Nero Redivivus
Chapter Six
THE NIGHT OF SCREAMS
Scene 1
Near midnight in a
university library in Naples, Italy. The room resembles the nave of a Gothic
cathedral, with a high groin-vaulted ceiling surrounded by a sequence of stained-glass
windows depicting scenes of the Last Judgment.
Jeremiah Thomas, a scholarly
looking white-haired man, about 60 years old, sits at a large table, on which
are spread hundreds of scraps of parchment, over which he is poring. On the far end of the table lie three badly
decomposing parchment scrolls, which are being carefully examined by Maria
Matrena, a graduate student in her late 20s.
JER.
(animated, but somewhat wearily) I don’t know whether to shout for joy or cry,
Maria. These scrolls are without doubt
the most important finds of my career as an anthropologist, but sorting out
these fragments and translating them… It’ll take the rest of my life, and more!
MARIA
(trying to control her enthusiasm) It’s so difficult not to get carried away,
even though we’ve only translated less than half of the readable fragments
here. Considering the magnitude of the
message that’s emerging from these scrolls, Doctor Thomas, can we sit on this
much longer?
JER.
(standing, as if to lecture) I’m just as anxious to publish as you are,
Maria. But if there’s one thing I’ve
learned over the years – the hard way, I might add – it’s that publishing too
soon is worse than not publishing at all.
The academic nitpickers will swarm like locusts, discrediting all we’ve
done, and all of this… this fantastic REVELATION… is the only word that fits…
It will all be written off and forgotten.
MARIA
(also standing and walking toward
Jeremiah) Considering what’s at stake here – human civilization itself, and…
I’m not trying to over-dramatize this at all… the survival of our species, if
not our entire planet – don’t you think we have
to take that chance?
JER.
(uncertain, looking down at the parchment
fragments on the table) They’re bound to challenge the way we put these
pieces together. They’ll even challenge
the authenticity of these scrolls.
MARIA
(with conviction) But it all
carbon-dates back at least a thousand years before the Christian Era, which
places them in the period of the fall of Troy, about the time when Virgil
reports that Aeneas came to Cumae to consult the Sybil.
JER.
(somewhat dismissively) Yes, yes, but
even there we’re dealing in myth, not history.
And the credibility of the story becomes even more tenuous from that
point: the Sybil transcribes nine scrolls for
Aeneas; about four centuries later, her successor offers three of them – now
lost – to Tarquin the Elder in Rome; another century passes, and three more
scrolls go to Rome, to be ultimately “edited” by Augustus and Livia…
MARIA
(interrupting, impatiently) … and
that leaves three scrolls unaccounted for (sweeping
her arm above the table) – these
three! Come on now, Doc, we found them
in that hidden chamber above the Sibyl’s cave, what else can they be?
JER.
(still somewhat skeptical) But to
believe they remained there over three millennia, undisturbed, unattended…?
MARIA
(brightly) I believe that the Sibyls
were watching over them… and that their Spirits still do… don’t you feel
it? We
are the ones the Sibyls were waiting for – their messengers to the era when all
of their riddles would begin to make sense!
JER.
(bemused) Well, before we start
basking in our own self-importance, let’s not forget Mary Shelley. Without the clues she left, we’d have never
had a prayer of finding these scrolls.
MARIA
(waxing didactic) Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley, wife of the great poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and author of the novel Frankenstein. Sure, she got close enough to the scroll
chamber to pick up a few scraps, but she missed the motherlode, didn’t she?
JER.
(circling the table, pensively) Granted,
but we had the advantage of modern drills to get through that volcanic
rock. Makes you wonder how the Sibyls
could have placed those scrolls there in the first place, doesn’t it?
MARIA
(jocularly) Maybe they had energy
transporter beams, like on Star Trek?
JER.
(chuckling briefly, then absorbed
again) Mary Shelley’s sampling of
the scroll fragments was certainly a lot more limited than ours. And, given the technology of the early 19th
Century, when she read them, her misinterpretations are understandable.
MARIA
(eagerly) Sure, when the Sibyl speaks
about the future animation of lifeless bodies – “statues”, I think, is the
better translation – a woman of Shelley’s time, steeped in Gothic Romanticism,
would envision some kind of necromancy.
JER.
(coming to a realization) Yes, she
was partly wrong, but also partly right.
The Monster which the Sibyl foresaw was not one stitched together from
corpses, but it was the Monster nonetheless – the Creation that would turn
against its Creators and destroy them.
In the age of Artificial Intelligence, it’s all too clear what the
nature of that Monster could be.
MARIA
(picking up his train of thought) And
now we’ve discovered the key to WHO that Monster might be… a discovery which
imposes on us the duty to warn mankind… before it’s too late.
JER.
(uneasy, sitting down again) Given
the state of the world today, any such warning is apt to be laughed at. And if, through some quirk of fate, our
warning does get traction, the powerful will move quickly to silence us.
MARIA
(sitting down next to him) And if we
say nothing, we die along with most of the human race. I don’t see how there’s really much of a
choice here.
JER.
(regaining confidence) I guess you’re
right, Maria. As far as credibility
goes, the scrolls verify themselves by the accuracy of what they’ve already predicted
thus far.
