Thoth, the Atlantean

by Brendan Carroll

  “I do think so.” Gil sat down across from him and began to pour up the tea. “You see, Master, knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

  ((((((((((((()))))))))))))

  Lucio chased after Vanni and the two dogs, but his heart was not in it. Vanni’s words concerning his soul had been highly disturbing and had painfully brought back the memory of Andrea Larmenius and her talk about owning his soul. He had never given that part of their relationship much thought. He did not believe that a man could sell his soul for any reason, to anyone. He believed that the soul existed separately from the body, and he believed that souls could be lost, but not sold or traded. Moved perhaps or released from the body before death as he had seen in the case of Simon of Grenoble and Jasmine de Bleu, but sold? Why had Mark Andrew done that to him? Sometimes he absolutely hated the man! There was simply too much water under that old bridge, and that brought him to another thought he had been avoiding. Meredith!

  Konrad’s account of what had occurred in America had astounded him more than his own account of what had occurred in Scotland had astounded Mark Andrew. Mark had seemed completely unaffected by Catharine de Goth’s surprise visit and had commented dryly to him afterwards that old evils always come home to roost. What he had meant by that had been unclear. But to hear Meredith was still alive! It was very great news indeed and relieved one burden on his mind that he’d not realized he’d been carrying. To know she was safe and sound and supposedly happy was a great relief to him. But now he was wondering about something else.

  “Vanni!” he shouted and the boy stopped to wait on him.

  He caught up with him near the mound of rocks surrounded by the tall iron fence and sat down after throwing the red and white stick for the dogs. The big dogs bounded away.

  “You really can’t see souls, can you?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Vanni said abstractedly. “I don’t know what souls are, Father.”

  “The soul is the spiritual part of every living person.”

  “Then why don’t the faeries have them?” Vanni asked him. “They are living people.”

  “Faeries are different.” Lucio shrugged. He did not know the answer to this question.

  “How so? Il Dolce Mio has a soul.”

  “How do you know?” Lucio asked him and took the stick from Astro’s mouth. He threw it again and the dogs were off once more.

  “I can see it.”

  Vanni sat down next to him.

  “I thought you didn’t know what souls are.” Lucio frowned.

  “I meant, I can’t see all of them.”

  Vanni made a terrible face, and Lucio caught his chin in his hand and turned his face up.

  “Look at me!” the Italian said sternly. “Either you can see them or you can’t! Now which is it?”

  “I can see them,” Vanni admitted miserably.

  “Can you smell them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what does mine smell like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why not? Is it an unfamiliar smell? Something you don’t recognize?” Lucio asked hopefully.

  “No. I just can’t smell it.”

  “Why not?” He asked again as his heart began to sink.

  “Because you don’t carry it with you like the others.”

  “Where is it?” Lucio heard himself ask.

  “Sir Ramsay has it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  Lucio let go of his chin and pressed his hands to his face.

  “Who told you?”

  “Il Dolce Mio.”

  “Why? Why did he tell you this?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “You must tell me, my son.” Lucio looked at him more sternly.

  “I promised not to tell. You won’t make me break my promise. It would not be honorable.”

  “Then can you tell me how Sir Ramsay came to be in possession of my soul?”

  “No. I don’t know how it is done.”

  “Did someone give it to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who? Who gave it to him?”

  “You did.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No! I did not!”

  “I think you did.”

  “Don’t argue with me!”

  “As you wish.”

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  “Santa Maria!”

  “Santa Maria!”

  ((((((((((((()))))))))))))

  Mark Andrew was in the cellar laboratory again, studying the tablets’ form and beauty when Lucio returned from his romp with the dogs and the boy.

  “Sir Ramsay!” the Italian’s voice startled him from his thoughts.

  He turned slowly on the stool to face the Knight of the Golden Eagle in the dim light offered by the guttering oil lamp. The fuel, burning low, cast deep shadows on the Chevalier du Morte's face.

  “Sir Dambretti!” He mimicked the Knight’s tone.

