The usual orgy

[Night, a hillside. Chants and cries of joy in the distant background; an aging, weathered male voice speaks in the foreground]

Listen to them down there. It’s a bloody disgrace, that’s what it is. This is the third…no, wait, it must be the fourth year, now. Four years in a row these people have made it their business to…infest…my hillside with their doings, their goings on. Perhaps they think I haven’t noticed. Or perhaps they think I don’t mind, that I’m somehow accommodating of this…incursion. “It’s only that old hermit in his cave!” they’ll be telling each other. “He hardly ever comes down, anyway.” “There’s only one of him, there’s a whole band of us!” And there is, there really is a whole band of them. My eyes and ears are still sharp enough, I can tell what’s happening. There’s more of them this winter than last, just like the winter before that. A small but palpable increase, year on year. Each time a little louder, a little bolder in their rituals. They come at night, they come covered, and in secret, and they come to this hillside of mine.

Alright, Hypatos, collect yourself now. Exercise patience; summon inner calm. Solitude tests a man’s virtue, that’s why you’re here after all. You haven’t survived fifteen years of this place – its drenching winters, teeming high summers, meagre roots and berries year round, and its unrelenting stoniness under head, foot and elbow – without knowing how to recover your perspective. This isn’t, for one thing, your hillside. You may be the only one living here, but it’s consecrate: a place given up to the divinity – to the One and Indivisible. You felt it so fifteen years ago, when you first came here. It’s no less so now. You’ve no business making it a possession, a ‘worldly good’. That’s a trap, a trick of the mind – one more dangerous than ever after the long years of privation. And for another thing, these people down there – they may have no conception of religion as you do, but they’re worshippers in their own way, there will be something sacred to them, I don’t doubt…

Just the same, I get a chill along my backbone when I hear them. All that chanting and weeping, all those throaty supplications. Worst of all is that ceaseless dark murmuring that drifts up the hillside and leaves its echoes on my cave walls. By all that’s holy, it’s everything I left Rome to get away from! What is it about our cities that makes them a spawning ground for these cults? Must be the cramped streets, all that writhing together of bodies. Far from giving the masses one mind, one shared and dignified perspective, it drives them to latch onto every novelty, every frantic little distraction that appears around the corner. Not that there’s anything genuinely new in these ‘religions’, of course. Just the offcuts and leavings of last generation’s idols. A pair of stark-staring eyes here, some stiffly-upraised arms there. The breasts of a goddess. A tail and a forked tongue. An impossibly elongated phallus. All jumbled together by restive hands. And their ideas, their beliefs? No better. A patchwork of half-garbled litanies. Such things are unwholesome in the truest sense of the word. All religions of the flesh are unwholesome. And what’s unfurling below me is a religion of the flesh if ever I knew one.

It’s dark enough now. I can creep out to the mouth of the cave, see what they’re up to. Yes, the fires are lit and their faces are uncovering, one by one. It’s just as I remember from last year. Women, so many women. More, even, than the men, I’d wager. Now they embrace, they kiss, male and female freely together. The brazenness of them! Look at their faces, aglow with ecstasy. All preludes to the usual orgy, I’ve no doubt. It’s not good for me to stay and watch. What comes in by way of the eyes can have a dreadful power over the soul. Still, perhaps for just a little longer. If only to confirm my suspicions. I can’t hear them but I can see their lips form the words. Yes, there can be little doubt: she ‘brothers’ him, he ‘sisters’ her, and she ‘sisters’ another in her turn. It’s that incest cult, alright, the one that was spreading before I left Rome. No wonder they hide out here in the wilderness to… prosecute their rites. Imagine taking pleasure from such a thing! Imagine resorting to this to sharpen the edge of your sexual appetite! To come at one another in some fantasy of breaking the ultimate taboo. Once the stuff of Egyptian pharaohs, it’s now taken up by the credulous masses and turned into a game, a sinister game that begins and ends in one another’s bodies. And they’re led on by priests who have nothing better to do than dupe a half-schooled generation…

There’s one of them now. Not that he makes it obvious with any fancy robes: they’re too crafty for that. But the way the others approach him, gather round. I’ve seen this sort of thing before. A cult drawn from the dregs of society has no money for temples or altars. So their priests exert a kind of inhuman charm that draws the people to them. Aha, there we go! From behind his cloak he pulls a goblet – just like magic! – and in it throws a thick draught of wine, mixed no doubt with some unholy concoction to spur their debaucheries on. Reprehensible! [Raising his voice] Well I haven’t a drink in fifteen years, mate, but I still wouldn’t touch what you’re serving! [Tense pause] Did they hear me? No one looked up. All too absorbed in their nasty rituals, I don’t doubt. Yes, yes, so it begins. They kneel, they drink, they kiss the hem, they roll up their eyes, one after another, then pass on. Never before have I seen so many women, now on their knees, now on all fours, now on their knees again… [Trails off wistfully]

Maybe I’ve seen all I should for one night. Certainly all that’s healthy. One last look, though, to be sure if it’s that same idol they always gather round, when their rites begin to climax. Not the head of a donkey, as was whispered in Rome, or even the stiff cock of their highest priest. But something that defies my understanding. Yes! There it is now! Up against the rocks. Just a stick…bisected by another stick… [Pause] What does a cult of the flesh find in such a thing? You can’t roast children or deflower virgins on it. But its very starkness seems like a marker, a boundary stone… a warning. So take it as a warning, Hypatos. Go back to your cave. Leave them be and they’ll leave you be. They are many and you are one, and things of the body should never be tangled up with things of the soul.