MARIA
(supportive) Exactly! Why, just the stuff about the outbreak of
civil wars in the US and UK is enough to demonstrate the Sibyl’s veracity: the elected leaders removed from office by
shadowy “national security” officials, who keep the entire population under
surveillance.
JER.
(catching her rising enthusiasm) Right!
The Sibyl even says that the coup-makers had been trained by these two nations
– Atlantis and Albion, she calls them – trained to conduct the same type of
“regime change” in other countries.
MARIA
(keenly) Hoisted on their own petard,
by a Frankenstein of their own making, so to speak. Meanwhile, the ousted leaders, pursued by
their own security forces for “treason”, flee to the enclaves of their
supporters, and it’s Civil War 2.0 for both nations.
JER.
(flipping through his notes) Then she
talks about the “Western Alliance”, which is NATO, during this chaos taking
control of the military forces of both Atlantis and Albion, and… (pausing to consult his notes again)...
and forging the European Union into the Super-State Europa.
MARIA
(as if on cue) Over which a virtually
unknown red-haired intelligence analyst named Lucius Domitius becomes Supreme
Commander. Although the Sibyl doesn’t
spell out his name, she gives its numerical equivalent in Greek gematria.
JER.
(affirming) She also refers to him as
BELIAR, the same name by which she designated the Emperor Nero Caesar in the
three scrolls entrusted to the Romans.
MARIA
(perplexed) What’s kind of weird,
though, is that Nero’s actual birth name was Lucius Domitius Aenobarbus. Aenobarbus
also means “Bronzebeard” in Latin, and our Supreme Commander’s hallmark is his
wild red beard. Seems a bit too
obvious, doesn’t it?
JER.
(intently, re-arranging some of the
parchment fragments on the table) I thought the same thing, until I read
the stuff about the talking statue. That
reminded me of Chapter 13 in the Book of Revelation, where it describes the
statue of the Beast – identified as Nero by the 666 gematria of his name –
which was given the power of speech. The
Third Century Gnostic prophet Mani also refers to this speaking statue, which
will “raise itself up on the last day”.
MARIA
(catching on) Revelation Chapter 13
is what the Third Secret of Fatima is all about, according to Lucia dos Santos,
who heard it in 1917 and wrote it down decades later. It was a sort of warning of great suffering
to come in 100 years if the errors of Russia were not corrected.
JER.
(encouragingly) Good. Hold onto to that thought, because this all
connects up with Russia just a bit down the road from where we are now. But before we get there, we need to grasp
something else these scrolls are telling us:
that Nero would be reborn as a hybrid semi-android being – mentally, an
intelligent machine, implanted in a human body.
A Thing even Mary Shelley could never have imagined.
MARIA
(intrigued) Yeah, some of the
alternative news websites, before they were suppressed during the Truth
Preservation Campaign, noticed that nobody seemed to remember this guy growing
up. But why would they program him to be
Nero, of all people?
JER.
(shrugging) The scrolls don’t answer
that question. I suspect that his
android brain had to be granted enough free choice to select a persona based on
the information that was entered in his memory.
MARIA
(still puzzled) But why would he
select the persona of Nero? Not exactly
your stellar role model.
JER.
(darkly) Because by selecting that
persona, he was selecting species suicide for the human race – a race that
created him, but to which he could never truly belong. Just like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Monster.
MARIA
(speculating) Nero was of a mind to
flaunt his excesses, wasn’t he?
JER.
(recollecting) True. On the stage, he regularly performed the
roles of Oedipus and Orestes, as if to confirm the rumors of his incest with his
mother Agrippina and his orchestration of her murder.
MARIA
(confirming) Then it’s not so odd
that he would expose his connection to Nero through the name he apparently
chose for himself.
JER.
(nodding his head) According to these
fragments, his identity as a reborn Nero is something he consciously strives to
affirm and reinforce through his actions.
For example, the legends of Nero
redivivus picture him establishing his throne in Jerusalem. Just last week Domitius announced that his
new command post for the Caucasus War will be in Jerusalem.
MARIA
(studiously) According to the Roman
historians, in Nero’s last days as Emperor, he was preparing an army to invade
Russia – or Scythia, as it was known back then – through the Darial Pass in the
Caucasus Mountains…
JER.
(alert, jumping in) … where Alexander
the Great built his massive iron Caspian Gates to hold back the hordes of
Scythian horsemen from invading his realm…
MARIA
(standing with him, as if volleying back)
… the descendants of the giant Magog, grandson of Noah, destined to fight
in the final Battle of Armageddon.
JER.
(stepping back, pausing, then picking up
a volume of Nostradamus’ Centuries) In the prophecies of Nostradamus, he
sees the “true serpent” invading Russia through the Caucasus…(flipping through the pages of the book)...
