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

have been shutting my eyes whenever it was staring me right in the face. Hadn’t Dacian Bassarides said it was essential to ask the right questions? That the process could often be more important than the product? There was something connecting all these seemingly unrelated things, and though it might seem like trying to find a missing chunk in a scrambled pile of jigsaw pieces, I had to figure it out.

And that was when I saw it.

All this time I’d been sorting and culling and following bits of string when I should have been looking at what Sam called the “tantra” of it all—that is, the thing that held the whole tapestry together, as in Eastern cultures tantra tied Fate to life and death. Sam said it even existed in the animal kingdom: that a female spider wouldn’t eat the male if he left the web by the same path he’d entered by, showing that he recognized the pattern. Well, I’d finally recognized the pattern I’d been missing. I felt a cold little ball forming at the pit of my stomach.

Though everyone in my family had perhaps told me conflicting stories, there was one person whose stories themselves were riddled with twists and turns and internal contradictions. And though the history or genealogy of each person might’ve turned out differently from what I was first led to believe—maybe even from what each believed about himself—there was one person I now realized I knew almost nothing consistent about. It was certainly true, though, that everyone had warned me against him from the very start—including, as I now realized in an awful flash, his own sister!

It was the man sitting beside me here in the plane, his dark, shaggy head leaning against my shoulder so I could barely make out his chiseled profile. It was my colleague, cousin, and erstwhile lover, Wolfgang K. Hauser of Krems, Österreich. And although only weeks ago I’d believed Wolfgang to be my own destiny here on planet earth, in the hard, cold light of reality I was forced to recognize that his every lie had only led to another lie, from the moment he’d mysteriously arrived in Idaho while I was away in San Francisco at Sam’s funeral.

Speaking of that funeral, hadn’t Sam himself told me—in contradiction of Wolfgang’s claims about the employer of Olivier and Theron Vane—that it had all been arranged with blessings bestowed by the highest echelons of the U.S. government? And hadn’t Zoe also pointed out that Wolfgang had sought her out in Vienna to pump her for information, not the other way around?

But the bitterest pill was the thought that Wolfgang had appropriated Pandora’s manuscripts from beneath my very nose, deploying the same suave deftness he’d used to appropriate my body and my trust.

There were already enough hints of Aryan preoccupation in his Valhalla-like castle and his upbringing by a mother who herself had been raised by a Nazi. And what about Wolfgang’s direct question to Zoe: “You don’t mean to tell me that Ariel’s grandparents were actually Gypsies?” What else could that mean?

Having already swallowed enough lies to choke a warthog, I wondered when I was going to stop lying to myself.

Now that I feared, in the deep recesses of my mind, that Wolfgang Hauser himself was the missing link that tied together this mingled, mangled, muddled web of myth and intrigue, I only prayed I could retrace my own steps carefully enough to extricate both Sam and myself from it alive.

URANUS

I would like at this time to touch upon the greatest spiritual event which has taken place … the release of atomic energy.… I would call your attention to the words “liberation of energy.” It is liberation which is the keynote of the new era, just as it has always been with the spiritually oriented aspirant. This liberation has started by the release of an aspect of matter and the freeing of some of the soul forces within the atom.… For matter itself, a great and potent initiation paralleling those initiations which liberate or release the souls of men … The hour of the saving force has now arrived.

—

Externalization of the Hierarchy

,

“DK the Tibetan,” channeled by Alice Bailey, August 9, 1945

The Uranus cycle begins when the planet reaches its north node … the last heliocentric passage of Uranus over its north node occurred most significantly on July 20, 1945, four days after the first atomic explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico, which indeed ushered in a new era—for better or worse.… Events do not happen to us; we happen to events.

—Dane Rudhyar,

Astrological Timing

The most important thing in the life of any man is to discover the secret purpose of his incarnation and follow it with wariness as well as passion … the Uranus in us is the Sacred Lance of the Legend. In the hands of the Holy King it built the Temple of the Grail; in those of Klingsor the Garden of Evil Enchantments.… Uranus is the royal Uraeus Serpent in Egyptian Symbolism, slow yet sudden Lord of life and death. It takes a great deal to move him; but once in motion he is irresistible.… If you do not allow him to create, he will devour.

—Aleister Crowley,

Uranus

Before I could formulate any real plan of action, I knew I had to find Sam. Terrible as it might be to face him and reveal my many disastrous failures—not least of all, fiddling with Wolfgang while Rome burned—I’d suddenly grasped the fact that, thanks to me, Sam might be in worse danger than when I’d left, if anyone learned he was alive.

Wolfgang was uncharacteristically quiet for the balance of the trip, which suited me fine. By the time we landed in Idaho, we’d agreed he would go directly to the office and let the Pod, who’d be back from Vienna by now, know we were back safely, too. I would briefly run by my house to drop off my things before coming in to