Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Victor, what’s this all about?” Vida asked, when she, Avram, and Yuri finally cornered Fremdkunst in one of the secured rooms inside the quarantine lab.

  “Sit down. I’ll show you.”

  Avram watched Vida and Yuri take seats around the lab’s conference table. Avram reluctantly followed suit, despite the fact that Victor remained standing.

  Bright blue eyes flashing, Victor glanced around as if he didn’t wish to be overheard. When he was certain the airlock was sealed, he took a vial from one of his pockets and twisted off its cap.

  “This,” he said. “Here. Take a sniff.”

  As Victor passed the vial beneath their noses, Yuri, Avram, and Vida did as he’d suggested. To Avram it smelled quite pleasant, if also a bit odd—a combination of perfume and mushroom subtly mixed.

  “That’s one of the divinest scents I’ve ever smelled,” Vida said, eyes closed as she continued to savor it.

  “Glad you like it,” Victor said, screwing the cap back on the vial and placing it on a nearby shelf, where it stood among many others. Avram began to feel a vague euphoria mixed with lassitude. He wondered if whatever it was Victor had swept before their noses might have a mild psychoactive effect of some sort.

  “But what is it?” Vida asked.

  “A little gift from the Temple Mount.”

  “What?” Yuri asked, incredulous.

  Vida gave Fremdkunst a suspicious look.

  “Victor, what was in that vial?”

  “Something quite possibly of extraterrestrial origin.”

  “Exposed to air?”

  “Air? Yuri, he exposed us to it! Are you nuts, Victor? How dare you expose us to that so callously, so cavalierly—”

  “Relax, relax. It doesn’t seem to have done any lasting harm to Jacob all those thousands of years ago, if this is from the same rock. Or to anyone else who might have been exposed to it since then.”

  “But why?”

  “Because, like our friend Avram here, I believe many myths and stories of ancient peoples actually describe celestial and meteoritic events—and their consequences. How about you, Vida?”

  Vida was caught off guard by the question.

  “Yes. I suppose I believe that, too.”

  “We’re not the only ones,” Avram said. “At ECOL, Miskulin suggested the scientific community ought to build up a global chronicle of shamanic responses to transient celestial events and impacts. I guess that’s part of what he was doing in his presentation on the Inuit and lemmings.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Victor said. “And seen—I’ve viewed a video recording of that presentation. What happens in lemming-year events has analogs in overpopulation, environmental destruction, and aggressive territorial expansion associated with humans. A number of scientists believe that, not just Miskulin.”

  “What does that have to do with meteorites?” Vida asked.

  Avram was about to say something about Miskulin’s life-code theories when Victor beat him to it—with something much more specific.

  “The same ‘junk’ nucleic acid sequences that code for the lemmings’ protein and hormonal changes during lemming-years,” Victor said, “also show up in organic material extracted from meteorites. Even more interesting, though, is that there are recurring legends associating meteorites with human territorial expansion, particularly the founding of a tribe or nation.”

  “The Nuhu,” Vida said. “The spears of the gods. They guided the founders of Tenochtitlan. Miller talked about it at ECOL.”

  Victor nodded.

  “I’m not too familiar with that one, but it sounds right. There are many, many others. The best known is probably Jacob’s dream-vision, in which God makes all those promises to him about how numerous and important his descendants will be.”

  Avram stroked his chin, thinking.

  “Miskulin said that the life-code programs species to expand and explore the spatial dimension, because that serves the code’s goal of returning to space and propagating itself throughout the universe.”

  “Too simplistic,” Victor said, shaking his head.

  “Sounds not so simple to me,” Yuri said. “What makes you say simplistic?”

  “Because the human response to celestial events is much more complex than that. It reflects who we are as much as what happens in the sky, but it’s deeper even than that,” Victor said, leaning on the table, staring from one to the other of them with eyes so bright and penetrating they seemed almost radioactive.

  “You’ll have to excuse me if this sounds a little weird. I’ve just gotten back from spending a good deal of time with a billionaire fundamentalist and a big military honcho at the Temple Mount. Frankly, I’m also a bit stoned, as they used to say. So, I would guess, are the three of you, right now.”

