Chapter 19: A Woman and a Death

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book I: Early Years
Part Three–Adventurer
                                      

Jesus rested in the temple several weeks, eating cleansing foods such as millet and mild greens to rid his body of leftover effects of the poison, and meats and beans to regain some of the weight he had lost. He needed the weight. Normally, he was not thin like John, but his fasting had made his ribs stick out. He became, for a short time, a favorite with the kitchen staff. They snuck him hearty snacks in his stone hut, between official meals.

As he waited during these weeks for the next, the sixth, test, he went for long walks around the huge perimeter of the Great Pyramid. There were other, smaller pyramids nearby. Each was made of great stones weighing the equal of dozens of men each. Ancient stories Jesus knew about reported that the stones were brought across the desert long ago by means of magic floating. He had heard it said that the most ancient Egyptians of all, more than ten thousand years ago, had conquered many of nature’s mysteries. They could, he had been told, make things float and move forward, they could send messages invisibly through the air by means of little black boxes as he already knew the yellow peoples beyond India could, and they knew how to heal using precious stones.

In even earlier days, according to the legends he had read, everyone alive could fly about on their own and make wonderful music without opening their lips.

He was in the temple garden again, wondering how it would feel to fly, when he was called to his sixth test.

The priest who took him to it, a bent old man with a smile on his lips, said nothing but led him high up inside the Great Pyramid to the wide, comfortable rooms near the top.

These rooms were known as The Halls of Healing, for here many hundreds of men and women were admitted each year to be healed. The priest and Jesus walked past many rooms whose walls were painted with cheerful reds and yellows. The scent of dozens of different healing herbs, smokes, incense preparations, and other lotions and waters filled the air. Old people, cripples, and even leprosy-ridden children walked past them in the passageways.

The old man nodded kindly, winked, and herded Jesus into a large central room. “Good luck!” he said in a cracked voice and closed the door.

Jesus was left standing in a shaft of warm sunlight from a stone-cut window far overhead. The walls of the large room were a soft, sunny gold, trimmed with light green.

He walked forward and put his hand on one of the curving, wood-carved couches. Its seat was a pretty orange-linen sheet stuffed with some kind of feathers, which made it both firm and comfortable to his touch. He lay down on it, on his side, as if he were about to eat. On a quiet little table in front of him, a wooden cat was pausing in the act of cleaning itself. He put his hand out and stroked the long, polished back. It was a statue worthy of a pharaoh’s collection.

A silver goblet of red wine stood on the table. Jesus picked it up and drank.

He waited. It was his normal time for afternoon meditation. The colors and comfort of the room and the couch were making him tired. He lay his head down briefly. A warm breeze drifted in, carrying a scent of lotus blossoms from the pool in one of the gardens below. He quickly fell asleep.

When he awoke, the room was dark except for the flame of an oil lamp at the far end. Beside the lamp sat a beautiful young woman touching her slender fingertips to a harp. The echoing notes, each one distinct but flowing easily into the notes that followed, poured over Jesus like fresh water over a thirsty person’s tongue. The woman sang with the music that her fingers drew from the harp. One moment her voice sounded like it was the harp itself. Then, the next, her song rose above the harp’s notes, caressing and sharing with the notes, and then soaring up on its own. A scent of myrrh, light and sweet, drifted from her to him.

He watched her as if he were dreaming. He blinked his eyes and carefully felt his own physical feelings within, to see if he was poisoned again. But he was normal. At least, he knew, he had no strange medicines in him. Something else was happening. His complete awareness was drawn to the woman. He felt weak and strong at one time, as if he were the soft petals of a rose and yet also a blade of new steel from the Pontine Sea.

The woman was very beautiful. Her bright red hair was unbound. It flowed down to the middle of her back in soft waves, framing her shoulders and her small, dark face. Yet her skin was not as dark as an Egyptian’s: she was from Israel, a Hebrew, and from her delicate features and careful dress, he judged her father was wealthy.

She turned toward him and smiled. She sang to him.

He stood up and slowly walked the length of the room to where she sat playing. Her eyes looked him over carefully, especially his face. Then she smiled again and put her hands gracefully in her lap before the harp, which was between her legs.