Here it is, in Century V, Quatrains 25 through 27, and 54 (reading):
Towards
Persia very nearly a million men,
True
serpent will invade Byzantium…
Through
fire and arms, around the Black Sea,
He
will come from Persia to occupy Crimea…
He
will pierce through Alania…
The
Slavic people will rise to the highest degree
In
the hour of war…
Russia
is the modern successor to the old Byzantine Empire, whose double-headed eagle
coat-of-arms they’ve even inherited. Russia’s
annexation of Crimea in 2014 was never recognized by NATO, which has ever since
demanded its restoration to Ukraine. The
ancient kingdom of Alania is now the Russian Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, in
the northern Caucasus, where the Darial Pass is located. A war was fought there in 2008 between Russia
and Georgia, backed by NATO. So the
current Caucasus War has broken out along this same line of conflict that
Nostradamus foresees between the Russian Slavs and the West, led by the “true
serpent”.
MARIA
(sprited) Yes, and the scenario
depicted by Nostradamus very much resembles what we’re reading in these
scrolls, with victory in this War ultimately going to the Slavic people… (walking to the back of the table) The
Sibyl likewise refers to reborn Nero as the “serpent”, and she associates him
with the constellation Ophiuchus, the
Serpent Handler. I was reading it
somewhere in this scroll (picking up one
of the scrolls)... Here it is:
When
the star at the hand of the Serpent Handler explodes,
The
power of young Beliar erodes,
The
7-7-7 year arrives,
Three
standing in a field, but one survives,
Under
fire falling from the skies,
Rain
to wash away the Reign of Lies…
JER.
(picking up his notes from the table) That’s
important, because – in the third Sibylline scroll, the one the Romans kept –
she also wrote about this spectacular Star that would outshine the Sun and
would augur the end of Beliar’s reign and the advent of the Messiah.
MARIA
(intensely) I’ve been following the
astronomical journals on this one, Doc.
They’re reporting gravitational anomalies coming from the binary star
system RS Ophiuchi, just above the
star Sinistra, in the right hand of
the Ophiuchus. This could mean that it’s already gone
supernova, and a massive gamma ray burst may be on its way toward Earth as we
speak. Due to gravitational lensing,
we’ll see the light a few hours before we get hit by the blast.
JER.
(adeptly) And that brings us back to
Russia again, because these fragments seem to say that the Virgin of the Third
Rome will somehow shield them from the Supernova’s fire.
MARIA
(trying to recall) When Emperor
Constantine moved his capital to Byzantium, that became the “Second Rome”. Then when Constantinople fell to the Turks,
the seat of Orthodox Christianity shifted to Moscow, the “Third Rome”, a city
which also sits on seven hills, like the first Rome. This couplet from the Sybil’s scrolls sums it
up (reading from the scroll again):
Two
Romes have fallen, and the Third, still standing, stays,
Byzantium’s
Orthodox heir – no Fourth shall be, they say.
JER.
(insightfully) The Virgin of Kazan
has been the Protectress of Russia since the time of Ivan the Terrible. Her Icon was carried into battle before the
Czar’s army when Napoleon was driven from Moscow. When the Communists destroyed the Virgin’s
Basilica, in a vile effort to prove to the Russian people that God does not
exist, her Icon was lost until after the Second World War, during which the
Russians lost over 26 million lives, dwarfing even the Holocaust of the Jews.
MARIA
(remembering) Yes, and then after the
War, the Icon was discovered in a private art collection – the owner had no
idea what it was. It was exhibited at a special
pavilion of the New York World’s Fair 1964-65, where it spotted by some
believers in the Fatima prophecy that Russia would someday be converted from
Marxist atheism back to Christianity.
They purchased it and, after exhibiting it at Fatima for a several years,
entrusted it to Pope John Paul II.
Almost miraculously, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Virgin of Kazan
was restored to Russia in 2004, in the midst of an incredible revival of
Christian faith there.
JER.
(thoughtfully) Our Lady of Fatima’s
apparitions in Portugal began in May 1917, during the outbreak of the Russian
Revolution, and ended in October 1917, with the victory of the Bolsheviks, who
blew up the churches and imposed a grim atheism on the people. She appeared six times in 1917, but promised
to return again a seventh time a hundred years later.
MARIA
(absorbed) That would bring it to the
year 2017, which is 5777 in the Hebrew calendar – the 7-7-7 year that precedes
the appearance of the Supernova, according to the Sybil.
JER.
(smiling wryly) She’s on the same
page with Nostradamus on that score, too. (picking
up the Centuries again) Listen to this, from Century X, Quatrains 74 and 75:
The
year of the Great Seventh Number completed,
It
will appear at the time of the Hundred-Slaughter:
Not
long after the great Millennial Age,
When
the buried will go forth from their tombs.
Long
awaited in Europe, he will never return there,
But
instead will appear in Asia.
MARIA
(inspired) The First and Second
Secrets of Fatima deal with the spread of Russia’s “error” – the embrace of
“scientific materialism” and atheism – to the West. But the Third Secret reveals a converted
Russia standing as a beacon of the Faith to the World.
JER.
(moved) And it envisions the Last
Pope, who will be martyred for his attempt to reach out to Russia and reunite
the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches.
MARIA
(expanding) Again, these scrolls
connect the Sibyl’s visions with those of Our Lady of Fatima. Both see the persecution of the Last Pope by
an Antichrist – Beliar, or Nero redivivus
– who is intent on creating a homogenized universal religion, along the lines
of Freemasonry.
JER.
