Bad Day at Black Rock becomes Great Day at Zey

Hard to believe it's been nearly five months since I posted. Apologies to anyone expecting more frequent updates, but I warned you from the outset that blogs and I have a love/hate relationship. The good news is that I'm nearly 100,000 words into my novel. The bad news is that a handful of story and structure dilemmas have stymied my production of late and it looks like I probably won't quite be finished with a first draft when I leave here. While I work through those, however, I thought I might as well catch up on recounting some of our springtime adventures.

The novel is about two women who go missing in Anatolia approximately a hundred years apart while searching for the origins of the mother goddess cult, one of the oldest, strangest, and least understood religions of all time. It's a story within a story, and a book about a book, but thankfully that's about as meta or postmodern as it gets. Mostly it's about seekers and travelers; about the still powerful lure of the ancient past; and about how words, names, faiths, myths, and landscape shape reality and our place in it. But it also represents my own humble attempt to read the palimpsest that is modern day Turkey--a land with so many cultures and paths written across on its face that its very soil becomes a kind of protean hieroglyph; the Borgesian Aleph or space-time nexus where all other points converge.

Because so much of the book takes place in exotic, often remote places, it was imperative that I see as many as possible with my own eyes. Some of these places I've been lucky enough to visit before, but with time winding down on our year abroad, I needed to knock out a few key stragglers so Lizzie and I somehow managed to convince our daughters (read: gave them no other choice but) to spend their spring break zigzagging across West-Central Turkey, covering well over 1000 km in the car and who knows how many on foot. Along the way, I got to thinking about just how much of this country they've seen, on this and their three previous visits. A staggering amount, actually. Certainly more than most Turks (who, like most Americans, rarely take the time to cross their own country by car). My daughters definitely don't love long car rides, but if they grow up anything like me, all those moments and experiences will pay huge dividends in ways they will only begin to understand as adults.

Pessinus

Our first stop was Pessinus, about an hour west of Ankara, a ruined city at the Eastern edge of the ancient kingdom of Phrygia and one which most Greek and Roman sources cite as the capital of Kybele worship. A word or two here about Kybele: nowadays, if one happens across it at all, her name is most often spelled with the Latinate C. This is simply because the Romans spread her worship farther, and left more written references to her, than all other ancient cultures combined. However, in both Greek and the original Phrygian, her name is spelled with a K and that is how it will appear in my book. That said, "Kybele" is just a catch-all epithet for a deity who went by many names. She was actually most widely known as Magna Mater (The Great Mother) or Mater Deorum/Meter Theon (Mother of the Gods, in Latin and Greek, respectively). Some of her other names include Kuvava, Koubaba, Kybebe, and toponyms like Dindymene, Idaea, Sipylene, Steunene, etc. She was also readily blended with preexisting deities, and took on their names as well, most notably the Greek titan Rhea or her mother Gaia. That is not to say she was a generic deity or Jungian archetype--her attributes and mythology were too specific, consistent, and idiosyncratic to support that idea--just that the ancients weren't always so hung up on limiting something to a single identity, name, or attribution. (One of the things I find most fascinating about ancient myths and religions is the way they force you to uncouple your mind from the modern insistence on binary thought and logic. Things are seldom either/or in such cosmologies, they can be both, neither, or all at the same time. Quantum archaism, people. Dig it.) Like one of my protagonists, however, I take great faith in etymology, and believe there is much meaning and hidden information to be found in words and names. Scholarly consensus now says that "Kybele" derives from "Matar Kubileya," a Phrygian epithet only attributed in two extant inscriptions but one which carries an extremely evocative meaning: "Mother of the Mountain." For a whole host of thematic and narrative reasons I have taken this phrase as the title of my novel.

One of many historical backdrops to my book is provided by a very curious episode in Roman history. It's fairly well known and extensively documented, but unless I'm mistaken (and correcting me would probably break my heart), I don't think it has been dealt with in any substantive way by any previous work of fiction. Just mentioning it here makes me nervous someone will beat me to the punch. I have a history of happening upon ideas or information, as if by osmosis or telepathy, at the exact moment someone else is busy broadcasting them (remind me to tell you the story about that Atari game some guy plagiarized from me when I was ten or eleven), but this one is mine, I tell you. All mine! If you're out there, you idea-pilfering doppelganger, and you're planning to steal my thunder this time, know that I'm coming for you and this time it's war.

Speaking of war... in the early third century BC, Rome was in a panic. Hannibal had crossed the alps on his war elephants, royally kicked their butts in a few key battles, and ravaged the Italian mainland. The Romans were terrified he would march all the way to Rome and pillage their fair city. To make matters worse, they were also in the midst of a plague, a drought, and a meteor shower (sources are vague on the timing of these things). So they did what all the ancients did in times of anxiety and uncertainty: they consulted an oracle. In this case, they asked the Sibylline Books, a venerable collection of trippy writings by famous female prophets, allegedly acquired by Lucius Tarquinus Superbus, the last king of Rome. The question: What should be done to protect Rome against the foreign invader? The answer that came back was as straightforward as it was strange: go to Pessinus and bring back the Great Mother.

