“What could you have done to be so guilty?” I asked.
Again she shrugged, eyeing me. “There’s always something, isn’t there?”
I couldn’t bring myself to deny it. I glanced at Dan. “What do you think it was?”
“I think it was probably just an overdose,” he said. “A violent reaction from too much of the gas.”
The waiter brought my “pancakes.” These were crispy little fried puffs of dough, with some sort of grape juice syrup on the side. The very sight of them saddened me. In my recent months of travel, it happened with increasing frequency that my hunger provoked sharp pangs of homesickness. Foreign food seemed unable to assuage it.
“What about the ‘Holy Things’?” I asked. “You must have some idea what they were.”
“There’s a lot of speculation,” Dan said. “The Greek archeologist Mylonas thought it was bits and pieces of a Mycenean palace shrine that survived in Eleusis through the Dark Ages of Greece.”
“Bits and pieces—like what?”
“No one knows. Some Victorian classicists assumed it must have included a phallus or a female sexual symbol.”
I thought of Sigmund Freud with all that primitive art on his desk.
“How predictable,” Phoebe said. “A bunch of priggish males turning the mystical wellspring of the ancient world into a peep show.”
“Some of the ancient writers hint that it was nothing more than shafts of wheat or a handful of seeds—symbols of the goddess of grain and agriculture, Demeter.”
“Awesome,” I said. “Shafts of wheat.”
“A profound revelation!” Phoebe exclaimed.
We laughed.
Dan didn’t find it amusing. “It might not have mattered what the ‘holy things’ were,” he said. “It was more about how they were seen, the state of mind of the beholder.”
“As in ‘stoned’?” Phoebe said scornfully. She didn’t share Dan’s enthusiasm for psychedelic drugs.
“In the right state of mind,” he said, “any object can become a vehicle for transcendence. You can look at an ordinary rock and see it vibrate with being. “
Being. Is-ness. I thought of my wristwatch, how strange it had looked in the starlight. And Phoebe’s eyes, so alive and mysterious. Was that only because of the gas I’d inhaled?
“What do you think the kykeon was?” I asked.
“It sure as hell wasn’t barley tea,” Dan said.
“You think it might have been ethylene vapors?”
“Unlikely,” he said. “That kind of geological phenomenon is rare. Those gas vents were unique to Delphi.”
“So what then? Stropharia?” This was Dan’s favorite hallucinogen—Stropharia cubensis, the magic mushroom.
“The first to suggest that kykeon was hallucinogenic was the famous English scholar Robert Graves. He believed the kykeon was a psilocybin mushroom, probably baked into sacramental cakes.”
“I doubt it,” Phoebe said. “Eleusis was a harvest festival, and barley was grown nearby on the Rarian Plain. The elixir may not have been barley soup, but surely the grain had something to do with it.”
“That’s what the researcher Gordon Wasson thought,” Dan said. “There’s a fungus that infects edible grains. It produces ergot, which contains alkaloids that affect circulation and neurotransmission in the brain. Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist, worked with Wasson researching these psychoactive alkaloids and found they were precursors to LSD.”
“Wow,” I said. “So the Greeks were dropping acid in 1500 BC.”
“Not exactly. Wasson and Hoffman believed the kykeon was a potion derived from infected barley, a specially formulated ergotized beer.”
“I thought the Greeks were wine drinkers,” I said.
“Beer is as old as bread,” Dan said. “Xenophon called it barley wine, but—”
He had glimpsed someone across the room. “Excuse me a second,” he said.
Phoebe and I watched him walk through the restaurant toward a woman who had appeared at the door. She was a plumpish Greek, with unruly black hair, a pasty complexion, and heavily made-up eyes. Her dress seemed far too tight for her weight. She acted a little self-conscious, but smiled in relief when she saw Dan approach.
He brusquely led her out the door.
I glanced at Phoebe. “Who the hell was that?”
“I can’t be certain,” she said. “But it appears your brother is wrangling with a whore.” She nodded toward the window. “Look.”
