Atlantis

by John Cowper Powys

  “That little grey spot on our horizon,” he cried, “is only one of thousands of islands in Greek waters! To it and from it, through all our bays and estuaries and harbours and river-mouths, the word is now being carried from promontory to promontory that the true Rulers of the world have at last come into their own and henceforth will prove themselves supreme. You all, O beloved sheep without a shepherd, know well in your hearts of whom I speak! I speak of that immortal pair of Deities destined by fate before the foundation of the world to be its ultimate masters. Need I say, my precious and dedicated people, some of whom are destined to be transformed and transported by the one, and some of whom are destined to be transfigured and redeemed by the other, that I speak of Love and Drink, of Eros and Dionysos! Between these immortal ones is a miraculous communion, a holy understanding, in the divine mystery of which each leads to, each mingles with, each is swallowed up by the other: Love in Intoxication, and Intoxication in Love!

  “It has been revealed to us at last that all this childish domination of the inhabitants of the earth by the twelve Olympians has been infantile play-acting; and that the time has come for the real rulers of the universe to be recognized by us all for what they are and what we their subjects are.

  “This was, O people of Ithaca, this was, O people of Hellas, whether you are Achaeans or Pelasgians, this was the meaning of the Songs of Orpheus! Orpheus and his Priests have, from the beginning of History, alone known that the true divinities behind Zeus and Poseidon and Aidoneus, the true divinities behind Hera and Demeter and Athene and Aphrodite have always been the same, that is to say Eros and Dionysos!

  “The Mysteries of Eleusis have always in their unutterable essence, of which we may not even yet reveal the true nature, been identical with the Mysteries of Orpheus. Come then, O people of Ithaca and of all the sacred Isles, come then, and acknowledge the truth that only in the sacred ecstasy of Eros and Dionysos, that is to say of Love and Drink, is the Secret behind life revealed and the Secret behind death shown to be identical with it!

  “This is the reason, let me now announce to you, my friends, why Aphrodite has been imprisoned by Hephaistos in the Island of Cyprus, and why Prometheus has been imprisoned by Dionysos where Atlas holds up the sky. What is happening now to our world, what is shaking the pillars of the earth, what is rocking the walls of Erebos, what is ransacking the recesses of Tartaros, is that Eros is shaking off the childish notion that Aphrodite is his mother, and is now showing that, as he once caused the aboriginal night to be impregnated by the whirling elements of Chaos, so today he is making Okeanos enlarge his boundaries both to the West and to the East and making the sun and the moon throw off the rule of the children of Leto! Come then, O people of Ithaca! Follow the Sun and the Moon! Shake off these bow-and-arrow tyrants, Apollo and Artemis! Throw down the altars and idols of the gods of Olympus, and worship none but the two Supreme Mysteries of the Universe, Eros the Mystery of Love and Dionysos the Mystery of Ecstasy!

  “Worship these alone; and Eros will give you the only clue to the inexhaustible joy of life, and Dionysos will give you the only redemption from the inexhaustible misery of life!”

  It was at that moment, as the voice of Enorches died down, that Nisos recalled a curious little event that had occurred just before he set out that morning with Odysseus. Carrying the heavy load with which he had started, his head held high and his right hand raised to keep the balance of the great sack which was swaying on his shoulder, he had been too excited to give much thought to those he was leaving.

  In her natural feeling for her betrothed, the elder son of Krateros Naubolides, Leipephile had turned aside while the king’s old Nurse was waving them goodbye.

  Naturally enough also the Trojan maid Arsinöe had turned aside from watching them depart. But Eione, the little sister of Tis, had followed them. Yes, she had followed them as far as the last Olive-Tree in the palace garden.

  Here, as she waved her farewell, the wind from the bay, which they were facing as they went off, blew a loose fold of her garment so shamelessly clear from her perfectly formed thighs that unwilling to give an impression of immodesty and at the same time reluctant to stop waving to them till they were out of sight she went on waving with one hand while with bent head and floating hair she re-folded her garment about her limbs with the other hand; and it was the simple and direct childishness with which she accomplished this double task of waving with one hand and controlling her rebellious clothes with the other that so particularly touched Nisos and became for him a kind of visual symbol or dramatic emblem of the charm of the eternal feminine.

