Theo wasn’t sure when he’d lost his clothes. Sometime after the mushrooms and before the drum circle. Mushrooms I did not realize I was eating, he insisted woozily to himself. He’d been in such a hurry to rent a car and get on the road that he hadn’t stopped to eat. By the time he reached the compound outside Woodstock, he’d wolfed down the offered shroom-laced chocolate chip cookie without question.
He tried to remember how he’d wound up sitting in the dirt in the middle of an orgy in upstate New York. If I had half a brain, I would’ve waited for Dennis to return to the city. But when the man once known as Dionysus had texted back the address of his upstate compound, with an invitation to join in one of his monthly bacchanals, Theo’s impatience had gotten the better of him. The sooner he discovered how Orpheus had rescued his love from the Underworld, the sooner he could do the same for his own.
Now, between the initiates gyrating ecstatically around the bonfire and the ceremonial wine making the rounds—or, knowing Dennis Boivin, something more than wine—Theo felt like he’d unknowingly joined yet another cult. The bacchants all wore gold leaf-shaped pendants around their necks—and not much else.
He sat in the circle of revelers with his hands resting over his nakedness, although the mushrooms made it hard to care about modesty—especially while the two men and one woman next to him engaged in a dizzying variety of oral-anal permutations that had Theo alternately wincing and aroused. At least four other initiates had approached him with blissful grins on their faces and asked him to join in. So far, he’d managed to politely refuse.
Finally, the host himself appeared.
Theo had expected Dennis to show up as naked as everyone else, but instead he wore a pair of skintight, groin-high cutoffs and a stained tank top that did little to conceal his potbelly, his copious chest hair, or his bulging crotch. Like his followers, he wore a gold pendant on a leather cord.
“Why do you get clothes?” Theo asked, peering up at him blearily.
“Benefits of godhood,” Dennis said, settling himself on the ground and taking a swig from a plastic cup of purple liquid. “Also, keeps off the mosquitoes,” he added as Theo swatted at an insect gorging on his thigh.
“So is this how you keep your power?” Theo gestured to a woman standing a few feet away, pouring wine over her hair. “God of Frenzy, right?”
Dennis laughed. “You know it. But real power would mean some human-sacrifice shit, and you know I gave that up back in the good old days. This is just for fun.”
“Fun? Honestly, I’ve got leaves up my ass and insect bites on my balls and my brain’s so fried I can barely remember why I’m here.”
“That’s the whole idea, dude.” Dennis stretched his arms overhead. “Let it go. Let it all go.”
“I can’t. I need to know about …” Theo fumbled through his mind and finally came up with, “Orifice? I mean Orpheus.”
“I miss that little motherfucker with the lyre,” Dennis said with a lopsided grin. “Man spread my rites over the earth faster than chlamydia in a whorehouse.”
Theo’s balls shrank as he imagined just how many viruses were currently joyriding inside the bodily fluids streaming nearby. “Your rites? I thought they were Orpheus’s.”
Dennis shrugged. “Both, dude. The whole Orphic cult was inspired by me.”
“Why? Tell me. Why do you know the Orphic hymns? What do you have to do with reincarnation and resurrection?”
“Whoa now! The fancypants scholar needs my help. Finally coming down from that Ivory Tower of yours to play in the mud with me, huh?”
Theo tried to sound angry, but his words emerged slurred and confused. “I’m not playing, Dennis.”
“Uh-huh. That’s your problem.” He rose and dragged Theo to his feet. “Tell you what—if you want to know more about Orpheus, then you gotta dance, bro.” He stamped his flip-flopped feet against the earth, then ground his hips like an over-the-hill Elvis impersonator.
“No thanks.” Theo blinked heavily, but Dennis’s figure remained before his closed eyelids. Impossibly, he no longer wore his shorts and tank top but rather his full regalia as the God of Wine: a leopard skin draped across his hips, his hair twined with ivy, his lips grape-stained. When Theo opened his eyes again, the hallucination didn’t disappear. He moaned softly.
