“Jump! Now!” Caedmon hollered.
“Oh God!”
With that panic-stricken yell, Edie was airborne.
Three pairs of hands reached out for her.
Caedmon won the prize, snatching her at mid-waist. Relieved, he awkwardly held her tight, one hand splayed on her hip, the other wrapped around her backside. Behind him he heard hoarse cheers and exuberant clapping.
Glancing up, he saw that the ledge above was now consumed in fire.
He handed Edie to the hefty bloke standing to the left of him. As he leaped off the receptacle, he winced, the pain in his arm unbearable.
Shuffling over to Edie, he plastered a cocky grin on his face. If for no other reason than to mask the pain. “A trial by fire, eh?”
The muscles in Edie’s jaw clenched. Then, eyes narrowing, she raised her right hand. Catching him completely off guard, she slapped him across the face. Hard.
“You bastard!”
CHAPTER 63
Manna from heaven, Mercurius thought as he watched from his study window a delicate swarm of cherry blossoms haphazardly tossed in the morning breeze.
But, as he knew all too well, such splendors were suspect, both blossom and breeze animated with a dark fire.
His heart heavy, Mercurius turned away from the window. Because of Caedmon Aisquith’s expansive breadth of knowledge, he’d had to make a painful decision. For the greater good. Although, mercifully, the Englishman had been unaware that there was a fourth stream of hidden knowledge—a disclosure contained within the pages of the Luminarium.
As he left the study and walked down the hall, he glanced at the grandfather clock in the foyer: 7:07 A.M. The deed had been done. The secret was still safe.
When he’d been unceremoniously given the Luminarium seven years ago by the Greek crone, he quickly realized that Moshe Benaroya’s manuscript was more than a fascinating text; it was a revelation into the secrets of the universe. Secrets that had been safeguarded by the Sephardic Kabbalists, and before them, the Levite priesthood. Those secrets had never been transcribed for fear they would fall into the wrong hands. Not until Moshe Benaroya put pen to paper in 1943.
Like many academics, Mercurius had been a card-carrying secular humanist, firmly believing that morality was rooted in reason and justice, not supernatural mumbo-jumbo. But all that changed when he read the Luminarium, composed of three separate parts. The first, titled “The Great Work,” was a lengthy commentary on the four streams of hidden knowledge.
According to Moshe Benaroya, the first stream was alchemy, a word derived from the phrase al-khem meaning “from the land of Egypt.” The goal was to find the Prima Materia and to affect its physical alteration by transforming it into a different material substance. In the next stream, Kabbalah, the adherent calculated the numeric equivalences of the individual words and phrases of the Torah. And in the third stream, magic, the novice mastered the art of crafting protective amulets and seals based on the Mogen David hexagram.
In actuality, it was a misnomer to refer to these three streams of knowledge as “hidden,” since seers, soothsayers, and students of the arcane had been practicing the proscribed rituals for centuries. But as Moshe Benaroya tellingly revealed, these three streams were merely a smokescreen. A carefully contrived decoy. Indeed, a man could devote a lifetime to studying alchemy, Kabbalah, and magic—and many did—blissfully unaware that there was a fourth stream. Well hidden from the uninitiated, and with good cause, the fourth stream contained the secret of Creation.
Moshe Benaroya named this fourth stream of sacred knowledge the Divine Harmonic.
The sacred sounds intrinsic to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are at the heart of the mystery, each of the twenty-two letters of the Otiyot Yesod animated with its own unique vibration. This was the reason why the Hebrew word for “letter,” ot, also meant pulse or vibration. When the letters were sounded out in a prescribed sequence, these sacred utterances initiate a flow of vibrational energy. Not only is sound a fundamental element of the universe, but everything in the universe vibrates. And it was vibrating clusters of energy bound together that created mass.
This vibrational energy was the basis for Creation.
According to the Luminarium, our world came into existence through the Divine Harmonic, the entire Creation dependent upon a sequence of nonverbal utterances, or kol. Before God ever recited the phrase “Let there be light,” he made a series of inarticulate sounds that created the vibrational energy that created “the light.” This was why “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” transpired before the Almighty uttered a single coherent word. Furthermore, the Hebrew word for that phrase “In the beginning,” Bereshit, can also be translated as “He created six.” Sound moves outward in a spherical wave. And the wave always travels simultaneously in six different directions.
Adept at using the fourth stream, the patriarch Moses knew that by changing the energy vibration through sound, mass is either altered or destroyed. Moses used the Divine Harmonic to perform every single one of his so-called miracles.
Exodus 14 recounts the famous story of the parting of the Red Sea. Students of the Bible (and fans of old Charlton Heston movies) know that six hundred thousand Hebrew slaves stood stranded on the banks of the mighty sea, the pharaoh’s army in pursuit. Suddenly, a pillar of cloud appeared near the Hebrews’ flank, casting a dark shadow that the Egyptians could not penetrate. In that instant, Moses extended his hand over the waters, causing a gale-force wind to drive back the sea, enabling the Hebrews to cross the exposed seabed.
What the story fails to mention is that it wasn’t God who parted the sea; it was Moses.
And Moses, who authored the book of Exodus, arrogantly gave the secret away in the biblical text. The tale is told in three verses, nineteen through twenty-one, each verse containing exactly seventy-two letters—the actual code! Albeit cleverly scrambled. The story also failed to mention that while Moses stood on the banks of the Red Sea, he chanted the sequenced code of seventy-two letters. The change in the vibrational energy current was what parted the Red Sea. The Divine Harmonic. An ancient technology whose roots extended back to Atlantis.
As the Hebrew tribes began their conquest of the Sinai, Moses used this ancient technology repeatedly, enabling the so-called Chosen People to crush every army that came between them and the Promised Land. Nine thousand years before that, Thoth used the same technology to destroy the continent of Atlantis.
Create. Transform. Destroy.
All of which proved that the process of Creation, or an act of cataclysmic Destruction, could be put into motion by a mere mortal. No omnipotent god required. A man had only to utter the correct sound sequence to alter the vibrational energy that permeated the entire universe. Any man could do it provided he had the encryption key to unlock the sequenced code contained on the Emerald Tablet, the relic encoded with a complex pictograph composed of symbols, letters, and glyphs.
Not only did Moses possess the encryption key, but he taught it to the Levis, the hereditary Hebrew priesthood. Committing the key to memory, for generations the Levis passed the secret from father to son. Because of the inherent power contained within the sound vibration, they were expressly forbidden from transcribing the key. The Levite priests and, later, the Sephardic Kabbalists, didn’t dare cross the line that the patriarch had drawn in the Sinai sands more than three thousand years ago.