The Savior at the End of Time

By Dionesia Rapposelli

In The Savior at the End of Time, the third in the Sorcerers and Magi series, Chaos Magic meets Jesus Christ Superstar. The Savior at the End of Time is a veiled take on the Christ-story in which the unassuming and disheveled but oddly charismatic iconoclast, Professor Aurelio Zosimo, introduced in book one, is haplessly rendered into a new messiah for the Lions of Light agenda and the “Immanentization of the Eschaton.” The novel references the post-modern magical counterculture current of Chaos Magic. In this installment of the series, Leo de Lux and Sofia La Maga are at odds about their designs regarding Aurelio Zosimo. Both find themselves in over their heads as plot line of the series progresses toward an apocalyptic showdown and the revelation of portentous secrets. Magical fantasy is woven with insights from Eastern mysticism and the Western mystery tradition. The series offers thought-provoking ideas about self and finding oneself and one’s true purpose and is geared to adult fiction readers drawn to magic, mysticism, and spirituality. A hidden gem that not only entertains but enlightens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dionesia Rapposelli
• Release date: Jul 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311248145

Dionesia Rapposelli

Dionesia Rapposelli is a professional medical writer/editor, artist, and independent researcher with interests in consciousness research, Eastern mysticism, Western occultism, folk magic, and historical perspectives about magic and mysticism. She is the author of the Sorcerer's and Magi series of fantasy/occult fiction, which she uses as a springboard to share pertinent concepts about spirituality, consciousness, redemption, and transformation. Under the name Soror ZSD23. she is also the author of The Seal of Secrets of the World Adventures in Astral Magic, a memoir on working with the 16th century grimoire, The Arabatel.

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the savior at the end of time

Third in the Sorcerers and Magi Series

by Dionesia Rapposelli

Copyright  2013, Denise M Rapposelli. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from the author

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Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

Whenever there is a decline in virtue and when iniquity predominates, be certain that I make myself a body and enter the sphere of humanity. I do this to deliver those who aspire to me, to annihilate the wicked, and to reestablish righteousness. I manifest for these purposes again and again in age after age. –Bhagavad Gita IV:7-8

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. –popularly attributed to Seneca the Younger (4 BCE –65 CE)

thee 23 chapters ov thee book

the soter gig

aurelio zosimo

the redemptive principle

planet zos

deevee 5

a paradigmatic shift

the serpent is slain upon the tree

lord consul avicenna a. tau-bridge

michael paracelsus solaris

the mother

fire-n-ice

the savior at the end of time

robert fludd

stirring the pot

setting the captives free

killing dragons

the magic horn

the wheel of the ouroboros

venus

a snake in the grass

the immanentization

the endgame

the beginning in the end

Contact the author for updates about the series and promos

1

the soter gig

It’s got to be a guy," Danny Bruno insisted.

I’m with you on that, Leo de Lux replied.

Because it’s always a guy. The female thing is something else, Danny continued. His tone was gruff and impatient.

I know that, Leo snapped, echoing Danny’s edge.

"And not some wise guy or a player like us two satyrs," Danny added.

Not Leonard, Leo said sharply. Leonard was Leo’s 23-year-old son. He was a young mage, whereas Leo de Lux and Dr. Giordano Danny Bruno were both wily sorcerers. They all had come from the Inner Plane, but de Lux senior and junior were now exiled to the Outer Plane, the realm of Commons; that is, folks like you and me.

Danny Bruno scoffed at Leo as he swilled a serving of bourbon. Leo was annoyed, but he calmed himself. Leonard has his hands full, Leo murmured.

"Leonard Junior has been implicated in the disappearance of way too many folks to qualify for sainthood or messiah-ship or whatever-the-fuck, Danny cackled. Even if he does come off as a fluff-bunny when you’re up close and personal with him."

Leo did not react. He thought he should find humor in Danny’s bravado and laugh either with or at him.

Leonard Junior was not a fluff-bunny. He was the perfect man, a solar deity, his father’s son. He was the poster child and hero of a noble cause—The Lions of Light, a guerilla social justice brigade. He was a warrior, like the Archangel Michael who had hurled the haughty from the heights to the infernal abyss and would never be vanquished because his righteousness was inviolable.

