Morning! Our first frost of the year hit last night and everything outside is tipped with white. It won’t last but at least it actually is starting to feel a bit more like November. Summer just wouldn’t let go this year. Now I realize I need to get moving on my holiday list. Pronto. But first, the morning prompt. Pens at the ready? Lets go.
Not quite sure where this storyline bubbled up from, but it could be fun to follow. I love not knowing what my brain will kick up once that timer starts ticking. Hope you had fun with whichever way your thoughts took you.
Tuesday, November 3rd: They let the myth get out of control.
They let the myth get out of control. That’s what Doug thought anyway. It was originally designed to keep people away from the sacred temple. He could see the uses. Scare people and they would leave the site alone. Make people who attempted to visit the site think they had fallen victim to some sort of cures, and the rumors would spread. People would learn to stay away out of basic caution. And they had. So they myth grew and kept growing until it was its own thing and more a reality than the temple it was designed to protect.
Doug studied the details of it and thought he saw how it was done. The myth claimed that there were twelve sacred guardians who would enact terrible punishments upon all who ventured into the sacred temple. He could easily picture men serving the function of these twelve sacred deities on earth during rituals, whatever rituals were actually performed at the site.
Then when the time of the temple’s use, those men and those they trained, either family or others, would then serve as the guardians, a long line of defenders, keeping the myth alive. What exactly they did varied from tale to tale but the end result was that it kept people away from the temple. ‘Well,’ Doug thought as he surveyed the street vendors.
‘Not the only result.’ While the temple was a part of the sacred mythology, and many still believed the ancient site was still a physical place, others thought of it more as a spiritual metaphor. All sorts of new age spiritualism had grown up around it.
Some was actual belief, a sort of religion that coexisted side by side with the more current religions practiced, and had for generations. For others it was a new and fascinating sub cult. For others it was just a commercial enterprise.
All around him he could see symbols from what few artifacts the museum carried from the time of the temple etched on to t-shirts mugs, key chains. In other places he could see discrete tattoos with the same arcane symbols. Not all of the tattoos were discrete.
There had been a resurgence lately as the old myth was bent out of its original form to serve a new kind of spirituality, one that had little to do with the original save that it used the old symbols as a means of linking it with antiquity. Those tattoos were not the delicate tracery done with a single hand held needle and blue dye over a period of days, weeks, months, lifetimes.
The new ones were things done in great swoops of black and accomplished in an hour or so by the mechanical buzzing needles inking the design into flesh. Doug couldn’t deny the allure of the designs and a few times he was tempted. But he was cautious.
He wanted the archaeology of the site. He wanted to study the temple, its functions, and its history as a scholar. To have himself inked in such a way would mark him as one of the new cult and potentially cast suspicious on his scholarly intentions. He likewise could not get the fine blue tracery of the other, older designs as that too would have meaning beyond what he intended at least in this particular social environment.
‘Perhaps when I have done it, established myself as the architect of the temple, then I can indulge in a tattoo as a sort of memorial homage to the city.’
His thoughts were so full of his eventual victory that the possibility of failure did not even cross his mind. He would find the temple, he would record it and bring glory down onto himself. His research was diligent and more complete than any before him. His equipment was top of the line and boasted things that no archaeologist from an earlier age could even dream of having at his disposal. There was no way he would fail. In his heart of hearts he knew he would succeed with an ease that would astound them all.
Ten til Midnight 