Wildalone (15 page)

“Yes,
samodiva
. In Bulgarian,
sam
means ‘alone' and
diva
means ‘wild.'”

“How interesting . . . a
wildalone
.” The word rolled off his tongue so naturally. “Untamed and all by herself. Like the maenad on a certain vase.”

We were back to my unforgivable error: writing the paper in the plural. It had offended him deeply, and I still didn't know why.

“In our folk tales, the
samodivi
never come out alone. They dance together in the forest.”

“As do the maenads. Their name means ‘raving ones.' And in your typical myth that's exactly what they are: a retinue of savage women, intoxicated by Dionysus in the frenzy of his rituals.”

He opened one of the books on his desk and, oddly, didn't need to flip through it to find what he wanted:

“I have seen those frantic women, who dart in frenzy from this land with bare feet . . . seeking to gratify their lusts amid the woods, by wine and music maddened . . . with snakes that lick their cheeks. Crowns they wore of ivy or of oak or blossoming
convolvulus.
One plunged her wand into the earth and there the god sent up a spring of wine.”

He closed the book.

“Familiar?” His eyes lit up with a strange excitement. “
Bacchae
by Euripides, won him first prize at the drama festival in Athens. An entire tragedy about the maenads. Or, in this case,
bacchantes
, as they were known in Rome.”

“I am sorry, but I haven't read it.”

“Well, I assumed as much. Yet I still thought it might ring close to home.”

He studied me for another moment, until it became clear that a vague nod was the only response he was going to get.

“Professor Giles, you wanted to show me something.”

“Yes, I did.” He hesitated, as if no longer sure it was worth the effort. “How well acquainted are you with the myth of Orpheus?”

“Other than what I wrote in my paper?”

“Everyone knows that part—his descent into the Underworld and the tragic mayhem that follows. I am more interested in the rest. In his life
before
he met Eurydice.”

My brain struggled for details, but to my own embarrassment retrieved very little: “He was born in Thrace, to the Muse of poetry, Calliope. When Apollo gave him a lyre, the boy began to turn his poems into songs.”

“Yes, yes, the music and all. But more to the point, Orpheus spent many years in the mystery schools of Egypt. Upon his return to Greece, he became involved in the cults of Dionysus.”

“Cults?”

“Cults, rituals, mysteries, orgies—I have heard the entire thesaurus. Most of the negative labels were invented by the Roman Church, the orgiastic one being a particular favorite.”

“Why would the Church invent orgies?”

“Funny, isn't it? There was sex, of course—after all, Dionysus is the god of nature's forces and of anything that produces life. Yet sex for its own sake, especially in its . . . well, its less common variations, was never a defining part of the rituals. Often they involved no sex at all.”

“I don't follow. The Church just filled the gap with made-up stories?”

“Filling gaps was not the intent, I'm afraid. Quite the opposite. You have to understand, there was a time when the Dionysian religion was as widespread as the Christian one, a pagan rival that had to be quashed quickly. And proclaiming the Greek rituals a drunken orgy was the surest death knell. Even more ironic is that it became a case of the lamb devouring the sheep, since Christianity had borrowed so much from the Greeks.”

“From their myths?”

“Especially from the myths. Dionysus, for one, is thought to be an archetype of Christ: both died in an act of sacrifice and were reborn, not to mention having the power to heal and to distill wine out of water. As for Orpheus, he is a Christian precursor too—of John the Baptist. John spread the teachings of Christ much as Orpheus spread the Dionysian mysteries. They both developed ideologies based on ascetic living and practiced rituals of purification with water—to the Greeks it was
kathairein
, or catharsis, to the Christians it is baptism. But my favorite analogy, one I am sure you can appreciate, is that John was beheaded at the request of an angry woman.”

“Salome?” I had seen an opera about her. The princess who demanded John's head when the young prophet didn't return her love.

“Salome, yes, the most consummate witch of all. Or
wildalone
, as you might call her. Used her beauty as a weapon to get his head severed. After watching her dance, the king just couldn't say no.”

