Templar's Code

CHAPTER 60

“ ‘Morning has broken,’ ” Mercurius murmured, luxuriating in the sun’s rays shining through the bedroom window.

As he stretched the kinks out of his seventy-two-year-old back, he slid his bare feet into a pair of ornately beaded Moroccan slippers. The Ali Baba slippers, his amoretto liked to tease. The frivolous footwear was a colorful reminder of the deprivations suffered during the war years. Those years when he had no shoes, climbed garden walls to pilfer oranges, and wore mended clothing.

He snatched his silk robe from the hook on the back of the door and slipped his bare arms into the sleeves, tying the garment at his waist.

Before retiring last evening, he’d listened to the recordings that his amoretto had made, distressed to learn how much Aisquith and his two cohorts had pieced together. Not only did they know about the three streams of hidden knowledge—alchemy, Kabbalah, and magic—they knew the Emerald Tablet contained a pictograph in which the secret of creation had been encoded.

He took a small measure of comfort in the fact that even if they uncovered the relic, without the encryption key they could not access the sacred power. Not even the brilliant Sir Francis Bacon had been able to decipher the encryption. Long millennia ago, Thoth had devised an ingeniously complex code.

Entering his study, Mercurius walked over to the built-in bookcase and rolled the floor-to-ceiling ladder several feet to one side. Hit with a twinge of arthritis in his right hip, he gingerly climbed the rungs. It took a moment to locate a slender volume: New Atlantis.

One could not help but admire the utopian thinkers who attempted to fashion a better world. One without war. Without hunger. Without misery. But every utopian colony ever founded had collapsed, besieged, the dark energy from the outside world too great a force to withstand. The inhabitants beaten down and demoralized because they dared to remake the world anew. While their aspirations were commendable, there was a flaw in the very concept of an earthly utopia. Simply put, it was impossible to remake or rehabilitate this dark planet.

For ours was a cursed world.

Which is not to say that a better world doesn’t exist. It did, on a plane of existence where the Light permeates every thought and every action of every man. Contained within each living creature, there was a divine spark. The soul. Our individual piece of eternity. Imprisoned within a physical body, from the very moment of conception, our souls long to be reunited with the Light. To return to the Lost Heaven.

Mercurius glanced down at his own withered body. How could anyone possibly accept the ridiculous notion that this belching, farting, perspiring vessel was made in God’s image? Physical existence was proof positive that this dark world was a failed experiment created by a malevolent demiurge.

To be free of this dark world, a soul must wrench itself from the physical prison of the body. Once liberated, the soul could return to the Lost Heaven and dwell in a state of luminous grace. That being the only true utopia.

He idly flipped through the pages of the slender volume that he held in his hands, the New Atlantis less than fifty pages in length. He stopped on page thirteen, a sentence in the text capturing his attention: “Thou hast vouchsafed of thy grace, to those of our order to know thy works of creation, and true secrets of them.”

In the New Atlantis, the scholars of Solomon’s House posses the secret of creation. Moreover, the esteemed scholars know that there’s a link between creation and the hidden stream of knowledge. While the brilliant Sir Francis was correct in postulating that the hidden stream of knowledge was the key, he was unaware that there were four streams of hidden knowledge. Not three. And that the fourth stream was the key to unlock the mystery of the Emerald Tablet.

As fate would have it, Mercurius had the key.