Behind the Ivory Veil
21 Goddess Revealed
Wednesday, 17 August 1955, City of the Gods
WESLEY WATCHED from his hiding place as the argument came to an end with Pol leading a reluctant Doc and Margaret away from the rostrum into the West where they seemed to disappear into the sun. Had they realized he was missing earlier, he would never have been able to remain hidden in this small world. But Pol’s plea to Doc and Margaret was so insistent, and their memory of the warning against the night so clear, that they disappeared along the Aquarius Avenue with a pang of misgiving.
Wesley was no longer afraid of the superpowers warding the city, nor of ancient curses that warned against the night. Perhaps that was hubris, but he had a clear message that he must brave the night in order to penetrate the veil. His misgivings, what there were, originated in the feeling of being alone in a vast, empty, and foreign space.
Daylight in the City of the Gods breaks almost instantly at dawn. As Wesley watched the setting sun, he realized that nightfall would be equally as sudden. Within an instant of the sun’s last rays, the city dissolved. Its presence surrounded him, but it was more felt than seen. The pillars seemed to disperse into the darkness as Wesley made his way back toward the rostrum. Wesley hadn’t realized how far down the Leo Avenue he was. It took a long time to reach the rostrum. Too long.
It was vaguely luminescent ahead of him, the colors lifting from the surface into the air. Perhaps it had absorbed the daylight and would glow for some minutes after nightfall. He stumbled on toward his goal. Once he reached it, he would stay there and wait for whatever it was that the night would bring.
He stumbled on one of the paving stones as he shuffled toward the rostrum, losing his balance and going down painfully on one knee. He had never noticed an uneven flagstone during the daylight. He reached in his cargo pocket for his flashlight, but when he turned it on, it flickered and the beam was eaten by the darkness. He slammed it angrily against the heel of his palm and stared into it demanding light.
There was an instant burst of brightness as the light went off in his eyes like a flashbulb, then died completely. Wesley was left in the total darkness with a myriad of colors burned on his retinas by the blinding flash. He had never realized that there were so many colors inherent in darkness. They continued to move and play in his eyes. He could feel his eyelids open and close, but could see no difference in the darkness nor in the patterns of color that lit it.
He continued to half stumble and half crawl toward the distant dais with one hand stretched in front of him to protect against running into one of the massive but invisible pillars. Instead he stumbled again and his outstretched arm crumpled under him as he ran headlong into the ground.
“All avenues lead back to the rostrum at the center,” he repeated to himself. “I need only continue forward, no matter how far.”
Shaking himself from the daze sent the colors vibrating around him. They no longer seemed to be at a point ahead, but he was within the swirl of colored lights. He could not remember falling, but it seemed he had once again tripped on a step. He was walking along and was suddenly lying on the ground as if he had walked into it like a wall. Beside him was the hard ridge of a step.
He did not remember steps in the City of the Gods.
Yet he stumbled against another. And another. In a flash to his childhood, Wesley thought that he must be ascending the Northern Steps to the Temple of Aurora Borealis and the colors around him were the dancing Northern Lights. He stumbled and fell once more, caught up in the colors that surrounded him.
He felt farther around him and found no wall. Smooth. Not even the small cracks between the closely set paving stones that should be there. Just a surface as smooth as glass for as far as he could reach. Perhaps his sensitive fingertips could also feel small indentations as if delicate characters were softly etched into the cool surface.
He shook his head again and sent the colors swirling about him. If only he could clear his eyes to focus through the darkness on his surroundings. But as far as he could see, there was nothing but the swirling pattern of colors.
Pattern. As Wesley sat, still blinking and rubbing at his eyes, slow realization dawned upon him. These were not the random colors of a flashblinding. These colors moved in defined patterns—the same type of patterns he had discerned in the faint pastels of the rostrum. Now, though nearly invisible in the daylight, the colors were all that he saw in the darkness and they burst into three-dimensionality, springing from the surface to surround him.
He was—must be—on the dais.
He stood regarding the colors with a new sense of fascination. He reached out for them as if they would have some physical presence. He remembered distinctly that first time, at age three, when a photographer snapped a flashbulb in his eyes. The child Wesley had wandered around the room for several seconds with hands outstretched trying to catch one of the balloons that floated before his eyes. Wesley chuckled in mirth at the reminiscence as he once again reached out to touch a visual image that had no physical manifestation.
