My Dearest Brother,
As is my custom, I write to you once every biblical threescore and ten, as though I have just lived yet another full lifetime, and burn my offering to the post in the sky where I hope you shall receive it, or at least it shall be received by our creator. My burden is, as always, greater than I can bear, yet have I born it this century as every other.
I write to you from a mountain hideaway called Masada, composing a letter amongst a thousand blackened corpses. I have just composed a speech I shall tell the world was written by our general, Elazar-ben-Yair, exhorting his people to nobly fall on their swords rather than allow themselves taken prisoner. I shall leave it next to his body ere I depart.
But there was no speech, and only one of these deaths shall be a suicide. Rather than tell and risk their families' flight, each husband strangled his own wife so they would not cry out in death and scare the children before the child murder itself. For once all the mothers of their children were dead, each father slaughtered his own children like kosher butchers, slitting the throat as two other men held the child down. Only then did they kill each other, for surely suicide is a great sin . . .
One might understand their plight, as surely torture, rape, and slavery is their best hope at Roman hands, yet were we better than the Romans? All I could do in response was hide a few women and children in a singular small alcove of which I knew I was the only person to discover. I wanted to save so many more, yet where could I hide them that their patriarchs would not find? The lots were drawn for whom should be the last man to live and burn the corpses ere they be sodomized, and of course, the chosen man was me. For I am Cain, who since that awful day in the field has died in every century yet resurrected from each death in different corner of the world with 4000 years of memory within me. I have died by burning and drowning, sword and beast, famine and thirst, violence and plague, strangling and stoning. Much of it self-inflicted, for if God will not let me die, he can at least see how much I long for it.
Jesus-ben-Joseph, if he is whom Paul says, was only resurrected once, and for that he is god, whereas resurrection is all I am, and I am not even a devil; merely sentenced to life eternal, wanderer and witness to all things, not even permitted sleep, everlasting to everlasting. Perhaps Satan is who awaits the sinners, but since I am the true and knowing perpetrator of original sin, I am His witness for all sins on earth. Your blood cried out to God, but for my injustice perpetrated upon you, God cries out the blood of every injustice to me.
It is nearly 4000 years since we trod earth together. I have written you in every century of my trevails and few small triumphs, but I do not know if you have received my letters, so every century I write you anew of my sufferings, my guilt, my experience, and my horrible knowledge. I have seen century after century of death. I've killed a tens of thousand more than I was killed - in war, in execution, and for pleasure. I watch as millions of slaves groan under their burdens. I have watched millions of tortured and executed plead for mercy. I have watched millions of women cry out against their captors, and millions of their children cry out before their sacrifice. I have watched billions cry out at every age for release against the pain of illness, the one pain which I shall never know, and therefore can never be released. All that I have loved has died so many times that I worry my longing to love shall rot, yet I am cursed to love anew in every lifetime - the eyes and embraces of so many women remain etched within me, all of them cursed to live alongside my curse, and bear my fate even after I am gone. My wives have born thousands of children, and each time I am reborn, my children think their father dead. A whole race of Cains probably exists upon earth in every corner of God's Earth - the wretched class of every empire and territory, existing at the mercy of all who are not them, their treatment a mere bellweather for whether their hosts shall be rewarded, or punished in manners little different than Cain is in every lifetime.
He with no name thinks he can console me for my sufferings with wisdom, but the greatest wisdom is that wisdom has no reward. He who increases knowledge increases sorrow, and to He my soul went with you, and like you, I am eternally departed from it - the one material man on earth. What shall it profit a man if he gain the world but lose his soul? Well, I have heard Christ preach on the Mount and was crucified the week after him. I wrote reports for Augustus Caesar and warned Julius about the Ides of March. I was sentenced to death by Cyrus the Great and had my death sentence commuted by Cyrus in my next lifetime. In one life was a Babylonian slave who died under the stones of Nebuchadnezzar and in the next designed buildings for Nebuchadnezzar. I died in the Punic Wars twice, once for Rome, once for Carthage. I was killed by the soldiers of Qin Shi Huang four times. I designed pillars for Ashoka, meditated with the Buddha, and sat at the feet of Confucius as his disciple. I fought alongside both Alexander and Achilles and was there when Troy burned. I was methodically examined by Socrates, examined Aristotle in turn, measured angles for Pythagoras and redacted Homer. I sealed the treaty at the Peace of Nicas with my blood and drowned at the Battle of Aegospotami. I hunted with Gilgamesh and sat at the gambling table of Yudhistira. As a slave I built pyramids for Pharaoh Khufu and sphinxes for Hatshepsut, yet advised Pharaoh Thutmose on science and served as high priest of Ra for Akhenaten. I attended to Cleopatra in her chambers and I counseled Queen Esther on how to please King Ahasuerus. I have written songs for David and wisdom for Solomon. I was with Pharaoh at the Red Sea and the Israelites at Mount Sinai. I, too, am that I am, and I everything the world is, I have gained, but gain after gain, life after life, I shall lose.
