The Secret Magdalene

by Ki Longfellow

  But on this day, Yeshu is gone entirely—like Salome, I think he has found a secret place, somewhere Megas might not find him. With all others also gone, each to their place, I take myself to the Temple.

  Nyx hops along behind me; Eio trots behind Nyx. And the son of Eio—this little one is never quiet, therefore Tata has named him Babel for the Sumerian god of speech—trots behind Eio. I shoo them all away at the door, then stand within the small entry and marvel at what I find.

  Inside or out, the Temple of the Carmelites is to the great Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem as the home of Thecla is to Father’s mansion in the Upper City, yet as humble as this, it is suffused with a deep and abiding sanctity. The altar is no more than a slab of smooth stone; the walls of the Temple are as rough hewn as Elijah’s cave, its floor as uneven, and on the interior altar nothing is placed but a cloth of curious design. Yet all this lack is of no matter, for it stands on what the most ancient of the Egyptian writings called the sacred promontory.

  In moments, I discover what I knew had to be so, there are no sacrifices of flesh and of blood here. No animal is put to death to placate a god; no money is required, for it is not home to Yahweh, but to Baal Jehoshua, the Lord of Salvation. Yet I am astonished at this. I stand in a temple to Baal, the name forbidden in Father’s house. Baal Jehoshua is the very god my Father and his Yahwist friends call Joshua, the Patriarch, so that he is made less than a god, less than Yahweh who would silence all other gods. Baal is the god who so vexed the prophet Amos, that among all the other unholy horrors he wished his god Yahweh would do, he called out for the top of Carmel to wither. But either Amos went unheard, or Yahweh proved helpless, for here Baal Jehoshua is as he was. Called Iao, called Jupiter, called Joshua, called Baal Jehoshua, this god is the greatest god. Or so believe the Carmelites.

  But look at this. I come now to a further room, and I turn where I stand. I am home! I am as I was when yet a child and newly brought to the wilderness. Above me the ceiling is round as the heavens and full of painted stars. And here is the moon and there is the sun, both shining in the sign of Pisces, the Fish. What I did not know then, seeing it for the first time in the small room under the settlement, I know now, having learned it in Egypt. The symbol above my head is the vesica piscis of Pythagoras. Two overlapping circles, one meaning spirit and the other matter; when they touch in sacred marriage—reality! It is both a fusion of life’s opposites and a womanly portal through which all things come into being. This “touching,” or portal, shape is also the Fish. No wonder the Pythagoreans thought mathematics the secret language of God, for in this symbol is also encoded sacred geometrical formulae. It is also the symbol of Osiris who is the Fisher King, and the mark of Joor’s Great Year of Pisces, a time marked by the precession of the equinoxes, which, two hundred years ago, was calculated by Hipparchus.

  There is nothing between this secret place and that secret place but distance. In the place of the Carmelites, so much is made clearer to me.

  I climb the circular stone steps in the Temple Tower, meaning to look from its top over all for as far as I can see, but when I come in time to the very last step, I find Seth before me. I am not surprised. Before ever I took an upward step, I knew I might see him, for it is a long time since I questioned the still and certain voice within me. I no longer love my voices, and I have never loved the Loud Voice, but by now, I assume the rightness of my inner voice, my very Daemon, as I assume the pure goodness of Addai.

  I have not seen Seth since first we came here. We have not been alone since Japhia. And now we stand together and together say nothing, and though I do not trespass against him, yet I feel his pleasure in this. Just as I feel my own. I say eventually, “Tell me, Seth, how did you leave such a place?”

  He answers instantly. “How is it my Queen Bee asks such a thing?” Queen Bee! It seems forever since he calls me this. “Can you, so full of questions, wonder that I, so full of questions, would come away from a place where there are only answers?” Only answers? I do not know what he means, and he knows I do not know. “They have found their answers here, Mariamne. Having found the answers they seek, they ask no more questions.”

  No more questions? Impossible. I understand him now.

