The True Story of The Fall of Troy

According to my personal fantasy universe, Cassandra was not born in Troy. She was a Babylonian priestess who ended up in Troy after a series of weird circumstances related to the battle of Kadesh. But she was adopted by King Priam and became known as his daughter. If you want to read the details, they are here, but the story that follows doesn't mention Cassandra's real birthplace  and so it is compatible with the standard version.  (image from Marvel Comics)

Over time, I had learned the science of how to summon ghosts from Hell. That required some weird spells and rare materials, but it seemed to work and one of my first attempts resulted in the summoning of Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess, who told me the story of her life. Some time later, I was surprised to see her appearing all of a sudden in front of me without having done anything. 


Oh...Lady Cassandra, it is you! You scared me. 

I am sorry, you see, ghosts normally come unannounced; really, there is no way...

Well, yes, I understand. See, you are all bluish and transparent...

That's the way ghosts are.

Yes, I suppose that's true. But don't worry, it is a pleasure to see you again. 

Oh, well, it is nice to be here again. See, the Goddess seems to like you enough that she sent me here one more time. And she makes me speak this funny language.... you call it Ingliss, right?

Something like that, lady. It is a language I can understand.

But why don't you call me just Cassandra? Do you have to be so formal?

Well, after all you are the daughter of King Priam. You are a princess. 

Hmmm..... there are many stories about me. But when we move to the other side, I mean, to Hades, there are no more princes or princesses.

I think I understand. 

Hades is not a nice place. It is boring, too. So, I am happy to be here. And if you like to call me Lady Cassandra, it is fine with me. But how have you been doing?

Not so well, Lady. 

Still the same problem you were telling me last time, right?

Yes, you remember what we said last time. We call it climate change.

You told me about that. It is really a big problem. And you say it is getting worse?

Much worse.

And your kings are doing nothing, right?

I would say so, Lady. Our, well, let's call them 'kings', are doing nothing. They don't even recognize that the problem exists. 

But you told me that already. Did something change?

Yes, two years ago, something happened. The envoys of many of these, as you said, kings, got together in a city called Paris.....

Paris? Like one of King Priam's sons?

No, Lady Cassandra, not that Paris. It is the name of a beautiful city North of here. And these envoys agreed on doing something against this curse that befell us. To change things; to stop the curse of climate change. And the kings who had sent them agreed on that and they signed a pact that bound together almost all the people in the world.  

That seems to have been something very good, indeed.

Yes, it was good. And also, one of our religious leaders, we call him the Pope, he wrote something about this big problem of climate change we have. 

Maybe the Goddess spoke to him?

I am not sure about that, Lady.

Well, the Goddess speaks to everybody, even to a male priest, although she prefers female ones.

Again, Lady, I am not sure about that. But what the Pope said was very wise. And he also said that people should get together and do something about climate change. That was before the pact of Paris, and some said that it was one of the reasons why the kings agreed on the pact. 

That was good, too. But you said that something bad happened afterward?

Yes, one of our leaders.... let me call him a king. The most powerful king of all. He has carrot-colored hair, and he is burly, arrogant, and obnoxious.

That's the way kings are.

Yes, maybe you know kings better than me. Anyway, this king went to see the Pope and the Pope told him about what  - well - about what maybe the Goddess had told him. But this king said he didn't care about the Pope, he said he didn't care about the pact of Paris. He said that climate change is not a problem and that he will do as he pleases. And that he will make the country he rules great.

You should know that this is the way kings behave.

Shouldn't a good king care for his people?

Should all kings be good?

I guess you are right, Lady Cassandra. Still, I am disappointed. Many people are disappointed. Can it be that this man doesn't understand the danger of climate change? Can he really be so stupid?

I understand you, don't think I don't. See, I have had my share of meeting kings. And they are as you say. Burly, obnoxious, and arrogant. They are stupid, in a certain way, but not so stupid in another.

Lady Cassandra, you are a prophetess. Can you tell me more about this? Why do kings do these things?

Well, yes, but I have to tell you a little story.

I would love to hear it.  

So, let me see.... I already told you something of the story of Troy when the city was besieged by the Achaeans. And I told you of how the Acheans had built that big wooden thing that they had placed in front of the walls. And that the Trojans didn't know what it was and they thought it was a statue of a horse.

This is the story that everyone knows. It says that the Trojans demolished parts of the walls of the city to let the horse inside. 

Well, this is what the story says. Do you believe it?

It is a nice story, of course, but I figure there was more to it than what the story tells. 

A lot more. Let me ask you a question: do you think the Trojans were stupid?

I wouldn't say that. But I guess you know this better than me. 

Yep. And I can tell you that they were not stupid. Oh, well, depends on what you mean. For people who would spend their time all clad in iron or bronze armor and exchange blows with battle axes; well, you don't expect them to be very smart. But not stupid; I mean, how could it be that they demolished the walls to let this thing get in without worrying about what there was inside?

I had always wondered about that.

Well, the answer to the question has to do with what you were telling me.

About climate change?

Yes, about climate change. You were telling me about this stupid king of yours, the one with carrot-colored hair. You said he doesn't understand what the problem is. But I think it is not true. He does - at least his advisers know.

You think so? Why?

I am a prophetess, you know? Seriously, people do a lot of things that look stupid, but if you look carefully they are not so stupid. Let me go back to Troy. So, they say that the Trojans did something that doomed them - letting inside the Achaean horse. Stupid, right? Of course, if you think of "the Trojans" it is stupid. But if you think "some Trojans" then it may not be. But I have to explain this to you.

So, it all started when Hector was killed. He was Troy's best warrior and he was supposed to become the new king, to succeed his father, king Priam. Hector was a good man, overall, but not so smart, either. He was all up to fighting and upholding the honor of the Trojans. So, he went up to fight and he got killed by that big man of the Achaeans, Achilles.

That was bad for the Trojans; very bad, but the war went on. Achilles was killed by another son of Priam, that Paris I was telling you about, the one who had been so idiot to steal the wife of one of the Achaean Kings, this Helen, and so starting the whole mess. And then someone killed Paris, too. So, at this point, the oldest son of Priam took over; I mean the oldest still alive: Deiphobus, another idiot. He had this idea of marrying Helen after that Paris had died. Great idea, sure; and it did him quite some good! But let me go on.

So, after the death of Hector, the Trojans were still fighting; but some of them understood that the war wasn't going so well. But Deiphobus and the other big bosses said that those who were thinking that were defeatists and that Troy was winning. You know, it was not so easy for ordinary Trojans to understand what was going on outside the walls of the city. They only knew what the warriors were telling them. And they kept telling them, 'we are winning, there is nothing to be worried about, just keep on'.

It was the same for me. I was staying in the temple of the Goddess and I was supposed to spend my time making sacrifices and praying for the city of Troy. Boring, indeed. But I was a prophetess, you know, and I suspected that the war was not going so well.

At that time, I had befriended a priest of the temple of Apollo, his name was Laocoon. Nice man and if you ask me if I had been playing a little with him - you known what I mean - I would ask you what can a girl do when she is supposed to be a virgin priestess and there is nothing for her to do the whole day? So, we became good friends, indeed. One day, Laocoon came and he told me that Aeneas wanted to see me. This Aeneas was one of the big men of Troy. He was a warrior, but also a rich man with plenty of gold and slaves. So, I went to see him and we talked a lot. He was smart, I can tell you that.

Aeneas told me about how the war was going and I understood right away that the game was over for Troy. So, he asked me, 'Cassandra, you are a prophetess, can you tell me what we should do?' I told him, 'You don't need to ask a prophetess. We need to parley with the Achaeans before it is too late.' And he said, 'You are right, Cassandra. You will be the one doing that.' I looked at him, bewildered, and he laughed and he told me, 'aren't you a prophetess, Cassandra? You should have known what I was going to tell you.' These big men really have a twisted sense of humor. Anyway, he asked me to contact Odysseus, one of the Achaean kings, said to be the smartest of the lot.

