“What’s wrong?” Kay felt that her husband was inordinately quiet. Something was obviously bothering him.

He was quiet for a moment, as if considering whether to say anything.

“You know when I said that Sanat Kumar hated women, never loved and never married?”

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid that I later thought of something that contradicts that. I think he actually did marry, in his own way”.

“What do you mean, in his own way? How many ways are there?”, she smiled weakly.

“I think we even saw his wife, or at least what goes for wife in his head”, he frowned darkly, and she saw the muscles of his jaw harden. “It’s Anthea”.

Kay’s mouth opened, and she reflexively put her hands in front of her face as tears streaked it in silent shock.

Zee nodded gravely.

“Yes, the broken angel, whom he enslaved, tortured and ordered to be repeatedly raped and then beaten until she miscarried, and then he fed her aborted fetuses to the dogs, and repeated the process until she was his willing slave, obedient, terrified and completely, irrecoverably insane. That’s the relationship he wanted to establish with a woman, and considering how she is bound to him, I think it’s the closest to her being his wife”.

Kay looked at him with red eyes wide open in horror, silently mouthing a word.

“Why? Because that’s who he is. People think I was joking or exaggerating when I described how much it shocked me to look inside his mind and truly know him. That’s what he truly is, in his heart of hearts. He’s someone who wants to have a wife so that he can have a broken, tortured, serially raped slave with a destroyed soul, who calls him ‘Master’ and pisses herself when he makes a sudden movement”.

“People are starting to treat his world as a legitimate place for spiritual evolution, a place where you go when you want to speed things up in your evolution, purposefully reincarnating there, sometimes with excellent results, but they don’t know who they are dealing with. He may be putting on an act in order to evade punishment. It may even be God’s will to allow him to do what he’s doing for a while because it serves a legitimate purpose. However…”, he shrugged, looking his wife straight in the eyes.

“Others should know”, she managed to use words finally. “They should know what monster they are dealing with”.

“Lord Shiva knows”, Zee nodded. “I think he got it when the bastard tried to buy Berfrid’s soul by starving his family to death, so that he could tear it apart and use it as bait to destroy more souls; I never saw him that angry, not even when he killed people. I think he, too, is keeping that knowledge to himself, because there’s no point in alarming people. When I see how you took it, I wonder if I should have told you anything at all. We would just traumatise them, and they wouldn’t do anything differently anyway. But I wanted you to know what I think because you’re my wife and I have no secrets with you”, he managed a smile.

“Thank you. It’s horrible beyond measure, but thank you for telling me”, she nodded. “I needed to know, so that when Father tears him to pieces as he promised, not a single thought of compassion would go through my mind”.

He hugged her and kissed her hair. “Let’s go comfort and teach people”.

“The disease itself is literally the same as the Plague of Justinian. It is a microscopic organism that lives in fleas that live on rats. It congests the flea’s digestive tract, making it starve. A starving flea desperately tries to feed and attacks and infects everything, including humans. The disease then continues to spread among the humans. Low levels of hygiene contribute to the disease starting, but after it gains momentum, the epidemic essentially just burns through towns and villages, creating secondary effects of starvation, as dead and dying people can’t farm, and the societal structure collapses; children die as their parents are no longer here to provide for them and so on. Tens of millions dead within a few years. It completely overwhelmed our Judges, and I am sorry to have thought of controlling Time as to ease their burden far too late in the process, and they are now all burned out and in dire need of rest. Fortunately, as I slowed the process to a trickle, the angels are dealing with all of it now without issues”, Lady Kay nodded, obviously not very pleased with herself.

“It’s not your fault, daughter. We were all caught by surprise”, Goddess Lakshmi smiled. “It is as if Satan made a sudden decision and implemented it instantly”.

“But why?”, Augustine rubbed his forehead. “I understand why he wanted to break the inertia of Rome and Greece’s intellectual heritage and shroud Christianity in darkness before it had the time to properly find itself. Is this something similar?”

