Raising Apollo & the Great Mother in Greece

Nonfiction / Travel / Spiritual


Raising Apollo
and the
Great Mother in Greece

A Pilgrimage

John E. Darling

To my children
 Heather, Hannah and Colin

I sing you good heart

Jdarling@jeffnet.org
Ashland, OR

c. 1994 and 2011 by John Darling.  All rights reserved. 

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher, except for quotations in critical articles or reviews.

Published by Oregon Darlings Press, Ashland. Printed in USA






Chapter 1

I have been a Grecophile for many years, constantly buying every book, reading the history and myth, writing in my budding novels about it, doing countless rituals with friends around it.  I’ve written a book on ancient coins and am writing a novel of Bronze Age Crete.  I’ve even been studying the language with my Greek tutor, Panos, a local professor of physics.

   We’ve just sold some land and, though I hate to leave small kids and wife, Helena, it is time for me to go off in search of goddesses and gods in their homeland.  I know they are still there.  They are certainly not here, in America, except in little enclaves where people have taken the trouble to read about the natural religion of our far ancestors, which they took from nature, seasons and human instincts that were honest, clear and guiding. 

   I would like to go with my old friend and fellow Grecophile, Hilary, also a writer, but she can’t, so I will go alone - and the idea scares me (though I bummed around Europe alone for five months as a young man). I score some tix for $900, not bad, and it begins to sink in that this is a pilgrimage, not a jaunt to lay on beaches or meet babes or go to modern fun spots; it’s to pay homage to what’s ancient, in a time before monotheism, machines, cars and I will be seeking out old temples, theaters, statues and opening myself to them in a way that I know will have some kind of big impact.  It’s an immersion.  As I go, I know I will be impacting the modern world also and that it’s very different from the ancient world I know so well - and that’s a recipe for some culture shock.  I will try to zip myself up and avoid it, though I don’t really know how.

   Actually, the shock is already here and I freak out, making excuses to do the trip later, when the children are bigger and when maybe I can find a companion Grecophile or maybe go with a tour of sacred places, led by our friend Jean Houston, the noted author and devotee of all things Greek.  But I realize, no, that would be too much cushion - and it would be with a bunch of rich old ladies.  I need to be alone, as scary as it is, though I’m not sure why.

   The novel I’m writing about Minon civilization of 3,500 years ago, well, it’s hard to write about a place I’ve never seen and felt.  What are the terrain and climate like?  Above all, what are the vibes like?  You can’t make that stuff up.  You have to grok the vibes yourself.  You have to see if Goddess is still there.  It was the last real Goddess culture in Europe and I have to know why.  I live in a time of neo-Paganism, the likes of which haven’t been seen in 16 centuries, since Constantine made Christianity ‘the’ religion of the Roman Empire and the ancient mystery centers were shut down.  But it’s not the religion the ancients knew.

   I have to go.  The money for the trip is in hand now and -- you know money -- it might not be in six months.  Go, man.  Just do it.  So it’s not going to be all tidy and safe and under control.  And besides, I have to know if my passion for the ancient is ‘real.’  It’s so deep-seated and I don’t know why, but I suspect it’s activated many past lives.  I know about past lives and have taught seminars on regression to past lives.  It’s real.  It is activated.

   Are the old gods still there?  That is what I really want to know.  Do they die and go away, just because cultures change and embrace a new god?  These gods, not the Asian Jesus and Father God Yahweh, are the gods of the Western soul. They are stamped into our genes and nerves and attitudes -- and not just in that time when civilization started in the Fertile Crescent and Nile and (for Europe) in Minoan Crete.  The gods of those cultures are rooted in hundreds of gods in the Neolithic and the hunter-gatherer cave days before that.  The whole thing of Abrahamic monotheism is a sudden overlay on Europe and not native to it.  I want to get the native Western spirituality we came from.

   There’s another big piece I need to explore and that’s the sheer fact that I want to learn who the old gods are to me -- because I’ve read so many books that told me who the gods are to modern, 20th century people and how the hell do they know?  It’s so easy to research gods and come up with our own projections and wishful thinking about them.  We all have ideas about who we’d like our gods to be, don’t we?  I want mine to be passionate, brave, wise, open about all the human energies (especially sexuality) and of course, personal and aware of me and interactive with me.  Wouldn’t it be lovely if that’s what I found out about these ancient deities?  But what if I find out they are indeed all dead and gone -- and what’s there is, well, Christianity much altered by a hedonistic modern life, just as we have in America? 

   I have long needed and wanted to see if the gods are really there where they were born and if they are who they say they are.  How can gods die?  They can’t.  So, it would be absurd for me to go there and find them absent. And when I find them, I want to honor them and set up a deeper relationship with them and pass it to the next generation -- and of course write about it and keep it alive that way. 

   I look at what I wrote at the time, a couple decades ago, and it’s pretty appalling. It says, “I make the reservations and from that moment on, I’m just in a nervous sweat, a tizzy, bonkers, nuts and none of it is pleasant. I am homesick at home.  I lose sleep.  I look sallow and worried.  Why don’t I listen to myself and not go?  Why not leave Greece in a fantasy or intellectual world, where it has lived for so many scholars and neo-classicists?  The truth is I just don’t want to go.  I only want to live it in my head.  I could go in a group someday, but I could not accomplish what I need to.  I could not be alone with the gods.”

   My daughter Hannah Isis, age 6, amazes me by asking that I bring back a stone from a cave, one with writing on it.  Well, that does it.  I am going.  I have to go.  I go.

   It’s October, 1994 and, flying from Ashland, Oregon to San Francisco, I begin sketching with ink and colored pencils in a hardbound blank book.  I can do it very fast.  I jot in a few thoughts or impressions with each picture, as would D.H. Lawrence or Edward Abbey.  I’m scared still - and angry about being scared.  I’m talking to the gods already and I feel embarrassed in front of them for being such a wuss. 

   I grab a cappucino in SFO and get a window seat on the right so I can look down the spine of the Rockies on this sunny day.  What a wonder they are, possessing all that space and beauty.  I sketch southern Montana.  I find myself longing for it, wanting to be on the ground, bumming around the west in this Indian summer sun, in my ’65 VW Bug, with a sleeping bag in the back, taking pictures of the mountains and deserts, stopping by inns in the evening for wine, trying out the local food.  I suddenly feel this immense sense of love and belonging for the western United States.  It is my home, has been all my adult life and my soul seeks to pour out this big cry, this embrace, this recognition of just feeling so right there.  But off I go to...Greece.

   It is night.  I eat the airline food and relish it.  I’ve always loved airline food.  Maybe its that you eat it streaking across the stratosphere.  I get red wine with it, two tiny bottles and it tastes so good.  A stupid Flintstone movie comes on.  Then the pilot says the northern lights are putting on a big display off the left side of the plane, which is the wrong side for me.  I have never seen the aurora and I think, crap, I will not get to.  But only a few people raise their shade and look out at this amazing spectacle of the Norse gods -- so I would describe it to myself -- then immediately pull the shade down so they can get back to the Flintstones, which I simply cannot believe.  I mean, I knew this was a callow race I belonged to, something that would inspire only disgust in the average ancient Greek, but this!  Are these people dead inside?

   I cross over to the rear of my sleek, silver craft and look out and there she is.  I can’t believe the beauty of it.  I know nothing I see in Greece will touch this.  The engines are roaring but I try to imagine the silence of the Northern Lights, as most people have seen them.   They are stretched across all the northern Cascades here, dancing all about, holding a pattern, then altering it suddenly and swooping all over the place, this pale, green electric dancing array. 

   I try to see it afresh, try to erase from my mnd all the PBS explanations I have heard about all the solar radiation interfacing with ions and magnetic fields, try to see it like the ancient Vikings.

   They, of course, would never have seen it as just phenomena of matter and energy, but would have known they beheld the actions of the gods.  They would have stopped what they were doing, would have moved into sympathy with it, would have been honored by it, electrified by it, would have started dancing around, waving their arms like the arms of aurora, would have known they beheld Loki, the playful one, or someone like that.  They would have tried to move in silence, I suspect, like aurora, maybe scatterd the live coals of their fires around the snow in resonance with the display.  And they would never have been afraid of it, would never have thought they had to placate or beg from the gods, would only have affirmed and celebrated, would only have tried to move in closest harmony with it.  Would have danced with the gods.  I look around to make sure no one is watchng me, then ever so subtly I bob around with it, moving my hands, sharing in this ancient rite.  This is great.  This is a good portent, a powerful one.  It is better than an eclipse, better than a meteor shower, certainly the equal of a star party, but no one pays any attention to it.  That’s ok.  I will keep the flame.

   I enjoy a fitful, brief night of sleep as we fly against the sun.  Then it’s morning and the sky-waiters are bustling loudly, popping up window shades, murmuring in their French accents about how we are over Ireland or England.  I can’t believe it.  I haven’t been to Europe for 25 years, since I was a young hippie-journalist half my life ago, bumming around on the cheap, sleeping in hostels and bushes, sleeping in the ring of Stonehenge and the yard of Rheims cathedral, reading existential novels like The Plague (La Peste!) and The Stranger (L’Etranger!) and writing about the thoughts of these authors, not about Europe.  I have become so much a student of history since then that I have come to wonder if there really is a Europe, if it were not a youthful dream, an invention from an impossibly lost world, like Atlantis.  But there it is, under that big cloud bank somewhere.

   We nose into France and finally through a break in the clouds I see a few houses and hills in the country.  France.  Gaul.  So it does still exist.  We have to change planes in Paris and I eagerly line up to buy something, to feel their money, their words.  I get a Herald-Tribune, that same old English-language paper, looking just the same as it did a quarter-century ago, no color graphics.

   “Merci,” I whisper.  I ask for coins in change and get a bimetallic 10 francs of “The Spirit of the Bastille,” this frontally naked winged Hermes type of modern invention, with full equipment exposed.  Oh yes, we are not in the United States anymore, where legions would be set marching over such an outrageous and blasphemous thing as the human pee-pee affronting the god who created it.  I leave my frame pack for a minute to get a latte and the security pounce on me, certain I am the terrorist I look.  They are disappointed; it’s only a lanky, eccesntric, geeky American -- and Americans have no motive to bomb anything.

   I want to get outside the airport, to smell the air and walk, but of course you don’t do such things anymore.  But then they announce that their walkway is broken and they apologize for making us walk to our plane.  I saunter slowly, looking about for something that isn’t airport hardware, but is some part of nature or history, maybe a cathedral spire.  But all I see is a line of trees in the distance.  I look at them longingly and sketch them when I get on the plane.

   We fly over some high, snowy peaks which must be the Alps, then down into Italy, where I now pick out the roads and towns and the Mediterranean in the distance.  We fly down the east coast of Italy, across the Adriatic and finally I catch my first glimpse of the turquise shoals and scrubby, rugged hills of Hellas.  We get to be in a holding pattrern above the Saronic Gulf and there is Athens, the Argolid and the island of Aegina, which I am proud to know how to pronounce, EE-guh-nuh.  Hard G.  I debark and am greeting the Uzi-toting soldiers as I set foot on the sacred ground of Greece.





Chapter 2

   I change money and am handed golden coins with the head of Homer and tails of an ancient galley.  Been looking for this one for years.  It is a talisman of those who are writers and who love ancient tales.  The other coin is a head of Alexander the Great, inscribed Megas Alexandros, which means Big or Great Alexander.  Big Al.  The image is taken from the coinage of his general Lysimachos, minted right after Big Al’s death in 333 BC.  He has the horns of Ammon from his trip to the oracle of Zeus Ammon in Egypt, where he was told he would rule the world.   One is worth 44 cents, the other, 22 cents.  They practically give away this ancient Greek sculpture.  The paper money has gods, too: helmeted Athena on the 100 and Apollo on the 1000 ($4.40).  All this amazing art will disappear with the EU in a few years.

   I step out of the airport into the hot Greek afternoon and homesickness hits me like a tangible blow in the gut.  I am all alone in a faraway land and must cope for my every move.  Years of family life have taken away my edge - and the pride I had in being able to handle any shit, pain, existential crisis, ennui, all the things Americans hate. I used to love this business of coping in exotic places, but when you are young, you can be very lonely and not know it.  I didn’t know it.  And when you are young, you know love or a breif facsimilie thereof can drop out of the sky at any corner, and often does, so you have this mystery and expectation.  But the ones I love are 10 time zones away, standing at a 90-degree angle with regard to me and my orientation to the earth’s center. 

   I try to use the credit card phone, but have no success.  This is before texting, cell phones and not quite into the age of full acceptance of credit cards.  I get maps and directions to the city bus from indifferent, gum-cracking young women.  I try to speak a little Greek but they just ignore my efforts and speak in English.  Everyone speaks English.  They speak it before I can open my mouth. 

   Riding into Athens on a bus, I am appalled by the trash, noise, screaming scooters and crazy, headlong driving.  Suddenly, I am stunned to see between the fleeting buildings, the bone-white columns of the Parthenon perched on the Acropolis of Athens.   There it is, just sitting there in the middle of our modern world.  It is awesome - no, it is awe itself.  It truly blows my mind to see it rising up out of the everyday world, visible from a dirty, busy street, as no doubt it was when it was built.

   I get off in the manswarm of Syndagma Square, where the Pariament is - and the cool bronze reliefs of Athena and galleys and the bullet holes inflicted by the generals against the students, since I last stood here getting food poisoning from vendor souflaki in 1969.  I check into the Hermes Hotel on Apollinos.  I have their card, given me by Tom and Mary, friends and Greek classmates.  It is in the $25 to $32 range, depending on how hard you dicker, but I don’t feel like dickering or trying to translate currencies in my head.  “Pay when you leave,” they say casually.