  He had been rather slow to recognize the peculiar quality of Eione’s charm, owing to the fact that there was nothing in her plain and simple face to correspond with the unusual loveliness and grace of her figure, but now that he was setting off on this historic expedition the whole quality of her personality invaded him.

  He wasn’t a conceited fool. He wasn’t so fanatically hostile to this sinister Priest of the Mysteries as not to admit to himself that what filled his mind at that moment with this plain-faced, exquisitely moulded young girl was what the fellow was saying about Eros. He had never heard till now of the primordial cosmology, so to speak, of the Mysteries, and there was something about the thought of shaking off the familiar personalities of the Olympians and concentrating upon the idea that the primeval origin of all things was Eros, that appealed to him extremely.

  He had always tried to think of himself as born to grow into a mysterious prophet, and the notion of such a prophet having a love-affair with some dedicated female was peculiarly appealing to him. Nor at this moment as the echoes of Enorches’ voice died away among the rocks and caves of his native island, did it seem a negligible stroke of fate on his behalf—perhaps showing the hand of Atropos herself, to whom he had been of some service—that the female to be associated with his career should be the youthful sister of his faithful old friend, Tis.

  In any case the Spinners of our human destiny did not give Nisos at this moment any further time for romantic thoughts about the youthful Eione with her homely face and her exquisite limbs, for he was called to the king’s side by an imperative summons.

  He obeyed with alacrity; and he found at once as he placed his treasure-bearing sack at the feet of the two protagonists that the transaction had been, with satisfaction to them both, brought to a successful conclusion.

  Odysseus was obviously in the particular mood into which he never rose or sank except when things fell out almost exactly as he had hoped, and yet without any exhausting effort on his part. His great square head seemed more like a fleshless skull now that he’d got what he wanted than when he was still fighting for it. His chin was so relaxed and at ease that his beard had the look of the bowsprit of a vessel that has reached a halcyon sea of undisturbed calm, with the Sirens in the form of friendly birds clinging contentedly to the rigging.

  As for Zeuks, he turned his head slowly towards Odysseus, then slowly towards the Priest of Orpheus who had now rushed between them, shooting himself down from the lichen-covered rostrum of his eloquence like a fleshly arrow from an hieratic bow.

  “Eros!” cried Zeuks with the inconceivable gusto of a guest at a delicious private banquet who has just tasted what to him is the renewal of a long series of forgotten delights, enjoyed long ago and far away. “Eros! Why it’s wonderful to realize at last that we can freely embrace our divine boy as a grown-up independent Deity, acting on his own without any woman’s help!” And as if to prove his delight Zeuks started singing:

  “Ha! Ha! Ha!

  Hee! Hee! Hee!

  Smell, taste, listen!

  Touch and see!

  Touch, see, listen!

  Taste every juice!

  Embrace Aidoneus!

  And you won’t fear Zeus!”

  Nisos felt such a burning atmospheric fire-ball of protection whirling round his head from Zeuks’ deep-set humorous eyeholes that he actually dared to make a faint flicker of an
ugly face of impudent defiance at the Priest of Orpheus: and when he turned to see how Odysseus was responding to the encounter between these two formidable ones he experienced an agreeable shock; for Odysseus was, as a matter of fact, making much the same sort of grimace as he was making himself, only it was made in accordance with the hero’s age, dignity, and heroic past. The old king indeed scrupled not to nod several times with his great massive head in the direction of Zeuks, as much as to say: “I am entirely of your opinion, O most excellent dealer in immortal horse-flesh! And as for this noisy rhetorician, he hides, as his type usually do, his only spadeful of good turf under bushels of mystical bad hay.”

  Obviously aware that their presence, combined with the special quality of their unusual nature, had much to do with this unseemly contention, both the winged Pegasos and the black-maned ivory-coloured Arion now began to use all their animal powers, four legs, their muscular shoulders, their nervous haunches, their arching necks, even the flashing wings of the one and the sweeping mane of the other, to thrust their way into the very centre of the contest.