Aeneas was no fool: he could see that I was a good envoy for Troy; a woman, a priestess, I could be seen as sort of neutral. And parleying was not going to be an easy task. The Achaeans were winning, they knew that and they wouldn't be appeased by giving back to them that silly woman, Helen, that Paris had stolen from her husband. No, that wasn't going to work, no matter how beautiful Helen was said to be (and she was much overrated, this I can tell you). And the Achaeans knew that if they kept fighting, they could have had everything: the gold of the city and its inhabitants as slaves. Still there was some space for a negotiation and that was my task. What would the Achaeans want to leave Troy standing and the Trojans alive? If we were willing to pay them a lot, maybe they would have accepted.

So, we freed an Achaean prisoner, officially he escaped, to tell Odysseus that a priestess of the Moon Goddess wanted to speak to him. And there came back a Trojan prisoner - again, officially he had escaped - and he said that Odysseus was waiting for the priestess in a certain place at night, at the rise of the moon. Which I took as a honor, because I was a moon priestess, as you know.

That was how I met Odysseus. I was accompanied by a bunch of Trojan warriors from Aeneas' retinue. It had been a mistake, as I understood later on, but Aeneas had insisted on that. Odysseus was there with some of his warriors, too. On both sides, we had these burly fellows armed to the teeth, looking at each other askance. But never mind that, as I said, Odysseus was a smart person and he wasn't there to fight and we had a nice chat. He understood what I wanted and he said that it was still possible to find an agreement if the Trojans were willing to pay. And that he wanted to discuss the price with Aeneas in person. So, I went back to Troy and I told the story to Aeneas. And he said that he would see Odysseus and that I should have kept my mouth shut about this story.

This is what I did. I told nothing to anybody about having met Odysseus, nor that Aeneas was seeing him at night. Days went by and I expected something to happen. I would have imagined to see Aeneas coming up in the central square of the city, standing on a pedestal, and telling people something like, 'Fellow Trojan citizens, we found an agreement with the Achaeans. If every Trojan is willing to sacrifice some of his wealth, then the city can be saved.'

But nothing like that happened. Quite the opposite: Prince Deiphobus came up in the central square of Troy and gave a speech to the Trojans saying that the honor of the city of Troy was not negotiable, that the Gods were with Troy, that the walls were solid, and that those stupid Achaeans were all but demoralized. Victory was all but certain for Troy, it was just a question of not listening to the defeatists among us. And he said that he was going to make Troy great again. I remember that Aeneas was with him, nodding and smiling as if he agreed on every word that Deiphobus was saying.  It was weird, but what could I say?

It was at about this time that the big wooden thing appeared in the field in front of the city, the 'horse'. So, there was a lot of head scratching with the Trojans and what the hell was that? But I knew what it was: not for nothing I was a prophetess and I had studied the ways of the world. So, I went up to the walls, I looked at the supposed 'horse', and I said, 'look, that thing is a siege engine! We have to burn it down before it is too late." And there came up my friend, Laocoon, and he also said, 'look, you have to listen to Cassandra. She knows a lot of things, and she is wise. We must destroy that thing.' And some people understood what we were saying, because they knew that I was a priestess and I knew many things. And also Laocoon was known to be a smart person and people respected him a lot.

Then, disaster struck. I should have known what was going to happen, am I not a prophetess? But even prophetesses sometimes ignore things they wouldn't like to happen. So, we were in the middle of a public debate on how best to burn the wooden horse when, suddenly, some people came up and accused me of betraying the Trojans: they said that I had secretly met the Achaean king Odysseus at night. Then, they called up some of Aeneas' bodyguards and they testified that, yes, it was true. They had accompanied me to meet Odysseus at night. Laocoon tried to defend me, but people started saying that he was my lover and that we had defiled the temple of the Goddess. We had committed sacrilege and we couldn't be trusted in anything we said.

At this point, Hell broke loose, as you may imagine. I tried to say that it had been Aeneas who had sent me to meet Odysseus, but they took that as a confession of guilt. Things went kinetic, as you say in Ingliss, Laocoon was killed and I was lucky to be able to escape with my life. I took refuge in the temple of the Goddess and  King Priam protected me; he was a good man, even though he was too old to understand what was really going on.

So, I stayed put inside the temple and I can't tell you exactly what happened afterward. Maybe the Achaeans used the siege engine to smash open the walls of the city, or maybe it is true that the Trojans were so stupid to demolish the walls and let the 'horse' in. Whatever the case, when the Trojans understood the danger, it was too late. Troy went up in flames, lots of people were killed, those who survived were taken as slaves, including me; I became the slave of the big boss of the Achaeans, King Agamemnon. Deiphobus, too was killed. In a sense, he got what he deserved: killed by King Menelaus, Helen first husband. You know the story? Helen told Menelaus where Deiphobus was hiding and Menelaus went in and hacked Deiphobus to pieces. And then, Helen undressed in front of Menelaus and she gave herself to him in that same room, with the floor still wet of Deiphobus' blood. At least this is what they told me - but I think it is true. I knew that woman. She was, well, in Ingliss you use this term, 'female dog', right?

It is right, we use this term, Lady Cassandra. We say 'bitch'. 

But those are details. The point of the story is about Aeneas. You know the story, don't you?

They say that Aeneas escaped from Troy when the city fell, yes. 

Not just him. Several Trojan notables; with their families, their gold, their slaves, their weapons. And not a single Achaean would raise a finger against them. Come on, they even had boats waiting for them to take them away from the mess; all the way to Italy. You see? It had been all prepared. It was all planned from the first time when Aeneas met Odysseus, and I came to think that it had been even before I had spoken with Odysseus. It was a trap, a perfect trap. And the people of Troy fell in it so perfectly. They were completely fooled!

You say that Aeneas betrayed the Trojans? How could that be? He was said to be so pious.

Pious, yeah, sure. I think there is a world in your language, in Ingliss... you say 'propaganda', right?

Well, yes. we use that term, propaganda. I didn't know that it could be such an old idea.
  
Yes, people are always the same, they are easy to sway. I suppose they haven't changed much in your times.

No, Lady, propaganda is still very much used with us. 

Yes, the poor people of Troy were fooled. It was all propaganda, it was all agreed. Even that I was to become the mistress of King Agamemnon. I had been agreed before everything happened. You see? Most of the people who kept saying that Troy was going to win the war understood perfectly well that it wasn't true. But they had to keep saying that Troy was going to be great again if they wanted to fool the Trojans and save themselves.

Well, it is a way of seeing the story that I had never imagined. But it sounds true. And you think it is related to our times?

Yes, you were telling me about this king of yours, the one who has carrot-colored hair. You say that he denies that you have a problem?

That's what he does. People say he is not very smart. 

Maybe he is not so smart, yes. He may be like Deiphobus, I mean, he may really believe that there is no such a thing as a climate change problem. But I bet he is not the only one. Am I right?

You are right. After all, you are a prophetess!

That was an easy prophecy! But I think that the people around him, around that silly king, I am sure they are lying. They know very well what's happening. And they are fooling him and many others. They have to if they want to save themselves.

You think so?

Yes, of course. You have been telling me that because of this 'climate change' a lot of people will die, right?

Well, I hope they won't....

You know better than that. You told me about seas rising, droughts, heat waves, storms and more. Do you think people won't die because of all that?

Yes, it is a possibility.

And those who will die will be the poor, right. Do you think your kings care about the poor?

Well, I guess, really, you are right, but.....

Your carrot-haired king may be part of the plot or not. It doesn't matter. But those behind him are surely planning to move to safer and cooler places. And leave the poor to drown or to starve - or to die of overheating.

I am not sure I believe you, Lady Cassandra.

As if it were something new......

Oh, I am sorry, Lady. I didn't mean to offend you. 

You are not offending me. After all, I am Cassandra, the prophetess nobody believes.

Really, I am sorry. I shouldn't have said that. 

No, no.... don't worry. I understand you. Some things that I say are really difficult to believe.

But are you really supposed to be always right?

It is part of the curse of being a prophetess. You should know that; you told me that you are a kind of - say - prophet, with those 'models' you make. You told me that people don't believe in what you say.

It is part of the job, indeed. So, what should I do?

The Goddess may help you, but in the end it is for the Moirai to decide.

You mean the fate?

Yes, in Ingliss you use that word. There is not much you can do. Fate will decide.

I see.....

You look sad. I am sorry.

You don't have to be sorry, it is not your fault. 