“My lady,” he greeted her.

“Jesus-bar-Joseph,” she said, rising and holding out her hand.

He took it and stared deeply into her Grecian-blue eyes.

“I am Miriam,” she said.

He suddenly felt a disturbing sensation in his body. He breathed deeply. He had no idea what to say. “What are you doing in these Halls of Healing?” he asked.

She smiled. “I look so healthy?” she asked. “I am here with my father. We have come all the way from Bethany so he may take the cures and medicines of the priests. It is a small problem he has, just pains in one leg. But we travel everywhere to find him a cure.”

You re lucky to visit so many places,” he said.

She shrugged and withdrew her hand. “We have the money. I have heard that you travel, too. Come, let us sit down again. You can tell me where you have gone.” She laid her hand lightly on his forearm and looked up at him hopefully.

He glanced around. The only seats where they could sit together were the comfortable couches with the orange cushions. He led her to one.

She sat quietly, hands folded in her lap, and watched him expectantly as he sat beside her.

“How do you now about me?” he asked.

“The priests told me. They said I had the chance to meet an amazing man from my own country, who would someday be famous.”

A mischievous gleam came into her blue eyes. “I asked them what you looked like,” she continued. “’Is he tall or short, heavy or thin?’ I asked.”

“The way a man looks, does this matter to you?” he asked.

“Yes. If he might become my husband.”

Jesus’ heart began pounding. “Are you part of this test?”

She frowned. “I know of no test. They simply told me they had found a man whom I might like to wed.”

He felt dizzy. He took another slow breath and put his hand on the couch.

“You are direct,” he said.

“That’s kind of you to say it in such a way.” She blushed. “I feel like a fool. If my father could hear me, he would fall down in shame. But we are far from Judea and Galilee now, you and I. Would you like me better if I were quiet and shy?”

He laughed. “Please be anything you want to be, as long as you are most yourself.”

She nodded. “Tell me about your travels to India. Don’t leave out the mysteries you can perform! The priests told me of some of them.” She leaned forward, glanced around, and spoke low to him. “I believe anything is possible,” she confided. “There is some great secret that the priests know about you. I sense it. Do not be afraid to tell me whatever you wish.”

He breathed deeply yet again. The myrrh fragrance was all around him, now. He realized it was coming from her slender neck.

“I will tell you what I can,” he said.

She stared up into his eyes. Her face relaxed. “Good,” she said.

He began to tell her about India. At first he stumbled over his words, for he had to stop frequently to catch his breath. His heart was racing and his loins were alive. But soon he was able to ignore these problems. He found the easiest way to talk was to watch her face. As her eyes traveled back and forth between his own eyes and his lips, the story poured out of him easily. He carefully avoided mentioning who he really was. For the rest, he told everything.

She asked him questions whenever he stopped to rest, as they both leaned back on the couch. She smiled up at him and told him of some of her own travels to Greece and Damascus and through Egypt. Her eyes glowed as she talked.

They spoke for many hours, until the sun had set and a priest came to get her.

She promised to return the next day.

He stayed in a pleasant room just off the large central one in which he had met Miriam. Each morning, early, he exercised and meditated. Then he went to her in the large central room and sat with her to talk, or they stood together at one of the deep-set windows cut into the stone, where they could quietly look out over the Nile. The river was just beginning to flood. From their lofty height near the top of the temple, they were able to look north and south along the river for many miles. Jesus pointed out to her the great cliffs that marched up from the south on either side of the Nile Valley, containing the overflow when the river flooded and became a great lake. Together they looked north, to where the many fingers of the Nile spread out on their way to the sea. Three great channels, one on either side of the fingers and one down the middle, carried most of the mountain waters their final distance to the sea. Beyond the valley was bleak, barren desert.

“The Egyptians say the River is the source of all life,” she told him.

He nodded. They were standing so close he could feel the warmth of her flesh through her linen robe. He back away from her.

Suddenly she spun around. “Why do you always move away from me! she exclaimed. “Don’t you love me yet?”

