Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar.
Ecumenical Chanuka and Christmas story with 30 fullpage color illustrations by Wanda Szyksznian.
Selected portions of the English translation by Ivan Sanders with Laszlo Bito's cooperation.

A Common Creed Christmas Story for all Ages

Preface to the English translation.

My original story appeared in the Christmas supplement of the Hungarian newspaper Népszabadság in 2005 under the title: “Gáspár, Menyhért, Boldizsár”. This inspired the outstanding graphic artist, Wanda Szyksznian, to design a picture book for all ages. It turned out to be a joint project, during the course of which I further developed the story. After much work, the book was published in October of 2006. The original Hungarian text was translated by Ivan Sanders with my cooperation.
The book can be obtained in the USA from www.blue-danube.com
László Bitó
Budapest, 2006 October 22
(Selected sections. For the whole text write to: bito.laszlo@t-online.hu)

I

For the sixth straight day the wanton windstorm raged on. Now and then its fury would subside, but only to allow the whipped up desert sand to cover over both the quick and the dead. Stranded for three days in a now barren oasis, the three traveling companions, Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, knew that they would have to await the storm’s passing before continuing their journey home from western lands. The one-time oasis offered but meager shelter, its source of water swallowed long ago by a vastness bent on reclaiming its pristine, inviolable self.

II

They had journeyed before on stormy seas, whose waves would part for the largest galley, and then quickly close behind, or over, it. But the desert measures time differently; to the human eye its waves roll with a slowness that is as cruel as it is imperceptible. Often, too often, it buries its victims alive. But if the unheeding traveler stumbles upon a sand drift, it rarely swallows him whole. The open mouth of his dried out skull—a casing that might give convenient shelter to scorpions—still seems to cry out for help, a warning to all who dare to go that way. There are brave men who will save a shipwrecked stranger from drowning; Caspar himself had done as much on a return voyage from Taurus. But no man could save even his best friend from the pitiless embrace of a sand drift that lies in wait for the rescuer as well, not content with the vast human toll already exacted.

III

It never occurred to Caspar to give up the meager protection provided by the few wilted tamarisks, and by stones dug out of the well long ago and stacked now shoulder high. Instead, he turned in his thoughts to Mithras and his twelve companions: to the invincible Sun God, who sacrifices himself each night, and is reborn in the morning, for the redemption of mankind. Caspar, too, had been reborn at his initiation into the Taurobolium, in a rite of death and rebirth during which the warm blood of the sacrificial bull washed clean his naked body. Touched also by the grace of the bread-and-water sacrifice called mizd—or missa, or mass, as it was known by others—his faith had grown ever stronger. A wise and wealthy merchant dealing in the rarest and costliest treasures, Caspar was also a simple magus, an anointed priest of the Invincible One.

IV

On the other hand, his traveling companion, Melchior, like all Parthian princes, had been for many years a high priest (in today’s parlance, a cardinal bishop) of Mithras and also of Anahita, Mithras’s virgin mother. The same was true of Balthazar, whose royal forebears were said to have been driven westward as hostages, perhaps during one of the campaigns of Alexandros, the great King of Macedonia, only to return later, enriched in body and soul, to their people near the banks of the Ganges.

V

Caspar called his Sun God by such names as Varuna and Indra, even though he knew that just as the same sun rose each morning at daybreak, there is only one God, no matter how many names He is called by in the many languages of the world. His traveling companion and old friend, Melchior, called the Father of Fathers Mihr, while others referred to Him as Bel, Marduk, Zeus, or Mylitta.

VI

Melchior was a welcome guest at the court of Herod, the great king on the Western shores, whose people do not refer to the same One God by name; they never utter it, even if they do know the word. The wise Parthian magus also accepted what had been whispered about for some time: that the name Mithras or Mithra was formed by the joining of Mut, the Mother of all Mothers, and Ra, the Egyptian Sun God, for according to the ancient belief of his people, Mithras is both male and female in nature. Not sharing this belief were the Roman Legions’ mercenaries, who were recruited from the pagan provinces of the Empire and who first encountered Mithras as grown men during their eastern campaigns. They saw in Him the very embodiment of a manliness that carried them to victory under His sign of the cross. For His blessing of eternal peace, the dream of Pax Romana, the soldiers of the legions would endure every kind of suffering.