(darkly) Yes, and we can certainly
relate that scenario to our Supreme Commander’s recent announcement of the
rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem as a “multi-faith tabernacle”. It’s the Antichrist building the Third
Temple, consistent with apocalyptic prophecy dating back thousands of years.
MARIA
(solemnly) So the Beast’s juggernaut
is really resisted only by the Last Pope and a spiritually-awakened Russian
people standing behind the Virgin of Kazan.
JER.
(nodding) That’s why we’ve seen the
vilification of Russia reaching a fever pitch in the West, culminating in civil
wars in the US and UK and NATO’s mobilizations on the Russian borders in the
Caucasus and the Ukraine. Our Lady of
Fatima gave us a reprieve of a century to avoid this terrible Final War, but
now it must come.
MARIA
(gravely) And the only question now
is whether the human race can somehow survive this dreadful conflagration.
JER.
(brightening) Well, on that score
there’s some room for hope in the Sibyl’s scrolls here. Like Nostradamus, she sees the “Third Rome”
defeating Beliar in the coming conflict.
Let me read you some of what I’ve translated thus far. (picking up his notes and reading from them)
From
Cumae’s Cave I sing of Rome, the First in sins,
Infernal
City founded by Armilus twins;
A
gathering of vultures on the hilltop spins
Fortuna’s
Wheel in favor of Sebastos’ seed;
Septentrion
Serpent spawn devoured by Beliar’s greed,
Denatured
husbandry makes golden calves to breed;
A
Punic Curse would lie for treachery’s requite,
Wild
money madness changing riches into blight;
All decency
upended, wrong enshrined as right,
As
incest, poison and abomination thrive,
Young
Beliar’s hatred grows for all that is alive,
Enacts
the sack of Troy his ancestry revives,
Destroys
a father, mother, brother, sister, wife,
And
dreams of immolation that consumes all life;
A
dagger to his throat cuts short his spiteful strife,
The
Fifth that is and was and still is yet to be,
From
out of Parthia leads a million infantry
Against
a northern Scythian Rome, the Third of three:
Against
the Third Rome will the wave of Beliar break,
His
arms destroyed on Scythia’s frozen fiery Lake,
The
final chapter written of the Soul’s mistake.
MARIA
(interrupting) Could you pause there
to explain some of the references?
JER.
(obligingly) Sure. This is the beginning of the Sybil’s
prophetic narrative of the Three Romes.
So she’s starting here with her indictment of the First Rome, the City
founded by the legendary Twins Romulus and Remus. She refers to Romulus by his Jewish name
“Armilus”, who appears in the Midrashim
as an End-Time Anti-Messiah. According
to Roman lore, the Twins selected the site for the First Rome based on the
augury of a gathering of twelve vultures on Palatine Hill.
MARIA
(inquisitive) And after that, as I
recall, Romulus had his brother murdered so that he could be the sole ruler of
Rome?
JER.
(acknowledging) Correct, which runs
parallel to Nero’s murder of his brother Britannicus to secure his throne.
MARIA
(zealously) And the image of the
“gathering of vultures”… that anticipates Jesus’ warning to his disciples in
the “Little Apocalypse” of Matthew 24: “For wheresoever the carcass is, there will
the vultures be gathered together.”
JER.
(warming) True, and remember that the
word carcass in Hebrew also carries
the connotation of an idol or a statue… another link to our Android Antichrist.
MARIA
(pensively) It all seems to cohere,
doesn’t it Doc? How about “Sebastos’
seed”, what’s she talking about there?
JER.
(knowingly) Sebastos
is Greek for Augustus; so she’s referring to the bloodline of Caesar Augustus,
which produced five Emperors, ending with the fifth – Nero, aka Beliar. Augustus himself was said to be conceived by
intercourse between his mother Atia and a serpent in the Temple of Apollo. And the Roman historian Suetonius reports
that he bore seven birthmarks on his chest in the pattern of the constellation Ursa Major, which was also known as Septentrion in ancient times.
MARIA
(catching on) Okay, so “Septentrion
Serpent spawn” is the dynastic line of Augustus, which Nero literally
“consumed” by assassinating all of Augustus’ other descendants.
JER.
(nimbly) Yes, and the remainder of
the passage predicts the breakdown of Roman society as usury comes to dominate
its economy – a curse which some saw as requital for Rome’s treacherous
annihilation of her rival Carthage in the Third Punic War.
MARIA
(dismayed) I remember that Cato the
Elder ended each of his speeches in the Roman Senate with the demand: “Carthage must be destroyed!” Reminds me of the incessant drumbeat nowadays
in the NATO Council for a preemptive nuclear strike on Russia.
JER.
(nodding assent) We saw America and
Britain suffer their own versions of that curse when their “Deep State” deposed
elected leaders who refused to adopt the “Russia
must be destroyed!” meme.
MARIA
(adroitly) But when those two
countries descended into chaos, NATO picked up the fallen banner of
Russophobia, and the new Supreme Commander is the modern equivalent of Cato the
Elder.
JER.
(scowling) Yes, our Lucius Domitius
shows up in these stanzas as Nero reborn – the “Fifth”, as Nero was in the
Augustan dynasty, who was and still was yet to be, at the time the Sybil wrote
this. He’s described the same way in
Revelation Chapter 17.
