He turned to regard me with those dark purple-green eyes. “I speak of a place—or so I understand—you’ll both be investigating in your journey to Russia. So our meeting today is fortunate. I am one of the few who can recount its history and, more important, the deeper meaning concealed beneath that history—for I was born there myself nearly a century ago.”
“You were born in Central Asia?” I said in surprise.
“Yes. And Sanskrit was the early language of this region, an important key. Let me give you a clearer picture of my homeland.”
Dacian withdrew from his satchel a thin piece of leather rolled up and tied with a chamois thong. He undid it and held it out to me. It seemed so fragile, I was hesitant to touch it, so Dacian spread it on the table. Wolfgang came over and stood beside us, looking down.
It was an antique map, carefully drawn and hand-tinted but without boundary lines. The map I’d just studied all that morning depicted pretty much the same terrain, so I felt topographically acquainted with the turf even without the labels: the inland seas were the Aral and the Caspian, the main watercourses the Oxus and the Indus, and the mountain ranges the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs, and the Himalayas. The only lines drawn in were dotted ones that might designate major travel routes. A few circles were drawn indicating geographical features—a few recognizable ones like Mount Everest. But it was hard to guess others without those artificial demarcations designating national boundaries we’re so accustomed to. Anticipating this, Dacian unfolded a sheet of translucent tissue marking the present boundaries and laid it over the map so the separate regions again leapt to life.
“So many people have lived here over the centuries, it blurs one’s awareness of what is important,” he explained. “These circles on the map are sites of legendary, even magical significance that transcend political changes. For instance, here.”
He indicated a spot where a podlike protrusion of Afghanistan slipped between two mountainous regions of Russian Tajikistan and Pakistan in a long, extended flow that reached out to touch westernmost China.
“It’s surely no accident,” said Dacian, “that the first of the major upheavals announcing our entry into the new aeon should occur in this particular corner of the world. From ancient times, more than any other spot on earth, it has acted as a cultural cauldron mingling east, west, north, and south—so it provides the perfect microcosm of this new age nearly upon us.”
“But if this age is to be a wave, tearing down walls and mingling cultures,” said Wolfgang, “I don’t see how it connects with this part of the world—especially Afghanistan, where Russia’s bloody but insignificant little war is unlikely to affect any culture but that one.”
“Not so insignificant. A turning point has been reached,” said Dacian. “Perhaps you think it coincidence that only this February, the Soviets withdrew from that unfortunate war ten years after invading? The withdrawal came at the precise moment when sunrise during the spring equinox, as I described before, approached one-tenth of one degree of entry into the constellation Aquarius—exactly eleven years and eleven months before the official dawning of the new aeon expected in the year 2001.”
“I agree with Wolfgang,” I told Dacian, stuffing another sheet. “It hardly seems troops marching home from a no-win war will trigger an earthshaking new two-millennium cycle. For the Russians, it seems more like back to business as usual.”
“That’s because no one has asked the key question: Why were the Soviets there in the first place?” said Dacian. “The answer is simple: Just as Hitler had, fifty years before, they were searching for the sacred city.”
Wolfgang and I stopped stuffing books for a moment, our eyes fixed on Dacian. He tapped at the map as if thinking, and favored us with an elusive smile.
“Magical cities have always abounded in the region,” he said. “Some were historically factual, while others were speculation or myth, such as Mongolia’s Chan-du—the Xanadu of Kublai Khan—described by Marco Polo. Or the Himalayan retreat of Shangri-La: according to legend it appears just once every millennium. Then the far western region of China, the republic of Xinjiang: In the nineteen-twenties the Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich recorded tales he collected from Kashmir to Chinese Xinjiang and Tibet of the fabulous sunken city of Shambhala, an oriental version of Atlantis. It was believed this miraculous city once was swallowed by the earth, but that it would rise again quite soon, to usher in the birth of the new aeon.”
Dacian’s eyes were closed, but as he slid his finger across the map, he seemed able to see each of these spots as he touched it. Although he had admitted he was recounting largely myths, they seemed so real to him that I was fascinated. I had to force my attention back to the papers I was supposed to be concealing.