I pretended not to notice the curiosity with which he looked at me as he said this.

“Anyway, the Christian appropriations from the Greeks are a topic for a different, and potentially endless, conversation. The point is, Dionysus was much more than a god of wine and sex. His rituals were part of a complex philosophy, a series of mystical initiations whose goal was to achieve rebirth. A spiritual rebirth, certainly. But also a physical one.”

“How exactly did they do it?”

“This is one of the greatest enigmas of the ancient world. Hence the term ‘mysteries.' The culmination of them all—the Mystery at Eleusis—lasted nine days and was arguably the most profound experience known to the Greeks. Unfortunately, everyone initiated into it was sworn to secrecy. And the secret remains untouched to this day.”

He gave me that expectant look again, as if I had the uncanny ability to get his Greek mysteries decoded.

“Miss Slavin, I don't suppose you can think of a circumstance in which one of these creatures, one of your . . . wildalones . . . might decide to venture out on her own?”

My wildalones.
I shook my head.

“Strange that you can't, because your sister described it so vividly. She developed her own—rather colorful, if I may say—version of the Orphic myth. I still have no idea how she came up with it. Perhaps growing up in those lands, on top of millennia of history, fuels the imagination in ways we, Western scholars, can only envy. But the fact remains: I hadn't seen anything comparable until then. And I haven't since.”

“What was so unique about it?”

“Everything. How would you react to the proposition that before Orpheus went into the Underworld, long before he even met Eurydice, he was already dead?”

I thought I had misunderstood. “You mean his soul?”

“No, really dead. In the most common, physical sense of the word.”

“I don't see how it is possible.”

“You don't, not yet. But now imagine this: a young man dies, probably an accident—even the most brilliant musician is not immune from death. Everyone mourns him. Especially women, all the women who were charmed by his music but never managed to steal his heart. Then out of nowhere, in the middle of the wake, a mystifying rumor trickles out—rumor of a ritual. Secret ritual. Dangerous. Dark. One that would plunge you straight into the madness of Dionysus. If you only dare, you can achieve the two things you desire most: bring that man back from death and make him forever yours. All this, of course, at a price—your own life.”

I stared at Giles. He sounded a bit delusional. Maybe one had to be, in order to climb so high up the academic pyramid? But I was curious about the rituals, so I decided to play along. “If you die, how is the man forever yours?”

“Giving up your human life doesn't mean you die. On the contrary, you are reborn as a maenad—immortal, possessed by the god. According to your sister, someone loved Orpheus enough to go through the ritual for him.”

“Eurydice?”

“No, Eurydice comes much later. This woman is different and doesn't have a name—your anonymous wildalone. She is angry. Broken. Orpheus has never loved her, and never will.”

“But you said she could have him forever.”

“Aha! Here we come to the core of things: How do you own someone? And not just own them, but own them against their will. Any guesses?”

I had none. Couldn't even imagine it—owning or being owned.

“It all goes back to that same ritual. The woman becomes a maenad. And the man, he . . . he wakes up from death to find himself a creature of a very different kind. You can think of him as a demon, although not exactly in the traditional sense. Our modern concept of the demonic dates back to medieval times, when Christian scriptures linked the term to malevolent spirits. The Greeks, on the other hand, believed in a being known as
daemon
.”

He wrote it down and circled the diphthong.

“Is there a difference? I mean, other than the extra letter?”

“They are like black and white. The Greek daemon was a benevolent creature, halfway between man and god. Your sister described him as a version of Dionysus: sensual, temperamental, prone to madness and even violence. In typical Dionysian fashion, he also had absolute power over nature and an unmatched gift for the arts. Music, especially. Which would explain why, through the rest of his time on earth, Orpheus achieved unsurpassed mastery of the lyre. The only problem is”—here Giles turned to a nearby projector and flipped the power switch—“even a daemon must pay a price for immortality.”

