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

form a separate Reich comprised of them and their children. He wished to purify the blood and reawaken the ancient mystical ties to the land—blood and soil.”

I looked at him in horror, but he wasn’t quite through.

“This is also certainly why Hitler called his attack to the east Operation Barbarossa—to awaken the waiting spirit of the emperor Frederick, long asleep within the mountain. He wished to invoke the magical blood of the long-lost Merovingians. To bring forth a utopian new world order, based on blood.”

THE BLOOD

It was believed that the blood in [the Merovingians’] veins gave them magical powers: they could make the crops grow by walking across the fields, they could interpret bird-song and the calls of the wild beasts, and they were invincible in battle, provided they did not cut their hair.…

Pepin [the first Carolingian] lacked the magical powers inherent in royal blood. He therefore sought the Church’s blessing … to show that his kingship came not through blood, but from God. Pepin was thus the first monarch to rule by the grace of God. To underline the importance of this act, Pepin was anointed on two occasions, the second time, with his two sons [Charlemagne] and Carloman, [to combine] the new concept of monarchy by divine right with the Germanic concept of magic power carried by blood.

—Martin Kitchen,

Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany

Tiberias, Galilee: Spring, A.D. 39

INTROIT

During that time [Herod Antipas] was almost entirely under the influence of a woman who caused him a whole series of misfortunes

.

—Emil Schürer,

The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ

In all the woes that curse our race

There is a lady in the case

.

—Gilbert & Sullivan

Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea, stood with widespread arms at the center of his royal chambers as he did each morning, while three of his personal slaves prepared him for his appearance at the receiving chambers to hear petitions. They attached the straps of the gold breastplate with its heavy chains of state, and draped the official red robes across his shoulders. His wardrobe complete, the slaves knelt and were dismissed by his freedman, Atticus, who accompanied the guards posted outside to follow the tetrarch along the promenade from his private wing of the vast palace at Tiberias.

This long walk in silence was the only occasion during the day when Herod Antipas ever had time to think—and right now he certainly had a lot of thinking to do. He’d already learned of the horror awaiting him in chambers: the freshly arrived imperial messenger dispatched by the emperor Caligula from his summer home at Baiae—an emperor, as Antipas could ill afford to forget, who regarded himself as a god.

Of all the woes that had befallen Antipas of late, he knew this might well prove the worst. And in this case, as in previous crises, the axis was centered upon his own family. Perhaps it ran in their blood, Antipas thought with a kind of dark humor. As many had observed, the brief history of the Herodian dynasty wasn’t lacking in problems of consanguinity. Whether intermarriage, blood feuds, bloodletting, or out-and-out bloodbaths, it seemed the Herods liked to keep things in the family.

This canker in the Herodian bloodline was derived directly from Antipas’s father, Herod the Great, a man steeped in his own sensuality and greed, who had slaked his thirst for riches and power in the blood of his own relations—a group that had included ten wives and dozens of offspring, many of whom he’d dispatched with an efficacy otherwise reserved for sacrificial beasts.

Herod Antipas himself had once stood very far down the line of succession. But due to the sudden shortage of heirs at his father’s death forty years ago, the kingdom had devolved upon himself, his brother Archelaus, and his half brother Philip of Jerusalem. Now, with both these brothers dead, Antipas found himself at sixty the last Herod still in possession of Jewish lands. But as of today, all that had changed—thanks in large part to the machinations of his ambitious wife Herodias.

Antipas knew he’d been cursed from the start by this love, this lust, this obsessive passion he felt for the woman who was actually his niece—and who, when they’d first met, had herself been married to another of his Herodian half brothers, Herod Philip of Rome. Galling as the theft of a brother’s lawful spouse might have been to his Jewish subjects here in Galilee, the wound was further exacerbated by Antipas’s repudiation of his first wife, a princess of royal blood.

To make matters worse, ten years ago, at the goading of Herodias and her daughter Salome, Antipas had actually executed a grass-roots spiritual leader from the Essene community who’d done nothing more than to publicly call the tetrarch’s wife a whore. Not satisfied with having a man beheaded to salvage her reputation, the power-hungry Herodias was now at it again—this time within their own long-embattled family.

More than forty years ago, when Herodias’s father was executed by Herod the Great, young Herodias and her brother Agrippa had been carried off by their mother to Rome, where they had grown up alongside the children of the imperial family. Agrippa was now spoiled out of all proportion. At nearly fifty, he was a dissolute spendthrift whose only achievement was having cultivated in himself the tastes of a king. And therein lay the crux of the problem. For thanks to his friendship with Caligula, today Agrippa, the man who would be king, indeed was a king.

The moment Tiberius was dead, Caligula—that vile little former dancing-boy who’d succeeded him—had released Agrippa from jail and lavished gifts and lands and titles upon him with the same abandon he would soon exhibit in spending all of Tiberius’s legacy of twenty-seven million gold sesterces in less than one year. Among these gifts, Caligula gave Agrippa lands that in Herodias’s opinion should certainly have gone to her husband Antipas, including the sacred land where the tomb of Abel, son