The Forgotten

The Forgotten - A Story by Rafi Aamer

I am the one the world forgot. I’m a silent-type and that didn't help the situation. People may have remembered me if I were a bit more talkative. But gods do not indulge in speaking needlessly. And I am talking about mere gods. What doesn't befit gods is certainly not suitable for the king of all gods. I am Zeus, Olumpios Astrapios Brontios, son of Koronus, grandson of Uranus and the destroyer of the Titans.

You might say, hey, talk about a silent type. There is lot of verbiage in just the introduction. Why couldn't I just say that I was Zeus and be done with it? You are right. But you must understand. Up on the heights of Mount Olympus where gods used to roam and praise me incessantly all the time, I now live alone and haven’t spoken to anyone for an eternity. So, bear with me and my verbosity.

Mythologists have muddled all the record and I need to set a lot of things straight.

Where did all the gods go? They died. What is it that you ask? How did the immortal gods die? That is the story I want to tell you. How they all died, one by one. All of them but one. And that one … well, that one will have to wait to be described.

But let me first express my disappointment with your current state of beliefs. I’m appalled at being forgotten. I’m appalled at being replaced with other deities but what appall me most are the kinds of deities you have replaced me with. You replaced the majestic silent-type with extremely chatty ones, who seem to be full of themselves. “Me Me Me” is all they seem to be muttering all the time. And what pride! Most of them claim to be running the world all alone. Managing the world alone! What flight of fancy! Look around yourself. Does this world look managed to you? There is no Poseidon reining in the seas and hence all these hurricanes and tsunamis. No Aether controlling the winds, No Gaia tendering the earth. And a small sampling of today’s music and poetry is enough to establish that Apollo is not around anymore. Everything is out of control and yet your new gods claim to be in complete control. Some gods and some control! Under Zeus’s charge, the world had order. People weren’t given the lists of do’s and don’ts. I didn’t hand out people a code by which they had to lead their lives. A true king of gods would care least what a peasant in a remote village drinks with a bunch of his friends. But your new gods have you on a tight leash. You are the only thing they truly control and they do it with scaring you of hellfire in the afterlife. I never needed those kinds of empty threats. One did whatever one wanted to do in one’s personal life under Zeus’s rule but if one did something against the designs of Zeus, there was no waiting for the judgment day. I didn’t use to roam around with a thunderbolt in my hand all the time for nothing. And what imagination, or lack of it, these new deities display! Man was created from clay? Create your own damn creation myths, I say, and don’t steal our stuff.

All right, I can sense the impatience. What happened? How mighty Zeus lost control of his world and why is he living alone in the ruins of Mt. Olympus. It all happened because of a four-letter word. But let us begin at the beginnings.

Dione, my beautiful wife was of the opinion that females extracted more joy from sexual intercourse but I had my doubts. So Dione and I did what in your parlance is called “making love” in the presence of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, and he told us afterwards that going by the two energies he had sensed in the room, it was I who had extracted more pleasure. I increased Tiresia’s life three times for proving me right. That was the day when we conceived Aphrodite, our stunningly beautiful and devilishly evil daughter.

Aphrodite grew up to be a beauty the likes of which were never seen before. There was always a crowd of young guys outside the palace begging for a glimpse of Aphrodite and another throng of angry fathers in my court complaining how their sons were bewitched by Aphrodite’s beauty and refused to do their chores, spending all their time outside the palace. As she grew, she became even more beautiful and I started getting complaints of people getting blinded by her beauty. At first, I ordered Aphrodite not to wear revealing dresses. She bitched and moaned about looking like a slave girl but I had not given her an option. The extra clothing didn’t work. This was not a beauty that could be concealed with mere fabric. You had to build stone walls around it to really hide it. And that’s what I did. I confined her to her quarters till she was old enough to be married off. Nobody but her mother was allowed to visit her because even the slave women had been getting smitten by her beauty. It was a tough decision. It meant almost solitary confinement for many, many years but I did it with public safety in mind. There were some riots in the city by the youngsters who were deprived of looking at Aphrodite but kings sometime need to take unpopular decisions. Aphrodite didn’t take it lightly either and, according to Dione, started to hate me for doing this. I didn’t worry much about that. I thought she would understand when she was older.

