned at the stake by the Inquisition.
The Magic Circle Page 39
