Image: 'Lore' by Diana Fegan

THE LONG ROAD TO ANTISSA

by Eleuthera

More than two years have passed since I have walked upon African soil. Since I made that decision to follow my chosen tradition and to walk the paths of the Ancient Hellenes. And so I left my home, family and career to follow a dream. A vision of a time when the Old Gods reigned supreme within the world of human consciousness. Perhaps I thought it would be easier to live a Pagan life completely if I was surrounded by its past glory. In many ways I was wrong. It is not easy to be a Pagan in modern Greece. I was not prepared for the deep sorrow I would experience in seeing the desecration of the temples and encountering firsthand the effects of the ignorance of people who are threatened by the past. I did however learn a valuable lesson about what it means to be a Eurocentric Pagan living in the 21st century.

Greece is a living memory of the Old Religion. There is not enough available money in the world to begin to excavate what lies beneath the modern city streets and old stone houses. Merely a fraction of the past has been uncovered. Only selected sites in tourist destinations have received proper archaeological attention accompanied by lavish funding from the European Union and local government. Unfortunately the majority of the sites remain neglected and uncared for due to a lack of funds. Universities will often sponsor a single dig over the summer months and then perhaps years will pass before anyone will return to continue the long and arduous task of unearthing the past. Fortunately the repair and maintenance of underground sewerage and water mains facilitates a large portion of archaeological discoveries. No one really wants to dig in the ground here. Too many problems arise when you hit an ancient site. Many beautiful old houses and valuable properties stand vacant and overgrown. The reason is visible in the uprooted earth of the garden which some poor person perhaps attempted to landscape a decade ago. According to Hellenic Law once an ancient site is unearthed, local authorities must be called in immediately and all building activity must cease. This is a great law that really does have the best interests of preserving the past deep within its paper heart. It’s just such a pity that laws don’t have legs themselves. Every day I drive past beautiful houses, old hotels and empty lots that have been waiting for local authorities for goodness knows how long. They were derelict when I arrived over two years ago and there is no sign that anything is going to change in the future. Alas, no one can really be blamed, least of all civil servants! The problem is money. So people do the best they can here. They catalogue the contents of the ancient settlements, agora’s (market places) and temples, send them off to the local museum and leave the site intact for some unknown person in the distant unknown future to continue the work. Needless to say the future has not arrived for most sites yet. The future did arrive for our local temple of Apollon. They filled in the site with earth and left it unmarked. No one can even agree upon its exact location anymore.

Everyday I spend time thinking about what lies beneath our own house. We live on the outskirts of Mytilene in the old section of town that is situated two blocks from one of the largest Dionysian theatres in ancient Greece. The ruins of the old city wall in the forest behind us testify that the past is buried beneath my own feet too. The ancient theatre is a living tale of hope though. Hope in that if people just finish excavating and leave well enough alone afterwards, something may remain of Pagan sanctuary. The site is fenced off and is open to the public during the summer months until sunset. It is the most beautiful of all ancient sites that I have seen to date. It is almost always deserted and stands in an amphitheatre of old pine trees that create an ambience of solitude. But once upon a time it held the noise and awe of 15,000 people who had come to watch the latest tragedies and comedies of the Greater and Lesser Dionysia. There isn’t much of it left though. All the marble seats remained intact until the middle ages when they were carted off to bedeck the monstrosity of a medieval castle that still stands upon the foundation of an ancient fortification. Luckily the marble statues were left unharmed and they are now being held by local government until there are funds to rebuild the theatre. Only the theatre is mentioned though. It would be impossible to rebuild the Temple of Dionysos that stood on the hill beside the theatre. Well, not impossible but I doubt whether the God-fearing locals would even consider tearing down the small monastery that the Church built on top of the Temple to keep the ‘demons’ at bay. Hope is like a razor blade, isn’t it? Most would say that the opportunity of rebuilding the theatre would be a good thing. Not me! I know by now what will happen to it. Personally I hope they never get the money unless somehow I become a multi-millionaire which at least would mean that someone who cared for the Old Religion could have some control over what would happen.

