Prelude to Eternity. Brian Stableford
Greek emphasis on his role in the myth has given rise to the popular idea that mazes were intended as traps for monsters and demons rather than—or as well as—tracks for ritual processions and dances. That idea is also supported by folklore from elsewhere that often sets dragons in the heart of mazes, but the Minotaur doesn’t seem to me to be a mere variant of a dragon. Personally, I suspect that Minos put about the story of Pasiphaë’s passion for a bull and subsequent motherhood of a monster in order to pay her back for poisoning some of his younger paramours. Then he used the myth of the Minotaur as a pretext for denying his priestesses—including his wife and daughter—access to the Labyrinth, where they might have used that privacy to hatch plots to threaten his increasingly tyrannical authority. It was presumably the same motive that led him to imprison the architect of the Labyrinth within it. While Escott and I were exploring, we actually found a subterranean cell with a curious high-walled roof-garden; we had no way of knowing whether that might actually have been Dedalus’ prison, but Old Harry Langstrade was very excited by it. At any rate, the volcanic eruption rendered the political issues surrounding Minos’ despotic tendencies redundant. The catastrophic destruction of the entire Cretan culture set the progress of civilization back by hundreds of years, until Athens.…”
“Rose up to continue the tortured rigmarole of Hope’s vapid fancy,” Escott said, waspishly. “In fact—to get back to your original question, Laurel—the real key to the Minotaur’s supposed dual nature lies in the fact that the previous king of Crete, Asterius, had adopted Minos after he had allegedly been sired on Europa by the god Zeus, in the guise of a bull—so it was Minos himself who was accused, in vulgar parlance, of being a human/taurean hybrid when his reign became excessively cruel. The Minotaur was merely a symbol, invented to describe his monstrousness, but it was a particularly potent image in combination with the Labyrinth, partly because it did recall previous folklore placing dragons in the hearts of mazes. Mazes were associated throughout the ancient world with dragons and their mundane kin, as evidenced by Herodotus’ description of the Egyptian City of Crocodiles, in which mummified kings were laid to rest amid mummified crocodiles. Hope and I searched for the lost city while we were in Egypt, but never found it. In any case, the mysterious Mistress of the Labyrinth was probably more closely analogous to Circe than to Athene, and that may be why Pasiphaë is sometimes represented in Greek myth as kin to Circe.…”
At this point, Michael followed Lady Phythian’s example and tuned out again, returning his gaze to the flickering telegraph-poles in spite of their seeming mesmeric threat, and consenting to drift into a light doze. While the conversation remained in such ostentatiously esoteric intellectual territory he deliberately reduced it to a mere buzz in his ears, akin to that of an irritating fly. He found, after a while, that he could ignore the telegraph poles too, by focusing his eyes on more distant points in the landscape—church steeples and belfries proved particularly useful—and tracking them as they retreated, relative to the speeding train, at a far more leisurely pace, as if they too were making a polite withdrawal from an arena of conflict that they found uncomfortable.
Michael did not consider himself to be stupid, or ignorant, but he always felt uncomfortable in the presence of naked erudition. He had not had the privilege of a university education, let alone of taking an exotic Grand Tour, and he knew that he would be at something of a disadvantage among the company assembled at Langstrade Hall, not only with respect to Hope and Escott but Gregory Marlstone, who had been studying natural philosophy at Corpus Christi while Hope and Escott were Classical scholars at Balliol. On the other hand, the present Lord Langstrade had apparently been a very undistinguished scholar at Merton, and had gone straight into the family business thereafter, while Marlstone had done likewise, following in his own father’s footsteps as a builder of church clocks, before his eventual inheritance had allowed him to divert his attention to the more esoteric mysteries of Time.
