The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century (5 page)

“Then walk back through the doorway,” the older priest said.

“But the doorway has closed,” Paul said.

“And it was first created or opened by Anu?” the older priest said. “He needs help to find it again?”

“It may have been created by a man,” Paul said. “Anu is uncertain.”

“So the question,” the younger priest said, “is how to move through different lifetimes, and whether this doorway you mention is made by the gods or the men, and where or how to find it. Is that correct?”

“That is correct,” Paul said.

“We shall consult Enlil,” the older man said. “In the meantime, please refrain from further demonstrations of the power of your talisman.”

“I will,” Paul said, putting the Bic lighter back into his pocket. “Thank you.”

The two men went to their rugs and each opened a small wooden box, removing a pinch of a dried green herb, what looked like oregano to Paul. Each put the herb into his mouth, positioning it between cheek and gums, and stood for a moment as they moistened it with saliva. The thin one took what looked like small bits of amber and walked over to a square brick box built out of the far wall. Looking carefully, Paul could see the slight shimmer of air above it indicating heat; it was the source of the smell of cedar smoke. The priest threw the bits of gum onto the coals, and a cloud of frankincense filled the air. He and his compatriot sniffed deeply of it, holding their heads over the coals.

Slowly, as if in a trance, the two men approached the front of the ziggurat, separated by a space of five feet. Marching to a sound beyond Paul's hearing, they slowly climbed the ziggurat, each man's foot lifting from the
stones and landing on the stones at the exact same moment, as if their nervous systems were one. They slowly climbed to the top of the ziggurat where they moved together, holding hands now as they stood before the Sumerian god Enlil. The thin one sang something, and then the stocky one, and the song went back and forth for three or four minutes. They bowed low. Then the thin one said something directly to the face of the statue, using tonality that clearly was questioning.

The two men at the top step of the ziggurat held their posture, as if frozen, for several long minutes. Outside the building, Paul could hear the sound of people talking, of dogs barking, of a baby screaming. The coals sizzled softly. The smell of frankincense tickled his nose and left a thick, bitter taste in the back of his throat.

One of the priests began to nod and make a soft noise through his nose, a grunt of assent. Soon the other man was also nodding and grunting. Both raised their arms, the hands between them still held tightly, and sang a short chant, bowed, and backed slowly down the ziggurat together.

They approached Paul and the thin one, a bit of greenish spittle drooling from the left comer of his mouth into his beard, hummed a soft tune.

Paul hummed back at him, the first few bars of
Row, Row, Row Your Boat.

The men nodded together, as if Paul had uttered a
profound statement. Their motions seemed oddly slow motion, and Paul wondered if the herb they'd put into their mouths was a psychoactive drug. Frankincense, he remembered from his friends in Catholic school, was also something that, when inhaled in sufficient quantities, could produce a mild high.

“Did you hear the voice of Enlil?” Paul said.

“Yes.”

“And it said?”

The old priest spoke with a soft and awe-filled voice. “Enlil said, ‘The Creator of the Universe brought forth humans so humans could create the gods.'”

“That's all?”

“We are shocked by this,” the young priest said. “It must be transcribed.”

“It is a profundity beyond understanding,” the thin, elder priest said. “A new revelation. It must contain the answer to your quest. It is the word of Enlil.”

Chapter Four

The Taste of Salt

Paul sat on the bank of the canal that carried the waters of the Euphrates River into Nippur and its surrounding fields. A hundred yards across, it flowed with a sluggish current, and smelled of vegetation and sewage. The surface was thick with brown scum and green algae, blue and brown water spiders danced across the water's skin, and under the surface Paul could see black beetles swimming with rowing-like motions of long jointed hind legs. The sun was close to the horizon, an ancient reddening disk, and the earth cooling into the empty blue-black sky made Paul feel chilly. Behind them, the city was shifting into evening gear, and the smell of wood smoke drifted out over the windless plains.

