Authors: Adrian D'Hage
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Roma
F
ather Vittorio showed ‘the Israeli delegation’ in to Pope John XXIV’s private dining room and a short while later Giovanni arrived with the Papal Physician, Professor Vincenzo Martines.
‘Allegra!’ Throwing Papal protocol to the four winds, Giovanni kissed Allegra enthusiastically on both cheeks. ‘
Benvenuta di nuovo
. Welcome again!’
‘David! Patrick! Tom!’ Giovanni gave each of his guests a very informal welcome before introducing them to Professor Martines. Vittorio smiled. If nothing else, this Papacy was going to be fun.
‘And you’ve set up the Omega Scroll,’ Giovanni said, moving over to where the document had been laid out on a long table to one side of the room. ‘That explains why I passed so many Swiss Guards in the corridors,’ he said, winking at Vittorio and accepting a glass of wine from one of the Sisters. ‘Though I guess it’s waited this long, it can wait until after lunch. To old times!’ Giovanni said, his smile filled with warmth now that the distasteful business of the morning was out of the way. ‘They spoil me here,’ he added. ‘From the little I’ve seen already, the wine is superb. And the food,’ Giovanni said, rubbing his stomach ruefully.
‘You’ve never put on an ounce of fat in all the years I’ve known you,’ Allegra chided.
‘Watch this space. This is a twenty kilo appointment!’ he said, winking at Patrick.
Patrick raised his eyes to the ceiling and shrugged. His smile said it all.
After lunch, the small group moved their chairs to the long table.
‘The Omega Scroll,’ David began, ‘was written by Mechalava, a Master from within the community of the Essenes at Qumran. He wrote it during the period 20
AD
to 40
AD
, and those dates are supported by Allegra’s carbon dating. The dates are very significant.’
Giovanni smiled. He knew what was coming. ‘Encompassing the years during which Jesus would have formed his own philosophy,’ he said, ‘as well as the period of his ministry and crucifixion?’
‘Correct, and as I think you’re already aware, Holiness, the Omega Scroll is in three parts: the Magdalene Numbers; the origin of DNA; and a dire warning for civilisation,’ David continued. ‘As we will see, all three contain connected messages. The Magdalene Numbers come from a literary device known as gematria. Because numbers in languages like Greek and Hebrew are represented by letters rather than figures, the authors of many ancient texts were able to embed hidden meanings that can be obtained only by adding the values of the letters to arrive at the sacred numbers.
‘The number that the Vatican fears most is 153, which has been encoded in the Omega Scroll. Although,’ David said, looking at Giovanni, ‘perhaps it would be more correct to say it is a number that used to be feared by the Vatican.’
‘So you found it,’ Giovanni said, smiling at Allegra. They both remembered Rosselli’s assignment and a little beach near Maratea.
‘The Omega Scroll records an odd phrase that is repeated in the Book of Revelation,’ David continued. ‘The passage translates as, “And I saw the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband”.’
Giovanni nodded in response. ‘The New Jerusalem. Otherwise known as the Bride of Christ, a symbol of the new heaven and the new earth.’
‘The gematria for this phrase totals 1224,’ David said. ‘The gematria for Jesus is 8. When we divide 1224 by 8 we get 153. In other words, this strange phrase incorporating “Christ” and “the Bride of Christ” is represented by the numbers 8 and 153. When we examine the gematria for
η Mαγδαληνη
, “the Magdalene”, we find that the sum of the letters is 153.’
Tom whistled softly. ‘So Mary Magdalene really was the Bride of Christ.’
‘Yes,’ David agreed. ‘The clue was elegantly embedded in the Bible and the Book of Revelation.’
‘And just as elegantly in the Gospel of Luke,’ Giovanni added calmly. ‘When the disciples are having no luck fishing on the Sea of Tiberias, Christ tells them where to cast their net and Luke, in what seems an odd statement, records that when the net is hauled in, there are exactly 153 fish.’
‘The fish representing the harvest of humanity which, in the broader sense, is also the Bride of Christ,’ Allegra observed, recalling Professor Rosselli’s impish sense of humour and his remark that 153 was the number the Vatican feared most and that ‘it may have something to do with fishes and cities falling from the sky’. ‘Although this will be difficult for the Church,’ she added, wondering how Giovanni would handle the Omega Scroll, not as Giovanni but as Pope John XXIV.