“It is here in Nepal,” he went on, “that for thousands of years Buddhists have believed the lost city of Agharti is buried within Kanchenjunga—the third highest peak in the world, whose name means ‘five holy treasures of the snows.’ Then south of the world’s second highest mountain, K2—in the disputed zone claimed by China, India, and Pakistan—lies another secret hoard of mysterious treasure and sacred manuscripts. The legendary occultist Aleister Crowley, who was first to attempt an ascent of this mountain in 1901, was searching for these. And the most magical mountain in the region is Mount Pamir—formerly Mount Stalin, today Mount Communism—in Tajikistan. At almost twenty-five thousand feet, it’s the highest peak in the Soviet Union. The Zoroastrian Persians viewed this mountain as the chief axis of a power grid connecting sacred points of Europe and the Mediterranean with those of the Near East and Asia—a relay, it is believed by many, that can be activated only under the right circumstances, such as those that will occur at the turn of this next aeon.
“But the most interesting of all these sacred places was a city founded by Alexander the Great around 330 B.C. near today’s Russian-Afghan border. According to legend it was on this spot, thousands of years ago, that a city of great mystery and magic once stood: the last of the fabled seven cities of Solomon.”
“King Solomon?” said Wolfgang in an odd tone. “But is it possible?” He got up, quietly spoke to the librarian outside, pulled the book-laden doors shut, and came back to sit beside me.
I kept stuffing Pandora’s papers into volumes, my head down so no one could look at my face. I knew this reference to Solomon was no casual remark on Dacian’s part, any more than Sam’s many allusions: the Solomon’s knot he’d left on my car mirror, the anagrams and phone memos directing me to Song of Songs. Plenty of input, but what did it mean? I felt like a reactor at critical mass. I sat there trying to shove my control rods back in and focus on the connections. I slid my pile of books to Wolfgang, who handed me another.
“It’s a part of the world few would associate with Solomon,” Dacian conceded. “Yet an entire range between the Indus Valley and Afghanistan, just south of where the hidden city is thought to be, is named for him: the Suleimans. There, in a hollow crater on top, his throne—the takht-i-Suliman—was regarded by the ancients as another axis connecting heaven to earth.
“With Solomon, myth is often mingled with fact: it’s said he was a magus with dominion over water, earth, wind, and fire; that he understood the language of animals, employing the services of ants and bees to build the Jerusalem temple; that doves and feys designed his magical city of the sun in Central Asia, a place long sought by Alexander the Great through many lands. When Solomon took Balqis, Queen of Sheba, on a tour of the many cities he’d created, aboard a magic carpet on which he placed a royal throne, and the queen looked back toward her homeland, Solomon’s genie scooped the hollow from the mountaintop and set down the throne so she had a better view. A real takht-i-Suliman was recorded in the expedition survey of the region in 1883. There was also a Persian fire temple from the time of Alexander built on the very spot. The link with fire worship is of importance to our story. Alexander and Solomon, each with one foot dipped in history and one in legend, are linked in other ways, too—in the lor
e of Hindus, Buddhists, Tantric Tibetans, Nestorian Christians—even the holy book of Islam, the Qur’ān.”
“Solomon and Alexander are mentioned in the Koran?” I said, surprised.
“Indeed,” said Dacian. “One of the hallows so intriguing to Wolfgang was described in the Qur’ān: a magical, luminous green stone believed to have fallen from the sky millions of years ago. Solomon, an initiate into the secrets of the Persian magi, had a chunk from it mounted in a ring which he wore at all times, until his death. Alexander later sought this stone for the powers it rendered over heaven and earth.”
Still listening, I resumed stuffing books as Dacian began his tale.
THE STONE
He was born at midnight in the heat of high summer, in the dog days of the year 356 B.C., at Pella in Macedonia. They called him Alexander.