I had my first taste of the Christian rebuilding of Pagan Temples some time ago. My husband, a native of Lesbos, told me excitedly of this temple of Aphrodite that was situated exactly halfway in between the towns of Kalloni and Mytilene. When we arrived we found that a large stone wall had been built around the Temple and a workman told us that we should return in a month after the renovations were complete. I was thrilled. How wonderful that someone would restore the ruins of what had once been the sacred and neutral territory of Aphrodite of Neighbourly Love. Apparently there were always problems between the local regions and hence all business between territories was conducted in the neutral and sacred territory of Aphrodite, Goddess of all types of Love. When we arrived back a month later, I was pleased to see the newly planted rose gardens that lined the wooden decks made to take the weight of many tourist feet. What I didn’t expect was the Christian icons and candles that stood on what was once the altar of our beloved Goddess. The eternal flame still burnt and the incense was fresh but it had not been lit in honour of Aphrodite. My husband explained that local priests did this at all the sites to ensure that the Old Gods would not return through their ancient conduits of energy. My rage burnt through me. I tried to accost the caretaker but she remained blissfully incomprehensible. I wrote my anger into the visitors’ book but it had no impact whatsoever. My husband, a veteran High Priest who is always as cool as a cucumber, looked on at my antics in bemused silence and calmly proceeded to do a small ritual to transmute the energy. We poured our libation upon the altar, but there was a wound in my heart and my tears were more plentiful than my libation. As we drove slowly home along the dirt road that led away from the temple, I knew that there must be a new way forward although at the time I could not think of how. This was a sacred temple of Neighbourly Love; how could I love the blasphemy, the injustice, the superstitions and the ignorance of village priests and their flocks? Why could I not bring myself to disturb their Christian paraphernalia and remove their makeshift altar myself? The questions spiralled unanswered through my mind. Little did I know that the answers would only be found in a bittersweet memory two years in the future. But for then Aphrodite was the Morning Star of War within me. I was blinded by my anger and Her Evening Star of Love twinkled just beyond the limits of my vision. And that was a part of the problem. My vision was limited. The same dream that had acted as a midwife to my new life had been offended by the realities of the world in which we all live. A world that is populated by the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms; each with its own agenda and its own set of priorities. Different species in a race to survive. My vision had been limited by my own expectations. Somewhere deep within my subconscious mind, I knew that a new vision had been shown to me that day but I could not see the forest for the trees.

And so began the war within me. Admittedly there was much to fuel the fire. In Athens we set off to explore the slopes of the Acropolis and the remains of the ancient city that still stand there. The Acropolis itself is a hopeless cause as you can’t get close enough to see anything properly. I took endless photographs of frescoes hoping to make out what on earth was being depicted. Hard to say from such a distance even with a zoom lens. The museum is remarkable but it’s hard to pay your respects when you’re standing in a queue of tourists. So off I went to sulk on the massive rock that Ares was said to sulk upon. The view seemed better from a distance. It was a ‘big picture’ kind of thing. We decided that perhaps the slopes would be better and so we traipsed in the midday heat to the Stoa of Attalos to buy a map. Four books later (there is no complete map sold in a single book) we emerged. I stood back to admire the Stoa. It is probably the finest restoration of an ancient building but then it literally did take a Rockefeller to do it. The search was on. I wanted to find the Eleusinion. For years and years I had dreamt of standing in the Eleusinion and the map pointed us to a site just beyond the South-East Stoa. I was so excited. This was after all the temple where the Greater Mysteries of Eleusis began with a torch lit procession from the Eleusinion in Athens to the temple in Eleusis. The path was uphill, leading back up the slopes of the Acropolis. We passed the derelict sanctuary of Hekate that was very clearly marked and after pouring a libation we continued up the road. We could see nothing, except for waist high grass and the inevitable crumbling columns scattering the various sites. Eventually we narrowed down the prospective sites it could be. This required maps and a big dollop of logical rationale as absolutely nothing there is marked. After much debate and guessing we decided on two possible sites and went closer to get a better look. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t looked so closely. The site lies directly against the fence that separates the cafes of the Plaka from the remains of the ancient city. It looked like a dumping ground. Cigarette butts, Coke cans and plastic bags of varying ages decorated this most sacred of sites. It looked like no one ever went there, not even to clean or weed. It was too obscure a site to interest tourists and thus had been left to become a rubbish dump for those passing by. There was even graffiti on some of the columns. The rage rose up within me again and I complained to anyone who would listen for months afterwards. There wasn’t much I could do personally as I live a 12 hour ferry trip away from Athens but to my delight I learnt there are Pagans in Athens who have taken on this war too. But it’s futile. There are too many wars and too few soldiers. Even a modern warrior must prioritise their battles.