  This put the torch to the pyre. The fury of the Priest of Orpheus broke all bounds. “What?” he shouted, projecting his carrion-crow physiognomy so close to the king’s impassive skull that it really did cross Nisos’ mind to wonder what would happen if the man’s vulturine beak were actually to snatch a gobbet of bleeding flesh from the throat beneath that proud ship’s bow.

  “Have you been dreaming,” was what the Priest had the gall to mutter to the King, “in the decrepit vanity of your degenerate flesh to which in the solitude of its ancestral cave an outworn Olympian, herself a refugee in Ethiopia, has granted a retreat wherein your moribund body can decompose at leisure; have you, I say, been dreaming that the present-day inhabitants of Ithaca, only a few among whom can even remember the lies and tricks and multiple disguises and devices, for which in days before their parents were born, you won for a year or two some kind of a melodramatic notoriety, will stand by quiescent while you terminate Tyrian transactions with dung-heap pirates, and hand over treasures which properly belong to the people of this island to do with as they wish? Give me these two horses, this moment, you Zeuks, if that is the ridiculous appellation put on you by some former clown in mischievous blasphemy or cringing sycophancy towards the tottering Thunderer we call Zeus whose very thunderbolts have fallen once more into the hands of that one-eyed race of Cyclopean Giants from whom he originally stole them; yes! yes! give me these horses this moment!

  “They shall remain in the sacred stables and in the consecrated meadows of the celebrants and hierophants of the Mysteries! They shall be made joyful by Eros, the Lord of Divine Lust, and shall be redeemed from the service of men by Dionysos the Lord of oblivious ecstasy!”

  Thus speaking Enorches snatched at the bridle of Pegasos with one hand and at the bridle of Arion with the other, evidently hoping that the power of his personality, and the authority of his manner, and the occult magnetism of his touch would produce the required vibration of super-human force in sufficient accumulation to enable him to carry them off to those usurped purlieus of Athene’s shrine which he had now appropriated as his own. But the event turned out otherwise.

  Never had Nisos felt prouder of the old hero than he did at that moment: never had he felt more utterly resolved that no insurrection against him by the House of Naubolides, even with his own dad, Krateros, and his own brother, the betrothed of Leipephile, as its leaders, should ever meddle with the old warrior’s authority!

  In a flash, in the flickering of an eyelash, in the curve of a single ripple on the halcyon sea outside the bay, Odysseus had made use of the Club of Herakles as if it were a battering-ram and had administered to the Priest such a blow in his belly that the man went over in a perfect summersault, legs and arms in the air, and lost all his breath for a moment when he struck the ground. Next, with a series of rapid gestures and commands, so calmly and quietly made that he might have been seated in his hall at the end of the pillared corridor, Odysseus got Nisos and the treasure, still in its great sack, on the broad shoulders of Pegasos, and Zeuks himself, shaken by terrific amusement, lodged on the immortal creature’s rump, and finally, just as his enemy, having regained breath was scrambling to his feet, he got himself, the club in his hand, and within it the Moth and the Fly clinging desperately together, balanced somehow upon the black-maned Arion.

  All would have been well and they would have escaped in royal style, leaving the Priest of the Mysteries confounded, if it had not been that at this moment of all moments the old everlasting competitive instinct was aroused in the black-maned horse, progeny of the semen of Poseidon when Demeter played the mare, an instinct to show that a horse born of the coupling of Land and Sea could be faster, though it never left the earth, than one with wings so wide that their shadows stretched further than any bow could shoot and whose parentage was the spilling of Gorgonian blood!

  With this natural but luckless urge propelling him the horse Arion started off with a bound before the old king, being a poor horseman since the isle was too rocky and mountainous to breed horses, had properly settled himself on its back; with the result that the old man, feeling himself to be slipping, tugged violently at the bridle, causing the creature to rear up on its hind legs.