Let's see.... actually, there is something you could do. Why don't you offer me a beer?

A beer? But you are a ghost, Lady Cassandra! 

But I always loved beer. And there is no beer in Hades. I was thinking, well, the Goddess is very powerful and I could pray her a little....

That's strange, Lady Cassandra, you are not bluish and transparent anymore. 

See? I told you that the Goddess is powerful.

Well, you look real now. That much I can say. 

And I think I could drink a beer. Do you have beer, here?

Yes, we do. It would be a pleasure. 

But, now that I think about it, don't you think I am dressed a little strange? Wouldn't people be surprised at seeing me?

Let me see... Linen tunic, woolen cape, golden arm rings, golden bracelets, and leather sandals. No, I don't think people will be surprised. You may be more surprised at seeing how some of my students are dressed! 

So, let's go for that beer! Hades can wait.

A Selfie with Galla Placidia

Myself in Barcelona. In the background, the remains of the temple of Augustus. A place where Empress Galla Placidia surely walked in her times, during the 5th century AD. You cannot see her in this photo, but I felt like she was there.

I am not into ghost summoning, of course, but sometimes I think I can hear ghostly voices of people who lived in remote times in my head. One of these voices is that of Galla Placidia, Empress of Rome and queen of the Goths, who lived an adventurous life some fifteen centuries ago. After so many years, her voice has become faint, indeed. But, paying attention, one can still hear it.

Because of the vagaries of life, it has happened to me to go to Barcelona, in Spain, several times during the past few years. And Barcelona is a place where Galla Placidia lived for some years with her husband, the Gothic king Athaulf ("The Wolf") with whom she had a child whom they named Theodosius. It was the name of Placidia's father, Emperor Theodosius "The Great," the last Roman Emperor to rule on both the Eastern and the Western part of the Empire. And by naming the child Theodosius, Placidia's plans were transparent: to create a new state that would have seen the former enemies, the Goths and the Romans, to live in peace with each other. A beautiful dream, but beautiful dreams are often short lived. This one vanished into thin air when the young Theodosius died as a child. He was buried in a silver coffin in Barcelona, then brought to Italy, and finally put to rest in the Imperial Mausoleum in Rome, possibly in the same year when Placidia herself died, in 450 AD.

So, Placidia was in Barcelona, called in her times Colonia Julia Augusta Faventia Paterna Barcino Even though she left little or no physical traces there, it is curious how she left an impression in my mind; an impression of presence. This impression came to me for the first time a few years ago. I was walking in the busy "La Rambla" avenue, full of tourists. It came to my mind that I had read that there was this Augustan temple in Barcelona, even though I had never seen it. At that time, I didn't have a GPS map on my phone, so I walked at random. Not completely at random; I had a vague idea of where that place was supposed to be. And I found it.

I remember how I felt when I went through a small door in front of an anonymous building that led into a large room where three columns of the ancient temple of August are still standing. It is not a really remarkable place, but I remember how happy I was when I found it. It was a place where Placidia had walked. She had seen these same columns. It was like if Placidia herself was there, welcoming me in her palla dress, smiling while wearing her double ringed pearl necklace. 

It was a curious sensation of elation that, now, I feel everytime I happen to be in Barcelona and I find the time to go to visit the great columns of Augustus temple, in the small road called "Carrer del Paradis." I did the same this May 2017 and I took a selfie of myself with the columns behind. You can't see Galla Placidia in this picture but perhaps you can imagine her being there, too.

Is truth a Chimera? The Empire is being destroyed by its own propaganda

A lucid discussion of the "post-truth world" by Casey Williams taken from Deric Bowd's excellent "Mind Blog." The Global Empire seems to be in the process of being destroyed by its own propaganda. (see also my previous post on how the same destiny befell on the Roman Empire)

Has Trump Stolen Philosophy’s Critical Tools?

By Casey Williams

Trump’s playbook should be familiar to any student of critical theory and philosophy. It often feels like Trump has stolen our ideas and weaponized them.

For decades, critical social scientists and humanists have chipped away at the idea of truth. We’ve deconstructed facts, insisted that knowledge is situated and denied the existence of objectivity. The bedrock claim of critical philosophy, going back to Kant, is simple: We can never have certain knowledge about the world in its entirety. Claiming to know the truth is therefore a kind of assertion of power.

These ideas animate the work of influential thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida, and they’ve become axiomatic for many scholars in literary studies, cultural anthropology and sociology. 

From these premises, philosophers and theorists have derived a number of related insights. One is that facts are socially constructed. People who produce facts — scientists, reporters, witnesses — do so from a particular social position (maybe they’re white, male and live in America) that influences how they perceive, interpret and judge the world. They rely on non-neutral methods (microscopes, cameras, eyeballs) and use non-neutral symbols (words, numbers, images) to communicate facts to people who receive, interpret and deploy them from their own social positions.

Call it what you want: relativism, constructivism, deconstruction, postmodernism, critique. The idea is the same: Truth is not found, but made, and making truth means exercising power.

The reductive version is simpler and easier to abuse: Fact is fiction, and anything goes. It’s this version of critical social theory that the populist right has seized on and that Trump has made into a powerful weapon.

Some liberals have argued that the best way to combat conservative mendacity is to insist on the existence of truth and the reliability of hard facts. But blind faith in objectivity and factual truth alone has not proven to be a promising way forward...Even if we felt comfortable asserting the existence of something like “truth,” there’s no going back to the days when Americans agreed on matters of fact — when debates about policy were guided by a commitment to truth and reason. Indeed, critique shows us that it’s doubtful that those days, like Trump’s “great” America, ever existed.

For this very reason, these strategies remain useful, however much something like them may be misused, and however carelessly some critical theorists and philosophers have deployed them. Even in a “post-truth era,” a critical attitude allows us to question dominant systems of thought, whether they derive authority from an appearance of neutrality, objectivity or inevitability or from a more Trumpian appeal to alternative facts that dispense with empirical evidence. In a world where lawmakers still appeal to common sense to promote regressive policies, critique remains an important tool for anyone seeking to move past the status quo.

This is because critical ways of thinking demand that we approach knowledge with attention and humility and recognize that, while facts might be created, not all facts are created equal.

While Trump appeals more often to emotions than to facts — or even to common sense — critique can help those who oppose him question the Trumpian version of reality. We can ask not whether a statement is true or false, but how and why it was made and what effects it produces when people feel it to be true. Paying attention to how knowledge is created and used can help us hold leaders like Trump accountable for what they say.

And if we question all ideas — not just the ones we dislike — perhaps our critiques can also reveal new ways of thinking and suggest political possibilities undreamed of by either Trump or his centrist opponents.

When the Russians came

The monument to the Russian sailors who helped the inhabitants of the Italian city of Messina after the great earthquake of 1908. Maybe it is not a great monument in itself, but it celebrates a gratitude still felt after more than a century. 

"The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!" is the title of a wonderful 1966 US movie that tells the story of a Soviet submarine which runs aground off New England during the cold war. Some sailors are sent inland for help and the result is a series of misunderstandings nearly leading to a bloody fight. Eventually, however, all ends well with the Russians and the Americans cooperating to save a little boy who falls from the bell tower of the island.

The story of the movie is eerily suggestive of a historical episode that saw Russian sailors really landing to help a population in distress. It was after the great Earthquake of Messina, in Sicily, which struck the town on Dec 28th, 1908 and caused maybe 200,000 victims. It was probably the most disastrous earthquake in modern history.

The scale of the destruction caused by the Earthquake was so large that the contacts of the mainland with the city of Messina were lost for a few days and the Italian government was slow in sending a relief force. For at least a couple of days, the survivors of the earthquake were helped only by an international force, mainly composed of the sailors of four Russian military ships that happened to be cruising nearby.

British and German ships also provided help and, subsequently, the Italian navy took over with a large relief effort. Still, it seems that the Russians did a lot and with great good will. We have little detail of the events of those confused first days, but some surviving documents of the time tell us much about the gratitude of the survivors. One note sent to the Russian consulate by the Pira family says, "Jesus is with Russia, thank you!"

The Russian intervention was so much appreciated by the inhabitants of Messina that, shortly after the earthquake, the city enacted a decree that dedicated a square of the town to the Russian sailor and planned to build a monument to them.

