I had a dream last night where I was the last priest and oracle of Hermes, sometime around 500-900 CE. The hidden village temple I had once studied at, somewhere in the mountains of the Balkans, had been destroyed in my youth, and now I wandered the Mediterranean, hoping to find yet a living god who had not yet been forsaken to the abyss.
I traveled to a small islet southeast of Rhodes. Once a temple center, it was almost entirely leveled, only a few scattered pillars remained. Between these pillars lay a flat stone slightly ajar of an opening, that had been covering a stairway to a crypt. I pulled aside the stone and descended into the crypt, an L shaped room, with a low vaulted ceiling constructed of dark stone blocks. It was already illuminated by a single oil lamp, which cast shadows that obscured all but the remains of a wooden altar, now decomposed past the point of recognizability, and the figure of another woman, dressed in a faded red cloak with a finely patterned golden trim.
She was turned to face something I could not see, blocked by the shadows cast by her lamp. She spoke, addressing me without moving her gaze, recognizing me by providence and our shared stations in life.
Her Coptic inflected voice was low and tired sounding, bearing with it a pain that I could not hope to temper, and she related to me the story of the now nameless god that was enshrined here.
Once this goddess had been generated by generations, the faith in her surviving countless conquesta and cultural change and countless and even the loss of her original name. She bequeathed fertile fields and rains to the lands that would become Caria and Lycia, and kind succor to those in their last moments. Even when she had been treated as a strange foreign serpent by the people that would later come to inhabit these lands, she persisted on in granting them grace, even when they forgot her rituals she accepted new ones, when they castigated her traditions she sought merely to reconcile them with ones these new inhabitants would find acceptable. She asked for little in sacrifice, satisfied to breathe even the leftover smoke of those other gods so long as she was still remembered in passing.
Both me and the woman in red had been drawn here, as we were ourselves oracles of different gods with a serpent nature. For myself, Hermes with his caduceus, while she was the last priestess of the Egyptian goddess once known as Wadjet, although she no longer knew even the name of her patron, referring to her only by the Greek Uto.
The forgotten god whose temple we stood in now was more obscure to us both, but we had heard her call, even so, and been brought here together. After she had told the story granted to her by vision, I related what I knew of this place , derived from history.
"This island once served as a place of worship for several gods, most recently that of Apollo. Perhaps those who built that temple believed this nameless god to be Python? It has been mostly abandoned for many years, but some years ago it seems that this island was bequeathed by an emperor to the bishop in Rhodes as a personal gift. The bishop leveled what remained of the temples and built a manor, only for that manor to be razed and the bishop killed during the Persian invasion. It seems her temple was spared this destruction only by being hidden underneath that which was once Apollo's."
The woman in red responded "Even the gods that once forsook others are forsaken themselves, what remains anywhere but ash?"
But while her words seemed despondent, her tone belied this with a tinge of hope, as she gestures to a small creature, in one small alcove of the crypt. Scarcely larger than a mouse, she resembled a small squat adder, but with a tale ending in the shape of a diamond and eyes that were the color of the sky. The goddess of this forgotten temple, somehow still holding on. It was at this moment I knew why we were both drawn here.
I mused that this might be the last serpent god with any devotees in the whole of creation, as even Jormungander to the far north had been made into naught but a demon.
The woman in red responded "Such a wicked betrayal has it been done to all serpents, to be cast as betrayers themselves by so many. But I suppose you would know betrayal better than anyone?"
At this point I had a flash of recollection, from one of my past oracular visions: the story of how once the Romans had tried to make their gods and those of my ancestors as one, how Hermes was forced to share a divine body with Mercury, and how he was trapped within himself by the Roman god, who would betray even his fellow Dei Consentes, when he came to earth and became the man named Jesus.
Returning to the present I prepared an offering to the nameless serpent that sat quivering before us. A burnt offering seemed too uncouth, given the circumstances, so with a silent prayer I cut open my hand with my knife, and offered her a dish of my own blood, while chanting a prayer without words.
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