Atlantis (19 page)

“Has anyone here been so freed of late from our mothers’ lullabies and war-tales as to know what I mean when I say that our way of life in Hellas has been saved only just in time from its final extinction by recent interpretations of the
prophecies
of our unique poet and singer, Orpheus?”

At this point in the midst of the resounding oration of Enorches there suddenly occurred the sort of movement of relaxation in that well-to-do careless crowd which suggests an articulate
admission
that the subject of a speech is totally beyond the
intelligence
of its listeners but that the personality of the speaker, and the fervour of his arguments, not to mention the dramatic situation in which he is taking so dominant a part, are all
conducive
to the said listeners’ settling down to listen in self-satisfied pleasure as if they’d been suddenly transported to an agreeable theatre.

What pleased our young friend Nisos in all this, especially when he noticed that both the two portions of this unconventional hill-top assembly, the part of it that had been so fascinated by Zeuks and his unusual horses as to feel definitely hostile to Enorches, and the part of it that remained under his spell, had both relaxed, was the fact that Zeuks himself had suddenly taken the initiative with Odysseus, and had advanced close up to him, trailing the long thin leather straps by which he drew the two horses after him, and that the two were now engaged, under the very nose of the excited orator in what looked like a very harmonious and mutually satisfactory bargain.

Meanwhile the speaker was approaching the culminating points of his speech, which were entirely concerned with the Mysteries.

“What is revealed to us in the Orphic Mysteries,” he was saying, “is the inner truth, the ultimate quintessence, of our whole Hellenic life. This essence, this quintessence, my dear friends, floats like an exhalation through every moment of our existence. Whither and Whence does it float?
That
is no simple question; for it is fed by a thousand ineffable imponderables!

“Mystery it is, and mystery it pursues. From mystery it ascends and in mystery it is engulfed. As the heat of this thrice-sacred noon dissolves in those blue waves down there, so there is a sweetly-dissolving high noon in the life of all of us Achaians towards which we are moving even as I speak; and I swear to you, brothers and sisters of this Isle of Ithaca, that it is only in the celebration of the Orphic Mysteries that you, men and women of Hellas, can rise to your full spiritual stature and rejoice in your full divine inheritance!”

Enorches was clairvoyant enough to grow aware at this point that his large audience were enjoying his speech delivered from that jagged little rock in precisely the spirit he cared least of all for it to be enjoyed, that is to say, as a theatrical performance, and he allowed his arms to sink to his side and his voice to die away.

But he didn’t come down immediately from his little rock.
He looked round him with a quite special expression, the
expression
of a creature with the beak of a bird of prey and the body of a serpent, a creature who has bitten its prey in half, and swallowed half of it, but still feels unsatisfied.

And it happened to be just at that very moment that Pyraust, the girl-moth, implored her boy-friend, Myos the House-Fly, to remove his powerful front legs from the particular one of her languidly trailing wings which it was always easiest for her to straighten out first when she had decided to spread both her wings in flight.

“I
know
he’s calling for me to go to him,” she explained, “and when he’s calling so strongly it hurts me, yes it hurts me very much, not to be able to go to him! So lift up your front legs, my beautiful one, I beseech you! They are so strong and so gloriously black; and O! how weak my poor trembling brown wings seem in comparison with them! But lift them up now, I beg you!”

But the fly remained obstinate. “In a second; all in good time, all in due course!” he buzzed. “But while we are together I do so want to settle once for all this one single point. Surely you do admit, my sweet one, you can’t help it, that in the smallest atom of dust, just as in the smallest grain of sand, there is a whole world of reality. Never mind all this noisy speaking and shouting! It’s about shams and shows; not about reality at all!”

Thus speaking Myos pressed his two front legs, so black, so shining, and so extremely strong, more firmly than ever upon the quivering wing of the girl-moth. “But look who’s here!” he added presently; and, again, after another pause: “Aren’t you glad, my Crumb of Crumbs, that I didn’t let you go when he first began bawling out his blathering bluster? Why! you’d have bumped into her! And I can tell you, my leaf of longing, my flying feather of dainty fancy, if you had bumped into her it would have been the end of you!”

The brown moth ceased struggling. The fly removed his leg from her wing. They both settled themselves down as
comfortably
as they were able in those narrow quarters where they
were only about six inches below the powerful fingers of the king of Ithaca as he went on bargaining with Zeuks. Neither Zeuks nor he paid the faintest attention to the torrent of rhetoric from the lichen-covered rock, a torrent which, as soon as the speaker realized what newcomer it was who had now appeared among them, recommenced with redoubled vigour. For the personage who had burst in upon that extemporized “ecclesia” was in fact no other than Petraia, the old-maid midwife; and it was a Petraia worked up to a considerable degree of professional indignation, not to speak of virginal vituperation.