He had walked here in silence, after the audience with Enlil and his priests. It was a few hundred feet from where he'd fruitlessly searched for the now-missing portal
back to twenty–first century New York. On the way all the soldiers and citizens of Nippur had given him wide berth; apparently word traveled fast here. He'd checked out the empty house, but there was no trace of Noah's body. Only the bloodstained floor gave a clue to the events of the afternoon.

Paul was still trying to understand the words of Enlil. So he wouldn't forget, he took out the little spiral–note-pad from his shirt pocket and wrote,
The Creator of the Universe brought forth humans so humans could create the gods.
He wondered what it meant; it couldn't be a literal truth, but had to be a metaphor for something deeper. And, more important, he wanted to know why this was something new, a revelation, to the two priests. They acted as if they'd actually heard the statue say something new, something they'd never before considered, something radical and startling. A deep and ancient truth, an unknowable paradox. Was it a shared hallucination? The recital of some well-worn teaching and they were only performing in their amazement? And how would it help him get home, in any case?

Paul thought about New York, how far away it was both in time and distance. In a way it was as if it had never existed; in another way it was as if this were all a bizarre dream. He looked over at a swarm of gnats that extended from a foot above the water to about three feet up. There were probably a thousand insects in the
egg-shaped airborne community, each flying about as if randomly, few ever breaking the perimeter of the swarm. Each was an individual, yet they moved as one.

Humans create the gods
, he thought, recalling the man-made statues. Noah had said that the Greeks and Romans would have called him a god. Was it possible?

Paul stood up on the riverbank and turned around to look back to where the portal had once been open. “Noah!” he shouted. “I create you!”

The landscape didn't change.

“I command the portal to open!”

The only motion was the slow, slight movement of a distant man on camelback.

“Now!” he screamed. “Please!”

A voice from behind him said, “Why all the noise?”

Paul spun around, and Noah was sitting on the riverbank next to where Paul had been sitting moments earlier.

“Noah! You're back!”

“I was never gone,” Noah said, gesturing to Paul to sit back down.

“But I created you,” Paul said, sitting cross-legged next to Noah. “Just now. I willed you into existence, just like Enlil said I could.”

Noah chuckled. “I'm sorry, Paul, but it's not quite that simple. You still have much to learn.”

“But you're here!”

“I've always been here. You just didn't see me.”

“You mean you didn't die on the floor?”

“No,” Noah said. “Of course not. But I sure put on a good show, didn't I?” His eyes crinkled into a broad smile. “Those guys are still looking for my body so they can give it a proper burial. They're convinced that maybe, if they throw enough goodies into my casket, it'll reverse the curse of your Bic lighter.” He chuckled. “Five thousand years from now somebody will find a hieroglyph about it. It'll hopelessly confuse the archeologists of the twenty-first century.”

“Do you mean that what Enlil said was wrong?” Paul said.

“No, but it wasn't entirely right, either. It was an understanding expressed in the way people of this time can comprehend.”

“Well, I'm supposedly five thousand years more advanced than these folks, and I'm confused by it. What did it mean?”

Noah ran the fingers of his left hand, the skin leathery and cracking, through his beard, then pointed to the canal. “Where did this water come from?”

“You said the Euphrates River.”

“And where did the water in the Euphrates come from?”

Paul thought for a moment, then said, “Runoff from rains, collecting in small streams and springs?”

“And where did that water come from?”

“The sky, as rain.”

“And where did that water come from?”

“Evaporation.”

“Evaporation from what?”

“Well, four-fifths of the world is ocean, so I'd guess that while some of it came as evaporation from land, most of it was evaporation from the oceans.”

“So,” Noah said, lifting a finger into the air. “We could say that the water in that canal in front of us came from the ocean?”

“Sure,” said Paul. “And it's going back to the ocean, too, eventually.”

Noah nodded. “And if I were to get a cup of that water, or any water, and proclaim it to be the ocean, what would you say?”

Paul laughed. “I'd say you were wrong!”

“But it's part of the ocean.”

“Yes, but it's not the ocean itself.”

Noah nodded again, and ran his right hand over his beard, pulling it together in his hand, as if to nod his head with his hand via his beard. “Yes.”

“Are you saying that all of these gods are just bits of a larger god, the way this water is a bit of the larger ocean?”