Jesus felt his whole body stirring because of her nearness. He did not try to stop his feelings. Many days earlier he had discovered he couldn’t. He accepted the ache inside of him as a child accepts the gnawing of hunger just to be with a beloved playmate a little longer.

“We have not yet talked of love, Miriam,” he said.

“It’s time!” she exclaimed. “I can’t bear waiting any more. I love you!”

Jesus watched her face. He had learned that, around her, a great peace and sense of safety flooded through him.

“I want to be betrothed to you,” he said. “I love you. But I cannot decide what is God’s will and what is my own.”

She looked away. She was weeping. “My father is ready to return to Bethany next week,” she told him. “We have little time left.”

“I know. I will make my decision before you must leave.”

The week went by quickly. They had begun to read together, sometimes sharing by looking over each other’s shoulder and sometimes reading aloud. On some days they looked at ancient book rolls. He discovered that she was not only well educated, but also had a quick and subtle mind.

On other days she brought poems and love stories from other foreign lands. She translated them out loud, sometimes blushing and sometimes bold. He laughed with her at the fixes lovers could get into, but whenever her face became serious as if she were about to ask him a question about love, he looked away. He was beginning to know his answer. He wasn’t ready to tell her what it was.

They had two days left to them before she was to leave. They were sitting on one of the comfortable orange-cushion couches, talking, when she began to cry softly.

“What is wrong?” Jesus asked her.

She looked at him with tear-filled eyes. “You must know.” She gulped. Then she lowered herself to her knees on the floor before his feet and rested her head against his legs.

“My Jesus,” she said. Her voice broke. “I cannot wait any longer,” she continued. “I must know your answer now. But before you speak, I want to tell you this. I am yours.”

She paused, took a deep breath, and sat straight before him, bowing her head. “I have never said or done this for any man,” she told him.” I say it now. I beg you to accept my love.” Tears came to her eyes.

He reached out his hand and rested it softly on her cheek. “My love,” he said. “I have learned more from you than I have from great men of wisdom. When you are gone at night, this room is filled with your presence. I look at the stars, and suddenly they are part of a great space that is filled with you. I hear your voice in the trickle of water in the garden below, and I feel your body touching mine when I lie alone on my straw mat at night.”

She looked up at him hopefully. Her cheeks were wet.

“you have let me see, my lady,” he told her, “that love of one woman truly lead to God, too. But I cannot marry you.”

She swayed. She lifted herself off her knees. His hand fell from her cheek.

“Why?” she asked.

“I want to, my beloved. But I am the shepherd of our people. Someday I must return to Galilee and spend all my time in teaching and healing.”

She jerked her hand to her head and ran her fingers through her hair. “Who are you?” she asked.

“I am one who will have no time for physical love, or a family.”

“Everyone needs love,” she whispered.

He looked full into her face and wept with her. “You shall give it to me,” he said. “But not as a wife gives it. When I have returned to our country, we will meet again.

Three days later, after Miriam had gone, Jesus was led before the high priest and the council in the large reception hall of initiation, just as he had been at some point after each previous test.

Everyone rose silently. Jesus was led forward across the long straw mats. The high priest handed him his piece of parchment on which were written symbols of the initiation.

Jesus had completed the sixth degree. The priests gathered around him happily to receive him in the spacious stone room. He was now one of them. He had passed more degrees than most of them could claim. Each man knew how much the passing of his own tests had cost him in sacrifice and effort. They knew that the cost had been as great for Jesus, perhaps greater. His youth no longer mattered. They respected him for the master and man that he had now become.

Before Jesus took the next and final degree, he studied with the high priest himself. John had already completed these same studies. The subjects were mysteries that could be reveled to seventh-degree candidates for initiation, only. They included such things as medical knowledge about plants that were dangerous but could be used for experiencing oneself more deeply, special studies of the stars and planets and how they affect healing and psychic powers, and revelations about the structures and purposes of the great pyramids built as symbolic copies of the universe. And there were secret methods for using these studies.

They also studied death. This was a preparation for the final test where, Jesus was told, he would be working in the tombs and the embalming rooms.

