The Pearl and the Serpent

He had everything. All that was missing was remembering who he was.Tomás, thirty-seven, a director at a multinational in São Paulo, receives after his grandfather's death an envelope containing only an ancient poem - the story of a prince sent to Egypt to recover a single pearl, who drank the cup of forgetting and forgot who he was - and one handwritten line: "You are the prince who sleeps. Go to the end of the earth."So begins the crossing of the 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago - and of the seven inner heavens the forbidden gospels described sixteen centuries ago. Guided by the enigmatic Basilio, Tomás will face, one by one, the guardians that govern every sleeping life: Fear in the storm of the Pyrenees, the Shadow on a medieval bridge, Desire in the city of wine, the Religion of Stone beneath the vaults of Burgos, the Illusion of the mind across two hundred kilometers of Meseta, the Passion that projects, and Despair in a dark night in a half-abandoned village at 5,000 feet.And at the end, when there is nothing left to conquer, the meeting with the serpent that guards the pearl - the last veil, the one nobody suspects, because it does not look like a veil: it looks like a prize.Along the way he will meet a widowed German engineer who planned his entire life on a spreadsheet, a Mexican grandmother carrying a letter on foot to her imprisoned son, an eighty-four-year-old priest who knows the narrow door, a Portuguese restorer who spends her days proving that the original work is always there - and the story of Sophia's fall told beside a fire.Drawn from the Nag Hammadi gospels, the Pistis Sophia, the Hymn of the Pearl, Taoist wisdom, and C. G. Jung's map of individuation, The Pearl and the Serpent is an initiatory novel in the tradition of The Pilgrimage and The Alchemist - with fourteen Practices of the Spark at the close of the chapters, so the reader does not merely read the journey but walks it.The pearl exists. And it has your name on it.

He had everything. All that was missing was remembering who he was.Tomás, thirty-seven, a director at a multinational in São Paulo, receives after his grandfather's death an envelope containing only an ancient poem - the story of a prince sent to Egypt to recover a single pearl, who drank the cup of forgetting and forgot who he was - and one handwritten line: "You are the prince who sleeps. Go to the end of the earth."So begins the crossing of the 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago - and of the seven inner heavens the forbidden gospels described sixteen centuries ago. Guided by the enigmatic Basilio, Tomás will face, one by one, the guardians that govern every sleeping life: Fear in the storm of the Pyrenees, the Shadow on a medieval bridge, Desire in the city of wine, the Religion of Stone beneath the vaults of Burgos, the Illusion of the mind across two hundred kilometers of Meseta, the Passion that projects, and Despair in a dark night in a half-abandoned village at 5,000 feet.And at the end, when there is nothing left to conquer, the meeting with the serpent that guards the pearl - the last veil, the one nobody suspects, because it does not look like a veil: it looks like a prize.Along the way he will meet a widowed German engineer who planned his entire life on a spreadsheet, a Mexican grandmother carrying a letter on foot to her imprisoned son, an eighty-four-year-old priest who knows the narrow door, a Portuguese restorer who spends her days proving that the original work is always there - and the story of Sophia's fall told beside a fire.Drawn from the Nag Hammadi gospels, the Pistis Sophia, the Hymn of the Pearl, Taoist wisdom, and C. G. Jung's map of individuation, The Pearl and the Serpent is an initiatory novel in the tradition of The Pilgrimage and The Alchemist - with fourteen Practices of the Spark at the close of the chapters, so the reader does not merely read the journey but walks it.The pearl exists. And it has your name on it.