Authors: Elizabeth Hand
She walked over to the lantern on the floor, squatted before it, and held her hands out, so that black smoke licked at her fingers. “Thousands of years ago they came out of the northern steppes and
boom!
everything changed. The way people lived, the way they talked and dressed, how they divided property, how they determined parentage. There was this sort of cultural explosion, and we’re still feeling the aftershocks; we’ll go on feeling them forever.
That’s
what the
Benandanti
are for: to make sure we keep on hearing the echo of a bomb that went off seven thousand years ago.
“The men in my father’s family have been
Benandanti
since the fifteenth century, when the sultan Mehmed helped create the
Laurenziana,
the de’ Medicis’ library in Florence. So my ancestors were librarians. Balthazar Warnick goes back to the Dark Ages, to those monasteries in Ireland that were the only place in western Europe where they still could read and speak Greek, until the Renaissance. And Oliver’s family goes back even further than that, to the first wave of Milesians in Ireland.”
I stared at her for a long time, the lunula a faint gleam upon her breast. Finally I said, “This is crazy.”
Angelica looked up, her face composed. “No, it’s not,” she said calmly. “When it starts to get crazy is when you find out that underneath this whole Indo-European tradition is an even
older
tradition. One that goes back twenty, thirty thousand years; and
that’s
what the
Benandanti
are afraid of.
“Because the people who were there before the
Benandanti
knew things that make my father and Balthazar Warnick look like Boy Scouts putting on a magic show. The
Benandanti
did their best to stamp them out, but old things survive. Old religions survive. And the
Benandanti
are afraid that someday the old ways will truly return. If you know anything at all about history, you can see the signs: there’ll be these little isolated outbreaks, like the old religions that were persecuted as witchcraft during the Middle Ages, and again in Salem. The whole hippie movement in the 1960s, and some of this pagan revival stuff that’s going on now.
“All that stuff scares the
Benandanti,
and they do their best to put a stop to it. You want conspiracy theories? Well, this one beats them all, Sweeney. The
Benandanti
are so powerful that, for the most part, they’ve succeeded in keeping any resurgence of this other ancient tradition from gaining anywhere in the world. Probably the smartest thing they ever did was to infiltrate the Church; although the earlier religion got a toehold in there as well, with all those holdovers from Isis and Dionysos grafted onto Christianity.
“But mostly the
Benandanti
have just made sure that
their
guys are always in charge. That’s how they’ve managed to carry on in this unbroken line for all these aeons, all of them: presidents and generals and priests and monks and scholars and regular guys, witch-hunters and that guy pumping gas at the Sunoco station who thinks Batman is a real person. He’s not as dumb as he looks; and my father and Balthazar Warnick and some of their friends are a whole lot smarter.”
“Okay,” I sighed. “So your old man and Richard Nixon and the de’ Medicis and I guess the Dalai Lama are all in on this together. So what’re they so afraid of? What are they trying to keep us from finding out about? What is the big fucking
secret?”
Angelica turned to stare out the window. A shaft of light from the hurricane lamp speared her crescent necklace so that it flared into a burst of gold and crimson.
“The Goddess,” she whispered.
I flung myself upon the bed. “Oh,
man
…
Angelica looked at me furiously. “I’m not kidding, Sweeney! Haven’t you read Magda Kurtz’s books? Don’t you remember what happened to her?”
“Okay.” I ran my hand through my hair and wished I was someplace else. “Magda Kurtz. You’re right, obviously something totally weird was going on with her. So tell me about your crazy goddess stuff.”
