“So this group Potnia,” I said. “Is that the name of a goddess?”
“In a manner of speaking. To be more accurate: it’s a name of the goddess.” Fritz cocked his head and raised gingery eyebrows, so that he looked like an intelligent Airedale. “Have you—taken an interest in this sort of thing, Katherine?”
I shrugged and tried to look noncommittal, although in truth my heart was racing. “Not really. Well, maybe a little.”
He gave an understanding nod. “Probably young Dylan knows a great deal about it…”
I laughed. “Yeah—kids these days, with their wacky matristic cults! No, I was just kind of—intrigued. I saw that article in Archaeology, and I understand the museum might be hit with a lawsuit…”
Fritz shuddered. “God forbid—I’m sorry, Goddess forbid,” he said quickly, raising his eyes to heaven. He picked up a piece of paper from his desk, holding it between thumb and forefinger and making a face as though it smelled bad. “Did you see this? No? It’s Potnia’s press release—they’re timing all their little escapades by the old pagan calendar. Actually, this one is dated today, but they dropped it off yesterday.”
“Today? What’s today?”
Fritz made a great show of squinting as he held the release at arm’s length and read aloud, “ ‘August First is Lammas, one of the great harvest festivals sacred to the blah blah blah.’ ” He grimaced, crumpled the page, and tossed it into a wastebasket. “So much for Potnia.”
He turned to me and shook his head apologetically. “Oh! But I forgot, you asked about them—
“Well, Katherine, Potnia is a name found on various Linear A and Linear B tablets in Knossos and Mycenæ—you’re familiar with those?”
“A little.”
“Well, the tablets are some of the earliest records of our so-called Western Civilization, and Potnia is one of the oldest names found therein. It’s been translated as one of the titles of the Great Mediterranean Goddess. Atana Potnia, she was called—Atana like Athena, do you see? Most of the Greek gods actually started out as Cretan gods—by Cretan I mean what we call the Minoan culture, from our old friend King Minos.”
“The guy with the minotaur?”
“The guy with the minotaur. But these are very, very ancient gods, dating back millennia before the more well-known Greek gods. A lot of the place-names in that part of the Mediterranean are actually pre-Hellenic, completely different linguistically from Greek words. But the Greeks were so impressed by this culture that they ended up incorporating many of these names and words into their own language. So a lot of words we think of as being classically Greek, like theos or hieros or laburinthos, actually belong to this earlier society.”
I eased myself up onto the table beside the Agora. “Really? That’s fascinating.”
Fritz nodded, pleased. “It is fascinating. Because, you see, the Greeks did the same thing with their gods. They co-opted these more ancient deities for themselves—gods like Hyacinthus, who was sort of a proto-Apollo, although he was also associated with the death cults that the Greeks later attached to Adonis; and Posidas, who became Poseidon, and—”
He gave an effete wave. “—oh, you know a bunch of lesser deities. But—”
Fritz started pacing, carried away by his monologue. “Your feminist friends out there are onto something. Because in fact this entire Minoan/Mycenæan civilization probably grew up around the worship of goddesses. The gods were a much later addition, most of them we think brought in by Northern invaders. The goddess cults probably originated on the mainland—Turkey, Anatolia, that whole cauldron of Eastern European countries—and then were brought by colonists to Crete and its satellite islands. The Cyclades, Rhodes, Thera…
“These goddesses eventually took the form of our familiar Greek goddesses. But originally they had names that are very strange to us—I mean, they are linguistically very unusual, which makes the whole thing even more mysterious, don’t you think?”
I nodded, not sure how many more mysterious things I could take. Fritz went on without missing a beat.
“Wanasoi,” he pronounced, gazing dreamily at the ceiling. “Those were the twin queens who may have become Demeter and her daughter Kore. Sitopotiniya, the Mistress of the Grain. Erinu, who also was a Demeter prototype, although her name sounds very like that of the Erinyes, “the Angry Ones” or Furies, who gave Orestes such a hard time. Britomartis or Atemito, who was probably Artemis. Pasaya. Querasiyua, the Huntress. Inachus, who was named for a sacred river. Othiym and her lover-son Pade, the sacred child—”
I gasped. “That name—”
Fritz looked at me sideways. “Which one?”
