02 _ Maltese Goddess, The (8 page)

“Who will speak for the Goddess? Try now, if you can, to set aside the kind of world we know today, and imagine yourself living in the world of six thousand years ago. To do so, you must leave behind you all those technological wonders we take for granted. Lights, cars, running water, telephones, television, computers. You must also forget all you know about the world around us: what causes the rain to fall, lightning to strike, the wind to howl, a bright orb to rise in the sky and then disappear into darkness, plants to grow, and most especially, for a child to be born and for people to die.

“Imagine yourself a fisherman, perhaps, or a sailor, setting out from your shelter in a cave or a mud-brick hut on the island we now call Sicily, to cast your nets on the sea, or ply your trade along the coast.

“As your small craft nears these islands, you catch your breath in amazement and perhaps in fear. For rising from this rocky terrain you see huge structures that you can scarcely believe are made by human hands, bigger and higher than anything you have seen before, maybe thirty feet or more in height, towering from the cliffs above you.

“‘You may wonder who built them, or even how they were constructed. But you do not ask yourself what they are used for, or to whom they are dedicated. Because when you and your ancestors before you try to explain the unexplainable, when you turn to a deity for succor, inspiration, or an explanation of the mysteries of nature around you, the god you turn to is female. She is the Great Goddess, giver of life, wielder of death, and for at least twenty-five thousand years and arguably much, much longer, She has provided the focus for human existence.”’

The speaker’s name was Anna Stanhope, Dr. Anna Stanhope, Sophia and Anthony had told me. Principal of a posh English girls’ school, she had taken a sabbatical to come to Malta to study the Neolithic Age on the islands. While here, she had taken it upon herself to enlighten Maltese students as to their own history, and had taken a part-time teaching assignment at the school Sophia attended. As she spoke, I sat in the darkness and tried to concentrate on her words.

But it was difficult work trying to keep my mind off the unsettling journey I’d taken to get here. Try as I might, I could not keep from thinking about the incident with the Great White Hunter, a man I’d regarded as something of a buffoon when I first laid eyes on him on the plane. Now his ridiculous outfit and pretensions of grandeur had taken on a more sinister cast. Could it have been he who killed the cat and tampered with the brakes? Did he know where I was staying? Had he followed me home from the airport? That seemed a ridiculous idea, and anyway, he’d been in no shape to do much of anything, and he’d been delayed in customs.

Furthermore, it couldn’t have been he who killed the cat. I’d seen him several times in Valletta, and I didn’t think he’d have had time to get to the house ahead of us. Did that mean he had an accomplice? The hooded man at the back of the yard?

The more I thought about it, the more difficult it was to assume that it was a coincidence that our paths had crossed so often. Could I recall seeing anyone else from the airplane since we’d landed? GWH’s original seatmate, his “lovely lady,” for example? The priest? My own seatmate, an executive with Renault, I think he’d said. No, not one of them. Only the Great White Hunter. Why? I told myself to stop thinking about it. I was driving myself crazy.

“Twenty-five thousand years! Since the end of the last great Ice Age! Not one of the great religions of today can claim a fraction of that! From the steppes of Russia, through the caves of France, all through what we now call Europe and beyond, humankind worshipped the Goddess. How do we know? For one reason, for every phallic symbol or male statue we find in these times, we find many, many more triangles or female statues. All over the ancient world, people buried their dead with tiny statues of the Goddess, they dyed the bones with ochre, the color of blood, symbol of life and of the Great Goddess.

“It is here in Malta that Her worship reached its peak, its most creative expression. Here the Goddess became the presiding deity of every aspect of life. At least forty temples, the oldest freestanding structures in the world, older than the Great Pyramid of Egypt, older than Stonehenge, were built to honor Her. Hagar Qim, Gigantija, Tarxien, names you know well.

“The tools that built these massive structures have been found. Remnants of the huts and cave dwellings of the workers and worshippers have been uncovered. What we do not find from that time period is archaeological evidence of weapons. What does this mean ? Quite simply that these people lived in peace with their neighbors, in harmony with nature, secure in the workings of the universe. That they knew their place, part of the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. That they understood the interrelationship of all things. That they saw life and all things of it as a circle, not a line.

