Journey to Eleusis: A Metaphorical Monomyth

By Susan A. Chadwick

The first story in this collection of mythical tales was written about
a Stranger that Echo, the narrator, met in the ashes, smoke and
remains of the fallen twin towers after 9/11. The last story, written
10 years later, is about two separate human beings, The Prisoner and The
Pythia, who met on the road to Eleusis to learn to travel together. It is a
mystical, ethereal and cathartic collection of tales that trace a path through
the depths of human despair, self-examination and the transformational
path from sorrow to peace, and beyond, to a sacred union.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481703697

Susan A. Chadwick

Susan Chadwick was born in 1947 in a village in southern Indiana, the eldest daughter in a large boisterous family of seven children that contained its own conflicts and turmoil. After leaving home, she married, and followed her husband around the world, raising her children in difficult, but stimulating circumstances in Bangladesh, Egypt and Mexico. She finished college and graduate school, studied cross-cultural psychology and comparative cultures. When she finally had the courage to leave an empty marriage, she found how cruel life can be, and lost everything, emotionally and financially. She became a soul on the run, looking for a reason to continue, to believe. She has found her home in Boise, Idaho, where she finished this collection of stories about men and women she has met, known, and loved along the way. She is living happily with her husband, Dean, and two cats, Tucker and Marlo. They each write everyday.

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© 2013 by Susan A. Chadwick. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/02/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-0370-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-0369-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012924394

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

THE STRANGER, a folk tale

. . . . Night-Womb . . . . a myth

IAMBE, a fairy tale

ECHO, a folk tale

PIRATES’ COVE, an alchemical myth

ECHO and CALLISTO, a fairy tale

ANANKE, a folk tale

Callisto and Arcas, a fairy tale

BELLEROPHON, a myth

RHESOS and KANO, a fairy tale

EDEN, a fairy tale

THE PRISONER and THE PYTHIA, a folk tale

For Dean . . . . I will always write to you.

One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. But why say ‘blame’? Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?

Virginia Woolf, A Room of one’s Own, 1929

Dear Virginia:

Forgive me the familiarity of addressing you as Virginia, for I should, if I were being properly respectful, address you as Dear Ms. Woolf.

I certainly do not mean even a hint of disrespect. I feel such a familiarity, as if you’re a sister or a very close, old friend of many years I want to sit with and talk to without constraint, to laugh at the absurdity we’ve both discovered. I want to write you a long letter and wait patiently and hopefully fowr your empathic and courageous reply.

I have cleaned and removed clutter, retrieved my writing table and placed it near a window in my bed-sitting room, to establish again a room of my own. I earn money, though not nearly enough to keep a roof or necessities without the generosity of my benefactor.

I have accepted my metaphysical purpose, and whether a dangerous obsession, especially with a woman, defiance of social convention, or merely a compelling need to write about reality as I experience it, I am prepared to take the challenge you posed to me 80 years ago, to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.

You implored me to remember my responsibilities, to be higher, more spiritual and reminded me how much depends upon me, and what an influence I can exert upon the future.

I take your sincere exhortation to embark upon another stage of your very long, very laborious and highly obscure career very seriously, and accept that the poet lives in me, as it surely did in you, and that it lives within many women and men I’ve known and worked beside who are now washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed.

Indeed, Virginia, these men and women are a continuing presence, as aware and concerned with the common life, the real life, as they’ve always been.

For the last few years I’ve been writing myths and fairytales about women and men I admire, but the tales have found no wider publication than to be privately and inexpensively printed and bound, and sent with common postage to those who inspired them. I’m sometimes awake at night, pacing around my living room or garden, or folding laundry, when I become struck like lightning with another story that needs telling. These lives sometimes haunt me, and I’ve sometimes wished to be left alone to sleep without dreams, to worry only about when I must vacuum the hall, pay the electric bill, or wash a window, rather than feel the incessant echoes of other’s inner lives.

But I believed you when you told me, so many years ago now, that I can put on the body which I have so often laid down, that I can be born again, that it’s not too late to find it possible to live and write poetry, fairytales, travelogues, fiction and myth. I find determination still resides within me. Why it hasn’t been firmly buried and lost is still a mystery . . . . maybe I will uncover that mystery as I write this to you.

I’ve recently realized a fact that has been confusing to me, for I denied it for so long—the world and humankind are still the same as they were when you were alive, and when I was still a young woman, only I have changed, and am changing still. What a surprise this is to me; even in my 60th year I can still be surprised and delighted by my own resiliency and willingness to be innocent again, to trust my own being rather than to immortalize myself in regret, doubt and bitterness.

I have discovered that I had to know myself before I could find myself.

