The Secret Magdalene Read online

  Salome squints up at the massive face of pharaoh high above her, a face of smooth and perfect beauty. “Yes,” she replies, “if someone like Izates were to break its nose, it would look just like Seth.”

  We hurry on after Ananias. There are temples everywhere, to Isis, to Horus, to Poseidon, to Serapis. Dositheus remarks to Seth that in Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem, only Yahweh can live; all others are called demons. But here Osiris, Zeus, Pluto, Apis, and many others live in harmony. I think of Tata’s goddesses and I smile.

  With a showman’s flourish, Ananias says more awaits us.

  Dodging beggars and vendors and chariots and a mob of assorted people going about their day, we have come to the center of the city, stand now in the vast open space where the Canopic Way crosses the steaming Street of the Soma—by the gods, Egypt is hot! Not the dry heat of the wilderness, but thick wet heat. There is almost a drowning to breathing. Ananias points to our left; we all look left. There stands the Gymnasium, the four porticos of which measure more than a stadion in length. There, Mark Antony once divided up the world among each of the children he had had by Cleopatra. Salome and I look at each other. What could it be like to think one owned the world, that one could apportion it at will? Ananias points to our right. There is Cleopatra’s temple built for the worship of Mark Antony, save that it is now the Caesarium, for as soon as the lovers were dead, Augustus Caesar had thrown out their statues and replaced them with his own. This tells us at least one thing it means to think one owns the world; both the thought and the world are fleeting.

  Farther along, there is a small green park, and in the middle of the garden in the middle of the park is Alexander’s tomb, a pretty thing of pink alabaster that leads deep down into the earth where the body of Alexander forever lies. But we spend no more than a moment looking, for rising up before us is the Palace of the Ptolemies, a magnificent palace so enormous, I wonder there is room left for a city at all. But it is not the palace itself that makes my heart now beat as it does; it is knowing what is in the palace. Somewhere behind its walls lies the museum and, in the museum, Ptolemy the Savior’s library!

  Holding Eio by her halter, an eio carrying his own library, Seth looks up at the golden walls. The man of dignity we knew in our wilderness fell away the night he learned he would travel here, replaced by an eager boy. Now there is yet a new Seth. This Seth is full of wonder and full of awe. “They say,” he says softly, “that the books number more than five hundred thousand and that agents are sent throughout the world to acquire more. They say there is no manuscript in any library anywhere that is not in Alexandria. Archimedes lived and invented here. Here, Euclid wrote his Elements and his Optics, and here Herophilus of Chalcedon came to understand anatomy by dissection and vivisection. In this place, Aristarchus of Samos explained how the Earth and the planets revolve around the Sun.”

  The Earth revolves around the Sun? How Father and his friends would laugh at that. But that the human body is dissected here? At that, they should not laugh. Oh, but more than five hundred thousand books! Yea Balaam!

  And now we learn that Ananias goes immediately back to the wilderness, taking with him his profits, as well as Eio who must be returned to Addai. We learn also that the actor Dositheus and his companion, Helena of Tyre, are to stay, by choice, near the Eunostos Harbor amid the bars and the brothels. But as for Seth and Salome and me, we three are to live in the royal district of Brucheion, in the very palace. Our rooms shall be those in the white marble museum given over to scholars, directly off the covered walkways along which are the very books themselves! And this will be so because we are believed to be kin to Seth, who is a Maccabee, as well as a son of the Queen of Adiabene.

  The room I have been given as mine, is more than any room in Father’s fine house. It is more than any room in Herod’s grand Temple of Jerusalem, and yet it is nothing more than a scholar’s room. Not only have I a whole room to myself, but so too has Salome. Hers is across a great hall of brightly painted pillars, but I can call out to her any time I wish, and I do. Our happy childish voices echo from end to end of the great hall and are immediately returned by a chorus of an unseen scholarly sssssshhhh! We laugh to hear this displeasure, but we shush.

  Seth seems to have been given a small palace within the palace, where he has eagerly taken himself with all he has unloaded from the back of Eio. For this he required the help of two slaves, who seem also to have been given him.