Fifty-nine years ago I was poisoned by Empress Livia before I could tell Caesar Augustus of her many plots. Divine Augustus, there was a king with the wisdom of Solomon who created an empire that will bend time's arrow just as once did David. But if the world only knew the price of greatness, even of goodness and justice, would we ever venture it? Would we ever pursue any goal knowing how much we shall suffer from it?
People only accept great leadership when webbed in chaos's maelstrom, and the greater the leadership, the more the followers forget that but for the restraints their leader imposed, they would be dead. And in the wake of great leadership, no potential successor has the credibility to make followers see unity's necessity. The only place a great leader earns credibility is in the valley of the shadow of death, and when a leader leads to a mountaintop, there is no place to move but by descent - the leader sometimes has great assistants groomed to become good leaders - Moses had his Joshua, Hatshepesut her Thutmose, but greatness has no true successor, and most leaders are no leaders. No great leader had a true heir but dear David, who only found him after the death of many sons, and even great Solomon paid for his success upon death with the immediate division of his kingdom. Under new leadership the followers bristle under the necessity of taxes and wars, old rituals and new traditions, current responsibilities and new righ
(Bloodstains make the scroll largely illegible for three columns at this location but for a few passages. One cannot help a tantalizing temptation to surmise a thought that in these passages the mystical Cain details a theory of historical evolution, effective political action, the rise and decline of civilizations, and the formation of the Roman Empire - RW)
Republics are lonely islands floating in the sea of autocracy. They inevitably begin with hopes for eternal improvement in the human lot and end with aspirations violated, inspirations defaced, and accomplishments dashed to ruins. In Athens, Carthage, and Rome each, republics generated the greatest achievements known to human history, and therefore still greater hopes. Each republic ended amid a rain of blood all the larger for their towering achievements that were enlisted in the service of murder. Perhaps future republics shall last still longer and achieve still more for more people, but the longer they last, the more people they include, the more death shall be their end.
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Amid a hundred years of decline and dysfunction, the end of our Roman republic seemed covered with such hope - first in Caesar Julius, then in Caesar Augustus. For fifty years, our First Citizen was the greatest man of his time raised to our highest position, and after our deaths, a ruler greater still would succeed him: be it Agrippa, or Gaius, or Germanicus, who could possibly doubt that Rome's next Princeps would extend her to still greater glories from which it could provide the world still more decency and improvement and peace? Who would have thought that the next Caesar would be mediocre, brutal, depraved Tiberi
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... the future was so charged with the godliest sunlight, but there is no sun god; neither Apollo nor Ra, nor was Augustus divine, there is only our Yahweh, who has no competition in the heavens, yet is jealous of phantoms as invisible as he.
(One can form no worldconception of this scroll's historicospirit. It was discovered underneath antiquisand in the Judean Desert's Cave of Horror and the historiographiconature of this testamentscroll is highly beliefdubious, and yet carbon dating does appear to show its composition to be roughly veracitous with the timedating of its claim of periodicity; one could easily imagine a Judean mystic, perhaps an Essene, who formed a genesis of selfconception as a man who'd lived past lives, albeit such a selfconception would be seen as blasphemous had he related his selfstory any fellow mystic. But how could a mere Judean mystic have such accurate knowledge of historical events and personages in the Eastern Orient? And how could he analyze future historical events with such foresighted precision?
That such a testamentscroll could arrive in the Cave of Horror when it was composed at Masada leads one to the definiconclusion that it is a work of spiritupure sensifabrication. One cannot definimagine one's way into the spirit of worldview in the world of two millennia ago, and yet this timespeaks to us of how Judeomystics may have selfperceived in the spiritudesolation of Roman Palestina post-First RomanoJewish War.
Dr. Richard Westenbach - Humboldt University of Berlin - Department of Archeology - 1952)
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