I want to tell you, Virginia, for I have doubted for many years now that you or anyone else cared to hear or read about these common lives of women and men who have taught me, and many others, so much that has been essential. I draw from my own life and the lives of my forerunners and colleagues to express the mundane beauty that has emerged since you wrote A Room of one’s Own 80 years ago. I am prepared, have exerted knee-bending heart-cracking effort, and find a small flame of determination to, even in poverty and obscurity, offer you fairy tales, myths, poems and musings from the 21st century that I humbly hope are worth your while.

I start with my great grandmother’s kitchen table—where she pared apples, pitted cherries and rolled pastry, the one my mother covered with oilcloth and where she peeled vegetables, wrapped the garbage, and kept the flour canister. This scarred golden oak table with three sets of turned legs was my kitchen table when my children were young, in my first home, where we colored Easter eggs, ate our breakfast cereal, learned to make Chinese egg rolls, where I leaned with a cup of coffee or tea while talking on the telephone to far away friends.

I often sat numbly pushed against its solid girth late at night, a cup of tea cooling on its scarred expanse, and worried about my daughter’s poor health, my silent, absent husband’s detachment and indifference, my son’s anger and bullishness, and my loneliness and fear that I didn’t know how to be more than I was.

I sat and wrote at this table when I attended graduate school in psychology—my considerable effort to find the answers to so many questions I had about humankind and human nature, my own included, of course.

For several years this table was in the possession of my sister, to whom I had given it when I thought, wrongly, I didn’t need or want it anymore. She kept it for me, as it turns out. For when I left my husband, after 33 years wedded, two children raised, educated and married, two grandchildren and a business partnership from which I had been carelessly banned to peel wallpaper, work on genealogy records, or bake cookies and take naps with my twin granddaughters, I lived for three months in a shed on my sister’s property along the Nehalem river in Oregon, writing everyday, this old oak table guiding, supporting and standing sentry to my dreams and nightmares. When I left Oregon to return to Colorado, I asked her if I could have it back. She said, of course, it’s your table.

So, now I sit at a keyboard (though I sometimes still prefer a yellow legal pad and pen, or even a scrap of paper to jot a few persistent ideas upon), at this same old table. This table is as comforting and familiar as ever, and seems to hold the remnants of inspiration like the remaining bits of white paint that sanding and paint remover couldn’t obliterate.

Possibilities are flourishing, and I’d invite you to read some of these stories. Open this book anywhere and you’ll find one, complete, pearled in an oyster shell. Then tell me candidly what you think—are they worthwhile? Is it possible I’ve managed to live long enough to write fiction that you, Virginia, could say of these stories that they are what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Have I found my metaphysical purpose—to find . . . collect . . . and communicate it to the rest of us?

Looking forward to a long letter from you soon, old friend. I hope my audacious embracement of your thoughts and words to me as a friend is not too presumptuous. If so, please forgive me.

Here’s one of the stories, Virginia, about a strange man I met in lower Manhattan, New York. He was, and I presume still is, an ironworker from Harlem. I spent several weeks working at the respite center at what we then called, and still do call, ground zero.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 200I, I felt compelled to leave my tidy, controlled life, or the appearance of one at any rate, and joined with thousands of others flooding to New York’s lower Manhattan to be awestruck and moved by the events that had smote the world. I was then still under the illusion I could help others. I had no idea the help, the healing, the therapy, was, in part, emerging for me, and women and men like me.

For me it was ground zero of a change in consciousness that continues to evolve within me. For years I had carried a tattered scrap of paper with a poem by an anonymous author that reminded me to not be afraid of falling down or catching fire, yet I was fearful much of the time, despite my desire to not be, and was to spend the next several years so filled with fear and anger I couldn’t think much of the time. I was so afraid my carefully crafted life would veer off its tracks and crash, which it did, of course. The train wreck was inevitable, but I didn’t know it yet; I only feared it, was depressed with the knowledge I forcibly denied, and still believed I could be smart enough, kind enough, energetic enough to avert the disaster I knew was coming directly at me.

The other tales aren’t arranged in a linear, chronological Cartesian manner, one written for each stage of life, for we both know that isn’t how stories arrive, and they certainly don’t arrive in swaddling carried by storks.

Sincerely,

Your friend, Echo

THE STRANGER,

a folk tale

. . . if that common mind which—as one divines—runs through all, is not, as with us, broken into a dozen minds that know nothing of each other, something even of what is most subtle in these verses will have come, in a few generations, to the beggar on the roads . . . one understands at every moment that he is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passion, so full of surprise, because he is doing something which has never seemed strange, unnatural, or in need of defence.

W. B. Yeats, on Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry, 1913.

Oh how many unknown things

You made known to me,

In how many places

You found room for me.

What was distant, Friend,

You brought near,

The stranger

You made my brother.

Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali 3

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, I met a strange man as I sojourned in the largest and most magnificent city of the realm—a shining city of silver spires, jade and ivory temples, rich treasuries of untold wealth, home to poets, philosophers, painters, sculptors, seers, scientists, alchemists and sages.