“We think so”, Lady Hypatia answered, obviously exhausted to the point of slurring words. “Christianity was reunited with the ancient libraries of Antiquity, that found their way to Europe through various trade routes. The process would have eventually produced the same results he successfully worked to prevent with the plague of Justinian and other calamities that preceded it. We had so many wonderful holy people in Europe; your Divine wife one of them”, she smiled to the blushing Lady Hildegard. “Many new wonderful angels, beautiful in ways we haven’t seen before. It was starting to be a golden age of God-awareness and piety, and it was quite balanced between men and women, which is a rare thing. And now, a terrible darkness came. People are blaming the Church for the plague, although it bears no fault. Priests have been struck disproportionately, as they have been aiding the sick and contracting the sickness themselves. People are turning to all sorts of superstition and sorcery to aid them. The older, wiser and more educated people are struck disproportionately, as they are old and their immunity can’t deal with the sickness as well, so wisdom is removed from the Earth. Again, people pray to God for help, and feel betrayed as they and their loved ones die; Satan again uses the misapprehension that is spread by the monotheistic religions such as Christianity, that God is the supreme ruler of Earth, which spiritually harms people as they see abundant evidence to the contrary. The spiritual aftermath of this calamity exceeds the physical one”, she concluded.

“First things first”, Lord Vishnu smiled and turned his sight inwards. Deep spiritual light enveloped the Judges present, and all their weariness and troubles were taken away. “I am sorry for your suffering, brothers and sisters. We missed the important developments, and you were left to suffer for our mistakes. As always, you saved the day and I thank you”, he bowed at them, and everybody else joined him.

“Now let us return to the matter at hand. This is the second time that Satan saw that things are going too well, and he reset the board. Judging by past experience, this means he already has something in preparation, that wouldn’t be as successful if it had the continued intellectual tradition of Europe to contend with. It is for us to discover what it may be, and how to counter it”, he smiled.

“I think I have a pretty good idea”, Bernard Gui whispered, more to himself.

“Please, Inquisitor; you are here because we value your insight. Tell us what you think”, Vishnu nodded in encouragement.

“I’ve seen the Cathari. It is as if their beliefs and theology were completely secondary, and the primary thing about them is satanic defiance and arrogance. They acted as if they had the holy light of truth, and the Church was an evil satanic thing merely because it was in power. They wanted to tear everything down, as if that alone will make everything better, and they lied and counterfeited history as was to their liking. I think we are going to see more of that in the future. Not of the Cathari, because they seem to be a finished story, but I have seen many examples of this revolutionary defiance and arrogance, both in the Church and outside it, and it always felt as if Satan himself was looking at me through the eyes of those people, and they looked maddened, as if under influence of some evil spirit or a drug, like sick men under a fever that influences the brain adversely. I am a newcomer here, but due to the nature of my job I faced all kinds of people accused of vile spiritual crimes, so it is likely that I am more familiar with this phenomenon than anyone else, save perhaps for the honourable Judges present”, he bowed.

“The attractors”, Azazel nodded to himself, and his wife nodded in assent. “Now we know how they manifest in practice”.

“Excuse me?”, Bernard was confused.

“Satan was buying souls of the incarnate angelic beings whom he placed in terrible situations, for instance he had their families starve, and offered to help if the angel sold him his soul. He then used those souls as sources of true spiritual light, placed in evil places within the world, so that they would attract souls like beacons, and lure them into desolate places of ruin”, Zina, now glowing with an inner light, and free from all weariness, smiled at him blissfully.

“That is absolutely vile. And yet, quite what one would expect of Satan”, Bernard shivered. “So you think he is powering all sorts of evil, starting with the Albigensian heretics, but not limited to them?”

“In a word, yes. However, it is a very general assessment, and it would be of great use if we could constrain it somewhat”, she confirmed.

“He hates women”, Azazel was scratching his chin. “He never loved, he never married, and I’ve seen his actions in the world. Whenever someone really hates women, and manifests this hatred and contempt in ways Cyril’s criminal mob manifested it against holy Lady Hypatia, or the way priests of Baal and Muslims treat women, you can always see his finger there. I think an increase in number of holy women in the Church, who were respected, admired and venerated, drove him insane and he wanted to put a stop to it”.

“Does he hate women as such, or merely the concept of male-female harmony and happiness?”, wondered Buddha.

“Hard to tell. He was always insane and hated everybody, and was full of malice. But about women, he always wanted to ‘put them in their place’, by which he meant enslavement, humiliation, rape, beatings and murder”, Azazel shivered from his recollection. “I regret not killing him then. Had I done so, many evils would have been prevented”.

