Next: III. Queue and Eigh |
Previous: I. Thursday evening, sometime shortly after the dinner hour, the corridors of Babbett Convocation Center
Xena and Gabrielle After India: Whither Faith?
--A lecture at the Center for Xena Studies
--To Prof. Clotho's Mythology 101 class
--Thursday night session
--Delivered June 24, 1999
--by Dr. Mitchell Cary Drummond
II. Drummond's Lecture
In the summer of 1975, when this great land of ours was greasing up for that exercise in national hubris we called the Bicentennial, and I was just out of my junior year at MIT, I had the occasion to rub shoulders with a political institution that was at that time over five thousand years old.
It was a requirement of my degree program that I spend a certain amount of time away from the campus, employed in my field of specialization, preferably in the industry in which I one day hoped to work. This practice is known these days as co-opping, but back then, in the dark ages, it was known as ... co-opping.
He grinned broadly. The older members of the audience found the remark funny, but the students did not. They were annoyed at the old fart for such a lame attempt at humor.
Strike Two.
In those days, I was not a person who applied himself assiduously to the task at hand. I was lazy and tended to procrastinate. I found the pursuit of members of the fairer sex far more interesting than my studies, and was assured by my instructors that it showed in my performance.
So while my classmates were off working for IBM and Hewlett Packard and the Defense Department and so-forth, I got told off to this little hole-in-the-wall in, of all places, Athens, Greece. I assured the placement counselor that I spoke not word one of Greek and was told it didn't matter. I almost threatened to jump ship or go AWOL or something, it sounded so awful to me to spend a summer in Greece, for crissake.
And then the name of the company that had agreed to employ me... Hephaestus Epicheirese. How tacky could you get, using the name of the Greek god of industry for a business? That was as bad as an American company naming itself after George Washington or something. Could they really expect to gain some benefit from a name like that?
But that was before I met the founder of the company.
The placement counselor informed me in no uncertain terms that there was no other position available to me, especially considering my academic record. My choice was to go to Greece and work for Hephaestus Epicheirese for the summer or fail to graduate the following year. I went.
Once I was there, of course, I got into the work and became entranced by the company's mission and, by the time I returned to MIT that fall, I had committed to returning to Athens upon my graduation. I had found my career.
Drummond took a sip of water from a tumbler placed on the stage for that purpose.
But even then, having worked there a summer and returned for a second, I still had not met the founder and owner of the company, a Mr. Ephesstos, who was, it seemed, always away at the company's "Northern Plant", which name was always said with a smile by the company's veterans, as though there were some inside joke involved into which I had yet to be initiated.
And through it all, the one legitimate reason that the company could have chosen the name it had never crossed my mind. I was so thoroughly inculcated--as you are--with the modern viewpoint that faith is based in myth and therefore belief in gods is belief in the impossible. Even now, with enough clues having been given to you for you to arrive at the desired conclusion, your minds continue to reject the truth.
From here, my credentials and my arguments are bound up in each other, so I will have to abandon the former while I develop the latter. I will, however, now get to the point that has brought me here, to this stage tonight.
You see, I stayed on at Hephaestus Industries. From my graduation with a BS in computer sciences from MIT, to my early retirement and subsequent employment here at the Center for Xena Studies, I was employed, first as a programmer, then as an engineer, and finally as an executive, by my patron and, I am pleased to say, dear friend, Mr. Ephesstos, who has traveled from Greece to be with us tonight. Sir, if you would be so good as to stand.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the God of Fire.
The man in the white linen suit, he of the blurry features who was seated in the place of honor in the middle of the, rose to his feet as the spotlight picked him out of the crowd, smiling, and nodded his acknowledgment of the applause. His head was now tilted to one side, as the tension of his warped spine tilted his upper body to one side.
I will not ask you to accept my identification of this gentleman as a god merely on faith. But for the moment, please just think of him as Mr. Ephesstos, a Greek businessman of... rather hazy antecedents.
I will, however, challenge you in your own minds to disprove what I now say...
My friends, the gods of Olympus are real. They exist even to today, and walk among us, as do the gods of every human culture from the earliest cave dwellers to the most ultra-modern speakers of Esperanto, who profess to not believe in gods at all. Many of the Olympian pantheon are, indeed, present in this room tonight, seated in the special VIP section in the middle of the orchestra. As friends and colleagues of mine, they have graciously consented to attend me here tonight to lend weight to my words.
The reason they have come ought to be obvious. They want their divinity back. They cannot have that so long as humans do not believe in them. Instead, they live a comparatively normal existence... an immortal existence, granted, but otherwise outwardly normal... and they find it boring.
Think of it, ladies and gentlemen! For thousands of years, they held sway over a human culture that was so advanced for its time, so wise and knowledgeable that, after thousands of years of scientific, technological, and philosophical development, we still look back on it as a kind of golden age of the youth of our race. The glories of Greece and Rome were dedicated to the glory of the gods on Olympus.
And then along came this little upstart god. A solo act, with his son who came to earth and gave up his divinity for a time and was crucified by the Romans. Big deal. The Romans crucified millions. But something about him captured the hearts and minds of millions of humans, and pretty soon, there were more people worshipping this one god than the gods of Olympus. The Roman Emperor abandoned them. And they began to slide into a long, slow twilight, which they soon shared with the ancient gods of the north lands and of the Celts of Britannia and Ireland, the pantheons of the Middle East, displaced first by Jehovah and Jesus and then by Al Lah.
So now, with the recent resurgence of interest in what the monotheists mistakenly call paganism, our friends from Olympus are again feeling that little tickling thrill of worship... of the power that lifts them above their mundane existence as mere humans who only happen to be immortal, and enables them to be something more--something... divine.
