He remembered the frustration of their early conversations - how he had felt sure that she was in possession of insights that were at once so profound and obvious that only a dunce such as he could fail to grasp them. He tried to recall exactly what it was she had said. He tried to reconstruct the subtle labyrinth of questions she had raised around him.
He was gazing at the pictures as he thought. And then, quite suddenly, like an increase of light inside the room, his thoughts and the images began to coincide. Circes questions were now urgently his own. Was it possible, he wondered, that if the dark aspect of the Goddess was admitted to the wedding-feast after all, then everything might change? Was it possible that if she was restored to an honoured place among the immortals, if an effort was made to see things through her eyes, to understand and inhabit her perspective, then she might prove to have healing powers? That instead of whirling the world down into a vortex of rage, she might make her true self manifest as its deep and fertile ground?
The questions came from a place so far outside the usual margins of his thought that Odysseus scarcely knew how to think them at all. Indeed, in those receptive moments, it felt less as though he was thinking them than that the thoughts were thinking him. And in the tranced space of that condition, three names began to chime like a riddle in his mind: Ares, Eris, Eros.
The divine names weaved a wild dance through his thoughts. Was it possible, he wondered, that the masculine predilection for violence might be converted into love by admitting the power of the dark goddess in the soul? Could this be the true source of compassion? Was it possible that Achilles had come to ask himself this kind of question in his final days when he released Briseis, the helpless captive of his spear, and sought out Priam’s daughter as a friend? Was it possible that Menelaus had been moved by some obscure sense of what the question might mean when he stood over Helen with his sword in his hand and could not bring himself to kill her? Was any of this possible?
Yet how could it be? Such thoughts seemed to invert the common order of the world. Things simply didn’t work that way.
Odysseus tried to shake his head clear. He reminded himself that he had been confined alone too long, that he was no longer in touch with his senses, that even his water might be doctored.
Outside this room there was a world where men went about their business untrammelled by such fantasies. That was the real world, a world in which he had always made his way by keeping his head clear and using his wits.
But hadn’t the consequences of the long and bloody war already turned that world upside down from Troy to Mycenae and beyond? Perhaps it would take such unfamiliar thoughts to set it deeply right again?
Was it possible? Was any of it actually possible?
Excited, famished, dizzy, Odysseus stood alone inside the painted room and let the questions swell inside his heart. It felt as though his head was spinning.
The sound of the water in the drain below his cell became a sibilant whisper piping in his ears. It might, he thought, have been the hissing of a snake. It might have been the sound made by the motions of the stars.
Guided by an instinct older than his consciousness, Odysseus went to lie down on his pallet-bed. He lay there unsleeping, listening to that whisper in the silence, still as an animal lying in its lair.
At dawn on what was the morning after the third night two women came to fetch him. When he complained about having been left alone for so long, the older of the two merely shrugged and said, ‘The ways of the Underworld are perfect and may not be questioned.’ Then he was led out into the day.
He saw the first light breaking through the clouds. Birdsong rose with the mist among the trees. The early fragrance of rosemary, the murmur of the sea below the hill, all the ordinary gestures of each waking day blazed across his senses. The black ewe that he had brought from Aiaia was laid before him on the altar. A knife was put into his hand. He made the offering. The entrails were examined and pronounced well-aspected.
He was taken to a bath-house near the painted cell where he was allowed to lie for a long time in waters that bubbled up from a hot spring amidst a dizzying mist of fumes. These were, he was informed, the Waters of Forgetfulness by which he would be cleansed of all the residual traces of the world he was about to leave behind him.
From the bath-house he was conducted back into the painted chamber and left for a further period of prayer and meditation. A further bath followed at noon in the colder, fresher Waters of Memory. And then, throughout the long afternoon, when he was already weak from hunger and disoriented by weariness, he looked on as a conclave of priests and priestesses made ritual offerings to Hades and Persephone, the Lord and Lady of the Dead.
