What is The Magic Circle about?
The Magic Circle is the story of transformation. It is the story of an aeon--a
2,000-year cycle--that began at the rise of the Roman Empire and the birth of Christianity
and that is approaching its completion right now. The ancients of nearly every culture
regarded the transition from one aeon to another as a form of initiation for the planet
and everyone on it. At such turning points, the world changes quickly, time seems to speed
up. Those who are rigid and wish to turn the clock backwards to an idyllic "golden
age" of the imagination often do not survive the transition, but are crushed under
the wheel. The Magic Circle is about the flexibility required for survival in
times of volatile change.
The book begins during the last week in
the life of Jesus, and it shifts quickly to 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. As
the modern heroine, Ariel Behn, pursues the truth behind her grandmother's ancient
manuscripts, we move back and forth with her through the periods of history that marked
such major turning points, such as the Middle Ages of Genghis Khan and the time of
Alexander the Great. In the course of the story the heroine, Ariel, must discover what
actions are required to help bring forth the new age.
How did you go about researching the background for a book
of this scope?
The ideas for every scene and plot in my books are based on my own personal experience. In
hindsight, I feel very lucky that over the years I was forced, by financial necessity more
than choice, to live and work in places where I was exposed to colorful people and
interesting situations. For instance, The Eight was based on my years in the
petroleum industry of North Africa. And in The Magic Circle, Ariel's job as a
nuclear materials expert is based on the three years in the 1970s that I worked at a
nuclear site in Idaho. In preparation for this book, I also lived in Vienna and
Germany--where, along with a director of the German College of Dowsers, I dowsed the
podium where Hitler always stood at the Nuremberg rallies.
I try never to write an action scene that I haven't experienced first-hand. In The
Eight there's the Sirocco at sea and the Sahara sandstorm. I didn't plan on being in
an avalanche or going over the falls of a river like my characters in The Magic Circle,
but I've gotten a lot of literary mileage out of such experiences.
I always want to tell a story in my novels, but I admit that, like my readers, I'm an
information junkie. We have a ten-room house with--at last count--twenty-seven bookcases
and more than six thousand books. Since The Magic Circle is about ancient and
modern views of transformation I had to delve into many cultures. I learned, for example,
that major events happening now have been predicted from the time of Babylon and ancient
Egypt. What my readers seem to love is the feeling of being drawn into the story in such a
way that they learn enormous amounts about history, science, and so on--without feeling
they've had to work at it. That's my job: entertainment, from the French entretenir,
to hold them between--in this case, between the pages. But I have to do plenty of hard
work to make it seem easy.
You originally planned to write a very different book after The
Eight and A Calculated Risk. How does The Magic Circle fit in?
I had actually outlined the book I was planning--a story about painters. But I couldn't
get the research done. It was almost as if doors were being shut against me, museums were
closed, books were out of print, things were thrown up to block me--literally, in one
case. Traffic jams prevented me from getting to a museum in Naples, and when I finally got
there, all the paintings I needed to see were out being cleaned! I finally gave in and
switched to another project.
I had thought of the idea of a millennial book--a book about what happens at the turning
of the aeon--as early as 1979 when I was living in Idaho. When I started writing it again,
it seemed almost magical: all doors opened and the seas parted. Then while we were living
in Germany in 1989, people started coming across the border in their little cars from East
Berlin to have dinner with us, and they told us the gate of the Berlin Wall was suddenly
open and people were tearing the wall down with their hands, just like the Bastille two
hundred years earlier. I now have a piece of the wall in my rock collection.
The collapse of walls and of regimes too rigid to accept change--the instantaneous
sweeping away of the old and inflexible--appeared in all the ancient predictions as the
very first sign of the arrival of the coming aeon. So when I pulled out my old outlines
and files for The Magic Circle, and I found that even the title and the chapter
headings I'd written ten years earlier reflected what was happening now, I knew it was
kismet.
How do you feel about The Magic Circle now?
The Magic Circle was a very important book for me. A breakthrough book.
At an early age, I knew that the kinds
of stories I wanted to tell were going to require a larger palette, a very different
palette than the one provided by the existing structure of the western novel. I needed a
storytelling palette, with lots of colors and contrasts. Even as a child, I listened to
the tales of the mountain men of the Rockies and wrote them down. I've kept an archive of
the oral literature of Native Americans, and of Latin America and the southwest. I did my
postgraduate studies in the literature of Black writeRs in French and English, in Africa,
Europe, and America. Many of these writers, like Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuola, and Chinua
Achebe, were creating new forms for
the nove that didn't exist in the west--more archetypal. In my writing today, I borrow
from all these diverse techniques.