And the exchange is not a one-way street. Humans do not give faith and credence to a god and get nothing in return. A great deal of human achievement has been realized with the help of the gods, through one agency or another. The stronger a god is, the greater the gift he or she can give his worshippers. Jehovah, after all, single-handedly protected an entire nation of people from all comers for hundreds of years. Granted, once they fell away and became secularized, things soured for them, but, hey! They chose that road, right?
But we're modern human beings, right? We understand more about the nature of the universe than the primitives ever could have. Right?
Right?
Or do we? Did you know that the astronomers of Ur of the Chaldees understood the Big Bang theory and advanced it as the story of the origin of the cosmos... five thousand years ago?
Did you know that there were electronic, digital computers in use in Babylonia four thousand years ago?
Did you know that Magellan was not the first human to circumnavigate the globe? Not by two thousand years?
Did you know that the Chinese had powered human flight four thousand years before the dawn of the common era?
All of these were the gifts of the gods to some degree or another, and they were withdrawn from humanity as worshipers of those same gods fell away or gave their fickle hearts to other gods.
And now we stand on the threshold of our solar system, ready to leap to the stars, if we have the will. Yet we turn our backs on a partnership with a race of beings with whom we have shared the planet from time immemorial.
In my own case, I was raised as a Methodist... a Protestant Christian, although what I might be protesting, I had no idea. My Midwestern skepticism was given a good many hard knocks when I finally made my pilgrimage to the Northern Plant which--you will have guessed by now--was that metaphysical locus known to the ancients as Mount Olympus. There I was introduced to the Forge of Hephaestus and met the ancient gods who, while stripped of most of their former glory, are, in their native habitat, still quite impressive.
No, it was not actually on the slopes of that mountain in Thessaly, any more than the Heaven of Jehovah or the Paradise of Al Lah or the netherworlds of any religion has an actual physical location one can visit corporally. It was, rather, a spiritual journey. But it was one that had at its end a destination rather more concrete than most journeys of its like. That is a deliberate choice of the beings we know as the Olympic pantheon... to relate rather more closely to humanity than other gods have or will. They see this as their particular strength; that they are willing to connect with their partners-in-spirit, whereas other gods of other pantheons are more demanding of distance and worship. The Olympians are, in short and as gods go, low maintenance. A little acknowledgment, a burnt offering now and again, and--shazaam!--a partnership for the ages.
As you exit the hall tonight, there will be tables set up in the lobby outside where you will find priests and priestesses of all of the principle gods of the Olympian pantheon. Should you have any questions, or any desire to partake of their gifts, please feel free to approach the priests and speak with them.
Now. As Prof. Clotho stated, this class session is presented for the benefit of her students in Myth One, and that its purpose is to rock their world view. You have heard the testimony of one individual, whom you have no reason to trust. I can urge your belief until I am blue in the face, and it means nothing without some demonstration, some clear token of the truth of what I claim. In recognition of that fact, I ask you now to rise and face toward the VIP section of the audience, and observe as our Olympian guests take their leave of us.
The audience rose, some with reluctance or doubt written on their features, but within a few moments, they were mostly on their feet and more-or-less facing in the direction of the special section of the orchestra.
At the same time, the occupants of that section, who had sat silent and impassive throughout Drummond's speech, stood and, facing the stage, arrayed themselves in rows, shoulder-to-shoulder, in front of their seats. Their appearance, unremarkable as individuals, albeit possessed of greater than average beauty and health, metamorphosed into something ... other. They became somehow larger without gaining in height, more beautiful without gaining in feature or strength. Their clothing, again unremarkable in a modern setting, if somewhat richer than average, transmogrified into classical costumes of white robes and tunics, of golden armor and crowns of laurel leaves in beaten gold, of gowns in silk and samite and cloth-of-gold and garments of skin-tight black leather.
And they began to glow. Around each of them there formed a bright nimbus of light, extending outward from their skin and clothing to fade into translucence in the air, the collective light of it at first merely uncomfortably bright, but growing quickly to become unbearable in its intensity. It continued to grow in brilliance.
The humans in the room reacted in various ways. All tried to shield their eyes from the blinding light, but some tried to peek... to catch a glimpse through teary eyes of what was growing in their midst. Others fell to their knees, stunned by the metaphysical forces unleashed in the chamber. Still others turned their backs or covered their eyes with their hands. A few even fled the room altogether, although there were not many of those.
At the end, there were only three humans in the theatre who remained more-or-less unaffected. Two of those were Dolly and Xe Doll, standing in the back row next to the exit where they had been seated at the last minute. They stood calmly, eyes closed, their auras flowing back from their body in the cosmic wind that blew out from the center of the Olympians' formation.
Their expressions were serene and they were lent for that brief moment a beauty even greater than their own, which was not inconsiderable by any means. Had any human in the place been brave enough to see, he would have had his heart stolen forever by the undiluted sight of them. The two former dolls could stand thus courageous in the flood of irresistible light because they had endured it once before themselves. This was only a small portion of what they had endured in their own Genesis storms, when they had been granted the gift of life, in part through the offices of these selfsame gods.
The third human to remain relatively unaffected was Drummond. He stood calmly on the stage, his eyes closed, basking in the brilliant golden-white light. He had experienced this luminance many times in his quarter century as an agent of Olympus, and it was an old, old friend to him.
A swirling wind sprang up that blew with hurricane intensity and yet disturbed nothing in its path save a few loose bits of paper and some dust. The light faded slowly, more an aftereffect of human vision than of the light of the gods themselves, and, when people came to themselves again and opened their eyes, the entire section of seats was empty.
Next: III. Queue and Eigh |
Previous: I. Thursday evening, sometime shortly after the dinner hour, the corridors of Babbett Convocation Center