“And many good things as well”, Zina smiled. “It is good that you didn’t, because had you done so, I would still have been a nasty demoness, thinking of what vile prank to pull on some innocent person, in my spiritual misery”.

“And humans seem to find it very easy to learn hatred and resentment, against any conceivable target”, Kay noted. “But oppressing the opposite gender that is meant to lead them to God by giving them the freedom and opportunity to love, that seems to be vile even for their standards”, she shrugged, as all nodded in assent.

“It can’t be just his contempt for holy women”, Hypatia noted. “It has to be a wider thing, connected with the strengthening of his attractors and his failure with the Cathari. Some evil thing against women is sure to be part of it, but it can’t be the whole plan”, she went on. “Let’s see what I would have done if I wanted to create a mechanism that will divert souls from God and towards something pointless, destructive and evil. The Church stands in the way; flawed as it is, it routinely leads souls to salvation and spiritual advancement, and as such it is his enemy on Earth. He will certainly work on weakening, sidelining and corrupting it. This is something we can take for granted. Furthermore, he will want to introduce alternatives. Dissent within the Church, of the kind similar to the split between Rome and Constantinople. Dissent always works in his favour because people work against each other instead of towards God. Prejudice, resurgence of paganism, worship of matter instead of spirit, involvement with the material things in pointless endeavours. If I were him, I’d put an attractor there, towards the matter, making it shine brightly so that people make it a false deity. Treat spiritual things as mere figments of imagination rather than the true reality that it is. Make reasons for people to hate each other; all kinds of groups for all kinds of reasons. Make them desire material things enough to hate and murder one another. Make them see each other as enemies rather than brothers and sisters. And, of course, his hatred of women and marital harmony will surely find its place in the context of all this”, she waved her head in dismay.

“I can’t find error in your thinking, beloved sister, and this troubles me greatly, for it means we are going to see an age of unprecedented darkness, where the darkest evils will be illuminated by the true light of murdered angels, to serve as beacons that will lure others into ruin”, Augustine lamented.

“I also agree with Lady Hypatia’s analysis”, Azazel nodded. “And I share Lord Augustine’s dismay, as we are sure to witness terrible things in the future”.

“I think we now know enough to plan for it”, Vishnu nodded. “I am grateful for all your contributions, for they were indeed insightful and wise. And now, we must heal the immediate wounds he inflicted, as there are tens of millions of souls who suffered and died there, and who will have all sorts of misplaced resentments that will fester unless we heal them with true knowledge and compassionate kindness”.

“All the Gods volunteering for healing and teaching sessions in the orchard until this is resolved?”, Lord Shiva raised an eyebrow.

“Indeed”, Lady Lakshmi confirmed, and all others nodded in assent. “The Judges and their angels will remain busy with the incoming, but the rest of us are on teaching and healing duty until further notice”.

“Good morning, Inquisitor”, a man holding a cup of a steaming beverage approached Bernard.

“Good morning to you too, Meister Eckhart”, he bowed. “Although ‘morning’ doesn’t seem to mean much in these realms”.

“You know, I feared we would exchange those greetings somewhere in France, under less pleasant circumstances”, Eckhart laughed. “Fortunately, I managed to die before the Inquisition managed to find something on me”.

“From what I heard, it was mostly political nonsense and very far removed from the actual heresy I had to deal with”, Bernard gestured apologetically. “What was it even, some uneducated cleric not understanding Scripture well enough, and coming after you in consternation when they saw you quote it?”

“Something very much along those lines, yes”, Eckhart nodded. “The problem with being a theologian is that every semi-literate dunce thinks he’s one, as well. Especially the Bishops and Cardinals”, he giggled. “May God be my witness, some of them don’t look like they have actually read the Bible since they left the seminary”.

“So, how does your theology survive this place?”, Bernard pointed around them. “Mine lies in ruins somewhere in the reception room”, he laughed.

“Mine is keeping yours company”, Eckhard snickered. “Along with, I suspect, everybody else’s”.

“Oh, they fared quite well, I hear”, Bernard pointed at the far end of the orchard, where the Buddhists were teaching. “The Christian theologians are mostly recovering from shock. The Muslim theologians are looking for their promised virgins. The Hindu theologians can’t agree on what the word ‘Hindu’ even means”, he smiled. “Who was your Judge?”

