Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (15 page)

Or, words having to make do for pulses, impulses, dartings, influences, star-stuff, star-winds, up she gets, that responsible elder Daughter, and says to Jupiter: “Father, isn’t it about time you gave a thought to poor humanity in its plight, poor Odysseus pining there in the arms of the enchantress and wishing only to go home. Haven’t you punished him enough?”

“I?” says her Father. “You are always so personal, my dear, so emotional. In the first place, I’m as bound by the cosmic harmonies as everyone else. And in the second place, it wasn’t me at all—surely you remember it was Neptune who hated him? He fell foul of the sea, that favourite of yours.”

Who was Neptune, when Homer lived and sung. Oh, the sea, of course … but then, as now, seas like all the other forces and elements had their sympathetic planets. Neptune the planet is a new discovery, or so we think. However that may be, Odysseus the brave wanderer was hated by some force to do with the sea, the ocean in its drugged condition, its moon-madness, always tagging along after the moon. It was the ocean Odysseus displeased, could not remain in harmony with, the ocean, our moon’s creature and slave.

Neptune had not been discovered, was discovered by us, modern man. So we know, quite definitely.

A hundred years or so ago (earth time), divines and historians and antiquarians of all kinds stated categorically that the world was created 4000 odd years ago, and anyone who did not go along with this thesis had a hard time of it, as the memoirs, biographies and histories of that period make so sadly clear. What a great step forward into sanity and true thinking has taken place in such a very short time: they’ll concede now that the age of the physical world is longer than that—oh, quite considerably, by many millions. A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a millionfold the age of the earth. But these same divines, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when it comes to the age of civilisations; they can’t even begin to concede that civilisations might have very old histories. The earth is allowed to be millions of millions of years old, but the birth of civilisation is still set somewhere between two thousand and four thousand
B.C
., depending on the bias of the archeological school and the definition of civilisation. We, now, are civilisation, we are the crown of humanity, the pinnacle to which all earlier evolution aimed, computer man is the thing, and possessed of wisdom those earlier barbarians did not have: from our heights man dwindles back to barbarism and beyond that to apehood. They say (or sing) that writing was first invented in the third millennium
B.C
.; agriculture is so old; mathematics so old; and astronomy is dated exactly like the rest, having become scientific at that moment it divorced itself from astrology and superstition. And everything is dated and known by things, fragments of things: the children of a society that is obsessed with possessions, objects, have to
think of previous civilisations in this way: slaves of their own artefacts, they know that the old barbarians were too.

Every time a new city is dug up, the boundaries (in time) are grudgingly shifted back—a couple of hundred years perhaps, half a millennium. On a plateau in Turkey part of a top layer of a city has been laid bare, which takes a high form of human living (one dare not say civilisation) back ten thousand years, and underneath that layer are many other layers, still unexcavated … but do the specialists say: We cannot make any pronouncements at all about human history, because our knowledge (or our guesses) is limited to the last site we have (partly) dug? No, no, not at all, what their present knowledge is—is knowledge, for this is how they always go on, it seems they have to, it is how their unfortunate brains are formed.

Well, it is at least possible that astronomers of ten thousand, or even twenty thousand, or even thirty thousand years ago were as clever as ours are; it is at least possible that the evidence for this lies easily available in easily excavated cities—available to people whose minds are less bound by the prejudices of our time.

We may suppose that ancient astronomers did not necessarily believe that the world was created on a certain day four thousand odd years before their own time, and by God in person. That they understood that words
had
to be used for their benefit—and understood what the words were symbols for.

