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

Wotan. Odin’s wife, the Sibyl, a prophetess from Marpessos at the foot of Mount Ida in modern Turkey, was one of a long line of women who recorded the history of the Trojan kings and prophesied the future of their descendants: their writings were also called the Sibylline Oracles.

After the Trojan War, two copies of these Sibylline Oracles were made and carried for safety to the Greek colony of Erythraea on the Turkish coast and to the Cumaean caves just north of Naples. The Cumaean books were later brought to Rome, in 600 B.C., by the last descendant of the Trojan sibyls, and offered to the Roman king Tarquin, who guarded them in closely held fastness, as they were still maintained down into imperial times. For these were of great value not only to the Teutonic descendants of Wotan but also to the Romans: Remus and his twin Romulus, who founded Rome, themselves were descendants of Aeneas, the Trojan hero of Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid. When Virgil died, the emperor Augustus placed his grave along the road from Naples to Cumae, where Aeneas likewise had descended into the underworld.

The Roman culture enjoyed a “Thousand-Year Reich” from its founding in 753 B.C. until its conversion to Christianity under Constantine, who in A.D. 330 moved the imperial capital back to the region of Troy. A second phase lasted until the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, one thousand years after the fall of the western Roman Empire to the Germans. So these two cultures, the Teutonic and the Roman, can be seen mythologically as two branches of the same vine, both descended from Troy.

The Germans regarded themselves as the “rightfully chosen” sons whose ancestor Wotan was not only a hero like Aeneas but a king of royal blood and a divinity. They loathed the imputation that civilized culture had been brought to the pagan North only latterly by Charlemagne and the Carolingian Franks, usurpers who’d crawled to Rome to kiss the pontifical ring and have themselves crowned Holy Roman Emperors.

When Zoe’s eclectic romp through two millennia ended, she told us how these Thousand-Year Reichs were woven together.

“Hitler, from an early age, attended boys’ school at the Benedictine monastery at Lambach. As a choirboy there he claimed he’d ‘intoxicated himself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals’—and aspired to become a Black Monk, as the Benedictines were called.”

This recalled Virgilio’s comments on Saint Bernard, patron of the Templars, who’d single-handedly made the flagging Benedictine Order the most powerful in Europe.

According to Zoe, Benedict—a contemporary of King Arthur and Attila the Hun—built thirteen monasteries, all located at or near important pagan religious sites. Twelve were outside Rome, at Subiaco, within spitting distance of the ruins of the emperor Nero’s palace facing the Sacro Speco, a famous oracular cave where Benedict himself spent several years as a hermit. When some monks of neighboring orders tried to poison the meddlesome Benedict, who was bent upon “purifying” them, he broke camp and relocated to the site of the ancient city of Casinum between Rome and Naples, where he built his now legendary thirteenth monastery: Monte Cassino.

At the height of World War II, when the Allies landed at Naples just after the fall of the Mussolini government, the Germans spent six months defending Monte Cassino in one of the longest pitched battles of the war. Allied bombing raids reduced the mountain to rubble. Yet the German army—though they’d removed the monastery’s many treasures and archives to safety—fought on amid the broken stones, in a desperate attempt to hold the mountain.

“By order of Hitler himself, Monte Cassino was defended fanatically,” said Zoe. “Just as he wished to seize Mount Pamir in Central Asia in his invasion of Russia, Hitler was assured by his dowsers and geomantic scientists that Monte Cassino in Italy was one of the key points on a massive power grid girdling the earth.”

“Yes, it’s what I was telling Ariel about, only last night,” Wolfgang said. “It seems these places are all connected with the coming aeon. And Hitler’s actions as well.”

“Indeed,” Zoe agreed. “An important event confirms it. Since Lucky’s horoscope foretold he could only be destroyed by his own hand, he was known among his intimates as ‘the man who couldn’t be killed.’ The last attempt on his life, at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters on July 20, 1944, was led by Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, a handsome war hero, an aristocrat and mystic. Because his name connects symbolically to the coming age—Schenk means cup-bearer and Stauf a tankard—Stauffenberg was regarded by many as the coming ‘pourer’ who would usher in the age by destroying the Great Adversary. Of further importance was that, like Wotan, Stauffenberg had lost—or perhaps given!—one of his eyes in the war.

“But once again, Lucky lived up to his nickname,” Zoe added. “Later, when he took his own life, he underwent cyanide, a bullet, and the flame—symbolic too—the Celtic triple death, like die Götterdämmerung.”

“That’s a pretty glamorous description for a guy who was your basic homicidal maniac,” I pointed out. “Just take a look at the actual deaths of Mussolini and Hitler: the first was hung up in the town square like a stuffed sausage, while the other got cremated with a can of gasoline. I’d hardly describe those as heroic or noble ways to die—much less a ‘Twilight of the Gods.’ Not to mention how many millions of people Hitler wiped out before himself, in the Holocaust.”

“Do you know the meaning of the word ‘holocaust’?” Zoe asked.

“Holo-kaustos,” Wolfgang said. “It means totally burned, yes? In Greek, if an animal offering was thought a good sacrifice, they called it ‘completely consumed by fire.’ It meant the gods had accepted everything that was sent them. For the Greeks, though, this was more of a thanks offering for gifts already received, where for the Semites such things were expiation of the past sins of the tribe.”

What in God’s name were they saying? I reminded myself I was