The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  As I danced on and on, it seemed that I truly felt my own body for the first time—not only more centered and balanced within itself, though that was true too, but also completely connected in some mysterious fashion with the earth and sky. I felt parts of me dying, falling away in pieces, spinning out into the universe and turning into stars in the vast midnight space, a space spangled with galaxies that seemed to go on forever.

  We danced into the morning, until the coals of our fire had flickered out, then we danced out into the wildflower meadow once more, to see the first grey light of dawn bleeding red into the morning sky. And still we kept on dancing.…

  It was only after all this time that something strange began to happen—something frightening. And the moment it did, I stopped dancing on the spot. The music was still playing on our cassette, as Sam whirled round and saw me standing there, barefoot in the wild-flowers. He came over to me.

  “Why have you stopped?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I’m not dizzy or anything, it’s just …” I couldn’t say.

  “Then dance with me,” he said.

  Bending down to switch off the music, Sam took me in his arms there in the meadow and we moved slowly in a circle, almost floating. Sam held me lightly, just enough for support. His rugged face with straight nose and cleft chin, his lashes shadowing strong cheekbones, seemed as he leaned toward me like those of a strong protecting spirit. Then he pressed his lips to my hair.

  “I learned something from Pandora’s manuscripts,” he said. “In an early version of a medieval alchemical text—the Goethe, the Magic Circle of Solomon the Magus—it says angels don’t make love like human beings. They don’t have bodies.”

  “How do they do it?” I asked him.

  “They have a much better way,” Sam said. “They mix themselves together, and actually become one for a very brief time, where before there were two. But angels, of course, have no substance. They’re made of moonbeams and stardust.”

  “Do you think we’re angels?” I suggested, leaning back in his arms with a smile. Sam kissed me.

  “I think we should mingle our Stardust, angel,” he said. Then he drew me down by the hand onto the grass, to lie on top of him among the wildflowers. “I want you to do whatever you feel like—or nothing at all,” he said with a smile. “I’m completely at your service. My body is your instrument.”

  “Can it play El Amor Brujo?” I asked him, laughing.

  “It can play whatever selection the virtuoso wishes to ripple out upon it,” he assured me. “What will it be?”

  “All at once, I feel like I’m way above timberline,” I told him seriously.

  “We’ve been there before, and we survived,” Sam said softly, taking my fingers and brushing them over his lips. “We entered the light once together, Ariel. Just after our totems found us—do you remember?”

  I nodded slowly. Yes, I remembered.

  When the cougar and two bears had vanished from that predawn mountaintop, we’d sat for a very long time, Sam and I—maybe hours—just touching each other’s fingertips, side by side, not moving. As darkness had faded to dawn, though, I had the uneasy feeling of something changing in my body, something shifting like restlessly sifting sands. Then all at once I’d found myself moving away from earth itself, floating through the air high up into space. I felt completely separate from my body, yet I still had form and shape—like a teardrop filled with helium, suspended in the night sky.

  I had a moment of panic, that I might fall or that I might actually be dead and leaving the earth forever! But then I suddenly realized I wasn’t alone up here. There was someone beside me: Sam. It was almost as if he were speaking to me from inside my own mind, though if I looked, I could actually see both our bodies sitting side by side, down there on the earth below!

  “Don’t look down, Ariel,” Sam had whispered in my mind. “Look up ahead. Let’s enter the light together.…”

  Oddly enough, we’d never spoken of it afterwards, not once. And odder still, it had never seemed to me that it was all only a dream. If anything, it was more vivid than reality, just as our three-dimensional, Technicolor world is so much more solid than a two-dimensional black-and-white photo pasted on cardboard. This was many exponential dimensions greater and deeper. But if I’d had to really pin it down in specific words, I would never have known where to begin.

  We had entered the light together as children, Sam and I. Now we were about to do so once again. This time, I knew, it was going to be very, very different from the last. We two were about to be transformed into one, on a spring morning among the wildflowers.

