A voice came near his ear and hissed:
‘Think of all those years in the wilderness, the fasting and meditation, the self-denials and sufferings…for what? Your scrap of a life has been marked by errors and you have led others to error thereby, for where is the Kingdom you proclaimed? Where is the Messiah you promised?’
John knew that he had seen Him with his very eyes! He had seen the spirit dove!
‘Ah…was this not a fine dream? Was it not a fleeting reflection that, like a delusion in the desert, is uncaused by reality? Is this not a trick of the light, of the mind, of the soul that wallows in its own one-sided raptures? You are less than less, remember that! No more than a speck of a speck and nothing you have done has a meaning!’
What a traitorous thought this was!
And yet…did he not himself say aeons before, that he must decrease while that other increased? That he must be less than less, so as to make way for Christ, who would come after him and who would be more and more? For was He not greater for His outward meekness? Was He not more powerful for His outward powerlessness, more Godly for His outward manliness? What had Christ Jesus said? He searched in his arid mind until he found it:
Blessed is he who is not ashamed of the man Jesus.
He understood it!
For who could be ashamed, who had seen what lay above, and below, and within him? Those who were ashamed that he was not a prophet or a king in outward ways, were only so because they had no faith to see the inner Greatness, the inner Power, the inner Godliness!
The dragons and demons and serpents, fearful of these thoughts, began to writhe and to uncoil and slither away from his soul, repelled into the dark corners of other cells. And so it was that deep in the dungeons of Machareus John the Baptist fell into peace, while not far away, from the Palace of Herod, there came the sound of shouts, of wild revelry and drunken merriment wafting on the dark breezes that passed over the sea of death and into the valley of tribulation.
For it was the anniversary of the death of Herod the Great and at this late midnight hour, Herod had run short of amusements to offer to his satiated guests.
And it was at this very moment that he called on Salome…to dance!
44
THE DANCE
The first time Herodias held the sword she was not taken by it because of the purity of its steel or the ornate craftsmanship of its pommel or the breadth of its tang nor even the trueness of its edge. She was impressed by its history.
Tales spoke how the sword made from a metal fallen from the sky and tempered in the blood of a dragon had been in the hands of Goliath when David slew him. David, having no weapon save a sling had cut off the giant’s head with it and had kept it for his own. Later, fearing its magic he had its hilt altered to depict not the dragon emblem of the Philistines, but his own star – the Star of David, which became the insignia of the Hebrew people. It was passed to his son, Solomon, who put a caveat on the sword so that it could not be used for evil. And that is how it had descended through the generations and came to rest in Herod’s hands. He, in turn, gave it to Herodias as a gift on the eve of their commitment to marry.
Once Herodias was wise to these things, she set her heart to unlocking its occult powers with a mighty ambitious greed. But despite all her concentration on it, its secrets continued to elude her until a vision in the smoke told her that the sword would not work in her hands until Solomon’s bewitchment was reversed, that is, until it shed blood again –not the blood of a Goliath, an evil man of great authority – but the blood of a pure man stripped of all power.
Such a man was John the Baptist!
She had waited a long time, but this night it seemed as if her plans might finally fall into place. After all, Venus was in Leo and she felt it in her bones that the moment was chillingly near.
It was the anniversary of her husband’s accession to the Tetrarchy and his birthday. A great banquet had drawn Herod’s Lords, his military authorities, and all his chiefs in Galilee and Perea to the fortress where they would drink and eat until they were drunk and satiated, bloated and replete.
Herod’s insatiable need to be loved and honoured had driven him to excess: pearls and onyx and gold had been distributed in the food, and in the cups sapphires and emeralds shimmered in the wine. One spectacle after another was performed – fire breathers, male dancers, magicians, and lion tamers. Even so, as the hours passed, the ignoble guests began calling for entertainment of a different kind. Entertainment that they knew only Herod could provide.
Now was time to cull some profit!
