When I was almost an adolescent, I accompanied the abbot on a journey to Jerusalem. He died there, granting me a freedom that by then had become essential for me. I sought the Truth among old Kabbalists, but when my organs of knowing developed, I understood that, unable to be universal, it presented itself as a violent belief. Then I sought a technique that would allow me to disconnect from that archaic desire. Truth would only be the world without my desire for it, and the technique would be to learn to disappear as a separated individual. To accomplish that, I had to confront inspired thought in other masters.
Egypt showed me its secrets in a numerical system: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etcetera. Ascetic Turks showed me how to fall into a trance: I could open my abdomen with a knife, empty my guts out onto a plate, and dance, spinning dizzily, and at the end put them back in their place and seal the wound without leaving a scar. In Fez, I studied alchemy, how to spiritualize matter, and magic, how to materialize spirit. Finally, I was visited during a dream by the Knights of Heliopolis, those who consider physical death a sickness and who have the incredible patience to live more than fifteen thousand years.
Those ancients treated me like someone they’d been awaiting for a long time, and each one (there were seventy-eight) gave me his knowledge summarized on a rectangular sheet. When I was able to order those drawings into a hexagonal mandala that resembled a snowflake, I thought I understood the constitution of the Cosmos and the mystery of life. Considering, as did my masters, it useless to go on remaining in one single body, I decided to live 151 years and to continue, in another life, my work, which was to lead all beings to Awareness, progressively eliminating God by absorbing Him in existence so that we would all become an exclusively human Universe. All of that was achieved with the consent of the Father, who, out of absolute love, creates us so we will be his tomb. Out of the putrefaction of the divine our eternity will be born.
I returned to Germany, where I adopted an orphan girl. I instructed her for some years until she became my wife. With the immense fortune I accrued transforming base metals into gold, I had a temple constructed in the Alps, carved from the rock of the mountains themselves. I led the workers there blindfolded and returned them home without their knowing where the site was located. There, with my young lover and four friends chosen from among the most highly developed spirits of the period, protected by our disguised and impregnable nest, we locked ourselves away to decipher the miraculous language of geometry. Almost a century went by. I saw my disciples die placidly. I had met them too late, after society had already encrusted in their minds the programing of death and the triumph of old age. Since they believed in those two concepts, they achieved them.
Federica, my companion, educated by me, grew up without those prejudices and accompanied me until I was 151 years old. Young, only 110, she wanted to die with me, but I forbade it; she had to go on living for several centuries, if necessary — until, in another incarnation, I would remember her and seek her out to achieve our final union, the sacred androgyne.
The two of us constructed a seven-sided crypt. In the center of the roof, we hung three lamps filled with oil we’d managed to extract from gold, which, thanks to a wick made from chameleon spittle, could burn for a millennium. At the center of the heptagonal floor, we erected a round covered altar with a copper plaque on which I engraved Hoc universi compendium unius mihi sepulchrum feci and other important things that, unfortunately, I’ve forgotten. Finally, in a glass coffin, I lay down with my seventy-eight cards floating from one hand to the other like a rainbow.
Under the serene gaze of my faithful Federica, I began to give up my body. I separated first from my feet, in which I felt the enthusiastic faith of the always-growing toenails, the fierceness of the instep, the solidity of the soles giving roots to intelligence, and the clarity of the heels, round fertilizers of the planet. I loved them the way you love during farewells: more than ever. Then I withdrew from my skin, flesh, bones, viscera, until, separated from my matter and my needs, I began to do the same thing with my desires, which was relatively easy. Only one difficulty arose: the profound attraction I felt for my companion.
A sperm as brilliant as a jewel had been waiting for many years to inseminate her. I’d had to sacrifice that natural desire for reasons related to my initiation, which I do not understand. Then came the farewells from all the humans who gave me wisdom, from all the plants, animals, minerals, an army of beings with which I had established tender links and which I also thanked and quickly abandoned. Finally, I eliminated from my spirit my unfinished works, anxieties of being, doing, and living. With an immense felicity, I gave myself to the change and emerged in the limbos of the Interworld. I wandered in the Interworld, there where space and time are absorbed by the unthinkable creator, Eye.
In that splendor, impeding the disintegration of my awareness, I waited for the manifested Universe to perish and be reborn in order to reincarnate in an advanced era where man would have overcome his animal inertia. But I made a mistake and let myself be trapped by a certain orange-tinged light that cast me into an avid ovary during a primary era that corresponded in no way with the dates of my death. Trapped in the past, I was born in Lisbon in 1415, in the body of the Jew Isaac Abravanel.
I had the good luck to be part of a family of notable and eminent Talmud scholars, among whom I learned numerous languages. I stood out in the study of Law and developed the powers of my spirit, managing to be named Minister of Finances by Ferdinand of Spain. In that country, I met Salvador Levi, a lion tamer. Thanks to contact with the stares of his beasts, hunters of souls, I managed to turn one corner of the veil and remember the seventy-eight arcana that had been revealed to me in my former incarnation by the Knights of Heliopolis. The rest of that life you already know. Do you remember? Thanks to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, I ended up in Italy, where, after many adventures, I decided to die like the clowns, by balancing on my head with my red shoes toward heaven.
By introducing the Tarot into the Levi genealogical tree, even if my material form hadn’t dissolved in their genetic codes, made it mine, and from the Interworld, with an astral vibration that might be compared, allowing myself all licenses, to human satisfaction, I watched the development, from generation to generation, of Cosmic Consciousness, which, without trying to make frivolous wordplay, is enormously comic. He who understands philosophy understands laughter. That mysterious Word at the beginning, mentioned in the Bible, is a divine guffaw.
All the ancestors of the woman who would be my mother were receiving, little by little, the infinite joy that emanates from the Creator. They shone like golden fruit among the branches that spread higher and higher. But none got as far in its glitter as Sara Felicidad. Her intense glow went beyond our solar system until, liberating itself from the attraction of the galaxy, reached the limits of the Universe and penetrated into the Supraworld, perhaps even farther than that. So much purity in love attracted me irresistibly.
I chose that woman as a crucible and, entering into her ovaries, I populated them with an imperious call. The task I took was a hard one, commensurate with my enormous life wilclass="underline" to make Jaime, whom I chose for the colossal energy that inhabited him, transport his sperm from the distant forests of the south to the desert, where my mother awaited him. That journey would take ten years. For mortals, an infinite waiting period, but for me, used to the time of the Eternal One, less than a tenth of a second.