King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (37 page)

“Willingly. It names the city.”

“Of Leontopolis ?”

“No, of Ariel ; the name which King David bestowed on Jerusalem.”

“You have set palm-trees on the roof of the Temple.”

“Solomon, son of King David, set palm-trees adorned with golden chains on the roof of his Temple. The ceiling was fir, overlaid with fine gold.”

“I have heard of this King Solomon : how he fetched all the secrets of Asia from Byblos.”

“We name the place Gebal. It is written in our Book of Kings that the men of Gebal assisted Solomon in the building of his Temple.”

“On your showing, he knew the language of trees : for in our sacred tree-alphabet, which we also fetched from Byblos, the fir, there sacred to Adonis, is called
Aleph
and the palm
Double Aleph
; and
Aleph of Aleph
is a title of the Great God whom we delight to honour. It signifies the Ancient of Days.”

“Teach me that alphabet.”

“In good time. Why have you set an ox beside the lion ?”

“The ox typifies the King who is to come, the Son of Joseph. The star foretells his coming.”

“How do you say ‘ox’ in Hebrew ?”

“We say
Aleph
.”

Both laughed for pleasure and the Gadelian said : “I whet my arrow
upon your tile. Is it recorded what were the dimensions of this Temple ?”

“It is recorded.”

“Tell me first, did Solomon place two great pillars before it, a green and a gold ?”

“Two pillars ; but their colours are not recorded in our books.”

“What were the names of the pillars ?”

“They were called Jachin and Boaz, but their true names are forgotten. No more is known than that Boaz is to Jachin as Mount Gerizim is to Mount Ebal, its twin across the vale of Shechem : as blessing is to cursing.”

“Expound.”

“It is written : ‘A blessing upon Gerizim to those who obey the Lord God, a curse upon Ebal to those who turn away.’ ”

“I can restore their true names ; also the name of the lintel. Tell me the height of these pillars.”

“Tell me, first, the true name of Boaz : for I also have an arrow to whet.”

“It is called Abolloneus.”

“Why so ?”

“Because of the consonants of the same tree-alphabet which run in this order : B.L.N.F.S. We set vowels between them.”

“Should not the third letter be in the fifth place ?”

“It is so in the Canopic alphabet of the Bull-calf and Lotus. The Acherusian tree-alphabet, which is the earlier, runs as I have told you.

Then Jesus said : “The height of the two pillars was thirty-five cubits.”

“How do you read thirty-five ?”

“They make seven lustra, half the years of a man’s life.”

“The pillar called Boaz ascends, the pillar called Jachin descends,” said the Gadelian.

“The green pillar of growth and the sere pillar of decay.”

“That is well said. Yet the most fortunate among you live to one hundred and ten, I surmise.”

“You are right. The patriarch Joseph who first brought my people into Egypt lived to that age ; completing the full circumference of his circle.”

“You are indeed the Hebrew in search of whom I have come. Your God has a sacred ark ?”

“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.”