How exactly does one kidnap a goddess? Well, fortunately for them there was a ready solution. Within the temple to Kybele was kept what's known in fancy circles as an aniconic image, called The Black Rock of Pessinus. That is to say, an object that represented the goddess without actually looking like one. If you had to guess, what do you think it was that made this particular black rock so special? Yep, it was a meteorite. Pretty weird, right? Actually, not so much. If the sources are to be believed, the ancient world was chock-o-block with holy meteors. One of them is still glued into one corner of the Kaaba, the black cube in the Great Mosque at Mecca that all Muslims pray to five times a day.

Exactly why the meteoric icon of a foreign goddess was necessary to thwart Hannibal, or why the Kybelean priests at Pessinus (known as the Galli) would just hand it over, are very open questions, discussed and debated quite a bit in the literature. The most straightforward explanation is that Kybele was seen as a protectress of cities, among other things (hence her crenelated headdress in later depictions), and her favor (earned or imagined) was often used to confer and legitimize kingship. Whatever the case an official delegation was sent, the king of Pergamon brokered the deal, and the Black Rock of Pessinus was brought to Rome with great fanfare. Shortly after that, the plague ended, the rains came to end the drought, and the Romans beat Hannibal all the way back to Africa. Kybele received her own temple on the Palatine Hill and enjoyed a place of honor for the next four centuries while the Empire spread her worship everywhere they held territory. Kybele altars and statues turn up from London to Cairo. So the million dollar question is, what happened to the Black Rock of Pessinus? More bad news/good news: you'll just have to read the book to find out.

Needless to say, the Black Rock was long gone by the time we pulled through the ramshackle village of Ballıhisar and set eyes on the screaming anticlimax that is modern day Pessinus. Unfortunately, the entire site, such as it is, is now fenced and evidently off limits off season, a fact which (sshh) did not keep me out but did keep my scramble-happy daughters from even wanting to get out of the car. The really curious thing about Pessinus, given its constant association with Phrygia and her chief goddess in the Classical period, is that very little of it is turning out to be Phrygian at all. Almost nothing there dates to before the famous Black Rock episode. Rather than screwing anything up, this actually plays nicely into my devious little hands (imagine me as Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, riffling my fingers and crowing "Excellent.")

They Zey

Still, we felt bad about Pessinus being such a letdown for the girls, so we decided last minute to add another stop to the itinerary: the little known Necropolis of Zey. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? The site was only (re)discovered and published within the last 10-15 years and doesn't feature in my book. Lizzie had been there once (with good friend and esteemed U. Vic. professor Brendan Burke) in 2002 but her memory of it was understandably hazy. At the time they just walked into the village and asked some little boys where the tombs were. I had done a lot of homework with Google Earth and had a long list of GPS coordinates to plug into our Garmin, but Turkey has a funny way of laughing in the face of such devices. En route to Zey we hit a farmer's market in the center of a nearby village. Lizzie leaned out the window and asked if there was any way through. "Not without great difficulty" said a somber man who seemed intimately familiar with such prospects. Nonetheless, we soldiered on. Three dozen jogs and little alley cuts later we were again upon the road to Zey, only the road soon became a heavily pockmarked dirt path climbing precipitously into the snow. Surely this can't be the road? we asked ourselves. Surely it is, Turkey replied.

A nervous half-hour later we pulled into the village of Zey proper but it was almost entirely abandoned because everyone was at the market. No brown Ministry of Culture signs. Not even a herd of goats heading out of town to show the way. Thankfully, there was one kind Omega Man to point us in the general direction of a tractor path above a river valley. The road soon bogged down and became impassable so we parked and set out on foot.

I absolutely live for this kind of bushwack adventure and, fortunately, my daughters do as well, so long as we cut the leash and allow them to roam free. (As an archaeologist, Lizzie's willingness to ramble sort of goes without saying). We scrambled over and around a bunch of rock outcrops, looking for telltale cuttings, and as usual it was much farther than expected. But what a payoff! Almost all Phrygian sanctuaries, necropolises, or cult centers are situated in naturally beautiful surroundings and this one was no exception. A clear brook curved and laughed below us, feeding a fertile valley where a trio of village women crouched and picked some kind of berry. We spent the rest of the afternoon there, climbing in and out of the half dozen tombs that were readily accessible, gazing at those that were not, and taking in the ancient peaceful atmosphere of the place. Once more we treasured the gift of exploring it alone, without official encumbrance or tacky tourist accoutrements. There are no signs, no trails, no guard ropes or postcards; just you and the natural mystic. Absolute heaven. It got a bit chilly when a light rain began to fall, but it couldn't dampen our spirits and we frolicked and lunched in our 2,600-year-old picnic spot. With a little luck and a break in the rain, I even managed to take my favorite photo of my girls so far.

My girls

After that, we drove to Eskişehir just in time for Lizzie to squeeze in her requisite dose of museum time (she turns into a gorgon if she doesn't get it), and then on to Kütahya, where we stayed in a smelly room near a noisy elevator at a lousy hotel with crap food. We woke the next day thinking at least we'd gotten our one bad night out of the way and man, were we wrong.

(To be continued.)