Xena and Gabrielle After India: Whither Faith? | Previous: III. Queue and Eigh
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
IV. There Will Be a Quiz
As Prof. Clotho made her closing announcements, mostly concerning study and writing assignments and the topics of the next sessions of each class, Drummond resumed his perch on the stool upstage in the darkness and waited for the lecture to end. When she was done, Clotho called Drummond down to the lectern and into the spotlight one more time and asked for applause from the audience, which was freely given. Drummond found himself smiling warmly in gratitude.
Then it was over and he bounded down the parascenium steps to the outer aisle and pushed through the crowd toward the rear of the auditorium. Along the way, he was stopped for a handshake and a quick word by many of the attendees, but (he was thankful), the direction and intensity of his gaze and his palpable impatience to be gone made all but one of them let him go within seconds, and he was rescued from the sole exception by a kindly bystander who shot a sympathetic glance at his back as he strode up the last stretch of red-carpeted aisle to slip through the cordon of treetop-tall Trolls and join the small knot of senior Center staffers and the one special person he sought in that company. But first he had to do his patient social duty.
He clasped arms with Xe Doll. "Xena," he murmured and she answered, "Drummond" as they kissed each other formally on both cheeks in the European fashion, a compromise between the hostility they bore one another and the affection those around them wished they could feel.
He gave a somewhat warmer embrace and peck on the cheek to Sappho, and gentle handshakes to the Center's Director Terry Britten and Assistant Director and Dean of Student Affairs Serafin Selk.
And then he turned to face Dolly. At first he held her by her forearms and just looked at her, his eyes tearing up slightly, his head tilted to one side. Then, at some subtle signal, he braced his stance and she was plastered against him, standing on her right toe, her left leg bent at the knee, her arms in a reverse choke hold on his neck that the Smack-Down folk would have been proud to claim as their own, her ruby-lipped mouth clinging hungrily to his.
"Hey!" he whispered when they came up for air the first time. "How you?" She smiled and his heart melted all over.
"You done good."
"Think so?" he grinned, preening.
She stuck her tongue between her teeth and nodded. "Yeah." The vibration of her whiskey voice in his chest sent a shiver down his body to somewhere around his knees. He pulled her to him for another kiss.
Xena made a disgusted noise with her tongue and Sappho cleared her throat. Drummond chuckled lightly and broke away from his tongue-exploration of his inamorata's mouth. Dolly loosed her death's grip on his neck and dropped back to stand on both feet, but stayed draped against him, even as she turned to acknowledge the others in their little group.
"So, Terry," Drummond said, a touch awkwardly, "D'you think we wowed 'em?"
Terry gave a small tongue-in-cheek grin in return. "Uh... yeah. I'd say that did the trick," she said dryly. "Oh, and the disappearing gods bit was pretty good, too."
"What?" Drummond looked puzzled. Terry nodded toward something behind him and he twisted around to see...
...between the Trolls standing guard, there was a group of the Myth One students forming just beyond the cordon. Some of them, no doubt, wore their wide-eyed expressions because of what had just passed between Drummond and Dolly.
"You have fans," Dolly murmured under her breath. "Are you blushing yet?"
"Oh, gods," Drummond muttered. Then, louder, "It's OK, Jimmy," he spoke to the Troll who was blocking the way. "Let 'em through." The Troll looked down at his former commander and nodded, standing aside.
In the vanguard of the crowd of students, Drummond recognized the slender lad with the long, light-brown curls. The student was tall and skinny, dressed in clean, if downscale clothing ... a burgundy thermal knit Henley shirt, clean blue jeans, and white running shoes. He stuck out a hand in a game attempt at politesse.
"Dean Drummond. Thanks for your lecture tonight."
Drummond accepted the boy's hand and murmured a demurrer. "I'm sorry. I didn't have a chance to memorize the seating chart before hand. You are ...?"
"Simon Talisker, sir."
"Scots?"
"Second generation," he said, and Drummond was able to place his accent by the slight flattening of the vowels that said Canada and specifically the north shore of Lake Erie. "My father graduated in archaeology from this place when it was the Center for Hero Studies back in the sixties ... Sir Rory Talisker."