Outside, across a lane of parked cars, Dan brought the woman to a stop at the curb. She appeared distraught and anxious, talking a blue streak while Dan tried to calm her. It wasn’t until he reached for his wallet that she finally settled down. Then, after counting the cash he gave her, she argued again until he handed her more. Apparently it was enough to make her happy: she left him with a kiss on the cheek.
“It’s her,” Phoebe said. “Last night. The spring.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Kassandra.”
We watched her saunter away up the street, hips banging.
Seconds later, Dan was back at the table. He seemed preoccupied and upset, and took his seat in silence, until he finally noticed the two of us staring. “What?”
“You could have told us,” Phoebe said.
“An unnecessary distraction,” he growled. “I needed you to focus on preparing for the rite.”
“Guess it didn’t work out like you planned,” I said.
“All she was supposed to do was distract him. I’d no idea she had such a flare for the dramatic.”
“How much did it cost you?” Phoebe asked.
“More than I bargained for,” he griped.
“The torn dress?”
“Yes. But money’s not the half of it. Those flashing lights last night?”
“Yeah?”
“An ambulance. Our wheezing nightwatchman is in the hospital—she gave the letch a goddamn heart attack!”
6
BEFORE SHE left for Crete, Phoebe spent a day with us in Athens. Over a breakfast of oily eggs in Dan’s cluttered apartment, we had a brief discussion about what we ought to do. Phoebe wanted to shop, saying she needed to buy good-bye gifts for Dan and me, and to find something Greek to send her father for his birthday. I wanted to head up to the woods on Mount Hymettus, which looked to me like the only place to escape the city’s smog. Dan, however, persuaded us there were more important places to visit, ones he hoped might help us solve the puzzle of Phoebe’s prophecy.
We had already been to the Acropolis together before we had headed to Delphi, but Dan now dragged us back again to find the Sanctuary of Aphrodite and Eros. It was not located atop the plateau, where the Parthenon and all the other famous ruins stood, but down on the side of the northern slope, where several primitive shrines were nestled among the steep cliffs and pathways.
From below the Acropolis, Dan led us up to a path along the cliffs. As we walked beneath the rocky walls, he told us about an obscure nocturnal fertility rite called the Arrephoria.
“Every year, four young girls were selected from noble families to be the servants of Athena, the goddess of Athens. They were a sort of Greek precursor to the Roman Vestal Virgins. The annual fertility rite involved carrying baskets on their heads, through an underground passageway and down a secret stairway to the Sanctuary of Aphrodite and Eros. Once there, they traded the secret contents of their baskets for other contents, which they brought back up to the Temple of Athena. No one knows exactly what it was they carried.”
“What do you think it was?” I asked.
“I’ve always thought it must have been some kind of aphrodisiac.”
“Oh, please,” Phoebe said disparagingly.
“Why not?” he said. “Ritual sex was an integral part of the cult of Aphrodite. A female slave of the temple was called a hierodule, a sacred servant. At Aphrodite’s temple in Corinth, there were more than a thousand of these women. People in the cult practiced the rite of hieros gamos, the ‘holy wed
ding,’ ritual intercourse with a god through coupling with another human. They believed it could induce a profound religious experience. It’s the basic premise of the orgy. By dissolving bodies and boundaries, you dissolve all personal identification and take the plunge into matter.”
The “plunge into matter” was a favorite phrase of Dan’s. It described the state of mind he always seemed to be after: escaping the prison of the individual ego, merging with the boundless mind of nature.
“Americans have a phrase for that, too,” I said. “It’s called ‘fucking your brains out.’”
“It’s called a male fantasy,” Phoebe said. “Ritual prostitution was nothing more than that—prostitution. There were plenty of brothels in the ancient world, but they were usually kept separate from the temples. In Athens, Solon established laws for prostitution, and he forbade procuring at the temple.”
Dan and Phoebe argued over this for a while, two know-it-alls going at it. I finally interrupted.
“You think this aphrodisiac—assuming that’s what it was—you think it might have been the kykeon?”
“Actually, I hadn’t thought of it until Phoebe made her prophecy.”
“Aphrodite leads the way to Dionysus. So you’re thinking…orgy?”
“The Bacchanalian orgy. Dionysus is the god of dissolution. He was known as the Liberator. He freed you from yourself into ecstasy or madness.”