It took more than a hundred years to build the promised monument. It is hard to say exactly why it took so long but, eventually, it was done in 2012. Today, it stands, little known outside Messina, but a reminder of a story of human solidarity and friendship.

A curious angle of this story is that my wife's family is from Messina and her relatives told me several times how difficult it was for their grandparents to survive the great quake of 1908. I don't know if they were directly helped by Russian sailors, but it may very well be that my life would have been different if they hadn't been there.

Thank you for having come, Russians!

The Origins of the Deep Ones

This is a piece of fiction that I wrote some years ago in a somewhat pompous and erudite style designed to imitate Lovecraft's fiction. It was supposed to be part of a scenario for a campaign of the "Call of Cthulhu" role playing game and, as you may imagine, Samuel T. Ellicon was one of the characters in play (h/t Luca Somigli, who developed it). Now that I reread it, I found it somewhat scary. Are the "Deep Ones" really existing? Who knows? (image source)

THE CULT OF WATER DEITIES IN ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS

By Samuel T. Ellicon, Ph.D., FRS

Curator's note: These pages were written by the late Professor Samuel T. Ellicon shortly before his disappearance in tragic circumstances in 1917, during the great war. The loss of professor Ellicon was a serious blow to science and in particular to studies of ancient mid-East civilizations. The curator has collected these notes and is diffusing them in the belief of carrying out a service for the scientific community, especially in light of the great prestige of the author. The reader is however advised that this text was not originally written for publication and that several points will require appropriate study before they can be accepted by the scientific community.

Among the variegated races of creatures that populate ancient myths, we cannot avoid to remark the large number of those which are in various ways related to the marine environment: Nereid, Typhons, Hydras, and, perhaps the most familiar one, the mermaid, a creature that is related to the one called "Siren" in the classic word. The popular knowledge about these beings was widespread in ancient times, and we may assume that it remains so even to this day. To convince yourself of this, a simple test will show that there are good chances are that anyone, even of the lowest classes, can describe the bodily appearance of a mermaid, a creature with the upper body and the head of a woman and with the lower body of a fish.

Perhaps, the fascination with mermaids and the associated marine creatures is something that is more worth of exploration by those who study the depths of the human mind, rather than by those who deal with ancient myths and beliefs. Yet, some intriguing hypothesis may be put forward even in the present context if we seek to find exactly where and when these myths originated. For this purpose, we must go far back in time. Some events that occurred in Mesopotamia at the age of the Sumerians, maybe as early as during the 3rd millennium B.C., are related by Berosus, a Babylonian priest of Bel-Marduk who lived at the time of Alexander the Great. Among other things, Berosus says that

.. there made its appearance, from a part of the Persian gulf which bordered upon Babylonia, an animal endowed with reason, who was called Oannes. ... the whole body of the animal was like that of a fish; and had under a fish's head another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish's tail. It had a human voice and it spent the time of the day among men without taking food, teaching the practice of letters, sciences and arts....At night it went back to the waters of the Sea. (1)

Oannes is the Greek rendition of the word that was spelled Aun in Sumerian. According to Berosus, in later times other fish-beings emerged from the sea, one of the last of them being named Odacon and again described as having the shape of a fish blended with that of a man. We find the same name mentioned also in the Bible in a slightly changed form as Dagon, the god adored by the Philistines. We cannot avoid to remark that the outlandish appearance of these beings seems to be unrelated to any belonging to the known kingdom of marine beasts. However, the mix of human and ichthyc characters strongly reminds us of those mythological creatures (the mermaid, for instance) which shared this feature.

Despite their weird aspect, beings such as Oannes and Odacon seem to have been readily accepted in the Sumerian world. In fact, as Berosus reports, the Sumerians appear to have attributed the very existence of their civilization to their teaching. Clearly, the fish-beings must have been benign deities, quite possibly carrying gifts with them. Yet, we cannot avoid to note how the passing of the centuries brought a substantial change of the attitude of mankind. Already Berosus, writing in Hellenistic times, denies them the status of gods, preferring to define them simply as terion, "animal". The Bible clearly shares the same attitude defining Dagon as a false God or a demon. This change in attitude may be linked to the reversals of fortune that the worshipers of these divinities underwent. Both the Sumerian and the Philistine civilizations disappeared, crushed by warlike neighbors.

The civilizations that dominated the Mediterranean area afterwards, the Hellenistic one first, and then the Judaico-Christian one, seems to have maintained only a distorted subterranean knowledge of these ancient deities. For instance, perhaps we could see the story of John the Baptist as told in the gospels as an allegory of the appearance of the water-god Oannes/Aun. It is well established, in fact, that the name "John" (Latin: "Ioannes", Hebrew: "Yohahan"), derives from the name of the Sumerian god Oannes. So, it may not have been just a coincidence that John the Baptist appeared most of the time semi-submerged in the river Jordan. Indeed, it is a disquieting thought at this point the one that leads us to recall the importance placed in Christian belief to the ritual submersion in water and to remember that early Christians symbolized Christ as a fish (2). 

However, this line of reasoning would lead us far away from our main points. We can only say that the old marine Gods were not wholly forgotten, but rather transformed into something that had taken an evil taint. In the great mass of myths of Greek lore, marine creatures are monsters and demons that dwell in remote and desolate places. The most widespread and best known of these myths is that of the siren. We shall not here attempt to disentangle the complex iconographic relation that links the ancient Mediterranean siren (originally described as a creature with the body of a bird and the head of a woman) to the half-fish and half-woman being that is nowadays referred to as "Siren" in the Latin world, but that we are more accustomed to describe with the Anglo-Saxon term of "mermaid". For the purposes of the present essay, it shall suffice to say that these two beings are basically one and the same. As described in Homer, sirens/mermaids were capable of luring people by their singing, but they would also devour them. It may well be that this vision is just an allegory of the capability of these creatures to impart some form of esoteric knowledge, something so different from everything normally accepted in the civilized world that it could be practiced only in remote areas. Furthermore, those who would receive it would be so transformed by it that they would not seek ever to return. To the eyes of those who remained, the followers of the sirens were at all effects "eaten".

Let us try now to interpret these facts, and in this I shall be forced to cast away at least some of the natural tendency of the academic to accept only the well proven evidence. However, I trust that the reader will forgive this attitude as it is the result only of a genuine quest for truth. So, let us first of all put forward some reasonable hypothesis about the origin of the Sumerian fish-gods: We know that Aun and Odacon came from a place called Apsu, a term that has come down to us from the Sumerian language as abyss, meaning, apparently, the same thing that it does now. In earlier times, however, "abyss" may have had a quite different meaning than it has in modern English. In fact, it may be possible to identify Aun/Oannes with an earlier deity named Enki, that in later Babylonian myths is referred to as Ea. "Oannes" in fact may derive from the compound word Ea-ghanna to mean "Ea the fish"(3) Now, some early versions of the myths do indicate that Enki/Ea originally came from the sky, apparently from a star. Aun may therefore have been a dweller of deep space before becoming a sea divinity (4).

I shall make now the bold assumption that a race of beings from far away in space traveled to Earth in the remote past, thousands, or maybe tens of thousands, of years ago. They may have been wholly alien to our world and they may have needed elaborate precautions to survive on land (something that may be reflected in Berosus' report, where the fish-god Oannes is described as if wearing some kind of pressure suit). Perhaps they were creatures originally adapted to live under water. But we may also see another, perhaps more important reason for these beings to avoid the land, and that was the presence of mankind. Clearly the knowledge of beings capable of traveling among the stars could not be but immensely superior to that of mankind, then still in the stone age. But the creatures from the stars may have been only few. Possibly, our ancestors of the stone age may have felt a natural revulsion against these creatures and may have fought them effectively even with their primitive weapons.

