“That’s pretty gruesome,” said Sam. Then he added with a grin, “So basically you’re saying that Dionysus—the god of the coming age—also provides the long-awaited answer to Freud’s question, ‘What does a woman want?’ You want a night off now and again, so you can run howling around up on the mountain, dancing, getting drunk, cavorting with young shepherds—is that it?”
“Well, it sure might flush out a few of those coagulated bloodlines,” I agreed. “Nobody seems ever to have introduced folks like Hitler or Wolfgang to the concept that hybridization breeds strength. I think a little shepherd-pollen might also answer Zoe’s question, ‘What makes them think they can’t?’ I think it’s just what you said to me about lying versus loving. If you do it to someone else, you’re doing it to yourself.”
“Yesterday, I may have learned something that connects this stuff together,” Sam told me with one of his mischievous looks. “The Essenes, who lived down at Qumran in the time of Jesus, believed that Adam had a secret wife, a first wife who came before Eve. Her name was Lilith—it means ‘owl,’ wisdom, sophia. Lilith deserted Adam, though. Guess why.”
“No clue,” I told him.
“Adam wouldn’t let her be on top,” Sam said. When he saw my face, he started to laugh. Then he said, “No, really, I’m serious—I think I’m onto something. Just listen.”
He sat up from his bearskin and faced me.
“Lilith is not only wisdom, she’s Mother Earth—wise enough to support all life, if we don’t dam her up but leave her free to do what she does best. Maybe the mystery is the ancient wisdom, how to use earth’s natural rhythms and energies to support us, instead of damming up rivers that are her arteries, ripping minerals out of her belly, cutting down trees that are her breath, building walls to confine all life to allotted spaces.
“You know that the Indian nation is matriarchal,” Sam added. “But you may not know this Nez Percé prophecy. During the Last Days, in any lands where women have been reduced to minions under male tyranny—or where the earth has been parceled out according to some patriarch’s land-grabbing—those lands in the End Time will be destroyed in the second flood.
“So when it comes to Mother Earth,” Sam finished with a smile, “I think we should let her be on top from now on, as she truly deserves. Just like you and me.”
And he was telling the truth.
A Biography of Katherine Neville
Katherine Neville (b. 1945) is an American author, best known for her spellbinding adventure novels The Eight, A Calculated Risk, and The Magic Circle.
Neville was born in the Midwest and from an early age spent many of her summers and holidays in the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. She would listen with fascination to the yarns of cowboys, miners, lumberjacks, riverboat folks along the Mississippi, Native Americans, and the legendary Mountain Men of the Rockies. These tales sparked her early desire to have adventures and to become a storyteller herself. However, that desire was to be deferred for quite a while.
While growing up, Neville disliked having to sit in stuffy classrooms, listen to lectures, and take exams. She preferred to be outside climbing trees. Instead of reading the dull texts assigned in her history, geography, and social studies classes, she escaped into sagas like The Odyssey and Jason and the Argonauts, swashbuckling adventure tales like Rafael Sabatini’s pirate novels Scaramouche, The Sea Hawk, and Captain Blood, and Jules Verne’s fantasy adventures 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days. When she was sixteen, she saw a movie that changed her life: Lawrence of Arabia. The film thrilled Neville more than all those imaginary tales combined and inspired in her a yearning to live in a wild and remote foreign land one day.
Throughout high school and college, Neville earned money by drawing and painting people’s horses, dogs, and grandchildren and by teaching art classes. Later on, during years of economic boom and bust, she turned to modeling to support herself. Not only did she get to meet interesting new people, she had an opportunity to work with highly skilled photographers and learn the art of photography. Eventually, she saved enough money to buy a Nikon F and a set of lenses, and she started snapping shots of everything and everyone.
When Neville graduated from college, she found that job opportunities for women were limited. After searching for work in several cities, she took a national exam for a new field called data processing, scoring in the top one percent nationally. It landed her a job in New York at IBM in the Transportation and Utilities industries, automating businesses for clients like Con Edison and Long Island Railroad. She became a devotee of early computer wizards Admiral Grace Hopper and Alan Turing and discovered a passion for code making and breaking. This was the inspiration for her first novel, A Calculated Risk, which she would complete nearly twenty years later.
The techniques Neville used in designing these large, complicated computer systems would later prove vital to handling the complex themes, intricate plots, and large casts of characters of her novels. But writing did not come as easily to Neville as drawing or painting, and she knew she needed an innovative structure for the kind of fiction she wanted to write—big, multilayered novels within which different tales could unfold and be interwoven. Fortunately, one of her colleagues at a data center introduced her to the work of black writers who were creating a new literary form based on ancient oral storytelling techniques that could capture the wisdom of an entire culture. Neville took a year’s sabbatical to study African literature in graduate school, focusing on the works of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Amos Tutuola.
But Neville’s fiction breakthrough was short-lived because she had to go back to a full-time job. After a year of repetitive work for an