  Avram, Yuri, and Vida glanced sheepishly at each other, confused. His colleagues grinned awkwardly at Avram, and he back at them. He also felt some apprehension beneath his own smile, and sensed the same from Vida and Yuri.

  As Victor toyed absently with one of the other vials from the shelf, his smile seemed to have no such underlayer of fear or worry.

  “All of us are quite literally stoned, then, since the source of our psychic alteration is a stone beneath the Dome of the Rock. My military acquaintance had the same response you did. Contamination, and all.

  Almost didn’t let me carry my samples away with me.

  “My biblically literalist friend responded differently. For him this is all glorious proof that the Antichrist must appear before Christ appears at the Second Coming. End-time destruction must come before divine transcendence. The shadow of the bad and catastrophic runs ahead of the light of the good and creative.”

  “What do you mean?” Vida asked. By way of answer, Victor put on a pair of augmented reality glasses and slid each of them a pair. Picking his pair up, Avram noticed that they were some of the fancy new ARGUS blinks, with slender pivoting throat mike and all.

  “I looked up the root of the word apocalypse, “ Victor said, blinking them to a prechosen website. “It’s from the Greek verb apokaluptein, meaning ‘to uncover.’ Revelation, in the sense of unveiling. The ecstasy of dream or vision that lifts the veil of waking illusion, to reveal a deeper reality. That was the original meaning.”

  “That’s not what apocalypse calls to mind when I hear that word,” Avram said.

  “No,” Victor continued, calling sotto voce for selections and blinking them to other sites—with wonderfully vivid graphics of hellish oranges and reds. “The popular meaning, now, emphasizes the rending of the veil of this world. Global destruction brought on by end-time catastrophe—a necessity, if the world is to be renewed. So, which one do you think rocks from space are really about? The ‘apocalypse within’ of individual ecstasy, or the ‘apocalypse without’ of worldwide catastrophe?”

  Avram, Yuri, and Vida glanced at one another.

  “Catastrophe,” Vida said. “At least in the case of doomsday impactors.”

  “Yes,” Avram agreed. “They’ve made Earth a palimpsest planet.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “The extinction impactors are like big erasers. Older life is mostly erased so newer life has a place to write its own story over the old one.”

  “Da,” Yuri said. “That’s your pattern: catastrophe, then new world. New worlds for old. Clear decks.

  Clean slate. Darkest before dawn. If all end-time visions share deep echo, genetic grammar of punctuated equilibrium, then apocalypse outside might also make apocalypse inside—in genes, neurophysiology.”

  “What about a rock that more directly causes ‘apocalypse inside’?” Victor asked. “There is a precedent, you know. The lapis. The alchemical philosopher’s stone.”

  Vida frowned deeply.

  “What are you saying?”

  “On my way back to the desert,” Victor said, calling up more preselected images, “I saw a TV program giving background on the Temple Mount attacks. It traced the connection of the Knigh
ts Templar to the Mount, and to alchemy. The original purpose of the Templars was to guard the Temple Mount precinct.”

  “I thought these graphics looked familiar!” Vida said. “Did this program suggest the Templars discovered the Ark of the Covenant in the ruins of Solomon’s Temple? And that the Ark contained a stone from heaven, or a meteorite, similar to the Black Stone of Mecca?”

  “The same. You saw it too, then? What do you think of the theory?”

  “Pretty unlikely, since the Ark disappeared from the temple about twenty-seven hundred years ago—long before the Templars showed up.”

  “True, but what about a discovery of skystones like those contained in the Ark?”

  “I don’t follow you,” Avram said.

  “I’ve been researching it pretty furiously since my experience at the Temple Mount,” Victor said, calling for selections on Jerusalem and Mecca, then blinking them to those sites. “These sacred stones have a convoluted history. Some historians say what the Templars found in their excavations at the Temple Mount was a fragment of the same Black Stone as that found in the Kaaba. The Hajar al-Aswad.”

  “I have heard Jacob’s pillow-stone might be under Dome of the Rock,” Yuri said, “but this is new on me.”

