Hellenic Immortal by Gene Doucette

Author:Gene Doucette [Doucette, Gene]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781612131016
Google: PQHBMgEACAAJ
Amazon: B007ZXKD5M
Goodreads: 13459107
Publisher: Writer's Coffee Shop
Published: 2012-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

DION: I WOULD GO TO ATHENS. FOR IT IS ONLY IN ATHENS THAT I MAY SPEND ALL MORN ARGUING REAL TRUTHS WITH A PHILOSOPHER, ALL AFTERNOON WATCHING CLEVER LIES FROM A DRAMATURG, AND ALL NIGHT DRINKING LIES INTO TRUTHS WITH A SENATOR.

From the dialogues of Silenus the Younger. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne

My first few days in Athens were spent just trying to figure out what had happened to the city. To that end, I bought a cheap tour book and an even cheaper city map and then walked around a lot, from Filopappou Hill to Likavitos, Kolonos to Syngrou Park. And then I returned to my little hotel room on Athinas Street and drank myself silly.

Coming to Athens had been a mistake. All I’d managed to accomplish was to deepen the depression I was already fighting—being a short flight away from Clara did not help this at all— while allowing the trail I was following to run cold.

There were no satyrs in sight. I’m one of the few humans on the planet who could easily identify one at a glance, and I was more than moderately certain I’d not seen one in my travails. If they were still around—and I was nearly certain they were—either they weren’t common or they weren’t in Athens.

With the help of the hotel desk, I secured a tour bus trip to modern Eleusis—now called Elefsina, which is a decidedly less graceful name. I spent the day wandering around the ruins of the Telesterion temple, and listening to a graduate student mispronounce words that used to mean a great deal to a goodly number of her ancestors. As always, the details of the sacred rites were butchered, filtered through the suppositions of modern archaeology.

It was the first time I’d been to the Telesterion without expecting a cup of kykeon at some point. Kykeon was what the adherents drank for a large portion of the nine-day ceremony. It was similar to beer, but with a few extra additives that induced hallucinations, an aspect I personally never got to experience because of my unique body chemistry. There have been numerous concerted efforts to recreate kykeon since those days, efforts I know could not possibly have succeeded because of one particular additive that may or may not exist anymore. My tour guide claimed it was poppy seeds. I actually bit my tongue.

The cave—the Ploutonion—was the only thing still standing. It was supposed to be the place where Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, returned to Hades and as such, it served a major function in the larger Mystery Ceremonies. I couldn’t imagine conducting the rites using the cave and then marching around the ruins. If the cult was indeed still active, it wasn’t active in Eleusis.

As I rode the bus back into the city and prepared for another evening of blind drunkenness, I considered that I was thinking about this all wrong. The last days of the cult were contemporaneous with the rise of the Christian faith. One thing the Christians did well—and they did a lot of things well—was create a thoroughly mobile religion.

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