VII

Caspar himself never imagined Mithras—his Indra—in any human form. In his eyes, as well as in those of Balthazar and Melchior, the divine essence of the Sun God was beyond the humanly comprehensible and tangible. There in the desert, in the seemingly ever-lasting sandstorm that regularly took its human toll, he did not turn to a manlike god, or wooden idol, who could be appeased with the promise of a sacrificial kid goat or ram. What gave him strength was the knowledge that he was one with the Life-Giver. From this he drew the hope and belief that he and his companions would be able to extricate themselves from the storm’s clutches.

VIII

As always, the winds finally quieted. Slowly, they could uncover their mouths and noses to speak a few words and study the sky. They knew the constellations better than they knew the palm of their hand, from which the traveler could glean nothing about directions, even if its lines were supposed to reveal much about the future. They agreed that the clouds were dispersing in the West, but they kept peering at the sky, hoping to find signs pointing them toward their homeland in the East rather than leading them back to the court of King Herod.

IX

If they set out homeward straight away, then—unless they had missed counting a day during the storm—they could still return to their families in time to celebrate the morning of the longest night of the year, the festival of the Undefeatable Sun. The position of the stars, however, clearly led them in a westerly direction, though not, according to Balthazar, to Herod’s city. Caspar knew why he said that, and let Balthazar choose their guiding star. Balthazar had good reason to avoid the embittered King Herod, who in the service of Rome had been stripped of much of his power. Herod judged Balthazar by his unusually dark skin, treating this Indus prince like a servant. Caspar understood this well, as there were places where he too was subjected to unkindly treatment. Thus, along with the half-blind Melchior, who rarely interfered when such things were discussed, he entrusted the leadership of their little caravan to his younger traveling companion. If they could not be home to celebrate the victorious rebirth of Mithras, it mattered little where they spent the festival. With their water and food supply running low, they couldn’t very well remain any longer in the middle of the desert.

X

Balthazar led them westward with a heavy heart. Of the three he had the youngest children, seven in number. (His first wife, his favorite, turned out to be barren; his second wife presented him with a son and two daughters, and his third gave him two boys and two girls.) On the festival of the Returning Light he never failed to bring them gifts. Perhaps that is why he was reminded of a custom he had heard about from a Mithra priest who celebrated mizd with consecrated unleavened bread and wine. According to the custom recounted now by Balthazar, anyone unable to return to his family by the evening of the longest night of the year finds a newborn child wherever he is stranded for the high holyday and presents the infant with the most precious gifts he can afford.

XI

Melchior and Caspar, too, rejoiced at the thought of such an uplifting custom, and in this too they let Balthazar take the lead. As soon as they emerged from the desert, Balthazar stopped people to ask where they could find a child, born in the days of the festival of the Undefeatable Sun. “Sol invictus,” he kept repeating, for he did not know the language spoken by local Jews, which was quite different from the Galilean dialect they were familiar with. Finally he was able to make himself understood by three shepherds who were in the pasture with their flocks. They told him how to reach the town known for its grist mill, and – to none of their surprise – it was in the very direction where Balthazar’s guiding star was pointing. Only a few days ago, the shepherds explained, a young girl heavy with child traveled that way with her man. They should inquire as soon as they arrived in Bet Lehem: an expectant mother like that could not have gotten much farther.

XII

In Bet Lehem the roomy attic of the inn was rented out to Mithras believers who descended on the town at this time of year. They were mainly Roman mercenaries who after their discharge from the legions had settled in this area. Balthazar went up to them, for he spoke fairly well the language called Greek by the soldiers, which in reality included borrowings from every tongue spoken throughout the Empire. He always liked to converse with men who had seen the world. And these seasoned veterans, who bore their battle scars proudly and did not seem at all despondent over lost limbs, were likewise happy to see the merchant who on this festive occasion wore his resplendent crimson robe, and was well-versed in Mithras’s mysteries. They asked him to bless their makeshift altar, built from their shields decorated with crosses that embraced the four corners of the world. Their improvised altar was also adorned with an image of Mithras conquering the Bull, painted on tent cloth. However, these veterans were not familiar enough with the place to be able to guide the three men to the newborn babe they had heard about.

