The one in charge over the north rim of the Mediterranean appeared as Artemis, or Diana of the Crescent Moon, – one version in the short tunic of a hunter with Athena’s borrowed messenger owl on her shoulder; the other as a mother-provider spirit, sometimes with a dozen or so pendulous breasts swinging down her front which ran with milk, disgustingly.
“Don’t be fooled,” Aktiarh warned about her, “She’s no rustic. She pleasures human intellect and influences it into sophistries of all kinds, inspiring men to seek after excellence of mind in all things, the arts, debate, sciences, even finance and couplings, ( he gave a look toward Hamar ). It produces an exalted headiness, pride, a reckoning of oneself by what one knows. Her power is Gnosis, the worship of knowledge
She entices to make people esteem themselves wise, – there really is strong sensuality to that state, Mystes. A try by men for godhood, near-enough, – the thrill of feeding the mind is powerful once indulged, and the victims ever afterwards hunt for best knowledge, take up rankings among themselves over who’s knowledge is best.” Hamar saw it at work below on a few Athenian philosophers debating with rapt students ringed around them in the Areopagus, and among studiers of the scrolls in the vast temple library in Alexandra, but clearly no solid ending to the mind journey was possible. It was an entrapment that ate up human lifetimes in the pleasure of mental exploration, and dwindled the heart-life of the people toward each other, – and toward all lesser thinkers – even as they reckoned themselves the most grounded and magnanimous of all, supposedly the truest appreciators of humanity itself.
Adepts he could see below in his own academy were being caught with its allure, their intellectual pride and aesthete ‘humility’ instantly recognizable to him. But just so, it even blinded both Aktiarh and Hamar to its working on them as they acquired the knowledge of it, its ability to blind was unstoppable on all who ever travelled its path, even in the unseen realm!
But Hamar did perceive one overarching truth, – that always, the workings of the entities were like the Academy’s, toward enticement and takeover. Strangely, the gods’ main preoccupation was ever their domination of man and his world, if not in death, then in dominion over the human mind and soul wherever men lived. All of the beings craved human connection, human worship, oddly reckoning themselves most highly by their effect on humankind. Their maps divided the whole Earth into spiritual quadrants.
Aktiarh once took him over Africa to see the ‘gods’ there, again mainly female. “African nations are overseen by the one they know as the Queen of the Sea, a powerful water spirit who moves in on the tribes via their ocean beaches and up their remote rivers, and who presides at wells. She specializes in ruling over them via threats of killings, – by drought and disasters, by plagues and curses, poisoned waters – which can only be warded off by her agents of witchcraft.
She grants lots of midnight visions, seductions, night travels, to her warlock priests. Watch this,” said Aktiarh, “the increasing flow is the thing.” They positioned themselves high over a riverbank to see some naked brown novitiates rising back up out of the water where they’d been staying supernaturally submerged for the night! The demon forces enabling them were all over their bodies. Hamar saw men like Yarboa sailing bare and invisible through the air to carry out night torments and snatch lives, the murdered bodies discovered in the morning by neighbours.
The spirit’s biggest harvests came in bloodthirsty wars of one majician’s domain over another, plagues and droughts and horrific ritual killings abounding, – much blood flowing. Accordingly, every village man craved chiefdom for getting himself exalted, or else stayed cowed by a war-chief, while protective majic was sought out by all.
Wine-head or no wine-head, Hamar’s buried heart recoiled at some things!
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