Newton’s Fire

II

Luke and Rachel made their way back to the vault, on the basis that they were far more likely to be overheard if they stayed near the well shaft. They turned off the lamp to save its batteries, then sat in the darkness with their backs to the Emerald Tablet.

‘So how come Newton?’ asked Rachel.

Luke shrugged. ‘He caught my imagination, I suppose.’

‘You’re writing a biography of the man,’ she teased. ‘You’ll need to have something better than that on the blurb.’

Luke laughed. ‘Okay. There’s this story about him I first heard when I was a kid. It’s kind of a nerd’s fantasy. You’ll find this hard to believe, I suspect, but I was a bit of a nerd myself back then.’

Rachel feigned shock. ‘No. Get away with you.’

‘This was 1697 or thereabouts. Newton was in a really bitter dispute with Leibniz over who invented the calculus. They both did, as it happens, but each was convinced the other had stolen the idea from them. The Brits supported Newton. The Europeans backed Leibniz. One of Leibniz’s mates, an Italian called Johann Bernoulli, devised a pair of mathematical puzzles that proved too fiendish for Europe’s top minds to crack, so he came up with a cunning plan. He sent them to Newton, hoping he’d fail too, thus wrecking his reputation for genius. Newton received them after a day at the Royal Mint. The following morning he sent off the answers to the Royal Society. They published them anonymously, but everyone knew. Even Bernoulli. You know what he said? He said: “You can tell the lion by its claw.” I just loved that. I used to daydream people saying it about me. Mind you, I was ten at the time.’ He laughed and tipped his head to the side. ‘Your turn,’ he said. ‘How come archaeology?’

Rachel sighed. ‘I don’t know. I guess it meant something at the time.’ The question seemed to make her restless. She stood and turned on the lamp, took a circuit of the walls.

‘Tweed suits you,’ Luke told her, as she came back around. ‘You’ll make a fine professor.’

‘It itches like you wouldn’t believe,’ she said. Her gaze slid from him to the Emerald Tablet inscription behind him, and then she frowned. ‘How about that?’ she murmured, to herself as much as Luke. ‘An acrostic.’

He turned to read the first letter of each line. ‘Balinus?’ he frowned.

She nodded. ‘It’s what the Harranians called Apollonius of Tyana.’

‘If that was meant to make things clearer for me,’ said Luke, ‘you might want to give it another shot.’

‘Apollonius was a Turkish holy man from the time of Jesus. We found a lot of his cult objects on my excavation in Antioch. And one of my colleagues from the dig is the authority on the guy.’

‘What’s his name doing here?’

‘The Harranians lived in Southern Turkey, right in the path of the Muslim Conquest. But they were allowed to continue with their own religion, which seems to have been almost alchemical in its nature. Their sacred texts were the Hermetica, which is how they survived until the Renaissance, and why Newton had to translate them from Arabic rather than Egyptian, Greek or Latin. And here’s the thing: they revered this Balinus or Apollonius guy for having saved the Emerald Tablet before them. He was one of their heroes.’

‘So our cabal decided to honour him too,’ said Luke. ‘But why use an acrostic? Why not just write his name?’

‘Because Apollonius was a very controversial figure, particularly among Christians. A male child whose birth was announced by heavenly beings, who embraced poverty and celibacy, who went everywhere barefoot and who refused to eat meat. A great moral teacher who healed the sick, raised the dead, cast out demons and predicted the future. Sentenced to death by the Romans but ascended into heaven instead.’

‘Apollonius?’

‘Which made him rather problematic for Christians preaching about the unique glories of Jesus,’ said Rachel. ‘Though I’m surprised to find that Newton was a fan. I always understood he was a devout Christian.’

‘He was,’ Luke assured her. ‘But a very idiosyncratic one. He believed in the teachings of Jesus, but he didn’t think him God. That was his great heresy. He loathed the doctrine of the Trinity, and therefore the Catholic church for foisting it on the world.’

‘What about these other guys?’

Luke shook his head. ‘All pretty conventional, as far as I know. But you had to be back then. Antitrinitarianism was a serious crime. At the very best, it would be the death of your professional and social life. No Antitrinitarian would ever have got to rebuild St Paul’s, for example.’

‘St Paul,’ muttered Rachel. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘Of course what?’

‘Here.’ She beckoned Luke around the other side of the plinth and crouched in front of the second inscription. ‘Apollonius wasn’t problematic for Christians just because of his similarities to Jesus. He was even closer to St Paul. The name Apollonius comes from Apollo, which is close enough to mistake for Paul. He was born in southern Turkey, about thirty miles north of Tarsus, where St Paul came from. And he studied in Tarsus himself throughout his teens. So essentially you have these two men with similar names, born at the same time and place, both growing up to become itinerant preachers famous for the letters on morals they wrote to the citizens of major Mediterranean cities. Both had encounters with wild animals in Ephesus. Both wrote about sacrifices and ritual. And both were Roman citizens who crossed emperors and were sentenced to death.’

‘You’re saying they were the same person?’

Rachel shrugged. ‘Plenty of people have thought so over the centuries. Maybe these guys did too. What do you think? Could they have believed in St Paul as Balinus, the secret alchemist who saved the Emerald Tablet?’

‘I can’t speak for them all,’ said Luke. ‘But Newton, sure. He didn’t think of the prophets as mystics inspired by divine revelation, like most people seem to. He thought of them as immensely intelligent and informed, masters not just of religion but also of mathematics, astronomy, alchemy and all the other disciplines of natural philosophy. So Moses, Enoch, Elijah, Hermes Trimegistus, Solomon and the rest were great alchemists by definition. That was what Newton aspired to for himself, so it would have made perfect sense to him that St Paul was the same. Especially as he was already a considerable figure among the alchemists.’

‘How so?’

‘You’ve heard of the Jesus myth, right? The idea that Jesus never even existed.’

‘What about it?’

‘A lot of that stems from St Paul, because he famously didn’t write much about Jesus the man, only about Christ the spiritual force. And he wrote something very peculiar in a letter to the Corinthians, about the followers of Moses drinking from the spiritual rock that followed them; and the rock was Christ. Some alchemists interpreted that to mean that Jesus somehow was the philosopher’s stone. Some even believed that if they found the philosopher’s stone they could precipitate the Second Coming.’

Rachel looked around at the faces on the walls. ‘What the hell were these guys trying to do?’

A dull buzzing noise sounded before Luke could answer. Dust motes shaken from the walls and ceiling began swirling in the lamplight. He looked bleakly upwards. ‘They’re drilling,’ he said. ‘They’re coming down through the floor.’