  And now I am left on my own. This means I run from place to place, exclaiming at the marble, at the ebony, at the gold, at the ivory, at the rich Arab carpets underfoot. I throw myself on the bed, an enormous thing, larger than any I have ever seen, even in the house of the high priest Caiaphus, and fear I shall sink into it. I jump up again and examine the walls, one whole section of which is my own library. Or will be when I acquire one. But the gleaming shelves and buckets await and my heart soars as I imagine what I shall place there. Scrolls of my own choosing. Scrolls of my own devising! By the horn-ed moon, if there could be such a thing as the complete opposite of our tent in the wilderness, this is that thing.

  I remember something, and turn to dig in my bag. It is the book Heli gave me as we left his house that night on our way to the wilderness. Heli’s book shall be the first to find a home in my library.

  With so little to put away, I am back out in the tiled hall, rushing into Salome’s room. I know she too must have run from place to place, have jumped on her bed, run her hands over the tapestries and the counterpanes and the cushions, but now she stands at a window overlooking a fabulous park extending all the way to the Egyptian sea. Saying nothing, I come to stand beside her. I take her hand and she mine; together weep great fat tears of happiness.

  We are home. At last, we are home.

  And then we see the library. Ten huge marble halls filled from floor to ceiling with books, every book that has ever been written. And everywhere scholars come from all the corners of the world, reading and writing and discussing and teaching. Oh! There is no describing the joy of this for such as Salome and myself. It is a great feast, a feast of the gods, and we are favored guests. I cannot imagine choosing another life.

  There follow months of learning and then years of learning; our heads are crammed full of learning. We live in the world as males; we live in our wonderful rooms in the greatest library on earth and we eat in the library and we sleep under our mosquito netting snuggled deep into beds that would suit any queen, and we read and we read and we study what we read and, of course, we argue. There is no shortage of teachers to argue with; thousands from every nation under the sun come here to study or to teach or to invent or to write. If no teacher, we argue with each other as we have ever done. Our lives are a quest for ataraxia—philosophical peace of mind. Outside these walls, life and all it contains is thought of as governed by blind chance. And if life is not seen in this way, then it is said to be ruled by pistis, blind faith in the gods, or a god. But here in the Great Library are gathered men and women in common community hoping for tranquillity from such dark depressions of the spirit by seeking philosophical truths for the mind.

  This is the course of our days.

  Salome is instructed in medicine by Sabaz, who was born far to the west in a nomadic desert kingdom ruled by women. Sabaz is so old and so venerated she can barely walk from one end of her rooms to the other. Therefore, she is carried wherever she wishes to go by her slaves, two of whom seem as aged as she, and one of whom is the biggest man we have ever seen, John of Delos, who must duck to pass through doors. We have heard that Sabaz was physician to Cleopatra herself, and to her children. All during the first year, Salome learns the fine art of potions and narcotics and poisons. By our second year, Emperor Tiberius’s truly terrible mother, Livia, widow of Augustus and connoisseur of poisons, had nothing on Salome.

  From Theano, born in Alexandria of Jews who fled the Law, we are instructed in harmonia, or the fitting together of all things that are: music, geometry, astronomy, and the s
acred numbers—she tells us Pythagoras of Samos said, “Number is the within of all things.” Theano wears nothing but white; her head is shaven, she is severely economical of movement and emotion, and so hideous, she is compelling. As a Therapeutae, an ascetic, she lives secluded with others of her sect somewhere outside Alexandria. We are very soon dazzled by Theano, and she is dazzled by Pythagoras, and by my Salome, who becomes cleverer by the hour.

  Within a month, Salome is full of nothing but the love of Pythagoras. She talks of him endlessly, saying he understood the code of number and of shape on which all reality relies. That he lived for twenty-two years in the temples of Egypt drinking deep of the ancient Egyptian Mysteries, and when he returned home to Greece, he wandered from place to place preaching all he had learned. He divined the future, he performed miracles, he raised the dead—meaning he awakened to wisdom many so unthinking they might as well be dead. He gave the Greeks the dying and resurrecting godman, Osiris, who is here a god of the most blessed ecstasy and the most enraptured love. But to Salome, this above all: Pythagoras loved women, thought them equal to men in all ways. If she had been blessed to follow Pythagoras, says she, she should not now be known as Simon, but could stand forth as who and what she is, Semne the Magus.