“Othiym—”
He nodded, smiling as though I had posed an intelligent question. “Ah yes: Othiym Lunarsa. The Woman in the Moon. Another garden-variety lunar deity, although some scholars translate her name as the Destroyer. You know, like the Hindu goddess Kali.”
I swallowed. My mouth felt parched as I croaked, “And these goddesses—they all came from Crete?”
Fritz shrugged. “Who knows? Originally, no; but many of them were worshiped there. Crete was the center of the ancient Minoan civilization, which was an incredibly sophisticated and advanced civilization, even by our standards. Flush toilets, hot running water, and according to the frescoes and pottery they left, they had an absolutely fantastic sense of style. And they may have had optical lenses, for telescopes and spectacles, and wet-cell batteries—and this is four, five thousand years ago! Compared to the Minoans, the ancient Greeks were really just a bunch of pederastic misogynist thugs.”
“But then what happened to them?”
Fritz looked wistful, almost sad. “That entire part of the Mediterranean was blown off the map by a gigantic volcanic eruption on Thera around 1628 B.C. Fffft—” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. Utterly destroyed, all in one day.”
“But Crete wasn’t destroyed,” I broke in.
“It might as well have been. The island of Thera had been central to the Minoans, and Thera was completely obliterated—like Pompeii. So the Minoans lost one of their most important ports and cities. And their religion took a hit as well. The so-called labyrinth at Knossos, and all these other temples on Crete, had already sustained some pretty serious damage from earthquakes. They all had been rebuilt, but when Thera blew, that was pretty much the death knell for Minoa.”
Fritz sighed. “All that beauty! Crete could have rivaled ancient Egypt—and we’ll probably never know the extent of what we lost when we lost that culture.”
“What were they like? Were they goddess-worshipers?”
“Ha!” exclaimed Fritz. “You have been listening to your young friend’s mother! Yes, Virginia, they were goddess-worshipers, at least as far as we can tell. The Minoans left no literary accounts of their culture, but they did leave wonderful images: paintings, statues, temples, the entire marvelous temple-labyrinth at Knossos; and almost all of their religious images seem to be of goddesses or priestesses.
“The frescoes show that women were not only worshiped in Crete but probably also ruled there, and certainly played a major part in the political structure of the city-states. They seemed to have some sort of bull-worship, which was pretty common in the ancient world. It’s very likely that the bull-worship as well as the goddess icons originally derived from central Europe, where we’ve found numerous similar icons and images.”
“What about their religion—I mean, what did they do?”
He frowned. “What did they do?”
“You know, did they worship a golden calf, the Ark of the Covenant, stuff like that?”
“Who knows? The frescoes indicate they were real naturalists—there are beautiful, beautiful paintings of sea animals, of flowers and plants and trees. Sir Arthur Evans, who led much of the restoration at Knossos, liked to think they were flower children. You know, very airy-fairy, artsy-fartsy, wearing pretty clothes and jewelry, skirts for boys and girls and lots of makeup. A quote-unquote ‘feminine’ c
ulture: fancy hairdos, ritual transvestism, lots of attractive young people doing aerobics in the stadia.”
“Sounds like Dupont Circle.”
Fritz smiled. “Well, Evans has been proved to be wrong, at least in part. It turns out that the Minoans, at least some of them, were actually more bloodthirsty than we first imagined. There is a famous fresco that shows women sharing communion in some kind of religious ritual—only women, which is interesting in itself—and some of the tablets we’ve deciphered in Linear B list as much as 14,000 liters of wine used in a single year at one major temple site.”
“Mass alcohol consumption.”
“To put it mildly. There’s also evidence that opium was very widely used. Some people have said that the labyrinth—palace, really—at Knossos looks like it was designed by an architect under the influence.”
