Excerpt from Fifth Gospel: Leave Taking

Lea fell quiet. Her words were spent.

I went to the window, for I could see the sun was rising, throwing a gold mantle on the world beyond Montsegur. For a moment, the entire Gospel stood before my eyes in the awakening clouds that were spread over the skies above the valleys and mountains, rivers and streams of the world.

‘Yes…it is magnificent!’ I said.

She pointed to the dawn and she seemed to grow tall, and white, and fair before my eyes. I trembled, for her voice was grave, ‘Look there! Do you see a world full of wonders and marvels?

I looked, and I saw a twilight land of strange buildings and contraptions.  

‘That is the future…do you see, pairé, how there are castles that fly, carriages that go at great speeds without horses, and torches that have no flame! In this future, pairé, the thoughts of men will travel like lightning, from one end of the earth to the other, and a man will be able to hold all the books in the world in the palm of one hand!’

‘All the books in the world!’ I smiled to think on it. ‘This is truly remarkable!’

‘Yes, but every light casts a shadow.’ She looked at me, cold and solemn and said, ‘The greater the light of goodness, the darker the shadow of evil. Wars will continue…there are dark times ahead, and it will grow darker still, for you see pairé, in the past, men fought over their misunderstandings of Jesus and Christ, now, they battle because they no longer understand the Spirit, but in the future the battle will be for the human Soul, pairé. It shall be more heinous and violent than any other battle that has come before! In those far flung days what is written in John’s Apocalypse shall come to pass again: the woman with the sun in her belly and the moon at her feet shall come to give birth to the spirit of Christ in the clouds, the soul of humanity will give birth to the spirit and the dragon will try to kill it as soon as it is born in the same way that Herod tried to kill Yeshua. That is when this gospel shall be needed pairé; before the end of the fifth age.’

I was breathless, caught in the swirl of images which she had shown in the sky before my eyes. Fear and dread entered into my heart and a sudden thought came. ‘Soon I will descend this pog, Lea, and what you have had me write down on those parchments,’ I pointed to them, ‘will turn to dust. It has all been for nothing! No man will know the Fifth Gospel!’

‘There is no accident in the universe pairé, nothing is ever lost. What you have written will come to you again, though differently, and you will remember.’

‘What must I remember?’

‘Look at me, pairé, what do you see?’

Before my open gaze her face seemed to change: one moment I saw the evening star, the next she was Demeter the mother of nature; again she was the lady who steals into the heart of every troubadour, the ideal woman, the good and beautiful and true in the soul of every poet. When her face paused in its transformations, I realised with a sense of wonder and awe that I was gazing at a countenance that I had only seen in my imaginations...I had been in the company of Wisdom all along... 

Nostradamus and the Acquisition of Wisdom

‘How long have you been with me now, Chavigny?’ Nostradamus said to Jean, with an expectant eye.

‘Ten years or thereabouts.’

‘How many hurdles did Dorat place in your way when you said you wanted to be my pupil?’ he said, setting the box down.

‘It took me near a year to convince him and then he gave me no letters of introduction.’

‘That’s right, and you made the two month journey south to my home and arrived empty handed at my door. What did I tell you then?’

‘That if I intended to become a student of the mystic arts I would have to be prepared to do those tasks you set me.’

He nodded.

‘But in all this time there have been no tasks and no instruction! Only menial jobs have you set me that any fool might be capable of doing!’

‘Really?’ he raised one bushy brow, ‘Do you think so? Have I told you the story of Antonius?’

‘Antonius?’

‘Antonius was a teacher. A simple man named Paul arrived at his door one day, much like you, and said he wanted to be his pupil. Antonius accepted him and caused him year after year do such menial tasks as seemed to have no reason. For instance he had him carry water from one place to another in perforated buckets, he asked him carry rocks up a hill and had him roll them back down again on the other side. He had him stitch and unstitch clothes. This he did year after year! Why? Because the simple man Paul who had come to him, in the process of these tasks, year after year, underwent a tremendous deepening of his soul.'
'By doing menial tasks he deepened his soul?'
'Oh you are still a fool Chavigny, for you do not know how gratitude even for menial tasks, reverence for the master who sets them and devotion which becomes a habit in the soul is what changes a man -  a thousand books will not do the same! You see, that is how Paul the Simpleton became Paul the Wise. '