LITMIR.BIZ

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(or our guesses) is limited to the last site we have (partly) dug’? No, no, not at all, what their present knowledge is—is knowledge, for this is how they always go on, it seems they have to, it is how their unfortunate brains are formed.

      Well, it is at least possible that astronomers of ten thousand, or even twenty thousand, or even thirty thousand years ago were as clever as ours are; it is at least possible that the evidence for this lies easily available in easily excavated cities—available to people whose minds are less bound by the prejudices of our time.

      We may suppose that ancient astronomers did not necessarily believe that the world was created on a certain day four thousand odd years before their own time, and by God in person.

      That they understood that words had to be used for their benefit—and understood what the words were symbols for.

      That long before the Roman Gods and the Greek Gods and the Egyptian Gods and the Peruvian Gods and the Babylonian Gods, astronomers listened to Jupiter and his family, or to Saturn, and knew that Thoth (however he was called then) served Amen the Father (and here again comes in the idea of deputy, of substitution, for Thoth created the world with a word); and that there were names for planets, suns, stars, and crumbs, blobs, and droplets of earth and fire and water; and that their patterns and sounds and colours were understood, and tales were told of them, instructive of Times and Events—why not? For no one knows what lies under the sands of the world’s great deserts. No one knows how many times poor Earth has reeled under blows from comets, has lost or captured moons, has changed its air, its very nature. No one knows what has existed and has vanished beyond recovery, evidence for the number of times man has understood and has forgotten again that his mind and flesh and life and movements are made of star stuff, sun stuff, planet stuff; that the Sun’s being is his, and what sort of events may be expected, because of the meshings of the planets—and how an intelligent husbanding of humanity’s resources may be effected based on the most skilled and sensitive of forecasting, by those whose minds are instruments to record the celestial dance.

      ‘Father,’ says Jupiter’s efficient and bossy daughter. ‘Why don’t you send down Mercury to do something about that poor voyager, stranded there on his drugged island? He could ask Neptune to let up a bit. It’s not fair, you know. It’s not just.’

      ‘Well, you see to it then, daughter,’ says Jupiter, a busy man. Sun’s deputy, and with all those bounding children, tugged this way and that like a busy housewife and mother with her large brood. ‘You just see what you can do, but mind you, don’t forget that We, Jupiter, are not the only influence on the traveller’s journey. No, it’s a harmony, it’s a pattern, bad and good, everything in turn, every thing spiralling up—but yes, it’s the right moment for a visit to Mercury. It is the exact time—thanks for reminding me.’

      ‘Timing is everything,’ murmurs Minerva the Flashing-Eyed, bustling off to find Thoth, or Hermes, and finding him speeding around the sun in an orbit so dazzling and so lively and so gay and above all so many-sided and accomplished that it was hard to keep up with him.

      ‘Ah,’ says he, ‘it’s time again, is it? I was thinking it must be.’

      ‘You sound reluctant,’ said Minerva.

      ‘I’ve just been visiting Venus.’

      ‘Everyone always likes her best,’ says Minerva, drily. ‘As everyone knows, she and I don’t get on. She’s so silly—that’s what I can’t understand. People say I’m jealous—not at all. It’s that damned stealthy dishonesty I can’t tolerate—that appalling hypocrisy, I’ve never been able to understand how it is that intelligent men can put up with it—but there you are. And I didn’t come to talk about Aphrodite. I’m here about poor Earth, poor traveller!’

      ‘Your kind heart does you credit. But don’t forget, it was partly their fault.’

      ‘Stealing the fire?’

      ‘Of course. If that fellow hadn’t stolen the fire, then they would never have known what a terrible state they are in.’

      ‘You, Mercury, God of letters and of music and of—in a word—progress, complaining about that! You wouldn’t want them still in that dark and primitive state, would you?’

      ‘They don’t know how to use it.’

      ‘That remains to be seen.’

      ‘All I’m saying is that knowledge brings a penalty with it—of course, it was enterprising of him—what’s his name, Jason, Ali Baba Prometheus, that fellow—in his place I might have done the same. Eating the fruit when I was told not to …’

      ‘Stealing the fire,’ says Minerva, always with a tendency towards pedantry.

      ‘Come now, don’t be so literal-minded, that’s to be like them,’ says Mercury.

      ‘And there’s the other thing,’ says Minerva, rather stern—at her tone Mecury began to look irritated. For Minerva was also a bit of a blue-stocking; her feeling of justice and fair play (regarded as childish by some of the Gods who regarded themselves as more advanced, philosophically) usually led her to the question of women’s rights, and men’s vanity.

      ‘All right,’ says Mercury, ‘understood.’

      ‘But is it?’ says she, severe. ‘His mother was an earth-woman, certainly, but who was his father? Well?’

      ‘Oh don’t start, please,’ says Mercury. ‘You really are a bore, you know, when you get on to that.’

      ‘Justice,’ she says. ‘Fair play. I’m my father’s daughter. And who was his father? With such blood, or rather, fire, in his veins, he was not to be expected to live like a mole in earth knowing that Light existed, and yet never reaching out after it.’

      ‘There was reason to believe,’ says Mercury, ‘that he was in it all the time. He walked in the Garden with God.’

      ‘And then he ate what he should not have done. He stole the Apple, dear God of Thieves. And paid for it.’

      ‘And in short everything is going as was expected, and according to plan, and with Our assistance.’

      ‘Progress has to be seen to be made.’

      ‘All right, I’m ready to leave when the Time is Ripe.’

      ‘Are you quite sure of your mandate?’

      ‘Dear Minerva! Is it any different this time?’

      ‘It is always the same Message, of course …’

      ‘Yes. That there is a Harmony and that if they wish to prosper they must keep in step and obey its Laws. Quite so.’

      ‘But things are really very much worse this time. The stars in their courses, you know …’

      ‘Fight on the side of Justice.’

      ‘In the long run, yes. But what a very long run it must seem to them, poor things.’

      ‘Partly through their own fault.’

      ‘You sound very severe today. Sometimes we even seem to change roles a little? You must remember that you are God of Thieves because you inspire, if not provoke, curiosity and a desire for growth, in such actions as stealing fire or eating forbidden fruit or building towers that are intended to reach Heaven and the Gods. Punishable acts. Acts that have, in fact, been punished already.’

      ‘Perhaps it isn’t always easy to take responsibility for our progeny? Is it, dear Minerva? For acts can be our children … Tell me, is it easy for your Father, or for you, to recognize as kith and kin acts of justice that are in fact the results of your influence—can in a sense be regarded as you, though in extension of course? Justice is Justice still, in the sentencing of a thief to prison—and the thief has stolen books because he has no money to buy them. In such a drama both you and I are represented—and there’s little doubt which of us appears more attractively? Are you sure you

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