  Once again, we gaze out over that which lies below us: sky and sea and cold gray mist. Directly below, Helena crosses a courtyard bearing some bit of undyed cloth. Toward an outcrop of blue stone, Jude has set his hand to repairing the garden fence that keeps the goats and Eio and Eio’s son, Babel, from eating all they might eat. Somewhere below Salome writes of John, and somewhere below Yeshu lives his brilliant life, and somewhere below Tata and Addai are complete unto each other. And I am more than content to know this.

  How long we stand in silence at the top of the tower, I cannot say, but when Seth speaks again, it seems perfectly timed. “I cannot love Socrates and also believe I know a thing. If I am told ‘this is a truth’ or ‘that is a truth,’ I ask always, Is it? When yet a youth, I set out for this blessed mountain, which held, so it was rumored, the highest truth of all. I brought with me only the writings of Plato, and I walked the whole of the way from Adiabene.” Here, Seth raises his hands as if he would hold in them the Temple and the mountain and the sea. “And I found a world of answers. Ask any man or any woman a question and you will get an answer. But is an answer the truth?”

  Say I, “I think perhaps each one is a truth, of many truths.”

  “Would my Queen Bee hear the answers of the Carmelites? Would she know what I once thought true?” He need not ask, and he knows he need not. “The Carmelites claim they are the Elect.”

  I think, who does not think this of themselves?

  “They say one can only join the Elect by rigorous renouncing of the world.”

  I think, Yeshu would ask how one can love the Father yet reject what he has made?

  “They say, as says Dositheus, that the world is the creation of a foolish god. They say it is they who shall inherit the Lord’s Kingdom on Earth.”

  I think, How can one inherit what is already his? Or hers.

  “And here, and in other places like this place, they await the ‘wondrous child’ who heralds the coming of the Kingdom. They await the Restorer. They will wait forever if need be. For a time, I waited with them. But I, as I was, could not wait long. I must ask my questions.”

  Over and over, people everywhere await a “herald of the coming day.” They await “the One who stands forth.” And here, in this place, they wait for the Restorer. In silence, I thank Isis that the Loud Voice is silent within me.

  Seth smiles to say this next thing and I smile to hear it: “They were not sorry to see me go.”

  Nyx finds us. In a great black flapping, my new friend alights on the low stone wall that rings the tower roof, and Seth, watching her as she struts toward me, says, “Only the Voice of the Few, who is the ‘wondrous child,’ would attract even such a one as this.”

  I drop my smile as I once dropped my magic pots. I stare at him, horror full in my eyes. Yea Balaam! Does he call me the wondrous child? Seth knows my alarm but takes no pity. “Have you never wondered why I came again and again to the house of Heli bar Nehushtan? Why I awaited you in the wilderness? Why I name you Magdal-eder, She of the Temple Tower, or why I went with you into the Land of Egypt, and there was so changed, I could not return to the beliefs of my youth?”

  I stare at him. Yes, I have wondered. When younger, I wondered often. But as the years passed, my wonder grew less as I grew as accustomed to Seth as I was accustomed to my hand. By now I grip the stones of the wall.

  “Did Socrates not hold that ignorance is all there is of evil, meaning evil to be that which harms the soul? No matter what it gain a man; if he harms others, he harms his soul. Therefore, how could I follow those who would kill for a god? Or call themselves the Elect, thereby sentencing all others to be outside the love of a god? How could I, knowing John of the River, call myself Carmelite? How could I, knowing Philo, call myself Nazorean? For
each of these fears the world and would set themselves apart as God’s chosen. Each of these would see the world destroyed so that they alone might inherit its ashes. Even for the love of Philo, I could not call myself Therapeut. And as for the Essenes, these are more rabid than any, and place no value on mind or the feminine. This is what I have learned, Mariamne: that beliefs are the masters of the world and that all masters are tyrannical. I find therefore that there is no sect, no teaching, in which I might place my heart. There is nothing but what I myself hear within.”

