Here Dwell the Immortals
Movieland - Chapter 19
The Forms Eternal.
19
Here Dwell The Immortals
The shaft of noon light flooded down on the altar and illuminated the large letters inscribed into the altar’s marble front.
Again, Tom’s high school Latin did not fail him. “Multa Corporis” meant “many bodies,” and the bottom line he eked out to mean “one form eternal.” It sounded almost liturgical, except it was more the gospel of Plato than of Christ:
“Many Bodies, One Eternal Form.”
Now he noticed that around the room in the dimmer light were small altar niches. Wondering what they were exactly, he went from one to the other, bringing each shrine to light under the yellow glow of his taper.
The bases of the altar niches were scalloped like an upturned shell. At the center of each shell was a crude terra-cotta figurine, roughly wrought. Made of slabs and angles like a Cubist painting. He had to read the name incised into the shell’s base to discover which god the abstract figure was supposed to represent, for the toga-ed effigies were uniformly faceless and sexless. In place of a face, they all had the same hollow-eyed Greek chorus mask, devoid of character.
The collection of gods, if such indifferent shapes could be called that, surprised Tom. Such was the precise imprint of his prep-school education in the classics, under the stern scrutiny of Jesuit taskmasters, that he could appreciate the discrepancies. For despite the relentless Italic theme that worked its way into every ornament of the theater, these gods were a promiscuous mix of Hellenistic deities, some called by their Roman names, some by their Greek.
Here was the curious thing: each figurine was surrounded by a multitude of votive candles in red glass cups. The candles had gone out long ago, but on the red glass of each cup was etched a name in gold. To his astonishment, Tom found that the names were those of movie stars.
It was only at the shrine of Venus, or “VENVS” as the inscription on the shell base read, that he began to figure the scheme out. Here in the Venus niche, the votive candles bore the gold names of “Theda Bara,” “Jean Harlow,” “Rita Hayworth,” “Marilyn Monroe,” among others. All these women had at one time been called “love goddesses.” Could the votive candles be the many bodies, the many incarnations; the faceless god, the one eternal form?
To test his supposition, Tom again circled the room, carefully examining the flocks of votive candles by the light of his taper. The actors and actresses, he noted, were all from his childhood, from a long-ago golden Hollywood; no one more recent than the 1950s.
The generic figurine of “Diana the Huntress”, correctly in line with his theory, had the athletic young “Katherine Hepburn” as a votive, as well as a team of 1940s cinema virgins: “Bonita Granville,” “Elizabeth Taylor,” “Jennifer Jones.” Next to Diana, the quick-witted Athena, usually depicted in armor and behind a shield, was represented by the tart-tongued “Bette Davis” and the warlike “Barbara Stanwyck.”
The drunken god of revelry, Dionysus, had a dual aspect: at times ecstatic, devilish, driving women mad; and at others, coarse, corpulent, falling off his wild ass and landing with a joyous chortle as he held up his goblet for more wine, more, more, more — this ribald God of Misrule, of Divine Madness, of Inspiration had in his entourage “Errol Flynn,” in his high manifestation, and “W. C. Fields,” in his low. Meanwhile, Juno, Queen of Heaven (and apparently MGM), resided in the person of “Joan Crawford”; her Jovian consort, Lord of all Olympus, naturally “Clark Gable.”
But there were other, more exotic gods in the circle of shrines. There was, for instance, a shrine to Prometheus, who was not an Olympian at all but an ancient precursor, a Titan. Hurled from the skies for stealing fire from that lofty empyrean and bringing it to lowly man, Prometheus was chained to a rock to have his liver eternally gored by an eagle, his liver as immortal as he and ever regenerating.
The Torment of Prometheus quickly attained a powerful meaning for the ancients, becoming a touchstone of Western civilization to this day. In the jealous, spiteful, self-involved Greco-Roman pantheon, Prometheus was the only god who was ever a true friend of man, the Bringer of Fire who had freed man from the caves and the long night of ignorance. And so Tom found it fitting that the rough-hewed figurine, this champion of upward aspiring mankind, was here surrounded by such Everyman votives as “Charlie Chaplin,” “Henry Fonda,” “Humphrey Bogart”: those who portrayed an earnest, openhearted humanity poised against time and tide.
Nearby was a provocative, and actually instructive, contrast of divine personae. Huddled around the shrine of Apollo, representing male beauty at its most refined and enlightened, were the candles of “Gary Cooper,” “Tyrone Power,” “Cary Grant.” This, in distinction to the more crowded shrine of Eros, a demotic god of animal sex appeal, where Tom found “Valentino,” “Johnny Weissmuller,” “Marlon Brando,” and — a surprise in this company—the rather recent “Elvis Presley.”
But of all the shrines, the most interesting to Tom was the shrine of MERCVRIVS, or Mercury. Tom had a special affection for Mercury. As the god of communication, Mercury was fancifully seen as the patron of new technologies like radio, film, and television. In the public imagination, Hermes, as the Greeks called Mercury, was dismissed as merely a celestial messenger, the fetch-and-carry errand boy of Olympus, but the ancients knew him as the God of Luck, of Gambling, of Thievery; as the mystic God of the Crossroads, those magical places where anything can happen, any road taken, where transformation occurs.
Here in this shrine, Mercury had come into his own. The god of change, of a hermaphroditic sexual fluidity, was attended to by the presently unlit flames of both male and female incarnations: “Ramon Navarro,” “Nazimova,” “Marlene Dietrich,” “James Dean,” even “Shirley Temple” the pre-sexual, pansexual magical child. Most startling was the presence of “Greta Garbo” among the votives.
