THE LADY AND THE LION
CONTINUED
They had a very late, very quick breakfast of dates and figs, cold fish wrapped in flat bread, and hard wine. Then they went into the city. The old maid who laid out their breakfast said, “Don’t stray too far, for rain is on its way.”
“I don’t see a cloud in the sky,” Jude said. “Still, these old ones know things.”
“I would go to that Temple again,” Jesus said.
“That temple unnerves me,” said James. “This whole place unnerves me.”
“I was going to say we will not go to the temple then,” said Jesus. “But if the whole of this place unnerves you, I’m not entirely sure what we can do.”
“I just don’t know why you would go to the abode of devils.”
“All temples are the abode of God,” Jesus said. “For God is One.”
“And,” John added, far more pragmatic, “it is beautiful, and all things—festivals, plays, great debates—take place around it.”
“The Temple of the Sun,” Jude sang. “How romantic.”
“It is a temple to Baal, the very god Elijah fought,” James said. “The God our ancestors fell into worshiping again and again, and now here we are, being drawn to the same thing.”
But it was difficult to be in Palmyra and not be drawn to the temple on its acropolis at the center of all things. It was built like a Greek temple, golden with sun glinting on sandstone, a massive colonnaded rectangle. They would not enter it, but the entrance was on the longer side, and a great stone walled court surrounded the shrine, not unlike the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple down in Jerusalem. There were sacrifices, surely, but here there were also debates and lectures. Palmyra was on the great caravan route that traveled westward into Asia Minor or south to Egypt but went east, out of the Roman Empire, into and Mesopotamia and past those mountainous gates into the heart of Persia and beyond to India. And in the temple, under the porticos of the great court there were all manner of teachers, Greek philosophers of every school, shaven headed Buddhists and turbaned Hindus traveling from India, the priests and priestesses of the ancient cults older than the gods of Rome or, perhaps, even than the God of Israel, and yes, here there were even Jewish rabbis. Jesus and his cousins went from each to each and presently, above them, the God of storms crackled, and the sky filled with heavy clouds and then released rain, slapping the roof of the portico hard, splashing all over the court of the temple. The high grand pillars of the House of Bel, golden at all times, were grey in the rain.
“I could listen to them all day,” John murmured as he rose from the lecture of an old Hindu, and James shook his head, saying, “But who is right? They can’t all be right.”\ Jesus was sitting on the steps that led down into the water drenched court and rain was splashing his feet and the hem of his robe.
John only said, “I’m not sure that’s the point, James.”
Jesus was utterly silent watching the rain, feeling fat drops cool on his feet and misting his knees through the robe. He was in awe of the grey sky and the wetness of water, and he thought, as the court went from the dryness of desert city to becoming a pool, of the flood story, the Ark rising above the waters with animals two by two until it rose above Mount Ararat. When his cousins talked around and past him, he drifted into visions as he always had. There was a woman all in red, a great mantle over her, and her hair was long and black and shestood at the right hand of a great lion with its mouth open, and as he looked closely he saw the woman was Magdalene. How she would have loved this city. How lonely it was to be woman with a mind who yearned for a world outside of what was her lot!
Lots. Someone was casting lots, someone was casting tares on the fire. The last would be first and the first would be last. Jesus snapped out of whatever was happening to him, the visions he all too often sank inside.
“…He was at the Jordan, in Judea last time I heard of him,” James was saying.
Yocanon. John. Elizabeth’s son. Jesus had not seen him in some time and did not wish to. That section of the family was strange, some of the cousins said. Mary had always been close with her kinswoman Elizabeth. John had always been… too much, burned to brightly, took too little pleasure in life. He was a bad fit for Temple life in Jerusalem. When, after the death of his father, he had abandoned his priestly work and gone into the desert to live with the Essenes, no one was surprised. When he left the Essenes and wandered off into the wilderness on his own, family members began to talk. Jesus felt, though he could not say why, something like guilt. Mary said, “It was all foretold. This was bound to happen. God planted a seed, and now it has blossomed.”
Well, had God planted a seed of madness? Seems like that was just the thing he did these days.
“…And he declared that the Kingdom of God was coming.”
“What in all the hells is that?” Jude demanded.
“It is the reign of the Messiah,” John returned. “The same reign that the prophets have talked about for centuries! The end times spoken of by Daniel and by Enoch in his holy books. What was it that Malachi said…?”
The sky cracked as if the thunder god could pick up the temple and all Palmyra in his hands and ball it up.
“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and awesome Day of the LORD. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.”
James added, “Otherwise, I will come and strike the land with a curse.”
“I’m tired of cursing,” said John. “We’ve had enough cursing.”
“Well if the time of the Messiah has come,” said Jude, “then is John Elijah, or is he the Messiah…?”
But by then Jesus was gone from the conversation, caught up in a great vision of a naked woman riding a seven headed beast in triumph, and the beast was like a lion with a star shaped mace at the end of its tail, and the woman and the beast were made of flame and she bore a chalice of clear fire with the burning liquid of a ruby swirling and the woman was Magdalene and Jesus declared:
“I have come to set the world on fire!”