I shall call these creatures, for lack of a generally accepted word, the Deep Ones (5). We do not know why the Deep Ones left their star of origin, yet if they came all the way to here, their purpose can only have been to live here, and that must necessarily mean to take over Earth for themselves. For this they were fighting not just against mankind, they were fighting against Earth's environment and for this purpose they needed mankind. Theirs was an ambitious plan of interbreeding, where they would use man to create a new race. A race that would be at home both on land and on sea; that would remain mentally kin to the original Deep Ones but use human breeding just as a means of adapting their physical bodies to the conditions of Earth. But it may not have been easy to convince stone age human beings to submit to this plan. Hence, by means of gifts and of teaching the Deep Ones tried to create a society where even their monstrous shape could be accepted, at least in some special moment and aided by special rites. Thus, worshiped as deities, they could mingle with humans and carry on their interbreeding plans.

But before the new race could emerge, something went wrong. Eventually the fish deities were rejected; the civilizations practicing their cult invaded and destroyed, their temples crushed to pieces. The very memory of their teaching distorted into vague tales of evil ritual about demon-like creatures. From the viewpoint of the Deep Ones, it must have been a crushing setback for their plans of interbreeding. But their knowledge and power must certainly far surpass that of human beings. What could then be the cause of their defeat? Certainly we cannot think that puny human beings could have fought them knowingly. Something or someone must have worked to thwart the Deep Ones's efforts. Someone holding a power and a knowledge at least of the same level as theirs. So what kind of creatures walk among men, perhaps disguised as men, that could fight the Deep Ones and chase them back to the sea? We cannot know and we are not in the position of understanding the strategy of beings whose plans extend over thousands of years. And certainly no one can be sure that the defeat of the Deep Ones is by any means definitive, and who can be sure that in this very moment somewhere, maybe not far away from here, they are not actively working to take over some town on the coast there to carry out their interbreeding plans.




1Adapted from F. Lenormant; "Essai de commentaire des fragments cosmogoniques de Berose", Paris 1871

2The fish (ICHTHUS) is commonly believed to be an acronym for Iesous Christos Theou Uios Soter (Jesus Christ, son of God, Savior)

3 H. Winckler "Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens". Leipzig 1892

4 Note here how the transformation from a sky dweller to an abyss dweller is mirrored in the change in the popular image of the siren from a bird to a fish.

5 I am indebted for this term, as well as for other precious insights in this matter, to mr. Howard Philip Lovecraft

Sumerian Humor? On the Origins of Jokes

Sumerian jokes? Well, hard to find any original ones (and the one above, obviously, is not).

There has been a claim that something written in Sumerian on a tablet from 1900 years BC. It says " "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Does that sound like a joke to you? Well, maybe. But note two things: the first is that I have seen many cases of Sumerian texts translated in completely different ways by different experts. So, maybe the translation for this one is good, but I wouldn't bet on that. The second is that we have plenty of Sumerian texts surviving. Even if you didn't spend some of your time examining them, you ought to be surprised that, out of so much material, only one joke came out (if it is one). Indeed, Sumeria left us a vast corpus of hymns, narrations, and stories. Most rather solemn and serious, the sense of humor, in those times, was not the same as it is in ours.

A little better is an Egyptian text from some 1600 years ago, said to be about Pharaoh Sneferu (from the same source as above). "how do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." A joke? Maybe. Still, not the kind of joke that makes you go ROTFLMAO.

Instead, the Romans had a jokes similar to ours. One is from the Saturnalia by Macrobius, around 4th century AD, as reported in Wikipedia. 

Some provincial man has come to Rome and walking on the streets was drawing everyone's attention, being a real double of the emperor Augustus. The emperor, having brought him to the palace, looks at him and then asks: "Tell me, young man, did your mother come to Rome anytime?" The reply was: "She never did. But my father frequently was here."

Again, no ROTFLMAO involved, but we are getting a step closer to modern jokes. In our times, when thinking of a Roman joke, we could say something like "A Roman walks into a bar and asks for a Martinus. You mean a Martini, the Bartender asks. The answer is, if I had wanted it double, I would have asked for it." Different kind of stuff, I'd say.

So, the records of ancient jokes are poor, but there seems to have been a slow evolution toward our times. "Jokes" are one of those slow trends that go on for millennia. And I think that jokes have a purpose: they have evolved with the increasing complexity of society. They serve as a tool against the psychopaths who tend to infest governments and rule states.

In the early times, states were still something new, so it took centuries for jokes to be developed. Now they are a powerful weapon against dictators, pompous rulers, and bureaucrats. In many cases, rulers reacted violently: in some places and some times, telling a joke about the local big man could you get you jailed or worse. Fortunately, today things are different. By the way, do you know the joke about Donald Trump......? Hmmmm........ Well, now that I think about that, I see that don't know any, actually.

Ukraine: a travel report written by a ghost

I wrote this piece several years ago about a travel of mine to Ukraine, in 1999. Now, I found it by chance and I thought it was worth publishing. It is titled "written by a ghost" but, after all, a Chimera is a sort of ghost. So, here it is, it has now a curious feeling as it comes from a time when cell phones didn't exist and the Internet still a novelty. Maybe you'll find it interesting. (image Insource)

Travel writers are rather ghostly figures: wherever they go, they pass by so quickly. They don't speak the language, they don't know the local uses, they miss the details, the subtleties, the complex interactions, the love, the hate, everything. The only thing they can glimpse is that, really, people out there are very much like us, or perhaps that they are so much unlike us.

Yet, traveling means, in a certain way, seeking for adventures. Some travelers report of truly dramatic events that may involve even being shot at, and missed. In most cases, however, the adventure consists of much more banal events: being packed in a too hot (or too cold) train, arriving too late to pick up the coincidence, being served awful food, finding yourself in some ugly place, surrounded by people who smell bad and who don't understand a word of what you say.

The story that I am telling you doesn't involve shooting anyone, no physical harm was involved, and the people I met were mostly well behaved and not bad smelling, even though not all of them spoke English. But I think it was much more adventurous than the average travel report by a tourist. So, let me tell it.

First of all, Ukraine. At the time of this story, in the late 1990s, the Soviet Union had gone several years before and when I arrived in Kiev I was told many times that this wasn't Russia. Apparently, it was important for Ukrainians to specific this difference. It was fine for me, except that I had been in Moscow several times already and I can tell you that Kiev at that time looked very much like Moscow, just a bit of a warmer place. The same smell of gasoline pervading everything, the same mixture of new and old, of misery and wealth, the aspect of everything falling apart, and here and there something new springing out, skyscrapers, alien in the gray landscape.

Let me explain you a bit more. My trip to Kiev was part of my job. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many researchers in the West felt that it was their duty to give a hand to their Eastern colleagues who were in trouble, having lost their salaries and their research grants. It was a time when NATO would pay the salary of Russian and Ukrainian researchers. I know that things have changed quite a bit since then, but that was the way it was. So, in Kiev, I visited a number of research centers since I was managing a NATO grant destined to pay salaries to Ukrainian researchers. After the fall of the Union, these institutes had become cavernous places, full of obsolete equipment and where you could see researchers walking aimlessly along empty corridors. Ghosts? Maybe; surely they gave that sensation to me.

Of this trip to Kiev, I have a few recollections such as having had dinner at a MacDonald's where they could speak something that vaguely resembled English and where the girl at the counter asked me if I was American. That had a curiously parallel ring with when, at a MacDonald's in Washington DC, they had asked me if I was Russian. I suppose that ghosts can take many shapes, depending on where they manifest themselves. Then, there was the lady of the hotel where I was staying who was very angry at me because she thought that I had damaged the samovar of my room. There followed a quarrel in Russian and she seemed to find that something I had tried to tell her in Russian was so funny that she went away, laughing. I can also remember the lady of the travel agency who for some reason abused me in Russian for quite some time (or, at least, I think she did; the tone, at least, was unmistakable). Then she looked at my passport, realized that I was Italian, smiled, and said in a dreamy tone something that eve with my very limited Russian I could understand as "Italy, good country".

So, as a travel, my days in Kiev could be described as rather adventurous already. But that kind of adventure was part of the usual trade of travelers: bad food, alien places, people who look like gangsters and who don't speak a word of English. Truman Capote wrote an entire book about his travel to Moscow in the 1950s ( "The Muses Are Heard") where the most adventurous thing that ever happens to him is to witness a fight in the street; he never speaks to anyone except through interpreters. So, I could tell you many more details about my visit to Kiev but my trip to Ukraine would reserve me a much more adventurous time. That was when I took a trip to a town in the East of the country where they had another big research center that I was supposed to visit.

