The Maltese Goddess

by Lyn Hamilton

  I could see Sophia in the crowd with a man, her father presumably, although I’d only seen him in profile in the window the night we drove her home. He had a firm grip on her arm and was trying to pull her away. Sophia’s mouth was set in a stubborn line, but I could see she was wavering. A couple of her fellow actors were starting to move away with their angry parents.

  It was beginning to look as if the sound and light show was not to be. Then the crowd suddenly began to clap and drew back to allow a silver-grey limo to pull up to the steps in front of the University building. Someone I could hear, but could not see very well from my position near the back of the crowd, began to speak rapidly and energetically in Maltese. No matter that I couldn’t understand a word. I found the voice compelling, the plummy tones of an orator and I could feel the mood in the group begin to shift. Sophia’s father let go of her arm and she edged her way to my side.

  “Who is that and what’s he saying?” I whispered to her.

  “It’s Giovanni Galizia, the Minister for External Relations. He’s telling them that he, unlike some others, has a vision for Malta in which we play a prominent role in the Mediterranean, that he believes we must take our place on the world stage. He says others may be content for Malta to be a mere pawn in European politics, but he believes that after this performance all the world will know of Malta, that the leaders of Europe, many of whom do not appreciate Malta’s glorious history, will be here to learn of it, and that they, as parents, and their daughters will help bring prosperity to all Maltese.” Sophia looked at me and made a face.

  I laughed. Just the kind of speech you’d expect from a politician, I thought, but had to give him credit. This was not the kind of crowd I’d have liked to have taken on. Galizia apparently moved into the crowd to press the proverbial flesh, although I still couldn’t see him. Soon, the limo pulled smoothly away, and even though you could not say the parents were all smiles exactly, the crowd began to disperse. Mario Camilleri, for some reason, glared at the back of the retreating car.

  “Who are these others Galizia referred to, by the way, the ones with no vision? Or was it just political rhetoric?” I asked Sophia.

  “He means the Prime Minister, Charles Abela,” she replied. “I think maybe the two of them don’t get along; Abela is sick, recovering from surgery. The deputy Prime Minister has been filling in for him, but Galizia is acting as if he has the job,” she added. “He probably hopes Abela will have to retire but it looks as if he’ll recover completely and be back at work soon.”

  “That would explain why Mario Camilleri wasn’t looking too keen. I assume he’s on the side of the PM in this feud.” Sophia nodded. “How do you think this episode happened in the first place?” I asked. “What set the parents off like this? Surely not just the girls talking about the play at home.”

  “Well, there’s no question they aren’t very keen on Dr. Stanhope’s teachings. But we think it’s

  Alonso, Marija’s brother. We think he’s spying on us and telling our parents,” Sophia replied. “But we need his help, so there’s not much we can do.” I personally doubted that he was spying. Alonso was just a nice big teddy bear of a boy, I thought. I put it down to schoolgirl paranoia, perfectly understandable in light of events.

  Just then Anna Stanhope, who’d beaten a hasty retreat when the crowd got ugly, returned rather pale and flustered. I assumed she had been frightened by the experience, but it soon became apparent that she was unfazed by the parents, but quite unbalanced by the presence of Victor Deva, who was being his usual overly charming self. Her appearance had changed too. Instead of her usual dull shirtmaker dress and sensible shoes, she was wearing a skirt, a pink blouse with a ruffled collar which displayed a fair amount of her more than ample bosom, and rather more stylish sandals. Her hair seemed wispier than usual, and she had taken the time to apply makeup with what seemed to my eye to be a somewhat unpracticed hand.

  I decided she was totally besotted with Deva, who in turn fluttered about her paying her extravagant compliments and rushing to help her every time she tried to do something. I rather unkindly decided he was an aging Lothario out to get Anna Stanhope’s money, but the flaw in this was that I wasn’t at all sure she had any money for him to get, and secondly he had bought a lot of lighting equipment which couldn’t be cheap. I concluded there was just no accounting for tastes.

  Deva and Alonso, the gofer and suspected spy, lifted three heavy crates of lighting equipment and my two wardrobe containers onto the bus, and then we all got on and headed for Mnajdra; the girls chattering happily as we went. Anna Stanhope and I sat together, with Victor Deva and Alonso across from us. Anna and Victor exchanged meaningful glances from time to time.

  “That was quite the scene with the parents,” I said.

  “Nasty lot, aren’t they?” she said. “Dinosaurs, mindless slaves to religion, if you ask me. Should be ashamed of themselves, stunting their daughters’ development like that. Got me sacked from my part-time job, you know. Now they’re trying to stop the play. They’re very much against my teachings about the Great Goddess. They think it gives their daughters ideas—makes them uppity. But the point is, it’s true: Malta really was a major center of Goddess worship for many centuries. Oh, I know there are archaeologists who dispute that, most of them men, of course. But why, I ask you, when you find dozens, hundreds even, of female figures and symbols like the triangle, and only a handful of phallic symbols, why on earth would you conclude their god was a man?

