“Field-dwelling-shepherds, ignoble disgraces, mere bellies: we know how to say many false things similar to genuine ones, but we know when we wish, how to proclaim true things.” The Muses; Hesiod, Theogony 22.
Coracle
He was not quite sure when or how it had started. Something to do with firelight, forced love and a King’s hall. Afterward there was a long time of travelling slowly southward; dust on his sandals, the sun in his eyes and camp fires under the cold stars. He remembered Orion with his belt, the Pleiades and other Gods less familiar to him wheeling overhead; and then maybe even a sea journey on a galley, or perhaps more than one. Blue and white and gold, and the smell of salt and the touch of the spray: the creaking of the decks and the wind’s rush; the crying of the gulls in the overarching emptiness of the daylight sky.
Here now though on this beach, he felt he had dealt fully with all of that; and the day seemed to be progressing with some real sense of order. He had eaten well, having come across a herd of goats coughing loudly amid the weather torn olive trees on the steep slope above the shoreline. He had also managed to collect from the dunes surrounding his landing place enough driftwood for his purpose.
The afternoon was spent shaping the wood into a concave collection of struts. He lashed them together with threads picked from his spare coarse spun blanket. What was left of the kill, its sinews as well as strips of the gut, were used to attach it’s now dried out skin to the newly constructed frame. He also used some left over fat to caulk the seams and the sides.
So by the time the sun began to sink into the sea, his small one man coracle was almost complete. He rested then with his cloak pulled around his naked shoulders to ward off the slight chill of the evening breeze. All that remained for the morning was to use his blade to carve a flattened face into one more piece of his flotsam; and so he would have a rough paddle he could employ.
It never entered his mind though, during the whole course of his labours that day to ask himself again where exactly he was, or why he was now journeying alone along this coast.
Cave Mouth
In the halcyon days that followed, he paddled his way slowly along the lengths of the cliffs beyond his first landing point. Finally, one morning, he reached a second beach on one side of a deep cove. The coracle had actually held up well, but he was glad to see a small waterfall on the western face of the cove’s wall as his fresh water was almost gone.
He pulled the small craft up onto the strand beyond the high tide mark and unpacked his belongings. Taking up his water skin, he trudged the few hundred yards to where the water was falling down and pooling into a deep depression in the rocks before it leaked back over the rim and onto the sands. Immersing the skin into the pool, he began to massage it, watching the bubbles leak out as it filled. Then on looking around for the first time, he noticed a plain metal cup sitting in a small niche to the right of the fall. He lifted the skin from the water and replaced its stopper, after which he reached out and picked the object up.
There was nothing remarkable about the vessel, except that it was there. In fashion, it was a shallow, two handed kylix. There was no shine on its surface, no design carved into its face or any maker’s mark: it appeared to be very old, grey and dull. He slipped it into the pool nonetheless and drank. As he had been taught as a child, he dipped his fingers and spread the last few drops with a small silent prayer. There appeared to be some letters carved into the face of the rock above the cup’s niche, but the script was to ancient and to indistinct to read.
“Can you make out any of the words at all?”, she said.
“No”, he replied, turning to look at her: “even if I could, I doubt it’s in any tongue I would know”.
“I’m thirsty”.
“Drink then”.
The sides of the depression were too high for such a small girl, so he helped her to scramble up onto the lip. She brushed her dark curls to one side and used her small hands to scoop the water up.
“It’s cold, isn’t it?”.
“Yes”.
When she had finished, he helped her back onto sand and waited until she had straightened the folds of her dress; then he took her hand in his and they began to make their way back along the beach.
As the sun was low against the sea once more, they made themselves busy setting a camp. A few loose stones provided another fire pit and more drift wood, fuel. He walked out along the opposite arm of the cove with his spear and found several rock pools with a fish or two, stranded by the tide, swimming in their depths.
They ate the fish with their hands by the fire, squatting on the sand. At the meal’s end, she licked her fingers and then begged more water from his skin to rinse her face clean. Having nothing else to do after that, they composed themselves with his cloak and his blankets and as the light fell away they slept.
On waking he felt rested if a little sore from his exertions in the last few days of paddling. He rose, relieved himself, and swam in the sea until he was clean. When he returned to the camp, the girl was still fast in sleep. He sat down again on his cloak by the newly stirred fire, waiting to be completely dry: and then, for the first time he raised up his eyes beyond the dunes to take stock of the full landscape of the cove. It was in that moment that the further wall of rock truly revealed itself, towering above the beach – but smashed back inwards at its foundations by the pitch black gaping mouth of a large cave. In front of it, moving back into the maw there was a jumble of marble that looked like the remains of a temple; and on the plinth, a weathered altar stone.
At the sight of this arrangement he stood and shook his head violently: he stared keenly at the cave mouth again. It seemed to him then, that beyond the cliff, in the blank emptiness of that hole like a rent in the skin of the world, there was something; something he had been brought there to kill.
