The Burning Man

1

It was a night for whispers and memories, dreams and magic. A full moon hung over the purple mountains at the heart of the Peloponnese and the warm air was filled with the scent of cooling vegetation and olives. Occasionally the wind would bring the salty aroma of the sea.

‘You do not have to join us.’ Demetra’s face was still filled with the weight of her grief.

‘I didn’t know her,’ Ruth replied, ‘but I feel I want to be there.’

Demetra flopped onto the swing-seat on the farmhouse porch. ‘So strong for so long, for everyone relying on me, and tonight I feel as if I cannot go on.’

‘It’ll pass. We all feel like that sometimes. And if we didn’t, we wouldn’t know what it was like to feel on top.’ Ruth sat next to her.

‘You are strong. I see a quality in you … it is hard to define … but it has the colour blue.’ Demetra peered deeply into Ruth’s eyes, then looked away with a smile. ‘I am sorry. I have strange ways.’

‘I think you’re under a lot of pressure. It must be difficult, trying to manage this community, keep these women safe, while all those powerful people have been trying to close you down.’

‘It has been a difficult road. The world has not been safe for women for a long time. Three years after my grandmother walked the many miles from Athens to find a safe place, she was raped and murdered by a gang of men building a road. It was not about sex. It was about control. They did not like what she was doing here, and wanted to punish her for it. Eventually, my mother took over the running of our community. She died when I was twenty, beaten to death on the hillside here. Her murderer was never caught.’ The moonlight illuminated the defiance in her features. ‘I fear my own end will be the same. But if we do not stand and fight for what we believe in, then nothing will ever change. And change always demands sacrifice.’

Ruth’s owl flapped onto a perch on a tree in the courtyard. Demetra eyed it curiously, as if she could see its true nature.

‘I try to understand the patterns of life, but it makes so little sense. The world would be a better place without the brutality, and the hatred and suspicion, the desire for money and power. Everyone knows that, yet we embrace this sour existence. We are condemned prisoners cheering as we walk to the gallows.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Why do we want to live in a world without magic?’

‘The world can be changed. You’re doing your piece-’

‘How small and ineffectual it is. I could not save Roslyn. In the end, what have I achieved?’

As Demetra went to meet Lou, the American woman, who was approaching carrying a candle, she looked diminished somehow, worn down by grief and the demands of the life she had chosen. Ruth’s heart went out to her.

‘We’re ready,’ said Lou.

The women had gathered just beyond the courtyard, all dressed in white flowing dresses that glowed spectrally in the moonlight. There were twelve including Demetra, each carrying a candle. Hidden beneath a shroud, Roslyn lay on a wooden stretcher amongst them.

‘We welcome Ruth into our celebrations,’ Demetra said to them. ‘And this is a celebration, for when we move from this harsh world into a better place, it should be recognised with ecstasy.’

A large wine flask hung from each woman’s waist. In turn the women took a long draught and made a solemn speech.

‘My name is Alicia. My arm was broken in three places, but I survive. I wish my sister Roslyn well, for she is now beyond our pain.’

‘My name is Melantha. It took six months before I could look at myself in a mirror, but I survive. I wish my sister Roslyn well, for she is now beyond our pain.’

When the final woman had spoken, Demetra offered Ruth her own wine flask. ‘Drink deep. Experience the joy of detachment from this world.’

Ruth swallowed a mouthful of wine and was surprised by its potency. It was not like any wine she had ever tasted before.

Six of the larger women shouldered the stretcher and a slow procession set off up the hillside towards the olive groves. The flapping of Ruth’s owl disturbed her, but when she tried to see the cause of the commotion she noticed the lights of a vehicle making its way across the dark landscape in the direction of the compound. Though a commonplace sight, Ruth felt oddly uneasy.

The women began to sing a quiet, lilting song that contributed to the dreamlike atmosphere. As they walked, they took repeated draughts of wine, not for the flavour but to get drunk.

‘The Cult of Souls has been a part of our culture in Greece for thousands of years,’ Demetra began. ‘They called us a mystery religion, and one of the mysteries we taught was the strength of the true, primal being that lies at the heart of all of us. The real person, the rider of the mare that is our body.’

‘The soul,’ Ruth said.

Demetra smiled. ‘That word has too many connotations. It is a mystery at the heart of a mystery. Our beliefs underpinned, and preceded, the Orphic Mysteries, and Gnosticism, and even Christianity. Some trace it back to the Osiris Cult of ancient Egypt. They believed the spirit existed in three forms. The akh was the form the dead existed in when they travelled to the Underworld. The ba was a bird released at death that contained the individual’s personality and character. And the ka was a double that could be released in dreams, but was finally released at death.’

‘And you’re all part of this cult?’

‘No one is forced to join. There is no religious text, no rules and regulations. At its heart is one simple idea: that what is inside us is stronger than our bodies and can go on for ever. It is not about any religion, rather an idea, just an idea. And we believe that by freeing ourselves from the body, and the care and worry that come with it, we can access that deeper being and through it glimpse the true nature of Existence.’

Ruth smiled. ‘So get drunk-’

‘And dance, and sing, and leave the world behind.’