Yeah, well, I’m old enough to remember when the kid was a juvenile-delinquent pain in my ass and yours, Danny quipped. Danny Bruno was the director of the H. Trismegistus Mystical Arts Academy. It was the secondary school that Leonard had attended. In his earlier youth, Leonard had been a truant and trouble-making embarrassment to his father, who was then the ruling magistrate of the North Atlantic Sovereignty, Terra Novit, Inner Plane Regions. It wasn’t until the boy’s junior year at the H. Trismegistus that he got his act together. He managed to do this because one of his instructors, a notorious lady mage named Sofia La Maga, redeemed him.

Leo had, until then, despised Sofia La Maga. She stood for everything counter to his sensibilities as a high sorcerer and elite patrician magistrate of the North Atlantic Sovereignty, but then, like his adolescent son, he fell in love with her and underwent a radical transformation.

Yes. I know the story of my life, Leo groaned.

Say it already, de Lux, Danny goaded. "Just . . . unburden yourself."

Fuck you, Leo uttered with an airy laugh.

Good! Danny hollered. He gave Leo a robust back pat. Thank you.

The men chuckled. Leo told Danny to get over himself and added that however much Danny tried, he was never going to be the devil’s prick. His glamour was too transparent and was becoming forced with age.

Yeah, I know, Danny agreed. A glamour was simply an act or attitude that a sorcererer or mage took on to confound those he or she was dealing with. It was a way to trap someone in their own sense of ease or superiority.

The former consul of the North Atlantic Sovereignty of Terra Novit, Leo de Lux, and Danny Bruno had a relationship that had changed over the years from antagonistic to competitive to caustically chummy. They shared an off-beat admiration for each other that allowed them to interact as accomplices in subversive and opportunistic endeavors.

Danny had dared Leo to show up at his old haunt, the Orion Club, to chat about immanentizing the Eschaton; that is, bringing the World to an end. Leo, however, was a fugitive from the Law in Terra Novit. He was a perpetrator of high treason. Were he apprehended while moving about in that land, he would have been subject to a proverbial fate worse than death: an interminable Lock Penalty sentence. The Lock Penalty was a severe form of capital punishment in which the criminal was locked-in—that is, he was rendered paralyzed in a harrowing cataleptic Bardo in his own body.

Regardless, Leo brazenly sauntered into the Phoenix and Harp. He was decked out in finely groomed garb bespeaking eccentric wealth and extravagance, and he was wielding a very large, gilded, and jewel-bedazzled magical staff in a lock-and-load manner.

Having made it to the bar without confrontation or incident, Leo had rapped on Danny Bruno’s back and straddled the stool beside him. Danny simply laughed at the absurdity of it for what seemed like 20 minutes before getting to the point. It was about an initiative he called the Soter Gig. Soter was the ancient Latin word for savior and one of the many names of Imperial Rome’s patron deity, Jupiter. Those of a more esoteric bent, like the Pythagoreans in 500 BCE and Neoplatonists eight centuries later, regarded Jupiter as God with a capital G, the preserving and sustaining principle of Existence, the Zas, the core of joy, lust, and life.

Danny had branded the term as a conceit directed at Leo de Lux. Soter had become a code word to use when referring to Leo. Indeed, the utterers were suggesting that Leo was the embodiment of the ancient Roman god: Jupiter Optimus Maximus Soter: Heavenly Father, the Best and Greatest Savior. They called him this, in part, because he was in the process of vanquishing the status quo that had spawned him. He was doing so in the interests of liberation and enlightenment. It was quite a turnaround for him; his newfound admirers had once considered him to be a despicable, self-serving tyrant—and he was back when he was the consul of the North Atlantic Sovereignty.

The Soter Gig was not about Leo de Lux, though. It was a scheme to establish a cultural hero who would sabotage the status quo, hasten the renegade political group the Lions of Light to power, and force the advent of the New Aeon.

We need someone who would be mistaken for ‘the Lion Cub of Light,’ Danny remarked.

Leo remained unmoved by the poke at Leonard. Instead, he said, What a shame that Michael Solaris is dead. He would’ve been a good candidate. Leo turned his face away to gloat on the clever response although he was pierced with melancholy.