Darkness
The girl helped by braiding up and tying off his long hair. He selected what he imagined he would need – the leather bag, the sickle in its soft pouch to hang at his side in place of a hunting knife. His sword he strapped thief-wise across his back between his naked shoulder blades. He tightened his greaves and his bracers and perched his helmet over the back of his head.
When all was done, she joined him to kick sand across the remains of their fire. He upended the coracle over the rest of the gear and hoisted his spear and shield. Together they set out up the dunes toward the hollow in front of the cave mouth where the ruins of the old temple began.
The remains were not particularly impressive – a few crumbling marble columns and parts of the pediment littered the ground amongst seeding thistles and weed. In front of these though, half buried, stood a large weathered statue.
The effigy was of a woman. She was clothed in a long dress and had sculpted tresses that escaped from the helmet covering her head – the latter in many ways the twin of his own. She carried a small round targe with the stylized face of an owl engraved on it and clasped a broken off spear. Her eyes were blind.
“Who do you think she is?”, said the girl, losing her hold on his hand and stepping forward to get a closer view.
“It’s the Warrior Goddess, he said, “from Attica”.
“Oh Immortal daughter of the Shining One…”, she intoned.
“Yes”, he said, looking down at her and smiling; “can you remember the rest?”
“No” said the girl, scuffing one of her small sandals in the dust. For a moment, her face looked sour.
The decoration of the altar on its plinth, like the inscription by the pool, was cut in an unknown script and far too damaged to make out clearly. The only thing that could be recognized was a succession of three faces, also women, carved into its front.
“Look at that – there, over there”, she said.
From behind the plinth, a second set of weather-smoothed marble stairs led downward at the back of the temple, their progress cut cleanly in half by the pitch black shadow of the cave mouth. One moment the light of the summer morning, then nothing beyond. Breathing deeply to control the beating of his heart and the slight shaking of his limbs, he followed the steps downward to the line and then with another deep intake, he called to the girl. When she had joined him, he took her hand again in his own and they stepped inward across the divide.
There was nothing: no light, no echo of sound, no smell. Only the feeling of the stairs continuing under his sandaled feet. He followed them blindly and further downward, inward through blank space. At some point they ceased and the floor underfoot again became sand. After half a dozen steps though, the quality of the darkness itself began to change; it lightened as if the air was slowly being illuminated by unseen torches and he began to recognize where they were.
The space could have once been a small theatre stage. But before them where the skene and the tiring house might have been, rose a vast mess of granite encrusted with wild, crawling shapes of limestone, stretching upward and away into shadows toward the roof of the cave; and then amid the jumble, half way toward the ceiling, stood the tall shadowed shapes of two women.
He dragged the girl in close and dropped to one knee, raising his shield and angling it to protect them both, his spear braced outward. These figures perched above them against the limestone were not votive statues or carvings half released by some artisan from the rocks: they moved; they were definitely alive.
The woman on the left spoke; a strong voice against the cave. “Welcome”, she said, “It is long, so very long since any have visited us here”.
“Who are you?” he said; but he felt as though he was merely whispering.
“We?” she replied: “I am Setheno, eldest of my family. This other is my second sister Euryale”. Each wore a peplos in the Doric style; and the faces were human and surprisingly beautiful – especially that of the one who had been named as Euryale – as fine as any woman’s that he had ever seen. The only strangeness about them was that the braids of their hair were finished with metallic images of the heads of serpents, and each was also crowned with an upraised diadem of blood red water flowers.
“You are not horrors”, he exclaimed.
The second sister, beautiful Euryale, laughed: “Oh believe me friend”, she said, “like any women we can be monstrous enough. But come; if we are to be further acquainted, you must leave off your fear for now and lower your guard”. At that, they both carefully gathered their skirts and by degrees, began to descend.
Stories
The sun was westering and the air was cool with a breeze fanning them from the direction of the shore. In the courtyard, in front of the perfect white marble of the temple, they reclined at their ease amid the debris of what had been a more than ample meal. Setheno and her sister each reclined on their own golden couch; he and the little girl shared another. Euryale had set aside her diadem and played with the snake chased ends of her braids; in a low voice, she told them stories.
“In those earliest of days”, she began, “we lived by the banks of a long flowing river with our family and there were always herds of horses. Some were wild and some we tamed; and the skies above were blue and there were fields of wheat grasses and the river was full of lotus flowers. But then others came from the north, and we were forced to travel onward. It was a long way through many places – more plains, forests, jungles, mountains. There was a second river in another land and it was broad, and beyond it were harsh deserts. In that place, finally again, we settled.”
“There”, she said, “the people, unlike us, were small and dark and fine boned: many of them, both men and women, shaved their skulls, going almost completely without hair under the burning sun. They grew grain on the strips of land in the river’s valley, and the river itself was also inhabited by strange grunting herds of very different horses. These liked to wallow in mud almost like huge pigs and they slept submerged in the waters. Fish were abundant as were birds, but the people also hunted the water horses for their meat in painted coracles made of reeds and sometimes even skins”.
