Revelations of the Ruby Crystal

by Barbara Hand Clow

  Sarah couldn’t keep the smile from her face. Simon was the first person she’d ever met outside of moldy academics that knew anything about Marcion. But he is a Jew and I’m a Catholic, she reminded herself as her body heated up with the thrill of finding somebody to talk with about her most passionate interest. She had been raised to be deeply suspicious of Jews. If her father, a strict Boston Catholic, knew what she was doing right now, he’d be furious. She had better just enjoy lunch and get out of there fast.

  “Well, I’m amazed that you’ve heard about Marcion,” she said. “I came across him because I was interested in the formation of the New Testament canon. It wasn’t until I read about Marcion that I thought about how demeaning it was for the early Christians to call Hebrew scripture ‘Old’ just because their scripture was newer.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Simon replied heatedly. “I’ve always thought Marcion had it right, that the Jews should have retained their own wisdom literature and practices and that the new Christians should have written whatever they wanted about their Christ, or Jesus, that Christianity should be a totally new religion.

  So my ancestors probably agreed with Marcion on some level. Their scriptures were their sacred culture, their heritage. Maybe they felt the Christians were stealing their scripture to legitimize their new religion. If Jesus was the Christians’ teacher, a divine visitation from God, then why would they need anything more?”

  Simon spoke from a burning inner pain that had ignited when his sneering, cold, rich college classmates treated him like a pariah. Even now, more than fifteen years later, the disdain and rejection burned inside him as a core wound. His education at Williams and later Harvard had, however, given him the ability to write and speak incisively about Judeo-Christian issues in a way that never insulted non-Jews. He was still deeply intrigued by the anti-Semitism lurking under the surface of Christian culture.

  Sarah sympathized greatly with Simon’s experience of anti-Semitism. Her studies had brought her face-to-face with the pains Jews suffered over the centuries from Christian judgment. Listening to Simon talk while watching his passionate facial expressions, she also felt his body. Somehow she actually felt the sensation of his thigh muscles tightening as he recalled those days in college. I wonder if he’s married? Feeling heat in her pelvis, a new sensation, her mind wandered. Her cheeks and chest warmed as she watched deep blue lights flashing in his dark eyes. I like watching his fine hands and taut arms while he talks. I wonder if it’s the red wine? Thankfully, a marvelous plate of antipasto served with crisp garlic crackers arrived, and they dove into the vegetables soaked in rich Italian olive oil.

  Admiring her piece of toast slathered with capers, mushrooms, garlic, and shaved Romano cheese, she replied, “Well, I’m Catholic, from an old Irish family in Boston. Until I encountered Marcion’s point of view, it never would have occurred to me that the early Christians stole the Hebrew Bible from the Jews. But after studying the sources, I can see Marcion was really afraid the newly emerging religion would lose sight of the authentic Jesus if it was too attached to Judaism. I often wonder how our Christian beliefs would have evolved if they hadn’t attached the Hebrew Bible to the Christian canon.

  “When I was twelve years old, I was given a Bible. Being a typical Catholic girl, I’d never before read the Bible, but I dove into it right away thinking it was strange that the Old Testament was a thousand pages long, yet the New Testament tacked on at the end had only around two hundred pages! I wondered if a mistake had been made and they’d given me a Jewish Bible! I forgot this until just now.”

  Hearing Sarah describe her strong religious background, Simon found himself wondering if she’d ever had sex. He could tell she was trying to control strong energetic responses to him. She’s eating a lot to calm her body, and she seems to get cerebral when she’s having erotic feelings. She must be very inexperienced. Tasting his wine thoughtfully, he put it all together in his mind. Maybe she’s younger than I thought, maybe only twenty-one or twenty-two? He blurted out, “Sarah, how old are you?” He was embarrassed at the way the question had just slipped out, but Sarah responded without skipping a beat.

