Slumrat Rising

The boat sailed down the wide, twilight street, cheered on by the entire polis. The sail was nothing less than the peplos that would adorn the giant statue of the goddess, lovingly embroidered over the course of the year to show her triumph over the giants. The boat was pulled along by hidden mechanisms under the street. A mechanism whose ingenuity exceeded the wisdom of all other peoples. Their goddess was the goddess of wisdom and war, and she had blessed her favored city generously.

Leading the procession to the temple were the basket bearers. They were girls just old enough to marry, possessed of impeccable virtue, and coming from the very finest families of the polis. They were allowed the privilege of wearing the festive mantle and a peplos of their own as they carried the baskets filled with barley, the first fruits of the season, and the long knives. Around their necks were necklaces of figs- the closest a woman could come to a laurel crown of her own.

Behind the basket bearers, the priests, the celebrants, the marching soldiers, the beautiful boat, the musicians, came the victims. This was the Panathenaia. Nothing less than a hecatomb would do. Fully one hundred head of cattle were led towards the temple. The horrific expense of those cattle was, naturally, proudly assumed by the wealthy of the city. It was their duty and their glory. The victims tossed their heads and stamped their hooves at the sound of the blaring trumpets, the banging drums, the smoke from the torches hurting their noses.

Up, up they went to that great rocky promontory and the vast temple dedicated to the Goddess. The sacrifices were led into the temple, where the priests scattered barley and fruit over them. They were stunned with blows from mallets, then their throats slit, the blood draining into the vessels set to catch it.

The stench of it all! The copper smell, the raw meat smell, the shit and piss of one hundred cattle. The priestesses had added frankincense to the brasiers to make the ritual smell better, and maybe for some, it worked. But who cared about the smell when it was the peak of the Panathenaia?

The games had gone on for two days now- men and boys competing in gymnastic events like boxing, wrestling, racing, and dancing in full armor. Pankration, too, for those who appreciated finesse in their violence. There had been boat races, chariot races, and rhapsodes had come from across the civilized world to perform. Singing out the Illiad and the Oddessy, those imperishable records of gods and heroes.

Feasts? When had the feasts ever stopped during the Grand Panathenaia? Rivers of wine and oil flowed into the bowls and bellies of the citizens and their guests. Tonight would be the greatest feast of all for men and gods alike.

The blood was collected in the wide-mouthed vessels. The priests dipped their bundles of rushes into the blood and then flicked them over the altar. The blood hissed as it hit the bed of coals, already hot and red. The first food was for the gods. The rest of the blood was carried away to be whipped to a froth by slaves for half an hour to prevent it clotting. Then it would be mixed with flour and salt and turned into food. It was far too precious not to use. They had so many to feed.

Next came the breaking of the flesh and bones. The victims were cut apart. The meat was scraped from the thighbones, then the bones were wrapped in a triple layer of fat. The priests ritually tossed them on the searing coals.

Once again, the smell was overwhelming- the sizzling beef fat and roasting bones watered the mouths of all in attendance. But this first bite was for the gods.

Next came the chunks of meat. Young men, carefully selected and purified, placed big pieces of the victims on five-pronged long skewers, like a fisherman’s trident grown extra limbs. They held the meat over the coals, roasting it as the libations- the wine sacrifices- were poured over them. The smells! The wine, the roasting meat, the fat, the woodsmoke, the frankincense, the sweat of the masses after a day in the summer sun.

The roasted, sacrificial meat of one hundred cattle was portioned out to the tribes of the city to be eaten at the feasts by noteworthy families. The skins went to the priests. The organs were eaten or sacrificed. Nothing went to waste. Such was the wisdom of the Goddess and her chosen people.

When the sacrifices and rituals were complete, the city scattered into itself, breaking out into neighborhoods and families, celebrating the Goddess and those who had triumphed in the games. There were guests, too, of course, from friendly polis across the peninsula and across the seas.

One of those guests had sailed all the way from Ella, no small journey for the old man. Still, he was warmly welcomed at a particularly noble feast. He had been the giver of laws for Ella, noted for his deep thought and broad knowledge. Not to mention his ability to wind up the followers of Pythagoras and Thales, which should help liven the party.

Not that it was a party for the purely intellectual. Such an elite party naturally had its share of sporting champions too- there were gilded laurel crowns on display, the victors’ prize oil generously contributed to the feast. One such champion, built like Ajax, stalked up to the old man.

“I have been looking for you for a long damn time, Son of Pyres.”

“And you have found me. Truth, wasn’t it? A strange name.”

“Blame my father, he was a strange man. I have questions for you.”

“Oh? I know little about Pankraiton. Not enough to teach a champion.”

The young man rolled his eyes. “Practice every waking hour for a few years, and you will learn all you need to. I age out of my division before the next great festival, and I don’t know if I will want to compete in the senior group by then. No, this is about something much more important. Your poem.”

“You read On Nature? A young hero like you?”

“You banged on for eight hundred verses about “alêtheia.” You guess why I’d be interested. Or you can blame my father again.”

“Fair enough. I think I’d like to meet him. What’s troubling you about the poem?” There was a certain gleam in the old man’s eye. Not a nice gleam.

“What, in the bowels of Zeus, is it actually about? Because you start the poem with a hallucination, expand into something I struggle to even put into words, declare that unspeakable insanity the only real and correct thing, then spend the next seven hundred rotting verses on what you specifically call wrong thinking for morons.”

