Chapter 17
THE SYMBOL OF THE SERPENT
A week after Jule and Laura first met at the Temple, the search for Pythagoras reincarnate was in full swing. In the prevailing atmosphere of unwavering belief, Jule’s initial skepticism regarding reincarnation had somewhat abated. He had proposed setting up some kind of bait message on the Internet and in newspapers around the world which might get a response from a potential candidate but would mean nothing to others. Trench, however, would have none of that, for fear of being swamped with calls from all kinds of impostors and freaks in search of attention or worse.
They began by looking at how other religions faced with a similar problem went about it and studied the case of the Tibetan Buddhists. After the death of a Dalai Lama, their supreme spiritual guide, a search team made up of monks and other Lamas is sent to look for his reincarnation. Their search may go on for several years. The thirteenth Dalai Lama, who died in 1933, had foreseen his reincarnation in a dream. He described a small house with peculiar gutters and an old poplar tree behind it, and the golden roof of a monastery in the distance. A place bearing a striking similarity to this description was found by the search party some four years later. A two-year-old boy called Tenzin Gyatso lived in the house with his mother. After the Lamas obtained her permission to conduct certain tests, they placed a number of objects in front of the boy; among these, there were some that had belonged to the previous Dalai Lama. They then asked Tenzin to pick out the items he liked. Familiarity with the possessions of the previous Dalai Lama is considered the main sign of reincarnation. When he finished, the boy had chosen all the objects that had belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama and none of the others. Tenzin also passed other tests and was declared the Dalai Lama reincarnate.
But the hunt for Pythagoras’ reincarnation could not proceed along quite the same lines. To begin with, they had neither a description of a place nor tests to evaluate potential candidates; moreover, unlike the reincarnations of the Dalai Lama, which all occurred within a small geographical area and only a few years apart, there was no particular reason to expect Pythagoras to reappear, two-and-a-half millennia later, exactly where he had last lived—in what is now southern Italy. All they knew was that if Pythagoras was reincarnated in the middle of the twentieth century as predicted, they were looking for a man between thirty-five and forty-five years old—not really the kind of information that could significantly narrow down the search. Getting their hands on the manuscript with the clues for recognizing Pythagoras was therefore crucial.
The most promising lead they had was the medieval book, or rather fragment of a book, that Trench had bought from his London agent: four parchment sheets, eight pages in all, featuring a mixture of elaborate artistic patterns, figures, mathematical symbols, and what appeared to be a short poem, in Greek. Two of the sheets had been partially eaten by rodents, resulting in damage at the margins but without significant loss of content. The last page, however, infected with a purple mold, was practically illegible, even after having been carefully washed in an alkaline solution.
Just to make sure the sheets did not contain some hidden text or drawings, Jule had a spectroscopic analysis performed on them. The results came back negative.
Since the book was most likely a copy, it was possible that the copyist had added his own artistic contribution. In that case, some of the pages would be irrelevant as far as the cryptic message they were looking for was concerned. Whatever the case, Laura and Jule had the strong feeling, if not the conviction, that only two of the pages deserved their attention: those, the fourth and the sixth, on which the five-pointed star or pentagram drawn inside two concentric circles appeared—the symbol of recognition among the Pythagoreans.
They began by studying the sixth page, at the center of which was a short poem in Greek. The rest of the page was covered with arabesques, which were clearly there as mere embellishments. Laura had found the four verses vaguely familiar:
He is a man of exceptional wisdom
Versed in the secrets of Number;
One who of all men
Has the profoundest wealth of intellect.
Was this a reference to Pythagoras? He certainly fit that description, but so did several other ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians.
Two days later, in the middle of the afternoon, Laura startled Jule with a loud “Eureka!”
“What is it?” he asked, turning around in his chair.
“Empedocles.”
“Who?”
“The poem. It’s a shorter version of some verses by Empedocles.”
“Forgive my ignorance, but what verses, and who’s Empedocles?”
“A Greek pre-Socratic poet and the father of rhetoric, according to Aristotle. As for the verses, I just found the reference in the ninth book of Timaeus’ Histories:
Among these was one in things sublimest skilled;
A man of wondrous wisdom,
His mind with all the wealth of learning filled.
And when he extended all the powers of his intellect,
All things existent, easily he viewed,
As far as ten or twenty ages of the human race!
“Timaeus, a Greek historian, believes that Empedocles had Pythagoras in mind when he wrote his enigmatic verses, and he adds:
‘The words ‘sublimest things,’ ‘he surveyed all existent things,’ ‘the wealth of the mind,’ and the like are indicative of Pythagoras’ constitution of body, mind, seeing, hearing, and understanding, which was exquisite, and surpassingly accurate.’”
“This simply confirms what we already suspected,” said Jule without much enthusiasm, “that these parchment pages have to do with Pythagoras. But the question remains: Do they conceal a message? I can see none in the poem; it’s just a reference to Pythagoras.”
Laura, happy at having found the source of the poem, did not share Jule’s thinly veiled pessimism: “Let’s focus on the other enigmatic page, then. I’m sure it’s the key to the mystery,” she said, with more hope than conviction.
The fourth page contained a finely executed drawing. To properly view it, one had to rotate the book clockwise ninety degrees. The center of the drawing showed a serpentlike monster or dragon inside an almond-shaped lozenge. Symmetrically placed on each side of the lozenge was a pair of matching feminine figures dressed in the tunic and pallium, a Roman cloak of Greek origin, worn by sacred persons; one of them was holding a stick and the other a scroll. The figures seemed to grow out of a stylized lily flower at their feet and were flanked by two cornucopias.
