Avram Davidson - The Phoenix and the Mirror

After a while he said, almost briskly, almost cheerfully, “So now I will tell you that which you must know, though why you must know if I know not, nor is that among the things which I must know. All knowledge now is but imperfect. We see but the dim and dark reflection in the bronze mirror. Such is the life of this world of illusion.

“You wish to know why you have not been permitted to pursue a journey into the interior, is it not so?”

Vergil nodded, dumbly. The countenance of the aged Ephesian settled into an expression of mingled sorrow and wrath. “Because, my unsought guest, because the road to the interior leads past the terrible, terrible shrine of the daemon whom the paynim denominate Zeus-Leucayon. Know you that name? And what it means? Wolf-Zeus! Wolf-Zeus! Fearful enough is his form in that shape of humankind which he counterfeits in order the better to deceive humankind, but, O! how infinitely more fearful is he in his lycanthropous form! Woe! Woe! Woe! O sinful city, and, O island of sin! Men like wolves and wolves like men!” And again he raised his eyes, his head, his hands and arms, cried aloud.

But his cry was brief. Vergil interrupted. “Why is it considered so important that I be not allowed to pass this shrine?”

“Because, my guest unsought, in that grim, gray fane erected of uncut rock and dark with the stains of centuries of evil sacrifice, preparations are underway for the horrid rite wherein the celebrant offers his own son as sacrifice and as sacrificial meal… and, for his pains, his punishment, and — as they would have it — his reward… is changed into a wolf! A wolf! Is changed into a wolf! He eats human flesh like a wolf! Such are the paynim’s ways, and their own records describe what happened when this was first done by King Lycaon, who killed a man and set the cooked flesh upon the table. Have you forgotten?”

The aged prophet began to chant the fearful lines. “The King himself flies in terror and, gaining the silent fields, howls aloud, attempting in vain to speak. His mouth of itself gathers foam, and with his accustomed greed for blood he turns against the sheep, delighting still in slaughter.

“His garments change to shaggy hairs! His arms to legs! In villos abeunt vestes, in crure lacerti-fit lupus et veteris servat vestigea formae. He turns into a wolf, and yet retains some traces of his former shape. There is still the same gray hair, the same fierce face, the same gleaming eyes… the same picture of beastly savagery.…”

“They say that this metamorphosis was ordained by their daemon Zeus, or Jove, or Jupiter — accursed by the evil names, all of them, he bears! — to punish that beastly and evil deed. And yet that daemon so delighteth in it that again and again throughout the years he requires it be repeated. Thus, the filth the paynim worship! O sinful city and O…”

No moral hesitations were involved in the urgent desire that Vergil neither see nor learn of this ceremony. It belonged to the realms of the oldest payanism, where concepts such as good and evil did not pertain, where magic had no division into black or white. The deed was neither fair no foul; it was potent; it was at the same time both fair and foul. Forbidden — abhorred — detested in any other time at any other place, in the time set and at the place set it became necessary and desirable and infinitely potent. The greater the sin, the greater (in this case) the blessing.

“And he,” said the aged Ephesian, shaking his gray head, “he who became a eunuch for the sake of the Kingdom of Satan, he is so blind as to think that this will benefit him.”

Vergil, for the moment confused, could only show his bewilderment by his face, and murmur, “He?”

He, Sylvian, Chief Priest and (by definition) Chief Eunuch of Cybele, and head of the third side of the triangle which was Paphain religio-politics. Cybele, whose worshipers called her Magna Mater, the Great Mother, denying that title to Aphroditissa. Cybele, whose cult had come, shrieking and dancing, out of the darkest depths of Little Asia.

‘Ditissa, indeed, was not the oldest of the Cypriote deities. These had long ago lost their names, perhaps had never had any; nyads, dryads, faint and fleeting little spirits of the woods and of the streams. But ‘Ditissa’s advent was both local and historical, she had been born of the foam gathered between the offshore rocks and the coast of Paphos, and had been worshiped long and contentedly. Pilgrims had come in entire fleets, passing o’er the white-waved seas, to offer to her great Temple and to embrace the Mother in the persons of her priestess-daughters. Throughout the changeless years the processions had passed slowly, chanting, through the Paphiote streets, group after group bearing palanquins surmounted by “trees,” each leaf of which was made of a pastille of incense, smoking fragrantly in the languid air.

‘Ditissa had been the Mother of all the land of Paphos; he who was both king and priest had been the Father; she, all goddess; he, partly god. The Greek and Roman pantheon had come to be represented, too, but in lesser wise. And then the Sea-Huns had swooped down, burning Chitium and ravishing Machosa, as they did a hundred cities and a thousand towns elsewhere than Cyprus. They were at last bought off, but the price was paid in more than tribute; it was paid in semi-isolation, in gathering silence, in slow decay. In such a time the old religions seemed to flourish, but familiarity and tradition could not forever satisfy the need for excitement and stimulation, now no longer met by foreign intercourse. And in the stagnant pond, strange things came to grow.

Critics claimed (though not often openly, and never loudly) that Cybele’s cult had been implanted in Cyprus by small groups of merchants trading in from Little Asia at a time before the Great Blockade had fallen across the horizon, and that in those happier days it had met with no encouragement from the peoples of the land. But the orthodox doctrine had it that “Mother saw the children of the Island languishing in loneliness and grief, Mother spoke to her Sisters and her Brothers, saying, ‘Will none arise and go and succor the sorrowful children of the Island?’, but none would speak and none would go. Therefore Mother herself arose and, gathering around her priests and galli, dervishes and devotees, took ship at Tarsus. The Sea-Huns clamored, the Sea-Huns threatened, the blood-red sails and death-black hulls of the Sea-Huns gathered around the Mother’s ship like flies, like lions, and like dragons. But none dared approach, none dared attack. Silent and abashed and wholly stricken with awe were the corsairs and the pirates, overwhelmed by the heavenly beauty and the fear and dread of Mother Cybele.…”

And so on and on. What needed neither faith nor dissent to believe was that for years, from time to time, the peace and quiet of the opulent Island had been rent apart by the Cybelean theopomps — pouring down some startled street like a maddened torrent, the image of their goddess surrounded by screaming and ecstatic religious, tambour, horn and shaking systrum; and, drawing to them each fascinated eye, the galli — the priests! the priests! painted faces and thick falsetto voices, prancing, dancing, jiggling and jigging, ranting, chanting, gesturing, cavorting, prophesying and giving tongue in the unknown speech of the sacred madness: the priests of Cybele.

The gelded galli, the eunuch priests.

All this was quite enough in itself, but there was more. For these castrati did not hesitate by every conceivable (any by many almost inconceivable) means to inflame others with their own mania. It was chiefly of the women that they sought and received alms, but their main appeals were ever directed to men and to boys. And seldom had it failed that at least once in each hysterical, ecstatic session some deluded youth would be caught up out of himself and, yielding to the frenzied cries of “Cast off the flesh! Cast off the flesh!” would seize the sacred knife and geld himself… forever and forever after by this hideous consecration a priest of Great Cybele.