As they moved into the dense trees, Ruth had the strangest sensation that the women’s song was now accompanied by the playing of a flute, but it faded into the background whenever she strained to hear it clearly. Golden lights moved high in the branches, like will-o’-the-wisps, and Ruth realised it was the winged figures they had puzzled and argued over earlier.

‘There’s magic here,’ Ruth said firmly.

Demetra looked troubled. ‘I would so like to believe … Everything is changing so quickly that I no longer know what is true any more. It began yesterday. We noticed the olives were bigger and more bountiful than ever before. The wine was stronger. The water and soil tasted and smelled richer.’ She shook her head. ‘And now those … beings. Perhaps it is just a trick …’

As they progressed further into the trees, the scent of the vegetation on the warm night air became almost hallucinogenic; or perhaps it was simply the effect of the wine. Ruth felt a sense of well-being rise up from her belly; her fingers tingled; the hairs on her neck stood erect.

The sensation took the edge off her profound longing for Church. When she considered it, the sacrifice she had made had been almost physically painful, and the best she could do was to try to keep it out of her mind. That was the most difficult thing of all, for he was always there, on the edge of her thoughts.

The tiny flying figures swooped low, dipping in and out of the branches, following then leading the procession. Every now and then, Ruth thought she glimpsed movement away in the dark, neither beast nor man but something in-between, yet oddly unthreatening.

What is happening here? she asked herself.

Finally they came to a large clearing. Roslyn’s shrouded body was placed in the centre and then the women stripped off their white dresses unselfconsciously. Ruth felt no pressure to join them. She sat back against an olive tree and watched as they played music on an old CD player, and danced and drank and sang. The heady, languorous atmosphere was punctuated by moments of grief when they would start to cry softly, before the dance and the music took them away again on an upward spiral of euphoria.

This is very strange, Ruth thought to herself. I feel as if I’m here and not here at the same time.

The wine went straight to her head, and at some point she fell asleep. When she came round, she felt as if she was still in the throes of a dream. The women were lost to ecstasy, dancing in such a frenzied manner that they no longer appeared to know where they were or who they were. Their whirl reminded Ruth of film she had seen of voodoo rituals, wild limbs, thrashing hair, rolling eyes. They left trails in the air behind them, and in her detached state, Ruth had to accept she was as drunk as the rest of them.

Strangely she found she was lying on a bed of ivy that had not been there before, and when she squinted she thought she could make out snakes of blue fire like the ones she had seen earlier sinuously weaving across the ground.

‘Come to me.’

The voice was deep and resonant like the call of an animal and she couldn’t tell if it was real or in her head. She pulled herself to her feet and moved into the trees. A shape circled her, and another, and a third, but however much she looked she could only catch impressions, like the flash of a shadow on a summer wall.

Lost in her dream, Ruth hurried through the trees until she eventually stopped and turned, and was confronted by a face that made her black out for an instant. She saw red eyes and fur and horns, but the rest was lost to shadow.

‘Do you know my name?’ it said in the deep, throaty rumble she had heard before.

Ruth tried to see who was talking to her, but every time she focused her head swam. ‘No,’ she replied in a voice that appeared to be coming from somewhere else.

‘I am a lover of peace and a lover of madness. On the boundary between the living and the dead, you will find me. I am of the trees, and of fertility, and of destruction. I was ancient even when the Greeks worshipped me in the grove of Simila, strange and alien to them. In Mycenae, they knew me as DI-WO-NI-SO-JO, and many other names were mine in the time before that time. I am not the oldest thing, but I am one of them.’

‘What do you want with me?’ The god terrified and entranced her at the same time.

‘You are favoured by the oldest things — the mark of my kin is upon you.’ Ruth realised he was talking about the brand of Cernunnos she carried. ‘You have a part to play in the great, unfolding pattern. But first you must give in to the madness and the ecstasy to unleash your hidden self.’

Ruth tried to back away. It felt as if there was a field of electricity around the god that made her heart pound and her anxiety and excitement rise in equal measures.

‘Drink.’

A wine sack was thrust into her hands. Though she fought it, she was unable to resist and when the warm, powerfully intoxicating liquid ran down her throat it felt more like a drug than wine. Her vision fractured; colours shifted, glowing with heat and life; sounds boomed and echoed in unnatural ways. Music swelled around her and she felt instantly aroused.

‘What’s happening to me?’ Her hands went to her belly where a heat was rising.

‘See my little brother? He brings the fear of wild places and the joy of congress.’

Ruth caught sight of a distorted image, goat legs, human torso, animal horns, an erect phallus. ‘The horned one,’ she gasped, recalling her Craft. ‘Pan …’

Another figure slipped by furtively, sleek, seal-skinned, with a dangerous grin and glowing eyes, gone before she could comprehend more.

‘The oldest thing in the land,’ the god growled. ‘We three stand beside and behind you as the pattern unfolds. Know you this, and act accordingly.’

‘What am I supposed to do?’ Ruth asked desperately. ‘I don’t understand any of this!’

The god cocked his head, listening. ‘Too late now!’ he boomed. ‘Great danger approaches. Run. Run!’