In The Eight, two parallel action stories are woven together within a plot that
itself is an ongoing two-hundred-year chess game with thirty-two characters in each part
that are the chess pieces. There are tales-within-tales, a tradition from the Persian,
like The 1001Nights, but which I expanded so that the tales are sometimes as many
as five or six layers deep. For instance, in one scene Robespierre tells the painter
Jacques-Louis David a story about the time he went to visit Rousseau on the Isle of
Poplars and Rousseau told him a story about meeting Casanova at the Venice opera, and
tells the tale that Casanova told him--and all the while Charlotte Corday is overhearing
the entire nest of stories from a back room. I wanted readers to drop so deeply into the
novel that ultimately they felt that they too were listening from that back room inside
the book.
In The Magic Circle I was able to stretch the envelope even further: Taking
stories, myths, and legends that have sprung from dozens of cultures over thousands of
years, I wove them all together into a single plot. Each story takes the heroine, along
with the reader, through a series of initiations--the Catholic Mass, Druid shamanic
initiation, Sufi Islam initiation--steps that leads us not only deeper into the mystery at
the core of the book, but deeper into the heart of the Ancient Mysteries as well. The
purpose of all initiation is transformation. Writing the book was a kind of transformation
for me, as I intended it to be for the reader.
Adolf Hitler plays a part in The Magic Circle. Why
did you decide to include him, and how did you feel about that?
You can't write a book about the aeon, the millennium, or even this century without
mentioning Adolf Hitler. Let's face it, he was a pivotal figure, and you really have to
discuss the fact that he and his followers were involved in the occult.
Though Hitler only has a walk-on part
in The Magic Circle--even smaller than Napoleon's in The Eight--as a character he
ended up overshadowing the other minor characters I'd already researched and had planned
to include in the story, like Trotsky, Mussolini, Stalin, or Ho Chi Minh. How did I feel
about writing about him? Pretty depressed.
I spent months researching the Nazis and found it totally exhausting. Friends sent me
fetishes and talismans to hang on my wall--a Native American mandala, a Japanese temple
bell, a Zuni animal necklace, a Virgin Mary from Ephesus, Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs. I
think they really helped.
But I really felt that too many books and films--even those of his own time--seemed to
dilute or glamorize Hitler as the Prince of Darkness, a symbol or caricature, someone from
another planet possessed by an inexplicable evil force, like Darth Vader. The Hitler who
emerged from my research was bone-chillingly real. I started by reading Hitler's writings
and speeches, and it soon became apparent that he was extremely clear about his goals from
the very beginning, goals that lead directly to the theme of my book. Hitler's chief goal
was nothing short of the transformation of the world along the lines of Norse-Teutonic
mythology, where the only salvation for Germanic superiority was to purify the bloodlines
and scourge the earth of the pollution of other races: Blood
and Soil. The Magic Circle asks us all to think about some key questions:
"What is pollution?" "What is purification? "What is catharsis?"
"What is transformation?"
How could
you write about Hitler and not really write about the war and the Holocaust?
So many people have written from their own experience about World War II and the
Holocaust, and written about these far better than I could. Also, I wanted to focus on the
parts that I felt were left out of the story. I particularly wanted to pay tribute to
those who are often overlooked or forgotten: the gypsies and others who were killed with
no political-religious agenda, but only because they were "different."
What do you hope your readers will take away from reading The
Magic Circle?
My books are designed to be experienced and enjoyed at many levels. What each reader takes
away from each book depends to a very large extent upon what he or she brings to it.
For instance, everybody can enjoy The Magic Circle without knowing anything about
mythology, nuclear energy, or the battle between the British and Russian empires to
control Central Asia--just as millions were able to read the love The Eight
without understanding the first thing about chess. But the more you know about any one
aspect of my books, the greater your appreciation will be of what's going on at a deeper
level.
Of course, I hope everyone will learn something from my books, gain fresh insights into
ideas and values, or be encouraged to think new thoughts. But I structure my books
purposefully to enable the reader to read them without working at it: to be able to go
through his or her own transformation process--a personal baptism in history and
mystery--and still have great fun at the same time.
How would you describe your audience?
I've personally met or corresponded with thousands of my readers. They range in age from
nine to ninety, and include children from Russia to Italy to Japan, chess grandmasters,
artists, Nobel laureates, high school and college students, esoterics--you name it. These
aren't groupies, but independent thinkers. If you had to find one thing in common, it
would probably be curiosity--the desire to learn and grow.
The Eight was such an unusual book that my publishers realized they would have to
create an audience for it from readers of other kinds of books--history, mystery, spy and
detective, ancient and modern, esoteric, science fiction, techno-thriller, romance, puzzle
novel, adventure novel, quest novel, and so on. It fit into no specific genre, but
incorporated elements of each. Now there's a group of people out there, all over the
world, who truly appreciate this kind of book.
Younger readers sometimes have a quicker take on what's happening in my books. They're
used to assimilating diverse information--sound bites, flipping channels. People who are
fixed on a large, slowly paced, novel might have trouble the first time through. One woman
I met told me she'd read The Eight seventeen times, because each time she felt
she went to another level and was enriched differently.
With The Magic Circle, if you flip around and try to read the end first, you're
only going to be confused. As I said, you get out of it what you bring to each
reading--even if it's just the desire for a good read.