  I learn the art of poetry from Julia, born near Rome but who boasts Etruscan blood. With Julia I have decided to add poet to my list of intended accomplishments, though it is here that Seth, not Salome, outshines me. It is he who shows a true gift.

  Day after day, when we are not one of us with Sabaz or Theano or Julia, we scribble away on our tablets of wax, as the historians Valerius Laertius and Zopyrus of Rhodes read us much of the prolific Roman Livy, and talk of the doings of Greece and Persia, while the Alexandrian historian, Apion, extols the history of Egypt. Apion has no taste for Jews, saying we worship an ass, and when I hear this I think of Eio and I laugh. But as he has such an appetite for teaching, and as he is moved to his marrow by the appetite and erudition of Seth who is also his student, he forgives us our heritage.

  When I am with none of these, I read Homer. Oh Homer! If he is not a god himself, he is like unto. That is, if Homer were ever a man at all and not a name to signal the talents of many. It is Seth who tells me Homer might be the work of many men, just as the Jewish Torah is the work of many men. I am shocked at first to hear this, but soon enough realize it makes no difference. The work is the thing. And then there is Ovid. Metamorphoses becomes my secret delight.

  Each day, Ammianus the Younger unrolls a large papyrus scroll on which there is a copy of Strabo of Amaseia’s map of the world. And each day I fall into Strabo’s map as if it was water and I were a fish. There is India, where Indian noblewomen are trained in the ways of war and ride into battle with their husbands and their sons. There is Britain, about which Plutarch wrote: “The fight had been no less fierce with the women than with the men themselves.” Oh, I dream of traveling the world as Strabo did! Or as the historian Herodotus once did. Herodotus set himself the task of discovering everything there was to discover about all things. Now this is surely a purpose. Nor did he shrink from telling the truth. To think that the oracle at Delphi took bribes. That in Libya it was once the woman with the most lovers who was honored. I love Herodotus.

  Yet if Salome or I attend three lectures a day, Seth attends four. If we walk out into the city to hear this lecturer or that, he walks farther. He would travel to Sais or to Naucratis, or journey a week to hear someone speak in Memphis, the city of the birth of Salome, now Simon. It is as if Seth were starving, and Egypt a great banquet. He cannot fill himself enough. He does not seem to sleep. He does not seem to eat. He does not seem to be as other men and have need of a woman.

  In public we have taken to calling Salome “Simon the Magician” to distinguish her from all other Simons, just as I am now called “John the Less” to distinguish me from all other Johns, though mostly to distinguish me from John of Delos, the very large slave of Sabaz. Where once she learned lower magic, tricks and illusions, as did I, from Addai, now she learns the art of transcendent magic from the famous Joor, son of Sipa of Thebes. As do I. But once again, the greater gift is Salome’s, who has become, as said, Simon Magus.

  The sea curls white over the seawalls. The rain falls as a shifting silver curtain. It rains so hard on the library roof, we barely hear Joor, though he shouts out our lesson as John the Baptizer would shout out over the Jordan. “What have your people taught you of Adam and Eve, John?”

  Hearing my name over the pounding rain and the crashing sea, I blurt out, “That the serpent was Satan who causes all suffering.”

  “By this,” shrieks Joor, “since the serpent represents Wisdom, you are told that wisdom is bad and therefore ignorance is good. But good for whom? Only priests and politicians benefit from a people’s ignorance. Could it not be that the God of the Jews did not wish men to have recollection of Ultimate Source, that which we call ‘All That Is,’ not wanting them to know that he himself was nothing more than they were, writ large? But as the serpent brought the man and the woman knowing, which means full gnosis of the mysteries within, is it any wonder that your god would be full of fury at the betrayal of the snake?”

  I listen to such things stunned by revelation.