  “A word with you!” It was quite obvious Lucio was extremely angry. His Italian accent was very pronounced and he clipped each word abruptly, adding too much air at the end of each.

  “Just one?” Mark goaded him. Mark had no idea why he was suddenly angry with Lucio. The anger appeared unbidden as if hidden only beneath the thinnest of veneers. The casual remark concerning leaving him to the Saracens had sounded some ancient, hidden alarm bell still vibrating in his head.

  “You mock me?” Lucio drew himself up and looked at him in amazement. “Do you not see how angry you have made me?”

  “I? I have angered you, my Brother? Impossible! That is against the Rule of Order. Do not provoke thy Brother to anger. You break another Rule of Order. And that is to falsely accuse your Brother and thereby you break the very Rule of Order of which you accuse me. You provoke me to anger.” Mark stood slowly and blinked at him rapidly. He reached automatically toward his hip and realized that his sword was upstairs under his mattress.

  “How so?” Lucio frowned at him and placed his hand on the hilt of the dagger he wore on his belt.

  “Your jokes are not funny, my friend,” Mark told him.

  “My jokes? And what of your jokes? Why would you pretend to be Jesus Christ? Why would you taunt my son about his gift? He is a precious son of God. And he has been placed in my hands for my keeping. I will not have you mock me or my son.”

  “Mock you? I did nothing of the sort. I merely questioned the boy about his gift. This precious son, the gift of God. The product of a union you hardly recognize as even having happened. Your son! Your son! And what of my son? What of my grandson? What of my sons?”

  Lucio took a step back toward the door. This made no sense.

  “My children are made to suffer for my sins. My sins! Does that mean that they are not gifts of God? Did God see fit to give me a gift and then make it to suffer in front of my eyes? What manner of gift is this? What manner of God is this we serve, Lucio?”

  “Blasphemy!” Lucio spat the word.

  “The Great Creator who made me in His image! Made me a shining light in the Heavens, and then cast me down because I dared to look upon His creations with an appreciative eye?”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.” Lucio shook his head.

  Mark slapped his right hand against his head and squeezed his eyes shut before looking at him again.

  “Do you think you hold the patent on suffering?” he asked.

  “I’m not following you.” Lucio took another step backwards. He had totally forgotten why he had come here.

  “Do you think that I cannot live without you?”

  “I never said that!”

  “Do you think I do not love you?”

  “I never questioned that!”

  “Then why? Why would you say such a thing even in passing?”

  “What?! Say what?!” Lucio was truly alarmed now.
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  “That you should have let me die!”

  “Santa Maria! I didn’t mean it!” Lucio’s eyes grew wide.

  “Then why did you say it?” Mark leaned against the counter and closed his eyes again. “Tell me.”

  “Because… because… I don’t know why.” Lucio shook his head.

  Mark Andrew began to mutter something in a dialect Lucio did not recognize, then clamped both hands to his head and sank to the floor.

  Lucio went down on one knee, frowning deeply at him.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  Mark Andrew looked up at him and shook his head.

  “Repeat that! What you just said!” Lucio told him.

  Mark repeated the words that meant nothing to him. He had no idea where they came from.

  “That’s it!” Lucio stood up. “That’s it! That’s the dialect! That’s it! It makes sense now!”

  The Italian was up and gone before Mark could climb to his feet. When he turned again to the table, the inscriptions on the tablet were as clear as the King’s English to his eyes. The words jumped out at him from the center of the leaf laying exposed beneath the light of the flame.

  “Then heard I the voice. Hear thou and understand. The flame is the source of all things, containing all things in potentiality,” Mark read aloud from the tablet. He reached up and took the lamp from the holder and set it on the counter. With shaking hands, he added more oil to the barrel and then turned up the wick. “The Order that sent forth light is the Word and from the Word, come life and the existence of all!” The Order! The Order! The Order that sent forth light is the Word. The Order is the Word! “And again spoke the voice saying: The Life in thee is the Word. Find thou the Life within thee and have powers to use of the Word.” The life in thee! The life in thee! The answer was there. Just out of reach. Just beyond his grasp. The life in thee! He sat back down on the stool and leaned his elbows on the table.