  “Oh, I’m twenty-five, but with the studies I’ve chosen, sometimes I feel like I’m ninety. I just can’t get rid of my obsession with the possibility that early Christianity took a wrong turn. I am so delighted to find somebody else who is interested in what people actually believed during this crucial turning point in religion. In my studies, 99 percent of what I have to focus on is scholarly arguments by writers who don’t think about what they actually believe. Well, I think Marcion may have been on the right track in 150 CE! Yet when you get into early Church dogma, the first thing you notice is the big Marcion cover-up directed by the early Church Fathers. There were and are a lot of powerful people—Jews and Christians—who don’t want anybody to hear anything about Marcion of Pontus. I don’t know what they were afraid of. By the way, Simon, did you know in Marcion’s era there was a significant teacher named Appelles who agreed with Marcion?”

  He smiled at her obvious excitement. “Really? I imagine you and I could stay here all afternoon, but unfortunately I have to get back to the office. Can we have dinner sometime soon and get more deeply into Marcion?” As soon as the words popped out, he realized how much he was hoping she’d agree.

  Sarah hesitated only a moment. “Okay, but on the condition that we share the expense. ‘Go Dutch,’ as they say in the States.”

  “Of course,” he responded, and they exchanged e-mails and phone numbers.

  2

  Reviving the Sibyl

  Simon’s article about the early Roman villa appeared in the weekend edition of Corriere della Sera, and Sarah read it with great interest. In spite of her difficulty reading in Italian, his painterly skill with words brought the beauty of the site right back. He hadn’t called her yet and she wondered if he would; it had been four days. Was he as interested in our conversation as I was, or was he just being polite? But Sunday afternoon he called and asked if she’d like to join him the following Tuesday for a private tour of the site and lunch at the little trattoria. She agreed, finding, to her surprise, that she could hardly wait.

  Simon used a key to open the gate by the sidewalk and then led Sarah down the steep, narrow steps. The sun had already warmed the street above, yet the stairwell was moist and cool. Noticing the way she grabbed the handholds on the sidewall as she made her way down, he offered her his hand.

  “You look great,” he said. She wore tight and faded jeans, a gray cotton top, and a blue jean jacket. Her reddish-brown hair waved back and forth across her back. It was full and wild as if she’d just washed it. When she took his hand for support on the rocky stones, he felt an intense hot rush that took him by surprise. What the hell is this, Cupid’s arrow?

  Sarah was about to take her hand back once she had her footing. But she fell sideways right into Simon when a flash of dirty gray fur scraped against a stone near her ankle. The cat flew past her knees and bolted. Simon held her up, reaching under her arms to stop her fall as she muttered, “Damned things, they are all over the place! Thanks.” She caught his scent, sweet like good essential oil, maybe frankincense.

  Simon felt like using the hand that had moved up to her left shoulder to turn her and kiss her. But he could sense by the rigidity of her body that this would be a disaster. Meanwhile, at the base of her spine, Sarah felt the same heat she had felt while talking to him last week. To regain her bearings, she looked away and scanned the site.

  They were more than twenty feet below street level. Although the ceiling was gone, allowing the late-day sun to dapple the stones, the air was musty and acrid from cat spray, black moss, and dry plants growing wild in patches of dirt. An inscription or a scratching on a stone caught Sarah’s interest. Relieved to be back in her mind, she moved closer, asking, “Is this one of the unusual symbols you mentioned last week?”

  Simon followed her over to the stone. “Yes, this is a very
interesting one. It’s on the back wall of what was once an inner courtyard where the archaeologists say there may have been a fire altar because they found charred stone bowls and a few figurines.”

  Together they examined the symbol, which was the upper half of a woman’s body on top of a small triangle. It was as if the triangle was her skirt. The woman’s arms were raised and holding sticks, possibly snakes. Simon and Sarah stared at the symbol, transfixed. Nearby, large bumblebees hummed lazily, dipping into blue cornflowers.

  He continued, “I think this is a version of the Middle Eastern snake goddess, Tanit. But the archaeologists did not identify it. The main work on this site was done more than a hundred years ago, when such an idea would have been anathema since Tanit was pagan. So as usual, they say it’s an unknown religious symbol.”