That long before the Roman Gods and the Greek Gods and the Egyptian Gods and the Peruvian Gods and the Babylonian Gods, astronomers listened to Jupiter and his
family, or to Saturn, and knew that Thoth (however he was called then) served Amen the Father, (and here again comes in the idea of deputy, of substitution, for Thoth created the world with a word); and that there were names for planets, suns, stars, and crumbs, blobs, and droplets of earth and fire and water; and that their patterns and sounds and colours were understood, and tales were told of them, instructive of Times and Events—why not? For no one knows what lies under the sands of the world’s great deserts. No one knows how many times poor Earth has reeled under blows from comets, has lost or captured moons, has changed its air, its very nature. No one knows what has existed and has vanished beyond recovery, evidence for the number of times Man has understood and has forgotten again that his mind and flesh and life and movements are made of star stuff, sun stuff, planet stuff; that the Sun’s being is his, and what sort of events may be expected, because of the meshings of the planets—and how an intelligent husbanding of humanity’s resources may be effected based on the most skilled and sensitive of forecasting, by those whose minds are instruments to record the celestial dance.

“Father,” says Jupiter’s efficient and bossy daughter, “why don’t you send down Mercury to do something about that poor voyager, stranded there on his drugged island? He could ask Neptune to let up a bit. It’s not
fair
, you know. It’s not
just.”

“Well you see to it then, daughter,” says Jupiter, a busy man, Sun’s deputy, and with all those bounding children, tugged this way and that like a busy housewife and mother
with her large brood. “You just see what you can do, but mind you, don’t forget that We, Jupiter, are not the only influence on the traveller’s journey. No, it’s a harmony, it’s a pattern, bad and good, everything in turn, everything spiralling up—but yes, it’s the right moment for a visit to Mercury. It is the exact time—thanks for reminding me.”

“Timing is everything,” murmurs Minerva the Flashing-Eyed, bustling off to find Thoth, or Hermes, and finding him speeding around the sun in an orbit so dazzling and so lively and so gay and above all so many-sided and accomplished that it was hard to keep up with him.

“Ah,” says he, “it’s time again, is it? I was thinking it must be.”

“You sound reluctant,” said Minerva.

“I’ve just been visiting Venus.”

“Everyone always likes her best,” says Minerva, drily. “As everyone knows, she and I don’t get on. She’s so
silly—
that’s what I can’t stand. People say I’m jealous—not at all. It’s that damned stealthy dishonesty I can’t tolerate—that appalling hypocrisy. I’ve never been able to understand how it is that intelligent men can put up with it—but there you are. And I didn’t come to talk about Aphrodite. I’m here about poor Earth, poor traveller!”

“Your kind heart does you credit. But don’t forget, it was partly their fault.”

“Stealing the fire?”

“Of course. If that fellow hadn’t stolen the fire, then they would never have known what a terrible state they are in.”

“You, Mercury, God of letters and of music and of—in a word,
progress
, complaining about that! You wouldn’t want them still in that dark and primitive state, would you?”

“They don’t know how to use it.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“All I’m saying is that knowledge brings a penalty with it—of course, it
was
enterprising of him—what’s his name, Jason, Prometheus, that fellow—in his place I might have done the same. Eating the fruit when I was told not to …”

“Stealing the fire,” says Minerva, always with a tendency towards pedantry.

“Come now, don’t be so literal-minded, that’s to be like them,” says Mercury.

“And there’s the other thing,” says Minerva, rather stern—at her tone Mercury began to look irritated. For Minerva was also a bit of blue-stocking; her feeling of justice and fair play (regarded as childish by some of the Gods who regarded themselves as more advanced, philosophically) usually led her to the question of women’s rights, and men’s vanity.

“All
right,”
says Mercury, “understood.”

“But is it?” says she, severe. “His mother was an earth-woman, certainly, but who was his father? Well?”

“Oh don’t start, please,” says Mercury. “You really are a bore, you know, when you get on to that.”

“Justice,” she says. “Fair play. I’m my father’s daughter. And who was
his
father? With such blood, or rather, fire, in his veins, he was not to be expected to live like a mole in earth knowing that Light existed, and yet never reaching out after it.”

“There was reason to believe,” says Mercury, “that he was in it all the time. He walked in the Garden with God.”

“And then he ate what he should not have done. He stole the Apple, dear God of Thieves. And paid for it.”

“And in short everything is going as was expected, and according to plan, and with Our assistance.”

“Progress has to be seen to be made.”

