Page 46 - WTP Vol. XIII #3

The Murderous Wood
......And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonored shroud.
— From “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” by T.S. Eliot
Sir James George Frazer looked up from his escri- toire and glanced in the mirror, the flickering
light from the fireplace softening his features with shadow adding a chiaroscuro patina to his high Scot- tish forehead and prognathic jaw. Like Merlin in his cave, Frazer looked about his domain and smiled with contentment. Every bit of floor space was filled with volumes of leather-bound books stacked helter- skelter in an avalanche of documented oddities from across the globe; words and more words, the realm
of cultural synthesis that Sir James excelled in. And above his head the walls were filled with artifacts from his annual anthropological expeditions; Polyne- sian spears still tipped with dried human blood; Ma- yan funerary urns whose squat geometric shapes still held the ashes of dead heroes; Japanese Noh masks frozen in attitudes of timeless dramatic anger; and of course his prized possession, the wide-mouthed Ca- lyx drinking cup from his excavation at Mycenae, its shimmering black surface etched red with the heroic battle of Hector and Achilles before the Gates of Troy. Three thousand years hence, he thought, and still the combatants fight, their small limbs and bronze weap- ons grappling with the chalk-mark of oblivion, all against the slim hope that deathless fame will redeem their consuming hatred.
Sir James looked down at his manuscript and won- dered how the Royal Society would accept this latest
abridgement of his twelve-volume tome, The Golden Bough; his compendium of primitive myth and homeopathic magic. The first printing had already enraged half of Europe with its bald assertion that all formal religions if dissected clinically and anthropo- logically could be reduced to primitive tribal ante- cedents, mere psychological manifestations of fear meant to create social identity; and used historically by kings and prelates to justify mayhem in the guise of sanctity.
The front door bell rang and Frazier dropped his glasses upon the piles of correspondence and proofs that littered his escritoire and carefully made his way through the darkened house to the front door, which he opened upon the snow-shrouded figure of his good friend and confidant, Thomas Stearns Eliot.
“Well met, Jamie!” Eliot said by way of greeting as he quickly entered the vestibule in a puff of wintry snow and glinting crystals illuminated by the street lamps beyond.
“Thomas,” Frazer replied, with equally terse bonho- mie, as he closed the door to the echoes of Christ Church’s bell tower striking ten evening strokes down the street, abruptly followed by every watch- tower and parsonage encircling Cambridge Town.
“The Christ Clock is too eager to get the Messiah down from his cross,” Frazer said with a smile as he looked at his own pocket watch then added, “while the carillons of Saints Peter, John and Paul—the typi- cal mincing disciples—follow cacophonously like the flamed tongues of the Epiphany.”
“James,” he said, “if speaking in tongues is the only proof you require to justify God’s hand in the world, I’d suggest you look no further than your own faculty lounge where the Tower of Babel is erected each eve- ning and then and demolished through gales of ar- gumentation and erudite prevarication. I am amazed at how you Academicians delude yourselves nightly, based solely on the certainty of your own sophistry,
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