He was brought to these rooms after several months of study. The entrance to them was a descending pit on the shadowy back side of the Great Pyramid. There were no other ways into or out of these rooms, for fear that the smells and aura of death would enter the rest of the temple. The long, dark, torch-lit hallway steadily sloped down into the bowels of the earth beneath the huge stone pyramid overhead.

Jesus first began work in the shadowing embalming rooms in the lowest caverns under the temple. The heavy odor of the thick embalming fluids and of decaying and sickened flesh hung like an impenetrable mist in the torch-lit air. The air was so hard to breath that one priest worked full time with a fan at the doorway, expelling air at the top of the great stone arch so that fresher air could seep in at its bottom. The first time Jesus entered these embalming rooms, his stomach lurched.

A master embalmer guided the work. He was a priest of the highest degree, an old and bent man with a grim face whose stained skin was patchy and red. He looked as if any day he, himself, might become a corpse, like the ones he helped treat in the shadowy light of the yellow flames.

This old priest guided the work of craftsmen embalmers who stripped and cleaned each dead body, made an incision in the flesh, and scooped out the quickly decaying bowels. Finally, chanting and moving ritually, they put secret herbs and spices into the dead body and into special wrappings, closed the incisions, and wrapped each corpse tightly. The metallic scent of stale blood hung over them always, in spite of the herbs they worked with. As soon as they had finished wrapping a corpse, they sent it above ground again to whatever kinsman claimed it for burial in small pyramids and other memorials in the desert. No one was buried beneath the temple itself, except for priests of the temple. They lay, wrapped in dusty chambers, long forgotten in black underground passages not far from the embalming rooms.

Jesus worked here in the dim light for several weeks, until he thought he would collapse from exhaustion and heat. Though the caverns were dep, the bubbling pots of cooked medicines for the embalming made the whole atmosphere hotter even than the desert at times, and moist. The air was so moist on occasion that it seemed impossible to draw the thick stuff into one’s lungs. Salty sweat rolled down his face and naked body.

Everyone wore loincloths only. He sweated so much that his hands and bare feet were constantly slippery. The work was difficult. He carried bodies that seemed twice as heavy in death as in life. He strained to life large bubbling pots of medicines off the fires. Everything, even the food, was soaked with the ugly smells in the air and on everyone’s hands. No one left, except to be replaced. Everyone, even the old master priest, ate and even slept in small, cramped but cool rooms nearby so they wouldn’t contaminate the upper world with the smell and feel of death.

The worst of it for Jesus, though, was not the physical conditions. As a man who hated death, the worst of it for him was seeing death every day. He had his worst time in the embalming rooms when he was assigned the work of receiving fresh corpses. Relatives–wives, sons, and daughters–brought them and so the corpses still clung to some of the dignity, and deep sorrow, of dying.

For this work Jesus carried a high, flaming torch that gave his face a bronzed, tomb-like cast. He wore a light linen robe so as not to appear rude to those who brought their loved ones to these deep, dark recesses for embalming. He greeted them at the bottom of the long, deep ramp that led to the embalming rooms, and showed their servants where to lay the corpse. Here also he made arrangements with sorrowing relatives for payment.

Some of the visiting relatives turned up their noses at the stench and, in the glare of the torch Jesus held, carefully avoided touching him. They would look at him as if he were filled with a disgusting sickness. But most of the relatives were too concerned to notice their surroundings much. It was this sorrow that Jesus could not easily bear.

“Why couldn’t he have been healed?” he found himself thinking, over and over, when a young corpse was laid before him. Some of the bodies had died, according to their relatives, from diseases any good physician could have healed. Jesus bent over each body and peered at it carefully while his torch sputtered and hissed. Some of them, he was sure, could have been cured by the healing powers that he had learned in India and Persia.

“My place should be out in the markets healing, not here! he once snapped at the old priest who guided everyone. A blackened cauldron of embalming fluids bubbled steadily beside them.

“Everyone is dying,” the grim-lipped priest told him. He coughed. “From birth to tomb we follow one road.”

Jesus shook his head. “Everyone is living, and we should be living more every minute!”

“You cannot get around death,” the old man said.

“Why not?” Jesus asked. “According to our old stories, the ancients used to be ageless, putting off one body when they grew tired of it and creating a new one with their minds.”