  “Some historians argue the Black Stone is a meteorite of ancient Bedouin provenance,” Victor said, calling up more images from the Mideast and blinking through them. “Others say it’s a meteorite stolen from an Egyptian pyramid or temple, where it was the throne of Isis. Anyway, the Black Stone eventually ends up in the Kaaba, the Cube temple in Mecca.”

  “Then how did part of it also end up at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem?” Avram asked, uncertain curiosity contending in his thoughts against certain confusion. “If it did, I mean?”

  “Some say the Black Stone might originally be from the same fall as Jacob’s stone pillow,” Victor said with a wry smile. “One thing you can count on: when everyone wants a piece of the rock, the rock doesn’t stay in one place happily ever after.”

  He blinked them to what were obviously historical illustrations.

  “Long before the Templars rose from their ranks,” he said, “the mad Caliph al-Hakim gave Pope Sylvester’s order of chronicler-monks the run of the Mount. Al-Hakim was himself the great-grandson of the Fatimid Caliph al-Mansur, who was the first and only person since the Prophet known to have had close personal contact with the Black Stone over a prolonged period.”

  “So?” Yuri asked.

  “So the stone stayed in al-Mansur’s presence for several months—after it was presented to him, and before it was returned to the Kaaba. No one knows just how much of the stone was ‘lost during shipping and handling’ by him, and by the Ismailis.”

  “Wait, wait…I know something about this,” Vida said. “The Qarmatians, the people the Nizari Ismaili Shiites came from, lived in Persia. The Heysessini, the so-called Hashishin, or Assassins, came from the Nizari Ismaili sect of the Shia.”

  “What do you know about these Qarmatians, these Ismailis?” Victor asked, striding around the lab, examining the samples. “I’ve read that they were allies of the Templar knights.”

  “I’ve heard that, too. Some Islamic scholars say the Ismailis may have kept a piece of the Black Stone themselves, before they passed it along to al-Mansur. Speculation. Not all that much is known about them. They had an exotic theology—equal parts Koran, astronomy, and Plotinean Platonism. Some scholars suggest there was also a Kabbalistic component to their worldview.”

  Victor gave her a quizzical look at that, but said nothing.

  “What happened to the sect?” Avram asked. Vida took over, calling up sites on the Ismailis and blinking to them on all their AR specs—more historical images, including photographs of ruins on a rocky, mountainous perch.

  “Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, the great scientist and writer, reportedly betrayed the Nizari fortress of Alamut to the Mongols, who destroyed the place, along with the last of the Heysessini. During the thirteenth century, I think it was.”

  “The whole period of the Crusades was steeped in power politics like that,” Victor said, returning to the conference table and leaning on it once more. “You think that, just maybe, the Fatimid Caliph al-Mansur might himself have decided to keep a piece of the Black Stone…as part of that politics?”

  “When the stone came back to the Kaaba it was a lot smaller than when it went out,” Vida said with a shrug. “That’s well documented. Since it was only removed from the Kaaba for those few brief years during al-Mansur’s time, any carving or splitting of the stone would most likely have been done at that time.”

  Victor smiled wickedly.

  “Some historians speculate it was al-Hakim’s possession of his great-grandfather’s chunk of the stone that drove Hakim mad.”

  “Made mad from a rock?” Yuri asked, with much indignation and bravado, it seemed to Avram.

  Understandable, given what Victor had exposed all of them to, and its possible source. “How?”

  Vida blinked them to a site dealing with al-Hakim.

  “Shi’ite tradition claimed that, at the turn of the fourth century after the Hejira, the Maudi or savior would appear and convert the entire world to Islam as a precursor to the Day of Judgment. In the year 400 AH—After Hejira—al-Hakim was the most important Shi’ite leader. He declared the Maudi had arrived, and that he himself was that divine personage.”

  “And the rock explains this…how?”

  “Say al-Hakim had a piece of the rock,” Victor said. “Then say that, maybe, he was reminded of its great importance by the envoys of the pope. Maybe spending a lot of time in the presence of the rock induced some kind of recurrent hallucination, or more prolonged mental imbalance. Enough to convince him of his own divinity.”

