Jonathan Rabb - The Book of Q

“Before the twelfth century? Oh, come on. You’re not even trying.”

He couldn’t help but smile. “I promise. I’m trying.”

“Think Hebrew scripture.”

“Okay. It’s … actually a pillar of salt.”

“Ha-ha. I’m telling you, you’re going to hate yourself.” When he shook his head again, she conceded, “Oh, all right. It’s a series of acrostics .” She looked out at her handiwork. “Such a common device in prayers, and Hebrew literature is full of them. Took me an age to get that that’s what they were doing here, but I thought you’d … well, anyway. They’re acrostics.”

He saw it at once. Following each of the lines, he confirmed it for himself. “The first letters of each line placed together spell out something else.”

“And these are ingenious. Those pages there,” she continued, pointing to the sheets closest to Pearse, “are the fifteen transcriptions of the prayer. Notice anything strange about them?”

He inched out farther on his chair. This time, he saw it immediately. “The lengths of the lines are all different,” he answered.

“Exactly. Given that they’re all the same prayer, you’d expect them to be identical, or at least close enough, perhaps a few words altered here and there. But in each one of these, the lines begin and end at entirely different points, while the individual words remain identical. Why?” He could tell she was enjoying this.

“The oral tradition,” he nodded.

“Exactly. I knew you’d get it. There wouldn’t necessarily have been established designations of lines and stanzas, because they would have recited it as a continuous flow of words-with a few pauses here and there-but with nothing absolutely fixed. An obvious explanation for the discrepancies. But was it?”

“I’m guessing no,” he answered, eyes still glued to the pages.

“I began to ask myself, Why, given that tradition, did they find it necessary on these occasions-most of them separated by thirty years or so-to write down the prayer along with the letters? Plus, you would have thought that a natural cadence for reciting the prayer would have emerged over time, giving it some sort of shape. There should at least be some similarities among the copies. And yet, there’s none. Why? And why include the prayer with each of the prophetic letters?”

“And that’s when you thought of the acrostics.” He nodded, getting caught up in her excitement.

“Of course. It ties in perfectly with the very thing that lies at the heart of any type of Gnosticism, Manichaean or not-secret knowledge. The gnosis. That’s why they all start with that bit from John. An alarm bell, if you will. ‘Remember the gnosis,’ it’s saying. In this case, the knowledge is literally hidden within the text.” Her enthusiasm continued to mount. “Why the different line lengths? Because each transcription has a specific message of its own, thus requiring different first letters in each of the lines.”

“So what’s the message?”

Her cigarette now found the ashtray. “Unfortunately, none of my first fiddlings came up with anything that made sense. More than that, I began to realize how oddly constructed the prayer itself is. One would expect a prayer called ‘Perfect Light, True Ascent’ to be uplifting, begin with the mundane and progress to the divine. In fact, it works in precisely the opposite way. Sublime at the start, commonplace at the end. That’s when I turned to the letters.” She pointed to the sheets closest to the desk. “They were also about ‘heavenly ascents.’ Why include them? And why keep them all together?”

Pearse stared at the pattern Angeli had created on the floor, following the arrows, trying to make sense of it all. He became aware of her growing impatience. “I’m all ears,” he said.

“Oh, come on, you must see it this time,” she said, the childlike eagerness once again in her voice. When he shook his head, a smile crossed her lips; she quickly leaned over and began to sweep her hand through the air just above the pages, three or four times-desk to him, desk to him-before nodding in encouragement.

“Pillar of salt?” he said with a smile.

With a burst of energy, she threw both her hands into the air. “ Up . It goes up . True ascent . You have to read the transcriptions from bottom to top. That’s where the acrostics are.”

He looked at the sheets; it was staring right up at him. “Form following content.” He nodded.

“Exactly. The message is in the ascent. It’s really quite marvelous.”

“Granted, but I still don’t see what’s-”

“So earth-shattering?” she cut in, nodding to herself as she focused on the pages near the desk. “Neither did I for nearly an hour. Each acrostic produced coherent sentences, but their overall meaning wasn’t clear-nothing more than unconnected catchphrases. I can’t tell you how frustrating that was.”

“I’ve worked with you before, remember? No broken plates this time?”

“That was an accident.” She waited. “And no. Just a few snapped pencils.”

“Then it couldn’t have been that long before you figured it out.”

“You know,” she said, “I’m beginning to like you less and less.”

He laughed. “I’m sure you are. You found the answer in the epistles, didn’t you?”

Her eyebrows rose. “You are a clever boy.”

“Each one was ascribed to one of the five Old Testament prophets.” He nodded, “Which, of course, was impossible.”

“Exactly. Oh, I wish you’d been here a few hours ago. Would have saved me an immense amount of time.”

“Not to mention pencils.” He smiled. “So why did the writers choose those names?”

“Why indeed?” she nodded, another cigarette emerging to fuel the fire. “To give the letters an added force, a certain sanctity? Maybe, but the very fact that each one included the written prayer was more than enough to set it apart. There had to be something else, didn’t there? It was then that I began to think that the entire scroll might be based around the idea of ascent, or at least of looking at things from bottom to top. More of the gnosis. It had worked with the acrostics, so why not with the prophets, who just happen to be the most sacred within the Manichaean system?” A long drag. “Maybe their names were meant to focus our attention not on the sacred, but on the profane.”

“Another way of flipping everything on its head. That’s very good.”

“Yes. I thought so.” She nodded, smoke pouring from her nose. “So that’s what I did. And that’s when the acrostics finally made sense. I noticed that anytime there was a reference to a metaphoric path taken as part of the ‘heavenly ascent’ in one of the epistles, there was a line from the acrostic that directly corresponded to it and, in a very real sense, brought it down to earth. For example, in that one there,” she said, pointing to a page a few rows up from the desk, “the letter describes the moment when the writer, calling himself Enosh, ‘followed the hand of the Paraclete into a garden of scented chestnut trees and found sustenance.’ In the acrostic that precedes the letter, there’s a sentence that reads, ‘In Trypiti, chestnuts grow lush.’ Now Trypiti, as you know, is a town on the northeasternmost peninsula of Greece.” Pearse didn’t know, but, naturally, he let it pass. “I also saw that the word chestnut appears nowhere else in the acrostic or the letter. So it went. With each new allusion in the letter, the acrostic provided a real-world connection. And the further along I read, the greater the detail-location, direction, even distances. Between eight and ten such references in each twosome throughout the entire scroll.” She waited before continuing. “The prayer and epistles aren’t about ethereal quests for knowledge; they’re about one very specific quest. Here. In the world of the material.” She seemed to be on the verge of giggling. “What makes the scroll so earth-shattering is that it turns out to be an ingeniously coded map.”