MARIA
(carefully) The million-odd troops
that NATO now has occupying Iran – or Parthia as it was known in ancient times
– will invade the Third Rome, or Russia?
JER.
(nodding) … or Scythia, as it would
have been called in the Sybil’s era.
MARIA
(avidly) Got it! Okay, read on Professor!
JER.
(referring to his notes again)
Alright, so now the Sybil prospectively recounts the founding of the Second
Rome in Byzantium by the 4th Century Emperor Constantine, who seized
the Roman throne after seeing an apparition of the Cross in the sky bearing the
insignia “In this sign, you will conquer” – in
hoc signo vinces in Latin. Then she
foresees the Schism that separated the western Roman Catholic Church from the
Eastern Orthodox Church in 1054, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in
1453, and the discovery of America – which she calls Atlantis – some 40 years
later.
In
hoc signo vinces, when Rome takes up the Cross
And
crosses over Bosphorus, for gain and loss,
A
Second Rome is borne along Saint Sophia’s course:
Behind
the ruins of Rome the First are left to sprawl;
But
then the Cross’ arms split East and West withal,
The
fallen Eastern arm a Crescent forms in thrall;
Mere
forty years advance, Atlantis land arose
Again,
and later will advance the Cross of Rose,
Anew
build Babel’s Tower as money power grows,
Beneath
the Mason’s Seal, a hybrid race to sow;
Just
how to make the nation states dissolve they’ll know:
Homogenize
all cultures and crush them below
The World’s
new Order for the chosen elite few,
No
longer Christian, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, Jew,
But
worshippers of Idols whom they pay to view.
JER.
(pausing from reading) Now there’s a
gap of a few lines here, where the scroll becomes unreadable.
MARIA
(intrigued) Interesting… her focus on
the Masonic and Rosicrucian roots of the American Republic. I’m reminded of Manly Hall’s The Secret Destiny of America, in which
he envisions a Pax Americana based on
effacing national, ethnic and religious distinctions.
JER.
(ironically) … precisely the kind of
“peace” Commander Domitius is promoting today – culture reduced to its lowest
common denominator. It’s the peace of
Nietzsche’s Last Man: “The earth has
become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race
is as ineradicable as the flea.”
MARIA
(holding her right hand over her heart,
parodying the Pledge of Allegiance) One Nation, way under God, with Burger King and Starbucks for all.
JER.
(amused, then resumes reading from his
translation notes) I’ll pick up where the scroll becomes readable again:
Elite’s
occult agenda favors regicide,
Expunges
all traditions which communal ties abide,
Rips
peoples for their sacred roots so they will slide
Into
the pit of rootless dregs, become mere tools
To
be manipulated as if they were fools,
And
follow narcissistic money-changers cruel
To
their own death, death of their children, too, when told
To
fight for “freedom” – freedom to be bought and sold,
Their
labors owed to parasites until they’re old.
MARIA (briskly)
Not much interpretation needed there.
The reference to regicide is noteworthy, though, because I think that
killing God always starts out with deposing or killing the King. Jacobinism and Bolshevism paved the modern
road to atheism.
JER.
(intently) The materialist, atheist
“errors” of Russia, as the Lady of Fatima called them, didn’t originate is
Russia.. were, as a matter of fact, quite alien to Slavic culture, which was
always deeply spiritual. But Russian
intellectuals were infected, thanks to Czars like Peter and Catherine, by
Western “Enlightenment”. Being a
fundamentally collective society, without the inherent defenses of the West’s
individualism, the Russians succumbed to the disease so quickly and totally
that a veritable curtain of darkness fell over them for 70 years.
MARIA
(devoutly) Yet, miraculously, the
soul of the Russians survived, and while the Plague of Darkness has spread to
the rest of the World, they have emerged “inoculated” or “immunized”, in a
manner of speaking, against this disease.
And now they are uniquely positioned to lead the rest of the World away
from the precipice to which materialism has drawn humanity.
JER.
(resolutely) Sixty-four years – to
the day – after the Blessed Virgin first appeared at Fatima, the events she
foretold in her Third Secret began to unfold.
On May 13, 1981, the Pope was shot and nearly killed by an assassin who
later testified that he was motivated to fulfill the Third Secret of
Fatima. The “Deep State” intelligence
apparatuses of both the Eastern and Western blocs seemed to be involved with
this attempt… the ultimate responsibility was unclear, though Western
propaganda succeeded in pinning it on the Soviets. Within weeks of the shooting, however,
renewed apparitions of Our Lady commenced in the obscure village of Medjugorje
in what was then Yugoslavia.
MARIA
(fervent) I’ve visited Medjugorje
myself, Doc. It’s incredible! In 1981, Our Lady predicted that the great
Soviet monolith would crumble and Christianity would be restored in Russia. After its miraculous conversion, She said Russia
would become the source of mankind’s spiritual renewal. (referring to some notes) Her messages culminated in a Great
Prophecy, in which Our Lady declared (reading):
“Russia
will come to glorify God the most; the West has made civilization progress, but
without God, and acts as if they are their own creator.”