“What?” James looked at his cousin in irritation.
Jesus blinked. He was a little disoriented, but only a little, and he repeated, “I have come to set this world on fire.”
It seemed a little incongruous given the rain pelting down.
As his friends looked at him, he said, sounding a little exhausted:
“How I wish it was already burning.”
But that day the world was soaking rather than burning, and though it houses immense treasures, many schools with several teachers, and several shopes, after a time they longed to leave.
“We will not melt,” Jesus said, and he added, “You may remain but I will walk.”
He walked arm and arm with John, who was glad to leave the others behind and brave the streets. In the grey afternoon of warm, falling rain, the water made Jesus’s robe transparent in places so John could see the outline of his body. The robe clung to his buttocks and revealed his thick sex while the beating rain plastered the robe to his exposed chest. The simple sight of him, long limbed and rangy legged, walking ahead of John or beside him reminded him of the passion they’d known in the dark, the intimacy that only existed between the two of them. Following Jesus through winding streets, John was remembered that first time, when he had been fifteen and Jesus had returned from Sephorris. Though he’d looked the same as ever, he looked like to John different than ever before and the whole night John trembled, and at the end of the three days, in a field outside of town, as the stars came wheeling into heaven, Jesus’s breath had been full of spearmint as he’d lain him down in the wheat field and they’d undressed before each other, making love all through the night, laughing and clinging together like little children, Under his cousin’s touch, John had always felt simple, and innocent and free as he felt now, while they splashed through the streets, their robes stuck to them like a second skin, rain in Jesus’s tangled hair, plastering John’s black hair to his head. They looked on each other and laughed.
The streets of Palmyra were strangely empty and unlonely all at once. As they wandered the bazaars and the throughways there were, Jesus was sure, fewer people than would normally be out, and yet all of those people seemed to be very much minding their business. Occasionally a sedan chair carrying an important person came by in the lessening rain, but in the corners and on the streets, against the walls, men were lifting their robes to piss, or frankly, in the alleys, near the main road, pulling up their robes, to press themselves into prostitutes who lifted one leg to allow the man privacy and entry. Few stopped to watch, and when the men wer finished they moved on as if nothing had happened. In further corners, lovers kissed, so Jesus, at the Street of the Steps, before going up a long winding stair, pressed John against the wall and kissed him long and hard in the rain before, taking him by the hand, they went up the Street of the Steps onto the street of the Rope Makers.
“What in the fuck is that?” Jesus demanded, stretching his hand out to an old building.
“Another temple.”
“Come back!” John called.
The rain was ending, and Jesus pulled John through the puddles toward what looked like an old tomb, but was a temple.
“Come,” Jesus said, “you are the one that showed me the great temple.”
“But this is strange,” John said as they stood at the black doorway, and his own face quite strange, Jesus pulled him in.
John made the sign against evil. This was a darkened shrine filled with the smell of incense, and burning oil lamp and on a little altar was the image of a young man. Before Jesus moved forward, he saw a woman on her knees, praying to the image, and she took from her robes a wand of incense and lit it from one of the lamps near her. She planted the burning stick with the others and made a sign of reverence, standing, and while Jesus and John moved to let her pass, she nodded and left.
“This is a shrine to Eshmun,” John whispered.
“Eshmun,” Jesus sat reverently, like the Hindus, and he folded his hands and lifted his stole over his head like one praying.
“A god of healing. They worship him up in Sidon. I am surprised to see him here.”
“Um.”
Jesus said nothing for a long time, and John’s nerves calmed until, finally, Jesus stood up and stretched out his hands over the lamps, stretched them to the lamps before the dark image of the smiling young man.
“All of your prayers, oh Eshumn, I accept unto me. For you are me.”
“What?” John said.
But Jesus said no more. His face was glossy, his eyes slits, and in a trance. He was, for a moment, like a bronze statue, and then he shook his head.
“Are you ready?” he asked John.
“Yes. But you had said…”
“Said what?” Jesus smiled at him, truly mystified.
“Nothing.”
“We could go to Sidon,” Jesus said. “I would like to see Sidon.”
When the stepped back into the noise of the streets, the clouds were lightening now, and traveling to Sidon didn’t seem impossible.
Jesus asked, “What is that?”
“The temple of Al Lat.”
“And who is he?”
“She?” John said. “She is the mother. She is the protecting one.”
“Is she Asherah?” Jesus wondered.
“James would say she is forbidden.”
“James would say many things. But what would you say?”
John shrugged.
Jesus grinned at him wolfishly, “Cousin that is not like you.”
“I would say so much of what we do and believe is based on being ignorant and calling other people idol worshippers, and all of our trouble comes from believing we are the only people God made without error and that our God is the only one, and yet…. When Moses said God is one, did he mean only our God mattered, or did he mean that all Gods were One?”
Jesus was nodding, but he had never slowed in his trip to the temple and now, at its gates he was in awe of a great lion, mouth opened and roaring, and he murmured:
“Judah is a lion's whelp. From the prey, my son, thou art gone up. He stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up?”