You may have seen one the battles of the Hellenic Pagan War on television earlier this year. It caught the interest of the international press and was reported on CNN as the incident took place in a high profile tourist attraction in Athens. Firstly let me tell you a little about Hellenic Pagans. They do not call themselves Pagan but ‘Ethnic’ and they do not practice Witchcraft. They are purely worshippers of the Gods of their Forefathers. Their ceremonies are based upon ancient practices and involve no casting of circles or evocation of elements. And more than anything they want the right to be able to hold their ceremonies in their ancestral temples. Every summer solstice hundreds of Ethnic Hellenes travel to the slopes of Mount Olympos to hold ceremonies, network and perform sacred drama. In early 2007 they wrote to local authorities to request permission to perform a ceremony within the remains of the temple of the Olympian Zeus. Permission was granted but when they arrived there, access was denied to them by the guards on duty. The argument was simple. It is an archaeological site and a huge tourist attraction in Athens. After much public dispute an agreement was reached but they were forced to leave their swords, banners, shields and ritual items outside of the temple. The ceremony then took place in between the amazed swarm of tourists and television cameras. What a furore ensued! For the first time they were invited onto a well known television talk show. So were a Greek Orthodox Priest and his tribe of little old ladies and indignant old men. Most of the Ethnic Hellenes are academics involved with the research and preservation of ancient material and sites. An academic does not stand a chance against the blind and angry ignorance of a herd of people who prefer to believe that the past was merely the imagination of their ‘child-like’ ancestors. The poor Ethnic Hellenes got screamed at and shouted down until eventually they just sat there quietly and allowed the drama to unfold around them. People walked off the set, the ‘Papas’ (Priest) almost had an apoplexy and the Pagans just sat there calmly taking it all. They deserve a commendation for their patience and decorum in the face of a tribal fear that recalls the mob of pitch-fork bearing peasants of the middle ages.

And that was perhaps the first great impact of the lesson of anger towards injustice that I been learning since I arrived in fair Hellas. When there is a battle to fight, don’t enter in anger. Anger strips you of your dignity and clouds your judgement. Calmness in the face of adversity will ensure that you are never completely defeated. Defeat comes only when you surrender your dignity. And so the Ethnic Hellenes may not have won the argument but they certainly emerged with their honour intact. They are after all fighting a righteous war: the right of Pagans to worship in the temples of their Gods.

This righteous war was indeed fuel for my inner fire and each day I stood upon my terrace looking over the medieval castle in the distance. Fuming at the loss of the marble seats from the Dionysian Theatre and scanning the ruins for a sign of the temples of Demetra and Cybele that are supposedly covered up somewhere in its midst. Each spring the poppies grow in between the stones of the castle and cover the grass like a pool of blood. Like the blood of Adonis pooled upon the altar of Cybele. Only the castle stood in my way. That emblem of man’s power and dominion over the earth and its people. It became like a subconscious allegory, a symbol of all that stood in the way of my vision. So close and yet so far. Until the day that I remembered the first sacred site that I visited when I arrived on the island. It was the place where the ancient town of Antissa once stood. And now I understand that the long road to Antissa is a modern Pagan allegory that shows us a way forward through the minefield of religious differences.

