They were silent for a long moment, thinking, feeling the weight of the, millennia weighing on them. Zoe broke the spell.

“What are the leaves and snakes on the border?”

“A gutsy statement by the artist,” Thalia said. “Blasphemy if I read it correctly.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s the artist’s statement that the powers that were couldn’t entirely get rid of the Great Goddess. The serpent and leaf of the sycamore fig—that’s what that is”—Thalia pointed to the stone—”are two of the most potent symbols of the Great Goddess. That’s why the authors of Genesis represented Satan as a snake—they were saying the Great Goddess was evil. They had to make her look as bad as possible so that they could close her temples and forbid her worship.”

“Spin control.”

“More like wagging the dog,” Thalia said. “The sycamore fig was her temple, which is why you see the Prophets of the Torah railing against the altars under the trees. This is where people went to worship the Great Goddess even after Yahweh was the official deity of the land. Worship and communion involved eating the fruit of the sycamore fig—fruit that was more like clusters of grapes than the figs we usually think of. When the devout ate the fruit, they were partaking of the body of the Goddess.”

“Roots of the Christian communion?”

Thalia nodded. “Just one of many tilings that Christianity and Judaism borrowed from the past Incorporate enough of the old, forbidden religion to satisfy people’s cravings for it… co-opt and conquer, only the Great Goddess has had the last laugh.”

“How’s that?”

“She was transmuted by the Greeks into Cybele and Artemis. But even after Constantine decreed an end to Goddess worship throughout his empire, the faithful simply converted those Goddess shrines into places to worship the Virgin Mary. This is one of the things that scares the old schnorrers in the Vatican. They know without a doubt that veneration of Mary is just thinly disguised Goddess worship.

“That’s also the reason the Romans and my people had to kill the man Jesus. He believed in women as equals; the Jewish and Christian Gnostics saw God as both male and female; the Essenes who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls also believed that God was both man and woman. They couldn’t even censor all the old religious scriptures to their liking. The Book of Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon are pretty clear when they refer to Wisdom as female. ‘Sophia’ is the Greek word for wisdom.”

“Sophia?” Zoe felt her heart catch; a frisson of excitement electrified her skin. “I think maybe she was another Messiah.”

“I know she was,” Thalia said. “I’ve listened to our Mafia buddies talking about what their real goal was at Kreuzlingen.”

“Oh my God,” Zoe whispered softly. “It all fits.”

Thalia nodded. “I think the conference at Nicea was really as much about Sophia as Christ. The orthodox Christians had changed ‘Wisdom’ to the male word, ‘Logos.’ The real fight, the real heretics were those who argued that the church should return to its roots—to Sophia and not Logos—and acknowledge that she was an original and inseparable part of the Creator. They argued that it was wrong to try and restrict God to one sex or one form or as the God of just one people. They said this set a human limit on the limitless and that was blasphemy.”