“Hitting you now, is it?” Dennis—Dionysus now—asked, a wicked smile on his purple mouth. “Dance with me. It’s not a request, Professor Schultz. It’s an order.”
The god started to dance again, his figure blurring into psychedelic colors. He turned away, hips swaying. The leopard skin lay across his shoulder now, the feline head staring at Theo with glowing yellow eyes. It blinked at him slowly, then licked its wine-stained jaws with a long pink tongue. It looked more sensuous than threatening, as if it’d rather be licking something else.
Theo felt his own feet move in response to the pounding rhythm of the drums. The others around the circle swung their hair like hippies at a love-in. The gold pendants bounced against their chests. He tried to copy them, flinging his head from side to side, hands raised high, as if to catch the starlight in his palms.
Not all the dancers are human anymore, he noted offhandedly. One had cloven hooves for feet. Another sported small horns on the crown of his head.
Theo turned back to Dionysus, desperate to ask if the satyrs were real or merely another hallucination, but the Athanatos had moved to the other side of the circle and now stood with his hands raised for silence. All the drums quieted but one: a steady, tripping heartbeat.
“You would know what Orpheus taught,” the god proclaimed in a clear voice devoid of his usual indolence. He spoke to the crowd, but Theo knew this lesson was for him. He took a step closer, willing his sluggish brain to focus.
“Orpheus tells us that the only path to resurrection is to follow the God of the Grape.” He lifted his cup of wine in a toast to himself, chugged the contents, and tossed the cup into the flames. His bacchants cheered.
He leered at a young maenad beside him, one of the few still wearing clothes. “The God of the Grape is He Who Unties! The Releaser!” She loosed the belt of her robe and let it drop to the ground as if to illustrate the power of the god’s epithet. Her blond hair brushed against the rise of her buttocks. Her gold leaf pendant nestled between ruby-tipped breasts. Wine and firelight flushed her face. Dionysus cast a lingering gaze on her before turning back to the circle of revelers.
“The Releaser frees us from more than our inhibitions. He can release us from death itself. You want to know how?”
“Yes!” Theo’s shout merged with the crowd’s.
Dionysus thrust a hand toward the night sky. “Look for the eagle!” His followers’ heads shot up in unison. Even Theo found himself squinting into the darkness, searching in vain for a bird.
“God comes with wide wings and wicked talons.” The alliteration shaped Dionysus’s mouth into a lascivious kiss with each word. “He looks down with eagle eyes and seeks his perfect mate. A woman who has no fear. A woman who wears her hair loose and runs with the beasts upon the mountain slopes! Whose veins pump wine and whose feet never cease to dance. And when he finds her, he dives down in eagle’s guise to take her for himself.”
He held out his hand to the blond maenad beside him. The last shred of Theo’s lucidity started with alarm, afraid Dionysus would reenact his ritual on this unsuspecting woman, but she walked toward him willingly, and when the god placed his hands on her stomach, it was an act more of benediction than possession. Theo was surprised to see something akin to love shining from his eyes.
Dionysus is telling his own birth story, he realized. To him, this woman is Semele, his mortal mother, impregnated by Zeus in the form of an eagle.
“The woman is ripe and full and ready to burst,” the Athanatos went on. “She has God’s love.” He traced the curve of her flat stomach, and it seemed to swell and round beneath his touch. “She should be content with that. But no!” He turned from her with a feline snarl. “A demon convinces her to beg God for a final favor.”
Dionysus didn’t describe this so-called demon, but Theo knew her name: Hera, Zeus’s jealous wife, who’d made a career of torturing her husband’s mistresses.
“God the Father is a loving god, a generous god,” Dionysus continued. “He swears to give his lover whatever she wants. So when she asks to see his true form, he can’t say no.” His voice darkened. The crowd grew silent, afraid. As if they knew what was coming.
“God appears not as an eagle, not as an angel, not as a burning bush—but as glory unleashed. So brilliant that mortal eyes can’t bear the sight.” Dionysus was shouting now, foam flecking his lips. “The Father comes like a lightning bolt. The woman turns to ash. Only her heart remains unburnt.”