“No,” said Noah emphatically. “What I'm speaking about is what people call things, not what they are.”

“I'm lost,” said Paul.

“I can call my cup of water the ocean, and may even be able to convince some people it is. Particularly those who have never seen the ocean. Right?”

“Probably.”

“But it's not the ocean.”

“Nope.”

“Yet a thousand different peoples are all pointing to their particular gods and saying, ‘These ones are the ocean!' Or, ‘This one is the only ocean and all the other oceans don't exist.”'

“But there is only one God,” Paul said.

Noah nodded and pulled his eyebrows together, his nose flared momentarily. “Tell me about this One God.”

Paul looked at the water, picked a piece of grass from beside him, and began to tear it lengthwise. “He's a jealous god.”

“And this god's name is?”

“Jehovah, I think.”

“But the scriptures say that His Name cannot be pronounced. There are only the four consonants, but no vowels. Nobody knows how to say the Name.”

“Ok, so we don't know His Name,” Paul said, rubbing the side of his hand where he scratched it pushing the little girl out of the way of the truck.

“You know what the One God said when Moses said, ‘Who are you?”'

“Something like, ‘I am me'?”

“He said, ‘I am that I In other words, ‘You can't know who I am.”'

“Why not?”

“Can a cup hold—and thus understand—the ocean?”

Paul looked at the sun, now a deep crimson, halfway below the horizon as shadows stretched and moved across the land. “I get it,” he said, feeling for the first time an understanding and identity with the God of his childhood, the God of the Bible.

“And what does He look like?” Noah said.

Paul rolled up one of the scraps of leaf and dropped it on the ground in front of him. “A burning bush?”

“Actually, the message Moses got was that nobody could look at Him and live.”

“That's pretty drastic.”

“If you interpret it literally. Again, though, I'd say that the message was, ‘I cannot be fully seen with your senses, nor described with your words, so don't even bother to try.'”

“Like radio waves,” Paul said, the insights piling one atop another, his heart racing as he saw how it all fit together, clearly heard the message, felt the reality of it.

“What do radio waves have to do with it?” Noah said.

“Well, radio waves have been around forever. Neutron stars emit them, for example. They've always been here. But we don't have sense organs for them, so to us
they seem not to exist. If you tried to tell the people of Nippur that with a small box in the palm of my hand I could pull out of the air the voice of somebody thousands of miles away, they'd say that I was crazy. If I did it, they'd say I was divine or a wizard. It wasn't until radio receivers were invented that we realized there was something there. The radio waves. So we have no receiver for God.”

Noah pulled on a bit of his hair that fell over his left shoulder. “I wouldn't make that assumption yet. Which was invented first, the radio receiver or the transmitter?”

“Geez, I have no idea,” Paul said. “Assuming you mean the man-made transmitter. That's an interesting question.”

“So how could we summarize what you now understand and know?” Noah said.

Paul thought back on Enlil, on the goddess in the house, on what he'd read in the Bible, on his own experiences of
knowing
God was real but being totally incapable of describing that knowing. “I'd guess that it would be something like, ‘Anytime you try to describe God, you miss Him.'”

“Him?”

“Or Her?”

“Actually, both are ‘descriptions.”'

“Ah, yes!” Paul said, pulling his notepad and pen out of his pocket. “But most languages require a gender for
pronouns. And the description of God we most often use came out of a male-dominated culture.”

“Does that mean God is a male, or a female?” Noah said.

“I'd guess neither. God is beyond gender. Or do gods each have different genders?”

“Only gods like Enlil,” Noah said. “Otherwise, it's ‘I am that I am.' So you could say, ‘Any god you can describe is not the Creator of the Universe, because the Creator of the Universe is bigger and vaster than anything that can be described by humans.”'

Paul nodded and scribbled in his pad,
Any god you can describe is not the Creator of the Universe, because the Creator of the Universe is bigger and vaster than anything that can be described by humans.
“I can understand that. And it's getting dark and I'm getting cold.”

Noah clapped his hands, and they were sitting back on the two sofas in Paul's living room in New York City.