Night of the Furies

by David Angsten

  I heard the whispered echo of her voice in my head: Aphrodite leads the way to Dionysus.

  Phoebe slowly reached up and pulled down my mask. Her eyes seemed to soften as they fell to my lips.

  “Jack…”

  She tugged on the T-shirt looped around my neck, pulling my face closer to hers. She held me there a moment, only inches away.

  “Phoebe,” I whispered.

  Her eyes again found their way into mine, and she saw in them the same desire that I was seeing in hers, a desire that was more like a craving or compulsion, a mania that had suddenly possessed us. As much as it might be a betrayal to my brother, as much as I might be taking advantage of her state, I realized that making love to Phoebe was all I had really wanted from the moment I had met her.

  She gently pulled me closer and brought her mouth to mine. She paused there with our lips barely touching.

  Aphrodite leads the way…

  I kissed her.

  Softly at first, then…hungrily. Our mouths devouring each other.

  I felt the soft stroke of her tongue and parted my teeth to take her. The wet flesh slid between my lips, teased my tongue, and retreated. Then her lips parted generously. Her fingers grazed my naked back. My hands took hold of her hair. When I tugged her head back and kissed her throat, she moaned and murmured my name.

  Then, with a sudden jerk of her head, Phoebe went cold and silent.

  I pulled away. Something had come over her. She was staring off blankly, her face upturned to a sky full of stars.

  … the way to Dionysus.

  “Phoebe?”

  She slowly turned her face to me. Her eyes, which appeared to have been focused on some deeply buried thought, gradually sharpened and fixed on my face. Her head jerked again with a sudden spasm, and a look of horror came over her, as if her mind had just unearthed some long-forgotten terror.

  Her voice cracked with fright. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God!”

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  She reached out to me, unable to speak. Fear strangling her words.

  “Phoebe—”

  She seemed unable to breathe. I moved to try to help her, but I was growing dizzy, overcome by the fumes, and once again I felt myself slipping into a dream. Everything seemed unreal.

  Her hands pushed at me, batting me away. “No!” she cried. “No!”

  I tried to calm her, to hold her arms, to carry her out of the chamber, but she fought me off frantically.

  “Phoebe—I’m here—you’re safe—”

  She was up from the stool now, backing away, fighting off invisible attackers. Her cries of terror frightened me.

  “Dan!” I shouted. “Help!”

  The Pythia had descended into a frenzy, a shrieking and violent hysteria. I grabbed hold of her thrashing arms and forced her against the wall. She kicked and twisted and squirmed. She was screaming out, over and over, words I could not understand.

  “Phoebe!” My brother suddenly appeared at my side. He helped me hold her down.

  Phoebe looked back and forth between us, peering in fear at our faces.

  “We’ve got to get her out of these fumes,” Dan said.

  The two of us readied to move her, but Phoebe had finally stopped screaming and appeared to be settling down. The sweet odor was dissipating. Dan had shut off the gas.

  “You’re all right,” he assured her, feigning calm. “Everything’s okay now.”

  “No,” she whispered, shaking her head. And then she whispered the same words she had until now been screaming. The words I had not understood.

  “The Furies are coming,” she said.

  Her eyes deliriously rolled to the sky. We held her as she fainted.

  5

  SOMEWHERE DOWN on the road below, police lights were flashing. We could see them reflecting on the cliffs.

  “They must have heard her screaming,” I said.

  Dan was returning with his backpack. Phoebe lay slumped beside the rim of the adyton, slowly coming to. I picked up her pack and started to wind up the plastic tubing.

  “Leave it,” Dan said. “The tank, too. We’ve got to get out of here fast.” Together we lifted Phoebe, slung her arms over our shoulders, and headed for the trees.

  We hid outside the sanctuary, in a ravine near the base of the cliffs, waiting for the lights to go away and our Pythia to recover. The police, to our surprise, departed only minutes after they had arrived, without even bothering to inspect the grounds. We watched their flashing lights pass along the road to Delphi, apparently in a vain attempt to scare off any intruders.