Not until sunset did the Sibyl appear. Odysseus had sacrificed a black lamb to the Mother of the Fates, to Dread Night and to her Sister the Earth. With the small animal lying dead at his feet, they dressed him in a white tunic and bound up his hair with white ribbons. A short bronze sword was fastened to a belt at his side. Estranged from himself, he was swaying where he stood in the torch-lit gloom when he looked up at the sound of low chanting and saw a procession of priests clad entirely in black passing in single file through a portal in the rock. Their faces were covered beneath high-pointed hoods. Only the hands carrying fronds of black cypress were visible. They might have been shades themselves.
Not until the last of them had vanished did Odysseus see the erect figure of a woman in a scarlet dress beckoning to him from where she stood at the entrance to what appeared to be a circular tomb. Her face too was concealed, but not by a hood. She wore a featureless mask that gleamed with an eerie white radiance.
As bidden, he approached her. Without a word, she handed him the bough of glistening mistletoe she held, and then turned on her heel and entered the tomb. With two attendants at his back urging him on, Odysseus followed and watched the Sibyl begin to climb down a ladder into a dark hole at the centre of the floor. Another push urged him to follow her.
His heart was beating very quickly now. Less than two feet wide, the shaft felt cramped about his shoulders. He couldn’t see where he was going, but he had descended for rather more than his own length when his feet touched the earth and he saw that he was standing in a round underground chamber smokily lit by lamps. The black hooded priests were already gathering there through a different entrance. From a third doorway appeared another figure who dragged by a rope the bleating black ram that Odysseus had brought from Aiaia.
When all were assembled in the stuffy heat of the chamber, the Sibyl crossed to the entrance of a tunnel like the mouth of a narrow mine-shaft and began to descend. Quailing inwardly, Odysseus followed her down the dark slope, feeling a cold wind blow about his legs and smelling the fog of black smoke blown out of the tunnel from a descending line of lamps.
He was not a tall man yet he could feel the roof of the tunnel pressing down not far above his head. Without a guide he would have progressed far more slowly, feeling his way as he went, but the Sybil walked confidently ahead, approaching a turn to the right. Behind him, though there was now no room to turn, he could hear the chanting dirge of the priests at his back and the bleating of the sacrificial ram. Odysseus knew that he had long since passed the point where he could change his mind about this journey into the underworld, but now there was truly no way back. As he followed the Sybil around the dark turn, he felt sweat seeping from his body.
The passage descended more steeply now and was lit by more frequent lamps so that the light dazzled his eyes. They had not progressed far when a sudden alteration of the air-flow in the tunnel brought the smoke from hundreds of lamps billowing towards him. It seemed to coat his throat. Then his skin shrank at a wailing sound that echoed on the thick silence of the air.
Were there truly souls in torment then down there in deepest Tartarus? A priest pressed at his back. Ahead of him the Sybil descended steps cut into the rock. Around the next bend the tunnel widened. Priests began to file quickly past him at either side so that he
was now walking through a passage of moving shades. When the tunnel turned again, he saw that the Sybil had halted with her priests lining the walls behind her. She was waiting at a low landing-stage that jutted out on timber piles into the warm black flow of an underground river. A bearded figure clothed in rags stood in a small boat by the jetty holding on to one of the wooden posts. From across the river echoed the fierce barking of dogs.
The bearded ferryman held up a hand to help the priestess down into a coracle made of basketwork and hides. Still clutching the bough of mistletoe, Odysseus stepped down into the little craft after her, and the two of them sat in the hot, vaporous gloom while the vessel was poled slowly across the dark flood. They could hear the sound of water bubbling upwards to break the surface from two hot springs. An acrid smell of sulphur tainted the air.
As they approached the opposite shore the barking grew louder and more ferocious. And then, in the fitful light cast from a torch in the wall, Odysseus made out the shadow of a dog with three heads, all of them snarling and barking.
