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XXVI. TOUR WITH MARCELLUS
You and Marcellus have decided to take an early morning walk down into the city. He tells you: "I have learned a little bit about yourselves, you and the Professor and Felix. Being a practical and realistic man, I have a hard time believing what some of the slaves whisper, that you are gods."
"We aren’t any more divine than you are," you tell him.
"That is certainly comforting," Marcellus says as the two of you wander along the streets of the city. "I understand you have come from afar to study the religions and cults of Rome, and Darwin has asked me to show you around."
"I thank you for that. We thought we would learn something about Christianity."
"Is that what you are?" Marcellus looks a bit pained. "Atheists?"
You shake your head. Darwin has warned you not to open yourself to that discussion. "We are Americans, who believe in a civic religion of the good state." You hope this pale story will satisfy his curiosity.
Marcellus is cannier than you supposed. "I have never heard of this America. There is a small town named Ameria in the north, but you don’t look or act Etruscan. It doesn’t matter what you believe," he says, shielding his eyes against the bright sunlight as you descend the hilly, rocky street down into the city. "Whatever people believe, they can alter their beliefs. Beliefs in themselves are not absolute, although weak thinkers seem to think so. Belief does not lead to truth, but simply to more belief, like a dog chasing its tail. However, philosophy suggests that wrong thinking usually leads to wrong conclusions, whereas right thinking always leads to right conclusions." He adds: "Many people in Rome are Christians. If you are followers of that Chrestus, forgive me if I offend you."
"I am not offended," you tell him, "but interested in your beliefs."
"My beliefs? I am a philosopher, a student of nature. I read the Greek masters like Aristotle and Plato, or the Archimedeans who do not eat beans because they believe beans contain souls transmigrating between incarnations. I have a nodding acquaintance with the many cults of the Christians, like the Marcionites, the Gnostics, the followers of Paulus, you name it. Then there are the other religions of the Orient, as well as the gods of the wild Celts and the Britons, not to mention the Germans who inhabit the dark forests. Rome is home to every cultus imaginable, so this should be a good place to learn about the gods."
"Should be?" you ask.
He admits sheepishly: "It’s all so confusing. When there are so many gods, and the people who practice their rites are all imperfect, then how can we conclude that this god or that goddess is the one who most embodies Truth? What’s more, they all seem to run together. Roman Jupiter with Greek Zeus and Egyptian Horus; Marmurius and Marmar and Mars and Hades and Ares and who knows what next. Mars or Mercury, Jove or Vesta, they all take on so many names and faces yet seem the same underneath, that it’s hard to pay them all their proper respect, much less find the right one for you or me personally. Have your people done better at resolving this problem than we have?"
You hesitate to tell him that your world is at least half dominated by monotheistic organizations that are like corporate monopolies, having killed off all competitors over the centuries, and by the bloodiest of means. It is confusing to you, and it would further demoralize Marcellus, so you keep the knowledge to yourself. You ask with feigned innocence: "Do you care much for the games?"
His eyes light up. "The arena? It’s so exciting!" A strange look comes over him, and blood reddens his face. "Ah, the games! How about you?"
"Er—not exactly." Your civilization has done away with the bloody games, or sublimated the blood sports into a round-the-clock bloodbath in digital media. "You don’t get bored by the endless repetition of the same mythological themes, the same basic gladiator types?"
"It is exciting," Marcellus says, placing a fist by his heart. "It is justice, entertainment, power, excitement, blood—everything a person needs to be uplifted. The Vestals, the Emperor, the priests and Senators, they all have fixed and prime viewing boxes, so the State approves, and that is good enough for me. I do feel sorry for some of the animals, and maybe the children sometimes, but Fate gives each of us what we are due, so they get what they deserve. The gods act in strange ways sometimes, and who are we to question?"
You drop the subject. It’s their fantasy, their utopia, their science fiction. They dream not of a golden future, but of a golden past.