Before his birth, the Sibylline Oracle predicted the blood-drenched slaughter of Asia by the one who was about to come. With his first birth cries, it’s said the Artemision, the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus, burst spontaneously into flame and was totally destroyed. The magi of Zarathustra who witnessed this cremation, so Plutarch tells us, wept and wailed and beat their faces, and they prophesied the fall of the far-flung Persian Empire which began at that very hour.
Alexander’s mother, Olympias, princess of Epirus, was a priestess of the Orphic mysteries of life and death. As a girl of thirteen she’d met his father, Philip II of Macedon, on the isle of Samothrace during their initiation into the darker Dionysian mysteries that ruled the winter months. By the time of her marriage to Philip, five years later, Olympias was also a devotee of the rituals of the bacchantes, the followers of Dionysus the wine god, who in the god’s Thracian homeland were called bassarides after the fox furs they wore (and little more) when they danced wildly over the hills all night, drunk on undiluted wine and mad with both sexual and blood lust. In possession by the god, the bassarides captured wild animals with their bare hands and tore them apart with their teeth. In such states they were called maenads—the frenzied ones.
Olympias often shared her bed with the oracular serpent, a full-grown python—a habit that frightened her husband so badly that, for some time, it postponed the conception of a child. But at last the oracle told Philip he would lose an eye for watching his wife engaged in a coupling with the sacred reptile, a mystical event when her womb was opened by the thunderbolt of Zeus and flames poured forth, heralding a child who would one day set the East ablaze. The oracle said their marriage must be consummated in the flesh. Their child would unite the four quarters and awaken the dragon force latent in the earth, bringing the dawn of a new age.
Alexander was fair, rosy, and handsome, of fine form, with one blue-grey eye and one of dark brown. He had a melting glance and exuded a marvelous spicy fragrance from his mouth and all his flesh due to his warm, fiery nature. The young prince’s education by Aristotle included training in metaphysics and the secrets of the Persian magi. He was soon wise beyond his years. By his mother, Olympias, he was tutored in the Mysteries. He became a fleet sprinter, a champion horseman, and an accomplished warrior, and was admired throughout his father’s kingdom.
But when he turned eighteen, Alexander’s life changed. His father divorced his mother, exiled her, and married a young Macedonian woman, Cleopatra, who quickly produced an alternative heir to the royal line. Olympias flew into a black rage and exercised her magic powers, which were formidable. She arranged by ruses and curses to have Philip assassinated by one of his male lovers, so Alexander might succeed to the throne. Alexander was twenty when, upon his father’s death, he became king of Macedon.
His first act was to bring his neighbors Illyria and Thrace within the Macedonian fold. Then he torched the rebellious city of Thebes in central Greece and enslaved its population. On the Ionian coast of modern-day Turkey, for more than one hundred fifty years Greek cities had labored under Persian vassalage. Alexander set about to defeat the Persians and restore democracy, and in some cases autonomy, to the former Greek colonies. His initial mission, to break a two-hundred-year hold by the Persian Empire over the Eastern and Western worlds, was soon revised into a mission of world domination. His final mission would be to bond himself with the divine fluid—to become a living god.
Alexander’s armies entered Asia through Phrygia—today Anatolia, in central Turkey—and came to the city of Gordion. In the eighth century B.C., four hundred years before Alexander, the people of Phrygia had been told by an oracle that the true king of their people would appear one day and be recognized by the fact that, as he entered the city gates, a raven would perch upon his cart. A shepherd, Gordius, had arrived down the eastern road. When he came to the first town, a prophetic raven perched on the yoke of his oxcart, and together they entered the city. Cheering throngs escorted Gordius to the temple and crowned him king. It was soon discovered that no one could untie the complex knot in the leather thong with which the yoke was fastened to the pole of his cart. The oracle said whoever undid the knot would one day be lord of all Asia. This was the Gordian knot that, four hundred years later, Alexander would cut in two with his sword.