Readers
often form strong bonds with your characters. How do the characters in The Magic
Circle compare to those in The Eight or A Calculated Risk?
I like Ariel Behn better than any of my previous heroines. She's more intelligent and at
the same time more vulnerable. She's my first heroine who doesn't necessarily need to have
a career, and also she's the first one to have a family--the rest, like Valentine and
Mireille in The Eight, are always orphaned at an early age.
Ariel's family is scattered all over the world--they meet her in various places in
critical parts of the story and reveal to her, little by little, the mystery behind the
mystery. For instance, there's her uncle Lafcadio, a world-class violinist in Vienna, and
his "companion," Bambi, a beautiful young cellist. Ariel's mother Jersey and
grandmother Pandora were both famous opera stars on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and
her aunt Zoe was a dancer in Paris and a protege of Isadora Duncan. And then there's
Lafcadio's valet, Volga Dragonoff, who reveals the mysterious secrets of his homeland
in Central Asia. I had enormous fun living with them all.
You've said that as a writer you go through a kind of
transformation as you work. Could you elaborate?
The process of writing The Magic Circle has transformed me by giving me a larger
perspective on the whole cycle of what has occurred on earth. I've become more altruistic
and committed to helping the earth and its life forms. I've been to the ancient
sites--Troy, Carthage, the home of the Virgin Mary in Ephesus, the home of the great
goddess in Central Anatolia--and I've begun to put in perspective how humans have
interacted with the planet for better or worse, these millennia. We've made mistakes and
terrific advances along the way in understanding life and the universe. Writing this book
helped me to see how we can develop our assets and cut our liabilities. It helped me to
see how everything is tied together. That's clearly the theme of the book: The World Knot.
As any fiction writer will tell you, writing itself is a transformation. At some point in
each book, you come to the realization that the author is not the person in charge, and
that things are happening that you didn't plan or expect. If you have command of the
material up front, the story, research, and characters, then you have to be able to let
go, let everything flow through you whether it's good or evil, let yourself dissolve a
little, as it does in the alchemical process. In The Magic Circle, I had planned
the period between the wars and the role of the god Dionysus. I didn't expect the Boer
War, or for Jesus to appear in person. I couldn't write the story of this century without
the Boer War which, as my heroine's uncle tells her, "first baptized our century in
blood." And Jesus sort of bumped Dionysus aside a little as if to say, "You
can't tell this story without me being there."
You can't write a book this complex if you're going to be a control freak or a nitpicker.
You have to let it evolve. My heroine expresses a lot of the feelings we have when we're
tackling a job this big. With THE MAGIC CIRCLE, I learned that I had to hang loose and
learn to dance on the waves--as Ariel finally gets to do at the end.
You've
spent much of your professional life involved with computers. How do you feel about them?
The Magic Circle is the first book I've written on a computer, and it confirmed
my worst fears of how much I would hate writing a book when I can't find where I've said
something. This probably explains why there is absolutely no high-tech material whatsoever
in The Magic Circle, as opposed to my other books. I got so frustrated with the
waste of paper, just printing things out trying to find them. . Ten years ago I had typed The
Eight on my IBM Selectric, and cut and pasted it together on the floor, so I knew if
the French Terror scene was over near the sofa. The biggest problem with
a computer is also the thing that makes it easy to use--the editing. I'd still prefer to
go back to sitting in a cafe in Paris and writing on a yellow pad.
What is your next project?
It's a story about painters, in the Elizabethan Renaissance. I've been a painter; I used
to support myself by portrait painting, though my goal was always to be a writer. But I
find it relaxing to paint while working on a long book; it lets me move my arms around and
think about absolutely nothing.
In my story I focus on three painters: Rubens, El Greco, and Caravaggio. The research for
this book was hampered at the beginning because I found that many art historians and
curators weren't really interested in the painters themselves--in their drives, in what
makes them paint, in the social history of art, external events that shaped the
individual. Often they're not even interested in the painter's techniques. Like
collectors, their interest seemed more focused on the provenance of a work.
I know a great many painters. Painters are far more driven than writers, or they wouldn't
be able to do it at all. Their paintings generally aren't worth anything until they're
dead, and they need patrons--today these are galleries and museums--just in order to stay
alive. Painters are very private people who work inside their heads, like fiction writers.
A number of them are unpleasant and antisocial. When I've interviewed painters for this
book, they always asked if I was going to say what I think drives them. When I tell them I
believe it is "passion," they always smile. That's the story I hope to tell in
my next book.
How will your new book fit in with your other books?
Ancient philosophers believed that there were four primary elements, from which all other
matter was created: earth, air, fire, and water. A Calculated Risk was my earth
book, dealing with finances and banking, the material world. The Eight was my air
or spirit book. The Magic Circle is my water book, about the age of pouring out,
the transformation from the Age of Pisces the Fish and the transformation to the Age of
Aquarius whose symbol is the water bearer. And my next book, about the passion of art,
will be my fire book.