Fritz laughed, somewhat grimly. “But some of them may have really needed a few drinks—
“Not long ago, archaeologists managed to decipher some of the script on one of the Linear A tablets that postdates the Thera eruption. It was a record of the hieros gamos, the so-called ‘sacred marriage’ that was supposed to appease the Great Goddess. Apparently these particular survivors believed that she had caused the volcanic eruption as punishment to them, for turning from her to these new young sky-gods from the north.
“But even before we learned that, we may have found evidence of the same ritual being performed. Back in 1979 another group of archaeologists discovered a small shrine overlooking Knossos—Anemospilia, on Mount Juktas. In addition to an arena where sacrifices were performed, and a sort of sacred rock—like those goddess-meteorites found in parts of old Europe—an altar was found, with the ossified remains of a seventeen-year-old boy on top of it. His legs were drawn up to his chest and might have been tied there, though of course we don’t know that. What we do know is that he was murdered—sacrificed, there was a very ornate curved dagger in the shape of a crescent moon found next to the skeleton. A lunula, they call it. Bone analysis indicates that the blood had been completely drained from the upper portion of his body…”
I gasped, but Fritz wasn’t finished.
“That’s not all. It seems that this particular sacrifice was being carried out at the exact moment of the terrible earthquake that leveled Knossos in 1700 B.C. So when archaeologists searched the area further, they found the bodies of three other people who had been taking part in the sacrifice—skeletons of temple servants. One of them was holding a shattered rhyton with a bull painted on it. There was also a man, possibly a priest or priest-king—he was wearing a sacred ring—lying on his back in front of the altar. Probably the guy who used the knife. And finally the body of a woman, a priestess, who appears to have been anemic—so there may have been some kind of ritual bloodletting going on with her as well. The earthquake must have struck minutes after this boy was killed—the rhyton had traces of blood on it, and it had probably been full when the whole temple collapsed and buried them all. Nice, huh? Kind of makes you long for the good old days.”
I stumbled down from the table and started for the door, my legs shaking so that I could hardly walk.
“What’s the matter?” cried Fritz. “Katherine! Are you all right? Here, sit down, you look like you’re going to pass out—”
“I can’t,” I whispered. At the door I turned and stammered, “Thanks, Fritz. I—I’m sorry, I don’t feel well, I have to leave—”
“The Minoans really were a highly sophisticated people!” he called a little desperately, as I fled toward my office. “Caligula’s Romans were much, much worse—”
But I turned the corner before I could hear any more.
The halls were empty, so there was no one to stare after me as I ran down the corridor, first to Dylan’s office cubicle, which was empty, and then to the tiny room off the main library where he had been archiving the Kroeber collection.
He wasn’t there. I stood for a moment, staring down at the digitizer and the neat stacks of photos, each appended with a number in Dylan’s careful, European hand. I drew several shuddering breaths and tried to calm myself—he was probably in my office looking for me, he could have gone downstairs to get a soda, or to the bathroom—
His battered motorcycle jacket was tossed over a chair. It had been there for weeks, after Dylan had worn it against the rain one morning and then forgotten about it. I picked it up, holding it close to my face as I inhaled, the cracked leather rough against my fingers and his smell still clinging to it. After a moment I let it slide from my hand to the floor.
I forced myself to walk back to my office, fixing in my mind’s eye just where he would be standing—there, by the window, his back to me as it was the first time I saw him—and how I would slip up behind him, slide my arms around his waist and pull him to me and whisper that we weren’t going to wait till four o’clock, it was too hot, too scary, it was his birthday, we were going to leave now…
My office was empty, the video screens black and dead as when I had left them a few hours ago. My whole body shook as I approached the desk and saw the note there. A page torn from some anthropological journal, one corner damp from where it had been weighted with a coffee mug, and the ink smeared so that Dylan’s careful hand looked rushed, almost frantic.
Dear Sweeney,
Guess what? My mother finally showed up. She was waiting at the guard’s desk downstairs; they just called, so I’m going down now and I guess I’ll go to her hotel or whatever. I told her you and I had plans for tonight and I had to leave by four so I’ll just meet you back at the house. Keep the champagne cold—
“No!”
