John Powys - Atlantis

“Let no wind,” he cried, “O people of sacred Ithaca, fill any ship’s sail that leaves your consecrated coasts! Keep this feeble, doting, maudlin, crazy, despotic, degenerate old man on his throne till old age makes him drop from it like a rotten apple and drop straight into his grave! Meanwhile let him stay where he is! Let him keep the throne warm for your brave Krateros who is a strong, sensible, natural man like any other man, and all the better for not being an herald-trumpeted, bard-celebrated, minstrel-sung, lick-spittle old legend-maker who doesn’t think his cup of glory is full enough in just being accepted by you islanders as your king, doesn’t in fact think that to be king at all over a crew of miserly farmers and poor fishermen, such as he considers you to be, is worthy of a deathless, immortal hero, like himself!

“What he wants to do by this mad voyage of his over the drowned cities of Atlantis is to win for himself a name beyond that of any of our famous men, a name beyond the name of Agamemnon, beyond the name of Achilles, beyond the name of Diomed, and of course far beyond the names of any of your most glorious Trojan enemies, such as Priam or Hector or Aeneas or Paris!

“O my friends, my friends, it is only yesterday we all heard, through the mediumship of earth and air and fire and water of the drowning of Atlantis. These murderous gods always like their news to reach us drop by drop, as it suits their god-almightynesses’ cunning craftiness, and not for our interest really at all! But there’s one little, obvious, simple, human interpretation of their trick of revealing their own murderous behaviour in connection with these hints from earth and air and water and fire that may not yet have occurred to you — I mean the double-dyed craftiness of suggesting that what they have done purely and solely to protect themselves was done in the interest of a faithful steering of human history, as it takes place on this old earth, and in the interest of progress on this old earth, or anywhere else in space.

“And now I would like to say something to you about this drowning of Atlantis of which we hear so much. I would like at this moment, my dear friends, humbly, patiently, submissively, and with all due respect where respect is due, to suggest to you that these curst Olympian rulers of ours recently made a great discovery. They discovered, never mind how, perhaps through earth or air or water or fire, or perhaps through some treacherous group of Atlanteans themselves, for there are traitors in every country, that some great Atlantean philosopher, who may now at this moment, for all we know, be wandering over the earth under a completely different name, anyway my suggestion is that somehow or other they found out that an Atlantic philosopher had got the secret of some new magnetic stone that can influence unborn embryos and that is probably called the ‘Embryo Stone’, and whose power — I am only humbly suggesting this to you, though, I confess, in my own philosophical researches I have discovered some very peculiar and very powerful magnetic stones that can change the sex of an embryo.

“The Atlantean philosopher’s stone may have the power of making the embryo bi-sexual. In which case, as you can well imagine, you warriors of Ithaca, the influence, the renown, the glory and the power of this Sage of Atlantis, not to mention his wealth, would be very great indeed! And naturally enough the high Olympians would hate him. They have always been extremely touchy and sensitive on such points; as they may well be! For doesn’t their authority with all of us ordinary mortals largely depend on their power over birth, and over the various issues of birth? — yes! extremely touchy they have always been about this whole problem of birth and sex; and if I may whisper this in your ears, you brave men and beautiful women of Ithaca, it is by the cunning trick of keeping sex, and birth, the issue of sex, completely under their control, that these Olympian gods retain their power over us.

“But they can be defied now and again for all that; and very successfully defied. You have only to visit the “Herm” of the great Goddess Themis, within a mile of where we are now, and as you can believe from my devotion to Eros and Dionysos I’m no fanatic champion of propriety and decency, to see the havoc done to her image by the hands of the chaotic Harpies; and yet upon the traditional order maintained by Themis the basic rule of these Olympians is declared by their champions to depend.

“Whereas I say it depends only on two things — on the Thunder-bolts of Zeus and on the plagues sent by the Queen of Heaven. O my friends! if you would listen to me and boldly defy all these false gods; if you would turn to the only deities and divinities in the whole pantheon of godlike creatures who really have the power of giving us new life — not just murdering us with thunder-bolts and with plagues and famines — but transporting us by mystic ecstasies and paradisic trances into Dimensions of Being, where what here we are deluded into calling reality is seen in its true light, and where nothing, I say again to you, my friends, where nothing is the secret of all the Mysteries beneath and above the Sun and the Moon, beneath and above the divine ether, except the mind that half-creates what it enjoys, except the mind that half-annihilates what it cannot enjoy!”

When Enorches had finished speaking he showed in the presence of that enormous crowd and in the presence, and before the steady eyes and pointed beard, of the unalterable old king, the same perfectly cool brain and perfectly poised intelligence that he had shown when he began speaking.

But neither the old king, who now held the awkward form of the daughter of Teiresias firmly by the waist while he slowly and indifferently swung the club of Herakles to and fro with his free hand, nor the agitated crowd of spear-waving men and excited women had time to note this serenity in their orator, for the attention of every person in that oldest portion of the “agora”, including king and crowd and prophet’s daughter, was suddenly and startlingly switched to a completely new occurrence.

This abrupt jerk to the particular set of nerves in them all that responded to dramatic events included in its field of operations, as may be easily supposed, both the moth and the fly who just then were peering out of the life-crack of the club of Herakles with concentrated interest. It also included the club itself who in following the rush of events at this particular crisis had the advantage of its vibratory contact with the Sixth Pillar in the Corridor of Pillars. This contact, based on a long series of experiences so homely and natural that they might almost be called domestic, was in its way as much of a philosophical discovery as any conceivable one made by the Atlantean sage, and neither the moth, whose silky wings quivered with the agitation of its emotion, nor the fly, whose great black head bulged with the intensity of its rumination, could do more than quietly accept such a verdict when they heard the club murmur aloud to itself what it had just caught from the massive Being that bore the signature of a son of Hephaistos, namely the words: “Hear therefore what the sage saith, “When the messenger flies or gallops, or drives, or runs, hope nothing, fear nothing, expect nothing, talk of nothing, till he’s standing on the ground at your gate.”

This messenger was indeed running at a speed that made some of the women who watched him fear he would fall dead the moment he delivered his message. And what was his message? This question, which was pulsing and heart-beating in that whole vast mass of people, did not disturb Odysseus in the slightest degree.

His plan of using the Prophet’s daughter as a shaft of irresistible power resembling the shaft that originally separated the Heavens from the Earth had completely failed. Well! That had failed. That was over and done with. That was finished, closed, shut, settled, rounded off; but in its frustration, in its defeat, in its absolute overness , it left the great battlefield of creation and destruction open for something fresh from the root up!