Herodias willed her thoughts into Herod’s head, willed them as much as if they were beings flapping their wings at her disposal. Herod, thinking them his own creatures of madness, drank down his wine and leaned his corpulence over the table to lean towards that beauty, which he so sorely wished to empower and to possess. He said to her,
‘I drink, therefore I am! I see your beauty, Salome, therefore I live!’
He raised his cup then, to that lithesome seductress, shaped and moulded and fashioned by Herodias for her own ends with incantations from smoke and air; that creation which she dangled always before Herod’s eyes like a morsel to a starved dog, and which she astutely removed from his jaws when it took her fancy.
Salome gave him a sour eye.
‘Don’t be cold, Salome. Your father needs comfort this night!’
Herodias was fond of the fact that her daughter, too, thought herself a woman of her own mind. It made her smile to see the girl unleashing her seductions as if they were of her own invention. But the stupid girl was dull of mind, for Herodias had not woven intelligence into her birth-spell, and so she had no notion that her dances were only alluring and mesmerising because she danced to Herodias’ tune!
Salome was still staring coldly at her stepfather. Herod had drunk too much seeking to flee from the bat’s wings and he took to fondling her daughter’s hair and saying, ‘My beauty! Console your father, dance one dance to make him merry!’
The room now burst into agreement. Herod’s chiefs and familiars had heard stories of Salome’s dances, which were said to induce even eunuchs to torments of passion and their eyes were full with those images that were called forth by wine and lust.
Salome, dressed in a sheer gown made from layers of silken fabrics adorned with pearls from Greece, opals from Rome, and Chrysolites, Beryls, and Topaz from lands beyond maps, gave Herodias a flash of daughterly disdain, and made her kohl-rimmed eyes bat their gilded lids at Herod.
‘Dance?’ she said, ‘why should I dance?’
‘The night is sad, Salome…dance to please your father!’
‘I do not wish to please you for you are not my father!’
He turned to Herodias, ‘Wife! Your daughter does not love me, again! Tell her she must love me!’
‘Why should she love you?’ Herodias said, ‘your father was the son of a camel driver!’
Herod’s vermilion face shone like a blooded moon, ‘I order her to love me!’ he said, ‘Do you hear me, Salome, I order that you love me!’
The room broke out in uncertain laughter, and Herod laughed too, until the happiness of the audience was diminished, and he realised he must say something.
‘Come, Salome…dance your dance to amuse me, for I am not merry this night, my spirits are pale!’
‘Your spirits are drunk!’ she said to him.
‘Yes, I am drunk on wine from Cyprus!’ he staggered to his feet, and raised his empty glass. ‘I am full of fish from the Euphrates, and peacocks fed on almond milk! I am a king and I am drunk and being drunk I beg you…’ he doubled himself unsteadily, and brought his face close to Salome’s. Indicating how small it should be with a thumb and forefinger, he said, ‘One little dance?’
Before the girl could answer Herodias made time pause, and keeping herself inwardly still, imaged forth a thought from out of her very skeleton itself, which she breathed out into the air. This black thought remained wafting in the b
reeze until it was inspired by her daughter, into her soul, which had earlier been seeded with feelings of revenge.
The girl’s eyes changed of a sudden and seemed to do battle for a moment with the birth of the…idea. Her face fell sour, as if the taste of this new orphan child of her mind were not to her liking. Still, she could not prevent herself from saying, ‘…I can always be made to change my mind!’
A great silence fell. Even the music was paused waiting to hear what would come next.
Herodias felt Salome’s delight as all eyes turned to her.
‘If I dance, what will you give me?’
Herod was breathless now. ‘What will you have? By my oath I shall give you whatever you wish for, if you will dance a dance! And I am a man of my oath, as all men know, I pride myself in this – that I do as I say. So tell me, what shall it be?’