  As Dan had promised, the effects of the ethylene wore off quickly. Phoebe was left with mild nausea, a slight headache, and no memory at all of her experience. Given our betrayal of my brother, I took her amnesia as a welcome relief.

  By the time we completed the trek back to our hotel in Delphi, it was after four in the morning. We’d been awake for nearly twenty-four hours. Much of that time we’d been hiking Mount Parnassus, an exhausting undertaking in its own right, but add to it our ice-cold dips in the spring and the episode of madness in the temple, and you’re left with one ragged little trio. Dan and Phoebe trudged like zombies to their room off the courtyard, and I clumped upstairs to my single above the street.

  I slept profoundly, without the slightest hint of a dream. Around noon, I awoke to the growl of tourist buses hauling into town, brakes hissing as they rolled to a stop and disgorged their chattering cargo. These behemoths had just completed their three-hour journey from Athens, reminding me that we’d be making the return trip later that afternoon. Then, following a day or two at Dan’s place, Phoebe would be leaving us, heading back to Crete.

  I lay there in bed awhile, pondering this unpalatable prospect, while watching sunlight reflections on the ceiling and listening to the polyphony of voices from below. French, German, English, Greek. And something else I couldn’t place. Swedish, Danish, Dutch?

  It occurred to me that I’d never heard Phoebe speak her native tongue. I wondered now what it sounded like, especially coming from her. I’ll have to ask her to speak it, I thought. Maybe she could teach me a phrase or two. How do I say, “Kiss me,” in Dutch! How do I ask, “Will you sleep with me?” Maybe we could make Dutch our own private language. Maybe the two of us could openly converse without Dan ever having a clue.

  Maybe.

  I climbed out of bed. Immediately, I noticed a manila envelope had been slipped under my door. Dan had scribbled on it: Meet you at the taverna. Inside, I found the first three pages of the introduction to his doctoral dissertation. He’d been working on it for nearly a year now, but for some reason had not deigned to share it with me. Its title, In Search of the Kykeon, told me nothing, but a glance at the heading to the introduction made clear why he had decided to show it to me now.

  I sat down at once to read it.

  The Eleusinian Mysteries

  Beginning around 1500 BCE and lasting for nearly 2,000 years, a great annual autumn festival was celebrated in Greece on the slope of a rocky hill by the ancient seaside city of Eleusis. Legend held that at this site an earth goddess named Demeter was reunited with her daughter, Persephone, who had been abducted into the Underworld by its lord and ruler, Hades. Persephone was allowed to rejoin her mother, but only for eight months out of the year, a bargain that resulted in the seasonal fecundity of the earth, the cycle that governed the growing of crops and the perennial blessings of Nature.

  Around this myth of birth, death, and rebirth, a formalized ritual gradually developed that became known as the Mysteries of Eleusis. In essence, these secret initiation ceremonies involved the imbibing of a mysterious elixir and the display of hidden “holy things,” leading to a profound experience of spiritual revelation.

  The Mysteries celebrating Demeter and her daughter became the preeminent religious festival of Athens. Each year it attracted upwards of 30,000 people from all over the Greek world—men, women, young and old, from al
l classes, even slaves. All the great men of Athens participated, from Socrates and Plato to Pericles and Aeschylus. At least three Roman emperors—Augustus, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius—became initiates. Despite its longevity and vast renown, the essential elements of the Mysteries—the drink taken, the sacred objects displayed, and the nature of the revelation experienced—were never allowed to be divulged by anyone, under penalty of death. Hence, to this day, the secrets of the Mysteries remain unknown and are the source of unending speculation.