At the appointed age of divinity, she chose to be the goddess of beauty, lust and that four-letter word that destroyed Olympus--love. Her choice perplexed everyone. Beauty and lust, everyone understood. They go hand in hand. But what did love, a mental sickness had to do with beauty and lust?
Now, don’t wince, frown or judge me by that description of love. That is what love was in my time. A condition of mind, in which one person became obsessed, infatuated with another person, usually a stranger, for no discernible reason. If you asked the love-struck what caused him or her to become such a slave of another, he or she would not be able to give you a reason, or at least not a reason that could stand to reason. You people today don’t think of love as a mental sickness yet you often compare it to be spellbound because you cannot provide the rationale. Love is akin to magic; no reasons, just happens. Well, nothing “just happens”. You don’t consider love a mental sickness and yet you describe the phenomenon as “falling” in love; just like falling sick. So how this love, this mental sickness, became such an accepted and even welcome norm? It was the result of the evil plan that Aphrodite must have hatched in the days of her confinement. That is why she chose beauty, lust and love as her dominions. Don’t go by her pictures drawn by your painters where she is depicted as a gracious beauty brimming with innocence. She was no such thing. Her innocence is a misguided notion and due to the muddling of the history by the mythologists, you people have many such notions. Many of you consider Cupid as the god of love. Actually, he was the god of male lust. Some of you think that he is still flying around and shooting arrows. That is probably not the case (I wouldn't know for sure since Cupid served Jupiter and not me) but if he is still out there doing it, watch out! The guy is a bit of an idiot and when seen last, his eyesight was almost gone. He would shoot an arrow at a young male hunk and the arrow would end up hitting the old married guy with five kids sitting next to the hunk and that would completely devastate the poor man’s family. I had Eros as Cupid’s counterpart but I used him for strategic purposes and Eros, I can confirm, is dead along with the all the other gods, Olympians and the ones serving the Olympians.

Here is what Aphrodite did as the first phase of her plan. Since lust and love both were in her dominion, she masterfully mixed them up. Lust, before Aphrodite’s acts, was never considered a bad thing. It was a normal thing like hunger or fatigue. If you were not married, you could lust after anyone you wanted without any guilt. Virgins used to line up outside the wrestling houses of gods to lose their virginity and non-virgins visited the same wrestling houses to reaffirm their status. This spared the gods from chasing goddesses to have sex with and also gave them a good cardiac workout. You didn’t even have to know the name of the person you were having sex with. Aphrodite messed all that up. She took lust and love, her two dominions, and mixed and mingled them in such manner that lust without love or love without lust became incomplete, bad and unacceptable. And so they are to this day.

Now, I am not talking about the love for your parents, that’s genetic disposition. Neither am I talking about things like love for humanity. If someone loves the humanity, it means that he or she cares about humanity but not planning to go to bed with every human. I am talking about love between two individuals, the mental condition. Aphrodite’s mixing of love and lust is why you call the act of fulfilling lust, “making love”. You are not making anything in the process except possibly a baby. You see what I am getting at? Two friends enjoy each other’s company. What are they actually enjoying? They are enjoying talking to each other, or reading books together and discussing them or playing a good game of tennis. That means that they are enjoying using their friend’s body parts; brains, arms, elbows, legs. And yet enjoying a friend’s genitals is completely off the limit unless you have the mental condition, love. You still doubt that it’s a mental condition? Ask someone the reason of being in love with someone else and you will get vague answers. Some adventurous soul may offer something concrete like, “I love her because of those deep green eyes”. But ask the sick one if someone with deeper greener eyes walks by, would his current love be converted to the new person and you will get a “no” back as an answer although the logical answer should be yes. All this confusion is the result of Aphrodite’s stirring two dominions into one. You can’t screw who you don’t love and you can’t love who you can’t screw. It’s not polite to fall in love with someone just because the person is beautiful to look at or has a gorgeous body. No can do. If you do that, you are considered a shallow person. And why is that? Because those are purely lustful motives and not worthy of love. To counter such motives, butt-ugly people have coined phrases like “beauty is only skin deep”. If you are like me who appreciates the fine texture, smoothness, silkiness and just the right firmness of skin, you would know that some skins are deeper than the Dead Sea. That’s quite some depth. Another faulty notion that the ugly of the world have come up with is that the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you look at an ogre and like what you see, what you are beholding in your eye probably is not beauty but cataract. Oh what falsities have arisen from the evil one’s doings!

Certainly, there are exceptions like platonic love and hippies but that is because a lot of time has
passed since Aphrodite and the dominions of love and lust have lost some of their grip on each other. But when she mixed them up initially, the effect was complete and total. Within days, everyone in Olympus went loony. The lines of virgins outside the wrestling houses vanished because now the virgins were waiting for their respective one-true-love to be presented with the gift of their virginity. Friends who used to enjoy sex with each other stopped meeting. People used to hide the mental sickness before. Now they proclaimed their love for someone in public. Aphrodite kept only two people above the Effect, herself and I. Herself because she had the lust of a thousand goddesses and did not want to get pinned down due to the mental sickness called love, and me, so I could see the results of her odd mix-up, or at least that's what I thought at the time. I also thought at that time that this coupling of love and lust is the extent of Aphrodite’s mischief. Little did I know that this was just a mean to a devastating end.