We continued this discussion as we passed several shallow caves—one of which Dan said belonged to Apollo—and the cut-stone entrance to an ancient spring. A short ways beyond that we arrived at what Dan called “Aphrodite in the Gardens.”
Though now mostly dry and rocky, there was a kind of gardenlike feeling about the spot—an appropriately seductive enchantment. There was no temple or shrine, but simply a hollow in the side of the cliff, with massive boulders, clumps of ivy, and a spattering of tiny scarlet poppies. The rock walls held at least a dozen neatly carved niches like the ones we had seen at the Castalian Spring. According to Dan, they had once held votive candles and tiny figurines.
“For the common people, these rustic sanctuaries on the slope were more personal places of worship than the great monuments up on top.”
After much searching of the rock walls, Phoebe finally located an inscription in ancient Greek. Tracing the letters with her fingertips, she announced that they spelled “Aphrodite.”
Dan was peering through his binoculars toward the bottom of the slope. I asked him what he was looking for.
“I wanted to see how far this is from the Eleusinion—Athens’ shrine to Demeter.” He nodded toward some ruins far below beyond the trees. “During the course of the year, the ‘holy things’ were kept there, until they were carried in the procession to Eleusis.”
“So the stuff they carried off from there might have been the same stuff the girls carried here?”
“It’s possible,” Dan said. “The girls might have carried down one of the ‘holy things,’ or perhaps an ingredient of the kykeon.”
“I don’t see any path down there from here.”
Phoebe looked askance at me. “Sixteen centuries have passed, Jack. Do you really imagine the path would still exist?”
Know-it-all.
Dan pointed out the Agora, the ancient city center, now a park-like stretch of ruins. “It’s only a part of the ancient city,” he said. “Much of it still lies there, under the Plaka.” He nodded toward the oldest neighborhood in Athens, crowded with shops and tavernas.
“That’s where I’d like to do my shopping,” Phoebe said.
“We’ll go there for lunch,” Dan said. “For now, we go to the National Museum.”
It was at this point that Phoebe started calling Dan “the Tyrant.”
WE SPENT two long hours at the National Archeological Museum. Phoebe seemed particularly engaged with an eight-thousand-year-old marble figurine of a wide-hipped woman from Sparta. She described similarities and differences with goddess figures from Minoan Crete.
Across the courtyard in another gallery, Dan stood us before a fifth-century BC relief sculpture of Demeter and Persephone from Eleusis. It showed Demeter handing an ear of grain to a youthful male named Triptolemus, though Dan insisted it was actually Dionysus.
“The so-called experts have it wrong,” he said. “They’re still trying to exclude the unsavory Dionysus. At Eleusis, Dionysus was considered the son of Persephone, born to her in the Underworld. He was androgynous, halfway between two sexes and caught between two worlds. The Dionysian cults and the Eleusinian Mysteries were the last remnants of Minoan Goddess culture that survived into patriarchal Greece.”
He took us up to the first floor to look at ancient pottery. One black vase showed the figure of a woman with snakes in her hands and her head cast back. He called it a perfect portrait of possession.
“It’s physically accurate,” he said. “That kind of jerking head movement is common. We saw it in Phoebe the other night.”
“What’s with the snakes?” I asked.
“Symbol of Dionysus. A living snake is a vehicle of the god. It added to the excitement of the Dionysian ritual—the sexual union of the god with the initiate. Ever heard of those snake-handlers in the mountains of Kentucky? It’s part of their religious service. ‘They shall take up serpents.’ They go into an ecstatic dance, then pull rattlesnakes out of boxes and pass them all around.”
Like the devil in the Garden of Eden, Dan led us down to another gallery where we contemplated a variety of classical nudes. Eventually, we found ourselves standing before the shapely sculpture of a naked Aphrodite, dated to 100 BC. Eros, the winged cherub, fluttered just over her shoulder, while standing beside her was the goat-god Pan, doing his best to seduce her. Pan had horns, an ugly face, and the hooves and legs of a goat. The lovely Aphrodite held a sandal in her hand, threatening to give the pest a swat. There could be little doubt what the sculpture was about—a point Dan drilled home with Phoebe.