Giovanni smiled at her, and as if reading her thoughts, picked up the discussion. ‘I am reminded of John XXIII’s remark when he instigated Vatican II and likened his
aggiornamento
– his renewal of the Church – to the opening of a window of St Peter’s. The Omega Scroll is like a great shaft of light, shining through the cupola and illuminating the darker areas of the Basilica. Regenerating the beauty of the Faith with the balance of the feminine,’ he added, his face energised with the possibilities. ‘I am not surprised to hear you say the three messages in the Omega Scroll are connected. We are at a critical time in history and I suspect the Omega Scroll is telling us to change course.’
‘For a lot of people, confirmation of the union of Christ and Mary Magdalene will not be earth shattering,’ Patrick observed shrewdly. ‘A lot of well-respected scholars have already reached that conclusion, but for hundreds of millions of Christians it will call into question everything they have been taught to believe and a lot of them simply won’t accept it.’
‘We shall have to bring them along gently,’ Giovanni said, looking meaningfully at Tom, ‘by focusing on what this means. The New Jerusalem – Christ and Mary Magdalene – represents a balance of the male and the female in Christianity that, when we look for it, is also reflected in other religions like the yin and yang of Taoism and the Shekinah, the feminine aspect of God in Judaism.’
Tom and Vincenzo were looking slightly bemused so Allegra took Giovanni’s point further. ‘What this means is that the feminine is a very important part of spirituality and religion, and contributes equally to the notion of a sacred partnership which is the original birthright of humanity. The balancing of male and female in the teachings of religion creates a power of harmony, restores the Earth to its natural balance, and fulfils the divine yearning within all of us towards a complete union, to be made whole.’
‘I suspect,’ Giovanni reflected, ‘that the feminine balance is emerging at this time in our history when the world is teetering on a precipice, hence the connection to the warning. At the extreme, we are facing annihilation from a clash of male-dominated interpretations of religion, but the other imbalances of the planet will also overwhelm us. The ills of the modern world are rising to catastrophic levels as the focus is skewed to one side of the equation, the masculine. The imbalance is showing up in ecological disasters, the persecution of minorities, a drastic increase in poverty and a universal unease. Put simply, the early Church Fathers were threatened by the feminine and our acceptance of their dogma has done untold damage. Ignoring the feminine side of the equation for so long has set the wheels in motion for human and ecological disaster.’
‘The suppression of the feminine,’ Allegra added, ‘and the lack of acknowledgement of the union of male and female, or Christ and Mary Magdalene, also reflects the exclusion of sexuality from religious life.’ Fleetingly she recalled the drive back from Maratea with Giovanni. ‘That exclusion is a distortion, a denial, and a profound wounding of our basic nature.’
‘The consequences of which are highlighted in the tragic imbalance of the clergy sex scandals that are tearing the Church apart,’ David added.
Tom shifted uncomfortably. Patrick caught David’s eye and shook his head.
David changed tack. ‘Basically, addressing this imbalance will restore tolerance to humanity.’
Allegra nodded in agreement. ‘And there is a link between the dangers of accepting dogma that is taught by rote, like the dogma of the creation story, and the second message in the Omega Scroll on DNA which is the real origin of life.’
As he had done so many times over the years, but now for the last time, Lorenzo Petroni stared out over the Piazza San Pietro and across the Tiber towards his apartment. The Keys to Peter should have been his. He had given the Church his soul, hiding people like Derek Lonergan and protecting the doctrine. What a powerful team he and P3 could have made with him on the throne of Peter. Vatican II could have been turned back and the power returned to the priesthood. The Vatican Bank would have risen to be a financial powerhouse to be reckoned with. Had Felici been halfway competent, the real Omega Scroll would now have been safe in the Secret Archives, instead of the Isaiah Scroll.
‘How could you not know the difference?’ he seethed, his bloodless lips parted in a snarl. Little flecks of saliva were forming at the edges of his mouth.
‘Bastards!’ Petroni frothed with anger.
The fog of despair consuming him, Lorenzo Petroni unlocked the top drawer of his working desk and took out the small black Beretta Cheetah from its leather case beside his black leather book.
‘One day,’ he mused bitterly, ‘they will realise that there is only one true path to the Omega.’
‘The second part of the Omega Scroll deals with the origin of DNA,’ Allegra continued.
‘If I recall, DNA wasn’t even heard of until the middle of the last century?’ Tom looked puzzled.
