Amelia: Reading from The Gates of Horn and Ivory - Life and Prophecy

Those blessed with the gift of prophecy form a small but very special community.

They instinctively seek each other’s presence, they are drawn to those who are similarly blessed.

If they are mortal, they become oracles and seers whose wisdom is sought and revered, and people travel from far away to seek their counsel. They are the living vessels of the gods, who speak through them in cryptic messages, which are only understood in retrospect.

It’s not that the gods were trying to make their teachings obscure, or that they even cared if they were. People can’t form concepts about things that don’t yet exist.

Immortal prophets like Apollo, Phoebe, the Moirae, doled their wisdom onto the world below, speaking through their official oracles, like those of Delphi, or Cumae, who were famous and revered and to whom people dedicated temples and compounds, theaters and springs.

And then there were the quiet visionaries, who saw a lot but kept it to themselves, not wanting to put any more strain on the greater order of things than it was already under, and staying out of the affairs of the mortals, whose misinterpretations of godly wisdom were a constant source of disaster and false hope.

Persephone had gained enough wisdom in Hades to understand that not all the figments of the mind were meant to be taken at face value, and only a precious few were meant as prophecy.

The denizens of the world beyond our sights weren’t any more good or bad than the dwellers of the physical one. Their pranks and straight out lies were just as self-serving, only in an unfamiliar context.

It was another realm, out of sight but just as real as the world of the senses, whose artifacts occasionally slipped into our range of perception to surprise and awe us, its bewildered inhabitants.

Just because a vision, or a dream, had come from beyond, that doesn’t make it trustworthy.

Future truths like to hide behind shiny objects, just like present ones, and cryptic prophecy can suddenly flip on its head in relationship with what actually happens, to reveal it meant the exact opposite of what was hoped.

And yet, people seek to see into the future, and go to great lengths to receive the oracular wisdom, because they hope the latter reveals the will of the gods.

Persephone knew for a fact the gods rarely cared, most of them, anyway.

Between the guidance of her mentor, Hecate, and of her mother, she wasn’t a stranger to having visions and speaking in tongues, even if she often second guessed her visions, and those were the prophecies that always came true.

Olympus had a twisted sense of humor about that.

She had learned to tame the properties of herbs to assist her in her dreams and travels into the imaginary, and she often visited the bizarre realms outside of reality with no specific question in mind, just to enjoy their eerie beauty.

They had mountains and streams, plants and animals, and their own people, and everything looked just like real life there, only to flip on her without warning, throwing strange details at her, details that didn’t fit the picture and had no connection with the story, as if a higher wisdom was trying to pierce through the veil of the known, but didn’t know how to relate to reason, so it spoke in weird images and sensations hard to describe.

Persephone had turned to art in the hope of making some sense of this unfamiliar information, which was too arcane for words, and often a bit scary.

The unknown can be a lot scarier than Tartarus, especially if you’re the queen of and can command the latter.

That was one of the first things Hecate had taught her: not to assume she knows what reality is truly like, because in this uncharted territory her privilege, her title, even her immortality, meant nothing.

Only people who fake these travels outside of reality will insist they can control them. You don’t control the world of dreams anymore than you do the real one. It’s a place you visit, where you go to see things that are as foreign to your own projections as other people’s thoughts. You are a traveler, graciously afforded safe passage, as long as you don’t flaunt the rules, an uninvolved observer, nothing more. You are there to learn what the outside of reality has created to tell you.

Time moved differently in those visions, and more than once Persephone was awakened from her reverie to notice hours had passed in what she thought were mere minutes, or stranger still, she found herself thrown back into the past, before the time she had entered her vision.

People use prophecy exclusively to divine what the future has in hold for them, but the real visions are not about that at all: they are windows into another world, whose rules we find very hard to understand, and only manage to do so after the fact.

Hades approached her, careful not to disturb her vision, and only spoke when she felt his presence and turned around to face him, smiling.