As you noticed along the way to Rome, and in the villa of Priscus, religion is all around you. For centuries, the state religion has been a fairly standard northern Mediterranean and west Asian mix of nature worship and anthropomorphic gods. From earliest times, the well-being of the state depended on the correct interpretation of omens and auguries by priests, in the Etruscan mode, and then the pious and correct execution of their duties by civic officials. That’s a simplistic picture, but what it comes down to is there was no separation of church and state. There was no church, actually, because religion was so bound up with civic life that, in a sense, the state was the church. No wonder that Rome herself, the eternal city, was deified. As Rome expanded, she absorbed the religious practices of her subject peoples, starting with the Etruscans, the rest of the Italians, then the Greeks, and eventually a good part of the world from England to the Indus, from Germany to Egypt. You could belong to just about any religion you wanted, as long as you remembered to do your civic duty and on the appropriate holidays cast a pinch of incense in honor of the emperor’s divinity. Perhaps the most revealing fact of all is that in ancient Rome, temples and banks were one and the same. Imagine walking into your local bank branch and paying the manager to burn incense to your favorite god—now that’s one way to ensure a good interest rate. As you know from history—Christianity was the only fly in the ointment. Or maybe the whole ointment went sour, and Christianity became the scapegoat. In turn, the Christians later suppressed their former suppressors, often in bloody and lurid ways. For example, there’s the last great philosopher and teacher of the ancient world, who happened to be a woman. Her name was Hypatia, and she taught in the great library city of Alexandria, Egypt, where she attracted devoted Christian and non-Christian students alike. This was during the lifetime of St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.), who lived not far away in Hippo. The best remembered historical marker of the age is 410, the year Rome was sacked and burned by barbarians—that’s across the Med and west a ways, in Italy, but it’s an event that affected the whole region. Consider that Alexandria was the site of the great library in which all the knowledge of the ancient world was stored, over 700,000 volumes—all of it lost. The great library was founded by Alexander the Great’s successor in Egypt, Ptolemy I, and destroyed several times. The first destruction occurred accidentally, in 48 or 47 B.C.,when Julius Caesar destroyed the Egyptian fleet and its logistics centers in port, and conquered the last of the Ptolemies (Cleopatra) as a ruler, and she in turn conquered him as a woman conquers a man. It’s said the library of the Ptolemies burned for two weeks. Its daughter library at the Temple of Serapis was spared, with 200,000 volumes. When it was converted to a Christian church in 391, the remaining polytheist books (the plays of Aristophanes, the philosophy of Plato, the poems of Sappho, to name just a few writings from throughout the ancient world, from Egypt to India and all points in between) were put to the kynegion (cremation fire near the town waste dump, where corpses of the homeless were normally tossed). The operative cry was "whatever isn’t in the Bible is the work of Satan and must be destroyed." This seems ironic because the final canon of the Christian Bible had barely been assembled by St. Jerome, papal secretary 366-384 under Pope Damasus, and the dust hadn’t quite settled on the matter. In fact, it was the last gesture of the Classical world on this effort, which peters out (no pun) within the next century, and in fact the dust had not settled when Martin Luther introduced a German Bible in the 1500s, and even in your time differing canonical collections exist. Hypatia, said to be the last Great Librarian at Alexandria, was attacked by a mob of zealous (they would have said ‘enthusiastic’) Christian monks in 415, instigated by fanatics in the Jewish and Polytheist communities. The Christian mob tortured Hypatia to death in one of the most painful and imaginative ways common under some of the worst polytheist emperors: they slowly and agonizingly scraped off her entire skin with the ragged edges of raw oyster shells—a dramatic demonstration of brotherly love. This very same church and library were destroyed in 640 by ‘enthusiastic’ Moslems whose operative statement, quoted from their Caliph, was: "If it isn’t in the Koran, it is the work of Satan and must be destroyed."
You and Marcellus drift down into the Subura sector of the city. Amid teeming crowds, smells of food, yelling, the cries of slaves and animals, hawkers, a din and an assault of the senses, you make your way through crowded streets and narrow winding alleys. One by one, you visit the temples of gods whose representations can also be found on the inside of the Pantheon’s dome. Rome may have 1,000 baths, but she has a thousand times that many temples, monuments, shrines, and other locales of worship. You become overwhelmed as you had not thought possible before. Your mind is a whirling blender of theological milk shakes. As Rome grew, her success brought myriad cults to the Imperial capital, including death and resurrection cults that thrived around the Mediterranean since the Stone Age. The cults of Mithras and Isis both involved features found in the external aspects of Christianity, such as the eating of the god and drinking of his blood. This resonates with Orphic cults as well as those of wheat goddesses and what not. In many ways they are all related. At the same time, each crag or valley has spun out its unique twist on its local deities, making them unique. It’s comforting, in a way, to think that symbols like a star or a cross occur in cultures around the world—which doesn’t mean every culture shares the same meanings and beliefs regarding those symbols. You recall that the U.S. military symbol is a white star, while the Soviet military symbol was a red star. Aside from conspiracy theorists, few would agree that the two cultures shared the same philosophy.
"How many gods to they worship in Rome?" you ask breathlessly at one point, holding a broken sandal in one hand and moping your sweaty, red brow with a cloth held in the other hand.
