The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

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.

It’s said that Alexander’s visit to Nysa was the turning point of his short but influential life. Approaching this verdant valley spread out between mountain ranges was like entering a lost and magical domain. The valley not only boasted rare vineyards and the heady wines Alexander loved to drink, it was also the only place in this part of the world where ivy, sacred to the god, was known to grow.

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