A scene from a vase emerged on the opposite wall. It resembled the one from my
psykter
: a vicious maenad attacking a weak musician. But then I began to realize that this was a different kind of attack. She was forcing her mouth on his, pressing his hand over her bare breasts.

“Are they . . .” I wasn't sure that saying “sex” out loud was a good idea. “It looks like the maenad is raping him.”

“Because that's exactly what she is doing. The ritual operates as a marriage vow, binding the daemon to the maenad forever. In essence, he has a debt to repay—since she gave up her human life to save him. And now every month, on the full moon, he must engage in the sexual rites of Dionysus with her. The two have become eternal lovers, whether the daemon likes it or not.”

“What if he breaks the vow?”

“Here lies the irony, you see. Nothing in this world can do physical harm to him, with one exception: he is at the mercy of a single woman, a woman he probably will never love. If he breaks the vow, she will tear him to pieces. The Greeks called this
sparagmos
, and I used to share the majority view that such acts of violence were only symbolic, enacted as theater in the dramatic spirit of the rituals. Now, having read your sister's paper, I am not so sure anymore.”

He switched the projector off, returning the wall to its varnished white.

“How do you know there is truth to all this?”

“I don't.” The regret in his voice confirmed why he had been so eager to assign the vase to me: Who else, if not Elza's sister, to bring him the missing answers? “Nothing would thrill me more than to find proof—any proof—that what she wrote was actual historic fact. Yet for now I must dismiss it as mere speculation. Provocative, compelling—sure. But still nothing more than an afflicted girl's fantasy.”

“Afflicted . . . you mean mentally ill?”

“Maybe not according to strict medical definitions. Unfortunately, however, I can't rule it out completely.”

The thought that something had been wrong with Elza's mind sapped me of any interest in the Dionysian rituals.

“Professor Giles, I don't think my sister wrote this paper.”

“No? Why not?”

“Because Princeton bought the vase in 1995. It wasn't even here when Elza was attending.”

He savored the challenge. “You have a rare inquisitive mind, Miss Slavin. But I am sorry to tell you that the vase
was
here in 1992. It had been loaned to our museum by a Greek foundation, and your sister's paper became the reason I eventually lobbied the school to acquire the piece. We obtained funds quickly, although the logistics took years.”

Without saying anything else, he took a few typewritten pages out of a drawer. The edges were dark with age.

“This is what I wanted to show you. I must say, I never expected it to see the light of day again.”

I noticed Elza's name printed at the top, and had to fight the urge to grab the sheets from him.

“She writes very convincingly, you will see for yourself. But when I first read it, I thought it was better fitted for a creative writing class. Not so much art historical analysis, more of a dreamy garble. A recounting of make-believe cult practices.”

Obviously, he had changed his mind—enough to save the dreamy garble for fifteen years.

“Then I looked at the back, at the copied illustrations. And the Dionysian practices were all there, exactly as she had described them. Everything already painted on the vases, over twenty centuries ago!”

He started to leaf through, pointing at each image.

“The mysteries of Dionysus—the drinking, the ecstatic frenzy . . . A maenad dancing . . . A maenad with Dionysus, in a sexual embrace . . . Maenads dismembering some sort of wildcat . . . And take a look at this—”

He flipped back to the first page. It started with a single sentence, separated from the rest:

I AM THE MAENAD AND THE DAEMΩN,

THE BEGINNING AND THE END

“Can you guess what this is?”

“It sounds like a quote.”

“The quote of all quotes. I suppose you haven't read the Bible?”

“No. My parents grew up under Communism and we were not very religious.”

“
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end
. Christ said it in the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation. These are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. They have become a Christian symbol, a code for the belief that only through God can one achieve immortality.”

“Just like in the Greek rituals?”

“More so than you think. A similar statement has been attributed to Dionysus,
so I am not surprised to see it in a Greek Art paper. The better question is, why did your sister replace Alpha and Omega with ‘maenad' and ‘daemon'? It has to do with the ritual, obviously, but I can't pinpoint the exact link. It must be a pun of some sort. A riddle.”