   It is getting dark out.  They tell me I can see the Acropolis from the roof.  I go see.  The sky is this blood-orange behind the Erechtheion, just beautiful, like so many postcards and PBS promos - a cliche, but you still can’t take away from that smashing image of the setting red sun and the ruins of the ancient world.  It says glory and it says faded.  And here both are true.  I take the picture.

   At night, I go prowling those winding streets about the foot of the Acropolis, amazed by the countless shops crammed with idols, gods, goddesses, icons, pendants, rings of all the sacred symbols, copies of ancient coins, any one of which would have bowled me over if I’d found it in the US.

   I have bought many of these before, always loving the way they seemed, like software, to actually summon, contain and transmit the energy and meaning of a goddess or a god.  But here, in Greece, something is different.  I hesitate, feeling it, but it is big, too big to take in right now.  Are these idols mass-produced junk or are they, like, real?  I ask myself and the answer is that they are real idols.  Also, they come from the real home of their ancient origins and are made by the real descendants of the people who first devised or received them.

   But I don’t want to buy and haul them around.  It’s clear they all have medicine and I don’t know what the effect of it might be, so I wait.

   I eat alone.  Damn, it is hard to eat alone in a faraway land.  I call home.  Everyone is fine.  I am fine.  Then I do some serious wandering, heading up to the Acropolis.  I find a street called Diogenes, which can only mean the place where he sat looking for an honest man and where, when asked by Big Al what the new King of all Greece could do for him, gave the reply, “Could you move a little? You’re blocking the sun.”  Who cannot be tickled by that story?   I rub a page of my blank book on the street, picking up a little dirt from it and noting where it came from.

   A few blocks up, I seat myself on the deserted corner and sketch the floodlit Acropolis, then follow a charming, marble-stone path winding around the flanks of the hill.  I realize I am walking the route of the Panathenaea, the great festival they used to have here - days of celebrations, feasting, processions, sacrifices, honoring goddess Athena.  This was her hill.  Still is.  Her home.  It is locked up for the night.  When I was here in 1969, you could walk in anywhere and lounge about in the moonlight, absorbing in solitude all the stories of the stones.

   I have two horrible dark nights of the soul and this is the first one.  Can’t sleep at all.  Just lay there so painfully alone and, so unlike myself at 25, deeply open to it and being wounded by it.  When young, I was tipping the scale heavily to the side of autonomy and unfeelingness.  Now, all I feel is how I love my children, my little Hannah and Colin and my babe Helena and our home and our life in Ashland, a darling artsy-college town in the mountain foothills -- and all the countless little things, the coffee, the talks we have, the how-was-work?

   What tremendous foolishness everything else is.  I write in my journal as I never want to forget this vast and visceral understanding.  And I write to help me through the night.  I write, “I hate this.”  I write how I am tired of this obsession of Greece and ancient myth and religion.  I am tired of any obsessions.  I want to live in the here and now, in 20th century western America with my family and never again think any other time or place is better.  I write something I have realized many times before, that although I cannot shake my fascination with the sacred world, that I will get to be with the gods full-time when I am dead, so why not spend life loving this magical world of matter and flesh?  Which of course brings rise to the question: are not the gods here, too?  Of course they are.  So stop searching.

   I lay in bed in my small room, sweating in fear, feeling my life has been one long journey of loneliness and alienation, that is, until I met Helena and even then it was hard to change over to having love.  And I am aware I am just trying to do it agan, mentalizing, introspecting, trying to make myself miserable. 

 I hear the singing off in the tavernas.  It is after midnight.  I beat myself up for not being there singing, too.  Then, oh, witty irony of the gods, the song of the springs begins in the next room.  It goes on for an hour.  I am making myself crazy and they are making love!

   I sleep till noon, trying to sleep off jetlag, which I never accomplish till it is time to fly back the other way.












Chapter 6

Walking around Athens next day, looking for the National Archaeological Museum, feeling aimless in the mob, feeling like an idiot for not planning a rigid agenda, I suddenly decide to head for Crete and its ancient capital Knossos and give myself a sea voyage where I can kick back on the overnight ferry.  I first grab a cappucino and lunch at Neon.  I ask people where is the bus stop but I can never find it and each person keeps sending me another block or two further on, until I am more than halfway to the museum in this mad din of traffic.

   I soldier on, heavy with pack.  I know what I am doing.  I am picking up just where I left off as a young man in Europe, walking miles and miles, wandering, wanting my feet to touch the ground over and over and over, as if absorbing the story of it, being grounded to it, knowing it through my ligaments and cells, through the sweat pouring down my back, missing none of the smells, the voices, the fumes, the sound of doors closing the feel of bumping into people, making my laboring breath a part of the breath here.  What am I, a writer or something?  Am I gathering material?  Don’t know.  Maybe.  Only know it is hard for me to take a cab. 

   I stop at a bank to get money changed and a nice, young woman fills out several forms for this little $100 transaction. (Who will read all this?)  She sees how ignorant I am and instructs me, making sure I have lots of 5000 drachmas ($22) notes.  “You can’t do anything without these,” she says.  I go on and buy a gluestick in a stationery store to paste scraps in my book.  They have only one item on the shelf and you grab a card under it and present it to the desk and they go scare it up and fill out the form and take your money.

   I am still lost, so I go in this large edifice, which turns out to be the National Library.  An older gentleman does not speak English, but asks me if I speak German.  He is a Greek from the pre-Nazi times, when Germans often vacationed in this region.  “Ein bischen,” I say.  He instructs me in German and I find my college years of that language flowing right back in, like they never had left.  I know it better than Greek.  I understand him.  I walk on, through Omonia Square and to the Museum. 

   Inside, in the first room, eyeball-to-eyeball with me, labelled in this crude hand-lettering, sitting in common glass cases are Schliemann’s gold masks and crowns, the ones always featured on the covers of books and magazines, the ones worn by the Bronze Age royalty of golden Mycenae, back before the Trojan War, about the peak of the civilization of Knossos, c. 1550 BCE.

   I seem to know the mask so well from studying it so long, seem to know every bend and plane of it.  You get a feel for it, from studying the pictures.  You get to know if maybe you’ve seen this face before and decidedly I knew I had seen this face before.  It was part of the reason I came here.  I read the captions to bring all the loose data up to the surface.  Next to it is the famous and enormous gold crown with rows of circles and spirals and seven detatched spires.  The card says it was found in the tomb of three women and two babies.

   I take a breath and just stand there, letting it come in.  Stories reel themselves off in my mind.  The crown is not with the men, but the women and babies.  Sisters?  Queen and daughters?  There were not old.  You feel the grief of it, like it happened this morning.  I sketch the crown and label it with that poignant note about the women and babies.  I take pictures, cannot stop myself, though I have dozens of pictures of these.  But I take them from an oblique angle: no one has published pictures of them like that.  Mine will be different. 

   In the next room are the giant kouros (boy) statues in the archaic mode, and a bearded Dionysos cult figure -- what he must have seen! -- in the same archaic style, which always has the full, rich eyes and the lovely, delighted, confident smile.  All is right with the world.  All is perfect.  You cannot behold these faces and feel sad.  I love the archaic look more than the classical realism.  It represents the sacred mood.  It is how we would look if we were gods.  It is how we sometimes have  looked, when we felt like gods.

   Then, among rows of busts, I come upon Apollo.  He is nude, standing gracefully with his weight on one leg, missing a nose and has shortish tousled hair, bound with stephanos.  He is classical, called the Apollof of the Omphalos and is from the theater of Dionysos on the Acropolis, c. 450 BCE, the peak of Athens’ happiness.  He is unutterably beautiful of face and figure.  I never cared for Apollo before, always feeling more comfortable with the great Goddesses - Isis, Demeter, Athena, Aphrodite, always giving the feminine the higher place.  Females give life and do not war and despoil.  Goddess is better than god.  So easy to think so.

   Apollo’s head is higher than mine and I look up, studying the rusty and gray toning of his head, I am drawn deeper and deeper into him.  The beauty is pulling me in, but not just to enjoy the beauty.  The beauty is the lure, the gate, the opening.  Then something happens, something is set in motion, some channel between mortal and god is being tuned, some common divinity is set resonating.  My vision traces the fine lines of his eyes and the swells and hollows of cheek and hair and it all just starts pouring into me, this god.  Apollo is suddenly telling me what Apollo means, why he was made a god and remains a god.  He pulls back the drape and I see man, men, males as such beautiful, shrewd creatures, agile and swift, cunning, bright with strength, potent, wily and capable of such discernment and daring.  It is there on his brow and in his eye, this power to behold, to be aware, to think and to act.  It is pouring off him and falling on me like rain, like a gift and I understand that, no matter what the depradations of males, the best part and the heart of men is this vibrant, exuberant and joyful wisdom.

   It is played now.  It begins to recede.  I know that when this happened in the ancient, pagan world, and I know at that moment that it often did, then they would say, yes, Apollo appeared to me today and the god spoke to me and greatly informed and changed me.  No one can be unchanged by an encounter with the gods and it happens often, not just to saints and such, not just to those who undergo spiritual disciplines, prayer and such.  And I know the sculptor was possessed of this presence and put it into the statue with the intent of it being lodged, like software, in there forever, available for anyone to boot up, tune into, which we call being blessed with.













Chapter 7

   I take the Metro to Piraeus, the port of Athens.  I do not take a seat, although many come open.  I remain standing, with my pack on.  I let the old people have the seats and I watch the buildings fly by the window.  I try to reach equanimity with the trashy, third-world look of everything.  I get my ticket on the big King Minos and ask the two men when it gets to Crete.  “When do you want to get there?” he says, grinning, making fun of me to entertain his friend.  Right, it gets there when it gets there -- in the morning.

   It is too late to see the treasures of the Piraeus Museum, so I kill a couple hours wandering around the trashy streets, looking for a decent dinner, not taking a cab and asking for a decent dinner, of course, just leaving it to my wanderings to find what I find.  I discuss pizza with a young woman, but she does not sell it by the slice -- only the whole thing.  Finally, I find a bar with cement floor and front open to the street, full of just men, no women, drinking beer and ouzo and bellowing at each other, one man getting to his feet, ranting in full bloom, which in America would mean a call to the police, but here is mostly ignored.  The others respond to him casually and soon he sits down, his say said.  But I get olives, feta and good bean soup, along with a half-litre bottle of Heineken, bigger than ours and it is so good.  I sit and sketch my ship in the fading sunlight, then board it.  It is jammed with people, all Greeks, going to Crete for the holiday, so there is only third-class, which means I have to sleep on the floor or in chairs.

   We sit there forever in port, then suddenly, with no noise, it just begins sliding out into the Saronic Gulf.  I love that moment.  It is dark.  The lights line the distant shore, but out here there is only this blackness.  It is warm.  Everyone starts drinking and some young boys sing songs.  It gets rowdy, but there isn’t the vaguest hint of any violence, which would almost be a certainty in America.  The expansiveness and noise draw people in.  In my country, it would do the opposite.

   We chug across the dark water for hours.  People smoke bales of cigarettes.  No man is seen without one for more than a moment.  The TV rattles on in Greek, with lots of colorful, happy, nay, ecstatic consumers hopping about, just like in America.  People drop off to sleep in their odd arrangements, with families, lovers and buddies in chairs, floors, stairs.  But I can’t sleep.  Suddenly, I realize I am listening to Dirty Harry.  In English.  On TV.  I leap up and find a seat, relieved at this island of American culture and brushing up on any subtitled Greek phrases which might come in handy, like “Go ahead, make my day.”

   Later, I go out on deck, which is thinned of passengers now.  Must be 3 in the morn.  The air gets more warm and moist as we chug further south across the Cretan Sea.  The moon is waning, less than half full and dropping behind some large, black island with no lights on it.  I whip out my map.  Must be Melos.  I sketch the scene, which is black on black - black sea, black sky, white stars, white moon, white foam coming off the wake.

   Then it starts happening again.  I become aware of the deepness of the quiet old Aegean.  I screen out the modern engine sounds and quickly fill with the sensations of being out here 3,500 years ago, when the Cretans plied this same route to Mycenae, carrying their little idols, so to teach the Greeks the fine things of the feminine side.  I bet they avoided sailing at night.  Not enough wind.  And scary.  But maybe it wasn’t scary.

   I realize I am at an altar of Poseidon, that I am gliding across the body of the god, being held up by him, face-to-face with him and that nonetheless, I am going deeper and deeper into this, the unconscious mind of the planet, which is the sea.

   I take out my Homeric Hymns, my little green bilingual Loeb edition in Greek and English on facing pages and I read aloud the Hymn to Poseidon, number XXII, which ends, “Hail Poseidon, Holder of the Earth, dark-haired Lord! O blessed one, be kindly of heart and help those who voyage in ships!”  I speak that last part in Greek also and as I do, the ship, which has heretofore tracked only straight and level, does a gentle swell back and forth.  I take that as a response.  God, the world is big and I know so little of it.

   I have brought some coins of the 20th century, my century, to offer back into their centuries as little sacrificial totems.  Into the dark water I toss a French 1920s franc with female head inspired by Demeter, with wheat ear crown.  I can’t tell you the feeling of moving my arm out and letting go of that offering and feeling it dropping down and down and down to the very black bottom of the Aegean Sea where it will lay forever and ever among the bones of galleys and Cretan sailors and countless amphorae and as it went, it took with it a stream of energy and awareness from me, my tissue, my be-ing, my vital life and that went into this dark-haired Lord and knew and was known by him.

