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these weren't warriors. These were priests, judges, and teachers. These
were the instructors of the young, the keepers of the poetry and the
laws that were never written in any language.
"`Only the mortal part of you will die,' said the one who had spoken
to me all along.
"`Bad luck,' I said. 'Since that's about all there is to me.'
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"`No,' he said. 'Your form will remain and it will become glorified.
You will see. Don't fear. And besides, there is nothing you can do to
change these things. Until the feast of Samhain, you will let your hair
grow long, and you will learn our tongue, and our hymns and our
laws. We will care for you. My name is Mael, and I myself will teach
you.'
"`But I am not willing to become the god,' I said. `Surely the gods
don't want one who is unwilling.'
"`The old god will decide,' said Mael. `But I know that when you
drink the Divine Blood you will become the god, and all things will be
clear to you.'
"Escape was impossible.
"I was guarded night and day. I was allowed no knife with which I
might cut off my hair or otherwise damage myself. And a good deal of
the time I lay in the dark empty room, drunk on wheaten beer and
satiated with the rich roasted meats they gave to me. I had nothing
with which to write and this tortured me.
"Out of boredom I listened to Mael when he came to instruct me. I
let him sing anthems to me and tell me old poems and talk on about
laws, only now and then taunting him with the obvious fact that a god
should not have to be so instructed.
"This he conceded, but what could he do but try to make me
understand what would happen to me.
"`You can help me get out of here, you can come with me to Rome,' I
said. `I have a villa all my own on the cliffs above the Bay of Naples.
You have never seen such a beautiful spot, and I would let you live
there forever if you would help me, asking only that you repeat all
these anthems and prayers and laws to me so that I might record
them.'
"`Why do you try to corrupt me?' he would ask, but I could see he
was tantalized by the world I came from. He confessed that he had
searched the Greek city of Massilia for weeks before my arrival, and he
loved the Roman wine and the great ships that he had seen in the port,
and the exotic foods he had eaten.
" `I don't try to corrupt you,' I said. `I don't believe what you believe,
and you've made me your prisoner:'
"But I continued to listen to his prayers out of boredom and
curiosity, and the vague fear of what was in store for me.
"I began waiting for him to come, for his pale, wraithlike figure to
illuminate the barren room like a white light, for his quiet, measured
voice to pour forth with all the old melodious nonsense.
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"It soon came clear that his verses did not unfold continuous stories
of the gods as we knew them in Greek and Latin. But the identity and
characteristics of the gods began to emerge in the many stanzas.
Deities of all the predictable sorts belonged to the tribe of the heavens.
"But the god I was to become exerted the greatest hold over Mael and
those he instructed. He had no name, this god, though he had
numerous titles, and the Drinker of the Blood was the most often
repeated. He was also the White One, the God of the Night, the God
of the Oak, the Lover of the Mother.
"This god took blood sacrifice at every full moon. But on Samhain
(the first of November in our present Christian calendar-the day that
has become the Feast of All Saints or the Day of the Dead) this god
would accept the greatest number of human sacrifices before the
whole tribe for the increase of the crops, as well as speak all manner of
predictions and judgments.
"It was the Great Mother he served, she who is without visible form,
but nevertheless present in all things, and the Mother of all things, of
the earth, of the trees, of the sky overhead, of all men, of the Drinker of
the Blood himself who walks in her garden.
"My interest deepened but so did my apprehension. The worship of
the Great Mother was certainly not unknown to me. The Mother
Earth and the Mother of All Things was worshiped under a dozen
names from one end of the Empire to the other, and so was her lover
and son, her Dying God, the one who grew to manhood as the crops
grow, only to be cut down as the crops are cut down, while the Mother
remains eternal. It was the ancient and gentle myth of the seasons.
But the celebration anywhere and at any time was hardly ever gentle.
"For the Divine Mother was also Death, the earth that swallows the
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