  What is known is derived from ancient texts and the accounts of early Christian writers. They describe a week-long series of rituals that climaxed in a great pilgrimage from Athens. From Demeter’s shrine at the base of the Acropolis, a vast procession of mystai carried off the secret “holy things” along the fourteen-mile road to Eleusis. To shield them from the eyes of the uninitiated, the sacred objects were carried in round baskets, called kistai, tied with purple ribbons. The celebrants, wearing garlands of myrtle, danced, sang, and shouted with joy as they followed the leader of the procession, a young male representing Persephone’s son, Dionysus, the notorious god of revelry and madness.

  At night, under torchlight, the procession finally reached Eleusis, and a special offering was made to Demeter. A day of fasting followed, and in the evening the mystai assembled in the Telestrion, or Hall of Initiation, a huge temple capable of holding several thousand worshippers. Here the fast was broken with the drinking of the special mixture known as the kykeon. Although it is reputed to have been a blend of barley and herbs, the ingredients of this mysterious infusion have never been definitively determined. What is known, however, is that following the imbibing of the kykeon, the “holy things” were at last revealed, and a deeply transformative, utterly awe-inspiring experience took place.

  “Blessed is the man among mortals on earth who has seen these things,” wrote Homer. The historian Plutarch described a great light “beheld in fear and silence.” Aristotle explained that it was not any instruction the initiates received, but rather the intensity of the experience that gave to the Mysteries their remarkable power. The great dramatist Aeschylus was nearly lynched for attempting to portray the experience in a play, thus breaking his vow of secrecy. The Greek poet Pindar described the initiation as a vision of life beyond death: “Happy is he who, having seen these rites, goes below the hollow earth, for he knows the end of life and he knows its god-sent beginning.”

  Perhaps the greatest testament to the spiritual power of the Mysteries is the fact of their remarkable endurance. For nearly 2,000 years, from deep in Greece’s archaic past, throughout the period of classical antiquity, even centuries into the Christian era, everyone who was anyone took part in these rites, and carried away with them the astonishing experience of an encounter they would never forget.

  I found Dan and Phoebe out on the back terrace of the Taverna Vakchos, the same restaurant we had shared a late dinner in the day we arrived. That night, it had been packed with college kids who were staying in the fully booked hostel next door. Now, it was crowded with older French tourists, fresh off the coach parked out front, and I wondered how Dan had finagled a table with such a spectacular view.

  The two of them were clearly finished eating and had been waiting there for a while. Dan was smoking a fat Hugo and typing away on his laptop. Phoebe sat sipping a cold Greek frappé from a straw while gazing out vaguely over the vast plain below.

  I was pleased to see her brighten as I joined them.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “I’m good,” she said. “Wonderful, actually. Slept like the dead.”

  “Me, too,” I said. Our eyes lingered a moment, so long that I began to wonder if her memory might have improved.

  Dan took the cigar out of his mouth. “Hate that expression—‘;slept like the dead.’” He looked at me. “What did you think of the paper? “

  “What do I think? I think you’re nuts.”

  “Why?”

  I started to answer, when the waiter appeared.

  “Uh, coffee, please. And a menu?” As he headed off, I pretended to call after him: “And would you bring me a cup of kykeon, please?”

  Phoebe laughed.

  Dan corrected my pronunciation. “It’s KEE-kee-on,” he said.

  “Whatever. Here’s what I don’t understand. Over fifteen hundred years have passed. If nobody’s figured out what the stuff was, what makes you think you can do it?”

  Dan shrugged. “Talent, experience, persistence? And failing all that…” He nodded toward the small notebook lying on the table. “There’s always divine intervention.”

  I turned the notebook toward me and read my scribbles aloud. “Aphrodite leads the way to Dionysus. Dionysus leads the way to Eleusis.”

  “It’s i-LOO-sis,” Dan corrected.

  “Whatever. Do you remember saying this, Phoebe?”

  Her lips were pursed around the tip of her straw. She shook her head.

  “Do you remember anything that happened?”

  She withdrew the straw and paused a moment, gazing off. “The last thing I remember…was you asking if I was okay.” She touched my hand. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m sorry I got out of control.”

