“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.”