Something completely unrelated. I don’t know if I’ll post the rest (or even finish it), but I’ve always found the best cure for writer’s block is to write something else.
Events have unfolded such that it is now clear to me that I must be very precise in my accounting. The world is changed now, very literally, perhaps quite irrevocably, and I am as yet the only man who has realized it. This, then, is my statement of the events which I believe accomplished this cataclysm, though the possibility remains that I will never truly understand the precise mechanisms my apprentice employed.
The signs portend a pivotal role for the cult of Jesus of Nazareth–and my faith in those signs has only grown–so it is with respect to their organization that I date my first interaction with the man who would become my apprentice at the start of the planting season 33 years after their Messiah’s death.
***
“Great Sage of Hermes, I seek your wisdom. It is said that you guard the secret of immortality, that you have gazed upon the same sky as Enoch, fifteen centuries ago.”
The man was young, by my guess no more than 30 years of age, unadorned clothes, hair that had been washed in preparation for this audience but likely no other time in the past month. Ribbons of burn scar striped peculiarly across his face, though not in the manner of any brand I had ever seen. His duplicitousness was that naive, guileless kind: no malice, but a quite foolish assumption that his provenance could possibly be immaterial to a seeker of truth. As if one could expect to read constellations in the absence of stars.
“I do,” I replied, pacing before the great cylix at the center of my temple. “And I have. But that which is guarded is kept from the outside.”
“Of course, Great Sage. It is not immortality which I seek–but the truth. That which binds the world together–fastens the material to the divine.”
I blinked.
“You are more educated than you appear, both to be pondering these notions as well as to know that I could teach them to you. But why? What would you do with the truth?”
“Is not understanding its own reward?”
“I do not believe so,” I replied. “No, I believe it is best taken as a means of doing miracles. But I also believe you have your own opinions on miracles. And truth–or at least its fungibility.”
The man’s face fell like spent wax, though he did not recoil the way exposed charlatans often do.
“You know of me, then?” he asked. I turned to regard the glyphs lining the cylix’s interior, as I often did.
“This temple is not a cloister, and your arrival in Athribis has not been silent,” I said. “The villagers have their opinions of who you are and what you flee. I make no claim that your true motives have been revealed to me. Merely that those you have revealed are false.”
The man vacillated over his secrets a moment, steeling himself.
“I seek to understand a particular miracle,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I fear it. And I wish either to find peace or undo it.”
It was my turn to consider the unexpected.
“What miracle is it that a Christian would see undone?” I asked, my tone betraying more than a measure of confusion. The man took a breath.
“I have been brought back to life,” he said. “I died. My soul existed in the beyond for three days before the Christ returned it to my body, and then I was alive again.”
“But…”
“And I have not aged since.”
“Hm.” I had turned. This Christian had my full attention now. I had dealt with his kind, amicably but unproductively. The greatest threat their teachings posed was the possibility I might listen–an audience which might bring Rome’s attention to my village. Their communion was irrelevant to my contemplation of the Harmony or my role as a physician, and most left when they realized I would be no ally to their movement. This one was a very different dilemma. He was most likely a liar, but his lie was a strange one for a Christian, and his wish–to die, plainly–was stranger still.
“It seems to me,” I began, “that the unraveling of this miracle would bring about your end. At least, if what you have told me is true.”
“Yes, that is my intent.”
“I trust you’ve tried more direct methods to bring this about?” I did not actually trust this was the case, but it seemed the easiest way to determine if he would be a waste of my time.
“I have.”
I could not help but raise an eyebrow.
“Oh? And?”
“I shall demonstrate to you and only you, if you will consent, Great Sage.”
***
I had assumed to this point that I was facing a con, though the goal of such a deception remained a mystery. The temple of Thrice-Blessed Hermes which I kept had few riches, and all of them could be purchased at market for a modest sum, even in a village as small as Athribis. I had begun to regard the Christian’s entreaties as a test of my wits, a game whose prize was the unraveling of just what this man wanted. His commitment, though, surprised me. What I thought was a flaw in his fiction brought our shared inquiry directly to the prospect of his imminent death. But he did not back down.