   To say you have been known by a god, to presume such effrontery, to be so cheeky, ah, it keeps haunting me, this notion of being unworthy around gods and later when I mention it to Hilary, she suggests I am not trying to be humble but rather an idiot.  I see her point.  Gods don’t get anything out of lording their superiority over humans.  That’s a human trait.  As long as we’re alive, gods want to know us here, in real, daily life.  Their realm, like ours, now, today, is in this rich world of action, emotion, laughter, sex, bloody birth, anger, blessed feasting, wine, sleep, fear, awe and death.








Chapter 8

Finally it is dawn and people are getting on their feet, bustling around and lining up to get something caffeinated with steamed milk.  But it turns out to be rotgut Nescafe, so I toss out the bitter brew.  Panos will later tell me they like Nescafe for its modern, American sort of feel.

   I know it will be a great dawn and I don’t want to miss any of it, so I head out on deck, where it is clear and very warm, with a light breeze.  Then boom - there it is, rosy-fingered dawn coming up and there She is, the sacred island, wellspring of my years of study and writing, the holy motherland of Kriti.  Reds, magentas, oranges embrace and crown the island and as soon as light silhouettes her skyline, I realize I am looking at Mt. Dikte, site of Psychro Cave, where the Minoan Cretans did so many rituals and left their little gold labrys totems.  I am looking at the birthplace of Hera and Zeus and of European civilization.  We cruise for 45 minutes in the growing light and I greedily study the many bluffs, beaches, buttes, peaks of this land of the Sea People.

   We dock and now I can see Mt. Jouktas, which is the jagged, sacred peak just south of and closest to old Knossos.  As I debark, I see, imposed upon it, a Pizza Hut sign in the port town of Iraklion.  No matter.  I desperately need real coffee as a reward and counterbalancer for this rugged, sleepless trip and so begin walking the town, heavy pack on back, reading all the Greek signs, wishing I could stop instinctively trying to read everything, as it is tiring me now.  I find a sidewalk cafe and they seat me at a tiny table with this man and do not come back to help me, so I leave, walking some more.

   It’s still very early and few shops are open, so I find myself walking along the old Venetian wall, which once surrounded Iraklion.  I trek up a small hill for a better view and some quiet and suddenly find myself at a grave site and am surprised to find it is Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba and The Last Temptation of Christ.  I am alone there, sitting on a bench.  The world is quiet.  I look across the Aegean and begin, of course, to sketch the grave and the town buildings and church towers beyond.  It is a lovely sight.  He is buried all alone up here with a tall cross, made of poles, at his head.  I do a rubbing of his epitaph into my blank book.  I have seen this epitaph on many t-shirts.  I can’t decipher it.

   I find some pretty good coffee and rolls in a tiny patisserie where the young woman clerk plays this repetitive yowling, whining music, sounding very Mideastern.  I try, like a good traveler, to get into it, but it is like trying to get into metal or most opera.

   In a few more blocks of walking, I find myself at the Iraklio Museum, where I know all the finds from Knossos are kept, as I have seen the photo credits countless times.  It is a low, dark two-story building, again with the humble glass cases and crude inscriptions in Greek and English, probably just as Sir Arthur Evans left them in 1910 or 1920 and I feel crazy, dizzy, dopey, treating myself to an initial dash through all the rooms, just taking quick glances at everything, recognizing most of it, hardly believing it’s all right here, only 5 km from where it was made and lived with, and not in the British Museum or in some private collection or sold off by looters to some idiot and lost centuries ago.  Thank god for dirt piling up on things.

   I’m loving this.  I love getting into museums.  They are like altars, I swear.  And here, on my left in the first room, I behold a dumb little cabinet of the sort you could pick up at a garage sale and in it is the bare-breasted, flounce-dressed Minoan Snake Goddess of myth and legend, standing with glaring eyes and holding the serpents out to her side.  This is the real one!  And beside her, the other, less famous one with the snakes crawling up her arms.  She is sometimes thought to be her priestess or daughter.  There she stands, made of the clay of Crete 3,500 years ago, much of the reddish colors still clinging to her, the Great Goddess herself, arrayed in human form.

   “Hail, Great Goddess,” I whisper lovingly.  I take out my silver pendant of this very same goddess, which I have had many years and I show her.  “Look, we are here,” I say to her.  I often take her out to show her these sights, to describe them to her.  I make an offering to the ancient idol, the same French-Demeter coin, which I place atop her cabinet.  I ask the young woman attendant to take my picture with her, which she does, seeming pleased.  I wonder what she thinks, a man wanting to pose with these feminine divinities.  I wonder what she thinks of them.  I wonder what the modern Cretans think of these things, which were so revered by their ancestors and whose genes they carry, thouch much mixed with later peoples - Greeks, Turks, Venetians.

   How rough, nearly childlike the Minoan Snake Goddess is, compared with the Classical things I have just seen in Athens, yet how potent.  In this statuette, the Minoans are closer in technology and spirit to the Venus of Willendorf, some 20,000 years earlier, than they are to the Classic Greeks only a thousand years later.  But what does it mean, this Snake Goddess?  There is no handbook left by these people to explain themselves and their images.  The mind races to surmise, loves scrambling back and forth from goddess-based, decidedly feminine-peaceful, Bronze Age Minoan to patriarchal, butt-kicking, polytheistic, yet somehow neo-polytheistic, cyber-techno-American.

   Snakes, bare breasts, the female, the eyes filled with power, the glorious dress.   She is so small -- you could her her in your hand -- yet she obviously represents someone and something very large, not a handmaiden, not the woman behind the man or queen behind the king, not the passive, betrayed Hera to a Zeus.  This being owns herself and her life and her world.  Her breasts may present themselves in the usual mode, as pleasure for men and food for babies, but there is a vast third dimension being all but screamed out here: the divine as sex-power-reproduction-life-death itself.  The breasts as the power of life, the snakes as the power of death (and regeneration), the eyes as the immanent and eternal awareness and power that govern life and death.

   The woman, all women, possess and are this.  All people come from this, are nourished by it as children, make love at this temple as mature creatures, then are absorbed back into it in death.  This is the Great Goddess.

   I am calmer now, but I can feel all this going into me like a thousand little injections into my flesh, into my aura, my nerve and brain cells.  It is past lives, I know this.  I have seen and known so much of this before.  You know when you know something and I know the things in this building.  I find the old Linear B tablet, where appears the earliest Greek writing, although in sign completely different from the Greek letters we know.  And here is the Phaistos disk, a round clay spiral of undeciphered pictographs copied on thousands of pendants I have seen in countless stores.  And maybe there is nothing to decipher.  No one knows.

   Here is the Goddess of Psychro Cave, the lovely, young votary head with wide eyes and the top of her head knocked off.  I draw her in my book.  Here are the dozens of tiny gold labrys left tucked into the folds of Psychro Cave.  Here is that amazing gold brooch of confronted wasps from Mallia, which I have seen adorning many color pages of books about Crete.  And in the corner are three giant bronze labrys of the type that stood upright on 10-foot high shafts by the throne.  I have the young woman attendant take a picutre of me standing with them.  I draw them.

   In the next room are skeletons of Minoan people.  Their jaws hang wide open.  There are their teeth, the only part of them that looks exactly as it did those millennia ago.  I suddenly see these teeth in smiles, walking around Knossos, catching the glint of the sun.

   Upstairs are all the frescoes recovered frm Knossos: the dolphins leaping, the Cup Bearer, the Young Prince with the big head plume, the three Ladies in Blue dancing, the so-called Parisienne (though Paris might have been a few mud-wattle huts in her time), the griffin, the bull leapers, the bull head in relief from the north entrance.  Seen them all so many times in such better light in pictures.  But here in front of me are the real fragments of painted plaster, all found fallen in the dirt and put back together by Evans.  It is all so much.  I would want to see just one of these things for a week, then study it in detail, then sit by it and absorb the information, then write about it.  But it must come all at once, must inundate one.

   I sit and sketch and write in my blank book and this young Argentine man comes up and asks me in halfway good English what the bulls and snakes are all about.  He says he won some essay contest back home, which gave him passage to Greece.  I tell him the bulls were the masculine earth-shaker, allied to the feminine earth and her wombs, the caves.  And the snake was life-force, the power of renewal by shedding skin, the fact of deathlessness for all life via rebirth.  As I say it, I realize one could speculate on the meanings of all this forever and constantly uncover new, deeper layers of meaning, never being sure which ones the ancients really knew, felt or lived.

   I tell him this was a matriarchal world that worshipped the Goddess and that this was before the patriarchal Greeks.  He is very interested in hearing more.  He says he is going to Knossos.  I say I am too.  I am very lonely and would like company, but I hesitate.  I want to go to Knossos alone.  I have things to do there and have dreamed about it for years now. 

   I check out the coin collection, but it is shamefully degenerated by humidy and iron mounts, which are causing streaks of corrosion on the coins.  There is clearly no professional conservator on the scene here.

   I wander about Iraklion some more, looking for a room, start getting desperate, what with all the noise of the holiday and the unbelievably noisy scooters screaming by constantly.  Sweat is running down my back.  I am not having fun in the downtown of Iraklion.  I go in the first hotel I see, the Iraklion Hotel on Delimarkou and get a crummy room for the night.  Then I go out to eat.  I find I am not eating.  I am too distracted.  I’m exhausted from no sleep, from not eating and from walking so much.  I go out to late lunch at some sidewalk cafe.  I have Greek salad and fish soup - psarisoupa, a word I recall from Greek lessons -- and another of those large Heinekens.  I am so lonely.  I wish I had befriended that young Argentine man.  I am an idiot.

   I sketch the sidewalk scene with palms and old church doors in the background.  I realize how far south we are.  It is humid and warm and I could be in Egypt in a day’s sail.  I am tempted to try it, just on the spur, just to greatly further the weirdness of this trip.  It is too late to go to Knossos today, but perversely, I walk halfway there, through all the neighborhoods and trashy streets, tring to get the feel of walking up to Knossos from the sea, as they must have so long ago when they came back from fishing or from voyages.  It is a gentle incline.  I turn around, walking back via Dimokratias, stopping to note the monument to the Kritan men who fought against the barbarian plunderers from the north, these being, not Bronze Age Greeks, but Nazi paratroopers.  The bronze relief shows the Kritans bayonetting the Germans.  The Germans won.  It was the first paratroop invasion in history.  I see a large sign for a Women’s Center and am amazed for a moment, but then it says it offers lessons in homemaking, hygeine and deportment.  I can read all this in Greek.

   I walk back to the hotel behind this couple and their small son, maybe five years old and the little tyke is looking behind him so he walks into a phone pole.  The father starts bellowing at him, having a cow, going on and on, yelling at the mother even.  The poor little kid.  I, of course would have bent down and checked out his head for cuts, but this is a whole different scene.  I suppose this badgering and kibbitzing of children is kind of a fox-like nipping at them, so as to teach them wariness and survival skills in the world.  Everyone vents any bit of frustration anywhere, so it seems.  Well, the Scandanavians don’t do it and look at their suicide rate.  Better shoot your mouth off than you head, right?

   Still, I feel the immense cultural differences.  The weight of tradition is so much greater here and in most of the world than in America.  One’s path here is much dictated by custom.  You can feel it.  If you violated it by much, the pressure of criticism or ostracism would be quick and stinging.  In America, we have little tradition and violate it a lot.  Freedom is so imporant to us, no matter what the wear and tear on family and society.  That is why we have this rite of teen rebellion.  The young must find their own way.  Our great life journey is to find family and society in spite of or after all this.

   I find an antique shop with ancient coin repros in the window.  I go in and look at them, but the old man starts haranguing me about how I doubtless won’t buy any.  I say, oh, here’s one from Rhodes, trying to strike up a conversation in the belief that perhaps he may be interested in the things he is sellling but  he yells, “I don’t care about what you think.  That is for you to think in your own head!”  Or something like that.  An American couple comes in and he practically throws them out, yelling, “Tomorrow! Tomorrow!”  He rants how they won’t buy anything and I won’t either.  I nonchalantly look at some more things across the room, ignoring him and then I point at something and say, “That’s very pretty” and walk out.

   This continual display of male ranting is as unbelievable as any of the antiquities I have seen and I find myself coming to think I am like witnessing some sad soliloquey from a Greek play or some apparition of ancient male raging and strutting still haunting the planet, unable to leave.  How easily I can see all this channeled into the old arts of war.

   I get lost trying to get back to my hotel and end up at the seashore, looking north.  I ask the young woman at the car rental where my street is.  She points at a fork and I don’t clearly understand which way at the fork, so she starts raising her voice, dissing me bigtime.  “Did I say left? Did I? I said right, so go right!”  Poor, sensitive John is not taking all tihs unbridled Mediterranean vitality and fire very well.










Chapter 9

   Back at my hotel, I of course can’t sleep.  It is still noon to my body.  I call home and get Helana right away, as she were in the next room.  We talk for half an hour and I tell her what an awful, homesick time I’m having and how I just don’t get the hang of this loud, rude, blunt communication style they have here.

   Then the hotel man comes to my room and says I owe him $135 for the call and I have to pay up now, which is shocking news.  It’s the surcharge from the hotel, probably two dollars for every phone company dollar.  I say I won’t pay it.  He calls his rather nice-looking teen daughter to translate better than he can.  He mentions the dreaded phrase, “keep your passport.”  But my passport is in my moneybelt along with travelers checks and airline tickets homs, all in my levis, which I am wearing so that will be hard.  Finally he says the room is free, but pay the money, so of course I realize he is making all this up as he goes along, so I just pay him what he asks and make it $150, as disdain money.  I don’t care.  He shrugs his shoulders and says, “You talk too much (on the phone).”  What an obvious truth.  The daughter sums it up by saying some clumsy but very charming line to the effect, “We don’t try to be mean to you.”  I smile.  “I know that.  You are very nice to me.”

