Robert Silverberg - The Feast of St. Dionysus

He thought of Matt and Jean, and Ernie who had called him brother, and the Speaker who had offered him love and shelter, and Nick and Will his sponsors. He retraced in his mind the windings of the labyrinth until he grew dizzy. It was impossible, he told himself, to hear the singing from this place. He was at least three or four kilometers away. He prepared his campsite and unrolled his sleeping bag. But it was too early for sleep; he lay wide awake, listening to the wind, counting the stars, playing back the chants of the city in his head. Occasionally he dozed, but only for fitful intervals, easily broken. Tomorrow, he thought, he would cover twenty-five or thirty kilometers, going almost to the foothills of the mountains to the east, and he would set up half a dozen solar stills and settle down for a leisurely reexamination of all that had befallen him.

The hours slipped by slowly. About three in the morning he decided he was not going to be able to sleep, and he got up, dressed, paced along the gully’s edge. A sound came to him: soft, almost a throbbing purr. He saw a light in the distance. A second light. The sound redoubled, one purr overlaid by another. Then a third light, farther away. All three lights in motion. He recognized the purring sounds now: the engines of dune-cycles. Travellers crossing the desert in the middle of the night? The headlights of the cycles swung in wide circular orbits around him. A search party from the city? Why else would they be driving like that, cutting off acres of desert in so systematic a way?

Yes. Voices. “John? Jo—ohn! Yo, John!”

Looking for him. But the desert was immense; the searchers were still far off. He need only take his gear and hunker down in the gully, and they would pass him by.

“Yo, John! Jo—ohn!”

Matt’s voice.

Oxenshuer walked down the slope of the gully, paused a moment in its depths, and, surprising himself, started to scramble up the gully’s far side. There he stood in silence a few minutes, watching the circling dune-cycles, listening to the calls of the searchers. It still seemed to him that the wind was bringing him the songs of the city people. This is the god who burns like fire. This is the god whose name is music. Jesus waits. The saint will lead you to bliss, dear tired John. Yes. Yes. At last he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Yo! Here I am! Yo!”

Two of the cycles halted immediately; the third, swinging out far to the left, stopped a little afterward. Oxenshuer waited for a reply, but none came.

“Yo!” he called again. “Over here, Matt! Here!”

He heard the purring start up. Headlights were in motion once more, the beams traversing the desert and coming to rest. On him. The cycles approached. Oxenshuer re-crossed the gully, collected his gear, and was waiting again on the cityward side when the searchers reached him. Matt, Nick, Will.

“Spending a night out?” Matt asked. The odor of wine was strong on his breath.

“Guess so.”

“We got a little worried when you didn’t come back by midnight. Thought you might have stumbled into a dry wash and hurt yourself some. Wasn’t any cause for alarm, though, looks like.” He glanced at Oxenshuer’s pack, but made no comment. “Long as you’re all right, I guess we can leave you to finish what you were doing. See you in the morning, okay?”

He turned away. Oxenshuer watched the men mount their cycles.

“Wait,” he said.

Matt looked around.

“I’m all finished out here,” Oxenshuer said. “I’d appreciate a lift back to the city.”

“It’s a matter of wholeness,” the Speaker said. “In the beginning, mankind was all one. We were in contact. The communion of soul to soul. But then it all fell apart. ‘In Adam’s Fall we sinned all,’ remember? And that Fall, that original sin, John, it was a falling apart, a falling away from one another, a falling into the evil of strife. When we were in Eden we were more than simply one family, we were one being, one universal entity; and we came forth from Eden as individuals, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. The original universal being broken into pieces. Here, John, we seek to put the pieces back together. Do you follow me?”

“But how is it done?” Oxenshuer asked.

“By allowing Dionysus to lead us to Jesus,” the old man said. “And in the saint’s holy frenzy to create unity out of opposites. We bring the hostile tribes together. We bring the contending brothers together. We bring man and woman together.”

Oxenshuer shrugged. “You talk only in metaphors and parables.”

“There’s no other way.”

“What’s your method? What’s your underlying principle?”

“Our underlying principle is mystic ecstasy. Our method is to partake of the flesh of the god, and of his blood.”

“It sounds very familiar. Take; eat. This is my body. This is my blood. Is your Feast a High Mass?”

The Speaker chuckled. “In a sense. We’ve made our synthesis between paganism and orthodox Christianity, and we’ve tried to move backward from the symbolic ritual to the literal act. Do you know where Christianity went astray? The same place all other religions have become derailed. The point at which spiritual experience was replaced by rote worship. Look at your Jews, muttering about Pharaoh in a language they’ve forgotten. Look at your Christians, lining up at the communion rail for a wafer and a gulp of wine, and never once feeling the terror and splendor of knowing that they’re eating their god! Religion becomes doctrine too soon. It becomes professions of faith, formulas, talismans, emptiness. ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born from the Virgin Mary—” Words. Only words. We don’t believe, John, that religious worship consists in reciting narrative accounts of ancient history. We want it to be immediate. We want it to be real. We want to see our god. We want to taste our god. We want to become our god.”

“How?”

“Do you know anything about the ancient cults of Dionysus?”

“Only that they were wild and bloody, with plenty of drinking and revelry and maybe human sacrifices.”

“Yes. Human sacrifices,” the Speaker said. “But before the human sacrifices came the divine sacrifices, the god who dies, the god who gives up his life for his people. In the prehistoric Dionysiac cults the god himself was torn apart and eaten, he was the central figure in a mystic rite of destruction in which his ecstatic worshippers feasted on his raw flesh, a sacramental meal enabling them to be made full of the god and take on blessedness, while the dead god became the scapegoat for man’s sins. And then the god was reborn and all things were made one by his rebirth. So in Greece, so in Asia Minor, priests of Dionysus were ripped to pieces as surrogates for the god, and the worshippers partook of blood and meat in cannibalistic feasts of love, and in more civilized times animals were sacrificed in place of men, and still later, when the religion of Jesus replaced the various Dionysiac religions, bread and wine came to serve as the instruments of communion, metaphors for the flesh and blood of the god. On the symbolic level it was all the same. To devour the god. To achieve contact with the god in the most direct way. To experience the rapture of the ecstatic state, when one is possessed by the god. To unite that which society has forced asunder. To break down all boundaries. To rip off all shackles. To yield to our saint, our mad saint, the drunken god who is our saint, the mad saintly god who abolishes walls and makes all things one. Yes, John? We integrate through disintegration. We dissolve in the great ocean. We burn in the great fire. Yes, John? Give your soul gladly to Dionysus the Saint, John. Make yourself whole in his blessed fire. You’ve been divided too long.” The Speaker’s eyes had taken on a terrifying gleam. “Yes, John? Yes? Yes?”