Tom would have thought Garbo too languid, too glacial and profound for the wing-footed Mercury. She would have been a better avatar of Persephone, the winter Queen of the Underworld. But then Garbo was a Unique, unbound by facile categories. It must have been the actress’ ability to appear as many things to many men (and women), to have something unstable and mercurial about her essence, that placed her here with the quicksilver trickster rather than, by contrast, in the more wholesome shrine of Venus.
With a start, Tom heard something stir in the gloom. He turned sharply and realized a draft was escaping through the brass door. He had let his nature get the best of him. Such was his categorizing, academic bent, he had gotten spun up in mythology as easily as he got spun up in the hierarchy of film stars. It was time to remember why he was here, the student he was in search of.
Tom turned now to the altar, the centerpiece under the noon light. He approached it and was just entering its sharp circle of illumination when something crunched beneath his foot. He move his shoe away and found to his alarm it was bone, shattered by his weight: the bones of a small creature.
Scanning the marble floor with its pattern of inlaid rectangles and circles, Tom discerned other groupings of small, dusty skeletal remains nearby. A few more intact than others. He examined the one closest, the one half in and half out of the circle of noon light.
With a sudden wave of revulsion, Tom realized what it was, what they all were. He was standing amid a bewildering boneyard of dry, withered-away cats.
“You there!”
Eden turned in her seat. The shapely Black woman was coming down upon her in her musketeer boots, a fiery look in her eyes.
“You’re the one I’m looking for.”
The woman hovered over the aisle seat. “Dante never left this theater. Dante Alessandro never got into his car, never drove away! You said you saw someone. Someone in black.”
“He was in a hood. I couldn’t—”
“A dark figure, you said. Dark glasses.”
“No …H-he wasn’t wearing glasses.”
“Show me. Show me where you saw this dark figure.”
Eden pointed to the stage. “Behind the curtain.”
“Let’s go.”
Clearly, this was a direction, and though Eden had found a new resilience in this place, found she had a will of her own that might, with effort, resist such spoken commands, the look in the woman’s eyes was not to be denied.
Eden marshaled her strength and began to stand when she careened out wildly, catching the back of the seat in front of her
“Are you okay!”
Eden was breathless. “It’s the air.”
The woman looked around in alarm. “Something wrong with the air here!”
“Everywhere. It’s wrong everywhere.”
Eden now managed to steady herself and stand. The woman nudged her toward the red curtain. “Come on.”
“Do you mind if I lean on you?”
“Are you going to be sick!” the woman demanded, annoyed.
Eden gripped her elbow. “It’s nothing, really.” Eden spoke huskily. “Just a… a…”
“What!”
”… a slight touch of vertigo.”
The cats seemed as faux-ancient as everything else in the miniature Pantheon. Was there something ritualistic about the way their bodies were broken or was it all haphazard? Some skeletons were even intact. Tom couldn’t understand it.
Perhaps the unlucky felines had fallen to their deaths through the oculus. But as Tom looked up, he saw that the oculus was covered in glass, a prudent concession to weather and modern times. Perhaps they had snuck in from the theater. Was the Palatine so abandoned during its porn phase that feral cats were allowed to prowl the balcony? But then how had they wedged their way through all these forbidding doors? The hidden one, the heavy brass ones. How was that managed? No, there was really only one possibility, a terrible, inhuman one.
But that too was all wrong. The Romans didn’t sacrifice cats. They heeded the Egyptians and regarded cats as somewhere between sacred and daemonic, observing with superstitious trepidation the eerie tendency of cats to stare off into the air, seemingly in mystic transports.
The shattered skeletons of the cats didn’t make any sense, but then many things about this irrational theater didn’t make sense. And Tom wondered again with a chilly sick feeling: Could it be so? Some person … some inflamed cult… had been sacrificing cats to these crude, faceless idols!
Turning back to the center altar, Tom noticed a rolled-up scroll at its base, fallen lopsidedly on the ground.
He scooped it up. It seemed, at first, more a work of art than a document. Tom stepped to the altar and unrolled the painted parchment on the marble slab. The beautiful flowing penmanship was ornamented here and there with Greek masks and mythological beasts. The swirling gold capitals that began lines shone under the direct sunlight, and the language was so poetic that Tom felt compelled to speak it aloud, working his way slowly through the ornamental filigree just to appreciate the music of the words.
Come, O Mercury, O Hermes, O Hermes Trismegistus.
God of Mischief Three-times Great.
Divisor of Twists and Turns.
Trickster. Shifter. Slayer of Argos.
Come, O, Mercury, Swift Wing-ed Messenger.
Bringer of writing, rhetoric, subterfuge.
Protector of thieves, travelers, gamblers, charlatans.
Come, O, Mercury in wing-ed helmet and wing-ed sandals.
Descend in showers of gold.
Thy ever-shifting shapes to reveal:
The Radiant Child,
The Cunning Catamite,
The Mysterious Stranger Met at the Crossroads.
We call Thee by Thy three hidden names:
Oneiropompus.
Psychopompus.
Trismegistus.
Ruler of the Hidden Worlds,
Thy gold hand extend.
Thy gold favor impart.
Guide us golden through the Under—
Tom looked up, alert. While he had been reading, when he came to the three hidden names, he thought he heard breathless tittering. A sibilant undertone mixed in with the sound of his words as they echoed hollowly around the coffered dome. It was not quite sound, really; an impression of sound, a memory perhaps, Jean Genie giggling helplessly as he looped-de-loo.
He looked about him. It was the oddest sensation, but he thought the domed temple had brightened. And then he saw them, a dark item, lying so plainly, so inconspicuously beside one of the small iron braziers on the altar.
He picked up the dark glasses and watched the room distort through the thick prescription lens. A ticklish chill went down his spine as he made the connection. The student who had gone missing, the one who had vanished into thin air, had stood exactly where he was standing now.
Preview: Welcome to Echo Valley, Night Traveler.
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