“Lord Buddha. Now, that was a shock”, Eckhart grinned. “I expected things on the higher planes to simplify; essentially, God turns out to be everything, other things turn out to be a mirage that vanishes. Not exactly how it works in reality, as I found out”.

“I met his holy wife, Lady Zina. My expectation was that I would be punished for theological error, the way I punished others; that would have been fair, for Christ said we shall be measured by the same measure we use on others. Imagine my surprise when she just shrugged all that off, and focused on my true intent, and mostly just explained things. I would say I fell in love with her by the end of it, but I wouldn’t want her husband to take offence”, he smiled.

“Nobody here cares much for theology, in a sense that it matters much what ideas we use to describe things that are true. But falsehoods and deceit are completely absent. Everybody is straightforward: they look at what is true and they say it as they see it. It is very refreshing after Avignon”, Echkart sighed.

“I still haven’t met Magdalena, Christ’s wife. I hear she spends all of her time with Christ’s parents, meditating, as their consciousness is so vast, she finds the experience addictive”.

“I can’t even imagine what that must feel like, but I don’t blame her. I would spend all of my time around Christ, but I don’t want to annoy him”, Eckhart mused. “But it’s the differences between the Gods that I find stunning. Buddha, for instance, is completely different from someone like Karuna, or, for that matter, Augustine. But they feel like different ways to perceive God. The Greeks expected things to get simpler and yet more powerful as you go up in the heavenly realms, and we took that expectation from them. They certainly grow more powerful, I’ll give them that. But it is the diversity of perfections that stuns me. I could look at them whole day and never get tired. I always expected there to be only one way to be God, and I would try to see all sorts of perfections in one person, but the thing is, most of those perfections sort of negate each other. It’s like carriages – it is either fast, or it fits many people. You can’t have it both at the same time. An ox is strong, but a horse is fast, and a swan flies to great distances. The Gods seem to be like that – split into dozens of different perfect combinations of qualities, and when you see one, you can’t imagine anything being better, and then you see their brother or sister and you see a different perfection. I tell you, I could go on about this until the sun goes down, and since here it apparently never does, that would be a long time indeed”, he snickered.

“Something seems to be going on”, Bernard was suddenly serious. “The number of people here seems to be increasing. And by quite a lot, from what I can gather”.

“Are they dying suddenly in great numbers?”, Eckhard scratched his neck. “This can’t be good”.

“Lady Zina!”, Bernard Gui stood up and bowed to the woman approaching them. “What’s wrong?”, he looked at her in alarm, as she looked weary and exhausted.

“Bernard, it’s nice to see you again. And you must be Meister Eckhart?”, she curtsied and smiled weakly, as the other man bowed.

“A great plague has struck Europe; the same if not worse than the one under Justinian, that ended the ancient world. I suspect the number of holy people in Europe recently was too great for Satan to bear, and he kneed the chess board again”, she shrugged.

“You must be flooded by the recently deceased”, Bernard observed the signs of mental exhaustion on the Goddess. “Can we help you in any way?”

“Thank you for the offer”, she smiled. “I have multiple legions of angels assisting already, and they are all busy. I’m afraid I overestimated my abilities and didn’t ask for help until very late in this deluge of souls, which is why I now had to take my leave and recover. Meister Eckhart, please, assist and guide the newcomers to the best of your abilities, because they will need instruction. Bernard, I must ask you to join me in the war room. You have extensive experience with the Cathari, and I’m afraid Satan is going to make his next move along those lines soon. If I am to judge by what happened the last time I had such a plague on my watch, this is likely going to be the end of Christian Europe”.

“So, my friend, what has been the most shocking for you here so far?”, Paul sat by Bernard’s side and offered him a cup of coffee.

“Thanks, Apostle”, the man nodded. “Most shocking? I don’t know where to even begin”, he gestured. “Probably multiple persons of God. I’m still trying to get my head around that. Not just that there are more than three, but that new ones can be born when existing souls reach their final stage of evolution. The concept that one can become God sounds outright satanic, until you remember that Christ urged us to do just that, but we seem to have swept that part under the rug because we didn’t know how to interpret it”.