   I can’t sleep most of the night.  I think Greece is persecuting me.  I think the patriarchal male Greeks are haunting me.  I think the old pagan gods are hostile to mortals who don’t fully understand them and sacrifice small animals to them.  I think or fear that I will never leave Greece.  I think I will never get off this island.  I think I am stuck in a Lawrence Durrell novel, one of the Alexandria Quartet.  I think Jesus is pissed at me for my countless blasphemies and is going to get me unless I repent.  I resolve not to have a spiritual life.  I consider being a Christian, but decide that isn’t the problem.  I consider the fact that nothing is really happening, that it is all undeniably in my head and why don’t I just get over it?  I resolve to get on a plane to Athens, hence home, first thing in the morning and skip the rest of this mad trip.  It is a flaming dark night of the soul.  I understand how vulnerable the mind is to madness.  It races on, trying to problem-solve in the rational, goal-fixated Western way, trying to make all the fears, guilt, woundedness go away.  But it cannot succeed, like it would at home by getting with spouse and friend or slipping on the TV or going to sleep in your own time zone.  I resolve to cope: to take cabs and buses, to eat three meals no matter what, to stay in nicer hotels and meet people, all in violation of lifelong habits.

   I recall suddenly what Hilary said just before I left, that Jean Houston lost a couple thousand bucks when she led her last sacred tour of Greece and so -- sacrifice may be required, an ox may have to be put to the knife.  Wow, and here it is.  Not a huge sacrifice, but undeniably it happened.

   I can’t sleep.  It is midnight.  I go out to a taverna and greet the bar guy with all the outgoing friendliness and Greek phrases I can muster.  If ever a man wnated a bartender to be his friend, it is now.  I drink some ouzo, which is unbelievably rich and delicious compared to the commercial swill in the New World.  I need a cigarette with this.  I try to buy one from the bar guy, as I have heard you can do that in Greece, but he yells, “I don’t like that!”  Or something.  I buy a pack and smoke one, leaving the rest and feeling I must constantly be doing something to offend Greek men.  It has become a phenomenon, a Greek mystery, a Greek tragedy. 

   But then, if your look at it psychologically as “how have I created this?” then what you get is that I have for years despised what the mounted, patriarchal, skygod-worshiping warrior class did to the peaceful, matriarchal, agricultural tribes of the Neolithic.  And of Bronze Age Crete.  The bad guys in history’s play are the Greeks, to say nothing of their imitators, the Romans, English, French, Germans, Spanish and Americans.  The Greeks overran and destroyed Old Europe, at least the Aegean part of it.  And then they built New Europe, aka Western Civilizaiton, which was basically misogynist culture.  It is my karma, my passion play to come here and be overrun, sacked and pillaged by the patriarchal macho warrior class.  I am living it and feeling it.  To my unconscious mind, I am living 3,500 years ago and being generally invaded.

   Something big and deep is changing in me.  I don’t yet know what, but parts of me are dying and rearranging in a big way.  For this trip, I had revived the wandering, stoic, armored, nonmaterialistic, angry young man of the Sixties and brought him here.  And now he is being offered up, a sacrifice.  And who will replace him?  Finally, I get a few hours sleep and wake up to find I am still in Crete.











Chapter 10

I ask the hotel man to call me a cab to go out to breakfast and he looks at me like I’m nuts.  A couple of his friends standing around also have words to say about it to each other.  There are always these spontaneous conclaves of people with nothing to do and plenty of opinions.  I pick up a few of the words.  He makes a motion of walking fingers and indicates it would be much quicker just to walk down a few blocks.  So I do, but all I can find is cuppucino and sugary, insubstantial rolls, which all consicous Americans know are not what you start the day with.

   But in the daylight, I feel better, still rather nutty, still bruised and homesick and hurting in my stomach, still sore from another night of wrestling the griffins, gorgons, boars and lions that seem still to populate the Mediterranean nights.  I decide I have the guts to go out to Knossos, can’t really face myself or anyone else unless I do.  So I make plane reservations to Athens for that night at 8 and check out of the hotel, not being the least bit nice to the man.

   I find the bus stop, always a job, and ask for a ticket to Knossos, which is a bit of a mind flash to me.  A ticket to Knossos.  “One ticket to Knossos, (accent on the second syllable), parakalo.”  I am standing here asking a Greek to take me to a place called Knossos, as it WAS called by the Greeks.  We don’t know what the Minoans called hardly anything.  I bumble along the 5 km to the Minoan capital, reading the tourist map, which notes that Iraklio was settled by Saracen pirates.  Well now, that does explain the finesse for tourists and children.  I get to the ruins early.  I can spend all day here.  I leave my pack at the ticket gate and read the sign that says, “It is strictly prohibited to remove any stones or pottery.  What?  There’s pottery laying around?  Not likely!

   I enter the palace of Knossos.  Here I am in the first city of Europe.  Here I am in the last city presided over by a supreme Great Goddess.  I walk all over it, seeming to know it all by heart.  I have long studied each passageway and room, each grove, each pillar reconstructed of concrete by Evans.  I am emotionally shut down, though, I realize.  I am getting almost nothing.  I gaze at the luxuriant pines.  Amazing.  These are the descendants of the ancient pines.  I pick up a small cone from the pines.  Maybe I can sprout it.  A pine from Knossos!

   I look around at the long east ridge, at Mt. Jouktas jutting craggily out of the southern horizon, at the gentle slope north to the sea.  Off to the east are the groves where the holy orgies are thought to have taken place, and where now stand the tourist shops and cafes.  I have not been able to get the whole feel and picture of the surround areas from books and this really does it.

   I stumble on the great throne room and, ye gods, there it is, in situ, the oldest throne in Europe. Maybe it’s not even a throne.  They have surmised that, you know.  Maybe it was strictly for some orgasmic rite of priestesses.  They have gently informed me in books and museum notes that the Minoans did seem to do some big ceremony in spring involving mass sexuality of some sort.  A sacred orgy. 

   The throne is in a very small room.  Thrones don’t ordinarily sit in little closets like this.  They are usually placed where large crowds can adore and get the message that this monarch is bigger and better than me, closer to the gods and is undeniably the boss of me.  This throne faces a so-called lustral basin, not a court.  The Snake Goddess and other highly sacred objects were dug up here.  This, I think, is not a throne room.  It is something else.  We do not have a parallel for it in patriarchal Western Civilization.

   The throne is fenced off.  It it were not, I realize I could not bring myself to sit on it.  I also realize I could not easily take artifacts or even soil from these sacred old sites, as I thought I might.  How did Elgin do it?  My encounters, divine and profane, have clued me in that I don’t really fathom this whole thing, by which I mean the great mysteries of life and death and human passions and the universe and the gods, and maybe no one else in ancient times did, either.  Maybe they just did the best they could, comprehdening it and knew it would always be an ever-unfolding mystery and the priestesses and priests were the folks just willing to hang out with it and interpret it and ceremonialize it as best they could, as it unrolled.

   Then I flash on the Judeo-Christianity and all the other monotheistic religions and realize they just simply are not of this world: they eschew this world of flesh and sex and nature and therefore do not have this feeling of unfolding before us, but rather are static and explained-it-all-for-you and when you die, then you get there.  Pagan polytheism, on the other hand, is just out of control.  It is alive and vibrant and unpredictable but has its codes, too, but basically it is, like our movies and TV programming, just rife with sex and violence.  It is a thing of THIS world, this most rich and unpredictable, orgasmic, heart-breaking and unspeakably lovely world.

   Still, I must somehow take something with me, other than photos.  I spy the patchwork of marble pieces in the throne room and make a rubbing with red pencil in my book.  It is beautiful.  It stuns me as I look at it.  I have carried back all these rubbings and sketches, which bring so much the substance of being there, yet I have removed nothing in so doing.  And they all add not one ounce to my baggage.

   Desultory bastard that I am, I can only bring myself to make one cursory sketch of Knossos.  What grief I feel, seeming to be grief for my own little story as a tourst, but looking back, how appropriate and what a coincidence that this, the mad nadir of my trip is spent at this last, great tomb of the Great Goddess.  Looking back with the wisdom of hindsight, I can easily read it as a descent to the lower world of the matriarchal journey, the place where the feminine soul went underground, went cthonic, went parthenos, went virgin, as she was to stay for 3,500 years in the mystery veils of virgin and I mean literal, no-sex, madonna Mary.

   I try to relax and let the scenes come in, but only get brief flashes: this is the great courtyard where the bulls ran, where those tiny-waisted women walked.  I can scare believe I am standing on the ground of this holiest of holies.  But I quickly return to my awareness of my anger and my wounds.  And I feel guilty, ashamed for such trivial preoccupations with myself.  But there it is, despair, madness, rage...here at Knossos.  And I know I have been here before.  And felt like this before.

   I walk the so-called Sacred Way, the first paved road in Europe, which ends at the Theatral Area -- two sets of intersecting steps.  There I decide to sit under the pines, away from the tourists and collect my wits.  I recall my vow to dig up some ancient little nothng artifact at Knossos to bring home, so I scratch in the pine needles and dirt.

   I immediately dig up a small, flat, earth-red stone, which, to my absolute amazement, I recognize as a piece of pottery, undeniably.  I look at it edgewise and it has that slow curve of pottery and the flecks of organic matter always mixed in with pottery.  I am simply dumbstruck.  I cannot believe it.  I search futher and there, at the surface is another and another, dozens of these.  I find sherds with the rolled lip and incised, geometric pattens,  In moments, I have a large handful.  I am simply blown away.

   But what to do?  I cannot take them all, would not dream of walking through customs or x-ray machines with antiquities, even this stuff which, obviously, after a century of digging, no one wanted.  And then there are the rather relentless, doubtless patriarchal spirits that have been hounding me.  I am about to get on a jet plane over water and would not want to miff them in any way.  But it’s junk!  No one wants it.  Ok, I will take only three shards, the ones with lips and markings.  I stuff them in recesses of my daypack. 

   I go have an omelet and vile Nescafe in the small arcade across the way, the one where Minoans are thought to have had mass, doubtless all-night orgasmic romps enacting the mating of the Bull and the Great Mother, “cow-eyed Hera,” all this in honor of Great Goddess.  Now that’s the kind of offering that appeals to just about anyone in their right mind.  I ponder it as I eat my eggs and consider asking for brewed coffee.  To attune to fertility and sexuality, you mimic the displays of nature.  Thus begins ritual.

   I shop next door, finding a neat brass labrys and a box of ancient coin copies.  I paw through them, thinking them kind of base-metal and trashy, but then espy the maze, the labyrinth on one!  It is the Knossian coin of the classical period, 300s BCE, a copy of what they made right here at Knossos, as an echo of the many-chambered, winding-passaged Palace which I behold right across the street and which, when they minted this type, was virtual myth of 10 or 12 centuries earlier.  The coin has magic for that.  On the obverse is the female head, crowned with floral stephanos, which, when I get home, I will look up and learn is Hera.  The Great Goddess of this civilization.  I buy them from this old woman who somehow pretends to bargain, but ends up bargaining not.  But I don’t care.  I love these old trinkets.

   Now, says my heart, about those antiquities you plan to loot from this sacred precinct and smuggle out of Greece.  I go sit on a parkbench on the gravel entrance to the Palace, pondering what I should do.  I open my pack and study the shards, then...I can’t do it.  I toss them back over the Palace Wall.  I am sad.  I wish they would let me take SOMETHING home.  But their voices were clear.  Very clear.

   Ok, I’ll make you a deal.  This is some part of my mind talking to some part of their mind.  If I can find a shard of pottery here in this gravel of the entranceway at my feet, I get to have it.

   Ok, deal.

   I look down.  I see one shard.  And another, and another, dozens.  I can’t believe it.  It’s everywhere.  If I gathered up all of it, I know I could, in time, reassemble a vase, cup or something.  I bend down and pick one up.  Amazingly, it is in a triangular shape with a small white line incised on it from a corner so that it makes a perfect yonic totem.

   Thanks, I get it.  This is what you want me to have, not the geometric stuff.

   Now I feel ok -- no fear of customs or spirits.  The thing looks exactly like a stone, not an artifact.  It would be hard for a lay customs agent to argue otherwise. 

   I abandon Knossos, knowng I have done the poorest of jobs of exploring it, revisiting it, committing the space to memory for my novel.  But my soul has interacted with it and absorbed information I will not be aware of for weeks or months to come.








Chapter 11

   I take the bus to the airport, at about 2 pm, knowing I will have to wait four hours for my plane.  But the thought of beng in a reasonably modern building with newspapers in English, waiting for a modern, Seattle-built jet to carry me back to mainland Europe, now that is irresistable. 

   At the terminal I find a blessed Herald-Tribune and, amazingly, a current National Geographic in English.  But I care not to read about strange cultures, so I get the news.  But even that makes me sick.  I am suddenly super-sensitive to the incessant conflicts, wars, negotiations of men and their cruel, insane armies and I cannot read the paper.  I throw it away, wishing for a cheap American novel.  Even Danielle Steele might be interesting, but no such luck.  I see a young woman, reading a Michael Chrichton novel in English.  She is Chinese and likely an American.  I want to go up and offer her $20 for the book but don’t.  Men sit down next to me and, of course, fire up their cigarettes.  I try to get up and move unobtrusively, wtihout seeming to disapprove.