  Again her eyes seemed to linger.

  “My pleasure,” I said. “I mean…No problem.”

  She smiled warmly. Her eyes were like pools.

  Dan looked back and forth between us. Phoebe withdrew her hand.

  “So…” I said. “Have you guys figured out what it means?”

  Dan and Phoebe exchanged a bitter glance.

  “I’d like to know what you think,” Dan said.

  “Well,” I ventured, “according to your dissertation, Dionysus—or some young guy in the role of Dionysus—led the procession to Eleusis. So we know what that line is referring to.”

  Dan nodded. “Agreed. So what about the first line?”

  “It’s obvious—” Phoebe began.

  Dan cut her off. “—I’m asking Jack.”

  “But he—”

  “—Please, Phoebe. Just let him answer.” The two of them eyed each other sharply, then turned to look at me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Isn’t Aphrodite the goddess of love?”

  “And sexual desire,” Dan added.

  “Love,” Phoebe insisted. “Aphrodite is the goddess of love.”

  “Jack?”

  “Uh…I don’t know…I suppose it could mean any number of—”

  Phoebe interrupted. “It means you’ve got to fall in love, dummy—”

  “Phoebe, will you please?”

  They glared at each other across the table. Phoebe went back to her straw.

  I was so caught up in the tension between them I hadn’t even noticed the waiter. A coffee and a menu lay in front of me. He was awaiting my order.

  “Uh…You know, I’m starving. Do you think I can get, like, a big stack of pancakes?”

  Dan said, “We’re in Greece, Jack. Not Wisconsin.” He looked at the waiter. “Bring him a double order of tiganites, please. With petimezi if you don’t have syrup.”

  The waiter took my menu and departed.

  We sat there in silence a moment. I sipped my coffee, eyeing Dan and Phoebe through wisps of steam. I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on between them. All I knew was it had to do with sex, so I thought I better try to change the subject.

  “So what the hell are Furies?” I asked Phoebe.

  “They’re spirits of vengeance,” she said. “That’s really all I know.”

  “Do you remember seeing them?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “The Greeks called them Erinyes,” Dan said. “‘Those who walk in darkness.’ They took the form of women, with snakes in their hair and blood in their eyes. They were clad in flowing gowns, and carried an ax or a torch in their hands. It was the Romans who gave them the name ‘Furies,’ from the Latin word furor. They drove their victims insane.”

  “W
ho were their victims?” I asked.

  “Criminals, murderers. Mostly they avenged the shedding of a parent’s blood. Nothing escaped their sharp eyes. They pursued the guilty with speed and fury, allowing them no rest.”

  “So what do they have to do with the Eleusinian Mysteries?”

  “Nothing that I know of,” Dan said. “But they were attendants of Hades and Persephone, and lived with them in the Underworld. Some consider the Furies to be the dark side of Persephone.”

  “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Phoebe said.

  “I think I prefer Aphrodite,” I said.

  Dan sat back in his chair. “Aphrodite is actually related to the Furies. Gaia, goddess of earth, married Uranus, god of the sky, and their offspring were the Titans. The youngest of these, Cronus, castrated his father and threw his severed testicles into the sea. The drops of blood that fell on the earth gave rise to the Furies. And the genitals formed the foam of the sea, out of which arose Aphrodite.”

  “What a lovely story,” Phoebe said. She noisily sucked up the dregs of her drink.

  “Sex and murder,” Dan said. “Oldest story in the world.”

  Phoebe teased the tip of the straw with her tongue. “Aphrodite and the Furies—they’re rather like sisters, then, aren’t they?”

  “Sounds like a rock band,” I said. I was growing impatient with all this incestuous mythology. “What do you think you saw last night, Phoebe? What made you so afraid?”

  She shrugged, pushed her coffee away. “It may be I just have a guilty conscience,” she said. “That’s really what the Furies are about, aren’t they? Those ‘sharp eyes’ pursuing you, driving you mad?”