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There was now only a nine-year old boy between the Dictator and his highest ambitions. Two final problems still remained to be dealt with: to give a legal form to a purely autocratic rule, and to find money to govern the country.

Of course, this explanation of the Minos legend and the story of the human tribute is in the meantime only a supposition, and not susceptible of absolute proof; but the constant recurrence of the nine-year period is, at least, very striking, and it is worth remembering that a custom precisely similar to that suggested has existed in connection with several ancient monarchies, and, indeed, survives to the present day.

There was now only a nine-year old boy between the Dictator and his highest ambitions. Two final problems still remained to be dealt with: to give a legal form to a purely autocratic rule, and to find money to govern the country.

In this case the seven youths and seven maidens who were offered to the Minotaur at the end of the nine-year period may have been slain with him to be his companions and servants in the underworld, or, as is perhaps more likely, they may, in a later stage of the custom, have been accepted as his substitutes, so that the death of the King was merely a ritual one.

He it was Who had been chiefly instrumental in providing the necessary means for Bahá’u’lláh’s release from His nine-year confinement within the city walls of Akká, and in enabling Him to enjoy, in the evening of His life, a measure of that peace and security from which He had so long been debarred.

Travelling at speeds close to that of light, spacemen lived at an accelerated pace. A nine-year trip to Alpha Centauri and back seemed to take only six weeks to men on a spaceship. When they returned, their friends and relatives had aged enormously in comparison, old customs had changed, even the language was different. So they did the only thing they could do.

The nine-year period recurs in the account of the bloody tribute of seven youths and seven maidens who were offered to the Minotaur every ninth year.

In sheer dramatic power, in the rapidity with which events of momentous importance succeeded each other, in the holocaust which baptized its birth, in the miraculous circumstances attending the martyrdom of the One Who had ushered it in, in the potentialities with which it had been from the outset so thoroughly impregnated, in the forces to which it eventually gave birth, this nine-year period may well rank as unique in the whole range of man’s religious experience.

The nine-year interval separating the first from the second Bahá’í Jubilee was signalized by the spiritual conquest of no less than fifty countries of the globe, whilst the first year of the Ten Year Plan has been immortalized by the opening of one hundred countries, swelling the number of the sovereign states and dependencies enlisted under the standard of the Cause of God to two hundred and twenty-eight.

To him during the period of a nine-year famine a prophet had borne the oracular message that the land would again bear fruit if a stranger were sacrificed once a year to Jupiter. In gratitude Busiris made a beginning with the priest himself. Later he found great pleasure in the custom and killed all strangers who came to Egypt. So Hercules was seized and placed on the altar of Jupiter.