This story starts a bit flaky. It started a little while ago, but today I saw Morbius and that clicked with a few other thoughts. The movie was OK, it was not great but I never read those comics, so I went in blind. The acting was good, the special effects were nice and there are two disadvantages, the first that it come across as an origin story and the second is that I never read those comic books. As such, I believe that those who read those comics are a much better source of criticism. Yet still it gave me food for thought, food from sources decades ago. You see it takes me back to the comic Dracula.
I was not the biggest fan, I read a few, not all and one thing stood by me. At the end of one of these stories Dracula says “You forgot, even demon’s have nightmares, in those nightmares it is me they see”, it is not a literal translation, but it comes close. You see, we think that the darkness is scared of the light, it is not, it fears a deeper darkness. You see if it was the light they feared there would have been an outright war between forces of light and forces of dark. But the dark fears a deeper darkness, it is where they cannot see, that is where their fears lie. This fear goes back to the age that preceded ancient Greece. And that is where I am now (to some degree).
Part 0
It was a sunny Sunday and I have been living is relative quiet for some time. He had been living in London for a few months now and most of the day, hours in the morning, the afternoon and the evening he was bend over a book he had received. In-between these moments he went to the foodcourt in Harrods, walked on Regent street and let the noises of London infest him. It brought a lull to his mind that he rather enjoyed. Day after day reading Ἐλευσίνια Μυστήρια’ (see Another episode) was taking its toll. He had read as much as he could on Eleusis, he had studied maps, he had even been digging into the stories of Demeter and the search for her daughter. A much larger setting that had connections all over, but he was not able to see them yet. There were links to longevity of the Eleusinian Mysteries, with connections to a consistent set of rites, ceremonies and experiences that spanned millennia, and it all seemingly came from psychedelic drugs. The problem here was that the drugs were unknown, or at least they were not in the book, making matters a little bit of a problem. There was in addition the small sentiment that Eleusís, seemed to be Pre-Greek, and that name was inclined to be linked to the goddess Eileithyia. A daughter of Zeus and Hera, but if the town was pre-Greek, there was more to all this and that was a rather large damper to the party, because what was still in existence that was pre-Greek? He was about to give up when he walked into the British Museum. He was walking and taking in the art it displayed when he noticed something, he was about to walk away when something within him told him to look deeper. He was staring at the the roaring lion from King Nebuchadnezzar and he suddenly noticed two words in there. It was faint, it as in the mortar and it was behind the stones. He had to stare longer to make the words out, The words were Eleusís and Nabu. Nabu was known to him, he was Mesopotamian, not Greek, what was the daughter of Zeus and Hera doing there?
As clues go, it was slither thin, but between thin and nothing he would take thin any day and now he had a new path to walk on. Where would it lead?
Part 1
To be continued…
Yes, it needs continuation and this is not a cliffhanger. It was as far as I got. You see, if despair opposes hope, what drives either? Consider a simple clock, the cogs that make the seconds move and form a circle in EXACTLY 60 seconds, now consider the minutes that are pushed one part forward every t60 seconds and 60 minutes later an hour will have passed. The setting of a clock. Now set that machine up to reflect hours, days, months moon setting (28 days) and years. A clock that does not ever stop and has been precise for millennia. That is the clock we need to find, because the Olympians have no concept of mortality. They are here forever, and that drives both despair and hope. You see a person that never fears anything has nothing to look forward to, that person is merely passing time. Eternity is the harshest taskmaster we could ever fear to face. And we must fear eternity, the Olympians certainly did. And there is the rub, there is the setting. If Eleusís is the goddess of childbirth, who is one the other end? Not the fates, not Hades and no one knows who is there and that is the setting towards a path we find ourselves on.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 