   I try to read the books about Greece I have foolishly brought with me, but cannot stand the sight of them.  So I resolve to master the phone system while I wait, so I can make affordable credit card calls.  The car rental lady tells me in detail and is nice about it, the first such indulgence I have experienced on the trip.  She takes time, guides me through my blunders and I offer much gratitiude.  The trick is -- you have to buy telephone cards, which tick off the remaining units in an LCD window.  Amazing.  Only trick is: almost no one carries the cards.  You have to track them down, like lost, precious icons with magic properties.

   The 6 pm plane is about to leave.  I am booked on the 8 pm.  I go up to the counter to check and they scream at me that they have space and have been paging me for a long time, but early on, I had grown crazy from the outrageously loud, echoey speaker and covered my ears.  So they rush me on the Olympia Airlines jet.  The Greek pilot flies exactly like the Greek drivers drive.  He revs the engines Way up, then pops the clutch and it rockets off the blocks into a steep bank.  The sun is its last stripe of blood-red over Crete.  Bye, Crete.  On landing in Athens, the plane practically lays rubber as it taxis a corner.  It tips.  Then he slams on the brakes hard.  The people applaud.  I get it.  It’s like a dirt bike.

   I am determined to get on a plane to America immediately, but they tell me I am at the domestic terminal and the international terminal is a few km away, but anyway there are no planes tonight and it is Saturday night so United will not be answering its phone tonight or tomorrow, either.  I despair.  I call home and tell Helena I am flying home tomorrow.  But I have to get on that bus back to Athens.  I have to wake up in Athens and try to figure out their world again.  I am so homesick I could scream.

   I get on the bus and we are bumbling along and I talk to these two middle-age English ladies who, because of the freedomes in the EU, are living and working in Germany, where there are more job opportunities, but the cost of living is higher, too.  They come to Greece every year.  It is a thing with them.

   A bubble is created on the bus.  People around us are listening to our conversation and soon, the Chinese lady, the one with The Book, says something and I learn she is from San Francisco and has just quit her 10-year advertising exec career and is doing Europe alone for three months.  We hit it off immensely and start chattering like we’d just found water in a desert.  She is Rosemary and hated Crete also and was stuck out in some lonely, bug-infested beach town by her Athens travel agent, so spent several days consuming novels.  And she had the same monstrous hotel phone bill for a six-minute call to the US.

   Then, two other American women join in the chat.  They are mother and daughter, the mother Francesca, from Chicago and the daughter, Lise, having married a man from Florence, Italy, so she’s spent her adult life there.  The women realize they all have tickets to Delphi on the same tour bus next day, Sunday.  Great!  I will go with them!  The mother and daughter are staying at my hotel, the Hermes.  We debark at Syndagma Square and, as you are supposed to do with total strangers, I get ready to say goodbye, but I just cannot face dinner or that room alone.

   “I’m going to go out to dinner after I check in,” I say to Rosemary.  “Would you like to join me?  There are some really nice, atmospheric restaurants by my hotel, on the slope of the Acropolis there.”

   “Sure, sounds great,” she says.  My heart soars.  This is the equal of receiving a divine oracle or hearing voices at a ruin: the companionship in a strange land of one of your countrymen.  One who can talk, who is interesting, who has a sense of humor.  It is a gift.  Later, I will read that Isis does this specific task - comforting travelers in faraway lands.  See, they knew way back in ancient times that it was a problem, an affliction, which everyone at some time has to go through.  It is as serious as an illness, which they have gods for, so of course they have gods for this.

   We drop the luggage at my hotel, so she can pick hers up after dinner and go to her much more expensive but not nearly as nice hotel, which her agent in Athens also picked for her.  We find a great restaurant, with a view of the Erechtheon on the Acropolis from our table.  We order wine though only I drink it, and lots of great dishes, which we savor over mad, animated chatter and laughter.  The fat, old owner sings and plays guitar with his band for hours, having a great time, waltzing around.

   At the end of our meal, the waiter whispers that the total does not include the tip.  We practically laugh in his face.  He lies, of course.  We crack jokes in slang he can’t understand and leave him 150 drachmai, about $1.35 and we howl some more.  He has never even come back to our table to check on us.  They never do.  The table is yours for the night.  If you want the check, you have to find them and ask for it.  It is the same all over Greece.  They never make small talk, either, never ask how is your trip.

   But I don’t care.  I am so enjoying this immense, sudden and complete relief of my homesickness -- or, more likely, my sickness of being treated like shit. So it’s not that I can’t be gone from my family for a few weeks; it’s that I can’t be utterly alone and feeling continually assailed by noise, smoke, bad driving, sleeplessness, hunger, fatigue and dismissive rudeness.  But mainly the affiction is loneliness.  What a balm is this companionship!  I am delirious with gratitude.  Like a great thorn has been pulled from my guts and a great lesson absorbed cellularly.

   When my head hits the pilow, I smile greatly and giggle, like I had, with my wits and the gods who love me, made a triumph somehow against the barbaric invaders from the north.  I had reinstituted a thread of that broad Neolithic fabric of feast, drink, laughter, talk and communal society.  I had found out how to beat them.  I would build society.









Chapter 12

I grab a hotel breakfast of olives, boiled eggs, corn flakes (corn flah-kees, as they say), vile coffee and OJ, then rejoin my friends on the bus for Delphi, great sacred, oracular center of the ancient world, whose prophecies all heeded.  This will be great fun.

   We head out through the burb of Kiffisia, where my friend and fellow numismatist Boris lives, out into the country and onto the plain of Marathon, blabbering constantly and happily.  Our young, humorous Greek guide recounts the battle here, where Miltiades and his warriors ran full-tilt into the midst of the Persian hordes, an unheard-of tactic, which made them think the Athenians mad.  The Asians were slaughtered and driven back into the sea, thus saving incipient democracy and budding Western civilization.  From here to Athens, with news of the Athenian victory that day, the first marathon runner ran his 26 miles and dropped dead.

   We whiz by fabled Thebes in Boeotia, which I finally learn how to say -- bee OH-sya -- stopping for one of the two good cappucinos I will have on the whole trip, thence into the Parnassian foothills and up that lovely valley to Delphi, where the guide makes oblique reference to the great number of antiquities taken by Lord Elgin -- “no hard feelings,” she says.

   We stroll by the Thesauros (treasury) of the Athenians, then we’re there, standing on the steep slope by the Temple of Apollo, where oracles were pronounced by the Pythia or Pythoness -- she calls her the PEE-thon-EE -- and I love it, love the way this Greek word comes out of her Greek lips.  I cling to these ancient sounds and think they somehow have medicine in them.  The seeress, she says, “munched on laurel leaves” and spoke her wisdom, often obscure.

   Here is the lumpy, large omphalos - the navel of the universe.  Where the guide is seated are countless inscriptions, to which she says French archaeologists have purchased the copyright and have not yet made public, although they are plain for anyone to read here. How quaintly absurd.  I see the word DELPHOI in archaic capital letters and make a rubbing of it in my book, alongside a sketch of the Temple of Apollo.  The legend, I later lean assures the people of the island of Chios that they get to have their oracles before anyone else.  Let’s get grabby here, folks, about our prophecy.

   Our guide leaves us to ourselves, so I stroll off to the reaor of the temple where the Pythoness is said to have worked and I whisper over the bare floors, “Sybil, tell me please, why is man to wicked and how might he be made anew?”  I listen for an asnwer, thnkng it might be a long time coming, but that it will come.  I pluck a pink flower from its crannied walls and press it in my Delphi guidebook.

   I lope up to the Theater and look out over this sacred precinct, where all cities and nations brought their important queries and best gold and sculpture.  I wait for my ‘moment.’  It is so peaceful here.  I could stay here for days.  Someday I will.  I will dine and shop some day down in that winding, cute village of Arakhova and I will come up here and write odes and poems.  But not now.  They stampede you on these tours.

   I dash up to the Stadium, where the Pythian Games were held, then, having lost my tour group and aware I might be left behind, I race down to the Museum, where repose all the artifacts from Delphi.  I rush by then: the more famous Hellenistic omphalos, which I touch, the famour Charioteer of bronze from Gela, the outrageous Sphinx from Naxos, with its archaic human face and curving wingtips, the lifesize silver and gold cow from Ionia, the two big Kouroi from Argos.  I photograph them all.  Lise has collected a handful of laurel leaves from the sacre precinct and hands me one, which I treasure, as I had searched in vain for a laurel tree there.

   We jump on the bus for lunch of moussaka at the Amalie Hotel, a sterile, modern hotel overlooking 64 million olive trees, the greatest collection in the world, the olives of Amphissa, stretching down all the way to the Gulf of Corinth.

   We drive back to Athens in the rain, the only wet weather of the trip, stopping in Arakhove to buy some cool t-shirts with Kritan motifs of dolphins and dancing ladies.  Driving home, I study the nerve-wracking driving customs of Greece.  It comes down to this: 1) go as fast as you want at speeds just this side of spinnout out, 2) you are free to pass anywhere, including any curves and hills if, in your judgment, this two-land road would hold three vehicles abreast if they were parked side-by-side, within a few inches of each other.  When being passes, the other cars are expected to move to the very edge of the pavement, while the passing vehicle barrels down the middle of the two-lane road, doubtless praying no one else is doing if from the other direction.

   In Athens, we go out for a lite dinner at the modern, brightly lit cafeteria near Kaphestiatoria, which means cafe-restaurant.  We have philosophical talks about the things which have guided our lives and the big choices that have made all the difference.  I tell these friends of 24 hours all a bout how I got interested in Goddess and had asked her for my true love and she came along five days later.  This ws a bit of a convincer for me, of course.  Francesca asks, now what hve I done in return and I say I have devoted my life to her.  Her, meaning Goddess, my goddess-wife and our godlike children, all manifestations of the same things.

   Rosemary syas she is going to the Acropolis tomorrow and invites me.  Lise is doing the market and shops.  I decide to go with Lise, since she is the first one I encounter in the morning.








Chapter 13

It’s Halloween, Monday and Lise spends the morning looking for a metal serving tray with three arms joined at the top, which you can easily swing as you walk and not spill your tea.  She wants her little son to be able to bring tea out, which they drink outside every day on their farm outside Florence.  A poignant picture.

   I follow
 her around and we meet all these interesting people, even an old organ grinder.  We give him some money.  We even find some older men who don’t speak English, a rarity, so I get to use a few words on them.  We see this group of half a dozen men standing on a corner, all going nuts, yelling and guessing which card has the hearts on it as this man plays the shell game on top of a big cardboard box.

   We go in half a dozen old Byzantine-era orthodox chapels - Saint Theodori, Saint Ioannis Theologos, Kapnikaria, Metamorfosis and others - which are all dark, candle-lit and filled with frescoes and icons.  These are caves.  That is exactly the feeling.  They are much closer to caves than to cathedrals.  You even have to step down into most of them.  The ceilings are black from centuries on candle smoke.  This would be almost too pagan for the tastes of American Christians, who like clean spaces and sky.  Greeks are constantly coming in, lighting candles, placing them in sand, kissing the icons of the Virgin or the Christ, making little ritualistic rounds and whispering their prayers.

   I do the same, pagan though I am.  I kiss the virgin, plant candles to the health of my mother and father and mutter prayers for them.  Hail and thank you, dear virgin.  Suddenly, I am weeping.  Her love is so tender.  This is the thing I have not as easily found in pagan polytheism, this personal, compassionate, touching of the soul by a god, this attaining to the individual psyche.

   A goddess and a god, her son, who know me - and who know me personally - and who love me without reservation or end.  This is what gets people and this is why Christianity has flourished over half the world for two millennia, despite the evil ends to which it has often been used, such as clinic murders I am hearing about on the radio as I write this.

   The pagan gods, I become keenly aware, represent great, primal forces of nature and human instinct: lightning, earth, grain, love, wine, war.  But they do not “love” us or dote on our individual lives too much.  I think that stuff started with the disintegration of tribe - and the beginning of craving for a lost network of belonging.  The church gave us this universe filled with magic, inexorable forces and we get to enjoy it and play out our free will in it.  Not as gods but yet, not unlike gods.

   But the gods don’t “love” us.  No one has ever mentioned in any writings that any god loves us, except of course for Jesus, who has all the time and attention and energy to sit up there in heaven and take care of us personally, if we give proper prayer, worship and devotion - all of which dawns on me as a preposterously childish and wishful fairy tale that has been bought by hundreds of millions of otherwise perspicacious and savvy adults.

   Lise, an American-Italian, is learning for the first time about this ancient, pagan, pre-Roman world.  I tell her that the instrument of Goddess and her divine child goes back far beyond Greece, back into the stone age.  It is the Goddess that is fertility, life and death, giving birth to the annual god, the ever persistent male rising-up force, who starts as a babe, becomes a man, then comes to his death -- he is sacrificed, killed -- with winter, only to be re-created -- resurrected -- in spring, Easter (estrus).  And how Jesus copied that with his death-resurrection.

   We stumble upon an icon shop down some stairs, where are offered hundreds of tinwork Madonnas and Christ childs, with a color print of their faces and hands showing through holes in the tin.  They are framed in gold and are obviously intended for locals, as the prices are unbelievable - only $7 for this framed Mary and child, which I buy.  These gods spoke to me in the tiny cathedrals down the block.  I must have this idol of them - yes, a Christian idol.