He allowed me to bind his hands and feet so that I could sacrifice him to the glory of my god–a practice which I, in truth, had never actually attempted, though I adapted an older funeral ritual to the task. But I here rely on an amended recollection of the results, for when I first attempted to cut his throat, I instead, assured I had already completed the task, began to loose the bonds on his wrists. It was only when he asked what I was doing that I realized that not only had I quite forgotten to kill him, but my entire memory of the event had been altered. At first I reasonably attributed my mistake to a weakness of my own faculties, but as I began recording my intentions for the Christian’s demise in writing, it became clear that I was only a part of what seemed a vast network of happenstance and coincidence dedicated to the strangely singular goal that this man should not die or, for that matter, suffer any severe injury.
Torches would spontaneously extinguish, tools would go missing, my own train of thought would become insufferably hard to grasp as I concentrated on this theoretically simple task. The closest I came to success, I sneezed at the instant I brought my old ritual knife to his neck, accidentally striking the stone table and shattering the blade. At this, I was forced to face the notion that an order had been constructed about this Christian that, despite its evasion of my senses, had the consequential force of stone. The manner of its function particularly intrigued me: I had long thought the Christians just another whirlwind of plebeian pseudo-objections to Roman occupation. But if the force which protected this man was indeed the work of Jesus of Nazareth, it meant the would-be Messiah not only understood the Harmony of the Spheres; he had found a way to command it of which even I was unaware.
“I truly hoped you would succeed,” the Christian said, as I stepped away from the table.
“Remarkable,” I breathed, not even processing his disappointment.
“Indeed.” He offered his wrists, which I untied.
“You have convinced me that you are indeed protected by a miracle. I am afraid I cannot simply explain its nature, but if you would aid me, I would attempt to decode it.”
“Decode it, Great Sage?” the Christian asked, looking up from the partially untied rope around his ankles.
“Tell me, Christian: What do you know of geometry?”
***
The man, it seemed, had a mind for connections, influence. He quickly grasped the profundity of mathematics that most dismissed as mere useful praxis, but his actual education proved rather arid, dotted with oases of things he had picked up from some of Christ’s more learned followers. For what I judged to be the most significant subject of study my order had encountered in centuries, I needed a partner, a counterbalance to my insights, so when I determined that the gaps in his mystic knowledge would require more than just remedial instruction, I proposed to take him on as an apprentice. My first in decades and–not to get ahead of myself–the only one who would not prove a disappointment, intellectually.
His training was expedited, just five years, shorter than my own by more than half, and in that time we did not even touch upon the mystery of his apparent immortality. Before we could interrogate this divinity, I needed him to understand the language of the divine. In effect, I needed him to be a translator: This working, allegedly by Christ, was a product of insights wholly illegible to me. The Christians’ teachings seemed meant for the poor, the beaten down. They seemed political, and I had only so much interest in the organization of the polis. Still, I knew to look for the truth within truths. Plato also modeled the soul as a city; baser political instincts have always served as a lead toward deeper truth. Thus I needed my apprentice to speak my language, so I could speak his–so I could begin to chart the divine soul beneath Christ’s Kingdom of Heaven.
Up to now, my contribution to my order’s work had centered upon a particular epistemological point: Why should it be that we, creatures of fire and flux, each uncertain step, mishearing, and misapprehension, have any access to Truth at all? How could we hear the Harmony of the Spheres? More importantly, how could we possibly be sure it was actually True?
I was not the first to express skepticism of my own faculties for knowledge, nor, most assuredly, would I be the last, but my attempt to resolve the ambiguity was to collapse the Meno Paradox: “That which is above is like that which is below,” I wrote. “And that which is below is like that which is above, to do thy miracles of one only thing.” The inner circle is like–and is thus connected to–the outer circle. If the Truth is unknowable, then the self is unknowable. But if the self is knowable, then the Truth is knowable, for we are connected to the divine. I was certain that my apprentice’s condition was the product of this connection, but my theory was that his particular connection to the Truth was different, enhanced, of a higher fidelity. In imprecise but appealingly comprehensible vernacular: I believed his soul had been recreated of better material.
In search of the method of reforging, so to speak, we attacked the corpus of Christ’s teachings, subjecting them to all manner of mathematical, geometrical, and philosophical analysis. We threaded our way through the curiously complex web of translational ambiguity created by the propagation of those teachings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Egyptian, and even Latin. We found numerous insights that would no doubt have given the ancients pause, would certainly guide future inquiries into the nature of the material world, but what we could not find was any hint, any notion as to how Jesus of Nazareth had been able to manipulate not just the material world but, for the case of my apprentice, the link between the material and metaphysical. Despite all of our efforts, all of our research, analysis, and experimentation, neither of us could fathom how one could alter the laws of material existence.