  And this time, I was no longer afraid.

  As I lay in Sam’s arms hours later, instead of feeling drained I felt exhilarated, as if my veins were suddenly filled with something light and bubbly and effervescent.

  “How exactly would you describe that?” I asked him as he wove his fingers together with mine. “I mean, what happened to us?”

  “Hmm,” said Sam. “I suppose if you must have a name, the technical term would be ‘mutual orgasm.’ A very long mutual orgasm. More or less your basically endless, drawn-out, hours-long, nonstop mutual orgasm—”

  I shoved my hand in his face.

  “On the other hand,” said Sam, smiling as he kissed my bare shoulder, “you could simplify things a lot and just call it love. Were you surprised?”

  “I’ve never felt anything like that before,” I admitted.

  “I guess I should be relieved,” said Sam. “But to be honest, neither have I.”

  He sat up and looked at me lying in the grasses, and he ran his finger from my chin down the center of my body until I vibrated. Then he leaned over and kissed me on the mouth as if we were slowly pouring Stardust into each other. I couldn’t believe how it felt.

  “I think we’re tuned up,” said Sam. “No more rehearsals—what about a real live performance?”

  Sam and I were still in the mountains six months later, early November, when Dark Bear sent us snowshoes, cross-country skis, and some bearskins in preparation for the expected first big snow.

  We’d nearly finished translating the manuscripts—Earnest’s, Lafcadio’s, Zoe’s, and the runes Jersey’d stolen from Augustus. As Wolfgang and others thought, these pointed to locations on earth that formed a grid the ancients had not only believed possessed enormous powers but which apparently they’d actually used in ceremonies and rituals, documented here in detail, over a period of at least five thousand years. The closely held secret of early mystery religions like the Orphics, Pythagoreans, and early Egyptians was that activating this grid was an alchemical marriage that would transform the earth, bringing down energy that connected us in a kind of “marriage” with the cosmos.

  “Do you know what a ‘center of symmetry’ is?” Sam asked me one day. When I shook my head, he explained. “In some mathematical models, like those in catastrophe theory, you can pinpoint the absolute center of a shape. There’s a model for wildfires, for instance. If a wildfire starts around the edges of a field, regardless of the field’s shape, you can predict precisely where the fire will burn out, at true center, by drawing a straight edge at each contour around the periphery and dropping a ninety-degree line from it. The place where most lines overlap is the absolute center, the center of symmetry—a kind of path of least resistance. Many field models can be analyzed that way—fields of light, of the brain, of the earth, and possibly the cosmos. Let me show you.”

  He drew the shape on his small computer screen for me:

  “You think these locations we’re looking for on earth aren’t necessarily just connected by straight lines or six-pointed stars?” I surmised. “You think they’re important because they’re acting as centers of symmetry?”

  “A kind of vortex or maelstrom,” Sam agreed. “Something that pulls energy into itself and magnifies its power, because it’s the true center of the form.”

  Part of the blueprint was inherent in the pages
we had before us. For instance, as we figured out in a flash one day, those patent drawings Nikola Tesla had made for his own high-voltage tower built in Colorado Springs—the tower he claimed would channel energy across the world grid—closely resembled a famous drawing of the first alchemical retort, the Chrysopoea of Cleopatra, from the oldest extant alchemy text. And both of these resembled—literally to a T—the tau cross, power symbol of the ancient Egyptians, as well as the Tyr rune Zoe spoke of, which invoked the magic pillar of Zeus. And, eerily, even the Irminsul itself, destroyed by Charlemagne but rebuilt in the Teutoburg Forest one thousand years later by Adolf Hitler.