XIII

Down below, in the inn, pious Jews, who were also forced by the fierce storm to break off their journey, had lit the oil lamps of their Festival of Light, and in the spreading glow of Hanukkah were reciting their holy script, arguing loudly over its every word. Balthazar knew well that these people, who dedicated their lives to their unnamable God and distanced themselves from the rather mixed local populace, could not be disturbed with trivial queries about directions, especially not during their devotions.

XIV

Melchior and Caspar’s burning thirst took them straight to the innkeeper, whose ruddy cheeks and generous girth served well to promote his profession. The gray-bearded but still robust and jovial man instructed them not only as to the whereabouts of the young mother and her newborn—he also gave them a piece of news which made them all praise Balthazar’s guiding star. For it first led them out of the wilderness, and then guided them, from among hundreds of other infants born with the renascent Sun, to the one baby boy who came into this world in a cave, in the Earth Goddess’s womb, and in a manger, as Mithras himself did, long ago.

XV

All three thought this to be a good omen and without delay set out toward the cave concealed behind shrubs and palm trees, as described by the innkeeper. When they reached the mouth of the cave, they were stopped by a towering cliff, or rather by the blocked opening of the widest of three clefts in the rocks. They greeted those inside, but the male voice that responded promptly sent them on their way, instead of receiving with due respect three weary travelers arriving from far-away lands. And this after Balthazar let it be known that they were merchants welcomed in royal palaces.

XVI

Only after recounting how they would like to present their most precious gifts of gold, incense and myrrh to a child, born on the Festival of the Life-Giving Light, did they hear the choked, whispering voice of a woman, more probably a mere girl. She wasn’t speaking to them, but they could gather that she was trying to convince the man to change his mind. And she succeeded: the young girl, no more than twelve or thirteen years of age, finally opened the gate, constructed recently, from freshly hewn beams. She asked them to come in and see her child, even if her husband did not wish to meet them.

XVII

When they entered the almost totally dark cave they could hardly make out the male figure that retreated deep inside the cavernous space, wrapping himself in his loose-fitting traveling cloak. Only then did the young girl light from one burning lamp the other eight, so that the light of the Jewish holiday could illuminate the front of the cave. And then, almost as if to prove that she was indeed a mother—something that, by virtue of her very young age, anyone less experienced than the magi would probably have doubted—she drew her son to her breast, though the infant showed no sign of hunger.

XVIII

The three of them were overcome with admiration for the newborn’s loveliness, his smiling repose, his inquiring gaze. Hearing their praises, the young mother—her name, they learned, was Merriem—became more at ease, and after finding out that none of the three was from Galilee, and they had never set foot in her native Nazareth, she related to these wise men from the East that it was really her fault that her husband, Joseph, treated the tired travelers so ungraciously.

XIX

They learned that Joseph had good reason to suppose that troublemakers from Nazareth might be snooping after them, anxious to find out if the man the young Merriem married was really the father of her child. Having said this, the girl looked outside, and only after making sure that no one was prowling about near the mouth of the cave did she return to the wise priests and admit to them, blushing as she did, that Joseph was not the father of her beautiful baby.

XX

Seeing her flushed face and quickened breathing, Caspar surmised that what made her blush was not her shame as much as the memory of the child’s father. “My Joseph,” Merriem said more than once, “is a good man; by bringing me here, he saved our lives.” As she said this, she smiled at her son who, burying his face in her ample bosom, slept peacefully. After learning that she was with child but without a husband, she went on, the people of Nazareth may well have stoned her to death. She was plainly relieved to be able at last to share her story with kind and understanding souls. 

XXI

The three magi were moved by the girl’s trust. They knew well that while the Jews’ sacred scrolls prescribed fatal punishment for dozens of violations of the Mosaic Law, the outraged populace in recent decades carried it out mainly—one could say exclusively—on adulterous women. If Merriem, for whatever reason, had kept secret who the father was of the child growing in her womb, what else could the elders of Nazareth have thought but that this lovely young girl must have seduced a man who had grown tired of his own wife.

