She contemplated the rest of this discovery for a moment and made notes. Maureen was familiar with the work of Piero della Francesca, as his iconic Magdalene was among her favorites. He had painted her for the duomo in Arezzo, a very strong and majestic image from which her power and leadership emanated. There was nothing penitent about this Magdalene. It was not painted by a man who believed for one minute the sixth-century propaganda of Mary Magdalene as repentant sinner. It was a fresco created to emphasize leadership. Maureen had a framed copy of this image hanging in her office. She had studied Piero della Francesca during her art research and always found him interesting. His frescoes in Arezzo were very alive, very human and full of narrative. When she looked at his art, she felt kinship with him; Piero was a storyteller. He painted The Legend of the True Cross in rich and elaborate detail, he infused The Coming of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon with profound sanctity, and all his artwork represented the most sacred teachings of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher.
Reading about the Order reminded Maureen that she needed to make arrangements for her return to Europe, as she had meetings with her French publisher in Paris to prepare for the release there. Paris was never a hardship; she loved the city and her best friend, Tamara Wisdom, an independent filmmaker, had been hounding her to spend some time there with her. Maureen’s cousin and spiritual adviser, Peter Healy, was also living in Paris at the moment. He had once been known as Father Peter Healy, but he was a refugee from the Vatican at the moment, possibly forever, and was no longer referring to himself as a priest or wearing his collar. Maureen was anxious to catch up with him.
She decided she would fly into Paris, do her business there, then drive down with Tammy to where both of their beloveds awaited them at Bérenger’s Château des Pommes Bleues in the southwest of France. Tammy was also blissfully in love, engaged to the gentle Languedoc giant Roland Gelis, who was the childhood best friend of Bérenger. They all lived together in the beauty of the Aude river valley, a magical part of the Languedoc region where the château was located, just outside of Arques. Bérenger, the heir to a Scottish oil fortune, had inherited the château from his grandfather. It had been built in the Languedoc as the exclusive headquarters of a secret society that protected dangerous and heretical secrets. Bérenger had inherited these secrets along with his French castle.
It was too late to call Bérenger tonight, but first thing in the morning—her morning, his afternoon—she would talk to him about accompanying her from Arques to Florence. Destino sent her a letter advising them that he was leaving Chartres to return to Florence, stating it was “once and for all.” The letter had felt very final, as if he were preparing to die in Italy. It had upset Maureen immensely at the time. Destino was ancient—literally—and his death was inevitable. But to lose such a treasure, now that she understood and accepted what he was and the extraordinary wisdom he had to offer the world, would be hard to take.
Destino’s letter indicated that he had much to teach Maureen in a limited time and that it would be her responsibility to be conversant in the Libro Rosso prior to her arrival. He did not have time to teach the basics of the Order’s tenets. He had very specific lessons for them and tasks that must be carried out in preparation for the mission they would all embark upon together. Destino was emphatic when referring to “the mission.”
In preparation for her trip to Florence, Maureen reaffirmed her commitment to study the teachings of the Libro Rosso, which she currently had in her possession, as Destino had given all of them a translation as a gift: Maureen, Bérenger, Tammy, Roland, and Peter were all currently studying the English translation of the sacred red book that held the greatest secrets of Christianity.
She had used these sacred pages to craft The Time Returns: The Legend of the Book of Love. But it was time to study them and commit certain passages to memory. Maureen pledged to start from the beginning and work all the way through, studying a few segments a night.
It wasn’t a chore. Maureen had thought from the first moment she had been exposed to the Libro Rosso teachings that they were the most beautiful words she had ever read. She recognized them as truth, and it had been a celebration for her to write a book about the brave souls who risked everything to preserve these astonishing teachings for two thousand years.
Maureen settled into bed with her book. The teachings always returned to the understanding of love as the great gift given to us by God. But as simple as such an idea should be, it was here that the controversy began. For within the Book of Love, God was not viewed as a patriarch; he was not simply Our Father. God was Our Father in perfect union with Our Mother. The first pages contained Maureen’s favorite passage:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. But God was not a single being, he did not reign over the universe alone. He ruled with his companion, who was his beloved.
And thus in the first book of Moses, called Genesis, God said, “Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness,” as he is speaking to his other half, who is his wife. For creation is a miracle that occurs most perfectly when the union of male and female principles is present. And the Lord God said, “Behold that man has become one of Us.”
And the book of Moses says, thus God created man in his own image, male and female created he them.
How could God create female in his own image if he did not have a female image? But this he did, and she was called Athiret. Later Athiret became known to the Hebrews as Asherah, our heavenly mother, and the Lord became known as El, our heavenly father.
And so it was that El and Asherah desired to experience their great and divine love in a physical form and to share such blessedness with the children they would create. Each soul who was formed was perfectly matched, given a twin made from the same essence. In the book called Genesis, this is told as Adam’s twin being created from his rib, which is to say his own essence, as she is flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, spirit of his spirit.
Then God said, “And they shall become as one flesh.”
