The association of such a claim with otherworldliness was almost inevitable. Under many labels, Gnosticism has been a recurring heresy. The original form, or rather forms, were an attempt to fuse Christianity with a mishmash of Oriental mystery cults, Neoplatonism, and sorcery. Legend traced it back to the Simon Magus who appears in the eighth chapter of Acts, whose memory was accordingly held in horror by the orthodox. Modern Johanninism was doubly bold in reviving that dawn‑age movement by name, in proclaiming it not error but a higher truth and Simon Magus not a corrupter but a prophet.
Could that possibly be right? Might the world actually be at the morning of the Reign of Love? I didn’t know; how could I? But by using my brains, as the Petrine tradition held we should, rather than my emotions, I’d decided the Johannine dogma was false. Its spreading acceptance I found due to plain human irrationality.
So you got communities of Truth Seekers, settling down to practice their rites and meditations where nobody would interfere. They drew pilgrims, who needed housing, food, services. The priests, priestesses, acolytes, and lay associates did too. A temple (more accurate than cathedral, but the Johnnies insisted on the latter word to emphasize at they were Christians) needed income; and as a rule it had a substantial endowment, shrewdly managed. Thus a town often grew up around the original foundation?like Siloam, where I was headed.
Simple. Banal. Why did I bother marshaling information that any reader of the daily papers had? Merely to escape thinking about Valeria? No. To get as much as possible straight in my head, when most was tangled and ghostly.
The Something Else, the Thing Beyond . . . was it no illusion, but a deeper insight? And if so, an insight?into what? I thought of the Johannines’ intolerance and troublemaking. I thought of the frank assertion, that their adepts held powers no one else imagined and that more was revealed to them every year. I thought of stories told by certain apostates, who hadn’t advanced far in their degrees when they experienced that which scared them off: nothing illegal, immoral, or otherwise titillating; merely ugly, hateful, sorrowful, and hence not very newsworthy; deniable or ignorable by those who didn’t want to believe them. I thought of the Gnostic theology, what part of it wash made public: terrible amidst every twist of revelation and logic, the identification of their Demiurge with the God of the Old Testament with Satan.
I thought of Antichrist.
But there I shied off, being agnostic about such matters, as I’ve said. I took my stand on the simple feeling that it didn’t make sense the Almighty would operate in any such fashion.
Light glimmered into view, far off across the prairie. I was glad of journey’s end, no matter what happened next. I didn’t care to ride further with those reflections of mine.
Siloam was ordinary frame houses in ordinary yards along ordinary streets. A sign beneath the main airlane, as you neared, said Pop. 5240; another announced that the Lions Club met every Thursday at the Kobold Kettle Restaurant. There were a couple of small manufacturing enterprises, a city hall, an elementary school, a high school, a firehouse, a bedraggled park, a hotel, more service stations than needed. The business district held stores, a cafe or two, a bank, chirurgeon’s and dentist’s offices above a Rexall apothecary . . . the American works.
That homeliness made the rest freezingly alien. Though the hour lacked of midnight, downtown was a tomb. The residential streets were nearly as deserted nobody out for a stroll, no teenagers holding hands, scarcely a stick or a wagon moving, beneath the rare lamps‑once in a while a robed and hooded figure slowly pacing. Each home lay drawn into itself, behind drawn shades. Where the inhabitants weren’t asleep, they were probably not watching crystal or playing cards or having a drink or making love, they were most likely at the devotions and studies they hoped would qualify them for a higher religious degree, more knowledge and power and surety of salvation.
And everything centered on the cathedral. It soared above the complex of boxlike ancillary buildings that surrounded it, above town and plain. The pictures I’d seen of it had not conveyed the enormity. Those flat, bone‑white walls went up and up and up, till the roof climbed farther yet to make the vast central cupola. From afar, the windows looked like nailheads, one row to a story; but then I saw the stained glass air, each filling half the facade it occupied with murky colors and bewildering patterns, Mandala at the west end and Eye of God at the east. From the west, also, rose the single tower, which in a photograph only looked austere, but now became one leap into the stars.