Dionysus gestured to one of the naked men beside him. No muscled youth, but an over-the-hill satyr with gnarled horns on his head and breasts as saggy as an old woman’s. The satyr reached into a cooler at his feet and pulled out a tupperware full of raw meat. Not the shrink-wrapped kind from the supermarket, but dripping and bloody organs, red and brown and floppy like the flesh ripped from an animal. The old satyr handed the heart, all swollen lobes and protruding arteries, to Dionysus, then passed the container to the next initiate.
With the blood from the raw heart dripping down his wrist, Dionysus reached into the bonfire with his other hand and grabbed a fistful of embers. They tumbled through his fingers, red-sparked gray; if the coals burned him, he showed no sign. “Does God let the child burn within her womb?” he asked the crowd.
“No!” they shouted in response.
“He snatches the unborn babe from the flames and plants him in his own thigh. He pulls the mother’s heart from the ashes and keeps it safe. And when the boy-child is born from the Father’s thigh, he carries his mother’s burning embers in his own soul. His feet dance to the same tune, his veins flow with the same sweet wine, he knows no fear.”
The crowd shuffled toward the fire, close enough for sparks to land on their rapt faces, their bare limbs. Theo found himself doing the same, a moth drawn to the flames. The sparks sent pinpricks of hot pain across his skin. The blood from the meat in his hand dripped cold across his knuckles. He had never felt so alive.
“The Releaser will find his mother!” Dionysus cried. “He will journey across the River Styx and the River Lethe to bring her back from the dead. But to do so he must rip apart Time. Tear through Time’s boundaries, release the serpent coils that hold him in place. Let Unbounded Time burst from his sphere! Let him fly on his many wings!”
The crowd’s groans oscillated between despair and arousal. Theo closed his eyes, seeing the image before him. The lion-headed creature hiding in the depths of the mithraeum, a winged proto-god made of snake and man coiled one within the other, holding their secrets close.
“The Releaser travels into Death itself and grabs his mother by the wrist.” Dionysus’s gesture echoed his words, seizing the blond maenad’s arm with his soot-stained hand. “His mother crumbles at his touch, for she is only ash. But he has her heart!” Dionysus held aloft the raw organ, the blood running down his arm. “Holy Spirit and mortal flesh! Join them into one! Bring the woman back from the Underworld. Bring her back to life!”
Each reveler raised the bloody meat to his or her mouth simultaneously.
“This is the blood and the body!” Dionysus cried. “Whosoever believes in me, though he dies, yet shall he live!”
They bit with gusto, blood streaming over their chins. Dionysus opened his own mouth wide and dropped the fist-sized heart inside, swallowing it in one inconceivable gulp.
Theo remembered the last time he’d seen men eat raw flesh—the syndexioi had made it part of their feast the night they’d sacrificed Mars. I’m on the right track, he assured himself, staring at the meat in his own hand. Mithraism and Orphism combined into one. Yet his stomach revolted as he raised his portion to his lips. Chewy and spongy at the same time. Blood gushing against his tongue. Arteries sticking between his teeth. But then, suddenly, it wasn’t raw organ meat anymore. It felt hot and golden in his mouth. It tasted like electricity—like the spark of life itself. Without thinking, he swallowed, wondering at the sudden feeling of warmth and energy that filled his veins.
Dionysus looked pointedly at Theo as he went on. “We can be Releasers!” He pounded a bloody fist against his chest. “Release from Death! Release from Time! Release from all the rules this fucking world binds us with.” He ended his tale with a bastardized quote from Plato. “We are dead, and the body is a tomb. But our souls are immortal, divine—”
“And full of wine!” the crowd roared in unison, finishing his sentence.
Then, as if on cue, the drummers threw themselves back into action and the dancing resumed, wilder than ever.
Dionysus gyrated his way back toward Theo. “Does that answer your question?”
“What did I just eat?” Theo asked, swiping at the blood already congealing on his stubbled chin.
