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“But why did the Queen scream?”
No, this was madness. I couldn’t let this confusion overcome me. I couldn’t deliberately slip from reason into these fantasies or recollections supposing they had a true root.
They had to be nonsense, twisted images of grief and guilt, guilt that I had not rushed to the hearth and driven the dagger into my breast.
I tried to remember the calming voice of my Father, explaining once how the blood of the gladiators satisfied the thirst of the dead, the Manes.
“Now, some say that the Dead drink blood,” spoke my Father from some long ago dinner talk. “That’s why we are so fearful on all these unlucky days, when the Dead are supposed to be able to walk the Earth. I personally think this is nonsense. We should revere our ancestors…”
“Where are the Dead, Father?” my brother Lucius asked.
Who had piped up from the other side of the table, to quote Lucretius in a sad little female voice that nevertheless commanded silence of all these man? Lydia:

Of earth return to earth, but any part
Sent down from heaven, must ascend again
Recalled to the high temples of the sky
And death does not destroy the elements
Of matter, only breaks the combinations.

“No,” my Father had replied to me quite gently. “Rather quote Ovid: ‘The ghosts ask for but little; they value piety more than a costly gift.’ “
He drank his wine. “The ghosts are in the Underworld where they
can’t harm us.”
My eldest brother Antony had said, “The Dead are nowhere and are
nothing.”
My Father had raised his cup. “To Rome,” he said, and it was he this time
who has quoted Lucretius: “ ‘Too many times, religion mothers crimes
and wickedness.’ “
Shrugs and sighs all around. The Roman attitude. Even the Priests
and Priestesses of Isis would have joined Lucretuis when he wrote:

Our terrors and our darkness of mind
Must be dispelled, then, not by sunshine’s rays,
Not by those shining arrows of might,
But by insight into nature, and a scheme
Of systematic contemplation.

Drunk? Drugged? Bull’s blood? Systematic? Well, it all came down to the same
thing. Know! Twist the poetry as you will. And the phallus of Osiris lives forever
in the Nile, and the water of the Nile inseminates the Mother Egypt eternally,
death giving birth to life with the blessing of Mother Isis. Merely a particular
scheme and a soft of systematic form of contemplation.
The ship sailed on.

[link]

Description
“But why did the Queen scream?”
No, this was madness. I couldn’t let this confusion overcome me. I couldn’t deliberately slip from reason into these fantasies or recollections supposing they had a true root.
They had to be nonsense, twisted images of grief and guilt, guilt that I had not rushed to the hearth and driven the dagger into my breast.
I tried to remember the calming voice of my Father, explaining once how the blood of the gladiators satisfied the thirst of the dead, the Manes.
“Now, some say that the Dead drink blood,” spoke my Father from some long ago dinner talk. “That’s why we are so fearful on all these unlucky days, when the Dead are supposed to be able to walk the Earth. I personally think this is nonsense. We should revere our ancestors…”
“Where are the Dead, Father?” my brother Lucius asked.
Who had piped up from the other side of the table, to quote Lucretius in a sad little female voice that nevertheless commanded silence of all these man? Lydia:

Of earth return to earth, but any part
Sent down from heaven, must ascend again
Recalled to the high temples of the sky
And death does not destroy the elements
Of matter, only breaks the combinations.

“No,” my Father had replied to me quite gently. “Rather quote Ovid: ‘The ghosts ask for but little; they value piety more than a costly gift.’ “
He drank his wine. “The ghosts are in the Underworld where they
can’t harm us.”
My eldest brother Antony had said, “The Dead are nowhere and are
nothing.”
My Father had raised his cup. “To Rome,” he said, and it was he this time
who has quoted Lucretius: “ ‘Too many times, religion mothers crimes
and wickedness.’ “
Shrugs and sighs all around. The Roman attitude. Even the Priests
and Priestesses of Isis would have joined Lucretuis when he wrote:

Our terrors and our darkness of mind
Must be dispelled, then, not by sunshine’s rays,
Not by those shining arrows of might,
But by insight into nature, and a scheme
Of systematic contemplation.

Drunk? Drugged? Bull’s blood? Systematic? Well, it all came down to the same
thing. Know! Twist the poetry as you will. And the phallus of Osiris lives forever
in the Nile, and the water of the Nile inseminates the Mother Egypt eternally,
death giving birth to life with the blessing of Mother Isis. Merely a particular
scheme and a soft of systematic form of contemplation.
The ship sailed on.

[link]