The Celtic Conspiracy (9 page)

Entirely unbidden, a sob caught in Shane’s throat. He took a few seconds to gather himself. “Sorry, but this is
all a bit much for me right now. I’ve been looking on helpless for years, seeing where things were headed, and I always come back to the same point: I just don’t see anyone listening.”

Thomas shook his head vigorously. “It’s not about whether someone’s listening to you. If anything, it’s about whether they understand you. And that doesn’t start in the head, it starts in the heart. What the president just said is testimony to the return of understanding that is fed by the heart, by intuition.”

“The difference between Ryan and you,” Deborah said, “is that he hasn’t pulled himself back into his shell. You need to act the same way.”

Thomas became even more animated. “Right. And if you really know what I think you know, and are capable of what I think you are capable of, then you have an even greater responsibility.”

“That’s an awful lot to swallow, Thomas. Answer me this: what’s really the difference between the Christians’ beliefs and the Celts’ or the Druids’? In the end, isn’t everyone just looking for God?”

“The big difference has to do with the form and character of the pagan gods. The old culture’s way of life is manifested in their worship of nature and not in a god as the Christians have designed him. In the old culture, devotion, humility, and magic were a normal part of life. They are the mystical metaphors with which the pagans had access to the all-encompassing and permeating universe and its knowledge. They honored and used it for the common good.”

“One thing is certain,” Deborah added. “If the Christians had shown more tolerance, if they hadn’t attacked people of different beliefs with such brutal psychological and physical violence, not only would the Celts and the Druids have survived, but also the culture of the Native Americans and the tribes of Africa and Australia.”

Sadly, he’s right about that
, thought Shane. The scope of this false teaching was enormous, and more people were beginning to be aware of it. The dawning of a new age that he felt within himself was spreading. Maybe Thomas was right. Maybe he could help.

* * *

Victor Salvoni walked through his office and looked out the wide-open balcony doors at the Sistine Chapel. It was a warm evening with a beautiful, starry sky. Salvoni sat down on a small bench in front of the door and let out a soft sigh. In Dublin, his men would have long since finished their work. Thinking about his discussion with Lambert, he realized that it couldn’t go on like this forever. One day, mistakes would be made that, in light of the Church’s diminishing importance in politics and society, couldn’t be covered up with the old methods.

With the number of people leaving the Church climbing at an alarming rate, and many distancing themselves inwardly, the pope had gotten carried away,
and in addition to allowing the radical society of St. Pius X, he had also countenanced the statutes of the secret society “Opus Angelorum,” also known as “Work of the Angels.” The Church was bombed back into the Middle Ages. The Work of the Angels didn’t do anything partway: if there was even the slightest doubt about faith, they deemed it the work of the devil. Salvoni had been busier than he liked in the last several months, fending off media attempts to interview the victims of spiritual exercises or to ascribe responsibility to the sects for several suicides.

He’d had to silence the victims of abuse from Catholic schools and seminaries in Germany and Ireland, either with money or by other means. Yet the sheer number of victims made it a hopeless battle. He had set up a broadly based covert action to destroy the traces left behind by the pope himself. But he had long known deep inside of himself that there was only one chance for the survival of Christianity: the return to the true message of Jesus of Nazareth. It had been a long time since the Vatican had anything in common with that.

“One more year, Victor, just one more year, and then you can stop,” he swore, the moon shining on his melancholy face.

The ringing of his cell phone interrupted his thoughts.

“Salvoni,” he answered.

“It’s Cassidy. We’ve taken care of everything as we discussed, but I found something you should look at. We must have overlooked it more than once, but it proves
what Padre Morati feared: MacClary has access to controversial documents.”

“What did you find, exactly?”

“I sent you a picture that will explain everything, I think. We also observed three friends of MacClary who had a long discussion with him before we could get inside.”

“OK. But for God’s sake, be careful, and calm down. It can’t be that bad.”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

Salvoni went inside again and opened up his mailbox. What he saw made his blood run cold. The document looked as if it might have come from the cave that Sean MacClary had found so many decades earlier. If this artifact had indeed come from that trove, then they really did need to fear what Padre Morati had always warned about.

Now, everything depended on finding out what else Sean MacClary’s son and his friends knew. Salvoni knew he could depend on Cassidy in the coming days. Until then there was only one thing to do: wait, and try not to go crazy in the meantime.

Let the flames of your smelting furnaces roast these gods! Make use of all the gifts of the temple and put them under your control. With the destruction of the temple, you will have taken one step closer to divine virtue.

—Church Father Julius Firmicus Maternus

Standing in MacClary’s house at his dinner invitation, Shane was feeling much better than he had for the past several days. He felt fantastic, actually. After so many difficult years, here he was finally surrounded by people who shared his interests and his questions, whom he could trust implicitly and with whom he could share his thoughts without reservation. It was only now becoming clear to him how much he had kept bottled up inside. But even that difficult time had, apparently, had a purpose.
Without all the brooding and questioning, without all the battles and despair, he probably wouldn’t be here.

MacClary brought his guests into the dining room where the diminutive housekeeper, Ms. Copendale, had just finished setting out their meal. As she left, MacClary told the group how in 1945 after the death of her husband, MacClary’s mother, Lisa, had hired Ruth Copendale, then just fifteen years old, to watch her son when she had appointments outside the house or when visitors were there. When Lisa MacClary fell ill, far too young, with a then-unknown immune deficiency, Ruth took on responsibilities that went far above and beyond those of a housekeeper.