  “Sounds like some of Darla Pittman’s ideas,” Vida said, swiveling the mike away and propping her blinks on her forehead. “Which I didn’t give a whole lot of credence to, before today. Even if this stuff we sniffed is harmless enough that we can converse more or less lucidly, I’m still not fond of having my head experimented with—without warning or prior permission. Any idea how long this altered state we’re in will last?”

  “A couple of hours. Don’t worry. I’ve already been through it,” Victor said, taking off his AR glasses, his toothy smile and striking blue eyes flashing mischievously. “Doctor Pittman wasn’t quite right, you see.

  The ‘head change’ she’s been touting as the primary cause and effect of so much, it’s only secondary, really. A by-product of the ‘stone of transformation’ being exposed to the elements. The heart of the mystery lies elsewhere. That’s what we need to stay focused on.”

  “Whatever the explanation for al-Hakim’s madness, some historians of the period suggest he might have feared the stone’s power enough to hide it in the Dome of the Rock, within the ruins of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. A place that apparently already housed rocks of similar type.”

  “Interesting,” Avram said, trying to focus his thoughts. He felt almost too lucid, the orbit of his imagination expanding so that, a moment before, he had wondered which would vanish last—the lightning of Fremdkunst’s smile, or the flash of his eyes—if the meteorite collector were to disappear Cheshire-cat style. “What does it have to do with alchemy, though?”

  Avram didn’t learn the Cheshire-cat answer, for Victor dropped his blinks back down over his eyes and flipped the mike back into command position.

  “The chronicler-monks evolved, in conspiracy theory, into the hoaxed-up ‘Order of Our Lady of Mount Sion,’” Victor said, taking up the thread of his discourse again, calling up search selections and blinking them to painted illustrations of crusaders, then woodcuts of alchemists. “The Knights of the Temple were real, however, and were initially the military wing of that earlier monkish order. A number of later alchemists with Templar connections believed the Black Stone and Jacob’s stone pillow were archetypes of the lapis, the philosopher’s stone. Still later, alchemists wrote that nothin
g could be accomplished in the Great Work without the right prima materia.”

  “And what the chronicler-monks may have found in the ruins of the Temple of Solomon—”

  “—was the best prima materia possible. Pieces of the alchemists’ ‘black stone.’ Pieces of a sacred skystone or several such stones, whether from Mecca, or Egypt, or right there in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. That’s why I was intrigued by your mention of Kabbalistic elements in what the Hashishin believed, Vida.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s a great deal of overlap between Kabbalah and alchemy,” Avram said, guessing what Victor was getting at. Victor seemed content to let him explain. After a moment figuring out the fancy ARGUS blinks, he was able to call up the right search selections and maneuver them to appropriately illustrated sites.

  “The first Kabbalistic text, Sefer ha-Bahir, was eventually put together and edited in Provence, in France, during the twelfth century. Sefer ha-Bahir combines the ideas surrounding the work of creation—the animating of matter—with the concept of celestial projection as a way to return to the divine source. That combination of ideas lies at the heart of alchemy as a mystical science. Systems like Kabbalah provide software for understanding and programming the universe-hardware.”

  “Exactly,” Victor agreed, blinking them from alchemists and Kabbalists to images of King Arthur and his knights. “What the alchemists were after—transmutation of elements, panacea for all ills, the elixir of life—are the same characteristics found in the Grail for which the Knights of the Round Table supposedly went questing—the actual chalice of the Last Supper, not the later Holy Blood and Mary Madgalene theory of sacred and profane history. It’s no coincidence the first great story of the Grail was authored by Chrétien de Troyes.”

  “What’s the connection?” Vida asked.

  “Troyes was the capital of Champagne,” Victor said, calling up sites that, as he blinked them through, turned out to be illustrated with sumptuous twelfth-and thirteenth-century paintings of royal courts, knights, ladies, and minstrels. “Chrétien’s patroness, Marie de Champagne, was the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was herself the daughter of Guilhelm the ninth, count of Poitiers, duke of Aquitaine, and first known troubadour poet.