“I was pouring over a scroll in the library when he came; dressed in my most faded, old clothes; my hair breaking free from its plaits as it so often did. There would have been ink on my fingers, scrawled-over papyrus all around and frown-lines on my forehead as I tussled with language, religion and bad penmanship.
“He had to say my name twice before I heard him. Then, as I looked up, shock drained allthe colour from my face. There was no doubt who it was, even if more than a decade had passed from our last meeting and, although I had half been expecting him for almost as long as I had lived in Alexandria, it had become an unspecified event which would happen some day. Not now. Not here.
Not standing in front of me when I looked such a mess.
“Paul of Tarsus was never a handsome man but no one who had cause to fear that face or that manner could forget him. He had a presence; the Greeks called it charis. I felt as though I were hallucinating for, I thought, just for a second, I saw a smouldering sensuality in those dark eyes.”
Confident, arrogant and certain of his role as leader of the new Christian movement, Paul of Tarsus comes to Alexandria to meet the sister of his saviour. It should have been be a formality; a courtesy, no more.
Deborah's knowledge came from direct experience of Jesus' teaching; Paul's from revelation on the road to Damascus. Could these two proud and volatile people work together and make a union that could change the world or would it tear both them – and the new faith - apart?
“On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” Book of Revelation 22:2.
Leaves of the Tree
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.
Why?
To create a cradle for the baby that the One Holy wished to birth. For Adam Kadmon, the Son of God.
‘But what is that to do with us?’ I asked my mother as I sat at her feet in the firelight so many years ago.
Imma smiled and said: ‘Everything. It is all about you and me. It is why we are here. Listen; I will tell you a story.’
Yeshua and I cuddled up beside her and sighed contentedly. Imma often told us stories. Every time we had a question, she would make us a story to tell us the answer. She told good stories.
Each one of us, she said, is one cell in that miraculous child and the baby will not be birthed until each of us – every one – has become perfect. It may take thousands of lives but that does not matter. There is enough time.
But why would God want to birth a baby? Isn’t God the Absolute? The All-knowing, All-being Oneness? Perfection. All that is?
‘For the same reason as your father and I wanted children,’ Imma said. ‘Somehow, even in the heart of perfection, there is a call to more; to create; to see another come into being and grow into its own self.
‘But listen,’ she said. ‘There is more.’
When the Elohim created the heavens and the Earth it created also the angels and the archangels. It created animals and fish and birds – and man and woman.
They lived in a matchless world; an endless world of perfection and beauty and all was very, very good.
But nothing changed and nothing grew and the soul of Adam Kadmon had no being and was lifeless for it had nothing of its own; nothing that made it unique. Nothing to strive for. Nothing that made it conceive of any moment that could be separate from God where it could make a decision for itself.
For God did not know how to create separation; all God knew was Absolute and perfect. And so there was a stalemate.
Then, one day, as God passed over the waters of the Earth and observed the glories of creation, something caught the Holy One’s attention. It was an oyster, with its shell open on the sands at the bottom of the sea. But it was not the oyster itself that drew the Holy One; it was the pearl within it; silver and purple and milky and shining and smooth.
God spoke to the oyster who carried this pearl and said: ‘O Oyster, I give you the greetings of this perfect day and I beg you to tell me, what is that which is inside your shell? For I know that I made you and for certain, I did not make that.’
And the oyster looked at God and said, humbly. ‘My Lord and my Delight, it is a pearl that I made myself. I hope that it does not displease you.’
‘Displease me?’ said God in surprise. ‘How could anything displease me? All that is, is of me and all of me is perfection. But how come you created this pearl, O Oyster? I have seen no angel, nor archangel, nor animal, nor fish, nor bird, nor human create in this world of paradise but you.’
‘Well, my Lord and my Delight,’ said the oyster. ‘I opened my shell to drink and a grain of sand – of perfect sand – flowed in with the water. And it caused me to be uncomfortable.
‘I tried to expel it but I could not do so. So I covered it with a part of myself to make it smooth and comfortable instead of irritating. Now I take pleasure in it instead of pain. Is it not beautiful?’
‘Beautiful?’ said God. ‘It is more than beautiful. It is the most wonderful thing that I have ever seen. Thank you, O Oyster, you are my teacher and I am truly grateful.’