  Here was Enorches’ chance, and “the well-hung one”, as his fellow mystagogues called him, who was now beside himself with blind fury, seized Pegasos by his nearest wing, and Arion by the nearest portion of his flowing mane, and with a mighty wrench and a superhuman tearing and rending, of which the maddest follower of Dionysos would have been proud, pulled out a whole quarter of that flowing mane by the roots and the whole of the left wing of the Flying Horse by its roots, screaming, as he did so, in a voice that seemed to whirl like a sea-vulture round their heads in strident circles: “By all that’s beyond our knowledge, and beyond our powers of knowledge, I curse you both!”

  But they were no ordinary mortal horses these two; and after a quick exchange of equine-heart to equine-heart commentary on the situation with their heads touching, disregarding the Priest of Orpheus as completely as if he were an inanimate reproduction of the male organ that had simultaneously come to life and become inebriated, but whose antics were of no interest to creatures of their immortal breed, they leapt forward on their dedicated journey.

  Thus it was that in spite of the abundant mixture of ichor and blood which dripped from the two horses’ injured sides, and in spite of the insecure seat and bad horsemanship of the aged king, and in spite of the weight of the sack of treasure and its uneasy balancing by so young a rider as Nisos, and in spite of the fooling and jesting of Zeuks, who astraddle on Pegasos’ rump, began murmuring a bawdy Bœotian ditty at the expense of the defeated priest, it was long before the sun showed any sign of sinking that this unusual group of living souls reached the rocky harbour-town of Reithron Paipalöenton. The laziest loiterers round the water-front of this town must have realized as they saw them, if they had not done so before, that something had happened, in the heaven, or in the earth, or in Erebos beneath the earth, that had materially altered the normal adjustment of the celestial and terrestial order, causing the most weird concatenations of persons and things.

  Here they saw, for instance, these Reithron spectators of their harbour’s routine, two mysteriously unusual horses, both dripping with blood, one of them with a single useless wing of many cubits length and a bleeding hole where its fellow had been and the other with a ghastly raw place where half of its sweeping black mane had been plucked out from its neck, so that its skin, though naturally of a greyish tinge, showed like white ivory blotched with blood, while riding upon one of these creatures was the most famous of all the heroes of the Trojan War save the swift-footed Achilles, and riding on the other, with a handsome boy in front of him, was a figure of comedy so extravagant that he might have been the tipsy Silenos himself, fresh from following Dionysos across the world!

  And if the philosophic observers of
Reithron Paipalöenton were struck by the outward appearance of our travellers, what about the Moth and Fly within the life-crack of the Heraklean Club?

  “Are we still ourselves, Pyraust, my sweet friend?” enquired Myos, the house-fly, of his bewildered companion, while the west wind rushed wildly past them and the waves broke under the hooves of their two steeds, as they followed the jagged coast-line of that long and narrow island from one extremity to the other; but there was a tense moment of speechlessness within the bosom of the club of Herakles until after several convulsive and deep-drawn shivers the brown moth collected strength enough to reply.

  “You are yourself, O imperturbable invertebrate! But, alas for me! I haven’t got the courage, nor the personality, to follow my own purposes and go my own way—O how wild this wind is! It would blow me into the forest if I were out in it; or if it were from the East I’d be drowned in the sea!—no! I haven’t got the strength of will to live my own life for myself in my own way; and even now my conscience is all worried because I didn’t go to help the Priest when he was surrounded by enemies! How brave he was to stand up for himself against them all and not even be afraid of tearing the feathers out of one of them and the hairs out of the other!

  “O the poor, lonely, holy, heavenly man! O the wildly-loving, desperate man! O the great, erotic champion of blind, beautiful, abandoned drunken passion! O divine intoxicator! O the blessed inspirer of eternal hatred carried to a point beyond all understanding! How could I have borne to see a Priest of the Love of very Love and the Hate of very Hate frustrated in the ecstatic piety of his revenge, just when his beautiful anger had become a devouring Worm that could not be destroyed and a consuming Flame that could not be put out?

  “I was a wretched disciple not to fly over to him, a miserable hand-maid not to whisper to him with my fluttering wings how much I admired him, how deeply I venerated his mighty, his majestic, his mysterious anger!”