“The next thing are the women”, he waved his head. “The fact that women can be very holy and smart was always completely normal and expected to me. But that you can have female persons of God, that was a shock, because when one says ‘Goddess’, the first association are the Pagan deities – Artemis, Isis, Venus and so on; you would expect some fertility deity of nature surrounded by Satyrs and bunny rabbits, and similar heathen nonsense. But no, they are nothing like that. The first person I met here was Lady Zina. May the Lord forgive me, the first idea I had was that she’s someone’s assistant. But when I understood who she is, I expected the worst – a non-Christian woman is going to get her payback on an inquisitor who burns witches on a stake and whatever nonsense Pagan enemies of the Church are spreading whenever we have to punish some woman who practiced actual witchcraft, gave someone a preparation brewed from toxic herbs and toads, and the person got possessed by demons or died. So, I expected Artemis to get her payback and send me to hell. Instead, she was incredibly righteous, her account of the facts was superb, and she interpreted them all in my favour, as if she were my own attorney, and not the judge. She behaved as if it was her goal to save me, teach me, comfort me, and she even told me stories from her own life on Earth, somewhere in the early Genesis, thousands of years before Babylon was a thing, if you can believe it. She even said that Adam and Eve are a metaphor for her first group of souls that inhabited human bodies on Earth, and I believed her. Instead of being vengeful, she was just, kind, and her judgment was the most charitable and in my favour. May God forgive me, but by the end of it, I loved her as much as I love Christ himself, and since she sent me to him and I actually talked to him in person, I know what I’m talking about. He asked me about my impressions of her and I told him the truth, that she is nothing how I would have imagined a female deity, but every much as I would have imagined him, and he nodded, praising her greatly. Let me tell you, everything in the Bible about how God is jealous, I expected to see it, but they love each other so deeply, it melts my heart as I see it. He told me that the part about the jealous God is about worshipping Satan and all other unworthy things, such as the made up Gods or nature, not worshipping other persons of the One True God”, he ended the tirade with a sigh and a smile.

“Did he tell you about his wife?”, Paul snickered.

“He did, but at that point, after all that I’ve seen, that part actually felt normal”, Bernard laughed. “What actually still shocks me is how the Gods are with each other”, he mused. “They are innocent like small children, and yet there is such wisdom and power in their eyes that I just stand there like a fool and can’t get my thoughts to move. One would expect them to be strict and stern, but they feel like family members who know each other for eternity, and yet every time they see each other they react with such deep joy, as if a brother and sister who see each other for the first time after being apart for years. It’s a wonder to witness. It feels absolutely pure and innocent, and yet, God forgive me, more intimate than sexual intercourse. When I was with Jesus, Lord Buddha came by and brought us coffee. The way those two greeted each other felt like diving straight into the deep mind of God, and yet they just greeted each other in passing. I read the books of Marco Polo about Buddhism in China, and I imagined that it must be some religion much inferior to our belief in Christ, but when I saw those two, I understood that I know nothing about God”.

“Want to hear some gossip?”, Paul grinned a lopsided grin of mischef.

“?”

“Augustine became a God just recently”, Paul nodded.

“St. Augustine?”, Bernard’s jaw dropped.

“Indeed. He used to sit here with me, brooding, as you do now. Then he met his wife again, the one he wrote about and regretted leaving in ‘Confessiones’. She remained celibate in that life and three more that followed, spiritually evolving so that she could be his true match. They are inseparable now”, he smiled. “I miss our talks, though”.

“Somehow, I’m not surprised; the Goddesses are incredible. Soft as feathers and virtuous and powerful as Christ. I’ve never seen anything like it”, Bernard shrugged. “Who is the Lady?”

“You might even know her, she was quite famous. It’s Hildegard of Bingen”.

“Of course I know her. Of her, at least. She wrote excellent music and interesting books. Incredibly virtuous and holy person of bright intelligence”, he nodded. “And you say she saved herself for him through all those lives and centuries?”

“Yes. She said she found her man, and until she could be with him properly, no other man had any appeal”.

“This is such a high standard for loyalty, chastity and faith, that I stand wordless. And is she a Goddess too? If not, she ought to be, because what you are telling me is amazing”, he was stunned.

“She is. Apparently, souls become Gods in couples. No single man, or single woman, can become a God or a Goddess. It’s always a couple of perfect souls who love each other perfectly”, Paul explained.

“Be perfect as your Heavenly Father”, Bernard quoted.

“Indeed”, the Apostle nodded. “Augustine told me that his heart stopped when he sent her away, all those centuries ago, and he couldn’t make any true spiritual progress since. And when they were reunited, they both attained perfection almost instantaneously”.