Thus the hieros-gamos was created, the sacred marriage of trust and consciousness that unites the beloveds into one flesh. This is our highest gift from our father and mother in heaven. For when we come together in the bridal chamber, we find the divine union that El and Asherah wished for all their earthly children to experience in the light of pure joy and the essence of true love.
For those with ears to hear, let them hear it.
EL AND ASHERAH, AND THE HOLY ORIGINS OF HIEROS-GAMOS,
FROM THE BOOK OF LOVE AS PRESERVED IN THE LIBRO ROSSO
Since meeting Bérenger, Maureen had become committed to understanding and experiencing the hieros-gamos in all its forms. Her eyes had been opened to a kind of love that she had previously never realized could exist outside fairy tales and legends. But this kind of epic union, this all-encompassing, nurturing love, was possible. If Maureen could experience it, be transformed by it, then she was certain that everyone could. She and Bérenger realized that this was part of their destiny: to help others find love as they had been blessed to find it themselves.
Maureen closed the book, content to sleep with visions of El and Asherah dancing in her dreams.
Maureen’s dreams did not obey her desires.
Her dreaming was usually lucid and clear; complete sequences and coherent images came to her unbidden in her sleep. Always, they contained important messages for her or provided urgent clues to be followed. Until tonight. This dream was chaotic, frenetic, with flashes of image, sound, and emotion, moving through time and space. Some of the images seemed to relate to each other; others did not. But there was one constant factor through the entire dream. No matter the image, no matter the time frame, each flash of vision contained one unifying element.
Fire.
The fire burned hot in the town square, the pitch that had been poured upon the kindling to make it ignite faster and burn hotter was effective. Hundreds of people surrounded the stake and its victim. Or victims? Sweat po
ured down the faces of onlookers as hell appeared to rage before them. In one flash the crowd was weeping, in another jeering. Two different fires. Two different cities. One, then another, then back again. In the first city, she saw the faces in the crowd. They were shocked, terrified, saddened. She did not see the victim, only the flames, which leaped high in the center of the square, enveloping in their terrible embrace what was once a human being. Maureen saw the faces of weeping men and women in the crowd, and one man in particular came into focus for her. He was dressed plainly enough, as a merchant perhaps, but there was something in his demeanor that marked him as different. He stood tall, and despite his obvious distress he had the presence of a king. As she watched a single tear roll down his cheek, she felt the man’s terrible grief—and guilt—over the tragedy unfolding before him. Then another bright flash of fire moved her attention away from the man and back to the space where the stake had been. But it wasn’t flame she saw now; rather it was a blinding white light that burst into the sky and rose to heaven. The sky appeared to darken all around them, turning nearly to black, as the white light against it took form for the briefest instant before fading away.
Maureen was then plunged into the fire of another city, another time, and another victim.
The faces in this crowd were angry, in contrast to the previous vision. And they all belonged to men, at least it was only men who were immediately surrounding the scaffolding. These men were the source of the jeering she had heard when the dream began. The riled mob threw things into the fire, objects Maureen could not identify, shouting in anger as they did so. A strange word she did not recognize, chanted over and over again. For a moment she thought they were saying “pig nose,” but it seemed absurd to her, even in the surreal dream state. Again, she could not see the victim as the flames here burned even higher than in the first vision. But the atmosphere in this city was markedly different. This victim was despised and those who turned out for the execution were determined to watch the hated one die in this terrible way. This was controlled chaos, but it appeared to be on the verge of getting out of control as the flames grew hotter and higher. Just as Maureen felt the images start to fade, began to feel her consciousness calling her out of the dream state, she had one last vision of the final, terrible execution. At the edge of the square, far enough away to be safe but close enough to be scarred forever by what she was witnessing, was a little girl. Her dark eyes were enormous as she watched the fire and the angry mob that surrounded it. She was a fine-boned little thing like a tiny bird, no more than five or six, and desperately undernourished. And yet for all her fragile physical appearance, this child did not appear weakened or even afraid. It was the look in the little girl’s eyes that Maureen would be left with long after the dream was over, as there was nothing of fear in them. Her eyes reflected the flames before her, and in them Maureen saw something she could not quite identify, yet she knew that it was something she did not like.
In the child’s eyes was something terrible, something not so far away from madness.
Confraternity of the Holy Apparition
Vatican City
present day
“YOU ALLOWED THIS to happen!”
Felicity de Pazzi hissed at her granduncle as she threw the book across the desk at him. Her heavy black eyebrows were a harsh frame to huge dark eyes, which flashed with the heat of anger in her narrow face. She didn’t care that he was old, ill, and feeble. He was supposed to stand for something. And he had failed, failed miserably when they needed him most.
“Calm yourself, my dear.” Father Girolamo de Pazzi held up one trembling, palsied hand in an effort to reach his outraged niece. He loved her like a daughter and had played a strong role in raising her to be the power behind the confraternity now that he was no longer physically able to deal with day-to-day operations. Her unbridled passion for their cause made her an unstoppable and infinitely holy force. It also gave her an extreme temper. She had been well named, as inspired by God. Her mother had had a dream of the great Saint Felicita while pregnant with this, her only daughter. Throughout her pregnancy she had had further visions of that blessed saint who had been brave enough to sacrifice all seven of her sons to prove her unwavering faith. It was clear to everyone in the de Pazzi family when this child was born on the tenth of July, the feast day of Santa Felicita, that she had brought her name and her identity with her.