Excuse me if I don't tell you the name of this town; there is nothing really special about that place and I am sure that if you know Ukraine you'll be able to recognize it. It is just that not mentioning the name provides a certain feeling of "never-never land" for it. I can tell you that it is on the Dniepr River, not far from the better-known city of Poltava; where the Russian troops led by Czar Peter the Great defeated the Swedes of King Karl XII. For me, going there was partly because of my job, partly curiosity, partly wanderlust, and partly I don't know what. As I said, ghosts can manifest themselves in many places.

But I have also to tell you that going to that remote place, all alone, not knowing the language, never having met the people who had invited me, well, it was a little too much even for the ghost I felt I was. So, to make the trip a little less adventurous, I teamed up with a couple of Italian businessmen. I had never met them before, but we had a common acquaintance and so I came to know that they knew that town well and that they were going there more or less at the same time when I was going to Kiev. So, I contacted them and they said that, yes, they would have been happy to meet me in that town and so it was agreed. Excuse me if I changed the names of these two Italian businessmen in order to make them not recognizable. But I left unchanged the names of the Ukrainian people I met. It seemed right to do so.

The trip from Kiev took about four hours by car. We followed the Dniepr River, crossing many villages and small towns where old ladies wearing wooden shawls were selling vegetables on the edges of the road. The river was frozen at that time of the year with some people standing on the ice and - I think - fishing. My driver drove an old red Lada, he spoke not a single word of English, and he offered me cigarettes that I politely refused. I remember that he never wore his seat belt but he made the gesture of wearing it every time we crossed a police car; removing it immediately afterward. It was a behavior that was typical of Southern Italy at that time, where drivers refused to wear seat belts. At least, I knew that there was something in common between Italy and Ukraine.

So, I arrived where I was to stay: Vladimir's home, the translator who was hired to help us manage in that place. Vladimir and his wife, Tanya, were renting their apartment to visiting foreigners and the arrangement was that Tanya would also cook meals for the three Italian businessmen sharing the apartment (actually, two businessmen and myself). Tanya was in her 30s, she was nice and helpful, her English was good. I only have to say that her attempts of cooking pasta Italian style were not very successful. But never mind, ghosts are not really affected by bad cuisine. About the apartment itself, I had already experience with Soviet-style apartments in Moscow. In the 1990s, they had this typical aspect of being part of a building that had been bombed just a few days before (I am afraid that some of these apartments in East Ukraine have actually been bombed in recent times, but that's another story). In any case, these apartments are large, warm, and comfortable. Surely not fancy, but they have all that's needed.

In the apartment of Vladimir and Tanya, I met my Italian partners, Giorgio and Alberto (cousins to each other), who had arrived there a few days earlier. Of the two, Alberto was a newcomer; like me, he was there for the first time. Giorgio, instead, was a veteran of the place and he had been there already several times. Over some five years of shuttling back and forth, he had created a lot of business contacts and he had even learned a version of Russian, or perhaps Ukrainian. As the Italian merchants of ancient times, he seemed to have built a small commercial empire in these remote lands. He was surely a man of sharp wits and quick intelligence. At that time, he was 63; a stout man, looking younger than his official age and with the physical built of a fighter. He told me that he had been a Karate master. A man, no doubt, fascinating under many respects, but also one that gave you a certain mixed feeling. But let me go on.

Theoretically, as I said, my trip should have been about visiting a research center, but something went wrong with this idea. The contacts that I had seemed have vanished, just as the research center itself. Whether it existed or not, it remained off limits for me during the whole time I was there. I don't know exactly why that happened; maybe they were suspicious of me; they thought I was a Western spy, a CIA man, or that, maybe, I could call up the NATO headquarters in Brussels and unleash a bombing raid on them. The whole story remained forever mysterious to me, but how could I complain? After all, I was a ghost.

So, I found myself engaged in accompanying Giorgio and Alberto in their business visits. It was fine for me; I took it as a form of extreme tourism. I think also for Giorgio I was some kind of an asset; his prestige of businessman was enhanced if he could take with him an Italian university professor as I was. So, off we went visiting all sorts of companies and businesses. Of two full days of this work, I can tell you a few glimpses. One was that if there ever was a dreary town on this planet, this one was it. It may be hard to imagine a medium sized town (they told me it had half a million inhabitants) which has absolutely nothing that could be of even vague interest for a tourist. For what I can say, it was all the same: rows and rows of tall apartment buildings and large squares of rotten industrial plants. It was an industrial town, one of those "closed towns" that, at the time of the Soviet Union, were forbidden to foreigners for military or strategic reasons, or whatever. Maybe they really had some important military secret hidden somewhere. Or, more likely, they were ashamed to show to me the disastrous conditions of a formerly important military research center. Perhaps, but I had the feeling that the whole thing, the secrecy, the evident diffidence of some of the people we met, was simply part of the logic of this particular place but that it didn't have to be grounded in any physical reality. Maybe they were all ghosts and I was the only real human being in the area. But never mind that.

If I have to be a travel writer, at least I don't want to bore you with a detailed report. Rather, I can just try to convey to you some impression that combines shrewd business and brute force, a movement to build and to rebuild and, at the same, time the immense difficulty of getting rid of the old ways. We visited somebody's office, a large man dressed in a striped suit. He looked exactly like the villain gangster of the 20s in a Hollywood movie. His office was small, nearly empty. It was furnished only with an old table with a plastic top, one of the windows panes was broken, on a little table on a side, there was a bible. Out of the window, we could see the main square of the town: an expanse of concrete full of holes so large that they could have swallowed an entire tank. In the center, there was a larger than life statue of Vladimir Illich Lenin. Later on, Giorgio told me that the man in the striped suit was negotiating with him the sale of 30 harvesters from Italy, a trick that, alone, was worth several million dollars.

As you see, that was not exactly my field, but I went along. It was all new for me and, in many ways, fascinating. Giorgio was looking very professional, dressed in a smart suit and talking softly and convincingly. For these meetings, he didn't trust his Russian enough and it was Vladimir who translated from Italian to Russian and back. So, I could follow the negotiations, too, even though I was not there to sell harvesters or anything else. I have no idea if these meetings resulted in some multi-million dollar business for Giorgio but, again, this is not the point here.

For a travel report, what I have just told you would already be something special. It is much more than what the average travel writer can ever hope to see. I had visited Ukrainians at work, I had stayed in one of their apartments, eaten with them, had business with them. I had this feeling that some travel agency could have organized my trip as an example of extreme tourism, something under several respects more adventurous than touring the Himalayas in a Land Rover. But that was not all. If ghosts can see what happens in the real world, they rarely interact with humans except with howling and chain-clanking. But maybe I was not a good ghost since I tended to speak to people, at least with those who could speak in a language I understood. And one of those people was Vladimir, the interpreter.

Vladimir was a man of remarkable culture, proficient in many languages, and also in many ways a philosopher and perhaps even a sort of prophet. His origins were from somewhere in the great plains once inhabited by the nomads of the East and he had something of the "spiritual" face and the penetrating eyes of Eastern monks. He told me about his way of learning languages. He said it was simple for him: it was just a question of remembering things he had known in one of his previous lives. I think it would not work so well for me but, for him, it seemed to be just perfect. In addition to Russian (actually, Ukrainian) he could speak Italian, Spanish, English, German, Turkish, some Japanese and perhaps some other languages that I don't remember right now. We exchanged a few gifts, I gave him a book by Borges in Spanish that I had taken with me to read, and he gave me one of his Italian-Russian dictionaries. For some reasons, none of the pictures I had taken on this trip came out in print except for one and that shows him.

Besides that dictionary, Vladimir's picture is the only souvenir I have of that remote town. No other material objects that say that I have been there for real, that it was not a dream. Wasn't Borges telling the story of a man who dreamed to have been in Paradise, that he picked up a flower there, and that when he woke up he had that flower in his hand? Maybe something similar had happened to me, though the place where I went was no paradise. Definitely not and there is something more that I can tell you about that place, about a woman called Valentina.

The first time I saw her, I had arrived in town just a few hours before and I was sitting on the sofa in the living room of Vladimir's house, watching Ukrainian TV. It was then that Valentina entered the room and sat in the armchair close to me, smiling at me. And that was an experience in itself.