"Endless," Marcellus says grinning. He extends his arms as if to embrace the city with all of its squalor and power and terror and bloodiness, and you are suddenly reminded of the holiness of ageless Calcutta. More than ever, Rome makes absolutely no sense like a crazy quilt of jarring images and ideas, and yet embraces all the logic of the universe. That is why Augustus in 20 B.C. placed the millearum aureum (‘golden milestone’) at the heart of the Roman Forum, a classic omphalos (Gk ‘navel’), to be the navel of the world, the center or focus from which all Roman roads were to be measured in stone milestones. Rome is the heart of the world. All roads lead to Rome. All roads of the spirit lead to Rome. The question that now burns in you, the same question that brought Darwin here in the first place, and a question that you know Marcellus cannot answer, and to which every high priest or bishop in the city can only give a partisan answer: With all that religious power, why are you still spiritually impoverished? In other words, what makes the whole apparatus flush itself out over the next century and adopt the least likely of all faiths as its sole cultus, that of an obscure Jewish preacher already dead and gone (some say to heaven) nearly 300 years by now? With so much philosophical and religious imagination, zest, brilliance, synthesis, focus, and hunger, how is it that these rulers of the known world turn to the very antithesis of their basic faith, a cult they call atheist?
The squalor, the stench, the colors, the pathos, the melancholy, the noise, the sex, the riot, the cruelty, the life and death in the streets, the ownership of one human by another, the abandonment of babies to be taken by wild animals (later by slave traders, pimps, pedophiles, cannibals, ritual killers, religious zealots, even lanistas or gladiatorial trainers, or just bereft parents looking to replace their own lost infant), all of this, the mix of street filth and sumptuous marble, the ages upon ages of history stamped upon this gigantic mountain of wriggling life, this veritable Babylon or Babble of languages, is enough to make you wish for the simple uniformity of a 21st Century London or New York or Los Angeles or Paris…or, for that matter, Rome. If you jazzed up Calcutta and stacked upon her religious depth and human squalor the military power of Hitler’s Berlin, and the commercial juggernaut of a New York as hated by Arab fanatics, and a hundred other chimerae of your age, then distilled them all into a human ant heap measuring about 22 km sq or 8.125 U.S. sq mi within the Aurelian Wall, you have Imperial Rome. You want to compare this with modern cities, but the comparison fails for a number of reasons, including the presence of wide, paved streets and mass transportation in modern times. Compare Manhattan (57 km sq/22 mi sq) with over 1.5 million persons, being the most densely populated county in the United States. The District of Columbia measures 176.75 square km or 68.25 square miles, with a population of 571,000. Paris, France measures 105 square kilometres (41 square miles) with 2.2 million persons in the immediate city (over 10 million in Greater Paris). You get the sense of a huge population density, with little street planning, and the only traffic on foot or by horse.
The city swarms around you like an assault on the senses, its smoky air making your eyes tear, its colors and noise making your head ache, its heat and smell enough to deaden your nose and taste buds. You trudge until it seems your limbs are burning and your feet sting, and still you march on. You visit the temples of many deities, including the traditional Roman ones. As a measure of purely civic respect, you toss incense to Jupiter in his temple on the Capitoline, and to Juno Moneta in her great temple on the other brow across the dip known as the Asylum. The titles and epithets of Jove alone seem endless, intoned by chanting priests: Tonans (‘Thunderer’), Fulgur (‘Lightning’), Fulgurator (‘Bolt-tosser’), Feretrius (‘Striker’), Dius Piter (‘God the Father’), Zeus-Geos (‘God-Earth’), Fidius (‘Oath-Lord’), Stator (‘Supporter’), Ultor (‘Avenger’), Dolichenus (‘Eternal’), Heliopolitanus (‘Sun-City-God’), and innumerably many more. On some monuments his popularly known acronym is given in three huge, smoke-wreathed letters: I.O.M., Iuppiter Optimus Maximus (‘Jupiter the Best and Greatest’). It is perhaps the next-best acronym known around the world after S.P.Q.R. (Senatus Populusque Romanus, ‘the Senate and the People of Rome’).
Among the Egyptian cults is that of the synthetic Serapis or Sarapis. This is a combination of Osiris+Apis (‘Sun’+‘Bull’). The cult originated in Memphis, where since ancient times the priests have embalmed, buried, and worshiped bulls, an animal whose male and female manifestations are also sacred in Hindu culture (elements of which you find in the temples of Rome). The Ptolemaic emperors of Greek and Macedonian extraction, whose ancestral ruler was Alexander, and whose last of the line was Cleopatra in the time of Caesar and Antony, created the Serapis cult.
