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

the boys and their widowed mother destitute. The family removed to the sacred mountain Burqan Qaldun, at the source of the Onon River, where they foraged for food. Each day, Temujin prayed to this mountain:

O Eternal Tangri, I am armed to avenge the blood of my ancestors.…

If you approve what I do, lend me the aid of your strength

.

And Tangri spoke to him. By the time Temujin was grown and married to his betrothed, he had succeeded in rallying the Mongol tribes and reducing their enemies the Tatars to mere collections of bones decorating the battlefields he’d left behind. He conquered a third part of China, and much of the eastern steppe. The shaman Kokchu revealed to the Mongol peoples that it was Temujin’s destiny one day to rule the world, to become the great leader who would unite the four corners as had been foretold since the dawn of time.

And indeed, at the age of thirty-six, after many successful battles, Temujin the blacksmith was elected the first Great Khan to unite all the tribes under one tuq, or banner. His title as Khan was Chenggis, from the Uighur word tengiz—which, like the Tibetan dalai, means sea. His followers called themselves Kok Mongol, the Blue Mongols, after their powerful patron, the sky god Tangri. The magical White Banner they followed, with its nine yak tails, was believed to be imbued with shamanic powers, to possess a sulde—a soul or genie of its own—that led Genghis Khan and the Kok Mongol onward to their conquest of the sedentary civilized world.

It was later said that, from the moment of his birth, it had been ordained that under Genghis Khan, East and West would be woven together like the warp and woof of a complex tapestry, so inextricably knotted as to be inseparable in future. Before they were through, the Mongol Empire stretched from the inland waterways of central Europe all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Genghis Khan had truly lived up to his title Ruler of the Seas.

He’d conquered the lands of Hindus and Buddhists and Taoists, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, but Genghis retained to the end his own animist faith and his worship of rivers and mountains. He rejected costly pilgrimages and religious struggles over places like Mecca and Jerusalem as foolishness, for the god Tangri existed everywhere. He illegalized baptism and ritual ablution as pollution of the sacrosanct source of all life: water. He demolished large stretches of China and Iran, razing all vestiges of earlier civilization, including animal and human life, art, architecture, and books. Loathing the soft decadence of city life, he burned vast tracts of cultivated soil, returning them to the appearance of those harsh, clean steppe lands he felt most comfortable living on.

Though illiterate, Genghis understood the power of writing. He had his own moral code written into law, and so rigidly enforced that it was said during his lifetime a virgin with a golden platter on her head could walk the length of the Silk Road unmolested. He had the history and genealogy of the Mongols encoded into sacred Blue Books and had these placed in caves for future generations to find. He also had the ancient wisdom of the shamans, magi, and priests of each land he conquered carefully examined and recorded, and he set these in the caves as well.

It is said that these documents, when combined, provide the key to ancient secrets of great power—secrets of a nature so organic that, when unearthed, they would demolish the pretensions of today’s “organized” religions, religions that have crystallized over the centuries, trapped within their own intractable dogma, their petrified rituals and rites.

What Genghis—the blacksmith who became an ocean—really hid in the caves, it is said, is a tradition transcending all faiths but containing the concentrated essence that provides the kernel of each. Down to our own century, those with an interest in harnessing such power have sought these caves and their contents.

Gurdjieff claimed to have found some of these documents before the turn of the century while traveling through Xinjiang and Tajikistan, somewhere in the Pamirs. There was also the famous British black magician and occultist Aleister Crowley, who was later evicted from Germany and Italy by Hitler and Mussolini, two men who feared the threat his own dark knowledge might pose to their plans. In the spring of 1901, Crowley was a principal in an Anglo-Austrian expedition for the first ascent of Chogo-Ri, or K2, on the China-Pakistan border—a failed attempt to locate these same caves.

After Red October, first Lenin and then Stalin would attempt to get back such territories once possessed by the tsars that were lost during the Russian Revolution. Then in the 1920s, between the First and Second World Wars, the Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich learned of the documents while traveling through Mongolia, Tibet, and Kashmir. He was told they were scattered across Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Tibet, and that when they surfaced, the hidden cities of Shangri-La, Shambhala, and Agharthi would rise. But there was another hidden city that sank beneath a mysterious lake when the Mongols first invaded Russia—Kitezh, the Russian city of the Grail—which will also rise from the waters to usher forth the transition to a new age.…

Volga couldn’t have hit the button better when he’d said I might find a “hidden level” in the story he had to tell me. He must have noticed just now the effect of what he’d said, for he suddenly stopped speaking. He’d long ago released my hands, and was now watching me closely.

The story of Kitezh was told in the famous Rimsky-Korsakov opera. Jersey had the starring role of Lady Fevronia, Saviour of the City, the last time we’d visited Leningrad. It’s a tale of two cities, the first destroyed by the grandson of Genghis Khan in his ten-year rape and pillage of the lands between the Volga and the Danube, a conquest followed by the long-term suppression of Russia, first under the Mongol hordes, then the