Malias - Page 3

The third page of the Maliad. The poem is 61 lines long now, and I've reached the critical moment of the first scene.

Then rising to his feet, Kameus said to the men: The temples have vast riches from the gifts that they receive, those golden labryses and many herd animals. Why do they deny me a just portion as a tribute? For the sky and the wind have no need of such things. Therefore let her go and bring me my just due!

Some nodded in approval, for indeed his store rooms were full of the things they had brought, olive oil and wine, prized ivory from Libya and other kinds of goods; and the halls of the palace smelled of their cooked sacrifices. They had given generously, so why should the temples hold back?

But gray-haired Dionides came forward and said: Man cannot take that which was offered to the gods, nay, however much he may desire it, lest they become angry with him and punish him for his hubris.

And Teliassa said: Hear now, Kameus, the words of wise Dionides, and do not hunger for that which is above you, for you are but a king and dust before the gods.

Now Kameus was furious, his pride wounded, and he said: Behold now, brethren, if she does not give me wealth from the temple, then I will take what she did bring!

Malias - Page 2

Here is the second page of the Malias. If you read the first page, you should note that I made a change to it - I changed the somewhat anachronistic name Alexius to the older Adamaos, a name attested in Linear B script.

Now fiery-haired Teliassa, priestess of the temple on the mountain where Zeus was born, entered the palace dressed in a gown with sparkling purple trim. She wore an iron armlet in the form of a serpent, and sandals stitched with cloth of silver. All eyes were upon her; women, envious of her great beauty, chatted in the corners, and men watched her with ravenous looks. She approached the alabaster throne with a regal gait, her gaze fixed on Kameus, and said: I offer you honors from those who serve the gods, Zeus and Hera, and Poseidon and Posideia, Hermes and well-girdled Aphrodite.

Nearby, Adamaos was staring at Teliassa as if struck by the arrow, for indeed he was, standing mute on the spot where love had overcome him.

The king too was struck by desire, but desire of another kind. He wrung his bear-like hands and said: I see you have the richest clothes, and an armlet more valuable than gold¹; yet in spite of your wealth, you bring me only words.

¹ In the bronze age, iron was extremely difficult to produce and was therefore more valuable than gold

Malias - Page 1

So here is the completed first page of the Malias Papyrus.

Sing, O Heaven, the heart of fiery-haired Teliassa, who brought about the downfall of the tyrant Kameus. What frightful, divine force could wreak such damage as befell the unfortunate Cretans? Indeed, only the most powerful of any that are known - love.

The goddess of seduction stirs the soul like wind upon the water, and changes the shape of our world forever. Thus it was for Malia on the night when King Kameus assumed the crown, carousing with men of renown and nobles from the surrounding lands.

Gray-haired Dionides was there, who had offered the hecatomb to all the gods, praying for their blessing and for a long and peaceful reign, alas but in vain; and bronze-skinned Alexius, who leaped over bulls with the aerial grace of a soaring kite; and great captains of ships which swiftly sailed the mercurial sea, laden with riches, and others whose names are now forgotten, feasting on the roasted meat by the light of the braziers.

Front page news - from 1650 BC

In case you were wondering whether I'd given up my ancient language fanfic, the answer is no. I've been plugging away at it from time to time, and I think I've finally (!) got an opening I'm happy with.

The piece is tentatively called Malias i.e. the Song of Malia, even though the place wouldn't have been called that in the Bronze Age. (No one knows that the Minoans called it.)

Here are the opening verses:

It reads:

Sing, O Heaven, the heart of fiery-haired Teliassa, who brought about the downfall of the tyrant Kameus.

What frightful, divine force could wreak such damage as befell the unfortunate Cretans? Indeed, only the most powerful of any that are known - love.

The goddess of seduction stirs the soul like wind upon the water, and changes the shape of our world forever. Thus it was for Malia on the night when King Kameus assumed the crown, carousing with men of renown and nobles from the surrounding lands....