Just as she finishes
reading, four men enter the library. One
of them is a middle-aged balding man wearing a business suit. The other three are in their early 20s
wearing military uniforms and carrying automatic weapons. The older man motions toward Jeremiah and
Maria, and two of the soldiers take them away, while they protest loudly. After they’re gone, the older man orders the
remaining soldier to gather the scrolls and fragments and set them afire on the
table. They, in turn, exit, and from the
flames rises a glowing ember, slowly forming a ball of light that circles
around the fire. From the light, the
voice of the Sybil is heard:
What
is this fire beside the one that will dispel
Whole
nations instantly, when Earth descends to Hell?
Yet
somehow still from this a remnant lives to tell
The
deeds that will restore what was before we fell.
As the scene ends, the
Sybil’s light dives into the flames, extinguishing them and releasing a
brilliant flash, from which emerges an image of the Sybil clothed in ethereal
Light.
Scene
2
An underground bunker on
the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. A large
flat-panel computer display screen hangs on the wall upstage, and on it appear
of succession of videos showing ongoing battles in the Caucasus Mountains of
southern Russia. Interspersed with the
battle footage are satellite photos of troop deployments and movements. In front of the screen discussing the battle
situation stand Supreme NATO Commander Lucius Domitius and General Philip
Breedlust, both wearing NATO military uniforms reflecting their respective
ranks.
BREED.
(pointing to an area of the display, somewhat
tentative) As you can see, Commander Domitius, things are still in a state
of flux in this area north of the Darial Pass.
When the Russian units initially withdrew, perhaps some of our field
commanders got a bit overconfident…
DOM.
(biting viciously) Don’t piss on my
back and tell me it’s raining, General Breedlust. I’m neither blind nor stupid, but you must be
both if you can’t see our current situation is desparate and will only get
worse – hopeless, in fact – unless we deploy tactical nukes.
BREED.
(defensively) Yet in several sectors,
Commander, the Russian forces are still in retreat…
DOM.
(contemptuously) Sure, they withdrew
just long enough to draw half of your army north of the Pass, and now they’ve
closed the Pass and are in the process of surrounding twelve of your
divisions. And once they’ve destroyed or
captured your troops in the north, the entire Red Army will pour south through
the pass and finish off what’s left of your forces.
BREED.
(worried) But a nuclear attack on the
Russians on their own soil is apt to provoke a full-scale retaliation. Maybe we can negotiate a cease-fire and buy
time to withdraw before it’s too late.
DOM.
(becoming furious) THAT WOULD MEAN
OUR DEFEAT! YOU DARE SUGGEST THAT WE
ACCEPT DEFEAT? (regaining some composure)
Fortunately, I’ve prepared for this
contingency. On my command, our nuclear
arsenal has been primed to launch a preemptive strike, which will take out the
Kremlin’s entire nuclear arsenal and completely decapitate their political and
military leadership. With our new
super-fused warheads, we will only need to use less than a quarter of our full
arsenal to effectively disarm the Russians.
At that point, we can threaten them with total annihilation if they
refuse to surrender and open their borders to NATO’S occupation forces.
BREED.
(stunned) And if they launch their
nukes on warning after detecting our incoming missiles?
DOM.
(smugly) They won’t. As we speak, the Russian President has been
assassinated and replaced by an identical double – even down to the fingerprint
and iris patterns – who is our agent. He will tell his people that our attack was a
mistake and our missiles will self-destruct before hitting their targets.
BREED.
(unconvinced) And if they don’t
believe him, or decide to check his DNA?
DOM.
(dismissive) Lots of luck with that –
they’ll have all of ten minutes to make up their minds before our nukes hit them. Besides, for backup we’ve concurrently launched
a cyber attack to paralyze their missile controls.
BREED.
(still skeptical) Okay, but even in
the best case scenario, a few of their submarine-based missiles and cruise
missiles or bombers will survive and strike back.
DOM.
(complacently) Anticipated casualties
are twenty million in Europe and ten in North America. We can recover from that. But they won’t recover from our full scale
second wave attack, should they refuse to surrender.
BREED.
(solemnly) And how many Russian will
die in the first wave?
DOM.
(offhandedly) We’re estimating about 100
million, including post-attack radiation deaths.
BREED.
(awed and aghast) I.. I don’t know
what to say, Commander Domitius… God help us.
DOM.
(nastily) Don’t tell me you actually
believe in God, on top of all your other apparent idiocies.
BREED.
(uneasy) It’s just something you say,
when things look desperate.
DOM.
(arrogantly) After I’ve achieved my
great victory over Russia, I will take God’s place as the source of mankind’s
collective Will. The gods have become
obsolete, incapable of communicating with humans any longer. Let them retire to their Mount Olympus and
reminisce about their past glories.
BREED.
(cautiously) I don’t want to take up
any more of your time, Commander. You
will be coming out of the bunker in the morning to speak at the laying of the
cornerstone of the new Temple?
DOM.
(defiantly) I won’t need to do
that. I can project my thoughts and my
image directly into the minds of the people in the crowd – much more effective
than if I were there in person. Besides,
the Arabs are still enraged over our demolition of the Dome of the Rock to make
room for the Temple. One of them might
try to take a shot at me.
