St George, ORC

“I know what links St John the Baptist, St Christopher and St Catherine…”

“You do?”

“They were all beheaded.”

“…Baphomet!”

“Sophia.”

“How did you get from Baphomet to Sophia?”

“There’s a cipher, you convert Baphomet into Hebrew letters then apply the cipher and… voila!”

“Could the Knights Templar have known that?”

“I don’t see any reason why not. They were in Jerusalem long enough to have familiarised themselves with both the Hebrew language and the Kabbalah and they had a reputation for delving into arcane subjects.”

“St George was beheaded too.”

“Why didn’t I know that, he’s the Patron Saint of England, why has no one told me that our patron saint was beheaded?”

“I bet no one told you he was Turkish either?”

“No wonder we never win anything.”

Wen giggles. “But what does it mean?”

“Huh!”

“All these beheaded Saints.”

“I don’t know what it means, yet”

“Are they venerated because they were beheaded?”

“There’s still St Lawrence, he was grid-ironed wasn’t he?”

“That is a famous one.”

“No more famous than St Catherine, she was put on the wheel, which everyone remembers because of the firework…but the wheel actually broke… and she was only beheaded afterwards… almost as an afterthought.”

“There’s some debate about St Lawrence though, some sort of glitch in the manuscript led to the grid iron story, I think you’ll find that in reality, if there is any such thing where the saints, are concerned he too… was beheaded.”

I look from Lawrence… to George… and Catherine… and then to Christopher… and then I see it…

“Blue Light.”

“Say what?”

“There is blue light coming from the clear glass of the windows.”

“…”

“Wait…I’ve read about this… it was in an alchemical novel…I forget which… one of the characters spends practically the whole book trying to rediscover the lost alchemical art of producing blue light from clear glass. He tries all sorts of weird and wonderfully exotic ingredients that were around at the time…”

“And does he accomplish it?”

“He does…as a matter of fact… or should that be fiction…”

“So what was the missing ingredient, what did we lose?”

“You’re not going to like this.”

“Don…”

“The missing ingredient… was faith!”

We look around the chapel together.

There is blue light streaming into it from all the windows in the North and South walls save for those that have been stained.

That is an awful lot of faith.

Extract from The Initiate