The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century Read online

  The air smelled fresh, the bright metallic taste of clean oxygen, tinged slightly with a note of distant wood-fires and a spice Paul couldn’t identify. The dryness of it cut the back of his nose and throat, and for a moment his eyes watered from the sudden change in humidity and light. The sun hit him with a palpable intensity, and he knew that if he didn’t find shade soon his skin would be burned. All around him was rock, sand, and scrub brush, an occasional tree that resembled the mesquite he’d seen in Arizona. On the far horizon he could make out the silhouette of what looked like several men leading heavily laden camels along a distant trail, and on the far horizon to his right what seemed like the beginning of a vast forest. In the distance to his left, he could see the shimmer of water in what looked like irrigation canals, and green fields filled with people tending whatever was growing there. He turned around, and saw through the portal his apartment in New York, and then with a slow fade the portal became fainter and fainter until it vanished, causing Paul’s heart to skip a beat.

  “How will we get back?” Paul said, trying to control the panic he could hear in his own voice.

  “When we need the door, I can re-open it,” Noah said.

  Paul relaxed, believing him. He said: “Where are we?” Beyond the empty space where the portal had been, Paul could see a walled city of wood and stone buildings, bustling with activity, the center of the city occupied by a square fortress of tall wooden poles, over the top of which peeked a massive stone building. Men stood atop the city’s walls, idly carrying bows over their shoulders and spears in their hands.

  “This is the city of Nippur,” Noah said. “On the other side of the city is a large canal bringing water from the Euphrates River to our west, and in the distance to our south is the city of Ur. To the northwest is Babylon. To the east, near the Caspian Sea, is the land of Nod, where the Bible says Cain went to find his wife.”

  “But that means there were other people besides Adam and Eve,” Paul said.

  “Of course there were,” Noah said. “The story of Adam and Eve is not the creation story of all humans, it’s the creation story of one particular tribe. Every tribe on earth has its own creation story, and every story is about the creation of their particular tribe, whether they came from the sun or were born from a god or fell as fruit from a tree or whatever.”

  “I’d never thought of it that way,” Paul said. “But it makes sense, since the Bible says Adam and Eve started out around six thousand years ago, and archeologists tell us humans have been around for two hundred thousand years. It must have been the story of the origin of the tribe we now call the Jews or Hebrews.”

  Noah shrugged as if it were self-evident, and continued. “Nod is to our east, and what was once called Eden is to our southwest. This is the land you now refer to as ancient Mesopotamia, a part of ancient Sumeria, in your time part of Iraq. It is now, at this moment as we stand here, a thousand years after the floods forced these people upland from where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers once met, and five hundred years after the invasion by the Kurgans.”

  “Kurgans?”

  “They were a herding people who lived north of here, in the areas around the Caucasus Mountains. When the climate changed and floods struck here, at the same time drought hit the Kurgans. Facing famine, they took up the sword and began to move out of their homelands, looking for food. They spread here, down into India, east into China, and west and north into Europe. Everywhere they went, they assimilated themselves into the local peoples, as they had no empire of their own. They have become largely invisible even by now, five thousand years before you were born, because they have become these people, and the people of India, and of Asia, and of Europe. There has been a mixing of their languages, their ways, and their gods. They brought the alphabet, and that transformed culture, infected it with new ways. You could say it rewired people’s brains, made them more ruthless, literal, abstract, and willing to dominate. The left brain, the male brain, took over, because that’s the part of the brain where reading is processed.”

  “We’re at some turning point in history? In the past?”

  “Yes. It’s about 3,000 B.C., give or take a century. Five thousand years ago, from when we left your apartment.”

  “Why are we here?” Paul said.

  “This is your first lesson in wisdom, to prepare you for the Secret.” Noah began a brisk stride toward the city, and Paul ran and stumbled to catch up with him.