Here, again, Wesley was surprised as there was a tangible presence. Not exactly shape or texture, but temperature. As he passed a hand through a red presence, he was aware that it was warmer than when he touched a blue presence. Not only was there temperature, but Wesley could smell the hot dryness of the red, the wetness of the blue, the freshness of the green. So intense was his fascination with this new phenomenon that he momentarily forgot the bizarre nature of the experience. He wrapped his hands lightly around a green presence and noted that the color did nothing to illuminate his own body, but the color itself seemed to vibrate and Wesley’s ears picked up a childlike giggle. As he held the color in his hands, it brightened perceptibly to a joyful yellow. This color he released and it danced in among its fellows.
No wonder he had so much difficulty mapping the rostrum. It was only a two-dimensional representation of a multidimensional phenomenon. It depicted not only the pattern and color, but also shape, texture, temperature, and movement. And, Wesley nodded to himself, the sound. As the clarity of the music faded into his consciousness, he was reminded of the choir singing in his ears on the climb to the City. Each presence had a voice of its own and the beings passed him from one to another, moving in such patterns that Wesley could no longer be certain that his feet touched the ground.
Wesley opened his mouth to join the chorus and could not find the note.
Lean against me, said one of the presences. Or Wesley thought the words were said, though his ears did not feel the sound. Wesley leaned into a magenta presence and felt the notes vibrating in his chest. He opened his mouth and his voice resonated with the other, sometimes in unison and sometimes in harmony.
If ever there was truly the possibility of joining heavenly choirs of angels, I have experienced it now.
An increasingly dominant shape captured Wesley’s eye as he moved in the pattern, himself no more than one spirit among those who danced. Sometimes the presence was pale white, sometimes almost blue green, Wesley followed the presence among all the rest, whether it was ahead of him, above him, or even beneath him. At last, its shifting form came to rest beneath his feet as he spun clockwise around it, stooping, bending, reaching toward the rich effervescence of this being.
So close was this hypnotic treasure—the end of Wesley’s rainbow—yet when he reached toward it, he felt only the solid flat surface on which he stood.
Stood. The illusions began to fade. His traverse of the patterned pathway was ended. The colors began to dissolve and soon Wesley was faced with only the single unreachable form beneath him.
As he watched, a multitude of smaller glimmering lights surrounded the being. They moved slowly from place to place in the dark field of the dais, making patterns and breaking to form new designs. Some of the patterns looked familiar, but he could not decide what they reminded him of.
Wesley lunged forward, having suddenly lost his balance. The surrealism of the colored presences surrounding him made it easy to believe that he was walking on air in some other dimension. As he regained his footing, the realism was too much to bear. Dizziness overcame him and he lurched again. He had never seen such depth and dimension in the sky before. His footing was solid, but his mind would not let him comprehend having the moon and stars beneath his feet.
The moon, that presence that had drawn him through the pattern, ultimately held his eyes. The surface gained additional depth and texture. As if fractured by some kaleidoscopic lens, there were more moons than he could count, in all phases of the lunar cycle. Wesley was plunged back into the dream of his childhood.
Angry voices are outside his window in the attic bedroom. It’s a small house that his parents proudly built themselves on the ten acres of land. He rushes to the window and sees people building fires—houses on fire—his own home the next target of the marauding hordes. He rushes down the steep stairway and out the door, unable to find his parents.
“What’s happening?” he demands. “Go away from my home!”
“It’s the end of the world!” screams a marauder. “Look into the sky and see the sign of the end times. We’ll burn the world down!”
He looks to the sky and sees the moon. Not one moon but many. They do not orbit in an orderly fashion, but crisscross the sky in near collisions. Young Wesley waves his Bible in hand.
“No! It is not the end time, but just a sign of God’s steadfastness. It says in the Bible, ‘Many moons will come and go, but my Word lives on!’ Stop trying to burn down the world!”
A small part of his consciousness knows he has misquoted, but it makes no difference. The hordes have turned on him and he flees. North. He must reach the Northern Steps and ascend to the Temple of the Northern Lights.
Wesley runs.
People have watched the moon for millennia, imagining shapes within it, but to Wesley it was a new and vivid experience. From the ever-changing moons before him emerged images—presences—beings struggling to escape from the satellite to invade his mind.
