John Powys - Atlantis

“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!

“Worship these alone; and Eros will give you the only clue to the inexhaustible joy of life, and Dionysos will give you the only redemption from the inexhaustible misery of life!”

It was at that moment, as the voice of Enorches died down, that Nisos recalled a curious little event that had occurred just before he set out that morning with Odysseus. Carrying the heavy load with which he had started, his head held high and his right hand raised to keep the balance of the great sack which was swaying on his shoulder, he had been too excited to give much thought to those he was leaving.

In her natural feeling for her betrothed, the elder son of Krateros Naubolides, Leipephile had turned aside while the king’s old Nurse was waving them goodbye.

Naturally enough also the Trojan maid Arsinöe had turned aside from watching them depart. But Eione, the little sister of Tis, had followed them. Yes, she had followed them as far as the last Olive-Tree in the palace garden.

Here, as she waved her farewell, the wind from the bay, which they were facing as they went off, blew a loose fold of her garment so shamelessly clear from her perfectly formed thighs that unwilling to give an impression of immodesty and at the same time reluctant to stop waving to them till they were out of sight she went on waving with one hand while with bent head and floating hair she re-folded her garment about her limbs with the other hand; and it was the simple and direct childishness with which she accomplished this double task of waving with one hand and controlling her rebellious clothes with the other that so particularly touched Nisos and became for him a kind of visual symbol or dramatic emblem of the charm of the eternal feminine.

He had been rather slow to recognize the peculiar quality of Eione’s charm, owing to the fact that there was nothing in her plain and simple face to correspond with the unusual loveliness and grace of her figure, but now that he was setting off on this historic expedition the whole quality of her personality invaded him.

He wasn’t a conceited fool. He wasn’t so fanatically hostile to this sinister Priest of the Mysteries as not to admit to himself that what filled his mind at that moment with this plain-faced, exquisitely moulded young girl was what the fellow was saying about Eros. He had never heard till now of the primordial cosmology, so to speak, of the Mysteries, and there was something about the thought of shaking off the familiar personalities of the Olympians and concentrating upon the idea that the primeval origin of all things was Eros, that appealed to him extremely.