Then the Holy One spent time in contemplation, for the new knowledge that the oyster had given was a treasure which required full enjoyment. And then, God made a decision and knew that it was very good.
The Elohim moved to the place where the man the woman lived in peace and harmony with themselves and with the creatures and he called them to him and he spoke to them.
‘Adam,’ he said. ‘Eve. The greetings of this perfect day to you. I have something to tell you. Do you see that tree over there?’
The man and the woman greeted the Holy One in turn, and in great happiness, and they looked over there and surely enough there was a tree – a new tree – which they had not seen before. It was tall and elegant and it carried luscious-looking fruits. They laughed for they had great joy in anticipation and they knew how much they would enjoy those fruits.
‘You are not to eat of the tree,’ said Yahveh Elohim. ‘Not one fruit. Never.’
Now the man and the woman had never heard such a command before. All the Elohim’s previous words had been ‘yes’ to them. They did not understand.
‘It looks good,’ said the man, perplexed. He felt uncomfortable and he did not know what was happening to him.
‘This is our country,’ said the woman. ‘Everything here is ours to enjoy.’
‘Not that,’ said Yahveh. And the Elohim’s heart melted with compassion for his creations for he saw that they experienced distress at his command. But the Holy One also knew, with the greatest of joy, that what the oyster had taught was true.
‘You can do anything else,’ said the Holy One. ‘Anything. But do not eat of that tree.’
And Yahveh Elohim left the man and the woman alone to consider.
‘Now,’ said my mother. ‘Come back for a moment into our home and think. And tell me, Deborah, what would you have done if you were Eve and you had been given such a very strange command.’
‘Left the tree alone?’ I said cautiously.
Imma laughed. ‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘What did you do when I made those honey cakes last week and left them by the hearth to cool?’
I blushed. ‘I only took one,’ I said shame-facedly.
‘And you, Yeshua?’ said Mother, looking at my brother. ‘How many did you take?’
‘Me?’ said Yeshua. ‘Me? I didn’t even know they were there! Besides, you didn’t tell me not to!’
We all laughed.
‘Imagine then,’ said Imma. ‘Imagine that there was a tree with the most delicious fruit on it in our garden and I told you not to eat any. A tree with hundreds of fruit; so many that I would never know that one or two had gone. What would you do then?’
‘Be good to start with. And then eat just one,’ Yeshua said.
I nodded. I wouldn’t have dared confess it on my own, but if Yeshua had already told the truth, it was safe to acknowledge it. ‘Anybody would.’ I said. ‘It’s not that we want to be bad…it’s just…how could it hurt anyone if we only ate one or two?’
Imma smiled at me. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘The temptation would be just too great. Well, I’ll tell you a secret – in fact I’ll tell you two. I had one of those hot honey cakes too, even though I’d forbidden myself to do so. And the other secret is that Holy One knew full well that Adam and Eve would eat from that tree.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Yeshua with satisfaction. ‘God wanted them to create a pearl.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mother. ‘Would you like to hear the rest of the story?’
We nodded and settled back down at her feet. I sighed, for these times with just the three of us before the others came home were always my favourite moments.
The Holy One left Adam and Eve in the Garden with the tiny grain of sand that he had slipped inside their minds and waited patiently for the moment that they decided to act to create their own lives.
The Elohim knew immediately that it happened; for Adam Kadmon’s soul quickened and life surged into it. The Divine Child began to grow at last.
But the Holy One also knew that every cell in Adam Kadmon would have to know of grit for the baby to thrive so Yahveh steeled the Elohim’s heart and returned to see the humans and told them that it was now time for them to leave the world of paradise and to be born into a lower world of physical life and death. There, they would have to make choices every moment of every day and, through their choices, they would become unique and different. And their belief in their separation from God would cause them to choose always whether to seek the Holy One or to turn away.
As they left the Garden to take on their coats of skin and live in the physical world as we do now, Eve was carrying a twig from that wonderful tree in her hand. It was a piece of twig that came off when she pulled at the fruit and it had a couple of leaves on it.