   Lise and I stop for cappucino (oh, divine nectar!) at a sidewalk cafe on Adrianou by the north side of the Agora, where we have a great view of the Acropolis.  It is the other good cappucino I find in Greece and I order a second one.  Lise tells me about her life in the green hills of northern Italy and shows me photos of her sweet boy and husband.  She met him there while she was a college art student.  I show her my family, whose photo is glued inside my blankbook.

   While we enjoy our java, a man sitting by the curb is yelling.  He gets up and, as he walks through the cafe, yells even louder.  He shouts, ‘Agamemnon!’ over and over.  Then he goes back and sits down.  No one seems to notice or care.  Someone pats his back.  Lise asks the waiter if he says the guy is a madman, but he just shrugs.  How interesting, the yelling of that name in this place in this century.  And on the eve of my visit to his tomb and citadel.

   Lise reads my palm as we finish our coffee.  She is skilled at it and notes many past lives and psychic influences.  We shop among the blankets spread with goods along the street.  They are Russian immigrants, Lise says, selling off their goods to survive.  I see many Soviet coins for sale.  We stop by some Greek-owned junkshop.  Lise offers a 1000 drachma coin (44 cents) for some worthless toy sword about three inches long.  He does not answer her, does not look at her, but only mutters some expletive and throws the toy back where it came from.

   I want to say something in Slangese and in a calm voice, kind of off to the side, just so as not to take this crap, so I say, “Perhaps one might consider lodging it where the sun don’t shine, oh, obstreperous individual.”

   In another shop, I fund a junkbox full of common European coins and want to buy a dozen, but the old geezer who runs it, a fellow with larynx removed (smoking), who speaks through a handheld amp to his throat, testily refuses every offer below his asking price of $7.  They are just trash coins, really, not worth more than a dollar.

   I am really starting to get the range of Greek men, at least the urban, Greek shopkeeping kind.  Their intransigence in traffic, in dickering, in smoking despite the ruinous health effects -- it is a matter of honor.  This is all connected with their freedom and valor and sense of being men.  But I don’t care about his valor.  I don’t need no stinkin valor!  I won’t be ripped off.  He can keep his sorry discolored coins!

   At last, we find Lise’s tray and a neat, brass, stovetop dipper which I buy for $3.  We go to the market, which is thronged.  Lise starts to go in this gross meathouse, with huge carcasses hanging all over and water and slop on the floor.  I feel like that guy in Sartre’s Nausea, looking at those tree roots.

   “I’m not going in there,” I say.

   “Would you like to go in the coin shop,” says Lise, “then meet me back here?”  There is supposed to be a coin shop a few blocks up, in the financial district.

   “Sure,” I say.  But then I look at the jammed streets of Athens and I simply cannot do it.  Such a sensitive fellow.  I need my friends.  She sees me appraising the city.

   “Or maybe you’d rather not go off into that?  It’s ok to be scared.”

   “That’s right, I’m not going off into that.  I’m scared.”

   So we buy spices for her Italian cooking.  We have heard about the Greek honey, so we find a health food shop and taste all the drippings from the barrels, then each buy a can.  I find the coin shop and, after lengthy dickering, during which the dealer actually hangs his head in despair as I refuse his asking price, I buy a long-sought 1930 silver coin with Poseidon head and galley, lifted from the motifs of ancient coins.   It is the third piece of a set, consisting of Athena and Demeter, which I have long carried in my pocket.  Now this one joins them.

   We reunite our group back at the hotel and gleefully share our stories with many a cackle and thigh-slap.  I love these people.  We share many tales from our lives, which we might take years to tell a friend in our hometown.  Francesca and her husband were old beatniks in the fiftiesshe says.  She reads my palm also, finding basically the same messages as her daughter.  Rosemary and I decide to take the tourbus to Sounion, which they call Sounio here, to see the Temple of Poseidon on the cape, where Attica juts into the Aegean.

   I call United, holding my breath and ask to reschedule my flight to Wednesday, two days from now.  The same day my friends are leaving.   They say there’s only one flight a day and that one’s full.  I’m never going to get out of here!  How about the next day, Thursday?  They have a seat but say they are going to charge me an extra $100 to change the date.  Fine, I say, another ox to sacrifice, which I willingly offer.








Chapter 14

   Rosemary and I head out to Sounio, past the Hellenistic Temple of Olympian Zeus, left to itself in a swarm of Athenian traffic and shops.  We pass through the resorts and beaches along the Saronic Gulf, which are clean and lovely.  Ah, here is the good stuff.  Our guide is an older woman with a charming accent on her English, telling us the history of the site and temple, making her language sound almost like an Italian accent, vowel sounds on the ends of words.

   “You will see this sacred and lovely temple,” she says as we round the last curve, “now.”

   And there it is, perched in the late afternoon, autumnal light on its bluff over the water, its rows of Doric columns standing erect like a rank of soldiers.  The guide recounts how early pilgrims used to come to this place by water and spend many days here, plumbing the depths of Poseidon’s world.  We, the modern pilgrims come on asphalt to spend many minutes here.  She says the temple was destroyed several times by northern invaders and lastly by the Persians.

   I walk around the wind-worn temple, read the Homeric Hymn to Poseidon, make a tiny altar of my new Poseidon coin on the marble steps, all this unobtrusively, of course.  I sketch these straight columns in my book and in doing so, have to learn them.  These aren’t like the columns of Mesopotamia and Egypt.  These are the most spare - no flowers, no lions, no frowning kings and generals, but rather clarity, logos itself.  This is a statue, not of a god, but of Western rationality.

   Wind is blowing steadily from the north and waves are crashing on the cliffs below.  To the north is the island-state of Euboa, where, she says, Paris took Helen on a bit of a honeymoon.

   Across the highway is the very ancient Temple of Athens, which preceded this Temple of Poseidon.  Only the foundataion remains, but it is plain to see.  I had planned to dash over there but see that it is surrounded by chainlink fence.  Nonetheless, I whisper my hail to Athena Sounias and hold up my Athena coin in salute to her.

   We go in the gift shop and I look over the ranks of divine busts and idols, but see none of Hera, which I still hope to find for Hilary.  I ask the saleslady.  She is young and pretty.  I realize that most of the people you see in Greece are men.  Of the women you see, most are older, married and mothers.  You do not commonly see the young women out and about. 

   “Do you have Hera?” I say, pointing to the busts.

   “Who?”

   “Hera, the goddess Hera.”  I say it slowly but she doesn’t understand.  I write it on a piece of paper for her, but I write it in Greek -- ‘Hpa -- which occasions a second glance from her.

   “Oh.”

   You never know when One of Those Moments is going to happen here in Greece and here comes one.  She turns to the other clerk, a man across the shop and says, in Greek, of course, “Blahbitty, blabbity, blah ee-RAH?”  I am watching her young mouth say this sentence, knowing I will hear the name of the Great Goddess spoken in Greek by a Greek woman, a young maiden and when I hear it, it’s like everything slows down, like when you have an accident.  Her voice is very firm and loud, speaking this name in the site of this sacred precinct like she were part of an ancient chorus of priestesses.  The name of Her, ee-RAH (wth rolled R), hangs, for me, in the air and I watch with rapt admiration as the clerk turns back to me to speak.

   “No ee-RAH.  We have no ee-RAH.”

   “Echaristo poli,” I say, bowing my head a bit, involuntarily, to her.

   “There.  That’s all it was.  But it kept coming back to me, riding back to Athens on the bus, watching the ruby-orange sun set over the Saronic Gulf and again for many days and months afterward, this little opening, this little handing of something to me.  And I take it with me and enshrine it in the best way I know, which is to write it into my words and hope it goes out to others for many long years, this little knack of expecting and, when they come, grasping and revering the tiny movements, glances, gestures of the gods which they do for us constantly in little things.

   I call home.  Helen says the pagan Moon Group just had their monthly feast and rituals and, of course, the subject of my trip and homesickness came up and they decided to do a ritual to make me Get Over It, so they placed a stool in the middle and everyone jumped over it and said, John get over it and have a good time.  I told my new friends about it and they howled.  Francesca and Lise said they foiund some ruby slippers (as Dorothy wore in the Wizard of Oz) for me while out shopping this day and almost bought them, but they were, of course, too small.  We scream with more laughter.

   Rosemary and I dine outside on the lower slope of the Acropolis again, this time on the Odos Diogenous, the place with the checkered tablecloths and the trees, down a seemingly quiet street on a seeming cul-de-sac.  It has charming ambience and an old fellow comes along croaking his songs and playing a violin-like instrument that looks very homemade.  Everyone loves him and gives him money.

   I order something off the ‘red wine’ list, called Domestica, thinking it local red, but it turns out to be resiny, gag-me retsina, so I send it back.  We chatter on and on, frankly acknowledging our gratitude to each other and to our fate for saving us from nasty, brutish and short dinners out.  A nearby, retsina-sipping Japanese couple oblige us by taking our picture at the table.  Ear-splitting scooters rip through the tiny square, just inches from our table, then are gone and music again prevails.  Ah, Greece.  I feel brave enough this night to take you all in.  Next, day, I will take the tourbus to the Peloponnesus: Corinth, Mycenae and Epidauros.  My friends are getting ready to leave, so none can come with me.








Chapter 15

    With bold and daring road warrior Vangelis at the wheel (same driver every trip), we head out south through the ghastly refinery section of Attica and soon our guide Giannes (John) says that, on our left, we are coming abreast of Eleusis, site of those most sacred of Mysteries, the rites of Demeter and her daughter Persephone.

   We will not be stopping.  I can understand that.  It is a bunch of commonplace buildings, stores, homes, oil tanks and freeway onramps.

   “There,” Giannes says, “that little hill with the two or three trees on it.  That was where, for centuries, these great and secret mysteries were performed.”  It was destroyed, he says, by Visigoths from the region of present-day Germany.  Of course.  What a lot of work for all these men to destroy so much stuff down through the centuries, including the present century.

   Some years back, Hilary and I had performed, as best we coul, using historic and dramatic sources, the rites of Eleusis, in which so many people found substance in life, knowing that, like Persephone and like each ear of grain, they would see rebirth.  Death would never be the final victor, only the bogeyman at the door to each new world.  And now, Eleusis has tasted death.  But yet, not. 

   Some part of me wants to get off the bus and explore it and maybe someday I will, but, for now, I cannot bear the thought of being on foot in another sacred grove turned urban hellhole.  I sketch the little hill in the corner of a page.  I look around for something likely unchanged since the times of the Mysteries.  Three craggy, dramatic buttes dominate the skyline to the south and I know the pilgrims here reflected on them, likely including them in their rites somehow.  I draw them in my book.

   Just offshore is the island of Salamis and between it and the mainland, the tiny channel where the vast Persian fleet of Xerxes was bottled up and destroyed by a scanty navy of Greeks, thus finally securing, in 480 BCE, the sweet Western ideal of freedom.  Here, free Greeks, not professional soldiers, gathered to fight.  Here, the wits of a small number of free people outsmarted the vast, monolithic lordships of Asia.  Xerxes, seated on his throne, watched from this shore, perhaps where I sit sketching, in the passing lane of Freeway 92.

   We rip by bright Megara, the city which founded Byzantium (Istanbul).  We stop for nasty coffee and souvenirs at that great canal by Corinth, dug a century ago to allow shipping between the Aegean and the Adriatic.   From an old lady, I buy a set of porno-coasters, with ancient Greeks in pairs and threesomes, doing it every which way but missionary.  Such a sale would be unthinkable in the US, as much now as in 1950, but here the porno art sits beside icons and the virgin.  A nice old grandmother bats not an eye handing them to me.  Fitting that they should come from Corinth, this ancient mecca of all that was lewd, wanton and unseemly.

   We wind our way down narrow dirt roads to the ancient city of Corinth, where Giannes pulls out his three-ring binder and shows us scholarly drawings and passes along much more schooled anecdotes than we heard from other guides.  Here, he says, Paul delivered his sermons, now found in Corinthians in the New Testament.  He stood on this spot in the dirt in front of the stone platform, as only Roman aristocrats spoke from the platform.

   Well, here’s one of those big polarities, I think, pondering the dirt.  This guy pretty much turned the Greco-Roman world around and brought the curtain down on the pagan millennia.  Are we better off?  Do we, for all those conversions, have the right gods now?

   Giannes reminds me that the Romans leveled Greek civilization in Corinth in 146 BCE, save only the Temple of Apollo.  Seven dark, roseate, monolithic columns remain, supporting a few chunks of the architrave.  I sketch it, of course and take a rubbing of its earth in my book.  Facing the Acrocorinth way up on a mountain, I read the Homerica Hymn to Apollo, “I will remember Apollo, who shoots afar.”  Never understood that epithet.  It’s about him being an archer, but I sense it means much more than that.

   I wander about, finding the Spring of Peirene, sacred to the Muses and to poets, dripping and gurgling back inside the six arched openings.  Poets came here for inspiration and the blessings of the Muses - and so do I.

   Everywhere are strewn countless fragments of architecture, countless engravings, all lined up, perhaps waiting to be organized, catalogued, theorized about and joined back together one day.  There is something strange about the engravings and it takes me a while to realize: they are in English!  No, they just use the alphabet we use, that’s all, the Roman letters.  But none of those beautiful letters -- phi, omega, gamma.  One engraving says TIBER and another says CAESAR.  I make rubbings of them in my book.  It was Caesar who rebuilt this city, he and Augustus. 

   The whole place feels so utterly different than anywhere I’ve been.  I am suddenly depressed, suddenly missing my friends, who are shopping, cracking jokes and lunching back in Athens. 