  “The temples here are extraordinary, and they have found as many as thirty Goddess figures, some of them ten feet high. You can’t argue that some more advanced civilization passed through here and built the temples, because there are no temples that date to the time these were built that are even remotely like them. They are absolutely unique. You’d think the Maltese would be proud of that. And whether they like it or not, there is a very long tradition of worship of a Great Mother Goddess throughout the Mediterranean that extended long after the temple builders of Malta, to the era of recorded history—to Roman times essentially.

  “She was worshipped under many different names, and the rituals may have varied, but the pattern of Her worship is strikingly similar.”

  “Which is?” I asked. This was all new to me, as it obviously was for the parents of Malta.

  “The Great Goddess, representing the power of nature, is usually associated with a child, usually Her own, divine but of lesser status. This child never attains real adulthood. He remains forever a youth. But he often becomes the consort of the Goddess as well as Her child. The young god dies, disappears from earth. The Goddess, in extreme mourning, searches for him all over the earth, and often as far as the underworld. While She searches, life on earth goes awry. Because She is the power of earth, crops don’t grow, animals and men cease to procreate. Finally a divine deal is struck. The youth, the so-called dying god, is reunited with his mother/consort for a part of the year, and must spend the rest of the year in the realm of the dead.

  “And so we have these divine pairings, Great Goddess and dying god, through much of ancient history. lnanna of Somer, Queen of Heaven and Earth, and her Dumuzi; Ishtar or Astarte with Tammuz; the warlike Anath with Ba’al in Mesopotamia; Isis and Osiris in Egypt; Aphrodite and Adonis in Greece; Cybele and Attis in Rome. Their sacred marriage and the god’s death and return represent the cycles of Nature, and provided the basis for earthly kingship for many centuries. Earthly kings took their right to rule through the institution of the sacred marriage to the Goddess: They became, in effect, the earthly embodiment of the dying god. The power of the Goddess diminished over time, of course, and gradually the patriarchal gods took over, but this does not take away from the tremendous power the Great Goddess exerted over life for millennia.

  “If people here think learning about this tradition gives their daughters ‘ideas,’ then so be it. I think it’s a good antidote to all the Adam and Evil kind of stuff they get in church schools. Neanderthals!”
r />   “You’re not teaching anymore, but you’re going on with the play, I take it.”

  “The show must go on, don’t they say? I don’t much mind about the teaching job. I’m on sabbatical and I can survive without the income. But I think the play’s important, and so, obviously, do the girls. They’ve rebelled, as you can see, and turned up despite their parents. Warms my heart, I’ll tell you.”

  “What happened to the temple builders, by the way?” I asked, thinking about the scene in the play about the temple builders where the music is supposed to end abruptly and the lights go out quickly.

  “You mean did a group of parents put a stop to the temple building?” She hooted. “Seriously, nobody really knows. All activity just stopped. Maybe famine, drought, a plague of some sort. One of the great mysteries of history!”

  When we got to Mnajdra, we found the site had been closed off to all but our group and a number of workmen who were erecting a large awning designed to protect the guests while they were watching the performance. Several members of the police and army were watching over the proceedings. Security for this performance was going to be very tight, that was clear. A guard met the bus and checked off each of our names as we disembarked, then all our cases, mine with the wardrobe and all Victor’s electrical

  equipment, were opened and searched.

  We got to work. We did a quick run-through of one of the later scenes in which two of the girls represent women trying to find enough food to feed their families during the German blockade of the island during the Second World War. I knew the story of Malta’s heroism during the war: The day after Mussolini joined forces with Hitler, the bombing of Malta began and continued until the island acquired the dubious distinction of being the most bombed out place on the planet. Such was its strategic importance in the Mediterranean that in a two-month period, twice as many bombs fell on Malta as fell on London in a year at the height of the blitz.

  Rationing began in 1941, the island completely cut off by the Axis blockade. In August of 1942, two weeks before the island would have had to surrender, five out of an original convoy of fourteen Allied ships limped into the Grand Harbour with supplies. For its heroism, and in recognition of the terrible suffering the islanders had sustained, Malta was awarded the George Cross, the only nation ever to receive it.

  I knew that the islanders had suffered terribly, on the brink of starvation, bombed day and night from Italy. But I had never heard the story so poignantly told, seen as it was now by these students, and even though I’d heard the scene before, I was again quite moved by it. It was one of the parts that Sophia had written.

  “This scene is quite wonderful, you know,” I said to Sophia. “You have a rare talent for this. Maybe you should think about a writing career.”

  She blushed. “Thank you. Dr. Stanhope said that too. I’d really like to try to write. But my father wouldn’t let me. He thinks I should get married soon and stay here and raise a family. He’s not too keen on Anthony either. If he goes away to school, my father won’t let me go with him. It’s a problem,” she sighed.

  I’m a firm believer in the Prime Directive, whether it’s applied to intergalactic journeys or to the kind of travel the rest of us do: that is, that you should leave a place the way you found it and not do anything to affect the future. I realize this rule would severely restrict the activities of the Anna Stanhopes among us, to say nothing of the missionary zeal of various religious organizations and those nations with aspirations to empire. But there it is. I could not help feeling, though, on hearing Sophia’s words, that the world had not changed much since Marissa Cassar had decided to do what her father wanted rather than following her heart, and that a little education about the Great Goddess might be just what Sophia and her friends needed.