  They walked in silence; Paul felt intuitively that he shouldn’t speak, and Noah didn’t initiate a conversation. The air was hot, but Paul noticed it was so dry he wasn’t sweating. He unbuttoned the white shirt he was wearing to expose the V-neck T-shirt underneath, keeping his sleeves rolled down to protect his arms from the sun. It took about fifteen minutes to reach the walled city. They entered through a gap in the stone wall protected by soldiers playing a game with dice made of white stones. The soldiers glanced at Noah and Paul with curiosity but didn’t say anything.

  “This is the Ur gate,” Noah said as they walked between tall brick pillars. Around this edge of the city, the homes were small and simple, made of sun-dried brick and wood brought from some distant forest.

  People gave Noah and Paul odd looks, but didn’t comment on them; Paul could sense fear in the air, and noticed that one of the guards got up and ran off into the city. The man glanced at them with a furtive look; Paul felt a dread, as if the fear in the city were contagious, and knew the man had run off to do or say something that would not be in the best interests of Paul and Noah. Perhaps there was money to be made by telling about the strange visitors. Perhaps he was intending to circle around and rob or assault them.

  Paul tried to put the man—the spy, he’d decided—out of his mind as they walked down a dusty street towards the fortress in the city-center. He smelled moisture, saw trees rising above the fortress, and the closer they got to the city-center the thicker the vegetation became.

  People moved in and through the city with a sense of purpose, some with long hair, dressed in beautiful robes and striding with an air of dignity, most with short-cropped hair, dressed in rags and pulling carts or carrying loads on their heads, shoulders, or backs. It reminded Paul that the Romans and many slaveholding people before them had marked their slaves by cutting their hair. Ragged children ran and played in the dirt, under the watchful eye of adults, or carried loads of sticks or baskets of what looked to Paul like barley. Paul noticed that he’d seen only men; there were no women out in public.

  They passed an empty house, and Noah turned and stepped into it through an open door. Paul followed him, happy for the shade. They walked through a large room, down a short hallway, and into a smaller back room with an open window on one side. On the other outer adobe wall was a small recessed area about two feet square and six inches deep. It was positioned just slightly lower than the window and had the effect of being the center of attention of the room; as you walked in you were facing it directly. In the cutout of the wall sat a five-inch-tall figurine made of a red-brown pottery, a woman with a rounded belly, thick thighs, and large breasts that reached down nearly to her legs.

  “The house goddess,” Noah said. “Before the Kurgans arrived, these people worshipped female deities in their homes, their fields, their temples, and the forests. They understood that women bring forth life but men cannot; they believed that the greatest gods must be women, because the gods bring forth the crops, rain, and everything else in the world. The Kurgans, however, were a people who had learned to survive by conquering and killing and assimilating themselves among other peoples, so they worship life-taking instead of life-giving gods. Warrior gods. Male gods. And when those male gods gave them victory over every peaceful goddess-worshipping people they confronted, they knew their male gods were the greatest and most powerful. So now most of the people they’ve had contact with have male gods, or at least male gods have become the highest gods. Still, today many of the peasants of Nippur, Babylon, and most of the world worship f
emale goddesses, although the practice will be eliminated within the next four hundred years.”

  Paul looked at the strangely formed figure and said, “But it’s just a statue.”

  “No, she is a goddess,” Noah said, “at least to the people who lived in this house, and to about half of the other residents of this town.”

  “A female god?”

  “Yes. They talk to her, they bring her offerings, they pray to her for good crops, success in childbirth, and good health. But they know they cannot pray to her for success in war, because women are life-bringers and not life-takers. They don’t realize it now, but as their population grows and they resort to war to get more wood, land, and food, they will turn to the male war-gods who will usurp the female gods.”

  “But it’s just clay, isn’t it?” Paul said, wondering if he should bow before the statue or genuflect or something.

