Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris Lessing

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emphasis from Saturn to Jupiter involving a change in all conditions on Earth and taking centuries (our time) may perhaps have had to find its message thus: That Jupiter fought Saturn (or Zeus Chronos) fair and square in mortal (or immortal) combat and—not killed—but defeated him, and thereafter Jupiter was God to Earth. But here is a thought and not for the first time—of course not, there is no thought for the first time—why God? The vastest, most kingly and, so they say, most benign of planets whose rays envelop Earth in justice and equanimity (so they say) and touching certain sections of humanity, that grey mould struggling for survival in its struggling green scum, with more particularity than other sections. And on Mount Olympus bearded Jove, or Jupiter, lorded it over the subsidiary Gods—not without a certain magnificent tetchiness. But why Father? Why Father of Gods and Men? For who is our Father? Who? None other than the Sun, whose name is the deep chord underlying all others, Father Sun, Amen, Amen, as the Christians still pray. Why not Father Sun, as Lord on Olympus, why Jove, or Jupiter, Zeus? For on that mountain Phoebus Apollo was a god like others, among others—very odd, that! Of course, man cannot look directly at his Sun. Gods go in disguise, even now, as then they were, or might be, Pillars of Fire—Forcefields, Wavelengths, Presences. It is pos-possible that the Sun, like other monarchs, needs deputies, and who more suitable than Jupiter, who is like a modest little mirror to the Sun, being, like the Sun, a swirl of coloured gas, and having, like the Sun, its parcel of little planets. After all, Sun is an item in the celestial swarm on an equal basis with the other stars, chiming in key with them, and having its chief business with them—for this is nothing if not a hierarchical universe, like it or not, fellow democrats. Sun can probably be viewed, though for any mortal to think such a thought comes hard, a lèse-majesté indeed, as an atom on a different time-and-motion scale, having comradeship with other, equal atoms, all being units of the galaxy, while galaxies are units and equals on another level, where suns are as tinily swarming as men (that broth of microbes) are to planets. Russian dolls, Chinese boxes!—and this is why it is not unreasonable to imagine the Great Sun, giving Jupiter a careless nod: ‘Be my deputy, my son! I have other more important business to attend to in my peer group!’

      Why Jupiter at all, if Saturn once held that place?—or at least, so the old myths do suggest. But why is it unreasonable to suppose that planets, as indeed, stars—like people—change character; for a weighty responsible old planet in its maturity may give a very different report of itself than the same creature in its skittish youth. Perhaps Jupiter grew into the post, Lord of the Gods, (as butlers are lord in the servants’ hall, the Master and Mistress being too far out of sight to count) a deputy God, while Saturn got too bad-tempered for the position. After all Saturn ate his children. They do say that Saturn’s rings are the smashed remnants of former planets.

      Who knows but that our little system is an unfortunate one, and peculiarly vulnerable to visiting comets and intermittent visitors of various kinds? Or perhaps all stars, planets, planets’ planets are as subject to sudden calamity as men are, and the correct government and management of a star and its planets, or indeed, a galaxy and its suns, is a prudent balancing and husbanding of probabilities and substances? Who knows but that beings are not moved about among the planets, in one shape or another, as plants are moved about in a garden, or even taken indoors when frost is expected? When that comet came winging in from the dark beyond Pluto and went Bang! into poor Earth, perhaps there were warnings sent then from Jupiter (or Saturn, if it was his regency)—‘Take Care, Earth!’ the message might have gone. Or even: ‘Poor Earth, would you like to send us some of your inhabitants to live out a hundred or so generations as Our guests, until the unfortunate results of that Collision subside. Not on Us, of course: pure flame We are, burning Gas, like our Father, the Sun—but one of our planets would do nicely, with a little adaptation on your part.’ For we may suppose, I am sure, that Planets are altogether gentler and more humane than poor beast Man, lifting his bloody muzzle to his lurid sky, to howl out his misery and his exhaustion in between battles with his kind.