Antissa was one of the central reasons that I was so happy to relocate to the island of Lesbos and not to Athens which was my original choice. This was the island of Sappho and home to Hieronymos and Hellanikos who wrote the famed Orphic Rhapsodies but more importantly to me, it was the mythical place where the head and lyre of Orpheus washed up upon the shore after his dismemberment. The site of this mythologem is Antissa; the sunken city. The site of ancient Antissa lies off the beaten path and completely submerged from an earthquake which devastated the area centuries ago. Antissa just lies there, untouched, in the bosom of the Aegean Sea and the care of the Great Sea God Poseidon. Who know what wonders the sunken city holds. Local legends say the temple that housed the Head and the Lyre of Orpheus lay buried in the depths. This is one of the sites that still await archaeological attention due to the expense of an underwater excavation. This is the first aspect of the modern Pagan allegory. There is usually some dream, some vision that lies submerged within the deep waters of the mind, just awaiting the voyage of discovery. When we become Pagan we begin this path of inner exploration. Yet all the time there is this distant goal that glimmers before us. Seemingly that waits for us at the end of the path. In some cases it is the realisation of dreams while in other cases it’s the individual emergence of the sunken city of pure potential. In many cases it is simply wish fulfilment in a most Freudian manner. This is our personal myth of which all the events of our lives are merely parts of the tale. And so we set off on the long road to Antissa and believe me, there is no highway to Antissa. Each tiny, bumpy, single-lane country road has been cut according to the lay of the land. Nature rules the world of man completely. To believe otherwise is an illusion. There are no shortcuts to Antissa. We learn this lesson too as Pagans. There is no fast road upon the path of initiation. You may of course travel as fast as you like upon the path but the winding curved nature of the roads and the sheer drop of the cliff at your side will make the journey hazardous. The road to Antissa also has no shoulders to protect you from rapid and fatal descent. Isn’t this true of a Pagan path too? We are taught to take responsibility for our own actions and are made to understand that the state of our lives is a consequence of our own choices. A Pagan makes no excuses. No, the devil didn’t make her do it, she chose to do it all on her own. No, his mother didn’t hold him back; he was just too lazy to do anything for himself. There are also very few people we can trust upon the path. It’s a treacherous road but that’s understandable when survival is the central fuel and everyone believes they are heading to different destinations. Each person is on their own journey and that means a whole lot of hidden agendas and differing priorities. But all roads are one, are they not?