  Tyr Rune

  Irmin Saule

  Tesla Tower

  The Chrysopoea of Cleopatra

  Still, Sam and I knew our task had a long way to go. Some documents pointed to others that weren’t in our possession. We figured out where many had been hidden millennia ago—a crevasse on Mount Ida along the coast of Turkey, Mount Pamir in Central Asia, a cave where Euripides wrote his plays in central Greece—but although some ancient documents had recently been found in these regions, clearly there was no guarantee the ones we were looking for would be there today. We decided that when we finished our task here, in the spirit of Pandora and Clio, we’d try to find at least a few of those others.

  It was uncanny, too, that as each event popped out of our Pandora’s box of ancient revelations, it seemed to be echoed simultaneously somewhere on earth, in the present. We knew we must be getting close to the transformation we were awaiting.

  Not only had the Soviets withdrawn from Afghanistan in February, but other countries with walls, whether political or physical ones, began to be hit by democratic urges and surges that were suddenly moving in torrents, like dammed water trying to seek its natural level, its center of symmetry.

  In June, Tienanmen Square in China, the country most famous for a wall that could even be seen from outer space, had erupted in social protest. Though the tanks rolled in, the yeast of ferment had already started. Then, on the November ninth we’d been awaiting—the date Wolfgang had identified as a turning point for Napoleon, de Gaulle, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Adolf Hitler—we received the astonishing news, via our Appaloosa express, from Laf and Bambi in Vienna. The Berlin Wall, symbolically separating East and West for more than twenty-five years, had come down overnight. The tidal wave had at last broken through; it was rolling now and couldn’t be stopped.

  But it wasn’t until late December—almost the anniversary of the ninetieth year since Uncle Laf’s birth in Natal province, South Africa—that I made the breakthrough of my own that Sam and I had been hoping for. I was working on the text of a long roll of very old and fragile linen, written in Greek, that I’d just unsealed from one of Sam’s lucite tubes. I knew I hadn’t seen it before. But as I was tapping the Greek words into my laptop, I thought something about it seemed familiar.

  “Do you remember a document of Zoe’s we translated around two months ago?” I asked Sam, who was working on his computer across the room, sitting cross-legged with an upside-down Jason sacked out in cat nirvana on his lap. “I mean the story about a voice calling across the waters from the isles of Paxi, telling an Egyptian pilot to announce, when he was off Palodes, that the Great God Pan was dead.”

  “Yes, Tiberius had the pilot brought to Capri for interrogation,” said Sam. “The pilot’s name, coincidentally, was Tammuz, like the dying god in the ancient mysteries. And he announced Pan’s death the same week Jesus died. What have you figured out?”

  “I’m not sure,” I told him, still tapping text into my computer. “But from just the amount of Greek I’ve picked up these past months by watching the machine translate, I think this letter may provide at least some kind of key to how things fit together at a deeper level. Unfortunately it’s torn, and some is missing. But it’s clearly written by a woman to a man—a woman that I think we’re already pretty familiar with.”

  “Read it aloud?” Sam suggested, pointing to the snoring cat on his lap with a smile. “I hate to disturb folks in deep contemplation,” So did I.

  Perdido Mountain, Pyrenees, Roman Gaul

  Beloved Joseph,

  Following your advice, my brother Lazarus and I have put the alabaster box, the chalice, and our other objects the Master touched in his last days, here in a secure hiding place within the mountain, where we pray they will remain safe until they are needed. I’ve made a list of these, and directions to find them, and will send these separately.

  In your last letter, Joseph, you expressed the thought that since you’ve now reached a great number of years, you may yourself soon be going to join the Master. You asked whether I, as the only true initiate of the Master, could find it possible to share my perspective of what occurred at that last supper he passed with his disciples, and how it related to the earlier descriptions I’d sent you, written by others present on that occasion.

  It’s impossible to put into words what can only be grasped through experience, such as one might attain through the process of initiation. But I shall try as best I can.

  It has always been my belief that in all he said or did, the Master was expressing himself at dual levels, though he made a clear distinction between them. Let us call them the levels of teaching and of initiation. In teaching, he was fond of using allegory and parable to provide an example of what he wished to communicate. But beneath such parables always lay hidden the second level, the level of symbol, which I believe the Master used only within the context of initiation.

