Chapter Cut from Fifth Gospel - A Novel - TEMPLE SLEEP

TEMPLE SLEEP

‘And the youth looked at him and loved him.’

The secret Gospel according to Mark

To Lazarus Christ Jesus said, ‘Soon you will pass into spiritual worlds, and your sister shall prepare you for your burial, she will sit with you and hold you in her heart, for she shall be the guardian of your soul until I return…Have faith Magdalena,’ he said to her, ‘support your brother as you support me…for in every death there is a rebirth…Wait for my call, then shall you see the last sign before the Son of Man begins his journey to his death. In your brother shall be resurrected what lives in me, the eternal Word, the light and the life that comes from those heavenly spheres from which I have come to earth. He shall be the first to see the Kingdom in all its fullness on earth, for his illness is not unto death, but to the glory of God, to the revelation of the eternal Word.’ Now to Lazarus he said, ‘Through this initiation, you shall venture into spirit worlds and you will become another man, you shall have another name and they shall call you John the beloved disciple of Jesus. It is true that every birth is accompanied by an illness, the illness of the mother. But this illness does not lead to death, but to new life.’

Lazarus was amazed by these words but his eyes were heavy laden and his heart seemed to falter. At this point he heard his sister Martha hurrying into the booth. ‘Lord,’ she said, ‘do you not care that my sister has left me to serve you alone? Please tell her to come and help me!’

Mary answered, ‘Martha, sit with us…the master is speaking of eternal truths.’

But Martha’s voice, very far away now, came into his mind, irritated and unhappy, ‘There is so much work to do! I should also like to sit and to listen to eternal truths, but who shall feed the master, then?’

‘Martha, Martha,’ came his master’s gentle words, ‘you are careful and troubled about the food, which is your task for you must care for my physical well-being; in you lives what is active. But one other thing is also needful - Mary listens to my words because she has a task that is different from yours, she cares for my soul, what lives in her is contemplative…and as you have chosen, so too has she chosen what is suited for her part…and this shall not be taken away from her.’

Lazarus heard his sister’s voice say, ‘Yes, my lord,’ and after that her footsteps in the courtyard.

Christ Jesus continued with his teaching and as his words were spoken Lazarus felt his body at peace, its turmoil stilled. The world too seemed quiet, the sea, and air and the very heavens came to rest and among this harmony did his acquiescent soul lift up from him.

And he fell out of his head.

                        

               Lazarus sees himself stripped of all earthly pretensions standing beside his master in the temple of Jerusalem, before the Pharisees.

          ‘Verily, verily,’ Christ says, and it is as if Lazarus himself were saying it, and it seems not strange at all but the most simple thing, for he feels as if he is one with Christ. ‘I say unto you, if a man keep my saying, he shall never see death…’

The Pharisees answer, ‘Are you greater than our father Abraham which is dead, and the prophets which are dead? Who makes you so great?’

Christ tells them, ‘If I honour myself, my honour means nothing: it is my father who honours me, of whom you say that he is your God…but you do not know him! I know him! And if I were to say that I do not know him to please you, then I would be a liar, like you. I know him and I keep his word, you only speak of Abraham. Abraham himself rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it and was glad.’

‘You are not yet fifty years old, how can a man so young have entered so deep and risen so high as to have seen the father Abraham in the blood of his generations?’

‘I am not an initiate. I am the initiator, and yea more than that, I am the subject of initiation itself! I am the foundation of the very world! I am not only one with Abraham, but with what pulses in the entire cosmos, I was before Abraham was. Before Abraham was, existed the one who is I AM and I AM He.’

The people grow angry. They take up stones to cast at him and he has to flee. There are hindrances all around. He feels pain as stones strike him but they are not stones, it is that his soul is being wrenched from the temple, the grave of his body.

He realises that Christ is the door and that through Him he can enter a higher sphere, a glorious mountain.

From the outspread widths of space comes to him an angel, the self of his great teacher, John the Baptist, whose words had so often warmed his heart. His mighty cosmic form seems to Lazarus like Adam and he blesses him with his greatest gift – the gift of his own spirit. Lazarus feels it enter into his emptied soul.

I am John!