We proceeded in this effort for the better part of twenty years, in which time the weight of old age began gradually to overtake me while, true to his original premise, my apprentice did not seem to age a day. And though he was, in real terms, my senior–and more ironically, though he was determinedly seeking his own death–he still fell into that sort of grief that afflicts the young far worse than their nearby, dying elders.
It was at first only an occasional day that my weakness or sickness forestalled my contribution to the Work, but as those days became more and more frequent, my apprentice began delving into solitary, increasingly esoteric, and sometimes violent lines of inquiry. I suspected that a boundary had been crossed when he stumbled into my bedchamber one evening, clearly addled–by substance, lack of sleep, or some other adrenal frenzy.
“The covenant was not sealed until Longinus spilled His divine blood,” he said. His voice was barely a whisper, but his diction was strangely perfect. “The cross links the Platonic heaven to the earth, yes, but the serpent may not be fixed to the sky without…” He trailed off, searching the room, before his gaze slowly homed to me. His mouth hung open. His lips were cracked.
“Without a Rose,” he said.
This was the first of many incidents in which I would find him amidst increasingly nonsensical ramblings. He grew difficult to collaborate with, and then he grew difficult to reason with, even on my good days. And of course, my health continued to deteriorate. It reached a point that I could scarcely rise from bed, and I was growing certain that my remaining time would be measured in weeks if not days. As my inquiries with my apprentice had consumed my time and efforts, I had never trained another to take up the duties of the temple, and I worried that the recent changes to his demeanor boded poorly for his willingness to take up my mantle. Even so, I rose one day and attempted to find him, in hope that he would take sympathy and help me complete the duty to which I had been truant.
By that time, he had taken to carrying out his research in a cave at the base of the hill that abutted the temple. It was close to the garden and offered convenient access to certain herbal reagents, though I strongly suspected he used the space for privacy moreso. In my condition, even walking the short distance there was laborious, but slowly, carefully, I managed.
I was surprised to find the entrance of the cave covered in thatch, with a piece of papyrus fastened to the exterior. It read:
“I have found the answer. I have made of myself a bridge to God, and all humanity will be made gods in turn.
Touch the circle, and will see the Truth.”
Painfully, I hurried to lift one side of the thatch and stumbled inside. At the end of the short path to the cave’s single chamber, I found a scene far more gruesome than any my lifetime of mystical inquiry might have prepared me for.
In the circular, lamplit space, my apprentice had erected a cross, stretching from the floor to the ceiling–which had somehow been scoured and flattened, parallel to the floor. On both surfaces, bafflingly complex geometric arrays had been inscribed, incorporating symbols of Greek, Egyptian, and Judaic origin, along with markings I had never seen before. Along the perimeter of the lower circle was inscribed an incantation in Latin which I haltingly translate here:
“Divine power made me
Highest wisdom and primal love
Before me were no things created
Except eternal ones
And I endure eternal”
This was mirrored on the ceiling by a language I had never seen before and which I had never seen and which I now believe had not, to that point, ever been written on earth before. But the most evocative feature of the arrays were the two serpents: The lower circle was bisected by a depiction of a snake, stretching from east to west. The upper circle held within in the Ouroboros. This was it, I realized–the fastening of the serpent to the sky.
The centerpiece of the apparatus I describe last not because it was in any way less salient than the previous components but because I now perceive it to be, in a sense, resultant from these components:
My apprentice had nailed himself shirtless to the cross at his angles and left wrist. His right hand, now draped over the other arm of the cross, still clutched a knife, which I gathered he had recently plunged into his chest. But the blood which should have soaked him, his knife, the cross, and the ground beneath his mortal wound had taken on strange and disturbing properties. All of it had become solid, with a rough, translucent, crystalline surface, stretching improbable arcs between the base of the cross and the knife and converging at his heart. I realized belatedly that these streams of frozen blood, pulsing as if with a heartbeat, resembled the thorny stems of roses, and indeed the scarlet bloom at his chest did seem to radiate like petals of a macabre flower. It would have been a horrible state in which to find my apprentice dead, but he was not dead. His eyes were open wide, fixed on the distance but intermittently twitching and blinking, and his ribs heaved with wheezing breath. I cried out to him. He did not answer.
I moved to help him, but my first step forward made contact with the perimeter of the lower circle, and the very last things I beheld with my own mortal eyes were the sanguine glow which filled the chamber–and the beatific smile which spread across my apprentice’s face.
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