  “But Seth, you agree there is no one wondrous child? Yeshu names us all wondrous.”

  It is now that Seth looks at me as he has never looked at me. It is as if he gazes for the first time at the Great Library of Alexandria. “Have you never wondered why, when I overheard Tata speak of your Death, and hoping to hear more of it, I asked also the man Yehoshua the Nazorean to hear of it too? And have you never understood the zeal of my affection for you?” At this, I flush and hang my head. For the world, I would not hurt Seth. He lifts my chin so that I must look at him. His touch is as soft as carded wool. “Then learn it now, Mariamne of the Temple Tower. I was mistaken to think we might wed. Because he is called, there is One who appears as the Shepherd among Lambs; but there is one who has come to herald that Shepherd. By the Voice within you and by your very life, you are that wondrous child. And though I once thought it John of the River, now I see it is Yehoshua of the Nazoreans who stands forth as a lion. Yeshu is the Messiah. And I pity him.”

  Turning my head so that I might not see, I look straight into the unblinking eye of Nyx. It is as cold as obsidian, as mad as Herod. She clacks her beak at me, cocks her head and ruffles her feathers of glossy black.

  If even Seth believes this thing of Yeshu, surely all is undone.

  The Elect have sent for us. They would hear she whom Seth calls the wondrous child. They would hear too Salome who walked with John. But most of all, they would hear Yehoshua the Nazorean.

  In this world of perpetual silence, Seth assures us that nothing short of Yeshu being called the Restorer could have done this.

  And so it is that on this early day in the month of Tevet, when the hard rains come in the valleys, and soft snow falls on Carmel, we stand before the Carmelites for the first time, and this after descending deep under the Temple. Just as the wilderness, here in this secret place, there is a further secret place.

  Despite my cloak, it is cold here. Despite my supper of boiled vegetables, I am hungry. Though deep in shadow, I know this shadowed room holds nothing. The fire would not warm a hand, much less the whole of a person. The lamps do not light more than the small space between us. But I become accustomed to cold and to hunger and to darkness, as I become accustomed to all else. All seven Carmelites, men and women, are older by years than John of the River, save one, who is no older than Seth. This one shares with Yeshu the unusual length of his hair, which falls below his shoulders, though he does not share the color. With Seth, he shares his beauty and his evident wealth. There is a lifting of his nostril as if he might catch our scent and, by this, know us.

  Where all these would sit, we four would stand.

  The elders have silently taken their places on benches, have silently arranged their clothing, have settled and become more silent still. And when all this is done, still there is silence. The moments stretch behind us as shadows stretch before the sailing moon. We wait. And we wait. Until, finally, there comes a movement. The oldest male among them turns to whisper into the ear of his neighbor. Who then whispers into the ear of her neighbor. And then there is a veritable hiss of whispering. And when all are silent again, the male, who names himself Matthat of Jamnia, lifts a thin finger to point at Seth, holds it for a moment, and then, in a voice as eager and as piping as a child’s, says, “This one is always a tumble of questions, and how he would read! So much lamp oil.” Matthat shakes his head as if such things were impossible of understanding. Behind him, others shake theirs. But I understand and am amused. As is Yeshu. As is Salome. Could there be four together so capable of such “a tumble of questions”?

  From among them another speaks up. This one names herself Ammia, and is older by far than any here, older, I think, even than the age of the Ptolemaic doctor Sabaz. She looks directly at Yeshu. “I hear that you call yourself Messiah.”

  Not the young man, but every elder in the room leans forward to hear Yehoshua the Nazorean respond, he who has amazed them now for many days. The young man has leaned not forward, but back.

  Yeshu does not flush and he does not tighten in all his parts, but answers in the low and musical voice I now so love, “I do not call myself this.”

  “But others do?”

  “So I am told.”

  “Well, then, are you the Messiah?”

  Yeshu smiles. Do I alone see the bleakness in it? “Tell me, old woman, what do you think to call me by calling me Messiah?”