“We really messed up with celibacy, didn’t we?”, Bernard nodded in dismay.

“I’m not sure about that. We’re talking about really perfect souls here, great holy people in their own right, capable of incredibly strong and pure love that is of God, and when they meet their counterpart, Divine magic happens. But ordinary people, they are more likely to be just male and female fools, doing foolish things each in their own worldly ways, making life difficult for each other. It might be better to be celibate and hone your spirituality in solitude until you are ready for this Divine form of love that makes you a brother or sister of Christ, than to lose yourself in the quagmire of worldly nonsense. That, at least, is what I am telling myself”, Paul shrugged.

“You are probably right. I would prefer staying celibate to being married to a worldly woman. But when I see those perfect, godly women, I am amazed at their perfection. It’s like seeing a female Christ, and not just one, but several different ones, all perfect in their own right. I can’t imagine myself being married to a woman like that, because I’m not worthy. But I want to be”, Bernard nodded. “It is a thing to aspire toward, because I can’t think of a more worthy goal”.

“There is a good thing about worldly marriage in a lesser standard of love”, Paul nodded. “You get to practice. Learn how to be with a woman, learn how one thinks and feels, how to help her and be a man for her. As a celibate, you are unlikely to learn any of it, and as such, you won’t know how to be with a woman, or develop spiritual features this requires. Sure, it’s unlikely that your wife on Earth and yourself are to develop the deepest form of love, like Christ and Magdalena, or Buddha and Zina, but it is going to be vastly better than lusting after boys, as pederasts do. Practice will show you both right and wrong ways, so that you can learn and improve”.

“You are indeed wise, Apostle”, Bernard nodded.

“Not as wise as Augustine, regretfully”, Paul smiled his lopsided grin.

“May God almighty have mercy on me, for I am a sinner”, a man mumbled.

“We’ll see what we can do about that”, Lady Zina smiled.

“I am Bernard Gui, my Lady. Could you please tell me where I am and what is going on? I see that I died, and this seems to be a place of judgment. Are you here to take me before a judge?”, he asked politely.

“No; I am to be your judge, Inquisitor. My name is Zina”, she curtsied.

“I see. Have you been appointed to this duty by our Lord Jesus Christ?”, he inquired.

“No, I have not. In fact, I have been on this duty for almost five hundred years before Christ was born”, she smiled. “I was appointed to this duty by his Father”, she smiled again.

“Are you not a Christian?”, he was shocked.

“I’m afraid things are not quite the way you expect them to be, Inquisitor. Just think about it: I was appointed to this duty somewhere around the time when Socrates was born. I achieved apotheosis soon after I met my husband, the Buddha, which was soon after that. You can think of me as Christ’s older sister, if that pleases you, although I am no more Christian than he is a Zinian”, she laughed. “If that makes you happy, you can look into me and ask to identify me”.

“Lady Zina, Person of God, Judge of Karma, the Love of God?”, he was shocked. “Your title is ‘Love of God’? You are a Person of God, like Father, Son and the Holy Spirit?”

“I am indeed”, she nodded.

“I sincerely apologise for questioning you, my Lady, but I don’t know what to think at this point”, the man appeared to be in shock. “On Earth, I was in charge of establishing orthodoxy and eliminating heresy, and yet if one on Earth happened to profess belief in any of what I am now seeing, I would have condemned them. And now, I am afraid it is my turn to be condemned, for I was obviously ignorant and in the wrong”, he mumbled, very much disturbed. “What have I even done?”

“Oh please, Bernard, let us dispense with judgmental and radical thinking and first establish the facts. I am not known as the ‘Love of God’ because I’m a judgmental person. None of us Judges are, despite what our title might make you believe. We are here to teach you, to inform you, to go through your past life with you objectively and see what lessons may be learned from it. Only in the most dire cases do we actually condemn souls to hell, and if you had witnessed those cases, I am sure you would agree with me that it would be a greater evil to let them roam among the normal souls, than to sequester them into a place where they can do no harm”.

“I am at your mercy, my Lady”, the man bowed humbly, obviously experiencing grave moments.

