My character is a (time traveling) 1st century practitioner of the art of Gematria, a spiritual discipline involving the presentation of literature that is simultaneously a written story and also a contains a sacred geometry diagram conveying a more cryptic spiritual truth. Ancient languages such as Greek used their alphabets as numbers also, and so any word has a fixed numeric sum associated with it. Iesous (Jesus) = 888. The Gospel of Mark uses a circle with a circumference of 8880 units (888 "raised" by "setting the Son of Man to naught" - or adding a zero) as the basis for most of its internal hidden Gematria structure.

It was the loss of this knowledge that led to the literalization of the sacred myths and their crystallization into a simple dogmatic faith that falls far short of the subtle beauty of the original gnostic transpersonal truths the stories were supposed to help initiates remember. The exoteric then gradually strangled the esoteric leaving us eventually with the absurdity of Original Sin and so on.