“It was hidden in a cave eighteen generations ago by the prophet Jeremiah ; the whereabouts are secret.”
“And the dimensions of this ark ?”
“They are recorded : one and a half cubits, by one and a half, by two and a half.”
“That is to say, one-eighth of forty-five square cubits—which is the contents of a chest measuring five cubits by three, by three.”
“Your reckoning is correct, and these are the exact dimensions of the coffins that I have been making of late for the Essenes. How do you read them ?”
“It is a calendar mystery,” said the Gadelian. “The Great Ark measured five cubits in length by three in width because there are fifteen seasons in the Holy Year, and the depth is three cubits because each season is divided into three weeks of eight days apiece. The Great Ark contains forty-five square cubits ; the Little Ark is one-eighth the size ; because eight is the number of the year’s increase from infancy to prime.”
“You have ploughed the same furrows as I have ploughed. Forty-five was, also, the number of pillars in Solomon’s House of Lebanon, which were set in three rows of fifteen pillars. Each was a week of eight days. Thus five days were left over when the three hundred and sixty days had been reckoned, and were set apart as holy days. How does the tree-alphabet run after its first flight ?”
“SS.H.D.T.C.—and again CC.M.G.NG.R.”
“Why are the S and the C doubled ?”
“To make fifteen out of luckless thirteen.”
“So the consonants are months, each of four weeks.”
“How did you divine that ?”
“Easily answered. Ezekiel the poet saw in a vision what trees grow on either side of the River of Healing, which flows eastward from the House of God in the Heavenly Kingdom. Their sustaining fruit and medicinal leaves do not corrupt, and their virtues are reckoned according to the month of the year. The thirteen tribes of Israel shall inherit the land watered by the river, to every tribe a strip running from east to west, from the Mountain of the South to the Mountain of the North. To every tribe a month, to every month a tree. What of the vowels in this tree-alphabet ?”
“They are A.O.U.E.I.”
“You are hiding two letters from me,” said Jesus reproachfully, “a doubled Iod and the doubled Aleph of which you have already spoken. For there must be twenty-two letters in this alphabet, of which seven are vowels.”
“I perceive that we can keep no secrets from each other, even the Prime Secret. You have a Typhonic, or harvest-red, beard, you write left-handedly, your nose is hooked like an eagle’s beak, your face is pale, your eyes are sea-green and luminous, the veins in your forehead branch in a blue Upsilon. But the seventh sign of royalty ?”
Jesus answered : “Under this garment my right shoulder is white as ivory.”
“We have a saying :
Three royal things :
Poets, groves, kings.
I am a master-poet ; you are a king, and by ‘grove’ is meant seven holy trees which are called the harbourage of the white hind of wisdom.”
“One of our Hebrew poets has said : ‘Wisdom has built her habitation with seven pillars.’ ”
“It is well said. What tree of the seven is best beloved of men ?”
“The wild apple-tree of immortality.”
“In agreement with us. The letter of the apple-tree is doubled C—C is the nut-tree of wisdom—which the Latins write as Q and the Greeks as Koppa. And doubled S is Z : S is the pitiless willow and Z the cruel whitethorn—trees of ill-luck.”
“With us the nut is also the tree of wisdom. Our sacred Candlestick, symbol of Divine Wisdom, is made in the form of the High Priest Aaron’s almond-rod that put forth seven buds ; each bud is a light and typifies one of the seven celestial powers. The shaft of the Candlestick is the rod itself.”
“The fourth and central light, then, typifies the Planet Nabu, the power of wisdom ?”
“On the fourth day our God said : ‘Let there be Lights’, and created these celestial powers.”
“As in our tradition. Their seven letters in the tree-alphabet are B.S.T.C.D.CC.F.”
“What do they spell out? They are the initial letters of the prayer that the Essenes use at dawn.”
“The Gadelian you would not understand, but the Latin, which may be known to you, runs :
Benignissime Solo Tibi Cordis Devotionem Quotidianam Facio.
‘Most Blessed One, to Thee alone I render the daily sacrifice of my heart.’ ”
“It is the very prayer.”