  “Can I touch it?” Encouraged by his favorable nod, she lightly ran her fingers over the defining lines to see if she could feel grooves.

  Simon watched her long delicate fingers, and he felt that strange disorientation again—a few minutes zipping by in a second. Her amethyst bracelet slipped down over her wrist and caught a flash of light. He felt a strange swirling feeling in his mind, as if watching something he had already seen somewhere else.

  He snapped himself back into place. “Come over here to see something that I think is related to it.”

  He led her a few feet away along a partially ruined inner wall of the ancient courtyard and pointed out a deep niche in a part of the wall that hadn’t collapsed. The niche, which was eight inches deep and about a foot square, was cut into a stone block, a perfect little outdoor altar.

  “This is where they found a standing figurine with a triangular skirt and a few grains of wheat, so they concluded it was a place to make offerings. Of course the rats ate all but a few fragments of the wheat long ago. I will take you to the Museo Romano to see it someday if you want.”

  “I’d love to do that, but luckily I read your article in last weekend’s paper, so I’ve already seen your photo of the figurine and read your comments about it. I have the same impression that it’s Tanit. You’re an excellent writer in Italian, as far as I can tell by my limited reading ability.”

  Simon was genuinely touched and thanked her for the compliment. “So now that you already know some things about this house, what would you like to see next?”

  “To tell you the truth, and I don’t know why, I just want to feel this place.” Sarah didn’t know how Simon would feel about such a thing—perhaps he’d think she was a weirdo—so she struggled to explain. “Normally I’d want to examine every significant thing there is, but since we have the place to ourselves, I’d just really like to, well, sit and feel it first.”

  Simon knew what she meant about how special this place felt. After reading the archaeological reconstructions he’d collected for the article, he had come back to the site two weeks ago for what he thought would be his last visit. He had sat on the hearthstone where the cats carried out the sacrificial ritual, closed his eyes, and entered into a meditative state, trying to visualize the house as it was in the beginning. A fuzzy white screen appeared in his mind that seemed to be suspended in front of his face. Then on the screen, the original house precipitated into form like a watercolor emerging on paper or a photo in the developing fluid. During this brief moment, he saw pastel blues, pinks, and beiges and a green garden. He heard metal clinking, dogs barking, children’s laughter, and saw a beautiful woman’s face. It was enchanting, quite unlike anything he had experienced before, a mystic dream. He’d erased it from his mind until this moment. Was she experiencing something similar?

  “Maybe you should take a moment to be alone here while I wait for you?” he offered. He walked quietly over to a partially standing column and leaned against it.

  Grateful that Simon didn’t seem to think her request at all out of the ordinary, Sarah sat down on the edge of the same hearth where Simon had sat two weeks before. She closed her eyes as soft breezes carried the sounds from above down into the pit. The sounds faded to be replaced by the low hum of bees sucking on nectar. She shivered when she heard a soft, lilting voice say, Follow it; follow it where it will go. You know how to use the thread leading back to your heart.

  When the voice was gone, she felt a chill in the back of her neck as she opened her eyes to see Simon still leaning against the crude stone pillar. She told him she was ready to go. After they emerged from the steps, he unlocked the gate as she said quietly, “Thank you for giving me that moment. It sounds silly, but I think I heard a woman’s voice that encouraged me to keep on going with my work. I can’t imagine whose voice it was; I’ve never had a message like that before. It was very real and it means something, so thank you for bringing me here.”

  Simon nodded. “A few younger archaeologists think an ancient oracle lived in that house. They believe the family was called Cumae, but they can’t prove it. The famous oracular school of the Cumaean Sibyl was near Naples, so it’s possible that family had a house here since Romans often sought her wisdom. She was more famous in early Rome than the priestesses of the Delphic Oracle in Greece, but we don’t know very much about her everyday existence. So maybe you heard the Sibyl’s voice? To me, this place feels magical.” He smiled. “Let’s have lunch.”