She began to declaim in her theatrical voice. “Well, in a way we just don’t know all that much. I mean, there’re these cave paintings and carven images that go back tens of thousands of years. The Venus of Willendorf, the Snake Goddess. And then later there’s Isis, and all these other Mediterranean goddesses; and Innana in Babylon, and the Great Goddess of Crete, whose name we don’t know. And the Roman Laverna and Satine in Indonesia and Skadi in Scandinavia. And the Virgin Mary, of course—she’s sort of the Sears knockoff of Isis—”
“I read
The White Goddess,”
I snapped. “I know how it turns out. Here’s all your goddesses, this nice big
kaffee klatsch,
and
you’re
saying that along came the
Benandanti
—okay, okay, the Scythian horde or the Hittites or Hyperboreans—that your basic group of patriarchal sky-god worshipers swept down and wiped them from the face of the earth. And for some reason Balthazar Warnick and his friends are doing whatever they can to keep them gone. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“Yes. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’ve been reading about it—you’d be amazed at some of the stuff Colum has in the stacks. I think these matrilineal cultures must have had some pretty dramatic type of social control. Their goddess religions were probably
much
more intense than we like to imagine. Almost certainly there was some form of recurrent human sacrifice. Magda Kurtz thought so; otherwise, why are there all these survivals of incredibly violent rituals? Even the ancient Greeks—we think of them as being so civilized, but originally the Greeks took most of their religious notions from places where the Goddess was worshiped, from Crete, and Anatolia, and probably other places we’ll never know about. When
we
read about Theseus and the minotaur, it’s just a fairy tale. But to the classical Greeks it was a memory of something almost unimaginably ancient, the remnant of some kind of human sacrifice to the Goddess. A tribute of young men and boys brought from the mainland to Crete at the end of every lunar cycle …
“And so for twenty thousand years we had these relatively peaceful matristic societies. No wars, no warriors. If we bought that peace at the price of a few men or boys a year, well so what?”
I stared at her as though her hair was on fire. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not kidding,” she said haughtily. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.”
“But it’s insane! You’re saying that human sacrifice is acceptable as some weird kind of social control!”
“No, that’s
not
what I’m saying! It’s just a theory, anyway—but why would that have been such a terrible thing? I mean, what about Christianity and the crucifixion?
That’s
a kind of human sacrifice, and nobody thinks
it’s
weird. Why is it okay if a
man
does it?”
I wanted to laugh, but Angelica’s piercing glare shut me up. “Angelica, I hate to say this, but—but isn’t this all kind of—well,
paranoid?
”
For the first time in the nine weeks I’d known her, Angelica got mad: really, really mad.
“Listen, Sweeney! Maybe I don’t know
everything
about the way the world works, but I know enough not to buy into every idea my father taught me. Or Balthazar Warnick. I mean, look at this—”
She crossed the room to her bed, dug into one of her bags and withdrew a book: Magda Kurtz’s
Daughters of the Setting Sun.
She flipped through it, walked back, and shoved it at me.
“What’s that a picture of?” She pointed to a print showing a pattern of intersecting lines and Vs. I squinted at the page and shrugged.
“Swords.”
“Guess again.”
“I dunno. Spears, I guess. Some kind of weapon.”
“Why not leaves? Why not fish, or birds, or fir trees?”
I shrugged again. “I don’t know. They just look like spears to me.”
“They look like spears because you’ve been
taught
to see spears. Or swords, or javelins. What about this?” Her finger jabbed at another image.
“Easy. Some kind of phallic symbol.”
She shook her head. “Doesn’t it look a little top-heavy for a phallic symbol? Look again—”
I peered at it more closely; and this time I saw that there were incised lines on the top of the little image, forming a crude face, and lines along its body marking a vulva. I nodded and handed the book back to her.
“You’re right,” I said, a little surprised. “It’s a face—”
“It’s a
woman.
A goddess figurine. And yet for a hundred years people were digging these things up and insisting they were phallic objects, when they could just as easily have been
mushrooms
! Just like they were insisting every circle or delta was a shield or sun, when they were found surrounded by millions of these goddess figures, and were probably supposed to be vulvas, or moons. Just like you said all these patterns of lines represented some kind of weapon, when they could have been any number of other things.”
“Then why can’t they just be
nothing
?” I asked stubbornly. “I mean, these people didn’t have notebooks to doodle in. Maybe they were just scribbling on the walls.”
“That’s not the way the world works, Sweeney.”
“Oh yeah? Who died and made you hierophant?”
Suddenly she looked exhausted. Small lines showed at the sides of her mouth and eyes as she leaned to cup her hands above the hurricane lamp.
“Look, maybe I
don’t
know what I’m talking about,” she said wearily. “What I do know is, I read Dr. Kurtz’s book in high school, and it was like a bell went off in my head. All of a sudden all these things made sense—why they used to burn witches at the stake, why women aren’t allowed to be priests or rabbis, why Christmas is a big deal, but Halloween is just for little kids—all these things that had always just seemed to be the result of some weird random decision on somebody’s part.