That was low, de Lux, Danny replied, perhaps feeling as crestfallen.

Michael Solaris was a rather physically gorgeous and good-hearted sorcerer who had been assassinated by the power brokers who ruled Terra Novit. He had been a secret agent for the Lions of Light. That is, he was a political provocateur and a terrorist by some accounts. Nevertheless, a hero cult quickly sprang up in the wake of his demise. Just as soon as it emerged, it turned into a seething chaotic soup of splintered factions. Some of these factions were even hostile to the cause for which Solaris had been martyred, focusing instead on a confabulated transcendentalism about him.

"We’ve got to create something similar in a controlled environment, Danny Bruno said. A counter, he said, slapping the back of one hand into another. With a live guy, not a dead one. And why the fuck are Commons in on this one? he blurted. Whose bright idea was that? At least two Outer Plane hysterics claim to be channeling someone who kinda-sorta sounds like Mikey Solaris, de Lux. Danny turned an accusing eye toward his companion. Some dame in California and another one in the Philippines."

Leo shrugged with mouth agape as if befuddled by the accusation. You know I no longer monitor interference between the Inner and Outer Planes, he said. It was not his job. He was no longer the consul of the North Atlantic Sovereignty. He did not have to know what mischief was going on between dimensions, and he did not have to thanklessly and vainly intervene. He was the figure-head of a mass political rebellion now and was considered by some to be an Ippisissimus—a fully enlightened mage—and even godlike—Jupiter Optimus Maximus Soter—even if he really was just an infernal high sorcerer and wise guy, like Danny Bruno.

The important thing was that the idea of him had become something to rally around. He had become a demagogue aspiring toward deity (Heavenly Father, Best Greatest Savior), which was why he could move about freely in the Inner Plane despite that he was supposed to be being arrested, locked up in a coffin-sized cell, and placed in a state of cataleptic paralysis (the Lock Penalty) for life and then some.

Leo merely commented that he doubted Solaris was communing with Commons from an alternate, deeper plane of existence from beyond the grave, but it wasn’t completely impossible. He added that he wasn’t that concerned about how poorly the Solarian Movement was progressing. The Sovereignty and those crack-ups at Gorgon Enterprises aren’t the only ones who can exact order through disorder, Leo remarked. We will persevere and overcome through sheer inevitability.

Too bad the guy can’t just rest in peace if he’s going to be less than useless to us, Danny swiped. It’s ass-backwards, he exclaimed. "The Solarian wingnuts should be advancing the Lions of Light, not screwing it over. But those bastards from the Central Intelligence Network and the Royal Conservationist Party who can’t function without hand jobs from Gorgon Enterprises were right on it. The bastards. They’re killing Solaris twice. You should have your horns up about this one, de Lux. You should be doing something. Now I’m telling you what we should do."

Leo quietly grimaced and shrugged. Gorgon Enterprises was a dirty industrial corporation founded by a villain named Hipparchus Gorgon, who was no longer among the living. The Central Intelligence Network—CIN—and the Royal Conservationist Party—RCP—were governmental bodies that were in the pocket of Gorgon Enterprises. The CIN allegedly had turned a blind eye to interplay between the RCP and Gorgon Enterprises regarding the assassination of Michael Solaris.

Leo de Lux had been close to Solaris. His death had been a shocking and painful loss. Although, through the quirky twists of fate, those responsible—heirs and allegients to Gorgon Enterprises—were wiped from existence, the greater forces responsible for the strife and oppression under which Terra Novit and the whole of the Inner Plane and the Outer were subjected continued to thrive. The sabotage of a grassroots cult surrounding Michael Paracelsus Solaris Sortiar was a major victory for those forces.

Leo ordered another round of drinks for himself and Danny Bruno. He tried to remain unmoved about Danny’s Soter Gig brainstorm. Let me ask you this then, he uttered after a very long silence. Do you have someone in mind?

Besides Leonard Junior? Danny exclaimed.

Yes, Leo groaned.

Aurelio Zosimo, Danny announced.

Leo twitched in incredulity. The shudder forced an ice cube to shoot out of his tumbler of bourbon. Half the contents of the glass followed the cube across the bar. Leo gulped hard to hold back exclaiming, "My brother-in-law?"