“Stories,” the priest said. He took out a square of cloth and spat into it.”

“Wait until you are in the tomb,” he told Jesus. “In a few days you will be.” He looked around the dark room at the dripping stone walls. “That is the last test you must go through.”

Jesus nodded He already had been told about it. Seventh-degree initiates had to spend three days in a small, sealed coffin.

“Then you will change your mind about death!” the priest exclaimed. He raised his work-stained, crooked finger. “No light, no sound, and nothing around you except the close stone walls of a casket!”

He coughed again, then continued. “Many of you young priests,” he said, “think of life as an act of bravery, carried out in the midst of a world that is wearing our bodies down and trying to kill us. Pha! We kill ourselves a little bit by every step we take.”

Jesus shuddered in spite of the damp heat of the rooms. “You talk like a demon, old man. Have you never lived happily?”

In the torch-lit darkness, the priest’s thin lips cracked into a small smile, the first that Jesus remembered seeing on his face.

“I lived,” the old man said, “and well. I have come to terms with both life and death. But you only understand life. Learn death, too. Now go do your work. A nobleman will come soon, bringing his father. Take your torch and be at the door to greet him when he arrives.”

Jesus bowed his head and went to his job.

The next few days passed quickly. His restlessness increased as he viewed the bodies of the dead and thought of his own burial in a stone grave. It seemed like a useless test that proved nothing except a man’s endurance. He wished he were in the sunlight markets of Heliopolis or Alexandria, healing and teaching, or back with the high priest again, studying.

When the time for the test came, the old priest escorted Jesus down a long, narrow, underground ramp off which little doors were set in the stone wall. Behind each door were large rooms filled with the stone graves and sarcophagi of long-dead priests.

At the shadowy end of the dry stone hall, far beyond all human activity and all light, a little room waited. Through the open door, by the priest’s torchlight, Jesus could see somber paintings of death scenes clinging to the walls. A Black human figure with a white tongue sticking out of its wide-open mouth was beside a black sun on the wall. A red sword, and capering blue demon figures, writhed against each other on another wall. Other figures on each wall proclaimed further symbols and experiences of death.

The dusty, little-used room was directly underneath the tip of the Great Pyramid high above. In the middle of the room, rising out of the stone floor, was a waist-high stone casket. Its rock walls and grey stone top were each a hand span thick. The top had been slid to the side. Within the casket was a space just large enough for a mummified body, its casing and a sarcophagus around both. Because Jesus would have no casing or sarcophagus around his own living flesh, he would have a small amount of room to move around when he lay down inside the coffin.

The priest sang a burial song while Jesus kneeled. Jesus’ heart was beating fast and he felt cold. He breathed deeply to restore his body warmth, but it seemed to do little good.

“Go in, now, body,” the priest spoke loudly. “I declare you dead. Enter your final resting place.”

With a shiver, Jesus climbed over the edge of the casket and lay down. He watched the priest slowly reach out his skinny arm and tug at a lever that was hidden from view.

The lid suddenly slid shut. Jesus was swallowed in the darkness.

the first half hour he did breathing exercises to calm his racing heart and steady his nerves. Then he began feeling around his rock prison. He had about two hand spans of space beyond the top of his head and below his feet. His arms, when he extended them upward, barely reached to the lid above. On each side of him were several more handspans of width. In utter blackness, his fingers felt the change in air near the small air holes by his head. One of his elbows bumped the loaf of bread that the old priest had laid inside, along with some water. Jesus’ bowels had been cleansed before coming here, and a tube attached to a goatskin had been given him for passing water. The priests who had created this test long ago had decided that initiates should not worry about food and water and other bodily problems.

They wanted initiates to think only about death. 

Jesus could hear no sounds. He knew that the old priest would have closed the room already and gone back up the long, narrow, dark hall. Jesus realized he could shout as loud as he wanted and no one would come.

The time passed slowly in the darkness. Since he had already gone through something like this while passing the second and fifth degrees, the lack of light bothered him little. Now and then he took a small sip of the tasteless water, and he meditated. As he had learned in the fifth degree, he reached inside his body with his awareness and calmed the medicines his own body was creating that might make him become too excited or afraid to lie still.

