Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,98

fly, to see visions, to heal with the laying on of hands! They got into battles with the Christians and the Jews. I don’t think the Roman army paid them any attention.

Medicine as I had known it in my mortal life had been flooded with a river of Eastern secret formulae, amulets, rituals, and little statues to clutch.

Well over half the Senate was no longer Italian by birth. This meant that our Rome was no longer our Rome. And the tide of Emperor had become a joke. There were so many assassinations, plots, squabbles, false emperors and palace coups that it soon became perfectly clear that the Army ruled. The Army chose the Emperor. The Army sustained him.

The Christians were divided into warring sects. It was positively astonishing. The religion didn’t burn itself out in dispute. It gained strength in division. Occasional furious persecutions—in which people were executed for not worshiping at Roman altars—only seemed to deepen the sympathy of the populace with this new cult.

And the new cult was rampant with debate on every principle with regard to the Jews, God and Jesus.

The most amazing thing had happened to this religion. Spreading wildly on fast ships, good roads and well-maintained trade routes, it suddenly found itself in a peculiar position. The world had not come to an end, as Jesus and Paul had predicted.

And everybody who had ever known or seen Jesus was dead. Finally everyone who had ever known Paul was dead.

Christian philosophers arose, picking and choosing from old Greek ideas and old Hebrew traditions.

Justin of Athens wrote that Christ was the Logos; you could be an atheist and still be saved in Christ if you upheld reason.

I had to tell this to Marius.

I thought sure it would set him off, and the night was dull, but he merely countered with more outlandish talk of the Gnostics.

“A man named Saturninus popped up in the Forum today,” he said. “Perhaps you heard talk of him. He preaches a wild variant of this Christian creed you find so amusing, in which the God of the Hebrews is actually the Devil and Jesus the new God. This was not the man’s first appearance. He and his followers, thanks to the local Christian Bishop Ignatius, are headed for Alexandria.”

“There are books with those ideas already here,” I said, “having come from Alexandria. They are impenetrable to me. Perhaps not to you. They speak of Sophia, a female principle of Wisdom, which preceded the Creation. Jews and Christians alike want somehow to include this concept of Sophia in their faith. It so reminds me of our beloved Isis.”

“Your beloved Isis!” he said.

“It seems that there are minds who would weave it all together, every myth, or its essence, to make a glorious tapestry.”

“Pandora, you are making me ill again,” he warned. “Let me tell you what your Christians are doing. They are tightly organizing. This Bishop Ignatius will be followed by another, and the Bishops want to lay down now that the age of private revelation had ended; they want to weed through all the mad scrolls on the market and make a canon which all Christians believe.”

“I never thought such could happen,” I said. “I agreed with you more than you knew when you condemned them.”

“They are succeeding because they are moving away from emotional morality,” he said. “They are organizing like Romans. This Bishop Ignatius is very strict. He delegates power. He pronounced on the accuracy of manuscripts. Notice the prophets are getting thrown out of Antioch.”

“Yes, you’re right,” I said. “What do you think? Is it good or bad?”

“I want the world to be better,” he said. “Better for men and women. Better. Only one thing is clear: the old blood drinkers have by now died out, and there is nothing you or I, or the Queen and the King can do to interfere in the flow of human events. I believe men and women must try harder. I try to understand evil ever more deeply with any victim I take.

“Any religion that makes fanatical claims and demands on the basis of a god’s will frightens me.”

“You are a true Augustan,” I said. “I agree with you, but it is fun to read these mad Gnostics. This Marcion and this Valentinus.”

“Fun for you perhaps. I see danger everywhere. This new Christianity, it isn’t merely spreading, it’s changing in each place as it spreads; it’s like an animal which devours the local flora and fauna and then takes on some specific