  I left Sophia to help Victor, who was working away at his lights. I could see he really was good at “electricals.” I helped him string wires as the girls rehearsed and he worried a great deal about the exact placement of the poles. Camilleri and his assistant, Esther whatever her name was, were also helpful. They’d arranged for the grassy area in front of the site to be cleared and smoothed out so chairs could be placed there, and for the hydro people to string a temporary line all the way from the restaurant at the entrance to the temple site way up the hill. Most of the time, though, they fussed a great deal about the comfort of the guests. Camilleri watched as a couple of heaters were placed in the tents, since evenings were still cool.

  “We’ll have a bar set up for them at the back of the tent,” he explained to me. “Champagne, caviar, the best, of course.”

  “Of course,” I murmured.

  “After the performance there will be a state banquet at the Palace. We’re out to impress these people, to convince them we can play in their league, so to speak.”

  Mr. Camilleri had seen to it that a temporary storage shed had been set up out of site behind the temple, so we were able to leave a lot of our equipment and the costumes there. After the rehearsal, we all piled back on the bus and headed into Valletta. I had been planning to walk back to the house, but Anna suggested I accompany them. “Victor is not entirely happy with the music we are using to open the show,” she said. “He has an idea, a modem Italian composer, that he thinks is just the ticket. Such a cultured man!” she said rather breathlessly. “Anyway, if you haven’t seen the market, it’s kind of fun, and if we hurry we can get there before it closes. Why don’t you come along?”

  Since I had been trying all day to avoid thinking about the conversation I’d had earlier with Marissa and what the implications of what she’d told me in connection with the murder of Martin Galea might be, I decided to go.

  The open-air market in Valletta is situated in the steeply sloped, narrow, and aptly named Merchant Street. The street is closed to vehicular traffic almost every morning, and vendors set up temporary stalls right down the middle of the street, from which they sell everything from tapes to T-shirts to towels. That day it was very crowded, and while we all started out together, I soon lost track of Victor and Anna, Sophia and the rest of the girls, as gradually we all went our separate ways, our paths crossing from time to time as we looked around. I saw Marissa and Joseph in the crowds, but they didn’t see me.

  I was inching my way along, close to the buildings on one side of the street, when suddenly I felt a strong arm reach out of a doorway, grab me, and pull me into the darkness. It was the Great White Hunter again. “We’ve got to talk!” he croaked. “There is something you should know, something wrong. You, the others, danger!”

  He was unshaven and reeked of alcohol and sweat. At close quarters, his jaunty hat was stained, as was his shirt. In the closeness of the doorway, I felt almost ill in his presence. I wrenched my arm away and made a run for it. Convinced he would follow me, I dodged through the crowds in the marketplace, looking for someone I knew.

  I finally stopped and looked behind me, but couldn’t see him. By now the fright was passing, and I could feel myself getting angry. “Enough of this!” I said to myself, and then, determined to be the hunter rather than the hunted, I started looking for him to give him a piece of my mind.

  At first I couldn’t find him, but then I saw his hat bobbing along in the crowd about a block and a half ahead of me. I followed as quickly as I could but gained very little ground because of the crowds. I did manage to keep him in view, however, and saw him turn down a side street. I reached that corner just in time to see him enter St. John’s Co-Cathedral, the place where he and I had already had our baffling conversation in the crypt.

  By the time I got to the church, a tour group was slowly filing in, delaying me enough that there was no sign of him when I got inside. I moved quickly through the chapels on the left of the altar, but could not find him there. The gate to the crypt, I noted, was chained this time. Trying to keep my eye on the main doors as best I could, I looked in the vestry and then moved to check the chapels on the right-hand side of the church. He wasn’t there either. I coul
dn’t be absolutely certain he hadn’t left while I was checking the chapels, but there was still one place to look: the cathedral museum.

  I paid the entrance fee and quickly walked through the first room where the Caravaggio was exhibited, then along a hallway and up a flight of stairs to a room with huge tapestries covering all the walls, and a choice of left or right. I listened carefully but could hear no sound. There was no one in sight, neither staff nor visitor. I chose to go to the right, since left led to the exit, and walked along a narrow hallway with windows on one side overlooking the street. I paused for a second or two to look out, and found myself overlooking the market. The vendors were beginning to take down their stalls, so the scene was even more chaotic than before, but I did catch sight of Anna almost directly below, and a little further down Marissa was talking to someone that I assumed was Joseph, although I couldn’t see his face.

  I left the window, turned right at the end of the corridor, and came to a room, a dead end, with another display of tapestries and some glass cases filled with illuminated manuscripts. Once again there seemed to be no one there. I quickly circled the room to make sure GWH was not hiding behind one of the cases, checking for telltale bulges in the tapestries that would reveal his hiding place, but he was not there. I retraced my steps, looking out the window again. Anna and Victor were studying a tape at one of the stalls. Sophia and Anthony were chatting on the far side of the street. I could not see Marissa or Joseph.