I married Aphrodite off to Hephaestus, the god of smithing and one of the hardest working gods in Olympus. It might have angered Aphrodite to be given away in marriage to a humorless brute who was the only ugly god but I thought that he was the only one who could match the strength and resolve of Aphrodite. In the hindsight, Aphrodite’s anger was unjustified because, as it soon became apparent, she was not going to confine herself to one man anyway. Her bottomless lust coupled with that devious, scheming mind gave birth to one shenanigan after another. She had a protracted, secret affair with her half-brother Ares which was exposed when Hephaestus caught them in bed. She knew no limits. Once she fancied a perfect Titan for her that could only be borne of the union of Theias, the king of Smyrna, with his own daughter Myrrha. Aphrodite urged and convinced Myrrha for committing this incest while tricking the king to have sex with his daughter. When the king discovered how he was tricked, he became furious with his daughter, Aphrodite took Myrrha to the woods and turned her into a tree. After sometime, the tree opened up and Adonis, Aphrodite’s perfect Titan, emerged. She had an affair with him for few years and then got bored but Adonis had fallen in love with her and wouldn’t go away. That didn’t pose much of a problem for the conniving goddess. One day Apollo’s son, accidentally, or I think conveniently, saw Aphrodite naked by the stream which blinded him instantly. Furious Apollo killed Adonis in revenge.

I wish that all those people who describe Aphrodite today in such glamorous and doting terms should have lived in Olympus in the days and the times I’m talking about to see how wrathful Aphrodite was. Once there was a mortal named Psyche who grew up to be as beautiful as Aphrodite. People started comparing both the beauties. Aphrodite, jealous of Psyche, commissioned Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest man in the world. What happened was nothing short of funny. The golden arrow that Eros shot at Psyche bruised his thumb and drew a couple of drops of Ichors, god’s blood, before leaving the bow. As a result, Eros himself fell madly in love with Psyche. When Apollo heard the account, he laughed uncontrollably which made Eros mad and he made Apollo fall in love with a nymph named Daphne who didn’t like Apollo at all. Such were the events succeeding Aphrodite’s adventures in lust and wrath. Eros, in love with Psyche, requested me to grant Psyche the immortality and make her a goddess so he could marry her. (I once read in a story written by some human that making love with an immortal makes you immortal. Actually, it’s the other way round because, while immortality is a godly trait, mortality has a stronger essence, the essence which can scare even a god.) I granted immortality to Psyche and made her the goddess of soul, obviously to the disappointment and anger of Aphrodite. But then she was responsible for the whole sordid affair in the first place.
Aphrodite was not the only one you humans have misguided notions about. Prometheus is another one. I find humans’ infatuation with Prometheus quite mind-boggling. You have named more organizations after that thieving little bastard than me. That’s quite juvenile of you if I may say so. Humans paint him as a giant bundle of muscles with flowing beard. He was nothing of the sort. He was hardly 5 feet tall, the shortest Titan who would sneeze unstoppably in spring because of his pollen allergy. What the mythologists have failed to report is that Prometheus was Aphrodite’s bitch, always following her around, waiting for her orders to run small, insignificant errands. Due to an uprising in the mortal areas, I had taken the fire away from the mortals. It was Prometheus who, I am certain now because of subsequent events, on the orders of Aphrodite, stole the fire and gave it to the mortals. I punished him by chaining him for eternity with a vulture on his shoulder gnawing at his liver. But I am sure the bigger punishment to him was that he couldn’t be near Aphrodite anymore.

Now, I am a fair person. A king has to be. Despite all she had done, Aphrodite did use her irresistibility at times to get me out of some pickles. So when she came asking permission to build her own temple, I allowed although I was not very liberal allowing new temples. I also thought that having a temple, she might find out that being worshipped was better than getting laid. She named her new Temple Aphrodisiac and announced a grand feast as the inauguration of the Temple. All the gods and everyone who heard about the feast were invited.

On the night of the feast, I was in my chambers waiting for the bugle that would announce that everyone else had arrived at the feast and now the king’s arrival was awaited. Kings have to be the last to arrive. As I heard the bugle and was walking out of my palace, I saw a glow on the western horizon. There was fire raging in the middle regions of Mount Olympus, the slopes where the mortals lived. I cursed Prometheus and saw that the fire was raging towards the summit at a rapid pace. It was close to Apollo’s temple by then. I rushed towards the fire, gathered some clouds and started pouring the rain down on the outer perimeter of fire. Usually that did the trick but not on this fire. I observed the fire closely and realized why the fire had spread so rapidly. It was no ordinary fire. It wasn’t just burning the tress. It was leaping at them, embracing them like a hungry lover, kissing its branches leaves with its flames shaped like lips. It was like this fire had a passion, a strange crazed passion. Someone had stoked the fire within the fire. It took hours and hours of rain to extinguish the manic fire. When the fire was out, I saw that it had burnt the dungeon down where Prometheus was bound. Suits you just fine, I said to the ashes of the thief.