  They were back at Simon’s favorite table sipping red table wine. They ordered and nibbled on fresh bread dipped in olive oil and balsamic vinegar while they waited for their meals. They looked so comfortable together the diners around them thought they’d known each other for years. Normally Simon—a great seducer and lover of many women—would be putting his hand lightly and insistently on her outer thigh by now. Or he might have drawn his body up close to the table’s edge, taking her hands by the wrists, softly pressing her inner palms with his thumbs. But something was causing him to act very differently. I wonder if I’m restrained because she’s frigid, afraid of men in some way. But, no, that isn’t it. It’s something else . . .

  He searched her face, capturing her eyes for a fleeting moment. He saw Sarah take a deep breath as her gaze flickered uncertainly. As he struggled to hold her tentative gaze, he experienced another time distortion, the third one, as if a whole hour of the distant past was swept away in the wind. Where is my mind going when this happens to me? The flashes of light from her eyes are hypnotic. She seemed to be waiting for him to say something, anything.

  “Strange things seem to be happening to me, Sarah, since I’ve met you. I wonder if my edges are thinning?”

  She still didn’t say anything, so he continued. “After I met you last week, I looked up that Appelles guy, conceivably my ancestor, who lived in Marcion’s time. Did you know Appelles believed in a psychic or channeler named Philumena?”

  Simon was curious as to how Sarah would respond. He suspected her inquiries into Marcion were forcing her to get honest with herself about her religion. To his surprise, however, she didn’t take him up on his invitation to discuss her favorite subject, Marcion.

  Instead, Sarah set down her bread and blurted, “Simon, you are having an effect on me, a huge effect, and I’m not used to that. For the moment, please listen to me and do not interrupt. If my father had any idea we were having lunch together, he’d put out a Mafia hit on you! My father is a bigwig in Opus Dei. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it’s a Catholic power group kind of like the Freemasons. I don’t really know what they are or what they do. To be honest with you, I think they’re kind of weird. But because of his involvement with them, I’m expected to be a power Catholic like him. That’s why he supports my expensive religious education, the reason I’m here with you this afternoon. Lucky for me, he’s never heard of Marcion. He thinks I’m just a studious Catholic girl who’s interested in the early Church Fathers, which I am. It never occurred to him or to me that my studies could change my beliefs.” She took a deep breath. “Now I’ve run into you, a Jewish guy who knows all about Marcion, and you have the perspective from the other side of the question. Yo
u are a person I can talk to, somebody who can help me get the wider view on issues that could change the course of my life. But how can I forget that my father would shoot you on the spot just because you’re Jewish and having lunch with me? Never mind the other stuff!”

  “Whoa!” Simon tried to interject, but Sarah held up her hand.

  “Please let me finish. I haven’t had much experience with men. I’ve been so busy with my studies, plus my father has drilled into me that I need to avoid men until I’m ready to marry.”

  Simon thought Sarah was building a wall between the two of them, but he resisted interrupting her. Painful memories of Williams and Harvard welled up in his mind, including the day Martha Mills’s father ran him out the back door and across the lawn, screaming he’d kill Simon if he didn’t stop sleeping with his daughter. It had been a favorite anecdote of his Jewish friends at Harvard, but they had never realized he was still suffering inside through every retelling even as they screamed with laughter. Are Catholic girls all like this?

  Meanwhile, Sarah was still speaking earnestly. “So even a friendship with you goes against the way I’ve been brought up. Regardless, when you looked into my eyes the way you did a moment ago . . .” She hesitated and then raised her eyes to his. “You are special, Simon, but it can’t happen. The only way we can spend more time together is if this relationship never becomes more than it is right now. Otherwise, we could lose our chance at friendship. It seems like we have so many things to share, a bond that would be valuable to us both. I have to ask you to, to control yourself, to block your natural feelings.” She stopped, seemingly at a loss for any more words.