Time Warp, Part Fourteen

The First City, According to Sergei
Translated from Russian

There are those who take issue with this argument, so I should clarify right at the start that I fully believe Atlantis was real and, not only the first advanced civilization, but the very first civilization. Whether it was advanced by any modern or ancient reckoning is irrelevant and probably mistaken anyway. Different people remembered it different ways. I believe the Greek story borrowed from their culture’s memories of it. I believe the Bible is trying to describe it when it talks about Cain establishing the first city, and again when Noah escapes the great cataclysm that destroyed it. I believe the Epic of Gilgamesh does the same thing, as do countless other stories from around the world. Every legend, every religion, every bit of folklore and magic and ritual in some way traces back to echoes of Atlantis. And I believe Atlantis is where we would find the very first worshipers of Hecate.

I submit that there was a single pantheon of gods honored in that place. Whether or not the Atlanteans themselves considered these entities gods is unknown and probably unknowable. But they knew the world had a spiritual component, and engaged with it in some way, and therefore knew the things we now call gods in their most primal form. And as the earliest civilization, they would have looked out on a world that was raw, untamed, dangerous and flawed, filled with people who hadn’t yet learned how to live together in peace. What they must have thought of these outsiders! These were the first people with a border; and along with a border comes the knowledge that things live beyond the border. Whatever gods or spirits or guides they knew within their ancient cities, there was one they absolutely knew: the Guardian of the Edges. The Outlander. The One Who Paces At The Border. The Gnawing Darkness Beyond. Whatever fears or hopes drew them to form a society, whatever they were walking away from when they came together, was known to them all and associated with some primeval spirit who waited just beyond their reach.

Hecate was not her first name, nor was Hathor. They almost certainly knew the liminal spirit by whatever name they spat when they talked about the days before their city was built. The wild one. The wanderer. The hunter. She was, in those days, all that they no longer wished to know. She was the spirit of all peoples, the great power they had to throw off their backs to create civilization. She may have been the first guardian of mankind as a whole, the first spirit they knew and came to fear. The old ways of mankind as hunter and gatherer died, and she was the key to recognizing what they were leaving behind. The transition required that they know her, and then turn away. And as she in later forms would guide those entering their new lives after death, so she then served as the guide to those dying to the hunter/gatherer lifestyle and entering society. If that society knew banishment, they surely understood it as giving the person back to her. So she becomes associated also with the leaving, the outcast, those who never return. I doubt she had direct worshipers, but she was known and feared. She was almost certainly part of some great duality, the wild and unknown standing in opposition to the spirit of order and knowledge that the greatest Atlantean priests extolled.

And this would mean she was there when it ended. Those who watched the city fall would know that she, somehow, was involved. She would not be forgotten. She would arise time and time again. Some people embracing her, others shunning her, but all remembering her. Then, she stood at the crossroads of mankind’s fate. Now she stands at the Crossroads of all the places we have built and all the powers we have amassed. As the liminal spaces have grown, she has grown to fill them. But what must it have been like for her? How did she take that moment, when mankind began to turn its back on her? The eyes in the forest stalking uncivilized humanity, the voice on the winds of deserts only the desperate would enter, suddenly finding form as a thing to be left behind? And then, as mankind continued to entangle her in our affairs, piling names on her, creating new liminal spaces for her to govern while only occasionally accepting her guidance with them?

​What did she want, what desire welled in her heart when she saw the first city walls erected against her? Has she ever truly wanted anything other than whatever she wanted then?

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