“I don’t think I specifically called it-”

“You might not have used those words, but you were taking the absolute piss out of the followers of Thales, with scattered shots at dozens of others. It was cosmography as comic insult routine.”

The old man’s younger companion- no spring chicken himself at forty, lurched to his feet. “Now you see here-”

“Zeno, right?”

“Eh? You have heard of me?”

“Sure. Wanna see if your ass can travel the infinite number of steps to the floor before your head?” There was an exchange of hard looks. Zeno sat.

“Let's just keep it civil, is all.” The older man sniffed.

“Very civil. Tell me if I misquote you here, son of Pyres:

At this point I cease for you the trustworthy account and meditation

regarding true reality; from this point on mortal notions

learn, listening to the deceptive order of my verses.

That’s “this whole next bit is strictly for the morons,” but prettied up. Look. I’m interested. Your mad notion of the universe is fascinating, if plainly cracked. I just don’t think I understand it.”

“The notion that everything exists in a fixed timeless moment, a single complete unity of everything, denying even the possibility of change or motion, flies in the face of our common experience. It is also, quite obviously, true.” The old man said “kindly.”

Even Zeno had the decency to wince at that.

“Oh, very obvious. So obvious, you have the Goddess Night appear to explain it to you. Let me summarize, and you tell me if I missed anything.”

The old man nodded.

“The universe, true reality, is eternal because what is, exists, and if what is came to be, then it would have to come from something out of nothing for no reason, which is a logical impossibility. Likewise, since it has always existed, there would be no reason for it ever not to exist because the something that could destroy everything would still be something which is part of everything and would therefore destroy itself before it could destroy everything, which is a logical impossibility.”

Truth took a deep breath. “Likewise, since true reality is, and is everything, then it isn’t many little things but one thing, complete and whole. There is nothing but the completeness of everything. Continuing this logic, motion is also an illusion. Since the totality is complete and perfect, it is an unchanging sphere. It has no reason to change or move, therefore, it does not change or move. Our perception of change and motion, like our perception of creation and destruction, are illusions.”

“You are skipping an awful lot, but I suppose you have caught the gist of the Path of Conviction.” The glint in the old man’s eye had been joined by an increasingly nasty grin.

“So the first, most obvious question is, do you believe any of this horseshit, and second, are you just fucking with the Pythagorians and Milensians, or what?”

“Let’s go in reverse order. I am not so dull as to do only one thing with a line. Consider this- When you think, you think of something; you are attaching the name of something to it. Thought and language require objects outside themselves as a referent. Since you can think of it whenever you like, whatever can be thought of or spoken of must be eternal. Therefore, there can be no change, since change consists in things coming into being or ceasing to be.”

Truth rubbed his forehead. ”Not helping. Are you saying the argument has nothing to do with Thales’ notion of the material world?”

“I’m saying it is both an appeal to pure logic and, yes, screwing with those morons.”

“Fantastic. Super. And the whole Proem and Way of Inquiry bit that sounds like you lifted it from the Cult of Apollo or Orpheus?”

“The absolute literal truth, as best I could record it.”

That got a double take from Truth.

“Pardon?”

“That happened. I described it as best I could, but… it was beyond me. I can only comprehend and put into words the barest fragment of what she showed me. The Goddess Night was wisdom herself, and as a lover of wisdom, I was granted as much gnosis as I could endure.”

“That the world is an illusion?”

“What is, is real. What we think “the world” is, is an illusion. I spent most of the poem describing the illusion as best I could, to stop people making aggressively stupid mistakes and hopefully leading them back to the Path of Conviction,” The old man said. “Almost everyone sees as a mortal and thinks as a mortal. Hard to teach them to think like the Goddess.”

“The Path of Conviction, not reason, yet you argue in favor of pure reason being more “real” than experience. This feast. This flesh. This conversation. All illusions.”

“Yes. At a certain point, gnosis, personal knowledge beyond pure reason, is required. A revelation of the truth.”

“Faith in pursuit of pure reason. An odd idea. One might even say it was contradictory.”

“Not at all. Those who love wisdom find much to love in all parts of existence. From the uses of plants, to medicine, to law, to the nature of the gods, mathematics, pure reason, and esoteric magic.”

“Magic?”

“Certainly. Every serious thinker I know of also was a devoted researcher of magic. Pythagoras, ass that he was, built a whole damn cult around his revelations. Do you think they sit around going, “Hooray for geometry?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause.

“Alright, yes, they do sit around going “hooray for geometry,” when not getting lightheaded from their own anti-bean vegetarianism. Put another way, do you really think they don’t use spells? They use them all the time. Covering up murders, mostly, I expect.”

“To be a lover of wisdom, to pursue reason, must require the hunter to arm himself with spells.” Truth looked skeptical.

“One way to put it. What more can I say? The Goddess of Wisdom revealed the unity behind the illusion. We may reason our way back to that unity, but until we can do so, we are trapped in the illusion. And while what is real is unchangeable, the unreal is changeable, by whatever means suits you.”

“Like pushing a wheel or sacrificing a cow. Etching a curse on bone.”

“Yes. We are prisoners of the illusion, Truth. And it is every prisoner’s duty to escape.”

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