His mind was fertile soil for grotesques from his deepest fears. Cyclops, Medusa, Gorgons, The Wicked Witch of the West. All combined in Wesley’s mind to take the form born of Wesley’s nightmares and nurtured on the dark side of the moon. This figure was the yin of nature; the darker feminine, so named by men who could not comprehend her nature hidden within themselves. She it was whose very repulsiveness attracted him with the fascination held unwillingly in his subconscious for its moment of triumph. Hecate of the dark side—threatening enticement of the fearful unknown. He was petrified as she rose silently from the moon beneath him—rose as his own death arose awaiting him before birth.
Wesley’s eyes were torn from their unholy fascination to the molten surface of a moon behind her. It froze and shattered to reveal a second face as beautiful as the first was horrid. An image of marble perfection, or perhaps chiseled from glacial ice. Undeniably feminine, she held him in a trance that bound his emotions before they could take form in his heart and held him transfixed—almost unwilling to breathe in her presence. Selene of the cold a dark moon—the eternal virgin—whispered his name to the night and it froze in the air like crystal.
Beside her chilling presence, another moon, full and ripe, thawed and bloomed. A third and more awesome image separated itself from the orb and rose to face him. The all-encompassing mother—Artemis of the hunt, the fields, the birthing stalls. The nurturing but critical mother goddess, her power ruled over birth and death. Wesley felt faint but could not pass out in the presence of the triple goddess. He hyperventilated, oxygen rich blood rushing to his brain, filling him with dizziness. But consciousness clung tenaciously to him. Nor could he cleanse from his eyes the images that floated toward him, pulsing one after another.
Wesley sang again, this time in the low halting tones of a child singing the alphabet to calm his fears. He would have whistled, but he found his lips suddenly dry and cracked, unable to mold around the slippery air. Nor could his dry cottony tongue make sense of the sounds he struggled to form into words. The sounds dissolved in his mouth and grated on his ears, burning his throat as he sang them. They were hideous animalistic sounds, but natural and beautiful at once. Sounds that in their primeval essence transcended his own picture language by as much as that language transcended mere music.
Wesley could hear the voices of the three images playing in his ears, running counterpoint to his own voice. He found himself supplying the baritone of a four-part harmony that brought him to his knees. In the singing, he picked out the voices of harmony that had played in the fog. The icy beauty was soprano, sometimes whistling a shrill descant to the strange harmony. The hag added an elderly but precise tenor to the chorus. Finally, the dominant maternal image added a rich contralto to the blend.
But just as the colors had cast no light, so the sound broke no silence. His ears rang with the chorus played out on his own vocal cords but he felt a person standing next to him would hear nothing. He was an instrument of the music, no longer controlling even his own voice. It was foreign, but filled his inner ear. And the chorus turned ancient fears to imminent threat. The triple goddess challenged the essence of his being, searching him for motive and means. One after the other, they interrogated him from the inside—exposing every weakness, each fault he strove to conceal—to find if he were worthy.
The gorgon monster, the dark of the moon, the shadow of shadows, Hecate of the night, took first command and sang.
I am the summer,
withering heat within your soul.
Sacrifice your life to me.
Love me.
Cook me a broth of the living
and speak three times the words
I give thee:
Dalmaley, Lameck, Cadat, Pancia.
I am the queen,
the sickle bearer of the summer wind
calling you to consuming passion
withering all around you.
I am the ruin.
I am the fall,
harvesting you to the fullness
of your soul.
I demand your all.
Wesley felt cold tendrils wrap around him. He was caught in the grasp of a mythical sea monster. He tore his eyes away from the three images approaching him, only to find the colors had returned to wind a pattern around him, binding him where he stood. He felt the tenor of the fabric taking shape. It was the timbre and tone of the crone’s voice. He sought it out with his own—ran counterpoint to the harmony that enveloped him. The pattern broke and the colors flew into a cyclone of sound that tore upward and away from Wesley. His eyes snapped back to the vision of the triple goddess below him.
The face of the crone receded behind the silver-tipped horns of the sullen Selene, the icy beauty, eternal virgin. And again, the words whistled around him as she took command, drawing him ever closer to herself, and sang.
I am the winter,
peaceful rest when life is through.
I am the queen of the palace of ice.
Brave the silent slopes of Borea
to capture my heart
and slip it still
beneath your breast.