“The woman. The god. The Holy Spirit. Whatever you thought you ate—that’s what you ate.”
“But the Holy Spirit is—”
Dionysus laughed. “Let your scholarly mind go, Theodore. Believe, and your heart’s desire will appear before you.”
And then he was gone again, and in his place stood a tall woman with eyes like the moon, a single streak of white shining in her black hair. The firelight tattooed each sculpted curve of muscle with flickering shadows and played across the shallow rise of her breasts, the sharp corner of her jaw. Theo took a step forward, eyes stinging with sudden tears.
“Selene …” His breath caught in his throat.
She slipped into his arms, her breasts pressing against his chest, her thighs hard against his own. Her mouth was on his, tasting of wine and blood and wonder. He had a million questions, yet for the first time in his life he feared the answers.
She wrapped one long leg around his hips, and the moment he’d relived every night for half a year came rushing back to him. He clutched at her as if she could disappear at any moment. He drew her down onto the ground, or she drew him, and then she was on top of him, head thrown back, her pulse thrumming visibly in the long column of her neck.
She pressed her hands against his chest and ground her hips against him. He reached upward to bury himself in the sweaty valley between her breasts, but she pushed him backward and then fell onto all fours, crawling over him until her groin hung above his face. He grabbed her thighs and pulled her downward, a moan rising in his throat. She stayed there, perched above him like a she-wolf birthing her cubs, until she cried aloud with pleasure, then squatted backward and pressed her face against his cheek, panting softly.
“How?” he whispered in her ear. “How did you come back?”
She said nothing, just raised her head and smiled at him, gentle and warm and sweet. That’s when he knew it wasn’t her. The real Selene was never sweet.
And just like that, he ceased to believe.
The woman was blond, not black-haired, her cheeks too round, her body too soft. She smelled wrong, tasted wrong. She wore a gold leaf pendant around a neck too short, too thick.
She must’ve seen the horror in his eyes, because she rolled off him.
Theo lurched to his feet, anger chasing the arousal from his veins.
The dancers weren’t satyrs after all. Just middle-aged men with paunches, young men with bony hips, old women with sagging flesh. The woman beside him wasn’t Selene—she was no maenad either. Just another drunken actress in Dennis’s little play. She darted into the woods, giggling maniacally. Dennis, in a tank top and shorts once more, danced nearby with his eyes closed, a stoned hippie believing his own nonsense.
His mind suddenly clear, Theo grabbed his old roommate by the arm. “I came here for answers! Not to be tricked into your damn orgy.”
Dennis’s eyes flew open, but he seemed more amused than angry. “You’re the only man I’ve ever met who has to be tricked into an orgy. Get it together, dude.”
“You’re saying you really brought your mother back from the dead?” Theo demanded.
Dennis shrugged in time to the beat. “That’s how the myth goes. The truth? I don’t even remember. But that’s the story Orpheus told to his followers, so I’m sticking with it.”
“Your mother returned from the dead because you ate her flesh.”
“Mm-hm. The Christians stole that from me, yeah? Fuckin’ Eucharist. So I decided to put a few Christian touches into my little liturgy here. What’d you think? Saturn did it with Mithras—I figured why not give it a go? Makes the crowd go wild.”
“Right, but it doesn’t actually bring back the dead, does it? I thought maybe Pythagoras—”
“That nerd? You can’t bring anyone back with just numbers, although I’m sure you’d like that,” Dennis scoffed. “You keep trying to avoid the obvious: If it doesn’t involve death, it can’t create life.”
“Then how did Orpheus bring Eurydice back from the dead?” Theo begged. “How does anyone return?”
Dennis stopped dancing, looking at Theo with eyes instantly hard. “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?”
Theo didn’t reply, just met his stare and refused to back down.