  On another day, Simon Magus and I are seated on the wide palace wall. Below us is the royal harbor in which floats the island sanctuary of the “New Isis” who was Cleopatra herself, where the walls were once white with ivory and the doors once green with emeralds. Before us, the light of the Pharos shines out like a small sun over the Great Sea. Behind us, we hear the murmur of scholars in the ninth reading room, busy taking scrolls out of their wooden chests or buckets or baskets, busy slipping them out of their niches along the marble walls, or busy putting them back. Above us, glitter the stars of Egypt. I am given up trying to read Artapanus’s History of the Jews and am now enthralled by a great poem of the philosopher Parmenides in which he descends into the Underworld to be instructed by the Goddess. For jest, or perhaps in boredom, Simon Magus leaps from our wall and begins striding up and down before me. “Who is greater than a magician?” she asks of all the scholars within hearing. “A magician can call down the rain, a magician can heal the sick, a magician can cast away sins. Even Jews call forth magicians. The rainmakers, Elijah and his disciple Elisha, were they not magicians? John the Baptizer’s grandfather Honi the Circle-Maker also brought the rain. Was Honi the Circle-Maker not a magician? Hanina ben Dosa heals the ill at a distance. Is he not a magician?”

  Hearing this, our teacher Joor, who is also head librarian, appointed by Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus himself, also busy with a scroll, gazes fondly on my friend, then tells all who would listen a story. It seems that far away in Hanina ben Dosa’s native Galilee, a lizard has been poisoning people. Hanina came when the villagers bid him to, and he asked them to show him the lizard’s hole, which they did, and eagerly. As soon as Hanina saw the hole, he put his naked heel over it. Oh! sighed all the villagers, amazed and awed. And ah! they all wailed when immediately the lizard rushed out and bit Hanina’s foot. But nothing could compare to the sound they made when immediately the lizard died.

  Simon Magus, my Salome, dances a small dance on the flowers made of tiny colored tiles on the library floor.

  Joor explains that Hanina did what he did by being a power unto himself. A magician, male or female, controls what is outside by controlling what is inside. “And what does this mean?” he asks, only to answer before Simon can. “The outside, the stuff of matter, is no more than a reflection of the inside, meaning nous, or mind. The mind controls matter in its own perception, and in the case of a magician, in the perception of others. Is this not exceedingly simple!”

  Yes, I think, it is simple, though it is also terribly hard, as many simple things are.

  Continues Joor, “A man who gains control over the rain can surely gain control over sin, which is merely a word for error.”

  “Eloi,” say I, “but this would infur
iate the Jewish priests, who claim through God only they can heal, only they can forgive sins, only they can bring rain, at a price.”

  Joor shakes his head. “A great magician gives these things freely.”

  I know whom Salome thinks of when he says this, for I too think of John the Baptizer on his river healing all who come to him for the mere asking.

  And by sitting for hours under the black dome of the Egyptian night in the exact middle of the largest palace courtyard, Joor also instructs us in the science of the heavenly bodies and their orderly array, which he himself learned from a pure line of Sethians, those who claim descent from Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, but who is also Set or Seth of the Egyptians. Listening, I ask myself, is our Seth named for the third son of Eve, or is he named for the Egyptian Seth who as the night sky is the twin and beloved enemy of the sun, Osiris? Is there a difference, since all these names, Hebrew and Egyptian, name principles of being?

  It is now we learn that the stars do not cause what occurs but instead indicate or sign events to come. We learn also that much myth and much symbol comes from observing the heavenly vault of the stars. That Isis or Issa is truly the Moon. That Ra is truly the Sun. That El means all the stars.

  Does this not then signify that Issa-ra-el is the land of heaven?

  And did not the Loud Voice say this: Children of Issa-ra-el?

  I run to Seth with what I have learned. I tell him all in a rush that we are Children of the Heavens, barely noting his stricken face before I run off again. Only later did I think what it must have meant to him, to hear it said that Issa, the great prophet of the Nazorean, was already known in Egypt as Isis, the Moon Goddess.

  On a day of wind, so fine a thing in Alexandria, Salome and I race to be in, I learn that I am more than my eidolon which is merely my waking self. I learn that I am my Daemon which is my true self who is immortal and does not die and cannot be harmed. I learn I am my own eternal witness and that I live forever. Death is only more Life. I learn we are eternally safe in Consciousness.