The dining room was much too conservative for Shane’s taste, but it reflected a feeling of security. You could easily have seated twelve people around the table. The room was filled with tasteful pieces of teak furniture probably dating back to the previous century. The walls were paneled with precious wood, and small, ornamented wall sconces bathed the room in a yellowish light. Pictures decorated the walls, including the signed photograph of Ronald’s father in uniform.

“I hope Ryan didn’t overwhelm you last night with his theories about early communist Druids,” remarked MacClary with a smile in Shane’s direction. Thomas glowered at the professor. Shane had had the feeling since the day before that there was a kind of love-hate relationship between Ryan and MacClary. Certainly they didn’t always share the same opinion, and their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different.

MacClary seemed to notice Thomas’s irritation. “Thomas, you have to admit there might have been a far more pragmatic reason for getting rid of the Druids.”

“Maybe, but the fact is that Celtic society was based on free accord and a moral order that had developed over more than a millennium. The Celtic people didn’t need a centralized government to remain a cohesive society. The Druids always considered property to be collective, for example. Rome, on the other hand, was intensely materialistic...”

“And we shouldn’t forget that the Romans considered women solely objects of desire, servants, and breeding machines, while the Celts worshiped them as the source of God,” said Deborah.

“Exactly,” Thomas continued. “And Rome could control both with their new
divine
business partners. The emperors were no longer dependent on the goodwill of numerous religious leaders. Now they were only dependent on the leaders of the Church, who were as easy to buy off as a prostitute...”

MacClary raised a professorial finger. “But the Druids would have been in a position, along with the few critical thinkers in Rome, to expose the Christians’ lies. That’s why they had to die.”

As excited as he had been only minutes earlier, Shane, who’d had little sleep lately, suddenly found himself overcome with profound tiredness. He couldn’t follow the debate anymore.

“Mr. MacClary, is there somewhere I can lie down for a minute?” he said, interrupting the exchange.

MacClary’s face showed concern. “Of course, right in the next room. And please, call me Ronald.”

Next to the library was a small, comfortable guest room, much more modest than the other rooms Shane had seen in the house. MacClary turned on the light and laid his hand on Shane’s shoulder. “I’m sure it was a difficult evening for you yesterday. I know how long Ryan can go on discussing this topic. He’s obsessed with the lost knowledge of the Druids. But it
is
lost; we have to reconcile ourselves to that. Lie down for a while. We’ll be in the library when you want to join us again.”

Shane lay down on the narrow bed. Thoughts raced through his head. He didn’t agree with MacClary. The knowledge wasn’t lost. He could feel it, even though he couldn’t say why he was so sure. It wasn’t lost, it was only that the remoteness of centuries had blocked access to it.

As he lay down, he quickly slipped into a trance-like state between waking and sleeping. Before he fell asleep completely, he wondered what role he had to play in this conversation.

A conversation that was still going when he awoke.

“Gentlemen, Rome’s motives, even before the rise of the Christians, were always marked by massive economic interests,” Thomas was saying. “There was a reason that all the emperors rewarded the priests with incredible gifts after their betrayal of Jesus. Constantine, in particular, inundated the bishops with riches, and from that point on
the teachers of the Church, including Ambrosius, Chrysostomos, Hieronymus, and so many others, were subject to him. They wrote praise scriptures for the Christians, adulterated the Bible, and wrote vehement but extraordinarily effective propaganda against the pagans.”

Shane quietly made his way back to the library. He saw Ronald reach for his glass of wine as Thomas scornfully added, “Constantine showed which faith he would build on in the future. He betrayed his pagan beliefs, and the Church began to destroy all the pagan places of worship. Then, to add insult to injury, the emperor’s money financed the construction of monumental churches on the same sites where pagan shrines had been. That was too much for the Druids.”

Ronald nodded. “There you’re right. The more the economic power of the priests grew, the more room the Celts had to cede, eventually retreating to our beautiful Ireland.”

From the doorway, Shane said, “What Thomas just said is true. Now I understand the deal that completed the betrayal of Jesus’s vision. That was his real crucifixion. In comparison, his actual death was practically meaningless.”

Ronald turned in his direction. “Ah, Adam, you’ve joined the living again. Should Ms. Copendale warm up some food for you?”

“No thank you, I’m not hungry.”

Niceties dispensed with, Ronald turned right back to the debate. “OK, Ryan, I still think that if we want
to understand what happened to the Druids and their knowledge and the source of their power, we have to force the Church to open their archives. But you know as well as I do that’s practically impossible.”

Unsure that he wanted to enter deeper into this discussion, Shane looked over at a glass case that held a scroll. An almost magical energy seemed to be drawing his attention to it.

* * *

Jennifer was just finishing packing, though she was still having second thoughts about taking the early flight to Brussels.

“I really think I’m ready for a vacation,” she said to herself with a sigh. Dinner with Ronald had gone late into the night before, and she had drunk a bit more than she should have. What had really tired her out, though, was how animated Ronald had been. He was furious with the rector of the university and was pumped up by his conversations with his Dublin friends, especially this Adam Shane, whom he was convinced Jennifer should meet. Then he simply got carried away on his usual themes. She hadn’t been able to get a word in edgewise.

This was unfortunate because she had things she wanted to say. She hadn’t wanted to hear him obsess about how to free Christians from the Vatican. She still shared
his opinions, but the path he was taking to reach his goals seemed increasingly remote to her.