And as she left, she bent down and planted that twig in the ground so that it would grow, tall and mighty, becoming a Tree of Life that could show all of humanity the way back home
My mother told us this story every year of my childhood and I taught it myself to my son and to my daughter. And at the end of the story I also add the words that Imma always used whenever we questioned what she had said:
‘I don’t know if it happened and I don’t know if it didn’t happen. But I know that the story is true.’
Her name was Miriam. She was not my blood mother as she was Yeshua’s but my own blood mother died when I was six and from the day that Imma and I met, I knew that I was her child.
She died last spring. I didn’t know the day and it is easy to be imaginative in hindsight, yet I can remember stopping for no reason one afternoon while I walked from the Serapeum to the harbour to see what catch had come in with Kasaki’s blue fishing boat. I paused by the waterside of Alexandria’s great harbour and looked out, past the great lighthouse to where another distant fishing boat dipped its sails across the horizon. Imma’s face came into my mind; a drop of comfort that I had not known I needed slid through me and, for a strange reason I thought of the story of the pearl and for a moment I saw myself telling it to my own daughter – a daughter that I didn’t have; a daughter whom I could name Marguerita – pearl.
I carried the thought for a moment, idly, feeling pleasure in it and then dismissed it – I was already too old for childbearing and, in any case, had been warned, by Imma herself, never to conceive again after my son Luke’s birth. I always took great care for I loved my husband deeply and our life together was passionate so there was no thought of a daughter in reality.
But even in dismissing it, I wondered where that thought had come from and why. I was always quite fey and I had learnt to notice such moments in my life of adventure. It was six years since I had seen Imma and very little news reached us from any Eastern port.
John wrote to tell me of her death. That was kind. The letter took seven months to reach us and travelled via Rhodos and Creta and Apollonius had to pay six whole drachmas to the ship’s captain to gain custody of it, not to mention a tip for the messenger.
He brought it home to me in the early evening of a cool autumn day and handed it to me unopened before he had given me his usual greeting and kiss. He knew the rare missives from my homeland were momentous.
I cried as I read and my husband stood with one hand on my shoulder to offer comfort. She had died in her sleep, John wrote, and she had spoken of James, Salome, Yeshua and me only the previous night. She had been talking to John’s grandson and telling him the story of Adam and Eve and the pearl and how she used to tell it to us, so many years ago.
‘She was a good woman,’ said my husband, and I looked up at him, my eyes swimming with tears. Of course, he had met her, all those years ago in Jerusalem and she had given her blessing to our marriage. Another lifetime; another world.
I bowed my head in acknowledgment and then stood and brushed my dress down and rearranged my palla over my hair. We had guests for dinner that night and there was work to be done.
There is an ancient curse: ‘May you live in interesting times.’
I have lived in interesting times.
I was the adopted sister of a Jewish prophet who was crucified. He was a great teacher of the mystical tradition and his work continues after his death. My husband’s name was Judah and he was Yeshua’s best friend. Some stories circulate nowadays that he betrayed his friend. It is not true; I know for I was there but that story has been written elsewhere.
A year after Judah’s death, I married Apollonius, a centurion, later elected to senatorial class and now an official in the legislature of Alexandria. He knew my brother for Yeshua had healed Apollonius’s son Vintillius in Kfer-Nahum. Yeshua said he had never met anyone with such faith, not even in all Israel.
Luke is not his blood son, just as I was not Miriam’s blood daughter. I never knew who his father was. It could have been Judah, or it could have been one of a group of Roman soldiers, including Vintillius, on the night of Yeshua’s crucifixion. That is past; Luke is our son.
We live in Alexandria; I am a herbalist and a scholar. We once lived in Rome but Apollonius was not popular with the Emperor Gaius Caligula and we were glad to come back to Alexandria. That also has been written of elsewhere
.
How my daughter Sarah came to be conceived, I will never know.
She made her presence known one day while I was walking with Philo to the Alexandriana for a meeting of Platonists and Merkabah teachers. Very few – if any – women were permitted in the Serapeum, let alone the great mother library by the harbour side. Philo thought little of women in general and whole-heartedly disapproved of learned women in particular. His brother was Alabarch of Alexandria so he was a powerful man with influence who had done much to alleviate the lot of the Jews in Alexandria. In Jewish society, on the edge of which Apollonius and I hovered, respectfully, he was unacknowledged King. One of our ‘true’ king, Agrippa’s daughters had even been married to one of Philo’s sons.