The worst problem was is feeling of suffocation. As his periods of sleep and meditation slowly took him deep into the heart of the cold aloneness, the suffocation increased. He realized much of it was just an illusion, for he was starting to see and hear things again, as in the other tests that took place in darkness.

Yet the feeling of suffocation, and the worry that he might actually die from it, grew stronger. Gradually he felt a building desire to beat at the walls and stone lid wildly and scream to be let out. As the urge build to a breaking point, he finally cleared it away, using breathing control and concentrating on the tense parts of his body. But the urge didn’t stay away. He had to guard against it constantly.

It was much later, during what he judged was his second full day in the casket, that the real test began.

It started when, to his increasing surprise, he began to feel as if he really were dead. It wasn’t the same as an illusion or worry, for it affected his body, too. He somehow lost physical contact with his sense of touch and with the difference between sleeping and being awake. Except in very clear moments, he wasn’t completely sure when he was dreaming and when he was awake, nor was he able to move his numb limbs most of the time, or feel anything.

When he was able, he sniffed his water carefully and tasted it. He did the same with the bread. There were no poisons or other medicines in them, nor in his body when he carefully checked. Yet the feeling of being dead increased.

Soon he began to feel, much of the time, as if he was floating. He was neither in the stone tomb nor out of it, but rather resting in a great, stretching blackness that was everything and everywhere. The blackness was filled with a quiet, distant tinkle as if, on a faraway beach, small seashells were breaking.

He stretched out his awareness, poking at each far corner of the blackness, trying to discover a way out. He felt his awareness expand beyond the stone walls of the room his body was in, and into other stone rooms like it, where long-dead priests were lying in mummified state in row after endless row. He stretched his awareness further. He felt other awarenesses, from above him, watching him and pushing their own thoughts into his. These strange, foreign thoughts were quick and short. Surrounding each of them, like the thick, jellied coating around a pomegranate seed, was a miasmic thought wave of dark nothingness. Each dark wave of empty nothingness passed over and through him, numbing his body and mind and adding to the blackness that he felt was stretching everywhere. He pushed against these waves of emptiness a little; then harder.

Suddenly he found his own thoughts were inside someone else’s mind. It was a priest’s mind. The priest’s thoughts seemed connected to other people’s thoughts. Jesus stretched his awareness a bit further and suddenly he felt like he was sensing the thoughts of dozens of priests above him, far up in the Great Pyramid. They all were thinking of him, and all of them were sending this great, black, dread wave of nothingness toward him.

This, he realized, was the reason he felt dead. It was also, he suddenly understood, the true test for his seventh degree. Somehow he must deal with this wave of deathly emptiness that the priests were sending to him with their minds.

He tried to fight their concentration on him by concentrating more intensely back at them. There were too many of them. Then he tried imagining a strong, healing-green psychic barrier around himself to keep out their thoughts. Again, there were too many of the priests concentrating on him, and their group effort aimed such a powerful beam of thought at him that it crept into his mind and took hold whenever his own concentration weakened just a little.

He finally realized there was nothing he could do except give in.

He let go of all his control, and quickly his sensation of floating in a black void increased. Thoughts of death passed through his mind. He remembered his dead father Joseph and felt overcome by sorrow. He imagined the weeping and suffering his mother would go through if he were to die this minute. He imagined how his death would affect the others, too. He saw Miriam marrying someone else, and his cousin John scowling and weeping. He watched as Judy and the other Essenes who believed in him suffered because he was suddenly gone and they felt cheated to the core of their beings because their Messiah had turned out to be an illusion.

Slowly his imaginings were interrupted by increasingly lengthy blank times. His awareness was still working, but it seemed to be narrowing down to just a small point with nothing around it. He hung on t this small grain of consciousness with all the strength he could gather, but it was getting tinier still.

Finally it disappeared altogether.

He cried out loud in fear, and that brought him back to a dim awareness. He tried to move his fingers but could not do it. He did not know where they were.

With a last great spurt of his strength, he concentrated on God.