“But even as She flourished here, Her worship was under threat elsewhere.
…”

Maybe he was following me. Maybe right this minute, as I sat in the darkness, he was watching me, or outside watching my car, I thought. Or perhaps he was back at the house doing something even more awful than before. Try to get a grip, I told myself. Your imagination is running away with you. Think this one through logically.

I tried to do that. Either it was a coincidence that our paths kept crossing, or it wasn’t. Either way, there had to be some rational explanation, a missing piece of information that would make it all make sense.

“What happened to the Goddess? Where did She go? Around about the fifth millennium b.c.e., a new group of people moved into the area which later became known as Europe. These people, some historians have called them Kurgans, brought a different belief system, a different religion. They worshipped what have come to be called sky gods, gods not of the Earth as the Goddess was, but rather deities, usually male and warlike, who ruled humankind from another place, a place without. Like Mount Olympus, for example, or the Elysian Fields, or more recently and perhaps closer to home, Heaven.

“Gradually these people, warlike like their gods, began to take over. In some cases, they lived in coexistence with the people of the Goddess, but by the time of the ascendancy of Greece, and even earlier, active attempts were made to stamp Her worship out, attempts that would ultimately be successful. Here in Malta, isolated in many ways from the rest of the Mediterranean world, the Goddess ruled supreme, omnipotent, long after Her worship had vanished elsewhere. Longer, but not forever. Suddenly, about 2500 B.C.B., the part of Malta’s history that belongs to the temple builders abruptly and mysteriously ends.”‘

Maybe, I thought, I needed to know more about the places where I had seen him, the places built by Gerolamo Cassar. I had the guidebook Anthony had chosen for me, and had already started reading it, in part because I thought he might quiz me later and I didn’t want to appear to be a total ignoramus where his country was concerned, but also because I was beginning to find the history of this tiny island absolutely fascinating. If I could do some study on the places Anthony had taken me to, I might find a connection. At the very least, it should take my mind off the morbid thoughts I was having about the Great White Hunter and his intentions toward me. I resolved to do that.

“While we may not know exactly what happened to the Goddess here in Malta, we can find hints as to what happened elsewhere in the stories, the epic poems, the mythology of those times. Many say myths are born of fantasy, but I believe they often have an historical basis, and that a careful reading will give us clues to the political and religious events of the day.

“And many tell of the replacement and subjugation of the Great Goddess and those who worshipped Her by ‘heroes’ of invading peoples. By the time we reach the world of classical Greece, we have an active attempt to rewrite the story of the Goddess to justify the new order as defined by the Greeks, and to denigrate the old. In the stories of that time, we have numerous examples of the conquest of centers of Goddess worship. We find these in the stories of Zeus and other members of that quarrelsome pantheon of Gods of Mount Olympus.

“Zeus’ rape of Europa, for example, probably tells us of an invasion of Crete, where the Goddess was worshipped for centuries. Think also of the story of Ariadne of Crete, whose name means holy or sacred, and who was probably an earth Goddess. She helped Theseus slay the dreaded Minotaur on his promise that he would carry her away with him. He did, but then he abandoned her on the island of Naxos. There are many stories of this kind
—
the beheading of Medusa by Perseus, Apollo’s attempted rape of Daphne
—
all representing invading peoples’ conquest and assimilation of centers of Goddess worship. The Goddess had been tamed.

“Oh, not gone entirely, of course. Tamed but not obliterated. She can be found, if you look for Her, but hidden, the dangerous other. In Greek mythology, She is demoted to mere demonhood: She is Charybdis, the bottomless whirlpool who drags sailors to their deaths, and Scylla, the six-headed sea monster whose lower half rests in a cave and who springs up to snatch hapless passersby. On Gozo, Malta’s sister isle, She is Calypso, the mesmerizing siren goddess who diverts Odysseus from his purpose for seven years. In the Old Testament She is Leviathan, and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Still later She is the dragon slain by St. George. And in our own times, we find vestiges of the Goddess, much diminished, in the Virgin Mary.

