Fantastic Metropolis

Norton was different from the majority of forty-niners. He did not come with the typical empty pockets to mine California’s newly discovered gold. Instead he is reported to have entered the port with $40,000. With this working capital he set himself up in the real estate and import brokerage business and before long had parlayed this sizable amount into a respectable fortune. By applying shrewd business practices to a variety of ventures, Norton is said to have accumulated about a quarter of a million dollars by 1853.

—Patricia E. Carr, American Heritage Magazine

After a childhood in Mecklenburg Schliemann became a wealthy businessman in St. Petersburg and the United States. He was often involved in unscrupulous dealings—for instance, he cornered the saltpetre market for gunpowder in the Crimean War, bought gold off prospectors in the California gold-rush, and dealt in cotton during the American Civil War–at least, that was his story. In the late 1850’s he seems to have wanted to break away from his business career into more intellectual pursuits in order to gain respectability.

—Michael Wood, In Search Of The Trojan War

I know, I know: what on earth could a madman who declared himself Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico (although he later removed his protection from Mexico on the grounds that it was ungovernable) have to do with the ‘discoverer’ of Troy? Well, possibly quite a bit, even if you ignore the two men’s outsize megalomania. Norton probably had a touch more of that than Schliemann, but on the other hand who’s to say that the man who declared I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon when he was in fact looking at people who had been dead for 400 years before that great king didn’t have even more monomania than Norton, a drive that balanced his personality like the prow of a ship breaking the waves?

Of course, to discuss Schliemann at all, we must discuss his greatest accomplishment: the excavation of the mound of Hisarlik and the discovery of what he called ‘The Treasures of Priam,’ especially that most famous of all jewelry, the ‘Jewels of Helen,’ which caused a stir when discovered unlike anything that had ever happened before (in one masterstroke Schliemann had proved, as far as the world was concerned, that the works of Homer were much more than simple tales but rather might actually be historically valid) and which achieved worldwide fame when Schliemann smuggled them out of Troy rather than hand them over to the Turkish government. Schliemann’s promise broken, the Treasures of Priam (or whoever they belonged to originally) ended up in Berlin, and were from there taken by the Russians following the collapse of Nazi Germany. Interesting to note that after Troy, Schliemann would go on to excavate at Mycenae, Orchomenos and Tiryns, in each case seeking the Homeric heroes of the Trojan War, always searching to prove that the battle reported by the blind poet had actually occurred, that there was history as well as lyricism in the Iliad. He was hardly the first to think so, of course.

Agamemnon, it seems to me, must have been the most powerful of the rulers of his day; and it was for this reason that he raised the force against Troy, not because the suitors of Helen were bound to follow him by the oaths sworn to Tyndareus. Pelops, according to the most reliable tradition in the Peloponnese, came there from Asia. He brought great wealth with him, and, settling in a poor country, acquired such power that, though he was a foreigner, the whole land was called after him. His descendants became still more prosperous… So the descendants of Pelops became more powerful than the descendants of Perseus. It was to this empire that Agamemnon succeeded, and at the same time he had a stronger navy than any other ruler; thus, in my opinion, fear played a greater part than loyalty in the raising of the expedition against Troy.

—Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

When the mortal Peleus married the sea-goddess Thetis, all the other gods attended the wedding and brought gifts, except, that is, for the unpopular Eris (Strife.) She was not invited, but appeared nevertheless and out of spite threw into the gathering a golden apple (the ‘Apple of Discord’) inscribed with the words ‘for the fairest.’ The three goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite all claimed it, and to settle the dispute Zeus told Hermes to take them to Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, who was tending flocks on Mount Ida, and to let him decide between them. They all offered bribes: Hera offered him imperial power, Athena victory in battle, and Aphrodite the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Paris awarded the apple to Aphrodite, and as his reward, during a visit to Sparta, he won the love of Helen and carried her off to Troy. Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon led a vast Greek force to Troy to regain Helen, and this was the beginning of the ten year long Trojan War during which the three goddesses took sides: Aphrodite naturally supported Paris and the Trojans, while the rejected Hera and Athena never forgave Paris and were staunch upholders of the Greek cause.