“And Dr. Kurtz’s book
explained
all this stuff. Okay, so maybe a lot of it isn’t even true—but maybe it doesn’t all
have
to be true. Maybe just
some
of it is true, and maybe for me that’s enough. Because when I read her book, for the first time I felt like I
understood
things. Things that had to do with my father and the
Benandanti,
with everything I’d been brought up to believe in …
“And so I came here to the Divine, because my father went here, and I met you and Oliver and Annie, and Daddy’s old friend Balthazar Warnick, and Magda Kurtz—this woman I
idolize
!—and out of nowhere she gives me
this
—”
Her fingers clutched at the silver crescent hanging around her neck.
“—she gives me this, and then she’s
gone.
The paper says she was in a plane crash but
I
know she wasn’t and
you
know—and there has to be a reason, Sweeney. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have given it to me.
There has to be a reason.”
I was quiet. Finally I said, “Sure there’s a reason, Angelica. Magda knew someone was going to kill her. She knew someone wanted that thing, and she was trying to get rid of it. And if
you
were smart, you’d get rid of it, too.
“No.” Angelica crossed her arms. “The only reason Warnick got to her at all was that she took it off. The lunula was protecting her. As long as she wore it, she was safe.
“And then she gave it to me …”
Her voice faded. When she spoke again it was in a whisper so soft I could barely hear her.
“That’s why I have to learn about it. If I was meant to have it, I have to know
why.
There are no accidents—that’s what my father says. Nothing ever happens without a reason.”
“Yeah, and when God closes a door, He opens a whole new can of worms. Well, you better be careful, that’s all,” I said darkly, and pointed at her throat. “I don’t know what that thing is, but it’s bad juju, I can tell you that.”
Suddenly the door to our room flew open. We both jumped; but it was only Annie.
“Hey, what’s this? You guys having a séance?” She flopped down beside Angelica and beamed. Her face was bright red and sweaty, and her hair stuck up in little tufts across her forehead. “Anyone I know?”
“Annie, have you been
drinking?
” Angelica raised her eyebrows in astonishment.
“Hell, no. I’ve been
dancing,
with Baby Joe and Hasel and those other guys. I just came back to get my sweater. You should come back with me. And listen: they’re having another party tomorrow night—”
She started throwing clothes out of her knapsack, finally held up a moth-eaten cardigan. “Eureka.”
“I think tomorrow’s supposed to be an evening of quiet contemplation, Annie,” said Angelica.
“Yeah, well, after vespers there’s gonna be some party over in Hasel’s room. I said you’d come, Angelica—oh, you too, Sweeney, don’t look at me like that!—they’ve got a boom box and a bunch of tapes, it’ll be great.”
“Sounds wonderful,” Angelica said doubtfully. “Is Oliver there now?”
“Oh, lighten up, di Rienzi! No, he’s not. I don’t know where he is—probably outside communing with Jupiter. Probably he’s
on
Jupiter.” Annie pulled on her sweater and whirled out the door again.
Angelica turned to me. “You can go if you want.”
“I don’t think so. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Are you tired?”
“Not really. I’m kind of buzzed, actually.”
“Would you like to take a walk? Outside, I mean.”
“Sure.”
We found a door that led out onto a rolling lawn. Beneath our feet the grass was brittle with frost and crackled noisily, like a match set to pine boughs. On the horizon, above the black tips of the trees, stars burned with a cold brilliance. There was no moon. We walked without speaking, and for once silence didn’t seem awkward to me. It was amazing how quickly we left the Orphic Lodge behind, neither light nor sound nor anything but the smell of woodsmoke hinting that it was there at all, sweet applewood and cedar, and an occasional flurry of red embers streaking the darkness overhead.
“I’m glad I met you, Sweeney,” Angelica said after a long while. The lawn had finally surrendered to tangled vetch and tall stalks of milkweed and yarrow. The night was utterly still; it was too late in the year for crickets, and even the night birds seemed to have fled. There was only wind rustling in dead weeds, and the crackling of leaves underfoot. “I don’t know, now, what I would have done if I hadn’t. I love Annie, but she’s different from you—you
understand
things about me, I don’t have to explain everything.”