“Let me take a look at your life. You were known as a fair, pious and intelligent man with good political connections within the Church, and as such you were appointed an Inquisitor to deal with the Albigensian heretical uprising, also known as the Cathari. This was done as to ferret out the true heretics from the seduced and mostly ignorant general populace of the region, so that the true ringleaders and ideological heads of the movements could be isolated and condemned, and their seduced, ignorant and foolish followers converted back to orthodoxy. During the Albigensian crusade, many terrible slaughters were committed, starting with the one in Béziers, under the motto that went somewhere along the lines of ‘kill them all, and let God sort them out’, am I right?”, she smiled.

“It was ‘Kill them all! God will know his own’, my Lady, but your account of the facts is otherwise perfect”, the man nodded in assent.

“So, over twenty thousand people were killed in Béziers alone. Also, hundreds of men and women were burned at the stake, being stubborn Cathari ideologues, and the entire population was contaminated by this ideology, which had terrible consequences for public morality, as their ethical teaching was terrible; they were essentially allowed to do as they willed, resorting to murder, plunder and rape, they could lie as much as they wanted, and terrible things happened regularly where they were in power. The Church desired to weed out the heresy itself, but bring as much people back into the folds of the Church, and they appointed you to implement this intent. They were also intoxicated with arrogance and acted as if mad. Am I correct?”

“You are, my Lady”, he nodded.

“And so, after almost a thousand court proceedings, you condemned forty five or so hardened heretics to be burned at the stake, and prescribed penance or imprisonment for the rest who were found guilty, and the result of your work was that you successfully exterminated the Cathari infestation from the Languedoc region. Am I correct?”, she smiled at the obviously concerned man.

“Yes, you are. Your account of the events is faultless”, he nodded in expectation of punishment.

“Your efforts in establishing the Catholic orthodoxy in the region were an unqualified success, and your approach to justice was very mild, considering the numbers I mentioned before your acceptance of the inquisitorial role. Truly, one less reasonable and moderate than yourself could have easily condemned thousands more, and one could still find scarce reasons to blame him. Still, you accomplished your task, and this satanic insurgency was quenched”, she bowed.

“Wait; am I to understand that you support the position of the Church regarding those heretics?”, his eyes opened wide.

“I understand that the Church, for its many flaws, was a factor of reason, order and virtue compared to the Cathari, who were a truly Satanic infestation. Had they spread and overtaken Europe, it would have been a regression into a yet unseen darkness”, she confirmed. “This doesn’t mean that I fully support the position of the Church in everything. You will see later that its teaching leaves much to be desired. However, souls are not condemned or saved based on the correctness of their belief, but on the purity of their hearts and kindness and virtue of their deeds. If you remember, my brother Christ commanded his disciples to love each other as he loved them. The philosophical and theological content of his teaching was quite superficial, and essentially stated that one should obey the Law sincerely, and not hypocritically. His teaching was so thin philosophically, that the early Christian theologians adopted the philosophical views of the Neoplatonists, and later Aristotle, for there were none to speak of in the original teaching. So, it would be foolish to expect God to condemn people based on something Christ himself didn’t care to teach properly”, she smiled. “The reason why I condemn the Cathari isn’t their teaching. Were it but for that, their teaching would have in fact been closer to the factual state of things than the official Christian one. No; they are condemned because of their immorality, and for the fact that they embraced the satanic urges of arrogance and madness. Contrary to them, you behaved with reason and kindness, and tried to save as many people as you possibly could, without releasing such obvious madmen that it would have been a greater abomination to free them than it was to burn them”, she nodded.

“But my Lady, I condemned people because they adhered to a wrong belief, whilst I myself adhered to a wrong belief, merely a different one. Surely I deserve the same fate as those I condemned?”, he wondered.