At that point his courage might have failed entirely, but the Sybil stood up in the coracle and threw some sort of sop into an alcove in the rock. Immediately the barking ceased. Yet the silence chilled his heart almost as much as the savage din that preceded it, for in this dim, hot space under the earth, he had been confronted by the materialization of things he had encountered before only as figments of story. The wailing must have come from the mouth of Phlegyas, who was condemned to eternal torment in the underworld; Charon the boatman had ferried him across the River Styx; the three-headed hound Cerberus guarded the other shore. Other, darker terrors must lie in wait for him.
Despite his efforts to remind himself that these were mortal men and women who were conducting him on this journey into the earth, his mouth was dry and his breathing terse as he disembarked from the coracle and followed the Sibyl up a long, steep flight of stairs. At the top of the stairs the scarlet figure took a sharp turn to the right where Odysseus found her waiting for him in a small chamber. For the first time since they had entered the warren of tunnels the mask was turned to face him again - white and unnervingly featureless but for the eye-slits and the open hollow of the mouth. Still silent, she gestured for him to place the mistletoe into a low niche carved in the rock as his offering to Persephone.
When he had done so, she pointed to a stoup of water from which he might sprinkle himself. Then she stepped aside, revealing a door into what he knew must now be the most sacred, inner shrine, the House of Persephone, the dread Queen of Hades.
Odysseus followed her through into the dimly lit sanctum. To his astonishment he saw the black ram that had been following him through the passages already waiting there. By some enchantment it had arrived in this place before him and was lying on the altar with its legs trussed. A hooded priest stood over the silent animal holding a knife. In a language which Odysseus did not understand he called out a ritual chant of invocation and drew the knife across the ram’s throat. For a moment Odysseus thought he had recognized the voice of Teiresias, but then the chamber was loud with the sound of moaning.
A smell of incense clouded the air. When the priest stepped aside, the bare wall that had been at his back was suddenly crowded with shadowy faces that moved and swayed before Odysseus’ astounded eyes.
Face after face appeared there, some howling, some grimacing with pain, others scarcely discernible at all; then he drew in his breath sharply for a face that he was sure he recognized was gazing back at him. A moment later a gust of wind blew out all the oil-lamps except the one illuminating the place behind veils of gauze in which the Sibyl stood with outspread arms like a figure of flame. Again Odysseus gasped, for the white mask had vanished. He was now staring into the bulging eyes and hideous, snake-wreathed features of a Gorgon’s head.
So severe was the shock that for a moment he thought his heart had stopped. Then the figure began to tremble and shake, moaning like a woman possessed. The moans gave way to a faint hissing whisper which, only after it was repeated a third time, did he recognize as his own name — but his name spoken as a snake might speak it. Then the voice addressing him changed again. Though still hollow and hoarse, it was now distinctly a human voice, the voice of the shadowy face he had just recognized: the voice of his mother, Queen Anticleia.
My authority for this account of a journey into the Land of Shades is Odysseus himself. Though he was depleted by hunger and isolation, and his senses had been deranged by whatever drugs had tainted the water he drank in the Painted Room, and though he was, by his own admission, terrified half out of his wits by each, ever more disturbing stage of the ordeal, nevertheless he retained, until the moment he had now reached, remarkably clear memories of everything he had undergone. But the sight of his mother’s face, followed almost immediately by the sound of her voice, shocked him to the bottom of his soul.
As far as he knew, his mother was alive and well on Ithaca. So strong had that assumption been inside him that he had scarcely given her a moment’s thought since leaving Troy. When he thought of home, it was primarily of his wife and small son, and then of his father. His mother was little more than an adjunct to his picture of their life, someone who had always been present, working quietly in the background and playing no part in the affairs of state other than through her many small acts of care for her husband. Her temperament had always been too shy and retiring for any larger role. So on those rare occasions when Odysseus gave thought to her, it was as an infinitely patient, always proud and almost entirely undemanding feature of his own life. Not since she had last scolded him as a boy had Anticleia exercised the least restraint on his lust for adventure. Then once he had decided to marry and settle down, she delighted in his choice of wife. Later, Odysseus had left for the war just as confident that she and Penelope would always be friends as he was sure that Anticleia would prove a doting grandmother to his son. Such was her nature — the modest, self-effacing manifestation of love as the deep and ordinary ground of things. His mother was simply, and always, there.