Salome stood and threw the veil from her hair, and called for a servant to remove her sandals. She clapped for music, drums, cymbals, flutes and as the song began, so did she begin to stir her body, moving her shoulders and her hips, contorting by degrees, more and more heatedly, agitating her rounded belly, contracting and gyrating all those warm, womanly muscles of pleasure, to the measure and cadence of the drums. Her eyes, big, black, liquid-some, promised to engulf the soul of her onlookers. Her hands caressed unseen lovers, her legs entwined around their thighs, her hips pressed against their insubstantial flesh, her lips kissed their airy form–until she was a dervish of silk and flesh and air and gesture.
A wave of yearning engulfed the room, hearts throbbed and pounded and pulsed in a communal ritual of eroticism, and then, of a sudden, the unthinkable happened.
Salome fell to the marble floor and called for the music to halt.
From this position, crouching like a tigress waiting to pounce, breathless, watchful, with her colour high in her face and her alabaster breasts heaving, and those thighs, shapely calves and turned ankles, caressing the cold floor, she said to Herod, ‘I will trade, the dance of seven veils, for the head of John the Baptist…on a silver platter!’
Herodias smiled inwardly. Immersed in victory, she watched her husband’s lecherous face, bloated and full of the blood of sexual tension, blanch.
‘But my dear…’ he stuttered, ‘this is not possible!’ He looked about him for encouragement from his chiefs and supporters, but it was too late, their faces were engorged with the heat of Salome’s seductions and like wolves their jaws were ready to snap. ‘He is a prophet! I cannot do it! I shall give you anything else, half my kingdom, anything at all! Name your pleasure…just do not ask me for the head of this man!’
‘I will ask it, for it is what I want!’
Herod looked to his wife and Herodias made a shrug.
He said to Salome, ‘He is a holy man…I shall not do it! Notwithstanding my oath, I shall not do it…ask me for some other thing, my little one, anything at all, and it shall be yours!’
‘You do not keep your oaths then! Here is a man that cannot be trusted,’ Salome said to those in the room.
Herod said, ‘All I am saying is that you may ask me for something else, if you like.’
‘But I do not like anything else…!’
Herod grew fearful and leant in to Herodias and said in a strangled whisper, ‘This is your doing, you sorceress! You have enchanted the girl and now she wishes me to kill a prophet! I order you to put a stop to it!’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Herod.’
‘Don’t you see…there is a terrible portent in such a doing, someone will suffer for it!’
‘You seem to have become a prophet yourself!’ She said aloud, ‘Come husband, it is poor manners to keep our guests waiting for their entertainment!’
The room resounded in agreement.
She could read Herod’s thoughts. He was stuck between a rock and a wall, cornered by his own oath and beleaguered by his conscience. Facing dishonour on the one hand and, on the other hand, the ire of a God known for his disdain of aberrant kings.
His gaze fell on Herodias, and it said,
You are a witch and there is nothing to be done about it!’
He looked again at Salome. ‘Let it never be said, that Herod Antipas does not keep his word!’ It came out weak and lacked heart, ‘And yet you may change your mind, my dear!’
Salome smiled whitely, clapped and began a new dance. She took her time and listened to her body’s arousal, allowing it to titillate and to frustrate, to insinuate what it felt for itself. Amid a fever of rhythm and discordance, amid the shimmer of gold and silver, the ringing of the little bells and the pounding of drums, she dropped one veil after another, releasing, with her nakedness, the sexual force that she had enticed from the depths of her limbs, the hidden demons of lust in those inner wheels of pleasure embedded in her body. Their abundance made the room spin with an elemental force and caused a storm of passion to rise up into the hearts of men and women alike. And amid this spectacle of lust Herodias sat like a Titan, observing from the heights of her own cold Parnassus.
When it was over a breathless Herod ordered his guards to bring John the Baptist to the hall and Herodias arranged for her servant to bring the sword of David from its resting place.
When the man was brought forth, soiled, dirt encrusted, thin and emaciated, she was struck by his height, for great and awesome did he seem despite his deprivations, like a powerless Goliath! He did not speak, but looked about, taking the room in with a guarded eye. Only when he was forced to kneel and his eye fell on Herodias, did he say something.
