Fantastic Metropolis

Schliemann was a well traveled, well educated man who spoke twelve languages, was self taught, and who wrote eleven books, including an autobiography that was probably more fiction than fact—a man who thought nothing of absconding with details from another man’s life story or pretending to have said or done things he had not. He dabbled in science as well as history and was a mercantile genius. In fact, he reminds me a lot of the Comte de Saint Germain. I’m not saying he was (although if he was, his sojourn in California makes it a lot more likely that it was the Comte that ambushed Guy Warren Ballard in 1930) especially if one considers the connection between the rise of German occult groups like the Thule Society and weird beliefs in the Hollow Earth having connections to California via Shasta’s gateway to the Secret Masters in the Hollow Earth (call ‘em Agarthans or Lemurians, makes no never mind to me) but it’s not like an immortal magician couldn’t have posed as a bookish German merchant if he chose to, and it would explain how Schliemann kept guessing right: his knowledge of the area coming from the very simply fact that he’d visited it, perhaps first alongside Priam’s nephew Memnon, King of the Ethiopians and the last victim of Achilles’ relentless drive for victory (Memnon being an interesting figure all his own, one wonders if the secret to the Comte’s longevity is as interesting as an ability to reincarnate in new bodies, making it possible that he was Memnon himself, Memnon the ever-living, Memnon who lives and dies, dies and lives, immortal by the will of his mother the dawn and Zeus). As a victim of the strife Eris had caused, it may well have behooved him to move to prevent it from happening again.

Eos, grief stricken, carried Memnon’s body from the battlefield and asked Zeus to show her son some special honour. Zeus either made him immortal or changed the smoke from his funeral pyre into birds which circled the pyre and then, separating into two groups, fought and killed each other, falling into the flames as offerings to the hero’s soul.

—Jenny March, Cassell’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology

Birds are psychopomps, escorts of the soul to the lands of the dead. Perhaps Zeus granted Memnon immortality by making it impossible for the birds to claim his soul (shades of Wilbur Wheatley, I know) and thus allowing that soul to return to the land of the living. So imagine Schliemann as Memnon reborn, nephew of Priam and descendant of old Troas himself. He builds his wealth, using the rising tide of chaos to his advantage, seeking that perfect hiding place for the Apple of Discord, a chaos great enough to conceal strife’s seed. He finds it in young Joshua Norton, born in Deptford (where Christopher Marlowe died for England’s spymaster and his own supposed sins) and brought over the water to Africa (Memnon’s homeland) and then to America. Imagine Schliemann convincing Norton that it would be a good idea to corner the market on rice, intending all the while to ruin the man. Soon Norton was penniless, friendless and ready to be driven mad. Perhaps Schliemann actually killed Norton and then refused to let the birds claim his soul, (similar to the ancient shamanic initiation process, or for that matter the Masonic rite, or of Odin hanging from the Tree for nine days, or even the Mysteries… death and rebirth helps make one a conduit of the gods, a sacred madman) or perhaps he simply shared a taste of the chaos to come. Either way, four years later Emperor Norton I was spreading a web of fantasy so powerful that the entire city of San Francisco accepted him as their Emperor, a perfect sin eater, a fool king to replace the true king.

He created a perfect gem of chaos, a surge of countercurrent energy, a pearl of strife. In the heart of Norton’s phantom kingdom, the power of the Apple would flow backwards, inculcating a new kind of chaos. When Norton went into the ground at the Masonic Cemetery (and here we are again with Freemasonry, just like Cagliostro claimed the Comte de Saint Germain helped show him in Paris, with the ritual of death entering into rebirth… was this Norton’s second death?) he bore the Apple of Discord with him, and the power of that artifact of conflict and chaos helped create the San Francisco that weathered the wrath of the Earth to become a holy city in Discordianism to this day, as well as elevating Norton himself to the rank of sainthood in that most contrary of religions. Is Eris herself coiled tight around the city by the bay, pleased at the tree her apple is sprouting into? Does Memnon walk among us now, the last of the line of Troas, forever reborn and forever playing a game of chess with gods themselves, hoping only to keep the game in play long enough to busy their giddy minds with other quarrels, keep the world alive just a bit longer, and is he winning or losing?

Matt Rossi, the author of Things That Never Were (MonkeyBrain, 2003), is entirely unexciting on first glance. His hair is a dirty blond color, his eyes a dull green that calls to mind beer bottles abraded by the ocean, and his demeanor mildly absent-minded. He has no dark secrets. He does not know the 72-fold Name of God, nor can he catalogue the mysterious hosts that populate the otherworld lying alongside this one. Any rumors that he raises young turtles to grow up and become Gamera are lies intended to smear him. His leather jacket does not hold the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the Yellow Sign, or the secret true path of the Otz Chaim, and he is certainly not Atlantean in any way. He’s from Rhode Island.