No one, nothing, not a thing or sound or spark of awareness answered him.

With a collapse of all his resources and awareness, he lost himself totally to the darkness. it overcame him, and he knew no more.

When he returned to consciousness, he felt as if he had been gone for an infinite stretch of time, as if great lengths of ages had lived and died while he was not existing. The first thing he became fully aware of was light. It was white, and shone all around him. He realized it was coming from him. Beneath him in the blackness, arranged in a row, were seven golden beings who had the shapes of humans and indistinct features. They bowed down to hm. An immense pleasure of energetic relief passed through him.

A voice, so perfect and total in its greatness that it spoke easily from every fiber of the darkness, from the golden shapes, and even from his own body of white light, filled this whole universe with its command: “Go to people and help them. I will call you when you are done.”

“Go where?” Jesus asked with his mind. He bathed in the brilliance of the white light streaming from him.

“To the land where I gave seed for your birth, where you are best known.”

“I am not strong enough,” Jesus said.

“I will be with you,” the voice told him.

Jesus bowed his head in assent. The white light that was in and around him increased in strength and brilliance until he was blinded by it, and everything became dark once more. He lost consciousness again.

Many hours later, he awoke to the sound of grating stone and a small oil-lamp flame. He saw the old priest, skin red and patchy as before, bending over him. “Arise, Jesus of Galilee. We await you in the reception hall of the temple!”

Jesus slowly sat up and rubbed his numb arms and legs. Slowly he recalled everything that he had felt, seen, and heard. He drank some of his water and ate a piece of the bread. The priest solemnly waited.

Together they climbed the long distance up to the large reception hall where Jesus had received the parchment symbols of his first six degrees. As they entered through the great stone doorway, Jesus saw that all the priests were there again, and the high priest was waiting at the end before his throne chair. Everyone bowed to Jesus as he walked down the aisle, except the tall high prest who now called out ritually to everyone in the room.

“He has risen!” the tall priest shouted.

“He has risen!” the other priests responded.

Jesus still felt dazed and stiff from his vision. He halted awkwardly before the high priest.

The priest handed Jesus his parchment signifying acceptance into the seventh and final degree, and laid a great gold necklace much like his own around Jesus’ neck. Jesus bowed low and glanced at the pendant on the shining necklace. Because he was from Israel, it bore mystical Hebrew symbols on it.

Long afterward, when Jesus was through discussing what he had learned in the test–for those who took it were expected to speak of their visions immediately afterward–the high priest drew him aside into a small room. Jesus was just beginning to feel normal again, though he was still weak from the tme he had spent in the stone coffin.

“How soon will you have to leave us?” the high priest asked. He cocked one of his busy eyebrows.

“As soon as John is done,” Jesus said.

The high priest smiled and embraced him. “You are the Messiah,” he said. “Your vision proved it!”

“Yet what is a Messiah?” Jesus asked. “What are the signs of his coming, and what is he to do?” He shook his head.

The high priest released him. “You will discover that when you journey forth from here.”

“Will John be done with his test soon?” Jesus asked.
Do you need him so much?” the older man asked.

Jesus nodded sharply. “Now more than ever. He and I will work hand in hand.”

The high priest bowed and, before Jesus could stop him, took the hem of the younger man’s robe and kissed it. “May the son of God go to his work with blessings from this temple.”

As he had done with beggars and thieves in India and Persia, Jesus gently lifted the man back to his feet. “We are all God’s children,” Jesus told him. “Each of us has his own work to do. Each has his own perfection to make, man or woman, in this life and the others that follow. I go only to do the job that my father has assigned me.”

With those words, the two men parted. They saw each other once more at John’s initiation several weeks later, and yet again, a final time, a few months after that. At that time. Jesus said goodbye to the high priest, knowing he would never meet him in that life again. The high priest would not leave the Great Pyramid, which was his temple, and Jesus had work to do elsewhere in Egypt and at home.

After his own final initiation, Jesus waited at the Great Pyramid only long enough for John to finish his seventh degree. After John, too, had completed it, the two young men turned their faces toward Heliopolis, leaving the temple and the Egyptian mysteries behind.

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Aug. 2020.