“What did we lose when we lost the Goddess? We lost our place in Nature, our sense of the sacred circle, of the Cosmic whole of existence. We underwent one of those major shifts of perception, a paradigm shift if you will, that came to govern how we saw everything. We began to see the universe in what has been called binary polarities, or opposites, and we thought one polarity better than the other. Like good and evil. Or male and female, from which came sexism. Black and white, from which came racism. We also moved from a belief in a relationship between all parts of creation to a belief that we were, like our gods in whose image we believed ourselves made, something apart from nature.

“From there it was a very small step to wanting to master Nature, and believing we could do so. Master? Perhaps conquer is a better word for it. And if Nature could be conquered, so could other people.

“And from there it was only a tiny step to Hiroshima.”
She paused.
“Who will speak for the Goddess?”
For several seconds after Dr. Stanhope stopped speaking, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop. Then she turned and abruptly left the stage. Pandemonium erupted. I looked over at my young charges. Sophia’s eyes were shining. Anthony looked thoughtful, his usual cheerful face altered by a somewhat puzzled frown. Everyone spoke at once. Some applauded, others left, offended, still others shouted outrage. Regardless of whether you agreed with her or not, Dr. Stanhope had made an impression.

The three of us made our way out of the noisy crowd and over to the car. The young boy was still there, smiling happily, and the car looked fine. That was one problem taken care of, but there was another.

“I got lost,” I said to Anthony.

“Yes,” he said. “Everyone new here does.”

“Can you direct me back?”

“Sure. How about we take Sophia home, and then go on to my place? Mr. Galea’s house isn’t far from there, and it’s easy to describe the route.”

“Thanks. Would you like to drive as far as your house?”

“Sure.” He grinned.

So that is what we did, and I got home without incident. None of us had much to say on the way, all lost in our own thoughts. Sophia gave me a hug at her place. I could see a man, her father presumably, silhouetted in the window waiting for her. Then Anthony gave me very careful directions from his home, seeing me off with a cheery wave.

As I carefully checked that all the doors and windows were locked, I thought how friendly and accommodating all the Maltese I’d met had been. Indeed, the first exception might be Martin Galea when he found out I hadn’t got the job done.

Then I thought about the foreigners I’d become acquainted with, in a manner of speaking. Dr. Anna Stanhope, who’d probably insulted half the population of Malta in the short space of an hour or two by implying their religion was responsible for most of the world’s ills, including the atomic bomb. To say nothing of her opinion of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Next the Great White Hunter. He obviously didn’t like me at all. Maybe even, I’d have to admit, he was trying to kill me. And for what reason I absolutely could not fathom. Surely not for stepping on his toe! Perhaps for some reason I did not understand, I was the Hunter’s prey.

And then there was the unknown. What had Dr. Stanhope called it? The dangerous other. The hooded figure at the back of the yard. Was he just a car parts thief? Somehow I didn’t think so.

All in all, I could only hope the Goddess was looking out for me.

FIVE

What do you think I am? A mere pawn in the battle for control of this sea called Mediterraneo? Your Hannibal, am I to admire his audacity in challenging Rome? Elephants in the Alps? Do you not hear it, the thump and groan of the Roman galley, the clang of the Roman legion? They are coming. Soon those among you who have ruled here, who have used My tiny island for your forays across the sea, you who have taken My people as slaves, will know what it is to be a slave. Go home. Your cities are in flames.
Delenda est Carthago.
Carthage must be destroyed!

Just when I thought nothing else could go wrong, Thursday Joseph went AWOL. Well, perhaps not exactly AWOL. Marissa probably knew where he was, but she wasn’t saying. Her pale, tired face and slightly teary eyes when she told me her husband wouldn’t be coming to work that day forestalled any questions I might have liked to ask.

To be fair, he’d seen to it there was lots of help. A handful of cousins stood by, ready to unload the furniture the minute it arrived. It wasn’t the same, though. I missed his quiet and somehow solid demeanor and perpetual air of calm. I even missed hearing him call me missus, a practice he persisted in, despite his wife’s having come to call me Lara with ease. Even Anthony did so when his parents, who would not have approved of such license, weren’t around. Still, Joseph would have been a definite asset on this rather harried of days, the one when, at last, the furniture was due to arrive.