The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  “So the knot is just a different way of looking at the warp and woof,” said Sam.

  Then I thought of something else, and I pulled up on my screen one of the documents I’d just translated earlier, of Uncle Laf’s.

  “Do you recall all that stuff about the Knights Templar of Saint Bernard and the Temple of Solomon? Well, guess what this manuscript says was the logo on their flag? The skull and crossbones—same as the Death’s Head squadron of Heinrich Himmler’s SS. But it doesn’t mean death in this document. It means life.”

  “How so?”

  “There are two figures of importance in the Greek pantheon that keep appearing over and over in these manuscripts,” I told him. “Athena and Dionysus. Can you think what they had in common?”

  “Athena was goddess of the state,” said Sam. “But also of the family, the home, and the loom—ergo, of order. That’s cosmos in Greek. While Dionysus was lord of chaos. His pagan festivals, which still survive in Christian ones like Mardi Gras, were a license for drink and debauchery and madness. They’re connected in ancient cosmogonies, where cosmos is often born from chaos.”

  “I found another connection—in the way they were born,” I told him. “Dionysus’s pregnant mother Semele was burned by his father Zeus when he appeared to her in the form of a thunderbolt. Father Zeus took the unborn baby from the mother’s ashes, sewed him up in his own flesh, and gave birth to him later from his thigh. That’s why Dionysus is called ‘twice-born,’ or ‘god of the double door’—”

  “And Athena was swallowed by Zeus and later born from his forehead,” finished Sam. “So she can always read his thoughts. I get it. One was born from the skull and one from the thigh of the father. Skull and crossbones, two kinds of creation or generation, spiritual and profane, only together are they whole or holy—is that it?”

  I recalled Saint Bernard’s words in his Song of Solomon commentaries, “Divine love is reached through carnal love.”

  “I’m sure that’s what this story is hinting at, about the Mysteries,” I told Sam. “The message must be that there’s no death without sex.”

  “Pardon me?” said Sam.

  “Bacteria never die, they divide,” I said. “Clones just keep on mimeographing the same material. Humans are the only animals that understand and anticipate death. It’s the basis of every religion, all religious experience. Not just spirit, but the relationship between life and death, spirit and matter.”

  “Our nervous system has two branches that tie consciousness to emotions called the cranial and sacral. They connect the brain and sacrum,” agreed Sam. “Your skull-and-crossbones, where the knee-bone’s connected to the thighbone, are associated in many languages with powerful generative properties, in words like ‘genius’ and genoux. There’s plenty of evidence, physical and linguistic, for Pythagoras’s famous line: As above, so below.”

  “That was the whole job of Dionysus in mythology: to connect the sacred and profane. The only way to do it was to hybridize. To yank women from the loom, get them away from the hearth and out of the house, up on the mountain, dancing and cavorting with young shepherds. Dionysus destroyed his hometown of Thebes, not once but twice. Or rather, they destroyed themselves.”

  “One time, it was because of incest,” Sam said. “Oedipus had killed his father, been crowned king in his place, and married his own mother. When it comes to our family, I do quite take your point. But what was the other time?”

  “It was when the young king of Thebes, Pentheus, refused to let the women, including his own mother, take part in the celebration of the Dionysian mysteries up on the mountain,” I said. “Pentheus claimed that the Lord of the Dance wasn’t a true god, not the son of Zeus. He actually wanted to keep the women home at night, so landowners could feel confident that their offspring and heirs weren’t sons of satyrs or shepherds.”

  “What happened to the young king of Thebes?” asked Sam.

  “His mother was driven mad,” I said. “She cannibalized her own son.”

  “That’s pretty gruesome,” said Sam. Then he added with a grin, “So basically you’re saying that Dionysus—the god of the coming age—also provides the long-awaited answer to Freud’s question, ‘What does a woman want?’ You want a night off now and again, so you can run howling around up on the mountain, dancing, getting drunk, cavorting with young shepherds—is that it?”

  “Well, it sure might flush out a few of those coagulated bloodlines,” I agreed. “Nobody seems ever to have introduced folks like Hitler or Wolfgang to the concept that hybridization breeds strength. I think a little shepherd-pollen might also answer Zoe’s question, ‘What makes them think they can’t?’ I think it’s just what you said to me about lying versus loving. If you do it to someone else, you’re doing it to yourself.”

  “Yesterday, I may have learned something that connects this stuff together,” Sam told me with one of his mischievous looks. “The Essenes, who lived down at Qumran in the time of Jesus, believed that Adam had a secret wife, a first wife who came before Eve. Her name was Lilith—it means ‘owl,’ wisdom, sophia. Lilith deserted Adam, though. Guess why.”

  “No clue,” I told him.