—Jenny March, Cassell’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology

Let us bend our minds to disentangle the complicated webbing that forms the myth Schliemann claimed to believe was literally a true story to some degree. First, of course we have the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the Argonaut and the goddess who he had won by wrestling with her while she shifted shapes (much like Proteus, Thetis the sea-goddess could control her form) and who would sire Achilles, the doomed and wrathful hero of the Iliad who would wreak so much havoc at Troy. Then we have the appearance of Eris and the Apple of Discord, which would of course lead to the Judgment of Paris itself, wherein Paris awards Aphrodite (and one should point out both that Aphrodite is the mother of Aeneas, one of the greatest of Troy’s heroes and the one who would survive the war and go on to found Alba Longa, the roots of Rome, according to Virgil’s Aeneid, so it’s possible that Paris would have naturally favored Aphrodite anyway, being that she was the mother of his cousin) and thus earned the enmity of Hera the wife of Zeus and Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war. In fact, one must wonder why Zeus chose Paris to make the judgment in the first place: it’s almost as though he knew that whoever made that decision would end up the poorer for it, and so chose someone he didn’t mind seeing get screwed over. Troy had already been sacked once by Heracles, Zeus’ son, so it’s quite possible that Zeus just plain didn’t like the place: in addition, the gods Apollo and Poseidon built Troy’s walls as punishment for daring to rebel against Zeus… but they did so alongside the mortal Aeacus, so as to ensure that the city would still fall rather than being impregnable. Why would Zeus deliberately send gods to build the walls of Troy yet not want them to be walls built by gods? Was it merely because he wanted his son Heracles to gain the horses once granted in exchange for the love of Ganymede? Laomedon’s treachery towards Apollo, Poseidon and Heracles would not only lead to his death, but to Priam’s ascension to the throne of Troy… and thus the reign of the last king of that great Asian city. (Asia here being Asia Minor, which to the ancient Greeks was Asia itself.) Was Eris’ Apple an unexpected attempt at divine division that Zeus merely decided to take advantage of or rather a deliberate part of his plan to mold the ancient Danaans (shades of the people of the goddess Danu, the Tuatha de Dannan), Argives and Achaeans into a civilization?

It’s interesting to note that the ancient Hattusan empire known today as Hittite was more or less the direct master of much of Asia Minor at this time, and the culture of the Hattusans was influenced by her neighbors to the east in Phoenicia and Akkadia. The resemblance between Aphrodite and Ishtar/Innana makes me wonder if perhaps a cult center sacred to Innana thrived in Troy itself. Since we know that Pelops (son of Tantalus) came from the region now known as Lydia, it’s possible that his descendants in Mycenae and the rest of the Peloponnese held a grudge against their rivals in Troy itself. (Since both the Hattusans and the proto-Greek Dananns, Acheaeans and Argives were Indo-European in language and religion, such cultural contact was less difficult than it otherwise would be… as would be illustrated later, when the Dorians, another Indo-European tribe, would sweep downward into Greece during the chaos that was soon to sweep the Mediterranean.) Was this war a battle of Mycenaean vs. Hattusan imperial interests as much as it was a massive woman-stealing raid gone wrong? If you prefer your mythology as a metaphor, then the Apple of Discord sowed at the wedding could well be explained as a battle between the cults of Pallas Athenae and Hera in their older form and that of Innana, a battle between Greek and Asian interests. Even if you are comfortable imagining a war in which the gods felt no difficulty choosing sides and taking part, Eris’ Apple was more than a mere prop to vanity: in short order would come the theft of Helen, the war at Troy, the destabilization of both Greece and Asia which would lead to the death of Agamemnon and the collapse of Mycenae, the fall of the Hattusan Empire, and wave after wave of barbarian invasions. Clearly, Eris knew how to instigate some strife, and if we consider that Aphrodite’s influence over Paris may well have led to the loss of her cult center and a need for her to become more dependent on the protection of Zeus as an alien element in the Olympian pantheon (as well as a loss of her warlike aspects… Innana being a goddess of love and war… to Pallas Athenae).