  “Long I watched the light, the flame, pouring forth from the fire, realizing that Life was in the Order and that man is one with the Order and with the fire. List now ye, O man, to this word I leave with thee. Use it and ye shall find power in its sound. Say ye the word and power ye shall find. Yet must ye understand that man if of the light and light is of man.”

  He ran his hand over the stone and found warm to the touch oddly enough.

  “Listen ye, O man, and hear a mystery stranger than all that lies beneath the sun. Know ye, O man, that all space is filled by worlds within worlds; aye, one within the other yet separate by Law. The one within the other. The other within the one. One and the same, yet different. Together, yet separate. Back to back, never seeing eye to eye, sharing space as one. Face to face, and yet alone, one to some and some to none.”

  Mark Andrew looked at the flame and the meaning of the words became clear to him. As clear as the dawn washed by a new spring rain.

  The words written so long ago by his own hand had predicted this very day for himself when he would realize that he could not hold onto his brother. That he could not hold onto his Brother. That he could not hold onto any other man or woman. Not by strength of will or by magick or even by love. That he was alone and complete unto himself for within him was another life, the other life the Creator had given him, his other half, his other self that he had pushed aside in order to make his home among men. He was not a man! He would never be a man and until this very moment, he had never really believed it.

  Ashmodel had been right. He did not belong here. And he had been fooling himself concerning Meredith all along. He had been trying to replace the missing part of himself with her. Trying to make her fit in the empty half of his being like a missing piece of a puzzle. And when he had found himself manifested in his purely female half, he had again, immediately tried to fill the missing portion with Lucio. So it mattered not which portion was evident in the physical form, the search remained the same. The goal unattainable in the separated state of being in which men live. The missing piece had not been missing at all, just turned the wrong way. Back to back. List ye, O man! He had written these words to man, to men. And not just men, but women as well. He had not written as a man, but to men and then he had become obsessed with what he could not have. When had he lost his way? When had he stepped out of the light and into the darkness? And it had taken him two thousand years… nay, longer… to find his way back to the truth. And though he had written these words to man, he had, incidentally written them to himself.

  And the Word? Unity! It was just as John Paul had said. They had to stand together. If they did not stand together, all would be lost. He got up and the room seemed brighter. His head was light and his spirits soared. He reached into his pocket and took out the photograph of Meredith and looked at it once more before laying it carefully, face-down on the bench. The Word. Zin-Uru. The wilderness. The desert. The home of Abrah-im. The Ur-im. Seraph-im. Cherub-im. People of Ur. People of the wilderness, people of the desert. People of Abrah-im. Abraham from the land of Ur. Unity of purpose, unity of the people of Abraham. The descendents of Abraham. The chosen ones of God had lost their way due to a lack of Unity. The Israelites, as they wandered in the desert with Moses, had been lost because they had not stood together. They had not acted as One. As One with God. Mark’s mind seemed to fold in on itself and then take a leap forward.

  These things rushed through his head and he remembered seeing Abraham sitting at the flap of his tent in the desert. Abraham sitting across a low table from him. Abraham arguing with the Archangels. Abraham. And Melchizedek, King of Salem, brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God! And he blessed him, and said, Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth: and blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand! These words had been written centuries before Abraham had met with Melchizedek. And he remembered that meeting. He remembered other meetings with the chosen one of God. And it had been then his confidence had begun to slip. What was it exactly that God saw in men? They were such hard creatures to understand. They spent all their lives trying to reconnect with something they had lost in the distant and dim past. Something that remained just out of reach.

  How stupid he had been! He had been jealous of them! He had wanted to understand them! He had wanted to know what it meant to be one of them! And now he knew. They were the great experiment and what had that made him? The greater experimenter? He walked out of the lab in search of Lucio.

