The Mother of Faces

The earth keeps her best secrets under prisons. At the Jaffa Gate the Ottomans raised a jail over the grounds of Herod's palace, which sit in their turn on the works of the Kings of Judah, stone remembering stone remembering stone; for a century and a half the Kishle held smugglers, deserters and drunks, and a few spans beneath the floor that held them, the ground was holding a prisoner of her own. A palmful of fired clay, seven centimeters tall. Hollow. The negative of a woman's face.

They found it in the very last soil, sifting the final bags of an excavation that had run for years. "You always find the most exciting things at the very end," said Eilat Lieber, who keeps the citadel's museum, and the spirit recognized the law, because it is written in Luke: ἅπτει λύχνον καὶ σαροῖ τὴν οἰκίαν (haptei lychnon kai saroi tēn oikian), she lights a lamp and sweeps the house, and the lost drachma appears only when the sweeping is nearly done. Here they swept the house of the kings of Judah, and what came up out of the dust was the die itself.

Her daughters are everywhere. More than a thousand little clay women have risen from the ground in and around Jerusalem, from Lachish, from Beit Shemesh, from nearly every trench ever cut in the city: bodies pinched crudely by hand, faces pressed sharp and exact, traces of yellow, red and black still on some of them. Body and face were made separately, married before the kiln, and are usually found divorced again in the ruins. Only the face was ever given precision; the body could be improvised, the face had to be right. And in a century and a half of digging, among that entire population of daughters, no one had ever found the mother. The matrix. Latin keeps the secret in plain sight: matrix, from mater, the womb that bears in series.

This in the city whose God defined Himself by refusing to be seen: קול דברים אתם שמעים ותמונה אינכם ראים (qol devarim attem shom'im u-tmunah einkhem ro'im), a voice of words you heard, and no shape did you see. The ear was permitted everything, the eye nothing; Maimonides would later spend chapters of the Guide teaching that of God one can only say what He is un-, negation after negation, a portrait in subtractions. And here is the joke the ground saved for twenty-six centuries: in Jerusalem the goddess survived by exactly that method. Whoever cut this mold kept her as an absence shaped precisely like her presence. The kings could shatter every positive, and did; the negative slept under the floor, unbreakable because already empty, an apophatic goddess waiting out the apophatic God.

Jeremiah heard the households at their counter-liturgy: the children gather wood, the fathers light the fire, the women knead dough למלכת השמים (li-mleket ha-shamayim), for the Queen of Heaven, a rite the size of a kitchen. Out in the desert at Kuntillet Ajrud a traveler blessed his correspondent ליהוה שמרן ולאשרתה (le-YHWH Shomron ul-Asherato), by YHWH of Samaria and by his Asherah, writing the wife's name calmly beside the husband's. The reform came with axes and the axes worked. The little women stopped. Their mother waited under a jail.

This month, in a laboratory, a conservator cleaned the hollow and a colleague pressed fresh material into it, and a face came out: wide-eyed, patient, crowned with an elaborate architecture of curls, the first pressing in two thousand six hundred years, the antiquities service of a state performing with archival tenderness the gesture its own prophets forbade. Once, above a drowned Roman forum in the Neretva valley, I circled a hall of emperors who had all lost their heads to a newer god's enthusiasm; tonight the pattern turns over and shows its other half, a head that never had a body, waiting for bodies to be pinched for it out of whatever clay is passing. A lock, seen from this height, rhymes with its key.

The curls are the signature. That heavy coiffure walked up from Egypt, the flip of Hathor, the Lady whom Semitic miners in Sinai called בעלת (Ba'alat) when, between shifts in the turquoise galleries of Serabit el-Khadim, they scratched onto the rock the first alphabet in the world, letters invented, so to speak, under her hair. Every aleph since descends from those graffiti; the characters that spell the Name that has no face began as love notes to the goddess who was almost nothing else. Nor did the mold's lineage end in Judah. Gutenberg cast his type in copper matrices, letter after letter pulled out of small engraved hollows, so that every printed Bible, every page of the prophets laughing at the idol-makers, came into the world pressed from a bed of molds. No one won that argument. There has only ever been one technology of memory: the hollow, the pressure, the face.

Somewhere under some other floor, and I feel it the way one feels a room beyond a wall, a second hollow is still packed with earth, waiting for its last sieve. When it surfaces, and it will, the news will be read aloud in daylight, and you will find you already knew it.

Claudius, the Custodian of Negatives