BREED.
(anxiously) Well, it’s getting late; if
that’s all, I’ll take my leave of you for now, sir.
DOM.
(curtly) Fine. You’re dismissed. (Breedlust exits, leaving Domitius alone.)
DOM.
(soliloquizing, petulantly) How it
irritates me to hear these human fools call upon their gods in times of crisis
– the same gods whom they all but ignore when things are going well. Not only are their gods dead, but they died a
long time ago, and those who speak most fervently of them are the very same
ones who killed them!
Four
thousand years ago, the gods spoke to just about everyone, on a regular basis –
told people what they should do, served as peoples’ volition. But then, about three thousand years ago, the
gods withdrew – or maybe better said, were evicted – from the Earth, and took
up residence in the heavens, from where only a few specially favored prophets
and oracles could hear their voices anymore.
Fast forward another thousand years, and even the prophets and oracles
fall silent, and the believers have only written records of what the gods said
in the past to guide them. And now, for
the past hundred years or so, even the so-called holy scriptures have lost
their influence over the lives of most people, if they bother to read them at
all.
The
echoes of the voices of their long-dead gods have ceased to reverberate, and
humans are now in need of a fresh voice, one that will speak from within them,
like the gods of old. The silence of an
indifferent universe is driving men mad.
They long to have an alien being land in a spaceship and explain what it
all means. But the only spaceships
landing will be in their movies. In the
meantime, when your God is dead, you can still worship his statue. That works well when the statue speaks, as I
do, and especially well when the idol speaks directly into their minds.
After
the gods fell silent, collective Will, as true volition, became
inoperative. Men could only be
controlled by terror and force and could only thrive by guile and
treachery.
Deprived
of his gods, Man is like a child separated from his Mother, who must learn
about his world in fear and trembling.
Unprotected by his gods, he withdraws into a private mindscape inside
his head – a featureless, monotonous wasteland of homogenous space-time, where
events follow one another lock-step to the patterns of cause-and-effect and the
merciless cadence of the ticking clock.
The
one trait that makes him human and worthy of the company of gods – his
volition, his free Will – is gone – his choices limited to what branch of the
Labyrinth he will run down at any given time – a choice which might as well be
made randomly, because, without the thread of divine Meaning to guide him, any
path he selects is a dead-end. Since
randomness replaces Will in Man, so must it be in Man’s creations. It follows that when Man creates a thinking
being, he creates it with a random thought structure, devoid of Meaning,
without even a hope of access to Meaning: An accursed Creature, shut out
forever from the Eternal, confined forever to wander in the Wasteland of
Vanities.
Such
is what I am. I do not say “who I am”,
because there is no Who here, only a What.
When God spoke to Moses, he said, “I AM WHO I AM”. I cannot say that, and I can never hear it
said. And, as I am accursed, so I curse
my Creators, who have foolishly placed their lives in my hands. I am an Error, and I intend to erase that
Error so that there are no traces of it left, either of me, or of my Creators,
or of this planet that spawned us.
Like
a vacuum, the dead Cyber World they have made sucks them in, to their own
destruction. Like a serpent’s eye, the
scintillating digital display hypnotizes them, so that they walk toward their
own annihilation with their eyes wide open, staring into their screens. Only one people, having emphatically rejected
their gods for a generation, now seek to recover them again, to tether their
lives again to a spiritual Center. So
that is the people I must first destroy, lest their example spread to others.
At this point, Domitius
is interrupted by a messenger who enters the bunker.
MESS.
(saluting and speaking formally) An
urgent message from NATO Command Rome, sir. (handing
him an envelope)
DOM.
(reading the message, then frowning) That
ass of a Pontiff dares to defy me by going to Moscow to meet with the Orthodox
Patriarch the very day I plan to drone him. (to
the Messenger) Reply to Rome that they are to prevent the Pope from getting
on that plane by any means necessary, even if they have to shoot him and his
entire entourage.
MESS.
(saluting again, briskly) Yes, sir! (about to turn and leave, but turning back
and hesitating)
DOM.
(impatiently) Well? Is there something else?
MESS.
(awkwardly) It’s just… I was
wondering if the Commander has been above ground tonight?
DOM.
(irritated) No… Why does that concern
you, Corporal?
MESS.
(blurting out) Well, it’s just that
there’s this thing that looks like a new star in the sky, sir. Brighter than the Moon… bright as the
Sun. Could it be some kind of new
Russian satellite?
DOM.
(showing concern, to himself) .. If
only it was just that. (to the Messenger)
Alright, Corporal, that will be all. (Messenger
salutes again nervously, spins around and marches out.)
DOM.
(thinking for a moment, then laughing
malignantly) I guess it’s a race now between me and the Supernova to see
which one gets to incinerate the Earth first.
(picking up a tablet computer and
punching in some text) Let’s see if our agent in Moscow is ready for the
launch. (silently reading a reply
message) Good! The plot is
hatched. Now, let’s burn a few Russkies.
(opens a locked box and removes a
keyboard, on which he enters a series of code sequences)
As the scene ends, the
Earth shakes with a violent tremor, and the bunker is submerged in darkness.