  Ur had been in Chaldea. Chaldaic was the dialect, the language in which the tablets had been written. Not Egyptian! Thoth, the Atlantean, one of the shining ones of Uru. Ur-iel. The Angel of Ur. Long before the Egyptians had been Kings of the World, he had taught them as Thoth, and then he had moved on to Chaldea. And when the Egyptians had begun to forget the mysteries of the Great Pyramid, he had written these tablets so the mysteries would not be forgotten. And when he had lost his own purpose in the never-ending search for the final answer, he had been punished, and his unity had been taken from him, not as a reward, but as a punishment.

  No longer did he enjoy the Unity bestowed on him by the Creator, but he was split apart and cast aside on a new mission to learn why Unity is the ultimate goal, the ultimate search and the ultimate truth. Without Unity there is only sorrow, longing and chaos. Long journeys on perpetual roads to inevitable dead ends with nowhere to turn except back. To go back. To go back to the beginning of dis-Unity and begin the search again down yet another long road to another dead end. The truth being one cannot make the journey as one… alone. Synthesis being the key to a successful journey back to Unity. The Creator had seen fit to give men only half the key. In one life he may travel the road as a man and in the next life, he may travel the same road as a woman, but never could he travel the road as both and only as both could the journey be made to completion and what was completion? What was the ultimate goal of the Journey?

  Reunion with God. Impossible for man to unite with God without first attaining
Unity within himself, and the Creator had made this endless circle in which ordinary men were caught and flung round and round like the planets in their eternal orbits of the Sun, always trying to move closer to the object of their worship, but being pulled unceasingly in the opposite direction toward the coldness of interstellar space and ultimate oblivion in the darkness of the beyond. Men were like the great planets, treading a fine line between Light and Darkness. And like the planets, mankind revolved in place, now following the light, now falling into darkness. If balance were not found between light and dark, good and evil, they would drift eternal in the frozen wasteland beyond the life-giving rays of the Sun. Of the Son. Of the Sons of God. Balance. Symmetry. One side holding up the other. Unity.

  The entire Universe was built on the One Word of God: Universe. Uni-verse. The verse or Word would reveal all the secrets of creation to those who could receive it and understand. The Word. Uni. One. Uni-ty! The state of being One! Not in the sense of being alone, but being united. United, male with female, but not as in man with wife, but actually united as one, inseparable entity. Unity!

  He stopped at the door of the library. Lucio sat in front of the computer again. Working furiously on the keys. Translating the symbols on the Tablets when it was no longer necessary. The Italian did not even perceive his presence, so intense was his concentration on the screen. Mark Andrew walked quietly across the room and stood behind him. Without making a sound, he reached his right hand around his Brother’s head and then clamped it over the Italian’s forehead. Lucio froze, staring blankly at the screen, his hands poised over the keys.

  “Take back what is yours, Brother. Unity is the Word.”

  Mark Andrew leaned over him and kissed him lightly on top of his head. He released him quickly and left the room in search of Simon.

  Lucio sat blinking at the screen for several seconds and then began to type again. He stopped typing and leaped to his feet, running from the library shouting for Mark Andrew. He ran about the house startling and disturbing everyone from their naps or their prayers or their meditations or whatever they were doing. Everyone came from their rooms to follow the excited Italian as he raced about from the third floor to the lab in the basement looking for his Brother. All of them murmuring in wonder to each other and trying to stop him long enough to ask him what was wrong, but they could see that nothing was wrong, that apparently something was finally right. But he could not be stopped and soon he had a small throng of followers behind as he burst through the back door and into the garden. They followed him down the bricked path toward the patio, and then drew up short at the sight of Mark Andrew kneeling in front of Simon of Grenoble. The priest had both hands on Mark’s head and a veritable swarm of orbs made of shimmering blue light swarmed about them. Simon’s face was upturned to the Heavens as Mark Andrew confessed his sins to his Brother. Lucio stumbled back away from the sight and then turned. He frowned at the crowd of people following him as if noticing them for the first time. He hurried back toward them, motioning frantically for them to go back into the house.