The Messiah Secret - James Becker [50]
‘So that’s it, then, is it?’
Angela smiled enigmatically and took another sip of coffee. ‘Not quite,’ she said, ‘because two interesting things have emerged. I told you about the grimoire, the Liber Juratus. There’s a theory that it was written by a small group of magicians and alchemists who had decided to incorporate their entire body of learning into a single volume. It’s a big book – ninety-three chapters in all – covering a huge range of topics. But one section is devoted to the finding of treasure, and whoever wrote that bit insisted that this particular treasure had some kind of magical powers.’
‘But he was writing a book about magic, so you’d expect him to say something like that, wouldn’t you?’ Bronson objected.
‘Well, the text of the grimoire was written in Latin, so when I did a search I had to use a Latin term, obviously. I tried thesaurus mundi first.’
‘A thesaurus? I thought that meant a word list.’
‘That’s what it means today, yes, just a list of synonyms and antonyms, but back then it meant a treasure or possibly a treasury. Anyway, that didn’t produce any results, so I tried a different Latin noun – arcarum – and that did find a reference.’
Bronson looked interested. ‘Go on.’
‘The word arcarum is more of a catch-all term than thesaurus, and to find out what the word means you have to analyse the context, which involves studying the sentence in which it occurs. One of the meanings was “money” and another one was “strong-box”, but there was a third meaning that hadn’t even occurred to me until then.’
‘Which was?’
‘“Ark”,’ Angela replied simply.
For a second or two Bronson just looked at her. ‘“Ark” as in Noah’s Ark, or “Ark” as in “Ark of the Covenant”?’ he asked.
Angela raised her hand. ‘Arcarum could mean “Noah’s Ark”, I grant you. But I don’t think we’re looking for the remains of a wooden boat on top of a mountain somewhere, Chris, do you?’
Chris leaned back in his chair and whistled. ‘Are you sitting here in this small Italian restaurant trying to tell me you might be looking for the Ark of the Covenant?’
‘And there’s something else. The authors of grimoires and other “magick” texts were very fond of using analogies to obscure the meaning of certain passages. It was a kind of rudimentary code – you needed to be educated in the craft to some extent before you could understand what they were talking about. For example, a very simple code would be for the writing to include something like “a box without hinges, lock or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid”.’
Angela looked at him expectantly, but Bronson just shook his head. ‘No idea,’ he said.
‘It’s an egg, you idiot. What else could it be?’ Angela shook her head. ‘Anyway, somebody a lot brighter than you would look at the rhyme and correctly identify the object as an egg, so that when the author of the work later referred to an egg, because of the words used in that rhyme they’d realize he was talking about a treasure chest. The egg would be the analogy for the treasure chest.’
‘I follow that,’ Bronson said, ‘stupid policeman though I undoubtedly am. But what’s that got to do with the Ark of the Covenant?’
Angela sighed. ‘My point is that there were two references in the grimoire that used almost the same words. But in the second one there was a misspelling – the author had substituted the letter “n” for the second “r” of arcarum.’
‘So instead of arcarum mundi it read arcanum mundi,’ Bronson said. ‘Gutenberg didn’t invent the printing press until the fifteenth century, if I remember my history correctly. So, if you’re right about the date of the grimoire, the first version must have been handwritten. Those two letters are very similar. Are you sure he didn’t just write the “r” with a slightly elongated down-stroke?’
‘I don’t think so. The two phrases were so similar that I’m certain it was done deliberately. And you haven’t asked the obvious question.’
‘I know,’ Bronson replied. ‘What does arcanum mean?