By the time you get to Zeus-Serapis-Helios, you have decided that the proliferation of cults in Rome is not arithmetic but exponential. You see endless pairings and triads: Jupiter-Mars-Quirinus, Jupiter-Mars-Juno, Zeus-Dione-Pallas, often sharing the same temple but each with their own cella or apartment. Some cults are particularly attractive to soldiers. Rome is a militant society, in which the army exercises enormous prestige and power. Jupiter Dolichenus (‘Eternal’) is a favorite of soldiers, and his shrines appear everywhere from Britain to Arabia, from Mauritanian Africa to the Black Sea shores of what will one day be Russia. Their other big favorite is Mithraism.
Then there are the Mystery Cults, derived from Neolithic and Bronze Age worship of the Great Mother, or White Goddess, Mesopotamian Kubaba, Achaean and Greek Kybele, Roman Magna Mater. A hundred variations on the theme, but basically the father god rapes a swan or a rock or some other manifestation of the female divinity. In so doing, he spills his seed on the ground, and up springs a hermaphrodite (seen in some places as a monster, in others a beauty, in most places a figure of both sexual fascination and pity). Dionysius or a similar figure comes along and tries to sort this out, drugs the creature, ties his male sex organs to a tree or a thorn bush so he/she will castrate himself. From the blood of this mutilation spring flowers, trees, almonds, you name it, pomegranates. The daughter of the river god holds the seeds of this flowering in her lap and becomes pregnant. The father repeatedly tries to kill her and expose the baby or send it off in a basket, but Kybele intervenes again and again, and the child grows up in to a handsome youth like Attis. Kybele falls in love with Attis; in some variants this is an incestuous union; in any case it is doomed. A jealous divinity intervenes and drives Attis mad, so that he castrates himself under a pine tree and bleeds to death. From the blood spring new flowers, trees, almonds, pomegranates, and we have a year-cycle, a harvest-cycle. The priests of this cult are often males who castrate themselves, perhaps (Frazer) to give their fertility as a gift to the Great Mother. In Rome, the eunuchs of this cult are called galli, and they parade in lavish and popular festivals in gaudy, effeminate garb. At first the stern, humorless Romans resist all this Oriental complexity, corruption, degeneracy, and what not, but as they absorb the world, the world absorbs them. It is too simplistic to think that Greek gods overwhelmed less refined Roman ones. From the very beginning, as runaways hiding in reed huts on the seven hills, the Romans reached out to the world immediately around them (Etruria, Latium) for inspiration. Their habit was to take, as with the Sabine girls, but ironically the Sabine girls became the mothers of all Romans.
"Where does it end?" you ask Marcellus with a weariness of heart and mind as well as of body. He replies with a shrug: "It has neither beginning nor end. I am as lost as you are. Then again, blame me for not accepting this simple answer or that."
"What about the Christians?" you ask.
"Too many varieties and flavors. There are the Gnostics, who make two of everything, and among them alone there are a dozen variations. There are those who believe in one god, and others, I hear, who worship three, which sounds more like Jupiter, Mars, and Juno, but I am inclined not to care for those old fairy tales told by grandmothers to make us go to sleep when we are small, or the fancy conceits spun by poets at the court. Too much cleverness, not enough soul." He says more things, but the chanting and bell-ringing of a passing religious procession of dark-skinned Egyptians with shaven heads drowns him out—or are they from India, these dancing priests with their yellow robes and tiny pigtails? You almost smile, because they resemble the hare krishnas who proselytize at modern airports.
You pass temples dedicated to Mithra, a derivative of Kybele cult. A particular favorite of soldiers and their generals is the cult of Mithra, the Bull-god that originated in India at the dawn of history, then was perhaps carried in from the Orient by the soldiers of Alexander, or emanated across Persia on its own. The way that works is you go underground into a dark tunnel of sorts called a Taurobolium, and the animal is ritually slaughtered overhead so that its blood pours down in a torrent through a grill, drenching the worshippers below. You find that, as with all religions, no matter how strange they seem at first glance, the followers always have some closed loop of logic that seems somehow plausible.