   This city of Corinth is Roman, that is the difference.  It is so much more streamlined, utilitarian and commericial.  They simpley did not comprehend the gods as the Greeks did.  Rome took them on, like a formula for an aqueduct: it will do the job, so let’s use it.  And, in my distressed guts, I feel the destruction of this city and its people, I swear.  “It feels cold, scary and bloody,” I write.  The words ‘sack’ and ‘pillage’ just don’t capture what it means when you destroy a city and the people there and send the women off to slavery, which also included sex bondage.  I want to leave.  I could never help excavate this place.  I dash through the museum and then we are gone.

   We scream through the countryside of Nemea, where, as his first labor, the hero Herakles defeated the man-eating Nemean lion.  Nemea - so many times I’ve read the name and the tales, studied its coins and here are the lovely, rolling green hills of it.  Soon we arrive at a parking lot of many buses and look up at the Citadel of Mycenae, home of Agamemnon and Klytemnestra.

   We walk up the wide, curving pavement, at the other end of which, I know, stands the Lion Gate.  This is the home of the earliest Greeks who came sackng their way down from north of the Black Sea, a thousand years before the classical Greece we know so much better.  These are the ones who learned the arts, architecture and religion of the civilized Cretans.  Now, I wish the buses and all the people would go away, for just one hour.  I need to be alone here.

   I have placed fictional characters here in these tiny stone rooms.  They have walked through this gate, talked and loved in these rooms, and though I’ve done my best to get the feel and features of their environment, I could not fully do it.  I made the slope down to the sea much steeper than it is, I see that right off.

   We stop at the Lion Gate and I listen to the brief talk of Giannes.  I sketch the Gate, hoping he will bring the main facts back to the surface for me, which he does.  Then I walk through the thick gate, which is topped by the two confronted lions.  Some suppose a bare-breasted snake goddess, symbol of feminizing influences from Knossos, stood atop them.  Wouldn’t it be something to see her standing there now?

   I walk over to the shaft graves, where Schliemann found the gold masks and crowns, the ones in the National Museum in Athens, and the bones of the royal ladies, kings, babies.  I take out my Snake Goddess pendant and let it see the scene. But I say, no Homeric hymns.  These people go back long before those were written.  I do say words to their souls.  I ask for help in knowing who they were and how they lived.  If I write my novel to the end, I want to avoid writing anything I know could not be true.

   I walk up to the Acropolis of Mycenae (it’s pronounced me-KEE-nees).  I attune positively to this site.  I like it here.  Again, like Knossos, it’s not unfamiliar.  In fact, it feels like Ashland, perched up high, facing twin peaks.  It is not practical for everyday life, being so far from ports and fields, though they are in view.  But it excels in being high and backed up against the mountains with a full view of any menacing advances below.

   Geomantically, it is outrageous.  It’s where I would have put a city.  It’s a place I would love to live.  It rings with beauty.  That, for me, overcomes its bloody past.  There were many happy days here.  I feel the influence of matristic Crete and strongly sense this place was made happy by the Greeks’ escape from the snowy, nomadic steppes of Asia and their settlement here in the sunny valleys, rich with grape and olive.  In two directions, the twin peaks, one craggy, the other smooth and conical, loom above.  I write, “Mycenae lies as if atop a pregnant belly, with two large breast-shaped mountains on either side.”

   The right peak doubtless was the one chosen by the watchman, who waited, propped up on his elbows, for a fire signaling victory at Troy, this in Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon.  Here in these walls is where outraged Klytemnestra killed her victorious husband, just back from the Trojan Wars.  He had sacrificed their daughter for fair winds to war.  Nothing can justify that.  No god could ever be placated by that.

   I photograph the surrounding terrain in every direction.  I will need these views for my tales, I suppose, maybe, perhaps.  I take a beautiful rubbing off the top of the Acropolis wall in green pencil.  I glance toward the bus.  I have a few minutes.  I let the pictures of this fabled place flood in.  I am back there, in Mycenae.  And they, the Mycenaeans, are still here and available to me.  Scandanavians, Germans and English may occupy my genes, but these people inhabit my soul and imagination.

   We bus down the road a few km and get out to explore the Tholos of Agamemnon, which is a giant, beehive-shaped stone tomb looking like a small, grassy hill from the outside.  A long dromos or open passageway leads to the door, which is very tall and topped by an open triangle.  Tholos means ghost-house.  It is gigantic and empty inside, with another passageway off to the right leading to a smaller tholos.  People are standing around with their lighters, illuminating this smaller chamber and I trip over stones sticking out of the floor, nearly falling on my ass.  The tholos is from the time of Agamemnon and the Trojan War, so there is nothing to say this was not his tomb.  It was looted of all its riches in antiquity.  I go outside and sketch the Tholos and also Mycenae, which sits perfectly on its bluff in the distance.

   We bus off through Argos, which Giannes says was “one of the great, ancient Greek cities, but no more.”  There is sadnes in the voice of this scholar-guide.  Argos is a medium size farming community and we can see a Venetian fort up on the hill overlooking Argos to the south.  I sketch the view in about 30 seconds, having become very efficient and impressionistic.  I color in many of my sketches later.

   We go screaming by fabled Tiryns at top speed and for three precious seconds, I behold this great citadel.  But the tour line wants us to get to another of their sterile Hotel Amalies for lunch, even though we are only a mile from beautiful Nafplio.  I eat with this table of Argentine people who tell tales in Spanish during lunch.  They are very gracious and polite to me, doubtless in part  because I am the only one not speaking their language.  They do not speak English well, except for the one older and more social lady next to me who sums up the stories for me.  They tell me how wonderfully gracious the Egyptian people were, earlier in their tour.  They tell me a charming story about how married Uraguayan men used to fly into their Argentine town to get laid and they would call it the stallion flight.

   I check the gift shop for Hera, which I pronounce in the Greek way.  The older lady repeats it back to be differently, emphasizing the first syllabe: EE-rah.  They don’t have Hera either.  I go outside and stand in the parking lot, amazed at the beauty of the countryside.  Each range and each individual hill and mountain seems a sculpture, a thing of beauty all on its own.  Such beauty in every direction.

   We motor through lovely Nafplio and wind through the countryside to the healing and drama center of Epidauros, which they pronounce eh-PEE-thav-ros.  It is like Ashland here, just gentle and charming and lovely everywhere you look.  The terrain is arid, but the healing center has many trees and bushes.

   We go in the great theater, which seats 14,000 and is still used for Greek plays in summer.  Giannes says it was trashed by the Visigoths in the first century.  Of course.  You are supposed to be able to hear players talk in conversational tones, even from the top rows, so there is always someone standing up and singing show tunes.  A woman sings, But Not For Me.  I go up to the top row and draw the theater and beautiful mountain range opposite, then take a rubbing of a theater seat.  I dash in the small museum for a quick peek, then ask Giannes where the Asklepion (healing center) is.  He points over behind some cars and chainlink fence.  I go over there and read a Homeric Hymn to Asklepios.

   We drive up the coast, watching the sun set in reds and oranges over the Saronic Gulf.  I am so looking forward to getting back to Athens and seeing my friends.  We still have dinner out on this, our last night together.  We will have a room in our hotel, finally, so all our doors face each other next to the elevator on the sixth floor.  We wander from room to room, hanging out the balconies and sharing all our stories from the day.  The main topic is trying to get Rosemary on the flight next morning from Athens to Italy, using the ticket that Fran has, but which she will not be using, as she is flying home to America.  We make up all sorts of stories about how Rosemary is Fran’s daughter-in-law and they are headed to a wedding of their sister in Florence.  We howl with laughter at all the scenarios we fabricate.

   Rosemary’s travel agent in Athens has invited her out to dinner and she agreed long ago.  But she badly wants to be with us and suspects the guy is a bit of a dirty old man who might expect something at the end of the date.  Still, she can’t bring herself to cancel.

   So, Fran and Lise and I decide to go to a real upscale restaurant listed in her book as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  We ask the desk clerk about the place - mistake - and he says it’s great but there is one just as good for half the prince in the Plaka around the corner on Aranou, the main ‘sourvenir street,’ as we call it.  I tell my friends this is the same desk guy whose armhair stood up when he talked about Mycenae, so we joke that maybe we should trust him.  We walk down there and read the menu while standing at the entrance.  Lots of motorcycles are going by and the young, dressed-to-kill hostess kind of says, “Well, what do you think?”  Like are you going to just stand there?  A hostess with attitude.

   Despite our hunches to the contrary, we decide to eat.  The food is just ok, very ordinary, really, and they even bring me red wine chilled, which I send back.  Suddenly, Rosemary appears at our table and we explode with joyful greetings at seeing her.  The date was ok and she begged off early, saying she had to get ready for departure.  So we crack jokes and tell stories, then decide to shed this restaurant and go off to cappucino and dessert in this sidewalk cafe facing the large, open courtyard of Athens Cathedral.  The last repast is a delight.  They ask me to come to the airport with them, just for fun, but I say no.  So, tonight, we are saying goodbye.  I have one more day in Greece, which I will spend seeing the Acropolis and doing most of my shopping for presents. 






Chapter 16

   I wake early to read my friends’ warm notes they have left on my door and I feel the pang of loneliness at their absence.  Damn, pesky old loneliness.  Oh well, I fly home tomorrow.  Gods willing.  How ironic that the peaks of joy and interest in my journey to Greece were not the ruins temples and gods, but these living, walking-about, ordinary, 20th century humans from my homeland.  This, I am realizing IS the gift and lesson the gods have given me.

   I eat at the hotel and walk up to the Acropolis, using the old Panathenaic Way.  Hardly anyone is here yet, so I enjoy the peace, sitting and writing postcards finally, sketching the Parthenon and Erectheion and takng a rubbing from one of the countless stones stacked all over.

   The archaeologists are clambering about, still researching and restoring after all these years.  They never want the Acropolis to be ‘done.’  I watch them inside the Pathenon.  A new one is introduced to the rest.  It could be me, I think.  I have the address of the American School of Classical Studies here and wonder if they would like a volunteer for a day or two, but decide I am not ready for another side adventure.  I wanna go home.

   Tbe Parthenon is roped off, so I can’t go inside as I did in 1969.  It is great to be here at the Temple of Athena.  I read the Homeric Hymn to her, “Pallas Athena, the glorious Goddess, bright-eyed, inventive, unbending of heart.”  In the museum I view her wondrous, archaic statue with snake aegis and many other great kouros statues with their great, knowing smiles. We don’t know that smile anymore. 

   I ask the young gift-shop girl if she has a Hera among her expensive museum replicas and, since there are no other customers, we take time chatting and cracking jokes about al the various gods and shops.  Here it is again, the finding of pleasant human company in unexpected, faraway places.

   I wander by the Areopagus down the littered slopes of the Acropolis to the ancient Agora and buy a ticket to get in.  But the woman forgets to give me the ticket, so I ask for it.  The man behind her explodes in heated discussion about whether or not I got a ticket and who might have or should have given it to me and both are still having a mighty cow about it when I am a hundred yards away.

   I sketch the Temple of Hephaistos, god of the lower world, rising up out of the nearly flattened ruins of the Agora (marketplace).  I take a rubbing of the earth here, where western democracy and philosophy had much of their start -- Sokrates, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Perikles, all those chaps, hung around marketing their thoughts, like we hang around our coffee shops doing the same thing today.

   I go in the long Stoa of Attalus, where the Agora museum is and view the big collection of coins excavated from many thousands of years or trading on this spot.  And there are the famous ostrakons, bits of pottery on which are scratched the names of Perikles, Demosthenes and many others whom the voters wanted banished.

   I check out the little Apostoli sanctuary, then wander back through the Plaka area, trying to find a coin shop Lisa discovered the day before.  I have lunch at a sidewalk cafe on Panos Street, by the Roman forum and make a nice sketch of the columns there while having my usual Heineken.  Some people at the next table are speaking good English, but not British or Australian style so I think they are likely Americans.  But they say they are from the Netherlands.  They stop by my table and admire my sketch and the speed with which I have made it.

  A foursome of loud, porky Americans nearby try to pay with a Visa, which almost no one takes in Greece, due to the percentage they must pay on it, but this group is not going to let any third-world waiter thell them whether or not they have to spend their cash, so the poor, cowed waiter digs out his embosser and dusts it off and tries to remember how to use it.  Where it would normally be a matter of honor for the Greek waiter NOT to let anyone use their US credit card, now it a matter of honor for him to appear schooled in matters of international credit.  I take a cue on my last day.  The ugly American thing can come in handy.

   I find a completely new market area on Pandrousou, jammed with foofurraw shops and two coin shops.  The first is trying to be snooty and the suit-and-tie chap seats you at the viewing table and lays out a piece of velvet to show them on.  He has real ancients and copies, priced high.  Across the street is the real find, the Gold Rose, where this guy Emmanuel Masmanidas, offers pure silver copies of countless ancient Greek types, all for about $22 each for tetradrachms and $65 for decadrachms.

   I inspect them, amazed to find them virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, except that they are uncirculated and sparkly-fresh from minting.  The workmanship is outrageously good and I ask how they are made.  Emmanual says he makes them.  Using flans and dies?  Yes, he says.  And who engraves the dies?  He does, he says, out of steel.  What is their weight, I ask, testing a bit.  He says they are 17 grams (which is the ancient standard for tetradrachms) and he adds that if you make them just a gram less, they will not strike up at all.  To reproduce the ancient diameter of coins, you must use the ancient weight.  He sounds convincing.  I want to buy them all, but there are so many.  I get only an Athens tet, the famous old Athena/Owl.  It is so beautiful.

