SELENA’S RETURN FROM THE BOWLS OF THE EARTH - and what the Oracle told her...

This is what happened:

The first indication that something unusual occurred was an almost imperceptible vibration in the air. A faint, pulsating tremor that gathered strength and momentum the further I progressed into the recesses of the planet Earth. Strange to say, it was neither strong nor weak. But it was so intense, in less evident ways, that it seemed to engulf and invade my mind with a faint, dislocated presence that could be felt but not heard. Everything else, too, seemed unreal and remote. As if I'd descended into some alien planet, or was about to be absorbed by an ageless entity that proposed to take me to itself for ever. Then I looked down and was startled by a curious manifestation at the very core of the planet. The creature below me, appeared ominously silent. She seemed suspended, motionless, immaculate and amphibian against the opacity of the Earth’s nucleus, glowing in the central fire, possessed of a strangely oracular beauty.

It was an extraordinary sight, and I watched it intently. The moment seemed to stand still, impressing its every detail on my mind. I was mute, neither exhilarated nor afraid. A feeble terrestrial mammal about to be subjected to some oracular, timeless epiphany?

That was the haunting part.

That and the feeling of destiny which emanated from it. Not knowing whether I was the observer or the observed, I yet felt like an onlooker expressly called upon to bear witness to some awful tidings from the other side of space and time. Our time. For what struck me most about this peculiarly subterranean creature was her singular eye, deep and imperious, and her silence, like a heavy, incomprehensible burden.

It is a bizarre recall, quite lacking internal logic. Whatever it was that managed to slip through a crack in the space-time continuum, its appearance was a singularity. It was as if this great dynamic Oracle, or what appeared of it in a weird geodesic distortion, had suddenly and unaccountably decided to become involved in a conceptual conflict with the empirical forces of the principal planet in the solar system.

Of course, it should be realized that I am speaking from memory and that if I have been able to recognize any of the prognostications concerning relations between the past and the future, it is still up to you to confirm them. But the following, in so many words, is the gist of what she said in reply to my unspoken questions:

*
“The executioner and oppressor of those people to whom he promised prosperity, brotherhood and equality will be slain at the hour of noon by one of his own sentinels. His heart will be ripped out of his chest, his liver fed to the dogs and his entrails devoured by scavenger birds...”
**
“Do not doubt that the K K K and its followers will be toasting the accession of the ‘half-breed’ to the White House with an attack on the lives of the incumbent and his family, followed by the worst outburst ever of racial violence right across the Deep South and the deployment of federal troops against rampaging gangs of Negro youths...”
***
“The rivers of Asia have flowed into the Thames. Thus Albion will be punished by Albion: the oppressor of the world will become the most abject servant of the most infamous slave... “
****
“The conquest of Mesopotamia, as the Greeks called the land between the Two Rivers, changes everything. All the Islamic resurgence spring from that hideous error. Women will be stoned to death for infidelity. Swearing in public will be made a felony, contraception a criminal offence and the UN declared guilty of war crimes...”
*****
So what about Osama bin Laden, I thought, Messiah or Anti-Christ?

“The Sunny saviour will never die. He will transform himself into a Holy Warrior. Vanquished as a source of political power he will pass into even greater supremacy as a mythic messiah. From the minarets of a thousand mosques will come the call, and armed men will spring from the soil of Islam! The more al-Qaeda is whittled down, its leaders captured, its cells broken up, the quicker it transforms itself into new shapes and forms.”
******
The son of a blacksmith, born in the shadow of the Alborz mountains, will adopt the mantle of a Shi’ite saviour, and, suffused in a green light from hell, bring about the final apocalypse between Rome, Jerusalem and Mecca...

*******
So much for Islam, I thought, but what about the future of Christianity?

“What Christianity achieved by a bold stroke of dogmatism, the world now acknowledges as an inherent good, which evidently it is not. It is nothing but the identification of the supreme power with the supremely self-serving expedient. All it really meant for Christ was that from the moment you learn to walk on water, you are no longer under the necessity of getting your feet wet...”

********
So what about the species of man?

“Many communities there will be who will hide themselves and their young and their victuals within gloomy caverns, and there in dark places will sustain themselves and their families for many months without light either artificial or natural.”

*********
And the future of the planet Earth?

"A wandering mass of shapeless flame,
A pathless comet, and a curse,
The menace of the universe.
A bright deformity on high,
The monster of the upper sky!"

I don’t know about you, folks, but to me, either of these prophesies, so far as they were identifiable and within my grasp, seemed altogether accountable. And if she knew anything of England versus South Africa at Lord's First npower Test Match , she never bothered to comment on it. But that apart, at the very least, I now realise, it isn’t me who is off my head, it is everyone else...

Dreamy

PS.: My thanks and gratitude to Leonardo da Vinci, Lord Byron, Juvenal, Horace, Pompey the Great, Johann Gottfried von Herder and all those upon whose quotes and passages I have deliberated without actual acknowledgement.