DEUS EX MACHINA

Nathaniel Katz

Every religion, no matter how supposedly beneficent, has exclusion at its heart. Did you think Dionysus an exception? Are you that naive, brothers? Every one of our secret society was an outcast of Dionysus. We were not wanted by your gods, but we refused to be playthings, compliantly knocked aside at our masters’ whims.

Don’t bother trying to apportion individual measures of guilt. All the members did their part. We all read and critiqued the script; we all helped compose the rituals and invocations. We all disseminated those occult texts so frowned upon by your j ealous gods. We were roles, instruments, nothing more. The Playwright wrote our drama, wrote what became your Tragedy. The Merchant funded us. The –

Me? You want to know who I was? I was the Actor. But you knew that, already.

We were one of the last in the festival, that celebration of accursed Dionysus, and we were well aware of the public’s expectations. In addition to being blasphemers, we were also talented men of the stage, you see, and we sat in that open-air theater and looked upon the others as the crowd whispered our names. Watched satyrs, summoned, prancing upon the platform. Saw those gods that we’d sworn against appear and descend to the stage, the mortal plain, from that great, behind-the-scenes machine, that Crane, towering so close to us.

The clay eyes of the gods were terrible. To look upon them and plot such things ....

But we persevered. We stared into their masked faces and we did not look away.

The Traitor was not in attendance and you will not find her. She slipped through Dionysus’s clutching fingers, so what hope have you mortals? She used to be one of those maenad followers of Dionysus, a member of that most revered circle of that most sacred cult.

Or did you think those followers of Dionysus, those maenads, willing? They are deceived and bound, fellow citizens! Open your eyes! You have allowed the gods to shape your perceptions, to shape your thoughts and your world. And now you try to claim that you follow them freely. How blinkered you are, my brothers. Those maenads, those raving ones, as you call them, are attached to Dionysus, pleasure and instinctual abandon their chains, even as their will is put to the sword by that god’s base nature.

But enough of the Traitor. She escaped, she helped us, and that is all you will ever know of her. Torture me, if you must. Torture all of us. We can tell you no more because we know no more.

The play that we produced would have been the crown of any other life. You leaned forward to see better; you watched, rapt, as we strode upon the stage. Our dialogue shaped your reality. Seduced from your sacrosanct paths, you were plunged into our drama.

Do you know what I hate about the customs of our drama, fellow citizens, judging public? I hate the endings of our plays. We have managed to make life into art, to render our own souls upon the stage, and learn from our flaws and virtues. And then, time after time, we ruin it.

I have wept at the creations of Euripides. And then, as his plays draw to a close, he deprives us of resolution. He turns away from the humanity that he has created and, instead of finding mortal solutions to mortal problems, invokes the divine.

It is delusion; can’t you see that? The gods do not intervene! The gods do not care! The gods merely dissemble.

Time after time, they appear on stage, force-feed us those damned lies, try to comfort us by their presence, and tie those messy strings of life into a pretty bow with which to adorn their wretched amorality.

It disgusts me.

When I descended to the stage, lowered by the Crane, did you think I was one of them? A god as all the other actors had so briefly become?

I remember little of what followed: of striding forward, hands outstretched; of our Chorus’ suicide, of their sacrifice; of the words spoken as they drove those daggers into their hearts.

I remember little of it, but the evidence is all around me in the toppled altars, the burned buildings, the slain priests.

We made a deal with an Entity. It has no name. We do not know what it is.

We released a hunter among the flock.

We killed your gods, fellow citizens. That Being that rode my flesh like the driver steers the carriage; that Being that strode to masked Dionysus watching our plays and drove a blade through his neck to see that all-too-mortal blood pour out; that Being was our prayers given physical shape, a god-killer born of invocation and drama on holy ground.

It is not gone, that Being that we summoned. I woke up, as you all know, memory-less and dying in the midst of the carnage, but it did not go back to sleep. It has been released.

It will not sleep again until the gods are dead, the world changed forever.

We have liberated you, even if you are too faith-smitten to see it.

Mortals – we give you the reigns to your world!

Do with us what you will.

Nathaniel Katz blogs about genre fiction at The Hat Rack (evilhat.blogspot.com). This is his first published work of fiction.

The author speaks: In Ancient Greece, the gods were like regular people – just stronger, faster, smarter, braver, more beautiful, and long-lasting. During plays, performed as rituals during the Celebration of Dionysus, the gods were thought to actually walk the stage in the body of the actor. The actors-cum-deities would be mechanically lowered into the scene and resolve the characters’ dilemmas – the literal origins of the term ‘Deus ex Machina’. Which, for a Lovecraft-themed anthology, begs the question: what else might be coming down?