  The Master told me that a single symbol, picked up in this way, would touch many levels in the mind of the disciple. Once someone experiences a specific image in this way, its deeper meaning works on him beneath the skin at a primal, almost physical, level.

  In a way, the Master was like one of those Eastern magi he’d studied with—always on a path, seeking, questing, looking for his special star to follow into a night of endless mystery. In that sense, one could see that he constantly scattered clues in his path, on his personal quest for the initiate who might pick up those clues and follow him down that road. Even today, so many years since he left us, I feel the same chill at recalling his tone when he first told me, “Put down your things and follow me.” I now understand he meant it to be taken at both levels, that I was not only to follow him but to follow his example in learning to ask the right questions.

  The Master’s questions on that last night seemed to me, as always, every bit as important as his answers. He told the others that I would know how to answer his question about the significance of the Shulamite, Solomon’s lover in the Song of Songs. Then the Master proceeded to give his own answer: The Shulamite represents Wisdom. But do you recall, at first, he’d mentioned it was a “knotty” problem? He once used that expression to ask you what was “unchanging and imperishable”—suggesting his answer on each occasion was only a partial one.

  The Master thought the initiate must always strive to unravel the full answer for himself. In this case, I believe I can suggest the full answer he had in mind. The Greek root of the word knot is “gna”—to know—from which we also derive gnosis, or hidden wisdom. There are words in many languages that come from this root, but all have meanings that suggest ways of gaining such hidden knowledge.

  By identifying the Shulamite with the Eastern or morning star, the Master has again pointed our attention to these mysteries. In the poem, Solomon’s love is black and beautiful: she represents dark matter, the Black Virgin of ancient belief, or the black stone that falls from the skies.

  The three chosen disciples of the Master’s inner circle were Simon Peter and James and Johan Zebedee, who wanted to sit beside him when the kingdom arrived. But he assigned them instead—significantly and symbolically, in my opinion—to fulfill individual missions, just after his death, at three very specific spots here on earth: James to Brigantium, Johan to Ephesus, and Peter to Rome. The first is the home of the Celtic goddess Brighde; the second, home of the Greek Artemis or, in
Latin, Diana. And Rome itself is home to the earlier Phrygian Great Mother, the black stone brought from Central Anatolia that now sits enshrined on the Palatine Hill. The first initials of these three cities strung together spell BER—the acronym of that goddess herself, in the form of a bear.

  These three spots on earth represent three faces of an ancient goddess—a goddess represented by the Shulamite of the poem.

  So the Master’s very question—Who was the dark woman of the Song of Songs?—drives right to the heart of his message that the Song itself was a formula of initiation, to be undertaken only by those setting out to conduct the Great Work. The marriage between the white king of the apple orchard and the dark virgin of the vineyard represents the marriage of divine and carnal that lays bare the very core of the Mysteries.

  When I finished reading and looked up, Sam, still sitting with Jason in his lap, was grinning at me.

  “That was one of the ones I’d translated myself, before Wolfgang made off with the copies of my manuscripts,” he said. “If it means what it sounds like, it would sure knock the stuffing out of a few of those good old celibacy theories—but I’d find it pretty hard to believe. And why did you say you thought it had to do with the ‘voice upon the waters,’ or the death of the Great God Pan?”

  “It may be exactly what connects all Pandora’s manuscripts together,” I told him. “What this letter here is telling us, I think, is that initiation—any initiation—requires a kind of death. Death to the world, death to the ego, death to the ‘former’ self of one’s existence, just as the earth has to die and be reborn every year for its renewal. Don’t forget, the two gods who traded off at Delphi each year were Apollo the apple king and Dionysus, god of the vineyard—same jobs as our hero and heroine in Song of Songs. By the same token, the birth and baptism of a new aeon, of a brave new world, requires the death of the old way of thinking, old belief systems—even the death of the old gods.”