XXII

Merriem’s fear and her husband’s wariness were best understood and most deeply felt by Caspar. Several years earlier he had seen with his own eyes—in a place far from Jerusalem and the moderation of the Sanhedrin’s wise judges—a crowd, following ancient customs, drag a young widow heavy with child all the way to the edge of their little town. The unfortunate woman confessed that she’d been unable to resist the urging of her body and for that she was ready to accept punishment. She was tearfully pleading only for the life of her child.

XXIII

Caspar, intervening as a stranger just arrived from a faraway land, was almost stoned himself by the incensed crowd—mostly old women in mourning for their youth and lacking confidence in their husbands’ fidelity. Their victim, who had been stripped naked, was trying desperately to protect with her arms her life-bearing belly. When the first sharp stones cut open her flawless white body, the crowd, seeing blood, began shrieking as if gone mad.

XXIV

“They would have stoned me for sure, whether or not I came out with the name of my child’s father.” Even at this safe distance from her home town, Merriem spoke fearfully, in a whisper, which made it clear to the visitors that the danger from which she had fled must have been real. Then, looking dreamily over the heads of the three wise men crouching before her, she concluded with devout tenderness: “Although he was only my betrothed then, Joseph saved my life.”

XXV

“And the child’s,” Joseph added, as he stepped out of the darkness into the circle of light shed by the warm glow of the Hanukkah oil lamps. Judging from his face and somewhat stooped figure, he could have been Merriem’s father, even her grandfather, bowing deeply, finally greeting his guests. He could hear from their accents, and as the light fell on them, by their clothes, too, that they couldn’t possibly be spies from Nazareth. “Every child is a blessing from God, no matter who sired him and in whose womb he was conceived,” he said quietly but firmly.

XXVI

It didn’t take long for Caspar and the other two to recognize Joseph’s wisdom. He believed himself to be a descendant of King David, and his words made it plain that unlike the Sadducees, who insisted on every letter of the Torah and rejected, unread, all other writings, he was affected by the freer Hellenic way of thinking that was fast gaining ground among the Pharisees.

XXVII

Encouraged by all this, Caspar spoke to him of their always victorious Sun God. And as Joseph and Merriem listened to his words with earnest, wide-eyed curiosity, he began to describe the amazing Mithraeum, built underground in his native city, and went into such detail that the girl who had never been beyond the borders of Judea and her husband, who knew only about the gigantic above-ground structures of Egypt, almost saw before their eyes the huge temple of an enlarged cave, in which all the initiated, rich and poor, soldiers and city dwellers, partook equally—through the unifying mystery of the bread and the wine—of the most divine essence.

XXVIII

“A symbolic and still very real theophagy — receiving God into our very being.” Balthazar was offering his interpretation of the Greek word. Still deep in thought and stroking his gray, forked beard, Joseph asked if he had heard rightly: For his followers, Mithras’s body really was present in a bite of bread and a sip of water or wine received in rituals from their priests. The three Mithras-believing wise men nodded their heads, acknowledging that the question he posed contained the answer. Then Balthazar dipped his finger in water, drew the sign of the Mithras cross on the newborn’s forehead, whom Merriem, as she was busy preparing supper, had placed in her husband’s lap.
“The shining star of divine grace led us here,” he said, “so we could behold the reborn Mithras, the life-giving incarnation of goodness. Blessed be this miraculous child among the sons of men; may the eternally victorious Sun illuminate each moment of his life in our midst.

XXIX

“All life springs from the Light,” said Melchior, the first words he had spoken since they left the barren oasis. “Anyone born of a mother is the child of the Father of Fathers. And each one carries the seed of divinity, whether born in a stable, in a cave, or in a marble palace. Each godly seed can sprout and burst into bloom, whether it is our blessing or their masters’ teachings that leads our children to the fount of truth and goodness. Mithras, the Light of the World, offers up his life for us daily for the benefit of mankind, setting us an example. But only we can redeem ourselves: each of us, one by one. And also redeem mankind, together, all of us, when its preordained time comes.”

XXX

After hearing Melchior’s prophecy, the bread and water – they had no wine – was blessed by Joseph. In the reverent silence that followed, they all turned to the same God, the Heavenly Brightness, the Eternal Light, the Lord of the World, praying for their minds’ enlightenment as they contemplated the future of the child, and praying, too, for peace among all the tribes on earth. They each addressed the Holy One with words that sprang from their own hearts.