The Magic Circle Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Instead of being the leader—the teacher, the rabh or master, the anointed king or whatever it was—that our companions here had hoped for, it seems he’s degenerated into a madman who thinks he’s genealogically descended from the one true God and can decide who shall live or die. I wonder how such an idea could have arisen in his confused brain?” He looked at Joseph with a sneering smile.
    Joseph knew full well that many there, though silent, must share the high priest’s opinion. For God was ineffable and intangible: He could not be incarnate. How could this have happened? thought Joseph. In one short year, his world had turned inside out.
    Joseph had to see the Master in person, at once. He knew him better than anyone—he always believed that he alone could see the purity of his soul. He had to see him before the others, before it was too late.
    FRIDAY
    Joseph’s own beautiful but wildly overrun estate on the Mount of Olives, which he rarely saw these days, owing to his travels, was called Gethsemane. He felt certain the Master would not take his disciples to Gethsemane, nor even go alone, without Joseph’s permission. So there was only one place he would stay in that part of the hill country, and that was in the town of Bethany—at the home of Lazarus of Magdali and his sisters, Miriam and Martha.
    At the very thought of the sisters of Magdali, Joseph always had to grapple with difficult emotions. Miriam of Magdali, or Maria as the Romans called her, brought back to him all the failures of his life, as a Jew and as a man. He loved her—there could be no question of that—and in every sense, he loved her as a man should love a woman. Though at forty he was old enough to be her father, if he had his way he would fulfill his infernal Jewish responsibility to God and litter the earth with the fruits of his seed—as Nicodemus might put it.
    But Miriam loved another. And only Joseph of Arimathea knew for certain, though many certainly suspected, that the object of her love was the Master. Joseph could not fault her for that, for he loved him too. Which was why he had never declared himself openly to her. Nor would he, for as long as the Master lived. But he did send a messenger to Bethany to invite himself to dinner.
    The Master would come down from Galilee on Thursday, and a formal dinner and a light supper were prepared for Friday when, according to Martha’s confidential reply, the Master would have something important to announce. Since the Master had raised the young head of the household from the grave upon his last visit, Joseph wondered with a kind of dark humor what he planned to do to follow that performance.
    On Friday morning Joseph drove out to Bethany, a few miles beyond Gethsemane. When he pulled up below the house, he saw the vision—or rather an apparition in white—coming down the hill with open arms. It was the Master, but he seemed somehow transformed. He was surrounded by as many as a hundred people, as usual most of them female, all dressed also in white and bearing armloads of flowers, and singing a strange but haunting chant.
    Joseph sat speechless in his cart. When the Master came up to him, his robes flowing like water over his limbs, he looked into Joseph’s eyes and smiled. Joseph saw him, just in that instant, as the little child he once had been.
    “Beloved Joseph,” said the Master, taking him by the hands and drawing him from the cart, “how I have thirsted for you.”
    Then, instead of embracing him, the Master ran his hands up Joseph’s arms, across his shoulders, over his face, as if examining an animal, or committing his features to memory to execute a pagan sculpture. Joseph scarcely knew what to think. And yet—he felt a kind of warm tingling deep beneath the skin, down in his flesh, his bones, as if some physical action were taking place. He drew away uncomfortably.
    The chanting people drifting about them were annoying to Joseph, who recognized none of them and