Aurelio Zosimo. The Crazy Professor. Yeah. That guy, Bruno barked anyway, devilishly smirking.

Aurelio Zosimo was the twin brother of Leo’s domestic partner, Sofia La Maga. Aurelio and Sofia had been separated at birth, raised in different households, and reunited decades later by happenstance. Unknown to Leo and most everyone except Danny Bruno and a scarce few very old and sage Illuminati-type relatives from the Old World in the Terra Principalis was that Aurelio and Sofia were Danny Bruno’s second cousins. The ancient elders had designs, no doubt, inscrutable and apocalyptic, about the twins. Danny had been appointed as the gatekeeper and middleman. In perfect love and trust, or something like that or not, he had mentored Sofia La Maga and threw her to proverbial lions in confidence that she would triumph—and she did. After living in political exile for more than decade, she returned to Terra Novit, seduced Leo de Lux, and turned him into a cultural hero and Enemy of the State. Now Danny was about to engineer some new mayhem using the other twin of the pair.

It was not that Aurelio wasn’t magically adept or sufficiently profound that mention of his name caused Leo to startle; it was that he was a strange bird. A very strange bird. If Danny were not joking, his pronouncement was either exquisitely ridiculous or ridiculously exquisite. Leo did not want to let on how intrigued he was.

The differences between Aurelio Zosimo and Michael Solaris—or Leonard Junior—were immense. Michael Solaris had been a golden, radiant fellow with round caramel-colored eyes and a rakish mop of blondish curls. He had a strong jaw line, a leonine hairline, a perfectly proportioned body, a casually bulging male apparatus, and a swagger of masculine character. Twenty-three-year-old Leonard was trying his best to resemble the kitschy Sacred Heart of Jesus meme. He had grown an auburn goatee to accent his girly, grown-out hair, and draped himself in luminous white tunics.

Aurelio Zosimo, on the other hand, although having height, was of a wispy and slightly slouching stature. In early middle-age, he appeared much younger than he was, even for an Inner Plane’s person. He was given to wearing worn corduroy pants, half-tucked plaid shirts, and woolen vests. His delicately masculine face was somewhat swarthy, flecked with sparse colonies of upper lip and chin hairs. His generous but uncertain smile involved the slight curling up of the left side of his mouth. The smile was a mirror image of his twin sister’s infectious grin.

Like his twin, he had warm and shiny eyes that were the color of dark and molten chocolate. His gaze often seemed distant and wondering, as if Zosimo were in a perennial state of inquiry or consternation. When he was suddenly amused or inspired, his eyes would spark along with the rest of his face like a child surprised by a jack-in-the-box. He had long brown hair that fell past his shoulders in swashbuckling waves and ringlets on well-groomed days and blew out into a voluminous ratty frizz on others. In other words, he resembled a heavy metal rocker on the crashing side of a drug-addled binge.

"He’s a disheveled Inchaote and uber-intellectual academic who gets away with quoting Pythagoras despite that even I know that Pythagoras never wrote anything to be quoted by, Leo said. And my son claims that he has told certain students at Bythos Academy that Hermes Trismegistus was a real historical person and other such fables for the purposes of sabotaging the intellectual integrity of our society. Disinformation. Seeding it is a mandate of his magical affiliation. Renegade sorcery—the stuff of the Black Brotherhood, if you ask me, Leo grunted. He would be a Frankenstein to the Cause." And even though Leo was playing devil’s advocate in this exchange with Danny Bruno, he knew that the Frankenstein analogy was right on. Worse, Sofia La Maga would support her brother’s mayhem in defiance of her husband’s designs.

Well, at least he’s not selling fake antiques or engineering counterfeit archeological discoveries, like you, Danny remarked, which was indeed where a bit of Leo’s wealth came from. "Not that there’s anything wrong with that. No use in being a sorcerer if you’re not going to make mischief."

"I make money, not ‘mischief,’" Leo shot back.

Well, if you can manage both, all the better! Danny exclaimed.

