Time

(Clocks are clouds?)

See:

The Horn Of Time

Time the Destroyer and Regenerator

Lion-Headed Time (Scroll down)

There Will Be Time

The Corridors Of Time

Time Patrol

The Shield Of Time

No one can possibly read or reread all that! But my point is the importance of time as shown in some of Poul Anderson's titles and in a few powerful phrases like "the horn of time" and "Lion-Headed Time."

OK. It is late and I am thinking about time.

Lion-Headed Time

There are some very haunting passages in Poul and Karen Anderson's Gallicenae (London, 1988), Chapter IV, section 1, pp. 90-94.

We think of gods as myths. Gratillonius, closer to their source, thinks of them as becoming myths. In Chapter III, he had reflected on Ys:

"...hundreds of leagues away at the far, lonely end of Armorica, Ys Whose Gods he had in his heart forsworn and Who were fading away into myth." (pp. 87-88)

We have seen that, even while it exists, Ys is already a fable to many. Here, Gratillonius, by traveling far into the Empire, puts hundreds of leagues between himself and the city. It is at the far, lonely end of Brittany and he foresees that its deities will recede even further away, into myths. His fourth century in which gods had power and magic worked is compatible with our twentieth and twenty first centuries in which those gods are regarded as nonexistent. We can have not only multiple futures but also multiple pasts.

In Chapter IV:

"'Mithras, sentry at the frontier of the dark -'" (p. 93)

The Mithraeum is a single room in a private house, windows boarded and plastered to simulate a cave, benches along the walls leaving only a narrow aisle, no font or image of lion-headed Time, just a basin for holy water. (Hindus have a lion-man incarnation and one Christian writer imagined the leonine Aslan who claims to have swallowed universes.)

Gratillonius assesses the Gods Who are known to him -

(i) "The Gods of Achilles, Aeneas, Vercingetorix were dead: phantoms at most, haunting glens and graveyards and the dusty pages of books." (p. 94)

Again, it is not that these deities never existed. They lived and died, becoming ghosts, haunting not only glens and graveyards (of course) but also books (!) - old and dusty books.

(ii) "The gods of Ys were inhuman." (ibid.)

We have seen that this was so.

(iii) "Christ was a pallid stranger." (ibid.)

Jesus the man would have been dark-skinned but Gratillonius refers to the deity presented by what had become the Roman religion, with the White Christ replacing Jupiter-Zeus.

(iv) "Mithras alone stood fast..." (ibid.)

- for the time being.

The All-Devouring

In The King Of Ys, Poul and Karen Anderson mention a Mithraic figure called "Lion-headed Time." Here, I compare this figure both to the Hindu man-lion incarnation and to CS Lewis' Aslan whom I accuse of swallowing universes whereas in fact, to be more precise:

"'I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and realms,' said the Lion."
-CS Lewis, The Silver Chair (London, 1988), p. 23.

Nevertheless, He is quite omnivorous. I suggest that, in His aspect as swallower of realms, Aslan functions not as the Biblical Lion of Judah but as cosmic Time, the All-Devouring. Gratillonius thinks of the Ultimate that is not prayed to, that is known of only by the highest ranks, and that is before and above all else forever as:

the One from Which Everything comes
Time
Aeon
Chronos
Saturnus
the Source
the Fountainhead.

Below the One but above all Gods is Ahura-Mazda Who is also called:

Ormazd
Jupiter
Zeus
the High
the Ever-Good.

Ahura-Mazda creates other Gods and His commander in the war against Ahriman is Mithras. Thus perhaps there is a sort of Trinity of Time, Ahura-Mazda and Mithras.

The Lion's Roar

This is not directly relevant to Poul Anderson's works but is a nuance that I should have remembered earlier:

we have mentioned the image of lion-headed Time in the Mithraic religion of Poul and Karen Anderson's character, Gratillonius;

I have likened this leonine figure both to the lion incarnation in Hinduism and to CS Lewis' Aslan;

I have also mentioned a Buddhist meditation group in order to contrast it both with Gratillonius' Mithraism and with his colleague, Corentinus', Christianity;

however, I have forgotten to mention that the Buddha's teaching is compared to a lion's roar.

Sometimes it feels that everything comes together.

Sun And Sea

On the Birthday of Mithras, the Mithraists in Ys dedicate their temple in the basement of The Raven Tower. They have statues of the Dadophori and of lion-headed Time.

Daylight is a glimmer "...in a cavern of night..." (Gallicenae, p. 153), which is appropriate since Mithras is worshiped in a cave.

At nightfall, when Gratillonius and his visiting father return to the palace, wind yells, driving rain and chill down the streets, and:

"Under the sea wall, tide ramped and snarled." (p. 158)

Why does Chapter VII end with this sentence? Because the Mithraeum is below the waterline and vulnerable to the sea god, Lir, Who will overwhelm His city, inundating everything in it, especially the basements built just beneath the sea wall. The doom that is to come is foreshadowed in much of the preceding text.