The excursion takes far longer than the distance would suggest. The road winds endlessly over the mountains and through the valleys. Past small villages clinging to steep inclines. The landscape changes like a living kaleidoscope. Past towns, forests, mountains, farms, plains and flat barren lands with scattered outcrops of scrub grass. It’s a motion picture of any and every country, regardless of its name and its location. Passing by, you realise that all places are the same place really. It’s only the magnitude of any particular type of landscape that changes from country to country. In the words of William Blake, you really can find a world in a grain of sand. And isn’t that Divine Justice? That it’s really all the same anyway, it’s just the greed level that differs. Learning to make a lot from a little is another Pagan lesson. As do we learn that if we persevere on the path that leads through this kaleidoscope of the multiverse, we will reach our destination. Perseverance is the key. But like the road to Antissa, the paths carved and tarred by others will only serve to deliver us closer to our purpose. At some point in our journeys we must leave the beaten path and follow the faded signs that lead to the sunken city. Our own personal Atlantis. It’s quite amazing really. As you see the sign and turn off the nicely tarred road onto the second worst dirt road you have encountered, a sense of elation stirs within you. You can see the sea perhaps a kilometre away. You think you have arrived but of course you are wrong. Be honest, Pagans, how many times have you celebrated your arrival at a particular point only to realise that appearances are deceiving? This is so like initiation. Everyone thinks when some coven with a lineage finally initiates them that the great secrets protected in that two hundred and fifty year old mouldy Book of Shadows will fall open and enlighten them instantly. Everything they want will be theirs. And if they don’t get it…. Well, it’s a conspiracy. It’s like the story of the seeker who went through all these initiation ceremonies with a well known order, only to discover what one would learn in a 10th grade science class. It’s like Crowley and the Hebrew Alphabet. Go to Yeshiva next time! We all have these mini-milestones. These signposts along the way, hammered in by the Trickster himself, just to make people starry eyed and awestruck by some silly old façade that someone bought second-hand from a B grade fantasy movie. This is the age old Pagan lesson of glamour. It’s all image, darling, and seriously there are still lots of kilometres of this dirt road winding off in the opposite direction to where we think we want to go. In other words that old Pagan philosopher Socrates was right. We may only begin to learn when we recognise just how much we don’t know and then the paradox continues because the more we learn the more we know how much we don’t know. It’s as endless as this long road to Antissa. But you find things to amuse yourself as you go along your merry way. Like the pretty flowers in a nearby meadow, the blue, blue sky above your head, the shape of the clouds floating in the distance or the gnarled trunk of a 200 year old olive tree. This is life, never quite getting to where you want to be, but living none the less and trying your utmost to make the best of it. And finally the road turns right and begins to swallow up the last kilometre to the sea. The anticipation feels like the night before every great day you’ve ever known and then you see it. Finally you arrive at your destination, your goal and the end of the long, long road upon which you have travelled. And there it is. The little tavern that is still closed from the winter months and to the left the inevitable well groomed, deserted church. It hardly seems like anything at first glance. The sea appears to be filled with rocks and the only sign that you have arrived at the site of Ancient Antissa is a few carved columns that are strewn in the backyard of the empty church. This is a lesson all in itself. Nature hides her greatest secrets beneath the most innocuous of surfaces. It’s really quite obvious and elementary in the end I’m sure. But none the less we cling to our illusions of complexity and the sea stretches invitingly out before our eager eyes; ever inviting scrutiny. I think it’s a challenge tailor made for the most stubborn among us. I didn’t recognise it as such and waded in anyway. It’s so typical of certain types of people to believe that they can accomplish what others before them could not do. Full of verve and fire, living each day like it’s a moon landing. Armed only with our eager spirit but ignoring the advice of elders, not learning from past mistakes or even bothering to gather all the information we possibly can before we embark on any quest. We always think we know better and we jump in unprepared and despite the odds stacked against us. The sea bed is covered by huge boulders and fragments of stone. The water is freezing. My husband dipped a toe in its murky depths and after declaring it too cold for body contact retreated to the shade of the church to watch my visit to the sunken city from a safe distance. This is a true allegory for entering the deep waters of the soul. We may have travelling companions that share our journey but our dream is always a solitary destination. No two visions are identical. I know now that this was the vision that was offered to me that day at the temple of Aphrodite of Neighbourly Love. This was the answer to all the questions that had burnt within me and it was the healing salve for the angry wound that my violent reaction had caused that day. The Christian Priest was merely fulfilling his vision by laying his sacred items upon the heathen altar as was the Pagan Priest fulfilling his vision by gently and quietly calling the energy of the Great Goddess back into her sacred precinct. Both visions participated in the act of Brotherly Love. Both Priests acted out of love for their visions of God and neither vision was wrong. It only teaches the lesson of how neighbourly love may only be achieved through learning to tolerate the differences between our individual dreams of how the world should be. This was the teaching of Aphrodite of Brotherly Love and it is a great path forward for Pagans living in the 21st Century. Perhaps, it is the only path if we wish to maintain our dignity and preserve our sense of sanctuary simultaneously.