   I wander about, loading up my pack with the dolphin dish, jewelry, pot for Hannah, ouzo for Panos and other trinkets.  When I am paying, a nice, older lady hands me a money clip, free, with the owl of Athna (design from ancient drachm) on it.  Euxaristo poli, I say.  I am touched.

    I locate the modern coin shop which Lise and Francesca had told me about and ask for any 20th century coins with mythical animals on them.  They bring me out the long-sought Athena from the 1970s, the one copied from that famous bronze of Athena with the giant, sweeping  Corinthian helmet, plus the owl, hippocamp, Solon and some others.  The owner has just gotten an economics degree somewhere in New England and has had to take over the shop on his father’s death.  So he says.  It’s a story, maybe true or not but sounds good.  He wants to go back to America and work, but is discouraged by the job market there.  I tell him there are lots of jobs: you just have to go look and be there, which, of course, he must already know, if there is any shred of truth in his most earnest story.

   It must be hard to seek money and opportunity in a faraway land when it requires you leave your family, friends and culture entirely behind.  But in the marketplace, they will say anything, as it’s felt to be appropriate for profit -- and one must feel it charming and know it’s just the chat of the agora and if you believe any of it, be prepared to part with your purse.

   I have dinner at the Athens Cathedral Square where we had dessert last night.  I have spanokopita, no better than what we find in the US, a Heineken, Greek salad (had that every meal) and two desserts and cappucino, which will keep me wired all night.  I realize I have the phone card with 15 seconds left on it, so I call home and Colin, age four, uses up 11 of them while I try to convince him to get mom on the phone.  Finally, she gets on and I say ‘I’ll be home tomorrow night...’  Bang, the call terminates.  Hell with it.  Too hard to find another phone card.

   It’s too early for bed and I’m too hopped up about flying home to my dear family to sleep.  I go in the hotels’ TV-bar and watch, of all things, “thirtysomething,” which is about, of all things. Christmas.  There they are, these half-dozen, over-therapized yuppie nutcases whining their way through the eighties, but with Greek subtitles here.  No wonder everyone can speak English here.  They get hours  of lessons every day.  And no wonder we get no respect from them: they have this deep and intimate knowledge of our values, our every thought, our every fear, our every mindgame.  No wonder they can out-think us.  No wonder they won’t dicker with us.  No wonder they seem to accept the 20th century only in small bites.

   I try to sleep but grab only a few hours.  Too worried.  I am counting on a wakeup call from the deskman, a cab to show up at 4 am and airport personnel to book me onto the flight.  Surely someone will screw up.








Chapter 17

But the desk does wake me and the cab driver does come.  I am standing in line at United when the power for the whole airport goes down, leading me to believe I indeed may never leave here. 

    It is still dark, so they process us very slowly, writing longhand by candlelight, saying I have “melissa” (honey), I swear.  Ah, this last touch of the ancient.  But we do get out.  I read my final sign in Greek.  It says exodus.  I lift my foot from Greek soil and, seated on the plane, sketch the sun coming up behing the Athens airport.

   When the wheels lift off the ground I break into a big smile and drink heady drafts of UAL coffee.  We fly over the Patros, the great west coast Greek port, then over Italy, the Alps and into France, where we circle over downtown Paris.  I see the Eiffel Tower.  At DeGaulle Airport, I buy a Paris coffee cup and perfume for my babe and get rid of my Greek money. 

    I am standing in line for pastry and coffee, right here in Paris and I swear I hear someone shout, “John Darling!”  I turn around and these two men are greeting me.  One knows me from Ashland, but I don’t believe I have ever laid eyes on him.  He says he and his buddy flew to Germany, rented a car and had a blast the last week just driving all the back roads and going into inns and pigging out and getting to know people, swapping tales and drinking local beer.  I feel like a compleate fool.  I have not had this kind of fun.  And who had the more religious experience, them or me?  I could have gone to Germany, where I can speak the language, and eaten great food, rather than crap, and probably been treated with hospitality.  Oh, well, next time.

   I have left my pack only 50 feet way to do these errands, so some airport dude, a black guy speaking French, asks me to please “come this way,” which is about three feet to the side and actually interrogates me about how long I left my luggage and wether I accepted anything from anyone in this airport and so on.  I say well, let’s dump it out and see if it’s ok.  He declines.

   We fly across the Atlantic, wtih the sun, so the day lasts a long time.  In the in-flight mag, I find an article with the lead paragraph saying something about writers who “seek treasures in foreign lands” only to discover “their true gifts lie buried in the heart of their own homeland.”  I rip it out and glue-stick in in my book.  How true.

   We see landfall over Newfoundland and it is so unutterably lovely.  There it is!  America!  I admire the vast expanse of the New World, how many countless lakes and forests there are, with so much space seeming to be available still.  We fly over old homestate Michigan, stretched out flat in the autumn sun and get off in Chicago.  The black customs man says, “Welcome home, John” with a smile.  I want to kiss him, buy him a drink.  He understands!  “Thank you.  Good to be here.”

   It is so great, just fantastic, just wonderful.  I sit and gaze out at the naked black trees, the lead-gray sky and the flat landscape.  How it used to offend me, growing up here.  But now, I marvel at its unutterable beauty.  “I love this country,”  I say it out loud.  I can speak to the people!  They understand all the inflections and subtleties of my speech!  I order pretzels and a Coors from this young girl, who is Asian, and I swear I want to hug her.  God, the food is great.  I just walk all over drinking it in.  What a country!

   We fly over the land to San Francisco in the gathering dark, then home to Medford, where my little babes run up and hug me and I embrace dear Helena.  How richly good this is.  How happy I am to be here.  We tell stories forever and eat dinner at home and hug and I dump presents on on the living room floor and the kids love it all and drop off to sleep in my lap.

   It takes a few days to come down, to recycle my jetlag.  I don’t want to see anyone, but eventually I tell my Greek stories to Hilary and to Tom and Mary and to Panos.  But it seems so vast, I cannot even begin to communicate it.  I keep saying it was ‘intense.’  If they want to know more, I say it was a relentless encounter with the gods, in the depths and heights, which led me to renewed love of family and community in this time and place.  How’s that?

   Hilary loves her little trinkets and idols. She loves the picture of Hera, which I finally look up in the Museum book.  It is from the Heraeum of Argos, the place of Her great home in Greece.  I get a big enlargement for her, framed in red and she says it is the best sacred-type gift she has ever got.  I finally identify the big kouros I photographed at Delphi.  It is Biton, one of the dutiful boys who pull their mother on a cart to this same Argive Temple for her duties as priestess, but who, at their mother’s request,, die that night to be in paradise with Hera.  What does all this mean?  To us, a few millennia later, we can only begin to guess at it.  But you can feel it; it’s huge and beautiful and a mystery.

   Everyone swoons over my photos and book of drawings.  I finally have assimilated my journey and tell my tales to all who will listen.  I finish the sketchbook with drawings of Grizzly Peak out our living room window.  I continue poring over my book of drawings, amazed at the beauty of it and how it brings it all back to me, even more than the photos do.

   I study the Athenian tetradrachm copy, wondering how they are able to make these exact replicas, also known as fakes, without getting in trouble with the law.  Finally, I notice something is missing from the design: the crescent moon behind the owl.  How cunning.  I call Emanuel in Athens and ask for his price list, which he sends, with a free Rhodian knockoff for Christmas.  In studying his catalog, I notice one or more significant details are changed on all the coins, which lessens their appeal but also makes them safe from any fraud.

   I walk with feet kissing home soil, wondering why fate threw me into this Journey to the East, this hands-on Greek Mystery School.  How did I come back a ‘changed man,’ as it was suggested I would.

   It was not a nice, innocuous tourist type journey or a guided tour.  It was of two parts: descent to the lower world of ancients, gods, mysteries, sacrifices and then ascent to the regular, everyday, earthly, 20th century world of social life with my fellow creatures, but in a much more deeply appreciative way.  Is that how it is supposed to work?  I wonder.  To be alone and rather cut loose and cut off from familiar friends, language, culture, family conveniences, then rather stripped to the bone, the way a shamn undergoes suffering, disjointing, then reassembling?  I have thought so.

   It would be too easy to say, well, I did not plan very well for this trip or I should wait to go with friends or I should make advance room reservations in nice towns like Naufplio (not a bad idea) and I am certainly an idiot.  But I know I had to have it my way, the way I did it, rather throwing myself into the dance and letting it all permeate me and inconvenience me and cast me off at sea, not unlike Odysseus when the winds were let out of his bag.  What good is it, controlling every hour and every motion, so that no inconvenience happens?  That is like being at home.

    But now I know it: I was meant to be here, have chosen to be here in the Western US, in this New World.  The ancient, European world will always fascinate me and has been my home in many lives, but this, the Western US, this land of freedom and newness, is it for this life.  We in the New World have only one new goddess and she is on the coins of dozens of nations and her statue was the only one erected in Tiananmen Square and her name is Liberty.  Pardon my swooning over such an easily exploited icon, but she does represent a new phenomenon and it is not just freedom from tyrants of state and church, but freeom, when we choose, from all the informal tyrannies -- of society, custom, upbringing, tradition, family.

   I find it difficult to study Greek now, but I keep going to the classes, mainly because I enjoy Panos and my friends.  Panos loves my book of drawings and my photos.  I show him the epitaph of the quintessential Greek, Kazantzakis.  Now I will find out what it says that was so important that it’s emblazoned on thousands of tourist t-shirts.

   It says, “I want nothing, I fear nothing, I am free.”

   So.  That explains it.  This is the Greek male.  It is also the Greek male nomad invader who swept down from the Steppes to occupy Hellas 5,000 years ago.  I wish to hell I had gotten a translation while I was there.  It shines an entirely different light on my experiences with Greek men.

   I used to live that motto, when a young man, but then I found love, which necessitated the death of that young man and his also his rebirth.  I still feel sadness from the journey.  Life can hurt, can be overwhelming and incomprehensible.  So you take months and years to understand what happened and, gradually, you make it part of you.

   I get a psychic reading from my friend Ellae, who tells me the past lives of it.  I lived in Greece, mentored by an older man and active in a broad band of awareness, such as philosophy, healing, sacred ritual and writing.  I got an infection and died in my early thirties and was very surprised and angry to find this paradisical life over.  It was unfinished.  She asks if I got sick in Greece and I say I almost died there of food poisoning in 1969.  We do that, she said.  When we go back, we tend to reexperience these things in some form.

   I ask about Crete and she says I was a woman there, with voluptuous breasts and body, who led a rich, happy life with much experession in the arts, that I experienced Knossos as a paradise with a great, protective net over it and was there when the men fought to protect it from intruders who would have drastically changed it.  And that I found Ashland as a replication of these places.

   In my present life, I do not experience these rich expressions and do not expect my culture to gladly receive or appreciate my gifts.  I have a deep well of experience from past lives, which I often have gone into, to hide, draw inspiration or feel longing.  I longed for the Aegean and when I went back there, I carried my present isolation.  When I arrived there, I ran into my isolation like a stone wall and deeply felt the pain and burden of it.  My journey now, while in Greece, was to emerge from that well into this present life and present world.  I did.  In Greece, I found friends, created society and learned to love my present era, home and family in ways more dearly that I could express in words.

   I left these happy, unfinished, longed-for ancient lives laying about the Aegean landscape like time capsules, waiting there to confront me with my isolation in the modern world.  Which they did.  I cannot have that ancient life.  No one can.  And I feel countless thousands of people do long for their old lives back there.  So the well persists, deep and rich, and will ever be part of my thoughts and character.  I live out of it, but cannot live in it.

   We are creating a new society now, the one to come after the male-centric, top-down, authoritarian societies and religions.  All those powerful and beautiful goddesses and gods inhabit the well, but we must continue to make our own goddesses and god, to invite them in, to realize their reality.  They need to have new generations, just as we do, and they need to have us know and love them.

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About the Author . . .

John Darling, M.S. is a writer, journalist, teacher and counselor in Ashland, Ore. He has been published in Gnosis, CoinAge, Living Simply (Australia), Pacific Northwest, Oregon Magazine, The Celator (Ancient Art and Artifacts) and others.  John writes documentary shows on history, the arts and nature for public television and wrote “Crater Lake: Mirror of Heaven,” shown on PBS.

He has been a daily journalist on the staff of The Portland Oregonian, Medford Mail Tribune, Ashland Daily Tidings, United Press International in Salem, Ore. and was news director/anchor for KOBI-TV News in Medford, Ore.

He was executive assistant to the Oregon Senate President and press secretary of campaigns for Oregon governor and U.S. Senate. He was U.S. Marine Corps journalist and editor of Pilot Rock (alternative magazine of Southern Oregon) and People Newsmagazine of the Ore. Dept. of Human Resources.

He has been a counselor since 1976 and led seminars in men’s consciousness, loving relationships, rebirthing, shamanism, prosperity and hypnosis.  He also writes and performs weddings.

He has a B.A. in history from Michigan State University and M.A. in counseling from Southern Oregon University.  John is a fourth generation journalist and was born and raised in Lansing, Mich. He has three children, Heather, Hannah and Colin.   ~


About the Author’s Dad...

   My father, Birt C. Darling, was an author, journalist, historian and archaeologist, who read this book in the last year of his life.  I sensed it gave him comfort and vision for his death, at 85, and understanding of the son he’d raised and what I’d become.  After reading this book he wrote to me: “You didn’t spend 10 years wandering like Hercules, but you sure covered a lot of ground.  I keep re-reading your book, always finding new stuff.  You know the people, ancient and modern.  I don’t seem to have the energy to go into a dissertation, but you’ve got it!”   ~