They continued with question and counter-question and each was well pleased with the other. To the uninstructed what has been recorded here of their conversation will read strangely ; but I write for the instructed. They will understand how Jesus had deduced from the Gadelian’s mention of the number 110 that the alphabet concealed an ancient mathematical secret ; the proportion of a circle’s diameter to its circumference, which is as seven lustra to twenty-two. They will also understand that the Gadelian’s reticence about the two doubled letters, A and I, drew Jesus’s attention to them : he saw then that the seven vowels, read sun-wise, formed a sacred name. It was II.I.E.U.O.A.AA., which, when written in Latin letters, is JIEVOAA.
Here was a wonderful illumination. Jesus recognized at once that this name of seven letters, the prime secret to which the Gadelian referred, is that of the God of the Ark, who is worshipped by a great number of nations allied by blood. The Hebrews, who are conceded to be his chosen people, the spiritual mentors of all Sons of Adam, call him Jehovah, a purposely misleading form of the name ; but their sacred rams’ horns musically blare out the true name at high festivals. It was at that blared name, it is said, that the walls of Jericho fell flat when Joshua besieged it. The ancient Phrygians knew the name, and knotted the letters on the ox-yoke at Gordium ; but the insensate sword of Alexander struck the knot apart. The Gadelians still preserve it, but divulge it only to master-poets. Jesus could never have learned the Name among his own people, since no Israelite was taught it except the High Priest and his chosen successor ; nor might it be written down or pronounced by human lips except once a year by the High Priest, when he entered the Holy of Holies and whispered it under his breath. It was communicated to him not by word of mouth, but by a display of seven sacred objects arranged in a set order, the initials of which spelt out the name. A name of proved power ; by the use of it, the Jews say, Moses brought the plagues upon Egypt, and Elijah and Elisha raised men from the dead.
Jesus said to the Gadelian : “Without the first and seventh letters of the Name, the bull-calf (which is Man) has no escape from the Cosmic wheel which the Female turns : he has no beginning and no end. But the doubled Iod and the doubled Aleph will together give him immortality ; as David says in a Psalm : ‘Praise him in his Name JAH.’ When the five days of the Female are lengthened to a week, then on the first day he celebrates his true origin and on the seventh he makes a perfect end : he is at one with the God whose name has been linked with his in the sacred wheel. Surely this is the hope of the Essenes who celebrate both the first day of the week and the last, and forbid the bull-calf, whom they call ‘Moses’, to be blasphemed.”
“But who will make the bull-calf at one with God ?”
“The suffering Servant of God, the destined Messiah, whose emblem is Aleph : he shall conquer death.”
“How can death be conquered ?”
“By denial of false beginnings and false endings.”
“But who first brought this falsity upon earth ?”
“God’s Adversary, whom the Greeks call the Cosmocrator, the lord of the illusive material universe, when he seduced woman and through her estranged man from the God who created him : it is against this fiend that the Essenes wear their prophylactic girdles of calf-skin.”
With the new knowledge that he had gained, Jesus was able also to understand the secret of the jewels in the sacred breastplate of the High Priest, and those formerly worn in the breastplate of the King of
Tyre, both of them used for divination. The jewels were set in a golden plate and behind them was a wheel which spun round, and on the wheel was a patch of phosphorus which shone in the darkness of the room where the divination was made, lighting up whatever hollow-cut jewel it happened to rest behind. Each jewel was of a different colour, and by the turning of the wheel words were spelt out, though without vowels, for each jewel stood for a consonant of the Acherusian tree-alphabet. Each jewel was also inscribed with the name of one of the original tribes of Israel, Joseph being two tribes. The series began with the red Edomite sard for Reuben and, running sunwise from left to right, ended with amber for Benjamin ; for Reuben the first-born of Israel means “See the Son”, and Benjamin the last-born of Israel means “The Son of my Right Hand”.
