initiation, what details I could tell a Priestess, for all these things were highly secret, you know, but I confirmed for her that I had been reborn in the rites.
All the stored-up weakness in me was cut loose in a flood.
Then I lay down my guilt. I confessed that I had, early on, left the Cult of Isis, that in recent years, I had walked only in the public processions to the sea, when the goddess was carried to the shore to bless the ships. Isis, the goddess of Navigation. I had not lived a life of devotion.
I had done nothing when the Priests of Isis were crucified, except speak out with many others behind the Emperor’s back. There had been a solidarity between me and those Romans who thought Tiberius was a monster, but we had not raised our voices in defense of Isis. My Father had told me to remain silent So I had. This was the same Father who had told me to live.
I turned over and slipped down off this couch and I lay on the tiled floor. I don’t know why. I pressed my cheek to the cold tile. I liked the coldness against my face. I was in a state of madness, but not an uncontrollable state. I lay staring.
I knew one thing. I wanted to get out of this Temple! I didn’t like it. No, this had been a very bad idea.
I hated myself suddenly for having become so vulnerable to this woman, whatever sort she was, and the atmosphere of the blood dreams beckoned to me.
I opened my eyes. The Priestess bent over me. I saw the weeping Queen of my nightmares. I turned away and shut my eyes.
“Be at peace,” she said in her calculated and perfected voice. “You did nothing wrong,” said the Priestess.
It seemed preposterous that such a voice should issue from such a painted face and form, but the voice was definite.
“First,” the Priestess said, “you must understand that Mother Isis forgives anything. She is the Mother of Mercy.” Then she said, “You have been more fully initiated by your description than most here or anywhere. You made a long fast. You bathed in the sacred blood of the bull. You must have drunk the potion. You dreamed and saw yourself reborn.”
“Yes,” I said, trying to revive the old ecstasy, the priceless gift of belief in something. “Yes. I saw the stars and great fields of flowers, such fields . . . ”
It was no good. I was scared of this woman and I wanted to get out of mere. I’d go home and confess all this to Flavius and make him let me weep on his shoulder.
“I am not pious by nature,” I confessed. “I was young. I loved the free women who went there, the women who slept with whom they chose, the whores of Rome, the keepers of the houses of pleasure, I liked women who thought for themselves, and followed me goings-on of me Empire.”
“You can enjoy such company here as well,” said the Priestess, without batting an eye. “And don’t fear that your old ties to the Temple caused your downfall in Rome. We have plenty of news to confirm that the highborn were not persecuted by Tiberius when he destroyed the Temple. It is always the poor who suffer: the street whore and the simple weaver, the hairdresser, the bricklayer. No noble family was persecuted in the name of Isis. You know that. Some women fled to Alexandria because they would not give up the worship, but they were never in danger.”
The dreams approached. “Oh, Mother of God,” I whispered.
The Priestess went on talking.
“You, like Mother Isis, have been the victim of tragedy. And you, like Mother Isis, must take strength and walk alone, as Isis did when her husband, Osiris, was skin. Who helped her when she searched all over Egypt for the body of her murdered husband, Osiris? She walked alone. She is the greatest of the goddesses. When she recovered the body of her husband, Osiris, and could find no organ of generation for him with which she might be impregnated, she drew the semen right from his spirit. Thus, the god Horus was born of a woman and a god. It was the power of Isis who drew the spirit from the dead man. It is Isis who tricked the god Ra into revealing his name.”
That was the old tale all right.
I looked away from the Priestess. I was unable to look