Gordius married the oracle of Cybele—a name meaning both cave and cube—the great mother goddess of all creation since the Ice Age. Cybele’s birthplace was Mount Ida on the Ionian coast, from which the gods looked down to observe the Trojan War, but her principal shrine was at Pessinus, only a dozen miles from Gordion, where she was enshrined as a meteoric black stone. One hundred twenty years after Alexander’s death, as protection against Hannibal and his forces during the Carthaginian Wars, this rock would be brought to Rome and enshrined on the Palatine Hill. It remained there, wielding Phrygian power, well into the time of the Caesars.
Gordius and his prophetess wife adopted the half-mortal son of the goddess Cybele, a boy named Midas because, like the goddess, he was born on Mount Ida. Midas became the second king of Phrygia. While still a young man Midas, accompanied by the centaur Silenus, tutor to the god Dionysus, traveled to Hyperborea, a magical land beyond the north wind, associated with the pole star and the world axis. Upon their return, Dionysus rewarded Midas with anything he wanted. Midas asked for the golden touch. Even today, the rivers where he once bathed flow with gold.
In the year 333 B.C., when Alexander cut the Gordian knot, he paid a visit to the tomb of King Midas, also to the temple of Cybele to see the black stone, and lastly to the temple of the patron god of the Phrygian kings, Dionysus. Having refreshed himself in the springs and wells of the Eastern gods, he then proceeded to conquer the East: Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Central Asia, and India.
The key event of these campaigns was in Central Asia, at the Bird-less Rock—a city built on a seven-thousand-foot tower of rock believed to be the pillar holding up the sky, so high that it could not be besieged by catapult. Alexander selected three hundred soldiers from the mountainous regions of Macedon who were capable of scaling the cliffs and the city walls by hand; once above, they fired arrows down on the defenders, who surrendered.
Somewhere near this site, the Qur’ān tells us, Alexander built a pair of vast iron gates to seal a difficult mountain pass against tribes from the east called the Gog and Magog—tribes in later times called Mongol. It was here also that he built his sacred city on the earlier site of the seventh city of Solomon. It’s said the sacred stone of Solomon is buried as a cornerstone, enabling the city to rise at the dawn of each new aeon.
Once the region beyond the Oxus was pacified, a troop of nobles visited from Nysa, a valley at the other side of the Hindu Kush. When they laid eyes upon Alexander, he was still in battle armor and covered with dust. But they were struck speechless and fell to the ground in awe, for they recognized in him those divine and godlike qualities already recognized by the Egyptian high priests and, indeed, the Persian magi. The Nyseans invited Alexander and his men to visit their homeland, which they claimed as the birthplace of the ‘god of Nysa’—Dio-nysus, who was also the chief god of Macedon.
The vine represents the journey into the outer world, the quest. The ivy describes the journey within, the labyrinth. Alexander and his troops, always ready to toast the principal god of their own birthplace, twined sacred ivy upon their brows and drank and caroused and danced across the hills in celebration of this new invasion of India—for the legends told that the god Dionysus himself was the first to cross the Indus astride his steaming, perfumed panther.
Alexander’s career was brief, but the oracular dice had been cast before his birth. In thirteen years and many campaigns he conquered most of the known world. Then, at age thirty-three, he died in Babylon. Because his hard-won and far-reaching empire was dismantled immediately after his death, historians believe he left nothing but his golden legend. In this they are mistaken. In those thirteen years he accomplished all he’d set out to achieve: a mingling of East and West, spirit and matter, philosophies and bloodlines. In every capital he conquered, he held public mass marriages between Macedonian-Greek officers and native noblewomen; he himself took several wives of Persian stock.
Iris known, too, that Alexander was an initiate of Eastern esotericism. In Egypt, the high priests of Zeus/Jupiter/Ammon recognized in him an incarnation of that god, and conferred upon him the ram horns of the figure who was associated on all three continents with Mars, the planet of war, and with the current age of Aries, the ram. Up north in the lands of the Scythians—Central Asia, the part of the world we are speaking of—he was called Zul-qarnain: the Two-Horned God. This term also means ‘lord of the two paths’ or two epochs—that is, he who’ll rule the transition between two aeons.
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