"Of course! Old Roarin' Rory, the Terror of Thessalonika! I remember him. I was on the Pella dig in '79 when he found Xena's sword. You know that they thought she was just a legend until then, even though the late Dr. Covington claimed to have had the chakram for all those years. It was your father's find that eventually led to this place changing its name, you know."
"Yeah. I've heard it and heard it," the young man said. Drummond chuckled at that sign of intergenerational friction.
"I imagine you have. Well, let me introduce you around. First, please meet my companion and partner in crime, Gabrielle Dolly."
Dolly extended a hand, properly limp at the wrist in preference to her usual firm businesslike handshake, and bent her knee demurely when the boy, in a suave maneuver that belied his working class dress, took it to his lips and brushed the back of it with just the exactly right amount of pressure before gently releasing it and meeting her eyes with a genteel inclination of his head. "Ms. Dolly. I'm delighted to meet you."
"And her spiritual sister, Xena Doll."
The Center's insiders had never really figured out how to explain to outsiders the presence of two women on campus who so closely resembled the actresses in the Xena television series. They finally gave it up and decided to let it remain a mystery... just as such things sometimes tended to be for real. The resemblance and their names were never commented upon in public and inconvenient questions were merely ignored.
Xena stuck out a gripping hand and took the young Talisker's in her and squeezed. "Ma'am," he gasped politely, shaking his hand discreetly to restore circulation when it was released.
"And the Center's Poet Laureate, Sappho Tarkasian ..."
"Mistress Sappho!" Sapph was gentler with the boy's hand than had been her lover. "I'm a big fan. I have a Zip disk full of your stuff. I save everything that you write as soon as it gets posted."
"Thank you," Trish said graciously and then, with a sly glance at Drummond, "If you don't mind my asking, what is the drive letter of your Zip drive?"
"Um ... L ... Why?"
"Oh, nothing. Just a... " Drummond stifled a giggle. "Just a theory I'm testing. You shut up," she commanded the taller man, poking him in the chest. Young Talisker managed to look bewildered.
Drummond recovered and moved on, "And of course, you know, if only by reputation, the Center's Director, Doctor Terry Britten."
"Dr. Britten," Talisker said diffidently. Terry suppressed a smile as she reminded the student with a look that he was treading on forbidden social territory, a fact that surely became suddenly uppermost in his mind as he was introduced to Serafin.
"And Dean of Students Affairs, Dr. Serafin Selk," Drummond said. Serafin acknowledged the boy with a distant nod.
"And what did you think of my little lecture?" he asked the boy in a kindly tone.
"It was quite... er, illuminating," young Talisker said. Drummond gave him points for balls, attempting humor in such a group.
"It was that," he replied, grinning.
"I had another question, if I may?"
Drummond spread his hands expansively. "But of course."
"You forgot the Creation. How does it fit into your world view?"
Drummond smiled. This was why teachers taught. It had to be. "An excellent question. I'm sure that Prof. Clotho," he nodded as the group's teacher strode up the aisle to join the growing knot of people at the back of the auditorium, "must surely have covered creation myths early in the course, without a doubt."
"Within the first division of the course," she confirmed in her classroom voice. The students parted like the Red Sea before Moses to let her through to join those within the circle of Trolls around the senior staffers.
"As far as I am concerned, the fact of the matter is that Creation myths are just that... myths. Almost every religion makes some claim of creation for its principal god or gods. Yet no god I've ever met--and I've met a number of them for long enough to speak with them on this very subject--has ever claimed credit for creation of the cosmos. You'll find this one or that one who lays claim to a seminal contribution to humanity, such as Prometheus's claim to having given the gift of fire to mankind. But no one I've talked to claims the big one. Now, I've never spoken with Jehovah, who would seem to have the most, er... stubborn claim on it. But I've spent considerable time with Eliahu--the one they call Jesus Christ--and he's never led me to believe that he or his father claims to have created even the entire earth, let alone the whole cosmos.