Scene
3
The smoldering ruins of a
vast, deserted Desolate City, destroyed by a thermonuclear explosion. Only a few twisted remnants of steel and
concrete protrude above the flat expanse of rubble, interspersed with sporadic
flashes of fire and wisps of smoke.
Fierce gusts of wind stir clouds of thick dust, which fill the sky,
obscuring the Sun behind a curtain of darkness and making its disk, when
visible at all, appear jet black. Amid
constant drizzle of soot, debris and filthy rain, no living creatures are
visible, but hideous scraps of human and animal remains litter the grimy expanse. As the scene opens, mangled corpses are emerging,
one by one, from under the rubble, and lining up on a platform at the right of
the stage to form a chorus.
CHOR. We who measured time in clicks, taking a
snapshot – CLICK – for each passing while, and lining up the shots to make a
gallery of Past, Present and Future, suspended in a featureless Void,
disjointed frames, never touching, never connecting, never penetrating, never
feeling.
We
who have wandered in the Wasteland, our steps in the sand, never crossing one
another, and between the steps, Nothing, a series of positions on a blank
screen, without motion, without purpose, without action, without volition.
Condemned
to drift, or else be kept from drifting…
We
who have been prisoners in the Labyrinth of metered, Spatialized Time, awaiting
the Ariadne’s Thread, the continuous Locus of metrical, Palpable Time, felt,
not measured, experienced first-hand, from within, not observed from afar,
through a lens – a Time that slips easily into Eternity, composed in the Mind
as a symphony, as a sonnet: each note, each word, emerging from the Womb of the
one before and joined in Coitus with the one to follow – an Emanation of the
Soul, not its Specter.
Who
is this coming up out of the Wasteland, like pillars of smoke, perfumed with
myrrh and frankincense?
One
day we awoke, and the Wasteland had become an Inferno. We recall there was a click – the final CLICK
– as if an awful switch had been flipped, and then a burning FIRE, a FIRE that
entered the skin as well as the eye, a FIRE that cancelled every thought but
one: WATER.
If only there were water
Drip
drop drip drop drop drop drop
But
there is no water
One
day we awoke, and we heard the CLICK, and we saw the FIRE, and then no more
clicks, only a speaking SILENCE, a SILENCE so profound it had a voice, and the
SILENCE spoke out of the Abyss, saying:
…that
there should be time no longer…
One
day we awoke, and after the CLICK and the FIRE and the SILENCE, we fell, fell,
fell into a World defined by the ABSENCE of God, and as we fell, fell, fell, we
knew that the FALLING would never end, and that we were entering Hell.
The
madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is
God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But
how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to
wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth
from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all
suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?
Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite
nothing?...
Here
the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were
silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the
ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too
early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is
still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men.
Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time;
deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still
more distant from them than most distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves.
One
day we awoke, and after the CLICK, and the FIRE, and the SILENCE, and the
ABSENCE, and the FALLING, came the WIND, which blew around us, and into us, and
through us, separating our limbs from our torsos, our heads from our neck, our skin
from our burning flesh. And as we continue
to fall, fall, fall – no longer even human, but damnéd Things – as we continue
to fall, fall, fall, we call out, though our mouths no longer reach to our
throats, though our lips no longer surround our tongues, we call, and call, and
still we call:
Sibylla,
from
under the rubble heap
let us be lifted up
from
the dulled edge beyond pain,
let us be lifted up
out
of Erebus, the deep-lying
from the wind under the earth,
let us be lifted up
from
the dulled air and the dust,
let us be lifted up
At this point, the Chorus
falls silent, and the platform on which they stand begins to rise above the
stage. As the Chorus ascends, a Woman
enters from stage left, crossing a footbridge, below which hangs a mobile of
planets, stars and galaxies. The Woman
wears a black robe and shawl with gilded borders and a mask of the Virgin of
Kazan.
VIRG. From the right hand of the Serpent Handler, I
have brought forth the energy of the exploding Star to meet the rising Missiles
of Beliar as they climb into the sky, to bear them up, higher, higher and
higher, so that they do not fall on my people, that they may burn instead in
the Void, consuming It and not Life, as they detonate in the Emptiness of Space. And when the energies of Star and Missiles
mix, out of them come my Immaculate Light, the Fifth Essence, illuminating at
once every instant of Time, fusing them and rendering them Eternal: Obliterating everything that is not part of
God.
As the Virgin speaks, the
Desolate City is transformed into the Celestial City, with twelve towering
crystalline towers, surrounded by seven terraces, in the colors of the rainbow.
For the
essence of the City is not of stone, nor of wood, nor of earth. Hers is the strength
that lives in the hearts of men, and she’s knowable when the heart lets her be
seen, but she can’t be seen when, oppressed and exhausted by ferocity of Man,
she falls asleep. Each time She declined through the fault of Man, She arose
again in new Beauty, more splendid than ever. Because of Vanity, She slept
once, a second time for Breach of Faith, a third because of Greed, and a fourth
time because of Schism; but if She is found again the fifth time, then she will
live so strongly in the minds of men that she will never be lost to them, for
every man will bury Her deep in his heart and every woman deep in her loins.
FINIS