“What?” John said.
“The sceptre shall not depart from Judah,” Jesus continued.
“Nor a lawgiver from between his feet, Until Shiloh come; And unto him shall the gathering of the people be. It is from Beresheit. It is what Jacob says on his deathbed to Judah.”
“I know that,” John said, almost in irritation. “It is only that you are so strange. Stranger than usual, full of poetry and prophecy and odd words.”
“Something strange is happening inside of me,” Jesus said. “I cannot understand it.”
But just then John’s attention was taken, for the whole time there had been a figure all robed in white, standing under the sandstone lion’s mouth, between its paws like one protected. Now the figure removed its head covering to reveal a woman, tall and stately in form with long black hair, and as she turned to look on them, it was John who nearly choked. But she smiled and came toward them, and though Jesus looked on her with something surprise, there was not the shock there should have been. How had she traveled so far, a woman on her own. But here she was, eyes bold, lined in kohl, grimly smiling.
“Magdalene!” he said.
“Well, when you all left, naturally I had to follow,” Magdalene explained as she reached across the carpet for hot bread and wrapped it about hummus and cucumbers, stuffing the whole thing into her mouth.
She swigged the wine, and then began to attack the lamb.
“You are a woman,” James said, almost scornfully.
“And should not have been traveling on your own.”
“And clearly I wasn’t,” she said in a dismissive tone, licking her fingers.
“Excellent kabob. Jesus, pass me the cucumber sauce. Thank you. Oooh, John, and that sliced melon!
“I waited a few days, and then set out with Hushad, and sent a message to Eliezar, who joined me before I reached Damascus, and then we all went on together.”
“The man named Eliezer looked bemused and put upon. He was handsome and clean shaven like John, though Jesus’s age, clear eyed and dark haired and usually lighter skinned from a life indoors.
“You came up all the way from Jerusalem so quickly?” John said.
Before Eliezer answered, Magdalene said, “It wasn’t that quick.”
“And we left the house to Marta,” Eliezer explained.
“With Marta the house is always in good hands,” Magdalene said, and John could not tell if she was insulting her sister or not.
“Lazaros, how long are you staying?” Jesus addressed his old friend by the Greek name his parents had given him. Before this was Roman land it was Greek land and for the most part Greek it still was. Romans taxed and taxed and built roads, but for centuries the Greeks simply seeped their influence into the land, their temples, their gymnasia, their poets and heroic tales, their philosophies about the inscrutable God, their belief that all was one and that reason and clear thought would save the world. And they left their language. Few Jews spoke Hebrew, most here spoke Aramaic, but all spoke Greek. At this point it was even hard to tell the difference between a Greek by culture and a Greek by blood, a descendant of those people who had left Ionia and the Peloponnesse with Great Alexander centuries ago to liberate the world from the Persian yoke. There were many Greek Jews, many Jews who were the children or grandchildren of pagans, and in the high and mighty families names like Jason, Aeolis and Menalaos were not uncommon. Even when families chose the names of prophets and priests and heroes from the past, they were, after all these hundreds of years Hellenized so that people bore two names, the Greek one given at birth and which they were known by, and its Hebrew original. Jesus, Yehoshana of Nazareth, was called Jesus, which was quicker to say anyway, even as his mother, Miriamne was called Mara, or simple Mary. Thus Magdalene called her brother Eliezar, though all others knew him as Lazaros.
“Are you ever exhausted,” James asked, as if Magdalene were not sitting before him, though she rarely paid attention to him, anyway, “by a sister like this?”
Magdalene was onto the figs now and Lazaros simply laughed and shook his head.
“Mari never bores,” he said, using the diminutive of her name. “Not ever.”
“I knew we would find you at the temple,” Jesus said. “I wasn’t looking, not exactly. But I knew.”
“And I also knew you would find me,” she said, joyously. “We had no idea where you were, but I know you would find me.”
She grasped his arms and bangles jangled on her wrists.
“You always find me,”
“What were you doing under that lion?” John asked.
“That is the Lion of Al Lat, the vehicle of the Great Mother who protects this city and all who ask for her.”
James frowned at this, but Jude said, “Is she a fabulous lion?”
“Fierce and terrible,” John said.
“Whatever were you doing at the temple?” Jude asked her. “Other than waiting for Yeshan?”
“I was praying,” Magdalene said. “I was giving worship to the Mother.”
“That is a blasphemy!” James lost his temper, “and would get you stoned in Jerusalem. Or even Capernaum.”
“It would not get my stoned in Capernaum,” Magdalene countered, “for I have seen many altars to her there. And a good thing it is that we are not in Jerusalem then. You are not Isaiah or Jeremiah or any of the the woman hating, masturbating, unwashed prophets of old. You do not get to tell me or any other woman who to worship, take away our Mothers and present us with a sterile old man in your image who never cared about us.”
She took a date pit from her mouth and lobbed it straight at James’s forehead.
“That’s what I think of your god and Jerusalem!”