She advanced at a pace which could only be described by the vulgar expression “at a run”. She forced her way straight through the crowd till she reached a family group whose members were pushing against each other to get as close as they could to Pegasos and Arion.

Here she singled out a woman, obviously about as far advanced in pregnancy as it is possible to be and, clutching her by the only portion of her person which was not already pre-empted by three other children in addition to the small creature as yet
undelivered
, she dragged her away protesting loudly, a protest shared by so many of her brood that her carrying off by Petraia caused quite a little convulsion and a sort of counter-eddy in the stream of people who surrounded those two supernatural beasts.

As she dragged the woman towards the farm-house which was nearest to Zeuks’ domain they passed so close to the club of Herakles that Myos and Pyraust could clearly catch what Patraia was saying, and she was saying a great deal.

“A self-respecting woman like you,” she was complaining, “ought to be wiser than to be so interested in these playthings of men! All that these silly boy-men want are more and more playthings! What they don’t realize is the true meaning of this great news that is now spreading through the entire world. They don’t realize, these silly boys, that during a few recent weeks there has been a revolution in Nature herself! Nature herself has decided to assert herself at last. And
this
means,
can
mean,
does
mean, and
will
mean only one thing! And that one thing is this: Women from now on are no longer subject to men.

“And it means more than that. It means that women are not only from now on freed from the yoke of men, but that men are from now on subject to women, and must learn, if they don’t want to witness the death and perishing of the entire human race, to subject themselves to their mothers and wives and daughters.

“From now on men must learn that their highest worship is their worship of women and that this worship is called
Uranian
because it resembles the inspiration of the Heavenly Muse!”

All this while Petraia never ceased dragging her pregnant captive towards the Bed of Delivery, the Bed which everyone present at that stupendous scene was forced by her ringing declaration to behold as the only holy and thrice-blessed Bed to be desired by all! The unfortunate or divinely fortunate woman in whom the shock of this outrageous publicity had already started the suspended pains of labour was imploring the three children who were clinging to her to let her go, as well as
imploring
Petraia not to drag her so fast; and so shrill was the
desperate
falsetto clamour of their combined voices that the man of the family following uncomfortably behind was unable to succeed in his attempt to appear to be absorbed with interest in a
particular
white sail on the horizon of the bay.

Just before passing out of sight Petraia called the man to the woman’s side, and, as the two of them with their children vanished from sight, she herself swung round once more and uttered, in a tone more piercing than any she had yet used, her final defiance.

“News has just reached me,” she cried, “from my sister, who serves the Nymph Egeria, in the land of the King of the Latins where the Trojans have founded a new Troy, that Persephone herself has escaped from the Kingdom of Death and has begun to hasten across the face of the earth to find her mother Demeter! When these two meet, so has the Nymph Egeria told my sister, the world’s new age of the real rule of women will begin!

“And then it will be that men will sink back once more into what was their position when the world began, that is to say into complete inferiority to women; so that from that moment onwards their proper use and value and status in the world will be as it was in the Golden Age under the Rule of Kronos; that is to say as merely the breeding animals that we women use at our free will and pleasure, so that we can bear a sufficient number of girl-children who will in their turn become the rulers of the earth!”

With this final cry of defiance Petraia was gone; but Nisos, whose diplomatic caution, not to speak of his vivid personal fear of the fellow, had made him keep his eyes on Enorches who had remained silent on his rock during Petraia’s outburst, now found himself unable to resist a shiver of panic when he saw the Orphic priest solemnly, pontifically, and with awe-inspiring intensity, lift up his right arm and point with extended fingers, as if uttering a devastating malediction, towards a particular point upon the horizon of the noonday blueness of the sea.

“Listen to me, O people of Ithaca!” he cried, “and be not deceived by an excited creature who knows no more of what has really begun to happen in the world than a feeble-winged moth!”

At this point it was no more concealed from Nisos than it was concealed from the Moth herself or indeed from her friend the Fly, that a thought-wave of some sort had been passing,
consciously
or unconsciously, in its gloating religiosity and its bitter belligerency between the Orphic priest and the two insects within the split bosom of the club of Herakles, one of them the priest’s natural sacrificial victim and the other his natural biter, stinger, teaser, poisoner, tormentor, scavenger, devourer, and final exterminator.

“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!