Waking the Moon

Hatteras. I went by Robert Dvorkin’s office, thinking I might grill him about what I’d seen on the news last night, but of course he wasn’t in.

“Okay,” I said out loud. There wasn’t anyone around to hear me. “Time for Classics.”

Classics was an expanse of brightly lit offices on the side of the museum abutting the dome. Fritz Kincaid was the chief of Hellenic Stuthes, a rosy-cheeked red-haired man of fifty who played squash on his lunch hour and lived in a houseboat tethered on the Potomac. I knew he’d be in because Fritz was always in. He was the kind of museum curator beloved of old movies and local news stations: photogenic, partial to polka-dot bow ties and cheerfully eccentric headgear, and most of all a terrific source of Strange but True (and often disgusting) Facts regarding the Ancients.

“Katherine Cassidy! Queen of the Interactive Video Display!” he crowed when he saw me peeking through the door. “What brings you to visit this old fossil?”

“You’re the only old fossil here today,” I said. “Actually, I saw the news last night, about all those artifacts at the University of the Archangels, and I thought of you.”

Fritz rolled his eyes. “Oh, yes: Potnia. Just what we need in these troubled times, a revival of the ancient matristic societies of the Aegean.” He turned and gave me a quizzical look. “Oh, but I forgot—your young friend Tristan—”

“Dylan.”

“Yes, of course, I’m sorry—Dylan. His mother’s the writer, isn’t she? The one we have to thank for all this nice publicity.”

He grimaced, then added, “Please, Katherine—come in, have a seat. Would you like some coffee?”

“No thanks. But are you busy? I wanted to pick your brain for a few minutes.”

Fritz shook his head solemnly. “I am never too busy for lovely young ladies. Entrez—”

I walked around the perimeter of the long library table that took up most of his office. It held an exquisite scale model of the Acropolis and the Athenian Agora, constructed of paper and cardboard and balsa wood, with matchstick triremes in the distance that glowed against the painted sea. The model had been constructed for an exhibit dismantled years ago, but Fritz never had the heart to get rid of it. It made a nice backdrop when he was visited by local news crews, especially since he’d improved the Acropolis by adding several troll dolls and plastic velociraptors.

“So this group Potnia,” I said. “Is that the name of a goddess?”

“In a manner of speaking. To be more accurate: it’s a name of the goddess.” Fritz cocked his head and raised gingery eyebrows, so that he looked like an intelligent Airedale. “Have you—taken an interest in this sort of thing, Katherine?”

I shrugged and tried to look noncommittal, although in truth my heart was racing. “Not really. Well, maybe a little.”

He gave an understanding nod. “Probably young Dylan knows a great deal about it…”

I laughed. “Yeah—kids these days, with their wacky matristic cults! No, I was just kind of—intrigued. I saw that article in Archaeology, and I understand the museum might be hit with a lawsuit…”

Fritz shuddered. “God forbid—I’m sorry, Goddess forbid,” he said quickly, raising his eyes to heaven. He picked up a piece of paper from his desk, holding it between thumb and forefinger and making a face as though it smelled bad. “Did you see this? No? It’s Potnia’s press release—they’re timing all their little escapades by the old pagan calendar. Actually, this one is dated today, but they dropped it off yesterday.”

“Today? What’s today?”

Fritz made a great show of squinting as he held the release at arm’s length and read aloud, “ ‘August First is Lammas, one of the great harvest festivals sacred to the blah blah blah.’ ” He grimaced, crumpled the page, and tossed it into a wastebasket. “So much for Potnia.”

He turned to me and shook his head apologetically. “Oh! But I forgot, you asked about them—

“Well, Katherine, Potnia is a name found on various Linear A and Linear B tablets in Knossos and Mycen? —you’re familiar with those?”

“A little.”

“Well, the tablets are some of the earliest records of our so-called Western Civilization, and Potnia is one of the oldest names found therein. It’s been translated as one of the titles of the Great Mediterranean Goddess. Atana Potnia, she was called—Atana like Athena, do you see? Most of the Greek gods actually started out as Cretan gods—by Cretan I mean what we call the Minoan culture, from our old friend King Minos.”

“The guy with the minotaur?”

“The guy with the minotaur. But these are very, very ancient gods, dating back millennia before the more well-known Greek gods. A lot of the place-names in that part of the Mediterranean are actually pre-Hellenic, completely different linguistically from Greek words. But the Greeks were so impressed by this culture that they ended up incorporating many of these names and words into their own language. So a lot of words we think of as being classically Greek, like theos or hieros or laburinthos, actually belong to this earlier society.”

I eased myself up onto the table beside the Agora. “Really? That’s fascinating.”

Fritz nodded, pleased. “It is fascinating. Because, you see, the Greeks did the same thing with their gods. They co-opted these more ancient deities for themselves—gods like Hyacinthus, who was sort of a proto-Apollo, although he was also associated with the death cults that the Greeks later attached to Adonis; and Posidas, who became Poseidon, and—”

He gave an effete wave. “—oh, you know a bunch of lesser deities. But—”

Fritz started pacing, carried away by his monologue. “Your feminist friends out there are onto something. Because in fact this entire Minoan/Mycen?an civilization probably grew up around the worship of goddesses. The gods were a much later addition, most of them we think brought in by Northern invaders. The goddess cults probably originated on the mainland—Turkey, Anatolia, that whole cauldron of Eastern European countries—and then were brought by colonists to Crete and its satellite islands. The Cyclades, Rhodes, Thera…

“These goddesses eventually took the form of our familiar Greek goddesses. But originally they had names that are very strange to us—I mean, they are linguistically very unusual, which makes the whole thing even more mysterious, don’t you think?”

I nodded, not sure how many more mysterious things I could take. Fritz went on without missing a beat.

“Wanasoi,” he pronounced, gazing dreamily at the ceiling. “Those were the twin queens who may have become Demeter and her daughter Kore. Sitopotiniya, the Mistress of the Grain. Erinu, who also was a Demeter prototype, although her name sounds very like that of the Erinyes, “the Angry Ones” or Furies, who gave Orestes such a hard time. Britomartis or Atemito, who was probably Artemis. Pasaya. Querasiyua, the Huntress. Inachus, who was named for a sacred river. Othiym and her lover-son Pade, the sacred child—”

I gasped. “That name—”

Fritz looked at me sideways. “Which one?”

“Othiym—”

He nodded, smiling as though I had posed an intelligent question. “Ah yes: Othiym Lunarsa. The Woman in the Moon. Another garden-variety lunar deity, although some scholars translate her name as the Destroyer. You know, like the Hindu goddess Kali.”

I swallowed. My mouth felt parched as I croaked, “And these goddesses—they all came from Crete?”

Fritz shrugged. “Who knows? Originally, no; but many of them were worshiped there. Crete was the center