“You still think Aphrodite is about love and not sex?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “This only proves it. You can see for yourself, she’s fighting him off. It’s Pan that embodies the sexual impulse, the base and beastly side of man. Aphrodite epitomizes the power of love, the harmony and order of nature, all that is noble and beautiful.”
“Hard to believe she’s so above it all,” he said. “Just look at the grin on her face.”
“She’s amused,” Phoebe said. “Aloof and amused.”
“You mean she takes pleasure in torturing him?”
“He doesn’t look tortured to me,” she said. “He’s just doing what animals do.”
They went on like this, back and forth, until finally I told them I’d kill them both if we didn’t get out of the museum.
WE HAD lunch in the Plaka. Afterward, in a souvenir shop, Phoebe bought Dan and me going-away gifts. From a shelf lined with Greek gods, she selected for Dan a small plastic statue of a very sexy Aphrodite. For me, who’d been complaining about the lack of a lamp by my mattress in Dan’s apartment, she chose a Cupid candle, a fat little cherub with a wick sprouting from his head. Half an hour later, in a shop in a neighborhood closer to the Agora, Phoebe found a string of amber-colored worry beads to send as a present to her father. “It’s perfect,” she said. “He’s always worrying about me.”
Over this endless hour of shopping, the Tyrant had been prodding us to accompany him to Eleusis. Phoebe wanted to take the trip by taxi, given that the sky was darkening with clouds, but Dan insisted the ride was too expensive, so we ended up going by bus. By the time we reached the coast, a drizzle had begun. This proved only a hint of the coming disappointment.
After the description of Eleusis I had read in Dan’s paper, I expected a Greek version of heaven on earth, a broad expanse of green pasture upon which mystical temples stood. Instead, we found the hideous industrial sprawl of the modern city of Elefsina. We passed belching petrochemical, steel, and cement works before finally reaching Demeter’s San
ctuary, what had once been the glorious endpoint of the Sacred Road from Athens.
Dan had conveniently failed to warn us about the hellish setting. He also didn’t mention there was nothing much to see. A vast graveyard of scattered marble from successive layers of history, the ruins at Eleusis were complex and confusing. The site lacked Delphi’s spectacular landscape, and none of its structures had been much reassembled, so there was little sense of the layout or focus. Together with the horror of surrounding smokestacks and the smell of fumes from refineries, the place exuded an atmosphere of desolation and despair.
Did I mention that it was raining? None of us had brought umbrellas along, and now we wandered this bewildering city of the dead while a steady drizzle descended. Only a couple of hippie tourists remained at the site, and they appeared to be leaving. It felt as if we had arrived in the quiet that follows a funeral.
The first thing we passed of any note was an ancient water well, neatly capped with tightly fitted polygonal stones. Dan told us it was the Well of the Maidens, where, according to the Hymn of Demeter, the goddess stopped to weep in her long search for her daughter. We stood there in dutiful silence, staring down grimly at the open black hole, but by this point we were soaking wet, and neither Phoebe nor I could muster the interest to ask Dan a single question.
From there he led us to what he said was the Great Telestrion, the Hall of Initiation and the Mysteries, the windowless auditorium into which countless thousands had come to witness a miracle in the darkness. All that remained of the structure now was a large open stone square with scattered remnants of pedestals and partially restored tiers of seats that once had bordered the interior. We stood on this open space for a while, squinting into the rain, trying to imagine what might have occurred there three thousand years in the past.
We failed. No vision of an Aphrodite or a dancing Dionysus emerged from the grim stones around us. No recipe for kykeon thundered from the sky.
I wondered what Dan had expected. Why had he dragged us here? Why was he so obsessed with these Mysteries, dead for so many centuries? Probably dead for good reason, I thought. Most likely there was nothing more to them than the nothing we now saw in front of us. The secret at its center was a parlor trick, a stone phallus or a shaft of wheat, revealed in a brilliant beam from the sun, something the gullible Greeks, drunk on barley beer, might have swallowed in their stupor as a vision of their god.
Night of the Furies Page 6