I have to explain that. You see, Slavic women are often handsome, but some are spectacular and Valentina surely was. It is easy for a writer to say that a woman is beautiful and then leave to the reader the task of figuring her in his or her mind. In real life, often you can say that a girl is pretty, sometimes you say also she is "beautiful" meaning the same thing. A truly beautiful woman, instead, is something you see only in TV or in your dreams. But Valentina was no dream and no literary construction, she was real. Dark hair, a perfectly symmetrical face, a sweet smile, big, dark eyes, a body which was the perfect balance of curves and slenderness. Not that she was actually perfect: whoever had worked on her teeth hadn't done a good job and those first small wrinkles on her face were painful to see in such a beautiful woman (later on, I learned she was 33 at that time). But never mind that. As I said, she was real: a spectacular woman walking in that living room wearing a yellow two-piece dress that I think you could buy for five dollars in any Salvation Army shop in the US.

It goes without saying that my attempts of entering into a conversation with Valentina were doomed from the beginning. She spoke nearly zero English and I spoke very little Russian. During the days that followed, I put together part of her story from what Vladimir and Tanya told me. She was, obviously, Giorgio's lover but, on this point, there was clear disagreement between the two, with Giorgio having lost interest in her but with Valentina still being interested in him. The situation was complex, with Valentina trying, as far as I understood, to convince Giorgio to go back to the apartment where they had lived together while he was in Ukraine during the past five years or so.

All that was, of course, none of my business. Besides, as I said, I was a ghost. I could only watch, and watch from a rather remote viewpoint as I could have no idea of what Giorgio and Valentina were telling to each other, nor what Valentina was telling to Ljudmilla (Ljuba), a friend who always accompanied her in her visits to Giorgio.I was told that Valentina and Ljuba lived together and Ljuba had about the same age as Valentina. A pretty girl, I could say, although in no way as spectacular as Valentina. Surely she had her story, her world, her loves and hates, all the small and big things of a whole life, again something that was wholly inaccessible to a ghost.

The afternoon of the third day of our stay, Giorgio said that our work was almost over and that we could take an evening off. That turned out to be a rather special experience, well worth a travel report written by a ghost. But let me tell you also that I was rapidly getting sick. That year's flu epidemics, which I had escaped while in Italy, had caught up with me in Ukraine. Sneezing and coughing, I considered if it would not have been a good idea for me to stay home that night. But I picked up a box of aspirin tablets and went with the others. Unwise, I know, but that's what I did.

The place we went to was Nina's bar. How can I describe it? It is difficult to imagine this place if you have never been to the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. It had, of course, all the things that a bar should have: five or six tables, a bar, music playing, dim and yellow lights. But the shabbiness of that place is something almost impossible to describe, unless you had been there. If you had, as I did, I guess you would find that the specific shabbiness of it would merge with the general shabbiness of everything else in that town in the middle of Ukraine and hence disappear.

Nina had closed the bar for everyone else; that night was to be our private party. We had a dinner of a rather modest culinary appeal (but not the worst in my life) and we drank wine, vodka, beer, other liquors I would not be able to name. And then there were the ladies. I guess this kind of entertainment must be rather common everywhere in the world for traveling businessmen. Just let me tell you that I was not much used to it, actually not at all. We had two nice looking ladies serving us dinner, and three more sitting at the table with us. There was Ilona, a spectacular blonde who was clearly Giorgio's target. Then Valentina (not the same Valentina), a girl of porcelain skin, red lips, and black hair. She seemed to have been assigned to Alberto. And Svetlana, a young redhead, she sat close to me. There was also another, older, Svetlana who sat intermittently at the table, just as Nina herself. This older Svetlana, not really old but clearly after her prime, seemed to be masterminding the whole business with the ladies.

Of course, given my state, my survival during the dinner was made possible only by aspirin. I swallowed, I think, one tablet every hour and that kept me more or less alive and awake. Maybe the mix of aspirin and alcohol gave me a high, maybe I caused me to became convinced that I was just dreaming of being there, that I wasn't really there, but peacefully asleep at home. Anyway, it prevented me from doing the sensible thing to do: excuse myself and go back home.

So is this part of a travel writer's story? Maybe, and yet sordid bars in the suburbs of a large town must be common everywhere in the world; what is there of so interesting with this specific one? Good question: I have no answer to it, so let's just go on. Dinner being over, we spent some time drinking and in conversation. I discovered that Nina, the owner of the bar, could speak English. She had studied in some technical school; actually, the cases of life; she had been a classmate of Tanya, Vladimir's wife. A nice girl, Nina, also smart and knowing a lot of things of the world. In her early 30s, she had the heavy physical built of Slavic women. It would have been hard to define her as pretty but she was lively, just a smile of her could carry more message than all our laborious conversation in English. Later on, Giorgio told me that he had met Nina a few years before, when she had a kiosk on the street, selling drinks. It was Giorgio who had bought this bar for her. I suppose it had been in exchange for something, but that's life.

Most of the time, Nina was not at the table, she was running the place. So the conversation with the Ukrainian ladies was most problematic for us, except of course for Giorgio who seemed to master Russian/Ukrainian well enough to have a good time with his spectacular blond friend, taller than him of a whole head. Those of us who spoke little or no Russian, myself and Alberto, had a more difficult time. I had Svetlana sitting by my side and my Russian-Italian dictionary in hand. Out of it, slowly and painfully, I could string together concepts, one word after the other. In a way, it was a full immersion Russian lesson. Out of my earlier trips to Russia, I already had in mind a number of simple Russian words: "glass", "dish", "bottle", "knife", "fork"… With that dictionary, I crammed into my mind a series of more complex concepts, including "beautiful girl" (referred to all the ladies present) and "witch" (referred to the older Svetlana). Later on, when I took a Russian class in Italy I found that most of what I had learned that night was Ukrainian, not Russian. The two things were similar but not identical, close enough anyway to cause a lot of confusion for a beginner as I was.

With Svetlana, I could carry out some kind of belabored and grammar-less conversation. I got the impression that she was not very much used to the kind of job she had been assigned to that evening. I think that the initial idea was that she should have been just serving at the table but that, at the last moment, someone had realized that there weren't just two Italian businessmen that night. They were accompanied by someone else, another businessman, or perhaps a professor of some kind. In any case, they had to find a girl for him. And so the job had been assigned to Svetlana in a hurry.

Indeed, Svetlana seemed to be a little out of place at that table, just as I was. Ilona and Valentina were clearly professionals. The way they dressed, their heavy make-up, the way they moved and smiled - it was all studied and performed with class and experience. Svetlana, instead, had no make-up and her gray two-piece suit looked like it was coming from the same Salvation Army shop where Valentina had bought her yellow one. Still, she seemed determined to play her role. She was not very tall, thin, had large gray eyes, the pale skin of Slavic women. In those laborious exchanges made scratching words in Cyrillic on a paper napkin, I understood that she had been born in that town, that she had never been outside Ukraine, that she would have loved to visit Italy, and a few more details which told me absolutely nothing about her. I had sometimes the impression that she was in fear of me, sometimes that she looked at me as if she genuinely liked me. Or maybe she was already an accomplished professional with hundreds of customers. How could I tell?

Everything is an illusion anyway; I just had a glimpse of another human being sitting near me; physically close, but incredibly remote at the same time. She had her story, her family, her place, her things, her way of seeing the world, but all that was completely denied to me. I had the feeling that, actually, we were both ghosts; that if we had tried to touch each other we would have embraced just thin air, as it happens to Odysseus when he tries to embrace the shade of his mother Antikleia in Hades. Would that have happened to us if we had tried? Of course, that was likely to be tested, later on, if things had gone according to protocol; the way these things are supposed to go. But I was spared this test as I'll be telling you in a moment. But let me go on.

It was maybe midnight when Valentina (Giorgio's Valentina) knocked at the door of Nina's bar. That was unexpected. Earlier on, other customers had shown up at the door but they had been politely told by Nina or by the Older Svetlana that the bar was closed. But, when Valentina appeared, neither Nina nor Svetlana could find a way to tell her that she couldn't get in. So, Valentina walked inside together with her usual friend, Ljuba. They were accompanied by two men; Giorgio told me that they were two engineers from a company we had visited the day before. They sat all together at a table not far from ours.