  “Adam wouldn’t let her be on top,” Sam said. When he saw my face, he started to laugh. Then he said, “No, really, I’m serious—I think I’m onto something. Just listen.”

  He sat up from his bearskin and faced me.

  “Lilith is not only wisdom, she’s Mother Earth—wise enough to support all life, if we don’t dam her up but leave her free to do what she does best. Maybe the mystery is the ancient wisdom, how to use earth’s natural rhythms and energies to support us, instead of damming up rivers that are her arteries, ripping minerals out of her belly, cutting down trees that are her breath, building walls to confine all life to allotted spaces.

  “You know that the Indian nation is matriarchal,” Sam added. “But you may not know this Nez Percé prophecy. During the Last Days, in any lands where women have been reduced to minions under male tyranny—or where the earth has been parceled out according to some patriarch’s land-grabbing—those lands in the End Time will be destroyed in the second flood.

  “So when it comes to Mother Earth,” Sam finished with a smile, “I think we should let her be on top from now on, as she truly deserves. Just like you and me.”

  And he was telling the truth.

  A Biography of Katherine Neville

  Katherine Neville (b. 1945) is an American author, best known for her spellbinding adventure novels The Eight, A Calculated Risk, and The Magic Circle.

  Neville was born in the Midwest and from an early age spent many of her summers and holidays in the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. She would listen with fascination to the yarns of cowboys, miners, lumberjacks, riverboat folks along the Mississippi, Native Americans, and the legendary Mountain Men of the Rockies. These tales sparked her early desire to have adventures and to become a storyteller herself. However, that desire was to be deferred for quite a while.

  While growing up, Neville disliked having to sit in stuffy classrooms, listen to lectures, and take exams. She preferred to be outside climbing trees. Instead of reading the dull texts assigned in her history, geography, and social studies classes, she escaped into sagas like The Odyssey and Jason and the Argonauts, swashbuckling adventure tales like Rafael Sabatini’s pirate novels Scaramouche, The Sea Hawk, and Captain Blood, and Jules Verne’s fantasy adventures 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days. When she was sixteen, she saw a movie that changed her life: Lawrence of Arabia. The film thrilled Neville more than all those imaginary tales combined and inspired in her a yearning to live in a wild and remote foreign land one day.

  Throughout high school and college, Neville earned money by drawing and painting people’s horses, dogs, and grandchildren and by teaching art classes. Later on, during years of economic boom and bust, she turned to modeling to support herself. Not only did she get to meet interesting new people, she had a
n opportunity to work with highly skilled photographers and learn the art of photography. Eventually, she saved enough money to buy a Nikon F and a set of lenses, and she started snapping shots of everything and everyone.

  When Neville graduated from college, she found that job opportunities for women were limited. After searching for work in several cities, she took a national exam for a new field called data processing, scoring in the top one percent nationally. It landed her a job in New York at IBM in the Transportation and Utilities industries, automating businesses for clients like Con Edison and Long Island Railroad. She became a devotee of early computer wizards Admiral Grace Hopper and Alan Turing and discovered a passion for code making and breaking. This was the inspiration for her first novel, A Calculated Risk, which she would complete nearly twenty years later.

  The techniques Neville used in designing these large, complicated computer systems would later prove vital to handling the complex themes, intricate plots, and large casts of characters of her novels. But writing did not come as easily to Neville as drawing or painting, and she knew she needed an innovative structure for the kind of fiction she wanted to write—big, multilayered novels within which different tales could unfold and be interwoven. Fortunately, one of her colleagues at a data center introduced her to the work of black writers who were creating a new literary form based on ancient oral storytelling techniques that could capture the wisdom of an entire culture. Neville took a year’s sabbatical to study African literature in graduate school, focusing on the works of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Amos Tutuola.

  But Neville’s fiction breakthrough was short-lived because she had to go back to a full-time job. After a year of repetitive work for an international consulting firm, designing computer systems in a variety of industries, she was ready to quit. But on the very day she planned to resign, her firm’s senior partner announced that a new project was starting up in Algeria for a small petroleum cartel called OPEC. Neville said, “I’ll go.”

  This is how Neville ended up in North Africa just months before the OPEC petroleum embargo took place, an event that would swiftly change the course of East-West detente and bring to light the story of Arabs, Islam, energy, and oil. Neville’s project group of international consultants reported to Algeria’s minister of industry and energy, affording her what she later described as “a worm’s-eye view from inside the apple” of global events. With Algeria marking the tenth anniversary of its revolution against France, people were focused on liberty and equality. Neville was reminded of the French Revolution, which brought down not only the monarchy, but the bourgeoisie as well, putting the reins of power in different hands. It seemed to her as if a giant chess game was taking place all over the world and an unexpected move had come from across the board. This experience sparked her to write her first published book, The Eight, the tale of a fabulous, bejeweled chess set that once belonged to Charlemagne and was buried within an abbey for one thousand years. During the French Revolution, when soldiers are looting abbeys and monasteries, the nuns at the abbey dig up the chess pieces and scatter them across the world. From the revolutionary 1790s to the 1970s during the OPEC embargo, people thirsting for power seek the marvelous chess set because it contains a dark, mysterious power. Historic figures such as Napoleon, Voltaire, and Catherine the Great match wits with fictional characters in a giant two-hundred-year chess game that forms the plot of the book.