“Did you see anything interesting?” He asked, joking.

“I suppose I won’t know that for a while,” Persephone replied. “I see fragments, flashes of things, insignificant details. I get forebodings of doom and sudden reassurance, but I never see the full picture. What good is it to see things you can’t understand?”

“Maybe we’re not supposed to peek through that veil,” he commented. “Maybe there is no set future, the figments of the Land of Dreams are constantly in battle with each other, and what we experience as our future are the winners. Maybe what you just saw in your vision was hanging onto a leaf in the Elm of False Dreams only moments ago.”

“But where do you think these figments are coming from? They always feel like they emerge from nothing, but things, feelings, concepts, they can’t be made from nothing. Their source must be elsewhere, in a place we can’t see. Doesn’t it bother you? That we can’t see past that?” She asked Hades suddenly. “I mean, we’re supposed to be omniscient and all powerful.”

“Where did you get that idea?” Hades retorted. “We’re making things up as we go, just like mortals do. We just have a longer time frame for our mistakes.”

“What is the meaning of all this, then? It can’t be all about sacrifices and offerings, can it? There doesn’t seem to be any reason to take one path instead of another. Everything looks equal in value and only interpretable in retrospect, for all the good that does. Last night I had a vision of a beautiful golden chalice I’d never seen before and this morning it was waiting for me in the middle of the table in the palace hall. What does that mean, my lord?”

Persephone had great regard for her beloved’s wisdom and often sought his counsel when things got too thorny to tease apart alone.

He had seen a lot, and experienced a lot, and he often had insights into things she never would have guessed. She always called him lord under such circumstances, and Hades was pretty sure she wasn’t even aware of it, a detail he found endlessly entertaining.

“Persephone, you’re thinking too much,” he countered, amused. “Life here is reasonably pleasant, is it not? Why don’t we put that in the not broken category and enjoy it? Forget about the golden chalice: maybe it was a gift from Minos. He’s always trying to get on our good side.”

“You know very well it wasn’t a gift from Minos,” Persephone looked at him, serious.

“So maybe you brought it to reality from that Land of Dreams you so love to frequent. What of it? Speaking of, be careful in there, my love. You might get lost in your own visions one day and it will be a bear of a task to find you.”

“But how does one turn thought into things? The chalice is real.”

“Maybe there is nothing else but thought,” Hades replied, distracted. “What does it matter? I’m here, you’re here, we’re home, we’re happy. Can’t that be enough?”

“But what if it isn’t real?” Persephone asked.

“Especially if it isn’t real.”

If we all live a dream, if everything is a figment of our imagination, as insubstantial as fog, if all our accomplishments and secret yearnings are nothing but illusions, if there is nothing to leave behind, because there is no before, or after, just a continuous experience of being in the present that we make up as we go and disappears when we do, then the one prayer we have to find meaning in this experience, and the only thing that matters is for this dream to be a pleasant one.

After all, what would better epitomize the essence of Tartarus than the fact it’s not even real, it only exists in your head, an artifact your mind carefully constructed for itself, your custom-built ultimate prison made from your own thoughts and fears?

The realms of bliss and despair are not places, they are states of mind.

“I want you to be happy with me, Persephone,” his eyes warmed up with deep and abiding affection, and just a tinge of worry.

“Of course I’m happy,” she smiled, while her eyes welled up with tears and she threw her arms around his neck. “It is because I’m happy that I am afraid. I don’t want this to be a dream that I wake up from one day. I love you. This is my home. I have friends and mentors, and my mother. What would be the point of existing forever in the absence of all that?”

“I’ll be here for as long as you want me to be. What in places brought up all this existential angst? Did something happen?” Hades frowned.

“I dreamt we were mortals dreaming we were gods,” Persephone whispered.

Hades laughed heartily and kissed her.

“You are what you think you are, my love.”

Thank you for reading.

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