"I do know for a fact that a good many deeds and attitudes have been projected onto gods by humanity desperate to believe in some all-powerful being, and that a great deal of what passes for the words of gods comes from the hands of men--and not necessarily men you'd want to follow. Remember that priests are no more or less immune to the seductions of power than the rest of us, and if putative ties to divinity can give them greater power over others, why, then... why wouldn't they invent tales that would enhance that divinity?"
"Do you believe that all priests are corrupt?"
Drummond sighed. "No. I don't. In fact, I don't think I've ever met a priest myself who did not thoroughly believe his own religion. But I've never met anyone who has written a major scripture, either. Those are the men who are suspect in my mind. And not even all of them. I'd tend to think that Mohammed was quite sincere, for example. But the men who selected and translated the Christian Bible... well, I would be surprised if there were no invention or distortion there."
"I notice you're really hard on Christianity. Is that because, since it's your birth religion, you know it the best?"
"Simon, I think you've monopolized Dean Drummond for long enough," Prof. Clotho spoke up then.
"No, it's alright, Lara." Drummond said. "Simon has asked some very good questions and deserves good answers, but this will have to be the last one. Our reservations at the Greystoke Inn won't keep forever." He smiled graciously.
"But," he turned to the younger Talisker. "You have made several assumptions in asking that question that cannot go unanswered. First, I would stipulate that I am hard on all religions. I have little patience with priests of any description. But to say that I discriminate in the case of Christian priests would be in error. Second, you fail to distinguish between Christianity, the system of moral beliefs, and the organized practice of the Christian religion, which varies widely from Rome to the African bush, but generally includes the requirement that a practitioner be a member of a congregation, which I have not been for almost two-thirds of my life. Third, I'm not sure that there is a real connection between being born into a religion or a culture and knowing it well. One might know it better in some ways, but to truly know a thing, you must stand outside it. I cannot stand outside the Christian religion any more than I can stand outside my body. For too long a part of my formative years, the belief system of Christianity was treated as an 'of course' in my world. No matter how much intellectual rigor I apply to attempting to overcome that canalization, I will never be totally free of it. A wise person, therefore, will take this into account when consciously forming opinions on his own, as opposed to accepting those foisted on him by others, and will attempt to filter out those prejudices as best he can. But I would say that I am actually more familiar with all of the tenets of the Olympian religions, their histories and mythologies, than I am with Christianity, having spent a good deal more time in close association with the deities of the former, and comparatively less with those of the latter."
"Have you really talked with Jesus?" asked a young girl from the back of the group. She sounded like she might be from an evangelistic or fundamentalist background -- something about the accents she put on the words of the question made him suspect as much -- and he hesitated to screw with her world view to the extreme that the claim would... if she would accept it at all.
But then, what the fuck. They come here to have their world views screwed with, whether they realize that on the way in or not.
"I wouldn't put it that way. The being I know as Eliahu was once known on this plane as Joshua ben Jusef, that is true. And he was the teacher who spread the godspell in Palestine during the reign of Tiberius and was crucified in Jerusalem at the Passover in approximately the year 29 of the Common Era.
"However! I must stress this strongly. It has been almost two thousand years, and no being--at least none of my experience--for which the passage of two thousand years has anything like the same meaning that it does for us--can remain unchanged over that long a time. And Eliahu is no exception. So, no. I have not talked with Jesus. The man you think of as Jesus died on the cross and the being that was reincarnated with his spirit is a new entity and bears little resemblance to that Jewish rabbi of two thousand years ago. To compare the two is probably meaningless."
"Just like the gods who were here tonight have changed a lot since they were worshipped in Ancient Greece and Rome," Dolly said.
"Exactly," Drummond agreed. "And now, if you'll excuse us, there's a cut of prime rib at the Greystoke that has my name on it, and it is not getting any younger while we stand here. Thanks for coming. Good night, all."
The Trolls closed ranks around them, then, and extruded the students like toothpaste from a tube, not doing them any harm, or treating them roughly, but making it abundantly clear that the interview was over.
THE END
Xena and Gabrielle After India: Whither Faith? | Previous: III. Queue and Eigh