Jesus and the Gadelian engaged to take lodgings together and work at the same trade, for the Gadelian was a smith and could forge locks and hinges for the fine cabinets which Jesus was now making. The Gadelian urged Jesus to travel with him to Gordium in Galatia where the Knot was cut ; to Asian Ephesus ; to Gades and the country of the Turditanians in Spain ; to the Acherusian headland of Bithynia ; to Olbia in Scythia ; to Hieropytna in Crete and to Lusi in Arcadia—places where the ancient wells of knowledge were sunk. But Jesus said : “On is a millstone” [which is the meaning of the word], “and here all the grist of knowledge is brought to grind : here you and I met in common search of learning. Wait patiently and all the learning that we need will come to us.”
He was proved right. Every year they met some person of importance to them who had come on a pilgrimage to On-Heliopolis, the most ancient city of Egypt, in search of learning : a Persian, a Ligurian, a Galatian, a Phoenician, an Indian, a Caspian, a Greek, an Armenian, a Spaniard, or a Scythian. Thus they increased their knowledge of the state of the world, but were always met by the same sick longing for immortality and by the same complaint : “The nations are scattered and disunited. When will the word of salvation be spoken that will bind all together? We come as pilgrims to On in search of light and fullness ; we find only a dark void.”
Jesus would comfort them in these words : “Immortality is the reward of wisdom ; wisdom the reward of seeking and suffering. To seek and suffer is to love God ; and there is but One God, the God of Israel. Turn to him and the word of salvation will be spoken.”
“And what of woman ?” a Sidonian asked him.
“No man can at the same time love God as he demands to be loved and woman as she demands to be loved. He must choose between the Eternal Father and the fish-tailed Queen of Heaven.”
He later enlarged on this saying to the midwife Shelom. She asked him : “Lord, how long will death prevail ?”
“So long as women continue to bear children.”
She answered : “I have done well, then, in bearing none.”
“Since your barrenness was not of your own choosing, you have avoided one bitter herb only to eat of another. But I will tell you this : until the two sexes shall be as one, the male with the female neither male nor female, God’s Adversary will still walk abroad.”
“What of yourself? Are you not a true man? “
“I have come to destroy the works of the Female !”
“Would you destroy the work of your own mother ?”
“I acknowledge as my mother only the Holy Spirit of God that moved upon the face of the waters before the Creation. The Female is Lust, the First Eve, who delays the hour of perfection.”
“And are you proof against her beauty? Are you sterner of heart than our father Adam ?”
“May it be granted me to dispel the curse of which the Preacher, the Son of Sira, writes :
An heavy yoke was ordained for the sons of Adam from the day they go out of their mother’s womb till the day that they return to the mother of all things, from him who is clothed in blue silk and wears a crown even to him who wears simple linen—wrath, envy, trouble and unquietness, rigour, strife and fear of death in the time of rest.
For the First Eve, or Acco, or Lilith, or the Spinner, whom Solomon styles the Horse Leech, and whom the Preacher styles our universal mother, has two daughters : the Womb and the Grave. ‘Give, give,’ she cries. In the hour of perfection she shall be denied at last.”
One morning in the last year of the five that the Gadelian and Jesus continued in partnership they found a man lying naked and wounded in an alley close to their lodging. They took him in, though he seemed to be dying, tended him, bound up his wounds, gave him food, and clothed him. When he had recovered his strength, he asked them : “My lords, how may I recompense you ?”
Jesus answered : “We are well recompensed by seeing you live.”
“But you, Sir, are a Jew, and according to your Law I am unclean, being an eater of rats and lizards !”
“All life is precious.”
“Lord, I am sunk deep in your debt.”
“Here is my hand ; go in peace.”
“I am ashamed to be thought so far lacking in generosity that when my life is saved I give nothing in return.”
“Give us what you will to ease your heart : but, friend, your possessions are not great.”
“I have a word to give.”
“We gladly accept a word, if it is a good word.”
“It is a word of power over venomous serpents : for I am a Psyllian from the Great Syrtis.”
“The name of a demon of Libya? Then refrain : we may not use it.”
