Pretty Girls Make Graves (Dark Academia Book 1) by Steffanie Holmes

Author:Steffanie Holmes [Holmes, Steffanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bacchanalia House
Published: 2021-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

I learn that the Orphic poems depict Dionysos as the son of Zeus and his daughter Persephone. Claws taught me that all Greek mythology can be summed up in five words – unfortunately, Zeus is horny again. And Dionysos’ story is no different.

Zeus’ wife Hera gets jealous and orders a race of magical giants called Titans to tear Dionysos to pieces, cook him, and eat him. But the goddess Athena saves his heart, and Zeus uses it to resurrect him.

(Zeus also strikes the Titans with lightning, they burn to cinders, and from the ashes arise the first humans. So that’s…a thing.)

It all sounds so insane, especially when I remember the Orpheus Society was started by a devout monk. But it makes a mad kind of sense. After all, Catholics drink the blood and eat the flesh of the son of God to wash away their sins. They believe in Jesus’ death and resurrection.

According to Euripides, for the Greeks, drinking wine – which is the blood of the god Dionysos himself – lightens the burden of mortal misery. Initiates to the mystery cults must embody the god by going through a ritual dismemberment, death, and descent to the underworld, before they can be resurrected anew. I can see how Benet of Blackfriars might’ve drawn parallels between them, especially after his religion was suddenly deemed satanic and dangerous, forcing him underground.

I need to know more.

I pick up my books and head to the Medieval Studies section, but after hunting for the book I wanted for twenty minutes, I come up empty-handed. I ask the librarian, “Excuse me, the catalog says you have this collection of the Black Monk’s writings, but I can’t find anything on the shelves.”

“That’s because it’s part of our special collection. Follow me.” She pulls an archaic set of keys from her desk drawer and marches toward a narrow staircase blocked off with velvet rope.

She pushes the rope aside and leads me through a dimly lit basement and down two more flights of stairs. Her swipe-card dings as we pass through security doors and temperature-controlled stacks.

I had no idea the library was so vast. It must stretch right beneath Martyrs’ Quad. “How deep does this go?”

“There are another three levels below this,” she says, pointing to the gothic stone arches holding up the ceiling. “These are the old cellars where the monks stored their beer, but these lower levels are even older than that. You’re studying Greek, aren’t you? You might enjoy this.” She shifts a couple of archive boxes from the end of the shelf and points her phone’s flashlight at the stone wall. At first, I don’t understand what’s so exciting about a few smudges, but then the shapes resolve into a faint drawing.

It’s a Roman fresco – Dionysos as a youth with his head wreathed in laurel leaves, surrounded by satyrs and maenads waving thyrsus (sticks wrapped in ivy with pinecones stuck on the end for…reasons) and flinging about comically large phalluses. The god carries a drinking cup in one hand and a double-edged ax used for animal sacrifices in the other.

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