The galli of Kybele castrated themselves in ecstasy, with a crude instrument like a sharpened stone, in literal commemoration of the passing of the seed through its birth and death cycle. Statues of the Great Mother are ceremoniously washed in the nearby river, not so much in purification of some imagined abstract sins that come in later elaborations of cult theology, but more likely to bring about the drenching rain that awakens life in the slumbering seed. This same ritual is applied in your day to statues of the Virgin Mary in many Mediterranean villages. The Mithraists observe a Day of Blood (March 24th) reminiscent of Good Friday, on which they fast and mourn, and this is a key moment for new priests to emasculate themselves. Contemporary sources tell of feast days on which the initiates castrate themselves and then race through the towns, looking for any open doorway; and any home whose door is not locked to them, into which they succeed in throwing their severed organs, then the dwellers of that home must adopt the initiate for some long period of time. In some ways the bull-cults call to mind the even more ancient custom of the Minoans, of bull-dancing by young initiates (some of whom surely perished on the horns of the animal) and we recall the bull-dance of modern-day matadors in Spain.
Marcellus offers this general thought: "It seems, summing it up, that the Olympian sky-gods of the Greeks have mated with the earth-gods of the Great Mother."
You notice the cults of the Sun God. Most notably, he comes out of Egypt in various guises (Ra, Osiris) and Babylon (Marduk, Shamash). (The Babylonian moon god Sin is male, an unusual twist since the moon tends to come through later ages as a female in forms like Diana, Demeter, the Carthaginian Dea Caelestis, et al.) The Classic Greek manifestation is Apollo, already worshiped by the Etruscans and Latins as Aplun or Apluns. The Zoroastrians worship not the sun but light itself, manifested by Ahura, Ahura-Mazda, or Varuna, the spirit of light and fertilizing warmth that bring life, and Mazda eventually becomes Mithra, west of Persia. During the dreadful history leading up to Carinus, one of the most infamous creatures to sit on the imperial throne was the young Elagabalus, or Heliogabalus, given Roman name Varius Avitus, grandson of the powerful Julia Maesa, and he styled himself a living incarnation of a Syrian sun god.
You wonder what Constantine thinks he saw over the Milvian Bridge as he went into battle, pious tradition suggests it was a Christian cross. Contrarian opinion suggests it might have been nothing more than a momentary nimbus of light pierced by cruciform shafts of light, or even that it was, in some hysterical moment, a variation of chi-rho (‘??’ or‘ Chr,’ the initials for Christus) which in turn may have been adapted from the far older Egyptian ankh, or ansate cross, a cross-like shape with a loop for its upper leg, abstractly symbolizing life, but in a more stylized sense a ray of sunlight, as depicted in Egyptian funerary art.
Your journey tires you. You are glad to return to the gardens of Ulpian. There, you and Marcellus lie on facing couches while slaves bring wine and food. "I’m wiped out," you say lying back panting. "Did I learn anything?"
"Did I?" Marcellus echoes. "I’m not sure. I think a few wise men know that the Romans, in seizing the soul of the world, have lost their own. That is the sad thing for those who love Rome, as I do, even as an African. Even the most learned and sensitive expert on poetry feels deep in his heart that the ancient people who gave us all these wonderful myths had simplicity in mind. Maybe therefore, in the sense that simplicity is the mathematics of the gods—because, think, nature follows the simplest line, and the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and water seeks a level area, and I can think of many more examples—then our ancient father-religion, if we could fully comprehend it again, must be the best of all religions."
"Do you know much about it?" you ask.
He shrugs. "I know that every hedge and every tree had a divine spirit called a genius. These genii aren’t complicated deities but nameless spirits. The more powerful ones, who are almost named gods, almost like humans, are numina; they must have heads at least, because their name refers to nodding. The gods do not necessarily speak, but they nod to us."
"Is that good or bad? Does it mean anything?"
"Well, a god or goddess might nod in happiness. I have seen people nod in disapproval. I think it could mean anything."
"So you think these genii and numina are more powerful than the named gods, whom you could call the divi?" The singular of that would be divus or diva, depending on gender.
"I suppose," Marcellus says. "Then again, you see those statues of divinities with wings? Those are messengers, who help heroes on their way to apotheosis, which is ‘standing before the gods.’ That’s as in apo+theos (‘before god’). So you might have some numen, like the spirit or genius of Rome, that gets uplifted and then deified—like Roma, Deified Rome. It’s hard to express, because it dates back to lost ages in our history, when people were busy living the simple country life and didn’t have time to compose long, fancy, awkward poems." It’s interesting that this Egyptian thinks of himself as more Roman than either Greek or Egyptian. You sense that in his mind, he sees himself as the ideal combination of Egyptian knowledge, Greek thinking, and Roman power—almost an ultra-Roman, though a slave. You don’t answer, knowing the Romans looked back with longing to a golden age, when the world was simple and bucolic. Groaning, you soak your feet and marvel that you’ve acquired bunions in your spiritual search.
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