  “No, she’s a goddess,” Noah said. “Not a statue of a goddess, but a goddess herself. She is Aruru, who, with Enlil was the mother of the first seven human men and women, the creator of Gilgamesh, the goddess who gave birth to this tribe, the Sumerians. Each statue in this town is Aruru, and each is she. Before the Kurgans arrived, she was also in the main temple.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Paul said, remembering what a Catholic friend had told him when he’d asked why people prayed in front of statues of Mary and others in Catholic churches and why she wore around her neck a little gold figure of Jesus on the cross. “It must be a statue that represents something larger than the statue.”

  “No,” Noah said. “She is a goddess. These people are quite certain about that. She has specific powers and abilities, and when they pray to her it is to her,” he pointed at the figurine, “to that piece of clay. They are not praying to anything behind her or other than her.”

  “But she was made by people!”

  Noah tilted his head slightly and said, “And who made people?”

  Paul felt a moment of dread, a shaking of reality. “Is she really a goddess? I mean can she make it rain and things like that?”

  “No and yes,” Noah said. “She is only clay for you and me, but she is something more to these people, and that is real, too.”

  Paul nodded, confused, wondering what it all meant. He felt vaguely uneasy, remembering the first commandment, which said the god of the Bible was a jealous god, and, You shall have no other gods before me. But how could you have other gods if no other gods existed? Why would the Bible’s god be jealous of other gods if they didn’t exist?

  “Is this the Wisdom School?”

  “There’s no single place that is this Wisdom School,” Noah said. “The teaching is both outside and inside you. When you are finished, the teachings of the Wisdom School will be within you, and wherever you are they will be.”

  A clatter from outside the house caught Paul’s attention, and he turned as four soldiers ran into the room, the two in the front holding short iron swords and the two in the rear holding spears. All were muscular dark-haired men, dressed in skirted uniforms made of leather strips adorned with bronze medallions and bits of red cloth. The two men in front made menacing gestures toward Paul, who stepped back and put his hands up.

  “Whoa, I’m just a tourist,” he said, trying to look friendly and sincere.

  The man near Noah waved his sword toward Paul, not to cut but to threaten, and an explosion of guttural syllables came from his mouth.

  “He says it is against the law of Enlil to be in this place of blasphemy,” said Noah. “The family that lived here refused to destroy their goddess, so they were killed. If we stay, we shall be killed, as well.” He waved his hand at Paul. “You now have the ability to speak and understand their language. It will sound to you like they are speaking English, and when you speak English, they will understand you in their tongue.”

  The soldier glared at Noah and said, “It is forbidden that you come here to worship Aruru. You have committed blasphemy!”

  Noah calmly replied, “We are visiting dignitaries from a foreign land, and stopped here because we were curious about the local customs.”

  The two soldiers in the front shook their heads vigorously in disagreement with Noah, and the two in the rear stood at attention, carefully following the conflict but also clearly subordinates. The first soldier who’d spoken, a huge man with black eyes and curly black hair, muscles like rocks under his skin, glared at Noah, who smiled in response. The man shouted, “You lie!”

  Noah leaned forward, raised his fist, and shouted back, “I speak the truth!” He waved at Paul. “And the man with me is Nusku, also known as Paul, who is the former chief-minister of Enlil, and now the chief-minister for Anu. As you know, Anu is very angry with Enlil, and so he has sent Paul to speak with Enlil.”

  The men stepped back and had a hurried discussion in furtive tones.

  Paul said, “Who is Enlil?”

  “At this moment,” Noah said, “he is the head of the pantheon of gods, the creator of humans and of storms. Within a few decades, however, he will be replaced by Anu, the father of Enmesharra, whom Enlil killed. These men know how angry Anu is with Enlil, and they won’t intervene in Enlil’s business, because he’s notorious for his short temper. For example, the people here believe that Enlil created the great flood, which was survived by only one family in an ark.”

  “Noah’s ark?”

  “No, this ark was built by a righteous man named Utnapishtim. But the story is the same.”

  “These people are Jews?”

