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

related to both these individuals who were sitting here chatting so calmly, even blithely, about the world’s largest-scale mass murder as if it were some atavistic religious rite. Wasn’t it enough to suggest that Hitler had arranged to have himself torched like a marshmallow—that he undertook a pagan ritual involving six children, a dog, and a handful of miscellaneous friends in an underground bunker on Walpurgisnacht—just so in death he’d resemble some self-sacrificial Teutonic hero? That was sufficiently disgusting. But if I understood correctly, what they were now implying was even worse.

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “Surely you’re not saying Hitler’s death was part of some god-awful rite involving slaughter on a massive scale—trying to purify the earth and everybody’s bloodlines because of some prophecy about an avatar of a new age?”

“It’s a bit more complex than that,” Zoe informed me. “When you arrived, I said I’d explain the magus missing from the deux magots. Some think it’s Balthasar, who brought the gift of bitter myrrh, for tears of repentance. But in fact it was Kaspar, whose gift was incense: an offering of sacrifice.”

“Like Kaspar Hauser’s death,” I said, recalling Wolfgang’s tale on our drive to the monastery of Melk.

“Have you ever visited Kaspar Hauser’s grave at Anspach?” Zoe asked. “It’s a small stone-walled cemetery filled with flowers. To the left of his grave is a tombstone that reads Morgenstern—in German ‘morning star,’ the five-pointed star of Venus. The stone to the right is Gehrig—‘spear-bearer,’ or the celestial centaur Sagittarius, from the Old High German word ger, spear. Coincidence? More likely a message.”

“Message?” I said.

“The centaur sacrificed his life to trade places with Prometheus in Hades,” she said. “He’s still associated with the Sufis and the Eastern mystical schools. The five-pointed star of Venus was the symbol of the sacrifice required for initiation into the Pythagorean mysteries. I think the message to be read at Kaspar Hauser’s grave is that at the turn of each age, sacrifices must be made, willingly or unwillingly.”

Zoe smiled strangely, her cold aquamarine eyes looking through me.

“There was such a sacrifice in our story: the death of Lucky’s niece, his sister Angela’s child. Perhaps the only woman Lucky ever wholly loved,” she said. “She was an opera student, like Pandora, and might have become a fine singer. But she shot herself with Lucky’s revolver—though the reason was never adequately explained. Her name was Geli Raubal, short for Angeli, ‘little angel,’ from angelos, messenger. So you see, as in the case of Kaspar Hauser, it may have been the symbolic messenger who died for what others were seeking.”

“What were they seeking?” I asked.

“The knowledge of the eternal return—Pandora’s magic circle,” Zoe said. “It is, quite simply, the power of life after death.”

THE MESSENGER

The belief of [the Thracians] in their immortality takes the following form.… Every five years they choose one of their number by lot and send him to Zalmoxis as a messenger … to ask for whatever they want.… Some of them hold javelins with speartips pointed upward, while others take hold of the messenger’s hands and feet and swing him aloft onto the points. If he is killed they believe that the god regards them with favour, but if he lives they blame his own bad character, and send another messenger in [his] place.

I’ve heard a different account from the Greeks:… Zalmoxis was a man and lived in Samos where he was a slave in the household of Pythagoras.… After gaining his freedom and amassing a fortune he returned to his native Thrace … where he entertained the leading men and taught them that neither he nor they, nor any of their descendants would ever die.

—Herodotus,

The Histories

And those of the disciples who escaped the conflagration were Lydis and Archippos and Zalmoxis, the slave of Pythagoras who is said to have taught the Pythagorean philosophy to the Druids among the Celts.

—Hippolytus, Bishop of Romanus Porto,

Philosophumena

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

—Job 1:15, 16, 17, 19

Camulodunum, Britannia: Spring, A.D. 60

FRACTIO

Jesus took bread, and blessed it

…

and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat, this is my body. And he took the cup and gave thanks … saying, Drink ye all of it. For this is my blood

.

—Matthew 26:26–28

And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined. And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death

.

—Isaiah 25:6–8

The grass spread beneath her was a thick carpet of rich emerald green that soothed her soul after another long, hard winter under the Roman yoke. She stood tall and proud in the wicker chariot perched high on the grassy knoll, holding the reins lightly between her fingers, her wild red hair lifted from her broad shoulders and tumbling to billow about her waist in the early morning breeze.

This past year had been far worse than the previous fifteen years since the Roman occupation, for the young emperor Nero had proved far greedier than his stepfather, Claudius, whom the rumors said Nero himself had poisoned.

Now native Britons were being brutally dispossessed by floods of opportunistic Roman colonists backed up by garrisons of legionary troops. Only a few months ago, when her husband died, she herself—proud queen of royal blood of the house of Iceni, and her two young daughters—had been raped by Roman officers, dragged out of their home and publicly beaten with iron rods. Her vast holdings of land were seized on behalf of the emperor Nero and her family’s wealth and treasured possessions, as with those of so many others, carted off to Rome. But despite these tragedies, she knew she had fared better than many others: Britons were everywhere being captured and sold into chain gangs