The Anathemas: A Novel about Reincarnation and Restitution
Why The title, The Anathemas?
Given its name, it could be a novel about an eccentric family of exotic origin, but anathema is actually an ancient and provactive word used in English without translation.
Webster’s Dictionary cites it as derived from the Greek and meaning “a thing devoted to evil” although it previously signified “anything devoted” to a specific purpose. Immediately, we sense confusion here. The implication, however far-fetched, is that anyone or anything set apart in a special manner is somehow the servant of evil.
The Encyclopedia Britannica explores this turnabout in the word’s evolution. In the Old Testament, it explains, anathema designated a creature or object set apart for sacrificial offering. Its return to profane use was strictly banned, and such objects, destined for destruction, thus became effectively accursed as well as consecrated. Old Testament descriptions of religious wars call both the enemy and their besieged city anathema inasmuch as they were destined for destruction.
In New Testament usage a different meaning developed. St. Paul used the word anathema to signify a curse and the forced expulsion of one from the community of Christians. In AD 431 St. Cyril of Alexandria pronounced his 12 anathemas against the heretic Nestorius. In the 6th century anathema came to mean the severest form of excommunication that formally separated a heretic from the Christian church and condemned his doctrines.
Such reversals in the meanings of words are not unusual. Take the common word hot, which normally means something too warm to be bearable, but when the current generation says, “She’s hot,” hot means “extremely desirable.”
As the priest DuPont explains to the protagonist in the novel: “Beware of words, my friend. Over time, meanings change. In this case, the meaning reverses. Anathema, which now connotes the solemn condemnation of a person or thing as damned or cursed, originally meant an equally solemn dedication or setting aside of a person or thing as sacred, even divine.” (The Anathemas, p. 310)
The paradox inherent in the word anathema and the related practice of placing certain ideas out-of-bounds, a powerful form of mind-control, is at the heart of this novel. Thus, the title. It is not coincidence that it begins with the line: “It was as if there were a curse on him.”
Is it possible that centuries ago we were robbed, personally and collectively, of our true history, our immortal heritage, and then force-fed a myth about a rigid and unforgiving spiritual destiny that enslaved us to the robbers? Remember, man, that you are dust and unto dust you shall return!
The History: Reincarnation
In 553 AD, Justinian I, the self-righteous ruler of the eastern half of the decaying Roman Empire, held Pope Vigilius prisoner until the church leader agreed to sign The Anathemas of the Council of Constantinople, previously convened by the emperor. Thus, with the stroke of the papal pen, anyone who believed in the ancient doctrine that souls existed before the present body’s birth or reincarnated after its death were excommunicated from the church, subject to persecution and eternally damned. This little-known power play between church and state served to prejudice the western world against the possibility of reincarnation right up to the present.
More than 25 years before, Justinian had married Theodora, a commoner and courtesan about 20 years his junior. When he became emperor in 527, he made Theodora empress and co-ruler. The marriage and elevation caused a scandal, but Theodora proved to be a potent leader in her own right as well as Justinian’s greatest supporter. She died in 548, perhaps of cancer, at a relatively young age, leaving the rudderless emperor to rule on his own for the remaining twenty years of his long life.
As if to assuage his grief, the emperor took to theology, usurping the rightful role of the clergy in deciding doctrine and proscribing heretics. Believers in reincarnation were just one group that felt his wrath.
Witnessing the triumphs and tragedies of the reign of Justinian and Theodora was the official court historian Procopius. While his public works are extravagant in their praise of his patrons, he also authored The Secret History, in which Justinian is cast as cruel and incompetent and Theodora, formerly a prostitute of insatiable lust, is shrewish, mean-spirited and manipulative as empress. It is to Procopius that we owe history’s ambivalent judgment of this imperial couple.
The Story: Restitution
In 1879, Richard Strawn, a Civil War medic disowned by his fellow Quakers, has to come to terms with his daughter Jennifer’s conviction that she was once a fabulous queen and he a king, or concur with his wife, Lucinda, that the girl is hopelessly insane.
