“But then why doesn’t anyone else know about them? I mean, even if it’s such a huge secret, wouldn’t this have popped up on ‘Sixty Minutes’ or something?”
“It’s not a secret.”
In the glow of the hurricane lamp Angelica’s face looked lovelier and more serene than ever, but also strangely remote: her voice detached, a little strained. As though she was reciting something she’d learned long before and was having difficulty remembering. ‘“Hide in plain sight,’ that’s one of their maxims. So, we all know about parts of the Benandanti—but nobody knows about all of it, unless you’re in the very center; and that’s where people like Balthazar Warnick are.”
“So what do they do?”
“Research, mostly. Very obscure, totally useless research.” She began to enumerate. “Sacrificial rituals of the ancient Scythians. The secret meaning of the Book of Genesis. Trying to find a pattern in NYSE figures between April and June of 1957.” She laughed. “I mean, can you imagine wasting your whole life on something like that?”
I thought of Balthazar Warnick running his fingers across a door, letting it fall open upon the landscape from a nightmare. “Yeah,” I said at last. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I can see how it might come in pretty fucking useful.”
I moved closer to her.
“Angelica,” I said, my voice low but urgent, “if what you’re telling me is true—and, I mean, it is true, I saw what they did to Magda Kurtz!—if this is all true, it means the world is completely different from what we think it is. It means—it means there’s, like, magic, or something—
“It means that everything I know is wrong.”
“No.” Her eyes were huge and luminous. “It just means that you didn’t know everything. That’s all.”
“But what happens now? Are they going to kill me because I saw them? Because I found out about this big awful secret?”
She looked at me pensively. “I don’t think so. I think if they were going to kill you, they would have done it already. I mean, I found out about them when I was young, and nothing happened to me.”
“But you said your father is one of them.”
“He is. But my father always said that no one ever really learned about the Benandanti unless they were supposed to, unless there was some reason for it. No, I don’t think they’ll kill you, Sweeney.”
I leaned back and gazed at the ceiling. “Tell me this, then. What’s the point? Why are they doing all this research, if it’s so useless? I assume they get their weird books and monographs published, and they all get tenure, but why? What are they trying to find out?”
Angelica hugged her pillow to her. “It’s not so much that they’re trying to learn things. It’s more that they’re trying not to forget, trying to make sure they remember—
“Someone like Professor Warnick… he knows the words to all the Vedas, he knows a language they spoke in eastern Europe ten thousand years ago. Not the whole language, maybe, but words, phrases, stories: this whole incredibly ancient oral tradition that’s been carried on since the Ice Age. Maybe even before then; maybe so far back that the people who spoke it, we’d hardly even recognize as human at all. But the Benandanti remember. That’s their job.”
I felt chilled, by what lay behind her words: thousands of years unrolling in the darkness before me like a vast eternal plain, endless steppes where tiny figures could just barely be discerned, crouched around a single flame or dancing with arms outflung beneath the starless sky.
“So,” I said at last. “They go out and find these old primitive priests, these witch doctors, and take their pictures and film them and stuff. Like they’re an endangered species. They’re just into saving all these old shamans.”
“No, Sweeney,” Angelica said softly. “You don’t get it. The Benandanti aren’t into saving the shamans. They are the shamans.”
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 tomo
rrow’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.”
Waking the Moon Page 20