“This is not how I choose to look at it. The way I see it, all beliefs are somewhat wrong; some more than others. In the long years of my service, I have seen perfectly holy people who adhered to beliefs that were almost completely wrong and evil; on the other hand, I have seen vile and corrupt people who adhered to beliefs that were technically quite correct. It is not belief that I condemn or absolve souls for, and neither did you. You did not condemn the heretics because they were heretics, but because they were immoral, vile, arrogant and satanic, and would have turned the world into a hellish nightmare, if unopposed. The reason why we Judges exist is the same. We need to filter out the evil souls, so that the normal ones might live in peace. We also have many separate locations for souls of different origins and character, so that they wouldn’t confuse each other and interfere with each others’ paths towards God. Don’t think that we separate people into good Christians and those who are condemned to hell. In fact, I have condemned many ‘good Christians’ to hell, because their souls were cruel and satanic in their nature, and in the choices they made in life. On the other hand, a vast number of non-Christians were good souls who in fact followed Christ’s teaching about love and kindness”, she pointed out. “My husband the Buddha, for instance, was the first great teacher of the world, and his success was an inspiration to Father to send Christ to improve upon his mission and designs. Lady Hypatia of Alexandria, as another example, is also a fellow Judge and a Person of God, a sister of Christ and our good friend. The fact that the Cathari were heretics in the eyes of the Church has absolutely no bearing on my judgment. The fact that they were attached to the satanic attractor, drunk with arrogance, and that their consciousness and actions were for the most part terrible, does”, she nodded seriously. “However, if you look at your personal feelings, you condemned the heretics based on the fact that they were vile, terrible people, who stunk of satanic defiance. Those who were not bad usually reacted well to your invitation to repent and embrace orthodoxy, am I right?”

“I see what you mean, my Lady”, he nodded. “I would not have put it in those terms during my life on Earth, but the moral quality of one’s life was indeed my main criterion of guidance, because I thought that those who are irredeemable have the air of Satan around them; proud, spiteful and full of madness and evil, while those who are merely confused and seduced react well to reason and virtue, and have modesty and humility to them”, he nodded. “But am I to understand that you do not condemn me?”

“Indeed, I do not. I am very much as you were – trying to teach and guide, to show souls light, truth and love of God, rather than find fault that would justify condemnation, for it is God’s will that souls find Him and love Him, and the will of Satan is for souls to be condemned and lost. I am appointed to this duty by God, and not Satan, which is why I try to teach and save, rather than condemn. I condemn only those who embraced Satan and evil to such a degree, that it would be a sin against the loving and truthful nature of God to absolve them”, the Goddess smiled angelically at the profoundly relieved man.

“But I must beg you to teach me, for I see that I am very much in the dark. Honestly, as I saw how things here greatly differ from all that I would have expected, I had darkest thoughts about my fate, and yet, you truly justify your title of Love of God, for I feel God’s love from you. You say you are Christ’s sister?”, he smiled.

“Indeed. He and I know and love each other ever since his resurrection, and I have served his Father for many centuries before. Truly, the earliest parts of the Bible have been at play in the time of my life on Earth, as it was before Assyria and Babylon. I was one of the first souls to come back from Earth, after it was first created”, she reminisced, as shivers went up Bernard’s neck, in understanding how ancient the holy woman before him truly is.

“Does this mean you are one of the ancients of the Old Testament?”, he wondered.

“I am their contemporary”, she nodded. “I was not someone of historical importance, merely a loving mother and a wife whose family was brutally slaughtered by bandits, and I was murdered as I tried to stop them as they were taking turns raping my poor daughter. I arrived here where you stand, but in such a terrible emotional state that I would have died, save for the mercy of my Mother, Lady Shakti, who healed my dying soul with her love and compassion, and I remain forever her loving daughter”, she smiled.

“I am sorry for the pain you suffered, my Lady”, Bernard’s eyes were wide.

“Those were cruel times, and it was very, very long ago”, she nodded slowly. “But, as you can see, I am ancient by your standards. To me, Rome was yesterday, and Carthage a day before. Ashurnasirpal was the first of our ancient terrors. And I was among the first fools who accepted Satan’s invitation to be born in that vile world, and suffered terribly as a result”, she concluded.

“You were there immediately after Adam and Eve?”, his eyes were wide in wonder.

“Adam and Eve were a metaphor for the first souls who were deluded by Satan to ‘eat fruits from the tree of telling good from evil’, because he promised that we will become Gods. Since I’m one of the first, you can rightly say that I was Eve”, she smiled. “I am an ancient fool; but fortunately, by the grace of God, I learned to love deeply and purely in my earthly life, and was saved. Later, I loved my Mother and my husband so much, that I truly attained apotheosis, becoming like Christ in my inner nature, somewhere around the times of Socrates and Plato”, she smiled an ancient smile.

“My Lady, I only now begin to understand what an incredible honour it was to have been assigned to your tender mercy”, he bowed deeply.

“I will now send you to my brother, Christ, to teach you the full truth about the world, because there is more, and yet our work here is done”, she curtsied with a blessed smile, and the man was gone.