Lucinda takes advantage of his absence to have Jennifer committed to an asylum. With luck, which materializes as randomly as misfortune, Richard rescues the girl. While recovering, she too has the dream about the revolt, but she, the queen, boldly confronts the rebels and saves their realm. This baffling coincidence eventually leads them to the irresolute 6th-century Byzantine emperor, Justinian, and his profligate empress, Theodora. Compelled by inescapable fascination, father and daughter—sometimes in tandem, sometimes in opposition—set out to discover what binds them to this long-dead royal couple.
Burying his head by day in work and at night at the pubs, he delays the decision, betting that time will either cure Jennifer’s fantasies or soften Lucinda’s intransigence. Then, just when a truce appears to be holding between mother and daughter, nightmarish events erupt. A fire destroys the Philadelphia business Richard manages, and he is accused of arson. He escapes town, drunk and despondent, only to be pursued by a dream in which he is indeed a king, but a cowardly one about to capitulate to a revolting faction.
But Lucinda, like the black magician who successfully foiled the two in the earlier existence, is never far behind. She is determined to prove that history indeed repeats itself, and there is nothing they can do to stop it.
Meticulously researched in disciplines both outer (academic research, on-site observation)and inner, (meditation, daily journalling adding up to thousands of pages), The Anathemas is founded in history, notably Procopius’s Secret History and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But it is a story first and foremost—a mystery with generous dollops of grotesque Gothic and romantic “magical realism,” a dynamic roller coaster ride that hurls the reader through the action. One enthusiast said it was unlike any novel she’d ever read, a new genre of literature. Another declared it “life changing”.
Taking history personally
It was the late ‘60’s and the sacred icons we’d grown up with were tottering. My own young life too had taken a radical turn (pun intended) when I left a Catholic seminary in rural New Jersey for New York City at the height of the Hippie and anti-Vietnam-War movements. Eastern concepts, reincarnation among them, were patently groovy. Bridey Murphy had come and gone, and Audrey Rose was still below the horizon, but the idea that we might have lived before and would live once again was all the buzz among young adults.
I found the idea curious but irrelevant until I came across the story of Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora. Given my theological background and classical bent, these characters provided a personal bridge from the more familiar ancient history to the choatic present.
A wannabe writer in my early 20’s, I never imagined that typing out a couple of one-page character sketches about this imperial pair would start a process, and not merely a writing project, that would span decades before completion. Their story was history and thus worthy of a self-defined scholar, but with a twist that defied the status quo enough to support my recently adopted unorthodoxy.
I didn’t know what of this reincarnation thing was true or false or what Justinian and Theodora actually had to do with it, but I was fascinated and definitely hooked on my own story.
In the introduction to The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Gary Zukav notes: “I realized that the book I was writing was more intelligent than I was. It was also funnier than I was, and it had a grander comprehension than I did.”
I too quickly discovered that my story had a mind of its own, and it made demands on the character and ability of its author. I had to be qualified to do the work. I wasn’t at first, so my life unfolded to make me so—a fascinating process, but quite another story.
Before long it wasn’t me writing the book but the book shaping me. And that, on several occasions, resulted in gaps of seemingly unproductive years where I had to endure adventures I would not have chosen on my own. But even these, I came to understand, were the story marching at its own pace.
For the writer there was the process of going within to find the story and match its step. What in The Anathemas the protagonist calls the “quiet place”:
The river bank was his magic vantage point where even life’s discordant notes would blend into the symphony. That constant, flowing river was his personal Holy of Holies, the quiet place, where chaos flew off with only the lightest touch of his will to have it do so. It had to be approached, he remembered, on tiptoes with bare feet. The snap of a twig, the flap of a bird’s wing, any alien thought snaring a bit of his attention, and the sacred place would dissolve into a scene quite ordinary.
(The Anathemas, p. 64)
Why not reincarnation?
It was in the quiet place that the most urgent questions came. Questions without answers that nagged until I held them up-close and personal. What if I did have previous lives? What might I have been or done? What difference would such knowledge make now? If I remembered, would I not be wiser for the previous experience? Would it explain some of those mysterious aspects of my personality that seem so random in the current context?
From “what if reincarnation?” personally, it was natural to go to “what if reincarnation?” for the human species.