(What should follow is a roll call of people present at the coronation feast, because every epic needs a roll call. And after that comes the incident that dooms the city.)

The First Rosicrucian

I googled "first rosicrucian" and the first like that popped up said "Understanding reincarnation" which leads me to the topic of today's post: Pythagoras.

He is primarily remembered today for his theorem concerning right triangles, but the history (mostly mythology, actually) of Pythagoras goes much deeper than that.

As a seeker of knowledge, he did not seem to distinguish between empirical and mystical ideas, and he was said to have been very keen to learn from cultures older than his native Ionian Greek civilization. Hence he traveled to Egypt and, it is claimed, to India.

An Indic concept of reincarnation first enters recorded western thought through the Pythagoreans, along with the concept of the monad or brahman as the source of all creation. If Pythagoras was not a real, historical individual, it certainly seems that the character must have been based on one or more real people who were exposed in some depth to the Vedic tradition and brought its ideas back to the West - kicking off a cycle of historical and legendary Westerners periodically "rediscovering" the knowledge of the East, from Pythagoras to Christian Rosenkreuz to Mme. Blavatsky to the Beatles.

Bride of Achilles - The Heroine's Journey

I would like to refer back to The Pansophy Secret Behind Western Initiation in which Samuel Robinson discussed the hero's loss of his phallic symbol and its restoration by the goddess. My question is : What if the hero is a heroine instead ? She has no phallus to lose, though she could be (re-)united with one in the form of a god.

To be clear, my purpose here is not to dispute the pansophic view of universal western initiation, which I don't disagree with. Rather, I wish to propose a complementary symbolic scheme which I think also relates back to mythic precedent.

The basic Rose-Croix image can be seen as symbolic of the union between masculine and feminine, and we have in Christianity, for example, St. Teresa of Avila and her desire to be pierced by the arrow of God's love. But what of older civilizations that have informed the western tradition ? I believe the concept does ultimately derive from them, though it was often the case that such stories were told from the point of view of masculine desire (and abduction/rape of the object of that desire) rather than from the perspective of the feminine desire to be taken.

First we have the myth of Persephone, apparently a key figure in the Eleusian mysteries. She is abducted by Hades (or runs off with him to become the queen of the underworld?) thus passing into death and being reborn in new life, both in the form of the Earth's fertility and, in some versions, giving birth to divine offspring. There is also the example of Helen of Troy, abducted by or running off with Paris, suffering "death" at the hands of Orestes and Elektra, but in fact taken up by Apollo to dwell in the heavens. Then we have the story of Iphigenia, who goes to her supposed wedding only to face immolation at the hands of her father (Elektra complex, anyone?) but who is miraculously saved from death to be transformed into a goddess or into the bride of alpha male Achilles in the afterlife.

For me, these stories illustrate the concept of a Heroine's Journey, of a seeker who doesn't start her path missing a link to the feminine and needing to be made whole by it, but rather the opposite.

The examples are not limited to ancient Greece, either. In Egyptian lore we can look at a goddess like Sekhmet, a destructive "lost soul" who's knocked out for three days, after which she achieves reintegration with the divine realm when she wakes and falls in love with a creator god. It's known that Sekhmet's journey was celebrated with temple rites and associated with healing magic.

In ancient times, women had their own mystery schools, presumably designed for and according to their own inner journeys. The Bacchae would go up into the hills and do whatever it is they did, with a strict "no boys allowed" policy. In the Christian era, self-initiation became virtually the only path open to female esoterics, buoyed on the back of a convent education or simply by local folklore.

In the modern age, some women have gravitated back toward a segregated paradigm centered on communing with their own femininity, while others have embraced a more gender-inclusive mysticism, but one originally engineered by men for the purpose of reaffirming goddess-knowledge as part of the path to salvation. The pursuit of reintegration through a Christ figure who has not been desexed has not, to my knowledge, been a focus of widespread attention, but it's one I've long felt an attraction to, and I hope this post has shed some light on it.