At boarding school in Great Britain, she adopted the English version of the name, Felicity. It had stayed with her, even after she was expelled from several British establishments for “aberrant behavior.” While in her early teens, she had begun to have visions that possessed her totally, events that proved deeply problematic for the British schools. She was brought back to Rome and placed in a convent school where her progress could be monitored by those closer to her family and faith. When it was determined that she was indeed seeing authentic apparitions, the confraternity adopted her as their living patron saint. Felicity had become a prophetess in her own right, a visionary who fell to the ground in ecstasy, writhing as she was struck by visions of Jesus Christ and his most Holy Virgin Mother. The fanaticism around Felicity and her visions had grown through the ultraconservative movement over the last two years, and she had begun to develop stigmata as the visions descended. Attendance at the confraternity meetings when Felicity was featured had become standing room only as a result. To watch her as the visions possessed her was eerie, yet powerful. There would be one such meeting tonight at the confraternity meeting hall, and she intended to make her appearance count.
Father Girolamo de Pazzi had given the girl a plaque as a gift upon her return to Italy, something she could use to bolster her strength while she made the transition to the harsher convent environment that would ultimately prove nurturing for her. The plaque was made of wood, inscribed with a quote from the blessed Saint Augustine regarding the sanctified actions of Saint Felicita. It was a quote that the modern Felicity had not only memorized but taken to heart as her model for faith. She would use it tonight during her appearance.
Wonderful is the sight set before the eyes of our faith, a mother choosing for her children to finish their earthly lives before her, contrary to all our human instincts. She did not send her sons away, she sent them on to God. She understood that they were beginning life, not ending it. It was not enough that she looked on, but she encouraged them. She bore more fruit with her courage than with her womb. Seeing them be strong, she was strong; and in the victory of each of her children, she was victorious.
To the de Pazzi family, Santa Felicita was an extraordinary woman of faith, possibly the greatest of all Christian martyrs when the total of her sacrifice was taken into account. This faith in the saint’s righteousness was shared with an unequaled passion by the younger Felicity. In all his eighty-plus years of life devoted to the Church, Girolamo de Pazzi had never met anyone with the religious fervor of the woman who stood before him. She was shaking with it now, unable to control her self-righteous anger over the offending book that had brought her to this confrontation. He pleaded for her understanding.
“What could I have done to stop it? It was . . . out of my control, Felicity.”
The book sat between them on the desk, a silent enemy. The Time Returns, by Maureen Paschal. The Legend of the Book of Love.
“You could have stopped her while you had her there.”
Girolamo de Pazzi shook his head. He knew when she said, “You could have stopped her,” she really meant that he should have killed her. There was a time when he would have been prepared to give that order. But he had discovered that he could not take a life in the presence of the Book of Love, and certainly not that life. Not after he had seen the book opened and realized definitively what it was. What she was.
What he had witnessed that evening in the crypt of Chartres Cathedral was not something he could readily describe to his grandniece, or to anyone else. He had lured Maureen Paschal into the crypt, sure enough, to bring her into the presenc
e of the Book of Love, the ultimate treasure of anyone who revered the name of Jesus Christ. It was a gospel written in his own hand and yet one which could not be simply read by scholars and theologians, many of whom had tried over the nearly five centuries that it had resided secretly within the Vatican walls. It was written in a polyglot of languages and there were layers to it, encoded teachings that average humans and traditional Christians had long forgotten how to access. The book was “locked,” and as such was a mystical treasure that required a unique key to unveil all the teachings within it.
That key was Maureen Paschal.
It was apparent to everyone in the Confraternity of the Holy Apparition that Maureen Paschal was a prophetess with extraordinary ability and clarity. They had all studied how she had found the Arques Gospel of Mary Magdalene by following her visions, a feat no one else could accomplish. Even within their confraternity, where they had cultivated the greatest visionaries of all time for almost eight centuries, no one had been able to track that treasure successfully. Once she made her discovery in France, it became infinitely clear that Maureen Paschal had a special destiny. Then they knew that she was the “Expected One” who would also be able to unlock the secrets within the Book of Love. This infuriated Felicity de Pazzi.
Felicity had been brought into the presence of the Book of Love on several occasions, and each time the confraternity members prayed fervently that she would be able to unlock the Book and reveal its contents to them. But the book remained silent, despite Felicity’s stigmata, which bled so profusely when in the presence of the Book that she had to be hospitalized after the last session.
Felicity de Pazzi had suffered and bled for all her visions. This is how she knew they were authentic. God required pain from his holy ones to test their faith. Anyone who claimed visions but did not suffer for them was a false prophet who had not been tested. Felicity lived to share this understanding with others. Her mission was to tell the truth of the terrible prophecies that were given her about the End Times and the sinners who would be boiled alive in their own blood if they did not repent. The Holy Mother was very specific about the nature of the death that would come to the unbelievers and to those who were not willing to make profound sacrifices to show their love of God.