And what was happening at Aphrodisiac while I was putting the fire out?
This, which I later found out. When all gods gathered at the temple, they realized that almost every mortal had turned up at the temple. The divines didn’t like the fact that there were almost as many mortals as gods at the feast but knowing Aphrodite’s temper, they decided to wait for me to show up to take the issue up. All attendees were being served the drink of Aphrodisiac Temple, a special concoction made for the occasion by Aphrodite herself and which was being served by Temple’s nuns in large quantities. Its aroma and taste were like nothing else. One cup of it and you felt lighter than air, two cups and you couldn't stop smiling, three cups and you started feeling a strange and exciting stirring in your libido, four cups and your mind was the sole property of the whims of Aphrodite. Drunk, smiling, unable to control their senses while enjoying every sensation, the entire crowd started pairing up in a delicious dance orchestrated by Aphrodite with hypnotic music playing in the background in the great hall. Aphrodite not only choreographed the dance but also decided who danced with whom pointing partners towards each other with invisible mental fingers. They all danced in this trance induced by the potion. With every passing moment, the dancers’ passion increased. After a while, they started shedding their dresses one article at a time, cajoling, coaxing and stroking their partners’ bodies. It was quite some dance. Bodies rubbed against each other in passionate movements. Dancers’ hands roamed the bodies of their partners as if they had acquired their own will. Lips got locked and pairs of tongues dissolved into each other. They were aware of what they were doing and not aware of it at the same time. They were doing what Aphrodite was making them do but it never occurred to them. Another thing that didn't occur to any of them was the pattern of dance pairing. Not a single god was paired with a goddess and not a single mortal was dancing with a mortal. Divines with mortals. Mortals with divines. There in the middle of the hall was Apollo kissing the bare shoulders of a mortal woman. And there in the other corner was Hestia, my sister who had always cherished her virginity but she was now losing it to a peasant. And where was Hephaestus, husband of Aphrodite, who tried to restrain her with ropes to stop her adulterous ways, who tried to keep her for him alone? Hephaestus was hungrily nibbling at the puss-oozing nipples of the oldest and the ugliest and the sickest mortal woman in the world whose wrinkled body was covered with leaking boils. Though unaware of the consistent pattern of pairing in the hall, the gods at their individual level were aware of what they were doing: consorting with a mortal. They knew the consequences. It was a death dance. They knew they shouldn't have been doing it. But the potion had stirred their desires, the lust, but they couldn't stop because the boundaries of love and lust didn’t exist anymore. The lust had love and the love had lust. The effect was complete and total. To lust, they had to be in love. They were falling deeper and deeper in love with their mortal dancing partners. And it was love, the mental sickness, which kept them dancing the dance of death.

When I arrived at this orgy, there were hundreds of naked couples writhing on the floor of the Temple like worms; entangled bodies making it hard to make out whose limbs of the two one was looking it. The hall was echoing with their passionate moans. And up there on the high terrace stood Aphrodite with a triumphant smile.

“Welcome, Zeus, Olumpios Astrapios Brontios, the king of gods, although the end of your kingdom has begun. All your gods tonight lost their immortality with mortals. They will now begin to die, leaving you with no subjects to rule.” Her smile widened and her voice became more solemn. She spoke in the tone which you adopt when you are happy to deliver some bad news. “There will be a new race of humans as the result of this unholy union tonight…”

“I will destroy the offspring of these unions.” I cut her short while pointing to the worms still writhing on the floor.
“No you will not”, her smile undisturbed, “these gods have become mortals but they have not lost their dominions. And they are in love with the mortal they are lying down with right now. And they will love their offspring even more. You, who get scared of mortals uprising, will surely not risk an uprising by your gods. This new race of humans will survive and thrive. They will spread to all corners of the earth. They will eliminate all competing races. This new race will be ferocious and kind, capable of killing with impunity and curing with compassion. They will create new things like gods do but you will not be able to claim them as your new subjects because they will be mortal because of their mixed progeny. And they will forget you. The will forget that you actually existed. Great mighty Zeus will be replaced with the deities that this new race will create. These new deities, invisible and non-existent, will be held above you. They will consider Zeus a myth, a figment of some poet’s imagination. They will look at your statues and not know whose statues are they. And they will cherish love, the thing that has destroyed your kingdom. One by one, your gods will die and mortals will move out. I know that you will not climb down from the Mount Olympus to mix with this new race. Neither will you try to become a mortal. Because you are not just a god. You are the king and kings do not disgrace themselves. And then, when you will be alone for the rest of eternity, you will realize what life you subjected me to.” With that, she went out of the Temple and out of Olympus to never to come back.
She was right. Kings do not disgrace themselves. She has gone who knows where. All my gods are dead and here, on Mt. Olympus, I am living Aphrodite’s revenge.