He would no more have allowed his wife, Giacinta, to have learnt to read as to permit her to attend any of our meetings at the library. And to be fair, Giacinta thought such meetings a time-wasting self-indulgence in a world where there was bread to bake, fish to gut and grill and grandchildren to raise. But I had earned my scholar’s privileges through my blood, my education and my beliefs and, in fact, Philo regarded me as one of his teachers. He had no knowledge of Hebrew, which Yeshua had taught me to speak and write, and he loved to compare his research with me. In turn, he instructed me in Greek and Etruscan philosophy and we were fast friends, enjoying the merging of traditions and faiths within the mystical structure of the Jewish Merkabah.
Walking along the colonnades and dodging in and out of the market-day crowds heading for the evening’s races, we were discussing the Kallimachos – the self-castrated priest/priestesses of the cult of Cybele in Rome.
We had begun with a comfortable argument over the life and re-birth tradition of gods and goddesses and were comparing Yeshua’s death and resurrection with the Cybele-Attis legend. As usual, we were being far from respectful of the older traditions – as with Isis and Osiris and so many other resurrection stories there was rather too much incest for Philo’s taste and I enjoyed leading him into his ego’s prejudices before suggesting that the symbology was more important than the reality. Even so, the need for the repeating myth century after century – and our own knowledge of its physical reality within our lifetimes – was always a source of great fascination to us.
The conversation moved on to the ecstatic priests of Cybele who dressed as women and ‘pranced’ said Philo. ‘Pranced is the only word you can use’ through the streets of Rome.
‘Our mutual friend Paul has been forced to ban all the women in his new Christian cult from speaking, let alone go bare-headed to their meetings,’ he said. ‘Romans are now having sport in killing the Kallimachos on sight, they are considered such an abomination and, according to my sources, Paul is afraid that the Christian women will meet a similar fate through misunderstanding.’
‘He would probably do the same in any case,’ I said. ‘You don’t approve of women speaking or going uncovered. Having met Paul and knowing a little of his attitude towards his ex-wife, I can’t see him being liberal with women.’
‘Ah, but you forget the people he is attracting,’ said Philo. A strange feeling in my gut, caused me to place my hand there. Probably indigestion, I thought, walking on. ‘Slaves, ex-prisoners, rejects, renegades, the unwanted, the unappreciated, the unwashed.’
‘You exaggerate!’ I said, slightly taken aback by his vehemence.
‘I don’t my dear,’ said Philo. ‘New religions which promise freedom and do not require you to follow strict rules are bound to attract searchers for immediate bliss. People want an easy answer and Paul is giving them just that. Would your brother approve of what he is doing?’
‘That’s not a fair question,’ I said. ‘For a start, I don’t know what they are doing and anyway, Yeshua had no intention of starting any new religion. He didn’t set down any new ground rules or anything like that. I’m sure he would say there was nothing wrong with the old ones! I know Paul is said to have had that revelation on the road to Damascus – and he may well have done so – but the rest of it, he seems to be making up as he goes along.’
‘My point exactly,’ said Philo. ‘You went to one of their meetings when you were in Rome. You know what they say about your first husband. Deborah – what is it?’
I had stopped listening and was standing stock still with one hand out on the base of the statue of Neptune. The other rested on my stomach which, I noticed for the first time, was becoming slightly taut. I believed myself to be somewhere around my 40th year and had experienced all the symptoms of an early onset of the woman’s change since the previous spring. I had assumed that I was just getting fatter. Even though this change was a little earlier than the norm for most women who had survived childbirth, my feminine constitution had never worked well and it had been a relief when menstruation had stopped. I was taking stinging nettle tincture for night sweats and red clover for nutrients but suddenly I remembered that red clover boosted fertility.
‘Oh Vesta!’ I swore. ‘Philo, I’m pregnant. I can feel her quickening.’
My friend reacted swiftly. We were just next to the back door of the Alexandriana where the food was delivered to the kitchens. He guided me through the gate into the courtyard, with his hand under my arm and sat me down on the low stone wall where Achmed’s donkey had his lean-to stable and the chickens laid their eggs.
Achmed, our favourite of the library’s stewards, would know what to do. I could almost hear Philo muttering to himself. Hot tisanes; compresses. Achmed would know, in the absence of any other women.