“I have heard of this land”, he said; “it rests on the dry southern coasts of the Sea: and the river animal, in my speech we indeed call them hippopotami: but how did you come here?”
The girl swung her small legs over the side and left their couch, wandering closer to the other two. Euryale filled her cup again and drank: then she answered him.
“The time came when we were old enough to make our own lives, my sisters and I. It happened like this.
One night a Goddess came to me under the stars and spoke. ‘I am Wisdom’, she said. When I asked her for her true name she laughed. ‘If not Wisdom, you shall simply call me Kore. But for you and your sisters now … I will give three choices.
The first is that you marry in this land and become chattels and mothers like your mother before you.
The second is that you wither in the bosom of your family; but then you will only come to dry dust without a name.
The third choice is that you leave here and journey to my house: there you will be my confidantes and have new names that will last forever. But in this, the third choice, you must vow on your lives that you shall never be touched by men’.
So having woken with the dawn, I consulted with my sisters and we came to agreement. It was then that we undertook the journey here to this House and plighted our troths to that Goddess who we thought was Wisdom”.
With her last words he felt memory rising up again as it had on the beach before: it charged his limbs with tension and he sat upright.
“I know the rest of this story!”
“Then perhaps we will listen to you now”, said Setheno, reaching to fill her own cup for a second time. The sun had since faded and it was fully dark; but it seemed that the unseen torches around them were lit once more; and it came to him that the walls were again deep with shadowed stone and the floor was sand.
“Your sister was raped by her uncle”, he said.
The little girl was suddenly still where she stood near the others with her back to him. Then she turned; and now she wore a mask on her face. With her hands clasped before her and her head bowed, she began in a high voice to declaim:
“She herself was barely sixteen. He came from the wine dark sea and he was beautiful: a body of bronze, a salt bleached beard and liquid eyes, but she feared him. And when she refused his advances he pinioned her arms and forced her down on her knees. There in the sands, like a bull or some rutting goat, while the tears were streaming from her broken eyes, he covered her”.
“You were not to blame”, screamed Euryale, suddenly rising to her feet and flinging down her metal cup; “and yet, that great bitch, the Goddess, his bastard niece, she punished us all”.
“I know this story”, he said, as he leapt from the slab of stone where they had lain together and reached out desperately to recover his discarded arms.
“Our sister”, said Setheno in a quiet voice, “could bear neither the pain nor the shame. Her injured soul simply regressed; backward, to that of a little child”.
The Price
“Who do you think she is?”, said the young woman, losing her grip on his hand and stepping forward to get a closer view.
“It’s the Warrior Goddess, he said, “from Attica”.
“Oh Immortal daughter of the Shining One…”, she intoned.
“Yes”, he said, looking at her; “can you remember the rest?”
“No” she said, scuffing one of her shapely feet in in the dust. For a moment the profile of the mask that was her face looked blind and the serpents twining in her pale hair glittered in the morning light. Then she turned to look at him again; but he knew in that instant that he could not meet her eyes.
“What should I do?”, he said.
“Oh Perseus, what you have been brought here for; what must be done”. With that, she lifted up her slender arms before her; and her beautiful young fingers could almost have been claws.
Throwing down his broken spear, he fumbled to withdraw the sickle from its pouch. Now, he believed he fully understood: and he thought that after this act, till end of his days, his heart could never again be anything else but stone.
Graves, Robert (1955). The Greek Myths. Penguin Books. pp. 17, 244. ISBN 0241952743. “A large part of Greek myth is politico-religious history. Bellerophon masters winged Pegasus and kills the Chimaera. Perseus, in a variant of the same legend, flies through the air and beheads Pegasus’s mother, the Gorgon Medusa; much as Marduk, a Babylonian hero, kills the she-monster Tiamat, Goddess of the Seal. Perseus’s name should properly be spelled Perseus, ‘the destroyer’; and he was not, as Professor Kerenyi has suggested, an archetypal Death-figure but, probably, represented the patriarchal Hellenes who invaded Greece and Asia Minor early in the second millennium BC, and challenged the power of the Triple-goddess. Pegasus had been sacred to her because the horse with its moon-shaped hooves figured in the rain-making ceremonies and the installment of sacred kings; his wings were symbolical of a celestial nature, rather than speed.
Jane Harrison has pointed out (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion) that Medusa was once the goddess herself, hiding behind a prophylactic Gorgon mask: a hideous face intended to warn the profane against trespassing on her Mysteries. Perseus beheads Medusa: that is, the Hellenes overran the goddess’s chief shrines, stripped her priestesses of their Gorgon masks, and took possession of the sacred horses—an early representation of the goddess with a Gorgon’s head and a mare’s body has been found in Boeotia. Bellerophon, Perseus’s double, kills the Lycian Chimaera: that is, the Hellenes annulled the ancient Medusan calendar, and replaced it with another.”
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