He’s asexual, Leo added even though he was more than sure that Aurelio Zosimo wanted to bed his wife and, for all Leo knew, may have despite that Leo’s wife was Zosimo’s twin sister. Then he went further to contradict what he had just said about Zosimo’s diabolism by calling him a closet magus. He merely poses as a sorcerer. A dickless ‘white-coat’ kind of mage even if he doesn’t go in for the starch-ironed white smock and the turban and tassels and all that nice crap that they wear.

Like Leonard Junior or Michael Solaris? Danny hit back.

Leo grumbled and protested that Leonard wasn’t dickless. Neither is he closeted or into the white— Leo choked over stutters about Leonard’s chosen magical orientation, considering, as mentioned, that Leonard did indeed costume himself in sparkling white raiment. "He’s a mage, not a sorcerer. I accept that. As for Solaris, part of his charm was that he was bold about his magian sympathies, but no one would argue that he indeed was a sorcerer and that he had an edge. And if he had managed his dick better, that banshee that he stuck it in and then scorned wouldn’t have sold him out to Gorgon Enterprises and gotten him killed."

The femme fatale, Danny snorted. The men were referring to a rogue sorceress who made mischief with magical men. She had consorted with both Michael Solaris and Solaris’s mentor, a fellow named Anderson Albright Magus, in a brazen act of cuckoldry. She turned rabid when Solaris cast her off. Then she went on to play an instrumental role in his assassination.

Mmm, Leo grunted disdainfully.

Well, I think ‘Zosi’ can be fixed up, Danny asserted. And he can be fella-pretty, like Solaris and . . . He stopped short and smirked before uttering Leonard.

Leo merely harumphed again but only to deny Danny the satisfaction of knowing that he was enthused by what might’ve been an exceptionally bright and engaging scheme.

Just consider it. Roll it around your head, Danny said. I think this Zosimo-guy might help us get certain persons out of the way more efficiently than Leonard Junior might. He winked and made an assured clicking sound with his tongue against his back teeth. Leo knew what the man was referring to, and it was indeed pure genius—it was something insidious and ruthless about Aurelio Zosimo. Nevertheless, Leo winced and rolled his eyes although he was profoundly intrigued by Danny Bruno’s notion.

2

aurelio zosimo

Aurelio Zosimo was a 44-year-old, wry, impish, and obscure-witted academic of early Greek philosophy and medieval Hermeticism. He had been a child prodigy. The prodigious-ness set the stage for him to become, at the mere age of 32 years, the Marsillio Ficino Scholar Emeritus at the Bythos Academy of Magical Sciences. He also was a scholar of Danny Bruno’s namesake, the 16th century philosopher and mage Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake because of his un-Christian–like ideas about the nature of Reality.

Zosimo had a plaque on his office door. On it was inscribed a motto adopted by Commons enthusiasts of his brand of sorcery. The plaque read Nothing is true; everything is permitted. Popular lore had it that the 11th century Islamic fundamentalist Hassan ibn Sabbah—a mystic and mastermind of an assassin squad—had said it right before he bit the dust at age 90 years, but the saying was actually penned and launched as legend by the Commons beat poet and career drug-addict William S. Burroughs, in whom a romanticist fascination with Sabbah developed. Outer Plane Discordians and Chaos mages had cheekily spun lore about Sabbah and his alleged pronouncement into cult fiction, conspiracy, legend, and disinformation.

Those of small mind and little vision regarded the saying as an anarchist war cry. To them, the saying was tinged with hedonism of a kind more crass than the generally misconstrued motto expectorated by the notorious Victorian-era sorcerer-mage Aleister Crowley: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. However, in modern parlance among those who adopted the motto Nothing is true; everything is permitted, it was simply an affirmation that all belief was provisional, not absolute. Because belief shaped perception, which modified behavior, which modified circumstance, perhaps circumstance could be modified if belief that modified perception and behavior was deliberately fabricated rather than imposed as unquestioned convention.

But what Zosimo’s beliefs actually were, or if he had beliefs, was unclear. Admirers considered him to be a mystic. Critics who took him seriously claimed that he was an anarchist, an absurdist, or a Discordian for whom all meaning was a twisted grin. Then there were those who thought that Zosimo was an endearing sort who suffered from Asperger’s syndrome or some