“No, Lord. It is a master-word in use amongst serpents by which they recognize one another and abstain from offence : its meaning is Love. By use of it you will have the power to handle all serpents without fear.”
“The word Love, spoken in love, is beautiful in any language.”
The Gadelian cried : “Can any man but a Psyllian or a black Indian speak lovingly to a venomous serpent? The serpent would not be deceived, and the man would die.”
“Let us make trial,” said the Psyllian.
He went out with them about a mile into the desert, where he crouched down and began to sing in a strange croaking fashion. Presently the black snakes and asps came rustling through the sand towards him. He stooped, picked them up, one after the other, crooned over them and said to Jesus, who stood unafraid beside him : “Look, is this one not beautiful, and this, and this? Their sharp white fangs, their bright eyes, the pattern of their scales, their lissomness! Lord, now I will speak the word of Love ; repeat it after me.” He breathed the word gently and the snakes curled peacefully into whorls in the lap of his garment.
Jesus repeated the word after him, reached out his hand to an asp, took it up and made much of it.
“Let it coil about your neck, Lord !”
Jesus did so.
The Psyllian instructed the asp : “Brother, be off and tell your fellows that they have found a new friend, a Hebrew !”
The asp slipped away into the desert, and ever afterwards Jesus had mastery of serpents ; he communicated the Psyllian’s word to his disciples not long before he was crucified.
But the Gadelian refrained from following Jesus’s example. He said : “I have little need of the word. There are no serpents in my country since my ancestor Gadelos expelled them with his wand.”
When Jesus and the Gadelian parted, they exchanged tokens of love. The Gadelian went travelling into Africa, and Jesus returned to Nazareth to his carpentering, to meditate on all that he had learned. They had agreed that if either were at any time driven from his own land he would take refuge in the other’s.
Chapter Seventeen
Four Beasts of Horeb
AT Nazareth Jesus found his mother in good health and lodged in her house for a while. She asked him no questions and he told her little of what had happened to him in Egypt. He learned from her that his brother Jose was prospering in trade at near-by Bethlehem ; but that James, grown more and more pious, had taken vows and gone to join an ascetic society in Lower Transjordania, called Ebionites or “the poor men”. The Ebionites were an off-shoot of th
e Essenes, from whom they differed chiefly in their abstention from the study of astrology, in never cutting their hair or drinking wine, and in not cloistering themselves in a compound. Their self-imposed task was calling the people to repentance and praying for them. They abominated blood-sacrifices and kept the Passover in the old style, as a festival of the barley-harvest, rejecting as spurious the passage in the Book of Exodus which orders the Paschal lamb to be ritually eaten at Jerusalem every year by all pious Jewish households. This was only one of many passages in the Books of Moses which they rejected : they accepted, for example, only a few verses of Deuteronomy, the book first published in the reign of Good King Josiah, which gave a pretended antiquity and divine sanction to current Temple practices. They lived on alms, which they did not, however, solicit ; and the Transjordanians considered it meritorious to support such holy men, whose knees were as calloused as their bare feet, by constant prayer.
Jesus now went into partnership with one Judas, a carpenter from Capernaum, who resembled him in size, build and the colour of his hair. The sight of Jesus and Judas rhythmically sawing down a tree together with a two-handled saw gave Judas the nickname “the Twin” or, in the Aramaic, “Thomas” ; for every third man in Nazareth was a Judas and all had distinguishing nicknames. Jesus attended the synagogue regularly and took his turn as the attendant who presented the sacred scrolls for reading by the synagogue elders, afterwards returning them to the sacred coffer. He also sometimes led the prayers, but refrained from expounding the Law, or from making use of the great powers that he had acquired in Egypt. He was patiently awaiting a sign. He waited for another seven years, lodging now in Thomas’s house and giving most of his earnings to the poor ; for he took to heart the text from Tobit : “Alms deliver a man from death.”
The sign came at last during a visit from his brothers Judah and Simeon, who were now settled at Cana again. Almost the first words that Judah addressed to him were : “Brother Jesus, will you come with us down to Beth Arabah to be cleansed of your sins ?”