Dennis threw back his head and laughed so hard he choked. “I know you’re a Makarites.” Theo’s ancient title sounded like a joke on Dennis’s lips. “And because of your oh-so-special status, you can use the gods’ divine weapons better than the gods themselves. But that doesn’t mean you’re actually an ancient hero, man! You sure you haven’t been eating too many of my shroom cookies? This is all just touchy-feely shit. A little wine and revelry to pass the time. You think Selene’s actually hanging out in the Underworld, waiting for you to show up and lead her out?”
“I know it’s a long shot,” Theo answered tightly. “But I have to try, don’t I?”
“So that’s why you came all the way up here.” Dennis clucked. “And I thought you’d finally loosened up.”
“You’re my last hope,” Theo said. “If Pythagoras’s numbers don’t hold the key to her reincarnation—”
“Enough. This is fuckin’ pitiful. You want to know my connection with Orpheus? Fine. When he went to get his chick out of the Underworld, he figured I’d know the way because I’d gotten my mom. He asked for instructions—I gave them to him. Told him how to get in and how to get past Aion on the way back out.”
“Aion?” The Greek name wasn’t familiar to Theo, though his whirring brain immediately connected it to the English word “eon.”
“You heard me. Aion. The name means ‘Unbounded Time.’ Weren’t you listening, dude? That was the best part of the story: ‘Release the serpent coils that hold him in place. Let Unbounded Time burst from his sphere! Let him fly on his many wings!’ You’ve got to release him to release death.”
“The lion-headed god! The one who looks like the Orphic proto-god. You used to sing his hymn all the time when you were especially wasted.”
“Yeah. Protogonos. Aion. Same thing. But he didn’t have a lion’s head last time I checked. That sounds like some Magna Mater shit—the Great Mother was the one with the lions sitting next to her throne like some dominatrix in a bestiality porno. The point, Theo-bore, is that my instructions to Orpheus didn’t work. Or has the classics genius forgotten how the myth ends? Orpheus failed, even with my help.”
“You gave him instructions,” Theo said, pouncing on the one part of the story that mattered. “Now give them to me.”
Dennis snorted. “Go get them yourself. Everyone’s wearing them around their necks.”
“The pendants! Followers of Orpheus wore them, right? They’re found in burial plots all over the Hellenistic world.”
Dennis rolled his eyes. “Too school for cool. As usual.”
Theo looked around the clearing with new eyes. “You had that many authentic gold leaves left over? Or did you make precise copies?”
“Yeah, precise copies, sure.” Dennis’s hand drifted to the leather cord he wore around his own neck.
A gray-haired woman with dirt on her breasts and leaves in her hair broke from the revelers and grabbed Dennis’s hand. “Dance with me,” she panted, blood staining her teeth.
Dennis grinned at her and made to follow.
“Hey, wait!” Theo lunged forward and wrapped his arms around Dennis’s neck in a crushing hug. “Thanks, man,” he gushed, “for your help.”
“Finally I get a little love.” Dennis squeezed Theo’s ass in both hands. “Anytime, fucker.”
The God of Revelry jigged his way back toward the fire.
Theo looked down at the necklace in his palm. The snapped leather cord was still damp with Dennis’s sweat. The gold pendant was paper-thin, shaped like an ivy leaf. He could hardly see the Greek characters etched on its surface, but he could tell from their shape that this was no cheap modern re-creation. As he suspected, Dennis had kept the authentic artifact for himself.
Theo closed his fingers over the pendant, then shouted after Dennis, “But how do I get to the Underworld in the first place?”
Selene had once told him that Hades lived in an abandoned downtown subway station, but he knew that couldn’t be the actual entrance to the realm of death. In the myths, heroes like Orpheus entered through a natural cleft in the earth. But which one?
Dennis glanced over his shoulder with a drunken leer. “We’re not in the Age of Heroes anymore—you really think you can just saunter into the Land of the Dead like some lamer version of Odysseus?” He waggled a finger. “You’re a shitty student, Professor. You forgot what I said: If it doesn’t involve death, it can’t create life.”
“So to enter the Underworld”—Theo choked—“I have to kill someone?”
“Don’t worry, dude.” Dennis began to laugh. “Only yourself.”