For three days, the people waited. There was a constant traffic between the village and the clearing above, and at no time, day or night, did the sound either of discordant music or of hymns and litanies cease. Pausanias learned that the purpose of the rite was not, as reported by Herodotus, that the sacrificial emissary should simply die, so that his soul might bear the people’s entreaties before Zalmoxis, but rather that he should enter a liminal state between life and death and, while suspended there, address questions to the god and obtain oracles to bring back to the faithful. Most of the prayers offered up during those days, in fact, included petitions for the victim’s survival of the ordeal—at least, for now. It was unclear to Pausanias whether the victim was still expected to die at some later point, as the price claimed by the god in exchange for those vatic deliverances; but he could not imagine that, even in a place so remote, anyone would dare defy imperial proscriptions on human sacrifice. On the morning of the third day, the whole village gathered again before the cave’s mouth and, to the sound of a single drum’s continuous beat, punctuated by a single horn’s occasional blast, the young man was brought out again, still alive but very pale and clearly weak. In addition to the priests carrying the bier, he was accompanied by a woman in a black robe, her head covered by a mantle that left nothing of her face visible except her lips and chin. Pausanias described her as a kind of Sibyl or Pythia. The villagers now fell absolutely silent. The drums and cymbals and horns were all laid aside. The priests placed the bier upon the ground in the center of the clearing and then retreated some distance away, leaving only the woman at the young man’s side. She knelt down by the bier and spoke words into his ear that no one but she and he could hear, and then inclined her head so that her ear was just inches from his mouth. She remained in this attitude for several minutes, listening intently until he grew faint and turned his face aside. At this, the woman rose to her feet, drawing back her mantle and uncovering her head. She did not appear particularly old, as Pausanias had expected she would; her hair, in fact—in which she wore a braided chaplet of laurel leaves—was dark without a trace of gray. She spread her arms out to either side and closed her eyes, and in doing so revealed other eyes, with enormous dark irises, painted in thick white and black pigments on her eyelids. These appeared to stare outward blankly, vastly, at everything and nothing. The effect was uncanny enough for the usually blandly dispassionate Pausanias to confess to a shiver of horror or awe. Then she uttered—or, rather, loudly intoned—the oracles that the young man had supposedly brought back from the throne of Zalmoxis. Pausanias described her voice as harsh, savage, unearthly. Not knowing the Dacian tongue, however, he could not tell what she was saying. He knew only that her ecstatic cries continued to ring out for many minutes until at last, depleted, she fell silent and dropped weakly to her knees in an apparent swoon. All at once, an ecstatic shout went up on all sides of the clearing. The drums and cymbals and horns roared out again, more loudly than before. A great din of laughter and delighted cries swelled around Pausanias, then a thunderous but rhythmic clapping of hands, and finally a great chorus of voices singing an obviously joyous song (albeit with a barbarous melody). Apart from a few women who went to kneel beside the bier—probably his mother and other women of his family, Pausanias at first assumed—all the locals were soon dancing and singing, and shaking rattles and beating drums, and were beginning as one to flow down again from the clearing, along the ridge and toward the village, where further celebrations were evidently yet to come.
Impatient to learn for himself what had elicited the crowd’s exultation, Pausanias sought out his host and asked what the “Sibyl” had said. Effusively, the man informed him that Zalmoxis had told them that the life of mortal men is brief, like the flower that blossoms and withers in a day, or like the flame of a candle caught in a rising wind, and that beyond the grave lies no happiness for anyone born of woman. At most, the dead linger on briefly as dreams among dreams, or as shadows wandering in shadowy places, lasting only so long as the living retain some memory of them. Then they fade like smoke against the sky. And the god had also revealed that, well before any of them might die, all the loves that made the world a home to them would fade, all their hopes would be extinguished, and all their joys would be exposed as illusions. It had been better for them never to have been born.
Pausanias, needless to say, was amazed. It was quite the opposite of what Herodotus’s account had led him to expect. More to the point, he could not imagine how tidings of that kind had moved the villagers to such exuberant and obviously sincere elation. Surely, he said to his interpreter, these oracles must be an appalling disappointment. His host laughed, however, and replied that the message was always the same, and had been delivered in like fashion for centuries, and no one could possibly be surprised, much less disappointed, to learn what everyone already knew. But why then, persisted Pausanias, did they rejoice at the message? What comfort could anyone take from it? To this, the man responded with a certain incredulity of his own. Surely Pausanias must know, he protested, that the great god of all, Zalmoxis, dwells very far from the habitations of men, and that his words must travel a great distance to reach the waiting ears of those who adore him. What could be more delightful than to hear his voice? What rarer or higher favor could he bestow upon his worshippers, and what higher honor could mortals know? The god speaks only truth, after all; but truth directly from the lips of the god is purest nectar to the devout, sweeter than honey from the honeycomb. What could possibly be more precious? What gift could be more worth treasuring in the secret places of the heart?
(excerpted from chapter 4)