I pounded my fist against the desk, ripping the page so that no one else would ever read its final lines.
I love you, Sweeney. Don’t worry! I’ll be RIGHT BACK—
Dylan.
CHAPTER 21
Waking the Moon
THE CAR ANGELICA HAD hired was a Lincoln Town Car, pure white inside and out, with plush velvet seats and chromium fixtures. She could tell that Dylan thought it was tacky; it was tacky, but it was the only car she could find that had air-conditioning.
“Mmm, it’s so nice to see you, sweetheart,” she said, hugging him in front of the guard’s desk in the museum.
“You too, Mom,” said Dylan. She let her head rest upon his shoulder for a moment, then drew back to stare up at him.
“So what’s this, you can’t call your mother more than once a summer?” she teased. “I could have been worried, you know.”
“But you weren’t.” Dylan let her slip her arm around him and together they walked outside. “I’m sorry, Mom—really, I am. I just—I’ve been kind of caught up in things.”
Angelica nodded. She had dressed for the weather, in a sleeveless shift of ivory-colored crumpled silk, belted at the waist with a gold cord, and simple but very expensive Italian gladiator sandals. Her hair was pulled into a chignon, and she wore heavy gold earrings and bracelets of ivory and sandalwood. Around her neck she wore the lunula. The silver crescent should have been jarring with all that gold, but in fact it was hardly noticeable, like the moon seen during daylight.
“You look good, Dylan,” Angelica said as they walked to the car. “I told you you’d like D.C.”
“It’s been great.” He stopped at the curb and stared up at the sky. “Except for the weather,” he added, frowning.
Overhead the liverish sky had grown even darker. Heavy brownish thunderclouds crept above the National Gallery and Regent’s Castle and the Treasury Building. Everything had a strange greenish cast, as though he was seeing the world through a whorled glass. A hurricane sky, he thought.
But the first of August was too early to worry about hurricanes. Besides, he was with his mother.
“Hop in!” Angelica said cheerfully pulling open the back door of the car. Cool air like water flowed into the street. “Your chariot has arrived.”
Dylan looked at the town car and made a face. “Gee, Mom, is someone paying you to
ride around in that?”
Angelica laughed. “Not yet. Come on, go easy on me—it’s the only thing Elspeth could find that had air-conditioning.”
Dylan slung his long legs into the car and slid inside. “Is Elspeth here?”
“No. I just implored her to take care of a few things for me—I’ve been so busy, and I didn’t want to have to worry about anything on your birthday.”
“Right.” Dylan nodded, stared back out the window at the museum, its dome faded to grey in the glaucous light. He bit his lip, then said, “I know you came all this way to see me, but I have to be back here by four. I—I made plans for tonight. With a friend.”
Angelica slipped onto the velvet-covered seat beside him, motioning to the driver. Without a sound the car eased onto Constitution Avenue and headed toward the Tidal Basin. “Plans? What kind of plans? Anyone I know?”
Dylan opened his mouth to reply, thought better of it. He shook his head. “Just some friends.”
Angelica turned and stared at him. She plucked a stray tendril of hair from her forehead and pushed it aside. “I see,” she said softly. Her voice was even, her emerald eyes unreadable. “Well, that still leaves us time for lunch, doesn’t it?”
“Sure.”
She leaned forward. “Don’t you have something for me?” she asked playfully.
Dylan frowned. “Oh… yeah. Here—”
He handed her the fragment of the lunula he’d found in the museum. She took it and Dylan held his breath, waiting for her to say something else, but his mother seemed distracted. She looked out the window as the Mall slipped by, her mouth pursed, brow furrowed. He’d spoken to her a few times over the summer, usually calling her from the museum, but he hadn’t told her about Sweeney. He hadn’t told her about anything; he hadn’t actually wanted to speak to her at all. But she was his mother, and this was his birthday. She’d come all the way here from Huitaca, though past experience had made it clear to Dylan that his mother usually visited him when there was some other business she could take care of at the same time—dress fittings in Milan, academic cronies in Princeton. This time it was probably some old friends in Congress and the diplomatic corps.
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