And now she was here, a shade in the Land of Shades.
The final shred of his composure frayed with the sudden understanding that his mother must be dead. Overwhelmed by the knowledge, he lost control of his will. For a time he was little more than a child again, unable to see or hear for his pain. Only gradually did he become conscious of the words that were trying to reach him as his mother’s voice, speaking through the mouth of the Gorgon mask, reproached him for leaving Ithaca, for wasting all those long years in the terrible war at Troy, for failing to come home. He heard her bewail the way that his long absence had broken her heart and brought her to her grave. The voice was coming and going as though a dark wind gusted round it. He cried out urgent questions about his wife and tried to make sense of the reply. Dimly he heard the voice chant, ‘Many lay claim to what once was yours.’ When he demanded to know about his son, the voice said only, ‘The child seeks to become the father that he lacks.’ But the scarlet-gowned figure of the Sybil was shaking as if the words were forcing themselves out under tremendous pressure. Odysseus’ eyes were blurred with tears. He tried to reach out to embrace the shaking figure, but his hands met only the gauzy veils. When he cried out at last, ‘Tell me, has the time now come for my return?’ the chamber fell silent as if holding its breath.
Again the Sybil began to sway and moan; then the voice issued low and hoarse from the lips of the mask: ‘The life you knew has gone for ever.’
Odysseus stood trembling in his tears. As though pushed by invisible hands, the Sibyl was shaking before him like an epileptic. Uttering a few, quick pangs of breath, she gave a shriek of pain and collapsed on the ground before him.
He was about to reach down to the fallen figure, demanding to know more when he was overwhelmed by the confusion around him. Quickly the priest interposed his body between Odysseus and the Sibyl. Amid a murmured babble of voices, hooded figures grabbed Odysseus by the arms from behind. A door other
than the one by which he had entered swung open. He was bustled out into another dark tunnel and hurried along through the swirl of smoke from the oil-lamps. They came to a door that shone with a cool ivory sheen. When it opened, he was urged through into an upward sloping passage.
Though his mind was in turmoil, he tried to take comfort from the thought that he must now be on the journey upwards, back into the world of men. They came to a place where a ladder climbed up through a trapdoor in the roof. One of the priests scaled the rungs first. Odysseus followed with two men coming after him. He was ushered through into a small chamber where he was made to take the only seat. Uncertain what else might happen, he waited there, distraught and confused. When he tried to speak to his guardians, demanding to know what was happening, not one of them would answer.
Eventually the door opened again. Another hooded figure entered. ‘Tell me, Odysseus of Ithaca,’ he said, ‘did the shades of the dead rise to meet you?’
Odysseus could only nod his head.
‘And did they speak?’ the figure asked.
‘One of them did,’ he answered hoarsely.
‘In whose voice did the shade speak?’
Trembling still, Odysseus said, ‘In my mother’s voice.’
‘You are quite certain you heard the voice of your mother’s shade?’
‘Yes.’
‘You would swear to it by the Gods of the Underworld?’
‘Yes.’
The figure stood over him for a time. Odysseus heard the sound of breath drawn in. When he looked up, he saw his interrogator leaving the chamber. Another door opened. Odysseus was ushered out and along a short passage. Only a few moments later, bewildered by grief, emotionally exhausted, he found himself alone again inside the Painted Room.
For a long time the events of that night haunted his mind like shadows of a dream that had left him more shaken than enlightened. Once he was back in the light of day and returned to the company of his anxious friends, he might have taken ship for Ithaca at once, resolved to deal with whatever he found there and to reclaim what was his own; but two things delayed him.
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