Was this a reference to a scroll and to some high-ranking personage, possibly a priestess, guarding it? They didn’t think so. The scroll was not sufficiently prominent for that; it was practically lost among many other elements in the image. Their attention turned rather to the drawing’s focal point: the serpent at the center of the page.
They had no idea when the serpent could have been drawn. The best estimate they had obtained for the parchment’s age was some eight hundred years—that is, dating it back to the thirteenth century—but the original drawing could have been as old as the first century AD, or even older. Jule counted on Laura’s almost encyclopedic knowledge of antiquity for guidance.
“The serpent is an extremely ancient and universal symbol of knowledge and wisdom,” she informed him. “Only in Christian times has it been endowed with demoniac attributes and used as a representation of evil.”
Jule observed that the two feminine figures could be priestesses standing in reverence before the serpent and presenting the cornucopia as offerings to the sacred animal. “Was there any particular school or sect worshipping the serpent or using it as a central ritual element?” he asked.
“As a matter of fact, there were a number of them. Their members were known as Ophites, from the Greek ophis, ‘serpent.’ These various sects and groups flourished in the Roman Empire during the second century AD. They were convinced that they possessed a secret and mysterious knowledge, not accessible to those outside, and based not on reflection or scientific inquiry but on revelation.
“In particular, the serpent occupied a central place in the worship and the symbolism of the Naassenes, from the Hebrew ‘nahash,’ serpent. The members of this Gnostic sect regarded the spiritual dragon or serpent as a symbol of intelligence, the redeeming power through which Adam and Eve gained the all-important knowledge of good and evil and learned of the existence of a Supreme Being higher than Jehovah, their creator, who had withheld this knowledge from them.”
“I see,” said Jule in a reflective tone. He looked disappointed. After a few moments he spoke again, with a touch of frustration in his voice:
“I can’t see any connection with the Pythagoreans. Their knowledge had not been revealed to them by any Supreme Being but came from the teachings of Pythagoras; and if they held something to be sacred it was certainly not a serpent but the Tetraktys, a triangular arrangement of ten points. I’m afraid we’re on the wrong track.”
Laura was not so pessimistic. “Not necessarily,” she said. “Neo-Pythagorean sects existed as late as the second century AD, an age in which abstract philosophy and arid formalism had begun to pall. It is quite possible for a splinter group of Neo-Pythagoreans to have been lured by ophite rites while at the same time wanting to preserve the secrets of the past, including the one announcing Pythagoras’ reincarnation. In that case . . .”
“Wait a second!” he interrupted her. There was a spark of excitement in his green eyes. “Maybe we’re trying to read too much into the drawing,” he said. “I mean, we’re assuming that it carries some kind of coded message to be deciphered.”
“Of course we are,” Laura cut in. “Didn’t we conclude that the presence of the pentagram was not fortuitous but an indication that the drawing had a purpose and a meaning related to Pythagoras?”
“I’m not questioning the fact that the drawing has a purpose related to Pythagoras,” Jule calmly replied, “except that it doesn’t have to have a meaning—at least not for us.”
“But then . . .”
“What I’m trying to say is that perhaps the drawing is merely the reproduction of a similar image that exists somewhere, in a place where there is something related to Pythagoras. Never mind its meaning, its purpose is to call attention to that place.”
Like sunlight bursting through the clouds, the plausibility of Jule’s interpretation of the drawing suddenly hit Laura: “Of course!” she exclaimed with excitement, “I’m pretty sure you’re right.”
It was only a small step forward, but enough for them to feel they were making some progress—which until then had not been the case. Each day, they spent a good deal of time on the Internet, scanning the online international press for some story that would be relevant, even remotely, to the search. Not that they expected to find the heading: “Man Claims to Be the Ancient Greek Philosopher Pythagoras.” There were some language limitations: Jule was fluent only in English and could read some French, while Laura also spoke German and Greek. However, they figured that if the news item was unusual enough it would also be carried in some English-language newspaper.
After their initial enthusiasm at the discovery that the drawing pointed to some particular place—they had no doubts about it—they realized that the road ahead could be long and difficult. The place they were looking for was in all probability some kind of ancient temple, and unless an archaeological expedition had dug it up at some point, they would have no reasonable hope of ever finding it. And even if the temple ruins had already been discovered, the painting or drawing on the wall or ceiling had to be in fairly good condition, good enough to be recognizable. Laura tried to find reasons to be optimistic: “When Evans dug up the ruins of the Palace of Minos, the legendary home of the Minotaur in Crete, he found many frescoes dating back to 1500 BC and most of them were relatively well-preserved. Who says we couldn’t be just as lucky?”
They first had to identify the place. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” Laura thought, “if one could search the Internet ‘by image’ the way one does by word or phrase?” But search engines were not yet sophisticated enough for that, so only traditional methods could be employed. Laura would comb through the reports and archives of archaeological expeditions with the help of her numerous contacts in archaeological and historical circles. Since the sect of the Naassenes, which worshipped the serpent with particular fervor, was believed to have originated in Phrygia—a large region of Asia Minor corresponding approximately to modern Turkey—she decided to start by examining records of excavations in that area.