      And who would convey these messages? (They have to use words when they talk to us.) For one may imagine that Hermes or Mercury (or Thoth or Buddha), the planet nearest to the sun our Father, may transmit messages from the Gods by the fact of his condition, the shifting and meshings of the planets causing him (at certain times) to shed substances on Earth as invisible to Earth’s senses (though not to her new and her soon-to-be-invented or re-invented instruments) as the solar wind. But why Mercury—why Mercury messenger to Jupiter … there is an idea of doubleness here, of substitution, like Jupiter with the Sun. For consider how Athene, Minerva, is as much a messenger as is Mercury, the Sun’s nearest child. We may play with the idea—why not? Gnats may sing to kings, and their songs have to be guessing games. Gnats are sure they have a few ideas of their own, for the seconds their lives last. But perhaps Minerva, Jupiter’s daughter, has the same position vis-à-vis Jupiter as Mercury with the Sun. Our great lump of cold glassily ringing Moon, planet to our planethood, is in intimate enough relation with us, what of Jupiter with his—is it now twelve?—subsidiaries? Perhaps the largest of them, a healthy, bouncing, rather managing girl, but handsome enough with her flashing eyes, runs errands for her father. A pulse darts earthwards from Jupiter’s child, a synchronizing in the machinery of Jupiter, the other planets, his planets, makes an impulse that becomes thoughts in the minds of men.

      Or, words having to make do for pulses, impulses, dartings, influences, star-stuff, star-winds, up she gets, that responsible elder Daughter, and says to Jupiter: ‘Father, isn’t it about time you gave a thought to poor humanity in its plight, poor Odysseus pining there in the arms of the enchantress and wishing only to go home. Haven’t you punished him enough?’

      ‘I?’ says her Father. ‘You are always so personal, my dear, so emotional. In the first place, I’m as bound by the cosmic harmonies as everyone else. And in the second place, it wasn’t me at all—surely you remember it was Neptune who hated him? He fell foul of the sea, that favourite of yours.’

      Who was Neptune, when Homer lived and sang? Oh, the sea, of course … but then, as now, seas like all the other forces and elements had their sympathetic planets. Neptune the planet is a new discovery, or so we think. However that may be, Odysseus the brave wanderer was hated by some force to do with the sea, the ocean in its drugged condition, its moonmadness, always tagging along after the moon. It was the ocean Odysseus displeased, could not remain in harmony with, the ocean, our moon’s creature and slave.

      Neptune had not been discovered, was discovered by us, modern man. So we know, quite definitely.

      A hundred years or so ago (earth time), divines and historians and antiquarians of all kinds stated categorically that the world was created 4,000 odd years ago, and anyone who did not go along with this thesis had a hard time of it, as the memoirs, biographies and histories of that period make so sadly clear. What a great step forward into sanity and true thinking has taken place in such a very short time: they’ll concede now that the age of the physical world is longer than that—oh, quite considerably, by many millions. A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a millionfold the age of the Earth. But these same divines, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when it comes to the age of civilizations; they can’t even begin to concede that civilizations might have very old histories. The Earth is allowed to be millions of millions of years old, but the birth of civilization is still set somewhere between two thousand and four thousand B.C., depending on the bias of the archaeological school and the definition of civilization. We, now, are civilization, we are the crown of humanity, the pinnacle to which all earlier evolution aimed, computer man is the thing, and possessed of wisdom those earlier barbarians did not have: from our heights man dwindles back to barbarism and beyond that to apehood. They say (or sing) that writing was first invented in the third millennium B.C.; agriculture is so old; mathematics so old; and astronomy is dated exactly like the rest, having become scientific at that moment it divorced itself from astrology and superstition. And everything is dated and known by things, fragments of things: the children of a society that is obsessed with possessions, objects, have to think of previous civilizations in this way: slaves of their own artefacts, they know that the old barbarians were too.

      Every time a new city is dug up, the boundaries (in time) are grudgingly shifted back—a couple of hundred years perhaps, half a millennium. On a plateau in Turkey part of a

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