‘Behold woman, the judgement of God shall come, and you shall be condemned for your iniquity! Lo, you shall never be at peace but shall wander the earth, bonded to your evil!’
She saw the gleaming of the burnished blade, and John the Baptist’s head come free from his body.
It fell to the floor to a chorus of gasps.
It made a wet thud.
The guard kicked the blood-spewing body out of the way, and brought the head by the hair to a silver platter, which a servant hastened to Herod.
Her daughter, struck by some semblance of remorse, fled the room, her hand preventing the bile in her mouth from spilling out. Herod, ducking and weaving to avoid the devil’s wings that flapped over his head, made a mournful gasp. All men sat shocked, brought back from the din of excess by the reality of death.
Herodias, however, was taken by the head upon the platter, for seeing it increased the magic in her bones, and made her feel so big as to engulf the earth with her jaws, and it was only when a servant removed the head from her sight that she awakened from this fascination. Now, from the night, came the hoot of an owl. But was it a portent of good fortune, or bad? It was too early to tell.
She gathered in the folds of her soul, and attentive, watchful, with her spine as cold as marble, she looked to the moment.
45
EXCALIBUR
John the Baptist was dragged, whipped, pushed and prodded across the cold compound and into the citadel of the castle by Herod’s guards. Upon entering the banquet hall he was blinded by light and stood a moment dazzled at the spectacle of debauchery before him. Demons fluttered before his gaze, having escaped from some foul source. Drunkenness, licentiousness and depravity were everywhere made plain to him.
Then he saw it – the blade of blue-burnished steel. It enticed him.
He was pushed to his knees and looked about until he found her, the witch and sorceress, that Jezebel reborn; Herodias. He saw it then, in her eyes, the kernel of many lives to come when she would bear the weight of the same message he had once proclaimed – that she would wander the earth with no peace. He told her so and waited.
The world pulsed.
He heard a whish past his ear and felt a sudden tug, a jolt.
The blade repulsed him and the world and its sufferings were taken away on the wings of the fine airs.
And this, after all, is bliss!
Lifted from the world, a crystalline clarity entered in
to him that near blinded his spirit eyes. This clarity was an angel, that great and mighty angel that had come to him in the cave came again to take him from the captivity of his body, and away towards the open spaces, towards the hills of Hebron and to the deep clefts of the Jordan Valley, to the oasis of Jericho and to the wilderness of Judea, to Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Along the way, the angel showed him all the scenes of his life, all of his labours, the sum of all his accomplishments, spread out like breeze-blown clouds over a wide expanse of sky. And he saw something else…the angel showed him what had not yet been.
‡
‘What does he see Lea?’ I asked.
‘He sees a room, pairé, and in it a painter.’
‘Oh!’
‘He is engaged in painting a picture of himself, so he is standing before a mirror. But there is a moment when he does not only see himself in the darkling reflection – he does not see the man with the heart-shaped face, with wide-spaced black eyes staring back at him. His self changes to another man.’
‘To another man? Who is it?’
‘In a far off future, men will ask the same question, pairé. They will wonder who it is that in so intimate a way, occupies a place in this painting, which he will call Self-Portrait with a Friend. They will not know that the painter sees not only his own image, as he is in that life, but also a likeness of himself when in the past he was John the Baptist. This is why he paints the two men together, for they are his two selves.’
I thought on this. ‘What is the name of the painter?’
‘He will be called Raphael, pairé.’
‘Like the Archangel?’
‘Like the Archangel, and he will paint many paintings of Mary with two children, he will even paint me, floating in the skies, holding a child in my arms…and yet it is unclear if he will come to paint the Transfiguration.’
‘What do you mean unclear?’
‘You see, a part of the future must always remain inscrutable, pairé, even for the gods who order destiny, because a man’s heart is free.’
Fifth Gospel: A Novel (Rosicrucian Quartet) Paperback Page 25