Fifth Gospel(53)

Now she understood the thread of destiny that wove her soul with Egypt.


After that day, she began to see other visions and she realised that the world was not only populated by beauty-bearing, life-begetting beings, but also beings of darkness, beings of death and foulness. Everywhere she turned her eye she saw legions of demons lying in wait for any error or failing in men and women. Lies, jealousy and gossip were food to them, nourishing their growth and they attached themselves, like parasites, to those who would feed them according to their nature.

For this reason, she rarely ventured to the places where groups of people met, to the bazaars where the merchants called out the virtues of their wares, or where people bargained for silks and baskets and gold and trinkets. She did not venture to those places where tradesmen, their minds intent on money, worked with tin and gold, silver and iron. She avoided the squares where musicians played their music; she did not even wish to go to the synagogue where men and women, crowded with devils, sought redemption and purification. Her dress became confused, her hair untended, unperfumed and uncombed and she wandered about, speaking to herself.

Those men who in the past had never cherished even a hope that she might look in their direction, now jeered at her and spat at her feet. Those women who had envied her position and privileges, her beauty and noble bearing, now whispered behind their veils, gloating with self-satisfaction.

‘There goes the fine, rich, harlot! There goes the mad one!’

Her sister, worried for her health, took her to doctors, one after the other. All of them agreed that hers was not a physical malady. Beside herself with worry, Martha called a rabbi to the house to perform an ancient ritual of banishment.

It was a fine day when the rabbi arrived.

Dressed in the wide fringed garments of the order of the Pharisees, he sat beneath a tree in the walled garden of the house at Magdala, chewing on the dates and nuts that her sister had served him, while frowning over an assortment of parchments. Mary, full of sorrow and guilt for her condition, sat opposite him, waiting for his diagnosis.

For a long time, the rabbi said nothing. When he finally spoke, it was between sucking dates and chewing nuts,

‘It is the way of demons,’ he said to Mary with a contemptuous slur, ‘that they like to enter into the backbone of girls who are not reverent…have you been bowing low to worship God, my child?’

‘Of course, rabbi.’

He observed this with a sceptical turn of the lip, ‘Have you borrowed drinking water?’

‘No rabbi.’

‘Or walked over water that has been poured out?’

‘No, rabbi.’

‘And the water you wash your hands in, and the oils which you use to anoint them…do they come from a known vessel?’ He looked at Martha. ‘Never leave a vessel unattended outside the house! It can be cursed by the evil eye of a neighbour, or a jealous suitor, or a demon of the morning intent on causing havoc.’

Martha said from her corner, ‘All our water comes from our own wells and is drawn just before we need it. The oil is our own and kept in sealed pots.’

He gave this some moment of sour consideration and bent his head again to study his parchment. ‘Here it says…that women who go about with their hair uncovered are prone to enticing evil spirits…that those who walk between two palm trees in the moonlight, especially when the space between them is wider than four cubits, are in danger of becoming possessed by demons. Have you been walking about in moonlight, child, between palm trees?’

‘No…’ Mary hesitated, ‘well, not exactly…but I have dreamt of moonlight, of rivers and temples.’

He stared at her, watchful, eager, and his lip ran a constant activity. She knew he was inspecting the air around her for demons and devils and spectres. But she also knew he must be blind to them, since about him there hovered so many that he did not seem to see. They pressed into him and squeezed him from without and made him slap his own head with a hand, which occasioned a great,

‘Oof!’

After it, a general silence fell.

Astounded by this unbidden action on the part of his hand, the rabbi said quickly, as if the foregoing were a prelude to this one word, which he knew would sum it all up:

‘Danger!’

He looked to Martha then, and gathering vehemence to his heart, said it again, only louder, ‘DANGER! Dreams of moonlight! Dreams of temples and rivers, more danger! Demons love moonlight! They live in the shadows of temples, in the shadows that move in the waters of rivers and streams. They live in the shadows of shadows!’

Meanwhile, Mary watched his own shadows whisper into his ears and scratch under his chin, but the rabbi, not cognisant of them, reined himself in, wiped his lips and consulted his parchments again for a cure.