  In her person, which is small and as spare as a stool, in the severity of her regard, which is as the iron nails of Cleopas, and in the way she does not turn away from the clear regard of Yeshu, Ammia puts me in mind not of Sabaz, but of Theano. “As for myself, I do not know what to call you, but if I were to name you Messiah, I would mean you were the Restorer of the Elect.”

  “And what would I, if I were your Restorer, restore you to?”

  All but the young man move to protect themselves from such blasphemy. Ammia is made of sterner stuff. “It is written that One comes who will defeat the Archon, which has formed this world, and that he will make the fallen to walk again.”

  Hearing this, I think: it seems that Dositheus is far from alone in his philosophizing. Hearing this, Yeshu asks, “And are you fallen?”

  In my struggle to contain the Loud Voice—in this place of silence, oh Isis, it would come now after its own long silence?—I catch the thoughts of Ammia. She asks herself if, after all, Yeshu is simple? Consider what he does each day. Consider his laughter. She decides he is simple; therefore, she will speak to him very slowly. “We are fallen into a world of sorrow and of pain. There is no man and no woman who is not fallen, save the Restorer. What god of goodness would make such a world? What god of goodness would place us here? Therefore, no god of goodness has made this place.”

  “Is there, then, no goodness here?”

  “There is goodness, but it is beaten back again and again by the Archon, and by his lesser deities who are the nephilim. We are taught and we believe there is no hope for us until the Restorer comes from Baal Jehoshua. And just as the prophet Elijah, who sleeps under this very mountain, waits, so too do we who are the Elect wait for him here in perfect silence and perfect faith.”

  Salome moves against me. Though the names change, is this not as the many Nazorean believe? All look to a messiah sent to redeem those who would believe in him, and do his bidding. And the Essenes and the Zealots, do they not increasingly assist their coming savior in acts of violence and outrage?

  Yeshu’s voice is lower still. “And if your Restorer does not come?”

  “If you are not he, still he will come.”

  “Until then, you do no other thing?”

  The old woman shakes her head. “What other thing would you have us do? We would do harm to no man, no matter how odious that man to us. We would not cause the people to suffer more from their oppressors. Until the Redeemer comes, we are trapped in the flesh. Nothing but his coming will restore us. Answer me, then, by your acts, by your words, by your very name, Yehoshua of Galilee, which is as our Jehoshua of Gilgal, which in Greek is Galilee, are you the Messiah?”

  I close my throat. I bite back the words that would come shouting forth. I will not be a spectacle before the Carmelites, for all Seth thinks me the wondrous child! But Yeshu is stopped before he can answer, and I see he is as grateful for this as I am grateful, though my relief is blunted by some cold thing that chills me as nothing has ever chilled me. Not the coming of the Loud Voice, not Father banishing Salome, nor his calling
me whore; not the crippling of Addai or Salome inexorably leaving me; not Yeshu learning my name, not even Herod come for Yeshu, it is this thing: Yehoshua the Nazorean does not know the answer to Ammia’s question. Yeshu does not know if he is the Messiah.

  I would turn here and now to him. I would look into his eyes and into his mind and into his very heart, but the young man, whose clothing is linen and linen only, and whose hair is loose and long, stands suddenly. Something here has so moved this one, he can no longer sit.

  He takes a step toward Yeshu; he holds up his hand, saying, “I know you.”

  Yeshu turns to face this third speaker. “As you know me, sir, might I then hear your name?”

  “I am Apollonius of Tyana.”

  My jaw has dropped, Salome gives an audible gasp. This is the traveler who calls himself Pythagoras come again? This is the celebrated seer of Cappadocia whose beauty and learning, as well as his healing and his miracles and his raising of the dead, is so great it is proverbial now to say, “Whither do you hurry? Are you on your way to see the young man?” He must be as learned as Seth; certainly he has traveled farther. The lands of Greece, of Asia, of Egypt, even of Babylon: all these have felt his unshod foot.