Now in the upper airs the moon’s snow face cuts the night’s skirt, and is stirred by delicate green whirlwinds that move from star to star inscribing in astral light grand pictures for his seeing.  He rises higher through the agency of another angel, upwards to a sea the colour of peach blossom that stretches out to distant purpling plains and resounds in glorious songs. This angel points to the father of his people. 

Abraham!

He is one with Abraham. his ancestor.

A light rises over the horizon of this unpolluted, immeasurable landscape. A sun, suspended, luminous, diaphanous. incandescent and transparent all at once permeates the heaven-opened world from all sides like the rays of a dawn sun. These throw their luminance upwards to the hems of a lowering cloud making it gleam all gold.

The Sun is the light and life and love of the world and it is born now in me!

I am a Son of Man!

I am one with Christ who is the light of the world.

From those mighty cosmic reaches, come the resounding words,

‘Lazarus…come forth!’

And Lazarus tells himself, 

‘Now do I truly recognise without hindrance what lives in the soul of Jesus…Him who has awakened me - the sublime being of Christ!’

             

Excerpt - Author's Cut Fifth Gospel - A Novel

EVIL COUNTERPARTS

‘He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good

and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’

Matthew 5:45

AT THE MOMENT the mother of God was receiving the essence of virgin-hood from the far-spread dominions of the Divine Sophia, leagues away upon an Island that faced Vesuvius called Capri, Caesar Tiberius was making room in his soul for a demon.

Some time ago, fascinated by the occult, Tiberius had become addicted to the pagan cults and rituals of the mysteries belonging to his conquered peoples. Ill prepared for the accelerated initiations to which he had subjected himself, his ignoble nature, already impetuous and prone to indulgence, became unfettered through a loosening of the mind from the heart and the will.

This loosening caused his thoughts to become crowded with hallucinations and delusions. He saw enemies around every corner, he heard of conspiracies, all men lay in wait to put a dagger into his back. Having succumbed to madness and fury, he plunged into a chaotic program of revenge. In the night his men seized unwary men, women, sometimes children, those whom his disordered mind suspected of treachery and in the day, loved ones would drag the countless bodies with hooks from the Tiber River, afraid to burn their loved ones or even to grieve, lest it be seen as a sign of treason. Some poor victims were made to drink poison, others were strangled and those young virginal women, who were protected by the law while inviolate, were first raped by his torturers before Tiberius’ sentence was carried out.

Not only delusions but also fits of excitement seized him, where his self love soared upwards in grand overestimations of his divine powers, of his status as a superhuman being whose surroundings in Rome could not hope to match his intoxicating grandness! In Capri he abandoned himself to sensual excesses, treating his deviant guests to grand orgies of food and wine that lasted days, with scores of naked dancers engaging in multiple lurid unions for entertainment, or with romps in the woods and groves where, in feverish stupor, his guests could find those boys and young women who, dressed as Pans and nymphs, would solicit their attentions in any way they desired.

At other times he experienced a pitching of his gloom into an abyss of despair. Unfettered by clarity of thought, he fell into states of anguish and hopelessness, which he sought to console through acts of cruelty against others. More and more did a depraved delight in suffering surface from out of the depths of his volcanic temper, whose volatile hungers increased with the distortions of his deranged thoughts and the fire of his disordered passions.

One day, he was taken by a stroke of genius, he ordered his guards to drag the half living and tortured carcasses of his imagined enemies and their supporters to the high cliffs where he had them cast headlong onto the rocks below. He was surprised and elated when he experienced the profoundest sexual raptures on observing his men break the bones of the dead with boathooks and oars!

Thus was his Satanic empowerment accomplished while at the same time two other events were occurring, side by side in Judea - the sublime spirit of the Sun was entering into the soul of Jesus, and not far off, in the province of Perea, the son of Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, friend and admirer of Tiberius, was taking his demonic sister in law, Herodias for a wife.

It was a resplendent wedding, followed by a feast to rival those feasts on the isle of Capri. Midway through the banquet, whose excess could have fed an entire village for months, Herod stood, with a goblet in hand and made a toast.

‘To Caesar Tiberius! The noble Wolf!'