The Fruit of the Tree Is Discord
Most of Schliemann’s critics and more than a few of his admirers will admit that the man played fast and loose with the truth. The mound at Hisarlik which made his reputation had been the property of Frank Calvert, an Englishman living in Turkey and serving as American Consul. Schliemann initially made common cause with the man before turning on him and stealing all of the credit for the discovery of Troy. In addition, he promised and then failed to share the excavation’s results with the Turks, invented anecdotes that were pure fantasy, claimed a lifelong obsession with Troy that he had to actually inform his own father about, and was prone to allow his hyperbolic desires to overwhelm whatever claims he could actually prove. Still, the man was very fortunate: his digs at Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns were all very successful, and his instincts were dead on regarding the importance of Crete in the development of the Aegean world before and during the Trojan War. Was Schliemann merely a wealthy eccentric with a taste for archaeology in a world that barely even had any yet? We know that his continuous excavations left him frail and sick and old: his death in 1890 (on Christmas, no less) came after a stroke. It was left to his assistant and later partner Wilhelm Dorpfeld (funded by the Kaiser of Germany) to discover the greatest extent of Troy itself, the walls supposedly built by Poseidon and Apollo.
Perhaps Schliemann didn’t find the walls because he was done looking for the one thing that he had come to Troy to find? Imagine, after the judgment of Paris, after the kidnap of Helen, after the war itself, when Aeneas the son of Aphrodite fled the ruined city with his son and a crew of faithful followers. He attempted to bring his father Anchises and the household gods (the Penates) as well as his son, but loses his wife. If Aeneas and Anchises were of such importance to Aphrodite, and imagining that at this juncture she saw the great devastation to which the Apple of Discord had brought low her cult, it’s not hard to imagine the apple being abandoned in the burning city. Alongside the supposed Treasures of Priam and Jewels of Helen, perhaps… after all, who is to say those weren’t the sacred relicts of the cult of Aphrodite/Innana? Imagine Schliemann, who had repeatedly profited off of the exploitation of war and who was a master of history and myth, looking back at the Greek Heroic Age and seeing parallel after parallel with the growing chaos in Europe. Not only did he see the Crimean and Civil Wars, but the Franco-Prussian War would start raging in Europe just as Schliemann began his excavations at Troy. Is it possible that Schliemann saw all the growing interest in Hisarlik, the Calvert family (three generations all obsessed with Troy) and Lord Byron’s own famous commentary as the beginning of a wave of resurgence that would lead to another world-shattering conflict similar to the war between the Acheans and Trojans (or Achiyyawa and Hattusa, if you’ve ever read up on the conflict the crumbling Hittite empire had with the so-called Peoples of the Sea, who have often been linked to Greeks driven forward by Dorian invasion of the Greek homeland) and while a constant state of war somewhere in the world is good for business, total war would destroy everything Schliemann had built and every thing he wanted to preserve (as, ironically enough, World War II would demonstrate by causing the spoils of Schliemann’s excavations to vanish behind the Iron Curtain for fifty years) as well as possibly wiping out his burgeoning attempts at respectability. Obviously, something had to be done.
Schliemann’s wife was named Sophie, and my friend Nyx mentions the interesting correlation to Gnosticism, as if Schliemann, by marriage, was attempting to get his own priestess, an effort to find someone who could handle the Apple of Discord (perhaps even by garbing her in the famous Jewels of Helen). If the jewels were in fact sacred relics of the cult of Aphrodite, perhaps he’d hoped they would shield her from the Apple’s influence long enough to get it the hell out of the Troad and away from those who would find and attempt to use it… as we’ve seen at Troy, and as Schliemann might have believed, possession of the Apple leads inevitably to destruction, discord, chaos and strife, perhaps because of the influence of Eris herself. But what to do with the precious, accursed thing? Where on all the Earth is a safe place for the Apple of Discord?
How about a fantasy kingdom ruled by a madman?
We asked Goddess if She, like God, had an Only Begotten Son. She assured us that She did and gave His name as Emperor Norton I—whom we assumed was probably some Byzantine ruler of Constantinople. Diligent research eventually turned up the historical Norton, as we call Him, in the holy city of San Francisco—where He walked His faithful dog along Market Street scarcely more than a century ago.
Gregory Hill (better known by his Discordian Holy Name, Malaclypse the Younger) has since become the world’s foremost authority on Joshua A. Norton who, on September 17th of 1859, crowned Himself Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.
—The Principia Discordia