  Upon her return to America in the mid-1970s, Neville was hired as a computer expert by Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, the premier nuclear-safety research lab in the country. The lab was about to conduct the first major test of a reactor’s loss of fluid, which is known as the China Syndrome, because a bared reactor core was predicted to melt down through the earth all the way to China. As chance would have it, the movie The China Syndrome was released, and simultaneously the accident at Three Mile Island took place. Once again, Neville the novelist had the worm’s-eye view of a major news issue and would be inspired by her observations to write The Magic Circle, her novel about the release of energy and the two-thousand–year cycle of the Aeon.

  While in Idaho, Neville was approached by Bank of America to work in San Francisco. She accepted, with one condition: The moment she wrote her first book, she would retire from the computer industry. Neville spent ten years in the Bay area, writing by night in her tree house in Sausalito.

  In 1987 she sold her first two books to Random House’s Ballantine Books and subsequently retired forever from data processing. Her financial thriller novel, A Calculated Risk, became a New York Times Notable Book and caused a furor in financial circles. The quest novel The Eight was published simultaneously in twelve countries, from Japan to Germany, and eventually became a bestseller in forty languages. It was widely lauded as the template for the new genre of “literary bestsellers” and for paving the way for novels such as The Da Vinci Code.

  While editing The Eight for Random House, Neville met Dr. Karl Pribram, the world-famous brain scientist. In the years that followed, the two lived in Austria and Germany before returning to the States. They continued to travel and lecture in numerous countries on four continents.

  Neville has been a speaker on NBC, the Voice of America, and National Public Radio and at the Library of Congress, the James River Writers Conference, the Ateneo de Madrid, the Turkish Culture Ministry in Ankara, the Orkney Science Fair in Scotland, the World Affairs Conference in Boulder, Colorado, and the University of Menendez y Pelayo in Spain. She was the first author invited to join the advisory board of the Smithsonian Libraries. She currently resides in a historic Japanese house in Virginia, where she is painting up a storm in preparation for her new book about painters in the seventeenth century and modern times.

  Neville in Algiers in 1973.

  A scene from The Eight: El Marad’s mountain stronghold.

  The author in Tizi-Ouzou (“Gorge of the Heather”), Algeria.

  Neville on Pikes Peak in Colorado, 1974.

  Headshot of the author by Nicholas DeSciose, 1977.

  The interior of Neville’s tree house in Sausalito, with the original manuscript of The Eight in the foreground.

  A photograph of the author in San Francisco’s Marin Headlands, California, 1985.

  The author in Pompeii, conducting researching for The Magic Circle circa 1988.

  Pictured in 1988, Katherine Neville with Karl Pribram in Vienna, Austria.

  Buddhas, bells, and blistering heat: the author with Karl Pribram in Japan.

  The author in a cemetery at the San Francisco Marina—the opening scene of The Magic Circle.

  Neville with one of her favorite authors, Martin Cruz Smith, signing a rare first edition of his book Rose (1998).

  Neville on a research trip to Tunisia in 1999.

  Authors Guild One Hundredth Anniversary Party in DC. From left to right: John Cole, director of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress; Nancy Gwinn, director of the Smithsonian Libraries; Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild; and Katherine Neville, the first author to serve on the Smithsonian Libraries Board, in 2012.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint material:

  Henry Holt and Company, Inc.: “Fire and Ice” from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1951 by Robert Frost, Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

  Houghton Mifflin Company: Excerpt from J.
B. by Archibald MacLeish. Copyright © 1956, 1957, 1958 by Archibald MacLeish. Copyright © renewed 1986 by William H. MacLeish and Mary H. Grimm. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

  Tom Lehrer: Excerpt from the lyrics of “Pollution” by Tom Lehrer. Copyright © 1965 by Tom Lehrer. Used by permission.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc.: Scripture from the King James Version Scripture. Copyright © 1976 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Publishers. Used by permission.

  New Falcon Publications: Excerpt from AHA by Aleister Crowley. Reprinted courtesy of New Falcon Publications, Tempe, AZ.

  Copyright © 1998 by Katherine Neville

  Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-1369-7

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10014

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