Michael had never met Marlstone, and only knew of him by virtue of newspaper reportage of the failed experiments at Horton Lacey and Chatsworth. Apparently, the would-be inventor had not inherited his father’s money until 1819, and it was only then that he had been able to interest himself in John Dee’s speculative attempts to develop a theory of time. Marlstone was said to have demonstrated some of his own theories experimentally, but only on a very small scale and in private. His attempts to replicate his laboratory results on a much grander scale had gone sadly awry, occasioning much mockery from the hard-headed physicists who refused to believe in the possibility of perpetual motion machines and similarly paradoxical endeavors.
Annoyed by this derision, Marlstone had apparently hunted high and low for a location more conducive to the functioning of his apparatus, whose failure he attributed to “quasi-acoustic feedback in the temporal field” resulting from the architectural design of the structures in which he had conducted his full-scale demonstrations. Apparently, the dimensions of the Langstrade Keep, although a trifle cramped, would be much more conducive to the establishment and maintenance of a stable “temporal field”—unless of course, Marlstone really was the kind of moonstruck fantasist that most people now took him for. At any rate, Marlstone’s enthusiasm for the potential location had found a resonant echo in Lord Langstrade’s enthusiasm for the tantalizing possibility that Marlstone’s endeavors held out: the possibility of seeing through time. Although Marlstone only claimed successes in his private laboratory extending over a matter of minutes, and was reluctant to promise that his large-scale apparatus might be capable of providing views extending over years, let alone decades, Lord Langstrade was enthusiastic to see the principle demonstrated, so that further progress in chronovisual technology might one day enable him to look back across a thousand years and more, in order to witness Harold Longstride’s combat with Emund Snurlson for himself.
In spite of his recent vicissitudes, however, Michael suspected that Marlstone might look down on him in much the same way that Hope and Escott obviously did, considering him a shallow recorder of the world’s contents rather than an educated analyst of their nature and meaning. What chance did a mere painter have, he could not help wondering, of comparing with such men as Marlstone and Hope in the eyes of his host?—as he would presumably need to do if he were ever to obtain approval for the marriage he hoped to make.
Lady Phythian was drawn back into Hope and Escott’s discussion again when it turned to matters of psychognosis, by which time the Sir Richard Trevithick was streaking through Lincolnshire. Escott, as might be expected, was scathing about the potential of the supposed new science, while Hope was far more hopeful that it might eventually generate a theory of the mind of Newtonian elegance and subtlety. Both men, however, were agreed on rejecting present-day Mesmerism as mostly poppycock, and its supposed practitioners—including, by implication, Augustus Carp—as self-deluding fools or mere charlatans. Lady Phythian objected to this characterization, insisting that Dr. Carp was an exceedingly wise man, who had used his undoubted psychic gifts to provided solace to many a widow—herself included—and would doubtless continue to do so if only he could find a more adequate replacement for his late and much-lamented somniloquist.
“I don’t doubt that somniloquists really do hear voices, Lady Phythian” Hope opined, “but we shall not be able to make any true progress in psychognosis until we abandon the fantasy that those voices emanate from the spirits of the dead. I don’t doubt that Dr. Carp’s last somniloquist was able to supply you with a measure of solace following your husband’s death, probably spiced with a healthy dose of commonsensical advice, but the voice that bid her do so came from within, not from the realm of the afterlife.”
“Hope is, as usual, half right,” Escott judged. “The voices somniloquists appear to transmit cannot emanate from the afterlife, but their origin in the mysterious depths of the human mind gives them no better access to wisdom, even of a commonsensical kind. In fact, the murky depths of the human mind are essentially chaotic, and their produce is essentially subversive and capricious. There is no possibility for progress there, but only one more proof that the idea of progress is a myth. What underlies the superficial order of the world is a deadly confusion, whose volcanic eruptions will always destroy the petty achievements of our constructive consciousness, and betray our fondest illusions of future happiness.”
Once again, as he completed this florid speech, Escott caught Michael’s eye and raised his eyebrows in a quasi-conspiratorial manner, but the gesture left Michael at