‘A little before that on our planet,’ Allegra said. ‘It was actually discovered in 1869, ten years after the publication of the
Origin of the Species
. Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss biologist discovered it in pus cells on discarded bandages, although to be fair, he didn’t recognise its significance. That came later, or earlier, depending on your planet in the universe.’
Giovanni smiled. He knew Allegra had one of the finest minds he had ever encountered and he was elated at just how far this brilliant Italian scientist had come since he had first met her at Milano’s Stazione Centrale.
‘Sir Francis Crick, the winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, published a book on the origin of life for which he was roundly criticised. In it he postulated that the molecular structure of DNA was of such intricacy that there had been insufficient time for it to develop from a standing start,’ she said.
‘Crick proposed that it must have come from a more advanced civilisation, from one of the billions of galaxies like our own that make up the universe, and that it had been delivered by rocket vehicle or spacecraft.’ Allegra placed a diagram of the hydrogen and phosphodiester bonding of the DNA helix on the table.
‘Crick’s view was fiercely opposed by many, particularly in the Church, as it directly contradicted the story of creation in the Bible. In the 1990s Michael Drosnin published
The Bible Code
which outlined the work of the Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips. Rips discovered hidden codes in the Torah which Yossi Kaufmann found replicated in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In a three-thousand-year-old document, Rips found the words “DNA spiral” and “DNA was brought in a vehicle”. Drosnin concluded that the vehicle was yet to be found, but was somewhere near the Dead Sea.’
‘Yossi wasn’t so sure,’ David said. ‘For starters, he thought there was more than one vehicle.’
‘Even if just one was delivered to the ancient seas of Earth, it would explain DNA combining with the amino acids in the primordial soup that made up the world’s oceans four billion years ago,’ Giovanni said, thinking back to his sermon in San Marco.
‘Precisely,’ Allegra agreed, ‘and as David will translate, the Omega Scroll makes that very clear.’
David walked over to the second section of the Omega Scroll and read from the Koiné. ‘And they came like stars from the sky, and were buried in the great sands of the desert, steel chariots bringing the seeds of life.’
‘So the Essenes found the vehicle?’ Professor Martines asked.
David nodded. ‘The Omega Scroll records the discovery and, as the translation suggests, it confirms there was more than one vehicle. As well as DNA, each contained a diagram of the structure of the acid and a map of its destination, which explains the Essene models, including the tenth planet which we have only just discovered. It might also mean that ours is not the only galaxy that has been targeted.’
‘A message we will ignore at our peril,’ Giovanni observed. ‘I think it is highly possible that another civilisation is trying to tell us that life on this planet is in our hands, but if we continue on our present course and annihilate the planet, in the scheme of the cosmos, that mistake will not be of great consequence. Other civilisations with greater wisdom will continue and take our place.’
‘There is still time to heed these warnings,’ Allegra emphasised, ‘and reverse the damage that has been done. I suspect there is a connection between the DNA element of the Omega Scroll and the balance of the feminine element. There are roughly three billion base pairs in human DNA organised into twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. We all have twenty-two pairs, but the critical twenty-third pair has always been different, two X chromosomes for females and an X and a Y chromosome for males. That delicate balance has been a deliberate part of the design of the cosmos from the very beginning and the Omega Scroll’s illumination of the origin of DNA contains a subtle message – any alteration of that balance will ultimately lead to our destruction.’
‘A lot of people are going to find this a little out there,’ Tom observed. His sceptical questioning was second nature to him.
‘And a lot of people have closed minds to anything that is beyond their experience, Tom,’ Allegra said firmly. ‘Crick pointed out that the universe is so vast, it is beyond the imagination of many of us. Our galaxy alone has perhaps a hundred billion stars. Billions of suns like our own energising the planets that are circling around them. Just in our galaxy,’ Allegra emphasised, ‘and there are at least ten billion more galaxies, which allows for trillions of planets. Are we seriously suggesting that among all of these, our planet is the only one to have life, or that we are the most advanced?’ Allegra spoke forcefully, then she continued more gently, ‘Less than four hundred years ago, one of the most brilliant scientists our world has ever seen dared to suggest that the Earth was not, as the Church stated, at the centre of God’s universe. He suggested that it revolved around the sun. That so enraged the Vatican that Pope Urban VIII had the scientist thrown into prison.’ Allegra was smiling but the challenge was in her eyes if Tom wanted to take it up.