“All right, I’m ready to leave when the Time is Ripe.”

“Are you quite sure of your mandate?”

“Dear Minerva! Is it any different this time?”

“It is always the same Message, of course …”

“Yes. That there is a Harmony and that if they wish to prosper they must keep in step and obey its Laws. Quite so.”

“But things are really very much worse this time. The stars in their courses, you know …”

“Fight on the side of Justice.”

“In the long run, yes. But what a very long run it must seem to them, poor things.”

“Partly through their own fault.”

“You sound very severe today. Sometimes we even seem to change roles a little? You must remember that you are God of Thieves because you inspire, if not provoke, curiosity and a desire for growth, in such actions as stealing fire or eating forbidden fruit or building towers that are intended to reach Heaven and the Gods. Punishable acts. Acts that have, in fact, been punished already.”

“Perhaps it isn’t always easy to take responsibility for our progeny? Is it, dear Minerva? For acts can be our children … tell me, is it easy for your Father, or for you, to recognise as kith and kin acts of justice that are in fact
the results of your influence—can in a sense be regarded as you, though in extension of course? Justice is Justice still, in the sentencing of a thief to prison—and the thief has stolen books because he has no money to buy them. In such a drama both you and I are represented—and there’s little doubt which of us appears more attractively? Are you sure you aren’t finding my celestial role rather more attractive than yours, and it is that which accounts for your concern—which I very much value, of course.”

“I should have known better,” says Minerva. “Only an idiot gets into an argument with the Master of Words. Well, I can’t really wish you an enjoyable visit, when things have never been so bad.”

“But one hopes, and indeed expects, that they have a potentiality for good in proportion to the bad—for that is how things tend to balance out.”

“The sort of remark that I usually make, if I may say so—and which tends to irritate you, dear Messenger. But you are right. This particular combination of planets will be really so very powerful—the equivalent of several centuries of evolution all in a decade or so. I don’t think I
am
exceeding my mandate if I say there
is
anxiety. After all, no one could say they have ever been distinguished by consistency or even ordinary common sense.”

“I am sure the anxiety is justified. But I expect there’ll be the usual few who will listen. It’s enough.”

“So we must hope, for everyone’s sake.”

“And if the worst comes to the worst, we can do without them. The Celestial Gardener will simply have to lop off that branch, and graft another.”

“Charmingly put! Almost, indeed, reassuring, put in such a way! But so much trouble and effort have already been put into that planet. Messengers have been sent again and again. The regard of Our Father (as of course it comes down to us through his Regent, my own Father) is surely expressed by the long history of Our concern? And there was that Covenant—the fact they continuously disregard it, is not enough reason to abandon them altogether.
After all, when all is said and done …”

“You are tactfully referring to that ancestry business again? Well, whatever the stark and dire nature of the shortly-to-be-expected celestial configurations, and whatever man’s backslidings, the fact that I am about to descend
again
(yes, I grant that I say that with a bit of a sigh) shows that our respective fathers are well aware of the situation. And more—that there is confidence in the outcome.”

“I’m glad I find you in such good heart.”

“Dear Minerva, do come out with it. You want to give me some good advice, is that it?”

“It’s just that—well, after all, there
are
a dozen or so of us, Jupiter’s children, and it
is
an enlarging family, and some of us are not unlike Earth, and as the oldest sister you must see that I have had so much experience and …”

“Dear, dear Minerva.”

“Oh well, I really didn’t mean to irritate you. I’ll leave you, then.”

“Yes, do, goodbye.”

And Minerva flies off.

As for Mercury the Messenger, he divides himself effortlessly into a dozen or so fragments, which fall gently
through the air on to Earth, and the Battalions of Progress are strengthened for the Fight.

Ah yes, all very whimsical. Yes, indeed, the contemporary mode is much to be preferred, thus: that Earth is due to receive a pattern of impulses from the planet nearest the Sun, that planet nearest on the arm of the spiral out from Sun. As a result, the Permanent Staff on Earth are reinforced and