  “No, this land is what your people would call early Sumeria, and these are Sumerians or pre-Babylonians. The ancestors of the Jews live several hundred miles from here, although the two peoples will collide many, many times.”

  The lead soldier stepped forward, belligerence etched on his face, his muscles twitching. “This man Paul could not be a representative of Anu. His hair has been cut, the sign he is owned. He is a slave, probably your slave.”

  “His hair reflects the custom of the aristocracy in Anu’s land. Look at his clothes, how elaborate they are. He is, himself, a supernatural being.”

  “And you?” the soldier said.

  “I am his servant.”

  “Hah!” the man screwed, and drove his sword into Noah’s stomach. Paul stared, horrified, as Noah’s eyes bulged, his mouth opened in a gasp, and a red stain erupted across his tunic. The soldier stepped back, puling his sword out of Noah’s stomach with a self-satisfied look. His partner kept his sword pointed at Paul’s stomach.

  Paul trembled, feeling as if he might throw up, his heart racing. The light in the room seemed to brighten, and he could hear the quickening breath of the two soldiers. Noah put his hands over his stomach, as if to hold the contents in, and stepped back, his face pale. He opened his mouth, then closed it, as if he’d thought better of whatever he was going to say.

  The soldier near Paul pushed his sword toward Paul, backing him into the wall behind him. The soldier stepped forward, the tip of his sword resting on Paul’s stomach. The man said, “Now, you tell the truth. Who are you?” Paul felt his palms moisten, his breath speed up. There was no place to run, no way out of the room except past the four soldiers.

  “Noah!” Paul said in a low voice, trying to conceal his panic. “What’s happening?” He felt the sharp tip of the soldier’s sword push hard against the fabric of his shirt, just short of the pressure necessary to pierce the fabric, skin, and muscle under it.

  Noah coughed and took a deep, loud breath, then fell to the floor. He lay without movement or breath, the ground soaking up his blood.

  The soldier with his spear to Paul’s stomach said again, “Who are you?”

  Paul thought of the times that he had faked being the assistant to the senator from New York when he wrote his ill-fated story for the Tribune. Step into the role, he remembered. Become the person you’re acting you are.

  He drew himself up straight and tall. “I am Paul, and I am here to see Enlil. I have a quest
ion for him, on behalf of Anu.”

  The man who’d stabbed Noah said, “Prove it.”

  What would Anu’s representative say, Paul wondered. Then it came to him.

  “I will prove it to Enlil. You are already in great danger of the wrath of Anu and Enlil because you have killed my companion.” He fought the catch in his voice and continued. “If you kill me, an even greater destruction will come upon you and your city.”

  The soldier with his sword to Paul’s stomach tensed his muscles, and Paul knew he was preparing for the killing stab. But the leader, who had stabbed Noah and now had an uncertain look on his face, said to his compatriot, “Stop. He is oddly dressed and his face is hairless. Clearly he is from a foreign land. We’ll take him to the priests and let Enlil determine his fate.”

  Paul felt relief wash over him, but knew he had to stay in his role. “And your fate as well,” he added, pleased to see the men wince at his words.

  They led him at spear-point through twisting roads and narrow streets, children staring and giggling at Paul’s clothing, hair, and clean-shaven face. The short-haired adults mostly averted their gaze, while the long-haired men gave him little attention whatsoever except to nod at the soldiers. They came to a gate in the stockade around the central part of the city, and the leader of the soldiers spoke briefly with the spear-bearing gate guards in hushed tones. They stood back, holding their spears respectfully at side arms, and allowed the five to pass.

  Paul walked with his head erect, every bit the messenger of a god, guided by the soldiers toward a massive stone building faced with polished marble and granite and trimmed with carefully hewn logs of cedar. On both sides of the large central entrance men sat on colorful blankets, and a slow but steady stream of longhaired noblemen came up to the blankets. Each placed an offering of food or carved stone or metal, took a small embossed bit of pottery that Paul assumed was a receipt, and then backed away, bowing.