And so I waded into the waters that covered Antissa. The first thirty metres were slow and arduous. Even with rubber soled sandals, each step either landed between rocks or slid on the slimy stone beneath my feet. It was too shallow to swim and too covered in algae and seaweed to see what part of the city ruins I stood upon. I have no idea how far into the sea the ruins spread. After what seemed like an eternity I finally stumbled into waist height water. It only became more difficult to move forward and then I felt it; a searing pain in my thigh. Sometimes we not only become blinded by our anger but also by our romanticised perspectives. We throw caution to the wind as innocently as a butterfly floating through the forest. Anyone with even a small amount of sense would have known that all kinds of creatures lurk in rocky sea beds. The ancient ruins had inhabitants: jellyfish! Somehow I waded back out of the water and half crawled to the shade of the church where my husband sat engaged in conversation with a lone Canadian tourist. I sat silently, miserably clutching my thigh and listened to the Canadian ramble on about how all diving gear has been banned in the area to stop people looting the sunken city. Happily he informed us of a much safer route into the deeper waters than the one I had gleefully ran into. But I was in no mood for further exploration and painfully considered the long road to Antissa that would lead us home again. Isn’t it funny how better alternatives only become available after we have chosen the wrong route? It must be the way it is meant to be. Or maybe we can avoid these wrong turns by being more patient. More deliberate about how we proceed through life and more cautious about how we engage our energy in the world around us. The easiest way of course is to listen to the advice of those that have lived upon this earth before we arrived. I know now that they do indeed know better. Yes, they are the past and the past is gone. It is the ground beneath our feet that supports and offers a firm foundation for every step we take. The temples are no longer ours. They are just pieces of stone owned by the government. The hallowed earth has been desecrated by the passage of time and the natural order of things. Humanity is divided by war, famine, greed and differences of opinion. We are not humane at all. Yet we seek to control the earth and our fellow men through the illusion of knowledge. Even though we know deep down inside that Nature is like Antissa. She does not yield her secrets easily. So how do Pagans find their spiritual home in this divided and strife torn world? Is political war the answer? Many Pagans believe it is. Personally I don’t agree anymore. Yet practising tolerance does not mean that we will be tolerated or understood or accepted. For me the only way forward is to understand that Pagan spirituality is a living religion. It lives within each one of us. We have no need for temples or sacred sites. The earth and the starry skies are the living icons of our Gods and anywhere we whisper our gratitude and devotion becomes a sacred place. And each spring I will look at the poppies growing in the stones of the castle, the blood of Adonis that has fallen upon the body of the Great Goddess and I will try to forget the marble seats and the lost temples. Instead I will remember Antissa and all the lessons it taught me. Sometimes the past is best left unearthed. Humanity is not ready to embrace its sunken city and the memories of everything we have ever been. I will also remember that no vision is more than just a place we stop to explore on the long road home.

And when things get tough as they inevitably will. When I lose sight of the forest and focus once more upon the trees. I will remember that regardless of how wrong I was, I was also right to make this journey. It is so awesome to stand beneath the Midnight Sun of Hellas. The Old Gods have never left their beloved Greece. The landscape and natural features embody and personify the myths beyond what my imagination could have summoned from a Johannesburg suburb. The light has a different quality here as does the earth itself. These are the bright arrows that are shot from afar by the bow of Apollo, healing and harming in perfect harmony. The curved silhouette that the mountains cut against the sky do indeed call to mind an impression of a large breasted, wide hipped Great Mother stretched out upon the earth. The calm yet playful nature of the sea evokes images of Nereids that gently float by your side and splash you when you least expect it. The wrath of Poseidon, the earth shaker, is still felt in the seismic activity deep within the seas. And the forests! Thousands and thousands of acres of mountainous forests that frame the narrow country roads as far as the eye can see. The distant sound of tinkling goat bells bears witness to the eternal presence of a frolicking Pan. It is poetry in motion. And these living things will be enough to warm me when I face the winter of other people’s discontent. I will learn to be satisfied with tending and loving my own sweet vines of life and learn to leave the grapes of wrath for those who do not know the difference or care about the consequences.