After all, the eastern half of the world has held this belief for eons longer than the “one life, one death” concept has been around. Would it make any difference to a society if its people were aware, individually and collectively, of their personal predecessors and descendants? Who of us, when beyond prejudice and fear, is not curious, even eager, to know his own source and destination, and the same for her immediate relations and the human race?
Who would not trade in the dismal declaration, Remember man that you are dust and unto dust you shall return! for a destiny more suited to man’s nobler aspirations?
From “What if reincarnation?” it is a natural leap, at least theoretically, to “Why not reincarnation?”
History and tradition of little help
A venerable priest-friend, on hearing about The Anathemas, emailed me thus: “It just came to my mind that I forgot to tell you that, according to the teachings of the Catholic Church, there is no such thing as REINCARNATION.” For him, and millions across the ages, case closed. The Authority has spoken and so it is. Snarky to mention, but this same authority condemned Galileo as a heretic for observing and teaching that the earth rotated around the sun, not vice versa.
When healthy curiosity poses questions that contradict dogma, our creeds offer only further mysteries in explanation; and our sciences, excluding spirit, admit evidence only from the dust here before we came and left behind when life leaves the body, ignoring the role and effects of life itself.
Here our written history becomes a part of the problem. As Alex Haley, the author of Roots observed, “History is written by the winners.” And implied is that what is handed down is not always complete or even true. As a librarian warns the protagonist in The Anathemas: “History is no exact science. Historians, no matter how objective they try to be, are individuals with limited points of view. Even when they honestly tell what they see, they too often dishonestly claim that what they see is all there is to be seen.” (P.96)
Why a novel?
So here I was with a mystery that went back millennia and touched the lives and minds of half the world’s population. Why not just write the facts and let the reader come to his own conclusion? Why a novel?
Search the Internet and you will find thousands of items, from one extreme to the other, on reincarnation, Justinian and the Council of Constantinople, but those gathered tracts and theories can leave one cold. By themselves, history can be stodgy and religion passé; but the inside-the-mind saga of people living multiple individual lifetimes, The Anathemas’ perspective, can electrify and revivify that vast region that lies behind barriers in “normal” memory.
The Anathemas, as a novel, is fiction—a creation—not entirely dependent on the records of the past events depicted, even while it takes them into account. So, it is free to fill in where the record falls short, to adjust where the record seems in error, and to postulate the record’s impact—the advantage of hindsight—on later and present thinking and behavior. This, by the way, is also done in non-fiction, but the novel needs no footnotes to prove that what is being written is based on what someone else has already written.
Resorting to fiction, I’ll admit, can be a defensive device. Those with a vested interest in keeping reincarnation under wraps are still around. As Dan Brown learned with The Da Vinci Code, even the best-plotted fiction, coming too close to debunking enshrined myths, generates furious backlash.
Fiction as a present-time Event
The word, fiction, essentially means “something created.” It’s root fict– is only one letter off from fact. From the predominant mechanical viewpoint, we give more credence to theories made up from sense phenomena than to those conjured up from the thin air of imagination. We call the first science and the latter fantasy. And yet we flock to concerts, art museums, movies, and sporting events or park for hours in front of TVs, all more fantasy than science.
In his book, Beyond the Occult, Colin Wilson says: “Imagination is the power to anticipate reality by conjuring up mental connections.” The fiction writer conjures consciously, usually with the intent to anticipate, or foresee, a present or future reality.
The Anathemas is based on a piece of history that takes place in the 6th Century, a critical event that changed the course of western civilization up to the present. However, the restitution required of the Justinian character, the perpetrator of the untruth, is not in the 6th century, the time of the crime, nor in the 19th century with Richard Strawn, but in the present time, since the misinformation persists and will continue to do so until corrected. Examining a “given” idea, no matter how old, to establish its validity is a present time activity, for both writer and reader.
Erroneous history is a present problem. Our history—what has been recorded about our past—bounds our view of ourselves and our kind. It governs how we think in the present and thus plan, and so create, the future. The details, as they happened, might be lost, but the essentials cannot be.
As the Jesuit DuPont observes in novel: “But there’s good news. Perennial truth, which the words in any document can but poorly represent, remains perennially true. So, it remains there to be observed and verified by the present observer.” (P. 315)