I am the goddess of night without end—
the mystery of the eternal
snowcapped sheets of the nuptial couch.
I am the goddess of winter—
Persephone’s revenge—
the avenger of lust and greed.
Lie in my icy embrace.
Love me.
I demand your nothingness.
The flesh on Wesley’s neck and scalp crawled. Icy fingers wrapped around him and he shivered involuntarily. He could sleep beneath her words as if they were a blanket of snow. The cold goddess wrapped him in her arms. Blue and white colors fell softly around him. The wind whistled lullabies in his ears.
Wesley shook. He was in a snow globe and the flakes spun around him in liquid air. His voice as he sang the fugue was almost inaudible, but soon rose in its own challenge to the icy fingers, sending warmth and sunshine into the voice that surrounded him. The icy crystalline presences melted into air and Wesley turned again to the mocking goddess below him.
The second face made way for the third. The most awesome of all, the mother goddess arose to face him. She commanded a voice outmatching the others combined, and his fear rose to a new pitch as she sang.
I am your mother,
the spring and the rain.
Love me.
Trust yourself to my care.
I am Artemis of the field—
Demeter of the earth and corn.
Lie across my bed of coals
till immortality is seared into your soul,
and learn from me the mysteries
of all that grows.
Find your rest in my bosom—
that long final rest
from which only the pure arise
to the newness of life.
I am the emasculating goddess of fertility.
Give your life to me.
I am she who gives life
and demands your life
be paid to me.
The rich and verdant presences did not merely surround him; they sprang from him as if he were a fertile field in which they might take root and grow as he decomposed. It was his life that gave them life. From life springs life and the rich contralto coaxed the very life from him, sending it twining outward, branching and leafing out into a magnificent growth of tree and vine.
At first, his own voice served as no more than fertilizer, causing riotous blooming of new presences to join the growing garden of Bacchic festivity surrounding him. Here, counterpoint would not avail. He sought the harmony in the voices that these presences brought, blending colors, orchestrating voices into a rich chorale of patterns that had brought him to the juncture to face the moon and its myriad of faces. Each presence took its place and in one last finale ceased to be.
Wesley turned his head and felt the cold hard surface of the rostrum against his forehead and the bridge of his nose. The moon had not been drawing toward him, but he had sunk to his knees on the flat surface and had drawn down closer to it. He struggled to regain a perspective on the single white shining presence beneath him. The goddess was gone. The stars continued to dance on the black field of the sky below as he rose to his knees, stumbled to his feet, still unable to shake his gaze from the vision.
He called for his own vision and rested in his mind as he walked with Rebecca in the quiet park behind Indianapolis City College with the moon and stars spread above them. He looked deep into her eyes and spoke her name, but the word twisted itself around his tongue and the vision of her face faded into the white moon presence below. Another face—not Rebecca’s—took her place on the shining surface of the moon. She was familiar to him—gentle, loving, inviting. He was drawn to the face for protection—for the intensity of his desire. The face whispered to him. The words came out of the wind as she sang.
I am the soul of the unborn.
I am she who can feel your feelings,
who knows your heart.
I am the captive spirit
behind the ivory veil.
Free me.
Come to me.
I am she whom you willingly obey
who obeys you willingly.
I require only your love.
She was distant. He could not reach her, but he desired her. He loved her. He reached for her and the voice on the wind called his name. He felt her fingers touch his fingers but he could not hold them. He reached again, overreached himself, fell—off into a vast chasm. He fell through the rostrum into the sky. No footing remained beneath his flailing feet. Air drove itself into his lungs. He screamed without sound, diving into space that he could not fathom.
All the colored presences in all their many voices sprang once again to life, meshing, weaving in and out in a delicate fabric of tangible music. He sang at them desperately, pushing them away, but they merely danced farther off, still weaving and singing their voiceless song.
How wrong! He was not the one. She was not the one. Here was no idol fancied, but more open trusting love than his heart could bear. That love, that goddess, would not contest the love of her whose heart already he bore so closely knit to his own. And plummeting into the chasm he screamed with all the energy that he could put into his voice, “Rebecca!”
The web of colors rose to meet him and dissolved into his own image as he felt the crack of the rostrum against his head and all the stars and all the moons and all the singing dancing faces went black beneath him.
And he floated in empty silent blackness.
Comments
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