‘Philo, I’m not ill,’ I said. ‘I’m just shocked.’
‘But my dear, you need help.’ He patted me nervously. ‘I won’t be a moment.’ And then he was gone, leaving me reeling from this strange knowledge, as the donkey, used to her treats, quested gently at me with her hairy, rubbery nose.
Sarah quivered again inside me. Sarah? I would never call a daughter Sarah! Sarah might have been the mother of our people but she had doubted God and seethed with jealousy over her handmaiden’s son. Marguerita if this were really true – but not Sarah!
Achmed was there with his gentle, laconic style before I had time for further thought.
‘Come with me, Madam,’ he said. ‘Are you well? Even so, we need to rest you a moment so as not to frighten the men’
I smiled at his terminology. I liked Achmed. He didn’t say silly things but he knew the truth about life. He realised, as I did, that my outburst had been embarrassing for Philo and anything to do with feminine things was anathema in the Alexandriana.
‘I am well, Achmed,’ I said. ‘Just shocked.’
‘Understandably Madam,’ he said. ‘Come sit with me in the pantry and I will instruct the gentlemen that you will be up in five minutes once you have had a healing tisane.’
‘To cure me of being horribly female,’ I giggled. Suddenly I was in a very good mood.
‘Exactly.’ The perfect servant’s cheek dimpled and the light in his eyes flickered as if dancing as he bowed me in through the door to the kitchens.
Treats from the great library’s kitchens were a glory in the lives of we Alexandrians, so few of us cooked ourselves at home and Achmed’s cronies excelled themselves with home-cooked sweets and cakes as well as savoury nibbles that tantalised the tongue with spices and herbs. I did have cooking facilities in the home that we shared with Apollonius’s extended family but even so, my cooking was not greatly admired – it was peasant food from Galilee as Luke so often reminded me! We ate out much of the time or had food delivered.
If I were a true mother I would tell you that the meeting passed my by, unattended to due to the miracle of new life. In fact, I stuffed this impossible baby’s existence into the back of my mind and, after placating my colleagues by taking in with me a plate of Achmed’s baklava and seed biscuits, I enjoyed a rousing argument with Arisotphanos and Philo. Their interpretation of Logos as a way of accounting for creation and the relationship between the infinite God and the finite world included the insertion of a whole realm of beings and potencies to bridge the gap between creator and creation and, although I could see their point, I thought it was dangerous ground in balancing Jewish and Greek belief.
‘Deborah, is this safe? Because I will not have you risk your life. You of all women know if enough can be done to ensure your safety.’ Apollonius, loving man that he was, was more concerned for his aging wife’s health than any additional heir to carry on his line.
‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘We have both always taken precautions that were so dosed to be on the edge of danger simply because we feared for my life. So if this child has come through despite that, then she means to come.’
‘She?’ Apollonius was alert to my intuition and rarely denied it. ‘Well, if so, we shall call her Apollonia Marguerita Miriam.’ You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
‘No you won’t,’ Sarah sang, her voice like tiny bells in a breath of wind. I heard her but said nothing, just smiling at my husband in acknowledgment.
‘What must we do to ensure your safety?’ my husband went on. ‘Your knowledge now is far greater than it was when Luke was born. There must be much that can be done. Modern medicine too. Luke will be able to tell us!’
I grimaced at the thought of my son’s reaction. Not only was Luke approaching an age where the idea of sex itself was embarrassing but the idea of his elderly parents indulging in it was going to be repulsive to him. I sighed. ‘We’ll wait a little longer before we tell him, I think,’ I said. ‘There is still time for the baby to miscarry. I shall go and see Constanzia and see what is best to be done.’
‘And you will stop taking the preventative herbs?’
‘Oh yes.’ And I will note the power of red clover too, I thought rather sheepishly.
‘A Pearl,’ said Apollonius, who had heard the story on the evenings when I told Luke. ‘A pearl in our lives. So unexpected. When do you think she might be due? I’ll cast a chart.
‘Five months?’ I said. ‘I really don’t know.’
A pearl, I thought as we made ready for bed that night and Apollonius was extra gentle and loving. Why do we need a pearl? There isn’t any grit.
