Secret Magdalene (10 page)

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.

T
he 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 infuriate 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.

Seth taught us this as we stood on the highest place on the library wall so that the wind might blow the heat from our bodies. And even then, as the wind blew and Salome hallooed out over the Royal Harbor and the seabirds were swept from the sky and the waves foamed over the seawalls, Seth talked of Socrates.

He said all men experience themselves first as the
eidolon,
which is the mortal self, the personality, becoming lost in the belief that their
eidolon
is all there is of self, and when this died, they died. Blinded by the
eidolon,
small and suffering, they could not do otherwise than perceive God as “other” and separate: that which is enormous and unknowable. Anything that is enormous and unknowable is also a thing to be feared. As this small self, they would see their higher self, which Socrates called the
Daemon,
as also separate; they would think it an independent thing, call it a guardian angel. But to those who blessed themselves by seeking gnosis, or complete self-knowledge, the
Daemon
would be discovered to be the Divine I, the One Soul of the Universe, the Consciousness in all men and in all things. To know this, all men could say: I am God. To know this would be to know what is meant by I AM.

Over the wind, I hear him say this of “men” and that of “men” and all things of “men,” and I call out, “Seth! I am not John the Less, but Mariamne. Salome is not Simon Magus. How does a man teach women?”

And this is how he answers me. “Do you not know Socrates was taught through the use of reason by a woman, the wise Diotima of Mantinea! Do you not know that he taught women! Am I less than Socrates that I should do less?”

Salome begins to laugh so hard and so long that she tumbles backward off the library wall and into the garden below, there to lie struggling with her robe. If the wind had not blown all the scholars inside, everyone in Alexandria would have known within the hour that Seth teaches women.

I
n the early spring of our second year, I am almost killed. It happens in a most suitable place: the City of the Dead. Julia, thinking to have us each write an ode on death itself, takes Simon Magus and John the Less and Helena of Tyre out through the Gate of the West, and thence into the goddess Hathor’s city called by all Alexandrian’s the Necropolis.

We pass the shops of the embalmers, so many of them, and so eager for custom, they crook their long brown fingers: come here, come here! These we veer away from in great horror. We pass the small gardens for mourners to sit and weep in. As for these, we try not to stare at the grief so publicly expressed. We pass the stonecutter’s huts and I am reminded of Addai and by this am saddened, but not for long, because by now, filled with a kind of curious gloom, we come on the labyrinth of tombs cut into the solid rock, so many we stand awestruck. As well as dismayed. Or I, at least, am. How long have they been here? How many have died to fill these holes in the ground, one layered on the other, down and down to some unutterable depth? As well as on and on for as far as I can see in all directions. I peer over the edge of one among the uncountable many. Stone steps descend down to small stone rooms and in the stone walls of each room are holes like honeycombs. But there is no honey here. Some of these are newly filled with what seems a cocoon of rags; some are so old those who once lived but now are long dead are no more than a carpet of dust on the stone shelving. How deep does it all go?