Atop the highest ledge of this renowned city of kings and princes, on the banks of a wide dark river feeding into the northern ocean, stunning shining twin cathedrals rose above the clouds, reaching into the fog, nearly to the ether, mirroring each other through the mist by day, reflecting golden shafts of sunlight, star beams and moon dust by night.

The twin spires elegantly extended almost to heaven crowned in glorious reflecting mirrored walls, wreathed in filigreed copper and silver twines, and were revered by the people of the realm who worshipped the gods and made sacrifices to the twin temples each day.

I was an itinerant storyteller and student of alchemy by night, learning the art and craft of the mystical runa by day, and was exhausted and world weary trying to make sense of this city of frenetic energy, avarice, arrogance, ruthlessness and noise.

I lived in a small cottage near the dark river’s edge, but was seldom there with my night and day work and studies, telling stories to anyone who would listen for a moment, hoping my fairytales would catch some rich person’s fancy long enough for them to throw a few coins on my red silk scarf.

For those who fancied an ancient rune reading (though I was still such an amateur at interpreting the dark green bloodstones, with their silvery etched glyphs of an ancient language I was just beginning to learn), I spread my red silk casting cloth and opened my black velvet bag of runa. Occasionally some traveler would stop and ask for his oracle to be read—or one for his lady, perhaps.

But no one was buying my oracular divination or stories enough to keep the fire lit in my cold little one-roomed cottage by the river, so I taught myself to feel small, to need nothing, and curl into an old worn silver spoon I kept in my woolen socks.

I’d forgotten where I found the spoon. It was a very old silver spoon, burnished with age and use to a soft glow; the family name, Levi, was etched in curling script across its broad flat handle. It was a simple design, and, no doubt, had once belonged to a minor merchant’s family, because it was not filigreed and curlicued with expensive design. I slept with the spoon in my hands at night, to bring me ease so I might dream.

I was often cold and lonely, and didn’t understand why this journey had become so hard. When I’d left the world through the Gate of Compassion, wearing the sandals given me by Gwan-Yin, certain I would find joy, serenity, sunshine and old friends, I was told I’d have everything I needed along the way. But sometimes I’d come to worry that maybe fairytales aren’t true at all, and I’m just a foolish woman looking for something that can’t be found.

I hated being so cold, I worried about how I was to pay the Titan’s taxes when they came pounding on my door looking for money. I even considered making a Faustian bargain—my soul for comfort and ease. I bartered with the devil, though I doubted there really was such an evil in the world. Nonetheless, in exchange for no more worries or sorrows, tears or aloneness, I begged that harbinger of grief for mercy, and pleaded with him to have me in exchange for my soul, for eternity if need be.

It was when the deal was struck, one cold dark night of my soul, I fell into a chasm from which I believed I could never escape; there was no way out—no forgiveness—a deal’s a deal.

I was stuck in a hopeless world, a very dark, shadowy place of confusion, noise and cobwebs, where no one loves anyone.

I nearly sold the silver spoon to the highest bidder, but decided to keep it, and hid it from thieves in my stockings. I found some semi-precious baubles from my former life that had somehow escaped the Titans, and sold them to the local pawn broker, gaining enough money to not starve for several weeks.

I held tight to my runa stones and wore talismans on a silver chain around my neck to remind me to keep going. I felt their weight against my heart, and defiantly would not release them to the money-changer or loan sharks who furtively roamed the streets. I also wore a nautilus pendant beneath my tunic; it was of an ancient sea creature I’d found on the sandy beaches near the northern ocean’s edge.

The other talismans were a silver heart and three rings. The three rings were each different, and I couldn’t remember where I’d found the gold and silver band, the pale blue sapphire set in white gold, and the heavy gold ring with the trident of small emeralds and diamonds. I’m certain they would gain me enough from the pawnbroker to eat a few more weeks, perhaps even months, but I couldn’t part with them.

I was nearly at some breaking point. I longed to go home, and was nearly ready to let go, freefall from a bridge without a net, sell my soul to the Titans if they still wanted it, when I saw a strange dark man sitting under a raggedy, scarred, singed old tree, quietly watching, witnessing, as heat and ash fell like rain around him. He wore a red and blue cloth covering his skull, and sat hunched over a steaming bowl of pooridge, shoveling the hot gruel into his mouth with an old metal spoon.

I don’t know why, because I’m usually wary of strangers and avoid them, but for some reason I asked him if he minded if I sat next to him under the burning tree.

It was a cold, misty mid-autumn day, rain drizzling through the last few cracked leaves of the tree; the smell of smoke and dust curled into our skin, a reddish-ochre light emanated from the ground beneath us in wisps and whorls of smoky amber clouds, catching ash and fragments of debris into spirals of sorrow that clung to us.

He looked up at me with