Of what happened afterward, I have a sort of a hazy memory, probably because of the mix of alcohol and aspirin. I wonder if ghosts see "real" people in the same way as we are supposed to see ghosts; that is bluish, translucent, and unsubstantial. My impression of that evening at that point was that I had ceased to be a ghost, but that everyone else had become a ghost instead. I remember Giorgio, in a certain way to be admired, carrying on his conversation with his tall blond friend, totally ignoring Valentina as if nothing special had been going on; as if she had not been sitting at another table in the same bar, but somewhere else, perhaps in another universe. I remember that, at some moment, I found myself sitting near Valentina. I remember her tense face, I remember that she was telling me something in Ukrainian. I got out my dictionary and I started a laborious work of trying to understand what she had told me. Too slow; time was flowing on, inexorably. That weird night was moving on to whatever had to happen.

I don't think that Valentina succeeded in exchanging even a single word with Giorgio. It was, maybe, 3 a.m. when she gave up and left, together with her friends. We were, again, alone with our friendly ladies at the table and the idea was now, I think, to revert to protocol. There was something that was supposed to happen, but I was in a state of near-stupor and I couldn't realize exactly what I should have been doing. Never mind, with or without my intervention, some kind of plans were under way, involving going back to our apartment, I presume, together with the three ladies. But the plan collapsed when someone tried to call a taxi. Apparently, the bridge on the Dniepr river was closed. That was the only bridge that connected this part of the town to that where our apartment was. No way to cross the river and get back home.

Long after these events, I am still not sure if understood correctly what was the problem and if it could be a reasonable thing that there was only one bridge crossing the river and that it would be closed at night. The point was that, anyway, we couldn't leave Nina's bar and we had to stay there until 6 in the morning. Of that time, I have vague recollections and the fact that the night passed was mainly testified by my empty box of aspirin tablets (I gave some also to the older Svetlana and to Nina; they had a hard time that night, too). I remember also that, at around 5 a.m., it started snowing. I was sitting close to Svetlana and we were both looking out of the window at the flakes slowly falling down in the yellowish light of the street lamps; both almost hypnotized. She was not sick with the flu as I was, but she must have been horribly tired, too. I thought that we could have fallen asleep together on a bench as if we were two tired children, but that didn't happen. Instead, that night was too much for the older Svetlana, whom I saw having collapsed into a chair and sleeping like a log. But the other ladies, as I said, were professional entertainers and they made a point to keep entertaining us. They kept drinking and chatting with us no matter what, continuing until the light of dawn appeared. out of the windows. That weird night was finally over.

It was maybe 6 a. m. when we walked out of Nina's bar in a cold and gray morning and we went back home by bus. I must say that Giorgio was to be admired here. He was obviously tired and upset by that sleepless night. But he sorted out a smart suit and a tie, drank some coffee that Tanja had made, and off he went with Alberto for one more day of business. For myself, I just went to bed and I stayed there. Sneezing had been replaced by pain in all my bones and moving any part of my body had become painful.

One of the worst things that can happen to a traveler is to fall sick in a hotel room in a foreign country. I think I'd rather be chased by a band of terrorists than to have to endure that. Fortunately, I was not in a hotel, I was in Vladimir's house and Tanya was very nice to me, inquiring about my health and bringing me hot tea, extra blankets, and a thermometer to measure my temperature. Just the fact of being in a room full of old things, books, clothes, boxes, trinkets, things that clearly belong to someone, makes you feel like being home; no hotel room, no matter how fancy and expensive, can beat that.

It was late afternoon when I felt well enough (more aspirin) to dress up and walk out of my room. I was feeling really like a ghost in that empty apartment. There was a light on in the living room and I walked there. Lying down on the sofa, there was Valentina, her eyes closed, a piece of cloth on her forehead. In a novel, you can say that someone's skin is gray. I don't know if I can say that of a real human being, one whom I saw in front of my eyes. But Valentina's skin color was closer to gray than the skin of anyone else I had ever seen. I remember that I thought I could just turn around quietly and go back to my room, but she opened her eyes and she saw me. She sat up and I had to sit down near her and inquire how she felt.

She felt bad, obviously. It is not difficult to convey the concept of a headache in any language, just touch your head and make the appropriate face. Then, aspirin is also a word universally known, so I gave her some (I had taken two boxes from Italy, I expected that flu to catch up with me). Aspirin seemed to be popular with Ukrainian ladies at that time. Then I sat quietly while Valentina slowly regained some color and finally sat up, not in good shape but at least back in touch with the real world. She was still wearing that yellow two-piece suit.

That afternoon, Valentina told me a lot of things. I sat and listened. How in the world did I understand what she told me, mostly in Ukrainian? Maybe because I knew already part of this story from what I had heard from Giorgio and Vladimir. Or maybe because of that full immersion in Russian the night before. I also remember that Tanja would occasionally appear that afternoon to translate for me and that Valentina had managed to sort out a little English. But, perhaps, I understood only because of some supernatural factor, didn't I say I was a ghost? I don't know; maybe I got it all wrong, maybe what she was telling me were comments on the Ukrainian soccer championship. Maybe. You may not believe me, but I have this feeling that I understood everything right.

Valentina told me that she had lost the best years of her life after that man, Giorgio. He was rich, sure, but it had not been just because of that and because he was a fascinating son of a bitch, and as he was seducing her at the same time he was seducing many other girls, and keeping also a wife down in Italy, she surely didn't know anything, poor woman. Poor Valentina, too: now everyone in town said she was a bitch, that she had sold herself for money, and also for an old apartment and what was she going to do with that? She had a job, yes, just a worker in apartment restoration with her friend Ljuba, and how in the world was she going to scrape a living out of that? And she was getting old, and Giorgio didn't want her anymore, and life had no more purpose, no more meaning, no way out….. I remember that I thought that she was going to weep at any moment, but she didn't.

What could I have told her? Of course, nothing that could have mattered. After all, I was a ghost and, besides, a non-Russian (non-Ukrainian) speaking ghost. I could only sit there, try to tell her something gentle in English, which I don't know if she understood, and that was it. So it goes.

Later on, Giorgio and Alberto came back home and Valentina disappeared in the bathroom to make herself more presentable. I don't know if I myself was presentable at all, but perhaps enough that we could go out for dinner at a restaurant with Valentina, and again Ljuba who had appeared from somewhere. It was one of those places for the "new Ukrainians", fancy, expensive, with glaring lights and bad food. Valentina was doing her best to smile.

The morning after was our last in that remote town. We all were leaving, back to Kiev by car and then from there to Italy. At breakfast Valentina was there, drinking Italian coffee with us. Of her face and expression, it would be hard for me to give you a description; I'll let you imagine it. I'll just tell you that during the return trip we had from Giorgio a description of Valentina's performance in bed the night before.

Look, I am not saying that Giorgio is a worse man than myself or anyone else. We are all human and we all are (or are gradually becoming) ghosts. So, it is typical of human males to boast about their sexual exploits. Who am I to criticize? Who knows what had really happened that night? I don't know, life flows on anyway and, besides, I was a ghost.

Of that trip back to Italy, I remember mostly the pain in my bones. But it passed, eventually, and so this is the end of my travel story. I don't know if you liked it, or if you found it interesting. After all, nobody got killed, nobody got hurt, the most physical damage reported being ordinary headache. Even in terms of feelings, nobody even wept, even though someone got close to that. So, was it worth to write this story? Who knows? There are many more details, more people, more small events that I could have told you, but I have this feeling that, as it was written by a ghost, that all characters in it are ghosts, that a certain degree of vagueness is inherent to this fact.

I don't know if I'll ever go back to that place in Ukraine. Years have passed and I lost contact with everyone, there. If by any chance I'll be there again I wouldn't know how to find Valentina, her friend Ljuba, Svetlana the redhead, or my philosopher and interpreter Vladimir. Even if I could, maybe I wouldn't know what to tell them. Only, at times, I sit back on my chair, and I just wonder what it is that they are doing right at that moment, and if by some chance they happen to think of an Italian ghost which just passed by for a few days in their world and then disappeared forever.