Indeed, it’s interesting to watch the entirety of the Trojan War from the perspective of a chessmaster. Zeus, having recently rebuked Hera, Apollo and Poseidon for their roles in attempting to overthrow him (an attempt thwarted by Thetis, the aforementioned sea goddess who may well have replaced Hera as Queen of the gods if not for that pesky legend that whoever fathered a child on her would be replaced by that child, destined to be more powerful than its father) might well have either set up Eris via the omission of her invitation to the wedding or merely have seized upon a good use for a bad bit of business. Either way, those of us who have read Shakespeare remember that old advice about one way to busy giddy minds… the Trojan War as a distraction to keep his fractious herd of Olympians too busy to plot against him doesn’t seem unlikely. The setting of Peleus and Thetis together to create Achilles, the death of Laodemon at the hands of Zeus’ son, also a descendant of Pelops the ancestor of Menelaus and Agamemnon… a series of test runs and preparations for the final war that would rock the eastern Mediterranean and usher in the dark age that would swallow Greece for 500 years, until the descendants of Dorus would take the name of his son Hellen as their own and a blind poet would try and sing the lost epic world back to life? Again it seems as though a god may have been hammering and forging his chosen people as well as setting his own kingdom to order.

I am mightiest of all. Make trial that you may know. Fasten a rope of gold to heaven and lay hold, every god and goddess. You could not drag down Zeus. But if I wished to drag you down, then I would. The rope I would bind to a pinnacle of Olympus and all would hang in the air, yes, the very earth and the sea too.

—Homer, The Iliad

Praise the goddess, the most awesome of the goddesses.
Let one revere the mistress of the peoples, the greatest of the Igigi.
Praise Ishtar, the most awesome of the goddesses.
Let one revere the queen of women, the greatest of the Igigi.

—James Pritchard, ed., The Ancient Near East—Hymn to Ishtar

Big talk for a guy who needed a hundred handed giant and a sea goddess to save him, but the very rhetoric in such a conspicuous place as the Iliad makes one wonder if Zeus wasn’t making a point. And if we consider Aphrodite to be the same goddess as Ishtar/Innana transplanted into the Olympian pantheon via contamination (perhaps even originally brought over by Pelops himself as he fled Lydia… was the ancestor of the Heraclidae driven from Lydia by the Hattusa?) then we see that he may well have had a good reason to make sure she knew that the son of Cronos was not so tolerant a god as Marduk the Dragonslayer.

Imagine that all of this was in Schliemann’s mind as he searched the lost cities of the dead titans that were the heroes of the Greek Heroic Age. This was a man who had, just as the Mycenaean warrior-kings, a combination of ruthless mercantilism and broad vision. He’d profited off both the Crimean War and the American Civil War, established a fortune in worldwide exploits that left him so wealthy that he could afford to sponsor massive excavations in some of the most resonant ruins in all of Greece. What if Schliemann’s uncanny ability to be right on the money time and again wasn’t a mere quirk of luck, but rather an example of something else?

Schliemann resolved to dig there:

By its splendid situation close to the Asiatic coast, its delicious climate and its exuberant fertility, Crete must have been coveted from the first by the peoples of the coastlands; besides the most ancient myths refer to Crete and especially to Knossos, I should therefore not at all wonder if I found here on the virgin soil the remnants of a civilisation, in comparison to which even the Trojan War is an event of yesterday.

Schliemann once again could hardly have been closer to the mark, for this was precisely what Arthur Evans would uncover in 1900.

—Michael Wood, In Search Of The Trojan War

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

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?

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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.